George, Duke of Clarence, twice Viceroy.
Execution of Thomas, Earl of Desmond, 1467.
George, Duke of Clarence, was Viceroy from 1461 to 1470, and again from 1472 till his mysterious death in 1478. Though born in Dublin, he never visited Ireland as a man, and the government was administered by a succession of Deputies. The fate of one of these Deputies, Thomas, eighth Earl of Desmond, deserves particular mention. John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, whose beautiful Latinity had moved Pope Æneas Sylvius to tears, was entrusted with the government in 1467, and he assembled a Parliament in which Desmond and Kildare were attainted. Kildare escaped to England, and procured a reversal of the attainder, but Desmond was enticed to Drogheda, and there beheaded. The ostensible cause for this severity is declared by an unpublished statute to have been ‘alliance, fosterage, and alterage with the King’s Irish enemies, and furnishing them with horses, harness, and arms, and supporting them against the King’s loyal subjects.’ The Anglo-Irish tradition attributes it to the vengeance of Queen Elizabeth Woodville, whose marriage Desmond had opposed. According to Russell, he told Edward that Sir John Grey’s widow was too mean a match for him, that he needed allies sorely, and that he had better cast her off and link himself with some powerful prince. By this account the Queen stole the royal signet, and transmitted a secret order for the Earl’s death to Ireland. Three years later Worcester was taken and beheaded during the short Lancastrian restoration; and this quite disposes of Russell’s statement that King Edward ‘struck his head from his neck to make satisfaction to the angry ghost of Desmond.’ What is historically important in Desmond’s execution is that it gave his successors an excuse for not attending Parliaments or entering walled towns. Their claim to legal exemption was not indeed allowed, but it may have had considerable effect on their conduct.38
Under Edward IV. and Richard III. the House of Kildare is all-powerful. The Butlers overshadowed.
After the death of Clarence, Edward made his sons, George and Richard, Viceroys, and Richard III. conferred the same office on his infant son Edward. The government was carried on by Deputies, and during the last twenty years of the Yorkist dynasty almost all real power centred in the House of Kildare. It was the seventh Earl who established the brotherhood of St. George for the defence of the Pale. The thirteen members of this fraternity were chosen from among the principal landowners of the four obedient shires, thus excluding the Butlers, who formed a small Pale of their own about Kilkenny. The brothers of St. George had rather more than 200 soldiers under them, who were paid out of the royal revenue; and that constituted the entire standing army. The cities and towns maintained a precarious existence by themselves. In the charter which Richard III. granted to Galway it was specially declared that the Clanricarde Burkes had no jurisdiction within the town which their ancestors had taken and fortified. An Act passed in 1485 declares that various benefices in the diocese of Dublin were situated among the Irish, that English clerks could not serve the churches because they could not be understood or because they refused to reside, and that it was therefore necessary to collate Irish clerks; and power was given to the Archbishop to do so for two years. The statute of Kilkenny and the Acts subsidiary to it had had their natural effect. The English, in trying to become perfectly English, had shrunk almost to nothing; and the Irish, by being held always at arm’s length, had become more Irish and less civilised than ever.
FOOTNOTES:
37. The quarrels of Waterford with the O’Driscolls are given in the Calendar of Carew MSS., Miscellaneous vol. p. 470. Smith refers to a MS. in Trinity College.
38. Besides those in the Statute Book many Irish Acts of Edward IV.’s reign may be studied in Hardiman’s Statute of Kilkenny.
CHAPTER VII.
THE IRISH PARLIAMENT.
The Irish Parliament a close copy.
The history of the Irish Parliament in the middle ages corresponds pretty closely with that of England. The idea of the three estates is plainly visible as early as 1204, when John asked an aid from the archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, archdeacons, and clergy, the earls, barons, justices, sheriffs, knights, citizens, burgesses, and freeholders of Ireland. The Common Council of the King’s faithful of Ireland is afterwards often mentioned, and in 1228 Henry III. ordered his justiciary to convoke the archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, earls and barons, knights and freeholders, and the bailiffs of every county, and to read Magna Charta to them. 1254 has been fixed as the date at which two knights from each shire were regularly summoned to the English Parliament. In the confusion which followed, the precedent slept for a while, but in Simon de Montfort’s famous Parliament in 1264 burgesses as well as knights had seats. The evidences of regular election in Ireland are scanty at this early period; but legislative enactments and pecuniary aids were more than once made by the whole community of Ireland before the close of Henry III.’s reign. The germs of a Parliamentary constitution were not planted in purely Irish districts; but it is probable that ecclesiastics attended Parliament even from them, and that the natives were thus in some degree represented. In 1254 the King called by name upon the Kings O’Donnell, O’Neill, O’Reilly, and O’Flynn, upon MacCarthy of Desmond, O’Brien of Thomond, O’Phelan of Decies, and fourteen other Celtic chiefs, to help him against the Scots. He confides in their love for him to furnish such help, and promises them thanks; pointedly separating their case from that of his lieges of Ireland.39
Growth of representative institutions.
Accepting 1295 as the date at which English Parliamentary representation settled down into something like its modern shape, we find that the great Plantagenet was not unmindful of Ireland. In that same year the justiciary Wogan issued writs to the prelates and nobles, and also to the sheriffs of Dublin, Louth, Kildare, Waterford, Tipperary, Cork, Limerick, Kerry, Connaught, and Roscommon, and to the seneschals of the liberties of Meath, Wexford, Carlow, Kilkenny, and Ulster. The sheriffs and seneschals were ordered to proceed to the election of two good and discreet knights from each county or liberty, who were to have full power to act for their districts. It does not appear that cities and boroughs were represented on this occasion; but in 1300, Wogan being still justiciary, writs were directed to counties for the election of three or four members, and to cities and boroughs for the election of two or three. The King’s principal object was to get money for his Scotch war; and, with this view, Wogan visited Drogheda and other places and extorted benevolence before the Parliament met. A certain supremacy was not denied to the English Parliament, for in 1290 a vast number of petitions were made to the King in Parliament at Westminster. Among the petitioners was the Viceroy, John Sandford, Archbishop of Dublin, who begged the King to consider the state of Ireland, of which he had already advised him through Geoffrey de Joinville, a former Viceroy, who was sitting in Parliament with others of the King’s Council in Ireland. Edward I. answered that he was very busy, but that he had the matter much at heart, and that he would attend to it as soon as he could.40
Parliament