Finglas' proposal for political reform involved the expansion of royal power within the Pale as a prelude to the reformation of the Irish lordship as a whole. "Furste, our Souveraigne Lorde the Kyng shuld extend his gracious power, for the Reformacion of Leinsterwhich is the Key and highwaye for the Reformacion of the Remanent."(22) The political reform of Ireland, however, ultimately required the Irish government to enforce English law uniformly throughout Ireland.

[W]hensoever our Souveraigne Lord shall extend the Reformacion of Irlaund, he must Reduce the Lordes and Gentilmen of this Londe whych be of English Nacion to due Obedience of his Grace's Lawes, which is very harde to doe, unless the Kyng with an Army represse Irishmen upon the Borders, to contribute in a good conforming.(23)

Finglas and the other Old English reformers demanded, and expected, the reformation of the Irish government to proceed on their terms. They sought efficient, centralized English governance sensitive to their own interests. Only when the king acted on these interests would the English foothold in Ireland be secure.

The crown took little account of these Old English reform programs in framing the government that replaced the fallen Kildare administration. The crown responded to the Old English demands in only the most formal of ways. In the new Cromwellian administration (1534-1536), the Irish government gained a nominally expanded jurisdiction but lacked the manpower, financial resources, and commitment to enforce it. The new administration acted conservatively to fill the vacuum of power left by the collapse of Fitzgerald hegemony. The crown replaced the traditional governing mode of aristocratic delegation with a more centralized apparatus that included an English-born deputy, a standing garrison, and stronger control by the government in London. This new administration limited its reforms to the Englishry in Ireland; it attempted to create around the Pale a network of fortified garrisons similar to those defending the English settlement at Calais. Among the Irishry, the government attempted simply to secure and maintain traditional agreements with the Gaelic lords.(24) The Cromwellian administration thereby provoked bitter resentment in the Old English community. The suspension in 1536 of Poyning's Law(25) during the so-called Reformation Parliament undermined the executive function of the local Dublin administration; legislative initiative passed from it to Cromwell and the Council in London.(26) The frustration of the Old English over their exclusion from traditional legislative processes provoked "the first appearance of organized opposition to government policy which became so marked a feature of parliaments in early modern Ireland."(27) The succeeding Irish administration of Lord Leonard Grey (1536-1540) served only to exacerbate Old English dissatisfaction. The expansion of English jurisdiction to include the Irishry strained the resources of an already understaffed Dublin administration, and the regime threatened to deprive the Old English of the little influence that they had maintainedin the government. "All Palesmen greatly resented the army of one thousand soldiers over whom they had no control," Nicholas Canny has explained. "[T]his left the Dublin government even more isolated than usual, since the army was resented even by those whom it was purporting to defend."(28) Thus, the outlines of future conflict emerged as crown and community pursued increasingly divergent goals for the government of Ireland. The Old English demanded a transformation of the Irish polity; the crown sought only to maintain the medieval lordship.

In the Irish parliament of 1541, the Old English struck preemptively to advance their program for reform against the crown's reluctance. Through the Act for the Kingly Title, which declared Ireland to be a sovereign kingdom under the rule of the English monarch, the Old English secured the comprehensive reform of the Irish administration for which Finglas and other reformers had called. The text of the Act reveals an attempt to bind the king to the enforcement of English laws in Ireland.

[L]ack of naming the king's majesty and his noble progenitors kings of Ireland, according to their said true and just title, style, and name therein, hath been great occasion that the Irishmen and inhabitants within this realm of Ireland have not been so obedient to the king's highness and his most noble progenitors, and to their laws, as they of right, and according to their allegiance and bounden duties ought to have been.(29)

This Act provided for the political unity of all inhabitants of Ireland, both Gaelic and English, under the unilateral jurisdiction of the crown and revealed an emergent impulse among the Old English to use the Irish parliament as their forum for political action within the new polity.(30) In repudiating the divided structure of the medieval lordship established in the Statutes of Kilkenny (1366), the Act for the Kingly Title envisaged a single Irish community under the rule of the king, and it committed the crown's energies to making this single community a reality.(31) The parliament of 1541, which included members of both the Irishry and the Englishry, acted for the first time as an instrument of national governance. By emphasizing their position as loyal subjects, the Old English constitutionally prevented the government from neglecting their interests. By transforming Ireland into a sovereign kingdom under the crown, the Old English gave constitutional legitimacy to their version of Englishness.(32) The implications of the Act for the relationship between crown and community were vast. "A local reform group lobbying for royal initiative to impose order throughout the island," Steven Ellis explained, "had finally succeeded in committing the crown to just that, despite rebuffs in 1494, 1520 and the mid-1530s."(33) What the Old English had not accomplished through persuasion and argument they achieved through constitutional manipulation. In emphasizing Henry's kingly duty towards his subjects in Ireland, they bound the crown to political reform on Old English terms. Kingly duty would become "a much-used weapon in the armoury of persuasives" on which the Old English would rely as conflict with the colonial administration escalated.(34)

Reactions to the passage of the Act for the Kingly Title in Dublin and in London revealed that both the Old English community and the crown recognized its implications for the dynamics of Irish politics. On 18 June 1541, a public holiday and a general amnesty for prisoners were proclaimed in Dublin as the Act for the Kingly Title was promulgated at Saint Patrick's Cathedral. Two thousand Dubliners celebrated High Mass and Te Deum, and cannonades, bonfires, and free wine marked the transformation of Ireland from a medieval lordship into a sovereign kingdom.(35) The reaction in London differed substantially. "Not a cheer was raised at court,"(36) and the king's council handled the Act as matter of routine administration and statutory revision. The passage of the Act infuriated the irascible monarch who acquired the title. Henry VIII condemned it on both constitutional and pragmatic grounds. The Act's text, he charged, implied that his kingly title in Ireland proceeded from the election and common consent of the Irish parliament and not from the right of original conquest; the bestowal of the kingly title by the Irish parliament, he argued, would derogate that title which he already held.(37) Henry also understood the Act's practical implications. He rebuked his council for devising "by an act, to invest in us the name and title of king of Ireland" when royal revenues were not "sufficient to maintain the state of the same."(38) Nevertheless, Henry could not refuse his new duties. The Old English, it seemed, had succeeded in binding him to protect and to advance their interests.

The statutory transformation of Ireland into a pan-insular kingdom, however, did not bring about this unity in practice. The attempt to implement the constitutional framework designed by the Act for the Kingly Title again raised tensions between the Old English desires for vigorous government and the crown's impulse to reduce costs. Conciliatory measures designed to bring the Gaelic Irish under English rule showed most clearly the practical short-comings of the new constitutional system. Surrender and re-grant, by which English property laws replaced traditional Gaelic methods of land tenure, provoked substantial Gaelic resentment to the expansion of English jurisdiction.(39) Henry's emphasis on economy in government initially kept these tensions to a minimum, but the attempt by the regime of Edward VI to impose a Protestant religious settlement and to deal aggressively with Gaelic Ireland gave rise to open conflict.(40) In Ulster, the imposition of English laws of primogeniture sparked a violent dispute between the sons of Con Bacagh O'Neill: Shane, who held the right of succession by Gaelic law, and Matthew, the firstborn who acquired this right by primogeniture. The intervention of the Tudor administration to enforce English law and to protect Matthew's "legal" inheritance provoked Shane to launch an attack on the Pale. This, indeed, was the typical result of surrender and re-grant; the imposition of English property laws met with limited success only in the Gaelic regions of the western earldoms of Clanricard and Thomond.(41) In the context of increasing unrest, two impulses converged to motivate the crown to revise its strategies of Irish government. First, the rebellions of the O'Neills in Ulster and of the O'Connors and the O'Mores in the midlands led the Dublin administration to focus its resources and energies on the reduction of border threats to the English Pale; colonial officials recognized the tenuous position of an English settlement surrounded by an increasingly hostile Gaelic Irish population.(42) Secondly, the emergence of Irish patronage as a significant prize in court politics motivated leading courtiers to press for a military suppression of and expansion into Ireland. During the reigns of Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth I, these courtiers entrenched themselves in the Dublin administration and shaped an increasingly militant approach to Irish governance.(43)

Between 1547 and 1565, these two impulses shaped a program for the military conquest of Ireland. Events at the beginning of Edward's reign suggested the form that this policy would assume. Gaelic Irish disturbances in the midlands erupted in 1546 and 1547 into open warfare under the leadership of the O'Connors and O'Mores. William Brabazon, Lord Justice of Ireland, suppressed the rebellions and established forts at Daingean, in Offaly, and at Ballyadams, in Leix. The privy council, in March 1547, authorized the establishment of English garrisons "in most meet places of service without the English Pale."(44) Around these garrisons, Lord Deputy Sir Edward Bellingham, one of those courtiers who had secured patronage in Ireland, constructed a plantation to secure the Pale against further Gaelic unrest. By confiscating the land surrounding the garrisons and populating it with soldiers, by driving the indigenous Gaelic cultivators west toward the River Shannon, and by organizing the remaining Gaelic population under a seneschal system,(45) the Plantation of Leix and Offaly attempted to provide a self-financing system of defense for the English settlement in Ireland.(46) The precedent of this plantation in the midlands informed the program that Henry Sidney, Lord Deputy of Ireland between 1565 and 1571, attempted to apply to Ireland as a whole.(47) Sidney considered his program to be "the solution to the government of Ireland and was convinced that the appropriate machinery would be in operation within three years."(48) It involved three aspects. Sidney would continue the seneschal system in the Gaelic parts of Leinster in order to make those areas into shire ground; he intended to remove the military threat to the Pale's security by gradually eliminating local Gaelic rule. He would reform the feudal lordships by instituting provisional councils, with jurisdiction confined to areas where English law had formerly prevailed and areas that had been drawn into English law by surrender and re-grant. Finally, he would launch a military campaign to overthrow Shane O'Neill and to expel Gaelic Scots immigrants from northeast Ulster.(49) Sidney intended to further these proposals with the assistance of the New English, a class of settlers newly brought from England to Ireland.

The implementation of Sidney's program soon revealed a divergence between conquest in theory and conquest in practice. Colonization formed a central part of the program; in 1567, Sidney explained to Elizabeth that,

. . . all the Treasure your Highenes sendeth, is yssued out of this Realm; and so will it be, thoughe your Majestie sent as muche as Englande bredeth. This Myschief is no Waye to be helped, but by ministring of Justice, and planting of som civill People upon thoise barbarous Placies. And, moste gracious Soveraigne, this Matter is worthie of deliberate Consideracion and spedy Redress.(50)