Penal law (British)
In English history, the penal laws were a series of laws that sought to uphold the establishment of the Church of England against Catholicism and Protestant nonconformists by imposing various forfeitures, civil penalties, and civil disabilities upon these dissenters. The penal laws in general were repealed in the early 19th century during the process of Catholic Emancipation.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. Marian Persecutions. In 1553, following the death of her half brother, Edward VI, and deposing his choice of successor, Lady Jane Grey, Mary I of England seized the  throne, and soon after repealed the religious legislation of her brother and father, Henry VIII, through the First Statute of Repeal(1 Mary, st. 2, c. 2). Restoring England, Wales and Ireland to the Roman Catholic communion. An English inquisition was established to identify exile, convert, or punish non conforming Catholics, with over 300 Protestant dissenters branded heretics, and killed, and many more exiled in her 5 year reign. A List of Protestant martyrs of the English Reformation published soon after her death. Elizabethan. Response to "Regnans in Excelsis". In 1570 Pope Pius V excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I with the papal  bull "Regnans in Excelsis". In response: Clarendon Code. While some of the Penal Laws were much older, they took their most drastic shape during the reign of Charles II, especially the laws known as the Clarendon Code and the Test Act. The four penal laws collectively known as Clarendon Code are named after Charles II's chief minister Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, though Clarendon was neither their author nor fully in favour of them. These included: Combined with the Test Act, the Corporation Act excluded all nonconformists from holding civil or military office, and prevented them from being  awarded degrees by the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford. Further penal laws in Great Britain. In the late 17th and 18th centuries, many non-conformist Protestants successfully evaded the political disabilities imposed by the Test Act by taking communion in the Church of England as required, while otherwise attending non-conformist meetings. High churchmen and Tories, empowered late in Queen Anne's reign, sought to close this loophole with the passing of the Occasional Conformity Bill in 1711, however the Act was repealed after the Hanoverian Succession with the return to power of the Whigs, who were generally allied with  non-conforming Protestants. In the wake of the Jacobite Rising of 1715, the British parliament also passed the Disarming Act of 1716. Penal laws in Ireland. The Penal Laws were introduced into Ireland in the year 1695, disenfranchising nonconformists in favour of the minority established Church of Ireland. Though the laws also affected adherents of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland (who were concentrated in Ulster), their principal victims were members of the Catholic Church, meaning over three quarters of the population. These laws included: The laws were eventually repealed from the 1770s by the Papists Act 1778 and the 1774  Quebec Act. The British Roman Catholic Relief Act 1791 was followed in Ireland in 1793. Finally in 1829 Catholic emancipation was enacted, largely due to Irish political agitation organised under Daniel O'Connell in the 1820s, but effects of the laws in terms of sectarianism between Catholics and Protestants can still be seen, particularly in Northern Ireland, today.