The Papists Act 1715 (1 Geo. 1. St. 2. c. 55) was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain. The Act required Roman Catholics who did not take the oath of fidelity to register their property.[1]
The Act was passed in the aftermath of the Jacobite rising of 1715. The Act's preamble claimed that the Act was necessary because Catholics had plotted for "the destruction of this kingdom and the extirpation of the Protestant Religion" despite the "tender regard" the King had shown by not enforcing the many penal laws against them.[2] It was further claimed that "all or the greatest part" of the Catholic population had been "stirring up and supporting the late unnatural Rebellion for the dethroning and murdering his most Sacred Majesty; for setting up a Popish Pretender upon the Throne of this kingdom; for the Destruction of the Protestant Religion and the cruel murdering and massacring of its Professors".[3] Therefore, the Act continued, Catholics are "enemies to His Majesty and to the present happy Establishment" who "watch for all opportunities of fomenting and stirring up new Rebellions and Disturbances within the Kingdom and of inviting Foreigners to invade it".[4]
The Act ensured that justices of the peace tendered the oaths of allegiance, supremacy and abjuration to all confirmed and suspected Catholics. If any Catholic had not taken the oaths by the deadline they were required to sign a register that included information about their estates. This was intended to facilitate a discriminatory tax on Catholics because, the Act claimed, they should pay any "large share to all such Extraordinary Expenses as are and shall be brought upon this Kingdom by their Treachery and Instigation".[5] The annual rent of the estates registered totalled £400,000.[6]
Notes
↑ Colin Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in eighteenth-century England, c. 1714-80. A Political and Social Study (Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 106.
↑ Rupert C. Jarvis, Collected Papers on the Jacobite Risings: Volume II (Manchester University Press, 1972), p. 304.
}} Jacobitism was a political ideology advocating the restoration of the House of Stuart to the British throne. When James II of England fled into exile after the November 1688 Glorious Revolution, the Parliament of England announced that he had "abandoned" the English throne, which they offered to his Protestant daughter Mary II of England, and her husband William III. In April, the Scottish Convention similarly held James had "forfeited" the throne of Scotland by his actions, as listed in the Articles of Grievances.
James Francis Edward Stuart, nicknamed the Old Pretender by Whigs and the King over the Water by Jacobites, was the son of King James VII and II of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and his second wife, Mary of Modena. He was Prince of Wales from July 1688 until, just months after his birth, his Catholic father was deposed and exiled in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. James II's Protestant elder daughter Mary II and her husband William III became co-monarchs. The Bill of Rights 1689 and Act of Settlement 1701 excluded Catholics such as James from the English and British thrones.
In English history, the penal laws were a series of laws that sought to enforce the State-decreed religious monopoly of the Church of England and, following the 1688 revolution, of Presbyterianism in Scotland, against the continued existence of illegal and underground communities of Catholics, nonjuring Anglicans, and Protestant nonconformists. The Penal laws also imposed various forfeitures, civil penalties, and civil disabilities upon recusants from mandatory attendance at weekly Sunday services of the Established Church. The penal laws in general were repealed in the early 19th-century due to the successful activism of Daniel O'Connell for Catholic Emancipation. Penal actions are civil in nature and were not English common law.
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An Act to prevent the further Growth of Popery was an Act of the Parliament of Ireland that was passed in 1704 designed to suppress Roman Catholicism in Ireland ("Popery"). William Edward Hartpole Lecky called it the most notorious of the Irish Penal Laws.
The Irish Rebellion of 1641 was an uprising in Ireland, initiated on 23 October 1641 by Catholic gentry and military officers. Their demands included an end to anti-Catholic discrimination, greater Irish self-governance, and return of confiscated Catholic lands. Planned as a swift coup d'état to gain control of the Protestant-dominated central government, instead it led to the 1641–1653 Irish Confederate Wars, part of the wider Wars of the Three Kingdoms.
The Nonjuring schism refers to a split in the established churches of England, Scotland and Ireland, following the deposition and exile of James II and VII in the 1688 Glorious Revolution. As a condition of office, clergy were required to swear allegiance to the ruling monarch; for various reasons, some refused to take the oath to his successors William III and II and Mary II. These individuals were referred to as Non-juring, from the Latin verb iūrō, or jūrō, meaning "to swear an oath".
The Act of Settlement 1662 was passed by the Irish Parliament in Dublin. It was a partial reversal of the Cromwellian Act for the Settlement of Ireland 1652, which punished Irish Catholics and Royalists for fighting against the Parliamentarians in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms by the wholesale confiscation of their lands and property. The Act describes itself An act for the better execution of His Majesty's gracious declaration for the Settlement of his Kingdom of Ireland, and the satisfaction of the several interests of adventurers, soldiers, and other his subjects there.
Lord George Murray, sixth son of John Murray, 1st Duke of Atholl, was a Scottish nobleman and soldier who took part in the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1719 and played a senior role in that of 1745.
John Drummond, 1st Earl of Melfort, styled Duke of Melfort in the Jacobite peerage, was a Scottish politician and close advisor to James VII & II. A Catholic convert, Melfort and his brother the Earl of Perth consistently urged James not to compromise with his opponents, contributing to his increasing isolation and ultimate deposition in the 1688 Glorious Revolution.
Patriot Parliament is the name commonly used for the Irish Parliament session called by King James II during the Williamite War in Ireland which lasted from 1688 to 1691. The first since 1666, it held only one session, which lasted from 7 May 1689 to 20 July 1689. Irish nationalist historian Sir Charles Gavan Duffy first used the term Patriot Parliament in 1893.
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.
The Jacobite rising of 1745 was an attempt by Charles Edward Stuart to regain the British throne for his father, James Francis Edward Stuart. It took place during the War of the Austrian Succession, when the bulk of the British Army was fighting in mainland Europe, and proved to be the last in a series of revolts that began in March 1689, with major outbreaks in 1715 and 1719.
The Manchester Regiment was a Jacobite unit raised during the 1745 Rebellion and the only significant number of English recruits willing to fight for Charles Edward Stuart in his attempt to regain the British throne for his father. Raised in late November 1745, the majority were captured in December at Carlisle; eleven officers and sixteen members of the rank and file were executed in 1746, over a quarter of all those executed for their role in the Rising.
The Jacobite rising of 1715 was the attempt by James Edward Stuart to regain the thrones of England, Ireland and Scotland for the exiled Stuarts.
The Glorious Revolution in Scotland refers to the Scottish element of the 1688 Glorious Revolution, in which James VII was replaced by his daughter Mary II and her husband William III as joint monarchs of Scotland and England. Prior to 1707, the two kingdoms shared a common monarch but were separate legal entities, so decisions in one did not bind the other. In both countries, the Revolution confirmed the primacy of Parliament over the Crown, while the Church of Scotland was re-established as a Presbyterian rather than Episcopalian polity.
Scottish religion in the eighteenth century includes all forms of religious organisation and belief in Scotland in the eighteenth century. This period saw the beginnings of a fragmentation of the Church of Scotland that had been created in the Reformation and established on a fully Presbyterian basis after the Glorious Revolution. These fractures were prompted by issues of government and patronage, but reflected a wider division between the Evangelicals and the Moderate Party. The legal right of lay patrons to present clergymen of their choice to local ecclesiastical livings led to minor schisms from the church. The first in 1733, known as the First Secession and headed by figures including Ebenezer Erskine, led to the creation of a series of secessionist churches. The second in 1761 led to the foundation of the independent Relief Church.
The Jacobite rising of 1689 was a conflict fought primarily in the Scottish Highlands, whose objective was to put James VII back on the throne, following his deposition by the November 1688 Glorious Revolution. Named after "Jacobus", the Latin for James, his supporters were known as 'Jacobites' and the associated political movement as Jacobitism. The 1689 rising was the first of a series of rebellions and plots seeking to restore the House of Stuart that continued into the late 18th century.
Henry Oxburgh was an Irish soldier and Jacobite who was one of the leaders of the Jacobite rising of 1715 in England. Captured by forces loyal to the Hanoverian Dynasty following the Battle of Preston, he was executed at Tyburn for high treason.
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