Penal Laws

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Penal Laws in English and Irish history, term generally applied to the body of discriminatory and oppressive legislation directed chiefly against Roman Catholics but also against Protestant nonconformists.

In England

The Penal Laws grew out of the English Reformation and specifically from those acts that established royal supremacy in the Church of England (see England, Church of ) in the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. Under Henry VIII and Edward VI civil disabilities were imposed on those who remained in communion with Rome, thus denying the king's spiritual headship. Elizabeth I made it impossible for Catholics to hold civil offices and imposed severe penalties upon Catholics who persisted in recognizing papal authority. Fines and prison sentences were prescribed for all who did not attend Anglican services, and the celebration of the Mass was forbidden under severe penalties.

The excommunication (1570) of Elizabeth by Pope Pius V, the Catholic plots to place Mary Queen of Scots on the English throne, and the attempted Spanish invasion by the Armada roused the government and public opinion to an intensely anti-Catholic pitch, and the Penal Laws were extended. Jesuits and other priests were expelled (1585) from England under penalty of treason, and harboring or aiding priests was declared a capital offense. Although a number of Catholics (e.g., Edmund Campion ) were executed for treason, these laws were never thoroughly administered except against prominent people who refused to conform.

Under James I the Gunpowder Plot resulted in added severity, but the official attitude softened after 1618, as James sought friendly relations with Spain. Charles I's wife, Henrietta Maria, was a Catholic, and her position made easy some open disregard of the restrictive laws. In the English civil war the Catholics sided with the king, and Oliver Cromwell punished them, along with royalist Anglicans, by wide confiscations, but few were executed.

After the Restoration of Charles II, Parliament passed the series of laws known as the Clarendon Code (1661-65) and the Test Act (1673), which required holders of public office to take various oaths of loyalty and to receive the sacrament of the Church of England. These laws penalized Protestant nonconformists at whom, principally, they were aimed, as well as Roman Catholics. However, the Protestant dissenters continued in their vehement anti-Catholicism and formed the backbone of the Whig party, which coalesced (1679-81) in the attempt to exclude the Catholic James, duke of York (later James II) from the succession to the throne. The anti-Catholic movement culminated in the overthrow of James II in the Glorious Revolution (1688), and the Bill of Rights (1689) and the Act of Settlement (1701) excluded the Catholic branch of the house of Stuart from the throne.

A Toleration Act (1689) relieved the Protestant nonconformists of many of their disabilities (although they remained excluded from office), but the Catholics were now subjected to new laws limiting their property and means of education. The Jacobites , in their attempts to restore the Catholic Stuarts, kept the politico-religious issue of Roman Catholicism alive until 1745. By this time the relatively small number of Catholics remaining in England and Scotland made the anti-Catholic laws there a minor issue, but Catholic Emancipation was delayed until 1829.

In Ireland

In Ireland, where the population was predominantly Roman Catholic and the Glorious Revolution had been vigorously resisted, the Penal Laws were extended and made extremely oppressive during the 18th cent. After the Treaty of Limerick (1691), the Irish Parliament, filled with Protestant landowners and controlled from England, enacted a penal code that secured and enlarged the landlords' holdings and degraded and impoverished the Irish Catholics.

As a result of these harsh laws, Catholics could neither teach their children nor send them abroad; persons of property could not enter into mixed marriages; Catholic property was inherited equally among the sons unless one was a Protestant, in which case he received all; a Catholic could not inherit property if there was any Protestant heir; a Catholic could not possess arms or a horse worth more than £5 ; Catholics could not hold leases for more than 31 years, and they could not make a profit greater than a third of their rent. The hierarchy of the Catholic Church was banished or suppressed, and Catholics could not hold seats in the Irish Parliament (1692), hold public office, vote (1727), or practice law. Cases against Catholics were tried without juries, and bounties were given to informers against them.

Under these restrictions many able Irishmen left the country, and regard for the law declined; even Protestants assisted their Catholic friends in evasion. In the latter half of the 18th cent., with the decline of religious fervor in England and the need for Irish aid in foreign wars, there was a general mitigation of the treatment of Catholics in Ireland, and the long process of Catholic Emancipation began.

Bibliography

See B. Magee, The English Recusants (1938); E. I. Watkin, Roman Catholicism in England from the Reformation to 1950 (1957).

penal laws or (the more common contemporary term) popery laws. For most of the 17th century the continuing political influence of Irish Catholics, and the desire of successive monarchs to retain a free hand, had been sufficient to block attempts to pass anti‐Catholic legislation similar to that in operation in England. Periodic repression of Catholic worship, and the increasing exclusion of Catholics from political and administrative office, had been implemented on an ad hoc basis (or, in the case of the Cromwellian regime, by the de facto application in Ireland of English law). The enactment from the 1690s of a series of discriminatory measures directed against Catholic clergy and laity reflected the hardening of Irish Protestant attitudes following their experiences under James II, the enhanced importance of the Irish parliament as a forum for their demands, and the new primacy, following the revolution of 1688, of statute over prerogative.

The first Irish penal laws were two statutes in 1695, both part of the bargain that ended the sole right controversy, and both reflecting Protestant fears that lenient treatment of the defeated Jacobites had left Protestants dangerously open to renewed attack. One forbade Catholics not covered by the treaty of Limerick to keep weapons. The second, concerned mainly to sever links between Irish Catholics and their continental allies, forbade Catholics to go overseas for purposes of education, but also banned Catholics from teaching or running schools within Ireland. The Bishops' Banishment Act (1697) required all regular clergy, and all bishops, vicars‐general, and other exercising ecclesiastical jurisdiction, to leave the kingdom by 1 May 1698. Other clergy were permitted to remain, but an act of 1704 required them to register with the authorities, limited their number to one per parish, and forbade the entry of further priests into the kingdom. The Act to Prevent the Further Growth of Popery (1704), the most important single penal statute, prohibited Catholics from buying land, inheriting land from Protestants, or taking leases for a period of longer than 31 years. (Protestant heiresses marrying Catholics had already been disinherited under an act of 1699.) The act also required that the estates of a deceased Catholic landowner should be divided equally among the male heirs. An act of 1709 strengthened these provisions, particularly by the introduction of the discoverer. Other legislation prohibited Catholics from practising law, from holding office in central or local government, from membership of grand juries and municipal corporations, and from service in the army or navy. Catholics were excluded from parliament (under an English act) from 1691, but did not completely lose the right to vote until 1728.

The penal laws were traditionally seen as victimizing the entire Catholic population. More recent work emphasizes the selective nature of their operation. The Catholic aristocracy and gentry, who in 1703 still owned 14 per cent of the profitable land of Ireland, were both the main targets of the legislation and its main victims. Over the next few decades most of these surviving Catholic landowners, deprived of the opportunity to extend their estates by marriage or purchase, excluded from local and national politics, and threatened with the progressive fragmentation of their properties, conformed to the Church of Ireland. By contrast the laws did not seriously affect the wealth of the Catholic mercantile and manufacturing classes. Catholic tenants suffered some disadvantage, but the laws did not prevent the emergence during the 18th century of a Catholic leasehold interest among large farmers and middlemen, or the growth of a Catholic tenant farmer class. Strictly enforced, the banishment of Catholic bishops, combined with the ban on ordained priests entering the kingdom, should have caused the Irish clergy to die out in a generation. In practice, despite the efforts of individuals like John Richardson, there was no sustained attempt either to enforce the laws or to promote the conversion of the Catholic masses to Protestantism. By the 1720s priests and bishops operated freely, if discreetly, in most areas.

Agitation for the repeal of the penal laws commenced with the foundation of the Catholic Committee in 1760. Catholic Relief Acts were passed in 1778, 1782, and 1792–3, with the remaining formal disabilities being repealed (‘Catholic emancipation’) in 1829.

Bibliography

Power, T. P., and Whelan, Kevin (eds.), Endurance and Emergence: Catholics in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (1990)

penal laws. The general name given to the enactments against Roman catholicism made between the accession of Elizabeth I and 1700. They enforced the Elizabethan religious settlement and tried to protect political activity from the influence of the pope and catholic Europe. The overall effect was to drive catholicism underground and to create recusancy. Catholics were placed beyond the political pale and evolved an informal and illegal network of religious and social connections.

Rejection of papal authority was imposed by an oath of allegiance in 1563, stating that ‘no foreign prince, person, prelate, state or potentate hath or ought to have any jurisdiction, power, superiority, pre-eminence or authority, ecclesiastical or spiritual within this realm’. Refusal of the oath was treasonable. After the excommunication of Elizabeth I in 1570, the purpose of legislation changed from securing royal supremacy to defeating the new recusant missionary campaign. Priests were tried and executed for treason, particularly after the Acts of 1584–5 which made it treasonable for a priest to enter England. In 1581 an Act to retain the Queen's Majesty's subjects in their due obedience was passed, declaring it treasonable to pervert people from their religious or political allegiance.

James I reinforced the legislation and further regulations limited the freedom of catholics in movement, professional activity, and inheritance of property. The laws of the Restoration period, especially the Test and Corporation Acts, kept the catholic community on the margins. Catholics suffered for the disastrous reign of the last catholic king James II under laws barring them from carrying arms, inheriting or buying property, sending children abroad for education or teaching in a school, and offering a £100 reward for the prosecution of a priest.

Had this massive penal code been enforced, it could have eradicated English catholicism, but catholics survived and even flourished in its shadow. Local imposition was sporadic and the Hanoverian mind found religious persecution distasteful. The Jacobite threat disappeared and repeal of the penal laws became possible. This happened in three main relief Acts of 1778, 1791, and 1829.

Judith Champ

penal laws The general name given to the enactments against Roman catholicism made between the accession of Elizabeth I and 1700. Rejection of papal authority was imposed by an oath of allegiance in 1563, stating that ‘no foreign prince hath or ought to have any jurisdiction, power, superiority, pre‐eminence or authority, ecclesiastical or spiritual within this realm’. After the excommunication of Elizabeth I in 1570, the purpose of legislation changed from securing royal supremacy to defeating the new recusant missionary campaign. Priests were executed, particularly after the Acts of 1584–5 which made it treasonable for a priest to enter England.

The laws of the Restoration period, especially the Test and Corporation Acts, kept the catholic community on the margins. Catholics suffered for the disastrous reign of the last catholic king James II under laws barring them from carrying arms, inheriting or buying property, sending children abroad for education, or teaching in a school.

Had this massive penal code been enforced, it could have eradicated English catholicism, but local imposition was sporadic and the Hanoverian mind found religious persecution distasteful. The Jacobite threat disappeared and repeal of the penal laws became possible. This happened in three main relief Acts of 1778, 1791, and 1829.

Penal Laws various statutes passed in Britain and Ireland during the 16th and 17th centuries that imposed harsh restrictions on Roman Catholics. People participating in Catholic services could be fined and imprisoned, while Catholics were banned from voting, holding public office, owning land, and teaching. The laws were repealed by various Acts between 1791 and 1926.