James II
of their country. A clause in the latter Act "for teaching and instructing the mathematics and the art of navigation" deserves, perhaps, more attention than it has commonly received. An Act "for Forfeiting and Vesting in his Majesty the goods of Absentees" has been sometimes represented as a flagrant example of legislative robbery; but its real object was to put an end to the indiscriminate seizure of absentee property by unauthorised persons which had been taking place in many parts of the country since the beginning of March.80 A bill for the repeal of Poynings' Act and another for establishing Inns of Court at Dublin, are said to have been rejected owing to the personal interference of James.81
A few measures of greater and more lasting interest have been reserved for a more detailed discussion. After a formal Act recognising the King's title a bill was introduced in the House of Commons and rapidly passed into law, "declaring that the Parliament of England cannot bind Ireland," a doctrine which had been held by a long succession of eminent Irish jurists, which had been maintained in the preceding generation by the Confederation of Kilkenny, which was re-asserted only nine years later in the interest of the Protestant colonists by William
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