The colonial New English refused to acknowledge these differences in religion and culture that distinguished the Old English and Gaelic Irish communities. As articulate members of the Old English community asserted their civility and loyalty, the New English actively stripped them of both qualities. Nicholas Canny has shown that a dramatic reconceptualization of the Gaelic Irish and Old English identities accompanied, and indeed justified, the widespread colonization of Ireland. Sidney was profoundly critical of the Old English feudal society but admitted that English colonization would reform it on the model of English civility. William Gerrard, one of Sidney's subordinates, argued similarly that only force could subdue the Gaelic Irish but that the "rodd of justice" would reform the feudal Old English, for "in theim yet resteth this instincte of Englishe nature generally to feare justice."(73) By the 1590s, however, New English perceptions had begun to change. Edmund Spenser's A View of theState of Ireland, written around the year 1598, reflected a subtle yet striking shift in the New English understanding of the task of reforming Ireland. Spenser's View revealed neither a recognition of the differences between the Old English and the Gaelic Irish nor any suggestion that the Old English could participate in the reformation process. The conditions of Irish society, he argued, had made legal reform impossible:

So the lawes were at first intended for the reformation of abuses, and peaceable continuation of the subject; but are sithence disannulled, or quite prevaricated through change and alternation of times, yet they are good still in themselves; but, in that commonwealth that is ruled by them, they worke not that good which they should, and sometimes also that evill which they would not.(74)

Spenser condemned both the Act for the Kingly Title and the parliament of 1584, instances of Old English self-assertion, as detrimental to the English reformation of Ireland; both suggested to Spenser the intractability of the Old English and their disloyalty to the crown. Nothing, however, revealed this disloyalty more clearly than did the Old English allegiance to Roman Catholicism:

[T]here bee many ill disposed and undutifull persons of that realme, like as in this point there are also in this realme of England, too many, which being men of good inheritance, are for dislike of religion, or danger of the law, into which they are run, or discontent of the present government, fled beyond the seas [to the Catholic kingdoms of the continent], where they live under Princes, which are her Maiesties professed enemies, and converse and are confederat with other traitors and fugitives which are there abiding. The which nevertheless have the benefits and profits of their lands here, by pretence of such colourable conveyances thereof, formerly made by them unto their privie friends heere in trust, who privily doe send over unto them the said revenues wherwith they are there maintained and enabled against her Majestie.(75)

For Edmund Spenser, the Roman Catholicism of the Old English community made it inherently traitorous and set it, for all intents and purposes, outside the civil Pale community. The suppression and reformation of Ireland that Spenser advocated involved a suppression and reformation of the Old English community. Indeed, that community, in its political action and popish loyalties, had emerged as a more inimical threat to English colonial interests than the Gaelic Irish had ever been.

In a lengthy treatise published for the first time in 1612, Sir John Davies, Solicitor-General for Ireland and Speaker of the Irish parliament of 1613-1615, attempted to explain how this transformation of the Old English from loyal subjects to enemies of the crown had come to pass. James P. Myers, Jr., has stressed the importance of this document to an understanding of New English perceptions at the turn of the seventeenth century; the treatise, he has suggested, may properly be read as "Observations on the State of Ireland in 1612" written by the commonwealth's highest administrator.(76) Davies' treatise shared structural similarities with Finglas' earlier "Breviat of the getting of Ireland, and of the Decaie of the Same"; both relied on historical frames of reference to account for deficiencies in the government of Ireland that demanded swift and comprehensive reform. However, while Finglas attributed these deficiencies to the neglect of the crown administration, Davies located them within the nature of the relationship between the Old English community and the crown:

[T]he State of England ought to be cleared of an imputation, which a vulgar error hath called upon it, in one point: namely, that Ireland long since might have been subdued and reduced to Civility, if some Statesman in policy, had not thought it more fit to continue that Realm in Barbarism . . . ever since Our Nation had any footing in this Land, the State of England did earnestly desire, and did accordingly endeavor from time to time, to perfect the Conquest of this Kingdom, but that in every age there were found such impediments and defects in both Realms, as caused almost an impossibility, that things should have been otherwise than they were.(77)

The theme of degeneracy pervades Davies' Discovery. He argued that, through their contact with the Gaelic Irish surrounding the Pale, the Old English became degenerate, adopted Irish ways, lost their English identity, and thus became crude and ungovernable.

These were the Irish Customs, which the English Colonies did embrace and use, after they had rejected the Civil and Honorable Laws and Customs of England, whereby they became Degenerate and Metamorphosed like Nebuchadnezzar: who although he had the face of a man, had the heart of a beast; or like those who had drunk of Circes Cup, and were turned into very Beasts; and yet took such pleasure in their beastly manner of life, as they would not return to the shape of man again; Insomuch, as within less time than the age of a man, they had no marks or differences left among them of that noble Nation, from which they were descended. For, as they did not, onely forget the English language and scorn the use thereof, but grew to be ashamed of their very English names . . . and took Irish Sirnames and Nick-names.(78)

The Old English, Davies argued, had in fact become Irish; their adoption of Gaelic customs indicated the decay and degeneration of their very Englishness:

[I]f we consider the Nature of the Irish Customs, we shall find that the people, which doth use them, must of necessity be Rebels to all good Government, destroy the commonwealth wherein they live, and bring Barbarisme and desolation upon the richest and most fruitfull Land of the world.(79)

This concept of degeneracy provided both a powerful justification for the exclusion of the Old English from political influence in the colonial administration and a compelling motivation for the thoroughgoing suppression of their incorrigible "Irish Catholic" ways. Davies collapsed the two threats to English interests in Ireland--the easily handled series of Gaelic rebellions and insurrections and the more intractable and problematic political opposition raised by the Old English community that had frustrated crown policy throughout the sixteenth century--into a single problem with a single solution. The suppression of "Irish Catholicism" and the "barbarism" which it engendered would solidify the strength and security of the English government in Ireland.

It was in this ideological context that the most significant Gaelic challenge to English rule in Ireland erupted. Between 1594 and 1603, Hugh O'Neill, the renegade earl of Tyrone, led a rebellion to secure his palatinate rule over Ulster. Essentially a provincial figure, O'Neill nonetheless wrapped himself in the rhetoric of a broad Irish and Catholic nationalism. O'Neill fought, he said, so "[t]hat the catholic, apostolic, and Roman religion be openly preached and taught throughout all Ireland, as well in cities as borough towns, by bishops, seminary priests, jesuits, and all other religious men," "[t]hat the Church of Ireland be wholly governed by the pope," and "[t]hat the lord chancellor, lord treasurer, lord admiral, the council of state, the justices of the laws, queen's attorney, queen's serjeant, and all other officers appertaining to the council and law of Ireland, be Irishmen . . . [and] that all principal governments of Ireland, as Connaught, Munster, etc., be governed by Irish noblemen."(80) The reaction of the colonial communities to O'Neill's rebellion reflected clearly the ideological conflict over the nature of the Old English identity. The Old English community was not swayed by the Counter-Reformation appeals of one "whose career had been far from that of an exemplary Catholic."(81) Rejecting his claims to wide religious authority, the Old English overwhelmingly opposed O'Neill and his Gaelic confederacy; they lobbied in Rome against O'Neill and against subsequent papal measures designed to enlist support for his movement. The Old English refused to participate in a revolt intended solely to secure the supremacy of an ambitious Gaelic Irish lord.(82) In the eyes of the New English administration, however, O'Neill's rebellion revealed overtly the inherent Irish Catholic disloyalty that they had long suspected. In the rebellion, the colonial administration mistakenly saw the convergence of the degenerate Old English and the fractious Gaelic Irish in a campaign to oust the English government and the Protestant religion from Ireland. Lord Burghley, during the rising, saw "the queen's loyal subjects in the English Pale tempted to rebel."(83) Sir John Davies perceived in O'Neill's movement the collusion of "all the lords and chieftains of the Irishry, and degenerate or rebellious English."(84) In O'Neill's rebellion, each component of the colonial community recognized the proof of the arguments that they had developed and deployed during the later sixteenth century. In withholding their support from a Gaelic Irish insurrection, the Old English confirmed their loyalty to English law and civility. In the rebellion's seemingly nationalistic resistance to English rule in Ireland, the New English saw the traitorous nature of Irish Roman Catholicism, an identity in which they included both the Gaels and the "degenerate" Old English.

The parliament of 1613-1615 thus responded proximately to O'Neill's rebellion, but the anti-Catholic legislation secured by the Irish government marked the culmination of the political and ideological struggle within the colonial community over the nature of the Old English identity and its place in the Irish polity. R. F. Foster portrayed this struggle as one aspect of a local competition between varieties of Irishness; in the 1613-1615 parliament, he suggested, internal regulation subdued internal rivalries. During the sixteenth century, however, this struggle assumed nationalistic implications that Foster fails to acknowledge; what was at stake in the political and ideological conflict between the Old and New English was not regional or local identity but rather the very distinction between Irishness and Englishness. Initially during the early sixteenth century and then increasingly as the royal Irish government adopted more autocratic policies, the Old English recognized the divergence of their interests from the priorities of the crown. To protect these interests, the Old English community asserted an integrative identity that reconciled differences of religion, national origin, and political outlook. The Act for the Kingly Title articulated most clearly the Old English national identity. In order to secure their ambiguous position in the English polity, the Old English bound themselves to the crown as Anglo-Irish subjects of an Anglo-Irish monarch. The royal Irish government, however, rejected this expansive definition of Englishness; as New English officials gained political power and social influence, the English identity that they cultivated became increasingly restricted. Anglo-Irishness, thus, became strictly Irishness, and the Old English community that had operated within an overarching English identity found itself excluded from it. "By degrees," Aidan Clarke has explained, "the loyal element in the population of Ireland not merely lost the potentiality to improve its position through the successful assertion of royal power, but found that its actual position had been placed in jeopardy."(85) The Old English identity rested on the fundamental affinity between English and Irish life; it was, indeed, an Anglo-Irish identity in the fullest sense of both terms. Political and ideological manipulation by the New English community that culminated in the anti-Catholic legislation of the 1613-1615 Irish parliament permanently destroyed that affinity and left the Old English in search of a new identity. Expelled from the English community, as Aidan Clarke has argued, the Old English, during the seventeenth century, gradually joined the Irish community. The New English prevailed in the political and ideological conflict of the sixteenth century; they destroyed both the most intractable political opposition to their rule in Ireland and the identity that supported it. In doing so, however, the New English drew the lines for the destructive conflict between the English and Irish communities that has characterized the history of modern Ireland.