that appeals might be carried
from the Scottish Court of Session to the House of
Lords.]

[Footnote 45: J. Mackinnon, The Union of England
and Scotland (London, 1896). This scholarly volume
covers principally the period 1695-1745.]

*40. The Union with Ireland, 1801.*--The history of Ireland, in most of
its phases, is that of a conquered territory, and until late in the
eighteenth century the constitutional status of the country
approximated, most of the time, that of a crown colony. During the
Middle Ages the Common Law and the institutions of England were
introduced in the settled portions of the island (the Pale), and a
parliament of the English type began to be developed; but Poynings's
Law of 1494, by requiring the assent of the English king and council
for the convening of an Irish parliament, by enjoining that all bills
considered by the Irish parliament must first have been considered by
the English parliament, and by declaring all existing statutes of the
English parliament to be binding upon Ireland, effectually stifled,
until its repeal in 1782, Irish parliamentary development. From the
middle of the seventeenth century Catholics were debarred from
membership, and, from the early eighteenth, from voting at
parliamentary elections. The repeal of Poynings's Law in 1782 and the
removal of the Catholic disqualification ten years later bettered the
situation, yet at the close of the eighteenth century Irish
governmental arrangements were still very unsatisfactory. Parliament
was independent in the making of laws, but not in the control of
administration; and it was in no true sense a national and representative
body. The policy urged by Pitt, namely, the establishment of a (p. 041)
legislative union on the plan of that which already existed between
England and Scotland, gradually impressed itself upon the members of
Parliament as more feasible than any other.

An Act of Union creating the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Ireland" was adopted by the Irish parliament in February, 1800, and by
the British parliament five months later, and, January 1, 1801, it was
put in operation. Under the terms of this measure the Irish parliament
was abolished, and it was arranged that Ireland should be represented
in the common parliament[46] by four spiritual lords and twenty-eight
temporal peers, chosen by the Irish peerage