To make an end of the aspirations to independent nationality which had budded under the Duke of York, and bring Irish legislation completely under the control of the Crown, the Lord Deputy Poynings caused to be carried through the Parliament of the Pale the pair of acts which bore his name, subjecting Irish legislation to the control of the English Council. The first act ordained that in future no Parliament should be held in Ireland "but at such season as the King's Lieutenant-in-Council there first do certify the King under the great seal of that land the causes and considerations, and all such acts as then seemeth should pass in the said Parliament." Should the king in council approve, the Irish Parliament was to be summoned under the great seal of England and not otherwise. The second act provided that all public statutes "late made within the realm of England" should be in force in Ireland. This it was decided applied to all English acts prior to the tenth year of Henry VII. Ireland was thus practically turned from a separate principality into a political dependency of England. The work of Poynings was long afterwards completed by the act of George I. affirming the right of the British Parliament to legislate for Ireland. III During the early part of the reign of Henry VIII. the policy of the English government was a continuation of that of Henry VII. It was a policy of conciliation and of ruling through the great Irish chiefs, the heads of the Butlers, the Geraldines, and the O'Neills, who were gratified by the bestowal of English titles of nobility, with flattering marks of confidence, and by a change in the tenure of their land from tribal to feudal, which invested them with full ownership. The Irish chief and the feudal baron of the Pale now sat in Parliament together for the first and last time. There appears to have been an inclination on the part of the Crown to favour the native Irish, it being still remembered perhaps that the Anglo-Irish had supported the Yorkist pretenders. The king himself penned a sage and benevolent manifesto, in the shape of a despatch to the Lord Deputy Surrey, on the blessings of civilization. The policy of conciliation was in fact necessary as well as laudable; for the king, plunged by his diplomacy into continental embroilments and lavishing his father's hoard on a Field of the Cloth of Gold, had not the means of subduing Ireland. It would have been vain to look in those days for the philosophy which could make allowance for a diversity of national ideas and habits. The O'Neill, upon his elevation to the earldom of Tyrone, is required with his heirs to forsake the name of O'Neill, to use English habits and the English language. The age, however, was one of growing light. Education was a passion of the hour. A decree in favour of the establishment of a system of free schools in Ireland went forth. Unhappily it remained a decree. No homilies, no peerages, no flatteries or marks of