of Parliament was asserted in the controversy between England and the American Colonies, the paramount authority of England over Ireland was asserted in several statutes, more especially in the famous measure passed in 1699, which prohibited the export of Irish wool and so destroyed the chief industry of the country.[1] But a doubt was held by some to exist as to whether the right of the English Parliament extended to Irish money Bills in the strict sense of the term.
The controversy was soon after widened. In 1719 the Irish House of Lords reversed a judgment of the Court of Exchequer. The defeated parties appealed to the House of Lords in England, and the judgment of the Court of Exchequer was affirmed. The Irish House of Lords thereupon resolved that no appeal lay from the Court of Exchequer to the House of Lords in England, and the Barons of the Exchequer were taken into the custody of the Black Rod for obeying the orders of the English Court. The English Parliament replied by passing an Act which declared the power of the Lords and Commons of Great Britain in Parliament to make laws to bind the people of Ireland, and further laid down that the Courts of King's Bench and Chancery in England were superior to the same Courts in Ireland and could hear appeals from them, and at the same time entirely abolished the appellate jurisdiction of the Irish House of Lords.
The most important results of the struggle were in Ireland the publication of Molyneux's Case of Ireland, a work which, burnt by the hands of the common hangman, became the legal text-book of Irish resistance; and in England the addresses adopted by the Houses of Parliament, in 1703 and 1707, in favour of a union with Ireland which in the previous century had been advocated by Sir William Petty. These addresses, however, received but little encouragement from the Crown. "The Parliament of England," to use the words of Lord Clare, "seem to have considered the permanent debility of Ireland as their best security for her connexion with the British
- ↑ See Stephens' Blackstone, 99; Hallam, Constitutional History, iii. 405.
