Ríocht na hÉireann
Kingdom of Ireland |
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1541 – 1651
1659 – 1801 |
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Coat of arms2
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| Capital |
Dublin |
| Language(s) |
Irish, English |
| Government |
Monarchy |
| King3 |
| - 1542-1547 |
Henry VIII |
| - 1760-1801 |
George III |
| Chief Secretary |
| - 1660 |
Matthew Lock |
| - 1798-1801 |
Viscount Castlereagh |
| Legislature |
Parliament of Ireland |
| - Upper house |
Irish House of Lords |
| - Lower house |
Irish House of Commons |
| History |
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| - Act of Parliament |
1541 |
| - Act of Union |
January 1, 1801 |
1From 1642, overlapping control with Confederate Ireland.
2 No official flag is known to exist for the Kingdom of Ireland. Numerous unofficial flags were used throughout its history, including: 1. Azure, a harp Or, stringed Argent, based on the coat of arms adopted in 1541 and much later to become the presidential standard; 2. Vert, a harp Or, stringed Argent, the Leinster flag, used from the mid-17th century; and 3. Argent a saltire Gules, Saint Patrick's Flag,[1] from 1783. The latter was integrated into the Union Flag, the first flag officially used to represent Ireland. However, the second appears to have been the most popular and its use as a naval jack is debated as to whether it had official status or not.
3 Represented by a Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. |
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The Kingdom of Ireland (Irish: Ríocht na hÉireann) was the name given to the Irish state from 1541, by the Crown of Ireland Act 1542 of the Parliament of Ireland. It was based on the contested legitimacy of the right of conquest. The new Monarch replaced the Lordship of Ireland, which had been created in 1171. King Henry VIII thus became the first King of Ireland since 1169. The Kingdom of Ireland ceased to exist when Ireland joined with Great Britain to form the United Kingdom in 1801.
Reason for creation
The Pope Adrian IV, an Englishman, had granted the Norman-English monarchy the Island of Ireland as a feudal possession in 1155, by the bull (Laudabiliter), which enabled the English monarchy to act as the ruler of Ireland. This was confirmed by his successor Pope Alexander III in 1172, but nominally Ireland remained a papal overlordship. With the excommunication from the church of the king of England, Henry VIII, in 1533, the constitutional position of the English rule in Ireland became uncertain. Henry had broken away from the Holy See and declared himself the head of the newly formed Church of England in order to procure an annulment, which the pope, Clement VII, refused. As a result, Henry could no longer afford to recognize the Roman Catholic Church's nominal sovereignty over Ireland. As a solution to this, Henry was proclaimed King of Ireland by the Crown of Ireland Act 1542 passed by the Irish Parliament.
However the new kingdom was not recognized by the Catholic monarchies in Europe. A papal bull of 1555 named Mary I as Queen of Ireland, thereby recognizing the personal link to the crown of England in canon law.
In this fashion, the throne of Ireland became occupied by the reigning King of England, thus placing the newly-formed Kingdom of Ireland in personal union with the Kingdom of England. In 1603 the throne of England became occupied by the King of Scotland, which eventually led to a Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707, when the parliaments of both kingdoms were combined into one sitting at the seat of the English parliament at Westminster in London. In 1801, the Irish and British parliaments were similarly combined producing the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
Lord Deputy
The Kingdom of Ireland was governed by an executive under the control of a Lord Deputy, which when held by senior nobles such as Thomas Radcliffe was elevated to Lord Lieutenant. In the absence of a Lord Deputy, lords justices ruled the part of Ireland under English occupation. While some Irishmen held the post, all lord deputies from 23 July 1534, when William Skeffington took office for the second time, were English noblemen.
Royal Coat of Arms after the Act of Union 1800
Displayed over the 19th century King's Inns in Dublin. These arms of dominion are similar to the royal arms before the union inasmuch as the arms of Ireland (the harp) form one quarter of the shield with the remaining quarters referring to the king's other realms: England, Scotland and Hanover.
The kingdom was legislated for by the bicameral Parliament of Ireland, made up of the House of Lords and the House of Commons, and which almost always met in Dublin. The powers of the Irish parliament were restricted by a series of laws, notably Poynings' Law of 1492. Roman Catholics and later Presbyterians were for much of its later history excluded from membership of the Irish parliament. In the eighteenth century parliament met in a new, purpose-designed parliament house (the first purpose-designed two-chamber parliament house in the world) in College Green in the heart of Dublin.
Grattan's Parliament
Some restrictions were repealed in 1782 in what came to be known as the Constitution of 1782. Parliament in this period came to be known as Grattan's Parliament, after one of the principal Irish political opposition leaders of the period, Henry Grattan. In 1788-89 a Regency crisis was caused when George III went insane, and Grattan wanted to appoint his son (later George IV) as Regent of Ireland; however the king recovered before this could be effected.
Union of kingdoms
By the Act of Union of the Irish Parliament, the Kingdom of Ireland merged in 1801 with the Kingdom of Great Britain to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The Irish Parliament ceased to exist, though the executive, presided over by the Lord Lieutenant, remained in place until 1922. The Act was preceded by the failed rebellion and French invasion of 1798, and was the subject of much controversy, involving much bribery of the Irish MPs to ensure its passage. [2]
Irish Free State 1922
In 1922, 26 counties left the United Kingdom and formed the Irish Free State. Under the Irish Free State Constitution, the King became King in Ireland. This was changed by the Royal Titles Act, 1927, by which the King explicitly became king of all his dominions in their own right, becoming fully King of Ireland instead. Though Kevin O'Higgins, Vice-President of the Executive Council (i.e., deputy prime minister), did suggest resurrecting the 'Kingdom of Ireland' as a dual monarchy to link Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State, with the King of Ireland being crowned in a public ceremony in Phoenix Park in Dublin, the idea was abandoned after O'Higgins' assassination by anti-Treaty IRA men in 1927.
An Act of 1542 that confirmed Henry's kingdom and its link to the English crown, and which had mistakenly been left on the statute books, was repealed in the Republic of Ireland in 2007 as part of a wholesale review of historic Irish law.[1][2]
Bibliography
de Beaumont, Gustave and William Cooke Taylor, Ireland Social, Political, and Religious :Translated by William Cooke Taylor : Contributor Tom Garvin, Andreas Hess: Harvard University Press : 2006 : ISBN 9780674021655 (reprint of 1839 original)
Pawlisch, Hans S., : Sir John Davies and the Conquest of Ireland: A Study in Legal Imperialism :Cambridge University Press, 2002 : ISBN 9780521526579
Keating, Geoffrey : The History of Ireland, from the Earliest Period to the English Invasion (Foras Feasa Ar Eirinn) Translated by John O'Mahony 1866 Full text at Google Books
References
- ^ W. G. Perrin and Herbert S. Vaughan, 1922, "British Flags. Their Early History and their Development at Sea; with an Account of the Origin of the Flag as a National Device", Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, pp. 51-52:
- The red saltire on white ground which represents Ireland in the Union flag had only an ephemeral existence as a separate flag. Originating as the arms of the powerful Geraldines, who from the time of Henry II held the predominant position among those whose presence in Ireland was due to the efforts of the English sovereigns to subjugate that country, it is not to be expected that the native Irish should ever have taken kindly to a badge that could only remind them of their servitude to a race with whom they had little in common, and the attempt to father this emblem upon St Patrick (who, it may be remarked, is not entitled to a cross - since he was not a martyr) has evoked no response from the Irish themselves.
- The earliest evidence of the existence of the red saltire flag known to the author occurs in a map of "Hirlandia" by John Goghe dated 1576 and now exhibited in the Public Record Office. The arms at the head of this map are the St George's cross impaled on the crowned harp, but the red saltire is prominent in the arms of the Earl of Kildare and the other Geraldine families placed over their respective spheres of influence. The red saltire flag is flown at the masthead of a ship, possibly an Irish pirate, which is engaged in action in the St George's Channel with another ship flying the St George's cross. The St George's flag flies upon Cornwall, Wales and Man, but the red satire flag does not appear upon Ireland itself, though it is placed upon the adjacent Mulls of Galloway and Kintyre in Scotland. It is, however, to be found in the arms of Trinity College, Dublin (1591), in which the banners of St George and of this saltire surmount the turrets that flank the castle gateway.
- The Graydon MS. Flag Book of 1686 which belonged to Pepys does not contain this flag, but give as the flag of Ireland (which, it may be noted, appears as an afterthought right at the end of the book) the green flag with St George's cross and the harp, illustrated in Plate X, fig. 3. The saltire flag is nevertheless given as "Pavillon d'Ierne" in the flags plates at the commencement of the Neptune François of 1693, whence it was copied into later flag collections.
- Under the Commonwealth and Protectorate, when England and Scotland were represented in the Great and other Seals by their crosses, Ireland was invariably represented by the harp that was added to the English and Scottish crosses to form a flag representative of the three kingdoms. At the funeral of Cromwell the Great Standards of England and Scotland had the St George's and St Andrew's crosses in chief respectively, but the Great Standard of Ireland had in chief a red cross (not saltire) on a yellow field.
- When the Order of St Patrick was instituted in 1783 the red saltire was taken for the badge of the Order, and since this emblem was of convenient form for introduction into the Union flag of England and Scotland it was chosen in forming the combined flag of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1801.
- ^ de Beaumont, G pp114-115
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