ABSTRACT
With the fall of the House of Kildare, the Tudor government which had got to work in England in 1485 could now get to work in Ireland. Aristocratic Home Rule was ended and henceforth the English government ruled Ireland through English viceroys and an officialdom controlled finally from Whitehall and by Star Chamber methods. Never again till the seventeenth century was a great Irish nobleman of any house to be the King’s lieutenant. The Pale had been extended to cover most of Leinster and Meath, and in this secure foothold a new policy in Church and State was put into effect, regardless of the alliance of lords and chiefs called the Geraldine league which threatened it all along the borders. The final consummation of the new policy was that Henry was to take the title King of Ireland, to which general approval was to be secured. His agent in this was first Lord Leonard Grey (1536-1540) and then Sir Anthony St. Leger for the rest of the reign. Except for the savage extinction of the Geraldines, Henry preferred the concilation method, one based on the wish not to spend money on Ireland, and expressed in his phrase ‘sober ways, politic drifts, and amiable persuasions’. To secure the necessary support was the task of the new English viceroys, and this proceeded slowly. But in Dublin was firmly entrenched a pro-English official class, both English-born and Anglo-Irish, while in the nearer areas in which the religious houses could be safely dissolved grants of rich abbey lands for a mere song won over the local gentry and nobles, as they did in England itself.
