The Kingdom of Ireland was a client state of England and Great Britain that existed on the island of Ireland from 1542 to 1801. Ireland had been ruled by the English-controlled Lordship of Ireland and by Gaelic principalities and chiefdoms until 1542, when the Parliament of Ireland created King Henry VIII of England as "King of Ireland", setting the stage for an expansion of English control over the island during the Tudor conquest of Ireland. The conquest of the island was completed in the 17th century, when the English confiscated land from the native Irish and colonized the land with Protestant "plantations", with the Scots-Irish Plantation of Ulster being the most successful. The island mostly remained loyal to the Crown during the English Civil War, when both Anglican Royalists and the Catholic Confederates supported the Anglo-Catholic Charles I of England against the Calvinist Parliamentarians. The island experienced particularly harsh conditions during Oliver Cromwell's dictatorship, as well as during the Williamite War in Ireland, the Armagh disturbances of the 1780s-1790s, and the republican Irish Rebellion of 1798.
Throughout the 18th century, the Irish Parliament had biased representation in favor of the small Anglo-Irish minority. The vast majority of Dublin MPs sat for rotten or pocket boroughs (where a local landowner effectively nominated the MP, elected by very small electorates) controlled by the Anglo-Irish elite, and, across the country, Presbyterians were poorly represented and Catholics were totally excluded. Irish Catholics lost the right to vote under the 1722 Disenfranchising Act, but their right to vote was not restored until 1795, and they could not hold public office until 1829. The Catholic landowning class had been destroyed by the defeat of the Jacobites in 1691, and only 7% of landowners were Catholic by 1770. Landlords, until the secret ballot was introduced by the Ballot Act 1872, could prevail upon their tenants to vote for the landlord's preferred candidates and evict them if they refused. From the adoption of Poyning's Law in 1494 until the Constitution of 1782, the Irish Parliament could only debate laws which were pre-approved by the Parliament in Westminster. From 1782 to 1800, Ireland became a fully independent country from Britain, with only a shared monarch, but the Rebellion of 1798 led to the adoption of the Acts of Union, which merged Ireland into a "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland."
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