Note 221 — Chapter LI · THE PARLIAMENT OF 1689

Light to the Blind, p. 70. ‘By the sitting of this Parliament,’ says John Stevens, p. 70, ‘the army was much damaged and weakened, the King lost the assistance of many of his friends, and gained a vast number of irreconcilable enemies.’ King James, says Colonel O’Kelly, ‘convoked the states of the kingdom, and as if in time of peace and leisure spent in unnecessary consultations the whole summer season, which might be better employed to go on more rigorously with the siege of Londonderry,’ Macariæ Excidium, p. 33. King says it was ‘manifestly against his interest to call a Parliament,’ chap. iii. sec. 12, 5. Besides anything given to Tyrconnel by his private Act, there appear to have been other grants. According to the Sheridan MS., James regretted at St. Germains that he had been tricked into giving him 50,000l. a year while only intending 12,000l. The extreme Irish party, of which Bishop O’Molony was the soul, condemned this Parliament for not repealing Poynings’ Act, Macpherson, i. 339.