A more astute and cautious man, Sir Anthony St. Leger, next took the helm in Ireland.  His task was chiefly one of diplomacy, and he carried it out with much address.  In 1537 a parliament had been summoned in Dublin for the purpose of carrying out the Act of Supremacy.  To this proposal the lay members seem to have been perfectly indifferent, but, as was to be expected, the clergy stood firmer.  So resolute were they in their opposition that the parliament had to be prorogued, and upon its re-assembling, a Bill was hastily forced through by the Privy Council, declaring that the proctors, who had long represented the clergy in the Lower House, had henceforward no place in the Legislature.  The Act of Supremacy was then passed:  thirteen abbeys were immediately suppressed, and the firstfruits made over to the king in place of the Pope.  The foundation of the new edifice was felt to have been securely laid.

This was followed five years later by another Act, by which the property of over four hundred religious houses was confiscated.  That the arguments which applied forcibly enough in many cases for the confiscations of religious houses in England had no application in Ireland, was a circumstance which was not allowed to count.  In England, the monasteries were rich; in Ireland, they were, for the most part, very poor:  in England, they absorbed the revenues of the parishes; in Ireland, the monks as a rule served the parishes themselves:  in England, popular condemnation had to a great degree already forestalled the legal enactment; in Ireland, nothing of the sort had ever been thought of:  in England, the monks were as a rule distinctly behind the higher orders of laity in education; in Ireland, they were practically the only educators.  These however were details.  Uniformity was desirable.  The monasteries were doomed, and before long means were found to enlist most of the Irish landowners, Celts no less than Normans, in favour of the despoliation.

At a great parliament summoned in Dublin in 1540, all the Irish lords of English descent, and a large muster of native chieftains were for the first time in history assembled together under one roof.  O’Tooles and O’Byrnes from their wild Wicklow mountains; the McMurroughs from Carlow, the O’Connor, the O’Dunn, the O’Moore; the terrible McGillapatrick from his forests of Upper Ossory—­all the great O’s and Macs in fact of Ireland were called together to meet the Butlers, the Desmonds, the Barrys, the Fitzmaurices—­their hereditary enemies now for four long centuries.  One house alone was not represented, and that the greatest of them all.  The sun of the Kildares had set for a while, and the only surviving member of it was a boy, hiding in holes and corners, and trusting for the bare life to the fealty of his clansmen.