offered control of Ireland to both the pope and Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire. Henry put down the rebellion by executing the leader ("Silken Thomas" FitzGerald), along with several of his uncles, and imprisoned Gearóid Óg, the head of the family. But now the king had to find a replacement for the FitzGeralds to keep Ireland quiet. What was needed was a cost-effective new policy that protected the Pale and guaranteed the safety of England's vulnerable west flank from foreign invasion. With the assistance of Thomas Cromwell, the King implemented the policy of surrender and regrant. This extended royal protection to all of Ireland's elite without regard to ethnicity; in return the whole country was expected to obey the law of the central government; and all Irish lords were to officially surrender their lands to the Crown, and to receive them back in return by Royal Charter. The keystone to the reform was in a statute passed by the Irish Parliament in 1542, whereby the lordship was converted to the Kingdom of Ireland. Overall, the intention was to assimilate the Gaelic and Gaelicised upper classes and to develop a loyalty on their part to the new crown. To this end, they were granted English titles and for the first time admitted to the Irish Parliament. One of the more important was the earldom of Tyrone, which was created for the Uí Néill dynasty in 1542. In a felicitous phrase, the king summed up his efforts at reform as "politic drifts and amiable persuasions". In practice, lords around Ireland accepted their new privileges but carried on as they had before. For the Irish Lordships, the English monarch was but another overlord similar to that found in the Gaelic system. It was, however, the Tudors' increasing encroachment upon the Irish local autonomy by the development of a centralised state that was to bring the English system into direct conflict with the Gaelic one. Henry's religious Reformation – although not as thorough as in England – caused disquiet; his lord deputy, Anthony St Leger, was largely able to buy off opposition by granting lands confiscated from the monasteries to Irish nobles. Difficulties After the king's death, successive lords deputy of Ireland found that actually establishing the rule of the central government was far more difficult than merely securing the Irish lords' pledges of allegiance. Successive rebellions broke out, the first