There are few scholars more knowledgeable about eighteenth-century Irish politics than James Kelly. Having authored several important monographs—Prelude to Union: Anglo-Irish Politics in the 1780s (Cork: Cork University Press, 1992), Henry Grattan (Dublin: Historical Association of Ireland, 1993), Henry Flood: Patriots and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts, 1998), and Sir Edward Newenham, MP, 1734–1814: Defender of the Protestant Constitution (Dublin: Four Courts, 2003)—Kelly is a preeminent authority on the central figures and issues of the period. Now, Poynings’ Law and the Making of Law in Ireland, 1660–1800 establishes his mastery of the legislative details and administrative processes by which the Irish Parliament attempted to rule Ireland within the constraints of its constitutional relationship with Britain. Deploying chronological, thematic, biographical, and statistical historiography, Kelly renders visible how the interpretation of Poynings's law—a late fifteenth-century act establishing the parameters of Parliament's and the crown's respective prerogatives to make law for Ireland—evolved in tandem with political necessity. By doing so, he revises the popular view that this law deprived the kingdom of all legislative and political agency and forwards a more nuanced account of the extent of English legal power in Ireland, showing how it waxed and waned in relation to the bureaucratic actions of key officials and trends in public opinion. Accordingly, Poynings's law, traditionally regarded as an impediment to Irish legislative independence, can now be seen as the means by which the Irish Parliament, by altering its interpretation and application in its favor, was able to legalize its authority.
The original intent of this law, enacted in 1494, seems to have been the prevention of the crowning of pretenders to the English throne by the Irish Parliament and allied English administrators in Ireland—an event that had taken place in 1487, when Lambert Simnel was crowned Edward VI. Its central provisions were that the Irish Parliament and Irish Privy Council should present the “causes and considerations” of convening to the king and the English Privy Council and that legislation communicated from Ireland could only become law if approved by these English bodies (9). Procedures under Poynings's Law were clarified in 1557, when it was determined that the English Privy Council had the right to amend such bills before they were returned to Ireland and that the Irish Parliament could not make changes to them (10). This rule gave the Irish Parliament only one option if the amendments were not agreeable to its members: a veto exercised via a refusal to pass these returned bills into law. Whereas various executive bodies over the decades had exercised their prerogative to write legislation about which Parliament would later be consulted, by the late seventeenth century, Parliament was arguing that it had the “sole right” to initiate budget and revenue (“supply”) legislation (61). A compromise on this right—a privilege that extended beyond supply bills to other matters—was reached in 1695, fudging Poynings's Law by making it possible for Parliament to submit “heads of bills” (titles and ideas for legislation but not specific content) for approval by the Irish and English Privy Councils (69). The journey of heads of bills, under this procedure, was from the Parliament or Irish Privy Council, then to the British Privy Council, then to the latter's committee on Irish bills, then to the British attorney general and solicitor general, and then back down the line again for approval in reverse order (140). Kelly's analysis shows that administrative officials were sensitive enough to the Irish Parliament's needs that the de jure provisions of Poynings's Law gave way to a de facto arrangement by the late eighteenth century in which Parliament's bills were not amended in council but simply rubber-stamped. By 1782, the Irish Parliament was sending full bills, not just heads of bills, to council, although in principle the British Council could still postpone consideration of them or reject them outright (336).
By evaluating Poynings's Law as the central nexus of Irish-English political engagement, Kelly's book enters the fray of the “kingdom or colony” debate that recently has preoccupied historians such as T. B. Barry, V. G. Kiernan, Roy Foster, Aidan Clarke, Jane Ohlmeyer, Patrick Kelly, Nicholas Canny, Patrick McNally, S. J. Connolly, and Neil Longley York. This controversy asks whether the administration of Ireland followed the pattern, on the one hand, of the American colonies, which had little formal constitutional authority, or on the other hand, of a properly English kingdom, which entitled it to a parliament with rights similar to its counterpart in London. Although there were differences as to whether the British Privy Council could initiate and amend legislation (as in the Irish case) or be limited to approving or vetoing it (as in the American case)—a difference that prompted English officials to seek an extension of Poynings's Law to the colonies of Jamaica and Virginia (362)—Kelly has little doubt that all of these Atlantic territories “were bound in a dependent colonial relationship with Britain” (363). He threads the needle between scholars who adhere to strict significations of “colony” or “kingdom” by arguing that the Irish situation “changed over time” and “that the nature of Irish dependence was not fixed” (359). By focusing on the dynamic nature of procedural mechanisms of rule, rather than on static definitions of different forms of administration, Kelly offers a reconceptualization of colonialism in which the continuity of the British legal prerogative in lawmaking—but not necessarily its exercise—was the determining factor. Under this criterion of “enduring” scrutiny, “the Anglo-Irish constitutional nexus possessed features … that were emphatically colonial in character” (360–61).
The great strengths of Poynings’ Law are its dogged presentations of facts concerning the number of bills initiated and approved by various governmental bodies and its statistical analysis of their passage or failure at each stage in the process. Such an approach reveals, for example, that the British Privy Council, due to diplomatic relations with allied Catholic kingdoms in Europe, often amended strongly anti-Catholic bills made by the exclusively Protestant Irish Parliament. This fact suggests that contrary to popular belief, English oversight often provided relief to the disenfranchised majority Catholic population of Ireland. Poynings’ Law's weakness, however, is that it mirrors the “lax drafting” about which English officials complained when they saw bills copied by Irish clerks (271). Kelly's book features numerous uses of “than” instead of “that,” substitutes of the singular instead of the plural, missing words (often in the names of bills), and other verbal problems that distract the reader from this otherwise highly ornate treatment of Irish legal history. The author is not to be blamed; this is not the first book from Four Courts Press that I have seen with this degree of typographical errata. I had no wish to be the first to say this, but if this prolific publisher wants to retain its status as a world-class academic press, it must provide better copyediting as a service to both authors and readers.
