Falkiner — Parliament of Ireland under Tudor Sovereigns. 515 



convenient to consider the effect of Poynings' Act upon the develop- 

 ment of Parliamentary institutions in Ireland in the century following 

 its enactment. 



Poynings' Act, though now chiefly rememhered as having reduced 

 the Irish Legislature to a state of dependence upon England, was very 

 far from originating solely in a desire on the part of the Crown, or its re- 

 presentatives, to assert the subordinate position of the Irish Parliament. 

 It was, on the contraiy, primarily due to the anxiety of the Lords of the 

 Pale to control the King's Deputies in their previously unrestrained 

 exercise of the royal prerogative. Prior to the legislation of 1495, both 

 the time of the calling of Parliament, and the choice of the measures to 

 be submitted to it, lay in the unfettered discretion of the Viceroy. In 

 the opinion of the leading men of the Pale, this discretion had been very 

 frequently abused in the latter part of the fifteenth century. Although 

 in the reigns of the latter Plantagenet rulers several princes of the 

 blood royal, and other English peers of the highest eminence, had 

 been appointed to the position of Lord Lieutenant, no holder of that 

 title had visited Ireland for upwards of thirty years prior to Poynings' 

 nomination as Lord Deputy. The authority of the Crown had in 

 consequence been, in a great measure, usurped by the rival families 

 of Butler and FitzGerald. In the time of Edward lY. and Kichard III., 

 the Earls of Kildare, who had been consistent supporters of the Yorkist 

 cause during the Wars of the Eoses, had enjoyed that practical monopoly 

 of power the loss of which under Henry YII. was the main incentive 

 to the patronage accorded by the EitzGeralds to successive pretenders 

 to the English Crown. And they had not always employed that 

 power for unselfish ends. Some of the unpublished statutes of the last- 

 named monarch are exclusively directed to the aggrandisement of the 

 great House of Kildare, whose predominance was distasteful, not 

 merely to the rival House of Ormond, but to the heads of the old families 

 of the Pale. Accordingly, while Poynings' Act was certainly designed 

 in part by Henry YII. and his advisers to punish Kildare for his action 

 in abetting the pretensions of Simnel and AYarbeck, it had the complete 

 approval of tlie Parliament of Ireland. This fact is attested not only 

 by the language of the Act itself, but by the curious fact that the 

 several repeals or suspensions of Poynings' Law, which the conditions 

 of the time rendered a matter almost of necessity during the century 

 following its enactment, were vehemently opposed by the Irish 

 Parliament. 



It is easy to understand that the operation of this law, which 

 rendered Parliament powerless until the business to be brought before 



