(80 A.) Archbishop Dowdall strenuously opposed the innovations of Henry VIII. and of his complaisant servant, then the archbishop of Dublin, the well known apostate George Brown. Brown was originally an Augustinian friar, of London, and provincial of that order in England. He was advanced to the see of Dublin, by Henry VIII. in 1535. He was the first Roman Catholic prelate who embraced the reformation in Ireland. Miles M'Grath, archbishop of Cashell, Staples, bishop of Meath, Lancaster, bishop of Kildare, Travers, bishop of Laughlin, and Coyne, bishop of Limerick, afterwards apostatized, and abjured the Catholic religion; Lancaster and Travers were, in turn, ejected from their sees, in Queen Mary's reign; as they, like the other apostles of the _Reformation_, took wives to themselves. Coyne, or Quin, was originally a Dominican friar; M'Grath was a Franciscan before his perversion. (87 A.) Richard Creagh was poisoned in the tower of London in 1585, and his successor, Edward M'Gauron, was murdered in his confessional, by a soldier, in 1598, as is asserted by David Roth, the learned bishop of Ossory, in his "_Processus Martyrialis_." To these illustrious martyrs, we may add the (92. A.) fourth in succession after M'Gauran; viz. the learned and holy martyr, Oliver Plunket, who, in 1679, was taken to Dublin, detained as a close prisoner there, and after being transmitted from thence to Newgate in London, was ultimately drawn on a sledge to Tyburn, that theatre of Catholic martyrdom since the _holy_ Reformation, and hanged, beheaded, and quartered, on the 1st of July, 1681, as may be seen more at large, in the Tripartite Theology of Richard Archdeakin, an erudite Jesuit of Kilkenny, printed at Antwerp, in 1682. (101 A.) Doctor R. O'Reilly, having completed his studies at Rome, returned to his native country, and, in 1780, was consecrated coadjutor bishop to Doctor O'Keefe, the predecessor of the present learned and pious Doctor Delany, in the diocess of Kildare and Leighlin. In 1782, Doctor O'Reilly was made administrator of the arch-diocess of Armagh; and on the death of the late Doctor Blake, in 1787, was promoted to the metropolitan chair of that primatial see.