United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

United Kingdom of
Great Britain and Ireland
Sovereign state
←
 
←
1801–1922¹ →
 
→


Flag Coat of arms
Motto
Dieu et mon droit  (French)²
"God and my right"
Anthem
God Save the King (Queen)

Capital London
Language(s) English (de facto official). Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Scots, Welsh and Cornish widely spoken in parts.
Government Parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy
Monarch
 - 1801–1820 George III
 - 1820–1830 George IV
 - 1830–1837 William IV
 - 1837–1901 Victoria
 - 1901–1910 Edward VII
 - 1910–1927 (cont. as King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) George V
Prime Minister
 - 1801, 1804–1806 William Pitt the Younger
 - 1924–1927 (In name-cont.) Stanley Baldwin
Legislature Parliament
 - Upper house House of Lords
 - Lower house House of Commons
History
 - Act of Union 1800 1 January 1801
 - Disestablished 6 December 1922
 - UK name changed 12 April 1927
Area
 - 1801 315,093 km² (121,658 sq mi)
Population
 - 1801 est. 16,345,646 
     Density 51.9 /km²  (134.4 /sq mi)
 - 1921 est. 42,769,196 
     Density 135.7 /km²  (351.6 /sq mi)
Currency Pound sterling
¹ The Irish Free State seceded from the United Kingdom in 1922 as a result of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, but this fact was not reflected in the long-form name of United Kingdom until the Royal and Parliamentary Titles Act in 1927. The current British state, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, is universally accepted to be a direct continuation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and should not be imagined to be a break from it or a new state formed after it.
² The Royal motto used in Scotland was Nemo Me Impune Lacessit (Latin for "No-one provokes me with impunity").

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (commonly known as the United Kingdom, Great Britain and Ireland, Great Britain and sometimes, as a synecdoche, as England)[1] was the formal name and the state form of the United Kingdom from 1 January 1801 until 12 April 1927. It was formed by the merger of the Kingdom of Great Britain (itself having been a merger of the Kingdoms of England and Scotland) and the Kingdom of Ireland, with Ireland being governed directly from Westminster through its Dublin Castle administration.

Following Irish independence on 6 December 1922, when the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty came into effect, the name continued in official use until it was changed to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland by the Royal and Parliamentary Titles Act of 1927.

Terms of the Union

Under the terms of the Act of Union, the separate Parliament of Great Britain and the Parliament of Ireland were abolished and replaced by a united Parliament of the United Kingdom.[2] The new House of Commons consisted of all Members of Great Britain's 18th Parliament and 100 Irish MPs co-opted in a special election in 1801.[2] The new House of Lords consisted of all members of Great Britain's House of Lords, as well as four Lords Spiritual and twenty-eight Lords Temporal from the Irish House of Lords.[2] The new Parliament met in the Palace of Westminster, formerly the home of the Parliament of Great Britain and, until 1707, the Parliament of England.

Part of the trade-off for Irish Roman Catholics, who since 1652 were barred from voting or attending Parliament altogether under the Cromwellian Act of Settlement, was to be the granting of Catholic Emancipation, which had been fiercely resisted by the all-Anglican Irish Parliament. However, this was blocked by King George III who argued that emancipating Roman Catholics would breach his Coronation Oath to act as protector of Protestantism.

The United Kingdom

The merger was initially seen favourably in Ireland, given that the old Irish parliament was seen as hostile to the majority Catholic population, some of whose members had only been given the vote as late as 1794 and who were legally debarred from election to the body. The Roman Catholic hierarchy endorsed the Union. However, King George III's decision to block Catholic Emancipation fatally undermined the appeal of the Union. Leaders like Henry Grattan, who sat in the new parliament, having been leading members of the old one, were bitterly critical.

The eventual achievement of Catholic Emancipation in 1829, following a campaign by Daniel O'Connell, MP for County Clare, who had won election to Westminster and who could not for religious beliefs take the Oath of Supremacy, removed the main negative that had undermined the appeal of the old parliament, the exclusion of Catholics. From 1829 on a demand grew again for a native Irish parliament separate from Westminster. However, his campaign to repeal the Act of Union ultimately failed.

Aspects of the United Kingdom met with popularity in Ireland during the 122-year union. Hundreds of thousands flocked to Dublin for the visits of Queen Victoria in 1900, King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra in 1903 and 1907 and King George V and Queen Mary in 1911. About 210,000 Irishmen fought in Irish regiments of the United Kingdom and Allied armies in World War I, at a time when Ireland was the only home nation where conscription was not in force.

Irish Home Rule

Figures such as Isaac Butt and Charles Stewart Parnell, the first leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, campaigned for a version of all-Ireland self-government called home rule within the United Kingdom, which was nearly achieved in the 1880s under the (British) ministry of William Ewart Gladstone who introduced two Irish Home Rule Bills. However, the measures were defeated in Parliament, and following the ascension of the Conservatives to the majority, the issue was buried as long as that party was in power.

With the return to power of the Liberals in 1910 general election supported by the Irish Party under John Redmond who now held the balance of power in the Commons, the veto power of the Lords was removed under the Parliament Act 1911 and a Home Rule Bill introduced in 1912 passed Parliament as the Third Home Rule Act in 1914, but was temporarily suspended for the duration of World War I. However the constant delaying of Home Rule and the opposition of the Orange Order in Ulster created the frustration that eventually led to political violence and the 1916 Easter Rising. An attempt to introduce Irish self-government was made by PM Lloyd George in 1917 when he called an Irish Convention which after six months deliberating failed to agree on the inclusion or exclusion of Ulster. The European situation with the threat of conscription changed the political climate such that in the 1918 general election, the Irish Party lost most of its seats to the new Sinn Féin party.