After this experience:
“We have small disposition to assent to any Parliament,” wrote Elizabeth to the Deputy in 1566. “Nevertheless, when we call to remembrance the ancient manner of that our Realm, that no manner of thing there ought to be commented or treated upon, but such as we shall first understand from you, and consent thereunto ourself, and consequently return the same under our great seal of this our Realm of England; we are the better minded to assent to this your request.”
The legal correctness of this regard for Poyning's Act disappeared in the course of three years' preparation for the new assembly. The Parliament met in 1569 to find the Commons packed with strangers, contrary to the renewed law which had been won from Henry VIII. in 1542 against the practice. The gentry of the Pale and the Dublin burgesses protested in vain against the return of strangers for boroughs which they had never even seen: “the more words the more choler.” Elizabeth's vast schemes of confiscation and breaking up of the old Irish society were met with hostility. Under pressure of the Deputy, therefore, a second session was held to pass a single bill, the “Repeal of Poyning's Act”; on the plea that grievous sores [pg 243] known to the high court in Ireland could not be reformed as not having been certified to the Queen. This bill was bitterly opposed: “so jealous were they that they would not in long time enter into the consideration thereof.” The remonstrants did in fact force some concessions; that provisions made by the present Parliament for the common weal, the augmentation of the Queen's revenues, and the assurance to her of lands and profits, which were certified under the Great Seal of Ireland, and returned to Ireland under the Great Seal of England, should first be publicly proclaimed in six cities, and only after these proclamations should pass into law, “Poyning's Act notwithstanding.”
The way was now clear, and the next session brought the attainder of Shane O'Neill and the tremendous confiscation of Tyrone and other lands in Ulster. A beginning was made of Munster confiscations. The Deputy was to appoint English-speaking clergy to all ecclesiastical dignities in Munster. Other Acts ordered all Ireland to be reduced to shire land; and abolished all Irish and Anglo-Norman chieftaincies or “captainships” except by special patent (thus depriving the chiefs of the benefit of their indentures), under penalty of death without benefit of clergy, as the law was drafted in England; the Parliament substituted a fine and passed the decree with great opposition, for “the matter misliked them more than the pain.” The Queen herself sent letters ordering Parliament to pass a heavy impost which must ruin the Irish wine trade, in which matter “they showed themselves so unquiet that they were more like a bear-baiting of disordered persons than a Parliament of wise and grave men.” Taught by experience, the Parliament now insisted on a law to limit the repeal of Poyning's [pg 244] Act, in which they explained their reasons for objecting to any repeal at any time. Before that Act, they said, when liberty was given to the governors to call Parliament at their pleasure, “Acts passed as well to the dishonour of the Prince, as to the hindrance of their subjects, the remembrance whereof would indeed have stayed us from condescending to the repeal of the said statute,” save for their persuasion that Sydney through his motion meant only the honour of the Queen and the common benefit of the Realm (going back in these words to the first repeal of 1536); but they feared that the like liberty might be abused by other governors, and therefore enacted that none other should ever use the liberty of Sydney, and that no Bill should ever be certified into England for repealing or suspending of Poynings' Act unless it was first agreed on in a Session of Parliament in Ireland, by the greater number of the Lords and the greater number of the Common House, that is by both Houses carrying the Bill by a separate vote.
The Parliament of 1569, distinguished by a high order of public spirit and legal ability, was driven to its fatal close in a general war against those “that banish Ireland and mean conquest,” a striking phrase of Anglo-Irish patriots.
A new “Repeal of Poynings' Act” was demanded of the Parliament in 1585. The reason was again the same—for the more convenient passing of Acts to deprive the people of Ireland of their land and their religion; Elizabeth mainly anxious about her property in land, and the deputy about religious uniformity. There was a Bill to extend to Ireland all the English laws against Popish recusants, and demand the Oath of Supremacy as a test of the fidelity of Parliament: an Act for the attainder of Baltinglas; another for the [pg 245] attainder of Desmond, and a hundred and sixty more “traitors,” and for the confiscation of Munster; one to limit the landowners' old-established rights of conveyancing of land as “likely to tend to disinherit the Queen's Majesty.” Such Acts could never be passed under the formalities of Poynings' Law.
The Viceroy, however, had to reckon with two new problems. Representatives of the Irish race sat in the Parliament, Hugh O'Neill in the Lords, some fourteen Irishmen in the Commons. And the effect of the enactment made by the last Parliament was now seen in its enactment that “repeal” henceforth must be carried by a majority in each of the two Houses, voting separately. By fraudulently counting an absent vote Perrott declared the Bill carried by one in the Lords: the Commons threw it out by thirty-five. He prorogued Parliament for three days, and when it met again brought in the Bill; again the Ireland Party in the Commons defeated the Englishmen who supported the Government; and thus overthrew, in Perrott's words, “the repeal of Poynings' Act that should have set them at liberty to treat of that and all other things necessary for the State.” The opponents of suspension, he said, desired only to make void the whole Parliament because they could abide no reformation in matters of religion or State; and would bring the new chiefs, O'Reillys, Maguires, and the rest, into jealousy of the Parliament. The landowners and gentry, “the stirrers of Parliament and the lawyers,” on their side declared they feared to give despotic power to the Viceroy and distrusted his purpose, “some of the Irishmen either mistaking or conceiving it was framed to another intent than it did pretend, whereby they drew on them the Deputy's disfavour, and displeasure on him from the Queen.”
The defeat of “repeal” showed the Houses their strength. The Lords dashed new Acts proposed against treason and the trial of accessories—statutes namely, said Perrott, for the safety of the Queen. The Commons wrecked the Bill for Desmond's attainder, striking out eight score names of “men of living” and leaving only eight. They refused, moreover, to escheat lands protected by law, and to tax land in a manner tyrannous and contrary to Irish custom. The “disturbers of Parliament” were met by five adjournments in eleven months; but the devices by which these sticklers for the law were finally subdued is too long to tell here. Parliament met at last in April, 1586, to register the royal will. The Lords read and passed the four Acts for the attainder of rebels in Munster. The Commons still resisted for a week. The official intrigue to compel their submission is confused by the bitter wrangle of the Deputy and the Treasurer for the honour of the plot. Finally the Desmond confiscations were “wrought out” of the Parliament with so great difficulty, said Spenser, “that were it to be passed again I dare undertake it would never be compassed”; and the Deputy gave the royal assent to the Bill by which over half a million acres of Desmond land were forfeited by Act of Parliament to the Crown, as the O'Neill land had been forfeited nearly twenty years before. After which Parliament was dissolved, with an oration of Justice Walshe, the Speaker, who, in “the universal comfort of all estates,” asked the Commons “what is there more of earthly felicity that can be required,” reminded them that the escheated lands “accepted by the Queen of us” were of far less value than the smallest portion of Her Majesty's charges for their benefit, and mentioned how they had “willingly consented to attaint and stain in blood Her Majesty's disloyal subjects and [pg 247] unbar the succession of their traitorous lines, to the end that the memory of their names may be quite extinguished.”
Thus after a hundred years the Parliament won its first success in refusing the repeal of Poyning's Act. Mr. Litton Falkiner calls us to wonder at the “curious circumstance” that “successive Parliaments of the sixteenth century declined on patriotic grounds to abrogate the very statute the repeal of which was to become the greatest triumph of Irish patriotism in the eighteenth century,” and insinuates that we may here see displayed the captious and capricious spirit that infects the “predestinate” peoples of Ireland. Out of the old habit of contempt it has being boldly suggested by some that the independence of Parliament, by others that the Catholic religion, were in no way valued by Irishmen until they made the discovery that these could be used to annoy and disconcert England. Such unworthy suspicions must disappear as we watch the grave conflict of men threatened with ruin, imprisonment, death, in their struggle to defend the first rights of law, property, and religion.
It was a slow battle, with rare and scanty triumphs for defenders of the constitution. Long silence followed the first victory of the Parliament in refusing the repeal of Poyning's Act: it was not summoned again for twenty-six years. Its next meeting was amid dark threatenings. The old sessions in Dublin had been honourably held in “the house called Christ's Church situate in the high place of the same, like as St. Paul's in London”; Parliament was now ordered to hold its debates in the Castle, surrounded by extra troops brought to overawe an assembly which was robbed of even the appearance of free deliberations. When they objected to being placed over the Castle stores of [pg 248] powder (in a room which had been, in fact, lately wrecked by an accidental explosion of gunpowder) and made a reference to Guy Fawkes, their objections were set aside with a scornful taunt “of what religion they were that had hatched such cockatrice's eggs.” From that time began a new and even more ominous story than before.