Brian Mac Giolla Phádraig takes the peerage of Upper Ossory

A constitutional settlement is rarely opened by the surrender of a single Gaelic chief in the Council Chamber of Dublin Castle. The Mac Giolla Phádraig kingship of Osraighe in 1541 was small (the Osraighe kingdom ran to approximately four hundred square miles between the Slieve Bloom mountains and the Suir, a sub-kingdom of the Leinster confederation rather than a senior provincial polity), but it was ancient (the kingdom had been continuously held by the Mac Giolla Phádraig kings since the ninth century) and it was the central single test-case of the surrender-and-regrant policy that Henry VIII had proposed across 1540 for the constitutional reorganisation of the Irish administration.

THE KINGS OF OSRAIGHE

The Mac Giolla Phádraig (the family-name means son of the devotee of Patrick, a tenth-century devotional patronymic) had been kings of Osraighe continuously since the foundation of the kingdom under Cerball mac Dúnlainge in the ninth century. The Osraighe kingdom occupied the central Leinster country between the Slieve Bloom mountains in the north and the Suir river in the south, with the royal seat at Aghaboe in modern County Laois (the monastery founded by Saint Cainnech around 577 had been the standing Osraighe royal-monastic centre for the previous six centuries). The Osraighe were a sub-kingdom of the Leinster provincial confederation under the standing acknowledgement of the senior Mac Murchadha kings of Leinster, but had maintained their own dynastic continuity and their own internal administration through the long Norman period from the 1170s and the long late-mediaeval period through the 1300s and 1400s.

Brian Mac Giolla Phádraig was born around 1500, eldest son of the reigning Mac Giolla Phádraig king Sean (Fionn) Mac Giolla Phádraig, was inaugurated as Mac Giolla Phádraig in his father's lifetime around 1520 in the standard Gaelic-tanistry arrangement, and succeeded as undisputed king of Osraighe on his father's death around 1530. He held the Osraighe kingship through the next ten years across the difficult late-Henrician period of Anglo-Irish constitutional crisis (the Kildare Rebellion of 1534-35 under Silken Thomas FitzGerald, the suppression of the Geraldine League under Sir William Skeffington across 1535-1539, and the standing Henrician administrative pressure on the surviving Gaelic-Irish lordships across 1540-41).

THE SURRENDER-AND-REGRANT POLICY

Sir Anthony St Leger was appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland in July 1540 on the standing Henrician Council recommendation that the previous military-suppression policy of Skeffington and Lord Leonard Grey was administratively unsustainable across the surviving Gaelic-Irish lordships, and that a new policy of constitutional accommodation was required to bring the Gaelic-Irish nobility into the English administrative framework. St Leger proposed across the autumn of 1540 the surrender-and-regrant policy: the standing Gaelic-Irish chiefs would be invited to make formal surrender of their Gaelic-tanistry royal-lordship of their territories under the standard Tudor constitutional protocols, and would receive back in the same ceremony the surrendered lands in formal Crown grant under English-style fee-tail peerage tenure, with English-style peerage titles and English-style succession by primogeniture.

The policy required, on St Leger's careful constitutional design, a successful test-case to demonstrate to the senior Gaelic-Irish chiefs (the O'Neills of Tír Eoghain, the O'Donnells of Tír Chonaill, the O'Briens of Thomond, the MacCarthys of Desmond) that the surrender-and-regrant arrangement was administratively viable and politically acceptable. St Leger selected the Mac Giolla Phádraig as the test-case on the strength of the small-but-ancient Osraighe kingdom's structural-and-geographical position (small enough to be administratively manageable, ancient enough to give the policy historical credibility, geographically positioned in the south Leinster Pale to be easily-observable by the surrounding Anglo-Irish gentry).

THE ELEVENTH OF JUNE

Brian Mac Giolla Phádraig accepted the surrender-and-regrant proposal in the spring of 1541 on the negotiated terms (the Crown grant of the entire Osraighe territory as a single fee-tail estate under primogeniture succession; the new English-style peerage title Baron of Upper Ossory with the standing parliamentary writ to the new Irish House of Lords; the standing protection against future Crown confiscation under the standard Tudor fee-tail peerage tenure; the standing Mac Giolla Phádraig family right to retain the standing customary Osraighe rents and tributes from the sub-tenant population), and travelled to Dublin in early June for the formal ceremony.

The Dublin Castle Council Chamber ceremony of the eleventh of June 1541 was the standing Tudor surrender-and-regrant ceremonial protocol on the early-Henrician English-and-Irish constitutional model. Brian Mac Giolla Phádraig knelt before the Lord Deputy St Leger at the standing kneeling-stool in the Council Chamber, made the formal Latin surrender-and-regrant oath (the standard Henrician oath of fealty-and-allegiance to the King), surrendered the standing seal-and-charter of the Mac Giolla Phádraig kingship in the formal renunciation of the Gaelic-tanistry royal-lordship, and received back from St Leger the formal Crown grant patent for the Barony of Upper Ossory in the standing parchment-and-Great-Seal form. He adopted in the same ceremony the new English-style surname Fitzpatrick, on the formal recommendation of the St Leger administrative team and on the standing Henrician practical-administrative convention that the new peerage title required an English-style surname for the formal Parliamentary records.

THE WIDER POLICY

The Mac Giolla Phádraig surrender of 1541 was the foundational test-case of the wider surrender-and-regrant policy that St Leger pursued across the next four years. Conn O'Neill of Tír Eoghain accepted the surrender-and-regrant arrangement in October 1542 and was created Earl of Tyrone. Murrough O'Brien of Thomond accepted in July 1543 and was created Earl of Thomond. Ulick Burke of Clanricarde accepted in July 1543 and was created Earl of Clanricarde. By the close of 1545 approximately forty senior Gaelic-Irish chiefs had accepted the surrender-and-regrant arrangement and had taken English-style peerage titles under the Crown grant tenure. The Tudor administrative reorganisation of the Gaelic-Irish lordships was effectively complete by the death of Henry VIII on the twenty-eighth of January 1547.

Brian Fitzpatrick, 1st Baron of Upper Ossory, held the barony through the next thirty-four years of his life. He served as a member of the Irish House of Lords under Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I, was confirmed in the standing peerage by each successive Tudor monarch, and was the central single Gaelic-Irish constitutional figure of the mid-Tudor period. He died at the family seat at Aghaboe in 1575 and was succeeded by his son Barnaby Fitzpatrick, 2nd Baron of Upper Ossory. The Fitzpatrick barony continued in the senior male line until its extinction in 1818 on the death of John Fitzpatrick, 8th Baron. The Fitzpatrick name in modern Irish constitutional history carries the weight of the standing ceremonial Dublin Castle surrender-and-regrant of the eleventh of June 1541.