Catholic emancipation in the context of "Robert Peel"

Edmund Burke (/bɜːrk/; 12 January [NS] 1729 – 9 July 1797) was an Anglo-Irish writer, philosopher, and politician who is regarded as the founder of the cultural and political philosophy of conservatism. Regarded as one of the most influential conservative thinkers and political writers of the 18th century, Burke spent the majority of his career in Great Britain and was elected as a member of Parliament (MP) from 1766 to 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party. His writings played a crucial role in influencing public views and opinions in both Britain and France following the 1789 French Revolution, and he remains a major figure in modern conservative political circles.

Burke was a proponent of underpinning virtues with manners in society and of the importance of religious institutions for the moral stability and good of the state. These views were expressed in his satirical work, A Vindication of Natural Society (1756). He also criticised the actions of the British government towards the American colonies, including its taxation policies. Burke supported the rights of the colonists to resist metropolitan authority, although he opposed the attempt to achieve independence. He is further remembered for his long-term support for Catholic emancipation, the impeachment of Warren Hastings from the East India Company, and his opposition to the French Revolution. In 1774, Burke was elected a member of Parliament for Bristol.

The Whigs were a political party in the Parliaments of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom. Between the 1680s and the 1850s, the Whigs contested power with their rivals, the Tories. The Whigs became the Liberal Party when the faction merged with the Peelites and Radicals in the 1850s. Many Whigs left the Liberal Party in 1886 over the issue of Irish Home Rule to form the Liberal Unionist Party, which merged into the Conservative Party in 1912.

The Whigs began as a political faction that opposed absolute monarchy and Catholic emancipation, supporting constitutional monarchism and parliamentary government, but also Protestant supremacy. They played a central role in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and were the standing enemies of the Roman Catholic Stuart kings and pretenders. The period known as the Whig Supremacy (1714–1760) was enabled by the Hanoverian succession of George I in 1714 and the failure of the Jacobite rising of 1715 by Tory rebels. The Whigs took full control of the government in 1715 and thoroughly purged the Tories from all major positions in government, the army, the Church of England, the legal profession, and local political offices. The first great leader of the Whigs was Robert Walpole, who maintained control of the government from 1721 to 1742, and whose protégé, Henry Pelham, led the government from 1743 to 1754. Great Britain approximated a one-party state under the Whigs until King George III came to the throne in 1760 and allowed Tories back in; however, the Whig Party's hold on power remained strong for many years thereafter. Historians have called the period from roughly 1714 to 1783 the "long period of Whig oligarchy". During the American War of Independence, the Whigs were the party more sympathetic to American independence and the creation of a democracy in the United States.

The Congregation of Christian Brothers (Latin: Congregatio Fratrum Christianorum; abbreviated CFC) is a worldwide religious community within the Catholic Church, founded by Edmund Rice.

Their first school opened in Waterford, Ireland, in 1802. At the time of its foundation, though much relieved from the harshest of the Penal Laws by the Relief Acts, Catholics faced much discrimination throughout the newly created United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland pending full Catholic emancipation in 1829.

Daniel O'Connell (Irish: Dónall Ó Conaill; 6 August 1775 – 15 May 1847), hailed in his time as The Liberator, was the acknowledged political leader of Ireland's Roman Catholic majority in the first half of the 19th century. His mobilisation of Catholic Ireland, down to the poorest class of tenant farmers, secured the final installment of Catholic emancipation in 1829 and allowed him to take a seat in the United Kingdom Parliament to which he had been twice elected.

At Westminster, O'Connell championed liberal and reform causes (being internationally renowned as an abolitionist) but he failed in his declared objective for Ireland – the repeal of the Act of Union 1800 and the restoration of an Irish Parliament.

Recusancy (from Latin: recusare, lit. 'to refuse') was the state of those who remained loyal to the Catholic Church and refused to attend Church of England services after the English Reformation.

The 1558 Recusancy Acts passed in the reign of Elizabeth I, and temporarily repealed in the Interregnum (1649–1660), remained on the statute books until 1888. They imposed punishments such as fines, property confiscation and imprisonment on recusants. The suspension under Oliver Cromwell was mainly intended to give relief to Nonconformist Protestants rather than to Catholics, to whom some restrictions applied into the 1920s, through the Act of Settlement 1701, despite the 1828–1829 Catholic emancipation.

Odd Fellows (or Oddfellows when referencing the Grand United Order of Oddfellows or some British-based fraternities; also Odd Fellowship or Oddfellowship) is an international fraternity consisting of lodges first documented in 1730 in London. The first known lodge was called Loyal Aristarcus Lodge No. 9, suggesting there were earlier ones in the 18th century. Notwithstanding, convivial meetings were held "in much revelry and, often as not, the calling of the Watch to restore order." Names of several British pubs today suggest past Odd Fellows affiliations. In the mid-18th century, following the Jacobite risings, the fraternity split into the rivaling Order of Patriotic Oddfellows in southern England, favouring William III of England, and the Ancient Order of Oddfellows in northern England and Scotland, favouring the House of Stuart.

Odd Fellows from that time include John Wilkes (1725–1797) and Sir George Savile, 8th Baronet of Thornton (1726–1784), advocating civil liberties and reliefs, including Catholic emancipation. Political repressions, such as the Unlawful Oaths Act (1797) and the Unlawful Societies Act (1799), resulted in neutral amalgamation of the Grand United Order of Oddfellows in 1798. Since then, the fraternity has remained religiously and politically independent. George IV of the United Kingdom, admitted in 1780 while he was Prince of Wales, was the first documented of many Odd Fellows to also attend freemasonry, although the societies remain mutually independent.