William Domville

Although the work was not published in his lifetime, his son-in-law William Molyneux drew on it for his own highly controversial treatise "The Case of Ireland's being bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated", and it is thought to have had considerable influence on later writers including Jonathan Swift.

The King, who was anxious to avoid a confrontation with Parliament so early in his reign, stated that the choice should be that of the members, and Mervyn was duly elected Speaker.

Domville emerged as the winner: both the King and the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormonde trusted him, whereas Mervyn had a reputation for corruption and his loyalty to the Crown was suspect.

[3] This marked the effective end of the Prime Serjeant's role as chief legal adviser to the Crown and the start of the supremacy of the Irish Attorney General.

He was a staunch Protestant, though tolerant by the standards of the time, and it has been argued that he was seen as an obstacle to the aggressively pro-Catholic policy of the new regime; on the other hand, he may have been quite happy to retire, in view of his advanced age.

Despite his unquestionable loyalty to the Crown, the views he expressed there on the separate authority of the Irish Parliament might well have been called subversive by some, at a time when the Civil War was still a fairly recent memory, and new political ideas tended to be regarded with great suspicion.

His son-in-law William Molyneux drew on it for his own highly controversial work The Case of Ireland's being bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated (1698).

These views, although they were considered radical, perhaps even seditious, at the time, (Molyneux's work was burned publicly) became widely accepted in the eighteenth century, and are said to have influenced Jonathan Swift.

Lady Lake, an eccentric and malicious woman whose false accusations had already landed her in the Tower of London, made trouble between William and his wife by insisting that he was already married.