ABSTRACT
This important relaxation of part of the penal code allowed Irish Roman Catholics to swear their allegiance to George III and so evade the charge that they were potentially disloyal because they were supporters of the Catholic Stuart claimant to the throne. They were allowed to do this without rejecting any Catholic religious beliefs, but they did have to renounce and reject the Pope’s right to excommunicate a Protestant monarch or to support the use of force to overthrow a Protestant monarch. No Pope or foreign ruler was to be acknowledged as having any temporal power or civil jurisdiction in Ireland. The oath was to be sworn without any mental reservation. The Pope’s decision not to recognize ‘Charles III’ as king when his father died in 1766 aided the passing of this act. Frederick Augustus Hervey, the Protestant Bishop of Derry, worked hard to devise a way of wording an oath of allegiance that would be acceptable to Roman Catholics.
