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.
But acting under the advice of John Fisher, Warham, and others, they submitted after adding the conditional phrase, quantum per legem Dei licet.
The formula then adopted ran: "I, A.B., do utterly testify and declare in my conscience, that the Queen's Highness is the only supreme Governor of the Realm .
This moderation in exacting the oath helped to prevent an outcry against it, and enabled the Government to deal with the recalcitrant in detail.
It comprised (1) A confession of "grievous offence against God in contemning her Majesty's Government"; (2) Royal Supremacy; (3) A clause against dispensations and dissimulations, perhaps the first of its sort in oaths of this class.
[3] This was not the first example of such a declaration of loyalty, but it was the first which withheld from the pope any possible exercise of the deposing power, rather than simply denying the validity of the deposition pronounced by Pius V. When the Puritan party had gained the upper hand during the civil wars, the exaction of the Oaths of Supremacy and Allegiance fell into desuetude, and they were repealed by the Act of February, 1650, and their place taken by an "engagement of allegiance" to the Commonwealth.
Everyone was to be "adjudged a Papist" who refused this oath, and the consequent penalties began with the confiscation of two thirds of the recusant's goods, and went on to deprive him of almost every civic right.
They checked the gallicanizing party among the English Catholics, which had at first been ready to offer forms of submission similar to the old oath of Allegiance, which is stated (Reusch, 335) to have been condemned anew about this time by Innocent X.
In Ireland the old controversy was revived through an address to the Crown, called "The Irish Remonstrance", which emphasized the principles of the condemned Oath of Allegiance.
It had been drawn up by a Capuchin friar (who afterwards left the order), called Peter Valesius Walsh, who published many books in its defence, which publications were eventually placed on the Index.
He freed himself, however, more or less from it by the Dispensing Power, especially after the declaration of the judges, June, 1686, that it was contrary to the principles of the constitution to prevent the Crown from using the services of any of its subjects when they were needed.
The first Parliament summoned after the triumph of William of Orange added a clause to the Bill of Rights, which was then passed, by which the Sovereign was himself to take the Declaration (1 W. & M., sess.
In 1774, however, it was necessary to pacify Canada, and the Quebec Act was passed, the first measure of toleration for Catholics sanctioned by Parliament since the days of the Tudor Queen Mary.
Soon after began the war of American Independence, the difficulties of which gradually awakened English statesmen to the need of reconciling Catholics.
The Irish Government took the first step by undoing William III's work of joining the profession of fidelity to the sovereign with the rejection of papal authority.
In 1774 an oath was proposed of allegiance to King George (§ 1) and rejection of the Pretender (§ 2), but without prejudice to the pope's spiritual authority, or to any dogma of the Faith.
The "temporal and civil jurisdiction of the pope, direct and indirect within the realm" was also abjured (§ 5), and the promise was given that no dispensation from this oath should be considered valid (§ 6).
It was intended to relieve the English Catholics from the worst consequences of the penal laws, and in it was embodied the Irish Oath.
A committee of lay Catholics, with Gallican proclivities, who afterwards characteristically called themselves the Cisalpine Club entered into negotiations with the government.
They were accordingly presented with a long "Protest", which not only rejected the alleged malpractices, already disowned by the Irish Oath, but declaimed against them and others of the same kind in strong but untheological language.
Eventually, owing to the growing influence exercised by Daniel O'Connell and the Irish, Catholic Emancipation was granted without any tests at all in 1829.