The success of the Counter-Reformation in Ireland following the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy was a remarkable achievement. Between 1618 and 1630 Rome made a staggering nineteen episcopal appointments in a kingdom that was ruled by a Protestant king. Documenting the achievements of the initial period only paints half the picture, however. The implementation of the Tridentine reforms and the thorny issue of episcopal authority brought the religious orders into a head-on collision with the secular clergy. This protracted dispute lasted for a decade, most notably in the diocese of Dublin where an English secular priest, Paul Harris, led a hostile attack on the Franciscan archbishop, Thomas Fleming. The longevity of the feud, though, owed at least as much to the intervention of Lord Deputy Sir Thomas Wentworth as it did to the internal tensions of the Catholic Church. Despite Wentworth’s influential role, he has been largely written out of the conflict. This article addresses the lacunae in the current historiography and argues that the lord deputy’s interference was a decisive factor in exacerbating the hostilities between the secular and regular clergy in early seventeenth-century Ireland.

We consider a continuous-time, single-type, age-dependent Bellman-Harris branching process. We investigate the limit distribution of the point process A(t)={at,i: 1≤ i≤ Z(t)}, where at,i is the age of the ith individual alive at time t, 1≤ i≤ Z(t), and Z(t) is the population size of individuals alive at time t. Also, if Z(t)≥ k, k≥2, is a positive integer, we pick k individuals from those who are alive at time t by simple random sampling without replacement and trace their lines of descent backward in time until they meet for the first time. Let Dk(t) be the coalescence time (the death time of the last common ancestor) of these k random chosen individuals. We study the distribution of Dk(t) and its limit distribution as t→∞.