THE first Anglo-Irish Parliament held within a period of twenty-seven years was summoned to meet in Dublin on May 18, 1613, and, notwithstanding the Act of Uniformity, it would appear that quite a large number of Catholics, styled in the language of the times “recusants,” because of their opposition to the spiritual supremacy of the king, were elected to serve in that body. They would have had a majority but for the creation of some forty “boroughs,” each entitled to a member, under the patronage of some Protestant peer. This was the beginning of that “rotten borough” system which finally led to the abolition of the sectarian Irish Parliament of after times. Scenes of great disorder occurred in this Parliament of 1613, chiefly occasioned by the intolerant, and even violent, proceedings of the anti-Catholic party, unreasonable bigots, having an eye to the main chance in the matter of confiscated property, to whom the presence of any “Papist” in that body was as gall and wormwood. This bitter prejudice led finally to the utter exclusion of all Catholics from the Anglo-Irish Parliament, and even the few Catholic commoners previously entitled to a vote were deprived of that privilege, or rather right, until the last decade of the eighteenth century. Still, the Catholic minority in the Parliament of 1613 succeeded in preventing ultra-tyrannical legislation, and, really, made the first stand for the constitutional rights of Ireland, from the colonial standpoint. It was finally adjourned in October, 1615, and no other Parliament was called to meet in Ireland until 1635, when Charles I had already been ten years on the throne. “Government,” meanwhile, had been carried on arbitrarily, without constitutional restraint of any kind, as under the Tudor sovereigns—only with far less ability. The Tudors, at least—particularly Henry and Elizabeth—were intellectual tyrants, which their immediate successors were not. Never was so shameful a system of public spoliation carried out as in the reigns of James I, and his equally despotic, and still more unscrupulous, son Charles I. The viceroy was not responsible to any power whatever, except that of the English monarch. Chichester was succeeded by Lord Grandison, and under his régime the infamous “Commission for the Discovery of Defective Titles” was organized, of which the surveyor-general, Sir William Parsons, ancestor of the Earls of Rosse, was the head. This Commission, “aided by a horde of clerkly spies, employed under the name of Discoverers (McGee), ransacked Old Irish tenures in the archives of Dublin and London with such good effect, that in a very short time 66,000 acres in Wicklow and 385,000 acres in Leitrim, Longford, the Meaths, and Kings and Queens Counties were ‘found by inquisition to be vested in the crown.’ The means employed by the Commissioners in some cases to elicit such evidence as they required were of the most revolting description. In the Wicklow