Interpreting Emancipation

The achievement of Catholic emancipation in 1829 is an episode at once simple and complex to assess. It is simple in the sense that it is regarded as an unambiguous achievement for the Irish people and for English Catholics who had been kept in a political outhouse since the Reformation and subsequent penal legislation. The achievement was, as one biographer has observed, ‘immense’. In the words of G. I. T. Machin, who situates the act as part of a series of emancipatory measures and processes, it was the ‘main legal advance made by Irish and British Catholics’ in the 1800s. In particular, its peaceful and public nature has been noted and contrasted favourably with other developments in Irish society. Historians of Victorian Britain consider it a ‘constitutional revolution’. It was, moreover, a catalyst for further systemic change: Wendy Hinde quotes J. S. Mill in the subtitle of her study of the measure, saying that it was ‘a shake to men's minds’, something which dislodged the reflexive prejudices of centuries. It could be seen, in context, as the high crest of the wave of liberalism in the 1820s and also as a herald of change to come. It certainly prepared Britons for the reform measures of the following decades.

Yet the central paradox is that it was passed by a resolutely Tory government and that it was given grudgingly and with a restrictive measure.