by S B Chrimes
It was not until June 1492 that Kildare was superseded by Walter FitzSimons, archbishop of Dublin, in the office of deputy, and four years were to elapse before he was restored to that office. Many vicissitudes in Anglo-Irish relations occurred during the eight years that passed between Edgecombe’s departure in 1488 and Kildare’s restoration at Henry VII’s hands to the office he was to retain until 1513.
Henry VII’s renewed demand for Kildare to come and see him in England, Kildare’s excuses and the excuses made by others, probably belong to the period intervening between Edgecombe’s departure in 1488 and the arrival in Ireland of Perkin Warbeck in November 1491.2 How far Kildare may have been tempted by the spectacle of another Yorkist pretender on Irish shores must remain a matter of speculation, but at least he refrained from overt connivance, and subsequently denied that he lent ‘the French lad’ any countenance at this stage, as some of the Irish lords had. Not enough of them did so, however, to encourage Warbeck to stay very long, and his early departure to France eased the tensions in Ireland for the time being.
Henry VII, however, clearly saw the dangers of another Yorkist conspiracy across the Irish Sea. By 6 December 1491 he had issued a commission to James Ormond and Thomas Garth to lead an army to suppress rebellion in Kilkenny and Tipperary, to array men, to make statutes and proclamations for the government there, and to arrest and imprison delinquents. All persons were commanded to obey them and were absolved from obedience to the lieutenant of Ireland for the time being.1 Kildare was thus suspended from office, but a successor was not appointed for another six months, when a clean sweep was made of the government in Ireland. On 11 June 1492 Walter FitzSimons, archbishop of Dublin, was appointed deputy, James Ormond2 treasurer, and Alexander Plunket chancellor.3 But the bitter struggles that ensued mainly between the Kildare4 and the Ormond factions proved to be more than the archbishop could handle, and he was replaced on 6 September 1493 by Sir Robert Preston, Viscount Gormanston. The new deputy speedily called a council at Trim and a parliament at Drogheda to try to ensure the keeping of the peace. He succeeded at least in getting Kildare and other magnates to attend, and with the assistance of the king’s special commissioners,5 Henry Wyatt6 and Thomas Garth, brought Kildare and other lords to give sufficient pledges and to enter into the recognizances that had been sought in vain in 1488. After this measure of pacification Kildare at long last agreed to go to England, along with the archbishop, Gormanston (whose son William was left as deputy in Ireland for the time being), and Sir James Ormond. Kildare was to make his peace with Henry VII and remained in England until late 1494. During these months the king could take his measure of Kildare, consult with all concerned, and formulate his policy and decide on his next steps. The outcome was the appointment on 12 September 1494 of his son Prince Henry as king’s lieutenant, and on 13 September of Sir Edward Poynings as deputy, of Henry, bishop elect of Bangor, as chancellor, and Sir Hugh Conway as treasurer.1 Poynings soon set out on his famous mission, accompanied by Kildare, and landed at Howth with a modest force of some seven hundred men on 13 October. By the time Poynings left Ireland fifteen months later in December 1495, the course of Anglo-Irish history had been changed; Perkin Warbeck had come and gone again; Kildare had been attainted of treason and sent to England as a prisoner but soon pardoned and restored to office as deputy. Poynings had unconsciously immortalized his name in the annals of Ireland and of Anglo-Irish relations.2
Edward Poynings, like Richard Edgecombe, had participated in the rebellion of 1483, was prominent in the uprising in Kent, and had escaped to Brittany to join Henry there, and returned with him to Milford Haven and Bosworth, where he was knighted. He had taken part in a military expedition to assist Maximilian in Flanders in 1492 and became governor of Calais in 1493.3 He was already a councillor and a knight of the Garter.4
The powers given to the new king’s lieutenant and in his absence to his deputy were extensive. He was to keep the king’s peace and the laws and customs of Ireland and to punish offenders, whether English or Irish; to admit rebels to fine and pardon; to go with the king’s power against those who would not submit; to confer ecclesiastical benefices other than cathedral or collegiate churches; to receive fealties and homages, etc.; to summon a parliament; to call all officers other than the treasurer to account, and to do all other things pertaining to his office. All with the proviso that should Prince Henry or in his absence his deputy do anything contrary to the king’s law he should be corrected by the King’s Council.5
It is perhaps an exaggeration to say that Poynings’s ‘first object was the military conquest of Ireland’.6 The military forces at his disposal were at no time large enough for such a hazardous enterprise. After having summoned a parliament to meet on 1 December at Drogheda, he set out on an expedition into Ulster, which had been overrun by the ‘savage Irish’, the purposes of which became frustrated by a rising by O’Hanlon of Orior in Armagh against him, the hostility of the powerful Hugh O'Donnell of Tyrconnell, and the involvement in these events in some obscure way of Kildare himself, apparently from 10 November, from which date his eventual forfeiture was fixed, although he was not arrested until 27 February 1495. In the meantime Poynings returned in time for the opening of the parliament at Drogheda on 1 December, one of the last acts of which was to attaint Kildare, whose dispatch on 5 March to England and the Tower kept him out of the way during Warbeck’s reappearance, at Cork and Waterford, in July 1495.
With Poynings’s preoccupations during the last few months of his mission to Ireland, the repercussions of Warbeck’s incursion and departure, the involvement in these treasonable activities of the earl of Desmond and a small number of the Irish lords, the efforts of the under-treasurer, William Hatcliffe, to instil some order into the financial accounts of the government in Ireland, we are not here concerned. Poynings’s rule, we are told with justification, ‘had achieved its main object – the rout of the Yorkist faction, and the year 1495 ended with Ireland calmed and Henry’s reputation considerably higher upon the continent’. On 1 January Henry Deane, bishop of Bangor, the chancellor, was appointed deputy.1 Before then Poynings had departed from Ireland, but unwittingly had left his name behind permanently.
Historians’ propensity to affix and cherish labels has indelibly stamped ‘Poynings’s Law’ on the pages of all text-books, but the law so identified was only one of forty-nine acts passed in the Drogheda parliament of 1 December 1494 to March/April 1495. These were the context in which the famous law was enacted.2
Of these forty-nine enactments3 three were formal and traditional,4 and eleven were of a miscellaneous minor character,5 and none of these needs further considerations here. The pardon for Kildare set out in one of the earlier acts6 was more than outweighed by his attainder in a later one.1 The rest fell into roughly five categories. Two dealt with financial matters; six with legal questions; seven with problems of law and order; five with defence; twelve with constitutional or governmental or parliamentary arrangements – some of which were relatively insignificant.
In the matter of finance, an attempt was made by the eighth act to raise revenue for the king by the grant of twelve pence on every pound of merchandise of imports and exports payable by all merchants other than the freemen of Dublin, Waterford, and Drogheda, for five years from the beginning of the parliament.2 The eleventh act sought to resume into the king’s hands all Crown properties alienated since the last day of Edward II’s reign, but whatever effect the act might have had was substantially reduced by a large number of exemptions.3
The six acts of general legal significance re-enacted and confirmed the statutes against papal provisions that had previously been made in England and Ireland;4 cancelled and revoked all the records, processes, and pardons made in the name of the pretended king lately crowned in Ireland (Lambert Simnel);5 confirmed the statutes of Kilkenny (1366)6 and all other acts made in Ireland for the common weal;7 and declared murder by ‘malice prepensed’ to be high treason.8 Other acts sought to confirm �
��the act against the Lollards and other heretics’,9 and to abolish the provision made by a parliament in the time of Richard, duke of York’s lieutenancy, declaring it to be treason for any person to bring in from England any writs to arrest any person in Ireland.10 The seven acts dealing with law and order referred to a variety of problems and abuses. One act sought to prohibit abuses in the extortion of the customs imposition of ‘coign, livery and pay’,11 whilst another act later in the parliament tried to reinforce these intentions.1 Captains in the Marches were required to certify the names of their retainers and regulations for the defence of these districts made,2 and special prohibitions put upon the extortion of coign and livery therein.3 No one henceforth was to keep ordinance or artillery in his house or garrison without licence.4 A doubtless futile effort was made by another act to substitute the cries of ‘St George’ or the name of the sovereign lord the king for the Irish war cries of ‘Cromabo’ or ‘Butlerabo’.5 More practicable was the attempt to re-enforce the statute of Winchester for the preservation of order.6
The act providing for the payment of Poynings’s army might be considered as both a financial and a military measure.7 For the future no one not English-born was to be constable of one of the seven chief castles belonging to the king.8 No peace or war should be made without the licence of the governor of Ireland for the time being.9 For better defence, ditches were to be dug around the English Pale.10 Every subject of Ireland was to have arms suitable to his status.11
Of the acts relating to governmental or parliamentary matters one defined, the duties of the treasurer of Ireland;12 another declared that the chancellor, treasurer, judges of the two benches, the chief second barons of the Exchequer, the master of the Rolls, and all accountant officers should hold their offices solely at the king’s pleasure.13 Another act specifically declared that anyone who stirred up the Irishry or Englishry to make war against the king’s lieutenant or his deputy or should procure the Irish to make war on the English should be deemed a traitor attainted of high treason.14 In the absence of the deputy, the treasurer was to be governor,15 and the chancellor was given authority to continue, adjourn, prorogue or dissolve the present parliament in the absence of the deputy and to perform therein all the duties of the deputy.16
Two acts were passed which sought to avoid misgovernance in the cities and towns. No citizen, burgess, or freeman of a town was to receive livery or wages from any lord or gentleman,1 and no one was to be admitted to be alderman, juror, or freeman in any town unless he had been an apprentice or inhabitant thereof, and any acts made in any city or town contrary to the king’s majesty and royal jurisdiction should be revoked.2 The earldom of March and Ulster and the lordship of Trim and Connaught were declared annexed to the Crown.3
If we can pass over the act which directed the lords spiritual and temporal of parliament to wear robes in the same manner as the lords in England, as they had been accustomed to do twenty or twenty-five years previously,4 and the act which declared void the acts of the parliament held at Drogheda in 1493,5 we are left with two acts for consideration. The thirty-ninth act declared that all statutes lately made in England for the public good of the same should be deemed good and effective in law and be accepted, used, and executed in Ireland.6 As this had for long been the legal position, no further comment is necessary. The ninth act is the one which has commonly been called ‘Poynings’s Law’.
The substantive part of this act reads as follows:
… no parliament be holden hereafter in the said land of Ireland but at such season as the king’s lieutenant and council there first do certify to the king, under the Great Seal of that land, the causes and considerations and all such acts as them seemeth should pass in the said parliament, and such causes, considerations, and acts affirmed by the king and his council to be good and expedient for that land and his licence thereupon, as well in affirmation of the said causes and acts as to summon the said parliament, under his Great Seal of England had and obtained, that done, a parliament to be had and holden after the form and effect afore rehearsed ; and if any parliament be holden in that land hereafter contrary to the form and provision aforesaid, it be deemed void and of none effect in law.7
It can hardly be pretended that this act was phrased with any masterly lucidity, but its intent was that (1) the king’s lieutenant (or deputy?) and the council in Ireland should inform the king under the Great Seal of Ireland the reasons for summoning a parliament and the nature of the acts to be passed therein; (2) if the king signified his approval thereof under the Great Seal of England, then the proposed parliament might be summoned; but (3) any parliament in Ireland summoned otherwise than in accordance with this procedure was to be void.1
We may well believe that Henry VII and his advisers did not foresee the remoter repercussions of this enactment,2 or promote it as part of any far-seeing programme of constitutional reform.3 But because the motive for it, inspired by the recent experiences, was doubtless to ensure that ‘there should be no legitimate parliament to give authority to an illegitimate king’, this does not justify us in thinking of it as ‘an opportunist and transient expedient’.4 It is an exaggeration, and also an anachronism to suppose that Henry VII wanted to subordinate the parliament of Ireland to himself in any precise or detailed sense, nor is there any contemporary suggestion that this was the effect of the act. For such notions one must wait until the eighteenth century.5 Henry VII had no ‘imperialist’ policies. What he was primarily concerned with in Ireland as elsewhere was the security of his crown. His aim was to end the Wars of the Roses in Ireland as in England, and to restore his dominium Hiberniae.6 If Sir Edward Poynings could do that, it was the utmost that he could achieve or aspire to do, and by and large, this is what he did, so far as in him lay. But what Henry VII had the insight to perceive was that the modus operandi framed by Poynings’s laws would continue to be operative only if he could win over to its support the most powerful of the Irish magnates. Hence the reappointment for the rest of his reign to the office of deputy of the eighth earl of Kildare. Whether or not it be true that Henry actually said of Kildare that if all Ireland cannot rule him, then he should rule Ireland,7 this was certainly an apt statement of the realities of the situation. Henry VII was above all a realist. With the reappointment of Kildare on 6 August 1496,1 the cause of Warbeck was lost in Ireland, and being lost there, was lost everywhere.
Kildare’s attainder was reversed in the English parliament and the reversal exemplified at his request on 14 February 1496.2 His sojourn in England resulted in the establishment of amicable terms between himself and Henry VII, who provided him with a wife in the person of his second cousin Elizabeth St John. By 26 August 1496 a general pardon3 was issued for the former supporters of Warbeck, including Kildare, Desmond, and other lesser figures. On 26 July 1497 Warbeck, ousted from Scotland, reappeared at Cork. But no Irish support was now forthcoming, and before long he set out again on what was to prove his disastrous incursion into Cornwall.4 Soon after John Top-cliffe, chief justice of the Common Bench in Ireland, was on his way to England to seek leave for the deputy to summon a parliament in Ireland and, all in accordance with ‘Poynings’s Law’, submitted legislative proposals for the king’s prior approval.5 On 25 March 1498 approval was given and a commission issued for Kildare to hold such a parliament,6 the first to be held in Ireland since Poynings had left.
Within its limits, therefore, Henry VII’s policy had been vindicated. Kildare indeed was now again the effective master of Ireland, but no longer as a rebel or semi-rebel. He was now in command with Henry VII’s full approval and support. The king’s lordship of Ireland had been restored, and a firm basis laid for future developments. No king of England had set foot in Ireland since Richard II’s fateful expedition in 1399; Henry VIII was to become titular king of Ireland in 1542, but for a visit from a reigning sovereign Ireland had to wait until the time of James II and William III.
But the limits to Henry VII’s policy towards Ireland were necessarily s
omewhat narrow and restricted to the politically possible. He could with impunity largely disregard the ‘wild Irish’, who together owned more than a third of the land, for they had never yet combined to extinguish the English Pale.1 The mass of Anglo-Irish feudatories, often more Irish than English, likewise had not threatened directly the king’s lordship. The menace had come from the very few magnate families, especially the Kildares, Desmonds, and Ormonds, who between them owned a very large part of the land of Ireland.2 By 1500 the three families, Butlers (Ormond) and two Fitzgeralds (Desmond and Kildare), divided between them all Ireland south of the Upper Boyne and Limerick. The Butler family descended from Theobold Walter (brother of Hubert Walter) who had been butler in John’s Household and had accompanied him on his first visit to Ireland, became the leading Anglo-Irish family in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. James Butler became earl of Ormond in 1328. The family estates centred in Tipperary, Ossory, and Kilkenny. The family developed close Lancastrian associations, was the only one of the three great families to do so, and the earls were absentee in England for many years. The earls of Desmond and Kildare were descended from a common ancestor, Maurice Fitzgerald, Strongbow’s associate. Two Fitzgerald brothers founded the two branches of the family in the thirteenth century, and the earldoms of Desmond and of Kildare were created in 1329 and 1316 respectively. The earls of Desmond in the fifteenth century attained a most powerful position in Kerry, parts of Cork, Limerick, Waterford, and Tipperary. They had strong Irish leanings and connections, and the somewhat obscure circumstances in which the seventh earl was executed in 1468 by Tip toft, earl of Worcester, then king’s lieutenant, are thought to have been largely because of these associations. At any rate the Desmonds were thereby alienated from the English Crown for a very long time. The earls of Kildare became the feudal lords of half the Pale and held jurisdiction over the Irish chiefs in the southern and western marches. The whole of county Kildare and parts of counties Meath, Dublin, and Carlow were under their domination. The three earldoms by 1500 covered most of Munster and much of Leinster.