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This difference in the constitutional position of the first chancellors of England and Ireland, corresponding to a similar difference in the political history of the two countries, is a striking and significant fact which Mr. O'Flanagan should have distinctly noticed. Though often held by eminent ecclesiastics, the office of Chancellor in England became peculiarly judicial at an early period; and men of remarkable parts and learning began soon to build up gradually the system of remedial jurisprudence, mitigating the harshness of the Common Law, which ultimately expanded into Equity. This influence may be traced as far back as the reigns of John and Henry III.; and the principles then established having taken root, spread fruitfully over the whole country. In Ireland, on the other hand, the earlier Chancellors were only the instruments of sovereigns possessing little power; they were placed among a colony of conquerors who occupied only a part of the seaboard and were separated wholly from the native race; and, accordingly, they never had an opportunity of imitating their compeers in England, and of spreading the blessings of improved law and of equal justice over the whole island. Restricted in their judicial functions within a sphere smaller than the Pale itself, they probably did not cultivate earnestly the noble science which they professed; and as they all belonged to the dominant caste, they were often more conversant with the sword than with the administration of justice, and they learned to regard the subject people as mere aliens and natural enemies. Hence, though the first generations of Irish Chancellors were usually selected from the same class as those who held the Seals in England, we see plainly from Mr. O'Flanagan's book that they differed widely in their general characteristics from their fellows on this side of the Channel. They certainly created no school of law; and they allowed a foundation for legal students established in Dublin by Edward I. to fall into decay and ruin. It would appear that, filled with the prejudices of race, they seconded the remonstrances of the colony when more than one of the Plantagenet sovereigns wished to extend the Common Law to the aboriginal people; and they never attempted to enlarge the sphere of their scanty jurisdiction. Indeed, many of them were rather distinguished for their hostings' against the Irish chieftains than for their labours in dispensing justice; and the Anglo-Norman tribunals, like the Anglo-Norman Church, furnished more than one redoubtable soldier who cut down by hundreds the Celtic kerne. The very courts of these heads of the law, held within the precincts of the fortified Castle,' which protected the foreign burghers of

Dublin from the raids of the septs of Meath and Wicklow, presented an image of martial state; and, unlike what was the case in England, most of these Chancellors went on circuit, and, in the interest of order in the Pale, hanged and tortured scores of the Irish enemy.' The spirit even of the ecclesiastics, of whom many filled the office, resembled that of their lay fellows: few appear to have been well-read lawyers; their position in the Church did not raise them above the sentiments of the Anglo-Norman colonists, or reconcile them to the real people; and as they were subject to hardly any control, they sometimes led idle and profligate lives, or were not above official corruption. De Bicknor, one of the most eminent, who attempted to found a university in Dublin, confined it to those of the English name; and he was compelled to disgorge a considerable sum, which he had appropriated by counter'feiting writings.'

The general result of this condition of affairs was to make the position of the Irish Chancellors, their influence, and their power in the State, wholly different from what it was in England; to render the office of little value as a means of civilising a rude society, and to separate altogether the heads of the law from the great mass of the Irish nation. This state of things was but little changed for more than three centuries after the Conquest; indeed the authority of the Chancellors, their importance, and their legal jurisdiction declined gradually as the Pale increased in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, while they became more and more isolated from the degenerate descendants of the first settlers, and from the Irishry who, having thrown off their nominal allegiance to the English Crown, now occupied almost the whole island, and knew nothing of the law of the Saxon, except as associated with cruelty and wrong, and utterly abhorrent to their ancient customs. It is unnecessary to do more than glance at the list of Chancellors during this long period, of whom many have been omitted by Mr. O'Flanagan, for some unknown reason. few were really eminent men; one especially, De Wickford, a trusted minister of Edward III., accompanied the King in his remarkable campaigns of conquest in France; and, just as we have seen in modern times, he insisted in negotiation on the absolute necessity of securing a strategic frontier' in Aquitaine, in order to justify schemes of annexation. Some other personages of note occur; the boy Chancellor,' the illfated son of the Duke of York and the Rose of Raby,' whose beauty, it is said, lured the Earl of Desmond and his Geraldines to perish at Wakefield; the Earl of Worcester, the

VOL. CXXXIV. NO. CCLXXIII.

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butcher of England,' one of the most accomplished scholars of his age, but stained, it is said, with execrable crimes; Alexander Plunkett, the first probably of the colonists who obtained the office; and one or two Archbishops or Bishops who seem to have been more than commonly distinguished. Speaking generally, however, this long roll of Chancellors formed a succession of military politicians or of prelates, who have left nothing worth recording behind; and they doubtless trod in their predecessors' sway, administering a kind of rude justice within the contracted bounds of the Pale, protecting diligently the • English interest,' and knowing nothing about the wild Irish,' except as creatures to be hunted down and destroyed. Mr. O'Flanagan has passed over one of these names: Thomas de Revi appears to have presided as Chancellor at the celebrated Convention of the Pale, which framed the well-known Statutes of Kilkenny, perhaps the most remarkable monument extant of an attempt to sow hatred between two races; and we may believe that his wisdom inspired the colonists in this legislative effort. It is hardly necessary to add that during these centuries there was no development of Equity in Ireland, like that happily witnessed in England; the profession of the law bore little fruit in a soil rendered unkindly and barren; and the Irish Chancellors did not provoke any jealousy by enlightened devices to reconcile the Common Law with justice. At the same time ancient records show that something like a system of Equity had been imported into the Pale from England; but complaints appear to have been made more than once that it was an unknown language to several Chancellors.

During the second half of the fifteenth century a significant change may be traced in the names of the personages intrusted with the office. Up to this time the Irish Chancellors had usually been English courtiers or bishops; they were now frequently selected from the houses of the dominant AngloNorman nobles who had practically usurped the Government of the Pale. We find Butlers and Fitzgeralds on the list; and these functionaries were faithful representatives of the disorder and anarchy generally prevalent. This was the period when the power of England in Ireland had declined to the lowest point; and the heads of the law seem hardly to have been more than the nominal servants of the English monarchy. This state of things was tolerated for a time after the accession of Henry VII. to the throne; but when his dominion had become settled, he began to turn his attention to Ireland, and to endeavour to restore the influence of the Crown in a dependency already a disgrace and a danger. The celebrated statute called

Poyning's Act, the opprobrium of later Irish patriots, by which the Parliament of the Pale was rendered subject to the English Council, and an attempt was made to bring the great Irish lords and their vassals under the control of the law, was passed in 1494; and from this moment we may date the revival of English ascendency in the country. Mr. O'Flanagan seems to know nothing about the life of the prelate who doubtless presided as Chancellor in this assembly; yet he was one of those men who, without any claim to personal importance, have a place in our annals. Henry Deane, some time Prior of Llanthony, was Chancellor of Ireland in 1494-5; he became afterwards Lord Keeper in England, Bishop of Bangor, and Archbishop of Canterbury; and he solemnised the ill-fated but memorable nuptials of Prince Arthur and Catherine of Arragon. At the beginning of the reign of Henry VIII., we see a return for a few years to the practice of committing the Irish Seals to the scions of families of the Pale; and during the brief ascendency of the House of Kildare, we find a St. Lawrence, who had fought with distinction at the great battle of Knocktuagh-the Harlaw of the Celtic tribes of Ireland-administering Equity as an Irish Chancellor. After the suppression of the Geraldine rebellion, when the King set himself to the task of consolidating his power in Ireland, we meet with Chancellors of a new type, formed doubtless in the revolutions of that age, and evidently selected as fitting instruments to carry out Tudor Irish policy. These men were nearly all eeclesiastics, trained in the school of Warham and Wolsey, and possessing considerable ability and learning, but pliant and useful servants of the Crown, and ready to do whatever Cromwell or their Sovereigne Lorde might hint at or order. Mr. O'Flanagan's estimate of these functionaries depends mainly on the part they played in promoting or discouraging the Reformation in Ireland; and he commends highly the Catholic Cromer, and denounces his Erastian successors. We freely allow that those who aided in the ecclesiastical work of that age in Ireland are not entitled to admiration; and probably more than one of these Chancellors was thoroughly selfish and rapacious; but Mr. O'Flanagan's test of their conduct is, after all, an unsafe criterion; and he does not point out what, in our judgment, was the least amiable of their characteristics. Henry VIII., in spite of Mr. O'Flanagan, who paints him as Cardinal Pole did, had, nevertheless, a policy for Ireland in some respects enlightened and grand; he wished to break down the barriers between the colony and the aboriginal race, and to reduce both to loyal obedience; and

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though he failed, partly through his own errors, his purpose was certainly wise and noble. His Irish Chancellors, however, although they bowed with meek submission to his commands, seem secretly to have tried to thwart them; filled with the dominant spirit of the Pale, they were to a man hostile to the Irish enemy; and, whether they adhered to the old faith or acknowledged His Highness as Supreme Head,' the State Papers show that relentless oppression was their only expedient for governing the island.

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The progress of Tudor conquest in Ireland extended the domain of English law, with the ever-increasing circle of the Pale. The confiscations of the religious houses gave an impulse also to litigation; and the practice of surrendering and taking back lands to be held by an English tenure, tended to the extinction of the Celtic customs. These causes contributed to enlarge the jurisdiction of the Irish Chancellors during the reigns of Henry and Elizabeth, and Equity having by this time become comparatively mature in England, began to flourish even in Irish soil. A School of Law, which it had been found impossible to establish before, rose upon the site of a suppressed monastery, and received the name of the King's Inns; and, as we know from the State Papers, the legal profession became a powerful body not always subservient to the Government. The Irish Chancellors in this age abandoned their duties as criminal judges, and transferred them to the Presidents and other officials charged with the administration of this kind of justice; and they confined themselves to their proper Courts, which attracted an increasing amount of business. These functionaries were either lawyers, trained regularly to the practice of the bar, or prelates imbued with legal learning; some were unquestionably able men; and if we may judge from old legal documents, of which we have specimens in these volumes, they possessed considerable technical knowledge. Yet they do not wear a pleasing appearance as they pass along the stage of history, though one or two, like Weston and Gerard, seem to have been men of character and honour. As a class they belonged to the servile courtiers who so often climbed to power in those days-trimmers, ready to change their faith with the times, and constant only to the instinct of self; politicians, willing at all hazards to assert the doctrine of Divine Right; prelates, thinking more of their greedy families than of the Church they neglected and starved; and without an exception they could see nothing but evil in the native race, now more than ever alienated from their conquerors, by a double distinction of blood and religion. Thus

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