The iconoclasm which accompanied the Reformation was one of its most distressing aspects for Catholics in Ireland. In some places the destruction of much-loved statues or historic relics was done quietly and without leaving any record. Yet in others, for example the burning in Dublin of the Bachall Íosa, the Staff of Jesus, a relic, in the words of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux 'deemed of the highest honor and sanctity' in Ireland, it seems that there was a public, performative aspect designed to deliver a message of humiliation to demoralize the Catholic population. The Annals preserved in Trinity College, Dublin recorded that in 1539:
"The most miraculous image of Mary which was at Baile Atha Trium, and which the Irish people all honoured for a long time before that, which used to heal the blind, the deaf, the lame, and every disease in like manner, was burned by the Saxons. And the Staff of Jesus, which was in Dublin, and which wrought many wonders and miracles in Ireland since the time of Patrick down to that time, and which was in the hand of Christ himself, was burned by the Saxons in like manner. And not only that, but there was not a holy cross, nor an image of Mary, nor other celebrated image in Ireland over which their power had reached, that they did not burn..."
Much less well-known than the burning of Our Lady of Trim, yet much better-documented, was the destruction of a similarly wonder-working statue of Our Lady of Coleraine, County Derry, in 1611. Unlike the Dublin burnings, which took place at the beginning of the Reformation in the reign of Henry VIII, the public destruction in Coleraine took place against the backdrop of the Plantation of Ulster by the first Stuart king, James I. It was the English former Augustinian friar, George Browne, appointed as Archbishop of Dublin in 1536 who organized the destruction of the Bachall Íosa; in Coleraine it would be another Englishman, Brutus Babington, appointed Bishop of Derry in 1610, who commissioned the destruction of the wonder-working statue but a Scotsman, Andrew Knox, made Bishop of Raphoe in the same year, who would actually carry it out.
Coleraine was one of the new towns established as part of the Plantation of Ulster, receiving its charter in 1613, but the founding of a church at Cúil Raithin, 'the corner or nook of the ferns' is described in the medieval Tripartite Life of Saint Patrick. The Dominican House at Coleraine, established on the River Bann facing the town was founded in 1244 and one writer has suggested that it may have been the original home of the statue known as Our Lady of Coleraine [1]. There was a tradition that the community at Coleraine was martyred en masse during the reign of Elizabeth I but the event went undocumented [2]. The existence of the statue at Agivey, a few miles from Coleraine, was documented in the early seventeenth century by the Anglican Bishop of Derry, George Montgomery in the survey of his new ecclesiastical territories:
Prope Aghdowie sunt Kilrian et Ageive locus canonicorum ubi in capella est imago beate marie ad quam fuit frequens peregrinacio…
Near Aghadowey are Kilrea and Agivey, a place of canons, where in the chapel is an image of the Blessed Mary to which there was frequent pilgrimage…
A. F. O’D. Alexander, 'Bishop Montgomery's Survey of the Bishoprics of Derry, Raphoe and Clogher' in “The O’Kane Papers.” Analecta Hibernica, no. 12, 1943, pp. 67–127.
Bishop Babington, who succeeded Montgomery in 1610, was a native of Cheshire, who attempted to recruit native Irish clergy to the Reformation cause and to evangelize using the Irish language. Even more zealous was the Scotsman appointed in 1610 to the neighbouring diocese of Raphoe, Andrew Knox, Bishop of the Isles in Scotland. His experience of promoting the Reformation among the Gaelic Highland Scots may have made him an especially desirable candidate for the position [3]. The part played by both of these men in the destruction of the statue of Our Lady was described in a letter of 1611 by Father Thomas Lawndrie which reported that Bishop Babington had suggested the deed to Knox:
"There came into my hands not long since a letter written by a friend from Drogheda, certifying it to be credibly reported that Knox, the governor of the redshanks (him the King terms his swaggering Bishop), and this summer, he being in Dublin, did his endeavour to induce the State to a bloody persecution, after taking view of the Bishopric or lands given him in the North, committed in his way homeward sacrilege not left altogether unpunished. Sic autem post alia habet epistola. Knox in his way took occasion to visit the superintendent Bishop of Derry (Anglus hic erat, et Babbington, ni fallor, illi nomen) who, after conference, seeking to take his leave, was requested by the said Bishop of Derry, that as he did pass to Coleraine, he should enter into a little church by the way, wherein, a fair picture or image of the B. Virgin was, which finding, prayed him to pull down the said image and to burn the same, for that the people (as he said) went thither of superstitionty to worship the same, which the said Knox promised to do, and in passing that way, went into the church and found the image there accordingly, whereupon he commanded his men to go and pull down the said image, which his people loathing and refusing to do, he ascended himself, and pulled down the image, and caused one of his men to carry it to Coleraine, where he caused a great fire to be made in the midst of the town, and had the image cast therein, which remaining a long time in the fire, till the fire was near spent, and taking no hurt, it was taken up out of the fire, and a new fire made, whereunto the said image was cast again, which, notwithstanding, took no great hurt by the said fire; and being admired of many, the said Knox, fearing farther notice should be taken thereof, sent for a carpenter, and caused him to bore several great holes into several parts of the image, whereunto he also caused a company of small dry sticks to be thrust with powder and tar, which being kindled, the image took fire and was burned. The same day the Bishop of Derry suddenly died, being in perfect health an hour before; soon after the aforesaid Knox took shipping to go for Scotland, and being at sea, was overtaken by a foul storm, and since nothing heard what became of him, a just judgment for so foul a fact. The day the Bishop of Derry died, was to come before him the clergy of his diocese, and such as would not conform should lose their benefices, who coming (with what resolution I know not) found him dead. The church wherein the image was is but six miles from Coleraine, wherein remains to this day many monuments of the several miracles wrought by visiting thereof, as the lame and blind to receive their limbs and sight: my cousin Gilbert Lambint, with several others of this town, hath seen the monuments, and saith that in their lives they never saw a fairer image. Hactenus epistola. And this I write because I hear it talked of, and partly acknowledged by the Protestants themselves....
From my lodging, 4° November. 1611.
"Your always assured,
"THOMAS LAWNDRIE.
"Since the writing hereof, I spoke with one that was in Drogheda the other day, who says it is held for certain there that Knox is drowned, he for whom the poor inhabitants of the Island durst not almost look upon any that might acquaint them with the means of their salvation. James Sail also telleth me more, that he was in Coleraine himself, at the burning of the image in the manner aforesaid….
W. McDonald, 'Irish Ecclesiastical Colleges since the Reformation', Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 10 (1873), 296-7.
Sadly, this letter does not contain an actual description of the 'image', although it was presumably a later medieval wooden statue. There are surviving examples in Ireland such as Our Lady of Clonfert, but without further information it is impossible to know if the Coleraine image was in the same style. There are, nevertheless, some interesting incidental details in the priest's report. He describes the reluctance of Knox's men to obey the order to pull down the statue, thus forcing the man himself to undertake his own dirty work and casting him in the role of chief villain. The statue is hauled off to Coleraine, then being established as one of the chief centres of the Plantation, where British civilization and its reformed religion will replace the barbarism of the natives and their Papist idolatry. By causing 'a great fire to be made in the midst of the town', which a recent commentator suggests was probably the market place or Diamond [4] Knox was demonstrating the new town's Protestant credentials. By contrast, in his use of miraculous tropes Father Landrie presents a firmly Catholic response. The statue initially resists burning, confirming the belief of Catholics in its wonder-working abilities and driving Knox to make even more extreme efforts to destroy it. Then the villains of the piece are both called to account, with the Bishop of Derry (Babington) being a victim of sudden death and Knox being reported as lost at sea. Babington's sudden demise is confirmed by other sources. Sir Arthur Chichester, Lord Deputy of Ireland, wrote in a letter of September 17, 1611 of the death of the bishop "on the 10th inst. suddenly, being well at 7 o'clock evening and dead at 8" [5]. In the Catholic mind the timing and manner of his death were directly related to his impious actions. Reports of Knox's death, however, had been greatly exaggerated. He lived on until 1633, but it might be significant that the rumours of his demise originated in Drogheda, for Palesmen from this town were known to have been staunch supporters of the pilgrimage to Our Lady's shrine at Agivey [6].
It is equally interesting to see how the story of the destruction of the statue of Our Lady of Coleraine survived and developed. The Munster exile, Philip O'Sullivan Beare, in his 1621 Historiae catholicae Iberniae compendium added the detail that Babington, whom he describes as Pseudoepiscopus Anglus, committed a further sacrilege by having a pair of trousers fashioned from a cope, which caught fire when he tried to wear them! [7]. The same incident made its way into the eighteenth-century Dominican history the 1762 Hibernia Dominicana of Bishop Thomas de Burgo and had lost nothing in the telling. A hostile Irish Anglican source published both stories in 1829, ironically the year of Catholic Emancipation:
Bishop Burke in his laboured book, "The Hibernia Dominicana,".. repeats what Fathers Porter, and Con of Colerain, in the 17th century, tell of a Protestant Bishop, who, in order to turn the Catholic religion, its rites, and its priesthood into ridicule, had that part of a Priest's vestments which is called a chesuble, and which he had carried off from some plundered altar, transformed into a lower garment, whose name, in modern days, is inexpressible. But, lo! the moment he attempted to encase himself in the garment, he became enveloped in blazes, and before his friends and attendants could divest him of the integument, he was burned to death. Another story which the Priests industriously circulated, and which is also repeated by Burke; that Brutus Babington, the Protestant Bishop of Derry, had the impious audacity to seize on a miraculous image of the Virgin Mother of God, that was worshipped with intense adoration in the town of Colerain; and the misbeliever ordered two of his apparitors to cast the image on a burning pile of wood, which he had prepared for its destruction. But the moment the satellites of heresy laid their unhallowed hands on the image, they fell down dead. Now this signal exhibition of Divine vengeance, might have deterred common heretics; but it seems that these Derrymen, with an obstinacy of heresy which sticks to their posterity up to this very day, were by no means kept back from their iconoclastic impiety; therefore, at the instigation of Bishop Brutus, they carried the image to the market place, and there, cramming its hollow parts with gunpowder, and daubing it with pitch, they cast it on the blazing pile. But, lo, a miracle! The flames, the moment the sacred wood touched them, drew back in bashfulness; the pitch would not burn, the powder would not explode, and the entire fire went out, just as if the river Bann was floated over it. Whereupon the heretic Bishop was struck with such terror, that after ordering the blessed image to be restored to the altar from whence it was ravished, he took to his bed, and amidst agony and dismay, breathed out his impious soul!
‘An Historical Sketch of Popery in Ireland’, The Christian Examiner and Church of Ireland Magazine, Vol VIII, 1829, footnote, p.36.
I couldn't help noting here how Bishop Knox, to whom the actual destruction of the statue was attributed at the time, had vanished, leaving Brutus Babington as the sole villain.
We will let a modern historian, the Rev. Doctor Brian Mac Cuarta S.J., have the last word:
The political background suggests that the broad outline of this report of the shrine's destruction is plausible... the event coincided with the start of a crackdown against Catholicism led by the lord deputy, Sir Arthur Chichester, with whom Bishop Knox consulted earlier that year, hence the bishop's coercive stance was in line with government policy...What allegedly happened at Coleraine was an early and violent encounter between the new state church and native society in north Ulster. It was typical of the destruction of relics and statues, and the profanation of sacred vessels and vestments, widespread in the first two decades of the seventeenth century. Devotion to the shrine by Palesmen ensured that contemporary testimony to this event has survived to a perhaps unparalleled degree. By contrast, as the state church was taking over what remained of the parish churches in the north, the destruction of the surviving images there went unrecorded.
Brian Mac Cuarta, S.J., Catholic Revival in the North of Ireland 1601-41 (Dublin, 2007), 40.
References
[1] Henry A. Jefferies, 'Bishop George Montgomery’s Survey of the Parishes of Derry Diocese: A Complete Text from c. 1609.' Seanchas Ardmhacha: Journal of the Armagh Diocesan Historical Society, vol. 17, no. 1, 1996, footnote 19 p. 59.
[2] Thomas S. Flynn, O.P., The Irish Dominicans, 1536-1641 (Four Courts Press, 1993), p.74.
[3] Alan Ford, 'Andrew Knox', Online Dictionary of Irish Biography https://www.dib.ie/biography/knox-andrew-a4605
[4] Robert Armstrong, 'Planting Protestantism in Urban Ulster' in B. Scott, (ed.), Ulster's Plantation Towns: Society and Administration (Four Courts Press, 2019), 167.
[5] Daphne Pochin-Mould, The Irish Dominicans (Dublin, 1957), p.98.
[6] Brian Mac Cuarta, S.J., Catholic Revival in the North of Ireland 1601-41 (Four Courts Press, 2007), 39.
[7] ibid.
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