The orthodox view is that under the law of England and Wales privileged communication exists only in the context of legal advice obtained from a professional adviser.
[1][2] A statement of the law on priest–penitent privilege is contained in the nineteenth century case of Wheeler v. Le Marchant: In the first place, the principle protecting confidential communications is of a very limited character. [...]
The foundation of the rule protecting communications to attorneys and counsel was stated by Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux, Lord Chancellor, in an exhaustive judgment on the subject in the case of Greenough v. Gaskell (1833) 1 Mylne & Keen 103, to be the necessity of having the aid of men skilled in jurisprudence for the purpose of the administration of justice.
It was not, he said, on account of any particular importance which the law attributed to the business of people in the legal profession or of any particular disposition to afford them protection, though it was not easy to see why a like privilege was refused to others, especially to medical advisers.
In view of the absolute repudiation by the state of the jurisdiction of the Catholic Church and in view of the abandonment of the sacrament of confession as practised before the Reformation, one may fairly presume that, from the date of that event, confession would no longer have been regarded as a ground from motives of public policy, entitling to an exemption from the principle of the disclosure of all the truth known about the cause, were it to be civil or criminal.
In the case of Du Barré v Livette (1791) Peake 77, Lord Kenyon again held that the privilege would extend so as to preclude an interpreter between a solicitor and a foreign client from giving evidence of what had passed.
In this case a priest was imprisoned for contempt of court for refusing to answer whether John Butler, 12th Baron Dunboyne, professed the Catholic faith at the time of his death.
Butler v Moore was an Irish case (Ireland at the time formed part of the United Kingdom, but had a separate legal system).
The Catholic Encyclopedia contends that he appears to have made no acknowledgment of his crime to the chaplain himself and that the question of confessional privilege did not arise.
In R v Griffin (1853) 6 Cox CC 219, a Church of England workhouse chaplain was called to prove conversations with a prisoner charged with child-murder whom, he stated, he had visited in a spiritual capacity.
In 1865, the murder trial of Constance Kent aroused a number of parliamentary questions whose answers reaffirmed the limited scope of professional privilege in England.
In this 1860 case, a Catholic priest was committed for contempt of court for failing to give evidence as to how he came by an allegedly stolen watch on the grounds that it came into his possession by way of the confessional.
The defendant, a Catholic priest, having been asked a general question as to the nature of the matters mentioned in sacramental confession, was told by the judge that he was not bound to answer it.
It is recorded in another anonymous case, in Lord Raymond's "Reports", 733, that the same judge refused to admit the evidence of a person entrusted by both the parties to the cause to make and keep secret a bargain.