Poynings Law (1485 – 1494)
Above: Poynings Law
The accession in 1485, of Henry VII, who belonged to the Lancastrians, was the final triumph of that great party. At this time all the chief state offices in Ireland were held by the Geraldines; but as the new king felt that he could not govern the country without their aid, he made no changes, though he knew well they were all devoted Yorkists. Accordingly the great earl of Kildare, who had been lord deputy for several years, with a short break, was still retained.
But the Irish retained their affection for the house of York; and accordingly when the young im- poster Lambert Simnel came to Ireland, and gave out that he was the Yorkist prince Edward earl of Warwick, he was received with open arms, not only by the deputy, but. by almost all the Anglo-Irish : nobles, clergy, and people. But the city of Waterford rejected him and remained steadfast in its loyalty; whence. it got the name of Urbs Intacta, the ” untarnished city.”
After a little time an army of 2,000 Germans came to Ireland to support the impostor; and in 1487 he was actually crowned as Edward VI, by the bishop of Meath, in Christchurch Cathedral, Dublin, in presence of the deputy Kildare, the archbishop of Dublin, and a great concourse of Anglo-Irish nobles, ecclesiastics, and officers. But this foolish business .came to a sudden termina- tion when Simnel was defeated and taken prisoner in England. Then Kildare and the others humbly sent to ask pardon of the king; who dreading their power if they were driven to rebellion, took no severer steps than to send over Sir Richard Edgecomb to exact new oath of allegiance. In the following year the king invited them to a banquet at Greenwich; and one of the waiter who attended them at table was their idolized prince Lambert Simnel.
A little later on reports of new plots in Ireland reached the king’s ears; whereupon in 1492 he removed Kildare from the office of deputy. These reports went not without foundation, for now a second claimant for the crown, a young Fleming named Perkm Warbeck landed in Cork in 1492,- and announced that he was Richard duke of York, one of the two princes that had been kept in prison by Richard III. And he was at once accepted by the Anglo-Irish citizens of Cork. It was chiefly the English colonists who were con- cerned in the episodes of Simnel and Warbeck; the native Irish took little or no interest in either claimant
The king now saw that his Irish subjects went ready to rise in rebellion for the house of York at every opportunity. He came to the resolution, therefore, to lessen their power by destroying the independence of their parliament; and having given Sir Edward Poynmgs instructions to this effect, he sent him over as deputy.
