Indemnity and Oblivion Act

(noun)

A 1660 Act of the Parliament of England that was a general pardon for everyone who had committed crimes during the English Civil War and Interregnum with the exception of certain crimes such as murder, piracy, buggery, rape and witchcraft, and people named in the act such as those involved in the regicide of Charles I.

Related Terms

Examples of Indemnity and Oblivion Act in the following topics:

  • Restoration of the Stuarts

    • He attempted to mediate between the army and civil society and allowed a Parliament, which contained a large number of disaffected Presbyterians and Royalists.
    • Lambert was incarcerated and died in custody in 1684 and Ingoldsby was, indeed, pardoned.
    • Many Royalist exiles returned and were rewarded.
    • The Indemnity and Oblivion Act, which became law in August 1660, pardoned all past treason against the crown, but specifically excluded those involved in the trial and execution of Charles I. 31 of the 59 commissioners (judges) who had signed the death warrant in 1649 were living.
    • In January 1661, the corpses of Cromwell, Ireton and Bradshaw were exhumed and hanged in chains at Tyburn.

  • The Calm Before the Storm

    • The Tea Act of 1773 arose from the financial problems of the British East India Company and the dispute of Parliament's authority over the colonies.
    • Parliament attempted to resolve these issues through the Tea Act, which in turn set the stage for the Boston Tea Party and eventually the American Revolution.
    • The Indemnity Act of 1767, which gave the East India Company a refund of the duty on tea that was re-exported to the colonies, expired in 1772.
    • The act also restored the tea taxes within Britain that had been repealed in 1767, and left in place the Townshend duty in the colonies.
    • This act restored the East India Company's full refund on the duty for importing tea into Britain and also permitted the company, for the first time, to export tea to the colonies on its own account.

  • The Townshend Acts

    • Enforcement of colonial taxation in the form of the Townshend Acts only increased colonial tension and resistance, especially in Boston.
    • The purpose of the Townshend Acts was to raise revenue in the colonies to pay the salaries of governors and judges so that they would be independent of colonial rule.
    • The acts were also meant to create a more effective means of enforcing compliance with trade regulations, to punish the province of New York for failing to comply with the 1765 Quartering Act, and to establish the precedent that the British Parliament had the right to tax the colonies.
    • The first of the Townshend Acts, sometimes simply known as the Townshend Act, was the Revenue Act of 1767.
    • The original stated purpose of the Revenue Act and the following Townshend Acts was to raise revenue to pay the cost of maintaining an army in North America.

  • The Post-War Boom

    • Between 1946 and 1960, the United States witnessed a significant expansion in the consumption of goods and services.
    • The forty-hour workweek established by the Fair Labor Standards Act in covered industries became the actual schedule in most workplaces by 1960.
    • The rapid social and technological changes brought about a growing corporatization of America and the decline of smaller businesses, which often suffered from high postwar inflation and mounting operating costs.
    • Newspapers declined in numbers and consolidated.
    • Smaller automobile manufacturers such as Nash, Studebaker, and Packard were unable to compete with the Big Three (General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler) in the new postwar world and gradually declined into oblivion over the next 15 years.