The Acts of Union 1800 were parallel acts of the Parliament of Great Britain and the Parliament of Ireland which united the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The acts came into force between 31 December 1800 and 1 January 1801, and the merged Parliament of the United Kingdom had its first meeting on 22 January 1801.
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 The penal laws in general were repealed in the early 19th-century due to the successful activism of Daniel O'Connell for Catholic Emancipation.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.
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.
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.
Cisalpinism was a movement among English Roman Catholics in the late eighteenth century intended to further the cause of Catholic emancipation, i.e. relief from many of the restrictions still in effect that were placed on Roman Catholic British subjects. This view held that allegiance to the Crown was not incompatible with allegiance to the Pope.
Charles Walmesley, OSB was an English Catholic prelate who served as Vicar Apostolic of the Western District. He was known, especially in Ireland, for predicting the downfall of Protestantism in 1821–5 and the triumphant emergence of the Catholic Church. He was a member of the Benedictines.
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.
George Ogle was an Irish Tory politician.
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 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 as the Leases for Lives Act 1777.
The Cisalpine Club was an association of Roman Catholic laymen formed in England in the 1790s to promote Cisalpinism, and played a role in the public debate surrounding the progress of Catholic Emancipation.
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.
John Milner was an English Roman Catholic bishop and controversialist who served as the Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District from 1803 to 1826.
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.
The Irish Patriot Party was the name of a number of different political groupings in Ireland throughout the 18th century. They were primarily supportive of Whig concepts of personal liberty combined with an Irish identity that rejected full independence, but advocated strong self-government within the British Empire.
Arthur O'Leary was an Irish Capuchin friar and polemical writer.
Anti-Catholicism in the United Kingdom dates back to the martyrdom of Saint Alban in Roman times. Attacks on the Church from a Protestant angle mostly began with the English and Irish Reformations which were launched by King Henry VIII and the Scottish Reformation which was led by John Knox. Within England, the Act of Supremacy 1534 declared the English crown to be "the only supreme head on earth of the Church in England" in place of the Pope. Any act of allegiance to the latter was considered treasonous because the papacy claimed both spiritual and political power over its followers. Ireland was brought under direct English control starting in 1536 during the Tudor conquest of Ireland. The Scottish Reformation in 1560 abolished Catholic ecclesiastical structures and rendered Catholic practice illegal in Scotland. Today, anti-Catholicism remains common in the United Kingdom, with particular relevance in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
The Toleration Act 1688, also referred to as the Act of Toleration or the Toleration Act 1689, was an Act of the Parliament of England. Passed in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, it received royal assent on 24 May 1689.
The Catholic Committee was a county association in late 18th-century Ireland that campaigned to relieve Catholics of their civil and political disabilities under the kingdom's Protestant Ascendancy. After their organisation of a national Catholic Convention helped secure repeal of most of the remaining Penal Laws in 1793, the Committee dissolved. Members briefly reconvened the following year when a new British Viceroy, William Fitzwilliam, raised hopes of further reform, including lifting the sacramental bar to Catholics entering the Irish Parliament. When these were dashed by his early recall to London, many who had been mobilized by the Committee and by the Convention, defied their bishops, and joined the United Irishmen as they organised for a republican insurrection.
