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| Act of Parliament | |
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| Long title | An Act that the King of England, his Heirs and Successors, be Kings of Ireland. |
|---|---|
| Citation | 33 Hen. 8. c. 1 (I) |
| Territorial extent |
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| Dates | |
| Royal assent | 1542 |
| Commencement | 1542 |
| Repealed |
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| Other legislation | |
| Amended by | |
| Repealed by |
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Status: Unknown | |
| Text of statute as originally enacted | |
| Revised text of statute as amended | |
TheCrown of Ireland Act 1542 (33 Hen. 8. c. 1 (I)) is anact of theParliament of Ireland passed on 18 June 1542, which created the title of "King of Ireland" formonarchs of England and their successors; previous monarchs had ruled Ireland asLords of Ireland. The first monarch to hold the title was KingHenry VIII of England.
Thelong title of the act was "An Act that the King of England, his Heirs and Successors, be Kings of Ireland". Among the 18th-centuryIrish Patriot Party it was called theAct of Annexation.[1]
Thepope in 1171 abolished theHigh Kingship of Ireland (of 9th-century origin, successor to theKingship of Tara) and devalued the ancientKingdoms of Ireland.
UnderLaudabiliter, apapal bull, the ancient realm was disestablished and turned into a feudal province of theHoly See of the RomanCatholic Church under thetemporal power of the monarch ofEngland who henceforth held the titleLord of Ireland, relinquishing to the papacy the annual tribute levied upon the nobility and people of Ireland.
The act was passed in theParliament of Ireland, meeting inDublin, on 18 June 1542, being read out to parliament in English andIrish.[2]
The secession of various European rulers during the ProtestantReformation, including Henry VIII, prompted thepapacy to initiate theCounter-Reformation. One consequence of this was that the papacy required all Roman Catholic rulers to considerProtestant rulers (and their loyal subjects) asheretics, thus making their realms illegitimate under customary Roman Catholic international law.[citation needed] Consequently, the title "King of Ireland" was not initially recognised by Europe's Catholic monarchs and the papacy. Instead, they remained committed in considering Ireland a feudal fief of the papacy, to be granted to any Catholic sovereign who managed to secure the island Kingdom from the control of its Protestant monarchs.
After the death of Henry VIII's only legitimate son,Edward VI and the deposition of his successorJane, the throne passed to his oldest daughter,Mary I, who was a devout Roman Catholic. Mary shortly thereafter marriedPhilip of Spain, who was also staunchly Catholic. The new monarch restored papal authority in both England and Ireland. However, the status of Ireland as a kingdom remained in question: would the papacy recognise Ireland's existence as a kingdom in its own right or maintain some fiction of temporal papal power in the land? To rectify this,Pope Paul IV issued apapal bull in 1555,Ilius, per quem Reges regnant, recognising Philip and Mary as King and Queen of England and its dominions including Ireland. Although this did not explicitly recognise Ireland as a kingdom, it represents the surrender of most of the papacy's declared authority over Ireland, elevating it from a mere province of the Holy See to one that united Ireland's and England's crowns in one person.[3]
Mary died without issue in 1558, and the thrones of England and Ireland passed to her half-sister,Elizabeth I, who was a Protestant. Once again, both Kingdoms were removed from papal authority. In reply,Pope Pius V issued a papal bull in 1570,Regnans in Excelsis, declaring "Elizabeth, the pretended Queen of England and the servant of crime" to be a heretic and releasing all her subjects from any allegiance to her and excommunicating any that obeyed her orders.
Over the course of the next two centuries, the papacy and Europe's Catholic rulers continued to recognise Ireland as a kingdom in its own right, whilst at the same time asserting its Protestant monarchy as illegitimate.[citation needed] Simultaneously, they would incite Catholic rebellion to Protestants in the island as a means of recovering Ireland to a Catholic sovereign, preceding the establishment of a Catholic sovereign on the English and Scottish thrones.[citation needed] In reply, British diplomacy concentrated on receiving the recognition of the sovereignty of Ireland from Catholic Europe in the hope of thereby ending future Catholic sovereign incitements of the larger Catholic peasantry and securing the western flank of Great Britain from Catholic invasion.[citation needed]
Until 1801, Ireland continued to exist as a Kingdom in its own right, with its own Parliament. The government of Ireland, however, remained exclusively Protestant, even afterGrattan's constitution came into effect in the 1780s. Most of the country's population remained Catholic, but its Protestant minority remained socially, politically, and economically dominant; and even many Protestants were excluded from power as not being members of theestablishedChurch of Ireland. ThePenal Laws preserving the position of theProtestant Ascendancy began to be dismantled in the 1780s and 1790s. However, fear of revolutionary violence in the wake of theFrench Revolution and theFrench Revolutionary Wars and subsequent republicanIrish Rebellion of 1798 led theBritish government to seek theunion of Ireland with Great Britain; this resulted in the formation of theUnited Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
As a result of theAnglo-Irish Treaty that ended theIrish War of Independence, most of Ireland officially left the United Kingdom in December 1922 and became theIrish Free State, a mostly self-governingdominion that still retained the British monarch as its sovereign and head of state. Northern Ireland, having been partitioned from what would become the Irish Free State by theGovernment of Ireland Act 1920, remained in the United Kingdom, withits own parliament and devolved system of government. Despite these fundamental changes, the 16th-century act remained unamended on the statute books.
From a British perspective, the Irish Free State became legislatively independent with the passage in the British Parliament of theStatute of Westminster 1931. However, the Irish Free State considered itself legislatively independent before its passage and did not recognise its legal situation as having changed. The dominion thereafter shared the person of its monarch with the United Kingdom and the otherdominions of the then-calledBritish Commonwealth.
The Irish Free State adopted anew constitution in 1937 with apresident, while theIrish monarchy, which had been retained for external relations, was abolished in Irish law byThe Republic of Ireland Act 1948, which became law in April 1949. Though no longer effective, the Tudor act remained on theRepublic of Ireland's statute books until formally repealed in 1962.[4]
The act of Henry VIII., commonly called the act of annexation, proves and ascertains what the member's arguments would deny, the existence, properties, and prerogatives of the Irish crown.;A Review of Mr. Grattan's Answer to the Earl of Clare's Speech(PDF). Vol. Part the first. Dublin: J. Milliken. 1800. p. 6.
What by a bold flight of imperialism we now denominate the act of Annexation, (33d Hen. VIII. c. 1.) was in truth no more than an alteration in the Royal style.
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