| Armagh Borough | |
|---|---|
| Former borough constituency for the Irish House of Commons | |
| County | County Armagh |
| Borough | Armagh |
| 1613–1801 | |
| Seats | 2 |
| Replaced by | Armagh City |
Armagh Borough (also known as Armagh City) was a constituency represented in the Irish House of Commons, the house of representatives of the Kingdom of Ireland, from 1613 to 1800.
This constituency was the borough of Armagh in County Armagh.
During the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland the borough was not granted separate representation in the Protectorate Parliaments (1654–1659), from the county constituency of Down, Antrim and Armagh.
After the restoration, in 1660, the Parliament of Ireland was revived with the borough again represented. In the Patriot Parliament of 1689 summoned by King James II, Armagh Borough was represented by two members. [1]
The city of Armagh, County Armagh, was the episcopal seat of the primate of All Ireland, the Archbishop of Armagh. The sovereign of Armagh corporation was the primate's land agent, or the seneschal of the manor, making the constituency a bishop's borough. The other burgesses were clergymen, "who seem to have held on an express or implied stipulation to resign on quitting the diocese, or in case of their becoming unwilling to act under the archbishop's direction". As these clergymen naturally looked to the archbishop for preferment, it is improbable that there were many resignations under the last clause of the agreement; and a corporation so managed must have been as easy to control as through tenants who had taken an oath, and against whom, moreover, the agent had the additional lever of the "hanging gale" (rent arrears). [2]
At Armagh, in the closing years of the old representative system, the archbishop although he was not a member of the corporation, and had no constitutional connection with it commanded twelve of the thirteen votes by which the members of Parliament for the city were elected; and "so completely was the election of the members considered to be in the primate, that he regularly paid the expenses of the admission of the free burgesses, amounting to five pounds each".
Following the Acts of Union 1800 the borough retained one parliamentary seat in the United Kingdom House of Commons.
| Election | First member | First party | Second member | Second party | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1689 Patriot Parliament | Francis Stafford | Constantine O'Neale | ||||
| 1692 | Marmaduke Coghill | Edward Lyndon | ||||
| 1695 | Samuel Dopping [lower-alpha 1] | |||||
| 1713 | Epaphroditus Marsh | |||||
| 1715 | Silvester Crosse | Charles Bourchier | ||||
| 1716 | John Eyre | |||||
| 1727 | Edward Knatchbull | Ambrose Philips | ||||
| 1749 | Philip Bragg | |||||
| 1759 | Marquess of Tavistock | |||||
| May 1761 | Robert Cuninghame | Hon. John Ponsonby [lower-alpha 2] | ||||
| 1761 | Hon. Barry Maxwell | |||||
| 1768 | George Macartney | Philip Tisdall [lower-alpha 3] | ||||
| 1769 | Charles O'Hara | |||||
| 1776 | Philip Tisdall | Henry Meredyth | ||||
| 1777 | George Rawson | |||||
| January 1790 | Henry Duquerry | |||||
| May 1790 | Robert Hobart [lower-alpha 4] | |||||
| 1796 | Sackville Hamilton | |||||
| 1798 | Hon. Thomas Pelham | Patrick Duigenan | ||||
| 1799 | Gerard Lake | |||||
| 1801 | Succeeded by the Westminster constituency Armagh City | |||||
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A bishop's borough or bishop borough was a pocket borough in the Irish House of Commons where the patron who controlled the borough was the bishop for the time being of the diocese of the Church of Ireland whose cathedral was within the borough. All bishops were themselves ex officio members of the Irish House of Lords. Three bishop's boroughs were disenfranchised by the Acts of Union 1800, and their bishops at the time applied for the standard £15,000 compensation due to patrons of disenfranchised boroughs; however, the Commissioners rejected these claims, and awarded the money to the Board of First Fruits. Armagh City, the Archbishop of Armagh's borough, remained enfranchised at Westminster and under the archbishop's control until the Irish Reform Act 1832. Although Cashel and Tuam were originally archbishops' boroughs, they passed to lay patrons in the eighteenth century.