A Sectarian Divide

Saul Church in County Down. Some of our  ancestors lived in Saul, and were practising members of the Church of Ireland. 

 By Man vyi - Own work (own photo), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1129742

It is safe to assume that Henry VIII was not overly concerned about whether the native Irish population themselves wished to secede from the European project of the day (Does this strike a contemporary chord?). Nor in fact was he particularly interested in the opinions of the old Anglo-Norman families of Ireland. However,  ever pragmatic, he could see that in dissolving the monasteries he would reap considerable resources with which to replenish what was a considerably impoverished treasury.

The Irish and Anglo-Irish were also now to be divided by denomination. It is from this point more or less that the Protestant Ascendancy commences, together with the broad association of Protestantism with the English, and Catholicism with the native Irish.

In its attachment to Rome for spiritual guidance and instruction, Western Christianity had always had a European dimension, exemplified most powerfully perhaps in the Crusades. Henry however, now sought to co-opt religion into a nationalist paradigm that would be essentially English in character and application.

It is hardly surprising that this new and radical departure was to meet resistance, not only from those who did not consider themselves to be English in the first place, but also from those who found it difficult to grasp how the spiritual heir of St. Peter could simply be arbitrarily replaced by an English monarch, who had, in effect, decided to establish his own personal theocracy.

There were those, and some of the Hadsor family members were amongst their number, who found -when not recycling their enemies' corpses into dog-food, and enjoying evenings of Irish music and drinking parties with the McMahons - that the new order proposed by the English was not necessarily to their taste. And so we meet our second John Hadsor.