[Footnote 208:  Many years afterward the restriction as to the Lord Chancellorship of Ireland was abolished.]

[Footnote 209:  The plan which Pitt had intended to propose was to substitute in lieu of the Sacramental test a political test, to be imposed indiscriminately on all persons sitting in Parliament, or holding state or corporation offices, and also on all ministers of religion, of whatever description, etc., etc.  This test was to disclaim in express terms the sovereignty of the people, and was to contain an oath of allegiance and “fidelity to the King’s government of the realm, and to the established constitutions of Church and state.”—­Letter of Lord Grenville, given in Courts and Cabinets of George III., and quoted by Lord Stanhope, Life of Pitt, iii., 270.  This plan seems very preferable to that now adopted, since it removed every appearance of making a distinction between the professors of the different creeds, when the same oath was to be taken by all indifferently.]

[Footnote 210:  The question had been discussed with the highest Papal authorities more than once since the beginning of the century.  In 1812 Mgr.  Quarantotti, the prelate who, during the detention of the Pope in France by Napoleon, was invested with the chief authority in ecclesiastical affairs at Rome, in a letter to the Vicar-apostolic, Dr. Poynter, formally announced the consent of the Papal See to give the King a veto on all ecclesiastical appointments within the United Kingdom; and, after his return to Rome, Pio VII. himself confirmed the former title by a second addressed, by his instructions, to the same Dr. Poynter, which letter, in 1816, was read by Mr. Grattan in the House of Commons, it being throughout understood that this concession of the veto to the King was conditional on the abolition of the disabilities and the endowment of the priesthood.  And in 1825, after Lord Francis Egerton’s resolution had been carried in the House of Commons, Dr. Doyle, one of the most eminent of the Roman Catholic bishops in Ireland, in an examination before a committee of the House of Lords, expressed the willingness of the Roman Catholic clergy to accept a state provision, if it were permanently annexed to each benefice, and accompanied with a concession of an equality of civil rights to the Roman Catholic laity.—­See Life of Lord Liverpool, ii, 145; Diary of Lord Colchester, March 17, 1835, iii., 373; Peel’s Memoirs, i., 306, 333 seq.]

[Footnote 211:  The sum to be thus employed seems to have been intended to be L300,000 a year.—­Peel’s Memoirs, i., 197.  On the whole question of the payment and Peel’s objections to it, see ibid., pp. 197, 306.]