Parliaments

Parliaments are first mentioned in Ireland in the 13th century, following closely on their appearance in England. The word parliamentum meant ‘parley’ or ‘discussion’, and seems to have been a newfangled term for the long‐established colloquies between kings and their leading lay and ecclesiastical subjects. It acquired additional significance during the disputes between Henry III and his barons (1258–65). Edward I (1272–1307) used English parliaments for royal purposes—hearing and answering petitions, promulgating legislation, and seeking consent to the taxes he needed for his wars. On occasion the forwarding of his business required the presence of representative knights from the shires and burgesses from the towns, alongside the magnates and higher clergy who received individual summonses. Similar development took place in Ireland, where the first clearly documented parliament met in 1264. In 1278 ordinances were promulgated in parliament with the assent of the magnates. In 1297 the justiciar summoned knights from the counties as well as lords or their stewards to the Dublin parliament, probably because a reorganization of shire government and the formulation of peacekeeping regulations was being planned. In 1300 the king's request for taxation towards the Anglo‐Scottish War saw the first known summons of both knights and burgesses. Parliaments did not, however, yet require the presence of elected representatives. Annalists continued to present them as primarily aristocratic occasions, when the justiciar might compose differences between the great lords and obtain their agreement to discipline their followers. It should be noted, too, that similar business to that transacted in parliament continued to be handled in ‘great councils’, which could be called at short notice (parliament involved 40 days' warning), and so tended to have a more regional attendance.

In England the 14th century saw the role of parliament change. The king's need for resources, especially after the beginning of the Hundred Years War, made taxation a frequent occurrence. Edward III (1327–77) used parliament to publicize and gain support for his activities, and an unspoken link appeared between the granting of taxes and the redress of grievances. Particularly from the 1370s, when the war went badly, some English parliaments saw magnates and knights combine to criticize royal ministers and policy. Broadly parallel developments are visible in Ireland, where the Gaelic threat to the colony led to more frequent taxation from the 1350s onwards. During the 1370s William of Windsor's heavy fiscal demands provoked opposition in parliament; when the king tried to bring representatives of the Irish counties and towns to England in the hope of unlocking their purses, their electors reacted by denying them authority to make grants. By this time country and borough representatives were a normal part of Irish parliaments, as were representatives of the lower clergy. (In England, by contrast, the clergy met separately in convocation.) The special problems of government in Ireland set a distinctive agenda for parliaments and great councils, which became, as the Statute of Kilkenny shows, an arena where royal ministers and the colonial elites dealt wth issues such as security, absenteeism, and Gaelicization. The Anglo‐Irish also used them as occasions to formulate appeals to the king and accredit messengers to the English court: in 1385 meetings at Dublin and Kilkenny sought to convince Richard II that without his personal intervention the colony would be lost.

The 15th century saw the appearance of an enhanced sense of parliament's status. This was sufficiently developed by 1460 to be exploited by Richard, duke of York, when the Drogheda parliament issued its declaration asserting Ireland's jurisdictional identity under the crown, and denying the validity in Ireland of English statutes unless these were accepted ‘by the lords spiritual and temporal and the commons of [Ireland]…in great council or parliament there held’. Such major political and constitutional issues, however, arose infrequently. The normal role of parliament was as a high court where legislation particular to Ireland was enacted, and where petitions from the lords, gentry, and communities of the lordship were dealt with. As the colony shrank geographically, it became rare for parliaments to be held outside the future Pale; but they still attracted attendance and petitions from south Leinster and Munster, and compensated in some degree for the declining effectiveness of other royal courts. The support in Ireland for Yorkist pretenders (see Wars of the Roses) to Henry VII's throne helped prompt the enactment of Poynings's Law, which gave the English government unprecedented control over the business of the Irish parliament, and may be regarded as bringing the medieval phase of Irish parliamentary history to a close.

In the period of reconquest and renewed colonization that followed during the 16th and early 17th centuries, the crown wanted a compliant parliament voting taxes for its increased expenditure and legislating for its policies on religion, land, and social regulation. Changes in representation generally favoured the state. The representation of the lower clergy by proctors was abolished after these had opposed royal ecclesiastical supremacy in 1536. The gradual extension of shire government saw new Commons constituencies, providing not only space for Gaelic Irish MPs but also room for government officials. The most dramatic change took place in Chichester's parliament (1613–5) when new boroughs, most little more than villages or projected plantation towns, were created. This gave 38 new MPs from Ulster, 18 from Munster, 16 from Leinster, and 12 from Connacht, and a government majority of 32. This majority was reduced to six after successful Old English objections to the late issue of borough charters, but became fully operational in Wentworth's 1634–5 parliament. For his 1640 parliament Wentworth eliminated 16 more Old English seats by disenfranchising boroughs. In the Restoration parliament of 1661–6, following the devastating Cromwellian attack on Catholic property rights, only one Catholic member was returned, and his election was subsequently overturned.

These changes in representation sprang from growing Old English resistance to government policies. In Grey's Reformation parliament of 1536–7, the state confidently suspended Poynings's Law. The local elite had little ideological objection to establishing Henry VIII as head of the church and, when its worries about monastic land distribution and new taxes were dispelled, the response was positive. St Leger's parliament (1541–3), which established Ireland as a kingdom and saw the attendance of many Gaelic and Gaelicized lords in response to the new policy of surrender and regrant, was euphoric. Sussex's two parliaments bringing back Catholicism under Mary (1557–8) and establishing Anglicanism under Elizabeth (1560) saw little opposition. But Sidney's parliament (1569–71) hit problems when the Commons objected to non‐resident New Englishmen being elected and refused the suspension of Poynings's Law in an atmosphere vitiated by the first Desmond revolt and the ongoing cess controversy. Sidney's subsequent plan to replacecess by composition encountered so much opposition that a second parliament intended for 1577–8 had to be abandoned. In Perrot's parliament (1585–6) Old English fears about recusancy laws and composition ruined most of the lord deputy's plans.

Parliament was not called for another quarter‐century. In Chichester's parliament, penal legislation was widely expected in the light of his mandates policy. In fact the anti‐Catholic proposals were mild but the parliament took place under an armed guard in Dublin Castle. The Old English minority sabotaged proceedings by attempting to elect their own speaker; when he was ejected, they withdrew from the house. Parliament reconvened only after concessions from James VI. In 1628 the Old English seemed on the point of getting a parliament to approve the Graces. The writs of summons had been dispatched but failure to follow the procedure laid down by Poynings's Law meant the parliament was called off and that run by Wentworth six years later was to be quite a different event. Wentworth's second parliament, however, went completely awry. After he left Ireland the government party disintegrated and Old and New English united against his arbitrary methods. They accrued authority as the executive power evaporated, culminating in Patrick Darcy's famous ‘Argument’ that the Irish parliament had power to make law and control the courts not‐withstanding the claims of either royal prerogative or English parliament.

Many of these aspirations were evident in the subsequent development of the Confederate Catholic assembly, which was technically not a parliament since it was not called by the king and itself made no legislation. However, the claims of the English parliament, which had applied 36 acts to Ireland between 1532 and 1640, were amply demonstrated by the unprecedentedly wide‐ranging Adventurers Act of 1642. The logical consequence of the growing assertiveness of the English body was parliamentary union in 1654, in which Ireland and Scotland each received 30 elected representatives at Westminster. The convention of 1660, which restored the king, shows that the Protestant interest in Ireland favoured its own parliament. Ironically the parliament of 1661–6, in which representatives of pre‐ 1641 Irish Protestants were joined by 16 adventurers and 50 Cromwellian soldiers, was no more compliant than formerly. It passed the Act of Settlement (1662) but protested as the Court of Claims proceeded to find large numbers of Catholics innocent and passed the Act of Explanation (1665) only with extreme reluctance. MPs were, however, willing to grant customs duties and the hearth tax in perpetuity rather than for a term of years. This, along with buoyant receipts for most of the next two decades, ensured that it was not necessary to summon another parliament until Tyrconnell's patriot parliament of 1689.

The 1690s began a new phase in the history of the Irish parliament. The rhetoric of representative government that had accompanied the revolution of 1688 had created new expectations among the Irish propertied classes. Meanwhile the need for additional grants of taxation, as the cost of prolonged war against France pushed government spending far beyond the traditional revenues of the crown, gave parliament, in both Great Britain and Ireland, new bargaining power. Both influences were evident in the sole right controversy of 1692, and in the compromise that followed in 1695. Parliament met at roughly two‐year intervals up to 1714, and regularly every second year thereafter until 1785, when annual sessions commenced.

The Irish parliament throughout the 18th century represented the Protestant propertied classes. Landowners and their relatives made up a substantial majority among MPs; there was also a sizeable contingent of lawyers and smaller numbers of bankers and merchants. In parliament members operated either as independent individuals or as part of informal groups or connections, based on family, friendship, or mutual interest. The only exceptions were the period c.1704–14, when parliamentary politics were dominated by the conflict of Whig and Tory, and the 1790s, when the formation of a new Whig Party once again introduced an element of conflict between political parties.

Up to 1782 the powers of the Irish parliament were still nominally restricted by Poynings's Law and, from 1720, the Declaratory Act. In practice, the Irish executive, and the British ministry to which it answered, found it preferable to proceed by co‐operation and mutual accommodation. Up to the late 1760s the Irish parliament was managed through undertakers. Townshend's much publicized conflict with these powerful intermediaries did not remove the need to construct parliamentary majorities by negotiation, consultation, and the careful distribution of patronage. Instead those functions were now taken over directly by the lord lieutenant and chief secretary. Nor did legislative independence in 1782 substantially change the relationship between executive and legislature.

This type of ‘management’ was made possible by the restricted electoral system on which the Irish House of Commons was elected. No fewer than 234 out of 300 members sat for ‘close’ boroughs, where the return of members was wholly under the control of a single patron; the rest were elected on a narrow, property‐based franchise. The unrepresentative character of the Commons, the prominence of patronage in parliamentary management, and the eventual willingness of parliament to vote itself out of existence by accepting the Act of Union have all contributed to the low historical reputation of parliamentarians. More recent writing, however, acknowledges the extent to which the pursuit of profit and influence was nevertheless regulated by notions of honour and duty, while episodes like the resistance to Wood's Halfpence, and the agitations for free trade and legislative independence, remind us that parliament was not wholly detached from what its members accepted as legitimate public opinion.

Bibliography

Ellis, S. G. , Reform and Revival: English Government in Ireland 1470–1534 (1986)
McCracken, J. L. , The Irish Parliament in the Eighteenth Century (1971)
Richardson, H. G., and and Sayles, G. O. , The Irish Parliament in the Middle Ages (1964)

RFF,/HM,/ and Robin Frame