ABSTRACT
The risk of foreign intervention in Ireland was a recurring fear of the Crown, and a continual source of hope for those who fell into conflict with it. Apart from the intimate connection with Scotland rooted in the nature of the Gaidhealtachd and functioning in ways which were geared to its needs, these hopes and fears were usually grossly exaggerated. The French threat in the reign of Edward VI and early in the reign of Elizabeth could only have come from Scotland, and the maintenance of French power there proved beyond the capacity of the Valois dynasty, despite the exist ence at one point of a dynastic alliance with the Stuarts which made the Valois seriously hope to make Scotland a French province. With the religious changes introduced by the Tudors, the possibility of support from the great monarchs of Europe who adhered to the Roman fold was a recurring phantom for opponents of Tudor power in Ireland. Especially after it be came clear that the Elizabethan regime was a Protestant one, it became standard practice for those in arms against her to demand aid from France or Spain, the only two powers even faintly capable of mounting an expedition. Shane O'Neill had postured as a defender of the faith, though few believed that faith was his central interest. Gaelic Ireland was in fact much slower to be affected by that mighty current of Catholic reform and anti-Protestant militancy known as the Counter-Reformation than were the Old English, and even they as a group were not intransigent on the religious front until quite late. It was in the mid-1580s when even the conservative Palesmen made it clear that they were not going to budge from their papal allegiance, though they also made it clear that this did not mean that they were going to abandon their allegiance to the Crown. It had become clear to them that they were being permanently excluded from the political process, and that therefore there was no point in tacking or compromising with a government which intended to offer them nothing real in return. Instead, they went over to a policy of firm passive resistance, both in politics and in religion. 1 An obvious advantage of this form of loyalist revolt was that it offered no openings for the court sharks for ever on the cruise for other men's lands.
