Sidney's colonization proposal of 1568, however, involved a larger commitment than the queen had anticipated: eight garrisons, with two thousand men, in Ulster alone. When Elizabeth withheld her support from so vast and costly an endeavor, Sidney pressed on with colonization by private enterprise. He enlisted as his subalterns landless adventurers eager to seize property and wealth in Ireland.(51) "[S]uch men," Nicholas Canny has explained, "would give enthusiastic support for a military campaign the end of which was colonization in the hope that they themselves would benefit from the spoils."(52) In the Munster colony of Kerricurrihy, west of Cork City, these landless adventurers sought royal authorization to confiscate property so that "thies contries now possessed by disobedient people assistinge euerie rebellion to the disglorie of God and greate dislike of your Maiestie shalbe inhabited by naturall Englishe men."(53) The colonizers of Kerricurrihy, in truth, revealed little intention to act as a "lanterne and countenance of all cyvilitie within that province."(54) They concerned themselves rather with the quick accumulation of Irish wealth and an equally quick return to eminence in England. Through Sidney's program of conquest and colonization, Ireland became a profit-making venue, and the exploits of these New English colonizers caused great unrest within both the Gaelic Irish and Old English communities. The English government, in the late 1560s, was "slowly groping" towards an efficient method of colonization; the experience of private enterprise had convinced the government of the necessity of the royal army's support in a centralized process of settlement.(55) In many ways, however, the damage to Irish governance and sensibilities had already been done.

During the 1560s, Sidney's colonization program dangerously alienated the Old English community from the royal Irish government. The imposition of unorthodox military extractions known as "cesses," the gradual exclusion of Old English influence from colonial politics, and an increasing suspicion of Old English loyalties by the New English settlers threatened to exacerbate the tensions that already existed between crown and colony. The augmented military establishment necessary to actualize Sidney's colonization program transgressed what Steven Ellis has called the "unwritten law" of English government: that "rule of the counties lay in the hands of their native elites."(56) The principal spokesmen of the Old English community began to assert "in open speche that ther Kyngdom was kept from them by force and by such as be strangers in bloodd to them."(57) Against the advance of the military conquest and colonization of Ireland, the Palesmen advocated the delegation of power to the Old English feudal lords who could both protect Old English interests and contain Gaelic regions and Gaelic resistance. Increasingly, the Old English held up the Act for the Kingly Title as a bulwark against the work of colonization. Old English lawyers repudiated the extension of superior English jurisdiction over the institutions of Irish government on the basis of Ireland's sovereign status.(58) The Old English continued to assert their inviolable rights as subjects of the monarch, but the conquest and colonization of Ireland in the 1560s and 1570s forced a shift in emphasis. Before 1541, the Old English had asserted their English rights to secure the protection of their interests in the absence of adequate English governance. After 1547, the Old English asserted their English rights to protect themselves against the increased encroachment of the royal administration.

Old English resistance to the New English colonization of Ireland played out along two distinct paths. One path was armed rebellion. Old English landholders outside the Pale revolted against the New English colonial officers in order to protect property rights and to stem the advance of colonization. The perceived inability of the Old English landed classes to forestall the implementation of Sidney's colonization schemes through traditional political processes prompted five Old English rebellions between 1568 and 1576: the rebellion of James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald between 1568 and 1573; the rebellion of Edmund, Piers, and Edward Butler, brothers of the earl of Ormond, in 1569; the rebellion of the earl of Thomond in 1570; and the two rebellions of Ulick and John Burke, sons of the earl of Clanricard, in 1572 and again in 1576. These rebellions, as Nicholas Canny has explained, were "by no means a total onslaught against the queen or her government in Dublin but were rather aimed specifically at ending local interference by the government."(59) Rebellion provided the last resort for landowners who saw the government closing in to confiscate their property; landowners thereby attempted to attract the attention of the crown in the hope that the queen would redress their grievances and restore them to their former positions. The Old English rebellions were conservative movements led by men, loyal to the crown, who attempted to preserve the integrity of the queen's justice in Ireland against overweening New English colonial officials who had overstepped their legitimate authority.(60) The rebellions shared several prominent characteristics. The Old English leaders, discarding English customs and dress, appropriated Gaelic traditions and reasserted their claims to the traditional rights and immunities of which the Sidney administration had deprived them. The leaders raised armies to defy the government, evicted the New English from their localities, and attacked those in their own communities who had favored and benefited from the colonial administration.(61) What they did not share, however, was a religious dimension. Though Catholic Old Englishmen led all five rebellions, only Fitzmaurice overtly opposed the incursion of English Protestantism. His attempt to usurp the earldom of Desmond necessarily required him to eliminate all Anglo-Irish, and not simply New English, influence from Munster. This religious dimension, however, stirred little loyalty; few Catholic landholders in Munster supported him, and his rebellion collapsed soon after assuming confessional overtones.(62) None of the five rebellions succeeded. Indeed, they merely spurred the New English administration to press on with the work of colonization.

The Old English enjoyed more substantial success in rolling back the colonization of Ireland through organized resistance in the Irish parliament. The parliament in session between 1569 and 1571 revealed a new political alignment between the Old English landowners of the Pale and the Old English feudal lords. Sir Edmund Butler, brother of the earl of Ormond, and the Palesman Sir Christopher Barnewall succeeded in consolidating Old English interests in the Commons to oppose the colonization policies of the government. Sidney had expected the parliament to endorse his programs without criticism; the emergence of a cohesive Old English bloc that transcended internal divisions between the Pale and the landed classes succeeded in extending the parliament for eight sessions over two years. The Old English in Commons forced the government to concede defeat on a number of key issues. The passage of many other bills was largely permitted by the withdrawal of the government's most strident opponents from the parliament. Frustration with the political process quickly drove Butler himself into open rebellion.(63) By 1584, the leadership of this Old English parliamentary bloc had passed to younger men who asserted that the English government was, by its very nature, inimical to local interests. An overwhelmingly Old English majority secured the defeat of an ambitious and autocratic program introduced by Sir John Perrot, the Lord Deputy, during the Irish parliament of 1584. Perrot's dual attack on constitutional liberty and on recusancy solidified Roman Catholicism as a rallying cry of the Old English cause.(64) The Perrot parliament of 1584, Steven Ellis has explained, saw "the final emergence of a distinct Old English community, centering on the Pale, overwhelmingly and tenaciously Catholic, but loyal . . . asserting its primacy in defending English civility in Ireland and its unique ability to secure a peaceful reformation of the Irishry."(65) The Old English had achieved through parliamentary opposition what they had failed to secure through armed rebellion; though they did not defeat the colonization project, they had, for a time, frustrated its expansion.

The Old English, of course, had always been Catholic, but the holding up of Roman Catholicism as a central and overt component of the Old English identity during the Irish parliament of 1584 suggested that the political struggle between the Old English and New English communities had taken on vast ideological dimensions. Religious conflict, it will be noted, has thus far been conspicuously absent from this essay. The tensions between the Old English community and the New English in the crown administration broke down largely along political lines during most of the sixteenth century. In their conflicts with the crown before 1541 and during the colonization program of the 1560s and 1570s, the Old English claimed and asserted rights on the basis of their English identity. As these conflicts intensified, however, the legitimacy of this identity came under attack. The struggle to maintain their political influence reflected a larger, ideological struggle on the part of the Old English to maintain their membership in the Pale community. The denial of this membership provided the means by which the New English extended and secured their authority in Ireland. Thus, political conflict sparked ideological conflict. During the latter half of the sixteenth century, articulate members of the Old English community attempted to reify their English identity; they defined themselves against the "uncivilized" Gaelic Irish and asserted the compatibility of loyalty and Roman Catholicism. At the same time, the New English deployed concepts of "degeneracy" and called attention to the common Catholic faith that linked the "civilized" Old English with the "barbarous" Gaelic Irish. The later sixteenth century, therefore, saw the Old English identity redefined.

The attempt to reify the Old English identity during this period manifested itself clearly in the writings of Richard Stanihurst, a leading spokesman for the Old English community and the descendant of a long line of prominent Palesmen. In his De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis, Stanihurst coined the term "Anglo-Hiberni," which "claims for the Old English society an identity apart from the mother-country," as Colm Lennon has explained. "Stanihurst's society was not to be considered merely as a remote outpost of English civilization but as a vibrant cultural organism with its own institutions which he took pride in portraying."(66) In an extended passage of his "Description of Ireland," Stanihurst praised the Fitzgerald Earls of Kildare and Lords Deputy of Ireland whose commitment to local Old English interests and management of the Gaelic Irish had secured the efficient operation of the Irish administration. "If it had stood with the good fortune of the Giraldines, that the king with equall balance would poise their valure, long yer this had all Ireland beene put in a quiet and peaceable state."(67) Stanihurst criticized those members of the Pale community who shunned their distinctive Old English identity:

There are some of the ruder sort so quaint in seuering the name Irish and Ireland, as that they would be named Ireland men, but in no wise Irishmen . . . who so will grate upon such diuersities, in respect that he is ashamed of his countrie; trulie (in mine opinion) his countrie maie be ashamed of him.(68)

Even the "meere Irish," Stanihurst argued, recognized the vast differences between the Old English and New English identities. "[T]he Irish man . . . termeth anie one of the English sept, and planted in Ireland, Bobdeagh Galteagh, that is, English churle: but if he be an Englishman borne, then he nameth him, Bobdeagh Saxonnegh, that is, a Saxon churle."(69) However, while he affirmed the distinctive identity of the Old English community and advocated a return to local governance, Stanihurst would by no means associate the Old English with the Gaelic Irish:

Before I attempt the unfolding of the maners of the meere Irish, I think it expedient, to forware thee reader, not to impute anie barbarous custome that shall here be laid downe, to the citizens, townsmen, and inhabitants of the English pale, in that they differe litle or nothing from the ancient customes and dispositions of their progenitors, the English and Welsh men, being therefore as mortallie behated of the Irish, as those that are born in England.(70)

Stanihurst described an Old English identity utterly distinct from that of the Gaelic Irish and equal in manners and civility to that of the royal administration. Stanihurst's Old English identity had a dignity and dynamism all its own. Uncorrupted by the influence of the "meere Irish," it was well adapted for the governance of Ireland.

Aidan Clarke has trenchantly argued that the influence of the Counter-Reformation on the Old English community provided the practical justification for the type of anti-Gaelic sentiment reflected in the writings of Stanihurst and other Old English commentators. The creed of the late sixteenth-century Old English community, Clarke explained, was based on the premise that Roman Catholicism and loyalty were perfectly compatible.(71) The Roman Catholicism of the Old English community and the Roman Catholicism of the Gaelic Irish, Clarke argued, differed fundamentally in structure and in practice. The Counter-Reformation aimed to preserve the Catholic faith by standardizing its practice through organizational reform; the Old English impulse to impose these reforms on Gaelic Irish Roman Catholicism provoked division and resentment between the two Catholic communities. The influence of the Counter-Reformation "operated positively, in the sense that tridentine catholicism reinforced nationality and descent by enabling the traditional presumption of the cultural inferiority of the Irish to be continued in a new context," Clarke wrote. "The Old English were rescued from provincial backwardness and given access to modernity through their links with a religious movement that allowed them to . . . strip the term 'civility' of its protestant associations."(72) The Old English were Catholic, but they by no means considered themselves to be native Irish Catholics; the influence of the Counter-Reformation in Ireland distinguished the Old English from their "barbarous" and "uncivilized" co-religionists. The reformed Old English faith, in the eyes of the Pale community, powerfully reconciled Roman Catholicism and civility and lent support to its claims for local political influence in the crown's Irish government.