ABSTRACT
In the years immediately before the Armada of 1588 Ireland was ruled by Lord Deputy Sir John Perrot. Reputedly a bastard of Henry VIII, he certainly looked like him and had the same temper. His rule was marked by the usual competition between the Gaelic, Old English, and New English lords. What is interesting is the way his policies gradually shifted towards a more pragmatic line, eventually accepting the idea that change was only feasible if the traditional ruling classes were allowed to benefit by it. What they objected to was not so much change as change which they could not control and which was used by others to rob and humiliate them. Perrot's quite spectacular failure to drive the Crown's high-handed and authoritarian legislative programme through the Irish parliament in 1585-86 was significant. The Crown's own nominee for the post of speaker, Nicholas Walsh, though an Anglican, summed up the views of his increasingly Roman Catholic fellow Old Englishmen when he said in his closing speech that Ireland was a constitutional polity in which the function of government was to defend loyal subjects without discrimination between them. Basically, this was a repudiation of attempts to ram through anti-Catholic legislation comparable to the tougher statutes which the English parliament had been passing under the stress of war with Spain. It also defied government attempts to secure an arbitrarily higher revenue by a process known as composition, whereby landowners had to abandon the practice of retaining armed men - 'coign and livery'. They were to be relieved of the burdens of military service and billeting of troops, and the obligation to render supplies to the government at artificially low rates under the system known as purveyance, but in exchange they would pay a fixed money rent. Above all, Walsh and his fellows gave the lie to the self-serving rhetoric of New English lawyers who waxed eloquent on the arbitrary power of the royal prerogative over an allegedly dependent Ireland, mainly because they could manipulate that prerogative to usurp the property of others. The rage of the executive at a parliament which failed to act as a mere tool of government was shown in the 27-year gap before another one was summoned in Ireland, but Perrot, despite his notorious irascibility, seems to have learned his lesson.
