Convinced that the measure was essential to maintain order in Catholic-majority Ireland, the Duke of Wellington helped overcome the opposition of the King, George IV, and of the House of Lords, by threatening to step aside as Prime Minister and retire his Tory government in favour of a new, likely-reform-minded Whig, ministry.
Daniel O'Connell (1775–1847) had rejected a suggestion from "friends of emancipation", and from the English Roman Catholic bishop, John Milner,[2] that the fear of Catholic advancement might be allayed if the Crown were accorded the same right exercised by continental monarchs: a veto on the confirmation of Catholic bishops. O'Connell insisted that Irish Catholics would rather "remain forever without emancipation" than allow the government "to interfere" with the appointment of their senior clergy.[3][4] Instead, he relied on their confidence in the independence of the priesthood from Ascendancy landowners and magistrates to build his Catholic Association into a mass political movement. On the basis of a "Catholic rent" of a penny a month (typically paid through the local priest), the Association mobilised not only the Catholic middle class, but also poorer tenant farmers and tradesmen. Their investment enabled O'Connell to mount "monster" rallies (crowds of over 100,000) that stayed the hands of authorities, and emboldened larger enfranchised tenants to vote for pro-emancipation candidates in defiance of their landlords.[5]
His campaign reached its climax when he himself stood for parliament. In July 1828, O'Connell defeated a nominee for a position in the British cabinet, William Vesey Fitzgerald, in a County Clare by-election, 2057 votes to 982. This made a direct issue of the parliamentary Oath of Supremacy by which, as a Catholic, he would be denied his seat in the Commons.[6][7]
As Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Wellington's brother, Richard Wellesley, had attempted to placate Catholic opinion, notably by dismissing of the long-serving Attorney-General for Ireland, William Saurin, whose rigid Ascendancy views and policy made him bitterly unpopular, and by applying a policy of prohibitions and coercion against not only the Catholic Ribbonmen but also the Protestant Orangemen.[8] But now both Wellington and his Home Secretary, Robert Peel, were convinced that unless concessions were made, a confrontation was inevitable. Peel (nicknamed "Orange Peel" by O'Connell on account of his anti-Catholic views) concluded: "though emancipation was a great danger, civil strife was a greater danger".[9] Fearing insurrection in Ireland, he drafted the Relief Bill and guided it through the House of Commons. To overcome the vehement opposition of both the King and of the House of Lords, Wellington threatened to resign, potentially opening the way for a new Whig majority with designs not only for Catholic emancipation but also for parliamentary reform.[10] The King initially accepted Wellington's resignation and the King's brother, the Duke of Cumberland, attempted to put together a government united against Catholic emancipation. Though such a government would have had considerable support in the House of Lords, it would have had little support in the Commons and Ernest abandoned his attempt. The King recalled Wellington. The bill passed the Lords and became law.[11]
The key, defining, provision of the Act's was its repeal of "certain oaths and certain declarations, commonly called the declarations against transubstantiation and the invocation of saints and the sacrifice of the mass, as practised in the Church of Rome", which had been required "as qualifications for sitting and voting in parliament and for the enjoyment of certain offices, franchises, and civil rights". For the Oath of Supremacy, the act substituted a pledge to bear "true allegiance" to the King, to recognise the Hanoverian succession, to reject any claim to " temporal or civil jurisdiction" within the United Kingdom by "the Pope of Rome" or "any other foreign prince ... or potentate", and to "abjure any intention to subvert the present [Anglican] church establishment".[12]
This last abjuration in the new Oath of Allegiance was underscored by a provision forbidding the assumption by the Roman Church of episcopal titles, derived from "any city, town or place", already used by the United Church of England and Ireland.[13][14][15] (With other sectarian impositions of the Act, such as restrictions on admittance to Catholic religious orders and on Catholic-church processions, this was repealed with the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1926.)[16][17][18]
The one major security required to pass the Act was the Parliamentary Elections (Ireland) Act 1829 (10 Geo 4 c. 8).[19] Receiving its royal assent on the same day as the relief bill, the act disenfranchised Ireland's Forty Shilling Freeholders, by raising the property threshold for the county vote to the British ten pound standard.[20] As a result, "emancipation" was accompanied by a more than five-fold decrease in the Irish electorate, from 216,000 voters to just 37,000.[21][22] That the majority of the tenant farmers who had voted for O'Connell in the Clare by-election were disenfranchised as a result of his apparent victory at Westminster was not made immediately apparent, as O'Connell was permitted in July 1829 to stand unopposed for the Clare seat that his refusal to take the Oath of Supremacy had denied him the year before.[23]
Political results
J. C. D. Clark (1985) depicts England before 1828 as a nation in which the vast majority of the people still believed in the divine right of kings, and the legitimacy of a hereditary nobility, and in the rights and privileges of the Anglican Church. In Clark's interpretation, the system remained virtually intact until it suddenly collapsed in 1828, because Catholic emancipation undermined its central symbolic prop, the Anglican supremacy. Clark argues that the consequences were enormous: "The shattering of a whole social order ... What was lost at that point ... was not merely a constitutional arrangement, but the intellectual ascendancy of a worldview, the cultural hegemony of the old elite."[24]
Clark's interpretation has been widely debated in the scholarly literature.[25] Other historians examining the issue highlight the amount of continuity before and after the period of 1828 through 1832.[26]
Eric J. Evans (1996) emphasises that the political importance of emancipation was that it split the anti-reformers beyond repair and diminished their ability to block future reform laws, especially the great Reform Act of 1832. Paradoxically, Wellington's success in forcing through emancipation led many Ultra-Tories to demand reform of Parliament after seeing that the votes of the rotten boroughs had given the government its majority. Thus, it was an ultra-Tory, the Marquess of Blandford, who in February 1830 introduced the first major reform bill, calling for the transfer of rotten borough seats to the counties and large towns, the disfranchisement of non-resident voters, the preventing of Crown office-holders from sitting in Parliament, the payment of a salary to MPs, and the general franchise for men who owned property. The ultras believed that a widely based electorate could be relied upon to rally around anti-Catholicism.[27]
In Ireland, emancipation is generally regarded as having come too late to influence the Catholic-majority view of the union. After a delay of thirty years, an opportunity to integrate Catholics through their re-emerging propertied and professional classes as a minority within the United Kingdom may have passed.[28]:291[29] In 1830, O’Connell, invited Protestants to join in a campaign to repeal the Act of Union and restore the Kingdom of Ireland under the Constitution of 1782. But in breaking the link between Catholic inclusion and democratic reform, the terms under which he was able to secure the final measure of relief may have weakened the case for a restored Irish parliament.
George Ensor, a leading Protestant member of the Catholic Association in the Ulster, protested "relief" being bought at the price of "casting" forty-shilling freeholders, both Catholic and Protestant, "into the abyss". While it allowed a few Catholic barristers to attain a higher grade in their profession, and a few Catholic gentlemen to be returned to Parliament, the "indifference" demonstrated to parliamentary reform would prove "disastrous" for the cause of repeal.[30]
Seeking, perhaps, to rationalise the sacrifice of his freeholders, O'Connell wrote privately in March 1829 that the new ten-pound franchise might actually "give more power to Catholics by concentrating it in more reliable and less democratically dangerous hands".[31] The Young IrelanderJohn Mitchel believed that this was the intent: to detach propertied Catholics from the increasingly agitated rural masses.[32]
In a pattern that had been intensifying from the 1820s as landlords cleared land to meet the growing livestock demand from England,[33] tenants had been banding together to oppose evictions, and to attack tithe and process servers. On his visit to Ireland, Alexis De Tocqueville recorded these Whiteboys and Ribbonmen protesting:
The law does nothing for us. We must save ourselves. We have a little land which we need for ourselves and our families to live on, and they drive us out of it. To whom should we address ourselves?... Emancipation has done nothing for us. Mr. O'Connell and the rich Catholics go to Parliament. We die of starvation just the same.[34]
↑ The citation of this Act by this short title was authorised by the Short Titles Act 1896, section 1 and the first schedule. Due to the repeal of those provisions it is now authorised by section 19(2) of the Interpretation Act 1978.
↑ Clark, J. C. D. (28 March 2000). English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (2nded.). Cambridge University Press. pp.90, 409. ISBN978-0-521-66627-5.
Davis, Richard W. (Spring 1997). "Wellington and the 'Open Question': The Issue of Catholic Emancipation, 1821–1829". Albion. 19#1 pp. 39–55. doi:10.2307/4051594.
Davis, Richard W. (February 1999). "The House of Lords, the Whigs and Catholic Emancipation 1806–1829". Parliamentary History. 18#1 pp. 23–43. doi:10.1111/j.1750-0206.1999.tb00356.x.
Jenkins, Brian (1988). Era of Emancipation: British Government of Ireland, 1812–1830. Kingston, Ont.: McGill-Queen's University Press. ISBN978-0-7735-0659-6. OCLC1034979932.
Kingon, Suzanne T. (November 2004). "Ulster opposition to Catholic emancipation, 1828–9". Irish Historical Studies. 34.134: 137–155. JSTOR30008708.
Linker, R. W. (April 1976). "The English Roman Catholics and Emancipation: The Politics of Persuasion". Journal of Ecclesiastical History. 27#2: 151–180. doi:10.1017/S0022046900052970.
Machin, G. I. T. (March 1979). "Resistance to Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, 1828". Historical Journal. 22#1 pp. 115–139. doi:10.1017/S0018246X00016708.
Sir Robert Peel, 2nd Baronet,, was a British Conservative statesman who twice was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and simultaneously was Chancellor of the Exchequer (1834–1835). He previously was Home Secretary twice. He is regarded as the father of modern British policing, owing to his founding of the Metropolitan Police while he was Home Secretary. Peel was one of the founders of the modern Conservative Party.
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was a sovereign state in Northwestern Europe that was established by the union in 1801 of the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland. The establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922 led to the remainder later being renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in 1927.
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.
Daniel(I) O’Connell, hailed in his time as The Liberator, was the acknowledged political leader of Ireland's Roman Catholic majority in the first half of the 19th century. His mobilisation of Catholic Ireland, down to the poorest class of tenant farmers secured the final instalment of Catholic emancipation in 1829 and allowed him to take a seat in the United Kingdom Parliament to which he had been twice elected.
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.
William Vesey-FitzGerald, 2nd Baron FitzGerald and Vesey, was an Anglo-Irish statesman. A Tory, he served in the governments of Lord Wellington and Robert Peel, but is best known for his defeat in the 1828 Clare by-election, hastening Catholic Emancipation across Britain and Ireland.
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 Registration Act was an act of the Parliament of Ireland passed in 1704, which required all "Popish" priests to register at their local magistrates' court, to pay two 50-pound bonds to ensure good behavior, and to stay in the county where they registered.
The Protestant Ascendancy was the sociopolitical and economical domination of Ireland between the 17th and early 20th centuries by a small Anglican ruling class, whose members consisted of landowners, politicians, clergymen, military officers and other prominent professions. They were either members of the Church of Ireland or the Church of England and wielded a disproportionate amount of social, cultural and political influence in Ireland. The Ascendancy existed as a result of British rule in Ireland, as land confiscated from the Irish Catholic aristocracy was awarded by the Crown to Protestant settlers from Great Britain.
John FitzGibbon, 1st Earl of Clare PC (Ire) was Attorney-General for Ireland from 1783 to 1789 and Lord Chancellor of Ireland from 1789 to 1802.
The Tithe War was a campaign of mainly nonviolent civil disobedience, punctuated by sporadic violent episodes, in Ireland between 1830 and 1836 in reaction to the enforcement of tithes on the Roman Catholic majority for the upkeep of the established state church, the Church of Ireland. Tithes were payable in cash or kind and payment was compulsory, irrespective of an individual's religious adherence.
The 1830 United Kingdom general election was triggered by the death of King George IV and produced the first parliament of the reign of his successor, King William IV. Fought in the aftermath of the Swing Riots, it saw electoral reform become a major election issue. Polling took place in July and August and the Tories won a plurality over the Whigs, but division among Tory MPs allowed Earl Grey to form an effective government and take the question of electoral reform to the country the following year.
The Catholic Association was an Irish Roman Catholic political organization set up by Daniel O'Connell in the early nineteenth century to campaign for Catholic emancipation within Great Britain. It was one of the first mass-membership political movements in Europe. It organized large-scale public protests in Ireland. Home Secretary Robert Peel was alarmed and warned an associate of his in 1824, "We cannot tamely sit by while the danger is hourly increasing, while a power co-ordinate with that of the government is rising by its side, nay, daily counteracting its views." The Duke of Wellington, Britain's prime minister and its most famous war hero, told Peel, "If we cannot get rid of the Catholic Association, we must look to civil war in Ireland sooner or later." To stop the momentum of the Catholic Association it was necessary to pass Catholic Emancipation, and so Wellington and Peel turned enough Tory votes to win. Passage demonstrated that the veto power long held by the Ultra-Tories faction of reactionary Tories no longer was operational, and significant reforms were now possible.
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 Ultra-Tories were an Anglican faction of British and Irish politics that appeared in the 1820s in opposition to Catholic emancipation. The faction was later called the "extreme right-wing" of British and Irish politics.
George Ensor J.P. was an Irish lawyer, radical political pamphleteer and freethinker. Among other conservative precepts, he pilloried the Malthusian doctrine that poverty is sustained by the "disposition to breed". As a hindrance to enterprise and prosperity, he pointed rather to the tyranny of concentrated wealth. In Ireland, it was a condition he believed could be reversed only through popular representation in a restored parliament. Ensor further outraged prevailing opinion by inveighing against the constitutional ascendancy not merely of Protestantism, but more broadly of the Christian religion. He argued that questions of morality and social justice cannot be addressed within a theology of salvation through faith.
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 Sacramental Test Act 1828 was an Act passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It repealed the requirement that government officials take communion in the Church of England. Sir Robert Peel took the lead for the Tory government in the repeal and collaborated with Anglican Church leaders.
The 1828 Clare by-election was notable as this was the first time since the reformation that an openly Roman Catholic MP, Daniel O'Connell was elected.
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