The Exercise of Power

Ireland’s role in establishing the British Parliament’s supremacy over the executive.

This piece first appeared on the writer’s website in October 2016. It seems just as relevant today, following Boris Johnson’s decision to prorogue Parliement. The last paragraph has been changed to reflect this.

Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford in an Armour, 1639, portrait by Sir Anthony van Dyck

It was the English civil war, a brutal affair that lasted, on and off, for six years and pitched brother against brother and father against son, that established the supremacy of parliament. And it began with the trial of a man who had the temerity to threaten to raise a mostly Catholic army of Irish men to assist King Charles in his campaign against Scottish protestants. And Ireland was to suffer some of the worst horrors perpetrated during the course of the war.

Thomas Wentworth had been appointed as the king’s representative in Ireland. As such he succeeded in maintaining an uneasy peace on the island, between Catholic ‘Old English’, Protestant ‘New English’ and Scottish Presbyterians who had been granted land in the north and west taken from Irish clansmen. Meanwhile, on the mainland, many in parliament and outside were becoming uneasy about the king’s continuing support for a reforming arch-bishop who, in their eyes, wanted to take the Church of England back to something resembling the Roman…