Indemnity Act 1717

English, Scottish, Irish and Great Britain legislation
Acts of Parliament by states preceding the United Kingdom
Of the Kingdom of England Before 1485 1485–1601 · 1603–1641 Interregnum (1642–1660) 1660–1699 · 1700–1706
Royal statutes, etc. issued before the development of Parliament
Of the Kingdom of Ireland Before 1701 · 1701–1800
Of the Kingdom of Scotland Up to 1707
Of the Kingdom of Great Britain 1707–1719 · 1720–1739 · 1740–59 · 1760–1779 · 1780–1800

The Indemnity Act 1717 is an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain (4 Geo. I) also referred to as the Act of Grace and Free Pardon.

The Act was passed by both houses of parliament in July 1717, the last enactment of the session. It followed almost two years after the Jacobite rising of 1715, during and after which many Jacobites were taken prisoner. Those later convicted of treason were condemned to death, and some were executed, but by the Act most of the surviving Jacobite prisoners were freed and were permitted to settle either at home or overseas.

Hundreds of Jacobites were freed by the Act. The more notable included the Earl of Carnwath, Lord Nairne, and Lord Widdrington, together with seventeen gentlemen awaiting execution in the Newgate and twenty-six in Carlisle Castle. Some two hundred men captured at the Battle of Preston were released at Chester, also all remaining prisoners held in the castles of Edinburgh and Stirling. The Act did not undo the effect of any attainders, and confiscated estates worth £48,000 a year in England and £30,000 a year in Scotland; the dispossessed owners were not restored of their property.

There were some specific exceptions to the general pardon granted by the Act: Matthew Prior and Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford, had been held in the Tower of London before the Rising of 1715, and Oxford's friend Lord Harcourt and his cousin Thomas Harley. All members of the Clan MacGregor were also excluded from the Act's benefits, one of the targets of this last exclusion being the famous Rob Roy MacGregor.Philip Henry Stanhope noted in the 1840s that "...a modern reader is shocked to find excepted 'all and every person of the name and clan of Macgregor'".

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