Treason and dissimulation in the Henrician Reformation: Leonard Grey and the polarisation of politics in the Irish Pale, 1534–40

Abstract This article rethinks the early Reformation in Ireland by approaching Henrician politics and sovereignty as problems of Christian moral order. Focusing on treason and dissimulation as age-old signs of moral perfidy that became emblematic of a stubborn attachment to Rome, it shows how after the Kildare Rebellion, both re-oriented English-Irish factional rivalries within a Reformation key by demarcating the ‘true subject’ from dissident persons and conducts. Both, in short, were now volatile loci of embattled Tudor and papal sovereignties. Key here were Lord Deputy Leonard Grey and the bogeymen of post-Reformation Henrician order: the Geraldines and friars he was accused of supporting. The article shows how Grey’s position as the late earl of Kildare’s brother-in-law and surrogate allowed a discourse of treason and dissimulation to crystallise in the factional opposition to his rule and into a distinctly early Reformation polemic. Out of struggles between royalists and ‘papists’ there emerged the newly polarised terms of Henrician order: cast as the enemy of the king’s ‘true subjects’, Grey died a traitor’s death in 1541 as the purported leader of the ‘Geraldine and papistical traitorous sect’. The early Reformation thus witnessed a distinctly Henrician and preconfessional polarisation of political life in Ireland.