Page:The Complete Peerage Ed 2 Vol 1.djvu/530

 APPENDIX F JACOBITE PEERAGES James II was declared, by the English Parliament (6 Feb. 1688/9), to have abdicated the throne on 1 1 Dec. 1688. In Scotland no similar declaration was made till 4 Apr. 1689, but only one Scottish peerage, and that only for life, was cr. by James II between 1 1 Dec. 1688 and that date. He however cr. 6 Irish Peers, when in Ireland, during a time when the government was carried on solely in his name (which was the case till the landing of Gen. Schomberg in Ulster in Aug. 1689), and when he was at all events the de facto King of Ireland. The acts of a King in possession have, as a rule, been recognised by his successor : e.g., the Peerages cr. by Henry VI were acknowledged by Edward IV ; those cr. by Richard III were acknowledged by Henry VII; though in both these cases (unlike the case of 1689) the preceding monarch was considered as an usurper by his successor. There remains indeed the constitutional question, whether Ireland, being " a dependent, subordinate kingdom, " and " inseparably united " to the Crown of England (see Blackstone, i, 99-104, and Coke, Inst., iv, 349, ^c), an " Abdication " in England would not override all kingly rights in Ireland, and the soundest legal opinion would, in all probability, be that it does so. By an Irish Statute, 33 Henry VIII, it is enacted that the King of England is ipso facto King of Ireland. The statutes relating to the Crown were not re-enacted in Ireland after the Revolution. Such Irish Peerages, however, as were cr. by James II in 1689 — at a time when he was in full possession of all his Regal Rights as King of Ireland, all of which creations, moreover, were duly enrolled on the Patent Rolls of that Kingdom, from which they have never been erased — stand in a very different category from other Peerages cr. by that King after his (so called) "abdication " of the throne of England on 11 Dec. 1688. By a singular coincidence, however, nearly all these Irish Peerages, at no long time after their creation, became either extinct or merged. ' In 1839, in the case of " Nugent of Riverston " (the only one then existing per se), the dignity was claimed but no decision was pronounced thereupon ; and in 1 87 1 this peerage also (assuming its existence) merged into the Earldom of Westmeath [I.].