On the 13th of April, 1829, King George IV gave the Royal Assent to the Catholic Relief Act, which granted Catholics the right to sit at Westminster, because Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington "felt that the threat of insurrection in Ireland surpassed the threat of allowing Catholics to sit in Parliament".

Much as the 1829 Act may be lauded by some as the best thing since sliced bread, history shows that it was considered at the time by some in England as a necessary evil, and by others as an unnecessary evil. Catholics and Irishmen apart, the Catholic Relief Act was considered a Bad Thing.

Still, it was a further step in retracing the steps imprinted by the anti-Catholic laws of the seventeenth and eighteenth century; indeed it repealed the odious Test Act of 1672, by which people were forbidden to take public office without denying the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament.