Page:Studies in Irish History, 1649-1775 (1903).djvu/338

After Limerick be consecrated. Such an Act, although it might succeed in England and Wales, as indeed it eventually did, could never be successful in Ireland, where circumstances were utterly different, and later on the Act had to be extended and elaborated in the hopes of making it more effective.

In the same year an Act was passed to prevent Protestants intermarrying with Papists. Any Protestant woman being heir to or possessed of any estate in land, or possessed of £500 of personal property, who married without a certificate from the proper authority to the effect that her husband was known to be a Protestant, was to be held dead in law, and her property was to go to the next of Protestant kin. A Protestant marrying a Popish wife without a certificate, was deemed a Papist, and lost all his civil rights.

The next year, 1698, an Act was passed to prevent Papists being solicitors. No one could act as a solicitor without taking the prescribed oaths; if he did he was liable to a fine of £100 to the prosecution, and to the loss of certain civil rights. In 1699 the English Parliament passed one of the most savage Acts in the Penal Code, and the era of priest-hunting began. The Act provided that any Catholic bishop or priest 326