Parliaments in Ireland, Bríd McGrath suggests, met for 424 days across the thirty-five years from 1613 to 1648 (p. 10). But this masterly and extraordinarily comprehensive study demonstrates how these 400-odd days mattered, whether considered internally, in terms of the development of parliament as an institution, or externally, in terms of the place which it would hold in, and indeed what it would reveal of, an Ireland undergoing transformation across the reigns of James I (1603–25) and Charles I (1625–49). Even considered in technical terms, this book is a remarkable achievement. The archival research which underpins it extends to twenty-nine named repositories, internationally-known or highly localised and specialist, on both sides of the Atlantic. And the results fulfil the promise of the title through examinations of a whole raft of topics relating to the operations of Irish House of Commons, from sitting times to the ceremonial opening of parliament, the intricacies in the evolution of parliamentary committees, the range of duties demanded of clerks to parliament or the complexities surrounding the payment of M.P.s. The arrangement, very sensibly, is for the most part thematic, bookended with a review of sixteenth-century developments (chapter one) and a close focus on the crisis years of the 1640s (chapter eleven). In between, topics are clustered in order to address questions of parliamentary records (chapter two); the principal functions undertaken by parliament, and privileges defended by M.P.s (chapter three); ‘Summoning parliaments, composition, electoral practice and strategy, adjournments, prorogations and dissolutions’ (chapter five); ceremonial and social dimensions of parliamentary meetings (chapter six); ‘How parliament functioned’ (chapter seven), not least in processing legislation through the chamber or committees; financing parliaments and, importantly, the questions of tax revenues (‘subsidies’) voted by parliaments (chapter eight); the personnel of the Commons (chapter nine); and the part played by lawyers (chapter ten). Readers with particular interest in a given parliament or session will have to work to connect points made across the chapters, but this is as it should be, for they will be rewarded for attending closely to the text, as McGrath recurs to the differing conditions prevailing in each session as these relate to the matter in hand.

What emerges, and with particular force in chapter four (‘Attitudes to representation and parliament’), is an argument for the continuing value placed in parliament not merely for what it can do, in the delivery of taxation and legislation, but for what it is, or at least what it can be, a vehicle for representation including, but not limited to, the communities which returned individual members; a forum where wider grievances could be aired and, just possibly, redressed. What gives unity to the period is the particular composition of the Commons. On the one hand, from 1613 this stretched to all corners of the island, as against the much more geographically limited, if gradually expanding, coverage of medieval and sixteenth-century parliaments. On the other, it witnessed the filling up of seats, especially newly-enfranchised boroughs, with ‘New English’ Protestant M.P.s, often with limited, or no, local connections and not infrequently sponsored by the Dublin authorities. Yet, it was only at the other end of the period, in 1642, that a depleted Commons reeling from the effects of the recent nationwide rising of 1641, voted to confine membership to those — Protestants — willing to take the oath of supremacy, prefiguring the exclusively Protestant lower House defined in practice from 1661 (its only elected Catholic being expelled) and in law from 1691 (and that on the basis of legislation enacted at Westminster), broken only by the almost exclusively Catholic Commons of 1689.

The implications of this particular set of circumstances can be discerned across the chapters, not least in the depiction of what might be thought of as competing narratives. McGrath argues that votes ‘did not generally break down on ethnic or religious bases’ (p. 229), principal exceptions being votes determinative of the composition or control of the House. But it could certainly advantage the Dublin executive, itself hampered by the constraints which Poynings’ Law (enacted 1495) placed upon negotiation and amendment in the legislative process, to advance as a ‘prevailing narrative’ that of defiantly ‘recalcitrant’ and ‘confessional’ voting, by Catholics M.P.s, against the beneficial laws they sought to promote (pp 109–10, 350–51). Despite, or indeed perhaps because of, the efforts of the Dublin authorities to concoct the return of regime-friendly M.P.s, and exercise control over the Commons, a counter-narrative can be detected, most clearly amongst the representatives of old-established electoral communities, where grand claims for a ‘fully representative Commons’ (p. 106) could ground itself in the defence of residential requirements for members, or prescriptive rights for constituencies. At times, there may be here an elision of the ‘Irish political community’ with that given voice by Catholic, and especially ‘Old English’, representatives (at least until 1640–41). But one of the many strengths of this book is how McGrath earths her subjects in their local soil, despite the intractability of the source materials required for such an undertaking. Those readers — like myself — who would wish for yet more of this flavour of the particular can look to the extensive body of her previously-published studies. Also familiar, and welcome, is the inclusion of prosopographical findings, such as of the increasing Protestant preponderance among the more socially elevated of M.P.s, the baronets and knights, as well as among the expanding numbers of elected officials, civil and military. By contrast, merchant representation was ‘overwhelmingly Catholic’, especially as drawn from longer-enfranchised towns. And there is the bonus of an extended (124-page) biographical appendix of lawyer-M.P.s. Here is not only telling detail on those more obscure members, absent from standard biographical dictionaries, but illuminating accounts of better-known figures, to which future researchers will be well advised to turn.

The present volume follows relatively closely upon the publication of Colman A. Dennehy, The Irish parliament 1613–89 (Manchester, 2019). Each book has its own distinct merits. Dennehy provides a fuller chronological span and extends his treatment to the Lords, as well as the Commons. McGrath treats in detail a broader range of topics, and provides a greater array of concrete examples, above all in her discussion of connections between parliamentarians and the communities they represented. The books are genuinely complementary. This indicates more than the blossoms of a renaissance in Irish parliamentary history. What the present study represents is institutional history in the best sense, not merely explaining, with patience and skill, the ‘operations’ of the Commons, but indicating how that grand, if only occasionally operative, machine was assembled from the materials — human, material and intellectual — present in the diverse and complex society in which it was placed and how it in turn functioned as an instrument of change.