Speaker, who, in “the universal comfort of all estates,” asked the Commons “what is there more of earthly felicity that can be required,” reminded them that the escheated lands “accepted by the Queen of us” were of far less value than the smallest portion of Her Majesty’s charges for their benefit, and mentioned how they had “willingly consented to attaint and stain in blood Her Majesty’s disloyal subjects and unbar the succession of their traitorous lines, to the end that the memory of their names may be quite extinguished.” Thus after a hundred years the Parliament won its first success in refusing the repeal of Poyning’s Act. Mr. Litton Falkiner calls us to wonder at the “curious circumstance” that “successive Parliaments of the sixteenth century declined on patriotic grounds to abrogate the very statute the repeal of which was to become the greatest triumph of Irish patriotism in the eighteenth century,” and insinuates that we may here see displayed the captious and capricious spirit that infects the “predestinate” peoples of Ireland. Out of the old habit of contempt it has being boldly suggested by some that the independence of Parliament, by others that the Catholic religion, were in no way valued by Irishmen until they made the discovery that these could be used to annoy and disconcert England. Such unworthy suspicions must disappear as we watch the grave conflict of men threatened with ruin, imprisonment, death, in their struggle to defend the first rights of law, property, and religion. It was a slow battle, with rare and scanty triumphs for defenders of the constitution. Long silence followed the first victory of the Parliament in refusing the repeal of Poyning’s Act: it was not summoned again for twenty-six years. Its next meeting was amid dark threatenings. The old sessions in Dublin had been honourably held in “the house called Christ’s Church situate in the high place of the same, like as St. Paul’s in London”; Parliament was now ordered to hold its debates in the Castle, surrounded by extra troops brought to overawe an assembly which was robbed of even the appearance of free deliberations. When they objected to being placed over the Castle stores of powder (in a room which had been, in fact, lately wrecked by an accidental explosion of gunpowder) and made a reference to Guy Fawkes, their objections were set aside with a scornful taunt “of what religion they were that had hatched such cockatrice’s eggs.” From that time began a new and even more ominous story than before.