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This chapter traces the prolonged military conflict of 1641-53. It examines the elaborate system of government, with headquarters at Kilkenny, established by the Confederate Catholics, as well as the importation into Ireland of the tactics of the European military revolution. It examines the divisions between Royalist and Parliamentarian among Irish Protestants, the former commanded by the earl of Ormond, as well as the shifting allegiances of the Scottish army established in the north east. The arrival in 1649 of a parliamentary army under Oliver Cromwell, and the controversial massacres at Drogheda and Wexford, initiated the last phase of the war. The victorious parliamentary regime initiated a massive scheme of social engineering, transplanting Catholic proprietors to a small western region while redistributing other lands among English settlers.

Henry VIII's breach with Rome, culminating in his assumption of the Supreme Headship of the church of England followed by Ireland, inaugurated the Irish reformation. In 1541, Henry became the first English monarch to style himself King rather than Lord of Ireland. For the rest of the century, with the exception of a brief interlude under Mary in the 1550s, the official religion of the Irish kingdom was a form of Protestantism. Despite the now unchallenged supremacy of the Stuart state in Ireland, the official church nevertheless continued to make little headway in terms of converting the native population. Catholicism, increasingly influenced by post-tridentine reform, established itself securely as the religion of the majority of the population, although the Catholic community was itself divided by a number of factors. This chapter examines the Irish rebellion of 1641 and the evolution of the Confederate Catholics of Ireland.

This book is a case study of a particular, important, and relatively neglected episode in the penetration of Ireland by the Catholic reformation. Its chronological scope is the second quarter of the 17th century, a period which in European terms is generally conceived as lying towards the end of what might be termed the ‘high counter-reformation’, that rough century between the first convocation of the Council of Trent in 1545 to the treaty of Westphalia in 1648 which represented a critical epoch in the remodelling of post-reformation Catholicism. The long-term political implications of the extension of the Catholic reformation to Ireland during this period were enormous. In the shorter term, this development also had a critical bearing on the Irish theatres of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in the 1640s. This book concentrates on GianBattista Rinuccini's nunciature and in particular on his profound political influence within the Confederate Catholics of Ireland which was responsible for the intensity of the reactions which he provoked.

The archbishop of Fermo, GianBattista Rinuccini, arrived at Kenmare in County Kerry, Ireland in October 1645. That Rinuccini carried the stamp of 17th-century Italian Catholicism is undeniable. But like ‘absolutist king’, the phrase ‘tridentine bishop’ is a convenient shorthand to describe a complex reality. There were many tridentine bishops, far more than absolutist kings. A bishop such as Rinuccini, born eight years after the archbishop of Milan's death, saw himself as another participant and shaper in a tradition of Catholic reform. It is as a variation rather than a replication of the counter-reformation theme that the archbishop of Fermo can best be understood. Rinuccini brought a rich cocktail of experience to bear upon his work as nuncio to the Confederate Catholics of Ireland. Prior to his nunciature, Rinuccini was reluctant to focus on the possibility that in his own era ecclesiastical authority might be forced to exert itself against Catholic temporal powers.