Kingdom_of_Ireland

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.

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.

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Some restrictions were repealed in 1782 in what came to be known as the Constitution of 1782.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

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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