Under King Henry VI. of England, Richard, Duke of York, being Lord Deputy, the Parliament of the Pale, assembled in Dublin, repudiated the authority of the English Parliament in Ireland, established a mint, and assumed an attitude of almost complete independence. On the other hand, in 1494, under Henry VII., the Parliament of the Pale, assembled at Drogheda, passed Poyning's Act, extending all English laws to Ireland and subjecting all laws passed in Ireland to revision by the English Council. This, extended to the whole of Ireland as English power extended, remained in force until 1782. Henry VIII. was the first English sovereign to take practical measures for the pacific and diplomatic conquest of the whole of Ireland and the substitution of English for Irish institutions and methods. His daughter, Queen Elizabeth, continued and completed the conquest; but it was by drenching the country in blood, by more than decimating the Irish people, and by reducing the remnant to something like the condition of the ancient _fuidre_. Her policy prepared the ground for her successor, James I., to exterminate the Irish from large tracts, in which he planted Englishmen and Scotchmen, and to extend all English laws to Ireland and abolish all other laws. James's English attorney-general in Ireland, Sir John Davies, in his work, _A Discoverie of the True Causes, etc._, says: "For there is no nation of people under the sunne that doth love equall and indifferent [= impartial] justice better than the Irish; or will rest better satisfied with the execution thereof, although it bee against themselves; so as they may have the protection and benefit of the law, when uppon just cause they do desire it." The ancient Irish loved their laws and took pride in obeying and enforcing them. The different attitude of the modern Irish towards foreign laws and administration is amply explained by the morally indefensible character of those laws and that administration, to be read in English statutes and ordinances and in the history of English rule in Ireland--a subject too vast and harrowing, and in every sense foreign to what has gone before, to be entered upon here. Though the Parliament of 1782-1800 was little more than a Pale Parliament, in which the mass of the Irish people had no representation whatever, one of its Acts, to its credit be it said, was an attempt to mitigate the Penal Laws and emancipate the oppressed Gaelic and Catholic population of Ireland. With the partial exception of that brief interval, law in Ireland has, during the last 360 years, meant English laws specially enacted for the destruction of any Irish trade or industry that entered into competition with a corresponding English trade or industry. In later times those crude barbarities have been gradually superseded by the more defensible laws now in force in Ireland, all of which can be studied in statutes passed by the Parliament, since the Union with Scotland, called British. REFERENCES: