the Act of Uniformity forced on the island the use of the
English Prayer-Book and compelled attendances at the services where it
was used. There was as before a general air of compliance with the law.
Even in the districts without the Pale the bishops generally conformed;
and the only exceptions of which we have any information were to be
found in the extreme south and in the north, where resistance was
distant enough to be safe. But the real cause of this apparent
submission to the Act of Uniformity lay in the fact that it remained,
and necessarily remained, a dead letter. It was impossible to find any
considerable number of English ministers, or of Irish priests acquainted
with English. Meath was one of the most civilized dioceses of the
island, and out of a hundred curates in it hardly ten knew any tongue
save their own. The promise that the service-book should be translated
into Irish was never carried out, and the final clause of the Act itself
authorized the use of a Latin rendering of it till further order could
be taken. But this, like its other provisions, was ignored; and
throughout Elizabeth's reign the gentry of the Pale went unquestioned to
Mass. There was in fact no religious persecution, and in the many
complaints of Shane O'Neill we find no mention of a religious grievance.

[Sidenote: Ireland and the Papacy.]

But this was far from being the view of Rome or of Spain, of the
Catholic missionaries, or of the Irish exiles abroad. They represented
and perhaps believed the Irish people to be writhing under a religious
oppression which it was burning to shake off. They saw in the Irish
loyalty to Catholicism a lever for overthrowing the heretic Queen.
Stukely, an Irish refugee, had pressed on the Pope and Spain as early as
1571 the policy of a descent on Ireland; and though a force gathered in
1578 by the Pope for this purpose was diverted to a mad crusade against
the Moors, his plans were carried out in 1579 by the landing of a few
soldiers under the brother of the Earl of Desmond, James Fitzmaurice, on
the coast of Kerry. The Irish however held aloof, and Fitzmaurice fell
in a skirmish; but the revolt of the Earl of Desmond gave fresh hope of
success, and the rising was backed by the arrival in 1580 of two
thousand Papal soldiers "in five great ships." These mercenaries were
headed by an Italian captain, San Giuseppe, and accompanied by a Papal
Legate, the Jesuit Sanders, who brought plenary indulgence for