The Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 (10 Geo. 4. c. 7), also known as the Catholic Emancipation Act 1829, is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that removed the sacramental tests that barred Roman Catholics in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from Parliament and from higher offices of the judiciary and state. It was the culmination of a fifty-year process of Catholic emancipation during which Catholics had been progressively relieved of their civil and political disabilities under the penal laws of what had been, until 1801, the formally separate kingdoms of Great Britain and of Ireland.
Convinced that the measure was essential to maintain order in Catholic-majority Ireland, the prime minister, the Duke of Wellington, helped to overcome the opposition of George IV and the House of Lords by threatening to resign and retire the Tory government he led in favour of what would have been a new, reform-minded Whig ministry.
In Ireland the Protestant Ascendancy had the assurance of the simultaneous passage of the Parliamentary Elections (Ireland) Act 1829. Its substitution of the British ten-pound, for the Irish forty shilling, freehold qualification disenfranchised over eighty per cent of Ireland's electorate. This included a majority of the tenant farmers who had helped force the issue of emancipation in 1828 by electing to parliament the leader of the Catholic Association, Daniel O'Connell.
In Great Britain the first Roman Catholic relief act was the Papists Act 1778; subject to an oath renouncing Stuart claims to the throne and the civil jurisdiction of the pope, Catholics were again permitted to own property and inherit land. Many of remaining restrictions on their participation in public life and the professions were removed under the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1791 passed by the Parliament of Great Britain, and the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1793 passed by the Parliament of Ireland. These acts preceded the Acts of Union 1800 which created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801. The Oath of Supremacy, declaring allegiance to the monarch as Supreme Governor of the Church, continued to bar Catholics from the higher offices of state and from taking seats in parliament.
Daniel O'Connell (1775–1847), an Irish barrister and leader of the Catholic Association, had rejected a suggestion from "friends of emancipation", and from the English Catholic bishop, John Milner, that the fear of Catholic advancement might be allayed if the Crown were accorded the same right exercised by continental monarchs: a veto on the confirmation of Catholic bishops. O'Connell insisted that Irish Catholics would rather "remain forever without emancipation" than allow the government "to interfere" with the appointment of their senior clergy. In Ireland, he relied on their confidence in the independence of the priesthood from Ascendancy landowners and magistrates to build his Catholic Association into a mass political movement. On the basis of a "Catholic rent" of a penny a month (typically paid through the local priest), the Association mobilised not only the Catholic middle class, but also poorer tenant farmers and tradesmen. Their investment enabled O'Connell to mount "monster" rallies (crowds of over 100,000) that stayed the hands of authorities, and emboldened larger enfranchised tenants to vote for pro-emancipation candidates in defiance of their landlords.
His campaign reached its climax when he himself stood for Parliament. In July 1828 O'Connell defeated William Vesey Fitzgerald, who was standing for re-election in a ministerial by-election, in a County Clare by-election, 2057 votes to 982. This made a direct issue of the parliamentary Oath of Supremacy by which, as a Catholic, he would be denied his seat in the House of Commons.
As Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Wellington's brother, Richard Wellesley, had attempted to placate Catholic opinion, notably by dismissing the long-serving Attorney-General for Ireland, William Saurin, whose rigid Ascendancy views and policy made him bitterly unpopular, and by applying a policy of prohibitions and coercion against not only the Catholic Ribbonmen but also the Protestant Orangemen. But now both Wellington and his Home Secretary, Robert Peel, were convinced that unless concessions were made, a confrontation was inevitable. Peel (nicknamed "Orange Peel" by O'Connell on account of his anti-Catholic views) concluded: "though emancipation was a great danger, civil strife was a greater danger".
Fearing insurrection in Ireland, Peel drafted the Relief Bill and guided it through the Commons. To overcome the vehement opposition of both George IV and of the House of Lords, Wellington threatened to resign, potentially opening the way for a new Whig majority with designs not only for Catholic emancipation but also for parliamentary reform. The king initially accepted Wellington's resignation and the Duke of Cumberland, brother to the king and Orange Order Grand Master, attempted to put together a government united against Catholic emancipation. Although such a government would have had considerable support in the Lords, it would have had little support in the Commons, and Cumberland abandoned his attempt. The king recalled Wellington. The bill passed the Lords and became law.
The key, defining, provision of the act was its repeal of "certain oaths and certain declarations, commonly called the declarations against transubstantiation and the invocation of saints and the sacrifice of the mass, as practised in the Church of Rome", which had been required "as qualifications for sitting and voting in parliament and for the enjoyment of certain offices, franchises, and civil rights". For the Oath of Supremacy, the act substituted a pledge to bear "true allegiance" to the King, to recognise the Hanoverian succession, to reject any claim to "temporal or civil jurisdiction" within the United Kingdom by "the Pope of Rome" or "any other foreign prince ... or potentate", and to "abjure any intention to subvert the present [Anglican] church establishment".
This last abjuration in the new Oath of Allegiance was underscored by a provision forbidding the assumption by the Catholic Church of episcopal titles, derived from "any city, town or place", already used by the United Church of England and Ireland (i.e. the established Anglican communion). With other sectarian impositions of the act, such as restrictions on admittance to Catholic religious orders and on Catholic-church processions, this was repealed with the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1926.
The one major security required to pass the act was the Parliamentary Elections (Ireland) Act 1829 (10 Geo. 4. c. 8). Receiving its royal assent on the same day as the relief bill, the act disenfranchised Ireland's Forty-shilling freeholders, by raising the property threshold for the county vote to the British £10 standard. As a result, "emancipation" was accompanied by a more than five-fold decrease in the Irish electorate, from 216,000 voters to just 37,000. That the majority of the tenant farmers who had voted for O'Connell in the County Clare by-election were disenfranchised was not made immediately apparent, as O'Connell was permitted, in July 1829, to stand unopposed in the 1829 County Clare by-election for the seat that his refusal to take the Oath of Supremacy had denied him the year before.
The historian J. C. D. Clark depicts England before 1828 as a nation in which the vast majority of the people still believed in the divine right of kings, and the legitimacy of a hereditary nobility, and in the rights and privileges of the Church of England. In Clark's interpretation, the system remained virtually intact until, in 1828, Catholic emancipation undermined its central symbolic prop, the Anglican supremacy. Clark argues that the consequences were enormous: "The shattering of a whole social order ... What was lost at that point ... was not merely a constitutional arrangement, but the intellectual ascendancy of a worldview, the cultural hegemony of the old elite."