Ireland the causes thereof, and the articles of the Acts proposed to be passed, and that after the King and Council in England had approved or altered the said Acts and certified them back under the Great Seal of England, and should have given license to summon a Parliament, the same should be summoned, and therein the said Acts and no other should be proposed, received, or rejected.[1] A subsequent Act provided that any new propositions might be certified to England in the usual forms even after the summons of Parliament.[2] Under the latter Act a practice grew up by which heads of Bills were prepared, and after two readings and a committal were submitted to the Lord-Lieutenant in Council, who on approval transmitted them to England in conformity with Poynings' Act. This procedure and the assent of the Privy Council in England came gradually to be claimed as a matter of right with regard to money Bills. The advantages of it were obvious, for it gave the Lord-Lieutenant the means of ascertaining what measures the Parliament desired to see passed. The doctrine, however, still held good that when once a Bill had been certified back under the Great Seal of England no alteration could be made in it. Thus the Irish Parliament was deprived of all power of amendment. But the English Parliament was not satisfied with the measure of dependence secured by this procedure.
Another of Poynings' laws, based on the assumption, in itself doubtful, that English statutes did not run in Ireland, had enacted that all Acts of Parliament previously passed in England should for the future be of force in Ireland. As a deduction from the principle on which this statute rested, it was held that all English Acts passed since the time of Poynings' Act did not run in Ireland. At the same time it was held by some that if Ireland were expressly named in a statute of the English Parliament, then Ireland would be subject to that statute. The question, however, though raised in 1641, continued to be more speculative than practical till after the Revolution, when, in the same way that the paramount authority
