# Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829

The Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 (10 Geo. 4. c. 7), 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.
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.
In Ireland, the Protestant Ascendancy had the assurance of the simultaneous passage of the Parliamentary Elections (Ireland) Act 1829. Its substitution of the British ten-pound, for the Irish forty shilling, freehold qualification disenfranchised over eighty percent of Ireland's electorate. This included a majority of the tenant farmers who had helped force the issue of emancipation in 1828 by electing to parliament the leader of the Catholic Association, Daniel O'Connell.

## Agitation and concession

Daniel O'Connell (1775–1847) had rejected a suggestion from "friends of emancipation", and from the English Roman Catholic bishop, John Milner, 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. 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.
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.
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. 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". 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. 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.

## Provisions and assurances

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".
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. (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.)
The one major security required to pass the Act was the Parliamentary Elections (Ireland) Act 1829 (10 Geo 4 c. 8). 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. 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. 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.

## 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."
Clark's interpretation has been widely debated in the scholarly literature. Other historians examining the issue highlight the amount of continuity before and after the period of 1828 through 1832.
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 Reform Act 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.
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.$^{:291}$ 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.
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". The Young Irelander John Mitchel believed that this was the intent: to detach propertied Catholics from the increasingly agitated rural masses.
In a pattern that had been intensifying from the 1820s as landlords cleared land to meet the growing livestock demand from England, 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.

## Amendment and repeal

One civil disability not removed by 1829 Act were the sacramental tests required for professorships, fellowships, studentships and other lay offices at universities. These were abolished for the English universities—Oxford, Cambridge and Durham—by the Universities Tests Act 1871, and for Trinity College Dublin by the "Fawcett's Act" 1873.
Section 18 of the 1829 act, "No Roman Catholic to advise the Crown in the appointment to offices in the established church", remains in force in England, Wales and Scotland, but was repealed with respect to Northern Ireland (the Church of Ireland having been disestablished in 1869) by the Statute Law Revision (Northern Ireland) Act 1980. The entire act was repealed in the Republic of Ireland by the Statute Law Revision Act 1983.
In February 2025, the UK Government introduced a bill in the House of Commons to repeal a clause from Section 12 of the Act, to allow Roman Catholics to hold the office of His Majesty’s High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.