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Queen Anne’s kingdoms remained engaged in the War of the Spanish Succession. Ireland was not a principal battlefield, but war shaped government priorities. It made communications, coasts and food supplies matters of state; it also intensified the fear that Catholic allegiance might be linked to the exiled Stuart claimant, James Edward Stuart, and to France. On 2 March, a proclamation prohibited Irish fishermen from corresponding with the enemy. A public fast followed on 29 March, while thanksgiving days on 17 March and 22 November connected Irish public worship to Britain’s military fortunes.
The Registry originated in the Registration of Deeds Act of 1707, which came into force on 25 March 1708. It established a public office in Dublin to register memorials of conveyances, wills and other instruments affecting land. Four days later Memorial No. 1 was registered. Benjamin Parry, an Irish MP, was the first registrar. The office did not initially compel every owner to register a deed; nevertheless, registration gave a deed precedence over an unregistered instrument or one entered later. That practical advantage encouraged use of the system.
Queen Anne was monarch, while James Butler, second duke of Ormond, served as lord lieutenant of Ireland. Appointed in 1703 partly because of his powerful Irish connexions and influence in both houses, Ormond presided over the 1705 session at a time when the crown required dependable revenue and political calm. The Irish parliament was not a national representative assembly in any modern democratic sense. Its electorate and office-holding structure were restricted by property, religion and the post-1691 political order; Catholics, who formed the large majority of the population, were excluded from the legislature.
Queen Anne had succeeded William III in 1702, and James Butler, second duke of Ormond, was lord lieutenant in Ireland during 1704. His government operated in a kingdom still marked by the Williamite wars of 1689–91, confiscated estates and the political victory of the Church of Ireland. The Irish parliament was overwhelmingly Protestant in membership and outlook. Catholics were already excluded from parliament and many offices; Presbyterian and other Protestant dissenters also faced disabilities under the established religious order. The legislation of 1704 nevertheless concentrated especially on Catholics, whom Protestant politicians associated with the defeated Jacobite cause and with the Catholic powers fighting Britain and its allies in the War of the Spanish Succession.
In February, Queen Anne appointed James Butler, second duke of Ormond, lord lieutenant of Ireland. The appointment mattered because Ormond was not merely an official sent from London. He was an immensely wealthy Anglo-Irish magnate, heir to a name with deep political and territorial roots in Ireland, and he possessed connections in both houses of the Irish parliament. Anne’s ministers hoped that his standing could make a difficult parliamentary session manageable.
William III died at Kensington on 8 March 1702. On that day Anne, his sister-in-law and the Protestant daughter of the deposed James II, became queen of England, Scotland and Ireland. The wording matters: these remained separate kingdoms under the same sovereign. Ireland possessed its own executive, courts, revenue and parliament, but the crown’s Irish government was closely controlled from London and Irish legislation remained constrained by Poynings’ Law.
