Various unproductive attempts have been made to trace the influence of the political ideas associated with the American revolution on Irish opinion. Raymond Barrett, author of the most sustained study of the kind, concluded that the Irish, despite their ‘close contact with American thought … scarcely utilized the American material’. This is what one would expect, given that Anglo-Irish constitutional theory was in advance of the American. The Irish House of Commons asserted its ‘sole right’ to initiate money bills (and consequently to levy taxation) as early as 1692, while Molyneux rejected the English parliament's authority to legislate for Ireland on the grounds of natural right eight years later. On the other hand, Westminster's power to legislate for – as distinct from its power to tax – the American colonies appears not to have been disputed before the 1760s, and its power to regulate imperial trade was acknowledged by American patriots until the outbreak of hostilities. Furthermore, while the members of the Irish political nation disagreed on the precise extent of the British parliament's authority over the colonies, they all, patriots and courtiers alike, assumed that the powers of the ancient parliament of the kingdom of Ireland were more extensive than those of the colonial assemblies. This assumption considerably diminished the relevance of colonial polemics and these, in any event, contained few novelties for the educated Irish reader: as Bernard Bailyn has noted, the ideas which inspired the American revolution derived largely from writings associated with the exclusion crisis of 1679–81 and the Williamite Revolution.