Roman Catholic relief bills
18th/19th century UK legislation
The Roman Catholic relief bills were a series of measures introduced over time in the late 18th and early 19th centuries before the Parliaments of Great Britain and the United Kingdom to remove the restrictions and prohibitions imposed on British and Irish Catholics during the English Reformation. These restrictions had been introduced to enforce the separation of the English church from the Catholic Church which began in 1529 under Henry VIII.
Following the death of the Jacobite claimant to the British throne James Francis Edward Stuart on 1 January 1766, the pope recognised the legitimacy of the Hanoverian dynasty, which began a process of rapprochement between the Catholic Church and the United Kingdom. Over the next sixty-three years, various bills were introduced in Parliament to repeal restrictions against practise of the Catholic faith, but these bills encountered political opposition, especially during the Napoleonic Wars. With the exception of the Papists Act 1778 (18 Geo. 3. c. 60) and the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1791 (31 Geo. 3. c. 32), these bills were defeated.
“Roman Catholic relief bills” enters the record as 18th/19th century UK legislation. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Roman, Catholic and relief can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Roman Catholic relief bills” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.