Abstract
This important study of the workings of the Irish House of Commons in the early seventeenth century has been a long time in the making. Bríd McGrath completed her MLitt study of the membership of the Irish House of Commons, 1613–15, in 1987, and her PhD on those men who made up the same body in 1640–41 in 1998. But the wait to see this work in print has been worth it. Building upon those two important studies and the author's subsequent research, McGrath presents us with this behemoth of a book, made up of 555 pages, excluding the plates. The exhaustive amount of research utilised in this study is also apparent in the book's bibliography of primary and secondary material which stretches to thirty-six pages in length. The timing of this book's publication is also apposite, as it can now take its place alongside other important and recent work by Coleman Dennehy on Irish parliaments in the seventeenth century.
The book is divided into an introduction, eleven chapters and three appendices. The study is contextualised with an opening chapter dealing with the development of parliament throughout the preceding Tudor period. Poynings’ Law and the lower house as it existed throughout the early modern period developed from the late medieval era, through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to become the parliament which sat until its dissolution following the Act of Union in 1800. This is followed with chapters dealing with the records of parliament, the powers which it possessed, the MPs themselves and their interactions with the communities whom they (in theory at least) represented, the functions of parliament, the culture and social aspects of the House of Commons, lawyers attached to parliament and how the House dealt with the various crises which it encountered during the early Stuart period.
As the author notes, the Irish parliament encompassed a fourfold function – to pass laws for private or public benefit (not, it may be noted, always for the good of the private individual or the public), to make representations to the Crown on behalf of the citizenry and resolve grievances, to operate as a judiciary and finally, and probably most importantly for the Crown, to raise money via taxation (known as ‘subsidies’). Although the Irish parliament did not mirror the English model precisely (it did not act on a consultative basis, for example, as the English parliament did), throughout the early seventeenth century it began to accrue more power to itself, along the lines of the English parliament. These powers included the right to adjudicate on disputed elections, disciplining its members and deciding on expulsions, none of which had any basis in statute, but which it, nevertheless, managed to accrue.
Another chapter investigates the functionality of parliament. Although Irish bills were not drafted to the same standards as those in England, and although Catholics were excluded from the introduction of private bills, McGrath notes that the Irish parliament continued to scrutinise carefully legislation which passed through the house. The establishment of committees were another important innovation in Irish parliamentary procedure (McGrath points to 1614 as the likely first date for their appearance in the Irish Commons).
One section of this book which this reviewer found especially interesting was chapter nine, which deals with the personnel of the Irish House of Commons. Most MPs, with three exceptions, came from a higher class than artisan, with all of the Catholic MPs being lawyers, merchants or gentry. Many of the Protestant MPs, however, were descended from soldiers and Crown officials who had arrived in Ireland in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, enriching themselves in the process and establishing themselves as a new gentry class. Interestingly, the Catholic and Protestant MPs rarely disagreed on religious or ethnic grounds and normally co-operated well in parliamentary business.
Of the three appendices, the third in particular deserves special mention. Coming in at 123 pages, it is made up of biographies of the lawyers in parliament. It is an especially impressive piece of research for an appendix and, such is the level of detail contained within it, it may have made a separate standalone publication.
This book is also very generously illustrated with forty-one colour plates, with images ranging from various manuscript sources to members of the Houses of Commons during the period investigated here, including, for example, Oliver St John, later a lord deputy, Sir James Ware, Sir Phelim O’Neill and Charles Coote – the latter two gaining infamy during the 1641 rising and afterwards.
It can be invidious to highlight certain sections of a book during a review, as it can sometimes imply that, where there are peaks, there are also troughs. But that is not the case here – rather, the scope and detail presented in a book this size makes it impossible to carry out an in-depth review of every element which the author touches upon. This is an all-encompassing and important study and McGrath has left no stone unturned in its compilation. This book sets a high watermark going forward for early modern Irish parliamentary studies and the author is to be strongly commended for her exemplary work here, as are Four Courts Press, who have reached their usual high standards in design and presentation, especially in relation to the forty-one images which add so much to the text itself. This reviewer learned a lot from it, and it is essential reading for all of those interested both in the political world of early seventeenth-century Ireland, as well as its practitioners.