PENAL LAWS

IN THE

REIGN OF GEORGE II.

1727-1760.

In this reign the following disabilities were imposed upon the Catholics :

By the George II, c. 9, sec. 7, no Papist can vote at an election without taking the oath of supremacy. However great the oppression which the Catholics had experienced during former reigns, this measure completed their entire exclusion from the benefits of the constitution, and from the opportunity of regaining their former just rights.

It was because this privilege had begun to operate amongst Protestants in a manner very favorable to the Catholics, and to bring about a feeling of regret for their sufferings, and a coalition between the two parties to oppose the influence of the English government, as a common cause of grievances, that Primate Boulter advised the ministers to pass this law.

His principle of government for Ireland was to uphold the English interest by the divisions of the inhabitants; and on this occasion it induced him to adopt the desperate resolution of disfranchising, at one stroke, above five-sixths of its population.*

By the first clause of 1 George II, c. 30, clerks, bar

* Primate Boulter, in his letter of this year to the Archbishop of Canterbury (vol. i, p. 210), says: "There are probably in this kingdom five Papists, at least, to one Protestant." See note B, Appendix, upon the present amount of the population, and the proportion of Catholics to Protestants.

risters and citizens occupying other stations in life, are required to take the oath of supremacy.

By the second clause, all converts are bound to educate their children as Protestants.

By 7 George II, c. 5, sec. 12, barristers or solicitors, marrying Papists, are deemed Papists, and made subject to all penalties as such.

By 7 George II, c. 6, no convert can act as a justice of the peace whose wife, or children under sixteen years of age, are educated Papists.

The 13 George II, c. 6, is an act to amend former acts for disarming Papists.

By the sixth clause of this act, Protestants educating their children as Papists are made subject to the same disabilities as Papists are.

By 9 George II, c. 3, no person can serve on a petty jury, unless seized of a freehold of £5 per annum, or being a Protestant, unless possessed of a profit rent of £15 per annum, under a lease for years.

By 9 George II, c. 6, sec. 5, persons robbed by privateers, during war with a Popish prince, shall be reimbursed by grand jury presentment, and the money levied upon the goods and lands of Popish inhabitants only.

The 19 George II, c. 5, is an act for granting a duty on hawkers and peddlers to the Society of Protestant Charter Schools.*

The following is the preamble of the charter for erecting these schools: "George II by the grace of God, etc. Forasmuch as we have received information, by the petition of the lord primate, lord chancellor, archbishops, noblemen, bishops, judges, gentry and clergy, of our kingdom of Ireland, that in many parts of the said kingdom there are great tracts of land almost entirely inhabited by Papists, who are kept by their clergy in great ignorance of the true religion, and bred up in great dissatisfaction to the government; that the erecting of English Protestant schools in those places is absolutely necessary for their conversion; that the English parish schools already estab lished are not sufficient for that purpose, nor can the residence of the parochial clergy only fully answer that end." Catholics are excluded by this charter from being subscribers to, or members of, this society.-See Report of

The 19 George II, c. 13, is an act to annul all marriages between Protestants and Papists, or celebrated by Popish priests.*

By the 23 George II, c. 10, sec. 3, every Popish priest who shall celebrate any marriage contrary to 12 George I, c. 3, and be therefor convicted, shall be hanged.

Of these last acts, and of Lord Chesterfield's administration, Mr. Burke gives the following account: "This man, while he was duping the credulity of the Papists with fine words in private, and commending their good behavior during a rebellion in Great Britain, as it well deserved to be commended and rewarded, was capable of urging penal laws against them in a speech from the throne,† and Committee of Irish House of Commons, 14 Appendix, 1788; Ir. Com. Jour., 12 Appendix, p. 810.

The children admitted into the schools are orphans, or the children of Catholics, and other poor natives of Ireland, who, from their situation in life, are not likely to educate them as Protestants. They are apprenticed into Protestant families at the age of fourteen years, at a fee of seven guineas with each female, and five guineas with each male. The society gives a portion of five pounds to every person educated in these schools, upon his or her marrying a Protestant.

In September, 1806, the number of children in the schools was 2,130.

The funds of the society consist of lands, funded property, and an annual grant of parliament; they amount to about £34,000 per annum. From the year 1754, 31 George II, c. I, to the 1st January, 1808, there has been granted by parliament to this society £491,326, besides certain duties on hawkers and pedlers, from 1754 to 1786.

By the 23 George II, c. 2, the society may appoint persons to take up beggar children, and send them to the charter schools, and, when old enough, bind them apprentices.

By the same act, sec. 8, a child received with the parents' consent is deemed a child of the public, and may be disposed of, though claimed by the parents. *The first acts on this head are 6 Anne c. 16, sec. 6, and 8 Anne, c. 3, sec. 26. "The measures that have hitherto been taken to prevent the growth of Popery have, I hope, had some, and will still have a greater effect; however, I leave it to your consideration whether nothing further can be done, either by new laws or by more effectual execution of those in being, to secure the nation against the greater number of Papists, whose speculative errors would only deserve pity, if their pernicious influence upon civil society did not both require and authorize restraint."-Speech to both Houses of Parliament, October 8, 1745: : Com. Jour., 7, 64.

of stimulating with provocatives the weary and halfexhausted bigotry of the parliament of Ireland. They set to work, but they were at a loss what to do, for they had already almost gone through every contrivance which could waste the vigor of their country; but, after much struggle, they produced a child of their old age, the shocking and unnatural act about marriages, which tended to finish the scheme for making the people not only two distinct parties forever, but keeping them as two distinct species in the same land. Mr. Gardiner's humanity was shocked at it, as one of the worst parts of that truly barbarous system, if one could well settle the preference, where almost all the parts were outrages on the rights of humanity and the laws of nations." *

On the conduct of the Catholics during the Scotch rebellion of 1745, fortunately for them, but greatly to the shame of those who accuse them of being actuated by religious principles inconsistent with their duty to their sovereign, there is on record an irrefutable document. In the year 1762, upon a debate in the House of Lords about the expediency of raising five regiments of Catholics for the King of Portugal, the Primate, Doctor Stone, in answer to the usual objections that were urged on all occasions against the good faith and loyalty of that body, declared in his place, "that in the year 1747, after that rebellion was entirely suppressed, happening to be in England, he had an opportunity of perusing all the papers of the rebels and their correspondents, which were seized in the custody of Murray, the Pretender's secretary; and that, after having spent much time, and taken great pains in examining them, not without some. share of the then common suspicion that there might be some private understanding and intercourse between them and the Irish Catholics, he could not discover the least trace, hint, or intimation of such intercourse or

Letter to a Peer in Ireland.

correspondence in them, or of any of the latter's favoring or abetting, or having been so much as made acquainted with, the designs or proceedings of the rebels. And what," he said, "he wondered at most of all was, that in all his researches he had not met with any passage in any of the papers from which he could infer that either their Holy Father, the Pope, or any of his cardinals, bishops, or other dignitaries of that Church, or any of the Irish clergy, had, either directly or indirectly, encouraged, aided, or approved of the commencing or carrying on of that rebellion."*

Those of the clergy of England who lately took so active a part in exciting and upholding the infamous outcry of "No Popery," will do well to compare this declaration of Primate Stone with the following statement of the conduct of the Irish clergy, immediately upon the breaking out of the Scotch rebellion. They will learn how easy it is, even for the grave profession of the Church, to commit errors, and to pollute its sacred character, by embarking in the controversy of party politics: The bishops wrote pastoral letters to their respective diocesans, to excite the members of the Established Church to enforce all the penal statutes, and, with equal wisdom and charity and a ready obedience, did the clergy follow the example and directions of their superiors, and apply the whole power of their body to support the fanatic politics of the day. In their inflammatory sermons they excited religious animosity, by reviving the most shocking circumstances of the Irish Rebellion of 1641, and of the Gunpowder Plot in England, in 1605. These transactions were studiously aggravated, and the crimes, whether real or supposed, committed by Catholics, dead more than a century before, were imputed to all those who survived of the same religious persuasion."+ Curry's "Review of the Civil Wars of Ireland," vol. ii, p. 261.

+ Ib., p. 259.