Kingdom of Ireland

The Kingdom of Ireland was England's, then Britain's, Irish dependency, lasting as a kingdom from 1542 to 1800. Before it there was only the Lordship, the shrinking Pale around Dublin where English law ran, while Gaelic chiefs ruled the rest as kings in all but name. In 1542 Henry VIII had his Dublin parliament declare him King of Ireland, raising the island in theory to a sister kingdom. Theory and fact diverged for a century: Desmond's revolts, the Nine Years' War, Cromwell's massacres and the Williamite confiscations ground Gaelic Ireland down, planted Protestant settlers on its confiscated acres, and built the Protestant Ascendancy that owned the parliament, the church and the army. By law Ireland was a coequal kingdom in personal union; by the Declaratory Act of 1719 it was a dependency bound by Westminster statutes. The end came with rebellion and bribery together: after the rising of 1798, London bought the Dublin parliament's consent, and in 1800 the Act of Union folded Ireland into the United Kingdom, closing two and a half centuries of the separate Irish crown.