Members of Parliament Quotes
1st Duke of Wellington. The prohibitions against Catholic participation dated from the time when the Pope and the Vatican tried to support Catholic insurrections in England to return it as a Catholic country which it had been until King Henry VIII had a dispute with the Pope. However, the Catholic attempt to take over England and crush the Protestant Church of England had occurred so long before that there was no practical danger to the then established Church of England. Wellington, an Irish Protestant himself, realized that the law presented no significant protection and caused not only great resentment of English and Irish Catholics, but denied the nation the benefit of their great talents in politics. England took a great step forward and passed the bill.
Orangemen were the ulta Protestant Nationalists of Northern Ireland. Both Protetants and Catholics had their extremists who publicly spewed their hate, desire for exclusivity, and insults with little moderation from moderates who always risked retaliation from the extremists even of their own religion, not unlike the situation of the beginning of the 21st century, where Muslim moderates were cowed and intimidated by the religious Islamic extremists.
At the time, The Oath of Supremacy, was required to take a seat in the British Parliament. It was specifically written to keep Roman Catholics out of Parliament. O’Connell and his colleagues adopted a political tactic whereby Catholics would run for Parliament, and then if an when they won, refuse to take the oath and hence be unable to take their seat. And that is just what happened. The Duke of Wellington, the Prime Minister, was trying to have Ireland join in union with Great Britain, and he didn’t want Irish Catholic anger and resentment because Irish seats in Parliament were empty by virtue of blatant religious discrimination. King George IV however was a virulent anti-Catholic, but Wellington finally persuaded him to relent and O’Connell and other Irish Catholics finally entered Parliament.
This was his perception of the change in Parliament in the 64 years he was in that body. Bribery, for example, was then commonplace for American and British legislators. By the 21st century the money spent by the rich and corporations to by legislative outcomes was many times as great but had been covered over by the fig leaf of campaign and party contributions.
Chief legal officer of a Dutch town. He wanted to have a plebiscite in each town on major issues before the assembly so as to instruct the representative as to how to vote. The graphic is a painting of Adriaan van Zeebergh and his board of the Teylers Stichting.
