The risings in Ulster in late October 1641 marked the climax of one of those key periods in Anglo-Irish history in which events in Ireland had a direct and crucial impact upon the course of events in England. For at least a year prior to the outbreak of the 1641 rebellion, there had been a complex interaction of English and Irish events which, to a significant extent, conditioned the English response to the news of the risings. Not only was thc Irish rebellion of central importance in helping to precipitate the armed confrontation of king and parliament, and in reinforcing party alignment, but sharp memories of the rebellion inay also have made some contribution to the final collapse of royalist fortunes. The great significancc of the 1641 rebellion in the escalation into civil war in England was recalled by Richard Baxter in his autobiography.

If the major themes in Irish history during these years were the progressive decline of the protestant ascendancy, the rise of a catholic middle class, the growth of agrarian and urban popular politics and the social and economic consequences of a swelling population, then it would be generally assumed that parliamentary electioneering—at least until the passage of catholic emancipation in 1829—had very little to do with them. Supporters of such an assumption would argue that elections were largely the preserve of an élite—the protestant ascendancy—and that despite catholic enfranchisement in 1793 and the pruning of the most notorious close and rotten boroughs by the act of union, electioneering in Ireland was largely confined to wearisome bargaining between landlords, excessive drilling of freeholders both genuine and fictitious, unbecoming scrambles for Castle patronage and the almost indecent disposal of such ill-gotten gains amongst squads of dependents. Furthermore they might add as a confirmatory postscript, that the disfranchisement of the 40s.

Thirty years ago, in a magisterial study of the early operation of Poynings’ Law, Professor R. Dudley Edwards and Professor T.W. Moody noted that ‘the primary dividing-line in the history of the law falls between the parliaments of 1613–15 and 1634–5’. Previously, they showed, it had curtailed the Irish executive and enjoyed the approval of the Irish parliament; only subsequently, they argued, was it used as a means of enabling the government to control parliament. The purpose of the present study is to develop that argument by examining both the way in which Lord Deputy Wentworth took advantage of altered circumstances to reierse the statute’s function in 1634–5 and the way in which members of the Irish parliament unsuccessfully campaigned to restore the traditional interpretation of its provisions in 1640–41.

When the Irish chieftains sent their ‘Remonstrance’ to Pope John XXII at the time of the Bruce invasion, they included among their indictments of English rule in Ireland the murder of Murchertach MacMurrough, the Irish king of Leinster, and of Art, his brother. The killer they named as ‘Geoffrey de Pencoyt’. This was evidently an event of some moment, to be classed with the more famous murder of Brian Rua O’Brien by Thomas de Clare in 1277 and the slaughter of the O’Conors of Offaly by Peter de Bermingham in 1305. Yet beyond the fact that the murder took place at Arklow on 21 July 1282, very little is known about it. The documents printed below shed new light on the event, suggesting strongly that it was politically motivated and inspired by the Isish justiciar, Stephen Fulbourne. They also furnish tlie crucial missing links between facts that have long been known, but which have not hitherto made coherent sense.