510 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



of Queen Elizabeth, which Mountmorres reprinted in full. The- 

 author makes no attempt at original inquiry, and the work is- 

 practically silent as to the Parliaments of Henry YII. and Henry YIII. 

 For information about the Tudor Legislature we are thus reduced 

 in effect to the ancient authority in Holinshed just referred to, to 

 some passages in Stanihurst's Description of Ireland, published in the 

 same Chronicle, and to one or two chapters in Edmund Campion's 

 Sidtory of Ireland, written in the year 1571. JSTo attempt has 

 hitherto been made to combine with these older authorities the- 

 information which the publication of the State Paper Calendars 

 has made available. Eor although the late Dr. Richey, in his- 

 admirable Short History of the Irish People, has based his account 

 of the Tudor period, and more particularly of the Irish policy of 

 Henry YIII., on the authority of these records, his attention was not 

 especially directed to questions of Parliamentary or Constitutional 

 history, ^^'or are the references to this subject in Mr. Bagwell's Ireland 

 under the Tudors much more than episodical, although in a chapter on the 

 Irish Parliament the earlier constitution of the Legislature is lucidly 

 summarised. It thus appears that the early Parliamentary history of 

 Ireland, from the time when Parliament, in the modern sense of the 

 term, can be said to have existed in this country, is still to a great 

 extent unwritten ; so that although the present inquiry is on a scale 

 much too small to exhaust the subject, it will, I trust, be found to 

 supply, in some degree, this lacuna in our history, and to illustrate the 

 evolution of the Parliamentary institutions of Ireland. 



The statement of Sir John Davies, that " for the space of 140' 

 years after King Henry II. had taken possessionfof the lord- 

 ship of Ireland, there was but one Parliament for both kingdoms," 

 has been criticised with some acerbity by writers zealous for the 

 antiquity of the legislative institutions of Ireland. It is certain that 

 the literal accuracy of this assertion cannot be sustained ; yet there 

 can be little doubt of the substantial truth of the statement that^ 

 " Eefore that time, the meetings and consultations of the great lord& 

 with some of the commons — though they be called Parliaments in the 

 ancient annals — yet being without orderly summons, or formal pro- 

 ceedings, are rather to be called parlies than Parliaments." The 

 eminent Speaker of James I.'s Irish Parliament, whose speech before 

 the Lord Deputy Chichester, in 1613, is the first extant attempt at 

 a historical survey of the history of Parliamentary institutions in 

 Ireland, would have been the last to depreciate the importance of the 



