In English history, the penal laws were a series of laws that sought to uphold the establishment and State decreed religious monopoly of the Church of England against illegal and underground Catholics and Protestant nonconformists by imposing various forfeitures, civil penalties, and civil disabilities upon recusants from mandatory attendance at weekly Anglican Sunday services. The penal laws in general were repealed in the early 19th century during the process of Catholic Emancipation. Penal actions are civil in nature and were not English common law.
The Constitutional Act 1791 was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain which was passed during the reign of George III. The act divided the old Province of Quebec into Lower Canada and Upper Canada, each with its own parliament and government. It repealed the Quebec Act 1774. The act remained in force until 1841, when it was largely repealed by the Union Act, 1840, which reunited the two provinces into the new Province of Canada. Some provisions relating to the clergy reserves remained in force. The remaining provisions of the act were repealed over time, with final repeal in 1966.
The words Popery and Papism are mainly historical pejorative words in the English language for Roman Catholicism, once frequently used by Protestants and Eastern Orthodox Christians to label their Roman Catholic opponents, who differed from them in accepting the authority of the Pope over the Christian Church. The words were popularised during the English Reformation (1532–1559), when the Church of England broke away from the Roman Catholic Church and divisions emerged between those who rejected papal authority and those who continued to follow Rome. The words are recognised as pejorative; they have been in widespread use in Protestant writings until the mid-nineteenth century, including use in some laws that remain in force in the United Kingdom.
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 Banishment Act or Bishops' Banishment Act was a 1697 act of the Parliament of Ireland which banished all ordinaries and regular clergy of the Roman Catholic Church from Ireland. By 1 May 1698 all "popish archbishops, bishops, vicars general, deans, Jesuits, monks, friars, and other regular popish clergy" had to be in one of several named ports awaiting a ship out of the country. Remaining or entering the country after this date would be punished as a first offence with 12 months' imprisonment followed by expulsion. A second offence constituted high treason.
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 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.
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 Popery Act 1698 was an Act of Parliament of the Parliament of England enacted in 1700. The long title of the Act was "An Act for the further preventing the Growth of Popery".
The Papists Act 1778 is an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain and was the first Act for Roman Catholic relief. Later in 1778 it was also enacted by the Parliament of Ireland.
The Succession to the Crown Act 1707 is an Act of Parliament of the Parliament of Great Britain. It is still partly in force in Great Britain.
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 Roman Catholic Relief Bills were a series of measures introduced over time in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries before the Parliaments of Great Britain and the United Kingdom to remove the restrictions and prohibitions imposed on British and Irish Catholics during the English Reformation. These restrictions had been introduced to enforce the separation of the English church from the Catholic Church which began in 1529 under Henry VIII.
An act against Jesuits, seminary priests, and such other like disobedient persons, also known as the Jesuits, etc. Act 1584, was an Act of the Parliament of England passed during the English Reformation. The Act commanded all Roman Catholic priests to leave the country within 40 days or they would be punished for high treason, unless within the 40 days, they swore an oath to obey the Queen. Those who harboured them, and all those who knew of their presence and failed to inform the authorities, would be fined and imprisoned for felony, or if the authorities wished to make an example of them, they might be executed for treason.
The Toleration Act 1689, also referred to as the Act of Toleration, was an Act of the Parliament of England. Passed in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, it received royal assent on 24 May 1689.
Events from the year 1704 in Ireland.
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 Succession to the Crown Act 2013 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that altered the laws of succession to the British throne in accordance with the 2011 Perth Agreement. The Act replaced male-preference primogeniture with absolute primogeniture for those in the line of succession born after 28 October 2011, which means the eldest child, regardless of gender, precedes any siblings. The Act also repealed the Royal Marriages Act 1772, ended disqualification of a person who married a Roman Catholic from succession, and removed the requirement for those outside the first six persons in line to the throne to seek the Sovereign's approval to marry. It came into force on 26 March 2015, at the same time as the other Commonwealth realms implemented the Perth Agreement in their own laws.
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.
