Oath of Supremacy

Last updated November 12, 2024

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 The Oath of Supremacy was originally imposed by King Henry VIII of England through the Act of Supremacy 1534, but repealed by his elder daughter, Queen Mary I of England, and reinstated under Henry's other daughter and Mary's half-sister, Queen Elizabeth I of England, under the Act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.

In 1801, retained by the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, the oath continued to bar Catholics from Parliament until substantially amended by the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829. The requirement to take the oath for Oxford University students was not removed until the Oxford University Act 1854.

Text

As published in 1535, the oath read:

I, (name) do utterly testifie and declare in my Conscience, that the Kings Highnesse is the onely Supreame Governour of this Realme, and all other his Highnesse Dominions and Countries, as well in all Spirituall or Ecclesiasticall things or causes, as Temporall: And that no forraine Prince, Person, Prelate, State or Potentate, hath or ought to have any Jurisdiction, Power, Superiorities, Preeminence or Authority Ecclesiasticall or Spirituall within this Realme. And therefore, I do utterly renounce and forsake all Jurisdictions, Powers, Superiorities, or Authorities; and do promise that from henchforth I shall beare faith and true Allegiance to the Kings Highnesse, his Heires and lawfull Successors: and to my power shall assist and defend all Jurisdictions, Privileges, Preheminences and Authorities granted or belonging to the Kings Highnesse, his Heires and Successors or united and annexed to the Imperial Crowne of the Realme: so helpe me God: and by the Contents of this Booke.^[1]

In 1559, it was published as follows:

I, A. B., do utterly testify and declare in my conscience that the Queen's Highness is the only supreme governor of this realm, and of all other her Highness's dominions and countries, as well in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things or causes, as temporal, and that no foreign prince, person, prelate, state or potentate hath or ought to have any jurisdiction, power, superiority, pre-eminence or authority ecclesiastical or spiritual within this realm; and therefore I do utterly renounce and forsake all foreign jurisdictions, powers, superiorities and authorities, and do promise that from henceforth I shall bear faith and true allegiance to the Queen's Highness, her heirs and lawful successors, and to my power shall assist and defend all jurisdictions, pre-eminences, privileges and authorities granted or belonging to the Queen's Highness, her heirs or successors, or united or annexed to the imperial crown of this realm. So help me God, and by the contents of this Book.^[2]

Punishment

Roman Catholics who refused to take the Oath of Supremacy were indicted for treason on charges of praemunire . For example, Sir Thomas More opposed the King's separation from the Roman Catholic Church in the English Reformation and refused to accept him as Supreme Head of the Church of England, a title which had been given by parliament through the Act of Supremacy of 1534. He was imprisoned in 1534 for his refusal to take the oath, because the act discredited papal authority, and his refusal to accept the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. In 1535, he was tried for treason, convicted on perjured testimony, and beheaded.^[3]^[4]

Exceptions and retention

Under the reigns of Charles II and James II, the Oath of Supremacy was not so widely employed by the Crown. This was largely due to the Catholic sympathies and practices of these monarchs, and the resulting high number of Roman Catholics serving in official positions. Examples of officials who never had to take the Oath include the Catholic Privy Counsellors, Sir Stephen Rice and Justin McCarthy, Viscount Mountcashel. The centrality of the Oath was re-established under the reign of William III and Mary II, following the Glorious Revolution, and in Ireland following the Williamite reconquest. The Oath was retained in the Acts of Union 1800 that transferred Irish representation, still wholly Protestant, from the Irish Parliament in Dublin to the Westminster parliament, reconstituted as the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

Abolition for MPs

In 1828, the Irish Catholic leader Daniel O'Connell defeated William Vesey-FitzGerald in a parliamentary by-election in County Clare. His triumph, as the first Catholic to be returned in a parliamentary election since 1688, made a clear issue of the oath, as it required that MPs acknowledge the King as "Supreme Governor" of the Church and thus forswear the Roman communion. Fearful of the widespread disturbances that might follow from continuing to insist on the letter of the oath, the government finally relented. With the Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, persuading the King, George IV, and the Home Secretary, Sir Robert Peel, engaging the Whig opposition, the Catholic Relief Act became law in 1829.^[5]

Related Research Articles

Abjuration is the solemn repudiation, abandonment, or renunciation by or upon oath, often the renunciation of citizenship or some other right or privilege. The term comes from the Latin abjurare, "to forswear".

The Irish Oath of Allegiance was a controversial provision in the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which Irish TDs and Senators were required to swear before taking their seats in Dáil Éireann and Seanad Éireann before the Constitution Act 1933 was passed on 3 May 1933. The controversy surrounding the Oath was one of the principal issues that led to the Irish Civil War of 1922–23 between supporters and opponents of the Treaty.

Regnans in Excelsis is a papal bull that Pope Pius V issued on 25 February 1570. It excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I of England, referring to her as "the pretended Queen of England and the servant of crime", declared her a heretic, and released her subjects from allegiance to her, even those who had "sworn oaths to her", and excommunicated any who obeyed her orders: "We charge and command all and singular the nobles, subjects, peoples and others afore said that they do not dare obey her orders, mandates and laws. Those who shall act to the contrary we include in the like sentence of excommunication."

The Acts of Supremacy are two acts passed by the Parliament of England in the 16th century that established the English monarchs as the head of the Church of England; two similar laws were passed by the Parliament of Ireland establishing the English monarchs as the head of the Church of Ireland. The 1534 Act declared King Henry VIII and his successors as the Supreme Head of the Church, replacing the Pope. This first Act was repealed during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary I. The 1558 Act declared Queen Elizabeth I and her successors the Supreme Governor of the Church, a title that the British monarch still holds.

Caesaropapism is the idea of combining the social and political power of secular government with religious power, or of making secular authority superior to the spiritual authority of the Church, especially concerning the connection of the Church with government. Although Justus Henning Böhmer (1674–1749) may have originally coined the term caesaropapism (Cäseropapismus), it was Max Weber (1864–1920) who wrote that "a secular, caesaropapist ruler ... exercises supreme authority in ecclesiastic matters by virtue of his autonomous legitimacy." According to Weber, caesaropapism entails "the complete subordination of priests to secular power."

The Supreme Governor of the Church of England is the titular head of the Church of England, a position which is vested in the British monarch. Although the monarch's authority over the Church of England is largely ceremonial and is mostly observed in a symbolic capacity, the position is still relevant to the established church. As the supreme governor, the monarch formally appoints high-ranking members of the church on the advice of the prime minister of the United Kingdom, who in turn acts on the advice of the Crown Nominations Commission. Since the Act of Settlement of 1701, all Supreme Governors have been members of the Church of England.

The Act of Supremacy 1558, sometimes referred to as the Act of Supremacy 1559, is an act of the Parliament of England, which replaced the original Act of Supremacy 1534, and passed under the auspices of Elizabeth I. The 1534 act was issued by Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII, which arrogated ecclesiastical authority to the monarchy, but which had been repealed by Mary I. Along with the Act of Uniformity 1558, the act made up what is generally referred to as the Elizabethan Religious Settlement.

The right to freedom of religion in the United Kingdom is provided for in all three constituent legal systems, by devolved, national, European, and international law and treaty. Four constituent nations compose the United Kingdom, resulting in an inconsistent religious character, and there is no state church for the whole kingdom.

The Oath of Allegiance is a promise to be loyal to the British monarch, and their heirs and successors, sworn by certain public servants in the United Kingdom, and also by newly naturalised subjects in citizenship ceremonies. The current standard wording of the oath of allegiance is set out in the Promissory Oaths Act 1868.

The Court of High Commission was the supreme ecclesiastical court in England, from the inception of King Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy in 1534 to 1689, with periods of time where there was no court activity, like in 1641, when Parliament disbanded the court with the Triennial Act. John Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury, obtained increased powers for the court by the 1580s. He proposed and had passed the Seditious Sectaries Act 1593, making Puritanism an offence.

The Act Respecting the Oath to the Succession was passed by the Parliament of England in November 1534, and required all subjects to take an oath to uphold the Act of Succession passed that March. It was later given the formal short title of the Succession to the Crown Act 1534.

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.

Events from the 1530s in England.

The title of Supreme Head of the Church of England was created in 1531 for King Henry VIII when he first began to separate the Church of England from the authority of the Holy See and allegiance to the papacy, then represented by Pope Clement VII. The Act of Supremacy of 1534 confirmed the King's status as having supremacy over the church and required the nobility to swear an oath recognising Henry's supremacy. By 1536, Henry had broken with Rome, seized assets of the Catholic Church in England and Wales and declared the Church of England as the established church with himself as its head. Pope Paul III excommunicated Henry in 1538 over his divorce from Catherine of Aragon.

The English Protestant Reformation was imposed by the English Crown, and submission to its essential points was exacted by the State with post-Reformation oaths. With some solemnity, by oath, test, or formal declaration, English churchmen and others were required to assent to the religious changes, starting in the sixteenth century and continuing for more than 250 years.

The Confederate Oath of Association was an oath of allegiance made by Irish Confederate Catholics during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1638–1653).

The Reformation in Ireland was a movement for the reform of religious life and institutions that was introduced into Ireland by the English administration at the behest of King Henry VIII of England. His desire for an annulment of his marriage was known as the King's Great Matter. Ultimately Pope Clement VII refused the petition; consequently, in order to give legal effect to his wishes, it became necessary for the King to assert his lordship over the Catholic Church in his realm. In passing the Acts of Supremacy in 1534, the English Parliament confirmed the King's supremacy over the Church in the Kingdom of England. This challenge to Papal supremacy resulted in a breach with the Catholic Church. By 1541, the Irish Parliament had agreed to the change in status of the country from that of a Lordship to that of Kingdom of Ireland.

John Giffard (1534–1613) was a Staffordshire landowner and Member of the English Parliament, notable as a leader of Roman Catholic Recusancy in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I.

Royal Succession bills and acts are laws or pieces of proposed legislation to determine the legal line of succession to the Monarchy of the United Kingdom.

The 1st Parliament of Queen Elizabeth I was ruled over by Queen Elizabeth I of England on 14 November 1958 and assembled on 23 January 1559. This Parliament would restore many of the laws created by Henry VIII and the English Reformation Parliament. Queen Elizabeth's 1st Parliament passed some 24 public statutes and 17 private measures by the time it was dissolved on 21 November 1959.

References

↑ Cromwell, Thomas (25 February 2012). "Oath of Supremacy 1535 (Actual Text/ Sir Thomas Audley)". queenanneboleyn.com. Retrieved 18 June 2013.
↑ "Life in Elizabethan England 21: More Religion". Elizabethan.org. 25 March 2008. Retrieved 18 June 2013.
↑ (Saint), Sir Thomas More (2004). A Thomas More Source Book. CUA Press. ISBN 9780813213767.
↑ Wilde, Lawrence (12 August 2016). Thomas More's Utopia: Arguing for Social Justice. Routledge. ISBN 9781317281375.
↑ Bloy, Marjorie (2011). "The Peel Web-Wellington's speeches on Catholic Emancipation". A Web of English History. Archived from the original on 17 December 2010. Retrieved 6 April 2011.

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.

[1] Cromwell, Thomas (25 February 2012). "Oath of Supremacy 1535 (Actual Text/ Sir Thomas Audley)". queenanneboleyn.com. Retrieved 18 June 2013.

[2] "Life in Elizabethan England 21: More Religion". Elizabethan.org. 25 March 2008. Retrieved 18 June 2013.

[3] (Saint), Sir Thomas More (2004). A Thomas More Source Book. CUA Press. ISBN 9780813213767.

[4] Wilde, Lawrence (12 August 2016). Thomas More's Utopia: Arguing for Social Justice. Routledge. ISBN 9781317281375.

[5] Bloy, Marjorie (2011). "The Peel Web-Wellington's speeches on Catholic Emancipation". A Web of English History. Archived from the original on 17 December 2010. Retrieved 6 April 2011.

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]