These counties were shired under Mary I, but this was not the beginning of the Leix-Offaly plantations. The initial phases first began as military garrisons, with the establishment of Fort Governor in Offaly and Fort Protector in Laois in 1546/7. The first land grants followed under Edward VI, c.1550-51. As so often is the case, these early attempts were unsuccessful, with very few settlers attracted and the garrison a large financial drain on English resources. Later developments under Mary I are effectively a continuation and an intensification of policies which had already been set in motion. Not a new departure when she took the throne.

The lord deputyship of Sir Thomas Radcliffe is when we begin to see some real movement in the attempted plantation. In 1556 he outlined considerably more extensive plans in an attempt to remedy the situation. Upon his appointment, the Lord Deputy was ordered to divide Leix and Offaly between the English and Gaelic Irish and proclaim the territories of the O'Mores and O'Connors as shire ground, with Gaelic law abolished. The Irish weren’t to be expelled entirely, but to be relocated and assigned less than one third of the land. The remaining two thirds of the region was to be divided between the forts and the English settlers. 124 Settlers on the new plantation were to be awarded estates of roughly 360 acres and were ordered to maintain armed men who were capable of defending their allotments of land against any Gaelic intrusion.

Mary’s religion did play some part in the specifics of the land grants she offered. In an effort to attract more settlers, incoming lessees were to be granted their land in fee simple (ie. permanently), but with stipulations that included the construction of ‘one church within three years’ in every town with an English priest, no doubt in the hope that the newly created shires, from Mary’s perspective, would remain strictly Catholic. Nonetheless, the concern was with “English civility” more generally, and perhaps crucially a desire for security against Gaelic intrusions. As noted, apart from some specific details, the developments under Mary were just that. Development of a scheme that was already in motion.

All plantation attempts in Ireland in the early modern period proceeded, broadly speaking, from the same set of underlying assumptions and overarching concerns. As I have written elsewhere, as the sixteenth century opened Ireland was far from a unified English holding. Rather it was a messy patchwork of independent or semi-independent fiefdoms called lordships, dominated by a handful of Gaelic and Anglo-Irish aristocratic families. This situation presented the English state with a twin problem.

Firstly, they wanted to eliminate the fragmented political authority in Ireland altogether and bring it into the fold of the centralising Tudor state. To achieve this, the near autonomous indigenous Irish lordships would need to be coaxed from their apparently barbarous Gaelic customs and thereby be brought together into an English 'commonwealth', held together by common bonds and assumptions about language, authority and the law, all based on English models of course. This was the theory anyway. In pursuit of this end-goal, they were prepared to use both conflict and conciliation as circumstances demanded.

Naturally, such extensive overhauls of Irish society could not be implemented overnight. These were long term aims of English policy. The second problem facing the English state in this period was thus a more immediate one. In order to have any hope of achieving their longer-term objectives and finally consolidating their rule in Ireland, they first needed to secure the borders of the “English Pale” (or the “four obedient shires”) where direct English authority persisted, from border raids and the exaction of a “black rent” (a kind of protection racket, in modern terms) by Gaelic lords and their followers.

Certainly the Reformation had an immense impact on English attitudes. The Irish were long seen as barbarous, but the religious divide introduced further proof of this to English observers. In the medieval period they had previously made the happy discovery that God was an Englishman, but with the reformation England also became God’s elect nation and, in this context, Protestantism came to be regarded as a further hallmark of civility. However, as your questions indicates, even in the mid-sixteenth century this reformation was a work in progress. English interest in Ireland had much longer roots.

While we can by no means discount the role of faith and religion in influencing decisions in this period (and this is something that is sometimes lost when people discuss the past), religion was not the main factor which motivated the English towards plantation in Ireland. Rather, it was those factors that I have highlighted already. If we want to simplify even further then we can simply say that plantation was spurred by a desire for English control, English security, and eventually, English profit. Plantation was conceived as yet one more tool in an attempt to impose English order on Ireland. It was a single part of a wider policy.

As I have also written elsewhere, although plantation was reintroduced in this century it was by no means a new policy. English settlement in Ireland predated the reformation by many centuries and although the specifics vary in every case, the one overarching concern was of course English control over the land of Ireland. This control had slipped over the centuries and, in effect, the Tudor plantations can also be seen as an attempt to restore it.

To turn specifically to the Leix-Offaly plantation again, well a bit of context would be useful. As noted, this should be seen within the wider context of Tudor attempts to ‘reform’ Ireland, as well as more immediate and practical considerations surrounding the security of the English Pale. In the previous century the crown had relied on the immense power and authority of the FitzGeralds, the earls of Kildare, to ensure the security and survival of the Pale. A powerful Anglo-Irish (or Old English) family, they had kept the Pale in check by policing its turbulent borders and negotiating with its neighbouring Gaelic lords in the government’s interests. Of course, in the process they also garnered significant power for themselves.

For reasons we won’t go into here for the sake of brevity, various political developments led to a Kildare rebellion in 1534. Following the collapse of this rebellion under Silken ThomasFitzGerald in 1535 we effectively have the removal of the Kildare buffer zone between the Pale and the Gaelic territories which lay beyond. This modern map, though over-simplified and showing c.1450, provides some sense of things. The O'Mores of Leix and the O'Connors of Offaly, the most prominent families of their respective territories, had for much of the later medieval period threatened the Pale, but had been deterred while it was under the protection of the Earls of Kildare. The breakdown of this system in the aftermath of Silken Thomas’s rebellion meant that the Tudors were forced to deal directly with these Gaelic lordships of the midlands.

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