The defeat of “repeal” showed the Houses their strength. The Lords dashed new Acts proposed against treason and the trial of accessories—statutes namely, said Perrott, for the safety of the Queen. The Commons wrecked the Bill for Desmond’s attainder, striking out eight score names of “men of living” and leaving only eight. They refused, moreover, to escheat lands protected by law, and to tax land in a manner tyrannous and contrary to Irish custom. The “disturbers of Parliament” were met by five adjournments in eleven months; but the devices by which these sticklers for the law were finally subdued is too long to tell here. Parliament met at last in April, 1586, to register the royal will. The Lords read and passed the four Acts for the attainder of rebels in Munster. The Commons still resisted for a week. The official intrigue to compel their submission is confused by the bitter wrangle of the Deputy and the Treasurer for the honour of the plot. Finally the Desmond confiscations were “wrought out” of the Parliament with so great difficulty, said Spenser, “that were it to be passed again I dare undertake it would never be compassed”; and the Deputy gave the royal assent to the Bill by which over half a million acres of Desmond land were forfeited by Act of Parliament to the Crown, as the O’Neill land had been forfeited nearly twenty years before. After which Parliament was dissolved, with an oration of Justice Walshe, the Speaker, who, in “the universal comfort of all estates,” asked the Commons “what is there more of earthly felicity that can be required,” reminded them that the escheated lands “accepted by the Queen of us” were of far less value than the smallest portion of Her Majesty’s charges for their benefit, and mentioned how they had “willingly consented to attaint and stain in blood Her Majesty’s disloyal subjects and unbar the succession of their traitorous lines, to the end that the memory of their names may be quite extinguished.”
Thus after a hundred years the Parliament won its first success in refusing the repeal of Poyning’s Act. Mr. Litton Falkiner calls us to wonder at the “curious circumstance” that “successive Parliaments of the sixteenth century declined on patriotic grounds to abrogate the very statute the repeal of which was to become the greatest triumph of Irish patriotism in the eighteenth century,” and insinuates that we may here see displayed the captious and capricious spirit that infects the “predestinate” peoples of Ireland. Out of the old habit of contempt it has being boldly suggested by some that the independence of Parliament, by others that the Catholic religion, were in no way valued by Irishmen until they made the discovery that these could be used to annoy and disconcert England. Such unworthy suspicions must disappear as we watch the grave conflict of men threatened with ruin, imprisonment, death, in their struggle to defend the first rights of law, property, and religion.