The Parliament summoned by James met in the Inn’s Court, Dublin, in the summer of 1689. It was composed of 46 peers and 228 commoners. Of the former body, several were High Church Protestants, but, in the Lower House, there were comparatively few members of the “reformed religion.” This, however, was not the fault of the king or his advisers, as they were sincere in their desire to have a full Protestant representation in that Parliament. But, perhaps naturally, the Protestants were suspicious of the king’s good intentions, and so the majority held aloof from the Parliamentary proceedings. The most important acts passed by that Parliament were one establishing liberty of conscience, which provided, among other things, that Catholics should not be compelled to pay tithes to Protestant clergymen, and _vice versa_; another act established the judicial independence of Ireland, by abolishing writs of error and appeal to England. The Act of Settlement was repealed, under protest by the Protestant peers, who did not, for obvious reasons, wish the question of land titles obtained by fraud and force opened up. An act of attainder, directed against persons in arms against their sovereign in Ireland, was added to the list of measures. Heedless of the advice of his wisest friends, James vetoed the bill for the repeal of the infamous Poynings’ Law, which made the Irish Parliament dependent upon that of England; and also declined to approve a measure establishing Inns of Court for the education of Irish law students. In the first-mentioned case, James acted from a belief that his own prerogative of vetoing Irish measures in council was attacked, but his hostility to the measure for legal education has never been satisfactorily explained. Taken as a whole, however, King James’s Irish Parliament was a legislative success; and it enabled the Protestant patriot and orator, Henry Grattan, when advocating Catholic claims in the Irish Parliament a hundred years afterward, to say: “Although Papists, the Irish Catholics were not slaves. They wrung a Constitution from King James before they accompanied him to the field.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER III King James’s Imprudent Acts—Witty Retort of a Protestant Peer—Architectural Features of Dublin