1992 President Mary Robinson became the first Irish president to visit Belfast. 1177 John de Courcy and his legendary ‘twenty-two mailed horsemen’, fellow knights in Henry II’s Dublin garrison, set […]
Read More →1670 John Toland, deist and writer on political philosophy and philosophy of religion whose best-known work, Christianity not mysterious (1696), was considered atheistic and subversive by the Irish parliament and ordered to […]
Read More →1939 Charlotte Despard, née French (95), suffragette, socialist and philanthropist, died when she fell down the stairs in her home in Whitehead, Co. Antrim. Considering that they were polar opposites […]
Read More →1987 Eleven people were killed and over 60 injured when an IRA bomb exploded during a service at the war memorial in Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, on Remembrance Day.
Read More →1917 Edgar Degas (83), French painter regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism, over half of whose works depict dancers, died. 1972 NIHE Limerick was officially opened by Taoiseach […]
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Personal Histories
On this Day
January 28
- 1970 Gerard Sweetman (61), Fine Gael politician and Minister for Finance (1954–7), was killed in a car crash in County Kildare.
- 1939 W. B. Yeats, poet, died at Roquebrune, France.
- 1918 Lt.-Col. John McCrae (45), Canadian surgeon and poet, who composed In Flanders Field (05/1915), died of pneumonia in Boulogne.
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Above: Henry VIII c. 1540.
1547 King Henry VIII (55) died. Popularly remembered for his six marriages and his despotism (it’s estimated that he judicially murdered some 1,500 of his subjects, from humble servants to queens), it was Henry, of course, who introduced the Reformation to these islands. In 1534, when Pope Clement VII refused him an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon in order to marry Anne Boleyn, he broke with Rome and declared himself head of the church. Two years later, his ‘Act of Supremacy’—not a doctrinally focused initiative but rather a revolutionary change in ecclesiastical management—was passed by a very reluctant ‘Reformation Parliament’ in Dublin, and the clergy were exhorted by the appointed enforcer, Archbishop Browne, to ‘deface the said Bishop of Rome in all your books and have no trust in him, nor in his bulls or pardons’. More disconcerting still was a recommendation by a royal commission that religious houses be stripped of their property, so as ‘to protect the Irish people from the monks and nuns with their superstitious ceremonies, worship of idols and pestiferous doctrines’. Beginning with an Augustinian religious house in Graney, Co. Kildare, over 30 were suppressed in a single year, including the Augustinian house of All Hollows in the capital, which decades later would provide the site for Trinity College. As for the destruction of religious images, the most notorious was the burning in August 1538 of religious objects of considerable antiquity in Dublin’s Christ Church Place, including the treasured Bacall Íosa (Staff of Jesus), a crozier that had been housed in Christ Church Cathedral since the late twelfth century. The process of introducing radical Protestantism as we know it began during the reign of his successor, Edward VI.