The Irish Parliament () was a legislative body created in 1297 to represent the Anglo-Irish in the English monarch's Lordship of Ireland. Like the English Parliament, it had its own Houses of Commons and Lords. When King Henry VIII of England elevated Ireland to a kingdom in 1541 through an act of the Irish Parliament, he invited the Gaelic Irish to sit in the England Parliament for the first time. However, later English monarchs' penal laws prevented Roman Catholics from entering Parliament. So, the native Irish after this were virtually unrepresented since they were almost all Catholic.