A fatal doom in fact hung over the two Houses in Dublin. The Irish Parliament, which at this time had no relation whatever with the English Parliament, depended directly and solely on the King. The royal policy of Tudors and Stuarts, in their different ways, was to fortify their personal authority over Ireland and its Parliament, and by this means to strengthen the despotic and military power of the Crown; and make Ireland, without or against its will, a peril to the liberties of England. The natural result was to bring the Irish Parliament under the angry suspicion of the English Parliament and people, and create a forced and disastrous hostility. Not only was the constitutional party in Ireland cut off from the natural support of their brethren who were fighting the battle of liberty in England, and separated from its due share in the general struggle for liberty; but the royal policy finally drove the English Parliament to determine that all independent action of the Irish Parliament should be entirely suppressed, and thus brought about a constitutional revolution which for the first time subjected the Irish Parliament to the absolute control, not of the King, but of the English Parliament itself. From this time, it is evident, Poynings' Act and its repeal took a new significance.
The Parliament which “England gave to Ireland,” that gift “of British extraction,” was, as we know, very far indeed from the Parliament which the English won [pg 249] for themselves. The English Parliament had behind it in effect the people of England. The Irish Parliament was by the Castle policy separated from the people of Ireland, who were utterly excluded, or if cautiously admitted were selected in small and discreet numbers from among those who had cut themselves off from their own people and pledged themselves to the Government. It was sedulously weakened within by perpetual infusion among its high officials, its peers, its prelates, and its members from boroughs and shires, of strangers born across the sea—men whose special mission was to “banish Ireland” and reduce all to subservience to the interests of another country. Its Statutes were treated with negligent contempt: “The same Statutes, for lack they be not in print, be unknown to the most part of your subjects here ... these of the Irishrie which newly have submitted themselves be in great doubt of such uncertain and unknown laws,” the Deputy reported. In 1569 it was proposed, apparently without any reference to Parliament, to print such of the Statutes “as it was desirable for our subjects to take note of”; in 1571 Recorder Stanihurst carried to London the roll of 170 statutes which were thought meet to be printed by the new English settler, Carew, (perhaps the most hated of all by the Parliament itself) and a few officials—a selection which was in London again corrected by Burghley, and the printing still delayed.
That a Parliament hampered, mutilated, restricted, demoralised, should have made such a stand for the country's interests, testifies to the vigour of constitutional and national life in Ireland. Society indeed is so closely bound together in any country that the most imperfect and exclusive body of its inhabitants must feel to some degree the needs and aspirations of [pg 250] the whole. Mr. A. M. Sullivan, in the last Home Rule controversy, rightly argued that it was not what the Parliament was that chiefly mattered, but where it was: “Anything will do, if it is only in Ireland,” he said, “the Protestant Synod would do.” The same need for some representative life of a people in their own land was felt by the Great Earl of Kildare over four hundred years ago. “You hear of our case as in a dream,” he cried to the London councillors, “and feel not the smart that vexeth us.”
The close of the old Irish polity, the fate of the Irish Parliaments, have a deeper lesson to teach than the supposed faults of the Irish temper, Iberian, Celtic, or Norman. The story of the old Gaelic State, and of the later Anglo-Irish Commonwealth, both alike reveal a power of patriotism, a passion of human aspiration, which cannot find its final satisfaction in material gifts; and which is ill understood by those who deny to Ireland fair fame, dignity, and a lofty patriotism, and offer in their place oblivion, with a promise for the future of Tariff Reform and its financial consequences. The series of failures that have through seven centuries followed the English dealing with Ireland have their inexorable lesson:
“That nothing has a natural right to last
But equity and reason; that all else
Meets foes irreconcilable, and at best
Lives only by variety of disease.”