EMANCIPATION, CATHOLIC

Term applied to the process, culminating in the Emancipation Act of 1829, whereby Roman Catholics in England, Scotland, and Ireland were relieved of civil disabilities dating back to the 16th century. Although the movement for repeal of anti-Catholic laws was initiated earlier, the term was first employed in the early 19th century by analogy with the British movement for the emancipation of slaves.

Early Relief Acts. Under legislation initiated in the 16th century, commonly known as the penal laws, Roman Catholics in England, Scotland, and Ireland were subjected to severe penalties and disabilities. The measures, varied in character, often were passed to meet the demands of political exigencies and were at times and in different places only partially and sporadically enforced. Nevertheless, they constituted a perpetual threat to Catholics, and the slow and complicated work of repeal did not begin until the reign of George III (1760–1820). Under the Quebec Act of 1774, George III's new subjects in Canada, formerly subjects of Louis XV of France, were accorded nearly all the religious privileges they had previously enjoyed. Catholic bishops might legally exercise their powers, their rights to tithes from their flock being enforceable at law; and the Protestant government was permitted by Rome to exercise a nomination right in the appointment of higher clergy. Little opposition was encountered in the British Parliament during the passage of this measure, save from William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, but the significance of this last is only evident in the establishment of Pitt clubs in the next generation as centers of Protestant resistance to Catholic emancipation. The first real Anglican protest emerged over the proposals to relieve Nonconformist ministers and teachers from subscription to the thirty-nine articles. In a hostile speech opposing the consequential Parliamentary Relief Bill, Sir Roger Newdigate raised the question whether George III could consent without breaking his coronation oath to maintain the Anglican establishment unimpaired.

Toleration for Catholics, as well as for Nonconformists, really began in the three kingdoms in the atmosphere of revolution in America and in France. During the American War the first concessions were made permitting Catholics to avoid penalties for religious observance, and an act of 1778 (17, 18 George III ch. 49, 60) enabled Catholics to hold long leases and to own landed property. These and all subsequent concessions depended upon subscription to an oath enacted in the Irish Parliament in 1774, testifying to the allegiance of the Catholic subscriber to the Hanoverian line and the Protestant settlement of 1702; denying to the exiled Stuarts any allegiance, and to the Pope any temporal power in the King's dominion; and denying belief in the doctrine that no faith should be kept with heretics, or that it was lawful to kill heretics. The 1778 English act, as well as the Irish, went through the respective Parliaments uneventfully. In Scotland, however, there was a great wave of antipapal feeling stimulated by the Presbyterian clergy, resulting in riots, the burning of the residence in Edinburgh of the Catholic bishop, George Hay, and the burning of Catholic property in Glasgow. The result was an appeal from pro-Catholic authorities to abandon the proposed relief bill. There followed in London the gordon riots, ten days in June 1780 of burning and looting by an antipopish mob.

Further progress in Catholic relief was necessarily inhibited; Edmund burke unsuccessfully appealed to the English Parliament to persevere with the Scottish relief bill. In Ireland, however, the second step taken in 1783 gave Catholic clergy legal protection and extended to the absolute purchase of real property by all Catholics the long lease concessions of 1778. After the outbreak of the French Revolution, England's second move toward international association with Catholicism took place in the flight of the old order from France. Many Catholic exiles took refuge in England. Not merely did the government, Anglican bishops, and landed class give refuge to the emigré French clergy, but modest schemes to provide for their support out of public money were set on foot. Privately, in Scotland, pensions were given to the two vicars apostolic and the few parish priests. Small capital building sums also were provided for Hay's seminaries at Alquoheries and Lismore. The third Irish relief bill was passed in 1791, admitting Catholics to the professions. In England the same year saw the passage of a similar measure over which there emerged a division between clergy and laity, as, under the influence of Charles butler (1750–1832), papal pretensions were drastically tailored to Protestant prejudices, and even the Catholic community was for a moment in danger of being statutorily termed "protesting Catholic Dissenters." Ultimately, under episcopal advice, the Irish oath was adopted. Butler responded by founding the Cisalpine Club, arguing that such an organization properly distinguished tolerable Catholic ideas from the ultramontane ones dominated by the Vatican.

In 1793, without a division, Parliament passed the first Scottish relief bill in approximately the same terms as for England and Ireland. In the same year, in the Irish Parliament, an advance was made that was maintained only in that kingdom until the final act of 1829. Catholics were now admitted to the franchise. More professional appointments were open to them, but not membership of Parliament. Proposals in 1795, under the aegis of the Whig Lord Lieutenant, Earl Fitzwilliam (1748–1833), to extend fully the relief measures, were abandoned in consequence of his embarrassing the government over attempting to displace the ruling Dublin clique. Two years later the Irish Parliament, recognizing the termination of Irish ecclesiastical education by the French authorities, approved the establishment of a seminary at home, with a body of trustees nominated in the act. These included the Protestant chief justices, the four Catholic archbishops, and additional bishops, the prelates being nominated personally without reference to their diocesan titles. In consequence, and with government money, there was established the Royal College of St. Patrick of Maynooth.

Act of Union. Regular association, as trustees, with the Catholic archbishops and other bishops gave such statesmen as Lord Castlereagh (1769–1822) considerable insight into the Irish political situation. The rebellion of 1798 was organized by the United Irishmen, a body concerned with political reform, drawing its strength from Dublin Protestants and Belfast Presbyterians, but also including some members of the Catholic Committee, which had played a decisive part in securing mitigation of the laws. After the war with France had commenced, Parliamentary reform had been outlawed, and the United Irishmen had sought support in a revolutionary program linked with Catholic agrarian societies, such as the Defenders, but also with the agnostic French revolutionary government. Few Catholic priests supported the rebellion of 1798; many condemned it, notably bishops, largely because of the association with French revolutionary destruction of organized religion.

Pitt's government, in the light of the French menace under Napoleon, determined to bring about the legislative Union amalgamating the Parliaments. Pitt persuaded the Irish Catholics not to oppose the Act of Union on the understanding that it would be followed by full emancipation. Castlereagh won support for the measure from most of the bishops and also planned a full emancipation scheme involving state payment of clergy and the veto on papal appointments to higher Church positions. The Union passed, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland came into being on Jan. 1, 1801. The Protestant Episcopalian Church became the "United Church of England and Ireland," doubly secured in a clause declared to be a fundamental article of the Act of Union. That the Church of Scotland was Presbyterian was tactfully ignored. And nothing was done for the Catholics. The King's susceptibilities regarding his coronation oath emerged nearly 30 years after Newdigate's, and Pitt resigned. When Pitt returned to office in 1804, George III insisted that he promise not to take up Emancipation again. However, the question became of greater significance particularly with the rise in Ireland of the Catholic middle class, until this latter element played the decisive part in forcing on government the solution of 1829.

Veto Question. After Pitt's death, the Whigs again took up Emancipation, sometimes reluctantly, but rarely abandoning it completely. Their ministry "of all the talents," in deference to George III, postponed the issue as long as possible; they then resigned after withdrawing a relief bill. The King again insisted on guarantees of immunity from further ministerial pressure on the Catholic question. About 1808, the desire to dissolve anti-Catholic prejudices led in England to security proposals, such as one that Rome should concede the British government a veto on ecclesiastical appointments. Most of the English prelates agreed, but not so in Ireland, where the ten years since Castlereagh's negotiations had brought about fresh thinking. In particular, lay opinion in the Catholic Committee resented a measure that might result in the diocesan clergy becoming the government's paid agents. In subsequent years the veto proposal commended itself more and more to pro-Catholic Protestant statesmen. Henry Grattan (1746–1820), the leading Irish Whig, sponsored such a measure in 1813, which, however, was not presented on strict party lines, as it gained support from George Canning (1770–1827), the pro-Catholic Tory. Previous to its introduction, the Grattan-Canning bill had been approved by G. B. Quarantotti, Prefect of Propaganda, the Pope being Napoleon's prisoner and not in a position to decide.

Rise of O'Connell. At this stage Daniel o'connell emerged as one of the leading Irish lay exponents of the question on the Catholic Board, as the successor to the Committee was called. He welcomed the bill but deplored the securities. The clergy of the Dublin province had already approved both, expressing themselves, under the influence of James Warren Doyle, Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin (1819–34), in a noncommittal manner. The clergy of the three remaining provinces were hostile in their reactions. O'Connell became the Irish spokesman by insisting that Irish Catholicism, so far as the United Kingdom was concerned, was more orthodox than Rome: "I confess myself a Catholic, but I deny myself a Papist." Many of the Whigs now considered the abandonment of the veto and other securities. After the deaths of George III and Grattan in 1820, optimism prevailed temporarily regarding the possible favor of George IV. William Conyngham Plunket (1764–1854) introduced a further relief bill still maintaining the veto, but it failed to secure more than the approval of the Commons. The general antipathy of the Lords was now clear. George IV also showed himself unwilling to abandon the extreme Protestant position, which under his father had become identified with the maintenance of the prerogative. A bill of 1823 failed. It was now evident that monarchical and aristocratic objections could be maintained indefinitely. The reorganization in Ireland of the Catholic Association, as the Catholic Board had become to evade the law, again made the matter a real political issue. O'Connell's intimidatory tactics and his appeal to the forces of nationalism and democracy aroused fear among the Conservatives. The Whigs again rallied, this time making the mistake of forcing it into a party issue. The result was the revival of antipopery agitation by the ultra-Tories.

Protestant clubs, Pitt clubs, and Brunswick clubs attempted to intimidate the government from the "open" system, which, since Lord Liverpool (1770–1828) became Prime Minister in 1812, had permitted ministers to maintain a pro-Catholic attitude while not committing the government. But the absence of ultra-Conservative talent made these conspiracies ineffective. Each successive government after Liverpool's found itself more and more involved. The election of 1826 resulted in an increased number of anti-Catholics being returned to the Commons, indicating how extensive was Protestant antipathy among ordinary British voters. Again it was Ireland that brought about the change. The democratic Catholic Association pushed O'Connell into supporting a political agitation against members unprepared to advocate emancipation. In a few spectacular cases, landlord domination of county constituencies was overthrown. The Whigs and the Tories alike were subjected to strong pressure from their pro-Catholic members, who were virtually under notice from O'Connell that the large Catholic vote would be turned against them and would turn them out if they failed to advocate emancipation.

O'Connell's Election. The fact that O'Connell carefully distinguished the Catholic question from that of Parliamentary reform, to which he did not commit himself until the Tories drove him into the Whig camp, secured the alertness of more Irish members than merely the Whigs. His strength emerged in his successful return at the by-election in Clare when he displaced William Vesey Fitz Gerald in order to force the government from the "open" policy of neutrality through fear of losing Irish support. O'Connell's election in itself was yet a further threat to the ascendancy of Parliament. Whether or not the Duke of Wellington (1769–1852) and Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850), who had in the meantime conceded Nonconformist relief, were correct in thinking that the alternative to granting Catholic emancipation and admitting O'Connell was civil war in Ireland, the fact is that the Union was certainly threatened. The Catholic Association would undoubtedly be able to secure the election of a number of Catholics who might well collectively claim, perhaps at College Green, Dublin, to speak for Ireland and to deny to Westminster any representative character. Thus, to save the Union and to quiet Ireland, emancipation was conceded in the Emancipation Act, which became law on April 13, 1829.

Act of 1829. "An Act for the relief of his majesty's Roman Catholic subjects" (10 George IV ch. 7), as it was entitled, abolished the anti-Catholic oaths imposed in former statutes defining the qualifications for membership of the legislature and for public offices (save for a few offices still confined to Protestants, functioning personally for the monarch or in relation to the control of the established church). However, it still remained essential to take an oath of allegiance similar to the Irish oath of 1774, upholding the Protestant succession to the crown, denying the temporal power of the pope within the United Kingdom, and undertaking not to weaken the Protestant establishment. Its immediate positive effects were small. Few Irish and next to no English and Scottish Catholics were returned to Parliament or given high office for more than a generation. Its prestige significance, particularly for Ireland, is almost impossible to exaggerate, and as such it was resented by most of the Anglicans, by contrast with the rest of the Protestants. It was a moral victory in the eyes of Catholic Europe, which gave O'Connell the role of the leading Catholic liberal, particularly as he allied increasingly thereafter with the Whig reformers to compel Protestant vested interests to enforce the act.

In England the resentment of the establishment was evident in the reenactment by the 1829 act of the petty restrictions upon further recruitment to the religious orders, the prohibiting of usage of Church vestments in public or of the robes of public officeholders at Catholic ceremonies, as well as by the banning of the Catholic Association of Ireland and the refusal to admit O'Connell to Parliament until he was again elected. Even the English Catholics reflected the anti-Irish feeling by slighting him, and the Irish hierarchy pointedly ignored him in publicly thanking Wellington for securing the passage of the measure. On a long-term basis the act made possible the building up of the Catholic Church in both countries, though the change was not so apparent in Britain until the great Irish immigration of the mid-century.

Later Relief Acts. In 1844 (7 and 8 Victoria ch. 102) and 1926 (16 and 17 George V ch. 55) most of the remaining obsolescent anti-Catholic laws were repealed. The ineffective Ecclesiastical Titles Act of 1851 (14 and 15 Victoria ch. 60) prohibiting the use of territorial titles by Catholic bishops was repealed in 1871 (34 and 35 Victoria ch. 53). Among the disabilities still retained is the law restraining either the king or the queen of England from being a Roman Catholic. Roman Catholics are barred also from the offices of regent, lord chancellor, and keeper of the great seal, and from a few university places.

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[r. d. edwards]