Suffrage, political franchise, or simply franchise is the right to vote in public, political elections and referendums. In some languages, and occasionally in English, the right to vote is called active suffrage, as distinct from passive suffrage, which is the right to stand for election. The combination of active and passive suffrage is sometimes called full suffrage.
The Test Acts were a series of penal laws originating in Restoration England, passed by the Parliament of England, that served as a religious test for public office and imposed various civil disabilities on Catholics and nonconformist Protestants.
The Oath of Supremacy required any person taking public or church office in the Kingdom of England, or in its subordinate Kingdom of Ireland, to swear allegiance to the monarch as Supreme Governor of the Church. Failure to do so was to be treated as treasonable. The Oath of Supremacy was originally imposed by King Henry VIII of England through the Act of Supremacy 1534, but repealed by his elder daughter, Queen Mary I of England, and reinstated under Henry's other daughter and Mary's half-sister, Queen Elizabeth I of England, under the Act of Supremacy 1558. The Oath was later extended to include Members of Parliament (MPs) and people studying at universities. In 1537, the Irish Supremacy Act was passed by the Parliament of Ireland, establishing Henry VIII as the supreme head of the Church of Ireland. As in England, a commensurate Oath of Supremacy was required for admission to offices.
Catholic emancipation or Catholic relief was a process in the kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland, and later the combined United Kingdom in the late 18th century and early 19th century, that involved reducing and removing many of the restrictions on Roman Catholics introduced by the Act of Uniformity, the Test Acts and the penal laws. Requirements to abjure (renounce) the temporal and spiritual authority of the pope and transubstantiation placed major burdens on Roman Catholics.
The Parliament of Ireland was the legislature of the Lordship of Ireland, and later the Kingdom of Ireland, from 1297 until the end of 1800. It was modelled on the Parliament of England and from 1537 comprised two chambers: the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The Lords were members of the Irish peerage and bishops. The Commons was directly elected, albeit on a very restricted franchise. Parliaments met at various places in Leinster and Munster, but latterly always in Dublin: in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin Castle, Chichester House (1661–1727), the Blue Coat School (1729–31), and finally a purpose-built Parliament House on College Green.
Armagh or County Armagh is a former county constituency in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom. It was a two-member constituency in Ireland from 1801 to 1885 and a single-member constituency in Northern Ireland from 1922 to 1950. It was replaced in boundary changes in 1983.
The Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829, also known as the Catholic Emancipation Act 1829, removed the sacramental tests that barred Roman Catholics in the United Kingdom from Parliament and from higher offices of the judiciary and state. It was the culmination of a fifty-year process of Catholic emancipation which had offered Catholics successive measures of "relief" from the civil and political disabilities imposed by Penal Laws in both Great Britain and in Ireland in the seventeenth, and early eighteenth, centuries.
"Unreformed House of Commons" is a name given to the House of Commons of Great Britain before it was reformed by the Reform Act 1832, the Irish Reform Act 1832, and the Scottish Reform Act 1832.
Forty-shilling freeholders were those who had the parliamentary franchise to vote by virtue of possessing freehold property, or lands held directly of the king, of an annual rent of at least forty shillings, clear of all charges.
In Ireland, the penal laws were a series of legal disabilities imposed in the seventeenth, and early eighteenth, centuries on the kingdom's Roman Catholic majority and, to a lesser degree, on Protestant "Dissenters". Enacted by the Irish Parliament, they secured the Protestant Ascendancy by further concentrating property and public office in the hands of those who, as communicants of the established Church of Ireland, subscribed to the Oath of Supremacy. The Oath acknowledged the British monarch as the "supreme governor" of matters both spiritual and temporal, and abjured "all foreign jurisdictions [and] powers"—by implication both the Pope in Rome and the Stuart "Pretender" in the court of the King of France.
Pembroke was a parliamentary constituency centred on the town of Pembroke in West Wales. It returned one Member of Parliament (MP) to the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, elected by the first past the post system.
Bristol was a two-member constituency, used to elect members to the House of Commons in the Parliaments of England, Great Britain (1707–1800), and the United Kingdom. The constituency existed until Bristol was divided into single member constituencies in 1885.
The Representation of the People (Ireland) Act 1832, commonly called the Irish Reform Act 1832, was an Act of Parliament that introduced wide-ranging changes to the election laws of Ireland. The act was passed at approximately the same time as the Reform Act 1832, which applied to England and Wales.
Newcastle-upon-Tyne was a parliamentary borough in the county of Northumberland of the House of Commons of England from 1283 to 1706, then of the House of Commons of Great Britain from 1707 to 1800 and of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom from 1801 to 1918. It returned two Members of Parliament (MPs), elected by the bloc vote system.
Events from the year 1728 in Ireland.
Brecon was a parliamentary constituency in Wales which returned one Member of Parliament (MP) to the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom and its predecessors, from 1542 until it was abolished for the 1885 general election.
The Roman Catholic Relief Act 1793 was an Act of the Parliament of Ireland, implicitly repealing some of the Irish Penal Laws and relieving Roman Catholics of certain political, educational, and economic disabilities.
The Newtown Act was an act of the Parliament of Ireland regulating municipal corporations, in particular the manner in which parliamentary boroughs elected members to the Irish House of Commons.
Ireland has had a franchise on an equal basis between men and women since the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. Historically, there had also been discrimination from the franchise on the basis of religion and on the basis of property. In 1972, the age of qualification for the franchise was reduced from 21 years to 18 years.
The Parliamentary Elections (Ireland) Act 1829, also known as the Irish Franchise Act 1829, was passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom in 1829. It restricted the franchise to elect knights of the shire in county constituencies in Ireland by raising the property threshold from the ownership or rent of a forty-shilling freehold to the British standard of a ten pound freehold. It ruled that:
... no Person shall be admitted to vote at any Election of any Knight of the Shire to serve in the Parliament of the United Kingdom for any County in Ireland, unless such Person shall have an Estate of Freehold, in Lands, Tenements, or Hereditaments in such County, of the clear Yearly Value of Ten Pounds at the least ...
