Kingdom of Ireland
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Kingdom of Ireland Ríocht na hÉireann | |||||||||||||||
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| 1541 – 1651 1659 – 1801 | |||||||||||||||
 Coat of arms2
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| Capital | Dublin | ||||||||||||||
| Common languages | Irish, English | ||||||||||||||
| Government | Monarchy | ||||||||||||||
| King3 | |||||||||||||||
• 1542-1547 | Henry VIII | ||||||||||||||
• 1760-1801 | George III | ||||||||||||||
| Chief Secretary | |||||||||||||||
• 1660 | Matthew Lock | ||||||||||||||
• 1798-1801 | Viscount Castlereagh | ||||||||||||||
| Legislature | Parliament of Ireland | ||||||||||||||
| Irish House of Lords | |||||||||||||||
| Irish House of Commons | |||||||||||||||
| History | |||||||||||||||
• Act of Parliament | 1541 | ||||||||||||||
| January 1 1801 | |||||||||||||||
| ISO 3166 code | IE | ||||||||||||||
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1From 1642, overlapping control with Confederate Ireland. 2 No official flag is known to exist for the Kingdom of Ireland. Numerous unofficial flags were used throughout its history, including: 1. Azure, a harp Or, stringed Argent, based on the coat of arms adopted in 1541 and much later to become the presidential standard; 2. Vert, a harp Or, stringed Argent, the Leinster flag, used from the mid-17th century; and 3. Argent a saltire Gules, Saint Patrick's Flag,[1] from 1783. The latter was integrated into the Union Flag, the first flag officially used to represent Ireland. However, the second appears to have been the most popular and its use as a naval jack is debated as to whether it had official status or not. 3 Represented by a Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. | |||||||||||||||
The Kingdom of Ireland (Irish: Ríocht na hÉireann) was the name given to the Irish state from 1541, by the Crown of Ireland Act 1542 of the Parliament of Ireland. It was based on the contested legitimacy of the right of conquest. The new Monarch replaced the Lordship of Ireland, which had been created in 1171. King Henry VIII thus became the first King of Ireland since 1169. The separate Kingdom of Ireland ceased to exist when Ireland joined with Great Britain to form the United Kingdom in 1801.
Reason for creation
The papal bull Laudabiliter of Pope Adrian IV, a native of Hereford, England, was decreed in 1155. It granted the Angevin King Henry II of England who ruled from Anjou in France, the title Dominus Hibernae. Laudabiliter enabled the king to invade Ireland, in order to bring the country into the European sphere. In return, Henry was required to remit a penny per hearth of the tax roll to the Pope. This was reconfirmed by Adrian's successor Pope Alexander III in 1172.
When the Pope Clement XIII excommunicated the King of England, Henry VIII, in 1533, the constitutional position of the lordship in Ireland became uncertain. Henry had broken away from the Holy See and declared himself the head of the Church in England. He had petitioned Rome in order to procure an annulment of his marriage to Queen Catherine. Clement VII refused Henry's request for political as much as religious reasons. Henry subsequently refused to recognize the Roman Catholic Church's nominal sovereignty over Ireland. Henry was proclaimed King of Ireland by the Crown of Ireland Act 1542. The Act was passed by the Irish Parliament.
The new kingdom was not recognized by the Catholic monarchies in Europe. After the death of King Edward VI, Henry's son, the papal bull of 1555 recognised the Roman Catholic Queen Mary I as Queen of Ireland. The Irish link to the Crown of England became enshrined canon law.
In this fashion, the Kingdom of Ireland was ruled by the reigning King of England. This placed the new Kingdom of Ireland in personal union with the Kingdom of England. In 1603 James VI King of Scots, became James I of England, which led to a Union in the Kingdom of Great Britain. In 1707 the parliaments of Scotland and England were united at Westminster in London.
In 1801, the Irish and British parliaments were similarly combined in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
Viceroy
The Kingdom of Ireland was governed by an executive under the control of a Lord Deputy or viceroy. The post was held by senior nobles such as Thomas Radcliffe. It was elevated to the title of Lord Lieutenant. In the absence of a Lord Deputy, lords justices ruled. While some Irishmen held the post, most deputies were English noblemen. While the viceroy controlled the Irish administration as the monarch's representative, in the eighteenth century the political post of Chief Secretary for Ireland became increasingly powerful.
Royal Coat of Arms after the Act of Union 1800
Displayed over the 19th century King's Inns in Dublin. These arms of dominion are similar to the royal arms before the union inasmuch as the arms of Ireland (the harp) form one quarter of the shield with the remaining quarters referring to the king's other realms: England, Scotland and Hanover.
The Kingdom of Ireland was legislated by the bicameral Parliament of Ireland, made up of the House of Lords and the House of Commons. The powers of the Irish parliament were circumscribed by a series of restrictive laws, mainly Poynings' Law of 1492.
Church of Ireland
The Church of Ireland became the established church in Ireland. It was not universally accepted as some seventy percent of the population living outside the Anglo sphere of influence rejected the reformed church. The Church of Ireland was seen as an ascendency church].[citation needed]
Roman Catholics and dissenters, mostly Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists, were excluded from membership of the Irish parliament from 1693 and their rights were restricted by a series of laws called the Penal Laws. They were denied voting rights from 1728 until 1793. The Grattan Parliament succeeded in achieving the Repeal of Poynings law in 1882. This allowed progressive legislation and gradual liberalization was effected. Catholics and Dissenters were given the right to vote in 1793, but Catholics were still excluded from the Irish Parliament and senior public offices in the kingdom. The vote was based on property ownership. As in the British Kingdom, voting and membership of parliament was restricted. In the eighteenth century a new parliament house was designed and located in College Green Dublin.[citation needed]
Grattan's Parliament
Poynings' law was repealed in 1782, granting Ireland legislative independence in what came to be known as the Constitution of 1782. Parliament in this period came to be known as Grattan's Parliament, after the principal Irish leader of the period, Henry Grattan. Although Ireland had legislative independence, its executive administration continued under British control. In 1788-89 a Regency crisis arose caused when George III became ill. Grattan wanted to appoint the Prince of Wales later George IV as Regent of Ireland. The king recovered before this could be enacted.
Union of kingdoms
By the Act of Union of the Irish Parliament, the Kingdom of Ireland merged in 1801 with the Kingdom of Great Britain to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The Irish Parliament ceased to exist, though the executive, presided over by the Lord Lieutenant, remained in place until 1922. The Act was preceded by the failed rebellion and French invasion of 1798. The union was the subject of much controversy, involving bribery of many the Irish MPs to ensure its passage. [2]
The Act of 1542 that confirmed Henry VIII's Kingdom of Ireland and its link to the English crown was repealed in the Republic of Ireland in 2007, as part of a review of historic Irish law.[1][2]
Bibliography
de Beaumont, Gustave and William Cooke Taylor, Ireland Social, Political, and Religious :Translated by William Cooke Taylor : Contributor Tom Garvin, Andreas Hess: Harvard University Press : 2006 : ISBN 9780674021655 (reprint of 1839 original)
Pawlisch, Hans S., : Sir John Davies and the Conquest of Ireland: A Study in Legal Imperialism :Cambridge University Press, 2002 : ISBN 9780521526579
Keating, Geoffrey : The History of Ireland, from the Earliest Period to the English Invasion (Foras Feasa Ar Eirinn) Translated by John O'Mahony 1866 Full text at Google Books
References
- ^ W. G. Perrin and Herbert S. Vaughan, 1922, "British Flags. Their Early History and their Development at Sea; with an Account of the Origin of the Flag as a National Device", Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, pp. 51-52:
- The red saltire on white ground which represents Ireland in the Union flag had only an ephemeral existence as a separate flag. Originating as the arms of the powerful Geraldines, who from the time of Henry II held the predominant position among those whose presence in Ireland was due to the efforts of the English sovereigns to subjugate that country, it is not to be expected that the native Irish should ever have taken kindly to a badge that could only remind them of their servitude to a race with whom they had little in common, and the attempt to father this emblem upon St Patrick (who, it may be remarked, is not entitled to a cross - since he was not a martyr) has evoked no response from the Irish themselves.
- The earliest evidence of the existence of the red saltire flag known to the author occurs in a map of "Hirlandia" by John Goghe dated 1576 and now exhibited in the Public Record Office. The arms at the head of this map are the St George's cross impaled on the crowned harp, but the red saltire is prominent in the arms of the Earl of Kildare and the other Geraldine families placed over their respective spheres of influence. The red saltire flag is flown at the masthead of a ship, possibly an Irish pirate, which is engaged in action in the St George's Channel with another ship flying the St George's cross. The St George's flag flies upon Cornwall, Wales and Man, but the red satire flag does not appear upon Ireland itself, though it is placed upon the adjacent Mulls of Galloway and Kintyre in Scotland. It is, however, to be found in the arms of Trinity College, Dublin (1591), in which the banners of St George and of this saltire surmount the turrets that flank the castle gateway.
- The Graydon MS. Flag Book of 1686 which belonged to Pepys does not contain this flag, but give as the flag of Ireland (which, it may be noted, appears as an afterthought right at the end of the book) the green flag with St George's cross and the harp, illustrated in Plate X, fig. 3. The saltire flag is nevertheless given as "Pavillon d'Ierne" in the flags plates at the commencement of the Neptune François of 1693, whence it was copied into later flag collections.
- Under the Commonwealth and Protectorate, when England and Scotland were represented in the Great and other Seals by their crosses, Ireland was invariably represented by the harp that was added to the English and Scottish crosses to form a flag representative of the three kingdoms. At the funeral of Cromwell the Great Standards of England and Scotland had the St George's and St Andrew's crosses in chief respectively, but the Great Standard of Ireland had in chief a red cross (not saltire) on a yellow field.
- When the Order of St Patrick was instituted in 1783 the red saltire was taken for the badge of the Order, and since this emblem was of convenient form for introduction into the Union flag of England and Scotland it was chosen in forming the combined flag of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1801.
- ^ de Beaumont, G pp114-115