In Ireland, the penal laws (Irish: Na Péindlíthe) 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 last significant disability, the requirement that Members of Parliament take the Oath of Supremacy, was removed in 1829, after Ireland had been incorporated by the 1800 Acts of Union into a United Kingdom with Great Britain.
The Government of Ireland Act 1920 (coming into force during the Irish War of Independence) contained an all-purpose provision in Section 5 removing any remaining sacramental tests technically still in existence.
The penal laws were, according to Edmund Burke, "a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.
"[1] Burke long counselled kinder relations by London with its American and Irish cousins, fearing that the punitive spirit fostered by the British was destroying English character, and would spur violent revolt.
In 1607 the Flight of the Earls seeking Catholic help in Europe for a further revolt set the scene for a wholesale Plantation of Ulster by the Lowland Scots and Northern English.
Following the flight from England to Ireland by James II caused by the English Glorious Revolution in 1688, the decisions of the Catholic-majority Patriot Parliament of 1688–9 in Dublin included a complete repeal of the 1660s land settlements.
... provided also, that no person whatsoever shall have or enjoy the benefit of this article, that shall neglect or refuse to take the oath of allegiance, made by act of parliament in England, in the first year of the reign of their present majesties, when thereunto required.
As a continuing reminder of their defeat in the Williamite War, the Whig historian Lord Macaulay suggested that the Penal-Law regime helps account for the failure of Irish Roman Catholics to heed the Jacobite call when the Scottish army of the Young Pretender marched on London in 1745.
The systematic discrimination and exclusion from favour kept their "natural chiefs" abroad.There were indeed Irish Roman Catholics of great ability, energy and ambition; but they were to be found every where except in Ireland, at Versailles and at Saint Ilfonso, in the armies of Frederic and Maria Theresa,.
[8]From 1758, before the death of the Old Pretender, who styled himself James III, ad-hoc groups of the remaining Catholic nobility and merchants worked towards repeal of the penal laws and an accommodation within the Hanoverian system.
Events abroad in the 1760s, such as the outcome of the Seven Years' War, the death of the Old Pretender (1766), the emerging "Age of Enlightenment", and the Suppression of the Society of Jesus by Europe's Catholic monarchs, all seemed to confirm their position.
They also demonstrated their loyalty by helping to recruit the soldiers in Ireland to fight for the Crown in the American Colonies in the 1770s and, later, by supporting the authorities as they suppressed Whiteboy agrarian protest in the 1780s.
[14] Assisted by Edmund Burke, who in 1764 had drafted a critical commentary on the penal laws that was widely circulated at Westminster,[15] the pro-government policy appeared to pay dividends.
In Dublin Tone was a leading member of the Society of United Irishmen first formed in October 1791 by his Presbyterian ("Dissenter") friends in Belfast, in the midst of the town's enthusiasm for the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and its defence by Thomas Paine.
[27] Appealing over the heads of the Dublin Parliament and Castle administration, in January 1793 this petition was presented to the King, George III,[28] who, persuaded by his ministers, gave audience to a delegation that included both Keogh and Tone.
In February 1795, hopes that the Oath of Supremacy might be amended were dashed when, having declared in favour of admitting Catholics to Parliament, Earl William Fitzwilliam was recalled as Viceroy after just 6 months in post.
Others, despite the threat of excommunication by their bishops,[32] leaned toward the United Irishmen who, despairing of representative parliamentary reform, now moved to draw the agrarian Catholic Defenders with them toward a French-assisted republican insurrection.
[35] A separate Irish executive in Dublin was retained, but representation, still wholly Protestant, was transferred to Westminster constituted as the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
[36][37] In 1808 "friends of emancipation", Henry Grattan among them, proposed that fears of Popery might be allayed if the Crown were accorded the same right exercised by continental monarchs, a veto on the confirmation of Catholic bishops.
Yet even when, in 1814, the Curia itself (then in a silent alliance with Britain against Napoleon) proposed that bishops be "personally acceptable to the king", the emergent leader of the popular campaign for emancipation in Ireland, Daniel O'Connell, was unyielding in his opposition.
This enabled O'Connell to mount "monster" rallies (crowds of over 100,000) that stayed the hands of authorities, and emboldened larger enfranchised tenants (the forty-shilling freeholders) to vote for pro-Emancipation candidates in defiance of their landlords.
His triumph, as the first Catholic to be returned in a parliamentary election since 1688, made a clear issue of the Oath of Supremacy—the requirement that MPs acknowledge the King as "Supreme Governor" of the Church and thus forswear the Roman communion.
Bringing the Irish franchise into line with England's, the 1829 Act raised the property threshold for voting in county seats five-fold to ten pounds, disenfranchising the "forty-shilling freeholders" who had risked much in defying their landlords on O'Connell's behalf.
[44] Perhaps trying 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".
In a pattern that had been intensifying from the 1820s as landlords cleared land to meet the growing livestock demand from England,[47] tenants had been banding together to oppose evictions, and to attack tithe and process servers.