These famous enactments were aimed at Dublin Castle rather than at the Dublin parliament. The Crown had always controlled Irish legislation, but the control had been exercised through a deputy, who was often more powerful in Ireland than the Crown; this independence was to cease, and the control of Irish legislation was transferred from the Irish deputy to the English Privy Council. No Parliament was to be summoned in the Pale without the consent, and no legislation introduced without the approval, of that body. Acts previously passed by the English Parliament were declared in force in Ireland, and in practice the English Parliament proceeded to legislate for, though not to tax, Ireland without the concurrence of its Parliament. Poynings also attempted to conquer the native Irish, and to rule the Pale according to English ways; but the expense proved greater than Henry VII. could bear, and, with the bit of Poynings’ laws in his mouth, the Earl of Kildare was sent back to govern the Pale in the time-honoured fashion.
Ireland was one of the questions upon which Wolsey and Henry VIII. disagreed. The Cardinal’s policy was to neglect Ireland and save expenses in that direction in order to act as the paymaster and to pose as the arbiter of Europe, with the result that on the eve of his fall, England’s hold on Ireland was said to be weaker than it had been since the conquest. When Wolsey was gone, Henry’s imperialism found vent in Ireland as well as in other spheres, and it was stimulated by the appearance as early as 1528 of Spanish emissaries at the courts of Irish chiefs. But the brutal hatred which later conflicts engendered did not inspire the Irish efforts of Henry VIII. His warfare in Ireland was less ferocious than that which he waged on Scotland, or on the monks of England. If he confiscated the lands of Irish monasteries, he shared the spoils with Irish chiefs, and he also confiscated the lands of habitual absentees; and if he proscribed the Earl of Kildare, he gave earldoms to O’Neill, O’Brien, and MacWilliam. Whatever plans for the expropriation of the Irish clans were propounded to his ears, his own policy was not expropriation, but the conversion of Irish chiefs into Irish peers holding their lands of him as their king; and by the common testimony of English and Irish alike, the land enjoyed greater peace and prosperity at the end of his reign than it had within living memory. The destruction of papal jurisdiction was no grievance to the Irish, for pope after pope had prohibited their preferment and restricted Irish sees to men of English race. Even Edward VI.’s Acts of Uniformity, which were applied to Ireland without the authorisation of its Parliament, evoked no Irish rebellion; and so mild was religious conflict that there was no Irish martyr under Protestant Edward VI. or under Catholic Mary.