dressed the king, setting forth their reasons against admitting the appellant jurisdiction. But the lords in England, after requesting the king to confer some favour on the barons of the exchequer who had been censured and illegally imprisoned for doing their duty, ordered a bill to be brought in for better securing the dependency of Ireland upon the crown of Great Britain, which declares

that the king's majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the lords spiritual and temporal and commons of Great Britain in parliament assembled, had, hath, and of right ought to have full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the people and the kingdom of Ireland; and that the house of lords of Ireland have not nor of right ought to have any jurisdiction, to judge of, reverse, or affirm any judgment, sentence or decree, given or made in any court within the said kingdom; and that all proceedings before the said house of lords upon any such judgment sentence or decree, are and are hereby declared to be, utterly null and void to all intents and purposes, what

The English government found no better method of counteracting this rising spirit of independence, than by bestowing the chief posts in the state and church on strangers, in order to keep up what was called the English interest 2. This wretched policy united the natives of

5 G. I. c. 5. Plowden, 244. The Irish house of lords had, however, entertained writs of error as early as 1644, and appeals in equity from 1661. Mountmorres, i. 339. The English peers might have remembered that their own precedents were not much older.

2 See Boulter's Letters, passim. His plan for governing Ireland was to send over as many English-born bishops as possible. "The bishops," he says, are the persons on whom the government must

66

Ireland in jealousy and discontent, which the later years of Swift were devoted to inflame. It was impossible that the kingdom should become, as it did under George II, more flourishing through its great natural fertility, its extensive manufacture of linen, and its facilities for commerce, though much restricted, the domestic alarm from the papists also being allayed by their utter prostration, without writhing under the indignity of its subordination; or that a house of commons, constructed so much on the model of the English, could hear patiently of liberties and privileges it did not enjoy. These aspirations for equality first, perhaps, broke out into audible complaints in the year 1753. The country was in so thriving a state, that there was a surplus revenue after payment of all charges. The house of commons determined to apply this to the liquidation of a debt. The government, though not unwilling to admit of such an application, maintained that the whole revenue belonged to the king, and could not be disposed of without his previous consent. In England, where the grants of parliament are appropriated according to estimates, such a question could hardly arise; nor would there, I presume, be the slightest doubt as to the control of the house of commons over a surplus income. But in Ireland, the practice of appropriation seems never to have prevailed, at least so strictly'; and the constitutional right might perhaps not unreasonably be disputed. After long and violent discussions, wherein the speaker of the commons and other eminent men bore a leading part on the popular side, the crown was so far victorious as to procure some motions to be carried, which seemed

depend for doing the public business here." I. 238. This of course disgusted the Irish church.

I 1 Mountmorres, i. 424.

to imply its authority; but the house took care, by more special applications of the revenue, to prevent the recurrence of an undisposed surplus '. From this æra the great parliamentary history of Ireland begins, and is terminated after half a century by the union; a period fruitful of splendid eloquence, and of ardent, though not always uncompromising patriotism, but which, of course, is beyond the limits prescribed to these pages.

' Plowden, 306 et post. Hardy's Life of lord Charlemont.

END OF VOL. IV.

INDEX.

A.

Aix-la-Chapelle, peace of, iii. Anglican church, ejected mem-