Loyalism in Ireland, 1789-1829 (Irish Historical Monographs)

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Loyalism in Ireland, 1789–1829

Irish Historical Monograph Series ISSN 1740–1097 Series editors Marie Therese Flanagan, Queen’s University, Belfast Eunan O’Halphin, Trinity College, Dublin David Hayton, Queen’s University, Belfast Previous titles in this series I. Ruling Ireland 1685–1742: Politics, Politicians and Parties, D. W. Hayton, 2004 II. Lord Broghill and the Cromwellian Union with Ireland and Scotland, Patrick Little, 2004 III. Irish Migrants in New Zealand, 1840–1937: ‘The Desired Haven’, Angela McCarthy, 2005 IV. The Fenian Ideal and Irish Nationalism, 1882–1916, M. J. Kelly, 2006

Loyalism in Ireland 1789–1829

Allan Blackstock

THE BOYDELL PRESS

© Allan Blackstock 2007 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Allan Blackstock to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2007 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 978–1–84383–302–4 The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction

vii viii 1

Section 1. LOYALISM DEFINED 1 Antecedents: loyalty and disaffection in Ireland before 1789

23

2

The Brethren of Britons: the emergence of Irish counter-revolutionary loyalism, 1789–96

39

3

‘The first up will carry the day’: the mobilisation and militarisation of Irish 70 loyalism, 1796–8

4

Closing the ranks: loyalism monopolised, 1798–1805

97

Section 2. LOYALISM IN LIMBO 5

‘Ceremonial pageantry’: the politics of parading and public display, 1805–15

133

6

The first dissolution and the second reformation: loyalism in decline, 1815–25

169

Section 3. LOYALISM, PROTESTANTISM AND POPULAR POLITICS 7

Protestant politics, popular loyalism and public opinion, 1825–8

197

8

The Star of Brunswick

225

9 Epilogue

263

Select bibliography Index

273 285

Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to the Leverhulme Foundation for their award of a Special Research Fellowship which was of invaluable help in the research and writing of this book. My thanks are also due to the University of Ulster for a subvention towards the costs of publication, to George Meharg for the cover design and to Dr John Privilege for his help with the index. I would also like to thank the following individuals and institutions for permission to quote from material in their keeping: Armagh County Museum; the British Library; the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava for the Dufferin Papers held in P.R.O.N.I.; Durham County Record Office; the earl of Gosford; the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland; First Presbyterian Church, Belfast; Hampshire County Record Office; the Centre for Kentish Studies; the Linenhall Library, Belfast; Nottingham University Library; the Director of the National Archives of Ireland; the Council of Trustees, National Library of Ireland; the National Army Museum (Chelsea); the Deputy Keeper of the Records (P.R.O.N.I.); the Public Record Office (London); the Robinson Library, Armagh; Southampton University Library; the Board of Trinity College Dublin and the West Sussex Record Office. Crown Copyright is acknowledged from the Home Office, Colonial Office, War Office and Wellington papers. For permission to publish from the Downshire papers (D607, D671) and the Enniskillen papers (D1702) I should like to thank the Deputy Keeper of the Records (P.R.O.N.I.). I would also like to thank all those people who have helped me with advice and support during the process of writing this book. Like the subscribers to many loyal declarations in 1792, their ‘names are too numerous to be inserted’; however particular thanks are due to Professor Tom Bartlett, Professor John Bossy, Professor Sean Connolly, Professor Marianne Elliott, Professor David Hayton, Professor Jacqueline Hill, Professor Alvin Jackson, the late Professor Peter Jupp, Dr Eoin Magennis, Dr Anthony Malcomson, Dr Petri Mirala, Professor Frank O’Gorman, Dr A. T. Q. Stewart and Professor Brian Walker. Similarly my gratitude is due to colleagues at the Academy of Irish Cultural Heritages and the School of History and International Affairs at the University of Ulster for their support and encouragement. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their love and support.

vii

Abbreviations A.C.M. Armagh County Museum BGCA Belfast Guardian and Constitutional Advocate B.L. British Library BNL Belfast Newsletter Centre for Kentish Studies C.K.S. D.C.M. Down County Museum DEP Dublin Evening Post DEM Dublin Evening Mail DNB Dictionary of National Biography E.C.I. Eighteenth-Century Ireland E.H.R. English Historical Review FDJ Faulkner’s Dublin Journal FJ Freeman’s Journal G.O.L.I. Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland Hansard 1,2,3 The parliamentary history of England from the earliest period to the year 1803 (36 vols, London, 1806–20); continued as: The parliamentary debates from the year 1803 to the present time H.C. House of Commons H.M.C. Historical Manuscripts Commission H.L. House of Lords HO Home Office papers H.R.O. Hampshire Record Office I.H.S. Irish Historical Studies I.M.C. Irish Manuscripts Commission Ir. Econ. Soc. Hist Irish Economic and Social History LJ Londonderry Journal L.O.L. Loyal Orange Lodge N.A.I. National Archives of Ireland N.A.M. National Army Museum New DNB New Dictionary of National Biography NS Northern Star NT Newry Telegraph NW Northern Whig O.P. Official Papers (Dublin) Parl. Reg. (Ire.) The parliamentary register, or history of the proceedings and debates of the House of Commons of Ireland (17 vols, Dublin, 1782–1801) P.R.O. The Public Record Office (London) P.R.O.N.I. The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland viii

ABBREVIATIONS

Q.U.B. Queen’s University Belfast R.I.A. Royal Irish Academy R.P. Rebellion papers (Dublin) SJ Sligo Journal SOB Star of Brunswick S.O.C. State of the Country papers (Dublin) S.U.L. Southampton University Library T.C.D. Trinity College Dublin W.S.D. Wellington Supplementary Despatches

ix

In memory of my mother

Introduction At the beginning of the twenty-first century, loyalism in Ireland is understood as a product of the recent ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland. As such, it has distinctive connotations of paramilitarism, sectarianism, illegality and a form of tribal identity displayed in territorial markers like flags on lamp-posts, gable-end murals and kerbstones painted red, white and blue. The boundaries between loyalism and unionism are vague; it is common to refer to the political representatives of paramilitary groups as ‘loyalist’ politicians in distinction not only to republicans and nationalists, but also to the various unionist parties. Moreover, with loyalist flags including the union jack, the Ulster flag and various paramilitary emblems, the focus of contemporary loyalism is ambiguous and often contradictory. The demarcation between this form of loyalism and the main traditional vehicle for loyalism, the Orange Order, while occasionally overlapping at local level and at the ritual parades, is nonetheless distinct at an institutional level. Socially, contemporary Ulster loyalism is located largely outside the middle and professional classes. Indeed, when a renewed ceasefire by the paramilitary Ulster Defence Association was mooted in November 2004, and financial assistance sought for urban districts in which traditional industries had declined, these areas were described in terms which implied that their working-class Protestant inhabitants were in danger of becoming a marginalised underclass. Such a situation would have been foreign to the tens of thousands of unionists of all social classes who signed the Ulster Covenant in 1912 in opposition to the third Home Rule bill, when it was commonplace to consider the terms loyalist and unionist as synonymous. Earlier still, when the legislative union between Britain and Ireland was under discussion at the height of the French Revolutionary war, loyalism meant something different again. On 22 January 1799, in a Commons debate about the proposed union, William Pitt said that those Irish loyalists who had opposed rebellion and invasion in 1798 well deserved the title ‘the brethren of Britons’. With hundreds of thousands of Englishmen and numbers of Scots and Welsh registered under the 1798 Defence of the Realm Act as willing to fight the French, and many actually armed as volunteers, Pitt’s fraternal welcome implied that British wartime patriotism and Irish loyalism were merged in the common cause. Yet, some twenty-five years after union, Sir Walter Scott and a party of cultural tourists, travelling from Glasgow to Belfast by new-fangled steamer, had their meal at the Captain’s table interrupted by an inebriated Orange ‘squireen’. After unleashing a tirade against popery, this unwel Belfast Telegraph, 2, 15, 19 Nov. 2004; Ulster’s Solemn League and Covenant (P.R.O.N.I., D1327/3).  Hansard, 1 Parliamentary debates, xxxiv, pp 273–4.



LOYALISM IN IRELAND 1789–1829

come guest demanded toasts to the ‘glorious memory’ of William III and the ‘heroic memory’ of Oliver Cromwell. ‘This feature of Irish loyalism’, archly noted the reinventor of Celtic nationalisms, ‘was new to the untravelled Scotch of the party.’ The brand of fiery anti-Catholic loyalism Scott described is more recognisable to the modern reader than Pitt’s: it appears to elevate sectional Protestant identity and ascendancy above patriotism and anticipates later developments which still cast long shadows on Irish politics, like Ulster’s resistance to Home Rule. However, to understand Irish loyalism we need to avoid anachronistically projecting it backwards or considering it solely on an insular basis. First, however, it is necessary to describe and explain the main concepts associated with the development of Irish loyalism during the period covered by this book. The terms ‘Revolution principles’ and the ‘Protestant (or Happy) Constitution’ were contemporary usages and recur frequently. Although precise meanings were sometimes contested by contemporaries, broadly speaking these terms relate back to the settlement of 1688, whereby William of Orange replaced James II, the ‘Glorious Revolution’ which led to the balanced constitution of king, lords and commons and the subsequent guarantee of Protestant succession to the throne. In Ireland, unlike England, the transition of power was not bloodless as James sought to use the country, where he enjoyed extensive Catholic support, as a base to recover his kingdoms. His deputy, the earl of Tyrconnell, removed Protestant officers from the army creating fears of a recurrence of the massacres of 1641 when they had suffered but survived in a native Irish rebellion. The rising of 1641 left lasting impressions on the Protestant mind, and the memory was constantly reinforced by annual sermons on 23 October, the anniversary of the rising’s outbreak. This engendered a particular conception of Ireland on the part of Protestants based on the paradigm of the rebellious and savage Catholic and the loyal and civilised Protestant saved by Providence. During the Williamite wars, Protestants fled to defensible towns like Enniskillen and Derry, which was besieged from December 1688 until August 1689 when the starving garrison was relieved, thus re-invigorating the providential model and making the siege assume lasting symbolic importance. The 1641 sermons were supported by the state until the early nineteenth century, but the spectre of Catholic Irish rebellion continued to haunt the Protestant consciousness long afterwards. After the Williamite wars Protestants, having survived, as they saw it, another attempt at annihilation, were determined that this threat should never arise again, and the Dublin parliament enacted severe penal laws targeting Catholic religious practice and economic and political power. These laws were, to a lesser extent, extended to cover Presbyterians, whose independent system of church government was seen as a challenge to the established Church of Ireland. The major obstacle to Dissenters, the Sacramental Test, which made Anglican conformance a condition of office-holding, was ended in 1780. The penal laws against Catholics were  J. G. Lockhart, The memoirs of Sir Walter Scott (7 vols, Edinburgh and London, 1837), vi, ­46–7.  Ian McBride, The siege of Derry in Ulster Protestant mythology (Dublin, 1997).  T. C. Barnard, ‘The uses of 23 October 1641 and Irish Protestant celebrations’, E.H.R., cvi (1991), pp 889–920.



INTRODUCTION

p­ rogressively removed during the eighteenth century, culminating in the 1793 Relief Act, which permitted them to vote in elections and hold arms subject to property qualifications. The last major disability, which remained on the statute book until 1829, was the right to sit in parliament, commonly referred to as Catholic ­emancipation. The term patriotism was in constant use throughout the 1789–1829 period but, again, some preliminary explanation is required as, like many words in the revolutionary era, the precise meaning was unstable. At one level, the term operated as a political descriptor to denote one who put the perceived needs of his country before the exploitative and self-serving demands of the central authority and its courtiers. The idea of the patriot derived from Enlightenment veneration of the classical republics of Greece and Rome and the pure civic virtue their citizens were believed to embody. In this sense, patriotism in Ireland paralleled similar tendencies in Britain, various European countries like Poland and the Netherlands and the American colonies. Patriotism had literary and economic dimensions but in its Irish political context it was most often expressed as opposition to the Dublin parliament’s perceived subordination by Westminster, which retained the right to modify Irish legislation before it received royal approval and to pass laws believed detrimental to Ireland’s trade. Eighteenth-century patriots formed the parliamentary opposition to a pro-government group who sought (for self-serving and corrupt reasons it was alleged) to ensure the passage of government business and back the English-appointed Dublin Castle executive of the viceroy and his officials. As no Catholics and few Dissenters sat in the Irish parliament, patriots were, by definition, Protestant. They venerated ‘Revolution Principles’, viewing parliamentary subordination as antithetical to the benefits due to Irishmen who had fought for William. Patriotism, then as now, also had a wartime connotation. Patriot ideology held that the good citizen would voluntarily take up arms to defend his country against foreign invasion, without having to be coerced or paid to do so. In 1778, when France and Spain entered the American war on the colonists’ side, companies of Volunteers formed throughout Ireland to undertake military duties when the regulars were abroad. They were organised in small local corps but, true to their patriot ideals, refused to accept any commissions, pay, arms or uniforms from the government, and elected their own officers. Patriot M.P.s, like Henry Grattan and Henry Flood, were members of Volunteer corps and, from 1779, a relationship and political strategy developed between the parliamentary opposition and the Volunteers. This combination of parliamentary and extra-parliamentary pressure was irresistible. Lord North’s weakened government was forced to concede equality for Irish trade and, crucially, in 1782, following a Volunteer convention at Dungannon in County Tyrone which helped mobilise public opinion in the patriot cause, the ending of the Irish parliament’s legislative subordination. 

Thomas Bartlett, The fall and rise of the Irish Nation: the Catholic question, 1690–1830 (Dublin, 1992), p 165.  J. T. Leersen,‘Anglo-Irish patriotism and its European context: notes towards a reassessment’, E.C.I., 3 (1988), pp 7–24; Simon Schama, Patriots and liberators: revolution in the Netherlands, 1780–1813 (London, 1997), pp 87–8, 94.



LOYALISM IN IRELAND 1789–1829

Many Volunteers and patriots were satisfied with ‘legislative independence’ (in reality many policy areas were left ill defined) or, as it was sometimes called, the ‘constitution of 1782’, but the more radical, especially those corps formed by Ulster Presbyterians, wanted to press on to reform the representation of parliament itself. With Catholics having remained quiescent during the various Jacobite scares in the first half of the eighteenth century, some radical patriots and Volunteers were prepared to include Catholic emancipation in their programme. The great radical reform movement founded in Belfast in 1791, the Society of United Irishmen, grew from this element of the original Volunteers. Contemporaries used the terms ‘Old Volunteers’ and ‘New’ or ‘National Volunteers’ to distinguish the two types, as the latter re-organised and re-armed themselves and replaced their red uniforms with green in imitation of the revolutionary French Gardes Nationales. On the outbreak of war with France in 1793 these threatening groups were proscribed, while some old Volunteers re-emerged as loyalist associations in a response to war and radicalism. This reaction was comparable in ways to that in England, where John Reeves, a lawyer and one-time chief justice of Newfoundland, began the Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Levellers and Republicans. Following its inaugural meeting in London’s Crown and Anchor tavern in November 1792, the metropolitan organisation became the model for many imitative ‘loyal associations’ throughout Britain and, as we shall see, with some in Ireland also. The United Irish societies, which quickly spread in eastern Ulster and to Dublin and included all religious persuasions, initially aimed at radical reform of the existing constitutional framework through parliamentary reform and Catholic emancipation. However, when these demands were peremptorily rejected by the Irish parliament, they re-organised in 1795 as an underground movement dedicated to armed insurrection with French help. Needing greater numbers and geographical expansion beyond their natal districts, they developed an alliance with the Defenders, a militant lower-class Catholic secret society. This grouping originated in the linenproducing districts of central Ulster where, from the 1780s, it had formed one side in sporadic but increasing sectarian feuding generated, some argue, from resentment at Catholic encroachment into weaving, previously a preserve of Protestants. The Defenders’ equally plebeian Protestant opponents were called Peep O’Day Boys, from their nocturnal raids on Catholic cottages for arms. After victory over the Defenders at the ‘Battle of the Diamond’, a bloody clash in County Armagh in September 1795, the Protestants organised themselves in the first Orange lodges. Initially these were comprised of lower class Protestants, but some landowners soon became involved, as much to mitigate their potential for lawbreaking as for ideological reasons.10  Allan F. Blackstock, Double traitors? The Belfast Volunteers and yeomen, 1778–1828 (Belfast, 2000), pp 9–10.  Marianne Elliott, Partners in revolution: the United Irishmen and France (New Haven and London, 1982), p 72. 10 Hereward Senior, Orangeism in Britain and Ireland, 1795–1836 (London and Toronto, 1966), pp 7–9, 14–15; but for a discussion of earlier usage of the term by Catholic protesters in County Meath see: Martyn Powell, ‘Popular disturbances in late eighteenth-century Ireland: the origins of the Peep of Day Boys’ (forthcoming I.H.S.).



INTRODUCTION

Ireland had previously experienced rural protest and disorder. In Munster in the 1760s, protesters called Whiteboys (from their habit of disguising themselves by wearing shirts over their ordinary clothing) opposed agrarian changes like the enclosure of common land. In Ulster, ‘Oakboys’ in the 1760s and Steelboys in the 1770s protested, sometimes violently, against local taxation and changes in landlord leasing policies.11 In 1785, Rightboys in Munster mounted protests against clerical exaction which were so severe that, though the protesters actually complained about Catholic priests’ dues as well as the tithes legally demanded by clergy of the Established Church of Ireland, some Anglicans interpreted their actions as political. Bishop Woodward of Cloyne wrote a pamphlet in which a new term – the Protestant Ascendancy – was conceived to denote the religious and political status quo, endangered by a combination of liberal reform-minded Protestants, reduction of the penal laws and Rightboy violence.12 Historians, however, make a distinction between such largely apolitical agrarian groups and the Defenders, who possessed a crude political ideology – an eclectic mix of traditional Jacobitism and French revolutionary ideas.13 Moreover, the Defenders (and the Orangemen) differed structurally from the agrarian protesters, as both were organised in a federated system of lodges based on localities, with a system of communication between counties. This helped spread both organisations outward from their mid-Ulster origins, creating structures and linkages which, as regards the Defenders, the United Irishmen were quick to exploit. By the mid-1790s, ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ had transcended its rhetorical origins to become a solid collective noun for conservative loyalists who opposed further political concessions and were prepared to take a stand against the United Irishmen. In October 1796, loyalists were boosted by the government’s decision to form an Irish yeomanry force for counter-insurgency and anti-invasion duties. This was a locally based, part-time organisation paid and armed by the treasury, officered and raised by the gentry, and manned, mainly, though not exclusively, by Protestants. Though there were overlaps between the yeomanry and Orange lodges (where these existed), the United Irishmen quickly dubbed all yeomen as tools of the Protestant Ascendancy. In reality, as well as Orangemen, the new yeomanry force also included old Volunteers, constitutional reformers and even considerable numbers of Catholics in some parts.14 In the months preceding the 1798 rebellion, however, the Orange presence in the yeomanry increased dramatically and, by the early nineteenth century,

11 Eoin F. Magennis ‘A Presbyterian insurrection? Reconsidering the Hearts of Oak disturbances of July 1763’, I.H.S., xxxi, no. 122 (Nov. 1998), pp 165–87; J. S. Donnelly, ‘Hearts of Oak, Hearts of Steel’, Studia Hibernica, xxi (1981), pp 7–73. 12 James Kelly, ‘The genesis of the “Protestant Ascendancy”: the Rightboy disturbances of the 1780s and their impact upon Protestant opinion’, in Gerard O’Brien (ed.), Parliament, politics and people: essay in eighteenth-century Irish history (Dublin, 1989), pp 93–127. 13 Tom Garvan, ‘Defenders, Ribbonmen and others: underground political networks in preFamine Ireland’, in C.H.E. Philpin (ed.), Nationalism and popular protest in Ireland (Cambridge, 1987), p 231. 14 Allan F Blackstock, An ascendancy army: the Irish Yeomanry, 1796–1834 (Dublin, 1998), pp 128–34.



LOYALISM IN IRELAND 1789–1829

though never formally linked, common membership was so extensive that the term ‘Orange yeomanry’ was frequently used. After the defeat of 1798, the United Irish organisation was largely broken up, apart from a brief and ineffectual flicker in Robert Emmet’s rising of 1803, which only really affected Dublin. However, the plebeian Catholic anti-establishment anti-Protestant tendency which had characterised the Defenders, re-emerged around 1811 in ‘Ribbon’ societies. Ribbonism affected in the same areas of Ulster, north Leinster, Dublin and north Connacht which had previously been troubled by the Defenders.15 The Ribbonmen were organised in federated lodges and, though precise grievances were shaped by local conditions, they expressed a crude type of physical force nationalism in riotous clashes with Orangemen. They adopted the colour green and engaged in public display on ‘Catholic’ occasions like Saint Patrick’s Day. Agitation for Catholic emancipation (which had originally been considered as part of the 1801 Act of Union, but was dropped due to George III’s opposition) began again with petitioning in 1805. Various organisations and committees were formed to direct the emancipation campaign, but none had the impact of Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Association which was established in 1823. It developed a concentrated campaign backed by the church hierarchy and, through utilising parish structures, the mass of the populace. The supporters of Protestant ascendancy (the term ‘ultra’ Protestant came to describe such people at the political level) alleged that there were links between the physical force Ribbonmen and the constitutional political movement for emancipation. A definable physical threat to the ‘Protestant cause’, as resistance to Catholic relief became known, was a more familiar enemy than O’Connell’s innovative and effective marshalling and manipulation of public opinion. Moreover, not all Protestants opposed Catholic emancipation. Some Presbyterians supported it for ideological reasons, drawing parallels between the position of Catholics and their own historical experience of subordinate treatment by the Anglican establishment. Other Protestants supported Catholic relief politically, as a necessary component in a broader reform campaign, while still others, including some who were conservative in every other aspect of their thinking, advocated concession on the pragmatic grounds of removing the causes of disorder. The term liberal Protestants will be used in this book, but not to denote a specific political group so much as in the way that contemporaries on both sides of the Catholic question used it: as a general descriptor for various Protestant emancipationists, some of whom supported Catholic relief for basically conservative reasons, while others saw it as a means to wider reform of the political system. Conservative Protestants had long defended their ascendancy by recourse to the old paradigm of exclusive loyalty using, as Sir Richard Musgrave did in his history of the 1798 rebellion, successive native uprisings since 1641 as proof that they alone were genuine loyalists and therefore justifying their continued political dominance. This position depended on the existence of a physical Catholic threat and the maintenance of armed and militarised loyalist organisations to counter it. However no real armed insurrectionary challenge was forthcoming in the 1820s and the traditional institutions of Protestant loyalism were in decline. The yeomanry 15

Garvan, ‘Defenders, Ribbonmen and others’, p 232.



INTRODUCTION

remained in existence till 1834, but was largely moribund since the inception of county police in 1822, and the Orange Order was legally dissolved between 1825 and 1828. Belatedly, and with the emancipation campaign gathering strength, the defenders of the Protestant cause formed Brunswick Clubs in 1828 as a new political organisation to challenge O’Connell. The organisation was inaugurated in Dublin but spread nationally through subsidiary clubs established to rally all classes and creeds of Protestants for petitioning purposes. The network of clubs developed such a sophisticated and extensive organisation with their own newspaper and reading rooms that this phenomenon can be usefully described as Brunswickism. In 1828 the terms loyalism and Brunswickism were virtually synonymous in Ireland, where they denoted opposition to O’Connell and the Catholic Association; however the former term had developed different connotations since the late eighteenth century. In 1799 loyalism was broadly understood in Britain and Ireland as part of the reaction to the dangers from revolutionary France and domestic radicals and was linked to war patriotism. On the British mainland, loyalism had emerged in several distinct stages during 1792. The first followed the publication of part two of Paine’s Rights of Man which ominously predicted the universal abolition of monarchy and aristocracy. Previous governmental complacency gave way to deepening concern about domestic radicalism.16 The government issued a royal proclamation in May asking loyal subjects to oppose radicalism and magistrates to prosecute the producers of seditious publications. Loyalist meetings were held in response, some organised by the ministry, some possibly by conservative Whigs. Addresses supporting the king and constitution were published extensively in the provincial newspaper press, to inform ‘Englishmen what other Englishmen were thinking’.17 In November, as war loomed, loyalism took a more organised and active form. On 20 November, John Reeves, ex-chief justice of Newfoundland, organised a meeting at London’s Crown and Anchor tavern to inaugurate the Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Levellers and Republicans. This example, as Reeves intended, was imitated extensively during the winter of 1792–3, with many loyal associations formed throughout the country embracing a wide social membership.18 Though loyalism as a counter-revolutionary phenomenon was not entirely new – the American colonists who opposed their revolutionary brethren were ‘loyalists’ – nonetheless its development and ubiquity in the 1790s was unprecedented.19 Indeed, so much was it a product of its time that ‘loyalist’ was one of several words which the London Corresponding Society tried to establish the precise meaning of

16 17

John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt (3 vols, London, 1969–83), ii, 3, 114. Robert Dozier, For King, constitution and country: the English loyalists and the French Revolution (Lexington, 1983), p 25. 18 H. T. Dickinson, ‘Popular loyalism in Britain in the 1790’, in Eckhart Hellmuth (ed.), The transformation of political culture in England and Germany in the late eighteenth century (Oxford, 1990), pp 516–19. 19 Jennifer Mori, William Pitt and the French Revolution, 1785–1795 (Edinburgh, 1997), p 190; Janice Potter, The liberty we seek: loyalist ideology in colonial New York and Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1983).



LOYALISM IN IRELAND 1789–1829

in 1794. Yet, until recently, British and Irish historians have been content with simplistic and, in the Irish case, anachronistic interpretations of loyalism. Before the 1980s, the British historiographical focus on political responses to the French Revolution was not on loyalism or conservatism but was firmly fixed in the opposite direction. Radicalism, it was believed, attracted such popular support and possessed such strength that Britain’s escape from revolution could only be attributed to state repression, and the failure to reform until 1832 laid at the door of reactionary Toryism. Such Whiggish views prevailed in the nineteenth century and persisted into the twentieth to merge with those of historians of labour and early trade unionism. In the 1960s, the theme of struggle and repression fitted well into the Marxist ‘history from below’ approach, epitomised by Edward Thompson’s work.21 During the Thatcher years, however, the focus shifted from radicalism and state repression to conservatism and popular loyalism. In revisions of the old orthodoxies and their shibboleths about class-consciousness the interpretative pendulum swung lustily in the opposite direction. Loyalism’s strength and appeal, it was now argued, reflected an instinctive indigenous patriotism which proved naturally resistant to imported revolutionary doctrines, and only required to be stimulated and given the means of articulation and organisation.22 Robert Dozier considered that the May 1792 declarations epitomised this instinctive English loyalty as for loyalists, unlike their revolutionary opponents, ‘the expressions necessary to explain the feelings which animated their support of the nation had not yet been invented’.23 The widespread nature of the support for loyalism helped the successful defence of the status quo. Such assessments about the popularity of loyalism led some to further question conventional views of Pitt’s ‘terror’. H. T. Dickinson argued that historians ‘sympathetic to the radical cause’ had seized on evidence of repression, ‘to exaggerate the popularity of reforming ideas and to play down the strength of loyalism among all sections of the community and in all parts of the country’. While acknowledging that ‘the government undoubtedly resorted to statuary repression, official harassment and judicial persecution’, Dickinson maintained that ‘the deep-rooted and inherent loyalty of the British people made it very unlikely that the radicals could have persuaded significant numbers of them to join their cause, still less to engage in revolutionary activity’.24 Rather than the Marxist interpretation, of radicalism smothered by official repression, a consensus was reached that loyalism was genuinely popular and that its conservative ideology had instinctive appeal to Britons of all social classes, an engagement which Robert Hole traced though popular tracts, cartoons and ballads.25 20

20 John Barrell, Imagining the King’s death: figurative treason, fantasies of regicide, 1793–96 (Oxford, 2000), pp 1–2. 21 E. P. Thompson, The making of the English working class (Harmondsworth, 1968), pp 916–17; David Eastwood, ‘E. P. Thompson, Britain and the French Revolution’, History Workshop Journal, 39 (Spring 1995), pp 81–2. 22 David Eastwood, ‘Patriotism and the English state’, in Mark Philp (ed.), The French Revolution and popular politics (Cambridge, 1991), p 146. 23 Dozier, English loyalists, p 25. 24 H. T. Dickinson, ‘Popular Loyalism in Britain in the 1790s’, pp 532–3. 25 Robert Hole, ‘British counter-revolutionary propaganda in the 1790s’, in Colin Jones (ed.),



INTRODUCTION

While it is generally accepted that the 1770–1830 period saw older patterns of allegiance transformed and heralded a ‘substantially different’ ideological context for political action, the question remains open about whether the new radical and loyalist doctrines drew on indigenous roots or were formed in reaction to the French Revolution.26 Linda Colley concluded that the linkage of new patriotic ideas to Empire and traditional English characteristics of Francophobia and Anglican Protestantism and a new royalism that venerated George III led to the invention of British nation. War with France and its consequent mobilisation and militarization was the crucible that transformed traditional anti-Catholicism into detestation of the revolutionary ‘Other’. This newly forged British identity was ‘superimposed’ onto much older English, Scots and Welsh loyalties, but excluded Ireland, which Colley represented in Shavian terms as ‘that other island across the Irish Sea’. Ireland was predominantly Catholic and ‘both its Catholic and its Protestant dissidents traditionally looked to France for aid.’27 Recently the new consensus about loyalism’s strength, cohesion and significance in the formation of national identity has itself been qualified and challenged. English loyalism is now depicted more problematically as multi-faceted and fluid instead of ingrained and customary and its relationship with patriotism is seen as complex and overlapping rather than coeval and synonymous. Initial views of loyalism, it is now contended, oversimplify loyalist ideology and underestimate its ambiguities. This is something which Pitt’s government did not do, utilising, according to Jennifer Mori, the flexibility within patriotic discourse to recruit a ‘wide spectrum of contemporary opinion to its ranks’.28 Conservative appropriation of patriotic discourse in the 1790s is now shown as only partially successful and the language of patriotism to have been contested well into the nineteenth century. By the same token, loyalism was neither simple, nor simplistic nor automatically deferential. Rather than being a ‘submissive and inflexible doctrine … loyalism was an empowering movement that gave its followers a public presence and political voice’ to ‘criticize the polity they sought to defend’.29 Amanda Goodrich has argued persuasively for the multi-faceted nature of English loyalism. Its component strands ran in parallel in opposition to revolutionary ideas, but were sufficiently separate to distinguish the conventional interpretation of loyalism as conservative defence of church and king and include a Whiggish model of ‘commercial loyalism’ which emphasised Empire and industrial prosperity. The aristocratic Whig foundations give this version of loyalism, like its Anglican counterpart, an ancien regime background; however, the promoters of ‘commercial loyalism’ presented it as a politically progressive development of Whig social theory, transcending its aristocratic origins and signifying a new more open model of society.30 Britain and revolutionary France: conflict, subversion and propaganda (Exeter Studies in History, no. 5, Exeter, 1983), pp 53–69. 26 Philp, French Revolution and British popular politics, pp 12–13. 27 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven and London, 1992), pp 5–8, 232, 370. 28 Eastwood, ‘Patriotism and the English state’, p 147; Jennifer Mori, ‘Languages of loyalism: patriotism, nationhood and the state in the 1790s’, E.H.R., cxviii 475 (Feb. 2003), pp 33, 57. 29 Mori, ‘Languages of loyalism’, p 33. 30 Amamda Goodrich, Debating England’s aristocracy in the 1790s (Trowbridge, Wilts., and



LOYALISM IN IRELAND 1789–1829

Thus English loyalism emerges as less monolithic, more motivationally complex and flexible. Far from being an instinctive response, the counter-­revolutionary loyalism of 1792–3 was conditional and transitional before the Napoleonic invasion scares galvanised national unity. So much so that movement between loyalism and radicalism was not inconceivable: some radicals became loyalists and some loyalists, as in the high-profile cases of William Cobbett and ‘Orator’ Hunt, became radicals.31 The revisionist ‘over-emphasis on the intellectual vigour of conservative doctrine and the natural loyalty of the British people’ has been challenged by Mark Philp, who has concentrated on that paradigmatic loyalist institution, Reeves’ Association for the Preservation of Property against Republicans and Levellers. Analysis of the rhetorical strategies employed by Reeves’ correspondents shows that the original intention for elite loyal associations was necessarily modified meaning that ‘loyalism found itself attempting to create a vulgar conservatism’. Rather than simply reproduce Burke’s views on the poor as an ideally passive and submissive element in a properly ordered society, loyalist pamphleteers saw the need to actively educate the lower orders. This unravelling of the strands of early institutional loyalism has deepened our understanding about subtle but important differences in the motivational patterning of its components and in its wider significance. If plebeian passivity and obedience could no longer be assumed, then elite intervention actually had the unintended effect of widening the boundaries of the political nation. Philp also recognises that the motivation in loyalist rhetoric altered according to the precise contemporary context. The pre-war loyalism of 1792 and wartime invasion-scare patriotism may be linked ideologically, but they are also different responses to different stimuli, and thus may have greater or lesser degrees of adherence and commitment. Moreover the presence amongst the ranks of loyalist writers of evangelicals like Hannah More, who hated violent loyalism like gentry-sponsored Paine-burnings, suggests that moral reform of the elite as well as the lower orders was part of their motivation as well as simply inculcating loyalty.32 More produced the Cheap Repository Tracts and Village Politics, didactic anti-revolutionary publications, written in a simple and accessible vernacular style and distributed extensively. The state’s role in sponsoring loyalism continues to be debated, especially regarding the way in which the emergence of English loyalism affected the balance of power between governors and the governed. It has long been recognised that loyalism and the subsequent development of the Volunteer movement had important political ramifications. In the 1950s J. R. Western argued that it brought change from elite to mass-based forms of political activity, by creating a ministerial ‘party of order’.33 Robert Dozier saw loyalism as a reaction to radicalism rather than an official creation: government sometimes led but at other times followed the loyalists. He saw this symbiotic process as leading to a consensus between the ministry and the popuRochester, NY, 2005) p 167. 31 Mark Philp, ‘Vulgar conservatism, 1792–3’, E.H.R., cx, 110 (Feb. 1995), p 68; John Belcham, Orator Hunt: Henry Hunt and English working-class radicalism (Oxford, 1985), p 20. 32 Philp, ‘Vulgar conservatism’, pp 43–5. 33 Austin Mitchell, ‘The association movement’, 57; J. R. Western, ‘The Volunteer movement as an anti-revolutionary force, 1793–1801’, E.H.R., lxxi, no. cclxxxi (1956), pp 603–14.

10

INTRODUCTION

lace, but David Eastwood argues that this link cannot be assumed, that the ‘delicate and frequently fragile’ relationship between loyalist activity and the government must always be scrutinised.34 Eastwood sees the ‘participatory patriotism’ in loyal associations, volunteer companies or the Cheap Repository enterprise as politically dynamic, constituting ‘a form of self-enfranchisement’ and ‘a process of empowerment which forced the English state to abandon popular political quietism’ as it ‘redefined the relationship between patrician and plebeian political activism’.35 John Reeves’ denial of a government role in promoting loyal associations continues to exercise historians. Donald Ginter was convinced that Reeves had Pitt’s ‘explicit’ approval; E. C. Black believed the initiative was co-ordinated in advance with the ministry, but Dozier thought it virtually impossible that an official like Reeves could have proceeded without governmental consultation. John Ehrman, on the other hand, deemed it unlikely that Pitt was consulted as he would instinctively have wanted government to keep its distance.36 Recently Michael Duffy and Jennifer Mori have modified the case for governmental involvement. Using a hitherto unknown letter from Pitt to Dundas, Duffy has argued that, though the ministry was not involved in the first advertisement of Reeves’ association, they soon reacted with ‘speed and vigour’ to turn the initiative to their advantage. Pitt met Reeves just after the Crown and Anchor meeting of November 1792 and agreed to a second set of resolutions. These bore a distinct ministerial imprimatur by following the model of local voluntary prosecution associations of the 1770s and 1780s and not that of the armed associations established, for example, during the 1780 Gordon riots. The advantage of the former was that they were unarmed and under the total control of magistrates, whereas the privately organised and armed variety were more independent. Pitt, doubtless remembering the Irish Volunteers of 1782, felt this type was too dangerous and potentially difficult to control in the current political climate. Pitt and Grenville were besieged by proposals for armed associations and had somewhat reticently toyed with the idea of initiating voluntary supplementary companies for county militias to overcome the control problem but jumped at the opportunity Reeves gave them. Mori agrees that the government was uninvolved in the London genesis of Reeves’ associations but actively promoted their subsequent national spread, treading a fine line between the need to create the impression of popular support for the ministry but, at the same time, disavowing open sponsorship. Mori considers that this ministerial sensitivity adds to the revisionist case about governmental repression by showing that the ministry had instinctively Whiggish reservations about the use of naked state power and certainly entertained no desire to sanction Church and King fanatics.37 Recently Frank O’Gorman has further modified the once-dominant interpretation of loyalism as simply an elite-engineered socially 34 35 36

Eastwood, ‘Patriotism and the English state’, pp 147–8. Eastwood, ‘E. P. Thompson, Britain and the French Revolution’, p 83. Donald Ginter, ‘The loyalist association movement of 1792 and British public opinion’, Historical Journal, ix (1966) p 179; E. C. Black, The Association (Harvard, 1963), p 237; Dozier, King, constitution and country, p 58; Ehrman, The younger Pitt, ii, 231. 37 Michael Duffy, ‘William Pitt and the origins and the loyalist association movement of 1792’, The Historical Journal, 39, 4 (1996), pp 944–7, 953–5; Mori, ‘The November crisis of 1792’, Historical Research, 69, 170 (Oct. 1996) pp 294–5.

11

LOYALISM IN IRELAND 1789–1829

coercive, fear-driven reaction to domestic radicalism and French revolutionary influences. He traces continuities between the loyalism of the French revolutionary wars and earlier responses to Jacobite challenges to the Hanoverian order which made loyalism a familiar phenomenon which anticipated the later version. O’Gorman also refutes the idea of any vertical power structures within English loyalism, which he sees as appealing to a wide social constituency, encompassing the middling orders as well as the more plebeian levels of society.38 Cumulatively these debates have had the effect of placing loyalism at the centre of enquiries about the nature of elite and popular politics during the revolutionary period. But perhaps the broadest context for the emergence of loyalism is the increased manpower mobilisation of many European states and the constitutional implications for similar strategies in Britain. Though the military manpower requirements of states had been rising throughout the eighteenth century, the fact that the French Revolution famously made ‘every citizen … a soldier and every soldier a citizen’ meant that the prospect of ideologically underpinned mass allegiance however qualified, was unprecedented.39 The governance of eighteenth-century Britain was characterised by the lack of central interference in the localities and any implicit alteration in the balance between the central authority and local government had constitutional ramifications. Disorders like food riots and even major political upheavals like the 1791 Birmingham ‘Church and King’ disturbances, were absorbed by a flexible governing system: substantive power was delegated to the localities and exercised by the propertied gentry as magistrates. This system was enshrined in the constitution established in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which guarded traditional liberties against arbitrary power. Local government is considered to have played ‘at least as important a role’ in the loyal association movement of 1792–3.40 An ingrained suspicion remained of any increase in state force and, as one military historian reminds us, ‘a standing civil police force was a concept even more obnoxious than that of a standing army’.41 Even allowing for the scope for exercising active patriotism in loyal associations, in volunteering, in subscribing to patriotic funds in the 1790s, and paying the income tax, notions that loyalism provided an accession of power to central government have lost currency. Notwithstanding the existence of many loyalist propaganda organs, from the press to the pulpit, the ‘illusion of a united kingdom’ thus created, was a myth. In reality, loyalism and patriotism were not necessarily amenable to government control and direction. The ‘national defence patriotism’ John Cookson has identified as the motivational force behind volunteer corps, was more reflective of regional concerns. This has important implications for our understanding of national identity formation. Cookson sees voluntary loyal societies and amateur military organisations as the agency whereby the urban middle class asserted and 38 O’Gorman, Francis, ‘English loyalism revisited’, in Allan F. Blackstock and Eoin F. Magennis (eds), Politics and political culture in Britiain and Ireland (forthcoming). 39 Brigadier-General J. F. C. Fuller, The conduct of war, 1789–1961 (London, 1972), pp 15–25; John Gooch, Armies in Europe (London, Boston and Henley, 1980) pp 1–2; Philip Dwyer (ed.), The Rise of Prussia, 1700–1800 (Harlow, Essex, 2000) p 211. 40 Eastwood, ‘Patriotism and the English state’, p 155. 41 J. A. Houlding, Fit for service: the training of the British army, 1715–95 (Oxford, 1981), p 61.

12

INTRODUCTION

exercised its influence within an aristocratic polity and moulded its own identity, as the volunteers were ‘the pre-eminent town making force’. They articulated patriotic sentiments in localist civic or county terms, a ‘sub-national’ patriotism which complemented the de-centralised traditions of the polity.42 The links between early loyalism in 1792 and 1793 and the militarised patriotism of the amateur military forces, the yeomanry and Volunteers, from 1794 are also vigorously debated. Some say there were strong links and see the Volunteer movement as the final appearance of the loyalists, that invasion fears gradually transformed loyalism into patriotism. Others hold that loyalism was primarily political and Volunteering more specifically military and that the connections between the two were limited and accidental.43 Eastwood saw volunteering and membership of loyal associations as two related but organisational and functionally different manifestations of voluntary endeavour. Volunteer corps had advantages over loyal associations in that they mobilised a broader social constituency and, being organised for the duration of the war, were a less transient organisational form capable of a more active defence role. Cookson has argued that there were both functional and ideological differences in that ‘national defence patriotism’ was a more active and participant form of loyalism which developed a significantly different rhetoric which conceptualised the threat of invasion in personal terms rather than the generalised danger from ‘republicans and levellers’.44 These developments in the British historiography beg vital questions for Irish loyalism; questions which have barely begun to be formulated, let alone addressed. If loyalism and conservatism are a growth area in British historical scholarship, the same cannot be said of its Irish counterpart.45 Here loyalism and conservatism are still the poor relatives of radicalism and nationalism, both in the 1790s and in the first post-union decades. This is a particularly glaring omission as this transitional period was one in which political identities were re-formulated and re-configured and where the origins of modern unionism and nationalism may be sought. As though reversing the adage that history is written by the victors, the bi-centenary of the 1798 rebellion generated far more studies of radicals and revolutionaries than of the victorious loyalists. Indeed, the weight of new scholarship in the crucial 1790s has been decidedly apportioned towards popular movements who sought radical and revolutionary change, like the United Irishmen and Defenders. Much of this is ‘post-revisionism’, which seeks to ‘reclaim the rebellion’ from ‘revisionists’. These, reacting against Catholic ‘nationalist’ historians who portrayed 1798 as a stage in the independence struggle, interpreted the southern rising as a spontaneous reaction of Catholic peasants motivated by sectarian or agrarian issues. Post-revisionists 42 Mori, ‘Languages of loyalism’, p 55; John Cookson, ‘The English volunteer movement of the French wars, 1793–1815: some contexts’, Historical Journal, 32, 4 (1989), pp 867–91; John Cookson, The British armed nation, 1793–1815 (Oxford, 1997), pp 10, 236, 253; Eastwood, ‘Patriotism and the English state’, pp 158–9. 43 Austin Gee, ‘The British Volunteer movement, 1793–1807’ (unpublished D. Phil. thesis, Oxford, 1989), vi. 44 Eastwood, ‘Patriotism and the English state’, p 158; Cookson, British armed nation, pp 212–13. 45 Jacqueline Hill, ‘Convergence and conflict in eighteenth-century Ireland’, The Historical Journal, 44, 4 (2001) p 1060.

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LOYALISM IN IRELAND 1789–1829

see the United Irish ‘project’ as denominationally inclusive (‘non-sectarian’ is the phrase of choice) and as having clear political aims rather than being a spontaneous outburst. Irish loyalism tends to be drawn into such accounts as the well-spring of the sectarianism which the government used to divide and conquer the inclusive United Irish project. If British history is no longer haunted by Thompson’s ‘peerrespecting, flag-saluting, foreigner-hating’ plebeian loyalist, his gun-toting, Orangesash-bedecked, anti-Catholic Irish counterpart remains a solid, ominous presence waiting in the wings to be wheeled on as a reactionary ogre, one whose fixed stare back into the dark recesses of the past contrasts with the progressive and enlightened story of Irish radicalism and nationalism. This neo-Whiggery, with its nods and winks towards the present, flourished during 1998, helped by the virtual coincidence of the main bi-centenary celebrations with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. The commemoration of the rising also gave more opportunities to recall Ireland’s links with France. The contrast between the Euro-centred, economically booming Republic of Ireland and post-Troubles Northern Ireland invited more teleological readings of contemporary Ulster loyalism. As Wexford remembered the 1798 rebellion and the historical French connection by hosting a stage of the Tour De France, County Armagh descended into another cycle of Drumcree violence.46 Alongside reductionist views of Irish loyalism as ‘the other side in 1798’ lies another conceptual problem. The United Irishmen are understood in terms of popular politics, with audible echoes of E. P. Thompson’s ‘history from below’ approach in method if not ideological objective. However, at the same time, leading post-revisionists like Louis Cullen and Kevin Whelan assume a high political ‘top down’ orientation to explain the mobilisation of loyalism.47 This underestimates the importance of loyalism’s popular dimension. Such asymmetry is puzzling when studies of British loyalism emphasise the importance of the plebeian dimension. Indeed there is a sense from the contemporary literature that, compared to the United Irishmens’ mass support, loyalism was relatively unpopular in Ireland. Yet verifiable membership of its two major institutional manifestations, the yeomanry and Orange Order, was consistently in the tens of thousands; indeed the former peaked in 1803 at well over 80,000 men.48 This combination of historiographical neglect and vicarious coverage of Irish loyalism through studies of revolutionaries suggests an implicit reluctance to consider loyalism as a legitimate topic of study in its own right, in its broad contemporary context and with equal historical validity to radicalism. As Petri Mirala’s recent study on Ulster freemasonry shows, assumptions about the uniformly close connection between masonry and United Irish radicalism simply disintegrate under scrutiny. Masonic sources reveal that, in the pivotal 1792– 93 period – the very period in which English loyalism emerged – Ulster masons were split between loyalist and radical lodges, some with United Irish connections, others more liberal and reformist. Moreover loose party affiliation and the existence of strong local rather than national connections, particularly at the plebeian 46 Ian McBride, ‘Reclaiming the rebellion: 1789 in 1998’, I.H.S., xxxi, 123 (May 1998), pp 395– 410; Kevin Whelan, The Tree of Liberty (Cork, 1996). 47 McBride, ‘Reclaiming the rebellion’, p 407. 48 Blackstock, Ascendancy army, p 115.

14

INTRODUCTION

and ­unofficial ‘hedgemason’ level, meant that lower-class loyalists adopted fraternal masonic organisational structures before the Orange Order was formed in 1795.49 For the Orange Order itself, apart from narratives suffused with hagiography or demonology, or popular accounts capitalising on Orangeism’s recent newsworthiness, at the time of writing the only full academic treatment of its political and social history remains Hereward Senior’s 1966 account.50 Militarised Irish loyalism has been addressed in my own work on the Irish Yeomanry and the more specialised militarised aspect of Orangeism has received some attention in the journal literature, but more is required.51 The question of early Orangeism, because of alleged connections with the Peep O’Day Boys, generated contemporary polemics and continues to attract scholarly study.52 Conservative political ideology has received timely attention, but the focus necessarily falls more on the educated elite whose views appear in pamphlets, rather than on those of the plebeians.53 Recently there have been attempts to understand Irish loyalism in its counter-revolutionary context. In a short study of the origins of the Orange Order, Jim Smyth notes the failure of Irish historians to respond to the ‘booming cottage industry’ on popular British loyalism, recognises the populist element in Irish loyalism and the gentry-plebeian interplay within Orangeism, which he represents not so much as sectarianism as an instrument of class rule by an elite maintaining control of their turbulent tenants: ‘The men of property hijacked the movement in order to contain it.’54 Yet, even this refreshing perspective fails to consider the power of popular loyalism and the strategies and compromises necessary for elite intervention. Smyth has edited a collection of essays entitled Revolution, Counter-Revolution and Union, which, although it sets out to deal with all aspects of the equation, nevertheless contains only three of twelve essays with a primarily loyalist theme, and none dealing with the popular dimension.55 By and large, the study of Irish loyalism remains in its infancy compared to its crosschannel counterpart, despite the fact that the issues raised in the British historiog-

49 Petri Mirala, ‘Freemasonry, conservatism and loyalism in Ulster, 1792–9’, in Raymond Gillespie (ed.), The re-making of modern Ireland, 1750–1950 (Dublin, 2004), pp 14–15, 29–30, 43–4. 50 H. W. Cleary, History of the Orange Society (London, 1899); R. M. Sibbett, Orangeism in Ireland and throughout the Empire (2 vols, Belfast, 1914–15); Hereward Senior, Orangeism in Britain and Ireland, 1795–1836 (London and Toronto, 1966); Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland, The Formation of the Orange Order,1795–98: the edited papers of Col. William Blacker and Col. R. H. Wallace (Belfast, 1994); Kevin Haddick-Flynn, Orangeism: the making of a tradition (Dublin, 1999). 51 David Fitzpatrick, ‘Orangeism and Irish military history, 1795–1920’, The Irish Sword, xxii, 89 (Summer 2001), pp 268–280; Allan F. Blackstock, ‘A dangerous species of ally: Orangeism and the Irish Yeomanry’, I.H.S., xxx, 119 (May 1997), pp 393–405; idem, Ascendancy army; idem., Double traitors? 52 D. W. Miller, ‘The origins of the Orange Order in County Armagh’, in A. J. Hughes and William Nolan (eds), Armagh history and society (Dublin, 2001); Jim Smyth, ‘The men of no popery: the origins of the Orange Order’, History Ireland, vol. 3 no. 3 (Autumn 1995), pp 48–53. 53 James Kelly, ‘Conservative Protestant political thought in late-eighteenth century Ireland’; S. J. Connolly, ‘The Glorious Revolution in Irish Protestant political thinking’, in S. J. Connolly (ed.), Political ideas in eighteenth century Ireland (Dublin, 2000). 54 Jim Smyth, ‘The men of no popery: the origins of the Orange Order’, pp 48–53. 55 Jim Smyth (ed.), Revolution, counter-revolution and union: Ireland in the 1790s (Cambridge, 2000).

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LOYALISM IN IRELAND 1789–1829

raphy are highly relevant for Ireland, both for loyalism itself and indeed for the wider understanding of key political themes. Apart from the paramount issue of tackling a gaping hole in Irish historiography for this vital formative period, this book will address other important historical questions about loyalism in Ireland. Research on English loyalism centres on three broad themes: its organisational structure, the ideological dimension, and the political ramifications. This has opened up debates which have not found much resonance in Ireland, a peculiar omission when it is considered how readily historians of Irish radicalism have adopted and adapted the British Marxist approach. Yet 1792 and 1793 saw significant loyalist organisational activity in Ireland, at the same time as Reeves’ loyal association movement was beginning in England. Dickinson has shown that Reeves’ organisation transcended its English base more extensively than previously thought, particularly in Scotland, despite its strong radical presence and less homogeneously Anglican populace, which begs serious questions of comparison with Ireland and connections between Irish and British loyalism. Scholars like Philp now see Reeves’ project as having a necessarily wide social and political appeal, and as being characterised by attraction and persuasion rather than imposition and expectation. If this is so, and the impulse was not confined to one of George III’s kingdoms, then Irish loyalism must be seen in its wider counter-revolutionary context rather than simply as a predictable ascendancy reflex. Yet Reeves’ loyal associations were neither the first nor the only manifestation of loyalism, and local responses could reflect older and different patterns of plebeian loyalist behaviour. Studies of popular loyalism in Manchester show a strong connection between local responses to Reeves and a long-standing tradition of violent antiDissenter ‘Church and King’ sentiment encouraged by the local Tory elite. This stretched back to the 1690s and on into the Reevesite Bull’s Head Association of 1793 and further forward to the Volunteer corps of 1798. Arguably, in its xenophobic and anti-Catholic character, the loyalist impulse extended still further back to the parish associations, which armed themselves during the Armada threat. The linkage between tradition and changing organisational structures suggests that a dynamic relationship between past and present characterised successive manifestations of loyalism.56 Protestant Ireland had its own traditions of loyalty and self-defence against indigenous Catholics and foreign invaders, traditions which had militarised and ceremonial aspects, organisational structures and elite and popular dimensions. Was the loyalism of the 1790s merely the most recent manifestation of long-standing Protestant fear of Irish Catholics? In this book I will trace the interaction of old and new and examine how, in the 1790s, different strands of loyalism, with distinctive emphases on past and present, emerged amongst Anglicans, Presbyterians and Catholics. If Irish loyalism fits in the context of a broad counter-revolutionary movement comprehending Catholic royalists in La Vendee, anti-republican Dutch ‘loyalists’ (some of whom sought refuge in Britain) and Reeves’ loyal associations, how did Pitt’s ‘Brethren of Britons’ become Scott’s neo-Cromwellian fanatics? Such questions have wider implications for our understanding of identity forma56 Alan Booth, ‘Popular loyalism and public violence in the north-west of England, 1790–1800’, Social History, viii, no. 3, 1983, pp 295–313.

16

INTRODUCTION

tion. ‘Britishness’ has become a badge of belonging for loyalists and unionists in today’s Northern Ireland, but can we trace its emergence historically and locate it in the post-Union period? For Linda Colley, the building blocks of a British identity were Protestantism, patriotism and military mobilisation, all components available to Irish loyalists. What implications for identities had these features in ‘that other island’, particularly after Union had made Irish men and women formally the ‘brethren of Britons’?57 The ideological underpinning of political identity and allegiance and particularly the rhetorical language of Irish loyalism and patriotism is therefore a vital area which requires rigorous analysis, especially as interpretations of the 1688 constitutional settlement had, by the 1780s, been appropriated by political patriots in the Volunteer movement. The struggle to control the language and meaning of loyalty and its symbolic manifestations will be a constant theme throughout this book, ranging from the ‘cultural loyalism’ which aimed to resurrect Williamite traditions of the 1690s during the 1790s to the propaganda of the Brunswick clubs in the late 1820s. The study of loyalism is used as a prism through which to view the relative importance and degree of overlap between distinctive local, regional and denominational identities and wider affiliations. Alongside discussion on Protestants’ views of themselves, the book will also examine the plebeian mentalité to assess how they saw the world around them and the role of loyalism in shaping that world-view. A third overarching theme concerns the political implications of Irish loyalism. The concept of loyalism as politically empowerment for the non-elite will be tested against the evidence to assess precisely how participation in various loyal institutions impacted politically on the balance of power between elite and plebeian. Rather than emerging as deferential tools of the Protestant Ascendancy, on the one hand, or uncontrollable backwoods bigots on the other, the relationship between elite and plebeian Irish loyalists is shown to have been frequently characterised by careful and delicate negotiation and compromise and, inevitably, mutual manipulation. The availability of various loyalist organisations and the importance bestowed upon them by the elite, saw political power tilt from a vertical to a more horizontal orientation, a process which contributed to the empowerment of the lower and middle classes. This book will examine some ways in which this frequently pragmatic transaction took place. The mechanisms and media by which power was negotiated, accessed and directed included a substantive loyalist literature of pamphlets, periodicals, newspapers, sermons, ballads and broadsheets. Analysis of loyalist parading and battle commemoration shows how the ceremonial and ritual elements could function politically not only in a local and sometimes electoral sense, but also at a macro level to send signals between central executive and the localities. If contemporary British loyalism was, as recent research tends to confirm, transactional as well as transitional in political terms, we must seriously question whether the Irish gentry did, as nationalist historiography accepts, cynically ‘hijack’ popular loyalism. By extension, the backdrop of European states increasing control over subjects geographically and socially remote from the centre of power gives a context to assess governmental sponsorship of loyalism, from control of the yeomanry to offi57

Linda Colley, Britons (New Haven and London, 1992), p 370.

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LOYALISM IN IRELAND 1789–1829

cial commemoration, to see if loyalism facilitated central encroachment or provided a vehicle for resistance. Though public expression of loyalty through the yeomanry and Orange Order became increasingly monopolised by Protestants from 1798, objectively loyalism was not the political property of any single religious group throughout the period covered by this book. The struggle for emancipation gained ground in 1805 and, with the obstacle of the Irish parliament removed by the Act of Union, supporters and opponents of Catholic relief sought to appropriate the expression of loyalty, both physically in the public arena and in its literary and rhetorical dimensions. During the Napoleonic wars, as Catholic enlistment in the British forces increased, there were several competing versions of loyalism and patriotism. The politics of loyalty is a major theme running through the British historiography and is one that raises relevant questions for Ireland by pointing straight at the heart of complacent and anachronistic assumptions. This book traces the evolution of this contest for loyalty and the stages by which it became largely, if never totally, monopolised by the ascendancy ‘Orange’ political interest. The continuing existence of Protestant loyalism, preserved institutionally in popular literature, memory and ceremonial, introduced a duality into conservative politics often expressed in a series of opposed configurations: elite-plebeian, roughrespectable and central-local. In reality the potential friction in these polarities was often absorbed internally within the structures of secular Protestant politics and by more active religious commitment in the early nineteenth century. Yet when the external threat mutated from a military and physical one to Daniel O’Connell’s innovatory mass political agitation in the 1820s, how well did traditional loyalism serve Ascendancy politics? Did loyalism’s strong local orientation impede its ability to respond to a national issue once the College Green parliament, the focus of the ‘Protestant nationalism’ of the eighteenth century, was removed? What impact had the Protestant evangelical impulse on secular loyalist politics? This book is written as an analytical narrative divided into three thematic sections with a broad chronological orientation. It is predominantly primary-source based and comprehends a wide variety of archival papers, both official and private correspondence and makes extensive use of printed material for popular consumption, such as newspaper, ballads and poetry, journals, diaries, sermons and pamphlets. My approach is decidedly the opposite of those who have either assessed loyalism as a side-show to radicalism and nationalism or allowed the immediacy of modern loyalism to influence enquiries into the past. Rather than adopt either of these starting points, the methodological approach will be to use the source material to build up a detailed contemporary context for every area of enquiry. It is only when Irish loyalism is understood in the lights of its time that its future implications can be considered. Though many of the most extensive archival materials relate to loyalism in the historic nine counties of Ulster, the coverage strives to address the phenomenon throughout the island of Ireland as well as making comparisons with Britain when relevant. The chapters in the first section entitled ‘Loyalism Defined’ consider first the prehistory of the counter-revolutionary loyalism of the 1790s. Chapter two ‘Brethren of Britons?’ tackles comparisons with British loyalism in the formative early 1790s. 18

INTRODUCTION

Chapters three and four examine the militarisation, mobilisation and Protestant monopolisation of Irish loyalism between 1796 and 1805. The second section ‘Loyalism in Limbo’ contains two chapters. Chapter five ‘Ceremonial Pageantry’ assesses loyalist parades and rituals between 1805, when Trafalgar removed the immediate invasion threat, and the end of the wars in 1815. This period saw the decline of the military and manpower needs on which Protestant loyalism thrived, but also the emergence of an increasingly strident campaign for emancipation. The loyalist response is examined against the ambiguities of Sir Robert Peel’s chief-secretaryship, in which his anti-Catholic politics were balanced by a reforming attitude to law and order which baulked at traditional Orange and loyalist display and ritual. Chapter six, ‘The First Dissolution and the Second Reformation’, examines loyalism’s failure to adapt to the realities of post-Union politics culminating in the dissolution of the Orange Order in 1825. The extent to which evangelical religion emerged as an alternative to secular Protestant politics is also addressed. The third and final section ‘Loyalism, Protestantism and Popular Politics’ examines how loyalism found a new focus which combined innovatory and traditional elements. It assesses the role of traditional loyalism in the doomed struggle with O’Connell’s Catholic Association leading to the formation of the Brunswick Constitutional Clubs in 1828. By analysing Protestant petitioning nationally and using local case studies in the contemporary (and modern) loyalist stronghold of Portadown, this closing section considers the extent to which Brunswick clubs laid the structural and ideological foundations for the emergence of Irish conservatism as an organised political entity in the 1830s. It therefore looks back to Irish loyalism’s eighteenth-century origins and forward to the emergence of unionism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

19

Section 1 LOYALISM DEFINED

1

Antecedents Loyalty and disaffection in Ireland before 1789

In Ireland, as in Britain, disloyalty was usually defined negatively by legal prescriptions for treason, which first received statutory definition in 1352 as the commission of treasonable acts against the king rather than the state or the government. This mediaeval statute applied in Ireland as sister kingdom under the same monarch. Treason has been described as the Janus face of allegiance, sovereignty and identity. Yet in eighteenth-century Ireland such conceptual polarities were problematic as the loyalties they represented were shifting, making Proteus a better metaphor for the resultant complexities. This situation had historical roots: the Protestant Reformation’s failure ensured that the native populace and some ‘Old English’ aristocrats remained Catholic, yet technically owed allegiance to a Protestant monarch as head of the established church. The seventeenth-century plantations further complicated matters and introduced more ambiguities. Influxes of English and Scottish Protestants were followed by an Irish Catholic rising and the extension of the war between Charles I and parliament. During this period aristocratic Catholics of both Anglo-Norman and native Irish ancestry fought as loyalists for the king, while many of the Scottish settlers in Ulster supported parliament and branded their opponents rebels. Already inclined towards the non-hierarchical Presbyterianism form of church government, and uneasy within the established Church of Ireland, when the English parliament sent General Munroe’s Scottish army to Ireland, the settlers seized the opportunity to organise the first presbytery in 1642 and spread the Solemn League and Covenant. Presbyterians faced dilemmas about whether their loyalty should focus on the legitimate monarch or the reformed faith, particularly in its Calvinist manifestation. During the Commonwealth many gave allegiance to Cromwell, leaving an enduring tincture of republicanism. Under Charles II, though technically loyal to the king, they were subjected to intermittent harassment by the Anglican authorities for non-conformity. In 1661 the Irish parliament passed legislation providing for special annual days of commemoration on 23 October, the date the 1641 rising began, and key dates in the  25 Edward III [Eng.] c. 2; Lisa Steffan, Defining a British state: treason and national identity, 1608– 1820 (Basingstoke and New York, 2001), pp 3, 5; Anon., The trial of Reverend William Jackson … for High Treason (Dublin, 1795), p 22.  Ian McBride, Scripture politics: Ulster Presbyterians and Irish radicalism in the late eighteenth century, p 28.

23

loyalism defined

calendar of the restored monarchy. The sermons preached on 23 October reminded Protestants, both Episcopalian and Presbyterian, of their deliverance from Catholic rebels by Providence and the British connection. These sermons, and books like Sir John Temple’s influential History of the Irish Rebellion graphically nurtured memories of massacres. Thus, by the late seventeenth century, historical experience and reverence for the monarchy inculcated a sense of allegiance combining devotion to the king and the British connection with a strong group loyalty to the Protestant cause in Ireland which, by constant reiteration, defined Catholics as treacherous and disloyal. However, the fluidity of loyalty in Ireland was re-emphasised in 1685 following the accession of Charles’s second son and Catholic convert, James II. Catholic landowners who had lost out through plantation and rebellion eagerly gave loyalty to James whose ‘Patriot Parliament’ passed an Act of Attainder (thereby invoking the treason statute) against Protestant proprietors and repealed legislation making 23 October a ‘holy day’. However James’s replacement with William of Orange saw further kaleidoscopic transformations in Irish loyalty and is a convenient starting point to survey the antecedents of the loyalism of the 1790s. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 and its constitutional implications introduced a important deity into the pantheon of Irish loyalty – the Protestant Constitution – and redefined attitudes to the monarch and, eventually, parliament. Ireland’s Revolution was not bloodless and this combined with memories of 1641 to produce a belligerently Protestant and militantly anti-Catholic sense of loyalty during and after the Williamite wars. Though some Presbyterians were initially attracted by James’s toleration of dissent, perceiving themselves under threat from Catholic resurgence, most Protestants of all hues eagerly gave allegiance to William, whose Calvinism may also have attracted Irish Dissenters. Though strong in their adherence to the British connection, this zealous loyalty also reflected the Irish Protestants’ unique experience. The reinstituted 23 October sermons reminded them that, unlike their English brethren, they lived ‘in an enemy’s country’. Consequently William’s loyal Irish subjects were prepared to exceed their sovereign’s wishes. Though they celebrated their new king as the bringer of political liberty, they put an Irish interpretation on parliament’s enhanced power under the Glorious Revolution to use the Dublin legislature to modify the 1691 Treaty of Limerick which offered surrendering Jacobites religious toleration and amnesty in return for an oath of allegiance to William. The question of an oath to secure Catholic loyalty would resurface throughout the eighteenth century and beyond, but for the present, the Irish parliament responded with the penal laws. The re-configured allegiance after the Williamite wars was complex: loyalty was  James Kelly, ‘The glorious and immortal memory: commemoration and Protestant identity in Ireland, 1660–1800’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 940 (1994), pp 27–9; T. C. Barnard, ‘The uses of 23 October 1641 and Irish Protestant celebrations’, E.H.R., cvi (1991), pp 889–920; S. J. Connolly, ‘The Glorious Revolution in Irish Protestant political thinking’, in S. J. Connolly (ed.), Political ideas in eighteenth-century Ireland (Dublin, 2000), p 50; J. G. Simms, The Jacobite parliament of 1689 (Dundalk, 1974); A. T. Q. Stewart, The Shape of Irish History (Belfast, 2001), p 98.  Barnard, ‘The uses of 23 October’, p 898.  Patrick Fagan, Divided loyalties: the question of an oath for Irish Catholics in the eighteenth century (Dublin, 1997).

24

antecedents

expressed, as previously, to the British monarchy, but following the 1689 Bill of Rights, this was enhanced with the guarantee of Protestant succession. A ‘cult of William’ became a significant aspect of Irish Protestant loyalty. William’s birthday, 4 November, was celebrated in Dublin in 1690 even before the outcome of the conflict was certain. This reverence had both official and populist aspects. ­Grinling Gibbons’s famous equestrian statue of William was commissioned by Dublin Corporation in 1701 and established College Green as a virtual shrine for future commemoration. Public celebrations of victories at the Boyne and Aughrim were more popularly adopted by the general Protestant population. These early demonstrations of loyalty to the crown, the British connection and the Protestant succession had considerable appeal which extended to Presbyterians who participated in the more raucous popular street celebrations in Dublin and Ulster. However, during Queen Anne’s reign, the smoke from cannon salutes and celebratory bonfires concealed considerable division amongst Protestants, reflecting unease about how to justify the political and religious aspects of 1688. As in England, Whig and Tory party divisions emerged in the later 1690s and sharpened during Anne’s reign. In Ireland, both parties were predominantly Anglican, but the Whigs had substantial Ulster Presbyterian support and their Tory rivals were mainly high churchmen and also included some remaining Catholic and convert interests. Despite their opponents’ accusations, however, Irish Tories were not pro-Catholic. Whigs and Tories disagreed profoundly about religious and political matters. Tories saw Whigs as too tolerant of Dissent, a significant issue given the numbers of Ulster Presbyterians. The 1704 penal law to prevent the further growth of popery was extended to include Presbyterians, debarring them from office-holding unless they took the sacrament of the established church. Whigs, in reality less prodissent than Tories claimed, believed Tory divine right preoccupations endangered the Protestant succession. The parties adopted diametrically opposed views on the meaning of the Glorious Revolution and this influenced allegiance by calling into question the relationship between subject and sovereign. Whigs saw the Revolution as reaffirming the citizen’s legitimate right of resistance to a monarch who had broken his contract with his people and become tyrannical. Tories, while largely accepting the fact of the Revolution, had conscientious scruples arising from high church principles of legitimacy, divine right and passive obedience to an erring ruler. Advantage ebbed and flowed; Irish Tory power peaked during the English Tory ministry at the close of Anne’s reign, when the regium donum was suspended. Despite Whig accusations, however, and misgivings about 1688 notwithstanding, most Irish Tories were not disloyal. Indeed rival claims to genuine loyalty saw vituperative squabbling, forcing definitions of principle which enunciated varieties of Protestant loyalty which would have significance during the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century.   

Kelly, ‘Glorious and immortal memory’, pp 26–7, 29–32. Finlay Holmes, The Presbyterian Church in Ireland (Dublin, 2000), p 50. S. J. Connolly, Religion, law and power, the making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760 (Oxford, 1992), pp 77–86.  A government bounty paid to Presbyterian ministers increased by William in recognition for Presbyterian support against James.

25

loyalism defined

Claims of Tory Jacobitism were countered by accusations associating Whiggery with Cromwell. The Tory lawyer, Sir Richard Cox, dubbed his opponents ‘fanatics and republicans’ seeking the overthrow of loyal men.10 Similar slanders prompted a Presbyterian cleric, John McBride of Belfast, to write a pamphlet defending ‘True Blue Presbyterian Loyalty’ against ‘jet black prelacy’. He traced loyalty to the French word for ‘lawful’ and allegiance to the ancient idea of the subject as ‘liege man’ to the sovereign. Loyalty therefore signified a bond ‘between the King and his Subjects; mutually obliging to each other: the King to protection and just government; the subject to pay tribute and due obedience’, a notion central to the Solemn League and Covenant.11 Though this was a separate development from John Locke’s idea of a contract between people and monarch, nonetheless the two ideas naturally coalesced for Whigs. Thus William’s intervention was legitimate, and loyalty was owed to the monarch and the principles of the balanced constitution. Though there were some signs of popular Jacobitism, like the smearing of William’s statute with mud in 1710, this was unrepresentative of Protestant opinion and more likely a protest against the Whigs’ virtual deification of William rather than active disloyalty.12 Irish Tory bishops were markedly less zealous for the legitimacy principle than their English counterparts. Even after the Boyne, the hard facts of Catholic demography helped determine minds: as one historian has written: ‘The besieged Protestant colony could not afford the luxury of a non-juring party in the Church of Ireland.’13 Despite a tendency for some Churchmen to admire, if not emulate, their English non-juring counterparts, and a certain ambivalence amongst some Protestants towards Catholics, especially where the Jacobites were not militarily defeated, this was not evidence of Protestant Jacobitism, so much as a realism based on numerical minority and possible convert kin links.14 In reality there were few non-jurors refusing oaths of allegiance and supremacy to William and Mary and few Protestant Jacobites.15 However Catholic loyalty to the exiled Stuarts is harder to quantify. British historians once underestimated the challenge of Jacobitism but recent work revises the significance of this form of allegiance, depicting it as transcending its legitimist and constitutional origins to function as an idiom of protest across wide-ranging social issues.16 Irish Jacobitism has been similarly invisible. Lecky magisterially pronounced: ‘Of active disloyalty among the Catholic population there was surprisingly little’, though more recent historians have focused on the emotive 10 11

Cited in Connolly, Religion, law and power, p 81. D. W. Miller, Queen’s rebels: Ulster loyalism in historical perspective (Dublin, 1978), pp 14–18; Ian McBride, The siege of Derry in Ulster Protestant mythology (Dublin, 1997), p 22. 12 Kelly, ‘Glorious and immortal memory’, pp 32–3. 13 James McGuire, ‘The Church of Ireland and the Glorious Revolution of 1688’, in Art Cosgrove and Donal McCartney (eds), Studies in Irish history (Dublin, 1979), pp 137, 147–9. 14 Thomas Doyle, ‘Jacobitism, Catholicism and the Irish Protestant elite, 1700–1710’, E.C.I., xii (1997), pp 28–9, 32–3, 35. 15 Connolly, ‘Glorious Revolution’, p 51; idem, Religion, law and power, p 81. 16 Nicolas Rogers ‘Riot and popular Jacobitism in early Hanoverian England’, in Eveline Cruickshanks (ed.), Ideology and conspiracy: aspects of Jacobitism, 1689–1759 (Edinburgh, 1982), pp 70–88; Murray G. H. Pittock, Jacobitism (Basingstoke and London, 1998), pp 4–11; Micheal MaCraith, Review of B. O’Buachalla, ‘Aisling Ghear Na Stiobhartaigh agus an tAos Leinn, 1603–1788’, E.C.I., xiii (1998), pp 166–71.

26

antecedents

Jacobitism of Irish Catholics. The aftermath of the Williamite wars certainly discouraged active Stuart support, but the fact that many Catholics did not see the treaty of Limerick as conclusive was reflected in overseas recruitment. The regiments entering French service after 1691 recruited large numbers – perhaps 20,000 between 1711 and 1714 – thus encouraging Jacobites to see the ‘Irish Brigade’ as the vehicle for restoration.18 There were also ongoing manifestations of popular Jacobitism as Dublin Catholics continued to mark the Pretender’s birthday (10 June) into the 1720s by bonfires and wearing white roses. Moreover, Dublin’s rival mobs, the Ormond and Liberty Boys, often rioted on the day making it a focus for CatholicProtestant tensions.19 In a tense climate, nervous Protestants could misconstrue any militancy amongst the Catholics as indicative of disloyalty. An agrarian protest, the 1711–12 Hougher outbreak in Munster, though directed at those promoting stock rearing over tillage, was seen by local Protestants as French-inspired. The actual evidence, however, shows the opposite: a Hougher leader issued proclamations that they would never oppose Queen Anne or her government.20 Irish Toryism declined as a political force after 1714, when the British Tory ministry fell and George I’s peaceful accession removed concerns over the Protestant succession. With Whiggery ascendant under Walpole and Protestant divisions mending, a more explicit defence of the Glorious Revolution began to be enunciated, emphasising its role in establishing a balance of power in the constitution.21 Events previously associated with Jacobitism, like the commemoration of the execution of ‘Charles the Martyr’ were embodied into the general calendar of royal anniversaries ands were open to all Protestants.22 The tradition of monarchical celebration continued under the first Hanoverians but the number of celebratory royal occasions was deliberately increased under George I. Official commemorations, like royal birthdays were interwoven with public celebrations of the Boyne and Aughrim. Unhealthy memories of gruesome 1641 massacre continued in a robust manner, judging by the ongoing 23 October sermons and frequent re-prints of Temple’s rebellion history. Hanover Clubs were formed and efforts made to popularise the monarchy by distributing free ale on royal anniversaries. Official commemoration during George II’s reign successfully linked loyalty to the Hanoverians with the growing ‘cult of William’ represented by popular commemorations of William’s birthday and his victories. The Old Pretender’s invasion attempt in 1715, the proclamation of war with Catholic Spain in 1739 and the Boyne’s fiftieth anniversary elicited large and enthusiastic displays of loyalty. The Boyne anniversary generated important developments which gave Protestant 17

17

W. E. H. Lecky, A History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (5 vols., London, 1913), i, p 413; For a recent review of the debate see S. J. Connolly, ‘Jacobites, Whiteboys and Republicans: varieties of disaffection in eighteenth-century Ireland’ E.C.I., 18 (2003), p 77. 18 Connolly, Religion, law and power, p 237. 19 Kelly, ‘Glorious and immortal memory’, p 33; Sean Murphy, ‘Municipal politics and popular disturbances, 1660–1800’, in Art Cosgrove (ed.), Dublin through the ages (Dublin, 1988), pp 81–2. 20 Connolly, Religion law and power, pp 130, 260; idem, ‘Jacobites, Whiteboys and Republicans’, p 72. 21 S. J. Connolly, ‘Varieties of Irish political thought’, in idem (ed.), Political ideas, p 16. 22 Kelly, ‘Glorious and immortal memory’, pp 34–5; Connolly, ‘Glorious Revolution’, pp 45, 51.

27

loyalism defined

loyalism institutional permanence. Semi-militarised Boyne and Protestant Societies were established and customs of marching on the anniversaries of the Boyne and Aughrim initiated which partly anticipated the later Orange Order. The loyalty and commitment of Irish Protestants to the Hanoverian monarchy was further strengthened by the alarm caused by Charles Edward Stuart’s invasion of Scotland in 1745. Though Catholics remained quiet, Protestants interpreted the crisis in terms of 1641 and 1688, so much so that a contemporary believed that their triple-focused loyalty – to the Protestant succession, the ‘Happy Constitution’ and William’s memory – was markedly more zealous than that of their English counterparts.23 Many towns and counties produced loyal addresses and Protestant regiments were raised in Ulster, like the four companies who celebrated George II’s coronation in Derry city in October 1745.24 In 1746 Culloden was celebrated as another Protestant victory and the Boyne and Aughrim Clubs were supplemented by Cumberland and Culloden Societies. For Presbyterians, the wars against Catholic France and Spain inculcated Protestant unity by binding ‘the loyalists of Britain and Ireland’ in common cause. Culloden helped ‘establish more firmly the Protestant succession’ and any resentment against Anglican privilege vanished in a crisis in which the reformed churches were equated with the tribes of Israel united against the rebel ‘Benjamites’.25 Though the threat from Catholic Ireland was exaggerated by Protestants, this does not mean that Jacobite allegiance disappeared. Scattered primary evidence reveals that the most overt Jacobite activity in early Hanoverian Ireland was actual recruitment to fight for the Pretender by innkeepers, priests and some Catholic gentry. This was often accompanied by the distribution of commissions, the swearing of oaths to ‘the king’ and declarations against ‘the usurper George’.26 This zeal also characterised the Irish military diaspora. Voltaire reckoned that the Irish Brigade’s courage which helped France achieve victory at Fontenoy in 1745 was motivated by a burning desire for ‘revenge for their king’s betrayal, their country and their altars’.27 Arguably there was a residual emotional and popular Catholic allegiance to the Stuarts, particularly in Munster, parts of which were unconquered by the Williamites.28 Those who see the actual strength of Jacobitism as belying its military quietism note that fertile conditions existed, with the economic, social and political implications of the penal laws.29 Yet, in reality, Catholic opinion was divided. The question of an oath of allegiance which included abjuration of Stuart legitimacy split Catholic opinion. The Old Pretender, James Stuart, was regarded by the pope as lawful king of Great Britain and Ireland and held the nomination of bishops to vacant Irish sees. Some regarded abjuration as violating the Limerick arti23 24 25

Kelly, ‘Glorious and immortal memory’, pp 36–9, 42. F. J. McLynn, ‘Ireland and the Jacobite rising of 1745’, Irish Sword, xiii (1977–9), pp 340–2. Samuel Delap, A sermon preached on 9 October 1746 being the thanksgiving day for our deliverance … by Samuel Delap, dissenting minister at Letterkenny (Dublin, 1746), pp 4,7,11. 26 Breandan O’Buachalla, ‘Irish Jacobitism in official documents’, E.C.I., viii (1993), p 129. 27 Pittock, Jacobitism, pp 119–21. 28 Louis M. Cullen, The emergence of modern Ireland (London, 1981), pp 198–200. 29 F. J. McLynn, ‘Good behaviour: Ireland and the Jacobite rising of 1745’, Eire-Ireland, xvi (2) 1981, pp 48–9.

28

antecedents

cles, though others readily supported the Hanoverians.30 In 1745 Jacobites sent an emissary, Patrick Wall, to Charles Edward Stuart purported to pledge Irish Catholic support. But, even before Culloden, other clergy urged quiet. Wall himself admitted that landed Catholics encouraged this for self interested reasons as any disruption would further compromise their position.31 A stick and carrot approach by the executive probably also helped: the viceroy, Chesterfield, combined military readiness with a diplomatically lenient administration of the penal laws.32 Most Catholics probably kept quiet; but some were more actively loyalist, like Charles O’Conor of Belangare, who saw total abandonment of the Stuarts as best serving Catholic interests. This quietism was noticed. Official toleration in Ireland increased and the Irish Brigade ceased to be an object of contention between Britain and France after 1745. From France’s viewpoint, unlike the 1680s, Ireland was no longer strategically central.33 Most historians agree that a sea change occurred in the allegiance of ­ propertied Catholics in the mid-eighteenth century, with active Jacobitism declining in the early 1740s and rapidly fading after Culloden. However, the loyalty of plebeian Catholics was feared by contemporaries (both Protestant and loyal elite Catholics) and continues to be debated by historians.34 This turn in Catholic loyalty may have been initially about economic self interest, but it soon had a political context: in 1756 the first Catholic Association began to lobby for concessions, leading to the ‘Catholic question’ emerging as an issue.35 This interplay between Catholic relief and loyalty was an ongoing theme throughout the period covered by this book. If Catholic allegiance was not a simple issue under the first Hanoverians, beyond the annual monarchical and Williamite celebrations Protestant political loyalty and its ideological underpinning was also complex. Moreover, as the century progressed and political patriotism developed, subtle but important changes emerged in the way Protestants viewed the British connection and expressed their identity. The concept of political liberty was central to patriot rhetoric, but liberty was an ‘essentially Protestant quality’ opposed to the ‘slavery’ and disloyalty associated with popery. This gave Irish patriotism a ‘cautious’ character for fear of Catholic political rehabilitation. But its language of Protestant superiority was inclusive of all reformed denominations, unlike the later exclusively Anglican concept of Protestant ascendancy.36 The keystone in political patriotism was defence of the Revolution principles of 1688 which established the balanced constitution and the Protestant succession. With the Protestant succession secured, patriots in College Green defined their political cause against Ireland’s perceived subordinate treatment by England. They demanded equal status with Englishmen which they felt their ancestry, loyalty to the monarch as king of Ireland and parliamentary tradition entitled them to. This latter 30 31 32 33

Patrick Fagan, Divided loyalties, p 12. Connolly, Religion, law and power, p 246. McLynn, ‘Good behaviour’, pp 50–7. McLynn, ‘Ireland and the Jacobite rising’, p 352; idem, ‘Good behaviour’, p 58; Connolly, Religion, law and power, pp 237–45. 34 Connolly, ‘Jacobites, Whiteboys and Republicans’, pp 64, 66. 35 Thomas Bartlett, The fall and rise of the Irish Nation: the Catholic Question (Dublin, 1992), p 60. 36 Stephen Small, Political thought in Ireland, 1776–1798: republicanism, patriotism and radicalism (Oxford, 2002), pp 14–15.

29

loyalism defined

was more representative of ancient constitutional practices which, they argued, 1688 should have restored, but current Westminster practice had drifted further away from.37 Patriot sentiment flared over issues like the granting of a patent in 1722 to an Englishman, William Wood, to mint Irish coinage, and the sale of Irish titles to English, Scottish or Welsh aristocrats who would become absentees.38 The ideology of eighteenth-century patriotism also had a bearing on conceptions of loyalty. Patriotism elevated love of country or patria above sectional and personal interests. Thus, as George III, when prince of Wales, read in Bolingbroke’s The Idea of a Patriot King (1749), the basis of loyalty to the ruling monarch could no longer be personal, but must be national.39 Bolingbroke’s ‘country party’ ideology stressed independence against increasing centralisation of power. In imperial terms, it was feared that central government encroached upon the de-centralised empire which had emerged from 1688.40 The rhetoric of the loosely organised Irish parliamentary ‘patriot’ opposition was based on ‘Revolution Principles’. Government ministers and supporters were criticised for monopolising power and patronage at home and colluding in Ireland’s legislative subordination to Westminster.41 Ministerialists were smeared as crypto-Tories for upholding monopoly against the ‘liberties of the subject’. Such appeals to constitutional propriety held that 1688 was not definitive, but only the most recent example of precedents going back to the ‘ancient’ AngloSaxon constitution and Magna Carta. This ‘Real’ or ‘True Whig’ position was most famously enunciated by William Molynaux’s The Case of Ireland … Stated (1698) which claimed Ireland’s entitlement to the same ‘constitution’ because of a compact agreed between its people and the Anglo-Norman invaders.42 Liberty was ideally secured in the balanced constitution of king, lords and commons, but patriots held that Ireland had not benefited equally from 1688: Westminster’s enhanced powers resulted in legislative impositions, principally the 1720 Declaratory Act confirming Britain’s right to legislate for Ireland. They protested by obstructing financial legislation, insisting on the Irish parliament’s sole right to initiate it. However, this was not disloyalty: patriots like Henry Flood joined fellow Protestants to produce effusive loyal declarations on George III’s accession, and were strong on the Protestant succession. But it was a loyalty hedged by conditions: Irish Whigs, wrote Lord Charlemont, ‘were taught to know that Ireland had, or ought to have, a constitution, and … that there was something more in the character of a Whig than implicit loyalty to

37 David Hayton, ‘Patriots and legislators: Irishmen and their parliaments, c. 1689 – c. 1740’, in Julian Hoppit (ed.), Parliaments, nations and identities in Britain and Ireland, 1660–1850 (Manchester, 2003), pp 103–4. 38 T. C. Barnard, A new anatomy of Ireland: the Irish Protestants, 1649–1770 (New Haven and London, 2003), pp 32–33. 39 Linda Colley, Britons: forging the nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven and London, 1992), pp 46– 7. 40 Jacqueline Hill, Patriots to Unionists: Dublin civic politics and Irish Protestant patriotism, 1660– 1841 (Oxford, 1997), pp 138–9, 142. 41 Author’s note: recent historiography has emphasised the need for caution in treating the patriots as a homogeneous group or adducing any patriot ‘tradition’, see S. J. Connolly, ‘Precedent and principle: the patriots and their critics’, in idem (ed.), Political ideas, p132. 42 Connolly, ‘Glorious Revolution’, pp 58–9; Millar, Queen’s Rebels, pp 30–1.

30

antecedents

king George … detestation of the Pretender, and a fervent zeal for the Hanover[ian] succession’.43 George III’s accession was marked by public demonstrations of loyalty, both in the Protestant community and, significantly, the Catholic elite. The possibility of French invasion the previous year produced many declarations of Catholic loyalty and offers of support. With the Hanoverian succession secure, such loyalism made political sense for those who stood to benefit from relaxation of the penal laws. The Catholic Committee of 1760 combined deferential petitioning with unambiguous loyalty.44 The recent quietism and loyalism was an argument for relief. In December 1759 a loyal address from around three hundred Catholic gentry, merchants and citizens of Dublin expressed the hope that Catholics could be ‘more strengthening friends to the state’ than hitherto, ‘under the constraints of the many penal laws against them’.45 From Britain’s pragmatic perspective, concern grew that Irish manpower was rendered inaccessible by the penal laws, and unofficial moves were afoot to access this constituency during the Seven Years’ War. As early as 1762 the Catholic grandee, Lord Trimleston, told the viceroy that the hierarchy had ordered prayers for a British victory, and offered to raise Catholic soldiers for overseas service.46 This process of abandoning the Stuarts accelerated during the 1760s: the pope stopped giving the Stuarts nomination of Irish bishoprics and, following the Old Pretender’s death in 1766, refused to recognise Charles Edward Stuart as ‘Charles III’. The question of Catholic loyalty and penal relief divided Protestant opinion in the 1760s as it would for the rest of the century.47 Those who distrusted the Catholics were frequently out of step with the British government and their Dublin Castle executive. In 1766 Frederick Hervey, later the famous earl bishop of Derry but then chaplain to his brother Lord Bristol, the viceroy, began formulating an oath of allegiance to give Catholic loyalty legal recognition. This oath confirmed the signatory’s loyalty, renounced the Young Pretender’s claims and denied that heretic princes excommunicated by the pope could be deposed by their subjects or that the pope had temporal power in George III’s realms.48 This typified the patriot stance on Catholics: entitlement to liberty should increase with their ability to demonstrate they were politically enlightened, free of the ‘tyranny’ of popery and thus becoming more like Protestants.49 Yet, the oath was not without controversy: how, for example, could renunciation of papal power be formulated in a way which would be acceptable both to Irish Protestants and to Rome? Various Catholic Committee recommendations were ignored by an Irish parliament dominated by Protestant landowners. Some 43 James Kelly, Henry Flood: patriots and politics in eighteenth-century Ireland (Dublin, 1998), p 76; Lord Charlemont’s memoirs of his political life, 1755–83 (The manuscripts and correspondence of James, first earl of Charlemont (2 vols, H.M.C., London, 1891–94), i, 7. 44 Fagan, Divided loyalties, p 125; Connolly, Religion, law and power, pp 247–8. 45 Cited in Fagan, Divided loyalties, p 125. 46 Trimleston to Egremont, 5 March 1762 (West Sussex Record Office, Petworth House Archive, PHA/1270/1). 47 Connolly, Religion, law and power, p 259. 48 13 & 14 Geo III [Ire.] c. 35. 49 Small, Political thought, p 15.

31

loyalism defined

historians see Catholic quibbles about the oath as evidence of residual Jacobitism. Such survivalist interpretations are vigorously contested by Professor Connolly, who sees reservations of leading Catholics as evidence that they were unwilling to bind themselves to George III in terms precluding them from acting as Irish Protestants had in 1688, if circumstances made the king unfit to rule.50 However, at the time, even the more confident Protestants and some propertied Catholics believed that the lower classes would, if opportunity arose, support a French invasion. From 1761, agrarian unrest by ‘Whiteboys’ in Munster encouraged such perceptions, if encouragement was needed. Studies of Gaelic Aisling poetry51 have revealed how well this literary form linked Jacobite divine right ideology with older popular traditions of the ‘marriage’ of a ruler to the goddess of the place, and how such rhetoric was absorbed by agrarian protesters like the Whiteboys. Indeed the messianic undertones survived into the nineteenth century when the ‘kings across the water’ were replaced by a more tangible deliverer: Daniel O’Connell.52 The Whiteboys’ use of provocative Jacobite tunes like ‘The White Cockade’ and the eagerness of Munster Protestants to interpret Whiteboy activities as evidence of a Catholic rising is well known.53 Yet, though some jittery gentry saw the spectre of Jacobitism in the white shirts which gave the Whiteboys their name, there is no evidence that they were political in their primary objectives, though they may have harboured emotive feelings for the Stuarts. The frequently cited toast ‘Long live King George III and Queen Sive’ (a mythical goddess) has been called into question as evidence of their apolitical nature. However, it is likely that the Whiteboys, like other contemporary protest movements, would evoke any authority against the main target, farmers who enclosed common land.54 Certainly the Munster Protestant response was disproportionate, recalling earlier Francophobic and anti-Catholic panics. Whatever the changes in the allegiance of the Catholic elite, the loyalty of Irish Protestants continued to be expressed in traditional terms in the early part of George III’s reign. The practice of public demonstration, both official and popular, was ­maintained with the number of loyal commemorations peaking at around 20 days per year. The key dates were 1 July (the Boyne), 23 October and 4 November (William’s birthday) when government and corporate dignitaries paraded to the College Green statute, an example followed by commemoration societies in ­provincial towns, including Belfast, where orange favours were sported. Though the annual 1641 sermons still reminded Protestants of their insecurity and dependency on the British connection, in the later 1760s the previous consensus was broken by the emergence of a more nuanced and politically contingent variant of William’s memory. In October 1768, for example, Dublin Protestants drank to ‘Wilkes and

50 51

See Connolly, ‘Jacobites, Whiteboys and Republicans’, pp 64–6. A poetic form in which a female personification of Ireland is identified with the country’s suffering and anticipates Stuart restoration for amelioration. 52 Michael Mac Craith, Review of B. O’Buachalla, ‘Aisling Ghear Na Stiobhartaigh agus an tAos Leinn, 1603–1788’, E.C.I., xiii (1998), pp 168, 170. 53 Louis Cullen, The Emergence of Modern Ireland (New York, 1981), pp 198–200. 54 Connolly, ‘Jacobites, Whiteboys and Republicans’, p 72.

32

antecedents

Liberty’ alongside ‘the Glorious and Immortal Memory’.55 Recent Catholic quietism undoubtedly facilitated this injection of contemporary radicalism to events previously characterised by clear religious and ethnic meanings. Nonetheless for some Protestants, the meaning of loyalty had gravitated from an unchanging expression of political identity to a political argument. If elite Catholics understood loyalty as heralding a mutually beneficial rapprochement with the establishment, liberally minded Protestants of the Whig-patriot type saw it as a political tool to reform the existing order. This reformist strand of constitutionally focussed loyalty became more prominent during the American war. Irish Patriots initially saw an identity of interests with their English and American counterparts.56 However, though generally sympathetic, they did not challenge the principle of parliamentary sovereignty over the colonies as they saw Ireland as a kingdom in its own right rather than a colony. Nor did sympathy for the colonists betoken disloyalty in Ireland.57 They aimed at securing legislative freedom for the College Green parliament on the grounds that it was historically entitled to same constitutional liberties as Westminster. Ideologically the patriots justified their political stance by adapting their interpretation of 1688. They now saw the Glorious Revolution as a uniquely significant event which, with Locke’s contract theory, formed a benchmark to measure how far the current ministry and its Irish adherents had deserted the ideal.58 Patriotism was also strong in corporate Dublin, in the guilds and commons. A typical reaction to the American crisis was the 1775 Common Council petition advocating reconciliation so that the British constitution could be more firmly established by being accompanied by ‘civil liberty and political security’.59 However when the Volunteer movement began after France and Spain had joined the war, traditional Protestant concerns about international co-operation between Catholics reminding them of self-defence and the British connection, came face-to-face with the new political creed which wanted to reform that link. The outcome of this clash would see Protestant loyalty define itself in some unusual directions. Apart from its ceremonial manifestations, Protestant loyalty had a parallel amateur militarised dimension. The militia legislation of the early eighteenth century remained in force until 1776. Under these laws arrays of able-bodied Protestants were mobilised by parish quota during the Jacobite invasion scares of 1708, 1715 and 1745, and semi-official groups of volunteer civilians established to counter internal disturbances.60 In 1760 when a small French force landed at Carrickfergus, hastily 55 Kelly, ‘Glorious and immortal memory’, pp 36–8, 42, 44, 51; Barnard, ‘The uses of 23 October 1641’, p 898. 56 Connolly, ‘Varieties of Irish political thought’, 18; Hill, Patriots to Unionists, pp 138–9. 57 Ibid., pp 138–9, 142; Small, Political thought, p 52. 58 Connolly, ‘Varieties of Irish political thought’, p 16. 59 Cited in Hill, Patriots to Unionists, p 143. 60 D. W. Miller, ‘Non-professional soldiery, c. 1600–1800’, in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds), A Military history of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), pp 323–4; Jim Donovan, ‘The militia in Munster, 1715–78’, in Gerard O’Brien (ed.), Parliament, people and politics: essays in eighteenthcentury Irish history (Dublin, 1989), pp 33–4; P. D. H. Smyth, ‘The Volunteer movement in Ulster, 1745–85’ (Ph.D. thesis, Q.U.B., 1974), pp 34, 37.

33

loyalism defined

armed volunteers were organised throughout Ulster and similar units were set up by southern gentry and magistrates against the Whiteboys. The Irish Volunteers of the American war period were in the tradition of these independent companies. The formal militia laws had lapsed in 1776 and, when France entered the conflict and it emerged that the government would not renew the legislation, a more extensive organisation of Volunteer corps began, starting in Belfast in 1778 but soon spreading throughout Ireland, particularly after 1779, when numbers reached around 40,000. Volunteering was particularly strong in Dublin and in Ulster, which supplied about half the rank and file, many of them Presbyterians who sympathised with the rebel colonists due to kin-links, identification of political grievances and, for some, antiCatholicism, particularly amongst the orthodox and strongly Calvinist Seceders, who understood why Americans saw the Quebec Act (which, for strategic reasons, recognised Catholicism) as royal autocracy.61 As the most recent manifestation of this long-standing defence tradition, many Volunteer corps were raised on the foundations of earlier Protestant commemoration societies, frequently with Williamite connections. Indeed some even included the prefix ‘Protestant’ or ‘Boyne’ in their titles, as with County Cork’s Bandon Boyne Volunteers.62 Yet this voluntary endeavour also chimed with the wider cultural backdrop of Enlightenment notions of the patriot acting for the good of his country.63 Indeed the Volunteers seemed the epitome of the patriot’s civic virtue and the antithesis of the ‘standing army’ feared by Whigs, particularly as the movement studiously maintained independence from government. By 1779, leaders of the parliamentary patriots like Henry Grattan began to utilise ‘the armed property of the nation’ to give extra-parliamentary expression to their campaigns.64 This liaison between patriots and Volunteers represented a new turn in Protestant loyalty. This was given its most pointed expression at the parade to William’s statue in Dublin on 4 November 1779. Volunteers hung placards on the statue demanding ‘a Free Trade – or Else’ and proclaiming ‘The Loyal Volunteers’.65 Though the politicalmilitary liaison underpinning the 1782 campaign for legislative independence was in the classical republican tradition, it was not incompatible with loyalty to the monarch, provided he fulfilled his part of the contract with his subjects. One recent commentator has perceptively categorised the Volunteers as quintessentially loyalist, ‘offering, as loyalists do … loyalty on terms defined by themselves’.66 Changes in how Protestants self-identified paralleled political volunteering. In the early eighteenth-century, they customarily saw themselves as Englishmen living in Ireland. In patriot rhetoric this gave way to a more Hiberno-centric claim to share the same rights and liberties as other subjects of the British crown. However there was also a separate strand of thought which traced specific Irish liberties back 61 62

McBride, Scripture politics, pp 116, 118, 123. Kelly, ‘Glorious and immortal memory’, 47; Padraig O’Snodaigh, The Irish Volunteers, 1715–93: a list of the units (Dublin, 1995), p 14. 63 McBride, Scripture politics, p 126. 64 Lecky, Ireland, ii, p 396; Blackstock, Double traitors, pp 3–4. 65 Cited in Hill, Patriots to Unionists, p 148. 66 Connolly, ‘Varieties of Irish political thought’, p 18; J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Protestant Ireland: the view from a distance’, in Connolly (ed.), Political ideas, p 227.

34

antecedents

to Henry II, who granted equal civil liberties for submission to the English crown, including the right to live under laws made by their own legislature.67 However, there remained strong economic and cultural links with Britain. Many men were educated in England or, if Presbyterian ministers, Scotland. The culture of parliamentary and municipal electoral practice was similar, as was the law and order system. Economically, though unequal trade was the stuff of patriot rhetoric, some larger Irish landowners held English estates, and trade links, even if contested, reinforced the connection for middle-class merchants. In the professions, legal aspirants completed their education at the Inns of Court. Military service fulfilled a similar function, particularly after 1745 when the embargo on recruiting Irish Protestants (other than officers) was removed. In the 1780s, some Volunteers symbolically emphasised their Irish identity by replacing the Imperial crown with the Milesian or old Irish crown above the harp in their insignia. The more radical even let the harp stand unadorned with any crown. Some historians call this phenomena ‘colonial’ or ‘Protestant’ nationalism, even peering darkly through the distorting glass of the 1790s to link it with later nationalism in the same way as those who connect Jacobitism and Jacobinism. Though links can be made, this conception is ultimately problematic. Most patriots of the early 1780s, having largely achieved their aims, reoccupied their place in the balanced constitution as a ‘loyal opposition’.68 Participation in Britain’s overseas wars, while not diluting a ‘distinctive Irish Protestant identity’, nonetheless fostered awareness of Ireland’s place in the empire.69 After the achievement of legislative independence in 1782, the more advanced of the Volunteers pressed on for radical parliamentary reform. Northern Presbyterians were influential amongst this group, though they were by no means all of that persuasion. Some reformers sought rapprochement with Catholics as their numbers made it expedient to link their demands with those for Catholic relief. As the Presbyterians were the smallest of the three religious groups, Catholic support made political sense. However, it is important to remember that any departure from the traditional idea that only Protestants could be genuine loyalists occurred against a backdrop of Catholic loyalty perceived, as has been noted, as a renunciation of popery. This encouraged developments which would have been inconceivable fifty years earlier. The writings of more liberally inclined Protestants like Edmund Burke ensured Catholic political discourse assimilated the language of Whig constitutionalism.70 William’s legacy was to establish the liberty of the subject in Britain and Ireland, and Catholics were consequently equally entitled to that liberty. Signs of rapprochement were even apparent in Volunteering, itself a manifestation of the old Protestant defence tradition which, by definition, assumed Catholic disloyalty and untrustworthiness with arms. As Volunteering declined numerically after 1782,

67 68 69

Connolly, ‘Varieties of Irish political thought’, pp 16–17. Pocock, ‘Protestant Ireland’, p 227. Thomas Bartlett, ‘A weapon of war as yet untried: Irish Catholics and the armed forces of the Crown’, in T. G. Fraser and Keith Jeffrey (eds), Men, women and war (Dublin, 1993), p 69; Barnard, A new anatomy of Ireland, p 191. 70 Jacqueline Hill, ‘Popery and Protestantism, civil and religious liberty: the disputed lessons of Irish history’, Past and Present, 118 (1988), pp 104–6.

35

loyalism defined

some corps began to admit Catholics, though not all did so. Even within County Armagh, there were both pro- and anti-Catholic Volunteers.71 Sometimes Volunteer loyalty was expressed in ‘true blue’ anti-Episcopal terms. In Monaghan, Volunteers from seceding Presbyterian congregations issued resolutions in 1780 reflecting allegiance in anti-Anglican rather than anti-Catholic terms by pledging ‘loyalty to his Majesty King George, and our attachment to our civil constitution’. The emphasis implied rejection of Anglican primacy and reverence for the original Scottish Covenant.72 Moreover, in the commemorative sphere, a new element appeared in hitherto exclusively Protestant celebrations. In Drogheda, Catholics wore orange favours at the 1780 Boyne celebrations. At Derry, the very bastion of Protestant loyalty, when the siege centenary was celebrated, Catholic clergy joined the procession. A parallel widening in the type of events commemorated is also evident: some Volunteers began to celebrate St Patrick’s Day in the 1770s, hitherto a Catholic occasion at a popular level.73 However, such re-configurations of loyalty were short lived. Signs of a reversion to more traditional expressions of Protestant loyalty (not that they had ever disappeared) were evident by the late 1780s as the main Williamite commemorations reassumed their traditional anti-Catholic character.74 Conservative Protestants, perturbed by the liberal direction of politics and fearing more erosion of their traditional position, saw the ‘Rightboy’ disturbances in Munster between 1785 and 1788 as evidence that Catholics still posed a threat. Despite the supra-sectarian nature of their protests, conservatives, like the M.P. George Ogle, who had already expressed alarm at the Catholic relief measures of 1778, saw the Rightboys as threatening ‘the Protestant establishment in church and consequently in state’ secured by the penal laws.75 Ogle saw the Irish church in danger and used the term ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ to describe what he felt needed to be defended. The concept was developed by Richard Woodward, Anglican Bishop of Cloyne, and Patrick Duigenan, a Catholic convert and erstwhile parliamentary reformer, who called the Rightboys ‘Popish banditti’. Woodward’s influential pamphlet The Present State of the Church of Ireland, clarified and popularised the term ‘ascendancy’ which replaced the older, less pointed ‘Protestant interest’.76 Regardless of the factual basis of the threat, the significance of this reaction is that the ‘neo-conservatism’ it inculcated chimed with wider concerns amongst Irish Protestants, engendering a revived strain of aggressive, 71 72 73 74 75

Miller, ‘Non-professional soldiery’, p 327; Hill, Patriots to Unionists, pp 167, 177–8. McBride, Scripture politics, pp 126–7. McBride, Siege of Derry, p 33; Kelly, ‘Glorious and immortal memory’, p 46. Ibid., 47–8. Cited in James Kelly, ‘The genesis of Protestant ascendancy: the Rightboy disturbances of the 1780s and their impact upon Protestant opinion’, in Gerard O’Brien (ed.), Parliament, politics and people (Dublin, 1989), pp 101–3; James Kelly, ‘Conservative Protestant thought in late-eighteenthcentury Ireland’, in Connolly (ed.), Political ideas, 195–6. 76 There is debate about the significance of the term ascendancy. One view (W. J. McCormack) holds that its real significance was for the future, while James Kelly argues that it also possesses contemporary significance as a turning point in attitudes. Kelly ‘Conservative Protestant thought’, p 204; W. J. McCormack, The Dublin paper war of 1786–88 (Dublin, 1993); P. J. Jupp, ‘Dr. Duigenan reconsidered’, in Sabine Wichert (ed.), From the United Irishmen to twentieth-century unionism (Belfast, 2004), p 81.

36

antecedents

Anglican-focussed and exclusive Protestant loyalty which soon outpaced the ‘liberal’ version. Indeed ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ migrated from its adjectival origins and entered the popular vocabulary as a collective noun applied to a tangible militant tendency opposed to further erosion of the penal laws. The perceived complacency of liberals and reformers about Catholics in the Volunteers also stoked the fires of reaction. Stephen Small has perceptively noted how, on the one hand, ‘Protestant ascendancy’ was like the later English ‘Church and King’ sentiment which violently opposed radical dissenters, but, ultimately, any British-Irish parallels were negated by demographic realities which meant that Anglicans could not afford to be too severe on their fellow Protestants.77 Duigenan highlighted the ease with which Munster Catholics got Volunteer arms during the Rightboy troubles.78 In a pre-democratic age, the right to bear arms signified status and inclusion. For conservative Protestants, particularly lower-class ones, it was a recognition of loyalty as well as a means of protection. It was a symbol, literally and figuratively, of ‘ascendancy’ at parish level. Such people saw Catholic armsholding as a dual threat, and this was often the pretext for the feuding between the Peep O’Day Boys and Defenders in County Armagh in the 1780s and early 1790s. In a sense, though loyalty in Ireland experienced various changes before 1789, the new militant conservative ‘ascendancy’ strand would have been readily recognisable to M.P.s in William’s and Anne’s parliaments who insisted on severe penal laws. Yet, though ‘Ascendancy’ in its 1780s formulation was anti-Dissenter as well as antiCatholic in that it saw the Church and its tithes as a bastion of the status quo, the process was not entirely circular: 1789 was not 1689 any more than 1798 was a rerun of 1690. Loyalty to the monarch was no longer framed in terms of divine right or legitimacy so much as focussed on the king as part of the constitution. However, loyalty to abstractions could co-exist with personal fealty. George III’s recovery from illness in 1789 was celebrated extensively.79 The ‘Protestant nationalism’ of the early 1780s did not mean disloyalty to the British connection. Rather, by emphasising different aspects of 1688, it signified alternative conceptions of loyalty compared to the conservative strand which held that Catholicism was incompatible with loyalty and Protestant security. Indeed, like the opposing loyalist and patriot positions in America, their Irish counterparts had common ideological roots in British constitutionalism; though differences had emerged to distinguish between the ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ strands of Irish loyalty. These distinctions also had American parallels. Irish conservatives and American loyalists would have emphasised Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, which modified Locke’s dictum about natural checks and balances in the constitution. Like Blackstone, they contended that any government was better than the ‘state of anarchy’ which could result from Locke’s view.80 While it is true that, for some, sympathy with the Americans was the starting point on a path which 77 78 79 80

Small, Political thought, pp 160–1. Kelly, ‘Conservative Protestant thought’, pp 201–4. Kelly, ‘Glorious and immortal memory’, p 48. Janis Potter, The liberty we seek: loyalist ideology in colonial New York and Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1983), pp 85–6, 102–4.

37

loyalism defined

would eventually lead to disloyalty and rebellion, it was not the same for all. The ambiguities inherent in Volunteering suggest other possible routes. A patriot could enact civic virtue as a Volunteer; yet he might also be someone whose love of patria exceeded his love for his king. Some Volunteers accepted the ‘constitution of 1782’, feeling that it had restored the constitutional balance. Others saw the legislature as still unbalanced and requiring restoration by reform of parliamentary representation, the more radical of whom would eventually adopt the position that, on the refusal of the king, lords and commons to countenance reform, loyalty must be withheld.81 This would eventually lead to rebellion, separatism and plans to establish a Frenchstyle republic; but in the 1780s, the political landscape did not exhibit a rigid division between the heights of loyalty and valleys of disaffection, but a picture where the contours were less rigidly defined and continually changing. Though still loyal, some of the more advanced Volunteer reformers pointed ominously to the future, while other Protestants looked, equally balefully, to the past. The critical developments in loyalty during the pre-revolutionary eighteenth century were the emergence of new strands and the modification and reinvigoration of older ones. Though ostensibly grounded in adamantine certainties like the crown and constitution, the prominence of any particular variety was influenced by contemporary circumstances, whether physical invasion threats or intellectual ideals. The ‘liberal’ loyalism of the patriots was modern and progressive in the sense of being predicated on Enlightenment notions of universal rights rather than ancien régime ideas equating membership of the polity and genuine loyalty with confessional identity. This was an important new strand of loyalist thought which, though it wilted before the ‘neo-conservative’ ‘Protestant ascendancy’ revival, would reemerge in the early 1790s. An equally important development was the emergence of Catholic loyalty amongst the elite and the hierarchy and the concomitant decline in Jacobite allegiance. This variant also had a rational utilitarian foundation making loyalty a political issue as well as a statement of politics. As the century progressed, active Catholic disloyalty was either a product of the Protestant imagination or the preserve of the lower orders. As the evidence of the Whiteboys suggests, lower-class Catholic sentiments might be better described as disaffected – potential rather than active disloyalty. However, conflations of popular Jacobitism and Jacobinism are as tendentious as that between Volunteer Protestant nationalism and nineteenthcentury nationalism.82 The years after 1789 were to be the crucible in which all strands of loyalty would be transformed.

81 82

Pocock, ‘Protestant Ireland’, p 227. Connolly, ‘Jacobites, Whiteboys and Republicans’, p 77.

38

2

The Brethren of Britons The emergence of Irish counter-revolutionary loyalism, 1789–96

The 1790s have been described as ‘a crucial decade for Ireland, witnessing the rebellion of 1798, a marked polarisation on sectarian lines, and the act of union’. Counterrevolutionary loyalism was, as we have seen, a recognisable feature in Britain by 1792. As Irish loyalists played a vital part in the ‘convergences and conflicts’ of this pivotal decade, and as loyalty in Ireland was a changing and multi-faceted phenomenon before 1789, if the subject is freed from its anachronistic straitjacket, questions arise about the extent to which the Irish variant of this broad ideology drew on indigenous and established patterns of loyalty or was influenced by wider developments like the Reevesite loyal associations begun in Britain in 1792. In short, were Irish loyalists really, as Pitt later claimed, ‘the Brethren of Britons’? In themselves the events of 1789 did not immediately transform Irish loyalty from pre-revolutionary to counter-revolutionary forms. As in Britain, the French Revolution’s first tangible effect was to stimulate political debate and to be welcomed as a Gallic version of 1688 by many reform-minded men who later became loyalists. Though support for the Revolution eventually waned among moderate reformers and became associated with extremists, a recognisably loyalist reaction did not appear until late 1792. Before this first phase of Irish loyalism can be understood, we must consider changing reactions to the Revolution. The French Revolution’s apparent mix of ‘True Whig’ principles and popular activism appealed to the parliamentary reform movement which had emerged from the original Volunteer movement of 1782. Despite links with British reformers like Price and Wyvill, Irish reform had remained moribund since the mid-1780s. Following the Regency Crisis of 1788–9, English Whigs had established links with their Irish counterparts: Whig Clubs formed in both countries to forward a reformist agenda, but the events of 1789 transformed the prospects of reformers and spurred a revival of Volunteering. However, as the course of events in France began to indicate social as well as political revolution, the reform movement split between moderate Whigs, who saw limited reform as the best defence for the status quo, and  Jacqueline Hill, ‘Historiographical reviews: convergence and conflict in eighteenth-century Ireland’, The Historical Journal, 44, 4 (2001), p 1057.  Thomas Bartlett, The fall and rise of the Irish Nation: the Catholic question (Dublin, 1992), p 114.

39

LOYALISM DEFINED

advanced radicals like William Drennan, who advocated a more aggressive middleclass version of reform inclusive of Catholics. The moderates looked to the old Volunteer leader, Lord Charlemont, instigator of the Northern Whig Club. While not anti-Catholic, Charlemont saw the further extension of political rights as unsafe unless accomplished gradually and with parallel improvements in education. The one-time leader of the Irish parliamentary patriots, Henry Flood, now a Westminster M.P., summed up this position: reform led by the landed interests was the best way to prevent upheaval. Drennan scathingly dubbed the Whig clubs ‘aristocratic’ dining and drinking societies. These divisions paralleled the ideological debate on the French Revolution. In 1790 Burke’s Reflections, which stressed the importance to the established order of society of property and religion (i.e. Christianity – Burke supported emancipation), went through eight Dublin editions and newspaper serialisations. In 1791 Paine’s Rights of Man had extensive newspaper coverage and seven printed editions. However the scale of dessemination, perhaps 40,000 copies of Paine by November 1791 – many more than in England – helped strengthen radical morale and expand support. In Belfast, tensions within the broad reform movement surfaced in July 1791 at a parade organised by the Northern Whig Club to mark the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. This appropriation was contested by radicals who subsequently used the town’s rejuvenated and radicalised Volunteers as the nucleus of the first United Irish society formed in Belfast in October 1791. The example of this radical club dedicated to reform and emancipation was soon followed in Dublin. Tensions in Belfast peaked in January 1792 when moderates refused to co-operate over a Catholic emancipation petition, arguing that further relief would be dangerous in current conditions. In England, ‘the awakening of the loyalists’ came in response to the royal proclamation against seditious writings in May 1792 in the form of mass demonstrations of public opinion by published loyal addresses (386 by September) convincing the government that most Englishmen opposed Paine. It would take several months before there were any comparable manifestations in Ireland which, when they came, responded to different stimuli, some rooted vertically in the Irish past, others drawing succour horizontally from contemporary events in Britain and Europe. In July 1792 the Bastille anniversary was again celebrated in Belfast, but now the radicals dominated and the Volunteers paraded the colours of ‘five free nations’: Ireland, America, France, Poland and the flag of Great Britain emblazoned with the motto:  Drennan, the son of a Presbyterian minister, was a Belfast apothecary and poet credited with the original idea behind the United Irishmen: A. T. Q. Stewart, A deeper silence: the hidden origins of the United Irishmen (London, 1993), pp 159–61.  James Kelly, Henry Flood: patriots and politics in eighteenth-century Ireland (Dublin, 1998), p 419; N. Curtin, The United Irishmen: popular politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1791–1798 (Oxford, 1994), pp 41–2.  R. B. McDowell, ‘Burke and Ireland’; David Dickson, ‘Paine and Ireland’, in David Dickson, Daire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (eds), The United Irishmen (Dublin, 1992), pp 108–9; 136–9.  Ian McBride, Scripture politics: Ulster Presbyterians and Irish radicalism in the late eighteenth century (Oxford, 1998), pp 171–2.  Robert Dozier, For king, constitution and country: the English loyalists and the French Revolution (Lexington, 1983), p 1.

40

THE BRETHREN OF BRITONS

‘Wisdom, Spirit and Liberality to the People’. However, the magic of the new dawn of 1789 was fading by the autumn of 1792: the September massacres made the cold reality of the revolutionary day chill the blood of anyone connected with property. Though part two of Paine’s Rights of Man was rapidly reprinted in Ireland, its readership narrowed to advanced radicals, since most Whigs were alienated by the author’s uncompromising attacks on monarchy and the legality of the British constitution, implying revolution rather than reform. The increasing militancy of the revolutionaries made it harder for reformers to construe 1789 as a repeat of 1688 and gave Burke’s critique increasing relevance for his fellow Whigs. As moderate reformers shifted their gaze from illusions about French liberty and focused attention on the balanced constitution they already possessed, advanced radicals became ever more enthusiastic about revolutionary achievements. Laudatory addresses flowed from Belfast to Paris warmly welcoming the November 1792 ‘fraternité et succors’ resolution to militarily assist all peoples who desired ‘liberty’. Belfast’s Volunteers sent Pitt an unequivocal message by celebrating French victories over Austria and Prussia with a parade and display of candle-lit ‘transparencies’ bearing slogans like ‘Vive la Nation’, ‘Vive la République’, ‘Church and State separated’ and, prophetically, ‘Union amongst Irishmen’.10 This was not yet disloyalty or treason, but it was provocative brinkmanship and was accompanied by an ominous development. Volunteer corps in Belfast, Dublin, Newry, Derry City and elsewhere, dubbed themselves National Volunteers in emulation of the Gardes Nationales. This was accompanied by sabre-rattling addresses (for which Drennan later faced seditious libel charges), and more tangible manifestations like green uniforms to replace the traditional red and plans to buy arms.11 At this stage, as the United Irishmen were officially a political society, the authorities were more concerned that the ‘National Volunteers’ would provide armed strength and ideological coherence for advanced radicals who were simultaneously courting the Catholics, by emphasising parallels between reform and emancipation.12 The Catholic question was being agitated in new forms which provoked responses linked to the emergence of counter-revolutionary loyalism. A Catholic Committee had been established to agitate for emancipation. Since mid-1792, ­parochial subcommittees of this organisation began to elect delegates, levy subscriptions and collect signatures for a convention planned for Dublin in December to organise a relief petition. It was feared that the middle-class section of the committee, which had broken with the traditional aristocratic leadership, was driving the convention initiative for ‘levelling’ ends by connecting emancipation to parliamentary reform.13  Brian Inglis, The freedom of the press in Ireland, 1784–1841 (London, 1954), p 69; BNL, 13–17 July 1792.  David Dickson, ‘Paine and Ireland’ in Dickson, Keogh and Whelan, The United Irishmen, p 141. 10 William Bruce and Henry Joy (eds), Belfast politics (Belfast, 1794), pp 85–7. 11 Allan F. Blackstock, Double traitors? The Belfast Volunteers and yeomen, 1778–1828 (Belfast, 2000), pp 9–12. 12 Marianne Elliott, Partners in revolution: the United Irishmen and France (London and New Haven, 1982), pp 57–8. 13 Thomas Graham, ‘The transformation of the Dublin Society of United Irishmen into a mass-

41

LOYALISM DEFINED

The plans for ‘democratic’ parish sub-committees caused uproar amongst conservative Protestants, who responded with a co-ordinated campaign of county grand jury addresses (at least twenty-three, plus a keynote one from Dublin Corporation) abhorring this new campaign and interpreting it as a threat to ‘Protestant Ascendancy’.14 The activities of other Catholics also caused great uneasiness for Protestants by evoking their darkest memories. Defenderism had transcended its mid-Ulster origins reaching Cavan, Meath and Dublin during 1792 and the scale of its violence had also increased, with proactive arms raids against Protestants now predominating. Equally worrying, from the government’s perspective, was the fact that Defenderism could no longer be dismissed as agrarian protest, but was clearly politicised. Recent research reveals that this process of Defender expansion and politicisation was driven by the nationwide organisation of parish delegates for the Catholic Convention creating greater awareness of shared grievances, coupled with the impact of Paine’s works which provided an accessible revolutionary framework for people to locate their complaints. Some Defenders bizarrely reconciled support for the French revolutionaries with residual memories of monarchist France and Jacobitism. Protestants and some Castle officials feared that a Defender insurrection was imminent. Unlike over-heated interpretations of the 1785 Rightboy agitation as a Popish plot, these concerns were not entirely irrational, as the Defenders had a rudimentary leadership and there were almost 200 arms raids during 1792 in County Louth alone.15 According to a land agent, ‘Protestants alone were the object of their fury’, and scarcely a Protestant house in Monaghan, Louth and Cavan was spared from attack.16 As Catholic delegates gathered in early December, nervous Protestants feared that this parish political activity, the Defenders, the National Volunteers and the United Irishmen were coalescing against them. With war looming, the more politically aware sensed Pitt’s readiness to abandon unconditional support for Protestant ascendancy.17 These tensions tended to destabilise previous patterns of political adherence, and provide the context for the emergence of loyalism. In corporate Dublin, the longstanding consensus over the balanced constitution and Protestant monopoly of power ended and two tendencies emerged – one broadly reformist and including Whigs and non-separatist United Irishmen, the other comprised of the supporters of Protestant ascendancy. The reformists were united in wanting parliamentary reform and some Whigs like Grattan also wanted emancipation, as did advanced radicals and ­ the United Irishmen, though individuals may have been vague about what Catholic relief meant in practice. The viceroy, Westmorland, had hoped that the limited based revolutionary organisation, 1791–6’, in Thomas Bartlett, David Dickson, Daire Keogh, Kevin Whelan (eds), 1798: a bicentenary perspective (Dublin, 2003), p 137. W. E. H., Lecky, A history of Ireland in the eighteenth century (5 vols., London, 1913), iii, p 129. 14 Bartlett, Irish Nation, pp 149–51. 15 Jim Smyth, The men of no property: Irish Radicals and popular politics in the late eighteenth century (Dublin, 1992), pp 50–1; Bartlett, Irish Nation, p 182; Jacqueline Hill, From Patriots to Unionists: Dublin civic politics and Irish Protestant patriotism, 1660–1841 (Oxford, 1997), p 238. 16 Campbell to Shirley, 31 Jan. 1793 (P.R.O.N.I., Shirley papers, D3531/A/5/5). 17 Bartlett, Irish Nation, pp 153–4.

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THE BRETHREN OF BRITONS

relief act of April 1792, which allowed access to the legal profession but denied the franchise, would have closed the issue. However, in late 1792, as international events moved inexorably towards war, he was dismayed to learn that Pitt, though he personally abhorred the use of delegate conventions as a means of political agitation, pragmatically intended to grant more relief to secure Catholic loyalty and participation in the war effort. The Irish executive had to follow ministerial policy and tried to calm Protestant fears. This process was reflected in the government or ‘Castle’ press. The Freeman’s Journal, edited by the government informer, Francis Higgins, published a letter, signed ‘Detector’, addressed to propertied Roman Catholics. This accepted propertied Catholic loyalty as genuine and supported ‘freeholders of an higher order’ getting the vote. However, it refused to accept that wealthy Catholics could assent to a delegate convention which ‘with all the apparatus of republicanism … like the primary assemblies in France’, was dangerous in the present climate. Despite such reassurances, some Protestants protested against Pitt’s policy by appearing to consider alliance with the Catholics, while others vengefully flirted with parliamentary reform.18 The impact of this confused situation of kaleidoscopic changes in allegiance impacted on extant Irish institutions. One of the earliest Williamite societies, the so-called ‘Aldermen of Skinner’s Alley’, although opposed to government in the 1780s and sufficiently reformist to dine with Whigs, United Irishmen and Catholic Committeemen until early 1792, was, by the summer, expelling anyone failing to support Protestant ascendancy.19 The inauguration of National Guards had split the Volunteer movement into ‘new’ and ‘old’ sections, but in reality, beyond the ultra-radical, green-jacketed corps lay a spectrum of opinion ranging from moderate reformers to those raised against the Defenders in Ulster and north Leinster, described by Wolfe Tone as being like Peep O’Day Boys.20 The key point is that, immediately before the first loyal declarations, Irish politics were in a protean state. Although extreme positions between conservatives and radicals were emerging, they had not yet hardened into polar opposites. Concurrently with the excitement generated by the ‘Back Lane parliament’, the United Irishmen asked the Volunteers to hold their own reform convention at Dungannon on the symbolically significant 15 February 1793, the anniversary of the famous 1782 Dungannon convention which had helped secure the Irish parliament’s legislative independence. Delegates would be chosen at Ulster parish and town meetings to agitate for reform and emancipation. As the Catholic Convention met, Westmorland was aware of growing alarm amongst Dublin Protestants. ‘The success of the French,’ he told Pitt, ‘the probability of England being involved in war or insurrection, and being unable, and what is worse, the suspicion that she is unwilling, to assist Ireland, frightens the Protestants.’21 The Castle stayed its hand against the National Volunteers until 8 December 1792, the day the Catholic Convention ended. A proclamation, aimed at the Dublin 18 FJ, 6–8 Nov. 1792; Hill, Patriots to Unionists, p 234; Bartlett, Irish Nation, pp 143–4, 146–7, 154. 19 It commemorated Protestant aldermen expelled under James II, see Hill, Patriots to Unionists, p 235. 20 Bartlett, Irish Nation, pp 181–2. 21 Cited in Lecky, Ireland, iii, 115.

43

LOYALISM DEFINED

Volunteers, accused ‘ill-affected persons’ of entering ‘heretofore laudable associations … forcibly to redress pretended grievances and to subvert the established Constitution.’ Though the ‘old’ Volunteers (i.e. those of 1782) were exempted, the more radical corps reacted belligerently. Resolutions from Belfast described the situation as ‘smothered war’ and urged all Volunteers to drill and arm.22 This potentially explosive political situation was framed both by ongoing Defender problems and the quickening pace of wider events, as Louis XVI went on trial for his life; and John Reeves’s Association for the Protection of Property against Republicans and Levellers was inaugurated at London’s Crown and Anchor tavern on 20 November 1792. This latter event soon had Irish repercussions. On 29 November 1792, John Giffard (1746–1819), the loyalist editor of Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, freeman representative of the apothecaries’ guild on Dublin corporation and soon to be city sheriff with responsibility for selecting the grand jury, printed the Crown and Anchor resolutions in his newspaper with an added preface of his own headed ‘Constitutional Societies’. This claimed that, while Reeves’s was the first English constitutional society, ‘In Ireland, we have had, in effect, many. The corporation of the city, the Grand Juries of the Kingdom have all proved themselves to be in that class.’ However, Giffard emphasised ‘we have yet had none to avow themselves associated for the sole purpose of resistance to the enemies of the state’. ‘IRISH LOYALTY’, he added, ‘has an example in [Reeves’s] spirited resolutions, which we trust it will have the courage to imitate.’ For their part, the Irish government also stimulated loyalty: the 8 December proclamation asked loyal men to avoid seditious associations and instructed magistrates to disperse unlawful assemblies. This was followed by appeals in the Castle press for wider loyalist backing. Seditious propaganda, when allied with ‘National Guards’ aiming to ‘overawe’ the army and the three estates of the constitution, made it ‘the bounden duty of every man … to assist in giving efficacy to the late proclamation’.23 Thus the first Irish loyal declarations emerged against a background which included reactions to the Catholic and reform conventions, governmental appeals for loyalty and plans to imitate Reeves’s associations. However, to distinguish the influences which shaped this early counter-revolutionary loyalism it is necessary to study the various loyal declarations and formations. No reader of the conservative press in the lead-up to war could fail to recognise that the current mobilisation of loyalty in Britain was being extensively paralleled in Ireland. ‘Loyalty’ announced the Dublin Journal on 15 December ‘is now properly understood to be patriotism.’ ‘The last ten days’, Giffard boasted about loyal formations on both sides of the Irish Sea, ‘have produced a picture of Loyalty and Patriotism which has never been offered in the World since the Creation if it.’ British loyalist tracts for popular consumption in the form of a ‘letter’ from John Bull to ‘Thomas’ were reconfigured in the loyalist press as being ‘from John Bull to his brother Patrick’. The Theatre Royal ‘resounded’ with repeated renditions of ‘God Save the King’. So many ‘constitutional societies’ were forming in Dublin that businesses tried to capitalise on the new loyalist identity. A uniform button ‘emblematic 22 23

BNL, 11–14, 18–21, 25–28, Dec. 1792; Curtin, United Irishmen, pp 52–3. Hill, Patriots to Unionists, pp 147, 243; FDJ, 29 Nov. 1792; FJ, 11–13 Dec. 1792.

44

THE BRETHREN OF BRITONS

of loyalty’ was hurriedly struck off by Messrs Lloyd and Ridley of Cole Alley promising a ‘considerable profit’ for these ‘ingenious artists.’ County Armagh loyalist, William Blacker, who was later to become prominent in Orange circles, recalled his schooldays in 1793 when a society – ‘the loyalty lads’ – wore ‘broad orange ribbons with our designation printed upon them, two years at least before … the Orangeism of after times was heard of’. In Cork city ‘that detestable herd, the levellers’, who had threatened to prevent corn exports, were routed by armed merchants and ‘principal citizens’ called the ‘True Blues’.24 This remarkable genesis occurred just three weeks after Giffard’s advocacy of Reeves’s example and one week after the government’s proclamation against the National Volunteers. Early responses also came from Ulster, where masonic lodge 650 of Bellaghy, County Londonderry, met on 3 December 1792 and produced resolutions declaring ‘loyalty and attachment’ to king and constitution. They acknowledged the existence of grievances, but advocated ‘loyal and peaceable’ representations to parliament for redress, rather than the ‘anarchy and confusion’ aimed at by reformers. They pledged to resist ‘all innovators’ and to support the civil power in executing the laws ‘as at present established’, which could be construed as the remaining penal laws. The radical Northern Star certainly understood it so, and detected the hand of government at work, dubbing the Bellaghy masons ‘the bonds-men of royalty, the minions of party, the very lowest and pliant groundlings of administration’. In Dublin on 10 December 1792, the Mayor was asked to call a Post Assembly to consider loyal resolutions. The requisition was signed by ‘a most respectable number’ of Corporation members, including Giffard. On 14 December draft resolutions were strongly proposed by Giffard and passed both Dublin’s corporate tiers, the board of aldermen and common council, with little dissent. These expressed loyalty to the king, determination to suppress seditious meetings, invited the active assistance of ‘every good citizen’, and reminded freemen of their admission oath requiring loyalty to the king.25 On 12 December a ‘Reevesite’ loyal association was formed from the inhabitants of Clonmel, ‘of all ranks and religions’. ‘We have read’, they declared, ‘the resolutions of the Association established in London for preserving liberty and property against Republicans and Levellers’, and then asked their fellow countrymen to join them in forming loyal associations. The resolutions pledged attachment to ‘our GOOD KING and HAPPY CONSTITUTION’, often a euphemism for the Protestant constitution, and expressed confidence in parliament’s competency to determine if any alteration in the constitution was in the country’s best interests. The invitation to Irishmen ‘of all religions’ to follow them as loyalists provoked a challenge from the radical Dublin Evening Post which claimed that the meeting was neither properly convened nor were the resolutions fairly obtained. However the association countered in the Freeman’s Journal claiming that the mayor had indeed canvassed respectable opinion beforehand, that the resolutions were signed 24 25

FDJ, 15, 18, 24 Dec. 1792; Blacker Day Book, i, ff 208–9 (A.C.M. 5/1948). BNL, 7–11 Dec. 1792; Petri Mirala, ‘Freemasonry, conservatism and loyalism in Ulster 1792–9’, in Raymond Gillespie (ed.), The remaking of modern Ireland (Dublin, 2004), p 20; NS, 15–19 Dec. 1792; FDJ, 13, 15 Dec. 1792.

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LOYALISM DEFINED

by Anglican, Dissenting and Catholic clergymen and also by a doctor, who was a Catholic Committee agent.26 On the surface this association seems like a model of Burkean liberal loyalty, emphasising property rather than religion; yet, on deeper probing, subtle links to Catholic politics appear. The Home Office papers show that the Clonmel resolutions were sent to the viceroy as the delegates from the Catholic Convention proceeded to Britain via Ulster, where they were feted by Belfast radicals. The chief secretary, Robert Hobart, told London that serious disturbances were possible in Ulster, but used Clonmel to prove that ‘in the South the prospect is more favourable, as the enclosed resolution from a wealthy and populous part of the country will show’.27 During the Protestant panic about the Catholic Convention and about Defender outrages, Westmorland had warned Pitt that ‘the violence of the levellers and republicans has altered in some degree the opinions of many on the Catholic question, and they begin to feel … the necessity of attaching the Catholics to the Constitution’.28 However, after receiving the resolutions, he noted ‘the spirit of loyalty and good order begins to manifest itself here to the levelling faction which, tho’ it lately frightened good people out of their prejudices is certainly not at present a considerable party’.29 The robust defence of religious inclusiveness in the Clonmel association by the Castle press suggests some government involvement. The association’s carefully balanced composition parallels similar propaganda in the Freeman. A letter to landed Catholics distinguished between the ‘levelling’ Catholic Convention and respectable Catholic freeholders whose loyalty and property merited emancipation. Though the paper criticised Catholics for short-circuiting Westmorland by sending delegates directly to Britain, it argued that to disassociate themselves from republicans on the eve of war, they should shelve their claims, but not surrender their objective.30 Westmorland was appalled at the recent coalescence of Catholic Committee aristocrats with the democratic element headed by the United Irishman John Keogh. Thus the Clonmel association’s import was twofold: in Ireland it helped re-draw lines of demarcation between propertied and ‘levelling’ Catholics, just as the government’s proclamation had separated republican from ‘old’ Volunteers. This would simultaneously reassure Protestants, and convince propertied Catholics that supporting the government and shunning the convention offered better chance of progress. In a British dimension, with Pitt fearing that resistance to the Catholic Convention could provoke unrest and Dundas stressing the ‘utmost importance’ of attaching Catholics to the constitution by conciliation,31 the resolutions gave Westmorland hard evidence to reduce political pressure on British ministers and so facilitate an outcome acceptable to his ascendancy advisors. Shortly afterwards another loyal association started in Youghal, County Cork which adopted Reeves’s resolutions and formed a committee to correspond with 26 27

FJ, 13–15, 22–24 Dec. 1792; FDJ, 15 Dec. 1792. Clonmel Resolutions, enclosed in Hobart to Nepean ‘private and secret’, 14 Dec. 1792 (P.R.O., HO100/38/167, ff 165–7). 28 Cited in Lecky, Ireland, iii, p 115. 29 Westmorland to Nepean, 18 Dec. 1792 (P.R.O., HO100/38, ff 175–6). 30 FJ, 6–8 Nov. 1792; 11–13 Dec. 1792; 8–10 Jan 1793. 31 Lecky, Ireland, iii, 126–8.

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THE BRETHREN OF BRITONS

the parent Crown and Anchor society.32 This loyal association, however, drew very strongly on indigenous foundations. Youghal, like Kinsale and Bandon, was a longestablished Protestant settlement and a corporate parliamentary borough which, in a militia return of 1757, contained 378 Protestants capable of bearing arms.33 Youghal was long dominated by the resolutely anti-Catholic earl of Shannon, whose grandfather had died in William of Orange’s service and whose family home, Castlemartyr, had been destroyed by Jacobites in 1689. Once a government supporter, Shannon had miscalculated during the 1788 Regency crisis and ended up in reluctant opposition. In 1792, however, the Catholic question presented opportunities to mend relations with Dublin Castle.34 Shannon had a long history of involvement with institutional loyalism in Cork. This included colonelcy of the True Blue Volunteer Legion, presidency of the Hanover Association (a law and order association formed in 1791 against the Whiteboys) and the Youghal Hanover Succession Society, an elite club founded in 1753 to commemorate key annual occasions in the Protestant calendar. The Youghal Loyal Association of 1792 had direct personal connections with the earlier Hanover Society. In addition to Shannon and his son Henry Boyle, other key Hanoverians on the loyal association committee were the mayor, Walter Atkins Heyman, John Haig, and John Uniacke, whose family were amongst Shannon’s political allies. Like many Williamite commemoration societies, the Hanover Society operated at two social levels. In August 1792 the society’s refined entertainment for the ex-viceroy, Lord Townshend, was also accompanied by a more plebeian ‘shouting, firing, bone fires (sic) and bumpering’.35 Moreover the advertisement for the Youghal Loyal Association’s inauguration emanated from the ‘Friends of Good Order’, probably a euphemism for the Youghal Independent Volunteers, who recently condemned radical emissaries spreading discontent about food prices.36 The Youghal Loyal Association also had a more recent but equally Protestant predecessor. In October 1792, Heyman had assembled local Protestants to endorse Dublin Corporation’s keynote ‘Protestant ascendancy’ resolutions. Regrettably details of the association’s activities are not in the Reeves papers, though Henry Boyle was kept informed the activities of Hampshire loyalists who, like many of the Reevesite associations, engaged in ritual burnings of effigies of Tom Paine to stimulate plebeian support.37 Shannon, however, was clearly the driving force in the Youghal Loyal Association and followed Giffard’s recommendation, linking war 32 Youghal Resolutions, 17 Dec. 1792; Hayman to Moore, 18 Dec. 1792 (B.L., Add Mss 16931, ff 25, 172–3). 33 E. M. Johnston-Liik, History of the Irish parliament (6 vols, Belfast, 2002) ii, 209–13; Barnard, T. C., A new anatomy of Ireland: the Irish Protestants, 1649–1770 (New Haven and London, 2003), p 248. 34 Esther Hewitt (ed.), Lord Shannon’s letters to his son (Belfast, 1982), xxiv–xxv; Bartlett, Irish Nation, p 158. 35 Minute books of the Youghal Hanover Society, 4 Nov. 1792, Shannon to Boyle, 4 Aug. 1792 (P.R.O.N.I., Shannon papers, D2707/C/1/2, D2707/A3/14/13303 (2) 219); Youghal Loyal Association, 17 Dec. 1792 (B.L., Add Mss 16931, ff 172–5); Johnston-Liik, Irish parliament, ii, pp 212–13. 36 New Cork Evening Post, 29 Nov., 6 Dec. 1792. I am grateful to Dr Petri Mirala for these references. 37 FDJ, 15 Nov. 1792; Watson to Boyle, 1 Jan. 1793 (P.R.O.N.I., Shannon papers, D2707/A3/1).

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LOYALISM DEFINED

patriotism to Protestant ascendancy to highlight the British connection, seen as being endangered by emancipation. Thus it primarily promoted the same objective as its Clonmel counterpart which, despite public pronouncements about republicans and levellers and notwithstanding its apparently ecumenical composition, was tacitly forwarding an ascendancy agenda. The loyal association formed for Limerick county and city on 17 December, though not naming the Crown and Anchor society in its notice in the press, bore more direct functional resemblance to the English loyal associations in its propagandist role than those at Youghal and Clonmel. The inaugural meeting of gentlemen, clergy and freeholders was extensively supported, with 250 signatures and so many ‘respectable’ supporters that their names could not be included. They pledged to suppress seditious publications, help arrest anyone guilty of sedition, and to devise popular explanations of reform and emancipation to prevent them being used by ‘evil-designing men’.38 The evidence from these Irish loyal associations, therefore, suggests the Reeves example was being interpreted pragmatically and applied eclectically. Sometimes this reflected tortured political convolutions over the Catholic question; at other times it appeared to promote a wider counter-revolutionary ideology of property and prosperity against anarchy and poverty. Significantly, the first correspondence that Reeves received from Ireland was not from Giffard or his acolytes but from a Waterford medical doctor who offered himself as a loyalist pamphleteer on the basis of having published an anti-revolutionary tract entitled Letters to Edmund Burke.39 However these apparently Reevesite associations in Munster and Connacht must be seen alongside many other expressions of loyalty appearing throughout Ireland. By late December 1792 magistrates’ meetings had occurred in various counties, including Cork, Limerick, Waterford, Tipperary, Monaghan, Wexford, Kildare and Queen’s County soliciting public declarations of loyalty to king and constitution and recommending nationwide emulation.40 As well as counties, the territorial basis of loyal declarations included smaller units like baronies, boroughs, towns and parishes. The structures these represented were equally diverse. In addition to newly formed loyal associations, they included extant groups like Volunteer corps and masonic lodges. Sometimes a locality merely produced a simple statement of loyalty without developing the mechanism for any more permanent organisational basis. Some were similar to Youghal, being based on borough corporations like that at Kinsale, a County Cork parliamentary borough. Occasionally they were based on earlier societies, as in Bandon, location of a long-standing Williamite commemoration society. The Bandon Boyne Volunteers had been based on the earlier society and now a loyal association, which met at the King’s Arms, drew on these same foundations. The fact that many loyal declarations came from conservative ‘old’ Volunteer corps was very significant for the future evolution of Irish loyalism, as it meant that, potentially, any more permanent loyal associations would be likely to conform to the 38 39 40

FJ, 22–24 Dec. 1792. James St John to Moore, 3 Dec. 1792 (B.L., Add Mss 16920, ff 70–1). FDJ, 11, 15, 18, 22 Dec. 1792, 3, 10 Jan 1793.

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THE BRETHREN OF BRITONS

armed association model. In the eighteenth century, before the systematic organisation of police forces, peacekeeping requirements which exceeded the capabilities of the old system of parish watchmen and baronial constables were met either by ordering in soldiers, or by voluntary associations of civilians. Basically there were two types of peacekeeping associations. The first was a band of civilians, in the tradition of the posse comitatus (i.e. the manpower of the country), assembled by magistrates to combat lawlessness. The role of these law and order associations ranged from the provision of physical assistance in the apprehension of criminals (the members could be armed at the magistrates’ discretion), to the organisation of rewards or prosecution funds by subscription. The key point, however, was that these people remained unambiguously civilians and their banding together was temporary. The second type, the armed association, was very different in this respect, as its members armed themselves against threats which were perceived to be greater than ordinary law-breaking and their organisation had altogether a more paramilitary character and could, potentially, last much longer. In short, armed associations could take on a life of their own and prove more difficult to control. Armed associations had been organised in London during the 1780 Gordon riots – William Pitt joined with his fellow lawyers in one during that crisis – and the Irish Volunteers of the American war period were quintessentially of this type.41 In late 1792, various Volunteer corps produced loyal resolutions, beginning with the Dublin Merchants on 9 December, who declared support for the constitution, the laws and the peace of the country, and offered as armed citizens to hold themselves in readiness to perform the same function whenever required. Conservative corps like the Bandon Union and the Mountmellick Volunteers pitched in with loyal resolutions and pledges to assist the magistrates, drawing a clear demarcation lines between themselves and the National Volunteers. Other non-Volunteer declarations also contained offers of armed service. In Dublin a proposed loyal association of ex-military gentlemen and half-pay officers vowed to ‘take an active part’ against all who disturbed the public peace by seditious writings or otherwise, by forming a military corps and putting themselves under government orders, ready to be called out if the National Volunteers appeared in arms. Large numbers signed loyal resolutions at Tallow, County Waterford pledging to march, if called upon, at their own expense to join with the military in defending the kingdom. However the armed association model was not ubiquitous. Functionally, the Youghal and Clonmel ­ associations were more like law and order associations as they offered generalised assistance to the magistrates as well as suppressing seditious publications and striving to educate the poor politically. Sometimes the armed and the law and ­order/­propagandist model were combined, as was the case with the Limerick loyalists, who, as well as ideological propaganda and supporting the magistrates would, if called on by government, arm themselves.42 41 Michael Duffy, ‘William Pitt and the origins of the loyalist association movement of 1792’, The Historical Journal, 39, 4 (1996), pp 955–6; Allan F. Blackstock, ‘The invincible mass: loyal crowds in mid-Ulster, 1795–96’, in P. J. Jupp and Eoin F. Magennis (eds), Crowds in Ireland, c. 1720–1920 (London and New York, 2000), pp 89–90. 42 BNL, 11–14 Dec. 1792; FJ, 22–24, 27–29 Dec. 1792; 29 Dec. 179 2– 1 Jan. 1793; 12–15 Jan. 1793; FDJ, 22 Dec. 1792, 3 Jan. 1793.

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LOYALISM DEFINED

Despite the fluid nature of early Irish loyalism, several general points about its composition, structures and character emerge from this survey. First, though the impetus came from the landed and corporate elite and from middle-class elements in Volunteer corps and masonic lodges, there was also a popular dimension. In Dublin it was reported that working-class Protestants in the earl of Meath’s Liberty ‘breathe nothing but perfect loyalty’.43 Second, though the accelerating rush of enthusiasm tends to suggest that the Reevesite template was widely imitated, Irish loyalists were more willing than their English counterparts to engage their opponents militarily by adopting or continuing an armed association model. Indeed, it could be argued that part of the impulse for loyalism was to maintain the capability for civilians to arm and organise after the proclamation against the Volunteers. Third, the Giffardinfluenced associations certainly drew strongly on their British counterparts, but adopted the lingua franca of the new loyalism for conservative reasons, seizing the patriotic moment to jolt Anglo-Irish politics away from Pitt’s pragmatic conciliation and towards a position where common counter-revolutionary ardour and the British connection became the life-blood of Protestant ascendancy. English loyalism, however, was broad-based and ‘capable of representing any ideological position other than revolutionary republicanism and associations made compromises with moderate opinion ‘in order to gain unanimity’.44 Some associations in Manchester and Birmingham had Church and King roots, but others in Yorkshire included many old Wyvillite reformers while Durham loyalists were ‘most ardent friends to the principles of reform, but as decided enemies to a spirit of innovation.’45 In Ireland, the fluidity of politics would inevitably impact upon the new loyalism; yet, to distinguish the different political influences it is necessary to change the focus from what loyalists said they would do and analysis the language used in their declarations. The early United Irishmen were ‘real Whigs before they were militant republicans’, opposing central government corruption and adopting the standard radical position on the British constitution. This derived from John Locke’s notion of an ‘ancient’ constitution whereby people entrusted their rights to governmental protection but which was eroded until partly restored in 1688 and, in Ireland, 1782, but required radical reform to fully regain its original purity.46 The concept’s fluidity was increased by Paine’s argument that, as the English constitution was unwritten, it had no permanent existence and the word itself could no longer protect political ideas or institutions. Indeed, as the French began attributing revolutionary meanings to words, political terminology itself became contested with attempts by the radical London Corresponding Society to fix the meaning of ‘republican’, ‘aristocrat’, ‘loyalist’, ‘citizen’ and ‘subject’. Loyalist pamphleteers sought refuge in Samuel Johnson’s dictionary definitions; while their opponents countered that the vocabu43 44

30.

Cited in Ann Kavanaugh, John Fitzgibbon, earl of Clare (Dublin, 1997), p 250. Austin Gee, ‘The British Volunteer movement, 1793–1807’ (D.Phil thesis, Oxford, 1986), p

45

E. C. Black, The Association (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), pp 240, 248, 255; Dozier, King, constitution and country, pp 79, 82. 46 Elliott, Partners in revolution, p 27.

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THE BRETHREN OF BRITONS

lary of loyalism was ‘invented to deceive’.47 In Ireland too, interpretations of the constitution featured prominently in debates about reform and emancipation. As the Catholic Convention met, the Freeman’s Journal asked rhetorically how propertied Catholics could support a delegate convention ‘with all the apparatus of republicanism … like the primary assemblies in France’. Glossing the ancient treason laws, the editor claimed: ‘I know of no statute … making it treason to imagine the intimidation of parliament, but every man of loyalty and reason knows, that to imagine the intimidation of the legislature, is to imagine the death of the Constitution.’ Later it hoped that ‘loyalty and patriotism’ would defeat sedition and that ‘the British Constitution and British Empire will triumph over French arms and arts’. As the Dublin Journal headline ‘Constitutional Societies’ suggests, conservatives like its editor, John Giffard, believed the constitution (which they understood as that established in 1688 enshrining civil and religious liberty, hence ‘Protestant ascendancy’) was the key target of ‘levellers and republicans’ who would surreptitiously undermine its meaning prior to open physical assault on its supporters. Inevitably the constitution became the focus of multifarious expressions of loyalty in 1792–3, but the different emphases help identify the components. Conservative declarations, like those published in the Dublin Journal by the Tallow Loyal Association of County Waterford, often swore loyalty to the ‘present happy constitution’. Kinsale’s loyalists also wanted things to stay as they were, being ‘happy in the enjoyment of the blessings derived from the excellent constitution of this kingdom’. The Bandon Boyne loyal society supported ‘the present happy constitution’. The Clonmel loyalists trumpeted support for ‘our good king and happy constitution’ and would prevent any plan ‘whether expressed or implied’ to overthrow it. The Youghal loyalists were ‘sensible of the happiness and security they enjoyed under the extant constitution’. The Dublin Loyal Association of half-pay officers swore to defend ‘the best of kings and the best of constitutions’, whereas the plebeian parishioners of St Thomas in the city were content with ‘the subsisting form of our happy Constitution’ and would support the authorities against ‘the speculations and disorders of Republicans and Levellers’. A loyalist meeting in Monaghan encouraged ‘every person of property who regards the Constitution to avow his determination to support it inviolate’. County Tipperary freeholders would support the ‘present Constitution in Church and State’. The Limerick association, while Reevesite in its propagandist purpose, though it claimed to be ‘unconnected to any party’ promoted a satisfied ‘Protestant’ view of the constitution claiming that 1782 established the British constitution fully in Ireland.48 These various expressions about the constitution all emerge as euphemisms implying the fixity of meaning necessary to maintain Protestant ascendancy, a fact readily recognised by Belfast radicals who, on starting subscriptions for the ‘Soldiers of Liberty’ to buy arms, declared ‘after all we have

47 Oliva Smith, The politics of language, 1791–1819 (Oxford, 1984), pp 45–6; John Barrell, Imagining the king’s death: figurative treason, fantasies of regicide, 1793–96 (Oxford, 2000), pp 1–3. 48 FJ, 22–24, 27–29 Dec. 1792; 29 Dec. 1792 – 1 Jan. 1793; 12–15 Jan. 1793; FDJ, 22 Dec. 1792; 3, 8 Jan. 1793.

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heard and read about our glorious and happy Constitution, we are so ignorant as not to be able to find what it is’, when three-quarters of the people were excluded.49 More moderate reformers, however, envisaged less fundamental change and saw the constitution’s strength in its ability to adapt and extend political liberty. Aristocratic Whigs believed that, to weather the revolutionary storm, property should fill its sails with popular support. Alarmed at growing United Irish support, the duke of Leinster formed the Association of the Friends of the Constitution, Liberty and Peace in Dublin on 21 December 1793. This was named after the Friends of the People, begun by parliamentary Whigs like Grey the previous April, and which had helped persuade Pitt to frame the May proclamation. Leinster’s association advocated reform and emancipation but required members to sign a loyal declaration opposing republicanism or subversion of the constitution in king, lords and commons. Like the Reevesite model, Leinster’s metropolitan parent encouraged imitation in counties and major towns, with the objective of petitioning for reform when the new parliamentary session began.50 By late December, as more loyal declarations appeared, significant differences about the constitution began to appear in their terminology. Resolutions from the duke of Leinster’s own heartland of Kildare emanated from a meeting at Athy of ‘different ranks and religions’, friends to their country who swore loyalty to the king and simple ‘attachment to the constitution’, without any happy or glorious prefixes. Similar ones were produced in Queen’s County. The first resolution of a Waterford city meeting chaired by the Whig and Quaker, Sir John Newport, and comprised of respectable citizens of ‘every religious persuasion’, emphasised that they were ‘strongly attached to the preservation of the Constitution’, an ambiguous phrase open to the interpretation that the threat came from the unreformed system as well as from French ideas. In Newport Pratt, County Mayo, a meeting of all denominations passed resolutions offering to assist the magistrates to execute the law ‘regardless of religious distinctions, uninfluenced by any spirit of party’ and declared loyalty to king and constitution, but anticipated reform of the ‘abuses’ that had ‘crept’ into the constitution, obtainable from the wisdom of parliament, not extorted by the ‘anarchy and confusion’ of societies who ‘under the pretence of Reform, call Irishmen to arms and preach the miserable doctrine of LIBERTY and EQUALITY’.51 Somewhat ironically, given Giffard’s advocacy of the English loyal association model, this chimed more with the Crown and Anchor resolutions which deprecated the new ‘doctrine of Equality and the Rights of Man’, claiming ‘everyone has all the Rights of Man that leave him at liberty to do good to himself and his neighbour and … protect his person and property’, and for which ‘every true Briton ought to shed his blood’.52 This elevation of property over Protestantism, and its corollary of Christianity over denominationalism, was thoroughly Burkean and appealed to moderates prepared to admit Catholics to political rights. 49 50

BNL, 25–28 Dec. 1792. Lecky, Ireland, iii, 106, 122; John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt (3 vols, London, 1969–83), ii, 108– 10; Henry Grattan, Memoirs of the Rt Hon Henry Grattan by his son (5 vols, London, 1849), iv, 126–8; BNL, 21 Dec. 1792. 51 FDJ, 3, 8, 10 Jan. 1793. 52 FJ, 6–8 Nov., 24–26 Dec. 1792; FDJ, 29 Nov. 1792.

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If the corporate, conservative Volunteer and Reevesite forms of loyalism were influenced by the politics of Protestant ascendancy, then these resolutions were stimulated by Leinster’s Friends of the Constitution, dedicated to clawing back popular support from the United Irishmen. This strand of loyalism with its more open stance on the constitution and greater evidence of Catholic participation recalled the more optimistic days of the 1770s, but its traditional landed basis failed to impress advanced radicals from the commercial and professional classes. Writing from Dublin to his brother-in-law in Belfast, the progenitor of the United Irishmen, William Drennan, accused the ‘Leinster Association’ of ‘endeavouring by all methods to gain converts and injure our little societies’, but hoped that ‘the North will see through this fawning aristocracy’.53 The Belfast newspapers were also full of declarations from freemason and Volunteer societies and from county, parish and town meetings. Here too the motivations and stimuli were mixed. Some, like the Bellaghy masonic declarations of 3 December 1792, seem related to the Catholic Convention and a northern response to Giffard’s call. County meetings in Monaghan, Cavan and Fermanagh issued similar resolutions and sometimes actual loyal associations were proposed. The Fermanagh gentry, headed by Lord Enniskillen, summoned a county meeting to consider ‘forming an association for the support of the present Constitution’. Other declarations referred directly to the government’s appeal after the proclamation against the National Volunteers. On 17 December a Portadown town meeting declared loyalty to king and constitution and vowed to suppress seditious associations as required by the proclamation. The resolutions were signed by 121 inhabitants, then taken to Drumcree Roman Catholic Chapel for endorsement.54 However, most Ulster declarations were prompted by the impending Dungannon reform convention, scheduled for February 1793. Drennan framed the address and, though republican himself, recognised changes in the political climate and, in common with the promoters of loyalism, understood that all was to play for. Aiming initially for ‘an impartial and adequate representation of the whole nation in parliament’, Drennan needed support from moderate Protestant reformers and Catholics nervous about the French. Thus ‘representative legislature’ was deleted from the draft convention address as suggestive of Parisian precedents and replaced by wording deprecating ‘all revolution, all republicanism’ while sticking to its principle. With this crucial test of public opinion looming, the meetings to select convention delegates attracted loyalist attention, as Drennan warned, ‘The cry of revolution and republicanism is raised against us [and] the lunge that all the runners of government is making at us will be hard to parry.’55 As the reform convention neared, many declarations came from freemason lodges, often linked to Volunteer corps. Though traditionally apolitical, masons were touched by the current atmosphere of politicisation and this coincided with organisational changes whereby county committees replaced previously loose struc53 Drennan to Samuel McTier, 31 Dec. 1792, The Drennan-McTier letters, 1776–1793, ed. Jean Agnew (3 vols, Dublin, 1998), i, 454–6. 54 FDJ, 3 Jan. 1793; BNL, 18–21 Dec. 1792. 55 Drennan to Samuel McTier, 19 Dec. 1792 (Drennan-McTier letters, i, 446–7).

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tures. This process of change was ongoing when the Catholic and reform conventions further inflamed the political temperature and county leaderships sought to publicise their views.56 In County Londonderry, Bellaghy lodge’s loyal resolutions thinly disguised support for Protestant ascendancy and the government. Though these were subsequently toned down, the county’s masons split. Radical lodges from Maghera responded, claiming that they would ‘no longer suffer … the mercenary slaves of power’ to prevent their linking with Catholics ‘to establish the rights of the Nation … in perfect consistence with liberty and loyalty’, thus restoring the constitution’s ‘original excellence’ which needed renovation not innovation. The Magherafelt Union Volunteers were ‘loyal to our King’ and ‘our excellent constitution, as it exists in theory’, but they felt that constitutional balance was ruined by the ‘overbearing influence’ of aristocracy, creating a crisis which could only be resolved by a ‘full, free and equal representation of all the people’ in parliament, including the Catholics.57 In Armagh, scene of recent sectarian trouble, the conservative-dominated county masonic committee asked lodges to pass resolutions similar to Bellaghy’s. Of the county’s thirty-six lodges, twenty-six immediately agreed and others indicated support later. As a result 1,131 freemasons met in Armagh city on 17 December 1792. Declaring their principles as ‘loyalty and love’, they issued resolutions deploring the ‘rude hand of innovation’ lifted against the constitution. Yet here too, in the county soon to give birth to the Orange Order, the ascendancy line was diluted. These masons opposed radicalism, but were ‘happy to meet with our fellow citizens of every persuasion’ to petition for ‘all legal and constitutional redress’. This example was followed elsewhere. On 27 December, St John’s day, County Antrim’s Ballintoy lodge ‘perfectly coincided with their brethren … at Armagh’ in loyalty to the king and the ‘existing constitution’, but stressed that this loyalty was truly Masonic and agreeable to their ‘oath of fidelity … without enlisting ourselves under the banner of any party, whether political or religious’. They also accepted that is was necessary to consider the ‘real or imagined grievances’ but, in a coded message about the reform convention, said that ‘no true patriot’ should use anything except ‘legal and loyal means of redress’. The Bellaghy masons’ St John’s day declaration re-iterated support for the constitution and laws ‘as presently established’, but added a conciliatory codicil, expressing readiness ‘to cooperate with our fellow subjects in requesting from the legislature redress of such grievances as may have crept into the system’.58 Other masonic resolutions were less equivocally conservative, like those from Hallsmill, County Down, which repeated that no patriot aimed to redress any ‘grievance, or alleged grievance’ (my emphasis) by other than peaceable and loyal means, but emphasised, in a concluding toast that their loyalty was apolitical – ‘the KING and the [Masonic] CRAFT, and Confusion to their Enemies’.59 On 21 December, as Leinster’s association began in Dublin, citizens and freemen 56 57 58

Mirala, ‘Freemasonry, conservatism and loyalism’, pp 14–20. NS, 26 Dec. 1792; BNL, 14–18 Dec. 1792. Mirala, ‘Freemasonry, conservatism and loyalism’, p 20; BNL, 11–14, 18–21 Dec. 1792; 28 Dec. 1792–1 Jan. 1793. 59 BNL, 1–4 Jan. 1793.

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in Derry city declared their loyalty to the constitution of king, lords and commons, but rather evasively noted that, as ‘the people of Ireland’ were inadequately represented, reform should be sought by ‘every constitutional means’. Resolutions were passed recommending parochial meetings to select reform convention delegates, as was one claiming that Ireland’s best defenders were its respectable citizenry trained in arms. Some debate occurred about absolving Volunteers from the proclamation’s ‘unfounded imputations’, but the resolution carried. However, though the coming Dungannon reform convention was the context, the overall tenor was moderate reformist and loyal – the subscribers included Alderman Schoales, later a noted loyalist and yeoman. On New Year’s Eve 1792, the very day on which Drennan warned about Leinster’s moderate association targeting northern opinion, nineteen masonic lodges, radical and conservative, including Bellaghy, met to attempt a compromise. This was unsuccessful. Seven radical lodges produced declarations about the ‘constitution as it exists in theory’ and Bellaghy reverted to its uncompromising support for the ‘King, Crown and the Constitution as in a state of present perfection’. Yet the fact that a settlement was attempted shows that, beneath the inevitable unanimity of published resolutions engineered by local activists of one form or another, lay a range of individual opinion to be solicited. The diversity of outlook at ground level prompted the Tyrone magnate, Lord Abercorn, to enquire into the reasons why people joined a recently re-constituted Volunteer corps. One member said he took up arms as ‘three million of our fellow [Catholic] subjects are in chains’, but another armed citizen explained that he wanted to prevent Ireland becoming a popish country.60 In this climate, it is difficult to make clear distinctions between different types of loyalists: uncompromising, pro-ascendancy loyalists, those more open to limited reform and co-operation with Catholics and those supporting the Leinster initiative; in reality, such rigid categories probably did not exist. Indeed, when the constitutional debate was raging, the Freeman’s Journal recommended that anyone who was undecided should ‘agree in the fundamental principle laid down by the Friends of the Constitution … that the principles of the British Constitution are founded in wisdom and justice, equally providing for the liberty and happiness of all people’.61 Some masons like those at Drumbeg, County Down actually adopted the Friends’ resolutions, as did some Volunteers. However, even allowing for the coexistence of different strands loyalty in the resolutions of 1792–3, not all published loyal declarations were what they appeared. There is evidence that some United Irishmen took Drennan’s warnings about the ‘Friends’ seriously enough to intervene by hijacking Leinster’s invitation to respond and put their own slant on declarations. The distinction, as ever, was to be found in the detail. The Ballymoney Volunteers declared it was treason against the constitution not to criticise the ministry. The ‘unmasked profligacy of government’ made the constitution ‘an empty name’, until the ‘sun of liberality … dissipates all the clouds of bigotry … when religious distinctions shall cease’. The government proclamation had stigmatised the people as seditious 60 BNL, 25–28 Dec. 1792, 4–8 Jan. 1793; George Knox to Abercorn, 14 Feb. 1793 (P.R.O.N.I., Abercorn papers, T2541/1B1/4/12). 61 FJ, 27–29 Dec. 1792.

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and Volunteers as levellers. The real danger, they claimed, ‘wafted on the wings of a proclamation’ which was why their resolutions were sent to the Friends of the Constitution. The Presbyterian congregation of Portaferry, County Down and the parishioners of Maghera, County Londonderry, also adopted Leinster’s respectable recommendations, but tacked on resolutions commending the Volunteers as ‘soldiers of liberty’ and the ‘REAL guardians of our persons, privileges and properties’ and nominated as convention delegates the Presbyterian ministers, William Steel Dickson and John Glendy respectively, both United Irishmen. Indeed, when Dickson arrived at Dungannon he preached his notorious ‘Scripture Politics’ sermon encapsulating the United Irish view and recommending delegates to follow the French.62 As the reform convention neared, jaded conservatives hurriedly attempted to form loyal associations, similar to the earlier southern ones. That they were rowing against the tide of a public opinion which did not see loyalty as incompatible with reform can be seen from the example of Dungannon itself. On 5 January 1793 its provost, burgesses and inhabitants headed by the town’s proprietor, Lord Northland, declared loyalty to the king and the ‘happy constitution’ and swore to protect the latter against ‘wicked and designing men’ who ‘by seditious publications and the most insidious arts’ tried to mislead the ignorant and promote anti-government opinion. Two days later Tyrone’s masons, led by one of the ‘designing men’, the formidable United Irishman James Reynolds of Cookstown, recently jailed for refusing evidence to a House of Lords secret committee, also met at Dungannon. Unlike Armagh, the balance here slightly favoured the radicals, and thirty Tyrone lodges repudiated Armagh’s moderation. They demanded ‘universal emancipation and adequate representation of ALL the people of Ireland’, through means ‘peaceable, but powerful – let every lodge in the land become a company of citizen soldiers. Let every Volunteer company become a lodge of masons.’ The dissentient minority, however, contained some genuinely conservative lodges, like the Orange Boys of Dyan, who vowed ‘to rouse ourselves, like bold Hibernians, in defence of our sovereign’. A further Dungannon meeting took place on 11 January, this time not including Northland, and produced more reformist sentiments, noting that the earlier publication of resolutions made repetition of their loyal declaration unnecessary, but that a reform petition was the best way to avoid ‘anarchy and confusion’.63 Often the most conservatives could do was to try to exert a moderating influence, as can be seen in County Down, where the dominant sentiment was reformist. Whig landowners planned a county meeting for 21 January 1793 at Downpatrick to express loyalty to king and constitution, but desiring reform. However, on 24 January a meeting of the sovereign, burgesses of Hillsborough Corporation and grand jurors of adjoining manors passed markedly conservative loyal resolutions. Hillsborough was a parliamentary borough controlled by the marquis of Downshire, one of the county’s largest landowners and a privy councillor. Concerned at ‘seditious and treasonable doctrines’, they pledged attachment to George III and stressed their ‘firm 62 63

BNL, 1–4, 18–22 Jan. 1793; McBride, Scripture politics, p 175. BNL, 18–22, Jan., 1–3 Feb. 1793; NS, 6–9 Feb. 1793; Mirala, ‘Freemasonry, conservatism and loyalism’, pp 22, 26.

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and unalterable veneration for our Happy Constitution and Form of Government’. Unlike the reformists and radicals, they viewed the constitution as a fixed inheritance ‘confirmed to us by the Glorious Revolution of 1688’ and to be handed down ‘to our posterity’. These loyalists resolved to defend the constitution and assist the magistrates. They grudgingly admitted that, ‘whatever grievances may exist’, they would look for redress by constitutional means only [i.e. not a delegate convention] and counteract ‘the disaffected’ who employed ‘various artful modes and false pretences’ to endanger the present constitution. They ended by linking loyalism and prosperity: the constitution created ‘a state of envied superiority in manufactures, commence, wealth, personal security and political freedom’. ‘Commercial loyalism’ was also a powerful new argument advanced by English loyalists to oppose a Whiggish model of economic progress benefiting all classes to Paine’s polar representations of rich and poor.64 In true loyal association mode, the resolutions were to be adopted elsewhere and copies were distributed to magistrates, clergymen and landowners for signature at twenty locations. However, only one ancillary society, under Thomas Dawson Lawrence at Tullylish, even got so far as calling a meeting which, in a measure of political realities, produced resolutions containing sufficient linguistic tweaks to indicate compromise. Although complaints were still to be redressed by constitutional means, in the twenty miles between Hillsborough and Tullylish the phrase ‘whatever grievances may exist’ had become ‘that grievances exist is a fact not to be disputed’.65 Other forms of conservative pressure were applied against the Down reformists, using the kind of local intermediaries, religious and secular, who were to become so important in later mobilisations of loyalism. At Waringstown, a meeting to adopt the Friends of the Constitution formula had to be switched from the church when the sexton refused the key.66 John Pollock, one of Lord Downshire’s adherents and a family friend of the Drennans, wrote a pamphlet addressed to the inhabitants of Newry, where the Hillsborough loyal resolutions had been sent, but initially ignored. Realising he could not prevent the election of delegates, Pollock asked the inhabitants to press for resolutions combining a more full-blooded loyalty with less criticism of parliament. Pollock’s belief that, in most people’s minds, neither loyalty nor disaffection were absolutes, reflected the wider situation, where ultimate political stances were not yet foreclosed. At a personal level his continuing relationship with Drennan revealed the same assumption. Though he opened a conversation with the sardonic remark ‘Well, Drennan, how many kings did you kill today?’ they were still on dining terms. However Pollock’s mission to use all means to create a less equivocal loyalism surfaced in late November when he suggested that Drennan write loyalist literature, ‘to put your abilities to their best advantage’, an offer which the radical righteously refused. Other establishment figures were exerting themselves in a similar manner. A parish meeting in Derriaghy church was prevented selecting delegates by the rector, Philip Johnson, a magistrate and Lord Hertford’s agent and 64 BNL, 11–15 Jan., 8–12 Feb. 1793; Amanda Goodrich, Debating England’s aristocracy in the 1790s (Trowbridge, Wilts., and Rochester, NY, 2005), pp 144–5. 65 BNL, 8–12 Feb. 1793. 66 BNL, 8–12 Feb. 1793.

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signatory to the Hillsborough resolutions, who gave the conservative message unambiguously from the pulpit and then published his sermon.67 The outcome of weeks of canvassing opinion and declaring principles was seen on 15 February 1793 when the Dungannon convention passed compromise resolutions. These reflected the United Irishmen’s radical agenda, insofar as they demanded immediate and full emancipation and redress of the ‘intolerable grievance’ of the unrepresentative parliament. Yet, crucially, they went well beyond Drennan’s wish for republicanism to be quietly ignored and came strongly out against it in a third resolution highly critical of that political ideology, which would ‘dissolve all government and destroy every wise and salutary distinction in society’.68 Although ultraradicals were present, including Reynolds, the Tyrone freemason, and the Reverend William Steel Dickson, future United Irish military commander for Down, numbers of the landed gentry also attended, reflecting the moderating hand behind the resolutions. Reynolds’s proposal to replace the third resolution with one condemning the war against France met strong opposition.69 This convention is sometimes seen as a United Irish triumph in getting Volunteer endorsement for their programme; in reality, the fact that a loyalist alternative emerged had longer term significance. In their responses those promoting loyalism were forced to define a counter-revolutionary ideology. This analysis of the first phase of Irish loyalism offers insights into its complex character. Though there were Reevesite imitations and several initiatives adopted a metropolitan-based, imitative model, Irish loyalism in 1792–3 was in general ­dissimilar to British loyalism. Although Reeves’s associations were not homogeneous in political or social terms, it is still possible to speak of a loyalist ‘movement’, in the sense that loyalism had moved beyond the May 1792 phase of public declarations to become something more lasting. In Ireland, many loyal declarations were simply a public expression of political sentiments provoked by varying stimuli. Those Irish loyal associations which appear as more permanent, were, with some exceptions, based on older Volunteer structures that did not exist in Britain to the same extent. In some functional aspects, however, Irish loyal associations compare more closely with their British brethren. The ‘commercial loyalism’ of some resolutions, north and south, was comparable and was surely intended to appeal to the same commercial and farming classes. Moreover it was common for inaugural resolutions to propose educating the lower orders in counter-revolutionary ideology or help prosecute the purveyors of seditious literature. The production and propagation of accessible counter-revolutionary material was a key function of Reeves’s organisation, to the extent that, arguably, it inculcated a ‘vulgar conservatism’. Hannah More’s Village Politics, written against Paine’s Age of Reason, was sent to the Crown and Anchor 67 John Pollock, Letter to the inhabitants … of Newry (Dublin, 1793); BNL, 11–15 Jan. 1793; Drennan to Samuel and Martha McTier, 1 Dec. 1792 (Drennan-McTier Letters, i, 433–4); Anon., A plain statement of facts in answer to certain charges … against the Rev. Philip Johnson (Dublin, 1814), pp 9–10. 68 BNL, 19–22 February 1793. 69 McBride, Scripture politics, p 175.

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committee on 3 January 1793 and became one of its most successful publications.70 Yet in Ireland, apart from scattered pamphlets like Pollock’s and Johnson’s, indigenous loyalist literature was noticeably scarcer than in Britain, though material was imported. Village Politics was advertised in Dublin ‘to be sold cheap by the hundred’ to mechanics, journeymen and labourers.71 Though the law and order model on which most English loyal associations were based was relatively common in Ireland, Irish loyalism in both its conservative and ‘liberal’ strands, differed in its readiness to form armed associations, again emphasising the enduring magnetism of Volunteering across a wide spectrum of political opinion. Politically, while Protestant ‘ascendancy’ certainly underlay some of the first manifestations of loyalism, overall the dominant sentiment was independent and moderate reformist. Loyalty to an idealised version of the constitution was not incompatible with resisting oppression and wanting to ‘renovate’ the constitution by radical parliamentary reform and Catholic emancipation and loyalism was certainly open to Catholic participation. This more liberal loyalism can be seen as both a central principle of some expressions of loyalty and an influence on others. Though the Armagh masonic resolutions could be considered as conservative and protoOrange and the Grand Lodge of freemasons disciplined those lodges which disobeyed the county committee, it was nonetheless a Burkean conservatism. The resolutions were transmitted to the prince of Wales by the grand master, Lord Donoughmore, a Protestant Whig and a Catholic Committee member. In addition to the non-radical elements in Armagh and Tyrone masonry, it has been estimated that a significant number of lodges in Antrim, Cavan, Londonderry, Monaghan and Down were mostly moderate.72 The moderate reformist nature of much early loyalism can be seen in the language of resolutions. Radical resolutions were framed in a Painite idiom, like those of the Maghera masons who refused to be ‘the mercenary slaves of power’, but the language of the loyalist response recalled Burke’s conciliatory arguments more than Bishop Woodward’s neo-conservative ‘Protestant ascendancy’ concept or the Peep O’Day Boys’ malignant threatening notices. The main components of early counter-revolutionary Irish loyalism therefore can be broadly categorised as a conservative, Anglican ‘Protestant ascendancy’ strand, represented by those in corporate Dublin and Munster and south Ulster who followed Giffard’s initiative; and the liberal Whiggish and progressive version. This strand, by virtue of the importance of its Volunteer and Masonic elements and its strength in eastern Ulster, must have been popular amongst Presbyterians. As Grattan said during the February 1793 Catholic relief debate, ‘the time has come when every loyal subject should be free, and every free subject loyal’.73 In every case there was interplay between the broad public issues the loyalists responded to – the conventions, proclamations and impending war – and their own internal politics. Expressions of loyalty in print and in public can be seen in the context of a widening public sphere 70 E. C. Black, The Association, p 267; Mark Philp, ‘Vulgar conservatism, 1792–3’, E.H.R., cx, 110 (Feb. 1995), pp 42–69. 71 FJ, 23–6 Feb. 1793. 72 BNL, 18–21 Dec. 1792; Bartlett, Irish Nation, p 152; Mirala, ‘Freemasonry, conservatism and loyalism’, p 26. 73 D. O. Madden (ed.), The speeches of the Rt Hon Henry Grattan (Dublin, 1853), pp 204–5.

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and, in a sense, every group involved seized this opportunity to address internal agendas as well as respond to broader stimuli. Moderate reformers used loyal resolutions in the struggle with radicals; the politics of Masonic reorganisation underlay their declarations; the gaping fractures within Volunteering were similarly reflected, whereas ‘neo-conservatives’ used loyalism as a surrogate for Protestant ascendancy. Polarities were not yet fixed, and the first manifestations of Irish loyalism are better seen as a process in which its dimensions and character were still being worked out. The ministerial role in English loyalism is a matter of debate; but in Ireland, though Clonmel showed that the Castle encouraged controlled loyalism and the promoters of ‘ascendancy loyalism’ certainly assumed official approval, there is actually little sign of direct government involvement. Drennan’s sister, Martha McTier, believed that government agents tried to manufacture loyalty by fomenting disorder and accused Belfast’s sovereign (i.e. the chief magistrate), William Bristow, of importing blackguards to attack the Volunteers. These men, plied with drink and money, had declared their loyalty at the military barracks. McTier noted that frequent declarations from its inhabitants had proved that ‘no town in his majesty’s dominions was as loyal as Belfast’, but ‘they [the townspeople] were not smuggled into a barrack for the purpose.’ On the semantics of the struggle, Martha told Drennan, ‘Bristow hung on the word loyalty. Jordan (a United Irishman) maintained that of Belfast – but that it was to the whole constitution, not any wooden part of it.’ However Bristow countered with a civic and patriotic argument which could have come from any loyal association committee, complaining that ‘such views could only come from a bad citizen’.74 The comments of Martha McTier, a highly intelligent insider from Belfast’s wealthy dissenting mercantile and professional community, are tinged with snobbish disdain for those whose politics were linked to material gain; yet, in England the alcoholic lubrication of plebeian loyalty was also endemic, as seen in the ritual Paine-burnings sponsored by the elite organisers of loyalism. Taken in the round, what is striking about the loyal activity of 1792–3 is the relative lack of central government involvement in its creation. The governmental response to radicalism tended to be legislative rather than organisational. The fact that many loyal declarations came from the ‘old’ Volunteer constituency and that an Irish militia was in contemplation, partly intended to supersede independent military corps, explains why the Castle balked at anything which might perpetuate Volunteering. Though Irish loyalists were more willing to arm than their English counterparts, paradoxically, there was less public display of popular militancy. There was a genuinely populist dimension stimulated amongst Protestant artisans in Dublin and in Boyne commemorative societies reinvented as loyal associations, but mass popular support was lacking. The volatile state of politics probably discouraged this, but there was no Irish equivalent to the Paine-burnings. This would change, and Martha McTier was prescient when she ominously predicted, ‘The introduction of the term Loyalist here was a new and invidious one, which might occasion animosity for years.’75 It took several years before the next organisational pulse of Irish loyalism came. 74 75

Martha McTier to Drennan, 1 Feb. 1793 (Drennan-McTier Letters, i, 478–9). Ibid., pp 478–9.

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The very ambiguities of loyalism in 1793 may have convinced the Castle of the need to legislate against the Francophile radicals. Though there were scattered localised formations, like the anti-Defender association formed on the Ashfield estate in County Cavan in 1794, there was no more systematic activity till 1795.76 Generally speaking, the period 1793–95 was characterised more by legislative and military action to suppress disloyalty than the more risky expedient of encouraging the organisation of loyalists in a divided polity. In January 1793 the Freeman’s Journal said that the agitated state of public opinion required that parliament pass laws banning radical clubs, as subsequently happened with the general proscription of Volunteering in March and the Convention Act of August 1793. The legislation was accompanied by judicial strikes against individuals. James Napper Tandy, populist Dublin politician, United Irishman and prominent organiser of ‘National’ Volunteering was charged with taking the Defender oath, and was forced to flee to Philadelphia. There were also military crack-downs and the suppression of the Belfast Volunteers was accompanied by a riot engineered by regular soldiers who forced a street fiddler to play ‘God Save the King’, thereby provoking ‘disloyal expressions’ which were then used as a pretext for an assault by the military on the Volunteers and their supporters in the town.77 Vigorous military and judicial action was also taken against the Defenders. The hesitant response to the arms raids of 1792 was replaced by direct action. In Meath troops clashed with Defenders and the assizes saw many death sentences.78 However, the war meant that fewer troops were available to counter domestic disaffection. During the American war the Volunteers guarded against foreign invasion or internal disorder; but, with volunteering banned, the government turned to the traditional expedient of militia. The Irish militia of 1793 was, however, anything but traditional in its composition. Facing a country that had disestablished the Catholic Church and killed a Catholic king, Pitt recognised the military potential of Irish Catholics. He had long associated Catholic loyalty with relief and, in April 1793, despite viceregal and Irish parliamentary reluctance, Hobart’s act permitted Catholics to serve in the militia and vote in elections.79 Unlike any eighteenth-century militia, this force broke the Protestant monopoly on wartime home defence. Politically, the combination of relief and armed service was, in Dundas’s words, intended to circumvent the radicals’ meditated Catholic-Presbyterian liaison and ‘connect all lovers of order and good government in a union of resistors to all the abettors of anarchy and misrule’. Recruitment was organised by ballot for county and city regiments to raise 15,000 men.80 There was provision for substitution, though the obligation often devolved on those who could not afford substitutes, meaning that many privates, particularly in southern regiments, were poor Catholics. The militia was widely unpopular. ‘Ascendancy’ Protestants had opposed Catholic inclusion; as the traditional ‘garrison’ they felt betrayed by Britain. This engendered 76 77 78 79 80

Clements to Cook, 20 Sept. 1796 (N.A.I., R.P.620/25/102). Bruce and Joy, Belfast politics, pp 127–9. Bartlett, Irish Nation, p 182. 33 Geo. III [Ire.] c. 22. Dundas to Westmorland, 7 Jan. 1793 (P.R.O., HO100/43, ff 28–43); Sir Henry McAnally Irish Militia, 1793–1816: a social and military study (Dublin, 1949), appendix vi, p 322.

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lingering suspicions and there was also considerable popular opposition to its actual raising. The radical Volunteers, recognising the threat, had campaigned against it when the legislation was mooted. The de facto compulsion of raising by ballot rather than by beat of drum was abhorrent to many. Louth, Roscommon, Meath and Westmeath, Wicklow, Wexford, Dublin, Clare, Sligo, Carlow, Kerry and Leitrim all witnessed rioting, as did predominantly Presbyterian parts of Down, resulting in an estimated 230 fatalities. This opposition was easily combined with other grievances, particularly amongst the Catholic peasantry who thought the ballot and the possibility of overseas service nullified the ‘victory’ of Hobart’s Relief Act.81 Though not primarily motivated by disloyalty, there was a symbiotic relationship between the anti-militia riots and disaffection. The first historian of the militia argued that these were not the precursor of 1798; however, recent research reveals that the context for the riots was contemporary, and was frequently a potent mixture of Defenderism and popular conceptions of Catholic relief.82 The Defenders spread to Connacht after the anti-militia riots, while, in south Ulster, they continued to prepare for insurrection and the winter of 1794 saw many arms raids on Protestant homes.83 This scenario had significant ramifications for the future as it produced growing dis­affection and an increasing militancy within loyalism which eventually replaced the relative breadth and moderation of 1792–3. The United Irishmen, meanwhile, continued to produce radical political propaganda through newspapers, pamphlets, handbills and ballads. Parliament’s rejection of their reform petition and the arrest in 1794 of a French agent, William Jackson, engendered sea changes in United Irish organisation and objectives. Jackson was indicted for high treason, confirming the government’s suspicions. Official repression almost broke the movement, but it re-organised as an oath-bound, underground secret society dedicated to militarising in readiness for insurrection and invasion.84 Emissaries to Paris convinced the revolutionary warlords that there was sufficient support in Ireland to warrant invasion. Domestically the United Irish ‘system’ spread from Dublin and eastern Ulster into other parts. In 1795 they allied with the already militarised and revolutionary Defenders and demonstrated their strength and organisation by attacking magistrates and intimidating juries. Suspicion also abounded that the militia had been infiltrated; as Lord Dillon put it, ‘being recently taken from the mass of the people who are generally disaffected, it is more probable they would side with them in any general commotion than with their officers’.85 In January 1795 Lord Fitzwilliam, the new Portland Whig viceroy, complained that no day passed without some outrage in Westmeath, Meath, Longford or Cavan. Fitzwilliam unintentionally contributed to the problems. Exceeding his instructions from Westminster, he virtually promised emancipation as a panacea; suggesting that 81 Thomas Bartlett, ‘An end to moral economy: the Irish Militia disturbances of 1793’, Past and Present, xcix (May 1983), pp 48, 58; McAnally, Irish Militia, pp 31–5. 82 Jim Smyth, The men of no property: Irish radicals and popular politics in the late eighteenth century (Dublin, 1992), pp 104–5. 83 Clements to [Pelham], 20 Sept. 1796 (N.A.I., R.P.620/25/102). 84 Curtin, United Irishmen, p 63. 85 Dillon to Westmorland, 5 Aug. 1794 (N.A.I., R.P.620/24/81); Curtin, United Irishmen, p 161; see also Elliott, Partners in revolution, pp 41–44.

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an Irish yeomanry force manned by grateful Catholics would stabilise Ireland.86 His peremptory recall made a bad situation worse: his successor, Camden, faced a deepening crisis as the Defenders and United Irishmen continued to coalesce and spread.87 In mid-Ulster, clashes with Protestants escalated, culminating in September 1795 when a large Defender force was defeated by Protestant vigilantes at the ‘Battle of the Diamond’, near Loughgall, after which the first Orange lodges were formed. Intensified sectarian feuding followed as the victors expelled Catholics in nocturnal attacks known as the ‘Armagh Outrages’. Against this background, magistrates and landowners in troubled districts around Dublin and in Ulster began a renewed effort to organise loyal associations. In October 1795 the Reevesite-sounding Association for the Protection of the Property and the Constitution in the Metropolis was formed in Dublin. In outlying County Dublin other loyal associations began in places like Ranelagh and Baldoyle.88 Similar associations were started in Meath and Kildare. This southern movement was led by Lord Mountjoy and other nobles, acting in conjunction with a military commander, Lord Carhampton, previously entrusted by government with the task of crushing Connacht Defenderism. In October 1795, Lord Northland, who had been involved in 1793 loyalism, tried to form an association at Dungannon. In south Antrim’s Hertford estate, a similar association of ordinary parishioners was proposed by the curate of Ballinderry, Thomas Higginson, a close associate of Philip Johnson who, as we have seen, had been an eager promoter of loyalty in 1793.89 These loyal associations were more proactive and better organised then their predecessors and more unambiguously based on the armed association model. Some loyalists were to be armed, and all were to be active and organised on a semi-permanent basis: Higginson’s plans included a managing committee and treasurer. However, Camden was no keener on armed associations than Westmorland had been, and adopted a hands-off approach. The prospect of semi-autonomous armed associations seemed as bad as the problems they addressed. Fearing an uncontrollable ‘new system of Volunteering’, Camden refused permission to arm; insisting that they ‘limit themselves to resolutions’. Although some southern associations continued during the winter, they reverted to the safer law and order model. In Ulster, Northland’s association dissolved and Lord Hertford took cold feet over Higginson’s resolutions, claiming that the association ‘would but irritate the more, and that the ferment would [naturally] subside’.90 Chronologically Higginson’s and Northland’s initiatives occurred on either side of the Diamond ‘battle’, suggesting some relationship with the emergent Orange association. Some early Orange societies were probably spontaneous plebeian responses to the troubles; but given Camden’s veto on organised loyalism, it looks as though frustrated landed figures may have been in the back86 87

Fitzwilliam to Portland, 10, 26 Jan. 1795 (P.R.O., HO100/56, ff 57–60, 61–5). Steele to Shirley, 27 July 1795 (P.R.O.N.I., Shirley papers, D3531/A/5/84); Camden to Portland, 25 Sept. 1795 (P.R.O., HO100/58, f. 344). 88 Hill, Patriots to Unionists, p 247. 89 Higginson to Cooke, 22 Aug. 1796 (N.A.I., R.P.620/24/156). 90 Hereward Senior, Orangeism in Britain and Ireland, 1795–1836 (London and Toronto, 1966), p 31; Camden to Pelham, 3 Oct. 1796 (B.L., Add Mss 33101, f. 306; Higginson to Cooke, 22 Aug. 1796 (N.A.I., R.P.620/24/156.

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ground. Orangeism certainly soon became established in Northland’s and Hertford’s estates. Colonel William Blacker, an authoritative Orange voice, later claimed that Northland had been amongst the first magnates to patronise the Orangemen.91 The southern loyal associations were based on the traditional landed law and order nexus of Protestant ascendancy, but their northern equivalent’s putative Orange linkages raises the radical possibility that the propertied elite involved themselves with volatile lower-class Protestants who entertained very different ideas of ascendancy. The miserable repercussions of the Diamond kept this issue prominent. It remains a matter of controversy whether the new Orange societies were responsible. Later Orange writers denied involvement, blaming the Peep O’Day Boys. However, County Armagh’s governor, Lord Gosford, unhesitatingly branded the Orangemen ‘an ungovernable mob’.92 Whatever the truth, from the local magistrates’ perspective, such activities increased rather than lessened the danger. Gosford’s remarks came at an Armagh magistrates’ meeting, which advocated traditional magistrateled peacekeeping associations to counteract the disturbances. They are important in the story of loyalist mobilisation for two reasons. Firstly, some of these associations also tried to move beyond the landed constituency to enlist plebeian support; and secondly, there was division about whether these associations should be solely Protestant, or ‘mixed’ associations comprising all religious persuasions. This phenomenon embraced County Armagh, and neighbouring parts of Down, Tyrone and Antrim. The form any particular association took was probably determined by a combination of gentry political viewpoints and what was acceptable to the local populace. Here too were echoes of 1793 loyalism. It is notable that although Gosford proposed mixed associations for Armagh, the only ones actually formed were in west Down including Tullylish. This parish had produced moderately ‘Protestant’ loyal declarations in 1793, and was now the location of the first ‘mixed’ association in January 1796. In County Armagh, exclusively Protestant associations were formed on Blacker’s estate near Portadown and elsewhere. The ‘mixed’ associations faded and their Protestant counterparts took on a new aspect in July 1796 marking another milestone in the development of popular loyalism.93 On 12 July 1796, a new type of loyal association was inaugurated at the Tyrone quarter sessions. Subscribers to the Dungannon Association swore ‘to support and defend the King and Constitution, to preserve the peace of their town and its neighbourhood, and to discourage and resist all endeavours to excite sedition and rebellion’. Again Lord Northland’s influence was noticeable. His son, Thomas Knox, magistrate and county M.P., was involved in the delicate background planning along with an Anglican cleric, William Richardson. Knox and Richardson realised that the rapid spread of the United Irish system meant that loyal men would be swamped, unless they too were mobilised. Recognising that prior organisation was essential, they considered ‘how these loyalists could be induced to step forward, avow their 91 92

Blacker Day Book, i, f. 240 (A.C.M., ref. 5/1948). Ferris to Grenville, n.d. 1800 (B.L., Add Mss, 41553, f. 129); for a recent discussion on the Peep O’Day Boys and Orangeism see D. W. Miller, ‘The origins of the Orange Order in County Armagh’, in A. J. Hughes and William Nolan (eds), Armagh history and society (Dublin, 2001), p 592. 93 BNL, 11–15 Jan. 1796; 4–7 March 1796; Blackstock, ‘Invincible mass’, pp 83–114.

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sentiments and make an offer of their services upon such terms as were likely to be accepted by the Lord Lieutenant, by whom a self-governed army might be deemed dangerous’. The previously insurmountable issue of control was overcome by making the offer of military service contingent on government approval, thus distinguishing the association from the old Volunteers, who had been independent of government control. Loyalists offering to arm in 1792–3 had usually included the proviso ‘if called upon by government’ so, despite Richardson’s claims for originality, this scheme’s positive reception probably owed more to the fundamentally altered security context in 1796 than to any difference in detail. The United Irishmen made the Reevesite connection: the Northern Star sneered that ‘this association seems somewhat similar to those who so nobly united in England in 1792 to suppress the Rights of Man’. In one sense, they were right. Knox, like Reeves, intended his template to be copied widely. The numbers involved in the Dungannon Association are impossible to calculate, since the published resolutions only name the magistrates who recommended and sanctioned its adoption; but the plan had a popular dimension to provide manpower, adherents whose names were ‘too numerous to be inserted’.94 This begs the question, who precisely were these loyalists? The very day the Dungannon Association resolutions were passed, the Orange lodges held their first Twelfth of July demonstrations in County Armagh. This may have been coincidental, as 12 July was the normal quarter sessions day, but radical critics soon accused the Dungannon loyalists of being Orangemen in all but name. The Northern Star held its egalitarian nose against ‘the embodied warriors of Dungannon, the invincible mass of peers, magistrates, butchers, lackeys, informers’.95 Knox was evasive about the Orange connection when soliciting government acceptance. ‘As to the Orangemen’, he wrote, implying they were a separate entity, ‘with all their licentiousness, on them we must rely for the preservation of our lives and properties, should critical times occur … I hope I shall be able to manage it with our Tyrone people that they shall not be lost to the cause of their King and Country, and at the same time be kept within due bounds.’96 Dungannon’s significance in the Volunteering tradition since 1782 gave this new loyal association a wider resonance and there were various attempts to replicate it elsewhere. Although it failed in County Londonderry at Coleraine and at the Armagh summer assizes, other localised responses strongly resembling the Dungannon plan came from the parishes of Seagoe and Drumcree near Portadown.97 In August 1796, faced with United Irish expansion, Captain Waddell of Islandderry, County Down, offered the Dungannon resolutions equally to Protestant and Catholic. This area was adjacent to the locations of earlier mixed associations, but Waddell now found that sectarian divisions had overtaken him. The local Orangemen, who were also organising rapidly, had formed themselves into military-style companies and refused 94

Knox to Pelham, 21 Dec. 1796 (N.A.I., R.P.620/26/113; William Richardson, A history of the origin of the Irish Yeomanry (Dublin, 1801), pp 14–15; NS, 1–5 Aug. 1796. 95 NS, 18–22 July 1796; 1–5 Aug. 1796. 96 Knox to Cooke, 13 August 1796 (N.A.I., R.P.620/24/106); Allan F. Blackstock, An ascendancy army: the Irish Yeomanry, 1796–1834 (Dublin, 1998), chapter 3 passim. 97 Corry to Cooke, 23 July 1796 (N.A.I., R.P.620/24/48), Kemmis to Wolfe, 27 July 1796 (N.A.I., R.P.620/24/188). Richardson, Yeomanry, p 23; BNL 5–9 Sept. 1796.

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to support Waddell’s inclusive loyalism, prefixing his surname with the erroneous and derogatory nickname ‘Papist’. The Catholics, though initially interested, also refused to sign up; having, as Waddell believed, become United Irishmen. Along with neighbouring magistrates he had tried to release the Orangemen from their secret oath, but by late August 1796 he succumbed to the inevitable and embodied only Protestants.98 The Dungannon plan was also replicated by Philip Johnson on the Hertford estate around Lisburn, an area of heavy Anglican settlement, very different from the solidly Presbyterian (and United Irish) mid-Antrim. As noted earlier, a loyal association had been unsuccessfully attempted the previous year. However, in July 1796 loyal resolutions came from various parts of the estate. The subscribers were undoubtedly Orangemen but, in a move similar to Waddell’s, there were attempts to subsume that explosive nomenclature under the more acceptable Reevesite and counter-revolutionary title of ‘loyalists’. Johnson’s colleague, Thomas Higginson said ‘they at first united under the title Orangemen, but are now about to change that to Loyalists’, and ‘adopt also the resolutions lately entered into at Dungannon as their own’.99 Johnson’s own parish association actually styled themselves ‘the Derriaghy Loyalists’. Castlereagh told Pelham that growing United Irish strength meant that unless ‘vigorous steps’ were taken ‘all the materials for establishing loyal associations will be lost’. ‘With this in view’, he continued, ‘an operation similar to that at Dungannon has been established at Lisburn’ and ‘it is reported by Lord Hertford’s tenants that a more active association based on Reeves’s principles has been formed in two of the neighbouring parishes.’100 The organisers’ attempts to submerge Orangeism into these loyal associations may, as the Northern Star believed, have simply been an exercise in subterfuge. However, the evidence is fairly consistent that, wherever we view these loyal associations, underlying the stated objectives of opposition to ‘foreign and domestic enemies’ was an implicit desire to draw the sting from equally dangerous plebeian Protestants. Waddell’s laundering of the Orange oath also makes sense in this context. Clearly then there was a concerted attempt to begin a loyalist movement in the north, comparable to the active rather than the resolution-producing phase of English loyalism which drew on and attempted to control turbulent groups. This element of elite control is corroborated by Johnson’s insistence that membership of his associations should have a moral dimension, which also recalls the evangelical dynamic in English loyalism, considered to be antithetical to the raucous Paine-burnings. Loyalists, Johnson said, must behave in a sober, responsible manner, and be lawabiding and disciplined, meeting after divine service to receive their instructions. They would be issued with arms, but could only use them under the magistrates’ directions. The Anglican dimension to the Dungannon scheme contrasts with most of the initiatives of 1792–3. This suggests that loyalism was beginning to evolve 98 99

Blackstock, ‘Invincible mass’, pp 108–10. Association and resolutions of the inhabitants of Killutagh and Derryvolgie, sworn before the Reverend Philip Johnson, n.d. July 1796, Higginson to Cooke, 22 Aug. 1796 (N.A.I., R.P.620/24/130, 156). 100 Castlereagh to Pelham, 23 Aug. 1796 (N.A.I., R.P.620/18/7/2).

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along hierarchical structures uncongenial to Presbyterians. Yet, here too, it is premature to seek absolutes; indeed if we set these associations in the broader counterrevolutionary context promoted in Britain and Ireland, aspects attractive to all denominations could still be found. If atheistic republicanism engendered ‘anarchy and confusion’, loyalty brought prosperity, social order and individual moral responsibility. This kind of internally pacifying imperative emerges in Richardson’s correspondence. He explained to Abercorn that, by mid-1796, Orangemen had, ‘signified to neighbouring gentry and in one instance to me, that they would meet no more as a party … but all or any of them were ready to serve His Majesty when called on’.101 Some of these gangs long pre-dated Orangeism. On the Downshire and Hertford estates, and doubtless elsewhere, there is evidence of bloody clashes at fairs fuelled not by politics or sectarianism but fierce rivalry grounded on locality and linked to disputes over turf-cutting rights. Factions from Broomhedge on the Hertford property and Kilwarlin on the Downshire estate frequently clashed at the Maze Races. The militarisation of the Volunteers worsened these by introducing weapons, and fatalities were not unknown.102 The gentry despaired about controlling such people; so their incorporation into loyal associations was a task of great delicacy, involving a range of intermediaries working from ground-level right up to the strata of central government. This chain linked nobles and grand jurors like Lord Northland with minor gentry figures like Captain Waddell. Thomas Knox’s role is particularly interesting and bears comparison with Reeves’s. Though I have seen no proof that the two men corresponded, it is noteworthy that both intertwined personal ambition with loyal association schemes and were both friends of the foreign secretary, Grenville, perhaps the most enthusiastic supporter of loyal associations in Pitt’s cabinet.103 At Dungannon, Knox and Richardson worked through Robert Lindsay, M.P. for Dundalk, and the attorney general, Arthur Wolfe, later Lord Kilwarden.104 Philip Johnson had an even more distinguished advocate in Hertford’s nephew, Lord Castlereagh, who, along with the County Antrim governor, Lord O’Neill, transmitted the offers to Camden.105 Waddell was a political supporter of Lord Downshire and a captain in his militia regiment. The channel of communication between Waddell, Downshire and the Castle was Robert Ross, Downshire’s member for the borough of Newry. Anglican clergymen were also crucial intermediaries: apart from their religious role, they exercised influence as magistrates and controllers of parish vestries, and were used by government as intelligence gatherers. Such interlocutors would become important in the nineteenth-century rapprochement between popular loyalism and elite Toryism, so the emergence of the archetype is significant. However such involvement carried a price. 101 102

Richardson to Abercorn, 22 Feb. 1797 (P.R.O.N.I., Abercorn papers, T2541/1/B3/6/5). Memorial of James Watson of Brookhill (Belfast, 1851), p 17; Anon., ‘Some historical memoranda respecting the territory of Kilwarlin’ (Liverpool, 1866). 103 For Knox see: Allan F. Blackstock, ‘A dangerous species of ally: Orangeism and the Irish Yeomanry’, I.H.S., xxx, no. 119 (May 1997), pp 393–405. 104 Richardson, Yeomanry, pp 18–19. 105 Johnson to Hardwicke, n.d. July 1804, The viceroy’s postbag, ed. Michael MacDonagh (London, 1904), pp 24–7.

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The reality was that plebeian banding gave people a sense of their own confederated power and the cost, as Waddell discovered, was that the Orangemen drove their own bargain, deductible from traditional deference. Despite wanting to replicate earlier non-denominational ‘mixed’ associations he and other gentry organisers of loyalism had to compromise with their Protestant tenantry and exclude Catholics. Another magistrate asked who ‘would be hardy enough to lead them [the Orangemen] on in the hour of danger [as] they say they won’t be officered by any one but those of their own choosing’.106 Such concerns found a ready ear at the Castle; but, in mid-1796 the embryonic loyal associations were subsumed in the Irish government’s own plans for raising yeomanry corps on the English model. In summary, therefore, Irish counter-revolutionary loyalism emerged in two distinct phases, 1792–93 and 1795–96, each associated with separate initiatives and with their own social, ideological and political characteristics. Neither was spontaneous: elite negotiation, manipulation and co-ordination are apparent, yet there were distinctions in the composition of the elites involved and also in the rank and file membership, and there were differences in the activities and structure of each type. The first phase bore similarities to the earlier Volunteer-patriot nexus. It involved sections of the landed and the middle classes and was participated in by Anglicans and northern Presbyterians, though with little overt clerical direction. Politically, it was broadly reformist rather than narrowly conservative and did not rule out accommodation of Catholics within the constitution. Ideologically, the language of its resolutions reflected the patriotism of the 1780s. The second phase arose in the face of a more obvious physical threat. Functionally, the loyal associations of 1795–6 were more active: rather than issue resolutions they were carrying arms and doing guard duties like the paramilitary versions of Reevesite loyalism in maritime English counties. Though also elite-driven, unlike the 1792–93 associations, this phase involved the lower classes at operational level. Initially, in parts of Ulster, there were attempts to include Protestants and Catholics; however, widening communal fractures led to the associations eventually assuming a distinctly Protestant and implicitly anti-Catholic character. The prominence of Anglican clergymen at the organisational level also made these different from the earlier loyal associations. The government’s input had also changed. From passively encouraging the first loyal associations, they opposed those of 1795; but, in 1796 a reversal of policy led to more direct participation when the next wave of associations was subsumed into the Irish yeomanry. Nonetheless, there were still delicate processes of negotiation: like the loyal associations, the raising of yeomanry was left in local gentry hands. This necessitated a radical and unprecedented shift on the part of elite organisers who often had to negotiate with plebeian Protestants. Two factors facilitated such negotiation: Orangeism and militarisation. These became crucial determinants in the future composition and complexion of Irish loyalism. Yet, in 1796, it was not a case of the later version of loyalism replacing the earlier; rather, they often co-existed and even overlapped. At other times, however, the strands could separate and become distinct. Early Irish loyalism was therefore complex: it had similarities to the English version. Indeed, viewed from an organisational 106

Bell to Pelham, 24 Aug. 1796 (N.A.I., R.P.620/24/153).

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perspective, the Reeves example was a constant theme. However, from a different angle the various Irish strands and their origins in the experience of Irish Protestants are more apparent. The extent to which indigenous and traditional Protestant loyalty and the new broader-based counter-revolutionary loyalism co-existed will be addressed in the next chapter.

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3

‘The first up will carry the day’ The mobilisation and militarisation of Irish loyalism, 1796–8

The scale of conflict against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France necessitated the mobilisation and militarisation of civilians to an unprecedented degree, swamping all traditional emergency expedients like militia and making Britain an ‘armed nation’. Ireland was not exempt. By mid-1796, reports of an imminent invasion attempt forced Camden to grasp the nettle of home defence, despite his dread of renewed volunteering. Time was short. From the north came Thomas Knox’s warning that the rapidly militarising revolutionaries made some scheme for ‘arming the loyalists’ urgently necessary as ‘the first up will carry the day’. From Camden’s perspective there were two choices: armed Dungannon-type associations, which because of their lower and middle-class rank and file membership would tend to be infantry; or a mounted force of ‘respectables’ modelled on the English yeomanry. Both options would be under gentry and, ultimately, government control. However, given the fact that this would involve de facto delegation of power to the localities, Camden preferred a force of mounted gentlemen and substantial ‘yeoman’ farmers. Selected gentlemen were sent to the counties to assess opinion, but it was already common knowledge that some sort of force was to be raised and various individuals had canvassed opinion; loyal resolutions had been published and civilians offered service for home defence and anti-invasion duties. The formal establishment of the Irish yeomanry in October 1796 subsumed the earlier loyal associations. Although the rationale for the creation of the force was primarily military and strategic, as yeomanry formation helped create and nurture loyalty, it can also be seen in the context of loyalist mobilisation. The procedure for raising and joining yeomanry corps bore many resemblances to the production of loyal declarations. The initial meeting which engendered the offer of service saw individuals openly profess their loyalty to king and country, then subsequently having that allegiance recognised by official acceptance, before having it finally formalised by taking the ‘yeomanry oath’. This process made a very public and lasting demarcation between the loyal and the disaffected or neutral. Both magistrates and army commanders realised that active loyalism, if it was to establish itself, required  

John Cookson, The British armed nation (Oxford, 1997). William Richardson, History of the origin of the Irish Yeomanry (Dublin, 1801), p 14.

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military protection. In districts where the United Irishmen and Defenders were active, the formation of yeomanry created, in effect, alternative power-structures for loyalists. Protection had previously been provided by detachments of regulars or militia, but by its nature this was temporary and reactive, thus allowing the disaffected to retain the initiative and the propaganda impact of controlling disorder. Such a scenario sapped the vitality from loyalism; whereas the confidence necessary to nurture and sustain it was created by the permanent physical presence of local residents as armed yeomen. Initially, around 20,000 yeomen enrolled throughout Ireland, though formation was harder in parts of Ulster where the United Irishmen dominated. Aware that yeomanry would challenge that dominance, after trying to dissuade people from joining, the United Irishmen resorted to a ‘system of terror’, threatening the assassination of those who had become yeomen in Belfast, Down, Antrim and Armagh. In Stewartstown, County Tyrone, some townsmen were ‘cut and maimed’ because they refused to join the United Irishmen and become yeomen. It was hoped that, if the intimidation could be resisted, the yeomanry would ‘prove a rallying point in bad times’, making central Ulster ‘the bulwark of the north’. As well as nurturing loyalty locally, the yeomanry also marked a new departure in central government’s intervention in the localities. As noted, government support for the 1792–93 loyal declarations was tacit, and armed loyal associations were positively discouraged in 1795. The limitations of late eighteenth-century government meant central co-operation with the localities would never produce uniformity. Although the yeomanry were ultimately controlled by government through the officer’s commissions and the men’s pay, responsibility for enlistment and daily running devolved to the gentry. This forced the government and local promoters of loyalism into being flexibile about its composition. In September 1796, as the yeomanry plans were being finalised, the ex-commander-in-chief of the northern Volunteers, Lord Charlemont, told Camden flatly that if infantry, the bedrock of the old Volunteers, were not permitted in Ulster, no feasible force could be raised. Camden accepted this analysis, modified the plan to include infantry and also backtracked on a planned embargo on yeomen electing their own officers in Volunteerlike ‘democratic’ fashion. More compromises followed. Grattan had told parliament that ‘an ascendancy army won’t do’, meaning that home defence must be based on a wider constituency than the Anglo-Irish and their retainers. This stance recalled the ‘liberal’ loyalism of 1792–93 and opened the door for constitutional reformers like Charlemont. No Dungannon-type loyal associations had mentioned reform in their resolutions. However, the chief secretary, Pelham, admitted that government’s use of Charlemont was ‘particularly calculated to reconcile those who had been eager promoters of the old Volunteers’. Soon afterwards Pelham indicated that Catholics, as well as reformers, could be included in the yeomanry. Politically, this helped 

 P. C. Stoddart, ‘Counter-insurgency and defence in Ireland, 1790–1805’ (D.Phil thesis, Oxford, 1972), vi.  Camden to Portland, 1 Nov. 1796; Proclamation, 6 Nov. 1796 (P.R.O., HO100/62 f. 312; HO100/65, f. 109).  Abercorn to Richardson, 17 March 1797 (P.R.O.N.I., Abercorn papers, D623/A/80/41).  Parl. Reg. (Ire.) xvii, 13, p 165; Camden to Portland, 3, 22 Sept. 1796 (P.R.O., HO100/62, f. 228; HO100/66, f. 106).

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deflect potential parliamentary criticism as opposition Whigs had used the Armagh Outrages to attack Pitt and would eagerly seize on an ‘ascendancy army’ as evidence of more ministerial repression. At ground level, the loyal mobilisation represented by the first yeomanry levy of 1796 was, in reality, far from an ‘ascendancy army’. Magisterial discretion allowed the mobilisation to be tailored to suit local balances of power. Gentlemen could enlist their corps on a narrow religious, political or social basis; or, alternatively, they could be based on broader configurations. The initial mobilisation therefore embraced the main components of the broad loyalist constituency, including conservative gentry, some mid-Ulster Orangemen, many constitutional reformers and ex-Volunteers (including Grattan himself) and some Catholics. At one level it helped draw the ‘constitutional’ wing of the reform movement further away from the revolutionaries; yet, simultaneously, arrayed them and numbers of Catholics under the banner of common loyalty and wartime patriotism as conservative Protestants, landed and plebeian. Despite the obvious inherent tensions, the yeomanry’s loyalty and utility was demonstrated at Christmas 1796, when Wolfe Tone and a French invasion fleet lay off Bantry Bay. The effective mobilisation of southern yeomen, and indeed the attitude of the Munster Catholic peasantry, made the yeomanry contrast favourably with the inadequate regular army response. However, it was the United Irishmen not the loyalists who drew succour from Bantry: by proving French commitment, they actually increased their strength in Ulster and began to make inroads on the new militarised loyalism. In response loyalists initiated a new departure which would have major ramifications. Brigadier-General John Knox, younger brother of Thomas Knox of the Dungannon Association, was military commander in central Ulster. He saw that the yeomanry, limited by government grant and pressurised by United Irish resurgence, was failing to rally loyalism in the way in which it was hoped, and sought ways of strengthening it. The nearest materials to hand were the Orange societies. Although some local Orangemen had already joined the yeomanry, the now rapid growth of Orangeism outstripped the yeomanry’s capacity to absorb it. Lacking the yeomanry’s military structures, the Orangemen were in danger of switching to the strongest side for protection. With government approval, General Knox arranged for local yeomanry corps to be expanded, and personally encouraged Orange enlistment. He also strove to maintain and ideally increase the mutual antagonism between Orangemen and the United Irish-Defender coalition. When his district was being disarmed under the Insurrection Act in March 1797, Knox ensured that illegally held Orange weapons remained with their holders, ‘not so much’, he admitted, ‘with a hope to succeed to any extent, as to increase the animosity between the Orangemen and the United Irishmen … for upon that animosity the safety of the centre counties of the north … depends’. Having augmented the Orange presence in the local yeomanry, Knox, assisted by his superior, General Lake, began to disseminate this militant Protestant loyalism into the wider populace. United Irishmen like Drennan are considered as having anticipated nineteenthcentury cultural nationalism. By combining French revolutionary images and rhet

John Knox to Pelham, 19 March 1797 (B.L., Add Mss 33103, f. 263).

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oric with popular depictions of Irishness, they created effective propaganda, in print and song, potentially capable of attracting mass-support from all denominations. Knox now sought to strengthen loyalism, using culture as a mobilisation tool. He actively promoted the Orange-yeomanry connection so as to invite linkages in the popular mind between social memory of the 1690s and the new counter-revolutionary loyalism. His deliberate linkage of the yeomanry with Orangeism recalled the military tradition of the county associations, under which northern Protestants had resisted James in Derry and Enniskillen and fought for William at the Boyne. Historians have noted the re-emergence of militant commemoration in the 1790s, coupled with a growing ‘respectable’ Protestant interest in the July celebrations, motivated not by sectarianism so much as patriotism due to their coincidence with British naval successes in 1795. However, the actions of General Knox and other northern gentry, like William Blacker of Carrickblacker near Portadown, were more far-reaching than merely rejuvenating traditional commemoration. Here too, the war was the backdrop, but it was the local ramifications of the conflict which were material. The Boyne anniversary was still celebrated on 1 July ‘old style’ (i.e. under the Julian calendar) in Dublin and in Protestant towns like Bandon; the change to 12 July under the Gregorian calendar did not take place in Dublin until between 1799 and 1800. However, in Ulster the switch to the ‘new style’ Twelfth of July and the first parades of the new Orange societies came in 1796 on the day Thomas Knox inaugurated the Dungannon Association. His brother John’s militarised Orange strategy emerged more openly the following year when he and Lake reviewed local yeomen in April 1797 in Lord Northland’s demesne. General John Knox deliberately cultivated a militarised-loyalist identity, encouraging yeomen to wear favours on their uniforms. Lake approved, noting gleefully: ‘we will have plenty of Orange ribbons’.10 This cultural assimilation climaxed on the Twelfth of July 1797 when Lake and Knox reviewed thousands of Orangemen and yeomen in Lurgan. This important alteration in the culture of commemoration undoubtedly reflects Knox’s Orange connections and the propaganda campaign. William Blacker heightened the Boyne connection by introducing a semi-sacred dimension. Large crowds attended Blacker’s own yeomanry reviews where he sported Boyne relics which were preserved in Carrickblacker house. Reflecting back years later he later recalled how people had swarmed after his horse, trying to touch the exquisitely embroidered saddle cloth as though it were a holy relic. In nearby Lurgan, the town’s yeomanry adopted Williamite terms as passwords. New defences at Enniskillen were named ‘Orange Redoubt’ and ‘Camden Fort’. The town’s yeomanry were re-named ‘Enniskilleners’, after the eponymous Williamite regiment, symbolising that Enniskillen, like Derry,  James Kelly, ‘The glorious and immortal memory: commemoration and Protestant identity in Ireland, 1660–1800’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 940 (1994), p 52; Jacqueline Hill, ‘National festivals, the state and “Protestant ascendancy”, in Ireland, 1790–1829’, I.H.S., xxiv, 93 (May 1984), p 37.  Niall O’Ciosain, Print and popular culture in Ireland, 1750–1850 (London and New York, 1997), p 113. 10 Lake to John Knox, 19 April 1798 (N.L.I., Lake Mss, MS56, f. 53); Blacker Day Book, ii, f. 94 (A.C.M., 5/1948).

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had been a key Protestant refuge in 1689. An address to Camden emphasised the point: ‘The Enniskilleners, above a century ago, distinguished themselves in support of their religion, their king and their laws; should the present times call forth the loyalty of the nation to oppose invasion or put down insurrection, we trust that the Enniskilleners of this day will not be found a degenerate race.’11 By casting yeomen and Orangemen in the role of traditional defenders of Protestantism and property, General Knox telescoped the revolutionary 1790s into the rebellious 1640s and 1690s. By highlighting United Irish links with Defenderism, Knox’s propaganda made those who associated ‘under the common name of Irishman’, appear as a familiar manifestation of rebellion in a district which had witnessed massacres in 1641. We have seen how the Freeman’s Journal imagined the death of the constitution in 1792. Knox and some northern squires encouraged plebeian Protestants to leap backwards into the horror of their collective memory and imagine their own deaths. Significantly this cultural loyalism, mediated through action and symbol, mirrored the United Irish ‘propaganda by deed’ strategy of crowd manipulation and co-ordinated violence more than their ‘literary mischief’ of handbills, pamphlets and newspapers.12 Thus, in a climate where old certainties of allegiance and social deference seemed ephemeral, Knox’s cultural propaganda was designed to manipulate and control meaning; it helped people interpret events by setting them in traditional frames of reference: loyalists and their opponents were shorn of their modern appearance and presented as archetypes. From an elite dimension, Knox’s propaganda also offered benefits. The Williamite county associations were elite-led and organised, yet hostile commentators variously described the new Orange society as ‘an ungovernable mob’, and ‘a loyal association upon Jacobin principles’.13 By stimulating memories of respectable Williamite precedents, Knox promised gentry control over plebeian loyalism, as well as muchneeded manpower. However, his activities can also be seen in the broader counterrevolutionary context of a struggle in which culture became part of the conflict and the past was ruthlessly subjugated to the present, by semantic surgery if necessary. It was, moreover, a conflict which actively involved the entire populace. In this light, the manipulation of Protestant social memory had a strategic purpose. Militarisation has been described as the key area of differentiation between the Reevesite loyal associations and the English Volunteers.14 The reality of a deadly serious, wellorganised French-supported revolutionary movement meant that Irish loyalism, or more correctly, its Orange strand, went in the opposite direction to its British 11 Blacker Day Book, ii, f. 208 (A.C.M. 5/1948); Lurgan yeomanry detail book (A.C.M., 3–42); Urquart to officers commanding yeomanry corps, 25 May 1797 (P.R.O.N.I., Enniskillen papers, D1702/12/2/2); Address to Camden, 24 March 1798 (C.K.S., Pratt papers, U840/078). 12 Hilary Simms, ‘Violence in County Armagh, 1641’, in Brian Mac Cuarta S.J. (ed.), Ulster 1641, aspects of the rising (Belfast, 1997), pp 137–8; Nancy Curtin, The United Irishmen: popular politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1791–1798 (Oxford, 1994), chapters 7, 9 (passim). 13 Ferris to Grenville, n.d. 1800 (B.L., Add Mss 41553, f. 129); Buckingham to Grenville, 28 July 1798, The manuscripts of J. B. Fortescue, Esq., preserved at Dropmore (10 vols., H.M.C., London, 1892–1927), iv, 264–7). 14 Austin Gee, ‘The British Volunteer movement, 1793–1807’ (D. Phil thesis, Oxford, 1989), p 32.

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counterpart. By facilitating its ultimate expression in paramilitary corps, Knox’s ­reinvention of Protestant defence traditions heralded the emergence of a specifically Irish loyalism. However, such developments were straws in the wind in 1797, as the banner of loyalty was still woven with distinctive strands. Indeed Knox’s cultural manoeuvrings reveal the jarring characteristics of the two main strands of Protestant loyalty. The liberal patriot version was positive and forward-looking, accepting Catholics’ loyalty and confident that the constitution could accommodate them. The Orange version was negative, narrowly Protestant and primarily characterised by fear. Though the reasons for fear were much greater in 1797 than they had been five years earlier, it is difficult not to see the liberal loyalism as reflecting the eighteenth century, and the Orange strand anticipating the nineteenth. However, in the wider loyalist response, action was not always more important than words. Like their Reevesite equivalents, some of the early loyal associations did produce cheap accessible printed propaganda. It is difficult to assess its effectiveness or extent, though there seems some continuity with the mid-1790s. This propaganda was often characterised by its political liberality and continuance of the variety of economic patriotism or loyalism seen earlier. In Counties Londonderry and Donegal, Sir George Fitzgerald Hill arranged to have weekly handbills produced so as to have a fresh one ready for each linen market, creating the impression that loyalism was organised and dynamic and able to match its opponents’ fertile productions. The handbill for early November 1796, ‘The Farmer’s Friend; or a word to the wise’, in addition to providing a litany of French atrocities in Europe, argued that their presence in Holland, a linen-producing region, signified an aim to destroy Ireland’s rival linen industry. Though slanted towards the farmer more than the labourer, Hill’s pamphlet was not exclusive in religion or politics: in true Burkean mode he appealed to its readers as ‘Christians’ to prove to the French and their supporters ‘that though you may hold different opinions on Politics or Religion, yet there is one thing in which you are decidedly and unanimously agreed: viz. in defending yourselves, your families and your country from rape and robbery, from murder and ruin, from domestic ruffians and from foreign foes’. Other loyalist pamphleteers around this time began to address their message to the lower classes.15 Hill’s pamphlet was probably printed by the pro-government Londonderry Journal. The Irish government, though lagging behind its British counterpart, was beginning to subsidise some Dublin and provincial papers. The earliest was the Waterford Herald, which the Castle rescued from financial collapse in 1794. However government intervention in this arena came well after the radicals had seized the initiative. This did not mean that individual editors were mute before the radical press, but they often had to press hard for positive governmental responses. In May 1796 the Sligo Journal requested Castle help against a republican newspaper, but waited a year for assistance. It was early 1798 before the main provincial papers were secured for the government. Even in Dublin, support generally only consisted of payment for proclamations and, apart from John Giffard’s Dublin Journal, had little circulation. The Belfast-published Northern Star began in 1792 and filled its pages with revolu15 Hill to Cooke, n.d. [c. 6 November 1796] (N.A.I., R.P.620/26/103); Stephen Small, Political thought in Ireland, 1776–98: republicanism, patriotism and radicalism (Oxford, 2002), pp 214–15.

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tionary propaganda which overflowed into pamphlets and handbills.16 Its rival, the Belfast Newsletter, had passed from the ownership of the moderate reformer Henry Joy in 1795. The new editor, George Gordon, received a secret Castle annual allowance of £200 in early 1796, but the paper’s anti-radical line saw the Star decimate its circulation. Like its competitor, the Newsletter also printed handbills such as that of August 1796 addressed ‘To the People’, arguing that everyone, from ‘the beggar on his barrow’ to the peer, benefited from the order of a natural hierarchy, which, if overthrown by the French, would make Ulster ‘a PROVINCE OF BANKRUPTS AND BEGGARS’.17 From its Enlightenment tone emphasising reason over passion to its socially inclusive model of loyalty, this too echoed the patriot rhetoric of the 1770s. The raising of the yeomanry and United Irish opposition to it also spurred loyalist propagandists, particularly when it emerged that ex-Volunteers in the Whig-patriot tradition would become yeoman. In Armagh city, when Charlemont tried to enrol his old Volunteers as yeomen, the United Irishmen sought to pre-empt him with handbills disingenuously claiming that ex-Volunteers taking the yeomanry oath were implicitly endorsing repressive laws and violating the ‘1782 constitution’. Charlemont’s supporters responded in kind and the rapidity of their reaction – counter handbills were on the streets within hours – suggests they were catching up with their opponents. Yet such loyalist propaganda still lacked the verve of its radical counterpart. In one sense it was inherently disadvantaged in that defence of existing systems is inevitably less stimulating than criticism, particularly when this took the form of clever satires. Even when loyalist writers tried to beat their opponents at literary abuse, they only revealed their own naiveté. Resolutions published by County Londonderry’s Loughinsholin Association gauchely called the United Irishmen ‘reptiles’, enabling them to respond by assuming mock animalistic identities, much as Burke’s ‘swinish multitude’ slur was turned back against him.18 Loyalist propaganda, however, rarely descended below the level of reason, and certainly showed no signs of General Knox’s Orange strategy which was confined to the visual and symbolic realms, thus begging the question of why early Orangeism was not represented in print. Arguably Knox pushed active loyalism further down into the social strata where literacy was less common. However recent research indicates basic literacy in lowerclass agrarian organisations like the Rightboys, through swearing to obey ‘Captain Right’s rules’ and the Orange oath indicates at least partial literacy. Moreover, oral literacy, whereby people could have printed propaganda read to them, could potentially be exploited; but who would do the reading? In many parts of Ulster, the more literate middle class tended to be Presbyterian and therefore suspect of United Irish sympathies. Henry Alexander, the County Londonderry M.P. for Ashkeaton, co16 Arthur Aspinall, Politics and the press, c. 1780–1850 (London, 1949), pp 109–11, 136; Brian Inglis, The freedom of the press (London, 1954), pp 72–3; J. R. R. Adams, The printed word and the common man (Belfast, 1987), pp 78, 86. 17 Ulster extracts, August 1796 (N.A.I., R.P.620/25/11). 18 ‘To the Earl of Charlemont’, ‘To the Yeomanry’, 8 Nov. 1796 (N.A.I., R.P.620/26/32,43); Allan F. Blackstock, ‘The Armagh paper war: Lord Charlemont and the United Irishmen’, Seanchas Ard Mhacha, vol., 17, no. 2 (1998), pp 6–71; NS, 3 Aug. 1796.

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operated with Sir George Hill in promoting loyalism, and, like Hill, suspected the mercantile classes of radicalism. Alexander envisaged the ideal yeoman as ‘hardy, resolute and little acquainted with newspapers and the trash of illuminating absurdities that blaze through them’.19 Another possible reason for the absence of an Orange intervention in print in 1795–6 was that raising yeomanry, ‘arming the Protestants’ as John Beresford described it, was such an accepted tradition in emergencies that people only required convincing when customary support was wavering. However, perhaps the main reason why Knox did not promote Orangeism in print was that the United Irishmen had already captured the ground. The Armagh outrages had already been used to promote the United Irish-Defender alliance in the Northern Star and ancillary pamphlets.20 When the yeomanry was being raised, a handbill entitled: ‘An address to the Catholics’, conflated the penal laws with the outrages and resurrected an erroneous assertion, claiming: ‘The Orangemen, in their Test, have solemnly pledged to destroy the Catholics … The Dissenter is willing to lay down his life in support of his Catholic brother. Ask your priest, will he advise you to join with the Orangemen? [in the yeomanry] If … so, he is a man of the world and bent on earthly things.’21 This argument presented a fabricated Orange oath as the bogus syllogistic conclusion drawn from the partially true premise: that the expulsions related to the penal laws in the popular mind. As the Armagh troubles had recently been debated in parliament, for Knox to highlight Orange connections with the yeomanry in print would invite political criticism in College Green and Westminster. Any counter-argument must both disavow the extermination claim and therefore risk the 1690 spirit Knox encouraged, or appear flexible over Catholic relief. Typically only ‘liberal’ loyalism could produce a riposte. In patriot mode, a pamphlet by a ‘True Born Irishman’ of November 1796, while deploring the Armagh outrages, argued they were deliberately exaggerated by the United Irishmen to discourage Catholics: by creating ‘a sort of pretext for your not enrolling yourselves in our Volunteer [yeomanry] associations’. Though the writer noted that war was not the time to press the Catholic question, he argued that Irish Protestants would readily admit Catholics to political power when it could be done safely.22 Catholic loyalty had long been linked to relief, it was acknowledged in the 1792 loyal declarations and would soon emerge in its own right as another aspect of counter-revolutionary loyalism. Recent scholarship on the origins of the 1798 rebellion has noted how plebeian Catholics were politicised by revolutionary ideas which facilitated ground-level links with the United Irishmen. The ‘United’ aspect of the lower orders of Catholics has become an interpretative model which presents them as secular, non-sectarian republicans. The Catholic hierarchy’s essential conservatism has been recognised, as has their Burkean ‘convergence of interests’ with the British government, symbolised by the formation by act of parliament of Maynooth College in 1795 for the 19 O’Ciosain, Print and popular culture, 29; Henry Alexander to Cooke, 1 Aug., 26 Sept. 1796 (N.A.I., R.P.620/24/76a; 620/25/122). 20 Anon., Lysimachia: a poem addressed to the Orange or Break of Day men (Belfast, 1797). 21 ‘Address to the Catholics’, October 1796 (N.A.I., R.P.620/25/150). 22 Anon., An address to the Roman Catholics of Ireland on the necessity of arming the government and constitution with the whole energies of Ireland (Dublin, 1797), pp 14, 38.

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training of priests, as the French Revolutionaries had shut seminaries on the continent. Regional studies like Marianne Elliott’s work on Ulster Catholicism, confirm the opposition of the hierarchy to membership of secret societies like the Defenders, which were seen as endangering clerical authority over the laity and compromising relations with the state.23 Most historians of contemporary Catholicism briefly mention the published manifestations of Catholic loyalty during 1797 and 1798, but dismiss them with equal brevity as unrepresentative, assuming that the majority of laymen were infected by the ‘French disease’. Daire Keogh furnishes a sample of 46 Catholic loyal declarations between June 1797 and July 1798, drawn from fifteen counties, but sees them as reactive not proactive; coercive rather than voluntary, and random rather than systematic. Sometimes the apparently loyalist exception even appears to prove the radical rule: Father Murphy of Boolavogue personally signed loyal declarations before emerging as a populist United Irish commander. Elliott sees Ulster Catholics who signed loyal declarations as a middle-class minority, lagging far behind the United Irishmen who recruited ‘great numbers’ by a Defender-like oath. Thomas Bartlett traces popular disaffection to the broken promise of emancipation in 1795 and parliament’s rejection of Grattan’s 1796 relief proposals. The 1798 rebellion and its bloody aftermath solidified the general Catholic population’s ‘alienation from what was increasingly seen not just as a Protestant but as an “Orange” state’. Most accounts agree that 1798 was a Rubicon in popular Catholic attitudes. Despite Archbishop Troy’s success in navigating between revolution and reaction, evidence from all four provinces suggests that behind the statistics of limited priestly involvement surged a ‘mighty wave’ of popular Catholic disaffection. Oliver Rafferty has asserted that: ‘By the end of the rebellion Protestants and Catholics were more divided than at any time in the previous fifty years’, while Elliott observes that ‘For the first time that century the bulk of lower-class Catholics were disaffected, the bulk of lowerclass Protestants and Presbyterians were loyalist.’ After 1798, Patrick Corish has argued, ‘Among the Catholics there certainly was an explicit sectarianism in the nineteenth century that had been unknown in the eighteenth.’24 Undoubtedly the bloodshed of 1798 had a profound impact on attitudes. Yet, in the broader context of war with a power which had guillotined priests, and given that the liberal strand of loyalism actively courted Catholics, the historical dismissal of popular Catholic loyalty must be questioned. The sources may contain an inherent bias against a balanced assessment of popular attitudes as the ‘literary mischief’ which targeted the lower classes necessarily attracted official attention and so features prominently in the historical record. However, when new ideas entered the popular mind, they did not meet a tabula rasa, but encountered traditional 23 Kevin Whelan, The tree of liberty (Cork, 1996), pp 64–6, 84–5, 101. For an overview see Ian McBride ‘Reclaiming the rebellion: 1798 in 1998’, I.H.S., xxxi, no. 123 (May 1999), pp 395–410; Daire Keogh, The French disease: the Catholic Church and radicalism in Ireland, 1790–1800 (Dublin, 1993), p 219; Marianne Elliott, The Catholics of Ulster (London and New York, 2000), pp 248–9. 24 Keogh, French disease, pp 258–61; Elliott, Catholics, pp 249–63; Thomas Bartlett, The fall and rise of the Irish Nation: the Catholic question (Dublin, 1992), pp 200–1; 224, 239; Oliver Rafferty, Catholicism in Ulster, 1603–1983 (Dublin, 1994), pp 94–6; Patrick Corish, The Catholic community in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Dublin, 1981), p 137.

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conservative attitudes which revered hierarchy and monarchy, and deep, intangible mental deposits of habitual and instinctive deference to the clergy. When the yeomanry was first raised there had been attempts to include loyal Catholics. However, though sanctioned by Camden and Pelham, these efforts encountered difficulties from erstwhile friends and avowed enemies alike. Catholic enlistment was undoubtedly hampered by Grattan’s decision to expose the Catholic question to inevitable defeat by raising it in the same parliamentary session which passed the yeomanry act and suspended Habeas Corpus. Additionally the United Irishmen fiercely opposed Catholics becoming yeomen, in print and physically, by sending emissaries like John Keogh to discourage it.25 Moreover, there was ‘great diversity of opinion’ amongst Protestants about admitting Catholics. Where Orangemen had joined loyal associations on condition that Catholics were excluded, this determination continued into the yeomanry. Such negative factors make the numbers of Catholics who did join significant: perhaps 2–3,000 in the original levy of 20,000.26 The patriotic loyalty of Munster Catholics during the Bantry invasion scare proved one of the few consolations the government salvaged from this near disaster.27 Afterwards some northern magistrates attempted to capitalise on this loyalty to thwart United Irish expansion. A County Donegal clerical magistrate, William Hamilton, tried to stimulate loyalty in the disturbed barony of Raphoe by organising a loyal association. He claimed to have rallied ‘the entire body of the Protestants and detached almost the whole of the Romans from the Dissenters’ despite severe opposition from Presbyterian elders, whom he dubbed the ‘active emissaries of Belfast’. He eventually succeeded in administering the ‘yeomanry oath of allegiance’ to 167 Anglicans, 876 Catholics and 82 Dissenters, efforts which led to his assassination.28 In Ballinderry, County Tyrone, Andrew Newton, linen bleacher magistrate and yeomanry captain, reckoned that except for the ‘violent republicans’, most people ‘only want encouragement and protection to become loyal’. He advocated that more yeomanry corps be established for Catholics, who were ‘crying out against the Presbyterians for including them in rebellious measures’.29 However, any moves to mobilise more general Catholic loyalty were overtaken by the same post-Bantry surge in United Irish support which had shaken the yeomanry and Orangemen. During 1797 United emissaries busily targeted Catholics in Leinster and Munster. The connection between allegiance and relief made Catholic loyalty inherently political. After the Fitzwilliam debacle, when emancipation was promised by the viceroy, then withheld, his successor, Camden was to ‘rally the Protestants’ by brooking no further discussion on the issue.30 In March 1797, Camden dismissed a 25 Lecky, Ireland, iii, 459–61; ‘J.W.’ [Leonard McNally] to Cooke, 28 Sept. 1796 (N.A.I., R.P.620/36/227). 26 Pollock to Pelham, 18 Oct. 1796 (N.A.I., R.P.620/25/176); Allan F. Blackstock, An ascendancy army: the Irish Yeomanry, 1796–1834 (Dublin, 1998), p 134. 27 Lecky, Ireland, iv, 1; Camden to Portland, 10 Jan. 1797 (P.R.O., HO100/69, ff 62–6). 28 Hamilton to Marshall, 14 Jan. 1797, to Cooke, n.d. Feb. 1797 (N.A.I., R.P.620/28/99, 259); Lecky, Ireland, iv, 10–12. 29 Newton, to Bourne, 1 Feb. 1797 (N.A.I., R.P.620/28/206). 30 Bartlett, Irish Nation, p 202.

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delegation of Catholic peers who had asked him to consider further relief. Despite this, the Catholic question re-emerged against a background of military repression, starting with the disarming of Ulster in March. Coercion was an emotive issue for many Whigs, conjuring visions of standing armies and arbitrary power. It dominated the debate between pro-ascendancy conservatives, who believed deteriorating security necessitated extra-legal emergency measures, while Whigs countered that repression created disaffection and conciliation was the remedy.31 Governmental flexibility over the Irish yeomanry’s composition had helped secure the backing of Grattanite Whigs, but military coercion was a compromise too far. Irish Whigs organised county meetings calling for ministerial resignations. Whiggish members of Pitt’s ministry, Portland and Pelham, speculated if the concession of emancipation and reform could reduce United Irish support. By April 1797 both men had come to doubt the wisdom of coercion. Pelham asked Lake was it not better to ‘restore loyalty rather than punish disaffection’.32 Pitt wanted to conciliate the Irish opposition and made overtures using Fitzwilliam as an intermediary. Pitt was prepared to offer emancipation if the opposition would support the Irish government, but Irish Whigs unrealistically insisted that Camden’s ascendancy advisors be replaced by Grattan and the Ponsonbys.33 Alongside these manoeuvrings, a shake-up in the Irish military command also appeared to enhance prospects for conciliation. Since the Bantry invasion scare, there had been serious concern about the Irish army. In May 1797, against an uncertain background of naval mutinies, Malmesbury’s peace negotiations with France and the preparation of a Dutch invasion fleet, Camden wanted the current supremo, Lord Carhampton, replaced by the more experienced Cornwallis. He favoured conciliation, and Portland supported the invitation, urging the Irish government to break the United Irish linkage between Dissenters and Catholics and ‘try for some means to attach the latter to the government’; in other words, emancipation.34 Camden was caught between having a master at the Home Office prepared to be flexible about Ireland, and being mastered by his own Irish advisers. Meanwhile the coercive security policy drove relentlessly onwards. Pressurised from all sides, Camden apparently weakened and offered to resign the viceroyalty to Cornwallis, if the latter also took military command. Matters clarified somewhat from mid-May, when Irish parliamentary secret committee reports revealed the extent of United Irish insurrectionary planning. Both houses of parliament now demanded that Camden take ‘the most vigorous measures’, and martial law was proclaimed throughout Ireland on 17 May. The defeat of George Ponsonby’s reform resolution on 15 May led Grattan into a Fox-like withdrawal from public life, and martial law precipitated his resignation from the yeomanry. Despite this, Pelham continued to canvass opinion about conciliation, but got mixed responses. The 31 Lecky, Ireland, iv, 25; Louis Cullen, ‘Alliances and misalliances in the politics of the union’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, x (Cambridge, 2000), p 223. 32 Pelham to Lake, 27 April 1797 (B.L., Add Mss 33103, ff 401–2). 33 Geoffrey Bolton, The passing of the Irish act of union (Oxford, 1966), p 26. 34 Portland to Camden, 15 May 1797 (P.R.O., HO100/69, ff 295–9); Bartlett, Irish Nation, p 225; Roger Wells, Insurrection: the British experience, 1795–1803 (Gloucester, 1983), pp 114–15; Lecky, Ireland, iv, 87–8.

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bishop of Ossory said that emancipation would not endanger Protestant ascendancy, but rather secure Catholic loyalty by removing the impression of mistrust. From Cork, Brigadier-General Loftus noted that those promoting the United Irishmen were not local people but came from Dublin and Ulster, and claimed that Munster Catholics remained loyal, though they expected complete emancipation. In Ulster, however, General Knox insisted that government remain adamant against emancipation to help his policy of ‘adding strength to the Orange party’. In any case, he claimed, most Catholics were uninterested in politics, having been tricked by Presbyterians using tithe abolition as bait.35 Following the proclamation of martial law, the Castle hoped to expand the loyal constituency by strengthening existing loyalists and also by extending the appeal to those previously disaffected. The hammer of coercion would be wrapped in the silk handkerchief of mercy. Amnesty was offered to those ‘deluded by unlawful oaths’, giving them until 24 June to take the oath of allegiance and surrender illegal arms. The proclamation also asked all loyal subjects to assist the military and magistrates in discovering weapons and suppressing traitorous assemblies. This initiative had mixed success, particularly in eastern Ulster where the United Irishmen were strongest. Despite this, Camden’s confidence rallied. Coercion meant that the ‘rebels were becoming alarmed’ and ‘the Protestants of the County Armagh who call themselves Orangemen … are returning to their loyalty’.36 General Knox’s Orange strategy also facilitated this transition, though Camden may have been spared the details. Following his selective disarming in March 1797, Knox had tried to secure Pelham’s approval for many ‘staunch Orangemen’ to be attached to the yeomanry corps of the County Armagh landowner, James Verner of Churchill, if government would arm them as supplementary men without pay. Pelham ignored this request but, following the May proclamation, Knox (long an advocate of martial law), secured the chief-secretary’s reluctant permission to administer a ‘test oath’ to yeomanry corps and purge those suspected of United Irish sympathies. He then resurrected the Orange issue, this time obtaining Pelham’s sanction, contingent on certain guarantees.37 Knox promised that Orangemen would commit no more outrages and arranged for Ulster lodge masters to meet in Armagh on 21 May and issue resolutions, which he forwarded to Pelham. These refuted United Irish propaganda, declaring ‘Our institution being entirely composed of Protestants, has afforded an opportunity to people who undeservedly assume the appellation of Protestants to insinuate to the Roman Catholics of Ireland that we are sworn to extirpate and destroy them.’ Disavowing any such intention, they insisted that ‘the loyal, wellbehaved man may fear no injury from us’. Pelham was satisfied and tacitly gave Knox discretion for Orange enlistment in the yeomanry to help ‘put down’ disaffection in Armagh, Monaghan, Cavan and part of Tyrone.38 The resolutions were published 35 Address to Camden, 16 May 1797 (P.R.O., HO100/71, f. 325); Lecky, Ireland, iv, 26–9; John Knox to Pelham, 22, 28 May 1797 (B.L., Add Mss 33014, ff 101–2, 139–40). 36 FJ, 18, 20 May 1797; Camden to Pitt, 1 June 1797 (C.K.S., Pratt papers U840/0516A/19); Camden to Portland, 30 May 1797 (P.R.O., HO100/69, ff 345–9). 37 John Knox to Pelham, 19 April, 12 May 1797 (B.L., Add Mss 33103, ff 379–80; Add Mss 33014, f. 39). 38 John Knox to Pelham, 21, 22, 28 May 1797 (B.L., Add Mss 33014, ff 91, 101–2, 139–40);

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in the Belfast Newsletter and Faulkner’s Dublin Journal and also in handbill form, marking the first Orange intervention in print. Hinting at the agency of conservative gentry in his politico-military strategy, Knox reassured Pelham that, although the Orangemen ‘were originally a bigoted set of men … ready to destroy the Roman Catholics, they now form a political party, and are the only barrier we have against the United Irishmen’.39 Printed handbills followed, dated Armagh 21 May, refuting appeals for the Orangemen to join the United Irishmen – a ‘heterogeneous mass of Presbyterians and Papists who hate our church’, – warning, ‘we gave you only a taste at the Diamond, but the next time we come to blows, you shall get a bellyful’.40 Knox played a dangerous game with the Orangemen. He was prepared to deflect their anti-Catholic militancy into the yeomanry, yet his correspondence with Pelham about emancipation suggests that Knox had already assured the Orangemen that the reward for co-operation was continuing their ‘ascendancy’. The resolutions of the Fort Edward yeomanry near Dungannon, a corps composed entirely of Orangemen, declared: ‘we will protect all our peaceable neighbours without religious distinction’, but warned that ‘we hope the legislature will not grant emancipation’ till the ­Catholic church repeal its articles against Protestants, making its members ‘more entitled to our confidence’. Camden echoed Knox’s analysis in trying to turn Pitt’s mind from emancipation. However, it was Cornwallis who finally pulled the plug. Negotiations for command of the army collapsed when he insisted on emancipation as his condition of acceptance. By 17 June Camden confidently declared: ‘I do not conceive … loyalty and good order receive any advantage whatever from concession.’41 General Knox’s subtle manipulation of Orangeism echoed his elder brother Thomas’s hopes, as the Dungannon Association formed, that Orangemen ‘shall not be lost to the cause of their King and Country, and at the same time be kept within due bounds’.42 Outside mid-Ulster the notion of attaching the Catholics still influenced government’s thinking as well as that of progressive loyalists. The ‘True Born Irishman’ pamphlet was re-printed on 6 May 1797 for free distribution, with a new preface appealing to Catholics to arm in defence of the state.43 It argued that acceptance as loyalists would reward Catholics for postponing political agitation, as parliament would readily admit them when it could be safely done. This appeal was double-sided. The implication for Orangemen was that co-operation with Catholic loyalists meant they would voluntarily relinquish their political demands, thus further securing Protestant ascendancy. Such a scenario raised the possibility of rapprochement between the Orange and liberal strands of loyalism and created Pelham to John Knox, 23 May 1797 (N.L.I., Lake Mss MS 56, f. 78); Pelham to John Knox, 26 May 1797 (B.L., Add Mss 33104, ff 123–4). 39 BNL, 26 May 1797; Resolutions of the Orangemen of Ulster, Armagh, 1797 (R.I.A., Haliday pamphlets, 730/8); John Knox to Pelham, 28 May 1797 (B.L., Add Mss 33104, ff 139–40). 40 Answer of the Orangemen to the address of the United Irishmen, 21 May 1797 (P.R.O.N.I., T1689/21). 41 BNL, 2 June 1797; Camden to Pitt, 1 June 1797 (C.K.S., Pratt papers, U840/0156A/19); Bolton, Union, p 27; Camden to Portland, 17 June 1797 (P.R.O., HO100/69, f. 402). 42 Thomas Knox to Cooke, 13 August 1796 (N.A.I., R.P.620/24/106). 43 Anon., An address to the Roman Catholics of Ireland (Dublin, 1797), p 38.

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political space for a broader popular movement along semi-military lines. The real difference between this inclusive model for loyalism and Knox’s party model turned on tangible physical realities. As Irish loyalism had evolved along armed association lines the key differential between Knox’s and the liberal version was that the former offered Orange protection for loyal, law-abiding Catholics, while the latter proposed that they could be armed and protect themselves as well as their country as loyalists and yeomen. Thus, though shelving full political rights, Catholics could become armed citizens. This distinction was to be an important one. In mid-June 1797, just before the proclamation amnesty expired, government plans were published for a new ‘general’ loyal association for every parish. It was suggested that, ‘in the event of any emergency’, the inhabitants would offer to serve without pay to protect their parishes. The members would enter their names in a book and form managing committees of householders. Rendezvous sites were to be established. Each parish was divided into ‘classes’, often a euphemism for religious denominations, of 50 inhabitants commanded by a captain. Members would provide firelocks, bayonets or pikes. No exercise was necessary nor was any uniform obligatory. Ordinary members could wear a hat and feather, while the captains would provide flags. This plan was clearly intended to apply to anyone whose loyalty was accepted by the local magistrate without religious or social distinction. Though it gave prominence to householders, it also permitted the involvement of ‘inmates’; while it invited those legally holding firearms, it also allowed men who only could provide pikes and bayonets on poles. However, a post-script noted that ‘The above plan is only suggested as a general outline, which may be varied and modified in such manner as may best suit the local situations and convenience of the inhabitants.’44 It is debatable how far these attempts to create an inclusive loyalist mobilisation from above, by manoeuvring people past local sectarian antipathies, had an impact at ground level. Despite the moderation of the May Orange resolutions, the ferocious spirit stirred by Knox and ongoing Defenderism inevitably exacerbated tensions. Disorder erupted at Stewartstown, County Tyrone, on the Twelfth of July 1797: Catholic soldiers from the Kerry militia, and local Protestant yeomen and Orangemen clashed furiously in a bloody affray resulting in ten fatalities.45 There was little immediate Catholic interest in the government’s planned new association. One exception was Andrew Newton, a Protestant magistrate from County Tyrone who had earlier tried to enlist Catholics as yeomen. Writing from Arboe on 17 June 1797 he claimed that he was ‘the first in Ireland that prevailed upon the Roman Catholics to enter into loyal resolutions and renounce the errors they had been led into by the Presbyterians’.46 More widespread attempts to mobilise Catholic loyalty came in December. The indefatigable Newton, clearly wanting to present government with the key to Catholic loyalty, produced more loyal declarations intended to trigger imitation in southern Ireland where ‘emissaries … had been successful in

44 45

FJ, 17 June 1797. Minute of meeting with Lord Blayney, 17 July 1797 (C.K.S., Pratt papers, U840/0129); Camden to Portland, 17 July 1797 (P.R.O., HO100/72, ff 109–12). 46 Newton to Cooke, n.d. June 1797;1 Feb. 1798 (N.A.I., R.P.620/31/114; 620/35/102).

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seducing many of our Roman Catholic brethren’.47 However, Newton was eclipsed by highly significant loyal declarations from Culfeightrin parish in north Antrim. After mass on 3 December 1797, the priest, Patrick Brennan, together with a Catholic gentleman, Edmund McGildowney, and 800 parishioners, signed resolutions deploring recent disturbances and acknowledging ‘errors which many of our body have been led into by the deep designs of wicked men, styling themselves United Irishmen’ attempting to ‘sow discord’ between themselves and Protestants. They expected ‘that men who have association, or will associate like us, for the protection of the Constitution, can have no enmity to those who are equally anxious for its preservation, of whatever religious persuasion’. They then assured Protestant loyalists of their ‘absolute determination, to co-operate and join with them … for the suppression of rebellion, the support of this happy constitution, the welfare of His Majesty’s Government – and in love and loyalty towards his sacred person’.48 These were not merely declarations, as they also echo the earlier general loyal association plan by offering active service from Catholic civilians and being a template for imitation. Their influence is evident in many similar Catholic declarations between December 1797 and March 1798. In Antrim, the Culfeightrin example spread rapidly to nine contiguous parishes. More came from counties Down, Tyrone, Londonderry, Fermanagh and Donegal, which were similar in tone and content. Resolutions from as far apart as Saul, County Down, and Cappoquin, County Waterford, on the estate of the liberal Protestant Villiers-Stewart family, explicitly mentioned Culfeightrin as their model. In parts of Ulster parish resolutions from all religious persuasions echoed the 1795 ‘mixed associations’, often being jointly endorsed by the priest and the rector. The dimensions of Catholic loyalism can be gauged from newspapers. Between mid-January and mid-March 1798 the Freeman’s Journal alone carried 15 Catholic loyal declarations with almost 7,500 signatures, from various counties including King’s County, Wicklow, Waterford, Wexford and Kerry. Many of these were almost verbatim imitations of Culfeightrin, particularly in their condemnation of Catholics who had been seduced by the United Irishmen, the ‘prime movers’ of sedition who attempt to ‘sow discord’, and the subscribers to the resolutions assured Protestant loyalists of ‘co-operation’ in the suppression of treason and rebellion.49 There had been no initial Orange response to the plan for general loyalist mobilisation, which is hardly surprising as the Orangemen were already organised, but the Culfeightrin initiative did not pass unnoticed. On 4 January 1798 resolutions appeared from thirteen County Antrim Orange lodges, expressing ‘heartfelt satisfaction’ at the precedent-setting Culfeightrin declarations and readiness to ‘to co-operate with loyal men of any persuasion’ in defence of king and constitution. Later in January similar resolutions came from Orangemen in Magherafelt, County Londonderry.50 In February 1798 several thousand Ulster Orangemen signified to 47 48 49

FJ, 13 Jan. 1798; Keogh, French disease, pp 258–9. BNL, 15 Dec. 1797. Ballycastle Catholic Declaration, 12 Dec. 1797 (P.R.O., HO100/72, f. 408); FJ, 13, 20, 23 Jan. 1798; 13 Feb. 1798, 1 March 1798; BNL, l2 March 1798; Keogh, French disease, pp 258–9. 50 BNL 15, 26 Jan. 1798.

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Camden their ‘satisfaction’ that Catholics ‘will not suffer themselves to be made the dupes of wicked and designing men’. They hoped that the Ulster Catholic declarations would be replicated throughout Ireland, denied that they opposed anyone over religion, but claimed to ‘consider every peaceable and loyal subject as our brother’ and were willing to protect and co-operate with loyal Catholics during invasion or insurrection.51 Given the earlier failed attempts at mobilising Catholic loyalism, what did this co-ordinated wave of service offers and reciprocal Orange declarations of co-operation mean? Some of the Orangemen who welcomed Culfeightrin may well have had links to the liberal loyalty of 1792 when the Magherafelt Volunteers pledged loyalty to the king and constitution, but wanted reform and emancipation. Magherafelt was outside General Knox’s district, raising the possibility that, even within Orangeism, there was some continuity with the more inclusive strand of loyalty. From the Catholic perspective, while recognising that many Catholics had once been ‘led into error’ by the Presbyterians, this initiative must be taken as a serious attempt, not just to neutralise opposition, but to actively mobilise civilians on the counter-revolutionary side. The United Irishmen, themselves expert in the power of coalitions in Ireland’s divided polity, certainly took the attempt very seriously. Their use of the Orange bogey as propaganda increased in ratio with the apparent loyalist coalition to the extent of spreading rumours of impending Orange massacres in Dublin chapels, crowded for Christmas Eve mass. They also recognised north Antrim as the source of the danger. Allegations in the Dublin radical newspaper, The Press, claimed that declarations from Rathlin Island were obtained by misrepresenting to the illiterate islanders that their purpose was petitioning against Armagh magistrates who, it was alleged, had sided with Orangemen against Catholics.52 However the best evidence about the coalition’s serious intent comes from the layman who endorsed the Culfeightrin resolutions: Edmund McGildowney of Ballycastle. His correspondence reveals the plan’s interior workings. McGildowney’s perspective is revealing and possibly unique. He was a magistrate and Catholic landowner, and agent for several prominent Anglo-Irish families, most importantly the earls of Antrim, who had once been Catholic and had owned the four lower baronies of the county. McGildowney’s gentry status and his position as agent and tithe collector made him an establishment figure; however, he simultaneously maintained an anti-establishment persona, as one of the County Antrim delegates to the 1792 Catholic Committee, and later, in the 1820s, helped collect O’Connell’s ‘Catholic Rent’.53 McGildowney’s local residence and knowledge, and his grasp on wider events, adds weight to his opinions about north Antrim Catholics. His papers contain two related letters to the Catholic bishop of Down and Connor, Dr Patrick McMullan, from October 1796 and November 1798. In the first, written when yeomanry enlistment was underway, McGildowney encouraged Catholic involvement and urged episcopal influence. He warned the bishop that many poor Catholics had been ‘seduced by pretended friends to join societies … 51 52 53

Verner to Government, 7 Feb. 1798 (N.A.I., R.P.620/35/120); FJ, 27 Feb. 1797. Lecky, Ireland, iv, 195; Keogh, French disease, p 168. A. P. W. Malcomson, Introduction to McGildowney papers (P.R.O.N.I., D1375).

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not … friendly to the present government’, revolutionary activity which would, he feared, as a Catholic landowner well might, cast ‘such an imputation on the body at large, as will not easily be wept (sic) away’. He complained that parish priests were not doing enough to discourage disaffection, and contrasted this with the situation during the 1779 invasion threats when the Irish Volunteers were organised and the priests encouraged loyalty among the ‘common people’. McGildowney exhorted McMullan to make local priests ‘enforce the doctrine of peace, subordination and loyalty from their altars’. In his November 1798 letter, McGildowney’s object was to produce more loyal resolutions. Like the national hierarchy, he wanted to distance the Catholic community from events in Wexford during the rebellion and predicted that he could ‘get them all right again’, noting how previously ‘near 2,000 of the Catholics have come voluntarily in and taken the oath of allegiance before me, the greatest part of whom surrendered themselves as United Irishmen’.54 The precedent he referred to was the December 1797 resolutions, when over 2,000 local Catholics signed loyal declarations.55 At that time, in addition to his personal and church influence, McGildowney had further reasons for confidence that he could counteract the United Irishmen through influential social links with other promoters of loyalism. He knew Snowdon Cupples the rector of Lisburn who had been involved in the 1796 loyal associations on the Hertford estate, a connection reflected in the fact that the first Orange ‘recognition’ of Culfeightrin came from that estate. Such a rapprochement would have been impossible without careful planning, and the communications between Cupples and the Orangemen in December 1797 reveal a premeditated sequence of resolutions and responses. Referring to the Catholic declarations, Cupples told a Dublin colleague that, immediately they appeared in the newspapers, he informed local Orangemen and recommended their ‘co-operation’ with the Catholic loyalists to ‘remove all misunderstanding between loyal men’. The synchronised and evidently pre-arranged Orange response publicly expressed their ‘warm approbation of what these Catholics have done’, and assured Cupples that they were ‘ready to co-operate with them’. Cupples was confident that ‘if a coalition can be effected it would do good’ by thwarting ‘treasonable democrats’ who, he noted, using the now familiar Culfeightrin terminology, strove to ‘sow dissension between these two classes’. Even that doyen of ‘ascendancy’, Lord Downshire, though sceptical of the utility of County Down Catholic loyal declarations, thought they could ‘do no harm’ and recommended that government fund their insertion in the Dublin papers, as the parishioners could not afford it.56 The Catholic hierarchy may also have been party to this embryonic coalition. As more southern declarations appeared, Archbishop Troy nominated Sunday 16 January 1798 as a day of ‘thanksgiving prayers’ for Admiral Duncan’s victory at Camperdown.57 Even if hierarchical involvement was coincidental, there is 54 McGildowney to McMullan, 19 Oct. 1796, 20 Nov. 1798 (P.R.O.N.I., McGildowney papers, D1375/3/35/10, 12A). 55 BNL, 15 Dec. 1797; 8, 15 Jan. 1798; Keogh, French disease, p 258. 56 Cupples to Archer, 20 Dec. 1797 (N.A.I., R.P.620/33/181); Downshire to Government, 14 Jan. 1798 (N.A.I., R.P.620/35/34). 57 FJ, 16 Jan. 1798.

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evidence of parish level connections between the thanksgiving Sunday and the loyal declarations. A loyal sermon by Father Mathew McCary of Carrickfergus on 16 January was published as a pamphlet, a decision he said was influenced by the plethora of Catholic declarations in the newspapers. McCary’s sermon was unusual amongst contemporary Catholic addresses as it combined political opinion with moral injunctions.58 It therefore reveals the views parishioners heard at the postmass meetings where declarations were usually adopted. McCary gave an ideological justification of the counter-revolutionary position, using historical and contemporary examples. He praised the hierarchical model of society and acknowledged the state’s temporal authority. ‘All true Catholic Christians’, he said, ‘acknowledge a sincere loyalty and obedience to the constituted authority over them, and bastards are they, and not real children of the Catholic Church, who would not take up arms when called upon by the legal and public authority.’ He distinguished between illegal oaths and the oath of allegiance, asserting that only ‘Kings and Potentates’ could delegate the power to administer oaths. He reminded listeners that the French had butchered ‘42,000 of their pious clergy’, and that Catholic loyalty had already been rewarded by government support for Maynooth College. McCary interpreted the revolutionary threat broadly, incongruously lumping together ‘Defenders or Offenders, Whiteboys, Rightboys, Break of Day Boys, United Irishmen, or United Englishmen or United Scotchmen’.59 It is suggestive of the tentative relationship with Orangeism, that he described the disturbers of Armagh as ‘Break of Day Boys’ rather than Orangemen. The two crucial elements for this loyalist coalition were that Catholics shelved emancipation and the Protestants accepted them as loyalists; yet, as Catholic relief was already a dead letter by June, this begs the question of why no systematic attempt to mobilise common loyalism came before December 1797. The answer lies in the wider context of renewed invasion threat. Attempts by the British plenipotentiary, Lord Malmesbury, to negotiate a peace with France collapsed in September 1797 and internal changes in the French government had seen the Convention, which was prepared to compromise with Britain, replaced by the warlike Directory. Moreover, the confidence-building naval victory at Camperdown in October was offset by Austria’s withdrawal from the First Coalition. This perilous international background again focussed attention on weaknesses in the Irish military command. This time Carhampton was replaced. In November 1797 Sir Ralph Abercromby was installed as the new commander-in-chief, albeit reluctantly. Like Cornwallis, Abercromby had a high military reputation and held conciliatory political views unpalatable to Camden’s ascendancy advisers. A doctrinaire disciplinarian, Abercromby was horrified by the army’s deployment; its strength was diluted and discipline eroded by dispersal on counter-insurgency activities, strategically suicidal in the event of invasion. He determined to put Ireland’s defences in order by concentrating the troops and leaving internal security to the gentlemen, magistrates and yeomanry. As the loyalist ‘coalition’ coincided with Abercromby’s 58 S. J. Connolly, ‘Varieties of Irish political thought’, in S. J. Connolly (ed.), Political ideas in eighteenth-century Ireland (Dublin, 2000), p 24. 59 John Gray, ‘A loyal Catholic sermon of 1798’, The Linen Hall Review, iv (1987), pp 12–13; Matthew McCary, A pastoral address to the Roman Catholics of Carrickfergus (Belfast, 1798), p 21.

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plan it seems likely that the intention to organise large numbers of civilians was in anticipation of the withdrawal of regulars. The total yeomanry establishment was just 35,000 in December 1797, meaning that internal defence gaps could only be plugged by the mortar of mass mobilisation.60 There was nothing particularly innovative or distinctively Irish about emergency mobilisation. In 1797, 600 citizens of Pembroke repulsed a small French landing. In this light, the common loyalty initiative, and its timing, make sense. Abercromby liked the idea of ‘county associations’ of loyal civilians, comparing them to those in his native Scotland in 1792 and 1793 which had ‘the best effect’ and ‘soon gained over’ all but the most disaffected.61 That his reading of British loyalism into the Irish situation was already anachronistic by early 1798 further indicates the extent to which the counter-revolutionary response in each country was diverging. As Abercromby’s ascendancy critics knew, 1792 and 1798 were light years apart. Acutely aware of the Bantry fiasco, Abercromby had gone on a fact-finding tour of Munster. But, as Lord Shannon warned Camden, whereas the anti-invasion strategy reflected Abercromby’s military expertise, his optimistic assessment of the Munster Catholic populace was naïve, as their earlier loyalty had dissipated and ‘the people have since united’.62 While Abercromby was away, Camden’s advisers began plotting to remove him and thus secure a return to the strong-arm counter-insurgency policies of Lake and Knox.63 Lake complained to General Knox that Abercromby, whom he dubbed ‘the Scotch Beast’, would ‘undo all we have done’ with his textbook plans for the army.64 Yet, having created a de facto loyalist armed association as a strategic barrier against revolutionary expansion, Knox hoped that, once assurances were given about emancipation, yeomanry discipline and gentry intervention would convert turbulent Orangemen into respectable loyalists who denied any hostile intent towards law-abiding Catholics. If so, it is a moot point whether Knox’s activity and the later loyalist coalition were part of the same phenomenon. In a purely strategic sense, as the United Irishmen and their opponents mobilised, Knox’s militarised Orange initiatives and the Orange-Catholic loyal coalition can both be seen in terms of balancing power, or rather manpower. Significantly no Catholic declarations from Knox’s district, where there were many lower-class Anglicans, and his strengthening of Orangeism had already tipped the balance against the United Irishmen, indeed Tyrone had the highest number of yeomen (2,889) in any Irish county and second only to Dublin city.65 Some of the Catholic resolutions of late 1797, like those engineered by Andrew Newton of Coach, were intended to split the religious coalition of the United Irishmen and isolate the Pres60 Instructions to General Officers, n.d. Dec. 1797 (P.R.O., WO30/66, f. 201); Blackstock, Ascendancy army, p 114. 61 I. F. W. Beckett, The amateur military tradition (Manchester, 1991), p 78; Abercromby to Pelham, 21 Feb. 1798 (B.L., Add Mss 33105, ff 345–6). 62 Shannon to Camden, n.d. Jan. 1798 (C.K.S., Pratt papers, U840/0166/10). 63 Tony Gaynor, ‘The Abercromby affair’, in Thomas Bartlett, David Dickson, Daire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (eds), 1798: a bicentenary perspective (Dublin, 2003), pp 400–401. 64 Lake to John Knox, 7 Jan. 1798 (N.L.I., Lake Mss MS 56, f. 121); P. C. Stoddard, ‘Counterinsurgency and defence in Ireland’, p 179. 65 Blackstock, Ascendancy army, pp 117–18.

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byterian element as the most incorrigibly disloyal. Newton triumphantly claimed that they ‘had a better effect in making a split between them [the Catholics] and the Presbyterians than ever was yet adopted’. In north Antrim, the Presbyterians also supported the United Irishmen; indeed Finvoy and Ballymoney, which produced Catholic declarations, had been among the first County Antrim parishes to be put under the Insurrection Act in February 1797.66 As Anglicans were a minority in that vicinity between significant blocks of Presbyterians and Catholics, the encouragement of the latter to coalesce with the Anglicans had a strategic logic. The southern Catholic declarations could be seen similarly. Arguably they attempted to apply the principles of association to hold or reclaim loyalty in areas of relatively recent United Irish penetration. However the ‘coalition’ seems hastily assembled in response to Abercromby’s concentration plan which threatened to leave loyalists without protection except for the yeomanry, but these corps were not as numerous in other parts as they were in General Knox’s mid-Ulster district. Knox’s strategy, by contrast, had been longer in gestation and was ready to be taken a stage further. He had devised plans for the defence of Ulster, giving the yeomanry a more military role by concentrating them in brigades in anticipation of insurrection or invasion. Abercromby belatedly recognised the extent of disaffection and the weaknesses in loyalism, and re-considered this brigade plan and another Knox initiative to provide a core of regulars to stiffen the yeomanry.67 Like the tentative moves to create a general non-denominational loyal constituency in 1797, the real differences again came down to guns. The Culfeightrin initiative was unambiguous in its loyalty and ‘absolute determination’ to co-operate with Protestant loyalists, but much less precise – ‘by every means in our power for the suppression of rebellion’ – about whether it would be an armed association or simply a law and order one. In the complexities of crisis-driven loyalist mobilisation, ambiguity had advantages. Abercromby, though, was anything but ambiguous. A tactless, if honest, general order in February 1798 declared that the army was in ‘a state of licentiousness’ and was ‘formidable to everyone but the enemy’. This was the last straw for Camden’s ascendancy advisers, and Abercromby’s position became untenable.68 Before leaving, however, he loosed a parthian dart at his tormentors, warning Camden that ‘we can have but little reliance on the yeomanry and we cannot depend upon much assistance from the exertions of individuals into whose hands arms might be placed’.69 What Abercromby’s ‘might’ referred to was an extraordinary offer of service recently conveyed to the Home Secretary, Portland, of a massive association of 170,000 Ulster Orangemen, which had apparently been joined by ‘all the principal gentry and well-affected persons of property’.70 In the months preceding the 1798 rebellion loyalist initiatives came at accelerating speed and bewildering complexity with overlaps, ambiguities and apparent 66 Newton to Cooke, 1 Feb. 1798 (N.A.I., R.P.620/35/102); Parishes, baronies and counties proclaimed, n.d. Dec. 1797 (P.R.O., HO100/79, f. 346). 67 Stoddard, ‘Counter-insurgency and defence’, p 252. 68 BNL, 15 Dec. 1797; Lecky, Ireland, iv, 203. 69 Abercromby to Camden, 27 March 1798 (P.R.O., HO100/75, f. 235). 70 Portland to Camden, 20 March 1798 (N.A.I., R.P.620/40/1).

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inconsistencies. Major organisational changes occurred in Orangeism with the establishment of a centralised Grand Orange Lodge in Dublin. The ‘plot’ amongst Camden’s advisers to remove Abercromby intensified after the infamous general order to the point where men like the under-secretary, Edward Cooke, and the Revenue Commissioner, John Beresford, had gone over Camden’s head to reach British sympathisers, including Portland, Westmorland and Lord Auckland. As Abercromby announced his intention of resigning on 15 March, only staying till a replacement was found, the possibility of policy changes under his successor also formed part of the context.71 Orangeism had grown considerably since its inception and extended beyond Armagh to all nine Ulster counties and Longford, Westmeath, Limerick, Carlow, Leitrim, Wicklow and the county and city of Dublin. As well as penetrating the yeomanry, lodges had been formed in some militia regiments, and also in some British fencible and militia units stationed in Ireland.72 The first Dublin city lodge, a gentleman’s lodge linked to the Beresford political connection and including John Giffard, had been established in June 1797. Recent research by James Wilson on the social composition of the Grand Lodge of Ireland and its power relationship to the wider Orange movement has revised an erroneous but widely accepted view that it was an elite body which moved control of Orangeism away from its less socially privileged northern originators.73 Those attending the inaugural meeting on 8 March 1798 included William Blacker, as Armagh grand master, and Thomas Verner, men from middle-ranking county families rather than landed magnates, while most others were militia officers. The meeting, chaired by Thomas Verner, resolved that a ‘Grand Lodge for correspondence and information’ should develop systematic linkages with all lodges; that individual county grand lodges ballot for representative members of the central body; and that each county be subdivided into districts to facilitate this system of communication.74 Recent analysis shows how this scheme was based on notional structures of county grand lodges, an organisational structure which, with the exception of Armagh, did not yet exist. Armagh resisted the proposals, believing that its own democratic system was being ignored – Blacker had no formal authority to attend and the county grand secretary was not consulted. Wilson has argued that the Dublin initiative was a clash between a group which assumed hierarchical central authority and control and the ‘democratic’ brotherhood nature of original Orangeism. Indeed Armagh forced revision of the Grand Lodge rules in 1799.75 However, this interpretation begs questions of why a relatively motley group in Dublin would devise and wish to impose a hierarchical system on their provincial brethren. The answer emerges if the situation is set the context of loyalist mobilisation and militarisation. Military men dominated the Dublin group. Of the nineteen who attended, 71 72

Gaynor, ‘Abercromby affair’, pp 399–401. Hereward Senior, Orangeism in Britain and Ireland, 1795–1836 (London and Toronto, 1966), pp 57, 71–2, 75, 91; James Wilson, ‘Orangeism in 1798’, in Bartlett, Dickson, Keogh and Whelan (eds), 1798: a bicentenary perspective, p 359. 73 Ibid., pp 345–62. 74 Grand Lodge minute book, ff 1–2 (G.O.L.I.). 75 Wilson, ‘Orangeism in 1798’, pp 359–60.

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there was one lieutenant-colonel of militia, one militia and two yeomanry captains (including Blacker), and eleven militia sergeants. Moreover, of the three civilians, the chairman, Thomas Verner, was the son of James Verner of Churchill, whose yeomanry corps General Knox had recently used to initiate his plan for introducing Orangemen as supplementary yeomen. The strategic rationale behind Orange reorganisation is revealed in a letter Verner wrote to accompany the resolutions for circulation to all Irish lodges. It acknowledges lack of consultation, in hoping ‘we have not presumed too far in forming these resolutions without the participation of the country lodges’, but rationalises this on grounds of dire military expediency. ‘Imperious circumstances’, Verner explained, ‘now render it necessary … at a time when our foreign enemies are making exertions unparalleled in the history of the world for the invasion of this kingdom and the subversion of our glorious and happy constitution purchased with the blood of our ancestors and our domestic enemies have formed so regular a system … and are now so actively endeavouring to sow disunion among us, that we may separately fall victims to their savage fury and that they may extirpate the descendants of the heroes of Boyne and Aughrim and suffer their name only to exist on the page of history.’76 Such rhetoric reflected Knox’s strategy of militarising Orangeism, but what relationship did it have to the offer of 170,000 Ulster Orangemen as an armed loyal association ‘joined by all the principal gentry’?77 The virtual coincidence of the Grand Lodge’s establishment in March 1798 and the emergence of this proposal strongly suggest they were connected, and it is here that the Abercromby situation becomes relevant. Abercromby thought that arming civilians should only be a last resort ‘in case of emergency’. Even the pro-ascendancy Lord Auckland admitted the Orangemen were ‘a dangerous species of ally’.78 Given the obvious exaggerations – Camden estimated contemporary Orange membership at around 40,000 and recent research puts it at 18–20,000 in March 1798 – possibly the proposal was aspirational, based on an optimistic assessment of what might be possible under Abercromby’s successor.79 As unfolding events would show, despite recent Orange support for a loyal coalition, the armed service offer certainly did not include co-operation with Catholics. The involvement of armed Orangemen in 1798, as yeomen, militiamen or simply as members of Orange societies, is well documented.80 However this counter-revolutionary wave was very different from the broader loyalism mooted earlier, reflecting a sea-change in loyalist mobilisation. Scanning the uneasy calm before the storm broke in May, it is easier to see the results of these changes than to fathom the processes of policy, pragmatism or partiality which engendered them. The visible signs were the administrative and military changes after Abercromby’s fall. Pelham became too ill to continue and was replaced by Castlereagh, and Lake was promoted 76 77 78

Grand Lodge minute book, ff 1, 3 (G.O.L.I.). Portland to Camden, 20 March 1798 (N.A.I., R.P.620/40/1). Notes on the defence of Ireland, 25 April 1798 (P.R.O., WO66, f. 211); Auckland to Mornington, 22 April 1798 (B.L., Add Mss, 37307, f. 132). 79 Camden to Portland, 29 March 1798 (P.R.O., HO100/75, f. 331); Wilson, ‘Orangeism in 1798’, p 361. 80 Senior, Orangeism, pp 101–5.

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to commander-in-chief, thus drawing Knox closer to the centre of power. Almost immediately a very significant alteration was made in the yeomanry system. Plans were made for the regular yeomanry to go on emergency ‘permanent duty’ as a military body and for additional supplementary yeomen to be raised to cover local duty, when the yeomen moved to their brigading points. Doubts had been expressed about the loyalty of a few regular yeomanry corps, but the de facto arming of civilians carried even greater risks. Camden had hesitated over the Orange offer of service, typically neither accepting nor rejecting it outright.81 On 16 April 1798, however, Castlereagh decided and Camden agreed that, to prevent ‘a sudden and promiscuous armament’ they should strengthen the yeomanry by adding loyalist civilians as supplementaries. These were to be men ‘of approved loyalty’ who would not be armed or uniformed, but were merely willing to take arms from government and do emergency duty when the regular yeomanry moved from their locality. Though the Orange offer was not accepted in full or in name, crucially Knox was assured by the under-secretary, William Elliott, that ‘though it is intended (for the purpose of precluding any jealousy or appearance of invidious distribution) to make the measure of enrolment general, yet Lord Castlereagh considers the part of the country falling under your command particularly within the object of the plan’. Additionally, John Beresford’s Dublin yeomen and others in selected southern counties were also to be included.82 For obvious reasons, this decision was not publicised. Why then did the basis of civilian loyalist mobilisation narrow so suddenly and so profoundly? The surviving sources are not specific, indeed the subterfuge surrounding the supplementary plan makes it improbable that such decisions would enter the written record. The arrest of the Leinster Directory of United Irishmen on 12 March 1798, and the subsequent proclamation of the whole country to be in a state of rebellion, may have been operative. Abercromby’s departure certainly gave Lake and Knox more leeway with the army and this reversion from counterinvasion to counter insurgency, plus Knox’s plans for regular yeomanry to undertake full-time emergency military duties, made general loyalism less imperative. The recent enhancement of plebeian Protestant loyalism may have eroded acceptance of a coalition with Catholics of an equally lowly background. Stronger evidence exists that crisis-driven anti-Catholicism again united Protestants of all classes. Paradoxically, conflicting propaganda combined to encourage this. The United Irishmen’s use of the Orange bogey to recruit Catholics increased exponentially. John Beresford maintained that the Orangemen who offered voluntary armed service as loyalists were not ‘the mad people who first associated under that name and began a religious war’ by driving Catholics from Armagh, but warned that ‘as the United Men style all Protestants Orangemen, by and by we shall come to a war of religion’.83 The promoters of loyalism were also responsible – Verner’s letter to all Irish lodges, with its alarmist language about Protestants facing extirpation, can only have recalled 81 Cavan to John Knox, 14 Feb.; Elliott to John Knox, 10 April 1798 (N.L.I., Lake Mss, MS56, ff 138, 153); Blackstock, Ascendancy army, pp 95–7. 82 Elliott to John Knox, 16 April 1798 (N.L.I., Lake Mss MS56, f. 154); Castlereagh to Yeomanry Commanders, 16 April 1798 (P.R.O., HO100/124, f. 153); Camden to Castlereagh, 4 Nov. 1798, The correspondence of viscount Castlereagh, ed. Charles Vane (4 vols, London, 1848–53), i, 424–6. 83 Beresford to Auckland, 15 March 1798 (P.R.O.N.I., Sneyd papers, T3229/2/30).

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the providential paradigm of the 1641 sermons. Camden noted a widespread belief in Dublin that the United Irish conspiracy was another ‘popish plot’.84 Personnel changes in the government and military high command were accompanied by shifts in thinking about the components of loyalism, with Catholics replacing Presbyterians as the most suspect group. Castlereagh spoke retrospectively on 6 June when he described William Steel Dickson’s arrest as an ‘exception’ to ‘the policy of acting against the Catholic rather than the Presbyterian part of the union’.85 Again the sources tell us little, but it is possible that the notional 170,000 Ulster loyalists were comprised, in the minds of those who proposed this scheme, of a combination of the largely-Anglican Orange societies and the Presbyterians. For whatever reason, as open conflict loomed, many Orangemen and yeomen refused to accept Catholic cooperation, either in a law and order or an armed capacity. Purges of Catholics from corps in Wicklow coincided with the mobilisation of Orange supplementaries.86 Though there is no evidence of a general policy decision to arm Orange lodges without the controls of the regular or supplementary yeomanry, Castlereagh allowed local military commanders discretion and, in the confusion surrounding the loyalist mobilisation, many Orangemen believed themselves to be standing ready to be armed. In May 1798 at Athy, County Kildare, the duke of Leinster claimed that ‘an Orange lodge … boast they have government’s protection’.87 Camden denied this, but Leinster was right in terms of perceptions. There is evidence that the Orangemen considered themselves free to act militarily against their enemies. It proved difficult, on the one hand, to spur up turbulent plebeian Orangeism against the United Irishmen and Defenders, but, on the other, simultaneously to expect them not to take matters into their own hands. One of Charlemont’s fellow-Whigs, Edward Hudson, told him that ‘in Lisburn and its vicinity “Orangemen” are multiplying exceedingly, and in fact have an absolute dominion over their adversaries’ and house-burnings presented ‘melancholy proof of the devastation of the “Orangemen” ’. Acutely aware of the politics of nomenclature in the current climate, Hudson wished ‘that this party (if there must be parties) had taken the name of loyalist or any other than that of Orangemen’ which ‘tends to frighten and alienate the Catholics’.88 The Ulster rising showed that the decision to arm Orangemen had its limits, but that the Orangemen did not know them. Camden knew the problems, complaining helplessly about how impolitic it was to refuse the Orange offers; yet, with the militia mainly Catholic, ‘how dangerous [is] even any encouragement to the Orange spirit’.89 Initially 5,000 muskets were shipped to Ulster but this proved inadequate, as a further 7,500 were ordered.90 General Nugent, Knox’s eastern-Ulster counter84 85 86

Camden to Portland, 6 March 1798 (P.R.O., HO/100/75, ff 162–9). Castlereagh to Nugent, 6 June 1798 (N.A.M., Nugent Mss, 6807/174, ff 457–8). Ruan O’Donnell, Aftermath: post-rebellion insurgency in Wicklow, 1799–1803 (Dublin, 2000), p 4. 87 Leinster to Camden, 9 May 1798 (C.K.S. Pratt papers, U840/0182/37). 88 Hudson to Charlemont, 3, 19 May 1798, The manuscripts and correspondence of James, first earl of Charlemont (2 vols, H.M.C., London, 1891–94), ii, 321–3. 89 Camden to Portland, 11 June 1798 (P.R.O., HO100/77, f. 132). 90 Castlereagh to Knox, 5 June 1798 (N.L.I., Lake Mss MS 56, f. 176); Castlereagh to Nugent, 10, 21 June 1798 (N.A.M., Nugent Mss, 6807–174, ff 473–5).

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part, armed some County Down and Belfast lodges, not as supplementary yeomen but as Orangemen per se. Yet even this apparent carte blanche sanction was qualified. Scarcity of weapons may have been a factor, but Nugent had other reasons. He ‘discouraged as much as possible’ the armament of Orange lodges, preferring to expand the yeomanry, and only gave Orangemen arms on a selective temporary basis. He opposed the general armament then being advocated by some Orange leaders; which, he argued, once begun, must be total.91 The incomplete nature of this armament is clear from Orange frustration at apparently being promised guns, but then, when the rebellion broke out, often being unable to obtain them. Dublin Orangemen ‘cried aloud for arms and to be let loose’. Lisburn Orangemen were hurt and baffled at Nugent arming their Belfast colleagues and not them. In default, they did vigilante work like guarding their own homes, catching suspected rebels and destroying Lough Neagh boats to prevent rebel reinforcements reaching the Antrim shore.92 The social and military strength and cohesion of militarised Orangeism was very apparent during the rebellion. In July 1798 a meeting of ‘the Orange Association assembled at Blaris barracks’ near Lisburn was chaired by Poyntz Stewart, a local landowner, Orangeman and yeomanry captain. There had been sectarian feuding between Orange yeomen and Catholic militia soldiers who had recently fought on the same side. Stewart presided over the passage of resolutions which declared that ‘as yeomen as well as Orangemen, we hold such conduct most essentially detrimental to … our country and our king and constitution’; the association recommended that all masters of Orange lodges and yeomanry captains ‘use their influence’ to expel anyone who disobeyed, and ordered that the resolutions be printed and displayed in Lisburn. Shortly afterwards William Atkinson, High Constable of Belfast and Orange Grand Master of Antrim, actually described himself as the ‘captain commandant of the armed Orangemen of county Antrim’, and boasted of government protection.93 In true counter-revolutionary idiom a term was even invented for the militarised Orangeman: ‘Delzo’. Though the semantic derivation has disappeared, the sense has not. The Delzo was the loyalist antithesis of ‘Croppy’, a derogatory term for United Irishmen who copied French revolutionary fashions for cropped hair. One popular Orange ballad renders perceptions of official sanction in the vernacular. Good Croppies speak What think you o’ [General] Lake Ain’t he a horrid Delzo?94

91 Nugent to Lake, 10 June 1798 (P.R.O., HO100/77, f. 135); Goldie to Lake, 13 June 1798 (N.A.I., R.P.620/38/185); Nugent to Hewitt, 4 Sept. 1798 (Castlereagh correspondence, i, 332–4). 92 Shannon to Boyle, 9 June 1798 (P.R.O.N.I., Shannon papers D2707/A3/3/80); Cupples to Foster Archer, 21 June 1798 (N.A.I., R.P.620/38/202, 8). 93 Stephenson to Downshire, 2 Aug. 1798 (P.R.O.N.I., Downshire papers, D607/F/305); Orange Resolutions, 6 Aug. 1798 (N.A.M., Nugent Mss, 6807/174, ff 503–6); Hudson to Charlemont, 27 Oct. 1798 (H.M.C., Charlemont, ii, 337). 94 Anon., Loyal songs No. 2 to be sung in all Orange Lodges (Dublin, 1800).

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Taken at face value, such evidence invites classic Marxist interpretations of the militarisation and arming of Orangemen. Yet the limited, contingent and temporary nature of this enterprise must also be considered. Nugent’s refusal to arm Orangemen indiscriminately and Knox’s insistence that offering service was conditional on them ending sectarian feuding makes the policy profile clearer: the militarisation of Orangeism was neither the Orangeisation of the military nor any official strategy to divide the lower orders to maintain the rule of the propertied and Protestant elite. From the perspective of the government, it was a pragmatic emergency measure which was embarked upon with reluctance. In some respects then, the mobilisation and militarisation of Irish loyalism was a dialogue between old and new, between tradition and innovation and between a contemporary western European paradigm of civilian mobilisation and indigenous Irish dynamics. Distinct strands of ‘loyalism’ emerge. Catholic loyalty was a definite phenomenon, though its potential was never fully realised. Within Protestant loyalism there were continuities with an initially dominant and inclusive patriotic variety open to Catholic participation in the yeomanry and in common loyalist associations, on condition of postponing political agitation. The conservative Orange strand of loyalism grew along both landed and plebeian levels in this period, initially tolerating limited co-operation with Catholics on a lesser, law and order association, basis, though even this was superseded in 1798. Although the Castle administration was keen to promote such co-operation, when coercion was in place and emancipation demonstrably off the agenda, the mooted liaison was always on Protestant terms. This dictated both its existence and its speedy demise in March 1798. The luxury of hindsight can represent Orange and Catholic co-operation as being sanctioned by the common defence of religion and hierarchy against the revolutionary, atheistic French and their republican, ‘democratic’ Irish Presbyterian allies. Such an interpretation sets the phenomenon in its international counter-revolutionary context, and echoes the inclusiveness of English Reevesite loyalism and the Irish loyalism of 1792–93. Yet the fact remains that, during the period covered by this chapter, significant changes occurred. Both varieties of loyalty are still visible, but the axis shifted. The oppositional poles of Protestant and Catholic re-emerged, especially at ground level, as the elements were pulled back into recognisable shape by the morbid magnetism of Irish history. The distant springs of the renewed unwillingness to accept Catholics can probably be traced back to decisions to include plebeian Protestants in the loyalist mobilisation. Although Orange loyalism was not ‘the first up’ in its loyal declarations, it would carry the day in shaping the mobilised and militarised loyalism of 1798. John Giffard later claimed that the Grand Lodge concept of ‘an alliance with all the Protestants of the realm’ was modelled on Reeves’s Crown and Anchor association.95 In some respects the developments in Irish loyalism from March 1798 confirm this – the propaganda-assisted creation of a recognisably loyalist movement did result. However, by the same token, and significantly for the future, this process marked further divergences between British and Irish loyalism, organisationally and ideologically. Because Irish loyalism drew on overlapping armed traditions, Protes95

Giffard to Gregory, c. 11 June 1814 (B.L., Add Mss 40199, ff 29–35).

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tant defence and Volunteering, since 1792 there was always more readiness, even amongst its most inclusive elements, to prefer the armed association model to the law and order version. The government, at the gentry’s behest, had partially drawn the independent sting from armed associations by creating a yeomanry and allowing infantry corps, yet the pace of the crisis outran all efforts, overtaking General Knox’s militarisation of Orangeism and thus engendering more civilian armed associations and taking Irish loyalism further from its British counterpart. As Reevesite loyalism was absorbed into the larger patriotic volunteering movement, Irish loyalism militarised in a different direction. Counter-insurgency superseded counter-invasion and patriotism 1798-style became partisan and would become synonymous with Protestantism.

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4

Closing the ranks Loyalism monopolised, 1798–1805

On Monday 4 June 1798, three days before a Belfast Presbyterian, Henry Joy McCracken, lit the flame of rebellion at the Battle of Antrim, Thomas Percy, the scholarly Anglican bishop of Dromore, watched bonfires blaze on the Belfast mountains during the short summer night. Below, candles in house windows illuminated the town’s streets and narrow entries in a celebration. The United Irish society had originated amongst Belfast’s heavily Presbyterian population and the town had a reputation as the citadel of Irish radicalism. Belfast had notoriously commemorated the French Revolution and support for the United Irishmen survived the change from a reformist to an insurrectionary organisation. Yet the fires Percy witnessed celebrated no revolution, but marked George III’s birthday which the townspeople celebrated ‘with as much public rejoicing as if it was at St. James’ and even prepared ‘a most loyal address’ offering voluntary military service. Despite the suspicions of Generals Knox and Lake, Presbyterian disaffection had never been total. Even in Belfast, some more moderate reformers and erstwhile radicals combined with the small Anglican cohort associated with the town’s proprietor Lord Donegall, and joined yeomanry corps raised, despite serious United Irish opposition, in early 1797. Presbyterian support for the yeomanry was led by William Bruce, minister of the First Presbyterian Church. Bruce was a Whiggish constitutional reformer of the Charlemont variety, whose congregation epitomised Presbyterian divisions: some members remained United Irishmen but others supported their minister’s line. Elsewhere in Ulster the first yeomanry levy helped draw Presbyterian reformers into active loyalism. Yeomanry corps in Armagh and Newtownards accommodated them by allowing service offers which acknowledged imperfections in the constitution, while pledging to defend it against rebellion or invasion. Castlereagh’s father, Lord Londonderry, raised the Newtownards yeomanry from his Presbyterian tenants, and overcame their initial reluctance by allowing them to dictate their own terms of service, including the condition that: ‘we do not consider ourselves as pledged to desist from seeking every constitutional method of obtaining a repeal of many laws we consider as very obnoxious and indeed encroachments on the very spirit and essence of the constitution’. Such conditional loyalty  

Bishop Percy to his wife, 8 June 1798 (B.L., Add Mss 32335, ff 35–6). Allan F. Blackstock, Double traitors? The Belfast Volunteers and yeomen, 1778–1828 (Belfast, 2000), passim.

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was similar to that expressed in many of the 1792–3 loyal resolutions. Some were prepared to include Catholic relief, but opposed immediate emancipation which, as befitted their Enlightenment background, they felt should follow better education for poor Catholics and, as Bruce said, be gradual, ‘from time to time, and as speedily as the circumstances of the country … will admit’. However, Presbyterian loyalty, like loyalism in general, was not homogeneous. Another strand was strongly conservative and, like mid-Ulster Orange loyalty, broadly anti-Catholic. With some exceptions, Bruce’s ‘liberal’ loyalty was most common in eastern Ulster, where it competed with republicanism and Defenderism was rare. In western and southern Ulster the picture was more complex. Though the United Irish system, dubbed ‘Belfast Principles’, attracted some Presbyterians; sectarian tensions were also present. On County Cavan’s Ashfield estate, Presbyterians and Anglicans combined in a yeomanry corps which had been superimposed on an anti-Defender loyal association of 1794. Although General Knox believed that Armagh Presbyterians supported the United Irishmen, there is evidence that Dissenters had been prominent amongst the Peep O’Day Boys. Presbyterians featured in the most conservative element in Tyrone freemasonry as an oath bound society, the ‘Orange Boys’, led by a Presbyterian farmer, James Wilson of the Dyan. At Omagh James Buchanan found that 2,000 local Presbyterians would only join the yeomanry if no Catholics served with them. There was also some lower-class Presbyterian involvement in early Orangeism, though its extent is hard to quantify. Musgrave claimed that most western Ulster yeomen were both Presbyterian and Orange and, while this interpretation was slanted to fit Musgrave’s Catholic conspiracy theory for the 1798 rebellion, there must nonetheless have been some Presbyterian involvement in both organisations. In areas where Presbyterians were conservative, United Irish emissaries often evoked Catholic sectarianism. Rumours circulated in Cavan that ‘the Scotch’ (Presbyterians) or the Orangemen would massacre the Catholics, leading to counter-claims that the Cavan Defenders would ‘destroy every Scotch or Presbyterian’ and that the fields of Donegal would be strewn with Presbyterian and Protestant dead. Yet, despite the prior existence of these strands of loyalty within Presbyterianism, the transformation Percy witnessed requires explanation, particularly as it was apparently at the price of Catholic loyalism. The facts surrounding the policy changes after Castlereagh’s arrival at the chief secretary’s office suggest that between April and May 1798 a decision was taken to highlight Catholic disaffection, in order to detach Presbyterians from the United Irishmen and rally them with Orange loyalists under their common Protestantism. Castlereagh’s own recent conversion from Presbyterianism to Anglicanism would certainly have helped him devise this strategy. The decision to arm Orangemen  Yeomanry Resolutions, n.d. Nov. 1796 (P.R.O.N.I., D1494/2/24); Cited in A. T. Q. Stewart, A deeper silence: the hidden origins of the United Irishmen (London, 1993), p 179.  Clements to Cooke, 20 Sept. 1796 (N.A.I., R.P.620/25/102); Knox to Bentinck, 3 June 1798 (Portland Papers, PWJa 216).  BNL, 1 Feb. 1793; Buchanan to Cooke, 19 Sept. 1796 (N.A.I. R.P.620/25/133).  Richard Musgrave, Memoirs of the different rebellions in Ireland (2 vols, Dublin, 1802), i, 391; Ian McBride, Scripture politics: Ulster Presbyterians and Irish radicalism in the late eighteenth century (Oxford, 1998), pp 191, 193–5.

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as supplementary yeomen can also be seen in this light, in that it signalled rejection of Catholic service. Camden may have worried over encouraging the ‘Orange spirit’ but Castlereagh had no such qualms, as he had decided on a policy of arrests which highlighted and publicised the Catholic rather than the Presbyterian component of the United Irishmen. Propaganda also played a part. There was deliberate stimulation of fears, not of Catholics per se, but of a Catholic rising. Reactivating and manipulating anxieties amongst the descendants of the original planters could provide a community of interests which might temporarily transcend political and economic grievances against the Anglican establishment. During the rebellion, extensive propaganda was spread about massacres of Wexford Protestants and priests as rebel leaders. John Giffard’s son Hardinge, who was connected with the Grand Orange Lodge, obtained an affidavit about the massacre in Scullabogue barn and had ‘a great many copies … printed and circulated through Ulster … to detach the Dissenters … from the general conspiracy and … coalesce with the Protestants of the Established Church’. The impact soon became apparent to those with fingers on the racing pulse of developments. Bishop Percy’s County Down retainers, his servant, Meredith Darby, and the yeomanry captain and Orangeman, Crane Brush of Dromore, assured him that, in addition to growing disenchantment with the French, the Wexford massacres ‘by the Irish papists has turned all the Dissenters against them’. In Belfast during the rebellion, a yeomanry officer told Lord Downshire that ‘the number of disaffected fellows now in this town under arms for the protection of their property would astonish you … to see Presbyterian ministers, with rich republican shopkeepers, sitting in the guard room … had … a wonderful appearance’.10 By 1 July 1798, the same informant reckoned that ‘every man in Belfast has now a red coat on’. General Knox’s worries about Dissenters were easing: ‘Depend upon it,’ he said, ‘the Presbyterians will not abide a Catholic plot.’11 Snowdon Cupples, who had earlier got Orangemen to agree in principle to co-operate with Catholic loyalists, now saw great changes: events in Wexford made Presbyterians ‘speak openly and pointedly of their dread and dislike of the Catholics’ and, their union notwithstanding, ‘the rooted jealously that has long subsisted, was not removed’.12 Yet, around 27,000 United Irishmen did actually ‘turn out’ in Antrim, Down and Londonderry. Although some Catholic Defenders were involved in the rising, most insurgents were Presbyterians, including some ministers and probationers. However, amongst the rebel ranks there was schism and sectarianism. The mixed Defender-United Irish force which captured Randalstown soon degenerated into quarrelling factions. At the Battle of Ballynahinch, where 700 Defenders were amongst the 7,000 insurgents, quarrels preceded  Camden to Portland, 11 June 1798 (P.R.O., HO100/77, f. 132); see chapter 3, p 93 for the arrest of William Steel Dickson: Castlereagh to Nugent, 6 June 1798 (N.A.M., Nugent Mss, 6807/174, ff 457–8).  First report of the select committee … on Orange lodges, H.C. 1835 (377), xv, p 82.  Bishop Percy to his wife, 28 May 1798 (B.L., Add Mss 32335, ff 27–8). 10 McKey to Downshire, 17 June 1798 (P.R.O.N.I., Downshire papers, D607/F/244). 11 McKey to Downshire, 1 July 1798 (P.R.O.N.I., Downshire papers, D607/F/ 293); John Knox to Cooke, 6 June 1798 (N.A.I., R.P.620/38/61). 12 Cupples to Foster Archer, 3 June 1798 (N.A.I., R.P.620/38/36).

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the conflict, prompting the United Irish commander, Henry Munro, to write to a fellow officer: ‘I hope the Defenders have rallied to you.’13 Though Percy exaggerated Belfast Presbyterians’ loyalism, arguably such disagreements within the rebel ranks reflected the collateral effects of the new policy. However, if the government and generals welcomed the changes, many longer-established loyalists saw overnight transformations as skin-saving pragmatism. When the appearance of new terminology in public discourse can be linked to a discernible context, changes in the popular mind set are revealed in a way inaccessible from conventional sources. The apparent ease with which turncoat radical Presbyterians proclaimed their conversion saw the introduction of a new term in an Ulster countryside still reeling from rebellion. In early July 1798, Robert Browne of Clough, County Down, yeoman and district master for seven Orange lodges, disputed custody of a prisoner in Downpatrick with two radical magistrates and a ‘man with verry short hare [who] came to spake for the man (sic)’. Browne told how ‘The yeomen and I sayed he was another … damn’d croppy.’ One magistrate objected and was immediately assaulted by Browne’s yeomen. A regular officer intervened, probably saving the man’s life, leaving Browne to fume ‘if I had done rong … This mussroom (sic: mushroom) loyalty in Downe is the cause.’14 As Browne’s outburst showed, the suppression of the rising did not ease suspicions. Such scepticism is understandable. General Nugent heard that rebels in Downpatrick had offered to join the yeomanry. In Belfast, Chichester Skeffington was more suspicious than Percy about the sincerity of Presbyterian loyalty. In County Londonderry, Sir George Fitzgerald Hill charted the progress of Coleraine’s middle-class Presbyterian merchants who had once ‘made the United and rebels’, then became prudently neutral, but were now ‘coming to government’.15 On the Downshire estates, Thomas Lane would rather trust Catholics than accept loyal protestations from ‘clovenfooted Presbyterians’. Orangemen responded by stressing their loyalty was genuine. Six lodges met at Dromore Church on the Twelfth of July, describing themselves as ‘Orangemen and true loyalists’.16 The rejection of ‘mushroom loyalty’ suggests that, though conjuring 1641 demons may have shifted Presbyterian allegiance at the point of rebellion, if their conversion was to be accepted, it was loyalist public opinion not the government that the repentant radicals must persuade. How was the transition from disaffection to loyalty to be accomplished? Loyal declarations offered a potential rite of passage. Between June and October 1798 the Belfast Newsletter contained a host of apparently loyalist productions. There were broadly two types: imitative declarations based on an original issued by the Belfast yeoman cavalry, and various ‘stand-alone’ resolutions, with their own 13

Curtin, The United Irishmen: popular politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1791–1798 (Oxford, 1994), pp 270, 275, 277; BNL, 18 June 1798. 14 Brown to Forde, 7 July 1798 (D.C.M., Forde of Seaforde documents); Grand lodge minute book, f. 13 (G.O.L.I.). 15 Nugent to Lake, 31 May 1798 (P.R.O.N.I., Dublin [Army] letters, MIC/67, f. 36); Skeffington to Cooke, 29 May 1798 (N.A.I., R.P.620/37/206); Hill to Alexander Knox, n.d. c. Sept. 1798 (P.R.O.N.I., Hill of Brookhall papers, D642/A/10/18). 16 Lane to Downshire, 24 June 1798 (P.R.O.N.I., Downshire papers, D607/F/272); BNL, 20 July 1798.

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forms of words. As with earlier manifestations of loyalty, all derived from specific locations or institutions, from towns, congregations, parishes or Orange districts. Sometimes the original declaration was presented locally to magistrates, clergymen, landowners, district generals, yeomanry captains, in other instances they went directly to the Castle. The background to the keynote Belfast cavalry resolutions was the same loyal and royal celebrations which had so impressed Bishop Percy on 4 June. The Newsletter noted that a group of townsmen, previously uninvolved in military associations, had now offered to become yeomen, when ‘rebellion has raised its head’.17 Chichester Skeffington had earlier objected to raising additional yeomen from those who had refused in 1797, when the first attempt had been made to raise corps in Belfast. Such men, he said, should now be rejected, ‘unless they establish different principles’.18 The government politely declined any new offers for Belfast yeomanry, but suggested that those now coming forward could attach themselves to existing corps as supplementaries. Accordingly, on 8 June, General Nugent approved the formation of a ‘supplementary division’ of the Belfast Infantry. Its Presbyterian composition is revealed by the fact that, of the fifty-eight names of members which were published, twenty-four had surname (and usually Christian name) correlation with a 1790 list of William Bruce’s First Presbyterian congregation. Moreover, as the Second congregation’s minister, Patrick Vance, also signed, many more were probably Presbyterian.19 What Skeffington had meant by ‘different principles’ soon became apparent. The Belfast yeoman cavalry published resolutions declaring their ‘abhorrence’ at French interference in Irish affairs, at the ‘atrocious rebellion’ and ‘all secret cabals and private conspiracies to subvert or new-model the Constitution, without the joint consent of King, Lords and Commons in Parliament’. They pledged their ‘utmost endeavours’ against ‘all seditious or disaffected persons’. These resolutions were immediately adopted, first by the new supplementaries, then by townsmen not enrolled in any corps, including a one-time United Irishman, Gilbert McIlveen. It was significant that the keynote resolutions originated with the cavalry: as a unit raised against determined opposition in 1797, it had no need to prove its loyalty or, as mounted yeomen, to demonstrate respectability. One member described Belfast’s cavalry as ‘composed of so respectable a portion of the community that I ever shall be proud of having been honoured by admission’.20 Skeffington, who headed the cavalry resolutions, was Collector of Belfast and later fourth earl of Massereene and part of Lord Donegall’s politically dominant Anglican minority. Thus the resolutions symbolised longstanding loyalty, property and respectability. As many supplementaries were Presbyterian merchants who controlled Belfast’s commercial life, their subsequent endorsement marked significant convergences of property and commerce, Anglican and Dissenter and conservative and Whig. Belfast’s position as Ulster’s mercantile capital also gave the resolutions additional authority. Thus the 17 18 19

BNL, 5 June 1798. Skeffington to Cooke, 29 May 1798 (N.A.I., R.P.620/37/206). BNL, 12 June 1798; Tom Moore (ed.), A history of the First Presbyterian church, Belfast (Holywood, 1983), pp 142–3. 20 BNL, 18, 22 June 1798: The recollections of Morgan Jellett (P.R.O.N.I., T2777/1A).

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loyal message was propelled along the same commercial conduits, previously utilised by the United Irishmen. In short, Belfast loyalty was being opposed to ‘Belfast principles’. A chain of imitations began ‘between Belfast and Lisburn’, then extended to Lisburn, Comber in County Down, Carnmoney, Ballyclare, Ballyeaston and Rasharkin in Antrim, all within Belfast’s mercantile hinterland.21 Only the Ballyclare resolutions actually name the subscribers as Presbyterians, but demographic realities meant that most were of that description. Where numbers are given, they were significant. Over 800 signed in Carnmoney, a district previously United Irish, and 600 heads of families in Comber, representing most of its adult male population. Moreover, though many ‘stand-alone’ resolutions were not replications of the Belfast Cavalry template, they do follow similar patterns of spread into largely Presbyterian and previously United Irish districts. Lord Downshire’s Castlereagh estate tenants were largely Presbyterian and many had supported the rebels. After the agent had five Presbyterians arrested, 700 gathered in the Meeting House and passed resolutions supporting king and constitution and offering assistance to the magistrates.22 From the thirty-eight of this type I have identified from the Newsletter, ten were professedly Presbyterian, nine were Catholic and six were Orange. Sixteen sets of resolutions were signed by the ‘inhabitants’ of a parish, usually without further distinction, though in three cases the category was broken down into religious components. However, the ‘inhabitants’ category is misleading as many were also from heavily Presbyterian areas, like Larne, Muckamore and Donegore in County Antrim, Coleraine and Macosquin in County Londonderry and Greyabbey and Dundonald in County Down. These resolutions were also numerously supported: around 1,000 signed from the Presbyterian congregation of Killyleagh, an area which had provided a strong rebel division at Ballynahinch. A desire to avoid guilt by association is sometimes discernible. The Killinchy Dissenters were ‘sensible of the infamy under which it [Killinchy] lay’. The only Tyrone Presbyterian declaration came from Coagh, where, in 1797, Andrew Newton had thought they were all republican. In Tamlaghtfinlagan, County Londonderry, the Presbyterian minister selected ‘two principle (sic) inhabitants’ from each townland as surety ‘to remove every suspicion of disloyalty’ prior to presentating their loyal address to the rector and magistrate. Occasionally the patina of guilt is less obvious to us than it would have been to contemporaries. At the very time that ‘His Majesty’s loyal subjects, the Protestant Dissenters of the Congregation of Moneyrea’ offered their ‘young and effective men’ as yeomen, another young member of the same congregation was being tried for high treason.23 As well as pressure for emulation from Belfast, these resolutions should also be seen against Synodical attempts to distance Presbyterians from complicity in the rebellion. It is estimated that forty-four clergy were implicated, divided equally between the conservative, ‘Old Light’ wing and liberal ‘New Lights’. The Synod 21 22

BNL, 26, 29 June, 3, 17, 20 July 1798. Lane to Downshire, 24 June 1798 (P.R.O.N.I., Downshire papers, D607/F/272); BNL, 13 July 1798. 23 BNL, 26 June, 3 July, 26 Oct. 1798.

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published loyal declarations in the Belfast and Dublin papers, claiming that Presbyterians were traditional supporters of constitutional monarchy, having opposed Cromwell, backed William and resisted the Pretender. An address to the people also embodied the historical appeal, applauded the majority’s abhorrence of rebellion, and entreated renegades to consider the consequences for life and property. In an Irish but no less Whiggish version of the ‘commercial loyalism’ propounded in England, the devastation wrought by the rebellion was contrasted with beneficial reforms like Free Trade gained before the revolutionary era. Like the Belfast Cavalry resolutions, the Synod remarked upon France’s ‘despotic power’ over its allies and its atheism, before cautioning against sectarian ‘party spirit’.24 These sentiments were soon amplified by the Newsletter’s approval at individual minister’s efforts ‘to recall to their allegiance the deluded part of their flock’. Letters from ‘correspondents’ like the anonymous Protestant Dissenter, ‘Truth’, refuted the obloquy indiscriminately thrown on Presbyterians, citing their monarchist stance at the Restoration, the Glorious Revolution and Hanoverian succession.25 Sometimes, however, there was a gap between what the church authorities propagated and what congregations actually felt. At Belfast’s First Presbyterian Church, William Bruce preached a sermon inculcating loyalty which was followed by the production of a congregational loyal address, modelled on the Belfast Cavalry original. However, the apparent unanimity of the address concealed real divisions within the congregation. One member, Martha McTier, told Drennan that Bruce’s sermon was ‘approved of by some’, but its political message was so clearly ‘stabbing others’ that they could ‘hardly prevail upon themselves to sit’. Indeed the sermon was so loyalist in its tone, that Martha speculated drolly as to why the closing hymn had not been ‘Croppies lie Down’.26 In themselves, Presbyterian resolutions could not convince sceptics. For one thing, since 1792, loyal declarations normally fluctuated in ratio to the extremity of the crisis. The post-rebellion declarations were also open to suspicion of gesture politics. Indeed, some declarations never proceeded beyond printed offers to assist the magistrates, and are comparable to Catholic declarations in early 1798; but with a critical difference. Although suspicion of ‘mushroom loyalists’ precluded such declarations being accepted on their own, the loyal bone fides of ex-radical Presbyterians were often established because, unlike the Catholic case, the door to the next stage in active loyalism, the armed association, was left open. This is apparent if we look beyond what prospective loyalists said to what they were allowed to do. Put simply, these declarations are best understood as the public tendering of bids to be accepted as loyalists. Agreement came in two institutional forms: by having their offers of service accepted and becoming yeomen; or by becoming Orangemen, though the overlap between the two organisations was ever increasing. In each case

24 McBride, Scripture politics, p 203; Records of the General Synod of Ulster from 1691–1820 (3 vols, Belfast, 1890–98), iii, 208–212. 25 BNL, 27 July, 25 Sept. 1798; McBride, Scripture politics, p 207. 26 First Presbyterian Church minute book, iii, 28 June 1798; McTier to Drennan, 30 Nov. 1798, The Drennan-McTier letters, 1776–1793, ed. Jean Agnew (3 vols, Dublin, 1998), ii, 428.

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local approval was necessary, an oath was required, and the individual’s views were on open display through marches or military duties. A yeomanry list of 1 June 1798 has later manuscript additions allowing comparison of formation patterns during, and immediately after, the rebellion with loyal declarations, thus revealing the dynamics of offer and acceptance.27 Down and Antrim produced most Presbyterian declarations. In Antrim, all seven new corps (against a previous total of twenty-six) came from Presbyterian and strongly ‘United’ districts; and two, at Larne and Killead, were the precise source of loyal declarations. Moreover, at Portglenone, through there was no printed offer, Edward Hudson used the Presbyterian-Catholic schism in the United Irish movement to recruit new corps.28 County Down’s twenty-two corps on 1 June rose to forty after the rebellion with many formations in previously disaffected districts. Correlation with declarations reveals that a corps was formed in Greyabbey under Montgomery of Rosemount, a landowner who had recently acted as intermediary for a loyal declaration and offer of service. A Killinchy declaration translates to the Florida Yeoman Infantry, which took its name from Florida Manor, residence of Daniel Gordon who mediated the offer of service. Another corps formed specifically as the Killinchy Infantry, which added the suffix ‘loyal’ to its title, a prudent gesture given the district’s rebellious reputation. There was exact or proximate correlation between the location of declarations and that of new yeomanry corps at Newry, Bangor, Donaghadee and Cumber Bridge. Equally revealing are those offers which were not accepted. The Castlereagh Presbyterians’ offer, which aroused Thomas Lane’s ire, led to nothing. A cavalry corps had existed there since 1796, and no other corps was ever formed. Similarly, a declaration from Moneyrea, a district which had explicitly offered yeomanry service, was never accepted. The Orange dimension to rehabilitating Presbyterians as loyalists is less clear. In some areas there was undoubtedly a Presbyterian influx in spring 1798. When we consider the deliberate stirring of massacre fears during the rebellion, at first glance it is surprising that this was not similarly publicised. However the current non-involvement of Presbyterian ministers in Orangeism probably made open association impolitic, and contemporaries rarely mention linkages, making them hard to trace. In County Antrim, Hudson noted that though Orangeism made no headway in the most disaffected parts, elsewhere ‘all denominations’ of Protestants became Orangemen, though some Presbyterians did so to ‘screen themselves’.29 There was some grass-roots Orange resistance to prospective post-rebellion newcomers. The Tyrone grand lodge resolved that James Stewart of Killymoon, a former champion of Presbyterian reformers, ‘shall never be admitted into the Orange society.’30 However, the coded language of other resolutions suggests that joining an Orange lodge was the rite of passage for some Presbyterians. Members of four Tyrone Presbyterian congregations near previously republican Coagh now represented themselves as 27 28

A list of the respective yeomanry corps in each county (Dublin, 1798). Hudson to Charlemont, 18 July, 12 Aug. 1798, The manuscripts and correspondence of James, first earl of Charlemont (2 vols, H.M.C., London, 1891–94), ii, 326–7, 332–3. 29 Hudson to Charlemont, 12 Aug., 6 Oct., 30 Nov. 1798 (H.M.C., Charlemont, ii, 332–3, 336, 341). 30 Circular from Thomas Verner, 1 Oct. 1798 (P.R.O.N.I., Staples papers, D1567/F/1/2/9).

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‘steady friends of monarchical government’, tracing their fidelity back to ancestral opposition to Cromwell, zeal in support of the restoration of Charles II, and conduct ‘in the reign of William of immortal memory’. The General Synod used the same historical argument for Presbyterian loyalty, but without the deliberately italicised suffix, making these declarations messages designed for local as well as national audiences. The first instance I can find of a Presbyterian minister openly involved with Orangeism was in July 1799, when Thomas McKay, Dissenting minister of Bray, County Wicklow, preached to Orangemen of Killyman, Stewartstown, Cookstown, Pomeroy and Coagh in Tyrone. It is unclear why a local minister was not used, but the transposition signifies an increasing Presbyterian presence in Orangeism. Hudson noted that ‘the word “Protestant”, which was becoming obsolete in the north, has regained its influence, and all of that description seem drawing closer together’.31 Castlereagh calculated that Ulster contained ‘a numerous body of determined loyalists’ by 1799 and that the ‘Dissenters … have in a great degree withdrawn themselves from the Union and become Orangemen’.32 As the evidence does not corroborate the totality of his calculations, it seems that yeomanry service was the primary way in which radical Presbyterians could be accepted as genuine loyalists. From government’s viewpoint, the yeomanry was under controls of pay and military discipline and the ultimate disgrace of turning their armed association status publicly back in their faces by disarming any corps suspected of disloyalty. Moreover, absorbing converts into the yeomanry did not preclude them from privately becoming Orangemen. Thus the public yeomanry oath took priority over the secret Orange oath, while gentry control of militarised Orangeism appeared to guarantee the primacy of property and respectability. Residual active disloyalty from Presbyterians was largely confined to those with nothing to lose. Both Antrim and Down were disturbed in the winter of 1798–9 by random lawlessness, like arms raids and robberies. By December 1798 at Ballyleidy in Down, where Sir John Blackwood had raised new yeomanry in August, his son complained that those who were not considered trustworthy enough to join the corps were creating so many problems that regular troops were needed to quell the trouble. In Antrim Hudson feared that ‘the divorce between the quondam (former) lovers is not so complete as it appeared’, as some poorer Presbyterians had again united with Catholics by a Defender-like oath. Snowdon Cupples damned the reprobates as ‘such Protestants as prefer revolution and plunder to religious considerations’, but emphasised that wealthier men were not involved.33 Therefore, although anti-Catholic sectarianism was a dynamic in post-rebellion loyalism, the fact that the yeomanry was the acceptable route into loyalism for wealthier Presbyterians meant that economics and social position were also important. Although the idea of the men of property leading the men of no 31 BNL, 17 July 1798, 26 July 1799; Hudson to Charlemont, 5 July 1799 (H.M.C., Charlemont, ii, 354). 32 Castlereagh to Portland, 3 June 1799 (P.R.O., HO100/87, f. 5). 33 Hudson to Charlemont, 7 Nov. 1798 (H.M.C., Charlemont, ii, 339–40); Blackwood to Castlereagh, 20 Dec. 1798 (N.A.I., S.O.C.1017/21); Monthly report (Antrim), 19 March 1799 (P.R.O., HO100/86, f. 247).

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popery has alliterative appeal as an Irish paradigm,34 connections between property and loyalty were germane to Ireland and Britain. In 1796 Wolfe Tone famously told the French that ‘if the men of property will not support us, they must fall: we can support ourselves by … the men of no property’.35 In the event, some propertied men did support Tone’s cause. The southern aristocrat Lord Edward Fitzgerald and the Belfast cotton merchant Henry Joy McCracken paid with their lives. But many more, particularly amongst the wealthy urban, middleclass leadership, failed to take up arms, leading to McCracken’s biting valediction ‘the rich always betray the poor’. McCracken was both right and wrong. There was an economic dimension to the post-rebellion growth of loyalism, but it was not narrowly based on simplistic assumptions about connections between class, wealth and politics, but rather drew on broader views about various forms of property. Government saw property as a permanent asset, usually land-based, which added to the nation’s wealth and security. Individual landowners saw it somewhat differently, and looked to the constitution to defend their property against central encroachments. By the 1790s the mainly landed definition of property was changing. In response to Paine, loyalist propagandists in both kingdoms had developed a new model that broadened the connection to include commercial and mercantile.36 Indeed the ubiquity of the revolutionary threat helped obscure central-local differences, binding all those connected with property closer together in its defence. John Jones, an English loyalist writing against Paine in 1792, envisaged the social order as a communal ‘chain of connection’ linking ‘the GENTLEMAN, the MERCHANT, the FARMER, the TRADESMAN, the MECHANIC, and the LABOURER’. The Dungannon Association of 1796 was described, ironically in the radical press, as a ‘heterogeneous mass of peers, lackeys and butcher boys’, thus lampooning a phenomenon which actually epitomised something very radical and innovatory itself.37 As we have seen, since 1792 some Irish loyal declarations and broadsheets had advanced economic arguments. Expanding the boundaries of ‘property’ and generating innovation as well as conservatism potentially allowed alternative paradigms to the sectarian model of the ancien régime confessional state. Notions of morality and civic responsibility were amalgamated with economic appeal. If property bound the community of the loyal, then plunder was the preserve and motivation of the disloyal. The third Dungannon resolution described the United Irishmen as ‘a set of desperate adventurers, who without property themselves, aim at that of others’. In 1797 John Beresford had said the ‘lower orders … both Papists and Dissenters’ became United Irishmen through ‘hopes of plunder, non-payment of tithes and rents, and a recovery of ancient forfeited properties’. General Knox thought ‘the loyalty of every Irishman … unconnected with property is artificial’.38 34

Jim Smyth, ‘The men of no popery: the origins of the Orange Order’, History Ireland, vol. 3, no. 3 (Autumn 1995), pp 48–53. 35 Cited in Jim Smyth, The men of no property: Irish radicals and popular politics in the late eighteenth century (Dublin, 1992), ix. 36 Amanda Goodrich, Debating England’s aristocracy in the 1790s (Trowbridge, Wilts., and Rochester, NY, 2005), pp 87–8. 37 Ibid., p 111; NS, 1–5 Aug. 1796. 38 Dungannon resolutions, 12 July 1796 (N.A.I., R.P.620/26/143); Beresford to Auckland, 24 Oct.

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Thus the new property-loyalty nexus extended beyond major landowners, substantial gentry and commercial men to people like tenant farmers and freehold voters. Loyalist propagandists saw how crucial it was to persuade people that they had something to defend economically and morally. An ‘Antrim Farmer’ claimed that tithes and rent could only be reformed at the price of destroying property and, as farmers’ wealth had been increasing for years, ‘in opposing the French every man is fighting for his religion, his property [and] … those sound morals which have long distinguished the Presbyterians of Ulster.’39 Institutions also influenced this process as voluntary participation in loyal associations, the yeomanry and the Orange Order brought the kudos of being connected with property. But it also brought responsibilities. The phrase to ‘defend with our lives and properties’ was common in loyal declarations and yeomanry offers. In addition to personal service, it was considered that those with a stake in the country should contribute to its defence. In Britain, Pitt launched the Voluntary Contribution scheme during the war-fuelled financial crisis of early 1797. The crisis also bit deep in Ireland and, in February 1798 the government followed the British example and developed its own Voluntary Contribution for the Defence of the Country. Camden set the tone, with an annually renewed personal donation of £7,000. Dublin raised around £27,000 and competed with Cork, where almost £10,000 was raised by yeomanry corps, the corporation, civic and customs officials and private individuals. The Freeman’s Journal emphasised that it ‘shows our expectations of its [Cork’s] loyalty not misplaced’. The Louth Militia gave £558 to the Voluntary Contribution; the Royal Irish Artillery nine day’s pay; the Cavan Militia privates four day’s pay bi-annually and the well-heeled Castlereagh Yeoman Cavalry, one month’s pay annually. During the rebellion, Belfast merchants accepted promissory notes from the ‘troops who have so gallantly stood forth in defence of our lives and properties’. Even the Synod of Ulster, usually more concerned with getting regium donum money from government, donated £500 in 1798.40 The links strengthened after the rebellion, as people whose property had been destroyed by the rebels were officially designated as ‘suffering loyalists’.41 Parliament voted £100,000 in June 1798 and passed legislation in October to settle compensation claims. The American loyalist bill was used as precedent, to the annoyance of Irish loyalists who claimed that this applied to a country which had been ‘given up’, but not to one which was saved and should be restored. A Commission of Suffering Loyalists was established to hear claims. Figures are incomplete, but it is reckoned that when the commission wound up in 1805, around one million pounds had been applied for in 6,630 claims.42 They range from several pounds to the £9,267 Lord 1797, The correspondence of the Rt Hon John Beresford, ed. William Beresford (2 vols, London, 1854), ii, 149; Knox to Pelham, 14 May 1797 (B.L., Add Mss 33104, ff 59–60). 39 BNL, 19 Oct. 1798. 40 FJ, 6 March 1798; BNL, 19 Feb., 18, 22 June 1798; McBride, Scripture politics, p 207. 41 Cooke to Castlereagh, ‘Pensions to loyalists’, n.d. 1798 (P.R.O., Colonial Office, CO904/7, f. 9). 42 Thomas Bartlett, ‘Clemency and compensation: the treatment of defeated rebels and suffering loyalists after the 1798 rebellion’, in Jim Smyth (ed.), Revolution, counter-revolution and union: Ireland in the 1790s (Cambridge, 2000), pp 119–20, 121–2.

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Downshire received for his Wicklow property. Thus the scope of the claims mirrored contemporary re-definitions of property and paralleling its institutional connections to popular loyalism in the yeomanry and Orange lodges. Arguably, voluntary participation in the war effort, either by financial proxy or personal service, encouraged patriotism and a sense of national identity. In Britain wealthy people ‘nourished their allegiance by their sense of possessing a stake in the country’, but patriotism also united all classes, so ‘where the stake was small or non-existent, the country itself remained’. Parish collections for the Voluntary Contribution, claimed one English loyalist, ‘keep us all loyal by becoming one body’.43 Though Irish loyalism in its institutional and militarised forms had drifted from earlier compatibility with Britain, grounds for commonality remained in the nexus between loyalty, property and prosperity. This was particularly so with regard to wartime patriotism. British schemes, like that for widows of sailors killed at the Battle of Camperdown, also published subscription lists in Irish newspapers. However in Ireland, wartime patriotism, like internal security, was traditionally a Protestant prerogative. Ireland was not just at war with France, but had undergone what virtually amounted to a civil war. The impact of this, and the partial divergence with Britain, can be seen in the operation of the Commission for Suffering Loyalists. The process of determining upon claims was sometimes used to demarcate between who was loyal and who was not, as the commissioners refused, for example, to release money to re-build damaged Catholic chapels in County Wicklow.44 For plebeian Protestants the armed defence tradition symbolised local dominance, security and identification with the central authority. Protestant political identity was copper-fastened by Protestant military hegemony. The penal laws had prevented Catholics possessing arms, but the 1793 relief act permitted this, subject to a property qualification. Any subsequent Catholic involvement in the various mobilisations could be interpreted as threatening ascendancy; but, if monopolised by Protestants, their dominance could be re-affirmed. As we have seen, from March 1798, rather than accept the Grand Orange Lodge’s offer of a massed loyal association, the Irish government had adopted a more controlled and controllable policy of pragmatically arming loyalists and Orangemen as supplementary yeomen. While this eased some of Camden’s fears about internal defence deteriorating into sectarian conflagration, it was not unproblematic. General Nugent, noted that ‘offers of service are very numerous’, but would accept only those ‘who are decidedly to be depended upon’. Moreover, fear-driven demand for arms often outran supply. Dublin’s 5,000 yeomen were adequately armed but, though thousands of guns had been ordered to be shipped north to Ulster, delays meant that northern generals resorted to re-distributing confiscated weapons to loyalists. Although 7,500 muskets reached Belfast, with another 4–5,000 at Charlemont Fort in Tyrone and 2–3,000 at Enniskillen, even more civilians clamoured for arms.45 43 John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt (3 vols, London, 1969–83), ii, 157; Cited in Roger Wells, Insurrection: the British experience, 1795–1803 (Gloucester, 1983), p 110. 44 Ruan O’Donnell, Aftermath: post-rebellion insurgency in Wicklow, 1799–1803 (Dublin, 2000), pp 26–7. 45 Castlereagh to Nugent, 6, 24 June 1798 (N.A.M., Nugent Mss, 6807/174, ff 457–8, 473–5);

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During the rising, pre-planning for arming loyalists became embroiled in the chaos. Loyalists who had not been included in the official arrangements of April 1798 often wanted to be armed as ‘supplementaries’. Hasty levying and vetting of supplementaries occurred in Belfast, Armagh, Coleraine and Rasharkin. The Belfast supplementaries were vetted by Nugent in conjunction with reliable townsmen. General Knox believed Armagh city contained ‘many disaffected people’, but those ‘respectable and loyal inhabitants’ not already in yeomanry corps, were selected by the garrison’s colonel for emergency duty.46 Sometimes people calling themselves supplementary yeomen or adopting crude forms of identity simply converged on towns. In Wexford the ‘Tinehealy True Blues’ undertook guard and prisoner escort duties. In Antrim, seventy Carrickfergus loyalists wore black cockades, while country people swarmed into town wearing ‘a piece of red ribband in their hats as a badge of loyalty’. After the Battle of Ballynahinch, country people ‘armed with rusty guns and bayonets’ visited the wrecked town sporting white hat-bands and calling themselves ‘supplementary yeoman’. The confusion about ad hoc arming of loyalists even permeated popular memory. A nineteenth-century account of the rebel leader, Munro’s capture near Ballynahinch, held that he was taken by ‘the Black Troop … fellows … known to be loyalists’, armed men who ‘did not wear uniforms’, though contemporary sources testify that he was actually captured by the Hillsborough Yeoman Cavalry.47 All accounts agree though that the volunteer loyalists of 1798 were Protestant. In Wexford and Wicklow, although there were some Protestants in the insurgent leadership, the rebels habitually called their loyalist opponents ‘Orangemen’. In Louth, John Foster explicitly asked Castlereagh to send down ‘a hundred stand of arms for a hundred good Protestants’. In Tipperary, a liberal magistrate complained that out-of-control Orange loyalists and yeomen, ‘the shoemakers, tinkers, carpenters and labourers of Rosscrea’, threatened to shoot him and that ‘no Papist … will think himself safe in his house’. These assorted armed loyalists were most numerous in Ulster, where Cooke reckoned: ‘the force of Orange yeomanry is really formidable’.48 However, formidability could be double-edged and lead to religious civil war. Even before the Wexford massacres, Camden noted the rebels’ actions had ‘literally made the Protestant part of the country mad’.49 The main instigators of loyalist arming, Castlereagh and General Knox, themselves recognised the risks in arming men who thought they faced a Catholic uprising. Castlereagh wanted volunteer loyalists attached to regular skeleton regiments (cadres which could be filled by recruitment) Cooke to Wickham, 2 June, Nugent to Castlereagh, 8 June 1798 (P.R.O., HO100/71, f. 21, HO100/81, f. 47). 46 Knox to Bentinck, 3 June 1798 (Portland papers, PWJa 216); Offer of service, 7 June 1798 (Robinson Library, Armagh, KH: II:38); Francis Gervais to Peter Gervais, 10 June 1798 (P.R.O.N.I., Gervais papers, T1287/3/14). 47 Morton to Lees, 24 May 1798 (N.A.I., R.P.620/37/139); Samuel McSkimin, The history and antiquities of the town of Carrickfergus (Belfast, 1909), pp 98–99; McComb’s guide to Belfast (Belfast, 1861), pp 13, 125, 137; Lane to Downshire, 15 June 1798 (P.R.O.N.I., Downshire papers, D607/ F/245). 48 Foster to Castlereagh, 9 June 1798 (N.A.I., R.P.620/38/108); Egan to Castlereagh, 20 Nov. 1798 (P.R.O., HO100/41, f. 53); Cooke to Wickham, 2 June 1798 (P.R.O., HO100/77, f. 21). 49 Camden to Pitt, 29 May 1798 (C.K.S., Pratt papers, U840/0156A/36).

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to provide proper training officered by local gentry, and capable of being drawn off for service anywhere in Ireland. Knox himself blanched at the prospect of controlling the plebeian loyalists he had helped raise, confessing that, as Armagh was ‘very populous and full of yeomanry and strong party prejudices subsisting, it will require an officer of more firmness and temper than I … to hold an equal balance between Orangemen and Roman Catholics’.50 However history repeated itself; another change in military high command led to a reversal of policy on arming loyalists. When Cornwallis replaced Camden to become joint viceroy and commander-inchief in late June 1798, he solved Knox’s problem for him. Other British officers who had served in America had used irregular troops of American loyalists, but Cornwallis positively detested the indiscipline of civilian militias. Arriving in Ireland when the worst fighting was over, the dreadful revenge pogroms by Wexford and Wicklow loyalists convinced him they were even worse than their transatlantic equivalents, being ‘in the stile of the loyalists of America, only much more numerous and powerful, and one thousand times more ferocious’. One of Cornwallis’s first decisions was to stop all loyalist enlistment and demand quantification of supplementaries.51 He was astonished at readiness of loyalists to substitute ‘the word Catholicism instead of Jacobinism’. Perceptions of the rebellion as a popish plot undoubtedly influenced the composition of volunteer loyalism. Nugent told Cornwallis that most northern Catholics appeared loyal during the rebellion; however, though they wish also to be armed … they are informed that they will be offered protection’, a critical and highly political distinction.52 The Catholic hierarchy and wealthy laity were appalled by the Wexford massacres and dismayed by the political handle this gave their opponents. In mid-June 1798, ‘respectable Catholics’ in Dublin and elsewhere swore ‘loyalty to the king and affection to their Protestant brethren’ and asserted that ‘imputations levelled against that [Catholic] community of a religious massacre, have been very unjustly extended, and should not involve the whole’. In Ulster, Edmund McGildowney again planned to use the Culfeightrin Catholics to retrieve the ‘Catholic character’.53 In November 1798, he obtained more loyal declarations renewing the former pledges, deploring atrocities against their ‘Protestant fellow subjects’ and asking ‘all the loyal, the honest and the true Catholics of Ireland’ to exculpate their community from blame. These declarations were again replicated in contiguous parishes. As noted earlier, the armed association issue bedevilled moves to create non-denominational loyalty in 1797 and early in 1798. In functional terms, the conversion of passive Catholic offers into active armed loyalism was cause of the problem. Now, against the backdrop of extensive Protestant loyalist mobilisation during the rebellion and 50 Castlereagh to Knox, 9 June 1798 (N.L.I., Lake Mss MS 56, f. 189); Castlereagh to Nugent, 10 June 1798, Knox to Nugent, 17 June 1798 (N.A.M., Nugent Mss., 6807/174, ff 459–62, 465– 9). 51 Cornwallis to Ross, 24 July 1798 (N.A.M., Cornwallis Mss, 6602/43/3, f. 5); Circular, 2 July 1798 (P.R.O.N.I., Morrow papers, D3696/A/4/1). 52 Cornwallis to Portland, 28 June 1798 (P.R.O., HO100/77, f. 200); Nugent to Hewett, 4 Sept. 1798 (Castlereagh correspondence, i, 332–4). 53 BNL, 15 June 1798; McGildowney to McMullan, 20 Nov. 1798 (P.R.O.N.I., McGildowney papers, D1375/335/12A).

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Nugent’s remarks about Catholics offering armed service but being granted protection, crucial changes appear in these resolutions. In an unreformed parliamentary system, to move from passive to active armed loyalty was to cross a political Rubicon. In a society shaken by rebellion, men with arms in their hands spoke louder than those with declarations in their mouths. Passivity may have had political clout during ordinary run-of-the-mill riots and disturbances; but after an armed insurrection it was a liability. Catholic declarations from Loughgiel, a County Antrim parish which followed Culfeightrin in December 1798, encapsulated this imposed powerlessness, noting plaintively: ‘We are told we cannot be Orangemen – be it so; but we solemnly declare, that we will not be Defenders.’ Most north Antrim declarations echoed Nugent’s noun: offering thanks for protection, and disarmingly offering service ‘in whatever way we might be most useful’.54 For all his establishment credentials, Edmund McGildowney did not raise yeomen until August 1803, when the Culfeightrin Yeoman Infantry was commissioned.55 Even this apparent exception of a Catholic captain of yeomanry looks like the exception to prove the rule as a process was unquestionably ongoing whereby loyalism was being monopolised by Protestants. The predominant and triumphant Protestant loyalism would brook no challenges after the rebellion. Though the rising had briefly threatened Protestant security, it proved to be a propaganda godsend, allowing Catholics to be represented as incorrigibly disloyal. This impulse motivated Sir Richard Musgrave, who began collecting evidence for his rebellion history as early as July 1798. This was eventually published on 1 March 1801 as Memoirs of the various rebellions in Ireland, and rapidly sold out its first edition of 1,250 copies due to an ‘unprecedented’ demand.56 Concentrating on the sectarian atrocities of Wexford and Wicklow, he represented the rebellion as a Catholic plot in the lurid 1641 mode and advocated Protestant unity. Though Musgrave personally knew little of Ulster, he was ‘assured that the Presbyterians quitted the papists as soon as they discovered that they were impelled by that sanguinary spirit which was ever peculiar to their religion’ and sought corroboration by questionnaires loaded to confirm his analysis.57 Historical accuracy aside, Musgrave is nonetheless of historical significance in that he reflected the bitterly anti-Catholic and highly emotive mindset of many Protestant loyalists in the aftermath of 1798. This ‘rebellion loyalism’ was to play a part in the promotion and resistance to legislative union. When Cornwallis arrived in Ireland as joint viceroy and commander in chief in June 1798, the military objective of crushing the rebellion was already well underway. However, his political objective, as it soon became clear, was nothing less that of effecting the ‘great question’ of legislative union. Moreover, it was already well known that Cornwallis personally favoured the granting of political conces54 55

BNL, 28 Dec. 1798; 1, 11 Jan. 1799; FJ, 3 March 1798. List of the officers of the militia and gentlemen of the yeomanry cavalry and volunteer infantry of the United Kingdom (London, 1805). 56 BNL, 19 June 1801. 57 Musgrave to Lenox-Conyngham, 27 April 1799 (P.R.O.N.I., Lenox-Conyngham papers, D1449/12/292).

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sions to Catholics. This resurrected the issue of Catholic loyalty. In an atmosphere where fear and deliverance, threat and triumph mingled explosively, any suggestion that non-Protestants could be genuinely loyal provoked furious rebuttal. Shortly before Cornwallis’s arrival, over 4,000 Newry Catholics had presented a loyal address embodying the hierarchical line of ‘abhorrence’ at those ‘seduced from their allegiance’, and offered to forego immediate emancipation and join ‘all His Majesty’s loyal subjects’ against invasion and insurrection. This provoked a swift and angry riposte from the ‘Loyal Protestant Association of Newry distinguishing themselves as Orangemen’. The dropping of Catholic political claims may have satisfied many loyalists as late as 1797, but it would not do now. Knowing Cornwallis’s conciliatory views, the Newry Orangemen unequivocally undermined Catholic claims to loyalty. Stressing that they had followed their ‘Brethren of Dublin’ in early 1798, being amongst the first to stand forward as ‘friends of Monarchy and the Constitution’, they sought to morally justify the ascendancy position and consolidate their recent victory in the rebellion by preventing any possible post-conflict lenity.59 Catholics and liberal Protestants welcomed Cornwallis, but he alienated ultraloyalists who resented his humane leniency towards defeated rebels. In October 1798 the case of a Wicklow yeoman, Hugh Wollaghan, became a cause célèbre. Wollaghan stood accused of killing a man in cold blood on suspicion of being a rebel, but claimed that he had acted on orders, and was freed by a court martial under a leading Orangeman, Lord Enniskillen. Cornwallis furiously ordered that Wollaghan never serve as a yeoman again. The reaction can be gauged from a loyalist ballad ‘Success to the Orange’, composed by a rank and file Orangeman which praised Lord Enniskillen ‘who’d ne’r hang a yeoman for shooting a Crop[py]’, and Dublin loyalists adopted sneering epithets like ‘Croppywallis’ and ‘Cornywallis’.60 When it became widely known that Cornwallis’s main task was to accomplish union, Protestant Ireland was split about its desirability. Supporters and opponents tried in a variety of ways to harness loyalism to support their case. The ­ultra­Protestant position was epitomised by Lord Clare who went to London in October 1798 to dissuade Pitt from including emancipation, thus ensuring a ‘strictly Protestant’ union.61 Cornwallis personally favoured union with emancipation, but this was so strongly resisted that he realised perseverance would hazard the entire enterprise. On the other hand, ‘If your union is Protestant’, Cooke calculated that the institutional structures of the ardent rebellion loyalism could be enlisted in support, as ‘we have 100,000 Protestants … connected by Orange lodges, and they might be made a great instrument.’62 Other conservatives like the M.P. for Armagh city, 58

58 Patrick M. Geoghegan, The Irish act of union (Dublin, 1999), pp 17–18; Thomas Bartlett, The fall and rise of the Irish Nation: the Catholic question (Dublin, 1992), p 225. 59 BNL, 26 June, 10 July 1798. 60 The trial of Hugh Wollaghan (T.C.D., MS872); see Allan F. Blackstock, An ascendancy army: the Irish Yeomanry, 1796–1834 (Dublin, 1998), pp 179–80; Constitutional songs (2 vols, Cork, 1799, 1800), ii, 36 [I am most grateful to Dr Neal Garnham for drawing these important songs to my attention]; Ross to Downshire, 24 Oct. 1798 (P.R.O.N.I., Downshire papers, D607/F/502). 61 Patrick M. Geoghegan, ‘The Catholics and the union’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, x (Cambridge, 2000), pp 247–8. 62 Cited in Geoffrey Bolton, The passing of the Irish act of union (Oxford, 1966), p 68.

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Patrick Duigenan, John Beresford and John Giffard, supported union, believing that strengthening the British connection would strengthen Protestantism. Their prounion stance was boosted in December by Cooke’s extensively circulated pamphlet, Arguments for and against an union, which argued that 1798 had proved that Irish Protestants ultimately depended on England for their security.63 Anti-unionism transcended normal political divisions. Reformist Whigs like Grattan and George Ponsonby wanted to defend the ‘constitution of 1782’ and sought emancipation, while ascendancy anti-unionists were headed by the Speaker, John Foster and Lord Downshire, and supported by many Orangemen and yeomen who believed 1782 embodied legislative independence, the Protestant Constitution and the British connection.64 Opposition to union was strong in Dublin, particularly within the corporation, guilds and the Irish Bar, where attempts were made to enlist institutional loyalism against the proposed measure. The leading Dublin lawyer, Orangeman and yeoman, William Saurin K.C., persuaded the Dublin lawyers’ corps to threaten resignation and ask the entire Irish yeomanry to follow them.65 The extreme emotions roused by the rebellion gave potential access to a wide range Protestant public opinion, which could be the foundation of strong opposition, if these feelings could be re-focussed on the union or those promoting it. In Ulster, Edward Hudson reckoned that ‘the most active loyalists were decidedly against it [union] with a degree of zeal bordering on rage’.66 The most obvious means of harnessing this powerful and popular post-rebellion loyalism were through institutional channels: the yeomanry and Orange societies. Both organisations had helped suppress the rebellion and had their own substantially intertwined networks. Unionists and anti-unionists knew this. Castlereagh, Cornwallis and the pro-union Protestants recognised the inherent political potential and danger in both organisations. Anti-unionism ran high with many rank and file Orangemen, but the Dublin Grand Lodge, though it contained supporters and opponents of union, adopted a policy of neutrality, recommending that all lodges refrain from discussing union. Putting loyalist unity above all else, this approach tried to avoid open splits in Orangeism and maintain its influence in the Castle, which was now looking shakier under Cornwallis.67 Castlereagh deliberately worked through the key Beresford interest to achieve Orange neutrality using John Claudius Beresford, as intermediary with the Grand Lodge. Patrick Duigenan played a complimentary role, preventing the Aldermen of Skinner’s Alley debating the issue. Castlereagh used similar tactics to thwart Saurin’s schemes to use the yeomanry as an anti-union instrument. John Beresford helpfully suggested that Saurin’s position as King’s Counsel made him vulnerable, and that a threat to remove his silk gown might make him desist from political manipulation of the yeomanry.68 Saurin blus63

W. J. McCormack, The pamphlet debate on the union between Great Britain and Ireland, 1797–1800 (Dublin, 1996), pp 29–31. 64 R. B. McDowell, Ireland in the age of imperialism and revolution, 1760–1801 (Oxford, 1979), p 690. 65 Blackstock, Ascendancy army, p 181. 66 Hudson to Charlemont, 21 Jan. 1799 (H.M.C., Charlemont, ii, 343–4). 67 Senior, Orangeism in Britain and Ireland, 1795–1836 (London and Toronto, 1966), p 124. 68 John Claudius Beresford to Castlereagh, 12 Dec. 1798, Duigenan to Castlereagh, 20 Dec. 1798

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tered, threatening to publicly lay down his yeomanry arms in protest, but the prospect of having himself disrobed and his yeomen disarmed (he was captain commandant of several Dublin corps) made him back down.69 The distinction between voluntarily resigning over loyalty to the Irish parliament and being officially disarmed with damning implications of disloyalty was crucially important; it proved a price Saurin was not prepared to pay. His bluff was called: his resignation threat appears less as ideologically motivated professional suicide, and more as a cry for political help. After the union’s parliamentary defeat in January 1799, both sides made renewed overtures to loyalist public opinion. Castlereagh thought that most people were ‘naturally indifferent’, but inflammatory tactics like Saurin’s meant that they could ‘easily be set in motion’. In March, Dublin yeomen resumed their normal Sunday parades ‘in as good temper as before the union was mentioned’.70 However unionists had learnt from Saurin’s machinations. When a Tipperary corps at Castle Otway published a pro-union address, Cornwallis stuck to the principle of allowing no political declarations, and issued circulars to all corps to prevent any recurrence. William Blacker later described this as ‘a bit of statecraft’, implying that Castlereagh deliberately engineered the Castle Otway resolutions as a pretext for the blanket ban.71 As government’s influence at the centre rendered institutional loyalism increasingly impervious to anti-unionist control, other more fundamental issues were needed to ignite Protestant public opinion. If the centralised structures of loyalism would not serve, then it was necessary to turn towards more localised and personal ways of appropriating the emotive and motive power of post-rebellion loyalism. Raw memories could be manipulated to make other concerns like union appear to be threatening Protestants and undoing their recent deliverance. The harbinger of union, Cornwallis, epitomised the threat; because of his unpopularity with ultraloyalists, union’s complexities could be represented as one stark choice: loyalty or lenity. Unionists recognised the dangers of personalising the issue. John Beresford reckoned that the ‘public clamour was quadrupled by the bad treatment the yeomanry conceived they had received’.72 A Newry by-election, ironically called because Isaac Corry sought re-election on appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer to replace John Foster, removed for opposing union, became contentious as Downshire controlled the other seat and the archbishop of Dublin, John Troy, instructed priests to mobilise voters ‘like the Macedonian phalanx’. Corry was reelected, but Downshire’s friends used the contest to brand Cornwallis ‘a friend to the Papists’.73 By thus demonising Cornwallis, anti-unionists hoped to harness emotive (Castlereagh correspondence, ii, 42, 52–3); Cornwallis to Portland, 2 Jan. 1799 (P.R.O., HO100/85, f. 1). 69 Edith Mary Johnston-Liik, History of the Irish Parliament (6 vols, Belfast, 2002), iv, 247–8. 70 Castlereagh to Portland, 2 Jan. 1799 (Castlereagh correspondence, ii, 78–80); Castlereagh to Wickham, 19 March 1799 (P.R.O., HO100/86, f. 163). 71 Castlereagh to Portland, 5 Aug. 1799 (P.R.O., HO100/87, f. 81); Blacker Day Book, iii, f. 137 (A.C.M., 5/1948). 72 Beresford to Auckland, 6 Feb. 1799 (Beresford correspondence, ii, 208–11). 73 Bolton, Irish act of union, p 136; Castlereagh to Camden, 26 June 1799 (C.K.S., Pratt papers,

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post-rebellion loyalism by exploiting their fears of ‘leniency’. Indeed, recent research suggests that Cornwallis had deliberately addressed most ‘suffering loyalist’ claims by January 1800, in order to prevent grievances about clemency and compensation combining to damage prospects for union.74 As time passed, anti-unionists also used tactical alarmism to make the physical danger seem alive and thus maintain the ardent loyalism they sought to exploit. County Antrim was undoubtedly disturbed during 1799, but General Nugent sensed political undertones in the way that it was reported and represented. In March 1799, Snowdon Cupples said the situation was even worse than in March 1798, but Nugent spotted the imprimatur of Philip Johnson, whose anti-unionism ‘biases his judgement to make things appear worse’. Another observer noted that Johnson’s absentee master, the unionist Lord Hertford, had been ‘feeling the pulse’ of his tenantry on union, and was ‘not much pleased with the results’.75 A letter in the Newsletter seized upon Cornwallis’s decision to encourage yeoman infantry to remind people how cavalry had saved Lisburn Protestants from massacre in 1641. In Wicklow and Wexford, regular sectarian violence elicited outbursts from Cornwallis about ‘ferocity of the loyalists’ and ‘patriotic Irish gentlemen’ who hypocritically raged ‘at the insolent interference of England’, but ‘beg for a garrison of English militia’.76 Though little encouragement was needed for loyalist vengefulness, the political benefits of Cornwallis’s dogmatic reactions compounded the situation. Alert to such local scheming, Cornwallis personally visited the regions. He successfully toured Munster in July 1799 finding considerable popular support in corporate strongholds like Bandon and Youghal, where, it will be recalled, the British version of loyalism was most eagerly copied in 1792. Castlereagh visited Ulster in the summer to thwart Lord Downshire’s attempts to use the July assizes for anti-union addresses. Cornwallis followed in October 1799. He succeeded in getting many signatures of support for pro-union addresses from Armagh, ­Monaghan, Donegal, Tyrone, Derry city, Coleraine, Lifford, Limavady, Antrim borough, Castlefin and Strabane, suggesting popular as well as propertied support.77 Encouraging signs also came from County Londonderry, through John Beresford’s influence, and from County Antrim from where, despite Philip Johnson’s ploys, a pro-union address also emerged. However, when Cornwallis visited the unionist Lord Gosford in Armagh, he avoided inspecting any yeomanry, which his position as commanderin-chief obviously invited. In Down, Cornwallis called at Castlereagh’s seat, Mount Stewart, but when speculation rose about including Downshire’s part of the county, the agent removed even the appearance of recognition by local loyalists, as he would not bother to bring yeomen from their turf-cutting. In the event the hero of the U840/C94/4). 74 Bartlett, ‘Clemency and compensation’, pp 122, 125. 75 Cornwallis to Dundas, 12 July 1799 (P.R.O., WO/1/612, ff 81–2); Monthly Report, 19 March 1799; Nugent’s report, 26 April 1799 (P.R.O., HO100/86, ff 247, 352); Hudson to Charlemont, 1 May 1799 (H.M.C., Charlemont, ii, 351). 76 BNL, 17 May 1799; Cornwallis to Ross, 13 Feb., 8 June 1799 (N.A.M., Cornwallis Mss, 6602/45/3, ff 36, 45). 77 James Kelly, ‘Popular politics in Ireland and the act of union’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, x (Cambridge, 2000), pp 277–9.

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­ hesapeake feared to cross the Lagan and strategically withdrew, ‘lest that proud C leviathan Lord Downshire should call it a declaration of war’.78 When parliament reconvened in January 1800, Castlereagh again used the Beresfords as an entrée to organised loyalism, convincing John Claudius Beresford that Orange neutrality furthered Protestant interests much more than ‘mischief making’ by the anti-union ‘cabal’.79 The Grand Lodge reissued its advice and the Antrim county grand master, William Atkinson, recommended obedience. Realising that their grip on the structures of loyalism was slipping locally, as well as centrally, antiunionists resorted to increasingly desperate measures. Philip Johnson later admitted that Downshire had circumvented the central and regional structure of Orangeism and sought to exert pressure on lodges at local level ‘to make use of them as an instrument’.80 The first lodge to rebel against the central diktat was number 258, which met thirty-one other Down and Antrim lodges at the Maze racecourse on 1 March 1800 and issued resolutions re-affirming loyalty to the king and ‘glorious Constitution’. They rejected the Grand Lodge’s advice, reprobated a Belfast lodge for passing unionist resolutions and declared the union ‘ill return for men who clung to that constitution in the hour of danger and distress’. Thirty-six Monaghan and Armagh lodges responded, representing 2,100 men, branding union a catastrophe for Ireland which would endanger commerce and violate civil liberties as ‘no man is to be taxed without his consent’. They then called on ‘our Brethren, the Orange Men of Ireland, to speak out, on the present occasion’ and recommended that George Ogle, the Wexford Orangeman and M.P., replace the unionist Thomas Verner as Irish Grand Master.81 Union supporters now also targeted these Orange dissidents at local lodge level. The leading rebel lodge (number 258) was from Islandderry, County Down, where the landowner Captain Waddell, one-time loyal association organiser and now yeomanry captain, was in Downshire’s political interest.82 This lodge was forced by the Orange authorities to issue counter-resolutions, disavowing those from the Maze meeting. In the Killylea district of Armagh, eighteen lodges issued similar resolutions, supporting neutrality and reprobating any interference with the appointment of Grand Lodge officers.83 A clinching factor for the unionists was the fact that the influential Philip Johnson switched sides. Johnson was reined in by Castlereagh’s father, Lord Londonderry, who tactfully used a non-Orange loyalist to pressurise him into persuading Orangemen to remain neutral. Downshire made despairing attempts, maladroitly attempting to get his militia regiment to sign an anti-union address, which was probably another ‘indirect’ attempt to circumvent the Grand 78 Nugent to Gosford, 30 Sept. 1799 (P.R.O.N.I., Gosford papers, D1606/1/1/220B); Lane to Downshire, 3 Oct. 1799 (P.R.O.N.I., Downshire papers, D607/G/199); Cornwallis to Ross, 24 Oct. 1799 (N.A.M., Cornwallis Mss, 6602/45/3, f. 67). 79 Castlereagh to Portland, 31 Jan. 1800 (P.R.O., HO100/93, f. 60); DEP, 21 Jan. 1800; BNL, 31 Jan. 1800. 80 Johnson to Hardwicke, n.d. July 1804, The viceroy’s postbag, ed. Michael MacDonagh (London, 1904), p 27. 81 BNL, 4, 21 March 1800. 82 P. J. Jupp, ‘County Down elections, 1783–1831’, I.H.S., xviii, no. 70 (1972), p 202. 83 BNL, 11 March 1800.

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Lodge, as an Orange lodge existed in the regiment.84 He weakly argued that his militiamen were also Down freeholders, but the episode was catastrophic for antiunionists, and also for Downshire personally, as it allowed Cornwallis to remove him from his colonelcy, the county governorship and the Privy Council. Grattanite Whigs, also vehemently opposed to the union, encouraged loyalists to look beyond their immediate feelings about the rebellion and back to their Volunteer roots. In 1799 some Belfast Orangemen reportedly wore green favours alongside orange and blue ribbons bearing the motto ‘forget and forgive’.85 In Dublin in 1800, Cornwallis noted, ‘The aid of the yeomanry, who are mostly Orangemen, is called for by inflammatory hand-bills, and it is asked … whether 60,000 Irishmen, with arms in their hands, will tamely stand by and see the Constitution of their country destroyed.’ This ‘artful’ bid invited ‘the yeomanry, Orangemen, and Catholics to form one solid … bond of opposition’.86 The pamphlet was by John Holmes, a Dublin lawyer who used the pseudonym ‘Eunomous’, Greek for a barrister. Holmes drew on the constitutional theories of Locke and Blackstone to justify the right of ‘armed citizens’ for self defence and ‘self-government’. He claimed that the yeomanry ‘holds its charter not from the crown, but from the genius of the constitution’; that ‘we have saved the land [in 1798] and will again save it … whether assailed … by Buonaparte, or by Pitt’.87 Cornwallis, worried that the yeomanry and militia were ‘prepared in conjunction with the mass of the people to overawe if not resist the decision of the legislature’, ordered regular military reinforcements into Dublin.88 Sabre-rattling proved inadequate to raise the ghosts of 1782 despite Grattan’s spectre-like re-appearance in parliament in Volunteer uniform. All this opposition was to no avail. By April 1800, the Castle heard that the Dublin Orangemen were ‘softening’ and the unionists, John Claudius Beresford and Thomas Verner, were ‘regaining influence over them’.89 Despite Cornwallis’s misgivings, there was no public clamour in Dublin when union became operative on 1 January 1801. In most places the transition into the United Kingdom was characterised by the facility with which all levels of Protestant loyalism re-united. Thus the loyalism of the immediate post-rebellion period played a part in the wider machinations for and against union. Undoubtedly the supporters of union exploited the structures of institutional loyalism more successfully than their opponents because of their closer access to the centres of power in the chief secretary’s office in Dame Street and the Grand Lodge’s rooms in Dawson Street. Though the anti-unionist position was entirely rational, their predilection to whip up irrational fears to graft 84 Louis M. Cullen, ‘Alliances and misalliances in the politics of the union’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, x (Cambridge, 2000), p 232. 85 McTier to Drennan, 30 Jan. 1799 (Drennan-McTier letters, ii, 465). 86 Cornwallis to Ross, 21 Jan. 1800 (N.A.M., Cornwallis Mss, 6602/45/3, f. 88); Castlereagh to Portland, 20 Jan. 1800 (P.R.O., HO100/93, f. 29); Cornwallis to Portland, 21 Jan. 1800, The correspondence of Charles, first marquess Cornwallis, ed. Sir Charles Ross (3 vols, London, 1859), iii, 168. 87 ‘Eunomous’, An argument addressed to the yeomanry of Ireland (Dublin, 1800), passim. 88 Cooke to King, 3 Feb., Cornwallis to Portland, 14 Feb. 1800 (P.R.O., HO100/95, f. 66, HO100/93, f. 105). 89 Littlehales to Cooke, 9 April 1800 (P.R.O., HO100/93, f.277).

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emotional post-rebellion loyalism to their cause was as much a hostage to fortune as a prisoner of bureaucracy as it needed the tangible threat of a religious civil war to sustain itself. However, on the other hand, recent perceptions that just such a situation obtained meant that the Grattanite appeal to Volunteer patriotism and Whig constitutionalism was so out of kilter with political realities in 1800 that it faded from the practical to the rhetorical realm. If loyalism had some influence on how union was passed, what influence did the debates about, and passage of, a measure which made Ireland part of the United Kingdom and removed its parliament, have on the focus of loyalty? Expressions of identity can arise from multiple motives, fulfil a variety of purposes and change in response to different circumstances, thus it can be difficult to relate them meaningfully to the real perceptions of contemporaries. Moreover Irish Protestant self-identity had historically fluctuated between expressions stressing English or British ancestry and those emphasising the Irish element, sometimes, as with the more radical Volunteers of the 1780s, articulating a version of Irishness which included Catholics. As noted earlier, before the union, Irish loyalists frequently saw parallels between their domestic endeavours and the wider war effort. Nonetheless the wide-ranging political, military and religious context surrounding union and the opposition of many loyalists raises questions about identity shifts. Linda Colley has argued that, cumulatively, the experience of wars against France, a shared Protestantism and a growing sense of Empire, helped the English, Scots and Welsh adopt an overarching identity as Britons.90 Though Colley excludes the Irish from the new British identity, the dominant form of loyalism in Ireland at the union was almost by definition, Protestant. Union had a concurrent military dimension shaped by wartime exigencies that amalgamated both army establishments. Moreover, it was a Protestant union in two senses. First, in constitutional terms, George III’s invocation of the coronation oath ensured that union did not include emancipation, thus maintaining the ‘happy constitution’ beloved of the ascendancy. Second, in institutional terms, it unified the Anglican establishments of England and Ireland. Union also had an imperial logic: its supporters argued that it promised the British Empire ‘strength and stability’ and that Irish loyalists could confidently take their part in this ‘Protestant Empire’. As recently as 1785 Grattan had opposed Anglo-Irish trade proposals with the oratorical flourish ‘perish the empire but live the constitution’. Yet by 1800 the notion of a ‘Union for Empire’ had so permeated political attitudes that Grattan could no more have made this comment in 1800 than he could have resurrected the phoenix of the Volunteers from the fires of rebellion loyalism.91 These scenarios correspond so closely with Colley’s building blocks of Britishness that we must ask if Ireland’s amalgamation into the United Kingdom changed the ways in which Irish loyalists identified themselves and encouraged them to become, as Pitt predicted they would, the Brethren of Britons? In terms of symbolism, the evidence suggests that loyalists readily identified themselves with the United Kingdom as yeomanry corps throughout Ireland rapidly 90 91

Colley, Britons: forging the nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven and London, 1992), p 5. Cited in Thomas Bartlett, ‘Ireland, empire and union, 1690–1801’, in Kevin Kenny (ed.), Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford, 2004), pp 85, 87–8.

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adopted the union flag.92 However, symbols, by their nature, are limited in what they reveal as they reflect generalities. A better route into how individual loyalists perceived their identity comes from the popular literature they generated to be read, recited and sung by their fellows. A series of Constitutional Songs published in two volumes at Cork in 1799 and 1800 reveals indicators of identity during the period comprehending the aftermath of rebellion and the debates and eventual passage of union.93 The toasts which preface these songs begin by declaiming: ‘May a British navy always keep their enemies at a distance’ and include ‘Here’s England and Ireland in a body, with Majesty for the head and our brave soldiers and sailors for the arms.’ The popular stereotypes beloved of the caricaturist were recalled in the proposal: ‘May Pat Brogue and John Bull always be hand in glove.’94 The songs themselves were a mixture of imported contemporary British and locally authored Irish loyalist songs and ballads. Most are anonymous or pseudonymous – ‘R.N. of [Orange] lodge 595’ authored several. Analysis of the content of the 132 songs in the incomplete edition that has been consulted shows that forty-one songs had entirely British subject matter with no mention of Ireland, seventy-one were entirely Irish in their themes and twenty songs contain references to both countries. The historian Andrew Lambert has contended that veneration of naval commanders like Nelson and pride in his victories at the Nile in 1798 and Trafalgar in 1805 were influential in the construction of new ideas of Britishness which contrasted Britain’s social, ideological and imperial identity with the chaos of revolutionary France.95 The solely British songs are often based on the wave of popular patriotism generated by naval victories or invasion threats, like ‘Britons Strike Home’, a version of an earlier ballad which dated from at least the 1770s, which was re-worked to celebrate Admiral Howe’s victory over the French in 1794 and would be played on Nelson’s ships before Trafalgar. Sometimes songs with Irish themes, often related to 1798, were composed to be tune of ‘Rule Britannia’. A song composed by a member of lodge number 595, ‘Success to the Orange’, which deals with the Wollaghan trial, was sung to the tune ‘The Army and Navy of Britain’. Most solely Irish songs deal with the themes of Orangeism, the yeomanry and the 1798 rebellion: there are no fewer than fifteen variants of the loyalist ballad ‘Croppies Lie Down’.96 These Constitutional Songs therefore suggest that loyalists often identified themselves with Britons, and occasionally as Britons, but more often articulated an identity in which Britishness and Irishness overlapped particularly in relation to the war, the armed forces, and military and naval heroes. But the selection of songs also shows attempts, if not to ‘construct’ a national identity, at least to encourage loyalists to see an identity of interests. In several cases there is editorial thematic juxtaposition of British and Irish songs. ‘The invasion’ celebrated Ireland’s providential deliverance 92 Bolton, Irish act of union, p 215; G. A. Hayes McCoy, A history of Irish flags (Dublin, 1979), pp 102–8. 93 Anon., Constitutional songs (2 vols, Cork, 1799, 1800). 94 Ibid., i, 1. 95 Andrew Lambert, Nelson: Britannia’s god of war (London, 2004), p 180. 96 Adam Nicolson, Men of honour: Trafalgar and the making of the English hero (London, 2005), p 53; Anon., Constitutional songs, i, 18, 67; ii, 36.

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from the French at ‘Bantry’s bold and rocky bay’ in 1797 and is immediately followed by the ‘The Voice of Britain’ which deals with popular anti-­invasion patriotism and eulogies Dover’s White Cliffs.97 A Dublin-produced volume of Orange songs of 1800 shows similar tendencies in terms of overlapping identities. One ballad, ‘the Orange Yeomanry’, which accused Catholic clergy of supporting the rebels, and which also appeared in the Constitutional Songs, was sung to ‘Rule Britannia’.98 In 1804 Francis Kirkpatrick of Aughnacloy, County Tyrone, published an unusual retrospective miscellany of poetry and prose entitled Loyalty and the Times.99 This also contains interesting signifiers on how he thought post-union Protestants should identity themselves. Although Kirkpatrick was local, he published in Dublin, thus replicating established loyalist links between the capital and mid-Ulster. A subscrip-­ tion list of 350 allows us to gauge his readership. Though this circulation was not especially significant per se, the fact that many subscribers were Orange lodge masters and yeomanry or militia officers suggests that the actual audience was much larger. Most came from Armagh, Tyrone, Fermanagh, Dublin and the Wexford Militia. As the publication was for internal consumption within the Protestant loyalist constitu-­ ency, the content can be read as an interchange between their views and the author’s intention. Kirkpatrick’s decision to publish in 1804 was influenced by renewed Catholic agitation, but the book’s retrospective, chronicle-like nature means it can be read as a response to tumultuous times, including 1798 and the union. Indeed it is a quintessentially unionist text: Kirkpatrick’s patron was John Crosslé, Orangeman, captain of the Aughnahoe Yeomanry and agent for the Verners, five of whom were subscribers, while James Verner, unlike many of his Armagh Orange brethren, was a strong unionist.100 In a chronology of historical events for 1800 Kirkpatrick noted that ‘the union became an operative law, and as such is considered and received by every true loyalist in Ireland’. Like the Constitutional Songs, Kirkpatrick’s poetry and prose often connect ‘the Emerald Isle’ to British wartime patriotism. Various poems emphasise the monarchical connection between ‘Great George and William’s cause’. A poem on the Battle of the Nile, ‘Admiral Nelson’s Victory’, begins: You true sons of William, attend to my story Who fight for your king, constitution and crown Great Nassau’s renown and the Protestant glory To hurl the rebels and infidels down … Let each loyal Orangemen join in a chorus In commemoration of that happy day When Admiral Nelson and his British heroes Triumphed in the Mediterranean Sea.

Victory at the Nile is presented as identifying ‘Hibernia’ with ‘happy Britannia … queen of the ocean’. Kirkpatrick, like the anonymous editor of the Constitutional 97 98 99 100

Anon., Constitutional songs, i, 80–3. Loyal songs No 2 as be sung in all Orange lodges in Ireland (Dublin, 1800). Francis Kirkpatrick, Loyalty and the Times (Dublin, 1804). Obit. Henry Crosslé, Newry Telegraph, 5 Jan. 1856.

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Songs, also presented an extensive loyalist interpretation of events in Ireland. Indeed he amplified Musgrave’s anti-Catholic interpretation of 1798 by comparing the Wexford rebels to those of 1641 like ‘Phelim Roe [O’Neill]’, asking ‘How many loyal heroes did they kill, At Gorey, Wexford, Enniscorthy’s hill.’ Also like Musgrave, he turned his attention to Ulster Presbyterians in terms that promoted the Britishness of union as an antidote to the union of Irishmen: ‘may they renounce the traitor’s murd’rous cause, and stand for great Britannia’s lenient laws’. Kirkpatrick’s work contains much intensely local Tyrone material, often treating the rebellion in a Musgravian and anti-Catholic vein, but interweaving this with a wider wartime British and imperial context. New terms were devised to distinguish loyal and disloyal Irishmen. Catholics are denominated ‘Erin-Gauls’; liberal Protestants, who ape loyalty but support emancipation, were ‘Bonaparte-Protestants’. Orange Protestant Irishmen are Britons whose ‘British thunder soon made them surrender’, and only they are ‘true loyalists’.101 Kirkpatrick knew his audience would readily assimilate wider events of the war within their world-view, particularly during a crisis. Thus the struggle with Napoleonic France is represented as the most recent stage in the conflict between loyal planters and their British Protestant allies and rebellious natives and their French Catholic friends. Inconsistencies like French treatment of the Catholic church and the Irish Catholic role in the war, soon demonstrated again at Trafalgar, are simply ignored. Instead, Kirkpatrick constructs a political genealogy of Protestant resistance to French and Catholic despotism from the Williamite wars to the current conflict, conflating the ‘happy constitution’ of 1688 with Protestant ascendancy, now guaranteed by the post-union British connection. Here too was consistency with Musgrave who, though initially anti-union, came to embrace it readily, revising his nouns to move Ireland from a ‘Protestant state’ to part of a ‘Protestant empire’.102 Thus these various texts show that loyalists were encouraged to transcend internal division and insecurity by identifying themselves in a way which amalgamated Irishness and Britishness under the Protestant succession from William III to George III. As for a more substantive post-union British identity, these pro-union authors certainly tried to create it, wanting their readers or listeners to identify what Kirkpatrick defined in ‘Lough Earne Shore’ as our ‘glorious cause’, with ‘this measure [which] though inconsiderately opposed by many loyal men, is now fully understood to be the wisest and most salutary means of restoring tranquillity to Ireland’.103 However, the plethora of solely Irish subjects in the poems and ballads, and the continued juxtaposition of Irish loyalism and Orangeism with Irish Catholic disloyalty shows that, though in patriotic anti-French terms Irish Protestant loyalists certainly saw themselves as brothers in arms with Britons, nonetheless they themselves maintained their Protestant, loyalist and Orange version of Irishness. The

101

Kirkpatrick, Loyalty, pp 3, 101, 105–6, 269. Nassau was the German region where the House of Orange originated. 102 Kevin Whelan, The tree of liberty: radicalism, Catholicism and the construction of Irish identity, 1760–1830 (Cork, 1996), pp 135–40. 103 Kirkpatrick, Loyalty, p 258.

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wider scope of identification and focus of loyalty seems to have come more in the imperial sense of common purpose in the war. One key reason for this resolutely Hibernian orientation was that loyalism, in its Irish configuration, still had a vital political role to play in resistance to Catholic emancipation or, as it was increasingly called, the ‘Protestant cause’. If loyalty was a prime argument for the continued ascendancy, the social prominence of Protestantism was another. Describing the first Twelfth of July parades after the union, the Newsletter stressed the socially elevated nature of the participants, noting that their ‘respectability … was characteristic of the cause’. In his preface to ‘The Orangemen of Ireland’, Francis Kirkpatrick described that cause as being ‘the surest pillar and support of the Protestant interest and our happy constitution’.104 This represented a significant shift from a primarily militaristic understanding of loyalism to that of a political ‘cause’ supportive of post-union Protestant ascendancy. The change came suddenly, but it must be seen in the context of the current position of the Catholic question. Though union had passed without emancipation, in July 1800 the Catholic bishop of Cork, Dr Moylan, praised Castlereagh for the measure and expressed confidence for the future. In 1801, Lord Fingall believed ‘the Catholic question to have made now such strong grounds as to want merely a favourable opportunity for its entire accomplishment’.105 The role of loyalism in the construction and promotion of the anti-emancipation, Protestant ‘cause’ will now be examined. Perhaps the most important factor in the transition from militarised post­rebellion loyalism to loyalism as the keystone of the Protestant political cause was its controllability. It was also the greatest dilemma. The turbulent and sectarian Protestant spirit, a strategic asset in the militarising of loyalism, could prove a serious political liability with the Irish parliament gone. The discipline and controllability of Orangeism was an important aspect of this. After the rebellion, the Grand Lodge of Ireland sought to eliminate indiscipline and sectarianism amongst plebeian loyalists. William McKenzie, the Dublin bookseller and Orangeman, was disciplined for producing material where the chorus of the popular ballad ‘Croppies lie down’ had been changed to ‘Papists lie down’.106 Within Orangeism, the national Grand Lodge sought to improve and regulate its control over the localities. The Grand Master of Ireland, Thomas Verner, regularised the structure of county grand masters and, in 1800, introduced the ‘New Orange System’ whereby all Orangemen had to be re-elected and re-initiated. A simple catechism replaced arcane initiation rituals and Grand Lodge nominees visited local lodges to ensure conformity.107 Danger had once been a unifying factor, but with the rebellion suppressed and the Catholics ready to re-assert their loyal credentials on the new United Kingdom stage, the politics of loyalty became paramount. If the elite-popular loyalist consensus of 1798 was to be preserved, then its public face must be characterised by respectability rather than rowdiness. 104 105

BNL, 21 July 1801; Kirkpatrick, Loyalty, p 3. Geoghegan, Irish act of union, p 129, chapter 7 passim; Fingall to McKenna, 10 April 1801 (Cornwallis correspondence, iii, 354). 106 Grand lodge minute book, November 1798, f. 43 (G.O.L.I.). 107 David Cargo, Cecil Kilpatrick and William Murdie, The history of the Royal Arch Purple Order (Belfast, 1993), pp 53, 55.

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Many lodge resolutions in conservative newspapers named and shamed miscreants, like the Lisburn Boyne Lodge number 207 which warned ‘all true Orangemen to dissociate from James Alderdice of Lisburn’, who was duly expelled. Reportage of Twelfth of July parades also stressed their gentry and military connections. Respectability guarded the ‘cause’ from the criticism of political opponents and safeguarded the necessary impression of official sanction. The conduct of parading was also intended to convey the same respectable message. Orange lodges often would ‘borrow’ the band of the regular army garrison, before attending an Anglican service to hear a sermon, which would then be published separately.108 Orange parades at this time can be understood almost as a ritual dramatisation of the ‘church and state’ aspect of the constitution, while at the same time encapsulating the tripartite composition of the Protestant cause: of propertied, military and plebeian loyalists. Yet control was aided by the safety valve of popular tunes as the parades afforded an outlet for the ‘spirit’ of rebellion loyalism as the bands played raucous tunes like ‘the Protestant Boys’ and ‘the Boyne Water’. The war with France created a widening public patriotic arena which, if it was seen to be occupied by Protestant loyalists, could boost their political cause. However, in March 1802 the ramifications of the Peace of Amiens potentially threatened the institutional structures of the cause, as the yeomanry faced demilitarisation and retrenchment. The new viceroy, Hardwicke, recognised that he needed to govern Ireland on Protestant principles and that the yeomanry’s linkages to the Protestant interest made that force valuable as a political tool. The mainly Catholic militia was disembodied, but yeomanry captains inundated the Castle with offers to continue service without pay, sometimes even returning unredeemed pay vouchers.109 In the event, the yeomanry was maintained on a reduced scale during the peace and, unlike their cross-channel equivalents, English Volunteers, was allowed pay and retained the capability to provide permanent duty for law and order problems.110 The chief secretary, Charles Abbot, dismissed a proposal that yeoman should stop keeping weapons at home. This, he said, ‘would disgust and break up the yeomanry, by making them individually insecure’. Even during peacetime reductions, Hardwicke felt under pressure to maintain the Protestant monopoly. In 1802, he acquiesced uneasily to vociferous demands from the Limerick gentry for new corps. ‘Though it is very desirable to have Protestant yeomanry’, he told Abbot’s replacement, William Wickham, ‘yet the less that is said about it the better.’111 The resumption of war in May 1803 reversed retrenchment in Britain and Ireland and enhanced the value of Irish loyalism for the Protestant cause. The conflict became a ‘war of resources’ as Napoleon’s huge ‘army of England’ massed on the channel coast to launch an invasion paralleled, it was feared, with a concurrent 108 109

BNL, 6 June, 15 July 1800, 17, 21 July 1801, 13 July 1802. Sir Henry McAnally, The Irish Militia, 1793–1816: a social and military study (Dublin, 1949), p 167; Hardwicke to Yorke, 15 April 1802 (B.L., Add Mss 35701, ff 323; N.A.I. (Calendar of State Papers [not extant], June–Aug. 1802). 110 Blackstock, Ascendancy army, pp 189–90; Hardwicke to Pelham, 7 Aug. 1803 (P.R.O., HO100/109, f. 173.9). 111 Minutes of Conversation with Sir Charles Asgill, 6 July 1802 (P.R.O., Colchester papers, 30/9/132/1); Hardwicke to Wickham, 12 Nov. 1802 (H.R.O., Wickham papers, 38/M.49/5/10).

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landing in Ireland. The government reactivated the British Volunteers under the ‘June allowances’, quickly followed by the levée en masse which increased the force to a colossal 400,000 men.112 The defence measures also included the computation of livestock, horses and farm transport in maritime counties and the construction of new coastal and inland defences, including Ireland’s ring of Martello towers and new defences on the Shannon. In short, if the war of resources was to be won, the entire population must be involved. This copper-fastened the need for yeomanry and, crucially, the general wave of popular patriotism when nearly half a million men entered volunteer corps during the invasion scares following the re-start of war, gave Irish loyalists the opportunity to increase their monopoly of its expression. The Irish militia re-embodied in 1803, but at the smallest possible level, based on that of 1795.113 Yet, this apparently pro-Protestant measure was offset by other developments driven by the union logic of military assimilation. Hardwicke’s brother, the secretary-at-war Charles Yorke, developed an Army of Reserve scheme to boost the regular army. Quotas of men for home service were to be raised by ballot in every county in the United Kingdom.114 This produced adverse reactions in Irish counties with mixed populations. In Tyrone, Abercorn disliked the measure, while in Cavan, Lord Farnham said the government should expand the yeomanry instead, as a rival levy would give offence because the former force was ‘almost all of a certain description’. Farnham’s reaction was driven by fear that Catholics would get training and status under the scheme or that it might draw Protestants to serve outside the county. Another difficulty was the fact that, since union, the selection of officers was no longer in the Castle’s gift. Thus the Irish gentry were denied their traditional intermediary role and influence over their ‘own’ people which was inherent in the yeomanry. Hardwicke accepted this, telling Yorke that ‘for various reasons … particularly applicable to this country, it will be necessary to avoid carrying out this plan to too great an extent’. Though the levée en masse did not apply to Ireland, Hardwicke planned massive yeomanry augmentations, including the reintroduction of armed loyal associations as supplementaries.115 Any officially sanctioned expansion in the patriotic public sphere invited promoters of the Protestant cause to occupy that space with their own exclusive and monopolistic version of loyalism. Yet what government policy gave with one hand, union principles in the form of military assimilation threatened to take away with the other. From 1803, the English volunteers were incorporated into the anti-invasion force, adopting new terms of service to facilitate service outside their localities, where 112 Austin Gee, ‘The British Volunteer movement, 1793–1807’ (D. Phil. thesis, Oxford, 1989), p 22; I. F. W. Beckett, The amateur military tradition (Manchester, 1991), p 93; John Cookson, ‘The English volunteer movement of the French Wars, 1793–1815: some contexts’, Historical Journal, 32,4 (1989), p 871; P. M. Kerrigan, Castles and fortifications in Ireland, 1485–1945 (Cork, 1995), pp 152–3. 113 John Cookson, The British armed nation, 1793–1815 (Oxford, 1997), p 167. 114 Littlehales to the governor of Armagh, 15 July 1803 (P.R.O.N.I., Atkinson of Crowhill papers, T2701). 115 Farnham to Wickham, 21 Aug.; Wickham to Addington 22 Aug. 1803; Littlehales to Wickham, n.d. [Aug. 1803] (H.R.O., Wickham papers, 38M49/5/39/44, 38M49/1/46, 39M49/5/33); Hardwicke to Yorke, 2 Sept. 1803 (P.R.O., HO100/111, f. 116).

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they were ‘brigaded’ with other corps for training.116 The Irish yeomanry already had many of these features. Since 1798 they had a system of county brigade majors, were under regular military control when on permanent duty, and were considered part of the ‘stationary’ anti-invasion force. Yet, in practice, this was all mediated locally. Ireland’s local law and order problems were usually seen in military terms. The Irish yeomanry, in its ‘police’ and military dimensions, was essentially a territorially rooted force, a characteristic often underpinned by parallel Orange membership. New proposals for extended service could compromise the linkages between the Protestant elite and plebeian loyalists if blindly promulgated on a UK-wide basis. Hardwicke again recognised the problem and asked his newly appointed commanderof-the-forces, William Schaw Cathcart, to assess the feasibility of brigading on the English model. Cathcart, a canny Scot, consulted the gentry before telling Hardwicke what he already knew: that brigading was unrealistic, even in Ulster. Not wishing to appear to break union principles, Cathcart recommended that it should not be abandoned, but be ‘gradual and progressive’; a perennial bureaucratic euphemism for doing nothing.117 Thus, when a sympathetic executive could be prevailed upon to head off threats like the Army of Reserve and yeomanry brigading, the mobilisation of loyal manpower offered opportunities for extending the Protestant monopoly and, through its commonality with Britain, dress Protestant ascendancy in the colours of Francophobic patriotism. On 23 July 1803, events in Ireland took a sudden turn that seemed to vindicate the warnings of Musgrave and Kirkpatrick. As the defence legislation entered its final stages, Ireland was shocked by Robert Emmet’s attempt to revive insurrection in Dublin and the despairing efforts of his fellow-conspirator, Thomas Russell, to raise Ulster. Rumours spread of Catholic complicity; but, while panic was understandable, the politics of the Protestant cause were also instrumental, as it was known that emancipation would be agitated again. The opportunities for wartime patriotism and the political potentialities of the new United Kingdom were apparent in some of the opening salvoes. A pamphlet by Denys Scully, a lawyer and ‘Castle Catholic’, urged his countrymen to shun the French and argued that Catholic loyalty entitled them to government’s confidence and hence relief. Moreover, though loyal addresses after Emmet’s rising sponsored by Lord Fingall, Archbishop Troy and other Catholic nobles were conventional in not mentioning political questions, Scully and another pamphleteer, Theobald McKenna, called for more radical addresses which explicitly included emancipation.118 Protestant nervousness also came from the military hierarchy. In almost uncanny symmetry with previous commanders-in-chief, the new supremo, Henry Fox, like his famous brother, Charles James Fox, was a committed emancipationist. Political Protestants responded by tightening their grip on loyalism and, like Abercromby before him, Fox faced conspiracies which led to a strained

116 117

Cookson, ‘English volunteer movement’, pp 871, 881–2. Hardwicke to Yorke, 27 Oct. 1803 (P.R.O., HO100/111, f. 257); Littlehales to Hardwicke, 18 Oct. 1804 (B.L., Add Mss, 35721, f. 265). 118 Brian MacDermott (ed.), The Irish Catholic petition of 1805: the diary of Denys Scully (Dublin, 1992), xix; Bartlett, Irish Nation (Dublin, 1992), p 278.

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relationship with the civil authority, which disintegrated completely during Emmet’s rising. The ultra-loyalists who forced Fox’s resignation had friends in the Castle. The new Lord Chancellor, Redesdale, seemed determined to out-do his predecessor in anti-Catholicism, including an absurd conspiracy theory that Archbishop Troy had known of the planned insurrection but had failed to inform the Castle.119 This antiCatholic virulence also drew venom from the growth of evangelical Protestantism on both sides of the Irish Sea. Evangelicalism comprehended all sections of Protestant society and gave political conflict a new religious edge. Redesdale and Abbot embodied the evangelical attitude and in correspondence with Abbot, Redesdale emphasised the need to keep Ireland as ‘a garrisoned country. I meant a Protestant garrison’, and lamented the lack of success of the Reformation and Penal Laws, complaining that ‘much pains have been taken to make the gentry Protestants’ but not the peasantry. The incongruities of this stance during the most ‘modern’ of all wars were not lost on a liberal law officer who derided Redesdale for ‘rummaging old books and musty councils to prove that men willing to stake their lives and properties against Bonaparte cannot be good subjects’.120 Redesdale engaged in acrimonious correspondence with Lord Fingall, about Catholics being untrustworthy as magistrates. George Holdcroft, a loyalist from Kells, County Meath, depicted Emmet’s insurrection in Musgravian terms: ‘everything that has been conceded has only strengthened their hands to demand more until now they feel emboldened to attempt to overturn the constitution of the country and connect it with Republican France’.121 The Castle snubbed the Catholic magnate, Lord Kenmare, refusing permission to raise yeomen, while a neighbouring thirty-acre Protestant squireen was allowed to enrol an entirely Orange corps.122 From Blackrock, County Dublin, the old patriot politician and Volunteer Sir Edward Newenham linked Leinster Catholics’ desire for yeomanry membership to Denys Scully’s pamphlet and preposterously claimed that Scully’s real agenda was reversing the Williamite land settlement. Mentioning an offer to form supplementaries from the bishop of Llandaff’s Catholic tenants at Nenagh, County Tipperary, he warned that Catholics were trying to dominate the proposed new corps and calling established yeomen ‘bloody Orange men’.123 Such antiquarian alarmism was only the more lurid side of a calculated strategy to ensure the Protestant monopoly of yeomanry augmentations that the ‘cause’ demanded. From Tyrone, Abercorn protested that ‘in the present state of men’s minds, to allow Catholic arms would both disgust and alarm all the Protestants in the country … It will be all I can do to admit ten Catholics in a legion of 1,200.’ In Dublin, an anonymous warning that

119 120

Ibid., p 277. Redesdale to Abbot, 15 Aug. 1802, 19 Nov. 1802 The diary and correspondence of Charles Abbot, Lord Colchester, ed. Lord Colchester (3 vols, London, 1861) i, 408–9; ‘J.L.’ to Colclough, 21 Feb. 1804 (P.R.O, HO100/119, f. 203). 121 Holdcroft to Hobart, 26 Aug. 1803 (P.R.O.N.I., Hobart papers, T2627/1/5/1). 122 Redesdale-Fingall correspondence, 15 Aug. to 6 Sept. 1803 (C.K.S., Pratt papers, U840/ C/104/5A); Kenmare to Fitzgerald, 19 Dec. 1803 (P.R.O.N.I., Fitzgerald papers, T3075/9/10). 123 Newenham to Wickham, 10–16 Sept. 1803 (H.R.O., Wickham papers, 39M49/5/32).

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an application for a new corps at Ball’s Bridge had emanated from Catholic United Irishmen led to its rejection.124 In Counties Londonderry and Donegal there were further Presbyterian influxes into the yeomanry, something that the district general thought arose ‘principally from fear of Roman Catholics having too great power’. Another commentator noted that many previously disaffected in Down and Antrim were now ‘steady’, but ‘place their loyalty on a rather unsatisfactory basis … that the country is in danger from the Catholics’.125 In Belfast, the ex-United Irish Presbyterian, Gilbert McIlveen, who had hurriedly signed loyal declarations in June 1798, finally made the transition to fully fledged loyalist. He secured a commission as third lieutenant in the Belfast yeomanry, commanded by Lord Donegall’s relative, Edward May, on 20 July 1803, three days before Emmet’s rising.126 Edward Cooke, though supportive of Protestant ascendancy when he had been Irish undersecretary, was now back in England, where he became a critic of Addington’s ministry. He complained to Camden, without any sense of irony, that, as the administration could not grant relief, the Irish government should ‘uphold the Catholic gentry, and encourage every symptom of loyalty’, by accepting their services in raising yeomanry.127 Wickham had done his political arithmetic, telling Castlereagh, now secretary-at-war, that the maximum number of Protestants capable of yeomanry service was 90,000. However, ‘the determination not to receive Catholics into many corps has increased since the late insurrection, so that we must either reject the service of loyal Catholics altogether, or create a ­Catholic corps – a measure which would not be cried but roared out against throughout all Ireland’.128 Fears of renewed Irish Catholic agitation proved premature in 1803, with the government easily able to stop the only real attempt, persuading Galway Catholics to drop a planned petition.129 But the issue re-emerged in 1804 when, after Addington’s resignation, Pitt formed a new administration, and a revived Catholic Committee prepared for petitioning. With the focus of their loyalty widened since union, Scully could claim association with the British ‘armed nation’. If Catholics could be ‘Brethren of Britons’, the partisan Orange loyalism that propped up the ascendancy cause could be represented as sufficiently divisive and dangerous to encourage Pitt to consider concessions. Scully had tried earlier to justify emancipation by asking: ‘Do we not see at the head of our army, the brother of our own constant advocate, Charles Fox?’ Protestants responded angrily. From Dublin, using the significant pseudonym ‘A Yeoman’, Sir William Cusack Smith condemned Fox’s handling of Emmet’s rising and branded Scully’s praise of the role of English troops 124 Abercorn to Littlehales, 15 Aug. 1803 (P.R.O.N.I., Abercorn papers, D623/A/81/64); Anonymous, 17 Aug. 1803 (P.R.O., HO100/112, f. 299). 125 Hart to Littlehales, 29 Aug. 1803 (N.A.I., S.O.C./1025/34); Carysfort to Grenville, 13 Nov. 1803, The Manuscripts of J. B. Fortescue Esq. preserved at Dropmore (10 vols, H.M.C., London, 1892–1927), vii, 196. 126 A list of the officers of the yeomanry cavalry and volunteer infantry of the United Kingdom (London, 1804). 127 Cooke to Camden, 13 Sept. 1803 (C.K.S., Pratt papers, U840C104/5). 128 Wickham to Castlereagh, 14 Aug. 1803 (Castlereagh correspondence, iv, 296–8). 129 MacDermott, Irish Catholic petition, xvii.

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a deliberate snub to Protestant loyalists. He claimed that Scully’s ‘dread of Orange loyalty’ was really a cloak for his own disaffection.130 In Ulster, Bishop Percy, now a member of the evangelical Association for the Discountenancing of Vice, asked Snowdon Cupples to counter Scully’s attacks on Orangeism. Cupples responded by republishing a sermon, originally preached to Lisburn Orangemen on the Twelfth of July 1799, on the text: ‘let not then your good be evil spoken of’ which defended Orange principles but disavowed sectarianism.131 By late 1804 Theobald McKenna noted how the Protestant desire to monopolise the yeomanry had grown apace with Catholic petitioning activity.132 However, despite such partisan patriotism, exclusive loyalty was not unanimous. Wartime patriotism affected all groups and, despite renewed anti-Catholicism and yeomanry monopolisation, not all Protestants were blinded to the real threat from France and the need for unanimity. The Belfast Newsletter rejected notions that Troy’s and Lord Fingall’s loyalty was suspect. It stressed that ‘we wish to see the spirit of unanimity hourly grow’ as ‘the salvation of Ireland depends on unity of all classes of Irishmen’ and ‘a broad and extended loyalty should engraft every man’s prejudices upon the support of the state’. Dublin merchants, bankers and traders also looked outwards, starting a general subscription for the ‘common cause … in concurrence with the general subscription in London’. A Belfast ladies’ committee raised subscriptions and stitched flannel waistcoats for the town’s yeomen. The inhabitants of Ballynahinch, a town whose loyalty was once suspect, now resolved that ‘union will guide us as a nation’, and the French should know ‘that Irishmen, with Britons, have the means and will to meet them’ as they possessed ‘the blessings and the glory … of being a Free People’.133 The press overflowed with belligerently anti-French resolutions, including many Catholic declarations, like those from thirteen Monaghan parishes published in Belfast and Dublin papers; or those of County Down Catholics, who had recently spurned the invitation to join Emmet’s insurrection. Reports of general loyalty came from Cork and Mayo, while Waterford, Wexford, Kerry, Tipperary and Kilkenny were considered ‘good’, though ‘poverty and ignorance’ tempted ‘the insidious spirit of treason’. In Desertmartin, County Londonderry, all religious denominations met to support the laws, liberty and the ‘free profession of the Christian religion … which is the happiest boast of this United Kingdom’, and ‘play our part in the glorious mass of national defence’. In their patriotism and inclusiveness these resolutions on the renewal of war were not dissimilar to the 1792–3 declarations; indeed Masonic lodges again issued loyal and patriotic resolutions. A parade on the large open spaces of St Stephen’s Green in Dublin of 9,000 city yeomanry was ‘a show of unanimity of Irishmen, forgetting party or religious distinctions’. It is even possible that not all Orangemen believed the alarmists over Emmet, choosing instead to 130

‘A Yeoman’, A letter to the Rt Hon William Wickham … on … Mr. Scully’s late advice to his brethren (Dublin, 1803), pp 41, 53, 92. 131 Cupples to Archer, 26 Sept. 1803 (N.A.I., S.O.C.1025/3); Snowdon Cupples, The principles of the Orange association (Belfast and Dublin, 1799); Percy to Wickham, 28 Nov. 1803 (H.R.O., Wickham papers, 38M49/5/38). 132 McKenna to Nepean, 18 Oct. 1804 (P.R.O., HO100/123, f. 112). 133 BNL, 16 Aug. 1803.

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respond to the French threat. Those from Coagh, County Tyrone where formerly radical Presbyterians had joined the lodges, reckoned that the domestic treachery was now confined to a few desperadoes, but that the foreign threat was genuinely serious. They passed resolutions deploring the treatment of Holland and Switzerland by ‘that renegado Bonaparte and his plundering horde of slaves’, and rejoiced in war’s renewal as it would ‘render concord more complete among all ranks and denominations … in every corner of the British dominions’. Some nearby lodges in Cookstown adopted these resolutions, though others did not. As in Britain, where the Anti-Jacobin Review bulged with French despotism, murder and plunder, the Irish reading public were fed a similar diet of Gallic atrocity. During 1804 and 1805, the Newsletter carried non-partisan poems, demonising ‘Buoni’ and celebrating allied victories. Jingoistic doggerel mocked Napoleon’s ‘answer’ to a card from John Bull and his brothers ‘Taffy, Sawney and Paddy’ inviting him to England, whereas ‘A King or a Consul?’ set traditional monarchy against despotism: Come all you brave Irishmen, list to my story You who love peace, honour, freedom and glory! No foreign usurper they hither shall bring We’ll be ruled by a Briton – our father and King.134

In the first part of this book various processes have been charted and comparisons made. In recognising the survival of an earlier eighteenth-century ‘patriot’ strand of loyalty as well as the exclusively Protestant and Orange variety, we can see that Irish loyalty was neither monolithic nor monochrome, nor indeed were its strands mutually exclusive. However, this period saw crucial changes. There were always overlaps, but these lessen suddenly in 1797 and the new militarised Orange strand, if not replacing earlier versions of loyalty, certainly overlay them. While the king and constitution remain the standard focus of loyalty in published declarations, the meaning changed from being the Whig constitution of 1688 emphasising the circumscription of the crown’s powers. Later, particularly after 1798, the focus became more emphatically fixed on the Protestant constitution; the king was no constitutional abstraction, but King George III, who had rejected emancipation as a breach of his coronation oath. The printed word also reflects the growing prominence of exclusive loyalism. This can be seen clearly in Musgrave, but also in the emergence of a genuinely popular literature. Most of all it was evident in the Protestant monopolisation of militarised loyalism. If the Volunteers and the older Williamite traditions of the Whigs and patriots were the dominant influence in the first yeomanry levies of 1796, from early 1798 the new gentry-led Orange associations increasingly determined the force’s composition and character in all but the western counties, where Catholics still participated. This monopoly of loyalist mobilisation drew in many repentant northern Presbyterians radicals, but at the price of Catholics. These processes by which the components and complexion of loyalism changed were symbiotically linked to the structural developments in the way loyal manpower was mobilised,

134

BNL, 29 July, 5, 16, 19, 26 Aug. 3 Sept., 18 Oct. 15 Nov. 1803.

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particularly the increasing predominance of the armed association model over the law and order association. By 1805 English loyalists were absorbed into the ‘armed nation’, looking defensively outwards as wartime patriots. Many of their Irish counterparts, despite the rejection of the Catholic petition, remained hypnotised by the enemy within, a foe their own insecurity had helped create. The vitality of exclusive Irish loyalism was dependent upon a verifiable internal threat. Yet this was not the whole story of allegiances in Ireland during the French wars. Even before the union, many loyal declarations demonstrate proud awareness of Ireland’s role in the British Empire. Afterwards, many Irishmen, including very many Catholics, served in the British army and the Royal Navy in the protracted struggle with Napoleon. The next section will mainly examine loyalism as a political entity, but it will not ignore its many paradoxes. It is noteworthy that the aggressively Protestant loyalism which Sir Walter Scott encountered on the Glasgow steamer in 1825 could co-exist with the general loyalty which gave George IV such a welcome on his Irish visit in 1821 that Scott strove for Scotland to emulate it in 1822.135 By then, however, Irish loyalism had long been directionless as a political force.

135

John Prebble, The King’s jaunt (Edinburgh, 1988).

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Section 2 LOYALISM IN LIMBO

5

‘Ceremonial pageantry’ The politics of parading and public display, 1805–15

Amongst the problems Robert Peel faced in 1813 – the second year of his Irish chief-secretaryship – was that of yeomanry bands participating in ‘the ceremonial pageantry … that occurs before certain anniversaries’, meaning Orange parades on 12 July. The commander-of-the-forces, Sir John Hope, agreed and wanted the practice banned. Peel knew that this custom encouraged ‘animosity between the parties’; but also understood that it was ‘a very delicate point to interfere with old-established cases’. The use of yeomanry bands in Orange ceremonial occasions symbolised the militarised Protestant loyalism of 1798. Any interference, especially by public order, would, Peel reckoned, create more disorder than it quelled and ‘people would suppose that we must be on the eve of a general insurrection’. Peel’s euphemism for the Twelfth of July may have been tongue-in-cheek, but his assessment of reactions to any interference with the yeomanry’s Orange connection was entirely serious. Typically, Peel’s analytic mind penetrated the crux of the matter: that such a move would be interpreted as an apocalyptic portent shows the importance of understanding how plebeian loyalists viewed the world. Their attitudes could be problematic both for government control over the yeomanry and for those who would harness popular loyalism. Implicit in this scenario was the loosening of the triple alliance of government, gentry and loyalists, thus compromising the political value of loyalism to the Protestant cause. The Protestant cause was headed in the Commons by men like Patrick Duigenan and in the Lords by ‘Orange’ peers like Lord Enniskillen and Archbishop Agar, then of Dublin. Backing came from key families with powerful political and ecclesiastical connections, like the Beresfords; and beneath them, rural gentry activists such as the Blackers and Verners of Armagh, the Bagwells of Tipperary and Castle placemen, like John Giffard. This network stretched across social boundaries, binding gentry, middle-class and plebeian loyalists by participation in the yeomanry and Orangeism. It permeated the legal establishment from the attorney-general, William Saurin, to the local magistrates and embraced corporate towns and cities. Orange and yeomanry structures operated as conduits of control, reinforcing traditional channels like the Church and electoral interests. The voluntary nature of yeomanry and Orange societies, however, meant that power was exercised in a reciprocal, negotiated way and communication operated vertically in both directions. Plebeian tranquillity could 

Peel to Littlehales, 30 June 1813 (B.L., Add Mss 40284, ff 31–6).

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be negotiated by yeomanry membership (with the essential provision of a musket), by well-paid permanent duty secured on the captain’s authority, and by maintaining Orangeism’s ‘democratic’ nature in the yeomanry by vetoing membership. Beneath the elite social and political levels, the foot soldiers of the Protestant cause were rank and file Orangemen and yeomanry privates. Their numbers are hard to estimate. Following the 1803 augmentations numbers of yeomen averaged over 77,000 between 1805 and 1810 and remained at 45,000 in December 1815. The Orange Institution did not publish, or perhaps know, its total membership. In 1804 Snowdon Cupples estimated over 100,000 Orangemen, and in 1809 another enthusiast reckoned 150,000 for Britain and Ireland. Though these were polemical exaggerations, the real figures were considerable. Colonel Verner told the 1835 Select Committee that the number of Orange societies continued to rise between 1798 and 1811. Galen Broeker’s estimate of an early nineteenth-century Orange membership in ‘the tens of thousands’ is reasonably accurate. Government officials habitually based yeomanry numbers on the strength of active loyalism, ‘by calculating what the well-affected force could be, rather than how much irregular force could be raised’. At its peak, the yeomanry reached between 80 and 90,000 men. With overlaps between yeomanry and Orange membership, it could be argued that from a combined Protestant population of approximately one million, this figure represents substantial connections with the wider community through kin networks. Such an analysis assumes that those linked to the yeomanry all opposed emancipation and believed that Catholics were disloyal. Yet some Catholics still served in the Munster yeomanry, and a minority of Protestants, including many Ulster Presbyterians, supported Catholic emancipation, but were also loyal. There were also those whose loyalty was apolitical, stressing patriotism during the war and tranquillity at home. In the war’s closing stages Peel spoke of ‘moderate loyalists, not of a party who just want peace and good order’. Loyalty and the Protestant cause were therefore not coeval: separate strands of non-exclusive loyalty still existed, but organised loyalism was increasingly an ascendancy preserve and, through dominance of institutions – principally Orange societies and the yeomanry – was more visible in the public sphere. In 1810 the chief secretary, William Wellesley Pole, noted that most ‘of the loyalists amongst the lower people are enthusiastic Orangemen’. These were the people Peel had in mind when he feared apocalyptic interpretations of a directive on Orange parades. Their reactions would influence how political Protestants would  

Lurgan yeomanry: detail book, 9 March 1809 (A.C.M, 3–42). Allan F. Blackstock, An ascendancy army: the Irish Yeomanry, 1796–1834 (Dublin, 1998), p 114.  Snowdon Cupples, The duties of an Orangemen (Belfast, 1804), p 39; Orangeism in Britain and Ireland, 1795–1836 (London and Toronto, 1966), pp 161–2; Galen Broeker, Rural disorder and police reform in Ireland, 1812–36 (London and Toronto, 1970), p 14; First report from the select committee on Orange lodges H.C. 1835 (377), xv, p 20.  Castlereagh to Wellesley, 28 Dec. 1807, The supplementary despatches, letters and memoranda of Arthur Wellesley, first duke of Wellington, ed. Duke of Wellington (5 vols, London, 1860), v, 279–83; Bedford to Spencer, 3 April 1806 (P.R.O., HO100/135, f. 106).  Peel to Sidmouth, 10 Oct. 1814 (P.R.O., HO100/176, ff 76–9); Memorandum, 10 Oct. 1810 (P.R.O., HO100/159, f. 403).

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cope with challenges, however, before the impact can be assessed, we must assess the plebeian loyalist mindset. Historians investigating the attitudes of ‘the lower people’ face problems of evidence. Though literacy levels were rising, this was largely a non-corresponding world. Alternative sources can be used, however, provided the methodology is sensitive to their nuances. Orange lodge minutes, where they survive, provide clues. Popular literature is another possibility. It is reckoned that ‘popular’ printed literature had a substantial audience, even amongst the lowest social classes to whom it was mediated by readers like clerics and schoolmasters. If we recognise that this material had to be suitably tailored for its audience, such authorial manipulation can provide an entrée into popular sensitivities and prejudices. Such an approach, by distinguishing message, media and reception also illuminates relationships between the landed intermediaries and rank and file loyalists. Sources include popular ballads, published sermons and newspapers. Another option is to use contemporary accounts commenting on people’s habits and customs. The journals of educated men sometimes record characteristics amongst the poor which struck them as remarkable. Other evidence comes from the Ordnance Survey, which mapped every county between 1825 and 1841 and produced accompanying ‘memoirs’ for the northern counties, recording detailed social and economic information. The record of surviving customs which can be projected backwards provides unique insights into the popular mind. Cumulatively, such sources help enable identify some of the crucial determinants. Religion was central in providing a universal frame of reference for the Protestant experience. We have seen how annual 23 October sermons commemorating 1641 continued during the eighteenth century and their sectarian tone sharpened during crises. Though official support ended under Lord Grenville’s administration, over time these sermons drip-fed ideas into the Protestant psyche. This was not antiCatholicism as a theological abstraction or a rational Enlightenment influenced critique of popery as a system, but was pointed specifically at Irish Catholics, represented as bloodthirsty rebels. Catholicism itself was incorrigibly irredentist, dedicated to religious supremacy and the retrieval of lost lands; but Protestants, on the other hand, were protected by Providence. By the early nineteenth century, this primitive anti-Catholicism was overlaid by a new version generated by evangelicalism. This movement was ‘progressive’ in that it targeted the poor of both religious communities, endeavouring to reform the Protestant’s scriptural ignorance and concurrently save Catholics from ‘popery’ and ‘priest-craft’ by education and conversion. In 1805 evangelicals reckoned that there were not twelve Irish provincial towns where bibles could be purchased; while in 1808, despite Ulster’s relatively high literacy, ‘the Bible could not be procured for any money’. Evangelicalism was growing within all Protestant denominations, and manifested itself in voluntary organisations like 

Niall O’Coisin, Print and popular culture in Ireland, 1750–1850 (London and New York, 1997), pp 33–9.  T. C. Barnard, ‘The uses of 23 October 1641 and Irish Protestant celebrations’, E.H.R., cvi (1991), pp 890, 897–901.  Cited in David Hempton and Myrtle Hill, Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster society, 1740–1890 (London and New York, 1992), p 54.

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the Hibernian Bible Society of 1808 and the Sunday School movement of 1809. Though there is some evidence that Catholic and Protestant clergy adopted a more accommodating approach and tried to defuse sectarian tensions after 1798, nonetheless from 1810 there were Catholic complaints about proselytism. Evangelical Protestantism inculcated a more ‘vital’ form of religion, zealous, improving and participant; yet it also reinforced sectarian prejudices.10 It is unlikely that lower-class Orangemen made theological and political distinctions between ‘Catholicism’ and ‘Popery’, but more likely that the new zealously Protestant itinerant preachers and their evangelicalism were seen darkly through the glass of inherited memory. As the Ordnance Survey Memoirs derive from the period when O’Connell harnessed cultural nationalism to achieve mass support and as northern loyalists utilised similar tactics to mobilise popular opposition, questions arise about the extent to which recorded social memories represent genuine popular feeling or are a politically motivated tactic of the elite. One of the original promoters of cultural loyalism, William Blacker, wrote a retrospective journal. As a zealous ascendancy man who intended his memoirs to be available for posterity, Blacker’s objectivity may be also questioned; however he was a man of parts, evangelical in religion and an antiquarian, in the Enlightenment sense, in his cultural tastes. These facets lend more credibility to his writing. The journal shows how the providential deliverance concept entangled with older traditions in the Armagh countryside. A proud man, Blacker lost no opportunity to note his own tenants’ respectability, yet his antiquarian instinct picks up primitive practices which were contrary to his own improving evangelical vision. Blacker recalls how collective panic after the Battle of the Diamond permeated local folklore as stories of supernatural lights traversing hilltops warning people that the Defenders had fixed a night for bloody revenge, a story which was understood as another sign of deliverance.11 The 1641 paradigm of nocturnal massacre and providential salvation therefore intermingled with superstitions reflecting an archaic world-view where boundaries between conventional religion and popular belief were obscured by the need to understand the unknown. Indeed, distinctions between popular folk-culture and the anti-Catholicism of official religion were often blurred. At one level, this shows how profoundly ‘official’ commemorations captured the popular memory; yet, from another perspective, it demonstrates the pervasiveness of folkloric customs that attributed supernatural and magical power to landscape features. The Memoirs record enough similar references to show that they were common elsewhere, regardless of religious denomination; indeed Blacker’s veracity is boosted by the fact that such beliefs were ubiquitous in western European folklore.12 The way plebeian Protestants remembered past events therefore overlapped with wider customs. Such beliefs also attributed power, sacred or secular, to routes through the countryside. Blacker told of Alexander (Saunders) Bell, a County Armagh yeoman who had gone on the run after a series of apparently sectarian 10 Desmond Bowen, The Protestant crusade in Ireland, 1800–70 (Dublin, 1978), x–xi; Hempton and Hill, Evangelical Protestantism, pp 55, 59–60, 189. 11 Blacker Day Book, v, ff 41–2 (A.C.M., 5/1948). 12 E. Estyn Evans, The personality of Ireland (Belfast, 1981), pp 66–7.

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incidents. Bell was arrested in 1809, sentenced to death and taken by post carriage from Richhill to Portadown, the place of execution. Bell became a loyalist martyr, and ‘from that hour the road got a bad name’, which persisted until the 1830s when a new road took a different line of country.13 Raymond Gillespie has argued that, in the eighteenth century, official Protestantism had different views from Catholicism about access to the holy, believing it was achieved through bible-reading, prayer or mediation, rather than something manifested ‘in particular places, at particular times’. However, daily practicalities saw many poorer Protestants embrace customs of miraculous healing, exorcisms and holy wells.14 Despite their literacy, many rural Presbyterians retained supernatural beliefs. In Drumnaul, County Antrim, there was an ‘implicit belief in ghosts, fairies, banshees among all sects and denominations’. Even in Carnmoney, in Belfast’s economic hinterland, poorer Presbyterians believed in ghosts and witches.15 There are sufficient grounds to argue that, however strong the motivation for myth-creation, social memory could not just be invented and there was interplay between manipulation, mediation and genuinely inherent traditions. Just how deeply awareness of the 1641 rebellion was embedded in the popular consciousness is evident in the way place-names preserved memories. Landscape features which recalled massacres of Protestants in 1641 were common, like the ‘Bloody Hill’, near Broughshane on the Antrim plateau. In north Antrim, Ballintoy Church was remembered as the only refuge for Protestants in 1641, and a rocky chasm nearby was associated with providential escape. Presbyterians at Muckamore, near Antrim town had traditions that a meeting house burnt in 1641 was never re-built.16 Similar memories in County Londonderry came from parishes along the rebel line of march by the Bann river. Macosquin people ‘remember the slaughtering march’ of ‘Phelimy Roe’ (Red Phelim). Tradition held that the Derry bank of the Bann was de-populated, except Glenleary Castle where Protestants took refuge. There was a belief that, after a Protestant defeat, Bembrandagh Burn ran blood red for three days. Movanagher Castle at Kilrea was destroyed in 1641 and the Protestant garrison slaughtered, except for the Mercer’s Company agent, who escaped by swimming the river. Further north, near Limavady, the site of a Protestant victory, the ‘brack of Gelvin’ (sic break i.e. break out, attack) was noted, as was O’Neill’s defeat of Garvagh Protestants.17 Another enduring landscape-based belief concerned the ‘fairy thorn’, again common to all denominations (indeed beliefs about solitary thorns as sources of supernatural power are considered pre-historical).18 Protestants developed their own version, connected to key events in their historical experience. Oral tradition read history from the landscape and certain places held a semi-sacred and crudely polit13 14

Blacker Day Books, iv, f. 314; v, ff 72–5 (A.C.M., 5/1948). J. S. Donnelly Jnr and Kerby Miller (eds), Irish popular culture, 1650–1850 (Dublin, 1997), xvii. 15 Angelique Day and Patrick McWilliams (eds), Ordnance Survey memoirs of Ireland, County Antrim (40 vols Belfast, 1990–98), vol. 19, p 60; vol., 2, p 63. 16 Ibid., County Antrim, vol. 2, p 94; vol. 10, p 65; vol. 13, pp 102–3; vol. 16, p 52; vol. 35, p 60. 17 Ibid., County Londonderry, vol. 25, p 50; vol. 34, pp 109–11. 18 Evans, Personality of Ireland, p 52.

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ical significance. William of Orange had stopped in Lisburn on his way to the Boyne. The surveyors found many traditions recalling this on the adjacent Hertford estate, where they were probably informed by Snowdon Cupples, who was as keen an antiquarian as he was a loyalist. At Magheramesk, a thorn grew where a Williamite commander reputedly tethered his horse; the original bush had been destroyed, but another was planted in its place. Local tradition held that William’s troopers trampled a field of oats which had not been re-planted, yet magically yielded a crop of ‘black oats’ the following year. ‘Williamite’ thorns were noted in other places too, like Portglenone on the Derry bank of the Bann. Sentry Hill near Carnmoney in County Antrim reportedly took its name from a sentry post established by William’s forces, whereas the Ordnance surveyors found that the ‘Burnt Hill’ referred to a 1641 incident when Presbyterians attacked a party of Irish. These memories reinforced earlier ones. The Lagan valley from Dromore to Lisburn saw conflict in 1641 and this was embedded in local traditions and nomenclature. An old building, originally a look-out against Irish rebels, stood near Philip Johnson’s Derryaghy church. The locals continued to call it the ‘Watch House’, though it had become a school. Brookhill House, residence of James Watson a gentry Orangeman and yeomanry captain who fought in 1798, was reputedly the scene of a battle between rebels and ‘loyalists’ in 1641. Topographical features associated with 1641 included the ‘Butcher Hill’ at Magheralave and the ‘murder hole’ on Mullaghglass Mountain, where ‘loyalists’ had been thrown.19 Cupples recorded another tradition that the 1641 rebels had abandoned women to starve on Ram’s Island in Lough Neagh, but they were miraculously saved.20 These providential narratives were a secular equivalent of the 1641 sermons, capable of reapplication in successive crises. Cupples claimed that, as a young man, he had met a centenarian who had witnessed William’s camp at Blaris, and he connected this with the fact that Blaris, which had subsequently developed as an army camp, became the base for the local Orange-linked yeomanry in 1798. Such traditions intermingled with a strong sense of local identity which could prove resilient to outsiders. The Tyrone memoir noted that Killyman (on Lord Northland’s estate) was long ‘remarkable for the Killyman Orangemen’. The people were mostly Anglican or Presbyterian, yet the locality was enclosed and isolated from improvement. The inhabitants lived meanly in one-story, two-room cottages ‘mostly made of mud’, and ignored cleanliness or comfort. In 1810 the Belfast Newsletter reported the death (at 105) of its oldest inhabitant, Edward Raverty, whose only regret was having ‘spent one night out of the parish he was born in’.21 This local identity was inseparable from Orangeism. The Killyman Yeoman Infantry were commanded by Lord Northland’s son, Thomas Knox, in 1798 and local Orangemen had a ferocious reputation; their nickname ‘the Killyman Wreckers’ recalled earlier Peep O’Day Boy type groups. People like this were predisposed to view wider events in a local and usually a sectarian context. The narrow outlook persisted well into 19

Anon., Memorial of James Watson of Brookhill (Belfast, 1851), 25; Day and McWilliams (eds), Ordnance Survey memoirs, County Antrim, vol., 8, pp 99–115; vol. 21, pp 122–3. 20 Correspondence of Dr Snowdon Cupples (P.R.O.N.I., Smyth, Johnson-Smyth and Cupples papers, D2099/5). 21 Day and McWilliams (eds), Ordnance Survey memoirs, County Tyrone, vol. 20, pp 67–8; BNL, 6 Nov. 1810.

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the nineteenth century, as seen by mass panics in 1832 over the ‘holy fire’ when O’Connell’s supporters carried burning turf between Catholic houses in the dark of night.22 Such extreme localism was not necessarily typical, though sufficient degrees of it existed for outsiders to notice. Presbyterian Orangemen around Larne were considered ‘clannish and contracted in their ideas’, seldom married outside the district, and discouraged strangers settling.23 Occasionally localism could even transcend sectarian divisions. In 1808 at Bleary, near Lurgan, in County Armagh local Orangemen and Catholics joined to prevent outsiders taking land ‘over their heads’.24 The attitude of people in a locality could be influenced by the political, social and personal complexion of its gentry, especially smaller gentry figures who were more directly influential than the great landed magnates. These people were permanently resident and in constant contact with the locals. Where their sympathies were Orange, as landlords and magistrates or clergymen, they represented tangible signs that plebeian loyalism had state blessing. Moreover, when loyalism was mediated through families which had possibly been resident since the plantation or were descended from Williamite soldiers, it gave the vital sanction of the past. Examples of these ‘intermediaries’ include Philip Johnson, Cupples, William Blacker, Holt Waring of Waringstown, the Verners and their agent, John Crosslé and Thomas Seaver of Heath Hall near Meigh in south Armagh, colloquially ‘Seaver of the Bog’. James Watson of Brookhill is an archetype. His property was on the Hertford estate and Watson was thoroughly integrated into the wider Protestant community by various social, economic, military and sporting networks: by marriage into another loyalist family the Wakefields of Springfield, by his Anglicanism and personal friendship with his neighbours Cupples and Johnson, by his Orangeism, his captaincy of yeomanry and sponsorship of agricultural societies and horse racing.25 Watson had a high local reputation as ‘a thorough loyalist’ who ‘adhered ardently and consistently to Revolution principles’. The popularity of such men was reflected in the local Orangemens’ habit of using of their houses as the focus for Orange parades. Orange favourites like James Verner and Lord Northland were often asked to head processions, giving them control of the ritual.26 Such parades, with their sensitivity to local people and places, must have encouraged poorer Protestant loyalists to locate their experience in a context where continuity with the past was personalised through local figureheads and reinforced by a vibrant oral culture. Though Orange parades, as such, began in 1796, traditions of parading and commemoration stretched back into the eighteenth century, including the parade to William’s statue in Dublin and celebrations of the relief of Derry.27 The ritual element in these parades functioned both as a preservative of the past and as a way of controlling its meaning so as to maintain the status quo. In Bandon, Williamite 22 23 24

First report of the select committee on Orange lodges, H.C. 1835 (377), xv, p 39. Day and McWilliams (eds), Ordnance Survey memoirs, County Antrim, vol. 32, p 105. BNL, 1 July 1808, Memorial, 18 Aug. 1808 (P.R.O., HO100/148, f. 105); Anon., 2 Sept. 1808 (P.R.O., HO100/148, ff 315–16). 25 Anon., Memorial of Watson, pp 20–1, 24. 26 Blacker Day Book, ii, f. 208 (A.C.M., 5/1948); BNL, 20 July 1802, 19 July 1803, 15 July 1813. 27 Ian McBride, The siege of Derry in Ulster Protestant mythology (Dublin, 1997), pp 35–7.

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traditions were preserved by parades each 1 July, an occasion traditionally marked by planting oak branches in specific streets and parading the town, accompanied by drums, music and orange insignia.28 This tradition seems linked to the town’s seventeenth-century origins: like most plantation boroughs Catholics had been prevented from living inside the walled town. In the 1820s Bandon’s gates reportedly still bore the inscription: ‘Turk, Infidel, or Atheist may enter here – but not a Papist.’29 This exclusion was reflected in the different types of housing occupied by Protestants and Catholics, with the former having better houses in the town centre. The duke of Devonshire improved the town in the 1770s, but the sectarian orientation of the centre-periphery dichotomy still remained. Arguably, as the parades virtually beat the bounds of this division (a custom also still preserved in some English towns into the 1820s) their meaning was to preserve them. The parade followed a predetermined route, but the river Bandon also featured: volleys fired on the bridge symbolised the Boyne victory. Enniskillen also had long-established customs of public display. On Williamite anniversaries the twin bells of the parish church, cast from captured Jacobite cannon and nicknamed ‘William and Mary’, were rung in celebration. The tattered standard of the 1689 Enniskilleners regiment was preserved in the market house as a lovingly repaired relic.30 William’s landing place, the mediaeval walled town of Carrickfergus, had traditions of blocking the west gate by carts on Christmas Eve. Though the precise origin was lost by the nineteenth century, the participants believed it was to stop Catholics from entering the town by surprise after attending midnight mass.31 Place-specific commemorative traditions also grew from 1798. In Wexford, the Enniscorthy Yeomanry habitually paraded on the anniversary of Vinegar Hill. This custom was stopped in 1807, by the chief secretary Arthur Wellesley, who felt it intentionally offended Catholics.32 In County Longford, scene of bloody rebel defeats in 1798, and where there was a substantial Protestant minority, rebellion memories created lasting hatreds which were played out in sectarian clashes.33 In County Down, the Rathgael Yeoman Infantry painted ‘Ballynahinch’ on their drum, thus giving every parade and inspection a commemorative undertone.34 In Dublin the commemorations focused on William III’s statue in College Green changed in ways reflective of altered political circumstances. The first of July had traditionally been the day of popular celebration, but following the establishment 28 Padraig O’Snodaigh, The Irish Volunteers, 1715–93 (Dublin, 1995), pp 14, 18; Bandon to Littlehales, 9 July 1809 (P.R.O., HO100/153, ff 347–8); Provost of Bandon to Leveson-Gower, 3 July 1829 (P.R.O., HO100/227, ff 257–9). 29 L. J. Proudfoot, Urban patronage and social authority: the management of the duke of Devonshire’s towns in Ireland, 1764–1891 (Washington DC, 1995), p 75; Hansard 2: The parliamentary debates, viii, p 757. 30 Day and McWilliams (eds), Ordnance Survey memoirs, County Fermanagh, vol. 4, pp, 52, 56–7, 73. 31 Ibid., County Antrim, vol., 37, p 54. 32 Wellesley to Beevor, 1 June 1807 (W.S.D., v, 71). 33 Kerby Miller, ‘The lost world of Andrew Johnson: sectarianism, social conflict, and cultural change in southern Ireland during the pre-Famine era’, in Donnelly and Miller, Irish popular culture, p 226. 34 Preserved in Bangor Abbey (I am grateful to Horace Reid for this information).

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of Orange lodges in Dublin, the Twelfth of July was also marked. Respectable Orangemen encouraged both types of commemoration to strengthen loyal morale, with 4 November seeing the statue decorated and painted in Williamite colours to commemorate the rebels’ defeat in 1798. These celebrations were socially and politically inclusive, having the backing of respectable Protestant opinion, both liberal and conservative. They continued to enjoy government support, as the November parades to College Green customarily included the viceroy. However, from the early nineteenth century, participation narrowed. The interest of respectable society declined around 1801 and official involvement ended in 1806, during Bedford’s Whig viceroyalty. Withdrawal of governmental and liberal Protestant support meant that the July and November commemorations became increasingly the preserve of the Orange Order and lower-class Protestants. Militant cross-class rebellion-induced loyalism had a limited life-span as an active phenomenon in the general Protestant population but, the further down the social scale one went, the longer the memory lasted. From 1811, lower-class celebratory zeal responded to the tempo of the emancipation campaign. For plebeian Protestants, the parades became tangible symbols of contestation with Catholics who, in July 1813, threw filth at the statue.35 Thus popular commemorations and communal memories can be read as indices of residual insecurity. Recent work on the siege of Derry commemoration recognises a ‘schizophrenic memory’ emphasising betrayal and liberation and guaranteeing its ‘unique position in the Protestant mind’.36 Early Orange lodge minutes convey the importance of the past in popular loyalist thought, indeed the physical book itself, as much as its written contents, symbolised this. These books were often regarded as communally owned, were sometimes hidden in dangerous times, and passed down through families rather than going to the Orange authorities. One rare survival comes from Lisburn Orange Lodge No. 152. These minutes reveal how institutional ancestry was claimed with an antiJacobite loyal association of 1725, the ‘Old Twenty-Five’, and detail the lodge’s own heroic origin story, which also echoed the providential paradigm. When the first Orange warrants were being distributed in 1795, two Lisburn men swam a flooded river at peril of their lives to get theirs back to its proudly plebeian resting place, a ‘small house in the Sandy Loanen’ (sic lane). The account had a parable-like preface which described how the first men sent for the warrant failed to reach Armagh, having drunk the warrant money. The 1824 minutes contain doggerel, praising old James Innes, one of those who swam with the warrant: For o’er 30 years he ruled as our master Our men to her principles loyal and true And her records proclaim those men in the past, sir Were all worthy members of one-fifty-two.

This was accompanied by a marginal note that Innes’ great-grandson was a current 35 Jacqueline Hill, ‘National festivals, the state and “protestant ascendancy” in Ireland, 1790– 1829’, I.H.S., xxiv, 93 (May 1984), pp 33, 39–40, 43, 45. 36 McBride, Siege of Derry, p 13.

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member. The members were obviously proud of longstanding oral traditions that re-affirmed their position as defenders of Protestantism by the sanction of the past and continuities of place, settlement and kin-links. Few understood the popular mind better than those who wrote and preached to it. As noted in chapter four, Orange lodge masters and yeomanry captains bought Francis Kirkpatrick’s books to read to their men. This poetry, a curious blend of educated and popular, reflects the dual audience. The centrepiece poems, ‘The Conspiracy’ and ‘The Committee of the United Irishmen’, are written in the heroic couplet style of Pope’s Dunciad, yet are replete with local references. They trace the United Irish conspiracy’s progress through the same mid-Ulster heartland where General Knox had encouraged Orange enlistment in the yeomanry, and where, according to Kirkpatrick: 37

Protestants of low condition Amidst the fiercest opposition Should volunteer, in spite of fate To stand for country, king and state

Kirkpatrick’s detail is pin-sharp, even to the extent of calling loyalists by their own self-designated local names. His lines ring with references to the Belturbet Boys, the Newtownbutler Heroes, the Ballygargin Boys from near Lurgan, who had fought the Defenders at the Diamond, and the boys of ‘Killyman, where treason fled, and loyalty like lightening spread’. Kirkpatrick’s knowledge of audience susceptibility and his desire to manipulate this politically is revealed in references intended to arouse their deepest fears. A local rebel committee is depicted as planning to reverse the land settlements, listing actual townlands. The chairman must have Ballygawley There’s Tullyvare for poet Dawley Drumcullion, Rohan, Ballylaggin For Laughlin Buoy and Paddy Hagan … And whoever can destroy Most loyalists, gets Aughnacloy.38

Kirkpatrick’s objectives were to rally plebeian loyalists against emancipation and ensure that exclusive loyalty, that valuable counter-argument to Catholic relief, was not swamped by wartime patriotism. Yet, in appealing to his audience’s deep fears of annihilation, the work embodies loyalism’s central paradox. Though his patrons, the Verners, epitomised respectable control through the yeomanry and Orange leadership, to activate his audience politically Kirkpatrick appealed to their instinctive anti-Catholicism and folk history thus stimulating militancy. Moreover, implicit in these stock appeals is the ongoing fear that Protestants could desert the cause. Kirkpatrick recognised the volatile nature of the plebeian mind and vulnerabilities in their leaders’ political control, hence his frequent injunctions for loyalists to be 37 38

Lisburn Lodge minute book, 1795–1895, ff 42, 46–7 (G.O.L.I.). Kirkpatrick, Loyalty and the Times (Dublin, 1804), pp 65, 152.

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watchful. Insecurity was the obverse of the coin of confident ascendancy. Similar uncomfortable dualities are also evident in Orange sermons. Confidence, even aggression, was the order of the day on the Twelfth of July 1805, when Tyrone Orangemen heard a sermon from an Anglican cleric soon to become notable, perhaps notorious, in the literary canon of loyalism. John Graham, curate of Pomeroy, later dubbed ‘mad Parson Graham’ by no less a loyalist than Colonel William Blacker, marked that ‘auspicious day’, 15 May 1805, when ­parliament rejected the Catholic petition.39 In the published sermon, Graham shoehorned the emancipation campaign (in reality moderate, and ‘unionist’) into a model of murderous rebellion, religious supremacy and political separatism. Had the ­ petition succeeded, he claimed, its true colours would emerge to reveal yet another of the ‘nefarious projects’, like the burning of Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley and ‘the horrors of ­Scullabogue and Wexford Bridge’ where Protestants were massacred in 1798. Catholics ‘like the frozen snake in the fable’, always waited an opportunity. Until they ‘unequivocally abjure the supremacy of that hoary monster, the Pope of Rome’, they naturally bore ‘implacable resentment’ towards Protestants. He excoriated the entire pantheon of contemporary Catholic activists and their liberal Protestant cohorts as treacherous and disloyal. Even Napoleon’s profoundly secularist Concordat was made fit the argument in claims that ‘[the Catholics] have again admitted Buonaparte to their church’. Graham’s audience was thus ­encouraged to see emancipation as a concealed part of an omnipresent Catholic plan for supremacy. Historical sanction and divine approbation were provided by linking present escapes to historical examples of providential deliverance at the Boyne, Aughrim, Enniskillen, Derry and Culloden. Graham exploited ancestral memories: ‘Shall we say to the papists, we know your forefathers persecuted our ancestors … when they had it in their power so to do, but as you now have the ability, will we remove all checks … and throw ourselves entirely on your mercy?’ The fact that Graham could confidently make such assumptions about his audience reflects the ubiquity of anti-Catholic views associated with 1641 and 1690. Like Kirkpatrick, he wanted to rally ‘Protestants of any denomination’ against emancipation and guard against complacency, and he repeated the adage ‘we cannot be too watchful’.40 Graham and Kirkpatrick epitomise the continuing difficulty of simultaneously motivating and controlling popular loyalism to support the Protestant cause. Both were caught in the same dilemma; though Graham weakly denied urging ‘vengeful retaliation’, his inflammatory rhetoric sparked ‘the Protestant spirit’, an explosive political fuel. Minds saturated with the past were not impervious to the present. Some aspects of the past were useful to these loyalist authors yet, in the post-union political world, they had to be sanitised so as not to compromise Protestant ascendancy in a United Kingdom parliament, or alienate a British public inclined to elevate 39 Blacker Day Book, vi, f. 373 (A.C.M., 5/1948); Anon. (Rev. John Graham), A sermon preached on 12 July 1805 (Dublin, 1806); Graham joined the Orange Institution and yeomanry when at Trinity in 1797 and had witnessed battles in 1798 (J. B. Leslie, The clergy of Derry and Raphoe (Belfast, 1999), p 319. 40 Graham, Sermon preached on 12 July 1805, pp 2–5, 8–9, 17, 37, 46.

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wartime patriotism above internal division. In the context of the political harnessing of popular loyalism, therefore, the embellishment of anti-Catholic and Williamite traditions were parts of the same delicate process as covering the fustian of the Killyman Boys in the respectability of a yeomanry uniform or an orange sash. Even if the conservative leaders of the Protestant cause circumvented the ‘modern’ dangers of proto-democracy, negotiated deference and fashionable popular patriotism, the balance between the critical mass of crude anti-Catholicism and the political and social necessity of respectable loyalism was always hard to establish. It oscillated wildly, according to time, place and context. It could present Protestant loyalism as a coherent political viewpoint recognisable to reasonable Englishmen; or it could trigger horrendous local reactions. It could make yeomen parade on the lawns of the gentry, or convince them to shoot their officers. The degree to which the balance tilted varied in different circumstances. The danger of invasion and the patriotic war effort certainly motivated Orangemen, as well as others; yet if the threat of local disturbance was more immediately felt, equilibrium was lost and a different response followed. When we consider the hair-trigger emotions surrounding ‘ceremonial pageantry’ and its accompanying ritual, Peel’s concern was justified. We now turn to these threats. John Graham’s warning that ‘we cannot be too watchful’ could have been applied across a range of contexts between Trafalgar and Waterloo. The type of government intervention on which Peel ruminated was only one of the difficulties that confronted the supporters of Protestant ascendancy. These challenges were both political and physical. The political threat came in several forms, all grounded in the Catholic question. There were concerns that the Protestant cause was vulnerable to vagaries of ministry and policy; indeed, until 1812, it was feared that the Regent still supported emancipation. In an ideal Orange world, Westminster and Dublin Castle would agree on unbending opposition to the Catholics and Ireland would still be governed by the Protestant interest. The degree of danger rose according to the extent to which any administration departed from this position. Hardwicke came close to the ideal. Addington’s administration owed its existence to the rejection of emancipation in 1801 and, with the status of the viceroyalty ill-defined after union, Hardwicke needed good relations with the ascendancy. Perhaps the greatest threat to the Protestant cause under Hardwicke arose from fears that union ‘assimilation’ would bring Ireland more directly under the Home Office’s executive authority, thus compromising Protestant control of the yeomanry. If Hardwicke rallied Protestants, his successor in 1806, Bedford, who came in under Lord Grenville’s coalition and pro-emancipation ‘ministry of all the talents’, shocked them to the core. This ­administration, which included Charles James Fox as Foreign Secretary, raised Catholic hopes and resurrected the issue in its old military garb, a powerful argument given the titanic struggle with Napoleon. The Catholic question brought Grenville down in 1807; but not before Bedford had removed some key office-holders. Redesdale’s replacement as Chancellor by the liberal Protestant George Ponsonby prompted Tyrone M.P. Sir John Stewart to predict that ‘the greatest rebels’ would become magistrates. It is indicative of the narrowing political constituency of Irish loyalism that the offer of Postmaster General to the pro-Catholic Lord Donoughmore (the masonic Grand Master who influenced the 1792 loyal resolutions) was 144

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perceived as damaging the Protestant cause and as appalling ‘the yeomen and all loyal men’.41 Portland’s incoming ‘no popery’ ministry renovated the ascendancy position. The Duke of Richmond served as Portland’s viceroy and continued in office under his anti-emancipationist successor, Perceval. After an initial show of impartiality, Richmond settled down to govern on Protestant principles. In 1808 John Giffard was reinstated to his customs post, which he had lost in 1805 for using undue influence in Dublin corporation to raise anti-Catholic petitions. Another prominent Orangeman, William Saurin, became Attorney General and the Maynooth grant was reduced. Patrick Duigenan and the zealous Tipperary Protestant, Colonel Bagwell, were made privy councillors as was the Derry loyalist, Sir George Hill.42 Loyalist vulnerability continued, however, even under Richmond. Though Peel was a robust parliamentary champion of the Protestant cause, as a reforming administrator he criticised sectarian excesses, telling Lord Liverpool that it was ‘a most difficult task when anti-Catholicism … and loyalty are so much united as they are in the Orangemen to oppose one without discouraging the other’.43 Liverpool’s ministry epitomised the ascendancy’s shaky foundations: despite the political ‘Protestantism’ of Peel and the new viceroy, Whitworth, emancipation became an open question for the cabinet. Nor was the parliamentary position more secure. Though the 1805 Catholic petition was flatly rejected, that year saw the Catholic cause gain a gifted speaker in the person of Henry Grattan, who came in for an English borough. Grattan headed a liberal Protestant group amongst Irish M.P.s, including Sir Henry Parnell, Sir John Newport, and George Ponsonby. Though such men were unquestionably loyal, their loyalty was not the exclusive Orange version. Ascendancy domination of elections continued, sometimes with government support, however, there were unwelcome straws in the wind. There had been some previous marshalling of a Catholic ‘interest’, most notably in Newry in 1799 and Dublin in 1802, when David Latouche was elected on an anti-Orange ticket. Population growth and unscrupulous electioneering landlords had doubled the forty-shilling freehold vote from 100,000 in 1803 to 200,000 by 1813. Demographic realities meant most were Catholic. From the 1807 general election a new type of Catholic politics emerged. Constituencies as widely separated as Downpatrick and counties Meath, Wexford, Limerick, Tipperary and Kerry revealed a Catholic interest which, though limited to voting for Protestants, collectively refused to support anyone opposing emancipation.44 Hopes for emancipation rose in ratio to Protestant discouragement. The Catholic Association of April 1806 was eager to avoid any ‘democratic’ appearance rendering it vulnerable to the Convention Act and was initially concerned with testing the bone fides of Lord Grenville’s administration, though matters had not matured before 41

Thomas Bartlett, The fall and rise of the Irish Nation: the Catholic question (Dublin, 1992), p 286; Stewart to Abercorn, 29 Dec. 1806 (P.R.O.N.I., Abercorn papers T2541/1B3/12/34). 42 Bartlett, Irish Nation, p 290. 43 Peel to Liverpool, 15 Oct. 1813, Sir Robert Peel: from his private correspondence, ed. Charles Stuart Parker (3 vols, London, 1891–99), i, 122. 44 P. J. Jupp, ‘Irish parliamentary elections and the influence of the Catholic vote’, Historical Journal, x, 2 (1967), pp 184–5; Bartlett, Irish Nation, pp 296–7.

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the ‘talents’ ministry fell. Though relationships between the Portland ministry’s viceroy, the duke of Richmond, and the Catholics continued strained, Protestants could still not rest easy as the pace of agitation was increasing. Another significant change occurred in 1807; a new Catholic Committee utilised church networks for petitioning, marking a departure from the moderation of 1805.45 New petitions were organised in 1808 and 1810, and the use of priests alarmed Protestants, despite the fact that Catholic organisers were divided over the government veto on episcopal appointments. This ‘security’ for emancipation was supported by Grattan and the liberal Protestants, but rejected by most bishops and the rising leader, Daniel O’Connell. Initial abhorrence at outside interference rallied many churchmen behind emancipation, making religion central to the emerging new forms of popular political activity.46 In parliament, resistance to emancipation seemed to be crumbling. In 1812 Grattan achieved 215 votes for a motion to discuss relief, and a relief bill the following year was only defeated by wrecking amendments. Richmond continued to maintain the Protestant line, convincing himself that the Catholics’ ultimate objective was to break the British connection and that their meetings presaged insurrection.47 With Richmond’s blessing, William Saurin tried to ban the meetings under the Convention Act, but the committee re-constituted itself as the Catholic Board in 1812. Agitation under the ‘Board’ became noticeably more aggressive as the moderate lay leadership was progressively replaced by clerics, and petitions demanded the removal of Richmond and his new chief secretary, William Wellesley Pole. The Board’s tactics were directed at the heart of ascendancy vulnerability: the problem of controlling popular loyalism. It sponsored lawyers to attend trials involving Orangemen and Catholics accused of rioting in Ulster to mount a challenge to Protestant dominance of the magistracy. This connection, of course, lay at the heart of the monopoly of loyalism. This was not new. In 1806 Denys Scully had wanted the Catholic Committee to discuss motions to ‘purge the commissions of the peace’ and ‘change the yeomanry system’.48 However these issues were now pursued with unprecedented pugnacity. Redesdale complained bitterly that ‘the extent to which the priests … now carry their authority is much beyond what they dared to go a few years ago’.49 The Catholics and their liberal Protestant supporters also directed propaganda at public opinion on both sides of the Irish Sea. The government-controlled yeomanry epitomised political Protestantism but was a hard target to hit, particularly during the war. Orangeism was more accessible and more vulnerable. The foundations of the critique had already been laid by United Irish propaganda and developed after union by Catholic writers like Edward Hay and the English historian Francis 45 46 47

Ibid., pp 285–6, 290, 298–9. S. J. Connolly, Priests and people in pre-Famine Ireland (Dublin, 1882), p 13. Brian Jenkins, Era of emancipation: British government of Ireland, 1812–1830 (Kingston and Montreal, 1988), p 84; Bartlett, Irish Nation, p 301. 48 Heads of Discussion, c. 8 Feb. 1806, Brian MacDermott (ed.), The Catholic question in Ireland and England, 1798–1822: the papers of Denys Scully (Worcester, 1988), p 128. 49 Bartlett, Irish Nation, p 301; Redesdale to Whitworth, 23 Sept. 1813 (P.R.O., HO100/172, f. 86).

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Plowden. The nature of the renewed attack emerges from pamphlets and newspapers insertions. From the Orange heartland of Tyrone, a liberal Protestant magistrate, Richard Wilson of Oona Lodge, published a series of letters he had written to George Ponsonby and William Elliott, respectively Lord Chancellor and chief secretary under Bedford. Wilson’s ostensible target was [William] Verner, who he accused of complicity in the partial administration of justice in the case of Constantine O’Neill, a prosperous Armagh Catholic who had been attacked by ‘a banditti who are generally yeoman’. Wilson alleged that several of Verner’s sons were involved and local yeomen were all Orangemen. An Englishmen who had previously been M.P. for Barnstable, Wilson sought to expose Orange loyalism before a wider audience. In 1807 he published letters in the Evening Herald, informing its English readers that robbers went unpunished in Tyrone because they were Orangemen. Richmond dismissed Wilson from the magistracy but was subjected to a bombardment of letters until 1809. Wilson dedicated a pamphlet to Richmond in 1809, broadening the accusation against the Orangemen to murder.50 Nor was he alone in bringing Irish loyalism before the court of English public opinion. Stephen Dickson, high sheriff of Limerick, complained of anonymous insertions in The Globe claiming yeomen provoked disorder to get permanent duty.51 More respectable, but in the same vein, was William Parnell’s 1808 Londonpublished pamphlet: An historical apology for the Irish Catholics. Parnell took the broader view: the demands of war necessitated Catholic loyalty, but the same governmental and Protestant ‘intolerance’ [refusing emancipation] which made peasants disaffected, made yeomen dangerous ‘partisans’. ‘In calling for their aid’, he claimed, ‘you run the risk of exciting a civil war.’52 In 1814, perhaps the most damaging, and certainly one of the most bitterly resented liberal Protestant criticisms of Orange loyalism came from within the legal establishment, normally an ascendancy bulwark, from a circuit judge, William Fletcher. He lectured the Wexford Grand Jury about Ulster, where ‘those disturbers of the public peace assuming the name of Orange Yeomen … come into the fairs … with arms in their hands under the pretence of self-defence or of protecting the public peace but with the … view of inviting attacks’. Fletcher openly accused the magistracy of partiality, claiming that a witness had only to utter the magic dictum: ‘I am a loyal man’, meaning: ‘Gentlemen of the jury, forget your oaths and acquit the Orangeman.’53 Other pamphleteers, petition organisers and parliamentary spokesmen represented Orangeism as divisive and dangerous, claimed that Orange loyalty was conditional on the monarch maintaining the Protestant constitution, and that the lodges’ legal standing was dubious because of their secretive oaths. A petition from Killyleagh, County Down, influenced by the ex-United Irishman, Archibald 50 Bedford to Spencer, 29 May 1806 (P.R.O., HO100/135, f. 226); Wilson to Richmond, 16 Jan. 1809 (N.A.I., S.O.C.1228/14); Richard Wilson, A narrative of the various murders … committed … upon the Roman Catholics by … Orangemen (Dublin, 1808); Hereward Senior, Orangeism in Britain and Ireland, 1795–1836 (London and Toronto, 1966), p 187. 51 Dickson to Trail, 15 Oct. 1807 (P.R.O., HO100/142, f. 400); Wellesley to Dickson, 17 Oct. 1807 (W.S.D., v, 138). 52 William Parnell, An historical apology for the Irish Catholics (London, 1808), p 155. 53 Fletcher’s charge, July 1814 (P.R.O., HO100/176, ff 79, 107–8).

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Hamilton Rowan, called the Orangemen ‘a faction … bound together by a secret oath’, who ‘have disturbed the peace by their riotous … proceedings’. ‘They arrogate large claims for loyalty, of which they boast exclusive possession; but their conduct proves that they only make a show of it for interested purposes: to be truly loyal is to obey the laws.’ At a more emotive level, the old chestnut of an ‘extirpatory’ oath was revived in 1813, when a controversy was engineered in the radical Belfast Monthly Magazine over a sanguinary oath which subsequently proved to be forged.54 Concurrent parliamentary attacks on Orangeism began in June 1813 when British lodges were branded secret, ‘unconstitutional associations’, with the Irish example as evidence. This assault focused specifically on Irish Orangeism in June 1814, when Sir Henry Parnell presented petitions from Ulster signed by Catholics and liberal Protestants complaining that Orange lodges kept the ‘public peace in a state of constant disturbance’ and that their oath was illegal. In November 1814, Sir John Newport’s motion on Orange Societies accused Peel of protecting associations which were in breach of 1799 legislation on secret societies.55 Some Presbyterians also rejected Orange loyalism and reverted to political tactics not dissimilar to those espoused by their United Irish predecessors in the early 1790s. The realities of Ireland’s demography, with Catholics accounting for around threequarters of the population, meant that radical parliamentary reform had its optimum chance of success if aligned with Catholic relief. In 1814 an anonymous Newrypublished pamphlet challenged Orangemen who had refuted parliamentary criticisms in local newspapers. ‘An Irishman’ claimed that Orangemen, though a small minority of the King’s Irish subjects, ‘impeached’ the majority’s loyalty; their open adherence to king, government, constitution and Protestant religion conflicted with ‘oaths of secrecy, grips and signs’, and sectarian outrage gave credibility to allegations of extirpation oaths. Moreover, it argued that by falsely claiming ‘Protestant ascendancy’ as a constitutional principle, the Orange system was founded on ‘conditional loyalty’. Ireland would become the happiest country in Europe, if it enjoyed ‘the free and equal administration of the British constitution … in its purity, not as it had been corrupted’.56 Widespread publicity, in print, in parliament and even by circuit judges therefore ensured the perceived threat to loyalism penetrated deeply into society. From the halls of Westminster to the columns of the Newry Telegraph Orangeism’s very essence was questioned and loyalists felt themselves assailed from all directions. To contemporary loyalists, the political challenged merged with a physical threat. Between 1806 and 1808 Connacht and south-west Ulster were disturbed by ‘Threshers’. Threshing was primarily economic and agrarian in origin and motivation, opposing unreasonable wage and land rates and clerical exactions, both Protestant and Catholic. The civil undersecretary, James Trail, thought Protestants would 54 Killyleagh petition, 5 Sept. 1813 (P.R.O.N.I., Perceval Maxwell papers, D3244/6/1/2); David Cargo, Cecil Kilpatrick and William Murdie (eds), History of the Royal Arch Purple (Belfast 1993), 41. 55 Hansard 1: The parliamentary debates, xxxiv, 974–6, xxviii, 362–3; xxix, 606; Senior, Orangeism, p 192. 56 Anon., Orangeism exposed and its errors detected (Newry, 1814), preface iii, pp 9–10, 12, 31, 34–5.

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interpret Threshing as a form of disloyalty. As the Leitrim yeomen ‘are all Protestants, and retain strong animosities towards Catholics’, he reckoned they would oppose any disturbances involving ‘the Catholic peasantry’. Though the yeomanry ultimately helped suppress Threshing, initial intelligence from Sligo, Cavan, Mayo, Fermanagh and Leitrim reported yeomen and Orangemen siding with the Threshers. From an ascendancy perspective, the danger was less from the Threshers and more that poorer Protestants might join them. In Cavan, Lord Farnham feared Threshing ‘broke in on the loyalty of the Orangemen and yeomen’, yet those involved did not think they impugned their allegiance. One Swanlinbar yeoman arrested for Threshing declared ‘he was as loyal a man as ever stood on green grass’, others ‘did not think it was against the king and constitution’. Mayo Threshers even concluded their ‘resolutions’ with ‘God Save the King’.57 Such activity, however, even if apolitical, compromised the tight controls of militarised loyalism. In Ulster, moreover, there were disturbances between lower-class Protestants and Catholic ‘Ribbonmen’ lineally descended from the Defenders. From around 1810 affiliated Ribbon societies existed as an antiOrange faction. Like their predecessors, the Ribbonmen later spread from Ulster to Leinster and elsewhere.58 Sometimes Catholic groups assumed different names – in County Down in 1812 they called themselves ‘Threshers’, though with no links to the eponymous Connaught combination.59 Regardless of nomenclature, Protestants saw them simply as Catholic rebels. Less simple, however, were the challenges from non-exclusive loyalty and wartime patriotism. As was noted in the previous chapter, Ireland shared the United Kingdom-wide surge of popular patriotism in the post-Amiens stage of the Napoleonic war. This had implications for possible re-formulations of identity in post-union Ireland, begging tantalising counter-factual questions about whether the wars offered, however briefly, the possibility of Irishmen and women adopting a parallel British identity. Patriotism also impacted upon the Protestant cause. The extent and composition of wartime patriotism are apparent from responses to royal occasions and military victories. Trafalgar produced a special banner-head in the Belfast Newsletter. In December 1805 Armagh freeholders requested a county meeting to address ‘his majesty on the success of … naval arms’, and convey condolences on Nelson’s death.60 Dublin led Edinburgh and London in erecting a Nelson monument in 1809, while Belfast already had a Nelson Club by then.61 The monarch’s birthday became an occasion for general patriotic celebration. In 1806 the Newsletter reprinted the Poet Laureate’s birthday odes, which proclaimed that the United Kingdom’s populace was: ‘United in one patriot band, from Albion’s, Erin’s, Caledonia’s land’. The 57

Trail to Eliot, 9 Oct. 1806 (P.R.O., HO100/138, f. 135); Sligo Report, 18 Nov. 1806 (P.R.O., HO100/136, f. 201); Galbraith to Trail, 11–13 Nov. 1806 (P.R.O., HO100/136, ff 135, 144, 159), Farnham to Elliot, 24 Oct. 1806 (P.R.O., HO100/138, f. 274), Browne to Trail, 13, 20 Oct. 1806 (P.R.O., HO100/138, ff 209, 340). 58 Tom Garvin, ‘Defenders, Ribbonmen and others: underground political networks in pre-Famine Ireland’, Past and Present, 96 (1992), pp 133–55. 59 Report, 20 Feb. 1812 (P.R.O., HO100/166, f. 129). 60 BNL, 12 Nov. 1805; Requisition, n.d. Dec. 1805 (Robinson Library, Armagh KH.II,38). 61 John Cookson, The British armed nation, 1793–1815 (Oxford, 1997), pp 11–12; BNL, 27 Oct. 1809.

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following year George III’s seventieth birthday was celebrated in Belfast with ‘every demonstration of loyalty’, and the usual feu de joie from the Londonderry Militia, the Royal Artillery and local yeomanry. In 1809 the birthday eve saw Lord Donegall head the table at the Belfast Exchange. The guests drank a staggering succession of toasts including: ‘the king and queen’, Nelson and the duke of York, the Emperor of Austria, ‘the yeomanry and Britons strike home’, ‘the rose, the shamrock and the thistle, may their union be indissoluble’, ‘the memory of Pitt, the pilot that weathered the storm’. Such British patriotism was not confined to the social and mercantile elite. While the Belfast gentlemen imbibed, more plebeian forms of patriotism appeared in Portadown where yeomen privates presented swords to their officers after which the captain, ‘regaled the lads with a barrel of Birmingham’s best ale’.62 Patriotism was not exclusively Protestant. The pro-Catholic Dublin Evening Post received many sympathy letters over Nelson’s death.63 In June 1808 at Limavady, County Londonderry six local yeomanry units converged on the town centre and were cheered by the entire population. Popular demonising of Napoleon accompanied this type of patriotism, typified by the poet, ‘Gustavus’, who berated Bonaparte and ‘his frog-devouring bands’.64 Undoubtedly the most widespread patriotic effusion occurred on 25 October 1809: the fiftieth anniversary of George III’s coronation. The jubilee was marked throughout the United Kingdom and the empire. Dublin was at the forefront and, again, ahead of London, though native patriotism may also have been a factor, determined to prove the capital’s status undiminished after union. John Giffard assumed a directive role, using his considerable influence in the corporation to organise festivities. Though Giffard has an unsavoury reputation as an Orange zealot, he can also be seen as an outward-looking pro-union loyalist, like John Beresford, who thought naturally in ‘British’ terms.65 This was very apparent in his endorsement of Reevesite loyalism in 1792 and showed through again in the 1809 Jubilee: Giffard was adamant that everyone should participate. Though few Catholics attended the civic dinner at the Rotunda, the celebrations were designed to touch both rich and poor and included features calculated to transcend narrow sectarianism, like subscriptions raised to free jailed debtors and provide poor relief. The iconographic focus on placards and transparencies was the king in his accessible persona as father of his people and non-partisan constitutional monarch, and jubilee ribbons, distributed gratis, bore mottoes contrasting British liberty with French despotism. The massive choreography was no mean task – even the Dublin Evening Post, normally Giffard’s sternest critic, admitted that the general public were transfixed by the festivities.66 The planned 8 p.m. start time had to be brought forward to accommodate the huge crowds

62 63 64 65

BNL, 10 June 1806; 6, 9 June 1809. BNL, 10 June 1808; Jacqueline Hill, Patriots to Unionists (Oxford, 1997), p 276. BNL, 8 July 1805. Louis M. Cullen, ‘Alliances and misalliances in the politics of the union’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, x (Cambridge, 2000), p 222; Hill, Patriots to Unionists, pp 277–8. 66 Hill, Patriots to Unionists, pp 277–8.

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gathered by the spontaneous enthusiasm of the public.67 In an ironic counter-point to the signal for the 1798 rising, the Dublin celebrations were intended to radiate nationally by mail coaches carrying placards. The Cork mail carried one showing Britannia and Hibernia holding a bust of George III, the ‘union arms’ and patriotic mottoes. The coaches, seven in all, were part of a procession which was inspected by the viceroy and passed suitably decorated public buildings. Trinity College surpassed all others: 150 coloured lamps each bore slogans like ‘quis separabit’, the centrepiece was a huge transparency depicting the king, Britannia, Hibernia and classical figures representing history, wisdom, peace and plenty, with the ‘enfranchised African’ in the foreground. Elsewhere, formal allegories were accompanied by others pandering to popular taste. Grierson’s Smock Alley printing shop had a transparency showing a lecherous Napoleon abducting a Spanish lady.68 Loyalism, in this Giffard-designed bonanza, was presented as an essential component of Dublin’s civic culture, all the more vital perhaps since union had downgraded its importance as a capital. The jubilee was celebrated with equal enthusiasm elsewhere. At Dundalk the nobles, clergy and principal inhabitants ‘of every denomination’ received a feu de joie from the garrison before the usual gargantuan meal presided over by Lord Roden. They raised enough money by subscription to relieve every debtor in Dundalk jail and created a surplus of £30 for the poor. In Belfast, though only the Exchange buildings, Donegall House and the Nelson Club were illuminated, instead of a general illumination, the town raised a large collection for the poor. Though the lack of ostentatious extravagance may have suited the taste of Belfast’s Presbyterian merchants, there was no shortage of public enthusiasm, with the streets ‘thronged’. At Tandragee in County Armagh, the local yeomanry fired a general salute and gave three cheers, ‘heartily joined by the surrounding multitude’. A tripartite social split followed: the gentry attended a ball at the Assembly Rooms, the yeomen and their ‘fair countrywomen’ had their own dance, while the lower orders gorged ‘good mutton and strong ale’. Similar patterns pertained at places like Dungannon, Monaghan town, Drogheda and the Abercorn estate in County Tyrone, where the marquis gave every labourer a good dinner with plenty of strong ale and whiskey and a suit of winter clothes. Derry city saw the usual church services and celebrations. Here too ‘the enjoyments of the day were not confined to the higher classes’. Every debtor imprisoned for under £50 was released, and bibles and food distributed to the poor from a subscription headed by Sir George Hill. During the subsequent dinner, the Roman Catholic bishop of Derry, Dr Charles O’Donnell, rose during the toasts and praised William of Orange ‘who never promised what he did not perform’, and George III, who had given Catholics more relief than his predecessors. This statement, which echoed the ‘ecumenism’ of the Glorious Revolution centenary celebrations, was ‘warmly received’ by those unprejudiced Protestants ‘ever prompt to meet every indication of Roman Catholic loyalty’.69 The Newsletter sounded a unionist note, remarking that 25 October was also the anniversary of Agincourt, 67 For discussion on Irish crowds and royal occasions see P. J. Jupp and Eoin F. Magennis (eds), Crowds in Ireland, c1720–1920 (Basingstoke and New York, 2000), pp 16–19. 68 BNL, 31 Oct. 1809. 69 BNL, 3 Nov. 1809.

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making it a day ‘auspicious to these countries’. However, the virtual coincidence with 23 October, the traditional date of the 1641 sermons was ignored. Had John Graham’s injunction to be watchful been lost in the blind patriotic frenzy? From an ascendancy perspective, wartime patriotism needed to be carefully watched as the ‘war of resources’ phase of the conflict against Napoleon re-opened other problematic issues. Previously anti-war British radicals now drew parallels between Britain’s need to harness the plebeian levels of society for manpower, and the popular revolt against the French in Portugal. If the Iberian ‘people’ opposed French despotism and Britain raised resources to help from similar levels of society, then she must reward this populace with political rights by granting reform and emancipation. Irish Catholic leaders saw this too: Wellesley noted how readily they emphasised their contribution to Nelson’s victories. After the rejection of the 1808 petition, a Newry Catholic address longed ‘for the day that their loyalty to the British constitution … will be rewarded’.70 As Wellesley embarked for the Peninsula, overseas war against French despotism was seen as a better platform for advancement than war at home against the United Irishmen. We have seen how loyalist propagandists tried to represent the war as a continuum of the struggle against Irish Catholicism and its European allies. Yet, as the appeal of patriotism also attracted some Protestant loyalists, the rebellion-induced monopoly of loyalism became harder to sustain. If we stand back from popular patriotic displays and examine the statements made and symbols used we can see attempts being made to appropriate such occasions for loyalist ends. Sometimes the imprimatur of ascendancy is seen in markers left for initiates to pick up; on other occasions, the ‘ultra-Protestants’, as proponents of the Protestant cause can be called, knew when to bend to the prevailing patriotic wind while raising the flag of exclusive loyalism to show it ranked highest.71 The Armagh freeholders who congratulated the king about Trafalgar, also combined their address with a yeomanry-type declaration offering to hazard their ‘lives and properties in defence of the king and constitution’, to prove that domestic peace in Ireland still needed to be securely preserved.72 In other words, to copper fasten the political status quo after the Catholic petition. In 1807 the Antrim Grand Lodge published an address which claimed that the Orange association ‘produced True Patriotism, public spirit, love for our king [and] invincible attachment to our glorious constitution in church and state’. This pro-Anglican conception of the constitution implicitly seems to marginalise Presbyterian loyalty and patriotism. On royal birthdays ‘the Glorious Memory’ would customarily be toasted. As seen in Derry, this was not automatically contentious. However, the patriotic toasts at the 1808 Belfast dinner included one to ‘the glorious and immortal memory of Boyne Water’.73 When we consider that it was fashionable to avoid ‘party’ tunes – the dinner was accompanied by the ‘king’s anthem’, ‘the duke of York’s march’, ‘Saint Patrick’s Day’ and ‘Rule Britannia’, reference to ‘the Boyne Water’, a notorious party tune, was a signal 70 71

Bartlett, Irish Nation, p 310; BNL, 21 June 1808. See Jacqueline Hill, ‘Dublin after the union: the age of the “ultra-Protestants”, 1801–1822’, in Micheal Brown, Patrick M. Geoghegan and James Kelly (eds), The Irish Act of Union in 1800 (Dublin, 2003), pp 144–56. 72 Requisition, n.d. Dec. 1805 (Robinson Library Armagh, KH.II.38). 73 BNL, 10 July 1807; 9 June 1809.

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recognisable to even the most befuddled patriot. At the Dublin jubilee celebrations, though all denominations participated, Jacqueline Hill has noted that Protestants embraced it most fully, in the same way as a leading Dublin Orangeman initiated the Nelson monument committee.74 When the Peninsular campaign began, many English volunteers offered to help Spanish ‘patriots’ overthrow French despotism. Irishmen responded similarly: when Wellesley’s expeditionary force sailed in July 1808, yeomanry corps began a coordinated campaign, volunteering ‘to assist the brave Spanish patriots against the common enemy of Europe’.75 When the yeomanry’s Orange nature and current Catholic linking of relief with wartime patriotism is considered, such orchestrated offers (most used the same words) can be read as a political ploy to signify the superiority of Protestant patriotism and loyalism. Loyalist responses became more overtly anti-Catholic as the war continued. After the celebrations for Vitoria in 1813, the Anglican Bishop of Clonfert told the viceroy, Whitworth, that the ‘prosperous occasion’ had produced scenes of political mortification, as a Galway priest complained of Protestant gentlemen using the chronological coincidence with the Battle of Aughrim to allow a yeomanry band to play ‘offensive tunes’. The bishop said he had only heard ‘Rule Britannia’, but that Catholics now called it ‘offensive’, and that their priests ordered no illumination of homes, and no Catholic attended a celebratory public dinner in Waterford.76 The effects of the Catholic Board’s aggressive campaigning were probably operative; but in truth, both ‘parties’ were struggling to subjugate the occasion’s meaning to their own political ends. Similarly at Clanmolton, County Westmeath, when another allied victory occasioned an illumination of the town in November 1813, Protestants attacked those Catholic houses they deemed insufficiently illuminated.77 Thus it appears that, like the Clanmolton candles, common patriotism could easily dim when sectarian flames were fanned. With Protestants feeling threatened by the Board and frightened by the Ribbonmen, re-kindling their fighting spirit had advantages in sustaining morale and preserving an insurrectionary analysis of the political situation. While this had purchase within Ireland, the danger was, with Orangeism and loyalism under hostile scrutiny on the wider United Kingdom stage, that it could easily descend into disorder and be utterly counter-productive by gifting their opponents a propaganda coup. The propaganda of Graham and his ilk had encouraged plebeian loyalists to see two related conflicts: one overseas and one in Ireland. However, the price was evident even before the end of the war. In 1813, after Wellington had driven the French from Spain, Orangemen in the County Londonderry village of Garvagh repulsed a Ribbon attack on the King’s Arms, killing several in a victory immortalised in the ballad, the ‘Battle of Garvagh’.78

74 75

Hill, Patriots to Unionists, p 277. BNL, 26 July 1808, Littlehales to Beckett, 8 Sept. 1808; Crauford to Littlehales, 16 July 1808 (P.R.O., HO100/145. ff 254–5, HO100/146. f. 63). 76 Bishop of Clonfert to Whitworth, 19 Sept. 1813 (P.R.O., HO100/172, ff 60–2). 77 Tighe to Gregory, 16 Nov. 1813 (P.R.O., HO100/174, ff 61–2). 78 Elizabeth Longford, Wellington: the years of the sword (London, 1969), p 380; Jonathan Bardon, A History of Ulster (Belfast, 1992), pp 42–3.

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In 1815, shortly after Waterloo, some of those who recently celebrated Wellington’s victory, turned Donnylong fair in County Tyrone into a sectarian ‘champ de Mars’.80 It is necessary to examine how leaders of the Protestant cause dealt with the dangers emanating from such fair day riots and advocated an approach which may be categorised as the ‘fair words’ response, which emphasised the primacy of Protestant loyalty and its ‘respectable’, law-abiding and religious ethos. In fairness this approach was not new: since 1799 Snowdon Cupples had published several defences of Orangeism in general, and his mentor, Philip Johnson, in particular, refuting accusations of fomenting sectarianism and disorder. Cupples emphasised the respectability of organised loyalism, stressing the links between Orangemen, yeomen, magistrates, government and military commanders.81 However, in the propaganda war of the renewed Catholic campaign, appearance, particularly the one Orangeism had in Britain, counted more than convoluted local realities. In August 1809, the Grand Lodge advised that ‘The moment any Orangeman departs so far from the principles of our Association as to infringe the tranquillity of his country … he reduces himself to the level of the lowest of his adversaries.’ However, even if the Orangemen avoided sectarian feuding, they still faced being isolated as an anachronistic throw back to the 1790s by even-handed modernising legislation. Peel’s law and order reforms curbed partial magistrates and introduced the Peace Preservation Force (the original ‘Peelers’) in 1814, policing developments which began to erode the yeomanry’s peacekeeping role.82 In 1810 Orangemen were in danger of falling victim to legal measures against Ireland’s secret societies. Though primarily intended for Catholic groups, Orangeism was vulnerable due to its oaths; indeed some leading aristocratic Orangemen, led by the duke of York, resigned. In July 1810 the Orange Order produced its own fair words in new rules omitting the ‘secret articles’ of earlier oaths, to shield it from the Unlawful Oaths Act. In June 1811, the leadership again addressed the lodges, noting how ‘calumnies … spread from the Catholic Board in Dublin to all over the British Isles’, and exhorted Orangemen ‘not to oppose force to force’, but to limit their July parades and offer no pretext for insult.83 In late 1812 and in 1813, Protestant meetings in Fermanagh, Tyrone and other parts of Ulster produced loyal addresses and petitions against further concessions to Catholics. In December 1813, a new loyalist organisation was inaugurated, the Apprentice Boys of Derry, whose membership was limited to city freemen or those whose family claimed connection by residence. The meetings were held in Dublin, indicating that the members were neither apprentices

79 80 81 82 83

Sibbet, R. M., Orangeism in Ireland and throughout the Empire (2 vols, Belfast, 1914–15), ii, 135. Hill to Peel, 23 Aug. 1815 (B.L., Add Mss 40212, ff 108–10). Snowdon Cupples, The duties of Orangemen (Belfast 1804), passim. Blackstock, Ascendancy army, pp 249–51. Sibbet, Orangeism, ii, 122, 124, 126; BNL, 10 Jan. 1812.

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nor boys, but wealthy and eminently respectable men like Colonel Blacker and Sir George Hill.84 Yet more fair words came from south Antrim in 1814 in a pamphlet, probably by Cupples, defending Philip Johnson against accusations by the English Catholic historian, Edward Plowden, that he had been ‘evangelising’ Orangeism from the pulpit. The defence was an historical retrospect tracing Johnson’s lawabiding loyalism back to the original loyal associations of 1793, thus conveniently pre-dating the Peep O’Day Boys.85 Again in 1814, following renewed parliamentary assaults, the Orange authorities issued more rules, which now dropped the words ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ from the oath, meaning that members merely swore to maintain the constitution and laws. Their opponents seized upon what they saw to be the Orangemens’ ‘Conditional Allegiance’, but the Grand Lodge countered that: ‘our real offence is, that we are Loyal Protestants; for every man well knows … that all allegiance is conditional – that allegiance without condition would be Slavery’.86 However, when we look at how such ‘fair words’ were mediated and received, incidents like Garvagh show they were not slavishly followed. According to the writer William Carleton (1794–1869), ‘party’ riots were a distinct genre in the extensive canon of Irish disorder. They occurred between Protestant Orangemen and Catholic Ribbonmen, whereas faction fights involved groups of the same denomination. Secondly, party riots were more vicious. Carleton was a Tyrone Catholic (later a Protestant convert) who had joined the Ribbonmen after being evicted in 1813; he claimed party conflicts had ‘something infinitely more anxious, silent, and deadly, in the compressed vengeance, and the hope of slaughter’.87 Writing after the Great War, Winston Churchill noted how, ‘as the deluge subsides … we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is … unaltered in the cataclysm’.88 Where Carleton struggled for an adjective to describe the ‘something’, Churchill saw the importance of place and the patterned continuity of the ‘quarrel’. At the cusp of the twenty-first century, Orange bands still play the ‘Battle of Garvagh’ each July. To the casual onlooker, perhaps recalling Drumcree’s ‘dreary steeple’, party or sectarian confrontations appear paradigmatic. Irish historians who address sectarian conflict generally avoid anachronistic approaches and examine factors like place to understand the historical trends of disturbances. A.T.Q Stewart focussed on recurring ‘patterns’ in Ulster: starting with the incomplete nature of plantation, he wove subsequent events into a narrative ranging forward to the twentieth century. Stewart saw the conflict as being about territory: Protestants and Catholics contest the same ‘narrow ground’. Frank Wright applauded such ‘continuity’ theses, but rejected Protestant fear of Catholics as an interpretative model in favour of one which acknowledges sectarian-

84 85 86 87

Apprentice Boys of Derry Minute Book, f. 1 (Robinson Library, Armagh, cxxxxii). Snowdon Cupples, A plain statement of facts (Dublin, 1814), passim. Sibbet, Orangeism, ii, 140–1. Robert Welch (ed.), Oxford companion to Irish literature, p 81; William Carleton, Traits and stories of the Irish peasantry (Dublin, 1832), p 253. 88 Cited in Bardon, History of Ulster, pp 464–5.

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ism’s ‘reciprocal’ nature.89 Other work has concentrated on the forms and rituals of confrontations. Studies of parading have found that ritual – the continuity of form – often concealed changes of meaning. This approach is useful: in recognising confrontations as a dynamic rather than a static phenomenon which adapted to different triggers, the potential for manipulation becomes clear. A recent study of sectarian rioting sees ‘habitual’ early nineteenth-century crowd confrontations as formative for the later emergence of polarized politics: ritual occasions helped ‘maintain, reinforce and update’ ideas and myths which became the building blocks of denominational politics in the 1880s.90 In British historiography, Marxist historians transformed crowd history in the 1970s by overturning earlier traditions which saw crowds as spontaneous and mindless mobs. Most notably E. P. Thompson’s ‘moral economy’ concept reinterpreted food riots as strategic negotiations between plebeians and the elite about infringements of customs about fair prices.91 Thompson’s ideas have been adapted by some Irish historians and recently expanded to the ‘sectarian moral economy’ – an ‘implicit contract’ between elites and plebeians to preserve ascendancy against emancipation.92 The Thompsonian approach was challenged in Mark Harrison’s 1988 study of English crowds, which resists imposing typologies to concentrate on understanding contemporary meaning by recognising that context was multi-layered and must be reconstructed from as wide as possible a range of primary sources, and not only those which report on riots. This approach informs a recent publication on Irish crowds, and will be adopted here to examine the strengths and weaknesses of loyalism in its elite and plebeian manifestations.93 While not unmindful of factors like residual popular anti-Catholicism which have continuity with the past, the main contemporary context against which violent crowd events will be examined is the broadening range of challenges facing the Protestant cause and its loyalist supporters, and their responses. Insights are obtained into the character and pattern of disturbance, unavailable by focusing solely on events or relying solely on sectarianism as an explanatory model, an inadequate approach which leaves important questions unanswered. Why, for example, was the Hertford estate in County Antrim, which luxuriated in 1641 legends and saw extreme sectarianism in 1798, free from this type of disturbance in the early nineteenth century? Why did County Donegal, largely quiet in 1798, see sequential sectarian clashes in the 1810s? When Belfast had experienced peaceful Orange parades since 1797, why did the first July riot suddenly erupt in 1813? As it would be counter-productive to attempt comprehensive coverage of all loyalist crowd events, the following analysis 89 A. T. Q. Stewart, The narrow ground: aspects of Ulster history, 1609–1969 (London, 1977); Frank Wright, Two lands on one soil: Ulster politics before home rule (Dublin, 1996), pp 2–3. 90 Neill Jarman, Material conflicts: parades and visual displays in Northern Ireland, 11; Sean Farrell, Rituals and riots: sectarian violence and political culture in Ulster, 1784–1886 (Kentucky, 2000), pp 5–7. 91 E. P. Thompson, ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’, Past and Present, 50 (Feb. 1971), pp 76–136. 92 Thomas Bartlett, ‘An end to moral economy: the Irish Militia disturbances of 1793’, Past and Present, xcix (May 1983), pp 41–64; Jim Smyth, The men of no property, p 125; Farrell, Rituals and riots, p 34. 93 Mark Harrison, Crowds in history: mass phenomena in English towns, 1790–1835 (Cambridge, 1988), passim; Jupp and Magennis, Crowds in Irish history.

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focuses on areas of symbolic importance or where significant clusters of activity can be identified. In Bandon, County Cork, yeomen infantry mutinied and rioted on 1 July 1809. Though there were fears that Catholics would be targeted, the real pretext was the earl of Bandon’s attempts to prevent party displays on the Boyne anniversary. Sensing trouble, Bandon and yeomanry brigade-major Auriel decided not to order an inspection parade that day. Their captain, realising that the yeomen would gather unofficially, ordered an exercise parade after which they were supposed to disperse. However, the yeomen apparently construed this as an attempt by the authorities to deny them the right to express their loyalty in the traditional militarised manner and vented their feelings by firing an impromptu feu de joie; then, on dismissal, formed in column and marched into the town to celebrate in their customary way. Lord Bandon intervened, ordering them home, but during the night shots were fired into the captain’s house. The brigade-major assembled the corps the next day, but they refused to say who had fired the shots, and sported orange lilies in their caps ‘as a badge to insinuate they would oppose enquiry’. Eventually, they threw down their arms rather than inform, and were disbanded by government. Anticipated trouble on 12 July was averted as Lord Bandon did not interfere.94 The context here was not anti-Catholicism per se, but the long-established parading rituals of Bandon’s Boyne Society. This ritual had institutionalised power in the sense that it replicated and enacted Bandon’s status as a Protestant bastion since the Elizabethan Munster plantation. However, when the parade was stopped by a member of the aristocratic family which had always symbolically embodied Bandon’s Protestantism, the power preserved in the ritual was released in dangerous directions. The crucial point is that traditional modes of demonstrating Protestantism and loyalism had been previously accepted and encouraged by the authorities; then suddenly, and for the Bandon yeomen inexplicably, the parade ritual became unacceptable. Unlike the responses of Lord Bandon and Major Auriel, who understood the broader need for strict military propriety and the avoidance of giving offence or provoking disorder, such considerations would not have registered for the yeomen in the emotional scale against the weight of tradition. This Munster affair is therefore best seen as a divided response, laying bare potentially destructive tensions within loyalism generated by the blunt and ever-increasing reality that the militarised loyalist defence of the Protestant cause was being steadily eroded by the political realities of post-union Ireland. With the Napoleonic wars raging and Catholic political agitation building, those realities meant convincing ill-informed Westminster M.P.s that Irish Protestants were entitled to their ascendancy from their adherence to the law; yet, from an Irish perspective, a parallel threat came from emancipationist ‘liberal’ Protestants at constituency level. At the opposite end of the country, loyalist rioting in Down must be considered against a political backdrop of a large independent Presbyterian interest, traditions of radicalism and hard-fought elections. South Down, where it bordered Armagh and 94 Auriel to Littlehales, 8 July 1809, Bandon to Littlehales, 9 July 1809, Littlehales to Beckett, 12 July 1809 (P.R.O., HO100/153, ff 343, 345–7, 347–8, 343); countess of Bandon to Lady Shannon, 12, 15 July 1809 (P.R.O.N.I., Shannon papers D2707/A2/7/25–6).

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Louth, had previously seen Catholic Defenderism and strong Presbyterian United Irish support, leaving a political residue centred on Newry. One particularly unsavoury affray in 1808 superficially seems to epitomise ingrained lower-class sectarianism. On Saint John’s Eve (29 June), a traditional Irish night of celebration, ‘a peaceful assembly of [Catholic] men, women and children’ were violently attacked at a bonfire party. The assailants wielded bayonets and muskets, suggesting they were yeomen and Orangemen.95 One man was killed, prompting a prominent local Catholic, Mark Devlin, to complain to Grenville that ‘It is impossible that men treated as we are can be so zealous and enthusiastic in defence of their country, and its liberties, as the situation of the empire seems at present to require.’96 Though this unprovoked attack unquestionably involved anti-Catholic sectarianism, it can also be seen in the context of Newry politics where there was a strong Catholic interest which, with liberal Protestant support, led to severe political tensions. In 1807 a gentry Orangeman and yeoman, Jonathan Seaver, reported that ‘Defenders’ who were totally Catholic ‘but exclude no religious group’, only awaited the arrival of the French to rise.97 In February 1808, pro-emancipation petitioning meetings had liberal Protestant support and, following parliament’s rejection of the petition, Mark Devlin chaired a meeting which passed resolutions which mingled disappointment with consolation due to having ‘the sympathy of their Protestant fellow-townsmen’. Political strains were also evident in the refusal of the gift of a church organ from the town’s M.P., General Francis Needham. In 1806 Needham had defeated a proCatholic Whig, but by 1808, despite some previous flirtation with the ‘Talents’ administration, solidly supported Portland’s ‘no popery’ administration.98 Arguably this backdrop of political, religious and electoral pressures contributed to the bonfire attack as, if a Catholic reaction could be provoked, it would substantiate ‘Defender’ rumours and alienate liberal Protestants. Thus Devlin’s outburst on the impossibility of Catholic loyalty was exactly what he was meant to say. In 1810 a yeomanry mutiny occurred near Banbridge in County Down which was later considered by parliamentary commissioners as evidence of Orange sectarianism.99 However, the contemporary context shows that, while spontaneous sectarianism was present, it was underlain by more subtle motivations. The pretext for the riot came from organisational changes in the yeomanry system requiring corps to periodically combine for training and inspection, in this case the Bann Infantry, Waringstown Cavalry and Scarva Infantry. Problems started when the first two refused to be inspected alongside the Scarva corps, as it contained six Catholics. The Bann and Waringstown men threw down their arms and began yelling and cheering. Discipline then completely disintegrated as Protestants in the Scarva corps broke ranks and joined the others in a menacing crowd. The captain, John Lushington 95 96

Magistrates’ resolutions, 30 June 1808 (P.R.O., HO100/147, ff 262–78). Devlin to Grenville, 1 July 1808, The Manuscripts of J. B. Fortescue Esq. preserved at Dropmore (10 vols, H.M.C., London, 1892–1927), ix, 207–8. 97 Hamilton to Trail, 7 Aug. 1807, McNaughten to Trail, 20 Aug. 1807 (P.R.O., HO100/142, ff  00, 179). 98 Needham to Wellesley, 9 Feb. 1808 (S.U.L., Wellesley papers WP1/190/32); BNL, 21 June 1808; R. G. Thorne (ed.), The House of Commons, 1790–1820 (London, 1986), iv, 651–2. 99 Third report of the select committee on Orange lodges, H.C. 1835 (476), xvi, appx., B4, p 30.

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Reilly, remonstrated with them. A soldier who had served in Europe, Reilly fulminated that ‘he never before knew British subjects refuse to obey their officers; that he had seen Protestant and Catholic fight side by side and nobly mingled their blood on the field of honour’. However patriotism made no impression on this sort of loyalism, and the Catholics fled.100 The incident, which resulted in the ringleaders being dismissed from the yeomanry, should not be understood as a chance encounter triggering residual grassroots sectarianism. Rather its meaning was traceable to divisions within Down’s political elite. John Lushington Reilly’s brother, William E. Reilly, was agent for the new Lord Downshire, who had come of age in 1809 and begun reversing his family’s costly policy of contesting the county with Castlereagh’s family, to the discomfiture of the ‘warren of freeholders’ created by his dowager mother. Thus Downshire’s deteriorating relations with freehold voters would give a plausible motive for enacting this embarrassing reversal of deference in front of Reilly. Moreover, the anti-Catholic aspect transcended parade ground prejudice and resonated upwards to the political level. Waringstown was a very Orange district, where the Reverend Holt Waring was influential and where there were well-founded suspicions that Downshire was gravitating towards emancipation; indeed he later supported it in the Lords in 1812.101 The radical Belfast Monthly Magazine suspected this sort of political manipulation and attributed blame, not to the ignorant yeomen, but to those ‘of rank and influence … the authors of the potent mischief’.102 In other words, the unfortunate Scarva Catholics were only the pretext for a political attack on liberal Protestants, which was designed to prove their loyalty inferior to the Orange version. Manufacturing yeomanry disorder was hazardous, but the risks could be lessened if popular Catholic violence could be provoked. In November 1811, the County Down magistrates met to consider disturbances by ‘Threshers’ (the local name for Ribbonmen). However, liberals and radicals also understood the politics of disorder and opinion was divided. Several radical magistrates were present, including Edward Southwell Ruthven of Downpatrick, who in 1807 had raised a ‘popish mob’ in an election.103 The 1811 meeting accepted the radical analysis that the Threshers were a reaction to Orangeism, and asserted that, if the latter ceased to exist, so too would the former. The Orange reaction to this came in an anonymous letter ‘from Lisburn’ which Lord Hertford forwarded to the viceroy, Richmond. The letter claimed that ‘a treasonable association’ was afoot in both Down and Antrim, and its members were drilling nocturnally and attacking yeomen. The writer noted a renewal of ‘the Orange association, which in 1798 was regularly useful’, but ‘unfortunately some gentlemen are believing the calumnies the disaffected put on them [the Orangemen]’. There were, besides an unspecified number in Down, 10,000 Orangemen in Antrim, of which 3,000 were on the Hertford estate which bordered the two counties. Loyalists needed to prove that insurrectionary Ribbonism existed. The inevitable 100 101

Belfast Monthly Magazine, v, 1810, pp 311–12; BNL, 13 Nov. 1810. William Maguire (ed.), Letters of a great Irish landlord (Belfast, 1974), pp 14–15; A. P. W. Malcomson, John Foster: the politics of Anglo-Irish ascendancy (Oxford, 1978), p 299; Thorne (ed.), House of Commons, iv, 644; Hansard 2: Parliamentary debates, xx, 658. 102 Belfast Monthly Magazine, v, 1810, pp 311–12. 103 BNL, 26 Nov. 1811; Thorne (ed.), House of Commons, iv, 644–6.

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outworking of this scenario at plebeian level came in an Orange-Thresher clash at Ballynahinch fair in February 1812. In 1813 there was further evidence of militarised Orangeism reviving. ‘The Honourable, the Protestant Loyal Society of County Down’, ­ representing 104 lodges, published resolutions which recalled 1798 and pledged resistance to ‘the treason once more agonizing this kingdom’.104 Clashes continued in 1814 with serious rioting at Kilkeel; Protestants were beaten at the fair, but returned with yeomanry arms to wreck Catholic houses. In July 1814 Downpatrick races saw another collision between Threshers and Orangemen, resulting in two deaths.105 Thus rioting in County Down, while certainly containing elements of lower-class sectarian rivalry, was also shaped by the interplay between local and national political tensions and can be understood in terms of loyalist responses to multiple threats. A similar configuration was apparent in Armagh. The first Twelfth of July riot to be reported in the Belfast Newsletter involved Catholic soldiers of the Limerick Militia and local Orangemen in Armagh city in 1806.106 Though near Orangeism’s birthplace, the city had also traditions of radicalism. As Ireland’s episcopal capital, it also contained a zealous Anglican loyalist party centred around the Primate and his nominee, Patrick Duigenan, the main spokesman for the Protestant cause in Westminster. Duigenan’s selection as borough M.P. had been controversial. After union, the Irish government wanted to regain the borough’s patronage from the Primate and to nominate Isaac Corry, the unionist and emancipationist Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer. Though George III personally opposed this and the Primate’s wish prevailed, the memories of this rebuff must have made Duigenan’s virulent opposition to the 1805 Catholic petition as objectionable to local liberals as his violent parliamentary language was shocking to English M.P.s.107 Ongoing political tension between emancipationist liberals and ascendancy Protestants was evident in the freeholders’ attempt to turn a Trafalgar address to loyalist ends in 1805. Given this background, the Orange historian, Sibbet, was probably correct to connect the 1806 riot to Duigenan’s fanatical opposition to emancipation the previous year.108 Similar tensions prevailed in County Armagh and provided a context for disorder. Though the dominant interests of Lords Charlemont and Gosford usually settled elections with little reference to politics, to the dismay of many smaller gentry in the Orange Order’s natal county, both men came to support emancipation. Though Charlemont’s candidate, Henry Caulfeild, did not contest the 1812 election, the political tensions engendered by the Catholic issue underlay several disturbances that year. The first came in June when an Armagh city yeomanry corps mutinied. The second was on the Twelfth of July, after which the brigade-major 104 Sibbet, Orangeism, ii, 126–7; Anon. to Hertford, 30 Dec. 1811 (N.L.I., Richmond papers, MS60 f. 284a); Report, 20 Feb. 1812 (P.R.O., HO100/166, f. 129); Resolutions of the Protestant loyal society of County Down (North Shields, 1813). 105 Hill to Dawson, 19 Oct. 1813 (B.L., Add. Mss 40212, ff 31–6); Peel to Sidmouth, 13 April 1814 (P.R.O., HO100/177, f. 143); BNL, 26 July 1814. 106 BNL, 15 July 1806. 107 Thorne (ed.), House of Commons, iv, 627–8; P. J. Jupp, ‘Dr Duigenan reconsidered’, in Sabine Wichert (ed.), From the United Irishmen to twentieth-century unionism (Dublin, 2004), p 82. 108 Sibbet, Orangeism, ii, 106–7.

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ordered off-duty yeomen to stop carrying weapons at fairs.109 The mutiny involved a corps which refused to serve with a liberal Protestant lieutenant who had signed an emancipation petition. However, the ‘message’ was directed at the captain, Lord Charlemont, as the disturbances were engineered to express opposition to liberal Protestants. However manipulation was not one-sided, and yeomanry insubordination could be provoked by emancipationists to push the Castle into an embarrassing choice between the constitutional path of disbandment, thus damaging links with the Protestant interest, and risking accusations of culpability by ignoring yeomanry misdemeanours. The Armagh corps was disbanded for ‘party spirit’, but the affair threatened wider political repercussions and rumbled on into 1813, when Peel noted that ‘the rebels at Armagh are putting a misrepresentation on the disbanding’, but pledged to ‘correct their errors’ by re-embodying it as part of his ‘Protestant’ policy, the ‘one course to be pursued in this country’.110 As in Down, yeomanry militancy thus served a political purpose, but in responding proactively to the threat from liberal-minded Protestants, the ascendancy risked giving their opponents a propaganda handle which compromised the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland’s ‘fair words’. Centralised attempts to control the response to emancipationist agitation could be interpreted locally as a threat to Protestant interests. Signs of internal Orange anxiety about loss of direction and fears of pusillanimity are evident in Armagh’s stout response to the Dublin-based leadership’s injunctions for a respectable, law-abiding response to their critics. In 1813 the Armagh Grand Lodge passed resolutions thanking those M.P.s who opposed Grattan’s (narrowly defeated) emancipation bill, but cautioned that anti-Orange propaganda should not divert them from ‘the GRAND point’ (i.e. ascendancy) and Orangemen should unequivocally prove that ‘dignified silence’ must not ‘be misconstrued into timidity … to save many worthy minds from being carried away by the daily tide of malignant calumny’.111 As in Bandon, respectable decorum and pragmatic conciliatory gestures looked like surrender in an area imbued with political and sectarian rivalries. Indeed there was division amongst the conservative elite in Ulster about the utility or danger of Orange parades. In north-west Ulster, Abercorn, though a strong Protestant who had opposed the ‘Talents’ and admitted only token Catholics to his yeomanry, disliked Orangeism because of its lower-class connections. Aristocratic hauteur was possibly complimented by personal hostility to Thomas Knox of Dungannon, whose family had Orange connections, and social contempt for the Verners (he dubbed James Verner ‘an Orange Boy’). Abercorn’s agent, James Hamilton, called local Orangemen ‘the most dissolute idle fellows, the very scum of the country’.112 Though many of Abercorn’s yeomen were poor, he was immensely proud of them, feeling that service in his personal legion itself bestowed respect109

BNL, 21 July 1812; Brigade Orders, 27 Aug. 1812 (P.R.O.N.I., Morrow papers, D3696/ A/4/1). 110 Hansard 1: Parliamentary debates, xxvi, 982; Peel to Gosford, 12 Oct. 1813, Peel to Richmond, 13 Oct. 1813 (B.L., Add Mss 40285, ff 81, 83). 111 Armagh Orange Resolutions, 8 Nov. 1813 (G.O.L.I. Edward Rogers papers). 112 Hamilton to Abercorn, 24 April 1802, 7 July 1802 (P.R.O.N.I., Abercorn papers D623/ A/94/15,22); A. P. W. Malcomson, ‘A lost natural leader: John James Hamilton, first marquess of Abercorn’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 88, C, 4, passim.

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ability, engendering ‘exemplary conduct’ under ‘disadvantageous conditions’. Considering membership of the yeomanry as the best way loyalists could serve their country, in 1808 he told the government that he could augment his legion, but that Orange parades should be stopped.113 The Strabane magistrates agreed and banned Twelfth of July parades. Problems arose because the locally stationed Kildare militia contained an Orange lodge and its lieutenant-colonel, John Baggot, was a loyalist in the 1798 tradition. He claimed that Orangemen in his regiment were ‘always, since the matter was countenanced by the highest authorities, in the habit of commemorating their former loyal efforts … by the wearing of orange ribbons’. Baggot defied the magistrates and allowed his men to parade, warning that ‘ill-conceived suppression will create problems’.114 These affrays were also connected to increasing Catholic political activity and fears that Abercorn’s anodyne approach would hamper resistance and that activists would provoke loyalist anger for political advantage. Baggot reported that his mainly-Catholic militia band encountered hostility from their local co-religionists, who called ‘God save the King’ a ‘party tune’. This undoubtedly raised tensions; yet, at another level, these incidents revealed serious local ascendancy divisions about how loyal men should respond. Attitudes amongst loyalists could be at variance with those who controlled them. Despite Abercorn’s hostility, Orangeism was a stronger influence on rank and file loyalists than yeomanry service per se. This was recognised by men closer to events on the ground. Sir John Stewart, who commanded the Omagh battalion of Abercorn’s legion and was in his political interest, pragmatically permitted yeomen to continue sporting orange ribbons and parading on anniversaries.115 Yet pragmatic indulgence of loyalists could generate more problems than it solved, as was the case at Omagh in 1809 when the King’s County militia passed through on an Orange anniversary. The local yeomanry wore orange ribbons, the militia put up green ribbons, trouble ensued and two yeomen were killed. Afterwards the militiamen fled to the barracks which the infuriated yeomen were only prevented from storming by artillery placed outside. The Home Office dismissed this as a ‘drunken brawl’, but the army commander, General Hart, saw a semblance of deliberate political method in the madness: remarking that ‘unfortunately the yeomanry had been assembled upon some festive occasion’.116 Hart, a Donegal landowner, came from the same social background as Stewart. Their different attitudes to yeomanry participation in Orange parading are thus indicative of elite divisions and the virtual impossibility of managing local loyalists in a way which responded effectively to the simultaneous central and local challenges to ascendancy. These incidents heralded more clashes at parades and fairs throughout northwest Ulster. In June 1810 local yeomen intervened in sectarian fighting at Ballintra fair, south Donegal, with similar clashes reported at Dromahair, in neighbouring

113 114 115

Abercorn to Littlehales, 17 Aug. 1808 (P.R.O.N.I., Abercorn papers D623/A/83/54). Baggot to Littlehales, 22 Aug. 1808 (P.R.O., HO100/148, f. 196). Thorne (ed.), House of Commons, iv, 688–90; Stewart to Littlehales, 12 Aug. 1809 (P.R.O., HO100/153, ff 366–8). 116 Stewart to Littlehales, 12 Aug. 1809 (P.R.O., HO100/153, ff 66–8).

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County Leitrim.117 The July parades of 1810 saw serious rioting between Orangemen and Catholics at Letterkenny, County Donegal. By this stage, whatever the manipulations and provocations of earlier incidents, rioting amongst the lower classes had taken on a life of its own: as revenge and retaliation took hold, any pretext would do for the next episode. The Letterkenny magistrates resolved to prevent clashes at the forthcoming horse-races, but failed, and another instalment was expected at the August fair at nearby Strabane.118 Moreover, the trouble extended beyond locationspecific set-piece confrontations. The Donegal yeomanry brigade-major, Palmer, was accosted near Dunfanaghy, by men who cursed everyone who ‘wears a red coat’ and boasted that ‘the Orangemen of Letterkenny had all been put to death’. Tensions remained high the following year, when Orange yeomen parading at Milford were stoned by Catholics and retaliated by firing on them. Trouble at Letterkenny on 12 July was only prevented by saturating the town with regulars.119 On 23 July 1812, at Killeter fair near Strabane, one woman was killed during a ‘dreadful affray’ involving yeomen and Catholics. In Leitrim an Orange yeoman’s funeral provoked a riot by ‘country people’, who threatened that Protestants would be ‘cut to pieces’. Three Orangemen and two Catholics died at Carrowkeel fair in Donegal in June 1813.120 At Loughpatrick, in west Tyrone, it was reported that matters had actually reached such a pitch that Protestants and Catholics reportedly agreed ‘resolutions’ to meet at fairs ‘for the purpose of fighting’.121 Part of the context for the Donegal situation was a surge in lower-class Orangeism in areas with a substantial Protestant population, and violent responses to Ribbonism against Grand Lodge advice. Many landowners recognised the deleterious consequences of disorder and appear to have disengaged from the Orange societies. After the 1810 Letterkenny riot, a local magistrate, Francis Mansfield, complained that ‘when associations are formed in the county that gentlemen of property do not take a part, as they would have influence to regulate and conduct with propriety the parades of such assemblies: there is no person of such description at the head of the Orangemen … composed of … the lowest of the mechanics and men of no property’. General Hart, a political supporter of Abercorn, noted the dilemma: ‘every person of consideration … acquainted with the merits of the armed Orangemen in times of rebellion, must respect and do give them every due merit’. Yet Hart recognised that Orange parades, which Catholics ‘take as, and make become, a pointed insult’ were now ‘unnecessary’, especially as parliament had rejected emancipation.122 He tried to stop yeomanry parades coinciding with Orange occasions and fairs in Donegal 117

John Hamilton to Littlehales, 27 June 1810, Stewart to Marshall, 29 June 1810 (P.R.O., HO100/159, ff 81–2, 99–100). 118 Hart to Pole, 22 July 1810, Mansfield to Hart, 24 July 1810, Stewart Hamilton to Pole, 24 July 1810 (P.R.O., HO100/158, ff 539–40, HO100/159, ff 32–3, 39–40). 119 Palmer to Pole, 22 July 1810, Monthly Report, 15 June 1811, Asgill to Floyd, 13 July 1811 (P.R.O., HO100/159, f. 84, HO100/163, f. 400, HO100/164, ff 28–9). 120 BNL, 31 July 1812; Slack to Marshall, 25 July 1810 (P.R.O., HO100/159, ff 61–2); BNL, 4 June 1813. 121 Hill to Peel, 2 Sept. 1815 (P.R.O., HO100/185, ff 99–100, 195). 122 Mansfield to Hart, 24 July 1810, Hart to Littlehales, 25 July 1810 (P.R.O., HO100/159, ff 39– 40, 43); Thorne (ed.), House of Commons, iv, 641–2.

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and Tyrone, well-knowing that the timing would be taken as provocation. Yet even within the military there was division. Operational realties raised dilemmas which paralleled the political quandaries: without a standing police force (Peel’s Peace Preservation Force was a temporary disturbance-related expedient) the yeomanry were the magistrates’ mainstay. The Donegal brigade-major foresaw that the current tension would mean captains would want their corps put on permanent duty; but to avoid this heavy expense, advocated that they order parades on fair days.123 Herein lay the problem. From his family seat at Baronscourt, Abercorn saw the overall danger to the Protestant interest of Orange parades; at a military and directive intermediary level, Sir John Stewart and General Hart appreciated the difficulty of balancing tradition with operational efficiency, to avoid offending loyalists while, simultaneously, giving no pretext for insulting Catholics. Stewart chose to indulge the yeomen, allowing them to wear ribbons; Hart wanted parades stopped and yeomanry and militia kept from towns on fair days. The tensions engendered by these contradictory demands contributed to the growth of mutual popular sectarianism. In neighbouring Londonderry popular sectarianism interacted with divisions within the county’s electoral make-up. There had already been party clashes at Portglenone in July 1810 and at nearby Kilrea the following year when Tamlaght O’Crilly chapel was fired with tar. The county had a substantial Catholic electoral interest which supported the liberal Protestant Ponsonby family, opponents of the Beresfords. The latter controlled both seats until 1812, when Colonel William Ponsonby captured one, prompting Sir George Hill’s claim that he ‘succeeded on and reinforced the Roman Catholic interest’.124 The Catholic Board was particularly active in Derry city, probably due to its position as a Protestant bastion. In late 1813, Hill affected to see sedition in the Board’s sending of a lawyer, O’Gorman, to counter loyalist influence at the trial of a Catholic. Though unsuccessful, an unruly Catholic crowd of 800 drew O’Gorman on a post-chaise past the toll-gates on the bridge without paying the toll, a symbolically defiant anti-ascendancy gesture in this of all places.125 Hill reckoned that ‘the popish population have been mischievously tutored’ and Protestants were so alarmed at this apparent Ribbonism that they might ‘purchase safety by acquiescence’. His response was two-fold. Hill had been a militant and zealous loyalist in 1798, but afterwards had reconnected with aspects of his earlier inclusive and more liberal loyalism and not embraced Orangeism, secure in his Beresford connections and dominant yeomanry position.126 He was prominent in the socially elevated Apprentice Boys club in 1813, but after the O’Gorman incident found he could no longer ignore the Orange Order, telling William Gregory: ‘Instead of discouraging the spread of Orangeism, as I have done heretofore, I must for safety promote it and head it.’ Hill simultaneously purged all thirty-two Catholics 123

Stewart Hamilton to Pole, 24 July 1810, Hart to Pole, 25 July 1810, Palmer to Littlehales, 30 July 1810 (P.R.O., HO100/159. ff 32–3, 38–9, 98–101). 124 Powers to Littlehales, 21 July 1810 (P.R.O., HO100/158. ff 537–8); BNL, 26 Nov. 1811, 21 July 1812; Thorne (ed.), House of Commons, iv, 669–71. 125 Hill to Peel, 10 Jan. 1814 (P.R.O., HO100/176, f. 286). 126 Alexander Knox to Hill, n.d. Sept. 1798 (P.R.O.N.I., Hill of Brookhall papers D642/ A/10/19).

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from the Londonderry yeomanry legion, claiming that almost the whole Catholic population ‘was under the Ribbon system and the guidance of the Board’.127 The Dublin Evening Post attacked Hill’s purges, but Peel approved his ‘removing the rebels from the Derry corps’, and hoped that the Board’s aggression would shock Protestant liberals out of their support for emancipation.128 Thus this situation represents another aspect of the Protestant response: a political gamble that Ribbon violence would drive a wedge between Catholic Board and liberal Protestant emancipationists, provided loyalists could be kept under control, or made appear the victims. Unsurprisingly serious fair-day clashes like the ‘battle’ of Garvagh and a similar riot at Maghera continued unabated.129 The wider political context can be seen in the contested nature of the judicial outcomes to these affrays. If Garvagh was about ‘proving’ connections between the Catholic Board and Ribbonism, the subsequent trial demonstrated Beresford dominance in county politics. Twelve men were tried for murder before Judge Fletcher, a liberal Protestant, who acquitted three and charged the remainder with manslaughter. However, an appeal was allowed and the accused bailed to appear before the Grand Jury at the next assizes, when they were all acquitted, along with several Ribbonmen. The popular ballad graphically emphasises Beresford primacy: The judge he would have us condemned, Had it not been for the jury men … Our thanks and praise we’ll tender still To Mr. Price and brave George Hill The Beresfords befriend us still For they saved the Boys of Garvagh.130

In 1815, after Ponsonby’s death at Waterloo, George Dawson, another Beresford kinsman and Peel’s private secretary, succeeded to the Londonderry seat. Hill told Peel, without any hint of irony, that ‘our politics here received a gratifying triumph (I mean the loyal constitutional politics) in having acquired Dawson’.131 Both men understood that, in the context of a fractured polity, county politics required the elevation of a non-combatant’s loyalty over that of one who gave his life for his country. In Dawson, as we shall see, they were sorely mistaken. The growing town of Belfast did not escape the spreading disorder. On the Twelfth of July 1813 a riot occurred which seems an ominous precursor of later disturbances, and has been described as ‘the first organized sectarian riot between Orange and Green’.132 Though it may have been precedent-setting, this affair also had a very 127

Hill to Gregory, n.d. January 1814 (B.L., Add Mss 40212, ff 43–4); Hill to Peel, 1 Jan. 1814 (P.R.O., HO100/176, ff 123–4). 128 Peel to Hill, 7 Jan. 1814 (P.R.O.N.I., Hill of Brookhall papers, D642/A/14/2); Hill to Peel, 10 Jan. 1814 (P.R.O., HO100/176, f. 286). 129 Hill to Dawson, 19 Oct. 1813 (B.L., Add Mss 40212, ff 31–6); Bardon, History of Ulster, pp 242–3. 130 Sibbet, Orangeism, ii, 135. 131 Hill to Peel, 9 Aug. 1815 (B.L., Add Mss 40212, ff 104–5); Thorne (ed.), House of Commons, iv, 578. 132 Farrell, Rituals and riots, p 33.

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specific contemporary context in terms of wider loyalist responses to the challenges facing the Protestant cause. Two factors are critical: the riot came just days after the parliamentary debate on Orange societies; and the connection between Belfast’s lodges and the Reverend Philip Johnson. Orangeism remained a minority tendency in early nineteenth-century Belfast: the usual attendance at July parades was 2,000 at most, whereas the town’s population grew from 19,000 in 1801 to 28,000 by 1811.133 However, the town’s loyalism drew succour from the county-based Orange structure which linked its lodges with those of Lisburn and the Hertford estate, and they customarily paraded together on the Twelfth of July. On the day of the riot, Orangemen from Belfast, Aghalee, Ballinderry, Lisburn and Glenavy had paraded to hear a sermon by Snowdon Cupples at Lisburn Linen Hall. The Belfast Newsletter expressed astonishment that local Orangemen should so disgrace themselves after parliamentary discussions, in which even Castlereagh, while acknowledging the former need for Orange societies, disapproved of their exclusive loyalty and of Orangeism in military bodies, preferring ‘the empire of the law, to the dominion of clubs and associations’.134 Parliamentary and local factors fused in the minds of Belfast’s remaining Presbyterian radicals who, though they had abandoned revolutionary separatism, nonetheless supported emancipation as part of a wider radical reforming agenda, and vehemently opposed exclusive loyalty. Philip Johnson and his Hertford estate cohorts were longstanding targets of radical and Catholic propagandists: his influence with government and local gentry and his continued advocacy of 1798-style militarised law and order-linked loyalism made him a prime symbol for an attack on the edifice of Protestant ascendancy. If Johnson’s Orangemen could be made to compromise ‘the empire of the law’ when Orange legitimacy was under parliamentary scrutiny, exclusive loyalism could be dealt a political coup de grace. The riot’s circumstances indicate careful planning. Orangeism’s popularity around Lisburn would have made any assault there impossible. However, if the Belfast contingent was attacked on their return home and a violent reaction provoked, it would damn Johnson by implication and undermine his arguments about lawabiding loyalism at their foundation. The Belfast lodges were stoned by a crowd sporting green favours and driven into a friendly public house. Here they obtained arms and fired on their assailants killing several, both Protestants. The local military commander had anticipated trouble and defence witnesses at the subsequent trial of the Orangemen told of paving stones being broken and carried by women in their aprons to the waiting mob. Radicals like Robert Getty and Dr Robert Tennant wanted the matter discussed in public by a town meeting modelled on the London meetings supportive of the jailed radical Westminster M.P., Sir Francis Burdett. Belfast’s authorities led by the Orangeman and town Sovereign, Thomas Verner, and Lord Donegall’s kinsman, the Reverend May, disagreed, claiming that such matters required a court of law, and the meeting was adjourned until after the assizes. Well aware of the political undercurrents, the trial judge highlighted the ‘shame of bloodshed in Belfast’ when the British army was fighting abroad and 133 134

Jonathan Bardon, Belfast, an illustrated history (Belfast, 1982), p 66. Hansard 1: parliamentary debates, xxvi, 986.

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criticised equally those who ‘encroach upon the constituted authorities’ and those who ‘from a mistaken notion of making a conspicuous display of extra-loyalty … have arrogated to themselves exclusive loyalty’. The edgy balance was evident in his verdict. Two Orangemen received six months for manslaughter, a similar sentence to that received by one of the attackers. The radicals were outraged and tried to maintain publicity at a re-convened town meeting. This was prevented by Verner’s accusation that it was not constitutionally convened by requisition, but was only ‘a mob’ collected by handbills. The matter ended in an unseemly fracas between May and Tennant, who was arrested.135 This bizarre contretemps between a conservative clergyman and a radical physician on the streets of Belfast symbolises how loyalist ‘ceremonial pageantry’ and sectarian rivalries were symbiotically linked with the wider political scene, locally, regionally and centrally. Thus, standing back from the various disturbances we can see evidence of ingrained lower-class sectarianism, but paralleling and often shaping it were contemporary political factors, sometimes pointed directly against the Catholic agitation or liberal Protestant emancipationists, and sometimes derived from fractures within loyalism itself. Moreover, the accelerating tempo of disorder can be seen to relate to specific political developments. A Catholic activist told Grenville that the 1808 petition ‘revived the persecuting and insulting spirit of Orangemen’.136 The many affrays between 1809 and 1814 can be linked to the Catholic Committee’s re-establishment in 1809, its replacement with the pugnacious Catholic Board, the rise of Ribbonism and loyalist responses. Colonel Verner told an 1835 Select Committee that hostility to Orange parades began in 1811 when they were conceived ‘as processions of insult, because their leaders told them so’. Another prominent Orangeman, Mortimer O’Sullivan, noted the co-incidence of the 1812 Catholic petition with Dr Dromgoole’s speech to the Catholic Board, which predicted the reversal of Anglican dominance in Ireland.137 As the Belfast example shows, the timing of riots can be related to the propaganda campaign against Orangeism and parliamentary debates on the subject supported by liberal Protestant petitioning.138 Such incidents also highlight the problems within loyalism. One inherent weakness was the willingness of Orangemen (those in Belfast damningly used yeomanry muskets) to forcibly break the laws they had sworn to defend. As the Belfast riot amply demonstrated, this even applied where loyalist leaders genuinely promulgated the ‘fair words’ approach. Even allowing for an element of provocation, the Orangemen’s readiness to resurrect their 1798 role indicates that ascendancy control of popular loyalism was tenuous. Where the gentry and Orangemen adopted more proactive responses to the perceived threat, as at Garvagh, their ‘victory’ was tarnished by Judge Fletcher’s widely publicised critique which, in turn, helped fuel the next parliamentary assault on Orangeism. Where the Protestant elite were divided 135 BNL, 13, 15, 30 July, 13, 20 Aug. 1813; Trial of the Orangemen of Belfast (Belfast, 1813) passim. 136 Devlin to Grenville, 1 July 1808 (H.M.C., Fortescue, ix, 207–8). 137 First report of the select committee on Orange lodges, H.C. 1835 (377), xv, pp 22, 37; MacDermott (ed.), Irish Catholic petition of 1805, p 179. 138 DEP, 19 April 1812; Hamilton Rowan to Tennant, 29 Aug. 1813 (P.R.O.N.I., Tennent papers, D1748/C/1/178/2).

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about how to respond, breakdowns of greater magnitude occurred. It was surely no accident that the spiralling lower-class sectarian disorder between 1811 and 1813 coincided with the Grand Lodge’s cautions to Orangemen in Donegal, Armagh and Tyrone about ‘silly shameful and even idolatrous practices’ of ‘mystically’ initiating men into unofficial ‘degrees’ and the establishment of ‘black lodges’.139 Herein lay a fundamental dilemma. Loyalism was at its most unified and coherent when facing an open insurrectionary threat. Defences against propaganda attacks had to be articulated by recourse to the militarised Orangeism of the past. The problem was how to convert the gold standard of 1798 loyalism to meet new demands now that the currency of politics had changed. Writers like Kirkpatrick knew that to motivate popular loyalist opinion against multiple political threats by activating reserves of anti-Catholicism, they had to make their audience feel that the conditions of 1798, 1690 and even 1641 still pertained. However, in spiriting up local loyalists a fatal paradox was revealed. Kirkpatrick saw the need to transcend localism to create a co-ordinated loyalist opposition to Catholic relief. Yet the means he used actually reinforced localism as, in tackling the divisions, the logic of his argument was torn apart with contradictions. The structures of loyalism were simply not elastic enough to cope with the conflicting demands and priorities of securing the political centre and the peripheries. Peel realised this in 1813 when, trying to fend off parliamentary criticisms of Orangeism by boasting how he disbanded mutinous Orange yeomen in Armagh, found that stretching loyalism beyond its capabilities made it snap back in his face with affairs like the Belfast riot. Ultimately, the fixation with 1798 militarised loyalism, whether in its legalistic or pugilistic forms, compromised and delayed an adequate defence of Protestant ascendancy. The ‘traditions’ underlying ‘ceremonial pageantry’ were recent, dating only to the mid-1790s; yet by 1813 they were already anachronistic. Rather than the shades of the past, loyalism needed a real enemy against which it could define itself.

139

Cargo, Kilpatrick and Murdie (eds), Royal Arch Purple, pp 60, 65; Sibbett, Orangeism, ii, 133–4; First report of the select committee on Orange lodges, H.C. 1835 (377), xvi, p 122.

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6

The first dissolution and the Second Reformation Loyalism in decline, 1815–25

As the Napoleonic war entered its final stages in 1814, Snowdon Cupples’s pamphlet refuting accusations against Philip Johnson included a retrospective account of loyalism on the Hertford estate, stressing its military and defensive nature. Cupples linked the loyal associations of 1793 with contemporary Orangeism by tracing an institutional genealogy through the armed associations of 1796, Johnson’s service as an active magistrate and the estate’s preponderance of yeomen. The version of loyalism he articulated could have appeared at any time during the eighteenthcentury, with its Erastian understanding of the Church and State relationship in ‘our excellent constitution’, and its old Whig conception of William of Orange as ‘our great deliverer’. In 1825, Sir Walter Scott’s sneering dismissal of an Irish loyalist who demanded he toast William and Oliver Cromwell completely missed the fact that the man’s attitude was conditioned more by contemporary developments than seventeenth-century issues. In 1823 John O’Driscol, a Catholic critic of the established church, noted that Cromwell, once a ‘saint’ in England, remained ‘the patron saint and tutelary spirit of the loyal Protestant ascendancy’, toasted more often than William III. Scott’s disdain for the tipsy traveller would have paled beside the reprobation he would have received from any evangelical Protestant clergyman for defining his Protestantism in such a vinous manner. Yet such a cleric would entirely understand the reverence of Cromwell, not so much as military conqueror of Irish papists, but more as a religious warrior who propagated the ‘fervent faith of biblical Christianity’. This outlook which emphasised the bible over the sword and focused more on the Jordan than the Boyne would have baffled men of the 1798 generation; yet much had altered. This chapter investigates ways in which various cross-currents of change impacted upon traditional Protestant loyalism in the decade since Waterloo. Broadly speaking, these factors may be categorised as religious, political, institutional and physical, in the sense of the threat posed by the Ribbonmen and other rural Catholic secret societies. In devotional terms, in response to the perceived complacency of eighteenth-century practice, the period of the French wars saw a growing zeal in all Protestant denominations. This impulse took several forms. For  Snowdon Cupples, A plain statement of facts (Dublin, 1814), pp 11, 17, 20; For Scott, see Introduction, pp 1–2; John O’Driscol, Views of Ireland, moral, political and religious (Dublin, 1823).  Desmond Bowen, The Protestant crusade in Ireland, 1800–70 (Dublin, 1978), p 61.

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some Anglicans and Dissenters, particularly Methodists, the ‘evangelical awakening’ in Britain and Ireland generated responses which included itinerant preaching and participation in voluntary societies dedicated to bible distribution and scriptural education, aimed at gradualist conversion of Catholics and also at improving Protestant religious practice. Another manifestation of religious seriousness was the reform movement within the Church of Ireland intended to revitalise religion at parish level and tackle pluralism and non-residence. However, with enhanced practice came internal tension. Some Anglicans supported evangelical voluntary societies but, from 1810, ‘high churchmen’ feared that these societies encouraged interdenominational co-operation, which would weaken the boundaries between Church and Dissent. This controversy was raging fiercely after 1815 when the post-war economic slump and political uncertainty gave the evangelical revival ‘extraordinary momentum’. The fluidity of religion was mirrored in politics. After the war, the emancipation campaign temporarily lost direction due to internal divisions over the veto on episcopal appointments and a belief that the political climate was unsuitable. The Catholic Board folded in 1817 but, by 1818 O’Connell had re-activated the emancipation campaign, appealing to Catholics and liberal Protestants, the latter on the utilitarian grounds that France’s defeat, the pope’s freedom from Napoleon’s control and the end of Stuart claims to the throne made withholding Catholic relief untenable. Agitation for emancipation gathered apace. In some constituencies, from the early 1820s, traditional electioneering patterns of personal and family influence were yielding to ideological issues. Dublin’s M.P.s, Henry Grattan and Robert Shaw, had enjoyed several unopposed returns when, despite Grattan’s support for emancipation, the issue had not featured. However, on Grattan’s death in 1820, his son lost a contest with the ultra-Protestant, Thomas Ellis, where emancipation was the key issue. Religious proselytising generated sectarian tensions and, with the campaign for Catholic relief gathering momentum, religion and politics seemed to be converging. The Catholic Church, itself entering a phase of renewal boosted by the papacy’s reassertion of authority in post-war Europe, responded to the Protestant challenge by contesting the Church of Ireland’s position in both theological and functional terms. Though Protestants continued dominant in traditional ascendancy bulwarks like the magistracy, local government and the corporations, and had supporters in Dublin Castle and Westminster, nonetheless the instruments through which ‘ultras’ monopolised loyalty were in danger. Militarised loyalism, which had served the Protestant garrison well during rebellion and war, lost ground after Waterloo in what  David Hempton and Myrtle Hill, Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster society, 1740–1890 (London, 1992), pp 10–13, 47, 63; Stewart J. Brown, The national churches of Ireland and Scotland, 1801–46 (Oxford, 2001), pp 49, 58–9.  Irene Whelan, ‘The Bible gentry: evangelical religion, aristocracy and the new moral order in the early nineteenth century’, in Crawford Gribben and Andrew R. Holmes (eds), Protestant millennialism, evangelicalism, and Irish society, 1790–2005 (Basingstoke, 2006), pp 52–82.  Jacqueline Hill, Patriots to Unionists: Dublin civic politics and Irish Protestant patriotism, 1660– 1841 (Oxford, 1997), pp 306–9.  Brown, National churches, 102–4; Hill, Patriots to Unionists, pp 332–3.

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Hereward Senior has called ‘the ebb tide of Orangeism’. Peel’s targeting of ‘ceremonial pageantry’ epitomised wider changes in governmental attitudes towards the old ascendancy indulgence of popular loyalism. Though he was himself a strong political ‘Protestant’, Peel’s reforming mind focussed on the practical effects of maintaining militarised loyalism, rather than what it symbolised. In 1814 he recognised that the yeomanry was a necessary, if blunt, domestic peacekeeping instrument. However, he agreed with the military commander, Sir George Hewitt, that they were ‘unfit for … those very duties in … which their main utility would consist … relieving the army from the maintenance of internal order’. Peel’s proto-police Peace Preservation Force undertook this role in disturbed southern counties from 1814, as he contemplated total yeomanry disbandment, but hesitated, realising ‘the bad moral effect’ this would have on loyalists. The yeomanry, bound firmly to local Protestant communities by ties of military tradition, territoriality and Orangeism, continued to feature in sectarian disorder, sometimes with the blessing of partisan landowners. In 1815 Peel decided on a partial reduction, leaving the residue in Ulster. A brief experiment saw northern detachments move to tackle agrarian disorder in Limerick and Clare. However Peel was trying to cover his political tracks and be seen to be doing something in anticipation of parliamentary criticism over the military estimates, and the experiment was soon dropped. Central government influence in the localities was inexorably increasing, establishment of the Peace Preservation Force ushered in a process whereby law enforcement came under governmental scrutiny. This increased exponentially in 1822 when the Irish County Constabulary subsumed most of the yeomanry’s peacekeeping role. Peel’s frustration with this politically dangerous loyalist anachronism exploded in 1816 when he faced parliamentary questions about an Orange yeomanry corps in Rosscrea, County Tipperary, who had first provoked a riot, then killed a man. ‘There is enough bad blood in Tipperary’, he fulminated ‘without those blockheads aggravating it with their party tunes.’ This incident represented a general slackening in elite control of popular loyalism. An enquiry revealed that the captain had neglected the corps which became effectively ‘under the control of the permanent sergeant’ who had ordered a parade in retaliation for a Catholic Saint Patrick’s Day parade without consulting the officers. Official disenchantment with the yeomanry was therefore part of a gradual broader disengagement with unalloyed Protestant ascendancy. Even ‘Protestant’ viceroys tried to curb the worst excesses of Orange magistrates; after sectarian riots it was common for balanced prosecutions on each side. Though centrally driven reforms still necessitated local gentry involvement, they nevertheless represented a decline in the old loyalist strength. The ability to influence the Castle’s perception of the state of law and order in the localities had been an important weapon for Orange magistrates to underscore local dominance, embarrass liberal Protestants and reinforce the Catholic rebelliousness paradigm. 

Hereward Senior, Orangeism in Britain and Ireland, 1795–1836 (London and Toronto, 1966), p 194.  Peel to Hewitt, 27 March 1815; Peel to Whitworth, 19 May 1815 (B.L., Add Mss 40288, ff 136–7, 46–7); Hewitt to Littlehales, 19 September 1815 (P.R.O., HO100/184, ff 231–2).  Peel to Littlehales, 9 April 1816, Peel to Whitworth, 3 June 1816 (B.L., Add Mss 40290, ff 208–9, 40291, ff 66–8).

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Now magistrates were no longer guaranteed that their analysis would be automatically accepted. Given that the yeomanry and magistracy traditionally functioned as an index of exclusively Protestant loyalism and a guarantor of security, the ­inexorable haemorrhage of power brought anxiety for loyalists facing physical challenges from groups of disaffected Catholics in the countryside. Ribbonism had spread from Ulster and reached Sligo and Mayo by late 1817 precipitating nocturnal attacks on isolated Protestant villages or yeomanry corps.10 In Ulster, Orange-Ribbon clashes reached such a pitch in 1815 that an ‘information centre’ in Armagh advertised venues for pre-arranged fights. Ribbonmen sometimes paraded to demonstrate their numerical strength: Saint Patrick’s Day was a favoured pretext, like the large demonstration at Hilltown in County Down on 17 March 1816 which loyalists interpreted as insurrectionary. Sectarian clashes often occurred at horse races and fairs. A serious riot occurred at Aughnacloy races in County Tyrone in December 1818, when Monaghan Ribbonmen fought Protestants from the Dyan, an Orange district in Tyrone. In late 1819, reports of Ribbonmen drilling and arming flooded in from Down, Monaghan, Cavan, Tyrone, Donegal, Leitrim, Roscommon, Mayo, Galway and Sligo.11 In the early 1820s, Protestants in Munster felt themselves physically under threat from the Rockites, groups of lower-class Catholics banded together under a fictitious champion, ‘Captain Rock’. Though the Rockites pursued traditional agrarian grievances like tithes, they had also pronounced antiProtestant and millenarian ideas. Their millenarianism was inspired by Pastorini’s ‘prophecies’, which were contained in chapbooks circulating in Munster from 1817 and those parts of Connaught and Leinster affected by Ribbonism in 1819. These prophecies predicted the fall of the Protestant church, usually in 1825. The Catholic clergy disapproved of these prophecies, and O’Connell even claimed that ‘the Orange party’ had invented them for propaganda.12 Recent research on the Rockites has suggested that they were more than just crude sectarians as their language and ideology also reflected ‘the agitation of national Catholic politics’ and they had a degree of political organisation.13 However, for isolated southern Protestants, the weakening of traditional loyalism provided a context to interpret the Rockites in apocalyptic terms. By 1821, ‘Captain Rock’ had attacked Protestants in Kerry, Clare, Limerick, Galway and Mayo.14 Yeomen were prime targets, due to their Protestantism and Orangeism and the fact that they had guns. Serious assaults were visited on yeomanry in Limerick’s Palatine settlements, noted for their ultra-Protestant sympathies.15 By late 1821, counties as far apart as Cork, Kerry, Limerick, 10

Galen Broeker, Rural disorder and police reform in Ireland, 1812–36 (London and Toronto, 1970), p 5; Report, Nov. 1817 (P.R.O., HO100/193, ff 470–1). 11 Sean Farrell, Rituals and riots: sectarian violence and political culture in Ulster, 1784–1886 (Lexington, Kentucky, 2000), pp 51–2, 62, 200; Magistrates’ reports, Dec. 1819 (P.R.O., HO100/197, ff 442–51). 12 J. S. Donnelly Jnr., ‘Pastorini and Captain Rock’, in Samuel Clarke and J. S. Donnelly Jnr. (eds), Irish peasants and political unrest, 1780–1914 (Manchester, 1983), pp 107–13; Rosse to Redesdale, 19 April 1822 (P.R.O.N.I., Redesdale papers, T3030/C.34/13/2). 13 Shunsuke Katsauta, ‘The Rockite movement in County Cork in the early 1820s’, I.H.S., xxxiii, 131 (May, 2003), p 296. 14 Précis of reports, 7 Oct. 1821 (P.R.O., HO100/200, ff 7–8). 15 Palatines were German Protestants settled in Ireland in the early eighteenth century; Arbuthnot

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Galway, Mayo and Donegal were reported disturbed; the viceroy, Lord Talbot, and many others were convinced that Rockites and Ribbonmen formed an underlying conspiracy connecting north and south. The Castle heard reports of clandestine arms shipments to Newry and Belfast with a Dublin ‘directory’ planning an ‘exclusively Catholic’ insurrection.16 Concerns were also raised amongst elite Protestants that rapid post-war economic change would stimulate radical political agitation and endanger the loyalty of their lower-class co-religionists. In 1819 the potato crop partially failed and Ulster’s linen industry suffered severe downturn. After Peterloo, some ultra-Protestants feared that Irish distress would make political radicalism and Ribbonism coalesce. Others worried that recession in weaving would make Ulster Protestants susceptible to radical agitators. Colonel Blacker warned Armagh Orangemen about ‘the machinations of the desperate and designing traitors in … Great Britain who seek the subversion, not only of the constitution, but of the Christian religion itself’. Though sympathising with the weavers’ plight, Blacker urged vigilance on ‘all well-wishers to loyalty’ for anything ‘hostile to law or Gospel’.17 Some Orange lodges sent loyal addresses to the Prince Regent expressing ‘detestation’ for those who ‘assembled people under the pretext of considering certain grievances, then arrayed them under the banner of sedition’. They also offered Orange manpower if it was ‘ever needful … to suppress them’.18 In Dublin, concern about radicalism merged with worries about the city’s declining yeomanry numbers. Dublin had once rivalled Ulster’s yeomanry numbers yet, by 1819, Henry Clark asked Talbot that ‘loyal associations’ be established so that ‘the friends of government would know who could be depended on for loyalty’.19 As Irish politics entered the orbit of British contingencies after union, governmental changes at Westminster also caused concern, as its impacts on the Irish executive meant unpredictable ramifications for the Protestant cause. Under Talbot’s viceroyalty, the executive was balanced between ‘Protestants’ and ‘Catholics’. Talbot’s chief secretary from 1818 to 1821 was Charles Grant, an evangelical of the Clapham sect variety, who viewed emancipation with the same humanitarian concern as the slave trade. He was not Liverpool’s first choice as Irish secretary, but his emancipationist views counterbalanced Talbot and the pro-Orange undersecretary, William Gregory. Grant advocated a conciliatory policy on disorder, shunning the use of the Insurrection Act (repealed in mid-1818) or, crucially, employing yeomanry. Grant caustically described Protestant ascendancy as the exaltation ‘of one class on the ruins of another’ and, while ultras raged about Grant’s antagonism,

to Sorrell, 6 May 1823 (P.R.O., HO100/209, f. 43); S. J. Connolly, ‘Mass politics and sectarian conflict’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), New history of Ireland: 1, Ireland under the Union (Oxford, 1989), p 82. 16 Précis of reports, 7 Oct. 1821, Talbot to Sidmouth, 28 Nov. 1821, 1 Dec. 1821 (P.R.O., HO100/200, ff 7–8, HO100/202, ff 235–7, 267–71). 17 Brian Jenkins, The era of emancipation: British government in Ireland, 1812–30 (Kingston and Montreal, 1988), pp 145–6; Address of County Armagh Grand Master, November 1819 (N.L.I., Brunswick papers, MS5107, f. 88). 18 Address of Orange Lodge 1551, 26 Nov. 1819 (P.R.O., HO100/197, f. 432). 19 Clark to Talbot, 5 Aug. 1819 (P.R.O., HO100/197, ff 171–2).

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at least he was sandwiched between Talbot and Gregory.20 However, in December 1821, further ministerial changes proved more unsettling with the arrival as viceroy of Wellington’s brother, Richard, marquis Wellesley. He supported emancipation and replaced key ultras with ‘Catholics’. Notably, the ageing Orange warhorse, William Saurin, was ousted as attorney-general by the liberal Protestant, William Conyngham Plunket. The Catholic lawyer Anthony Blake’s appointment as a special advisor appalled ultras, but put O’Connell and Wellesley on good terms.21 The executive was ‘balanced’ by Henry Goulburn’s appointment as chief-secretary and Gregory’s retention. Goulburn admired Peel and was a staunch evangelical; but, unlike Grant, he utterly opposed emancipation.22 Thus the executive remained balanced but, crucially for ultra-Protestants, the point of balance had changed. The effects of these broader political and religious changes percolated downwards till they met the customary annual Orange rituals. At a parliamentary level, ultras recognised that the potential for disorder at the annual Orange parades increased their political vulnerability, but from the popular loyalist perspective, any decline in traditional rituals created insecurity. Therefore these factors of change – religious, political, physical and institutional – individually and cumulatively, reflected a changed environment in which ultra-Protestants sought to promote exclusive loyalism as a key dynamic in the Protestant cause. We have seen how Blacker had appealed to Armagh Orangemen tempted by radicalism, to do nothing ‘hostile to law or Gospel’.23 He had been one of the architects of militarised Orange loyalism in the late 1790s, yet his exhortations to obey scriptural as well as secular authority show one way in which the new emphasis on religion could mitigate the original warlike ‘Protestant spirit’. Moreover, in a county with substantive Presbyterian communities, Blacker significantly refrained from recalling previous connections between Dissent and radicalism. No such sensitivities restrained the County Dublin ultra, Sir Harcourt Lees, an Anglican cleric who, though he resigned his stalls in 1806, remained a zealous Protestant in a conservative and Erastian manner. Lees was convinced that all Catholic agitation was a Jesuitinspired conspiracy, a threat to Protestantism necessitating a combination of firm repression and state payment of Catholic clergy. Lees took the ‘high church’ position on evangelicalism, which he strongly opposed.24 Radicalism was another part of the plot against ‘the established religion of the Empire’ by a ‘dark, unrelenting, bloodthirsty crew’ of ‘ATHEISTS, DEISTS, SCHISMATICS AND PAPISTS’.25 Lees also blasted those Anglican clergy who aimed ‘to evangelise all Ireland’. Refreshingly cosmopolitan in his fanaticism, Lees blamed the Irish Evangelical Society for 20 21

Jenkins, Era of emancipation, pp 137–8, 145. Thomas Bartlett, The fall and rise of the Irish Nation: the Catholic question (Dublin, 1992), p 328; Jenkins, Era of emancipation, p 179. 22 Ibid., p 167; see also idem, Henry Goulburn, 1784–1856, a political biography (Montreal and London, 1996). 23 Address of County Armagh Grand Master, November 1819 (N.L.I., Brunswick papers, MS5107, f. 88). 24 New DNB. 25 Harcourt Lees, The antidote; … recommended for … Rt Hon W. C. Plunkett, and other advocates of civil and religious liberty (Dublin, 1819), p 8.

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attracting ‘Enthusiasts and Puritans’ from ‘hot-beds of treason’, like Manchester and Glasgow. Thoroughly Erastian in outlook, he demanded that the government ‘check … this spirit of proselytism in the saints’, lest it stimulate another rebellion. ‘Rest assured,’ he prophetically intoned, ‘you will have another topic than the window tax or Catholic emancipation … you will have war; and the first victims will be the mangled bodies of every Protestant clergyman.’26 These different responses to the same problem – economic change endangering lower-class Protestant political loyalty – epitomised broader fractures within Protestantism along social, religious and political lines and confusion about what the issues really were. Would exclusive loyalty in its militarised and institutionalised form, formerly the ideological sheet anchor of Protestant ascendancy, still hold firm against these tempestuous changes? The ultra-Protestant response took regionally different forms. In the south, Ribbonism, the Rockites and declining yeomanry numbers combined to generate reactions reminiscent of the tradition of banding against threatened massacre and created an atmosphere of panic. Protestant houses and pubs were burned in Sligo, while from Parsonstown, King’s County, Lord Rosse warned Gregory of incipient insurrection; but, unlike 1798, now ‘the loyal people’ were ‘unarmed and unprepared’ with no yeomanry. Protestants in predominantly Catholic areas felt particularly vulnerable. Loyalists in Galway and Roscommon barricaded their houses, while the Ribbonmen were ‘so confident of their numbers … that they are regardless of any measures’. In Mayo, ‘Protestants find themselves so threatened … [that] they will naturally associate and arm in their own defence.’27 In Ulster, where more yeomen remained embodied though precluded from active service by Grant’s conciliatory policies, loyalist magistrates used Ribbon disorder to pressurise Grant. They habitually sent reports to the under-secretary, William Gregory, rather than to Grant demanding the Insurrection Act or yeomanry permanent duty. In Monaghan, Colonel John Madden begged Gregory for permanent duty to ‘give confidence to magistrates and loyalists’; or, alternatively, if the government adopted any other measure, ‘all the loyalists in the area would assist in putting down the Ribbonmen’. In Antrim, Lord O’Neill ludicrously claimed that most Catholics were Ribbonmen and intended ‘extermination of the Protestants’. ‘We have, within ourselves, little or no means of defence’, he complained, while ‘as to the yeomanry, I conclude that the government had good reasons for the conduct adopted towards them, but the effect has been to do away with the spirit of the few that are left without … one round of ammunition’. Failing a reversal of official yeomanry policy, O’Neill also asked: ‘Is there any model by which the loyal men on whom we can depend could get arms and ammunition and form themselves into associations’ otherwise, he said, confident that Gregory could take a hint, ‘Antrim will be as bad as in 1798’. Galway and Roscommon gentry called ‘aloud for the Insurrection Act’, which, ‘was never more

26 27

Harcourt Lees, L’Abeja, or a Bee amongst the Evangelicals (Dublin, 1820), pp 2–3, 8–9. Daly to Sligo, 5 March 1820 (P.R.O.N.I., Sligo papers, MIC292/2); Rosse to Gregory, 28 Dec. 1819 (P.R.O., HO100/179, f. 500); Gregory to Talbot, 16, 26 Feb. 1820 (P.R.O.N.I., Talbot-Gregory correspondence, D4100/2/6).

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required’. Clearly such reports of Ribbonism were designed to encourage Gregory and Talbot to counteract Grant. Sectarian tensions were sometimes manipulated to accommodate local power balances. An 1818 riot at Aughnacloy races was a manufactured showdown involving an Orange party, embedded since 1798 in the local yeomanry and centred on their captain, Edward Moore. The events followed familiar patterns of Orange-Ribbon clashes. Moore sent his yeomen to town to keep order; Catholic and Protestant groups clashed. The yeomen initially fired over the rioters’ heads, but later joined with the Protestants and opened fire, killing two. Reports spoke of Monaghan Catholics actively gathering supporters en route, while an official investigation found that, though Moore allowed his yeomen into Aughnacloy under arms, they were neither officially on duty, nor under a commissioned officer or even a magistrate, but led by the permanent sergeant.29 With a background of long-standing, localised sectarian tensions, despite Moore’s protestations to the contrary, the real meaning was the maintenance of Orange dominance. Ascendancy was demonstrated not just over the Ribbonmen, but, in a governmental climate where exercising power through the yeomanry was becoming difficult, Moore had effectively proved his continued leadership over the Orangemen by engineering the opportunity to virtually re-enact 1798. Afterwards, yeomen and Orangemen celebrated the ‘victory’ with party tunes. However, for rural southern Protestants the terrifying realities of Ribbon and Rock brooked no misrepresentation. Their gentry could no longer offer protection, one of their basic roles and a fundamental expectation of a loyal subject. In Ulster, however, a different reaction is apparent in the confidence of men like Moore that traditional militarised loyalism had still a role. Ultra-Protestants had some success in retrieving institutional loyalism from Grant’s conciliatory policies in late 1821, achieving a partial yeomanry call-out. Talbot noted triumphantly that ‘Grant feels some doubt of the expediency of calling out the yeomanry, lest it should cause irritation! “Where?”, said I, “Among the Catholics”, replied he – but I think this week will hardly elapse ’ere they will be called upon.’30 Grant complained to the Home Secretary, Sidmouth, that such a proposal involved ‘extreme delicacy and difficulty’, as ‘they are, especially in the north, all Protestants and Orangemen’, and ‘employment of them has a tendency to excite irritation’ amongst Catholics. Talbot countered, telling Sidmouth: ‘I confess that I have heard for the first time that the placing of arms in the hands of loyal subjects in the hour of danger ought to be made the subject of hesitation.’ In the event forty-six yeomanry corps went on permanent duty ‘to assist the civil power’, some selected from remaining corps in disturbed southern counties and some redundant Dublin corps were re-constituted. A significant portion, however, came from northern Orange loyalist heartlands, including the Brookhill and Ballymacash corps on the Hertford estate, Blacker’s Seagoe Infantry and the Tandragee corps from Armagh 28

28

Précis of reports, Dec. 1819 (P.R.O., HO100/197, ff 442–5); Madden to Gregory, 23 Dec. 1819, O’Neill to Gregory, 23 March 1820 (P.R.O., HO100/198, ff 39, 285–9); Gregory to Talbot, 16 Feb. 1820 (P.R.O.N.I., Talbot-Gregory correspondence, D4100/2/6). 29 Cited in Farrell, Rituals and riots, pp 51–2; Francis Kirkpatrick, Loyalty and the times (Dublin, 1804), p 153; Littlehales to Moore, 30 March 1819 (N.A.I., O.P.517/19). 30 Talbot to Gregory, 19 Nov. 1821 (P.R.O.N.I., Talbot-Gregory correspondence, D4100/3/15).

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and Sir George Hill’s now exclusively Protestant Londonderry Legion. In total around a thousand yeomen went on duty in Ulster: ostensibly to free regular troops to move south.31 The fact that key Orange corps were selected, many commanded by the same magistrates who had been complaining to Gregory, suggests that this revival of institutional loyalism was a sop to ultras. Gesture politics, however, would have been misunderstood by ordinary yeomen who would have seen the revival of the corps as a necessary genuflection at the shrine of counter-revolutionary loyalism. The length of the war perpetuated the unnatural coexistence of militarised and politicised loyalism making it seem natural, but the post-war environment stripped away the active militarised aspect, exposing only rituals and rhetoric. In constituencies where emancipation was an electoral issue, the rhetoric of exclusive loyalty became an electioneering strategy. In Monaghan, Colonel Madden’s complaints of Ribbonism and demands for yeomanry permanent duty probably related as much to ensuring that a sitting ultra-Protestant, Colonel Leslie, retained his seat.32 Though Monaghan had avoided contested elections since the union, its polity was fractured. Whiggish magnates like Lord Cremorne, the absentee Thomas Barrett-Lennard and Lord Rossmore, had significant liberal Protestant support, but Leslie was backed by an ‘independent’ interest, described as a reactionary phalanx of lesser gentry who ‘would support the devil if he would vote against Catholic emancipation’.33 Since 1818 the representation was divided between Leslie and Lord Rossmore’s son, Henry Westenra who, despite liberal support, retained Grand Orange Lodge membership and had pledged in 1812 – a promise later to haunt him – to support the Protestant interest.34 With an election coming, the freeholders BarrettLennard sneered at were probably Orangemen and yeomen. If Leslie’s ‘friends’ could stir the Protestant spirit, provoke the Catholics, and get the yeomen to suppress them on permanent duty pay, his electoral position could be improved by being associated with the constantly reinforced memory of exclusive loyalty. Even in contests between rival ‘Protestant’ candidates, loyalism had purchase for whoever could claim the best loyal credentials. County Armagh experienced a contested election in 1818 with emancipation as an issue. The Catholic vote and much of the ‘independent’ electorate backed the defeated liberal, Henry Caulfeild, while Charles Brownlow and William Richardson triumphed, in what Blacker called an Orange victory.35 However, in March 1820, Colonel William Verner considered standing. Though he subsequently withdrew, claiming a late canvass, early squibs and addresses suggest that Verner intended to capitalise on his family’s extensive Orange connections. He envisaged a bid for the Protestant vote based upon appearing as a true loyalist supporting ‘the interests of the constitution and the rights of this highly Protestant county … during the present crisis’. As both sitting members 31 Grant to Sidmouth, 19 Nov. 1821; Talbot to Sidmouth, 19, 24, 28 Nov. 1821 (P.R.O., HO100/202, ff 114–17, 128–30, 197–9, 235–7); A return of the dates on which any volunteer or and yeomanry corps was called out for actual service, H.C. 1828 (182), pp 1–5, xvii, 283–7; Allan F. Blackstock, An ascendancy army: the Irish Yeomanry, 1796–1834 (Dublin, 1998), p 251. 32 Madden to Gregory, 23 Dec. 1819 (P.R.O., HO100/198, f. 39). 33 R. J. Thorne (ed.), The House of Commons, 1790–1820 (5 vols, London, 1986), iv, 678–9. 34 Committee of the Grand Lodge, n.d. c. 1819 (P.R.O.N.I., Leslie papers, MIC606/3/J/7/121/4). 35 Thorne (ed.), House of Commons, iv, 627–8.

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were ­‘Protestants’, Verner adopted a classic independent position, complaining of an ‘unmerited coalition’ against him. However, to compete against ‘Protestants’ with Orangeism as his trump card, a credible physical threat was necessary. One supporter, Dean Carter, erected a placard on his gate at Tandragee warning Protestants of a Catholic massacre ‘plot’ thus exploiting popular memories of 1641.36 Moreover, as the Orange institution struggled to maintain consensus, different factions within it sought to appropriate loyalism to forward sectional agendas. The Grand Lodge of Ireland’s 1820 injunction against ‘black’ orders divided Armagh Orangemen, with several prominent members rebelling. A middle-ranking Armagh landowner and yeomanry captain, Thomas Seaver of Heathhall, and a barber, Henry Sling, were expelled over the issue. A vicious exchange of squibs shows how rival representations of unimpeachable loyalty were the grounds on which the bitter divisions were fought out. ‘A New Song’ by John Carson of Lodge No. 886 supported the Grand Lodge stance on grounds of loyalty and rationality: ‘We wanted no mysteries, silly obscure, Our aim it was protestant loyalty pure.’ He accused Sling of touting unofficial orders to ‘poor weavers’, a practice inimical to true loyalism: ‘Be they Ribbonmen, traitors to country and king; Or these ribbon dealers, it’s much the same thing.’ This drew a riposte from Luke Gibbon of Lodge No. 336 whose squib, ‘The Sun has gone Down’, represented supporters of the new regulations as ‘old rebels’: ‘Those half rotten scrubs, true chameleons have been, And alternately wore both the Orange and Green.’37 Whatever the vote-catching power of Orangeism, Irish loyalism’s transformation from an internationally compatible, militarised counter-revolutionary phenomenon to county electioneering rhetoric epitomised its demise. As exclusive loyalty lost its power to give moral sanction and political direction to the Protestant cause, the response of liberal Protestants and Catholics to the changing political situation saw older and alternative strands of loyalty re-emerge. If the narrowing acceptance of Williamite rituals depressed Orange loyalists, the growing disengagement of the elite social and, particularly, the increasing militancy of the remaining participants delighted emancipationists, enabling them to reclaim loyalty for their cause, as their reformist predecessors had done in the early 1790s. Liberal Protestants strongly supported Charles Grant’s conciliatory policies, as did many British M.P.s, in terms reminiscent of the progressive commercial loyalism model of the early war years. Grant was cheered in parliament when he condemned the Insurrection Act as unconstitutional, and claimed that England’s prosperity arose from the principles he advocated in Ireland, prompting ‘A loyal inhabitant of Ireland’ to denounce Grant to Sidmouth, and resurrect claims of exclusive loyalty to defend the Protestant constitution.38 In July 1821, similar Whiggish interpretations of William’s memory emphasised political liberty over military deliverance. On the Twelfth of July, despite appeals by leading ultras, including Thomas Ellis and 36 Verner’s address to the electors of Armagh, 16 March 1820, Petition to Verner, n.d. March 1820 (P.R.O.N.I., T. G. F. Paterson papers, D236/534/1,2,4); Magistrates’ reports, Dec. 1819 (P.R.O., HO100/197, ff 442–51). 37 John Carson, A new song (Cavan, 1820); Luke Gibbons, The sun has gone down (Armagh, 1820) (G.O.L.I., Edward Rodgers papers). 38 Jenkins, Era of emancipation, pp 145, 148.

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Blacker, the ‘dressing’ of William’s statute had been raucously continued by rank and file Orangemen, who were little better than a ‘rabble’ according to the O’Connellite Freeman’s Journal. This newspaper insisted that the anniversary’s shifting from 1 July, when William’s religious toleration was ‘formerly celebrated by the friends of civil and religious liberty’, to 12 July had been engineered by an Orange faction in the late 1790s and contravened ‘the principles which gave celebrity to that monarch’s reign’. Liberals claimed that genuine loyalty – to the monarch and the law – had degenerated into partisan Orangeism, which they represented as ‘a violent and illegal faction’. Shortly afterwards, celebrations in Dublin for George IV’s coronation evoked what the Freeman called unprecedented ‘public displays of loyalty’ amongst all groups. His acceptance of an invitation to visit Dublin in August 1821 provided an additional imperative for unity amongst the new king’s Irish subjects.39 Some ultras felt confident enough to steer along with the popular mood of unity, as George IV was not perceived as problematic, having jettisoned his emancipationist ideas and, in any case, had ultra backing in the divorce crisis when O’Connell and the Whigs had supported Queen Caroline.40 Yet, given the Boyne commemoration’s virtual co-incidence with George IV’s visit, whatever confidence ultras had in the new monarch, the fact that liberals and Catholics felt able to re-appropriate William’s memory epitomises the degree to which exclusive loyalty had declined as a political symbol. O’Connell tried to capitalise on the mood, presenting the bemused monarch with a laurel crown ‘to be replaced with one of emeralds’, and founding a ‘Loyal Union, or Royal George Club’ to perpetuate the Irish people’s affection.41 In truth, ‘conciliation’ meant different things to different people. Ultras saw it as a benefit of preserving the status quo, whereas O’Connell saw it as Catholic emancipation. The hard realities emerged after the king left a civic banquet when, despite John Claudius Beresford’s refusal from the president’s chair, the Orangeman and alderman Frederick Darley proposed the ‘glorious memory’.42 Events would prove Darley’s toast to be more prophetic than was Beresford’s abstinence. Wellesley’s arrival in December 1821 further encouraged the emancipationists. To O’Connell, he was ‘the harbinger of Emancipation’ who would ‘put the Orange faction down’. The liberal Lord Donoughmore told the duke of Leinster, ‘I like his politics on the Catholic Question’, and predicted, ‘If we get nothing else by the change [we] will be gratified by the putting of the Orange ascendancy down.’43 On the other hand, northern Orange magistrates met Wellesley with a flurry of reports about Ribbonism, in the hope that resurrecting the loyalty-rebellion model would make this ex-soldier elevate security considerations over political ideology. Robert Bateson, a Belfast landowner and adherent of Lord Donegall’s, claimed that powder and ball were being purchased and hundreds were drilling. ‘If the government don’t protect the loyal’, he claimed, ‘the gentry will abandon the country and take their 39 40 41

FJ, 11, 13 16 18 July 1821; DEM, 12 July 1821. Hill, Patriots to Unionists, p 320. Oliver MacDonagh, O’Connell: the life of Daniel O’Connell, 1775–1847 (London, 1991), pp 176–7. 42 Senior, Orangeism, pp 174, 196; Hill, Patriots to Unionists, pp 320–2. 43 The correspondence of Daniel O’Connell, ed. Maurice O’Connell (8 vols, I.M.C., Dublin, 1972–80), ii, 347; Donoughmore to Leinster, 28 Dec. 1821 (P.R.O.N.I., Leinster papers, D3078/3/13/12).

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families to Scotland or England.’44 Liberal Protestants were rightly sceptical. William Hawkshaw, a Lisburn magistrate, told Lord Downshire that such scaremongering emanated from Snowdon Cupples, who was electioneering on behalf of Lords Hertford and O’Neill (a Grand Lodge member), and that Wellesley would see through it. Belfast’s sovereign, Thomas Verner, even received a ‘Captain Rock’ letter, which Hawkshaw suspected was ‘written by one of the Orange party’. The yeomanry played their part in orchestrating tensions, providing party tunes and declaring, as Hawkshaw remarked in a droll manner that they had ‘enrolled under their Harmonic Influence’.45 Goulburn was realistic: ‘Everybody here tells me that we are to see scenes of 1798 … but I am far from convinced’, though he recognised that real security problems existed in Munster, where the Insurrection Act was re-introduced in February 1822 for six months. That April, to prove Ulster was also threatened, Blacker arrested Ribbon ‘delegates’ in Armagh.46 In July 1822, Wellesley requested an end to Orange parades in Ulster and the ‘dressing’ of William’s statue. Both activities continued, though Orange leaders strove to keep their followers calm and prevent internal division. Sometimes the spiritual imperative in revitalised religion curtailed boisterous loyalist displays. The Anglican minister of Pomeroy, David Evans, preached a Twelfth of July sermon to Tyrone Orangemen entreating brotherly love amongst those who ‘all profess and wish to support the Protestant interest and the memory of he who freed you from slavery’. Evans warned about ‘discord or contention among yourselves’, which would ‘afford a secret satisfaction to your enemies’, but counselled quietism, ‘from the respect you owe to those gentlemen under whose command and direction you appear’ and on grounds of religious belief, as ‘religion and loyalty go hand-in-hand’.47 The July parades in Ulster attracted large crowds, but were generally peaceful. The Lisburn lodge minutes note that the 1822 parade was ‘the largest and most respectable body of men ever seen’. In County Tyrone, 100 lodges paraded through Dungannon peacefully after a rendezvous in Lord Northland’s park which implicitly offered the customary sanction of the town’s proprietor. However tensions surfaced briefly when the rector removed a union flag from the spire of the parish church, only to be stopped by youths who snatched the flag back and re-hoisted it.48 If Ulster Orangemen were generally kept in bounds by their leaders’ injunctions about respectability and religion, no such restraint operated in Dublin. Here declining official support for popular ritual rankled sorely and, under a ‘Catholic’ viceroy, dressing the statute became an act of political defiance. The Freeman’s Journal claimed that plebeian Orangemen had forced passers-by to doff their hats to the ‘God of Orange idolatry’ and created a noisy disturbance till early morning. 44 45

3).

Bateson to Grant, 12 Dec. 1821 (P.R.O., HO100/202, ff 344–5). Hawkshaw to Downshire, 24, 27 Dec. 1821 (P.R.O.N.I., Downshire papers D671/C/12/262,

46 Goulburn to Peel, 26 Jan. 1822 (P.R.O., HO100/203, f. 120); Jenkins, Era of emancipation, pp 180–1; Blacker Day Books, vi, f. 193 (A.C.M., 5/1948). 47 David Evans, A sermon preached to the Orangemen of Cookstown, Stewartstown, Coagh and Moneymore districts, 12 July 1822 (Dungannon, 1822). 48 Lodge minutes and members’ Book, Lisburn LOL152, 1795–1895, f. 50 (G.O.L.I.); BNL, 19 July 1822.

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The discomfiture of ultras was implicit in the way the Protestant periodical, The Antidote reported these events. It refuted liberal claims of Orange licentiousness and partisanship, claiming that the dressed statue was actually attacked by ‘the disaffected’ but had to be defended by ‘loyalists – for we have reason to know that several who were not Orangemen, were zealously engaged’.49 The eager re-appropriation of loyalism as an acceptable descriptor of the public face of ascendancy speaks volumes about the difficulty of responding effectively to the challenges facing the Protestant cause. Anticipating more problems as the November anniversary of William III’s birthday approached, Wellesley asked Dublin’s liberal mayor to suppress the statue-dressing. The Grand Lodge offered to prevent it, but Wellesley rejected this suspecting their real motive was to strengthen the Orange interest on the corporation. Plunket claimed that most respectable Dublin Protestants agreed with the suppression, but others warned of the danger of alienating people whose loyalty maintained the British connection.50 This renewed assault on traditional customs generated deep anger amongst Dublin Orangemen, which exploded on 14 December 1822. Attending the new Theatre Royal, Wellesley was hooted, and missiles were hurled at him, including a bottle, a watchman’s rattle, and, symbolically, oranges. Several Orangemen were arrested after this affair which, as it occurred within walking distance of the national headquarters in Dawson Street, epitomised the inexorable unravelling of control. Moreover, the riot further weakened the ultras’ appropriation of the rhetoric of loyalty and vindicated liberal propaganda. The veteran United Irishman, Archibald Hamilton Rowan, could now use the ‘theatric exhibition’ as a stick to break the ascendancy. ‘It is not’, he vowed, ‘the punishment of a bricklayer, or a drunken carpenter, I would aim at.’ O’Connell simply asked why was Orange lawlessness not ‘struck on the head by emancipation?’ For emancipationists, therefore, Wellesley was a political ace to trump the Orangemen’s king. As Catholic addresses congratulated Wellesley on his escape, O’Connell smugly noted ‘what a curious revolution it is in Dublin when the Catholics are admitted to be the only genuine loyalists’.51 In such a highly charged political climate both locally and nationally, the need for Protestant ultras to keep up loyalist militancy and the dangers of doing so both increased exponentially. As the interrelationship between religious change and politics was to have such profound and lasting consequences, it will now be considered separately. In October 1822, as Wellesley nervously contemplated William’s birthday and Orange leaders worried about keeping Protestant loyalism unified, another event in Dublin heralded the beginning of a process which promised, or threatened, to transform the entire political, social and economic situation by reconfiguring everything in a religious context. In an episcopal address on 24 October 1822, the archbishop of Dublin, William Magee, inaugurated a new crusading spirit. An advocate of high church principles, Magee had supported the reform movement for enhanced 49 50 51

FJ, 13 July 1822, The Antidote, cited in BNL, 13 July 1822. Jenkins, Era of emancipation, pp 185–6. Hamilton-Rowan to Carr, n.d. [3] Feb. 1823 (P.R.O.N.I., Young papers, D2930/8/21); O’Connell correspondence, ed. Maurice O’Connell, ii, 412–13.

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clerical activity in parishes. By 1822, however, he believed the Anglican Church was in such danger that much more was needed. Magee conceived the threat as hydra-like, reflecting the complex post-war religious and political developments. It encompassed Catholic agitation and the likelihood that the state would grant emancipation, and thus weaken the Erastian foundation of the Protestant constitution; concern that local clerical zeal was blunted by fear of destabilising relations with Catholics and Dissenters; and the physical threat of Rockites and other anti-tithe protesters. Magee lambasted the non-Anglican denominations: ‘the one [Roman Catholicism] possessing a church without what we can properly call a religion; and the other [Dissent], possessing a religion without … a church’. The Anglican Church must reclaim its role, not through reliance on the state or political action per se, but by converting the entire population to Protestantism in a ‘Second Reformation’, as the crusade he launched became known. For Anglicans, this initiative temporarily healed the high church-evangelical divisions giving parish clergy, bishop and bible society enthusiast a common cause, but liberal Protestants and Catholics vigorously opposed it. Presbyterians were used to periodic anti-Dissent rhetoric, but the intensified targeting of poorer Catholics paralleled the establishment of the Catholic Association in 1823. Resentment against proselytism boosted O’Connell’s popular support, thus raising questions about the Second Reformation’s negative impact on Protestant politics.52 Moreover the reformation impulse could also stir denominational divisions within Protestantism, endangering the consensus once facilitated by counter-revolutionary loyalism. The concept of a Church of Ireland in danger would have been viewed with equanimity by many Presbyterians to whom opposition to Anglican establishment was natural. When Presbyterians were forced into political comment, it was inevitably loyal, as in 1812, when the Synod of Ulster disavowed Steel Dickson’s autobiographical Narrative, which sought to retrospectively justify the ways of the United Irishmen.53 However, though unequivocally loyal to the British connection and constitution, Presbyterians did not necessarily support the ascendancy politically; indeed uncomfortable memories of 1798 encouraged a turning-away from politics. Largely concentrated in Ulster, secure in numbers and supported by the state through the regium donum grant to ministers, Presbyterians did not feel the same need to convert Catholics. In many respects Presbyterians reverted to type in the 1820s, becoming preoccupied with internal divisions. The theological liberals were led by Henry Montgomery, with a larger orthodox wing under Henry Cooke, a prominent evangelical. Though Presbyterians felt the pull of religious renewal, their response was more nuanced than their Anglican counterparts. Church reformers were not necessarily evangelicals and the theological divisions between liberal and conservative did not automatically imply parallel political attitudes. For Presbyterian evangelicals, proselytising was not the only ingredient of their faith, particularly in Belfast, where ministers concentrated more on their own expanding industrial population than on anti-popery crusades. Here, the evangelical impulse encouraged an improving agenda of education, temperance and respectability. 52 53

Cited in Bowen, Protestant crusade, p 89; Brown, National churches, pp 93, 95–6, 98, 106. BNL, 7 July 1812.

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The Presbyterian view on emancipation was complex: the Synod of Ulster had pronounced in favour of Catholic relief in 1813.54 Henry Montgomery whole­heartedly supported emancipation and was friendly with O’Connell. Even Henry Cooke would initially have accepted limited relief, provided it did not threaten the Protestant status quo. Cooke supported the Second Reformation, but directed its energy against complacency within his own denomination, accusing the synod of ignoring the feelings of ordinary Presbyterians over emancipation and being indifferent to the danger from liberals whose theology was Unitarian or ‘Arian’, as opposed to orthodox Trinitarian. In 1825, Cooke told a parliamentary commission that rural Presbyterians retained deep-rooted fears of Catholics and remembered 1641. Cooke eventually forced the Arians to leave the synod and form their own ‘remonstrant’ synod in 1829, and was later instrumental in mending political fences with the Anglicans. However, in 1826, his views were not dominant and he had accusations of alarmism and of being a ‘fanatical enthusiast’ flung at him in the General Synod.55 When the Second Reformation triggered a mania for public theological debates between Catholic and Protestant clerics, few of these occurred in Ulster. In political terms the Second Reformation failed to re-build the old panProtestant loyalist consensus, arguably its greatest impact was apolitical, casting Ulster’s Dissenters back into their customary doctrinal narcissism. For political Protestants, the reformation movement’s tendency to stimulate disorder was worrying. Apart from provoking Catholic hierarchical opposition, tensions generated by proselytising impacted lower down the social scale and invigorated sectarian clashes in parts of Ulster. In July 1825 one of the major evangelical peers, Lord Roden, received a semi-literate report from Denis Deacy, a converted Catholic. Roden’s estate lay in south Down, an area afflicted by Ribbonism in the 1810s. Deacy, who ran a Sunday School, had encountered problems in his missionising. Another convert told him ‘we protestants could not believe or be saved when we swore agin the Mother of God, maning the Virgin Mary (sic)’. Deacy said he was well received by local Catholics, but expected hostility after Rathfriland fair, as twenty Catholics were ‘nearly murdered’ after the last fair by Protestants who ‘ris (sic) up from behind the hedge and struck at them’.56 The religious enthusiasm unleashed by the Second Reformation must therefore be seen as having the potential seriously to compromise the Protestant political cause. Evangelicalism may have halted the decline in institutional religion, but the dissipation of loyalist institutions continued unabated; and, facing the Catholic Association’s growing power, where else could ultra-Protestants turn to counter O’Connell’s mass support? ‘Now that the yeomanry are so diminished’, Nicholas Delachrois wrote to a fellow ultra-Protestant, the Downpatrick M.P. John Waring Maxwell, in July 1823, Orangeism was ‘the best rallying point for the loyal inhabitants’.57 Like many ultras, these men used ‘loyalist’ as a synonym for supporters of the Protestant cause, yet, as 54 55

Finlay Holmes, The Presbyterian church in Ireland (Dublin, 2000), pp 93–4. Bowen, Protestant crusade, p 30; J. L. Porter, The life and times of Henry Cooke (London, 1871), p 145. 56 Deacy to Roden, 27 July 1825 (P.R.O.N.I., Roden papers, MIC147/5, v, ff 129–32). 57 Delacherois to Maxwell, 17 July 1823 (P.R.O.N.I., Perceval-Maxwell papers, D3244/G/28).

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we have seen, its powers as an agent of exclusion were waning. Bishop James Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin, Catholic Association supporter and trenchant opponent of the Second Reformation, analysed the political situation. ‘Until now’, he wrote, ‘the government and the Ascendancy were always identified’, but this had unravelled leaving three ‘great parties’, the Orangemen, the Catholics and the ‘government party’.58 Ultras would have disputed Doyle’s claim of their unbroken Castle influence; nonetheless, under Wellesley, his assessment accurately reflected the changing balance of political power. Nor was the change confined to Dublin. At Westminster the Orange societies were increasingly coming under fire from Irish liberal Protestants and English Whigs and Radicals. By June 1821, parliamentary criticism had precipitated the duke of York’s resignation as British Grand Master.59 Wellesley had thrown beleaguered Orangeism a lifeline when he over-reacted to the ‘bottle riot’ by attempting prosecutions on the ridiculous charge of treasonable conspiracy, a capital offence. The prosecution failed and made the culprits appear as Orange martyrs. Wellesley’s ineptitude was again apparent in 1823 when, to Peel’s embarrassment, he insisted on including Orange lodges in a bill to suppress secret societies. Peel instinctively disliked legislating against an organisation with avowed loyal objectives and whose membership included peers, gentry and Anglican clergy. Yet, as a pragmatic politician he could see the problem. ‘I wish they [the lodges] ceased to exist’, he told Wellesley, ‘the only difference of opinion can be as to the most effectual way of putting an end to them.’60 Peel hoped that the influence of landed gentlemen would curtail rowdy Orangeism, but was unable to prevent the Unlawful Oaths Act, which forced another rule change. The admission oath was replaced by a statement proving that prospective members had taken the oaths of allegiance and abjuration.61 The parliamentary assault broadened significantly when, in February 1823, the English Radical, Joseph Hume, demanded that the largely moribund yeomanry be completely disbanded, as they were mostly Orangemen in Ulster and were involved in party disputes.62 The attack now focused on both arms of traditional Protestant loyalism and was given impetus by O’Connell’s new agitation. Catholic Association meetings in Dublin and Belfast heard O’Connell re-heat the old United Irish chestnut about Orange massacres and extirpation oaths. The leadership trotted out its usual defence. ‘Where in this land’, asked the Armagh Grand Lodge, ‘have the laws been so well obeyed as in those districts where the Orange Association has … influence?’63 Yet Orangeism’s state connection was again maladroitly highlighted in June 1823 by a sectarian clash at Maghera, County Londonderry. Though the June fair was ‘from time immemorial associated with rioting’, this affray was especially violent and four Catholics were killed. The pattern was familiar: a local magistrate was conveniently absent, the expected riot occurred, sparked by the arrest and rescue of a drunken Catholic. Local Orangemen were driven into a house and turned their 58 59 60

‘J.K.L.’, Letters on the State of Ireland (Dublin, 1825), p 40. Hill, Patriots to Unionists, pp 320–1. Peel to Wellesley, 10 March 1823, Sir Robert Peel: from his private correspondence, ed. Charles Stuart Parker (3 vols, London, 1891–99), i, 496–9. 61 Senior, Orangeism, pp 206–7. 62 Hansard 2: parliamentary debates, viii, 93. 63 Cited in Senior, Orangeism, p 206.

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guns on their assailants, and yeomanry from an outlying district became involved when the regulars lost control. With Orangeism in the parliamentary spotlight, such local affrays assumed national importance: one bemused soldier noted ‘it is impossible for party spirit to run higher than it does’ and the affair was highlighted by newspapers on both sides of the Catholic question.64 In a more positive reaction to Wellesley, ultra-Protestants established a new loyalist newspaper, the Dublin Evening Mail, in February 1823. Crucially, it was independent. Peel had previously reversed the traditional policy of supporting a loyalist press (usually by payment for printing official proclamations) partly from concerns that the virulence of journalists like John Giffard would create problems. In 1821, a new ‘Orange’ weekly, The Warder, had been refused a government subsidy, leaving it free to follow its loyalist leanings. When the Mail was founded, it had no need of the proclamation fund, developing a large circulation, triple that of any Dublin paper.65 In 1824, when only £7 16s 0d was received from the proclamation fund, it sold 315,000 copies. Wellesley once told Lady Blessington that ‘Saurin set up a newspaper to defame me.’ On another occasion he told Sir George Hill that he was convinced that Hill’s nephew, Colonel Blacker, had instigated it ‘for the purpose of writing down his government’, but the Mail’s progenitor was actually Timothy Hayden, previously the editor of The Patriot another loyalist paper. Blacker described Hayden as ‘a crack-brained, creative high Protestant to the backbone’, who filled the paper with squibs and personal attacks on Wellesley.66 Hayden, who had reputedly fought four duels in ten days due to his journalism, was replaced in 1824 by Thomas and Remé Sheehan, under whose editorship the paper became more respectable, though its circulation remained high. However, though the Mail provided another channel of communication between elite and plebeian Orangemen, the strains generated by the problem of controlling loyalists continued. In July 1823, as Peel had wished, the Orange leadership asked lodges to desist from public parades, but local Orangemen perceived this as a surrender to O’Connell. John Waring Maxwell called a meeting of County Down lodges to discuss parading. Though some resolutions stated that Orangemen would concur with the demands of the government and the Grand Lodge ‘for the peace and welfare of the Kingdom’, others expressed their fears about losing the annual ritual of commemoration, insisting it was ‘their duty to celebrate the Twelfth of July as usual … for the purpose of keeping alive that sacred flame … for commemorating an event by which we were freed from more than Egyptian bondage’. They claimed that ‘Orange processions are no real grievance to Roman Catholics’ were it not for the Catholic Association and its ‘artful and designing conspirators’. Nicholas Delecherois had his finger on the Orange pulse when he acknowledged fears that

64 Elliot to Sorrell, 17 June 1823, Sir James Galbraith to Gregory, 5 July 1823 (P.R.O., HO100/208, ff 97–8, HO100/209, f. 357); Farrell, Rituals and riots, pp 76–7; Senior, Orangeism, p 205. 65 Jenkins, Era of emancipation, pp 110, 205–6; Brian Inglis, The freedom of the press in Ireland, 1784–1841 (London, 1954), p 150. 66 Arthur Aspinal, Politics and the press, c. 1780–1850 (London, 1949), pp 140, 143; Inglis, Freedom of the press, pp 171–2, 174; Blacker Day Books, ii, f. 19; vi, f. 197 (A.C.M., 5/1948).

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‘if they stop [parading] they will never get started again’.67 Harcourt Lees implored Orangemen to confine themselves to private meetings in lodge rooms. Full of Second Reformation zeal and apparently modifying his pervious hostility towards proselytising evangelicals, Lees dismissed commemorative mummery: ‘My objects never were confined to the carrying of banners, or … ribbands on a statue.’ Though such rituals were as innocent as ‘May-day pageants of a country fair’, Lees ‘contemplated a far more transcendent exhibition, in the proud triumph of the Protestant reformed religion, over all the errors and wiles of Popery and Priestcraft’. ‘Do not’, he warned, ‘overturn the structure that is nearly complete for your final security.’68 The reaction to these appeals was mixed. There was no statue dressing in Dublin, and Orangemen in Cavan and Derry stayed in their lodge rooms, but there were public parades in Belfast, where some yeomen, in defiance of Lord Donegall’s orders, used yeomanry drums. Other Orange parades occurred in Armagh, at Comber in County Down and, for the first time ever, at Carrickfergus in County Antrim. A significant parade took place in the old loyalist heartland around Lisburn. Here over 2,000 Orangemen paraded ‘according to ancient usage’ to Philip Johnson’s church at Derriaghy, where they heard a sermon emphasising the traditional Erastian view in his text: ‘Fear the Lord and the King and meddle not with them that are given to change for their calamity will rise suddenly; and who knoweth the ruin of them both?’ Afterwards they adjourned to Moore’s Inn to be joined by around thirty gentlemen, several of whom were not Orangemen. Snowdon Cupples, as Antrim Grand Master, presided over a long list of toasts including ‘the king’, ‘the duke of York and the army’, ‘the duke of Clarence and the navy’, ‘the yeomanry of Ireland’, ‘the duke of Wellington and … the heroes who fell at Waterloo’. By the time the list eventually reached ‘Sir Harcourt Lees’, the predominance of political and military toasts would have made it clear that the tenor of the meeting decidedly favoured a resurrection of traditional militarised loyalism.69 The administrative logistics of the 1823 change of Orange membership rules further weakened the leadership’s tenuous control of local lodges by breaking communication with the Grand Lodge. Lodges still met under the old arrangements and it was early 1824 before warrants were re-issued under the ‘new system’. O’Connell meanwhile continued to agitate, proposing in May a petition to parliament ‘to disarm Orangemen or pass a law for giving Catholics arms to defend themselves’.70 In July 1824 all Orangemen were again asked by the Grand Lodge not to parade, a request which was generally followed, with many lodges meeting indoors. This time the Lisburn Orangemen obeyed and dined in their lodge-rooms, though their minutes record anger at Wellesley stopping the Dublin statue-dressing and refusing the corporation’s charter toast, a gesture they felt was designed to ‘conciliate the disaffected papists.’ However, there were still some public parades and a riot at

67 Heron and McCreedy to Maxwell, 10 July 1823, Delacherois to Maxwell, 17 July 1823 (P.R.O.N.I., Perceval-Maxwell papers, D3244/G/26–7, 28). 68 The Antidote, 5 July 1823. 69 BNL, 15, 19 July 1823. 70 Report of a meeting of the Catholic Association, 22 May 1824 (P.R.O., HO100/213, f. 169).

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Newry. In Tyrone, though James Verner, as Grand Master, had asked all Orangemen to obey the injunction, even within his own sphere of influence local lodges disobeyed and paraded as usual between Ballygawley and Castlecaulfield. Verner’s agent, Henry Crosslé, actually tried to prevent one procession when the local priest warned of an imminent clash with Ribbonmen. Yet, despite the interlocking yeomanry, Orange and social influence he could bring to bear, Crosslé could neither prevent the Orange march nor make them change their route. The Orangemen suffered in the inevitable riot and told Crosslé that he had ‘deceived them’.72 In reality, the withdrawal of sanction bluntly reminded them that they were living in 1824, not re-enacting 1798. Protestant loyalism, therefore, had come to mean different things to its plebeian adherents and its ultra-Protestant promoters. Indeed, the relationship with Dublin had become so fraught that the Verners tried unsuccessfully to organise an Ulster Grand Lodge.73 Such a move would have returned the structures of the Orange movement back to their pre-1798 format. The fact that this proposal received some support amongst Ulster Orangemen, shows that the fractures in loyalism were appearing at different levels. The potential for plebeian repudiation of gentry direction, the dynamic of institutional loyalism, was clearly present. Those desperate to maintain the Protestant cause’s political and social cohesion in the era of mass politics had to square the circle by adjusting its structures to defend Protestant interests nationally, without paying the price in local control and influence. William Verner noted his tenants’ reluctance to register freeholds, which he thought a rent reduction ploy. Yet, the fact that this Orange leader’s tenants even considered exploiting the political situation for such ends suggests loss of influence.74 Sir George Hill noted ‘the Popish proceedings are becoming more audacious every hour – Protestants stare at each other and say – what are we to expect?’ Pressurised by his Derry constituents to hold meetings to rally the Protestant cause, Hill refused, saying he could do more in parliament. In an atmosphere of fear and expectation, even this sensible approach sparked wild speculation: ‘is Sir George afraid of Lord Wellesley … maybe he knows that Peel and Liverpool are relaxing’.75 Apprehension was not exclusively a preserve of the lower-class. The sectarian tensions in Ulster and the ongoing Rockite disturbances in the south also worried the elite. Goulburn told Peel that ‘a respectable portion of the community entertains the most serious apprehensions, and … there is much to excite the fears of even the most courageous.’76 In Westmeath, Lord Clancarty, fearing a ‘dreadful explosion’ amongst the ‘Romanists’ in a year ‘in which [Pastorini’s] prophesies are to be fulfilled’, proposed arming an association of 500 Protestant tenants.77 In 71

71 Lodge minutes and members’ book, Lisburn LOL152, 1795–1895, f. 51 (G.O.L.I.); Senior, Orangeism, pp 208–9. 72 Crosslé to Goulburn, 26 July 1824 (P.R.O., HO100/212, f.157). 73 R. M. Sibbett, Orangeism in Ireland and throughout the Empire (2 vols, Belfast, 1914–15), ii, 266. 74 Verner to Leslie, 24 Oct. 1824 (P.R.O.N.I., Leslie papers, MIC606/3/J/7/14/1–2). 75 Hill to Dawson, 14 Nov. 1824 (P.R.O.N.I., Hill of Brookhall papers, D642/A/18/7). 76 Goulburn to Peel, 14 Dec. 1824, Peel: private correspondence, ed. Parker, i, 352–3. 77 Clancarty to Goulburn, 30 Nov. 1824 (P.R.O., HO100/212, ff 137–8).

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Cork, Kerry and Waterford there was ‘very serious alarm in the minds of the bulk of the Anglicans’ about attacks by ‘poorer’ Catholics who had been influenced by the prophecies. In Belturbet, County Cavan, a yeomanry captain faced demands from his men, panicking about insurrection rumours, to distribute muskets from storeage. Apprehension of nocturnal massacre was palpable in Tyrone. The district commander, Major-General Egerton, wrote that ‘it is impossible to describe the agitation produced by these absurd rumours’ and that ‘Protestants, without the sanction of the magistrates, form nightly armed patrols, conceiving their lives and properties in danger’, a powder keg situation as Catholics were ‘dreading an attack from these parties’. As might be expected with the legacy of 1798, loyalist panic reached similar heights in Wexford and Carlow. The yeomanry brigade major inspected corps at Clonegal, Scarawalsh, Mountnorris, Gorey, Castletown and Ballaghkeen, and found ‘great alarm amongst the Protestants – not solely the lower orders but even among the better description’. Yeomanry corps were neglected, rendering them unfit for service and the gentry barricaded their houses.78 Even Wellington reckoned that ‘if we cannot get rid of the Catholic Association, we must look to a civil war in Ireland sooner or later’, and advised a precautionary assessment of reserve military strength in militia and yeomanry. Henry Goulburn was now effectively running the Irish government, as Wellesley retreated into hypochondria. Though politically ‘Protestant’, Goulburn realised better than many loyalists that the Catholic Association could only benefit from ‘an agitated fury’ against Protestants; but no force could prevent random disorder, and certainly not the yeomanry. Indeed any call-out would convince people of ‘approaching war’. The gentry would, ‘enrol only Protestants … but that … would draw still more clearly the line of population’. He recognised the danger but doubted that the leadership existed to effect any co-ordinated rebellion. Only actual insurrection would justify calling out the yeomanry, when ‘the Protestant must then be arrayed against the Roman Catholic as the only security for his life or his possessions, and for the security of the state’.79 This policy of caution was applied to requests for yeomanry or loyal associations. Goulburn deemed it ‘impossible to accede’ to Clancarty’s request ‘till we are more assured that insurrection is at hand’, lest this ignite the explosion it was intended to prevent: ‘Can we deny Sir John Burke a regiment of Roman Catholics for his protection … and would not the members … measure swords with the Protestant regiment of Lord Clancarty?’ In Cavan, Captain Knipe’s request to distribute yeomanry arms, which emanated ‘from the opinion of the loyalists’, was refused in case it set a precedent.80 This cautious attitude inflamed loyalists and even O’Connell’s arrest did not placate them. Changing tack again and reverting from conversion to coercion, Harcourt Lees took the pretext for the arrest – that inflammatory speeches encouraged Catholics to arm – as gospel truth, and published a ‘furious letter to the Protestants of Ulster’. This called on them to arm against the Catholics, and prom78

Mahoney to Goulburn, 29 Dec. 1824; Knipe to Semple, 24 Dec. 1824; Egerton to Goulburn, 1 Jan. 1825, Beevor to Goulburn, 9 Jan. 1825 (P.R.O., HO100/214, ff 3–11, 26–7, 38–9, 58–9). 79 Goulburn to Peel, 14 Dec. 1824, Peel: private correspondence, ed. Parker, i, 348–9, 352–3. 80 Goulburn to Peel, 3 Dec. 1824 (P.R.O., HO100/211, ff 71–4); Semple to D’Arcy, 27 Dec. 1824 (P.R.O., HO100/214, ff 28–9).

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ised that he would ‘to place himself at their head … because the government are so weak as to despise the danger to the Protestants, and to decline supplying them with arms’.81 In December 1824, as a counter-balance to O’Connell, the government had unsuccessfully tried to prosecute Lees for seditious language.82 The letter to Ulster Protestants is revealing, not so much for its extreme language, but more for the fact that it addressed wider concerns within loyalism. Lees canvassed northern opinion before publishing and confided his fears to the Portadown magistrate J. O. Woodhouse that government was equivocal about the Catholic Association and that a coherent response was difficult because the Grand Lodge of Ireland was inactive. Lees circulated all Grand Lodge members with his proposal for ‘a civil and military confederation of all the Protestants of Ireland’.83 Though many Protestants, like Goulburn, considered Lees ‘half mad’, the local effect of his plans can only have exacerbated existing tensions, particularly as the botched prosecution bestowed on him a semi-martyrdom. In early 1825 – the year named in Pastorini’s ‘prophecy’ as that in which Protestantism would be overthrown – rioting erupted in the Tyrone village of Clogher, near the Anglican church. The chief constable of the new county police, George Brien, who was attending church at the time, candidly admitted that his men were overwhelmed as both parties attacked each other with ‘great violence’. Reluctantly, Brien sought the local yeomanry’s aid, by which time the Catholics ‘had fled to the mountains’. However, the reaction to the riot also revealed the fraught state of local loyalists. The congregation rushed out, convinced they would be slaughtered; crazy rumours spread that the bishop and clergy had been hauled from church and a magistrate assassinated. Armed groups of Protestants poured into Clogher from miles around and, in an archetypical massacre panic, no one went to bed that night.84 The riot was planned. Robert Waring Maxwell, who owned property nearby, told his brother John that ‘the priests have a man in each townland preaching Pastorini’s prophecies and leading the poor unfortunate dupes to believe that the Protestants must be killed … and … they will all get estates’. Thus 3–400 Catholics had marched ‘in military order’ to the church.85 The choice of Clogher on the first Saturday of the ominous year was heavily symbolic: it was the cathedral town for a diocese covering parts of Tyrone, Monaghan and Fermanagh. Moreover, Protestants anticipated the attack and, despite the yeomanry run-down, had obtained weapons, which would have been impossible without the gentry’s tacit countenance. However Maxwell’s assumption of Catholic clerical involvement with the Pastorini craze is not supported by the facts. By 1825, the Catholic Church was also undergoing renewal and deprecated popular disorder as it strove to reform practice and oppose proselytism. From January 1824 the hierarchy allowed priests to collect the ‘Catholic rent’. The fact that this convergence of Catholic religious renewal and 81 82

Goulburn to Peel, 22 Dec. 1824, Peel: private correspondence, ed. Parker, i, 355–6. DNB, xxxii, 394–5; Werburg Street Lodge minutes, 1823–39 (G.O.L.I.); MacDonagh, O’Connell, p 214. 83 Lees to Woodhouse, 18 Nov. [1824] (N.L.I., Brunswick papers MS5017, f. 89). 84 Brien to D’Arcy, 3 Jan. 1825 (P.R.O., HO100/214, ff 60–1). 85 R. W. Maxwell to J. W. Maxwell, 20 Jan. 1825 (P.R.O.N.I., Perceval-Maxwell papers, D3244/ F/2/48).

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O’Connellite politics paralleled Protestant proselytising strongly suggests that these wider political and religious issues underlay the local rioting. The fateful year of 1825 did not witness the fall of the Protestant church, nor did Harcourt Lees lead Ulster Protestants to fight for a promised land. It did, however, see the demise of organised Orangeism. In March 1825, the month appointed by Lees for his crusade, one of his pessimistic prophecies was realised. Despite petitions reiterating old arguments that Orangeism derived from an era when French revolutionary principles threatened ‘the throne and altar’, and was itself grounded in the principles of 1688, the association had to voluntarily dissolve itself on 18 March, having come within the compass of the Unlawful Societies Act, directed primarily against the Catholic Association.86 The failure of conventional constitutional means of influencing the legislature sharpened the omnipresent perceived division within loyalism of respectable elite and rough plebeians. To accept the situation meekly could appear to the lower-class supporters of the Protestant cause as doing nothing, yet breaking the law would give their opponents more ammunition. Even ascendancy stalwarts like William Gregory counselled quietism and consulted with Orange leaders.87 The approaching July parades would test popular opinion. In the event, though in places like Derry and Armagh Orangemen confined themselves to erecting arches, dining in lodge rooms and attending church, parades did take place in other areas. Sometimes these were informal, as at Lurgan, where on the preceding night some disorderly ‘boys’ assembled spontaneously and without official Orange approval, and fired shots. However, in Lurgan, as elsewhere, most Orangemen attended church and obeyed the pulpit exhortation to desist from parading.88 The tension between the Protestant political elite and their plebeian supporters was nevertheless almost palpable. Sectarian clashes at fairs in County Down increased; indeed in June both Down and Louth went under the Peace Preservation Act.89 This tension was epitomised by the situation in south Donegal, an area with traditions of Orange-Ribbon problems. The Ballintra Orangemen assembled as usual to parade, but the local magistrate, William Hamilton, asked them to desist and promised a dinner at his house, Brown Hall. They initially rejected this combination of legal authority and traditional paternalism, claiming that abandoning their tradition would make ‘all the papists cry out against them’, relenting as more magistrates appeared, though Hamilton had to snatch a banner of King William from one of the more recalcitrant and lay about him with the pole. Some magistrates refused to stop parades, as in Lisburn where the veteran loyalist, Philip Johnson, defied his colleagues to permit a parade.90 Such problems paralleled the sidelining of the yeomanry and cumulatively point to the fact that elite control of the institutions of exclusive loyalism, an instrument of propaganda as well as of mobilisation, was in no fit shape to meet O’Connell’s challenge. Clearly something new was needed; 86 87 88 89

Draft Petition, James Verner, Grand Secretary, 11 Feb. 1825 (P.R.O.N.I., D1079/1). Jenkins, Era of emancipation, p 232. BNL, 15 July 1825. Deacy to Roden, 27 July 1825 (P.R.O.N.I., Roden papers, MIC147/5, xi, ff 29–32); Jenkins, Era of emancipation, p 232. 90 Catherine Foster to Lord Oriel, 24 Aug. 1825 (P.R.O.N.I., Foster-Massereene papers, D207/73/36); Hansard 2, xvii, p 151.

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but, in what would be a recurring pattern, when Irish Protestants needed innovatory political vision, they got an inveterate religious visionary. Having advocated a religious solution, then oscillated towards militarism when the Catholic clergy had backed O’Connell, Harcourt Lees now turned his frantic attention to a replacement organisation to preserve the structure of loyalism. It is indicative of accelerating ascendancy disarray that, while the Catholic Association rapidly remerged as the New Catholic Association in July 1825, as politically focussed as its namesake but designed to circumvent the Unlawful Societies legislation, loyalism’s institutional riposte was the Benevolent and Loyal Orange Institution of Ireland. This organisation, in which Lees had a formative role, was primarily directed towards inculcating Protestant religious principles, to which end it published and circulated literature and pledged itself ‘never to be connected with any object merely political’. The Benevolent Orange Society was an attempt to maintain the institutional connection between Irish loyalists by re-modelling Orangeism on the pattern of the British lodges as friendly societies. The connection, however, went deeper as the Unlawful Societies Act did not apply in Britain, and the Benevolent Orange Society, of which the earl of Aldborough was Grand Master, partly anticipated the Orange Institution’s renewal on the British model in 1828. However, as will be seen, far from preserving popular loyalism, Benevolent Orangeism exacerbated divisions: it was aristocratically dominated, largely Dublinorientated, and disliked by northern Orangemen who felt it ignored the ‘Diamond System’, thus losing the spirit of the original movement.91 If the institutional self-mutilation cut deep with rank and file Orangemen, this was nothing to the blow received when some parliamentary champions of the Protestant cause changed sides. In March 1825, just after the Orange Grand Lodge’s final meeting and the dissolution of the Catholic Association, the English Radical Sir Francis Burdett, with O’Connell’s blessing, introduced a motion for Catholic relief which included two ‘wings’ or securities proposing the disenfranchisement of the forty-shilling freeholders and government payment of Catholic clergy. Since 1819 emancipation commanded a small Commons majority and it was left to the Lords to defeat the bill in May. From a ‘Protestant’ perspective, however, the real shock came when one of the County Armagh members, Charles Brownlow, the first M.P. to have publicly avowed himself an Orangemen, who was toasted at the Lisburn Orange dinner of July 1823 and who had recently claimed that the Catholic faith was founded on ignorance and that the Association sought Church property and political concessions, deserted the cause and ‘ratted’ when ‘a new light beamed on his mind’.92 The self-imposed ban on Orange parades in 1824 has been described as an insoluble dilemma, trapping the institution between mutually antithetical yet equally damaging alternatives: the danger of alienating ordinary Orangemen by ending

91 92

Sibbett, Orangeism, ii, 286–8; Senior, Orangeism, pp 218, 226. Fergus O’Ferrall, Catholic emancipation: Daniel O’Connell and the birth of Irish democracy, 1820– 30 (Dublin, 1985), p 90; Bartlett, Irish Nation, p 334; Thorne (ed.), House of Commons, iv, 286–7; Anon., The last speech and true declaration of Judas B---n—ow (G.O.L.I., Edward Rogers papers).

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traditional demonstrations, yet the vulnerability of being open to legal action by persisting. In this view, the ‘first dissolution’ of 1825 was the natural outcome of this quandary, which emasculated Orangeism politically, and rendered it incapable of offering effective resistance to O’Connell’s Catholic Association.93 There is truth in this assessment; however, Orangeism was only one component, albeit an important one, of the political machinery of Protestant ascendancy. The foregoing analysis suggests that Orange disintegration was part of a wider breakdown in the entire superstructure of ascendancy politics. The functional decline in the yeomanry as the county constabulary took over its law and order role was crucial in this collapse and intersected with Orange demise, precisely because of the close connection, as many yeomen were also Orangemen. The armed power of popular loyalism perpetuated traditional constructs of Protestants as the garrison. Such a conception provided a ready-made political justification for continued ascendancy, forged, as it was, with strong links binding Protestants of all classes and denominations, central and local government, the Anglican clergy, the military and the magistracy. The exclusively Protestant loyalism symbolised by this alliance was thought to be the best argument against emancipation and offered a via media between the elite and the lower classes mediated through the yeomanry, the Orange societies and even the courts. Structural weaknesses and problems of control were not the cause of its breakdown per se; but merely symptoms of its greatest vulnerability: everything was founded on the notion that Protestants faced insurrection. In short, the political uses of the apparatus of counter-insurrection were illusory and short-lived. Lack of a viable alternative method of political control and mobilisation compounded the difficulty. Repeated abuse of the yeomanry system may have been effective in maintaining local dominance and reassuring loyalists in Tyrone or Tipperary; but, in the larger national picture, such incidents further compromised the yeomanry as the martial arm of the Protestant body politic, leaving it in a dangerous functional vacuum as a northern-orientated armed anachronism. The stuttering decline of traditional Orangeism and the emergence of the Benevolent Orange society were negative and reactive to their opponents’ agenda. This can only have increased the sense of loyalism disintegrating as a political or military force in an organisation which prided itself on its martial traditions. The atrophy of the yeomanry and the Orange societies caused collateral damage to the social and denominational consensus of the old 1798 loyalism. The early stages of the Second Reformation did little to promote cohesion within the constituency where the ultras derived their popular backing from; but, for the meantime, religious and political Protestantism continued in uneasy tandem. Yet, to the extent that the moral crusaders stimulated sectarian tension and loyalist law breaking, they diminished the moral legitimacy which exclusive loyalty bestowed on Protestant political ascendancy. O’Connell tried to exploit this. The more alert ultras also understood the problem and tried to curtail disorder. But fair words were not enough. Wellesley himself noted, probably through gritted teeth, that ‘the most respectable Orange leaders tried to allay the zeal of their associates’, though ‘the spirit of the institution

93

Senior, Orangeism, p 209.

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survives in several places, especially Ulster’.94 Perhaps the most alarming symptom for the Protestant cause was neither Orange dissolution nor yeomanry redundancy but the fact that the term ‘loyalist’ was again becoming current in its earlier sense: people were clamouring to form armed associations as they had done before the formation of the yeomanry or the Orange Association. It was as though the victories of 1798 had never happened. As the tide of Orangeism inexorably ebbed, it was no accident that a poem about the foundation legend of the lodge at Lisburn, a bastion of the old loyalism, was recorded in the minute book on 12 December 1824, the very day that its members submitted themselves to yet another change of rules, and were initiated into the ‘New System’. So here’s to James Innes who took out our warrant Who I wish with his comrade was with us alive To tell how they stemmed the storm and the torrent In seventeen hundred and ninety and five When homeward returning and bringing the charter Beneath which we meet as brethren and men Determined to never sell our rights or to barter The freedom our forefathers won for us then.95

94 95

Wellesley to Peel, 19 Jan. 1825 (P.R.O., HO100/214, ff 71–86). Lodge minutes and members’ book, 1795–1895, Lisburn L.O.L. 152 (G.O.L.I.).

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7

Protestant politics, popular loyalism and public opinion, 1825–8

Come jolly boys, your glasses raise, and cram the flowing brimmer For Derry’s boast shall be our toast, no renegade or trimmer The name we drink is one I think we well may spend applause on ’Tis honour due to old True Blue – to hail the health of Dawson.

The ‘True Blue’ loyalist lauded in the ballad for making a defiant speech at the annual commemoration marking the shutting of Derry’s gates in December 1825 was the County Londonderry M.P. George Robert Dawson. The ritual heart of the ceremony was the burning of an effigy of Lundy, the treacherous city governor who had defected to the Jacobites during the 1689 siege. In the year of Orange dissolution this local ceremony assumed wider significance as the Protestant cause appeared trapped between the Catholic Association and its own internal tensions. These problems underlay Dawson’s fiery speech, so belligerent that it attracted the disapproval of his brother-in-law, Peel, who worried that ministerial approval might be implied. Dawson explained that as most Protestants only wanted ‘an assurance of support to express their own feelings’, he used the ceremony to ‘to cheer up the Protestant spirit’ and thus do ‘some good to the cause’. This was not the only contribution to the cause by ‘that uncompromising Protestant Derry Dawson’ as he had recently acted as an intermediary between parliamentary ultras and county gentlemen, urging them to back anti-Catholic M.P.s by petitioning. Dawson’s remarks were given at a public dinner, they were reported in detail in loyalist papers like the Londonderry Journal and the Belfast Newsletter and, as Colonel Blacker’s ballad shows, recapitulated in meetings of the Apprentice Boys of Derry. Though Dawson addressed an elite and corporate audience which was politically aware, he knew the impact would reach a wider and increasingly well-informed Protestant public. As he himself observed, the Catholic question had made ‘every man, from the peer to the peasant … a politician’. Since the end of the French wars, public opinion had become a much more influential political force than it had previously been. Contemporaries attributed  Stanza 1 ‘The health of Dawson’, by Colonel Blacker, ‘written and sung for an entertainment given by the gentlemen of Derry to their representative, 23 Dec. 1825’ (Apprentice Boys of Derry minute book, Robinson Library, Armagh).  BNL, 27 Dec. 1825; Dawson to Peel, 14 Jan. 1826; Peel to Dawson, n.d [mid Jan. 1826], Sir Robert Peel: from his private correspondence, ed. Charles Stuart Parker (3 vols, London, 1891–99), i, 391–2; BGCA, 15 April, 15 Aug. 1828.

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this to the growth in the number and scale of the forums in which political issues were discussed outside parliament. The causes were a matter of debate. Some people believed that the spread of education and increasing availability of political information were responsible, while others attributed the expansion to the increasing wealth and power of the middle class. Historians are divided about the real impact of public opinion on the political elite and their decision making. One line of argument is that the ‘constitutional revolution’ of 1828–32 – the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform – were the result of public opinion from outside the political system mobilised primarily by the commercial and professional middle-classes. Recent interventions in the debate have contended that the constitutional changes principally derived from divisions (over repeal of the Test and Catholic relief) within the ruling elite of an ancien régime state, where landownership and religious identity were still paramount. Whatever the ultimate impact of public opinion, however, there is no doubt at all that contemporaries saw it as increasingly significant and that the various arenas for public political discussion and representation had expanded since the eighteenth century. These included county, civic and petitioning meetings, clubs and societies, coffee houses, reading societies and print media like song-books, squibs, handbills, broadside ballads, periodicals and, particularly, newspapers. In eighteenth-century Ireland, the penal laws had made politics and public opinion a Protestant preserve, typically expressed in the meetings and resolutions of magistrates, grand jurors and corporations, in sermons and in official celebration of state and royal occasions and commemorations associated with William of Orange. These arenas for the expression of opinion were controlled by the political and religious elite, though, as previously noted, the Williamite commemorative customs also had a popular dimension. Election rituals, from chairing to mobbing, can also be seen as an arena where the opinions of elite and plebeian Protestants were represented, though there was an accepted level of compromise as election disorder was traditionally tolerated. By the 1780s, the expanding arenas for expression of opinion included the military ceremonial of the Irish Volunteers, participation in which brought the nobility and landed gentry into closer contact with the Protestant (and Presbyterian) mercantile and professional classes, though, due to the ‘democratic’ nature of volunteering, in a less dominant role than was customary. Catholic public opinion followed a somewhat similar social trajectory as the original Catholic Committee was dominated by aristocrats, but from the time of the 1792 Catholic Convention, an assertive middle class element became increasingly influential in a process which reached its apogee in the Catholic Association. The emergence of institutionalised popular loyalism during the French wars had provided new opportunities for the expression of a wider Protestant public opinion. On either side of the Catholic question, therefore, arenas for public opinion were expanding. The change from the old elite emancipation organisations into the mass-based O’Connellite movement was paralleled by the rise of Orange lodges and evangelical



P. J. Jupp, British politics on the eve of reform; the duke of Wellington’s administration, 1828–30 (Basingstoke, 1998), pp 330–1.

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societies. Yet they differed insofar as the Catholic impetus was driven by the middle classes, while the Protestant landed elite still largely dominated, especially in the countryside. They also differed, in that the methods of marshalling and expressing Protestant public opinion gravitated towards the traditional – even the new loyalist institutions tended to occupy printed space with resolutions and public space with parades. These modes of expression were increasingly overtaken and superseded by newer forms orchestrated by O’Connell. These new methods utilised a repertoire of mobilisation techniques ranging from parish meetings to enlisting the church’s parochial apparatus and were amplified by a vigorous print culture. Yet, for both sides, 1825–8 was a period of uncertainty, innovation and experimentation as neither was totally sure of its ground. The constitutionality of O’Connell’s political use of the church was questionable; while for ultra-Protestants, two key modes of expression, the yeomanry and Orange Order, were moribund or dissolved. This chapter will analyse the Protestant response, concentrating on four key arenas: elections, public dinners, Orange ceremonial parades and petitioning. Straws in the electoral wind were visible from October 1825, when Waterford liberals planned to run Henry Villiers Stuart, a Protestant supporter of emancipation, against the Beresfords, a key ascendancy interest. The election was postponed and re-scheduled for June 1826, by which time the Catholic Association had intervened to back Stuart, urging Catholic freeholders to defy their landlords. O’Connell himself visited Waterford to humiliate the ‘bloody Beresfords’ and the preponderance of Catholic freeholders told heavily against their candidate, Lord George Beresford, who finished a bad third behind two emancipationists. Similar interventions occurred in Louth, Cavan, Monaghan, Westmeath, Galway and Kerry as Catholic voters ignored their landlords. As a result electioneering was robust and elections violent. Although the Beresfords’ prominence in ascendancy circles gave the Waterford victory symbolic resonance, northern counties with sizeable Protestant populations were arguably greater prizes. The bitter Monaghan and Armagh elections reveal the Protestant elite’s response and also give insights into the reactions of ordinary loyalists. Monaghan’s social, economic and political mix encouraged electoral tension. The population was evenly divided on religious lines, the major interests were split between ultras, like Colonel Leslie of Glaslough, liberal magnates like Lord Cremorne, and smaller independent interests. At a popular level, emancipation organisations were well-established, as were Orangeism and Ribbonism. A resident peer, Lord Rossmore, controlled the second seat occupied by his son, Henry Westenra. Rossmore was a liberal, but his son had previously voted against emancipation and was considered bound by pledges of 1812 to ‘support the Protestant Ascendancy to the utmost of his power’. Rossmore, however, supported emancipation and,  P. J. Jupp, ‘Government, parliament and politics in Ireland, 1801–41’, in Julian Hoppit (ed.), Parliaments, nations and identities in Britain and Ireland, 1650–1850 (Manchester, 2003), pp 160–1.  S. J. Connolly, ‘Mass politics and sectarian conflict, 1823–30’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), New history of Ireland: 1, Ireland under the Union (Oxford, 1989), pp 98–9.  Brian Jenkins, Era of emancipation: British government of Ireland, 1812–1830 (Kingston and Montreal, 1988), pp 236–7.  Peadar Livingstone, The Monaghan story (Enniskillen, 1980), pp 178–83; R. G. Thorne (ed.),

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though Westenra had opposed it in 1825, there were suspicions in 1826 that he would trim at Cremorne’s behest. The situation was complicated by the arrival of a new force, an Englishman, Evelyn J. Shirley, who owned extensive lands in the predominantly Catholic barony of Farney. Previously an absentee, Shirley now sought an active political role. As High Sheriff in 1825 he had registered a ‘beggarly crew’ of Catholic forty-shilling freeholders nicknamed ‘Cossacks’, whom he had courted by providing material support. Although a liberal in English politics, Shirley opted for neutrality in Monaghan, but ‘this foreign man at the head of his Cossacks’ upset the electoral arithmetic. In 1826, when Shirley announced his candidature, Westenra and Leslie both attempted coalitions for the second seat. Leslie and Shirley promised each other their second votes, a pragmatic gentleman’s alliance requiring Cossack and Orange co-operation. Westenra played a deeper game: he would not publicly solicit the Catholic vote but worked surreptitiously to access it through Cremorne, while still hoping that previous ‘ascendancy’ commitments would secure his ‘Protestant friends’. Leslie’s supporters accused Westenra of duplicity, while his father’s Catholic sympathies led to suspicions that he was an ‘apostate’ to Protestantism. Anti-Leslie squibs undermined his Orange credentials, by alleging that an ancestor had been proclaimed a traitor in 1745. Resistance to aristocratic coalitions appealed to many Orangemen: Westenra claimed he fought ‘the battle of the independent interest’, and some people preferred his Protestant pledges rather than Leslie’s duplicity, which ‘no freeholder … who is a loyal man and a good prodistant (sic) can deem being strictly in unison with their wishes’. O’Connell’s intervention in Monaghan was crucial. He told priests that, as Shirley’s election was certain, the Association should thwart Leslie, who ‘has ever been our foe’. Though Westenra had voted against emancipation, his father was ‘one of our most steady friends’, and had Cremorne’s support. ‘As his friends are our friends’, Westenra was promised Association support without open avowal, and priests ‘laboured night and day’ against Leslie.10 The Association moved quickly to thwart Leslie’s overtures to the Cossacks: O’Connell’s lieutenant, John Bric, had a pastoral letter read in Westenra’s favour. Shirley and his ‘Cossacks’ were in an invidious position: he was bound by his gentlemanly promise to Leslie, they were caught between obeying a good landlord or conforming to the pressure of priests and Association. Leslie’s position was even worse: without ‘Cossack’ support his return for the second seat was doubtful and he faced both Association and Orange antipathy towards any junction with Shirley. As matters became openly sectarian, Leslie’s supporters desperately reiterated his loyalist credentials against ‘the Popish agitator’s The House of Commons, 1790–1820 (5 vols, London, 1986), iv, pp 678–9; Kelly to Rossmore, n.d. [June] 1826 (P.R.O.N.I., Leslie papers, MIC606/3/J/14/84–5).  Foster to Leslie, 17 Feb. 1826, Evatt to Leslie, 22 June 1826, Murdock to Leslie, 8 Feb. 1826 (P.R.O.N.I., Leslie papers, MIC606/3/J/7/14/56; /130; /53–4); Livingstone, Monaghan story, p 185.  Martin Cahill, ‘The 1826 election in County Monaghan’, Clogher Record, v (1964), p 168, note 182; Address from ‘your ould Balderdash’, 15 June 1826, Westenra’s draft election address, n.d. [June 1826] (P.R.O.N.I., Rossmore papers, T2929/10B/1A; /10A/114A); McDowell to Leslie, 27 May 1826 (P.R.O.N.I., Leslie papers, MIC606/3/J/7/14/76). 10 Dublin Morning Register, 30 June 1826; O’Connell to McDonnell, 6 June 1826 (P.R.O.N.I., Clogher diocesan papers, DIO (RC) 1/6/2).

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hostility’ thus undermining the ecumenical ‘junction’. Shirley’s agent, Henry Evatt, expected Association supporters to attack the ‘Cossacks’ when they came to vote and had wanted Orangemen ‘taught’ to consider the ‘Cossacks’ friends; but, though such an arrangement would have kept Westenra out, they baulked at it. ‘Can you not open the eyes of the Orangemen’, he asked Leslie; but tensions were running so high that they could not surmount their dislike of Catholics. At a pre-election meeting, the Farney men came under enormous pressure from Bric, Rossmore and Bishop Kernan to defy Shirley and give their second votes to Westenra. Evatt tried to counter this, but Bric prevailed and, despite a last-ditch appeal by Shirley, most ‘Cossacks’ supported Westenra.11 The polling saw serious violence. On opening day Westenra’s supporters entered Monaghan carrying sticks, wearing green sprigs and carrying a liberty tree and tried to stop Leslie and Shirley entering the courthouse. The rioting worsened as Leslie’s carriage was destroyed and the police lost control and fired, killing three men. Shirley and Westenra were elected and Leslie beaten into third place, but the bitterness lingered. Leslie’s ‘Orange party’ and Westenra’s friends published conflicting statements about ‘stony Saturday’. Tempers reignited at the summer assizes when Leslie’s supporter, Colonel Madden, fought a duel with Westenra in which both were wounded. On 12 July, Leslie’s supporters published addresses in the Dublin Evening Mail denouncing priests for superseding ‘the privileges of the electors’ and predicted that ‘the entire representation of Ireland’ would be in ‘the hands of the clergy’.12 They considered petitioning parliament, blaming Westenra’s supporters on the riot, but decided against this and submitted an election petition in December 1826, claiming priestly interference invalidated Westenra’s return. When this also failed, Leslie unsuccessfully sought a parliamentary enquiry into ‘unconstitutional’ interference, and asked electors to ‘uphold what the state of your country as well as that of the Empire demands: the Protestant Ascendancy in Church and State’.13 The Catholic Association did not intervene in Armagh, but the county’s dynamics promised a ‘wicked and bitter’ contest when Colonel William Verner belatedly decided to run.14 Brownlow’s ratting and Caulfeild’s previous support for emancipation ensured them the Catholic vote. The issue therefore was essentially a trial of Orange strength. When Verner came forward, Lord Downshire noted that ‘the whole strength of the Orange party’ was directed against Brownlow for the second seat. Verner’s supporters rushed out squibs proclaiming ‘Brownlow and the Catholics forever … birds of a feather flock together’ and lampooning his ‘mushroom conversion [to] the true Catholic religion which … has always marked its steps in blood!’15 Despite dissolution, Orangeism’s residual influence proved potent.

11

Cahill, ‘The 1826 election’, pp 163, 165; Evatt to Leslie, 18, 22 June 1826 (P.R.O.N.I., Leslie papers, MIC606/3/J/7/14/111–12, 130–1). 12 BNL, 27, 30 June 1826; Morning Chronicle, 15 July 1826; DEM, 12 July 1826. 13 Cahill, ‘The 1826 election’, pp 178–9; Draft petition, n.d. [c. Nov. 1826]; Richardson to Madden, n.d. [c. Dec. 1826] (P.R.O.N.I., Madden papers, D3465/J/7/7/4); Draft address, n.d. [c. 14 Dec. 1826] (P.R.O.N.I., Leslie papers, MIC606/3/J/7/14/147–8). 14 Verner to Leslie, 16 June 1826 (P.R.O.N.I., Leslie papers, MIC606/3/J/7/14/106). 15 Downshire to Londonderry, 21 June 1826 (Durham County Record Office, Londonderry papers,

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A radical, George Ensor, admitted to Verner that, although they differed politically, he felt obliged to leave his tenants ‘to themselves, and that as they were mostly Orangemen you would probably obtain their votes’. As in Monaghan, violence came from both sides.16 At the proposal meeting the uproar from the huge crowd meant that neither Brownlow nor Verner could be heard. On the first polling day, Verner came in an open landau replete with medals and supporters marching in military fashion. Brownlow’s supporters took the colour green, while Verner’s friends were ‘true blues’, and their placards proclaimed ‘Waterloo Hero’, ‘Protestant Interest’ and ‘Now or Never’. Brownlow’s squibsters abused ‘Colonel Vermin’ and dubbed his followers ragged peasants. As Brownlow’s people sensed victory, they attacked Verner’s committee room, but were repelled with sticks, stones and horse-whips by a mob which then chased Brownlow’s supporters who were in fear for their lives. When Verner’s defeat was known, the atmosphere became so charged that the magistrates stopped the candidates’ addresses and the customary chairing. Though for different reasons than in Waterford, this election materially damaged the Protestant interest as, despite exerting dormant Orangeism’s whole weight behind Verner, Brownlow’s vote – 2,563 to Verner’s 1,894 – shows that, in addition to his Catholic support, ‘Judas’ retained considerable Protestant backing. Deep division was still evident at Christmas 1828 when a man died in a pub row following rival toasts to Brownlow and Verner.17 The Catholic Association also challenged ascendancy interests in other counties. An intervention in Cavan failed to break the dominance of the evangelical ultra-Protestant Lord Farnham, though around 600 tenants defied their landlords and two emancipationist candidates put up a creditable showing. An Associationbacked candidate, Alexander Dawson, triumphed in Louth, however, as Catholic freeholders abandoned their landlords. This election, described as ‘decidedly Papist against Protestant’, saw the intimidation of Protestant voters and an emancipationist sharing the representation with the Fosters; thus it represented another symbolic victory over a key ascendancy interest.18 An interesting coda to the electoral upheavals came in a Cork city by-election in December 1826. The opposing forces were John Hely-Hutchinson, a liberal Protestant emancipationist and Gerard Callaghan, a whiskey dealer from an English Catholic family, who had once been open on emancipation but now opposed it. The aristocratic Hely-Hutchinsons were immensely powerful and Callaghan was defeated. Recent research on the poll book suggests that religion was a central issue and that priestly interference in the earlier general election had already raised tensions. The electorate was split between largely

D/LO/C515 [5]); ‘A Protestant’ to William Verner, n.d. [June 1826] (P.R.O.N.I., T. G. F. Paterson papers, D236/534/4,5). 16 Ensor to Verner, n.d. [June 1826], Privately held family papers: I am indebted to Dr Peter Hard; Third report of the select committee on Orange lodges, H.C. 1835 (476), xvi, pp 44–5. 17 BNL, 27 June, 7 July 1826; NT, 2 Jan. 1829. 18 S. J. Connolly, ‘Mass politics and sectarian conflict’, p 99; Oliver MacDonagh, O’Connell: the life of Daniel O’Connell, 1775–1847 (London, 1991), p 225; Catherine Foster to Lord Oriel, n.d. Oct. 1826 (P.R.O.N.I., Foster-Massereene papers, D207/73/55); Henry McClintock’s dairy, 22 June 1826 (P.R.O.N.I., Redhall papers, MIC582/1/43).

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middle-class and Protestant freemen and poorer Catholic freeholders, correlating to ultra-Protestant and liberal support.19 Despite the fact that emancipation was only an issue in a minority of constituencies, contemporaries and historians have regarded the 1826 elections as transitional, marking the ‘shattering experience’ of mass politics on the ascendancy.20 What do these embittered contests reveal about the role of exclusive loyalism in sustaining Protestant public opinion as complacent reliance on old, elite-dominated forms was shown up as inadequate in the new climate? The Waterford contest showed the inability of Protestant landlords to dictate to Catholic freeholders, but Leslie’s defeat exposed weaknesses in Protestant public opinion. As grand juror, colonel of the Monaghan Militia and long-standing county M.P., he would have assumed that public opinion was solely Protestant and propertied and that plebeian voters deferentially elected their betters when required. Such assumptions underpinned his junction with Shirley; yet, although dislike of aristocratic electoral monopoly was not new, the fact that neither Leslie nor his friend Evatt, a yeomanry commander, could induce Orange acceptance suggests that landlords could no longer take Protestant freeholders for granted. In Monaghan at any rate, Orange dissolution seems to have adversely effected the mobilisation of opinion. Leslie sensed this and responded by getting hurriedly proposed for Dublin’s York Club. This, he hoped, would ‘show them by the most unequivocal testimony … the opinion of a Protestant Club, whose decision on such a subject could not be questioned’. A unanimous invitation to join this ‘loyal and constitutional body’ without balloting would show ‘every Orangemen that he is now called on to give you his most effective support’.21 The fact that a pledged ‘Protestant’ had to resort to such measures suggests a painful awakening to political realities. The Monaghan election raised sectarian tensions to the point that, with Ribbon factions uniting behind Westenra, Leslie’s supporters needed Orange backing.22 Catholic Association intervention made electioneering less a well-understood ritual and more of an unknown and dangerous quantity, with real, rather than rhetorical, links to popular sectarian tensions. This raised the perennial danger that the Protestant constitution’s defenders would be drawn into unconstitutional actions, thus forfeiting the claim to represent any form of opinion. In truth, there was no consistent response. There are marked differences between Leslie’s approach and that in Armagh, where Verner, rather than reach for his copy of Blackstone or his social credentials, dusted off his Orange sash and polished his Waterloo medals. Verner had unashamedly courted residual popular Orangeism and loyalism through overt militarism. During the polling he had marshalled his supporters like troops, in a way both commanding and familiar – he called them his ‘Boys’ at one stage, and used military metaphors to describe their rioting. Moreover the huge crowds he brought into Armagh, suggests that, as he mobilised Killyman Orangemen 19

Ian D’Alton, Protestant politics and society in Cork, 1812–44 (Cork, 1980), pp 136–7; P. J. Jupp, ‘The social geography of Cork City elections, 1801–30’, I.H.S., xxix, no. 113 (May 1994), pp 19, 31–2. 20 Connolly, ‘Mass politics and sectarian conflict’, pp 99–100; Fergus O’Ferrall, Catholic emancipation: Daniel O’Connell and the birth of Irish democracy (Dublin, 1985), p 133. 21 Thetford to Leslie, 7 Feb. 1826 (P.R.O.N.I., Leslie papers, MIC606/3/J/7/17/50–1). 22 Cahill, ‘The 1826 election’, pp 168–70.

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from across the county border in the 1834 election, this had probably also happened in 1826.23 These Orangemen had a fierce reputation and, coming from Tyrone, could not have voted in County Armagh. Non-voter participation was an accepted feature in Irish and British elections, but the mobilising of Orangemen from a district notorious for turbulence suggests that Verner had decided to run the risk of unconstitutionality to turn rough and ready popular loyalism to his account. This populist route would eventually include formally reviving Orangeism as an engine for mobilising opinion. From a county electioneering perspective, such an approach could be justified on the grounds that traditional Protestant public opinion was too small and too divided to resist emancipation, but what did the plebeian Protestant loyalists who were mobilised think they were doing? In Armagh and elsewhere, emancipation was no longer an abstract concept promulgated nationally, as Catholic Association electioneering made it more tangible and locally relevant. Green-bedecked election mobs must have been indistinguishable from Ribbonmen. In this combative context, humiliating defeats revealed the weaknesses of those normally considered natural leaders, while the election of Brownlow and Westenra also proved that Protestant voters would support emancipationists. With the Twelfth of July falling soon after the elections, the relative merits of the cautious and populist approaches would be tested. The government feared trouble and instructed magistrates to suppress party processions. Henry Goulburn noted perceptively that ‘the Protestant proceedings are of a nature to render them accessible to the law. They hoist flags, they carry swords, they go in procession to church decorated with ribbons.’ The Catholics, however, being ‘the party numerically strongest can easily annoy, irritate and injure their opponents without rendering themselves liable to legal interference’.24 The Orange institution was still officially suppressed, though public displays did occur in parts of Ulster and the south. Overall, the Protestant reaction was mixed. In County Londonderry an address to Orangemen was circulated and published by John Graves, previously Deputy County Master, regretting the delay of ex-members in taking the initiative. Noting the government’s instructions to magistrates, Graves advised Orangemen ‘as loyalists who once shed blood to defend the Constitution’, they should show their enemies that they would obey the laws. Landowners and magistrates similarly appealed to them ‘as loyal subjects’ but emphasised, significantly, that they had no wish to control their ‘political feelings’. Dublin and Belfast saw no displays, but Orangemen paraded in Antrim, Fermanagh, Down and in Armagh. Using ‘Popish’ election interference as a pretext, Verner’s friends paraded Loughgall and drank whiskey toasts to king, constitution, and Verner, ‘the staunch, tried and uncompromising friend of the Protestant cause’.25 This affair was quiet, but a different atmosphere prevailed in Fermanagh, less equivocal than Londonderry and more actively militant than Armagh. In the village of Garrison, several lodges turned parading into an act of symbolic 23 Francis O’Gorman, ‘English loyalism revisited’, in Allan F. Blackstock and Eoin F. Magennis (eds), Politics and political culture in Britain and Ireland (forthcoming); First report of select committee on Orange lodges, H.C., 1835 (377) xv, pp 238–9. 24 Goulburn to Peel, 25 July 1826 (Peel: private correspondence, i, 416–17). 25 BNL, 7, 11, 14, 25 July 1826; FJ, 12, 14 July 1826.

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resistance to magistrates who had supported the injunction against public display. After having failed to prevent parading in Garrison, the resident magistrate was visited by Orangemen, including several yeomen, who marched and countermarched outside his house brandishing pistols and swords. Though Lord Enniskillen did not overtly encourage Fermanagh’s Orangemen to march, it was well-known beforehand that extensive preparations were afoot for a ‘grand field day’; indeed, Orangemen marched towards Fermanagh from County Leitrim. In the south, parades occurred in Westmeath and Mountmellick, County Carlow where, in a virtual 1798 re­enactment, Orangemen and regular soldiers paraded firing shots, playing ‘Croppies Lie Down’ and daring ‘Papists’ to show their faces. Rather than being a rallying point after the elections, the mix of militancy and enforced inertia on the Twelfth of July 1826 reflected serious fragmentation within the Protestant cause and illustrated how the decline in institutional loyalism had restricted this forum for public opinion. The emancipationist Freeman’s Journal, jubilantly responding to the Mountmellick riots, asked: ‘Is this the Constitution? Not at all – it is Caribbean barbarism.’26 A more civilised response to the O’Connellite threat emerged in early October 1826 when the Dublin Evening Mail announced an invitation dinner in Armagh city, hosted by the gentry for Lord George Beresford and Colonels Verner and Leslie. In the early nineteenth century political dinners were important in the political process in both Britain and Ireland as an arena for the mobilisation and expression of opinion as significant as public and petitioning meetings and press agitation. The social composition of the diners and the rituals of dining and toasting were means to convey political meaning, through the sentiments expressed in the toasts and the proposals for toasts and responses to them, all of which were disseminated widely by being published in the newspaper press. Political dinners were, moreover, integrative in several important aspects. First, they functioned as ‘intersection between metropolitan or national politics and local political concerns’. Second, these affairs were public, rather than private occasions where, although the elite gathered at the table, the middle and lower orders formed an audience. Given that such dinners are considered to have been ‘conspicuously events in the public domain’ and important forums where national and local public opinion met, the Armagh dinner assumes a crucial importance in the attempts to respond to O’Connell.27 The ‘leading political characters of the kingdom’ were to attend at Armagh and the fastidious planning reveals that this political dinner was envisaged as nothing less than a platform from which to launch a complete rejuvenation of the Protestant cause and to mobilise a collective response against O’Connell and the liberal Protestants ‘on a scale commensurate with the object’. Furthermore, it was not ‘confined to those in whom the project originated’, but was to be ‘considered as national and indicative of the opinions of the Protestants of Ireland’.28 The choice of Armagh had immense symbolic importance, both for Orangeism, as its natal county, and for Anglicanism, as Beresford’s brother was Primate. Cumulatively the aims and scope 26 27

FJ, 14, 18, 22 July 1826. Peter Brett, ‘Political dinners in early-nineteenth-century Britain: platform, meeting place and battleground’, History, 81, no. 264 (Oct. 1996), pp 527–52. 28 BNL, 3 Oct. 1826.

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of this initiative make it appear less as a one-off confidence boost, and more like the inauguration of a new national strategy prior to the new parliamentary session in November, anticipating the Brunswick movement of 1828. An organising committee circulated invitations and co-ordinated the event to ensure no repeat of recent election disorder. Although plebeian Protestant sanction was still sought, the balance between rough and respectable was altered, and the line between exceeding, and staying within, constitutional norms was firmly drawn. Two hundred guests assembled at Rogers’s Inn, then walked in stately procession through a ‘dense mass’ of supporters to the Market House dinner. This political and social choreography coincided with the lighting of a huge bonfire on Cathedral Hill. The table party reinforced the constitutional theme. It was headed by the High Sheriff with Verner on his right and, to his left, the veteran Derry loyalist, Sir George Hill, the Cavan M.P., Henry Maxwell, John Corry Moutray of the Tyrone gentry, Lord George Beresford, Colonel Leslie, and Verner’s kinsman, the Wicklow evangelical Colonel Wingfield. Then came landed dignitaries including Colonel Blacker, plus various Anglican clerics and Presbyterian ministers. The combined propertied income on display was reckoned at £400,000 annually. After opening toasts to the king, the duke of York, the Lord Lieutenant (‘received without cheering’) and the Primate (‘immense cheering’), the speeches began. An Anglican clergyman, Dr Miller, refuted charges that his church was illiberal, distinguishing between a false liberalism which compromised with Catholicism, and ‘true liberality’: free expression of opinion rather than the Catholics’ ‘mental slavery’. Only Protestants could safely hold political power, and Presbyterians could be assured, except those ‘deluded by pretended liberality’, that ‘the orthodox part of them’ was ‘kept apart from us only by … long-established habits’. Miller then toasted Verner, noting approvingly how he had awakened ‘that spirit … long the boast of the county of Armagh’. Verner replied by contrasting his own loyalty with Brownlow’s treachery for having priests in his election committee.29 Beresford followed with remarks about ‘unconstitutional’ doings in Waterford, then justified the Protestant cause historically, based on the principles of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 – a settlement now eroded ‘until nothing remains to be given but the surrender of the Protestant Constitution’. Protestant ascendancy, ‘if you will call it by that name’, was synonymous with ‘the fundamental principles of the British constitution’. Catholics were congenitally disloyal, and emancipation was a ‘stepping stone’ to subvert Protestantism in church and state. Alluding to the ‘Second Reformation’, he argued that the peasantry should emancipate themselves from priests before considering politics. Liberal Protestants would see who their real friends were as elections became ‘a contest between the landed propriety and the priests’ who manipulated voters by threatening denial of religious rites, thus disproving liberal claims that the ‘Romish Church was stripped of its civil influence’. ‘What may we expect … were it elevated to political power, and united … with all that is … disaffected in the state? … If ever the Protestant constitution needed strenuous and straightforward advocates, it is at this moment.’ Beresford’s guiding theme was that recent events had misrepresented public opinion and that ‘the real 29

BNL, 13 Oct. 1826.

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sentiments of the Protestant gentry of this great and powerful part of the empire need but to be made known … to secure the permanence of our establishment’.30 Several points emerge about loyalism from these opening salvoes. The appropriation of exclusive loyalty, while it could denigrate the Catholic Association by emphasising the old and convenient Protestant loyalty-Catholic rebelliousness paradigm as a justification for continued ascendancy, was less useful against liberal Protestants. Their primary loyalty to king and country could not now be easily challenged without raising uncomfortable questions about Dissent in an Anglican establishment. Where liberal Protestant emancipationists were vulnerable, it was calculated, was in their attachment to the Protestant constitution. This went to the core of the Whig traditions and ideology within Irish Protestantism, as it juxtaposed issues of political and religious liberty. If liberals could be made to appear as having compromised revolution principles by selling out on Protestantism, then the foundations of their political loyalty were vulnerable. Henry Maxwell paraphrased the struggle as attempts ‘to substitute, in the place of Protestant Ascendancy, a system of Popery and Priestcraft’. But religion and politics were part of the ‘great work which commenced at the Reformation [and] perfected by the Glorious Revolution’ and now ‘every loyal man … [should] come forward in defence of his dearest rights and liberties’. After apologies were read from Henry Goulburn and George Dawson, Sir George Hill rose to praise Dawson’s fidelity and thanked the chairman for the toast linking him with Derry’s ‘’Prentice Boys’, whose constitutional principles provided his political creed. Dr Robinson, representing another Anglican bastion, Trinity College, spoke next. He lambasted the Catholic Association, and noted that neither Fermanagh nor Tyrone Protestantism was fully represented, nor were the Fosters of Louth. ‘Can it be … that they are dead to the call [and] indifferent to the high Protestant feelings … of Ulster?’ Protestants should remember 1641, ‘bind themselves together’ and alert parliament to their anger. Toasts followed to Peel, and to ‘a loyal and highly respectable body of Protestants – the Synod of Ulster’. The Reverend Hogg replied that most Presbyterians agreed, stressing their attachment to the liberty achieved by ‘William of glorious memory’. Hogg claimed that the essential loyalty of Presbyterians had been proven by the fact that there were relatively few rebel clergymen in 1798. Moreover, a pro­emancipation declaration by the synod of 1813 was, said Hogg, unrepresentative. Similar loyal claims were made for the doctrinally conservative seceding Presbyterians. The speeches concluded with Blacker blasting ‘modern Whiggery’ and that ‘wily necromancer J. K. L.’ (O’Connell’s supporter, Bishop Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin). Holt Waring answered a toast to the Orangemen, claiming that Protestants would again ‘join their united strength’ and that Parliament would welcome reinvigorated loyal associations: For loyalty is still the same, Whether it win or lose the game; True as the dial to the sun Altho’ it be not shone upon.31 30 31

Draft of speech, 5 Oct. 1826 (P.R.O.N.I., Beresford papers, T2772/2/6/6C). BNL, 13 Oct. 1826.

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This was a serious initiative: three separate drafts of Beresford’s lengthy speech survive, indicating his concern to pitch things right, and the location was carefully chosen as the dynamo of a national revival. The organisers took care to ensure maximum publicity: the event was extensively publicised in the Dublin Evening Mail, and the speeches reproduced verbatim in the Belfast Newsletter, which printed a two-page supplement, a rare occurrence usually reserved for the proceedings of the Presbyterian General Assembly. This indicates the importance of the event and the strategy of disseminating the message downwards and outwards from the top table. However, the deliberate manipulation suggests a need to create as much as to publicise a viable public opinion to counteract the opposition. But therein lay the problem: to do so meant stretching traditional opinion impossibly. To succeed it needed to mobilise sufficient numbers to counteract O’Connell’s mass movement while simultaneously creating a socially elevated platform to surmount liberal Protestantism’s aristocratic supporters. It is indicative of the fragmented state of Protestant opinion and the parlous condition of exclusive loyalty that at least as much rhetoric was spent damning political liberalism as resisting the damnations of popery. This duality explains the incongruous combination of mass support and the constitutional flaunting of £400,000 worth of property. Social status was an engine of dissemination and guarantor of fidelity, but additional political propulsion was envisaged in Ulster Protestant numbers and Armagh’s Orange ‘spirit’. Politically this duality made sense – a squaring of the battle lines dictated by the enemy’s formation – but it created confusion for the foot soldiers of Holt Waring’s envisaged new loyal association. Unlike the Catholic Association with its rent and travelling agitators, this was passive politicisation: the plebeians were expected to obey their betters deferentially. Indeed, Waring’s sabre-rattling belied his evidence to a select committee as to the way in which the gentry had first sponsored Orangeism to rescue it from lower class control.32 Moreover, using the rhetoric of anti-Catholic loyalism as a common denominator to transcend Anglican-Dissenter divisions was problematic as, historically, the effectiveness of this configuration had fluctuated in ratio to the physical danger from rebellion. In terms of public opinion, therefore, the wish to create an impression of unity is more apparent than acceptance of its implications. In the short term, though, the wider impact of the dinner soon became apparent. Taking the hint from Armagh, a Fermanagh county meeting was held to prepare petitions. In Sligo, parish petitioning meetings were held, while gentry in Tyrone gave a dinner themselves Colonel Verner at Omagh at which similar anti-Catholic, anti-liberal sentiments to those recently voiced at Armagh were expressed. There was also a deliberate attempt to involve the masses. Parties of mounted men with bands of music, marshalled people from nearby towns and marched over 10,000 to Omagh, ensuing that gentry opinion was amplified out of doors. The fact that this cavalcade was held on 6 November (the fifth being a Sunday) unquestionably

32 Report of the select committee of the House of Lords on the state of Ireland, H.L. 1825 (521), ix, p 334.

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invited traditional popular Williamite associations.33 Beneath the public excitement, however, some key figures were privately less sanguine. Sir George Hill, who had attended the Armagh dinner, was equivocal when he told Peel of Protestant feelings on 2 November 1826, as the new parliamentary session opened. Hill said that the ‘lively active opposition’ to emancipation had abated with a ‘few exceptions in the North’, and that Protestant ‘apathy’ fed on governmental weakness in permitting the Catholic Association to re-emerge ‘when the Orangemen were almost universally dissolved’, raising fears of eventual betrayal from Westminster. Hill also noted that, even in Ulster, the ‘small gentry’ were trimming, and calculated that the opening emancipation debate would see support increase and the government succumb. In contradistinction to the impression assiduously cultivated at Armagh, the waverers included ‘many of the wealthier Presbyterians’, but most poorer Dissenters and almost all farmers remained firm. Hill could not say so publicly, but despite the ‘honest phalanx of gentlemen’, he reckoned the time had passed for regenerating a ‘party Protestant’ and they could only bargain as ‘Ireland will eventually become a Popish country’.34 Goulburn detected distinctive regional responses to this growing tension. In Ulster he feared party clashes, but landed and lower-class Protestants elsewhere believed they had either to flee the countryside or be in constant ‘preparation for death’. In Louth an ex-magistrate demanded arms for self-defence, claiming that armed Ribbonmen boasted they would ‘exterminate the Protestants’, while an inoffensive Athlone landowner was attacked simply for once having been a yeoman.35 Dire predictions and panicky fears notwithstanding, the success or otherwise of elite-driven political regeneration would soon be put to the test of public opinion. Although the Catholic question did not come before parliament until March 1828, the period after the Armagh political dinner was one of growing uncertainty, in which the Protestant cause endured more body blows. After the death of the staunchly ‘Protestant’ duke of York, the Reverend Horner of Dungannon used a memorial sermon on 14 January 1827 to shore up opinion. The duke, he intoned, ‘was calumniated by “reptiles” because he took his stand for a party – you too have done the same in your sphere … those who malign a Prince will not hesitate to malign an ordinary subject … and unless I mistake your character … these principles [the Protestant constitution] you will only forsake with your lives’.36 Lord Liverpool’s stroke and his replacement with the pro-Catholic Canning in April 1827 was another set back. Moreover, the position concerning Orange suppression was unclear: the 1825 legislation was effective for two years, but had the possibility of re-enactment.37 The attempts to organise Protestant opinion in late 1826 were aimed at ‘making

33 BNL, 7, 10 Nov. 1826; Petition from Union of Tawnagh, n.d. [late 1826] (P.R.O.N.I, Coopers­ hill papers, D4031/F/12/2). 34 Hill to Peel, 2 Nov. 1826 (Peel: private correspondence, i, 424–6). 35 Bigges to Goulburn, 20 Nov. 1826; Goulburn to Peel, 14 Dec. 1826 (P.R.O., HO100/216, ff 7–8, 114–5). 36 Robert Horner, Sermon on the death of H.R.H. the late duke of York (Dungannon, 1827). 37 G. I. T. Machin, The Catholic question in English politics, 1820–1830 (Oxford, 1964), pp 49–50.

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parliament aware of your anger’.38 In an unreformed parliament, petitioning was a key way of representing public opinion. Overall, it had increased from a yearly average of 176 in the five years ending 1785 to 2,454 in 1826. Since the late ­eighteenth-century two broad types had evolved. The first and more traditional form, ‘constitutional petitioning’, involved those generated by county and civic meetings properly convened by requisition to the High Sheriff, sanctioned by the local authority and containing a broadly representative section of the populace headed by the gentry. However, a newer form, ‘institutional’ petitioning, came to prominence during this period, involving petitions generated by specific institutions, religious sects and interest groups, including trade unions. Parliamentarians felt that constitutional petitioning offered the best representation of opinion, provided it was broadly representative and not artificially forced. Institutional petitioning did not produce the same consensus, with politicians like Peel suspicious of the manipulative capacity of interest groups.39 The 1826–7 session saw many petitions for and against emancipation. My own calculations on the basis of the returns in the Commons Journals suggest that 157 Irish anti-emancipation petitions were presented to the Commons during that session, rather less than the number from the rest of the United Kingdom. Their provenance is revealing. Ninety-two were from parishes, though the number of parishes represented is still greater at 114, due to the occasional practice of combining parishes on one petition. There were 13 town petitions, 13 diocesan petitions (from 22 Irish dioceses), 12 from Presbyterian congregations, 11 from counties, 7 from Dublin guilds, 5 from cities, 3 from baronies and 1 from the Protestant landowners of Ireland.40 Parish, town and Presbyterian congregation County Fermanagh 21 Antrim Donegal 18 Londonderry Cavan 16 Wicklow Wicklow 14 Westmeath Wexford 11 Fermanagh Armagh 10 Donegal Tyrone 7 Armagh Monaghan 6 Sligo Down 5 Tyrone Westmeath 3 King’s County Londonderry 2 Monaghan Dublin 2 Queen’s County 1 Galway 1 Meath 1 Tipperary 1

These statistics reveal a relative dearth of county petitions, as compared to parish and congregational petitions. The scant return from southern counties is perhaps 38 39 40

BNL, 13 Oct. 1826. Jupp, British politics on the eve of reform, pp 216–20. Commons Journals, 1826–27 Vol. 82.

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understandable in the context of the fears of their gentry; however the lack of any response from the city and, more especially the county, of Cork and its strongly Protestant boroughs of Youghal and Bandon, less so. Lord George Beresford had criticised the duke of Devonshire at Armagh for his complacent liberalism, so it is likely that his influence prevented petitions from these quarters, with the Hely-­Hutchinsons stifling any movement in Cork city, where Protestant opinion was organised more for electioneering than petitioning. The lack of a County Down petition reflected the dominance of the Hills and Stewarts, who controlled both seats, yet the gap between parliamentary appearance and public opinion is evident at ground-level when it is considered that there were 144 Orange lodges in the county before dissolution.41 Where figures are available, it appears that northern county petitions were heavily supported. George Dawson presented those from Londonderry, Antrim, Tyrone, Westmeath and Wicklow. The Londonderry petition had over 22,000 signatures, while that from Antrim, whose premier noble Lord O’Neill had been Orange Grand Master of Ireland, over 20,000.42 Monaghan’s raw political divisions were reflected in the fact that its petition was limited to the High Sheriff and Grand Jurors. In terms of public opinion, however, local petitioning is the most interesting variety as parish, town and, especially, congregational petitioning could be seen as ‘institutional’, because interest groups like the clergy could pressurise people. It is difficult to say how ‘genuine’ such opinion was, particularly when dealing with petitioning on such a scale. Even where sources are available, claims and counter-claims can be hard to disentangle. Nonetheless selected examples from Ulster and Leinster raise crucial questions about plebeian loyalist political awareness and elite manipulation. Although Down produced no county petition, three parish petitions were got up, one of which was highly controversial. The papers of the ultra-Protestant Downpatrick M.P. John Waring Maxwell reveal that parish petitions were chosen strategically as the best vehicle for Protestant opinion. As ‘so many of the leading interests’ were pro-Catholic ‘you cannot have any petition against them from the county’.43 The first parish petition came from Bangor and was organised by James Cleland of Rathgael, a local landowner, magistrate and yeomanry captain. His local connections make this look like institutional petitioning at its manipulative worst, yet he insisted: ‘If ever there was a petition originated in the spontaneous act of the people, this from Bangor has a claim to that title.’ Cleland argued that, as other landowners opposed it – the Whig Colonel Ward and the radical Sharman Crawford – he, Cleland, had to intervene, ‘finding that they [the populace] were determined to ­petition’. ‘Fearing that it would get into bad hands’ he agreed to write and manage the petition. Cleland confidently expected it to be signed by most adult males, which was significant as the area had a high ratio of Presbyterians to Anglicans and had been strongly United Irish in the 1790s. A liberal counter-petition was organised and presented by Charles Brownlow. The liberals accused Cleland of sectarianism, 41 42 43

Jupp, British politics on the eve of reform, p 161. Hansard 2: parliamentary debates, xvi, pp 787–8. Cleland to Maxwell, 16 Dec. 1826, Trail to Bullick, 28 Dec. 1826 (P.R.O.N.I., Perceval-Maxwell papers, D3244/G/1/40,41).

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by frightening people into signing by saying they must choose ‘between the King and the Pope’ otherwise the Catholics would ‘cut their throats’. Cleland countered, using the rhetoric of traditional loyalism by alleging that his opponents had exploited ‘the principles of 1798’, and had sufficient inside knowledge of the Catholic Association to make ‘marked men’ of those signing the Protestant petition. Ironically Cleland himself wanted ‘a list of the persons who have signed the Bangor counter-petition … for it would show us our enemies, and if … their names were known, it would not be easy to get them to sign again’. Cleland assured Maxwell that care was taken not to use non-residents and claimed impressive figures. The parish contained 1,750 adult males, 1,337 of whom had signed Cleland’s petition; of the reminder, 100 were Roman Catholics, 100 were supportive, but afraid to sign, and only 213 had signed the counter-petition. Further anti-emancipation petitions came from the adjacent and heavily Presbyterian parishes of Donaghadee and Ballywalter, and from the ‘Protestants and Protestant Dissenters’ of the mainly Anglican Inch parish. This petition was co-ordinated by Anglican clerics and attracted 570 signatures. Cleland boasted that ‘all the Presbyterians are decidedly against Catholic Emancipation … although circumstances prevent their petitioning.’44 The Bangor petition is significant for several reasons. As both sides were prepared to use any means to gather support or damage the opposition, this could be represented by liberal Protestants as an example of institutional petitioning at its worst. Yet Cleland and Maxwell tried to limit the potential damage of defending the Protestant constitution through questionably constitutional means. One pro-emancipation peer, Lord Londonderry, told the House of Lords that the Bangor petition had been ‘hawked through the parish … and that the signatures of some had been obtained by deception’, an accusation denied by its lukewarm presenter, Lord Dufferin, based on Cleland’s proactive explanations.45 Cleland’s vagueness about official Presbyterian petitioning probably conceals the fact that, despite the overtures from Armagh about Protestant political unity, and notwithstanding Henry Cooke’s growing prominence, many Presbyterian ministers and elders still supported emancipation. Able to claim a less exclusive and more progressive loyalty, they felt immune to allegations of disloyalty. However, at a congregational level there was substantive, if not total, anti-Catholicism. The Belfast Newsletter’s correspondence columns reveal a vigorous debate on the petition between the religiously orthodox and liberal ‘nonsubscribers’. Considering these internal tensions, it was not surprising that opponents of emancipation ‘had difficulty in getting some person to take the lead and manage it for them’.46 Nor was it surprising that Cleland would readily oblige, as parish petitioning could foster anti-Catholic opinion as a surrogate for electioneering, and send a Trojan horse within the walls of County Down liberalism. The fact that Cleland’s mainly Presbyterian petitioners traditionally had supported the 44 Trail to Bullick, 28 Dec. 1826, Hutton to Maxwell, 23 Feb. 1827, Cleland to Maxwell, 16 Dec. 1826, 28 Feb., 12 March 1827 (P.R.O.N.I., Perceval-Maxwell papers, D3244/G/1/40–1 /48 /49, D3244/E/28/8). 45 Handbill: ‘Public dinner at Bangor’, 29 May 1827 (P.R.O.N.I., Perceval-Maxwell papers, D3244/G/1/54). 46 Finlay Holmes, The Presbyterian church in Ireland (Dublin, 2000), pp 92–4; Cleland to Maxwell, 16 Dec. 1826 (P.R.O.N.I., Perceval-Maxwell papers, D3244/G/1/40).

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independent interest against the same aristocratic families that they now opposed was less ironic than it seemed. Though the Hills and Stewarts had faced the petitioners’ United Irish fathers and the sons of old rebels were now replacing pikes with petitions, the fact that the opposition ran along precisely the same social lines must have helped Cleland’s cause. The reality was that the original Whig reformism of the early United Irishmen and later Orangeism both drew on similar ideological roots in eighteenth-century patriotism with its exclusively Protestant conception of liberty.47 Although southern circumstances differed, here too loyalist rhetoric and alarmism were used to obtain signatures for parish petitions. In Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Archibald Hamilton Jacob, a loyalist of 1798 vintage, launched an anti-emancipation petition in parallel with requests that the government augment his yeomanry, the Loyal Vinegar Hill Rangers. Jacob anticipated many alarmed applicants, and over 1,300 signed, including ex-liberals frightened by the Catholic Association’s mass plebeian membership. However this does not mean that the anti-Catholic opinion of parish petitions was entirely manufactured. In Down and Antrim, counties with large Presbyterian populations, the substantial numbers signing anti-emancipation petitions indicate levels of genuine support. While the evidence of manipulation is irrefutable, nonetheless many petitioners needed little encouragement. A County Antrim cleric told Cleland that people ‘offer their signatures without any solicitation’.48 Such parish petitioning overlapped with the renewed Protestant unity strategy begun at Armagh, and Cleland tried to capitalise on his achievements by organising a political dinner of his own at Stevenson’s Inn in Bangor in May 1827. This was ostensibly to tell petitioners of George IV’s rejection of the pro-emancipation Canning’s proposition to create new peers, but the real reason was further to cement the ‘party Protestant’. Cleland emphasised that ‘Protestants must unite and support each other, or … be crushed by numbers’ and refuted attacks on the petition’s constitutionality and the Northern Whig’s accusations of Orange manipulation. As at the Armagh dinner, the guest list and toasts advertised the representative respectable nature of cross-denominational unity, and the entire proceedings were printed in newspapers and as handbills. Interspersed with toasts to the king, Peel and Wellington, were others pointedly directed at the public. Though not an Orangeman, Cleland gave a huge wink in their direction by proposing ‘the glorious and immortal memory of King William who delivered our forefathers from Popery and Slavery’. This appeal to ‘True Whig’ traditions bears comparison with Beresford’s and Blacker’s remarks at Armagh and was conceived for the same reasons: to ideologically isolate aristocratic liberal Protestants from the bulk of Presbyterians by making resistance to emancipation seem conformable to traditions of political liberty. The Protestant constitution’s Erastian implications of Anglican dominance were blurred by toasts stressing Protestant unity in the face of physical danger. 47 Stephen Small, Political thought in Ireland, 1776–1798: Republicanism, Patriotism and Radicalism (Oxford, 2002), p 227. 48 Jacob to Peel, 30 Dec. 1826 (P.R.O., HO100/216, ff 369–70); Trail to Bullick, 28 Dec. 1826 (P.R.O.N.I., Perceval-Maxwell papers, D3244/G/1/41).

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These included the Protestant ascendancy ‘purchased by the blood of our ancestors’; the Apprentice Boys of Derry, ‘may every true Protestant re-echo the cry of “No Surrender” ’, and the Belfast Guardian’s editor, James Stuart, who had refuted the Northern Whig’s criticisms. Orthodox and seceding Presbyterians pledged support and, alongside these proofs of intra-Protestant unity, toasts to Lord Farnham and the Reformation Society indicate a belief that ascendancy’s ailing body politic could be restored by a transfusion of evangelicalism.49 The reality of priestly power in 1826 had initially stemmed the Second Reformation’s momentum; but it diverted along narrower channels with greater vigour. Evangelical landowners like Farnham became convinced that neither conventional politics nor paternalistic influence would save Protestantism. They must become much more proactive in the ‘Reformation’ to resist emancipation and maintain the union. Farnham was one of ‘the Bible gentry’ who was convinced that the educated elite concealed irreconcilable theological differences from the populace in a vain attempt to promote peace. Thus the same theme – landed indifference – that suffused the political revival meetings recurs in evangelical thought. The ‘Bible gentry’ also opposed emancipation politically, but hoped that proactive proselytising could turn defence into attack in a quantifiable propaganda-rich way. Politics, religion and social status became intermeshed in this network which included aristocrats like Lord Roden, whose connections illustrate the extensive linkages. He was related by his sister’s marriage to Lord Powerscourt, whose brother, the Reverend Edward Wingfield, was a passionate evangelical, as was the Rector of Powerscourt, County Wicklow, Robert Daly. Daly, in turn, was related to Farnham, as were the Wingfields to the Verners of Armagh. The influence of these networks operated vertically: upwards towards parliament and downwards to ordinary tenants, often through a ‘moral agent’. As in Britain, the evangelical impulse also radiated horizontally outwards towards urban professional and mercantile elites, like the Lefroys from Dublin’s legal establishment.50 Farnham saw his Cavan estate as a sanctuary to draw wavering Catholics from elsewhere. Weekly convert numbers were reported in the Protestant press and, in January 1827, he established the Reformation Society to spread the initiative nationally. By April affairs looked promising, with 1,340 conversions reported and important Dublin clerics, including Harcourt Lees, giving literary support: by the time of Cleland’s dinner, and with branches forming in Britain, confidence was high that religious renewal would propel political revival.51 Yet, if the components of ‘party Protestant’ initiatives like Cleland’s are abstracted from their rhetorical context and examined for their impact on non-elite opinion, the vintage claret of the top table toasts must have soured in the crowded reality of 49 Cleland to Maxwell, 28 Feb. 1827, Handbill, ‘Public dinner at Bangor’ (P.R.O.N.I., PercevalMaxwell papers, D3244/G/1/48 /54); DEM, 11 Dec. 1826. 50 Irene Whelan, ‘The Bible gentry: evangelical religion, aristocracy and the new moral order in the early nineteenth century’, in Crawford Gribben and Andrew R. Holmes (eds), Protestant millennialism, evangelicalism, and Irish society, 1790–2005 (Basingstoke, 2006), p 62; Desmond Bowen, The Protestant crusade in Ireland, 1800–70 (Dublin, 1978), pp 72–5. 51 Stewart J. Brown, National churches of England, Ireland and Scotland (Oxford, 2001), pp 120–9; idem, ‘The new reformation movement and the Church of Ireland, 1810–29’, in Stewart J. Brown and D. W. Miller (eds), Piety and power in Ireland, 1760–1960 (Belfast, 2000), pp 195–205.

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the expanding public sphere, whether in ale-house Orange lodge rooms, or bible meetings. From a plebeian Protestant perspective, where elite ideas were acted out at ground level, such ventures represented a veritable Protestant medley of traditional anti-Catholic loyalism, militarism, Orangeism and evangelicalism, concocted to appeal to all strands of opinion. This made tactical and ideological sense for the elite: many landowners genuinely believed that religious practice and political adherence were indistinguishable. However the Protestant revival lacked the coherence of O’Connell’s representation of emancipation as a panacea. The mixed messages being broadcast to Protestants would prove a mixed blessing in attempts to create a viable mass-based public opinion. For one thing, the Reformation stimulated opposition which, in turn, raised sectarian tensions, a scenario which always redounded to the disadvantage of the ultras, whose cause was predicated on the shibboleth that Protestants were loyal and Catholic rebellious. Farnham held public meetings to trumpet convert numbers and spread his society more widely. The Catholic clergy resented the reformers, and bitter rivalries were worked out publicly in the ­1824–6 ‘bible war’. Bible meetings were disrupted and rival clerics issued challenges to engage in public disputation, generating great popular interest. Goulburn noted the transformative effects: ‘Our divisions are no longer political. The language of the priests is more directed against the Protestant religion than against the Protestant ascendancy. The destruction of a Bible school is a more exciting cause than the attainment of political privilege.’ Yet, Goulburn’s assessment failed to consider how plebeian Protestants understood the expanded ‘public sphere’. In reality, bible societies, alongside the entire paraphernalia of theological disputes, rowdy electioneering, Catholic rent, contested parades, faction fights, petitioning meetings, newspapers, broadsheets, songs and ballads meant that political abstractions like emancipation and the Protestant constitution were becoming a tangible local feature where they merged with extant divisions, as the ‘Ballymena Controversials’ show.52 The Reformation Society’s success was short-lived and declined from mid-1827.53 As it dwindled, however, great interest was generated by a public theological disputation in Ballymena. Previously Presbyterians had largely ignored proselytising and public disputation, but in August 1827 and perhaps reflecting Henry Cooke’s influence, the Presbyterian minister of Portglenone, William Kennedy McKay, locked horns with Bernard McAuley, Catholic priest of Crebilly. McKay noted: ‘As the reformed and Romish churches are … opposed … as regards light and darkness’, public discussion would enable the ‘rational enquirer’ to obtain divine truth. Protestant reformers usually issued challenges like declarations of war, supremely confident and determined to achieve maximum publicity. McKay had recently upbraided another priest for ‘obscene and histrionic language’, and warned that his ‘mean scurrility’ would be publicised by ‘a public challenge to dispute … until all the fifty points of Popery are gone over’. In many respects these debates paralleled the new mass politics. At the gladiatorial climax in Ballymena courthouse, 200 tickets were sold to ‘auditors’, half Protestant, half Catholic, chairmen appointed and newspaper reporters invited. The Guardian reported the Ballymena affair alongside other 52 53

Goulburn to Peel, 31 Oct. 1826 (Peel: private correspondence, i, 421–2). Brown, ‘New reformation’, pp 195–205.

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reformation items, including discussion on Catholic superstitions about miraculous healing. These affairs were presented to show how the established church led the new reformation, but their ‘Protestant Presbyterian brethren have not remained far behind. If Protestants of every grade, rank and denomination’ united ‘Popery would disappear from Ireland’.54 For ordinary Protestants, pre-existing local sectarian contexts helped condition perceptions: in the Ballymena case the rival clerics came from Portglenone and Crebilly, both notorious areas for Orange-Ribbon affrays, making the theological contest appear as an extension of older conflicts by other means. In such instances the possibility of militant rhetoric being interpreted as a call to once-familiar militarised activity cannot be discounted. Customary forms of expression – Orange parades and demonstrations of armed loyalism – had been discouraged by the government and were now treated equivocally by the gentry. Many ‘Bible gentry’ were premillennialists who believed that present danger would spark an apocalyptic struggle to inaugurate a new era (Protestantism’s triumph over Antichrist/Popery) before Christ’s Second Coming.55 Cumulatively, the increasingly exciting mass activity of petitioning meetings, public controversy and political rallies inculcated the same sense of impending crisis but at social levels where it would be interpreted very differently. The effect was broadly ‘politicising’ but, as the enemy became more tangible, old political certainties faded. As the political dinners showed, dissolution did not entirely stifle Orangeism as a vehicle for political expression. Yet, within the Orange constituency too, there were conflicting views to compounded the rank and file’s difficulties. Harcourt Lees’s Benevolent and Religious Orange Society sent Ogle Gowan, once Grand Lodge secretary, through Ulster issuing ‘precepts’ to replace Orange warrants. This interference was opposed by many northern Orange gentry, including Blacker and James Verner, who wanted to keep existing structures intact, to be resurrected when the legislation lapsed. The Benevolent challenge, however, allowed Verner to tell Orangemen publicly that ‘this institution is not only unconnected with the late Orange society … but … has been got up in defiance … of the late Grand Lodge of Ireland’.56 In one sense, Lees kept step with broader developments – one of his organisation’s objects was to aid the ‘new reformation’, which was strong around Ballymena. Verner’s opposition indicates tension between the traditional gentry control of popular loyalism that he represented and this new Dublin-originated invader. Yet, for ordinary Orangemen, competition for their adherence must been confusing, as it was unclear whether they could resume their parading in July. The fact that some former leaders counselled them to obey the laws, others like Verner and Holt Waring winked at illegal parades and suggested new loyal associations and still others like Lees promoted new structures, must have conveyed the distinct impression that the Protestant elite were hopelessly divided. In these circumstances the 1827 July anniversaries were awaited anxiously. 54 55 56

McKay to O’Neill, 17 Aug. 1827 (P.R.O.N.I, D2579/4/1); BGCA, 22 June, 10, 17 July 1827. Whelan, ‘Bible gentry’, pp 61, 73. Printed Notice, 15 Jan. 1827 (G.O.L.I., archive box 2 shelf BI); Hereward Senior, Orangeism in Britain and Ireland, 1795–1836 (London and Toronto, 1966), pp 218–19.

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Parading generally kept pace with other expansions in the public political arena. The freemasons continued to gather publicly on Saint John’s day and it had become customary for Ribbonmen to march on Saint Patrick’s day, making the continued discountenance of Orange parades problematic as the increasing tempo of parading meant that to forego this right of expression would further damage an already embattled cause. Moreover, there was uncertainty about whether the legislation was still operative. The Ulster inspector-general of police, Major Thomas D’Arcy, needed the attorney-general’s opinion to scotch rumours that, with parliament prorogued, the law had lapsed.57 Magistrates were asked to put up warning notices and consult with those who had influence with the Orangemen. The result was mixed. Parades were prevented in Dublin and in southern counties, with several minor exceptions.58 In Ulster, processions were again avoided in Belfast, but there were gatherings elsewhere, several of them notably larger than normal. The Belfast Guardian reported parades in Hillsborough, Banbridge, Rathfriland, Newry, Warrenpoint, Portadown, Tandragee, Markethill, Loughgall, Armagh City, Newtownhamilton, Derry City, Dungannon and Enniskillen. The conduct of the commemorations paralleled the objectives of recent political dinners. A strike against liberal Protestantism was made at Hillsborough. Lord Downshire had just returned from England, but, though only a token few Orange lodges appeared, his tenants made their point in a symbolically significant hiatus in deference, by sullenly refusing to light bonfires to mark his return lest they were accused of Orangeism. The wish to demonstrate numbers was also evident. In Banbridge and Portadown the Orange gatherings were large, 2,000 and 5,000 respectively, and ‘immense’ at Tandragee. In Enniskillen the day saw ‘much greater parade and ceremony than … on any former occasion’ and the O’Connellite press accused the ‘still favoured members of the Orange faction’ – the county governor, Lord Enniskillen, ‘and every other Orange magistrate and Police Constable’ of connivance in this event which saw priests advise their flock to quit the town. Several reports stress that Orangemen were accompanied by massed female supporters. Sometimes the gentry overtly involved themselves in order to prevent trouble. At Portadown the magistrate, Curran Woodhouse, read the attorney-­general’s opinion to lodge masters but, with only fourteen police officers available, he prudently decided not to stop the parade. At Tandragee, Dean Carter took firearms from Orange marchers, and after the parade a dinner was held for some forty gentlemen of the ‘Boyne Association’. At Dungannon, Killyman Orangemen were invited to parade in the grounds of Northland House and be entertained by the Knox family in an effort to prevent public procession, it being market day. This was complied with, but, as the lodges were being treated, groups from outlying districts entered the town and paraded at will. Yet the overall impression was of control. The Northern Whig implicitly contrasted liberal loyalty with its plebeian Orange equivalent, calling the public drunkenness and ‘litany of rags and ribbands’ ‘the

57 D’Arcy to Downshire, 6 July 1827 (P.R.O.N.I., Downshire papers, D671/C/12/336); FJ, 12 July 1827. 58 Willcocks to Gregory, 17 June 1827; Lansdowne to Wellesley, 20 July 1827 (P.R.O., HO100/217, ff 226–7, 242–5).

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usual display of loyalty’ (original emphasis).59 Many locations were indeed decorated for the occasion: the use of flags, garlands of orange lilies and triumphal arches was not new, but the frequent mention and depth of detail suggests that the emblematic aspect was unusually important. The Tandragee Orangemen sported twenty-eight stand of colours, but Enniskillen exceeded everywhere in emblematic display. Elaborate arches were erected on the town’s east and west bridges, which were festooned with flags, equestrian statues of William III, crowns of flowers and ribbons, loyal mottoes to George IV and political slogans. The arch on the west bridge was topped by a placard inscribed on the ‘town side’: ‘WELLINGTON, PEEL AND THE PRESENT ADMINISTRATION’ and, on the obverse: ‘THE UNITED EFFORTS OF ENNISKILLEN AND DERRY FOR PROTESTANT ASCENDANCY’. In the unlikely event of anyone missing the message the Erne Packet newspaper reproduced a drawing of the arches and inscriptions, probably the first depiction of an Orange arch published.60 Beyond the obvious function of reminding everyone that the ministry opposed emancipation, if any local representatives of the government had been able to stop physical parades, such inanimate emblems could still have marked the day. Moreover, as with speeches at petitioning meetings and political dinners, the heavily symbolic emblems inundated plebeian Protestants with political information which explained their present experience through collective views of the past. This cross-fertilisation was apparent in toasts given near the cradle of Orangeism at Loughgall in County Armagh. Orangemen drank to individuals and institutions past and present representing a national focus of allegiance: the king, the duke of Clarence, the army and navy, William III, Wellington, Eldon and Peel, ‘who would not barter their principle for the sake of office’. Local landed loyalists like Blacker were also toasted, as were the 1826 electoral candidates. Additionally, other contemporary strands of Protestant experience, actual or desired, were mixed in the toasting, including ‘Primate Beresford’, ‘the Reverend Hogg’ and the ‘Protestant Dissenters of Ireland’ and ‘civil and religious liberty, the emancipation of the human mind from the trammels of superstition and priestcraft’. The readiness of these Orangemen in Loughgall to adopt the political dinner format as a substitute for their more traditional mode of expression by parading is indicative of the gathering pace and organisational sophistication of the Protestant political revival. Aware of the need to broadcast their views, the health of the Belfast Guardian’s editor, James Stuart, was duly drunk. Stuart reciprocated by printing the entire proceedings, taking care to note how the Loughgall loyalists were of all denominations and vied with one another in attachment to ‘our happy constitution’. Yet the organisers were careful not to turn their back on tradition. The dinner’s location in James Sloan’s pub (where the first Orange warrants were issued in 1795) encapsulates the meditated relationship between past and present, between local and national issues, between the different Protestant strands and between popular loyalism and elite politics: a compound to mend the crumbling walls of ascendancy.61 59 60 61

BGCA, 13, 16, 20 July 1827; NW, 19 July 1827; FJ, 16, 17, 18 July 1827. Erne Packet, 12 July 1827. BGCA, 20 July 1827; Senior, Orangeism, pp 19–20.

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For Protestants, the resignation of Canning’s emancipationist successor, Goderich, in January 1828, and the return of Wellington seemed favourable signs. However in that same month the Catholic Association ominously flexed its political muscle by organising simultaneous meetings in 1,600 of Ireland’s 2,500 parishes, putting the 92 Protestant parish petitions of the previous session into grim perspective. This had predictable effects in places where Protestants were a minority, as some detected a ‘Popish Plot’ and talked of emigration.62 In the north, the recent initiatives continued and renewed petitioning activity began. Building on the extravagant demonstrations at Enniskillen in July, a constitutionally convened county meeting was planned for Fermanagh. Though the county had petitioned in 1827, the Belfast Guardian considered this to be a new initiative intended to stimulate wider emulation throughout Ulster as ‘surely the Protestant counties will be ashamed to slumber any longer’. Sir Harcourt Lees recommended parish anti-emancipation petitions. Though based at Blackrock, County Dublin, his sights were firmly set on Ulster. Parish petitions, though lacking the social and constitutional gravitas of those from counties, were easier to manage and could reduce the time between planning and production of signed petitions (a three-week gap had occurred between calling and staging the Fermanagh meeting).63 Most Protestant petitioning was again parish based. There were 99 petitions representing 102 parishes, with 8 from towns and one townland, 4 from Dublin guilds, 3 from Presbyterian congregations, 2 from Anglican dioceses, 2 from Dublin city and three personal petitions from Harcourt Lees. Despite the appeal to the counties, only six responded: Antrim, Tyrone, Fermanagh, Armagh and Cavan, plus a petition from the Monaghan Grand Jury.64 The geographical distribution of parish petitioning shows some similarities and some significant differences from 1826–7. Cavan Wicklow Monaghan Sligo Armagh Tyrone

31 Down 20 Westmeath 15 Antrim 13 Carlow 9 Mayo 5 Wexford

4 Cork 4 Fermanagh 2 Meath 2 Queen’s 2 2

1 1 1 1

The lack of any Londonderry petitions, city, county or parish suggests that Sir George Hill’s instinct that things were changing was correct. The continuity of activity between Cavan and Wicklow and Wexford’s decline suggests that, despite the hullabaloo raised by Jacob in Enniscorthy, the real organisational impetus for petitioning came less from the traditional loyalist nexus of yeomanry, Orangeism and 1798 memories and more from the strong evangelical connection between the former two counties. However, the relative paucity of Presbyterian congregational petitions raises questions about whether the inter-denominational unity avidly talked up at meetings accurately reflected opinion. The other significant point about parish petitioning in Wicklow and Cavan, and to an extent Sligo, Monaghan and 62 63 64

McClintock to Ferrard, 8 Feb. [1828] (P.R.O.N.I., Additional Foster papers D3084/4/44). BGCA, 25 March, 15 April 1828. Commons Journals, 1828, vol. 83.

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Tyrone, was that contemporary Ordnance Survey sheets indicate that the active parishes were contiguous, and therefore petitioning came in clusters, suggesting high localised levels of co-ordination, more so than in 1826–7, again partly attributable to evangelical networks.65 One of the first 1828 petitions came from the Cavan parish of Kildallen. Harcourt Lees wanted this precedent to be imitated throughout Ulster to show ministers that Protestants were ‘neither terrified nor asleep’. Lees planned to co-ordinate emulation by proceeding northwards to Ballymena, where he hoped everyone had signed ‘some petition or other against Popery’. Convinced of his popularity, this self-appointed messiah asked to be allowed to proceed between Newry and Ballymena ‘without the least symptom of exultation and applause’ in his honour. From the thin press reportage, it seems these temptations were resisted. Lees was similarly erratic when it came to organisation. On the one hand, and reflecting recent developments in the nature of petitioning, he saw the need for efficiency, co-ordination and expedition and produced a template which parishes could transfer onto parchment, facilitating quicker and more widespread responses. He also saw how Benevolent Orangeism could function as a petitioning agency. His Ballymena meeting on 10 April 1828 coincided with its quarterly meeting. Despite his messianic predictions, Lees did not appear personally, but conveyed his injunctions by letter. At the meeting, many new ‘branches’ of the society were formed and loyal toasts drunk to the usual Protestant icons, the Church, the Reformation Society, the ‘Protestant part of the Synod of Ulster’, on whose behalf the Reverend Allen declared attachment to the Benevolent institution. This latter toast can be seen in the context of recently struggles within Presbyterianism between a theologically liberal section of ‘Arians’ and a more orthodox Trinitarian tendency. After bitter debates in Synod and in pamphlet, Henry Cooke had triumphed and it looks as though this doctrinal victory for the conservatives was being exploited politically within the framework of Benevolent Orangeism. Indeed other toasts to both the new and the original Orange societies reveal that Benevolent Orangeism had organisational roots in Counties Londonderry and Antrim. Carefully chosen adjectives liked ‘active’ and ‘efficient’ imply that petitioning capability was not uniform. Though the ‘late’ Orangemen of Down and Donegal sent representatives, unity was lacking as none came from Armagh or western Ulster.66 Moreover, separate revival initiatives from Armagh and Fermanagh and the hostility of Blacker and the Verners towards Benevolent Orangeism suggests that attempts to mobilise and unify Protestant politics from Ulster were themselves fraught with disunity. In part the causes were organisational: broadly speaking it is possible to distinguish between those who saw traditional Orangeism as the basis to mobilise opinion and those who believed the Benevolent society served the purpose better. At another level, the loyalist foundations of traditional Orangeism were yoked to militarism in the militia and yeomanry, both sources of power to county elites. Benevolence and religion may not have attracted those whose experience had 65 66

Census of Ireland, general topographical survey (Dublin and Edinburgh, 1904). Ian McBride, Scripture politics (Oxford, 1998), pp 116, 119–21; BGCA, 28 March, 18 April 1828.

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taught that self-defence was a powerful rallying call for plebeian Protestants and an effective electoral tool. The Belfast Guardian printed the Fermanagh county meeting’s speeches verbatim. These cast the O’Connellite challenge in rebellious terms, with the sheriff, D’Arcy Irvine, stressing that, though liberals may compromise with ‘the traitors of the Popish Association’, Fermanagh Protestants too much value the constitution ‘for which our fathers bled’, to yield it to ‘the descendants of those they formerly defeated, and who … only want an opportunity to execute the same cruelties’ as in 1641, 1688 and 1798. Several speakers noted the county’s reputation for loyalty: Sir Henry Brooke hoped that ‘the day’s proceedings would rouse the Protestants of Ulster, and the Protestants generally throughout the kingdom from their seeming apathy’ so every county could petition.67 At the height of the petitioning in April 1828, there were signs that gentry elements were becoming more overt in their encouragement of traditional Orangeism, but still, with a craftiness which O’Connell would have understood, they managed to stay within the law. Orange funerals had long doubled as political displays, but the funeral of a murdered lodge master near Belfast in April 1828 was used as a surrogate parade, attracting a huge crowd. Radicals complained that the funeral had been unnaturally delayed until a Sunday in order to draw the biggest possible crowd. The mourners marched in military order, bedecked in Orange colours, to hear a graveside oration by Sir Richard Bateson, M.P., later a leading Belfast Conservative.68 Harcourt Lees sensed these stirrings and, distrusting northern ultras to do the job right, addressed himself ‘to the Protestant Loyalists of Ulster’.69 The once-familiar term ‘loyalist’ was making a re-appearance. With so many crosscurrents, it is worth pausing to consider what it meant. Lees used it with characteristic inconsistency as an umbrella term for loyalty to Protestantism and old Whig 1688 principles in contradistinction to the new liberal Protestant, emancipationist ‘northern Whigs’. Yet he also used it in its original meaning, once threatening O’Connell’s ‘Liberators’ that he could ‘command, an army of 211,000 of the late Irish Orangemen, waiting in loyal tranquillity’.70 Such ambiguous obscuring of original military and political simplicity reduced the efficiency of loyalism as a political guarantor. Fermanagh Protestants, who had previously linked their loyalty to the government and to their Williamite traditions, would, by 1828, have had to reconfigure its focus. Indeed, all told, the 1828 petitioning, like the various Protestant revivals, was decidedly unfocussed. It was no surprise that, despite additional British petitioning, Burdett’s motion on the Catholic question passed the Commons by six votes on 12 May 1828. Tensions in Ireland soared as the Lords’ response was awaited. In Lurgan, Brownlow’s agent, William ‘Papist’ Handcock, sought to disarm the (thoroughly Orange) Lurgan yeomanry infantry. The political motivation was detected by the brigade-major, who told the under-secretary, William Gregory, that ‘under the present circumstances’ 67 68 69 70

BGCA, 15 April 1828. Draft memorial, n.d. [April 1828] (P.R.O.N.I., Tennent papers, D1748/G/767/2A). BGCA, 28 March 1828 BGCA, 28 March 1828; BNL, 24 Oct. 1826.

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this would ‘cause much dissatisfaction, not only to the members of the corps but to the entire loyal population of the country’.71 Nationally the pressure reached boiling point in July 1828. The month opened with emancipation being debated in the Lords, and the new viceroy, Anglesey (despite his own previous opposition to concession) was now advocated giving it serious consideration. Meanwhile O’Connell planned to contest a by-election in Clare. This tactic, of setting up a Catholic candidate rather than a liberal Protestant, put the legitimacy of the whole political system to the approval of the Catholic Association and re-emphasised Protestant weakness. Protestants in Kilrush in Clare were terrified, convinced that the priests had decided ‘the time to hunt them down has come at last’. Gregory reckoned that, as the Boyne anniversary approached, serious trouble was likely from Ulster Orangemen as ‘the persons of rank who formerly had influence over them have lost it, and they are in the hands of inferior men … as violent as the lowest of their order’.72 However, despite still being technically dissolved, the partial gentry-backed Orange revival of 1827 fed on the crisis. There were signs of renewed central direction to make the parades a riposte to O’Connell. The Dublin Evening Mail exhorted Orangemen throughout Ireland to parade, as ‘faith has been broken with them’; they had been ‘insulted’ while their enemies were ‘courted’. Now was the time ‘that they should show themselves in their power, and in their NUMBERS’. The Boyne commemoration would test the government, by ‘ascertaining whether the loyal Protestant of Ulster is to be prosecuted for exhibiting his Orange badge, while the seditious demagogue displays his Green decoration with impunity’. Much of this was rhetoric: demography dictated that this could not be a national exercise. From Tyrone, Edward Stopford told the Primate, ‘The Orangemen are determined to show all their strength … Here no bad effects can happen, but I fear for other places where parties are evenly balanced or Protestants in the minority.’ On 11 July Anglesey anxiously waited, believing the Orangemen ‘in a high state of excitement’.73 The Belfast Guardian played the numbers game to the full, reporting massive parades in Ulster, though again there was no Belfast parade. At several County Londonderry venues, lodges met ‘multitudes’ of non-Orange supporters. In Lurgan 18–20,000 gathered, with other large parades in Crossgar, Hillsborough, Cookstown, Markethill and Antrim, where the Benevolent Orangemen paraded. There were parades in Cavan town, Newbliss, County Monaghan and in Colonel Leslie’s Glaslough, where 6,000 marched with ‘scarcely a loyal Protestant in the county but was seen in their ranks’. Reporters stressed the marchers’ peaceful cross-denominational character and anxious discussion about southern events.74 Even allowing for exaggeration, the parades seem to have been controlled by levels of elite involvement. The O’Connellite press resorted to jibes about technical illegality rather than disorderly lawbreaking. There was one death in Ulster and some military problems 71 72

Hamilton to Gregory, 23 May 1828 (N.A.I., O.P.860). Tuyll to Anglesey, 3 July 1828 (P.R.O.N.I., Anglesey papers, D671/32A/2/81); cited in Senior, Orangeism, p 225. 73 DEM, 4 July 1828; Stopford to Beresford, 6 July 1828 (P.R.O.N.I., Beresford papers, T2772/2/6/17); Anglesey to Peel, 11 July 1828 (P.R.O.N.I., Anglesey papers, D619/26/C/64–5). 74 BGCA, 15 July 1828.

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in Dublin and the south, but the anniversary, if demonstrative, passed more quietly than anticipated.75 If the July parades were relatively peaceful, however, the relief of Derry commemoration on 12 August created a sensation which reverberated from the lowest Orangeman to the highest in the social order. A tradition of dining and speechmaking existed and the 1828 dinner had extra significance as it also marked the unveiling of a memorial to George Walker, a hero of 1689.76 On this symbolic day that ‘uncompromising Protestant, Derry Dawson’, who had rallied the cause on similar occasions, delivered a bombshell more devastating than any fired by James II’s troops. Taking as his theme how the relief of Derry should be celebrated in accordance with current political realities, Dawson’s opening platitudes to ‘true patriotism’ and ‘liberty’ received the standard applause from an audience unaware of the explosive ambiguity couched within these terms. It was praiseworthy, he said, that their ancestors had beaten James’s French allies, but the victory was a ‘mixed cup’ for Irishmen who were all ‘natives of the same soil’, and that the city’s heroic defender Walker and Patrick Sarsfield were both Irishmen. The audience’s reaction began to change when they realised that Dawson’s rhetoric was that of liberal, non-exclusive loyalism. Cries of ‘No! No!’ accompanied hissing as Dawson went on to claim that James’s supporters had also been loyal men, having sworn allegiance. Turning to the Catholic question, he said that it was the inescapable topic, met with at breakfast, dinner and supper tables, in Dublin Castle and the houses of country gentlemen, in grand jury rooms and vestries and the fairs and places of popular entertainment. This disordered state of affairs and the resultant antipathies were compounded by ­Catholic Association’s agitation, so granting relief was the best way of restoring tranquillity. This was classic liberal loyalism and Dawson was using this, of all occasions, to publicly announce his ratting. Sir George Hill, as chairman, strove to contain the howls of ‘down! down!’ Protocol dictated that Dawson be heard out, but when he had eventually finished, Hill hurriedly proposed a toast to the yeomanry. Rumours were abounding that Anglesey would dissolve the force. The yeoman John ­Schoales seized his opportunity to respond to Dawson. Equating the yeomanry with the original apprentice boys, he declared that yeomen were motivated by loyalty to king and constitution and opposed foreign and domestic enemies, and disarming would destroy the connection between Ireland and England, ‘cemented with Protestant blood’.77 The Belfast Guardian assured its disconsolate readers to ignore ‘the Brownlowizing of Mr. Dawson’, as English support and the coronation oath still protected them.78 Despite this, the damage to the Protestant cause was clear. The period since Orange dissolution, therefore, had seen recognition of the urgent need to organise and mobilise all Protestant opinion and that such regeneration must come from 75 Anglesey to Peel, 20, 26 July 1828 (P.R.O.N.I., Anglesey papers, D619/26/C/75–6, /82–3); see also: Senior, Orangeism, p 225; FJ, 14, 15 July 1828. 76 Jenkins, Era of emancipation: British government of Ireland, 1812–1830 (Kingston and Montreal, 1988), p 269. 77 Farnham to Wellington, 15 Aug. 1828 (S.U.L., Wellington papers, WP1/947/25); BGCA, 15 Aug. 1828. 78 BGCA, 15 Aug. 1828.

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Ulster. Yet the implementation lacked central direction and was even self-defeating in its contradictory appeals to different aspects of the Protestant experience. Unlike O’Connell’s mass movement, where the medium was the message, Protestants had many media and mixed messages. Dawson’s message, however, was unequivocal and Farnham frantically sent Wellington a verbatim report of the speech. The ramifications were felt at the highest levels of government. Peel told Hill that Dawson’s conduct was ‘unfair and impolitic in the extreme’ and wrote to Dublin Castle seeking Anglesey’s assurance that there were no plans to disarm the yeomanry.79 Protestant attempts at mobilisation were growing. The Monaghan liberal Protestant, Nicholas Ellis, was surprised to hear that Orangemen from adjacent counties were to gather in Enniskillen on 12 August.80 This was the anniversary date of the relief of Derry, but commemorations in Enniskillen were not customary. In the context of larger and more expressive parades and petitioning meetings this was undoubtedly part of the initiative for northern Protestant unity, by appealing to the historic connection between the two places, a connection in which Anglican and Dissenter rallied to William. It was also known that O’Connell planned to send John Lawless, a radical journalist, to Ulster to rally all religious groups behind emancipation. In the edition that reported Dawson’s ratting, the Belfast Guardian advocated formation of a ‘Protestant Association’ with its own rent, census of numbers and mobilisation strategy in the hope that government would crush the Catholic Association before Protestants were forced to imitate it. As the edition appeared in Belfast on 15 August 1828, a meeting was held in Dublin to inaugurate Brunswick Clubs to rally Protestant opinion throughout Ireland and Britain. At Derry’s gate-shutting ceremony that December, George Dawson, once the manipulator of loyalist ceremonial, found it turned against him. Just two years after his fiery speech at the same ceremony, the traditional effigy of Lundy, in addition to its usual accoutrements of a bunch of keys and burning slow-match symbolising security and betrayal, held in its other hand a rat by the tail, as bands played the popular air, ‘Nancy Dawson’.81

79 Peel to Wellington, 24 Aug. 1828 (S.U.L., Wellington papers, WP1/948/43); Anglesey to Peel, 26 Aug. 1828 (P.R.O.N.I., Anglesey papers, D619/26/C/108–9); Mountcashel to Peel, 22 July 1828 (P.R.O., HO100/224, ff 206–7). 80 Ellis to Barret-Lennard, 10 Aug. 1828 (P.R.O.N.I., Barret-Lennard papers, MIC170/3). 81 BGCA, 15 Aug. 1828.

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Then raise the Brunswick standard high Let No Surrender be the cry!

The Irish Brunswick club movement of 1828–9 has been as badly served by posterity as by hostile contemporaries. O’Connell dismissed the clubs and their intention to unite all strands of Protestantism against emancipation with sanguinary and stereotypic euphemisms like ‘Bloodhound Clubs’ implying that they were merely the militant loyalism of 1798 resurrected. In July 1829 George Dawson damned the Brunswick ‘union’ as ‘a rope of sand’. Writing retrospectively, Colonel Blacker dismissed Brunswickism as an aristocratically dominated phenomenon which ignored plebeian concerns: ‘The thing flashed for a moment, and went out.’ Later historians of Orangeism agree, stressing Brunswick’s social and organisational disjunction from the older organisation. Sibbett claimed: ‘Brunswick clubs were good; but Orange lodges were better … in the former the bond of union was weak, and men would come and go’, whereas Orangeism was ‘tried and tested’. Hereward Senior saw Brunswick as holding ‘little attraction for the peasantry’ unlike ‘the attractions of a secret society’. Recent work on Irish popular politics gives sparse attention to Brunswick, concentrating, understandably, on its successful rival the Catholic Association. Yet such neglect perpetuates anachronistic interpretations, judging Brunswick through its failure to prevent emancipation, and fails to acknowledge its contemporary importance. The implied comparison with O’Connell’s modernising Catholic democracy forecloses consideration of a movement that created 108 clubs in 12 weeks. However, in its contemporary context, what retrospectively seemed like Brunswick’s doomed and lonely star appears as part of a cluster of revivals and regenerations within Irish Protestantism. This chapter identifies the distinctive influences upon Irish Brunswickism including loyalism. Although a Cork political club of 1826 was the first to bear the Brunswick title, the movement proper began in England in late June 1828 when ‘ultra’ Tory peers,  

BNL, 24 Oct. 1828. O’Connell to the Catholic Association, 3 Sept. 1828 (P.R.O.N.I., Perceval-Maxwell papers, D2344/G/1/51); Dawson to Hill, 14 July 1829 (P.R.O.N.I., Hill of Brook Hall papers, D642/209); Blacker Day Book, vi, ff 229–30 (A.C.M., 5/1948).  Hereward Senior, Orangeism in Britain and Ireland, 1795–1836 (London and Toronto, 1966), p 226; R. M. Sibbett, Orangeism in Ireland and throughout the Empire (2 vols, Belfast, 1914), ii, 26; But see Suzanne T. Kingon, ‘Ulster opposition to Catholic emancipation’, I.H.S., xxxiv, 134 (Nov. 2004), pp 137–55.

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including the duke of Cumberland and Lords Kenyon and Eldon, formed an aristocratic club to co-ordinate anti-Catholic feeling. There was unease about ‘club government’ given the Catholic Association’s extra-parliamentary agitation; so, to present the new organisation in a better light, Eldon suggested ‘Brunswick Constitutional Club’, implying constitutionally guaranteed Protestantism and Hanoverian prestige. The Irish ultra-Tories, Longford and Farnham, attended the original London meeting and the Dublin Evening Mail soon urged emulation. On 6 August, the marquess of Chandos, a founder English Brunswicker, suggested to Thomas Lefroy that the establishment of clubs in every village would thwart O’Connell and defend the constitution. This proposal seems analogous to ongoing developments in Ulster aimed at regenerating the Protestant cause nationally. A parallel Orange revival was also under way. The Grand Lodge had been dissolved since 1825 but, as the unlawful societies legislation lapsed, northern counties began reactivating. Thus, on the one hand, some Irish ultras wanted to transplant the English Brunswick structure of elite-led political clubs while, on the other, indigenous initiatives were already underway. Establishing whether the new English-linked Dublin-centred initiative supplanted or overlapped with the Protestant political revivals is crucial to understanding the subsequent development of Irish Brunswickism. By mid-1828, the sporadic Ulster revivals were given focus by parades, commemorations and political dinners planned for 12 August 1828 in locations including Derry, Enniskillen, Omagh, Dungannon, Aughnacloy and Ballymena. That date had multiple meanings for Irish loyalists: marking the anniversary of the relief of Derry in 1689, the battle of Newtownbutler and, more immediately, the king’s birthday. Royal birthdays were traditionally celebrated by the military and yeomanry with feux de joie. However, the events of August 1828 were shaped much more by the present than the past. Significantly there had been no 12 August parading tradition in these places, except in Derry where commemorative customs went back to at least 1772. Newtownbutler had no tradition comparable to Aughrim and the Boyne. But even in Derry the celebrations were extraordinary, as they included the unveiling of Walker’s memorial pillar, an occasion which saw large numbers of Orangemen being marched in from outlying districts. The gatherings elsewhere were similar, with the Protestant gentry backed by massed Orangemen in orchestrated shows of strength. The largest and most militaristic demonstration was at Enniskillen: streets and bridges were decorated with the same arches and mottoes used in 1827. The marquess of Ely conducted a military-style review of Orangemen on the racecourse. The Belfast Guardian claimed 50,000 were present – the number of Tipperary men O’Connell boasted would invade Fermanagh. Hyperbole aside, large numbers attended. The Orangemen had to form double lines to cram into the review ground, and even hostile witnesses reported extensive preparations in Fermanagh and Monaghan. At Omagh, 6,000 Orangemen were marched from different districts through the town  

G. I. T. Machin, The Catholic question in English politics (Oxford, 1964), p 132. DEM, 16 July 1828; Fergus O’Ferrall, Catholic emancipation: Daniel O’Connell and the birth of Irish democracy, 1820–30 (Dublin, 1985), pp 208–9.  T. G. Fraser, ‘The Apprentice Boys and the relief of Derry parades’, in Fraser (ed.), The Irish parading tradition (Basingstoke and New York, 2000), p 174.  Ellis to Barret-Lennard, 10 Aug. 1828 (P.R.O.N.I., Barret-Lennard papers, MIC 170/3).

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by the High Sheriff to a field where, at a pre-arranged signal, they cheered the king. At Dungannon, thirty-two lodges headed by ‘respectable gentlemen’ formed a circle around bands playing the National Anthem and party tunes like ‘the Protestant Boys’ and ‘the Boyne Water’, then cheered the king, Wellington, Peel and ‘their friends in parliament’. O’Connell’s friend, Pierce Mahoney, considered these events as simply ‘dedicated to the invigoration of the triumph of a party’. Clearly then, these appropriations of historical and cultural loyalism on the king’s birthday were intended to advertise Protestant revival, demonstrate mass support and promote provincial mobilisation for national emulation. The ostensible reasons were legitimating pretexts for the elite to rally popular loyalism and build on earlier mobilisations. The salient point is that these mobilisations were based on Orangeism in its most traditional and militaristic form, the image of 1798 loyalism. As these events occurred just after the proposal to spread Brunswick to Ireland, analysis of the ritual and rhetoric reveals the interplay of both initiatives. Some speakers at Derry echoed Chandos’s advice to extend Brunswickism to Ireland. The alderman, James Gregg, said the Walker memorial was ‘not, thank God, a monument for Derry, it is a national monument’. He continued: ‘the British Lion has aroused himself … follow you his example – answer his indignant growl like Protestants’. Alderman Beresford, representing Dublin Corporation, concurred: ‘Let us follow the example of England. Let the Noblemen, Gentlemen, Clergy, all form themselves into an Association.’ The Belfast Guardian told Protestants that, with English Protestant support, they could counter a government overawed by the Catholic Association and ‘form their Protestant Association – their Protestant rent – their Protestant organisation of men – their Protestant census – and boast aloud of their Protestant numbers’. At Enniskillen, reference was made a forthcoming political dinner in Morrison’s hotel in Dublin on 14 August, to which key Protestant nobles and gentry were invited. Ostensibly planned to honour the city M.P., George Ogle Moore, its purpose was to plan the first Irish Brunswick club. Sir Henry Corry said this was ‘not to be a nominal dinner, but an unity of Protestants, and a concentration of Protestant feeling; a feeling that has … shown itself on the other side of the water’. The Fermanagh High Sheriff proposed toasts to the Moore Committee, the duke of Gordon and the Brunswick Clubs. Aside from the shared anti-emancipation aim, broader ideological parallels existed between views expressed in Ulster and those of English ultra-Tory Brunswickers, for whom opposition to emancipation was paramount amongst other grievances about central government encroachment on local patrician influence. They initially hoped the Wellington government would shun ‘liberal’ reforming measures, but were furious when the new cabinet balanced ‘Protestants’ and ‘Catholics’. Some, like the marquess of Blandford, eventually became radicals in order to purge the corrupt executive.10 Similarly in Ulster, though speakers routinely attacked the Catholic Association, Beresford also criticised central 

BGCA, 19 Aug. 1828; Mahoney to Horton, 10 Sept. 1828 (P.R.O.N.I., Anglesey papers, D619/33A/58).  BGCA, 15, 19 Aug. 1828. 10 P. J. Jupp, British politics on the eve of reform: the duke of Wellington’s administration, 1828–30 (Basingstoke, 1998), pp 276–9, 282.

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misgovernment: ‘One time we have a Popish Lord Lieutenant and a Protestant [chief] Secretary; at another time a Protestant Lord Lieutenant and a Popish Secretary.’ His point was that irresponsible executive government, by failing to uphold the Protestant constitution’s inviolability, facilitated the return of ancient threats to civil and religious liberties.11 As the Brunswick initiative originated amongst English and Irish ultra-Tories, such statements did not imply any questioning of the union so much as growing disillusionment with the way post-union administrations were governing Ireland. Support for the King’s ministers, a central feature of the counterrevolutionary loyalism of the later 1790s, was being eroded. Yet, as long as English ultras remained firm for the cause, the position of defending shared notions of the Protestant constitution could be maintained as the standard from which ministers had deviated and to which they should return. Certainly the content of the various speeches made at Ulster political revival meetings reflect notions of a shared enterprise: the ideological similarities with English Brunswickism and frequent mention of the respectable Moore dinner suggest an overlapping with the embryonic Irish movement. Yet, for all the imperatives to unity, to see Brunswickism simply as a common Anglo-Irish reaction would be to miss vital distinguishing aspects of Irish Protestantism at this crucial juncture. One important difference concerned the practicalities of involving the nonelite. If English ultras were uneasy about ‘club government’, their Irish equivalents, by mobilising northern Protestant opinion, revived the problem of how to control popular loyalism. If the danger in England was of mobilised masses pressing on for parliamentary reform, the risk in Ireland was of precipitating civil war, evident in unease at the more sabre-rattling speeches. After ‘Jemmy’ Gregg’s ‘roaring’ oration in Derry – the audience became so excited he could scarcely be heard – Sir George Hill cooled things by advising the Protestants ‘that their only resource was to petition’. But most speakers showed no such restraint: in now-familiar rhetoric, the apprentice boys, the Enniskilleners of 1689 and the yeomanry of 1798 were cited, the old siege cry of ‘No Surrender’ evoked, and military metaphors applied to O’Connell’s threats to ‘invade’ Ulster. Therefore, even before Irish Brunswickism was launched, importation of the English model was problematic as it would have to be imposed upon pre-existing and regionally different structures. From Enniskillen there was a barely concealed sense that, while supportive of Brunswick in principle, rather than meekly following the English example, the flaunting of traditional militarised Orangeism was intended to dominate the revival by casting it in the recognisable garb of earlier loyalism, in which yeomanry and Orange lodges linked elite and plebeian Protestant. Here, toasts to the Moore committee were accompanied by the couplet: Orange cocks and purple hens Increase their brood ten times ten.12

These differences were apparent at the Moore dinner. Over 400 people, ‘comprehending the aristocracy of the country and the wealth and respectability of the city’, 11 12

BGCA, 19 Aug 1828. BGCA, 19 Aug. 1828.

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attended the event, chaired by the earl of Rathdowne. Several peers were absent, including Lord Enniskillen whose apology complacently noted that he would ‘always be happy to assist in promoting union amongst the Protestants of Ireland … and … there appears to be but one opinion in the North upon that subject’. Thus, one important strand of Protestant opinion saw traditional loyalist militancy as a better counter to O’Connell than any innovation of political clubs. The cocktail of bellicose militarism and careful constitutionalism in the toasts suggest that some prospective Dublin Brunswickers agreed. William Saurin was lauded as the ‘Eldon of Ireland’ and included in a toast to Chandos and English Brunswickism. However, Thomas Ellis, a defeated parliamentary candidate for Dublin, who began mildly by advocating that ‘Protestant Societies will be formed for constitutional purposes’ in imitation of the sister country, ended with a fiery dart, warning that ‘there is a Protestant power in Ireland which nothing can resist. If the government are not apprised of this, they should be made to know … that it contains four hundred thousand Orangemen; armed, organised, intelligent and brave … ready to start into the field at a moment’s notice.’13 The context for Ellis’s belligerence related more to a current Orange revival that paralleled the political meetings. On 13 August 1828 two hundred lodge masters met in Armagh to form a county Grand Lodge and a committee to correspond with similar bodies in other counties, aiming to create a ‘Grand Orange Lodge of Ulster’ by December. The continued existence of the Benevolent Orange Society was a complicating factor. A meeting of 600 Benevolents at Carrickfergus in late August also recruited new members. There were attempts to amalgamate Benevolent and traditional Orangeism under a resurrected Dublin-based Grand Lodge. A meeting of County Monaghan Orangemen ‘connected with the new and the old (original emphasis) institutions’ asked members of both to meet in Dublin on 17 September. Resolutions were issued aimed at securing ‘the co-operation of all the Protestants of the United Kingdom’.14 This three-day general meeting at Freemasons’ Hall saw the British and Irish Orange lodges unified. Eustace Chetwoode, Grand Secretary of English Orangeism, provided that institution’s signs and passwords. The British grand master, the duke of Cumberland, was elected to that office for Ireland, with Lord Enniskillen as deputy grand master. It is unclear if the Armagh plans for an Ulster Grand Lodge, or that from Monaghan for a unified ‘Anglo-Irish’ structure, were separate initiatives or simply different stages of the same phenomenon. After the September meeting, Chetwoode toured Ulster trying to reconcile the old Orange gentry to the new arrangement, accompanied by ‘mad Parson Graham’ representing grass-roots Orangeism.15 It is notable that revived Orangeism reflected the same Ulster-Dublin and Anglo-Irish fault lines as had been evident in the broader stirrings within Protestantism. Back in 1824 Verner had complained of northern dissatisfaction about control by a complacent Dublin-based aristocratic leadership. Thus, as

13 14 15

BGCA, 19 Aug. 1828; NW, 21 Aug. 1828; Sibbett, Orangeism, ii, 6. BGCA, 19 Aug., 5 Sept. 1828. English Orangeism was not judged unlawful when Irish lodges were suppressed; Sibbett, Orangeism, ii, 27; BGCA, 23 Sept. 1828; BNL, 7 Oct. 1828; Senior, Orangeism, pp 236–7.

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Irish Brunswickism began, its eventual character was unclear. Before its dénouement can be analysed, the formation process must be examined nationally and regionally. The inaugural Dublin Brunswick meeting on 15 August at Morrison’s hotel was attended by many Protestant nobles, gentry and clerics. Serjeant Lefroy and William Saurin were the prime movers, and Lord Longford was elected president.16 Whatever the undercurrents, the new organisation emphatically reflected English Brunswickism’s elevated social character. Thirty-eight noble and titled individuals were chosen as vice-presidents, including Chandos and Lord Enniskillen; and a ninetyseven man ‘committee of management’ was formed, consisting of landed gentlemen like John Claudius Beresford, legal men like Lefroy, M.P.s and senior army and navy officers. Several influential peers were chosen as vice-presidents, including Lords Roden, Farnham and Lorton of the evangelical ‘Bible Gentry’, as was Lefroy. Resolutions were passed and published in the press, stating the club’s objectives as solidly political: promoting co-operation between ‘friends of the Constitution in Ireland’, expressing ‘constitutional feeling’, facilitating petitions, disseminating information and gathering intelligence on the Catholic Association. Handbills contrasted the society’s respectability with the vulgarity of O’Connell’s organisation: the vice-presidential list alone comprised four marquesses, fourteen earls, ten viscounts, eight lords and two right honourables. Subscriptions of £150,000 were confidently anticipated before November.17 The Dublin club would stimulate local auxiliaries, spreading, as the Londonderry Journal put it, ‘like circle upon circle on a lake … until it identifies itself with all that is truly loyal in the land’. The Dublin Evening Mail urged Protestants: ‘look to the Metropolis, let Dublin’s example animate all, form in every county a Constitutional Club, look to the men who have come forward to lead you, look to your friends in England’. The Dublin management committee issued an organisational imperative in the form of standard rules requiring branch clubs to be limited to 100 members and adopt management structures in microcosm: a ‘parochial president’ to maintain correspondence with Dublin, three vice-presidents, officers and a committee of six; new members were to be balloted for, and all officeholders elected annually. Admission cards were issued for monthly meetings, with an annual meeting on 12 August. There were injunctions against rowdiness. Nobody could spend more than 2d on drink at meetings, and anyone wantonly insulting Catholics would be banned. Crucially, however, the rules, including membership subscription rates, permitted a measure of local independence, as they could be altered by a majority vote in a subsidiary club.18 Thus the parent club, while recommending its children to reflect its own image of respectability in marshalling the masses, nonetheless allowed local discretion on how to accomplish this. Membership, as Lord Longford later put it, required only commitment to ‘simply and solely preserve the integrity of 16 17

O’Ferrall, Catholic emancipation, pp 208–9; Blacker Day Book, vi, ff 229–30 (A.C.M., 5/1948). BNL, 29 Aug. 1828; ‘Read and Compare’ n.d. [c. Sept. 1828] (P.R.O.N.I., Perceval-Maxwell papers, D2244/G/1/51); DEM, 25 Aug. 1828. 18 LJ, 2 Sept. 1828; DEM, 20 Aug. 1828; Printed rules for forming auxiliary branch of the Brunswick club (N.L.I., Brunswick papers, MS 5017, f. 2).

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our ­Protestant constitution, and … our Protestant establishment’. Yet, despite the evangelical input, this political orientation pulled Protestants in a worldly direction away from the new reformation and had potential to re-open the rancorous high church-evangelical split.19 However, for the present, such clouds were obscured by new movement’s social resplendence. In its inaugural phase, therefore, Brunswickism opted for a pragmatic mixture of aristocratic and landed direction, with flexibility on the ground, enabling it to begin without being pulled apart internally, while ensuring regional characteristics were shaped by local political realities. The first provincial imitation came from Sligo, where a county club was established on 19 August by gentlemen returning from the Moore dinner, but the main response came from Ulster where intensive preliminary activity soon began. However, most early activity came from eastern, rather than central and southern Ulster, the areas in which the Orange revival was strongest. In early September one of Lord Downshire’s agents noted: ‘there is the world and all to do about this new Brunswick Club’. Some received circulars while others were approached personally. A meeting of gentlemen at Sir Richard Bateson’s house scouted opinion about a Down county club. Lord Donegall’s son-in-law, Sir Stephen May, directly approached Lord Downshire’s friend, Major Waddell, on this subject.20 However Downshire’s opposition scuppered this effort and the outcome was a meeting at Belfast’s Commercial Exchange on 10 September. The choice of Belfast calls for comment. After Lord Downshire had stymied the formation of a County Down club, the original plan was for the Belfast meeting to inaugurate ‘The Down and Antrim Brunswick Constitutional Club’, but Barré Beresford had the title amended to the ‘Ulster Brunswick Constitutional Club’, as a better rallying point for Protestant gentlemen. There were grumblings from more traditional loyalist centres: ‘that Derry, ever foremost in the hour of extremity … instead of giving the tone to other places … should … be behind them’. Derry was Beresford’s natural sphere of influence, but Dawson’s apostasy and Sir George Hill’s equivocation ruled out the northern bastion as a birthplace for Ulster Brunswickism. Belfast’s recent emergence as de facto provincial capital possibly provided a more logical centre of gravity, though Lord Donegall’s key role suggests he may also have had the town’s residual liberalism in view. Certainly the liberal Protestant and County Down landowner, Lord Londonderry, felt under political pressure from ‘Donegall’s Orange mania and the Beresford Blood [and] these blustering declaimers of high church principles.’ Probably the main reason for launching Ulster Brunswickism in Belfast was to start it with a separate identity before attempting expansion.21 The Belfast meeting encountered problems. Though it had been convened by circular letters signed by Lord Donegall and May and sent throughout Ulster, the attendance of 160 gentlemen was disappointing. The Guardian said it was ‘respect19 A full and authentic account of the proceedings of the first annual meeting of the Brunswick constitutional club of Ireland (Dublin, 1828), p 5; Alan Acheson, ‘The evangelicals in the Church of Ireland, 1784–1859’ (D. Phil thesis, Q.U.B., 1967), pp 119, 156. 20 SJ, 19 August 1828; Reilly to Downshire, 4 Sept. 1828 (P.R.O.N.I., Downshire papers, D671/ C/2/341). 21 BNL, 12 Sept. 1828; LJ, 16 Sept. 1828; Londonderry to Downshire, 8 Oct. 1828 (P.R.O.N.I., Downshire papers, D671/C/12/353).

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able’ and ‘fully sufficient’, but the Northern Whig sneered about a ‘secret meeting’ with a ‘contemptible’ attendance. Lord Donegall was elected president, and several ‘noblemen and gentlemen’ as vice-presidents, assistant-secretaries and a management committee. The membership fee of one guinea paid in advance allowed the Whig to allude slyly to Donegall’s financial problems, and mark the conspicuous absence of Belfast’s middle-class bankers and merchants. The Ulster club adopted the rules of its Dublin parent. Its composition was primarily aristocratic and landed, though it had some commercial men as officeholders: the newspaper owners, Stuart of the Guardian and Mackay of the Newsletter, were assistant secretaries and expressed palpable anxiety about Brunswick’s elite composition, with Stuart claiming that if the meeting was publicly advertised, 20,000 would have attended. The provincial club’s remit was to promote county, baronial or half-baronial clubs, then local town and parish ones. The Newsletter had already said that the Catholic Association could only be countered by ‘able and active coadjutors’, but this required leadership. Stuart’s advice was heeded: it was advocated that local clubs be open to ‘the great body of the Protestant population’, and a letter was read from the parent society hinting that local clubs could include Protestants of all social classes, except sectarian hot-heads.22 The Newsletter soon noted a ‘rapidly progressive extension’, with meetings planned in Armagh and Down and signs that other counties would ‘take the hint’. The Londonderry Journal was confident that a club would soon be formed as ‘the necessity of union … among Protestants is strongly felt by the gentlemen of this [city] and adjoining counties’.23 Meanwhile, as Brunswick’s concentric circles rippled respectably outwards from Belfast and Dublin, a wave of Catholic populism was threatening to swamp Ulster. The Catholic Association was preparing to send O’Connell’s lieutenant, ‘Honest’ Jack Lawless, into Ulster where, apart from Monaghan and Cavan, its organisation was patchy. As south Ulster was Lawless’s first objective, that area’s promoters of militarised Orangeism found themselves caught between two organisational tides, Brunswicksim and Lawless. When the paramilitary nature of the south-Ulster Protestant revival is considered, Lawless inevitably faced an unequivocal hint at the point of a bayonet. Lawless’s mission occasioned widespread alarm. Parish resolutions circulated in Down for Protestants to ‘publicly declare, and … pledge ourselves … that we will henceforth use all lawful means … in support of the integrity of the constitution’. Lawless’s boast to visit Derry, brought warnings about what ‘the mongrel cur’ could expect if he ‘gets into the hands of the ’Prentice Boys.’24 But Fermanagh was the gateway to the north, and many 12 August speeches in Enniskillen anticipated the ‘invasion’. Sectarian tensions rose as Lawless proceeded through Monaghan. By late September, Nicholas Ellis of Clones reckoned the ‘speechifying and publications’ of the Catholic Association, Orange societies and Brunswick Clubs agitated the lower orders into an incredible ‘state of rancour’.25 On 22 September, as Lawless’s entou22 23 24 25

BNL, 22 Aug. 1828; BGCA, 12 Sept. 1828; NW, 11 Sept. 1828. BNL, 23 Sept. 1828; LJ, 16 Sept. 1828. BGCA, 22 Aug. 1828; LJ, 23 Sept. 1828. Ellis to Barret-Lennard, 27 Sept. 1828 (P.R.O.N.I., Barret-Lennard papers, MIC170/3).

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rage neared the mainly Protestant town of Ballybay, local leaders mobilised many armed Orangemen and yeomen out of uniform and occupied high ground near the town. They were directed by Sam Grey, a local publican and Orange District Master with a reputation for fearlessness or ferocity, depending on one’s perspective.26 Grey’s belligerence was encapsulated in one of the many popular ballads generated by the Lawless incident: From Dublin one night in fit of despair Jack Lawless set out to breathe the North air … [but] SAM wrote to Lawless, if he entered Ballybay He would give him his breakfast, his dinner, and tay (sic)27

General Thornton rushed in all available troops and police, but Lawless was forewarned and prudently withdrew to the chapel, where he tried to retrieve matters by issuing resolutions, boasting of 500,000 supporters ‘without a flag or banner’ (Ellis reckoned 3,000) claiming that ‘the fault [violence] we blame in others, we should not commit ourselves’. The outcome was not entirely peaceful: some of Lawless’s men clashed with Orangemen, leaving one Catholic bayoneted to death.28 Despite this, Lawless persisted and planned visits to Monaghan town and Clones on 27 and 28 September. However similar opposition was anticipated and Ellis encouraged leading local Catholics to dissuade him from proceeding. Ellis found the road to Clones ‘covered’ by piquets armed ‘with muskets, fowling pieces, pistols … sabres, small swords, bayonets’. In the town, Charles McVittie, an Orange leader, was on a white horse acting as commander; but, with no sign of Lawless, ­McVittie’s loyalists dispersed, firing in the air.29 Rumours spread that Lawless would visit Armagh city and ‘well-armed Protestants’, marched ‘by the hundred’ into the city ‘in military array’. Again local Catholics prevailed on Lawless to desist, whereupon the Protestants with ‘colours flying and drums beating’ formed three lines before Thornton and the magistrate, Joseph Atkinson, a 1798 yeomanry veteran.30 Meanwhile in Monaghan, Lord Rossmore told magistrates that Protestants and Catholics sat up at night fearing attack and warned them ‘to use your influence (if any yet remains to you) to … dissuade the immense bodies of armed Protestants who … have taken the law into their own hands’. Rossmore pledged to exert himself similarly with the Catholics. Ellis feared that if Lawless’s ‘infuriate ruffians’ collided with the ‘insolent overbearing … Orangemen … the authority of magistrates would be as nothing’. In Ballybay Grey’s men patrolled the streets under arms, imposed a curfew on Catholic residents, and obliged the constabulary to admit ‘that they are 26

Sibbett, Orangeism, ii, 14–15; Pedear Livingstone, The Monaghan story (Enniskillen, 1980), pp 178–83. 27 Proclamation, 1 Oct. 1828 (N.L.I., Brunswick papers, MS5017, f. 77). 28 Notice from Lawless, 25 Sept. 1828 (P.R.O.N.I., Clogher diocesan papers, DIO (RC) 1/6/5); Ellis to Barret-Lennard, 27 Sept. 1829 (P.R.O.N.I., Barret-Lennard papers, MIC 170/3); D’Arcy to Leveson-Gower, 8 Oct. 1828 (N.A.I., S.O.C.2885/19). 29 Ellis to Barret-Lennard, 29 Sept. 1829 (P.R.O.N.I., Barret-Lennard papers, MIC 170/3). 30 From correspondent at Armagh, 30 Sept. 1828 (N.L.I., Brunswick papers, MS5017, f. 77); Senior, Orangeism, pp 228–9.

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not equal to control the Orangemen of Ballybay’.31 Thornton’s admission of powerlessness raises the question of how this hijacking of constituted authority by armed Orangemen sat with the spreading Brunswick initiative, as it seems the antithesis of what the respectable Dublin and Belfast gentlemen had envisaged. Hereward Senior interpreted the anti-Lawless reaction as a plebeian ‘initiative from below’, and doubts whether the gentry could have restrained men like Grey. From his perspective of writing the history of Orangeism, he also believed that the ‘invasion’ stimulated Ulster’s Orange revival.32 Yet this teleological interpretation will not stand scrutiny. If the reaction is set in the contemporary context of south Ulster politics and Orange revivals, Sam Grey emerges not a causal factor, but rather as a consequence of previous events. In Monaghan, the bitterly divided county elite and the festering rancour against Rossmore gave local ultras motives for wanting a fierce popular reaction to Lawless. The Newsletter dubbed Lawless’s followers ‘Cossacks’: if the disturbances could be laid at the door of the Catholic Association, Rossmore’s county governorship would be compromised, given that he had accepted O’Connell’s support in 1826. The means as well as the motive existed. As the Association had marshalled and mobilised its supporters in that election, local loyalists who marched in military order at various ‘revivals’ must have felt, when they armed against Lawless, that they had the sanction of the gentry who once raised yeomanry against rebels.33 In many respects then, Grey symbolised a traditional militarised Protestant loyalism beset by the modernising tide of the two rival conceptions of mass politics. Grey’s militant mentalité was shared by many. Sabre-rattling at the ‘revival’ meetings was encouraged by the local elite who clearly wanted Orangeism revived in its old armed loyalist format. Enniskillen was the crucible of this agitation. It was packed on 29 September when the Grand Lodge of Ireland’s deputation arrived to re-establish a Fermanagh lodge for the county’s 34,000 Orangemen. During that meeting the town was swept by rumours that ‘the Lawless gang’ was approaching.34 Shortly afterwards, the Belfast radical, Robert Tennent, visited ‘this celebrated Protestant city’ and found ‘men, women and children … talk with a disgusting … eagerness of the scenes of blood, massacre they anticipate’. The similarity of anti-Lawless mobilisations across different counties indicates a well-established communication network, probably with elite sanction and based on Orange structures. In Clones, Ellis noted ‘the Orangemen all round this country were summoned by some authority to assemble’. Though McVittie of Clones acted as Orange ‘commander’, many ‘country gentry’ and several magistrates were also present in a similar defensive capacity.35 Thus the Brunswick and ‘Sam Grey’ mobilisations were framed by different conceptions of whether the problem was insurrectionary and requiring 1798-style mili31

Notice to magistrates, 30 Sept. 1828, Ellis to Barret-Lennard, 29 Sept. 1828 (P.R.O.N.I., Barret-Lennard papers, MIC 170/3); McCosker to Anglesey, 2 Oct. 1828 (N.A.I., S.O.C.2885/13); Livingstone, Monaghan story, pp 178–83. 32 Senior, Orangeism, pp 229, 280. 33 BNL, 30 Sept. 1828. 34 BNL, 7 Oct. 1828. 35 Tennent to McCracken, 16 Oct. 1828 (P.R.O.N.I., Tennent papers, D1748/H/46/36); Ellis to Barret-Lennard, 29 Sept. 1828 (P.R.O.N.I., Barret-Lennard papers, MIC 170/3).

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tarised loyalism in 1828, or whether it necessitated an innovative elite-directed extra-parliamentary ‘political’ organisation. Was Protestant ascendancy better defended by taking the moral heights of respectability, or by literally occupying the strategic high ground at Ballybay to aim yeomanry muskets at Lawless? These issues raised problems of control. Previously yeomanry and Orange structures had helped the Protestant elite contain popular loyalism enough to prevent it threatening law and order but indulged its ‘spirit’ sufficiently to make it formidable. Much depended on the composition Brunswickism took as it spread from its national and provincial bases. The period between late September and November 1828 saw many Brunswick clubs formed in Ulster: county clubs in Londonderry (which included the city of Derry), Donegal, Monaghan, Down and Armagh. These meeting were usually held in the county town. Sometimes, as in Derry city, they were convened by handbill and notice, in other instances, as in Tyrone, by requisition to the High Sheriff. The pattern was for county clubs to be followed local acolytes, publicised by gala foundation meetings. The County Londonderry club was typical. Following the Dublin example, the foundation meeting elected an eminently respectable president, vicepresidents, committee, and agreed membership fees of one guinea. This done, they resolved that branches be established for the city and liberties of Derry, the town of Coleraine, and rural baronies, with a lower threshold of 2s 6d. The meetings for auxiliaries were usually situated at court houses and the formations were rapid – all occurred between 2 and 4 October – allowing the same keynote speakers to attend each meeting conveying the impression of momentum and organisation.36 The effects can be judged from the radical press’s disapproval of villages being disturbed by ‘strangers’ racing around in post-chaises prior to meetings. The autumn witnessed hectic activity with clubs formed throughout eastern Ulster including Ballymena, Carrickfergus, Newry, Bangor, Coleraine and Limavady. However the most extensive formations were in mid and south Ulster. In Fermanagh, clubs began during October at Newtownbutler, Lisnaskea, Brookborough, Boho, Rossary, Tempo, Irwinstown and Trillick. In Armagh, key clubs were formed at Lurgan, Tandragee, Mountnorris and Portadown. An extensive range of formations occurred in Cavan and Tyrone. Monaghan saw many branches form following a key meeting in Monaghan town on 7 October.37 The lower membership fees for some branches suggest that advice from the Protestant press to open them up socially was followed. In Belfast, clubs were inaugurated in the Sandy Row district, at Brown Square in what is now the lower Shankill Road, and at Ballymacarrett, a populous industrial suburb. The latter start-up meeting consisted ‘entirely of operatives’, with a few gentlemen leading it and membership fees set low at 1d per month. At the other end of the social spectrum, the inauguration of a baronial club in County Londonderry deliberately coincided with the meeting of the North-West Agricultural Society so that the landed gentry would be present, and the Brunswick club would be grafted on to well-established county structures. Sometimes the character of a clutch of clubs was 36 37

LJ, 16, 23 Sept. 1828. BGCA, 14, 19 Sept. 1828; BNL, 12, 19 23, 26, 30 Sept., 3, 17, 21, 24, 28 Oct. 4 Nov., 1828; NW, 26 Sept., 2, 6, 23 Oct. 1828.

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determined by underlying historic structures which were deliberately exploited. The Antrim organisation began with a ‘central’ club in Lisburn, a noted loyalist centre in the 1790s, and Brunswickism here was explicitly based on earlier loyal associations, to the extent of having their progenitor, Philip Johnson, now aged eighty-one, as president. He reminded the crowd how he had once ‘stepped forward in defence of the same principles before either Orangemen, or yeomanry, or Brunswick Clubs had been heard of’ and, though now old, he approved their ‘loyal systematic attempts’. Johnson’s original loyal association plan was replicated in the local clubs formed in Derryaghy now divided into eight ‘districts’ with their own officials and membership capped at 100 men.38 Continuity with more recent loyalty occurred in Bangor, where James Cleland formed three clubs by mid-October and expected more.39 But Orangeism, especially in its militarised local defence capacity, was the key influence which, for many plebeian Protestants, circumscribed all loyal formations. The subtle interplay of various influences on the evolving movement are more visible at the local level. Aware that the new movement could be wrecked if it appeared simply as a vehicle for paramilitary exclusive loyalism, on 23 September, the day after Ballybay, the Belfast Newsletter’s editorial asked: ‘What are the objects of the Brunswick Clubs?’ Refuting critics who, with Grey in mind, said the clubs prepared Protestants for sectarian civil war, it asserted that they simply demonstrated Protestant strength, prevented the threatened conflict and emboldened government to suppress the Association. Far from being anti-Catholic, many Brunswickers ‘were perfectly willing that it [emancipation] should be disposed of, on the concession of securities adequate for the perpetual preservation of the Protestant Constitution’.40 The defensive tone implied uneasiness about the practicalities of opening Brunswick to the masses. There is also evidence that this apparently incongruous statement on emancipation had some substance. Local inaugural meetings actually reveal a range of sentiments with distinctive inter-regional variations, from raw emotive antiCatholic appeals for popular loyalist militancy to sedate evocations of respectable civility. Some speakers even advocated loyal Catholic membership, in terms reminiscent of early 1790s ‘liberal’ loyalty, which remained a distinct, if less lurid, thread in the fabric of Protestant Ireland. The Newsletter printed huge supplements for inaugural meetings containing speeches and resolutions which were often published as handbills, as the Newry Telegraph did for a Tandragee meeting on 26 September. Tandragee was near the property of an evangelical ultra peer, Lord Mandeville, and the organisation was undertaken by the local Boyne Society, a gentleman’s club active the previous July. The spectators were ‘well-dressed farmers, manufacturers and active yeomen’ many wearing orange and blue ribbons. A large platform, fifty feet square, ‘elegantly’ carpeted with special seating for press reporters, was erected in the market place, facing Mandeville’s castle, where a flag flew signifying approval. The

38 39

NW, 23 Oct. 1828; BNL, 14, 21 Oct. 1828. LJ, 16 Sept. 1828; BGCA, 14, 19 Sept. 1828; BNL, 12, 19, 23, 26, 30 Sept., 3 Oct. 1828; NW, 26 Sept., 2, 6, 23 Oct. 1828. 40 BNL, 23 Sept. 1828.

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chairman, Dean Carter’s, chair was placed in front of a large painting of William III headed with the motto ‘Tandragee Brunswick Constitutional Club’.41 At noon the Boyne Society gentlemen paraded from their clubrooms through dense crowds and bands of music. About 200 gentlemen took the platform, but the meeting was delayed as crowds kept arriving. The Newry Telegraph claimed the numbers and assembled wealth gave ‘an importance to this meeting, by far surpassing any that has been held for many years, within … Ulster’. It claimed 40,000, an impossible figure, which the Newsletter realistically reduced to 10,000 (figures which even the Northern Whig accepted). More arrived during the meeting: large contingents marched in from Down behind bands and purple flags emblazoned ‘Lower Iveagh’, ‘No Surrender’ and ‘the King and Constitution’. The Orange and yeomanry connection was emphasised by the areas of mobilisation as Iveagh barony was an Orange district and a yeomanry denomination. The platform speakers included landed gentry and some lawyers, together with Anglican and Presbyterian clerics, orthodox and seceding, and a Methodist preacher. Dean Carter’s opening remarks on the ‘enemy at the gates’ set the theme. Others lambasted O’Connell for asserting that Orangemen would massacre Catholics, but, rather than refute this by disclaiming hostility to individual Catholics as the Newsletter had recently done, Carter opted for the politics of atrocity. Apparently judging the mood of the crowd, he reminded them of massacres of Protestants at Wexford in 1798 when the Orange societies had ‘saved the country’. The curate of Tandragee adverted specifically to Lawless’s invasion, while a Presbyterian minister from the Synod of Ulster, John Lucas, claimed that dangerous times justified ‘meddling in politics’, while a seceding counterpart emphasised that Brunswickers were defending the bible. Cornelius Boomer, an attorney and probably Mandeville’s political agent, promised that his lordship had now a political interest sufficient to get Verner elected. Thus there were different conceptions of the new club: genuflections towards plebeian Orangeism suggest the armed loyal association model, while Boomer’s comments imply electioneering. Politically, the various Williamite symbols locate these Boyne Society gentlemen in the True Whig tradition, stressing adherence to the 1688 settlement with loyalty focussed on ‘King and Constitution’. Yet religious changes made intervention problematic for some natural Whigs. Lucas’s stance showed this was more difficult for Presbyterians than Anglican clerics, whereas the Seceders, like some Anglican evangelicals, continued to conceive matters in primarily theological rather than political terms. Even at the basic social divide within Protestantism between rough and respectable there were glaring incongruities between platform respectability and Carter’s rabble-rousing. But such potential problems were obscured by the choreographed excitement and in the chairing of various gentry and clergy.42 In other places even temporary unanimity was harder to achieve. A Brunswick meeting in Monaghan on 10 October to establish a county club saw tension between those who wanted it to formalise the armed Orange loyal association model which Sam Grey epitomised and which drew succour and gentry sanction from the current 41 ‘Important meeting at Tandragee’ (Newry, 1828) (G.O.L.I., Brunswick pamphlets, box 11, shelf B2). 42 Ibid., BNL, 30 Sept. 1828; NW, 2 Oct. 28.

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revival of traditional Orangeism, and those who, for various sectional reasons, envisaged other means and different ends. Prior to the meeting, walls bore notices publicising the Orange revival and the junction between Irish and English Orangemen under Cumberland. Nicholas Ellis wrote that popular opinion saw Brunswick as simply ‘modified’ Orangeism. The crowds were such that the venue was switched from the court house to the Diamond (town centre), where the meeting was addressed from the balcony of the inn. Another hostile observer, Lord Rossmore, noted the militarism, complaining that the audience were ‘a multitude assembled and marched into Monaghan in military order, with colours and party insignia, and proceeded by drums and fifes playing party tunes’ and who fired pistols on being told ‘to arm themselves – to get ammunition’ in readiness to be ‘called upon to act’. Rossmore’s description was too consistent with Grey’s activities for it not to be true. The dignitaries included the ‘Protestant’ part of the county representation, Shirley, Leslie and his brother-in-law Colonel John Madden, many gentry Orangemen, Sir Harcourt Lees of the Benevolent Orange Order, and a strong phalanx of Anglican clergymen, some of whom, like Romney Robinson, had come from Armagh at the Primate’s behest. Problems surfaced even before the meeting began. Ellis noted an unseemly contretemps over who should be chairman. An Anglican cleric, Dean Roper, harangued the ‘multitude’, then proposed Madden. One of Grey’s cohorts, Charles McVittie, ‘a great leader of the real Orange’, interrupted, claiming that neither the Dean nor Madden should take the chair. The issue was defused by the timely arrival of Thomas Stewart Corry, ‘true Orange’ and previously Monaghan grand master. In the event, Lord Blayney, a Monaghan magnate and member of the Dublin club, chaired the meeting. He had supported emancipation in 1825, a record of which Corry and Robinson reminded him. However, common perceptions that the Protestant cause lacked aristocratic leadership, and with Rossmore and Cremorne in the Catholic camp, meant that Corry welcomed ‘Protestant gentlemen of rank and station coming forward at last’ and gave Blayney his blessing.43 The Protestant press noted no pre-meeting altercation, but other fractures were implicit in its reportage. Romney Robinson had come straight from a Brunswick meeting at Armagh. Robinson and Beresford saw Brunswickism as a useful device for consolidating church-state relations, threatened by emancipation. Robinson decreed that ‘Protestantism is favourable to a nation’s political power to its internal improvement, and to the preservation of good order among its subjects, while popery tends to … debilitate all three.’ As well as inculcating moral reform, this high church position made the classic political distinction between Catholics and ‘popery’ as a political system. ‘Roman Catholics … will, in truth be as much gainers by our success as ourselves: none will lose but the Priests and demagogues.’ Brunswickism would enable Wellington to resist O’Connell ‘without firing a shot’. A local gentry figure, William Tennison, followed Robinson with a less political representation of Wellington, comparing his Waterloo command ‘up boys and at them’ with the Ballybay Protestants. Dean Roper renewed Robinson’s Erastian refrain, stressing the need for constitutional clubs to maintain the political and ecclesiastical union 43 Rossmore to Anglesey (P.R.O., HO100/226, ff 130–4); Ellis to Barrett-Lennard, 6, 22 Oct. 1828 (P.R.O.N.I., Barrett-Lennard papers, MIC 170/3); BNL, 17 Oct. 1828.

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between Britain and Ireland for ‘with British connection the Protestant Ascendancy must either stand or fall’. Captain Mayne followed, noting how ‘treason’ had been first checked in Monaghan, and claimed that he would happily lead the Protestants militarily. In such a scenario, he had ‘no doubt whatever, that with such loyal and brave spirits as I know the Fermanagh and Monaghan men to be, I should be able in one month to beat the whole Papist population of Ireland’. These speakers represented recognisably distinctive sub-groups within the ‘Protestant cause’: the high church clergy and the local Orange gentry and their different conceptions of what they were being threatened by and what they were defending. The former group conceptualised the problem in wide Erastian and political terms, whereas the other wished to preserve local sectarian dominance by physical force. While these different approaches can be seen as complimentary parts of a whole, the salient point is that, for the excited crowd jammed into the Monaghan Diamond and the branches that formed in Clones, Glaslough, Smithborough and Ballybay itself, the militant armed strand which saw the Catholic Association as rebels predominated.44 Moreover Monaghan’s bitter electoral politics also featured. Several speakers, including the Reverend Henry Lucas St George, launched lacerating criticisms of Rossmore who, for his part, was convinced that ‘this club was got up for the real purpose of promoting party, political and electioneering’.45 Rossmore had a point: as Ellis noted ‘there is not a gentlemen in the neighbourhood of Clones, but is a member of the Brunswick Club’.46 However, whether the aim was Protestant ascendancy in high church terms, drumming up militarised Orange loyalism for local sectarian ascendancy or drumming Westenra out at the next election, Monaghan Brunswickism was successfully launched and briefly seemed capable of being all things to all men. Though not overtly stated in Monaghan for obvious reasons, high churchmen saw secondary advantages in Brunswickism in translating their own concerns about the moral and social order into broader anxiety about populism in the evolving movement. As plans were laid for a Brunswick Club in Downpatrick in late September, the Reverend Holt Waring was dismayed that his relative, John Waring Maxwell, could not attend the inauguration. ‘Without the people of influence … such things lose their effect. It was that [sic] prevented the Orange Association from doing all the good that it ought to have done … the gentry withheld their aid in general, and … it fell into the hands of common people who are always hot-headed and rash … besides as it [the Brunswick club] will not be held up as a society for drinking or parading, it will not induce them so much to join.’ Sam Grey was exactly the type of plebeian Orangeman Waring dreaded: a violent publican with local influence. If the Orange and Brunswick strands of the revival in Down could be drawn together under the same elite patronage, Waring’s concerns could be addressed. On Saturday 27 September, ‘leading members of the old Orange Institution’ were to meet at 44 45

BNL, 17 Oct. 1828; BGCA, 17 Oct. 11 Nov. 1828; Enniskillen Chronicle, 30 Oct., 6 Nov. 1828 ‘To the inhabitants of Monaghan’; ‘A specimen of what the liberal resident nobleman has to contend with’, 15 Oct. 1828 (P.R.O.N.I., Rossmore papers, T2929/10/B/5A); ‘To the Protestants of County Monaghan’, 21 Oct. 1828 (P.R.O.N.I., Barrett-Lennard papers, MIC170/3). 46 Ellis to Barrett-Lennard, 15 Nov. 1828 (P.R.O.N.I., Barrett-Lennard papers, MIC170/3).

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Downpatrick to form a new county lodge and, simultaneously, ‘for the establishment of Brunswick clubs in every part’. Resolutions were produced in which Down Protestants pledged themselves to ‘cooperate cordially’ with Brunswick clubs, but which also noted that they, like most Monaghan Brunswickers, ‘understood’ the Orange system better.47 Anglican clerics were prominent at the many Brunswick inaugurations in central and southern Ulster, as were other Protestant clergymen. A Cavan meeting at Ballyjamesduff was held in the Presbyterian meeting house, where ‘members of the Establishment, Presbyterians and Wesleyan Methodists all concurred … in forming a sacred confederation for the support of their common constitution’. Nor was this mere propaganda: many Methodists shared with Anglicans the same sense of interlocking religious and political crises. Indeed, to the dismay of their British counterparts, preachers flaunted the traditional Methodist ‘no politics’ rule by speaking at Brunswick meetings. The Northern Whig accused Tandragee Presbyterian ministers of ‘pandering to the bigotry of their congregations’.48 However, in the heavily Presbyterian north-east, Brunswick clubs were generally less prolific, though north Donegal was an exception. At Ballymoney in north Antrim, the local Presbyterian Kirk Session refused use of the Meeting House; despite gentry approval, the building was ‘to be used solely for religious purposes’.49 In reality, many Presbyterians and their ministers supported emancipation. Ballymena saw a large and raucous Brunswick meeting prompting the Northern Whig’s jibe that ‘the Holy Fathers had gathered to protect their tithe’. But Ballymena, a centre of Henry Cooke’s influence, was an exception to a pattern which saw relatively few clubs outside the Anglican heartland of traditional loyalism around Lisburn.50 In County Down, though James Cleland formed clubs of Protestants and Dissenters at Bangor, and there were Presbyterian anti-emancipation petitions in 1827, no minister became an office holder.51 Indeed the encroachment of Brunswick clubs forced some Presbyterian liberals into defending their position, by adopting the language of non-Orange loyalty. A Hillsborough Presbyterian, Dr William Wright, told Downshire he had refused to join a Brunswick club as ‘I am too loyal a subject to meet for any political purpose without the regular call of government’, which ‘every clergyman should inculcate’. This recalls Nicholas Ellis’s suggestion in Monaghan, that ‘there should be some way for those who will not join Brunswick to publicly declare that they are not attached to the Catholics [Association], but firmly attached to the British constitution and British connection’.52 Liberal Protestant strength in a locality could impede the spread of Brunswick clubs by, for example, 47 Waring to Maxwell, 19 Sept. 1828 (P.R.O.N.I., Perceval-Maxwell papers, D3244/G/1/58); BNL, 19 Sept. 1828; Sibbett, Orangeism, ii, 28. 48 BNL, 19 Sept. 1828; David Hempton and Myrtle Hill, Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster society, 1740–1890 (London and New York, 1992), pp 78–9; NW, 2 Oct. 1828. 49 Ballymoney Presbyterian church, session minutes, 26 Oct. 1828 (P.R.O.N.I., CR3/1/B4); I am indebted to Dr Andrew Holmes for this reference. 50 NW, 23 Oct. 1828; BNL, 14, 21 Oct. 1828. 51 BNL, 2 Jan. 1827, 17 Oct. 1828. 52 Wright to Downshire, 10 Nov. 1828 (P.R.O.N.I., Downshire papers, D671/C/12/356); Ellis to Barrett-Lennard, 22 Oct. 1828 (P.R.O.N.I., Barrett-Lennard papers, MIC170/3).

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denying access to county infrastructure of office-holders and court houses. However, the initial appeal of Brunswick to the popular loyalist constituency was such that, even where the liberals dominated, as in Down and Monaghan, the formation of clubs was hard to prevent. Lord Londonderry desperately asked Downshire how to ‘keep down the Brunswick and Orange clubs which are now all around the quiet landlords … At present I am helpless, except with my own people and tenantry.’53 Branch club formation in Londonderry and Donegal revealed more local characteristics. The Derry city inaugural meeting, perhaps reflecting the more liberal influences of Hill and Dawson, saw ‘many Roman Catholics present’, some of whom subscribed to clubs there and in Coleraine. The Catholic Association’s lack of influence may have been a factor, as one Catholic, in a gesture reminiscent of 1790s non-sectarian loyalism, came forward ‘unsolicited’ with his subscription, stressing the necessity ‘for the loyal part of the community to rally round the constitution’. At Magherafelt, a local landowner, Rowley Miller, made even more overt links to the liberal loyalist tradition, hoping that ‘we Brunswickers will be … ready, able and willing to give the enemies of our country the same warm reception as the loyal men of all Christian denominations gave them thirty years ago’, and that ‘there can be no objection to the loyal Roman Catholics joining this club’. Lord Londonderry, in a public letter blaming the Catholic Association for the crisis and dubbing Brunswick a secondary cause, noted the inconsistencies in the fact that some liberal Protestants had joined clubs ‘saying they are not opposed to further concessions to Roman Catholics’, while other Brunswickers claimed that their clubs’ ‘basic tenet … is to stop further concessions’.54 The Brunswick movement also spread in the south, if not so extensively. In corporate towns and cities the organisation was often simply grafted on to existing guild and freeman structures. Dublin Corporation signified approval at its quarter assembly toasting the marquess of Chandos and the duke of Gordon for forming British Brunswick clubs and thanking Lord Longford for his Irish exertions. The corporation warmly welcomed the commencement of clubs, giving the freedom of the city to Anthony Lefroy and the Sligo M.P. Major King for promoting the Protestant revival. Though Dublin was the centre of aristocratic Brunswickism, the artisan and operative classes also formed clubs. The Guild of St Luke established its own Brunswick club; a City of Dublin Brunswick club included ‘hundreds’ of the most respectable, as well as ‘loyal Protestants in the humbler classes of life’, who had been enrolled by the Anglican clergy.55 The Brunswick club established in Cork in 1827 widened its membership from freemen to include all Protestants and pledged cooperation with Dublin, thus transcending its original electioneering function by conforming to the wider template. Gerard Callaghan, the defeated Tory candidate of 1826, was now ‘a rank Orangemen, or Brunswicker … like all the rest of [Cork] corporation’. Despite the earlier poor showing in anti-emancipation petitioning, 53 Londonderry to Downshire, 8 Oct. 1828 (P.R.O.N.I., Downshire papers, D617/C/12/353); BNL, 2 Dec. 1828. 54 Dawson claimed the Association’s influence did not extend to Derry: Mirror of Parliament, i, 40; LJ, 7 Oct., 4 Nov. 1828; BNL, 31 Oct. 1828. 55 BNL, 12 Sept. 1828; Jacqueline Hill, From Patriots to Unionists: Dublin civic politics and Irish Protestant Patriotism, 1660–1840 (Oxford, 1997), p 340; BGCA, 23 Sept. 1828; SOB, 20 Dec. 1828.

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Brunswickism had enough support in rural Cork to make Lord Donoughmore, a liberal Protestant, concerned about getting enough signatures in favour of emancipation from his co-religionists.56 Elsewhere in the south and west of Ireland there were numerous formations in the autumn of 1828. The first Brunswick club in Connacht was formed in County Sligo soon after the Dublin club’s inauguration in August. This was followed by a ‘Protestant Dinner’ given by the propertied gentlemen for Colonel Irvine, where it was claimed that this county club gave the lead to Connacht and was already ‘planting in every corner of the county, subordinate clubs’.57 Later in the autumn clubs formed in Leinster, including Baltinglass, County Wicklow, a county club in Wexford town and a subsidiary at Newtownmountkennedy. A County Kilkenny club was formed and a Louth club began at Dundalk. Other southern formations were at Dunkeerin, County Tipperary, Athlone, and Ballymahon in County Longford, where around 2,000 Protestants attended the inaugural meeting. This affair was condemned by the liberal Protestant, Lord Forbes, as inviting a ‘collision of party’, being the work of ‘a very foolish and violent High Sheriff’ who had ‘borrowed’ Protestants from adjoining counties.58 Such an attendance would not have excited notice in Ulster, but it was exceptional in the south. However, some of these formations faced opposition. A Brunswick club at Limerick met strong Catholic Association opposition, and one even struggled into existence in Ennis, the scene of O’Connell’s electoral triumph, though it only enlisted the High Sheriff and several magistrates. Generally speaking, southern Brunswickism lacked the numbers and militancy of its northern counterpart, a vulnerability recognised in Anglesey’s comment that it was only in Ulster where ‘from their numbers they are in no danger from … the Catholics, that the Protestants unite for personal protection’, which, he feared, would provoke ‘dreadful retaliation in the south’.59 Therefore, beneath its show of unity, Irish Brunswickism was full of unresolved contradictions and regional variations. Strategically, there were different views about whether the paramilitary or political aspect should dominate. Politically, though the ultra-Protestant stance of outright opposition to emancipation predominated and was rooted in the traditions of exclusive loyalty, there were signs that not all liberal Protestants were outside the fold, as some advocated a more progressive approach to Catholic relief with ‘securities’, and justified this in a language of liberal loyalism. Socially, the elite and plebeian connection was still unproved. For clergymen, both Anglican and Dissenting, involvement in Brunswicksim raised thorny doctrinal questions. Though Brunswick formation often accompanied Orange resurrection, the two movements were not coeval. In short, it was a grand theoretical edifice; but untested. Progress would be reviewed at the first general meeting at Dublin’s Rotunda. 56 Paget to Anglesey, 24 Sept. 1828 (P.R.O.N.I., Anglesey papers, D619/32A/2/120); BNL, 19 Sept. 1828; O’Ferrall, Catholic emancipation, p 211. 57 SJ, 22, 28 August 1828; LJ, 7 Oct. 1828. 58 BNL, 10, 14 Oct., 4 Nov. 1828; LJ, 2 Sept., 7 Oct. 1828; O’Ferrall, Catholic emancipation, p 209; Notes and cuttings (N.L.I., Brunswick papers, MS5017, f. 18). 59 Anglesey to Peel, 2 Oct. 1828, to Wellington, Nov. 1828 (P.R.O.N.I., Anglesey papers, D619/26/D/1,2).

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Awareness of the symbolic power of anniversaries was becoming a Brunswick hallmark: this meeting was set for 4 November 1828, William of Orange’s birthday. Affiliated clubs were circulated and their office-holders’ attendance required, ‘as it is of the deepest importance that the meeting should afford an imposing display of Protestant rank, respectability and numbers’. About 600 landed and clerical guests each paid £1 10s for tickets to the post-meeting dinner. Dublin Corporation made the Mansion House’s George IV room available, thus continuing the royal theme and giving proceedings a distinctively Erastian tone. The quality of the bill of fare at political dinners was a recognised way of signifying the importance of the occasion. Here no expense was spared, the room was brilliantly illuminated by gas lighting; the hotelier, Robert Morrison, provided ‘turtle, venison – every luxury the epicurean could desire’. The diners, overlooked by Lawrence’s full-length portrait of George IV given to the corporation, would hardly have doubted that the king would support their political objectives as enthusiastically as their gastronomic indulgence.60 Earlier, at the Rotunda, Lord Longford had opened proceedings by outlining Brunswick’s raison d’être of defending the constitution and the civilised modus operandi: firmness, temper, moderation, but he was interrupted by shouts of ‘and No Surrender!’ The Dublin club’s ‘managing committee’ then presented their progress report. Despite regional imbalances, the parent club was satisfied. Their report, that 108 clubs were already formed, was to be printed and a newspaper, the Star of Brunswick, established using extant funds. More evidence of Brunswick’s developing tenor came when the list of clubs being read out reached Ballybay, the speaker was stopped by yells of ‘Bravo!’ and ‘Ballybay, the best bay in Ireland!’61 Speeches accompanying resolutions initially suggested that the movement might accommodate its early contradictions. Thomas Stewart Corry from Monaghan, admitting he was daunted by the salubrious audience and, doubtless with Sam Grey in mind, said ‘wealth is not a necessary ingredient in constitutional loyalty, and poverty is, thank God, no bar to it’. Speaking for Dublin Corporation, Sir Abraham King refuted O’Connell’s charge of its being ‘beggarly’, noting that any poverty was the result of ‘this truly loyal and … exclusively Protestant body’ having voted thousands of pounds to help man the fleet. Harcourt Lees was present, as was Lord Enniskillen, who said all loyalists must do ‘everything in their power’ to thwart the ‘enemies of the Constitution’. In the toasts, ‘loud cheers’ were given for ‘Lord Enniskillen and the Orangemen of Ireland’, but they were more muted for ‘the ’Prentice Boys of Derry’, doubtless reflecting Sir George Hill’s rejection of Brunswickism.62 However any complacency was exploded by an Anglican clergyman and Trinity Fellow, the Reverend John Martin, who, seconding a resolution for petitioning both houses of parliament, warned that the new Brunswick movement was endangered by liberal and evangelical elements within Protestantism. 60 Peter Brett, ‘Political dinners in early-nineteenth-century Britain: platform, meeting place and battleground’, History, 81, no. 264 (Oct. 1996), pp 527–52; A full and authentic report of the first annual meeting of the Brunswick constitutional clubs of Ireland, pp 4–5, 66–7. 61 Notice of first general meeting, n.d. [Oct. 1828]; Blacker to Portadown Brunswick club, 7 Nov. 1828; Circular n.d. [Nov. 1828] (N.L.I., Brunswick papers, MS 5017, ff 21, 27, 30); O’Ferrall, Catholic emancipation, pp 209–10; Sibbett, Orangeism, ii, 20–1. 62 A full and authentic account of the first annual meeting of the Brunswick … clubs, pp 15, 67, 73.

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Writing in 1914, the Orange historian R. M. Sibbett called Martin’s speech ‘a remarkable prophecy’, which had all come true.63 Sibbett’s attribution of quasiMosaic status must be seen in the light of Anglican disestablishment and Home Rule; but he was correct in recognising Martin’s contemporary importance within Protestantism in giving Brunswick an Erastian high church ‘political’ character. Martin had strong high church credentials. He attended as proxy for the Primate’s protégé, Romney Robinson, and soon after married the daughter of the high churchman, Bishop Mant of Down and Connor.64 Martin’s speech occurred against a backdrop of renewed tension between the evangelical and high church wings of the Church of Ireland. The Second Reformation had temporarily healed these splits, seeming to satisfy the evangelicals’ missionary instincts and offer orthodox churchmen a truly national church, but the overall lack of interest of most landlords in conversionism saw divergences within evangelicals ranks. Some would revert to a political solution; others, like the Reverend Robert Daly of Powerscourt, complained about the Reformation being politicised by those ‘never known to show any interest in spiritual matters before’. By 1828, prominent aristocratic evangelicals like Farnham, Roden and Mandeville were gravitating towards a political position congenial to high churchmen, in what has been aptly described as ‘the kaleidoscopic interaction of these varieties of churchmanship’.65 Brunswick’s ambition of Protestant unity inevitably brought the emotive distinction between religion and politics back into the foreground. Martin’s reluctance at embarking ‘upon a sea of politics’, and criticism of those who, for ‘the tranquillity of the country’, would have settled the Catholic question with securities reflect his two interlocking concerns: that clerical support for Brunswickism could be compromised by misplaced notions of piety, and that the ramifications of otherworldly evangelicalism would de facto be the same as those aimed at by liberal Protestants. Catholic relief, Martin argued, was not, as liberal Protestants and even some Brunswickers believed, an answer to Ireland’s disturbed condition and therefore a safeguard for ascendancy, but a precursor to a deluge of demands threatening the civil and ecclesiastical establishment. ‘Popery’, he said, was ‘an adamantine chain of motive and moral obligation that hangs from the Papal thrones and binds … the secular clergy from Metropolitan down to Curate’. If emancipation passed, Irish demographic realities would see eighty Catholic members pledged to Rome’s ‘creature and instrument’ the Association, guaranteeing the overthrow of the legislative freedom achieved in 1688 with dire consequences for the Established Church. ‘Why not’, he asked, ‘make it a pledge that every see of the Established Church, when vacated, should be, filled by a Roman Catholic Churchman, why not … pledge for the extinction of Dublin Corporation, of Trinity College, to repeal the union and extinguish the Kildare Place Society?’ If emancipation was not stopped, 63 64 65

Sibett, Orangeism, ii, 20–1. W. B. Mant, Memories of Richard Mant (Dublin, 1857), p 228. Stewart J. Brown, ‘The new reformation movement in the Church of Ireland’, in Stewart J. Brown and D. W. Miller (eds.), Piety and power in Ireland, 1760–1960 (Belfast, 2000), pp 191, 203–7; T. C. F. Stunt, ‘Evangelical cross-currents in the Church of Ireland, 1820–33’, in W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds), The churches, Ireland and the Irish (Studies in church history, 25, Oxford, 1989), p 219.

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there would be ‘no end to it’ and, though some objected, there was no better way of resistance than joining Brunswick clubs to petition.66 This political approach angered doctrinaire evangelicals. The influential Anglican evangelical periodical the Christian Examiner had published an article on the dangerous state of the country, deploring clerical participation in Brunswick clubs. While deprecating the ‘maddening violence’ of the ‘Popish faction’ and the ‘apparently vacillating conduct of our own government’ the Examiner blasted clergymen who exhorted people on Sundays to renounce the ‘transient occupations of the world’, then immersed themselves in Brunswick business during the week. In an implicit reference to south Ulster, the article continued, ‘the fact that any citizen may become a brawling politician, no more justifies a clergyman in assuming a political character, than … swaggering as a yeomanry officer’. Rather, he should embrace ‘the great work going on in Ireland … the promotion of the principles of the Reformation’. Purged of sanctimonious rhetoric, the argument was logical. Its essence was, first, that Catholic Association militancy copied by Protestants damaged their cause; and second, that Brunswickism was a political ‘faction’, and that ‘party’ conflict would mean inevitable defeat as ‘both will be confounded by the enemy and the mob, and the pious clergyman will be classed with the agitator’ allowing priests to ‘identify the Biblical and the Brunswicker’. Flesh was put on the bones of Martin’s fears when the Examiner praised George Dawson for rejecting violent Orangeism for tranquillity’s sake. The evangelicals’ problem was jealousy at Brunswickism’s apparent success in mobilising the Protestants when the reformation was rapidly declining. ‘We cannot but regret that an object merely political should have the power of calling out such an exhibition of Protestant zeal.’67 Moreover, the fact that some key landed evangelicals and supporters of the reformation movement like Farnham were now throwing themselves wholeheartedly into the political Brunswick clubs, led the Examiner to lament how ‘some we revere as friends of the Reformation have proved … that they do not share our opinion’. The Reverend Martin’s speech at the Rotunda had opened up a debate about religion and politics. The Dublin Evening Mail printed a letter to Farnham’s brother, Henry Maxwell, which was supportive of Brunswickism and bitterly opposed to antipolitical evangelicals. The Examiner responded by complaining that the Protestant press had dubbed ‘modern evangelicals’ as ‘slang journalists’ and ‘assassins prepared to plant the stiletto thrust in every patriotic heart’. Despite rebukes in the press, evangelicals would continue ‘advocating what we believe to be the revealed instrument for the good of our country’. Those advocating a political route countered by publishing Martin’s ‘powerful, unanswerable and argumentative’ speech in the Star of Brunswick as a defence of ‘Reverend Brunswickers’. This rebuttal of the Examiner’s charges emphasised Brunswickism’s True Whig ideology by rendering evangelical opposition in neo-Jacobite terms as, ‘this species of Quietism, of passive obedience to the march of events, of High Tory non-resistance’. Martin’s argument was paraphrased: ‘for, however spirited the views of the Reformers … that the Gospel should 66 SOB, 29 Nov. 1828; A full and authentic report of the first annual meeting of the Brunswick … clubs, p 47. 67 The Christian Examiner and Church of Ireland Magazine, xli, vol. vii (1828), preface, pp 313–19.

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prevail of its own force, Popery, which is altogether a system of politics, never fails to drag into its own cause all the engines of state’. Martin’s sentiments were considered so much ‘an official record’ of Brunswick principles that they were to be printed as pamphlets to give ‘as wide a circulation as possible’.68 Immediately after the Rotunda meeting efforts were made to resolve these potentially debilitating divisions. The concurrent Orange revival had proceeded apace since September. The county grand lodge structure had been re-activated, sometimes almost paralleling the establishment of Brunswick clubs. One speaker at the inauguration of Maghera Brunswick Club in County Londonderry said it was ‘founded on exactly the same excellent principles’ as the Orange Association: loyalty to the king, to the Protestant constitution and good will to all men. Yet, the lines of demarcation between Orange and Brunswick movements were unclear. The Orange Order and Lord Enniskillen were lavishly praised at the Rotunda, and the reconstituted Grand Lodge held its first general meeting at Morrison’s the following day. On 16 November, one of Harcourt Lees’s periodical announcements to Benevolent Orangemen showed signs of easing inter-Orange tensions. Though regretting that the ‘old’ Orange societies ‘should have been so deluded by an English Missionary … as to surrender the independent birthright of Irish Orangeism’, Lees pledged that ‘the benevolent and strictly Irish Society’ would acknowledge the ‘new Anglo-Irish ­Institution’ as ‘we have the same vital object in view, our systems alone differ’. The next quarterly meeting of the Benevolent Orangemen in Belfast would try to unite under a ‘common symbol’ these ‘two great bodies of incorruptible loyalists’. Meanwhile the orthodox Orange leadership was moving towards Brunswick. On 28 November 1828 it resolved to ‘co-operate with the committee of the Brunswick Club’ in getting petitions signed, and sent a deputation to meet them, as ‘both societies profess the same object’. This occurred on 29 November, the day the Star of Brunswick’s first edition appeared boasting the clubs’ objects were those which brought William to the throne.69 By 2 December a Grand Lodge sub-committee recommended that lodge secretaries level co-operate with Brunswick clubs and Orangemen should sign their petitions.70 The gravitation of the revived lodges in Brunswick’s political direction sat ill with the militarised Orangeism of Ballybay, but there was no shortage of ameliorative ideas. At the Rotunda the Fermanagh High Sheriff, William D’Arcy Irvine, proposed that some token of esteem be given to Grey, but this suggestion aroused little support. The Belfast Newsletter took up the cause, surprised that, apart from Fermanagh’s Impartial Reporter, there had been no response to Irvine’s call. Grey’s supporters formed a committee and appointed a treasurer and secretary for each county. The gift envisaged for ‘honest Sam Grey’, the plebeian hero of Ballybay, was nothing perishable like a piece of plate but something, ‘perhaps a freehold, that will descend to his posterity’. Later Grey was made a member of Dublin’s exclusive Royal York

68

Ibid., preface, pp 313–19; SOB, 29 Nov. 1828; Circular n.d. [Nov. 1828] (N.L.I., Brunswick Papers, MS 5017, f. 30). 69 BNL, 21, 28 Nov. 1828; SOB, 29 Nov. 1828. 70 First report of the select committee on Orange lodges, H.C. 1835 (377), xv, appx 6, p 73.

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Club.71 Grey’s lionising, which was paralleled by reams of ballads published in the press, obviously reflected Orange-Brunswick rapprochement. If Grey’s social status became commensurate with his value as a loyalist icon, perhaps the Brunswick leadership could make petitioning capital from the militant spirit. It had certainly provided the evolving Brunswick movement with a morale-boosting hard edge and facilitated plebeian Protestants interpreting Brunswick’s fiery inaugural meetings as similar to self-defence schemes their fathers had enrolled in as loyalists. However, having attracted mass support, it remained to be seen if this ‘vast political machine’ could hold itself together long enough to be effective. With the clubs started, all depended on their activities.72 Promoting co-operation between Protestants and disseminating constitutional information through handbills, pamphlets and newspapers were the Brunswick movement’s official objectives. Any evaluation of Brunswickism’s effectiveness must consider their dissemination and reception. The Star of Brunswick reflected the organisation’s elevated social character and was based on the same premise, that respectability and wealth advertised the cause, gave gravitas with government, socially outshone the Catholic Association and outgunned liberal Protestants in numbers and rank. Even in a material sense, the new paper embodied social status and constitutionalism: the ‘finest’ paper was used, new type was specially ordered from London and offices obtained, strategically situated opposite King William’s statue. Though no production expense was spared, the new paper sold at 7d, little more than provincial papers like the Londonderry Journal which cost 5d. The first issue contained a free supplement reminding readers that it was ‘a mechanical production, superior to any exhibited in England’. In its reportage, unlike most Dublin Protestant papers which simply abridged local reports of Brunswick meetings, the Star guaranteed to have ‘reporters’ at important events.73 Although readily organised through the club network, it was nonetheless innovatory in journalistic terms. The content appealed to all readers, ranging from detailed political analysis and verbatim reports from meetings to patriotic ballads on Sam Grey. The Star of Brunswick was published weekly, but the organisation’s initiative in print extended to occasional publications in pamphlet and handbill form. Martin’s speech was printed in Dublin and sold at 1s 6d per copy, though local clubs could bulk order at a discounted price of 30s for 20 copies. Branches could purchase in bulk from Dublin, or if cheaper, have copies re-printed locally. Handbills were extensively circulated, like that entitled ‘Read and Compare’, which contrasted Brunswickism’s titled respectability with O’Connell’s jibes about ‘Bloodhound Clubs’.74 Sometimes handbills which required a local imprimatur were produced in skeleton template form carrying core information to be reproduced and endorsed locally. In response to claims that the clubs stirred up sectarianism, a template handbill entitled ‘To the Roman Catholics of this neighbourhood’, was circulated by the central club. 71 72 73

BNL, 21 Nov., 5 Dec. 1828. SOB, 29 Nov., 6 Dec. 1828, 10 Jan. 1829; O’Ferrall, Catholic emancipation, p 209. Circulars, 4, 22 Nov. 1828 (N.L.I., Brunswick papers, MS 5017, ff 32, 34); SOB, 29 Nov. 1828; 6 Dec. 1828. 74 Irvine to Blacker, 17 Nov. 1828 (N.L.I., Brunswick papers, MS 5017 f. 29); Handbill: ‘Read and compare’ (P.R.O.N.I., Perceval Maxwell papers, D3244/G/1/51).

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Extant examples show locally printed versions for Tipperary’s Dunkeerin club and County Down’s Lower Iveagh club – verbatim except for the name of the club and its officers. Such methods facilitated the production of propaganda and conveyed the impression of systematic co-ordination. The central generation of propaganda material had advantages of speed and consistency, yet was flexible enough to allow local discretion. Consideration was given to those who could not afford newspapers and pamphlets. Local clubs established reading rooms where ‘the humbler classes of Protestants can be informed of their constitutional duties’.75 The same templating technique was used in petitioning, a key Brunswick objective. Amongst the ‘hints’ the Dublin club sent to Belfast was the suggestion that ancillary clubs establish funds to purchase parchments for petitioning. In 1829 local secretaries were given specific directives by the parent club on organising the signing once the ‘forms of petition’ were received. No erasures or interlineations should take place (a Protestant petition had been rejected on these grounds in 1827). There were six template petitions, to the King, to the Lords and four alternatives for the Commons. Copies were printed from the original and attached to pre-ruled paper ‘slips’, and sent to different locations for signature. When these were collected, the copy of the petition’s prayer was detached and the text engrossed onto one parchment to which all the signed slips were attached. One person in each petitioning district was tasked with collecting the completed petition.76 If the Brunswick clubs were innovative in their use of printed propaganda and petitioning material, they were also adept at appropriating loyalist commemorative traditions. As numbers counted in the battle against the Catholic Association, religious demography required the Protestant dead to be enlisted. Brunswickism built on extant trends. The raising of subscriptions for the Walker memorial in Derry had begun in December 1826, but with the pillar in place when the clubs started, attention turned to his tomb in Donoughmore, County Tyrone. Its inscription was published in the Dublin and Belfast papers. Slogans recalling the Protestant past, already embedded in local social memory, were now broadcast nationally. The ‘No Surrender’ motto of Derry’s defenders was adopted as an unofficial Brunswick war cry in speeches, newspapers, ballads and even, as Lord Downshire found to his disgust at Banbridge, in graffiti. Sir Richard Musgrave’s history of the rebellion had already set 1798 in the context of previous insurrections, so it is not surprising that Protestant security featured in the more rousing Brunswick speeches. However, the systematic and physical way in which it was envisaged now was different: sermons were supplemented by tangible artefacts. Provincial and county massacre monuments were planned, commemorating a notional figure of 3–400,000 Protestant dead in 1641. The central committee also asked branches to collate numbers of Protestant proprietors in relation to Catholic property.77 The politics of subscription could exclude or embarrass opponents, as in the furore over 75 Address to the Roman Catholics, 1 Jan. 1829 (P.R.O.N.I., Downshire papers, D671/C/12/366); Circular n.d. [Nov. 1828]; Address to the Roman Catholics, n.d. [Nov. 1828]; Circular, 22 Nov. 1828 (N.L.I., Brunswick papers, MS 5017, ff 30, 34, 36). 76 Circular letters to local secretaries, n.d. [Jan. 1829] (N.L.I., Brunswick papers, MS 5017, f. 47); BGCA, 12 Sept. 1828. 77 BGCA, 23 Sept. 1828; Reilly to Downshire, 20 Nov. 1828 (P.R.O.N.I., Downshire papers,

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Dawson’s contribution to Walker’s pillar. However, notwithstanding its socially splendid openings, at street level Brunswick’s loyalists did not blink at the gaudy and gimmicky. Dublin shops sold lurid orange and blue King William silk handkerchiefs, a gesture with a politico-economic logic: the weavers’ guild had voted for the ultraProtestant, Thomas Ellis, against Grattan in the 1820 election and the industry was in decline as silk was out of fashion.78 Such activities were paradigmatic of the entire Brunswick enterprise as they reflected and utilised its organisational structure, whether in the Tyrone-Dublin-Belfast trajectory of Walker’s inscription, the regional pattern of 1641 monuments, or the multi-coloured mixture of paternalism and loyalism in the King Billy handkerchiefs. A tactful approach which offered leadership and direction without insisting on rigid compliance gave the movement optimum chances of success. This pragmatism is well illustrated by the Portadown club, which reveals how general Brunswick policies were interpreted locally. The pre-planning, formation and daily activities of the Portadown Club are well-documented because its president, Colonel Blacker, was frequently in Dublin and acted as liaison with the parent club on whose management committee he sat. Despite Blacker’s later disavowal of Brunswickism, it is abundantly clear that he was the driving force behind the Portadown club. He summoned sixteen local gentlemen and clergy to a preliminary meeting on 20 September 1828 to discuss formation. Joseph Atkinson of Crowhill, the elderly loyalist and yeomanry captain, attended this meeting when draft resolutions were discussed, including one proposing him as president. However, this was amended before the public launch on 25 September, Atkinson was given his place as chairman, but Blacker was proposed as president, on the basis that, as a membership of 3,000 was sought, they needed someone active and efficient. Two points are significant. First, the division of functions occurred before the public launch, with Atkinson getting an essentially honorific role to ‘advertise’ the meeting and encourage linkage of the current crisis with 1798. Second, the envisaged membership was huge: the Dublin parent had originally recommended that branches cap membership at 100. The subscriptions agreed at the meeting, reportedly with 10,000 present, were relatively low: a minimum of two shillings and a maximum of one pound, lower than the range of 2s 6d to a guinea normally set by most branches. As Orangemen attending monthly lodge meeting in the 1820s typically paid between 5d and 10d clearly the Brunswick organisers obviously wanted no financial barrier erected to exclude the bulk of plebeian Protestants.79 The formation meeting was typically emotive and carefully choreographed. The prospective membership was largely Orange. The District Tyler (whose role was to monitor attendance and discipline at lodges) was paid 3s 4d to warn Orangemen that their attendance at the Brunswick meeting was expected. As individual lodges within a county were organised in districts, by harnessing this it is clear that the organisers saw the old Orange structure as the prime mobilising device. Individual D671/C/2/360); SOB, 3 Jan., 14 March 1829; Circular, n.d. [Nov. 1828] (N.L.I., Brunswick papers, MS 5017, f. 30). 78 Hill, Patriots to Unionists, pp 286–7, 311. 79 Waringstown Orange Lodge subscription book LOL 67 (P.R.O.N.I., MIC202/1); Ballymena Orange Lodge minute book (P.R.O.N.I., T1751/1).

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popularity and loyalist tradition were also utilised. Atkinson could have been speaking in 1798 when he claimed that, though they wished to live in good relations with their Catholic neighbours, the activities of ‘seditious agitators’ meant they were ‘driven to self-defence’. Various speakers followed, including the Reverend Robert Henry, Perpetual Curate of Portadown, who valiantly offered to spill the audience’s last drops of blood for king and constitution. George Pepper, who formally proposed Blacker as president, alleged the Catholic Association really aimed at reversing the land settlement and ‘extermination’, a powerful signifier in an area which witnessed 1641 massacres. The meeting closed with cheering for the king, the Ulster Orangemen, the Dublin Brunswick club and ‘honest Sam Grey, who routed JACK at Ballybay’. The Dublin link was re-affirmed by the late arrival of Lord Blayney, a vice-president of the parent club, whose carriage the crowd drew along the road.80 However, exciting local Protestants at the launch was not the same as keeping them involved. After the initial drama, one potential barrier to retaining mass support was lack of understanding of precisely how incipient rebellion would be stopped by petitions. Clergymen had experience in translating abstract concepts into meaningful forms and a sub-committee of three clerics was appointed to handle the mediation of the message. They produced printed notices and handbills, revealing a delicate balancing of legality and constitutionalism, as the message oscillated between a wish to give government ministers constitutional assistance to resist emancipation, disavowal of ‘uncharitable feelings’ about Catholics, and a belligerent familiar rhetoric. Protestants were reminded of Dawson’s fear-driven apostasy and promised that the Brunswick clubs would defend the throne and constitution of 1688 which ‘their ancestors sealed with their blood … should force be resorted to against them’. Despite its urban title, the club drew support from the barony of O’Neilland East, an area steeped in militarised Orangeism. Here Brunswick rhetoric must have been understood by Protestants through historical precedent: that they were again being asked to provide physical force. This militarism was more than recruitment propaganda. Following Anglesey’s proclamation against the Catholic Association’s mobilisation of the southern peasantry, Blacker advised the Portadown committee to summon ‘all loyal subjects within the range of their influence to be ready to assist in enforcing the commands of his Excellency’, provided they put themselves under the magistrates.81 As the yeomanry was inactive, the similarities between this ‘offer of service’ and earlier loyal associations are striking. At its operative level, the club disseminated propaganda, gathered intelligence and managed petitioning. Blacker wanted the Warder and the Star of Brunswick delivered to a house convenient to all members to promote ‘free interchange and communication of sentiment between … every class and denomination’. The committee was chosen on a district basis with key local men appointed, making each townland become, in a deliberate military metaphor, an ‘outpost’. These ‘leaders’ were

80 Resolutions of Portadown Brunswick Club, September 1828 (N.L.I., Brunswick papers, MS 5017, ff. 8–10). 81 Blacker to Portadown Brunswick Club, 2 Oct. 1828 (N.L.I., Brunswick papers, MS 5017 f. 19).

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nominated by the committeemen, who were substantial farmers like the Orangeman and ‘respectable tenant’ William Lutton, a committeeman for Ballymacardle, whose son held the key rank of permanent sergeant in Blacker’s yeomanry corps. Having such locally influential Orangemen as townland ‘leaders’ made logistical sense as they were to collect subscriptions, liaise with members, distribute propaganda and prepare petitions.82 One such exercise was the distribution of the duke of Newcastle’s letter to Lord Kenyon. The Downpatrick club used the Dublin-printed original, but the Portadown committee wanted the letter printed locally by the Newry Telegraph. It comprised three long, close-printed columns in an elevated style. Reading that governments should exhibit ‘undeviating rectitude of principle’ can hardly have excited the membership who probably expected to get guns. This is perhaps reflected in the fact that only 300 copies were printed six weeks after a foundation meeting which envisaged 3,000 members.83 On 8 November 1828 the committee resolved to begin petitioning, appointing the curate of Drumcree parish church, Charles King Irwin, as joint secretary with responsibility for co-ordinating the business. The club’s papers suggest that thirteen petitions were envisaged: those for the Commons were planned for the parishes of Drumcree, Seagoe and Tartaraghan, from the manors of Richmount, Clanticlew, Ballyoran and Corbrackely, from the inhabitants of Portadown, and congregational petitions from the Presbyterians of Portadown and Derryanvil and the Methodists of Scotch Street, Armagh. The single Lords petition was to be from Drumcree parish. Problems were soon evident. Another Anglican minister, Robert Henry, was decidedly less sanguine about the realities of petitioning, than in his sanguinary rhetoric at the formation meeting in September, and refused to help, for reasons which are unclear. Irwin was responsible for the two Drumcree petitions and tried to organise other districts through the local leaders. He followed the Dublin club’s recommended procedure by circulating duplicated printed petitions attached to ­parchment ‘slips’ ruled for signatures. This was designed to speed things up as the prayer could be engrossed separately on parchment as signing continued, and the components joined up later. This was fine in theory, but Irwin’s correspondence suggests further problems. For one thing, signing the slips needed careful monitoring. On the Drumcree petition Irwin had to mark in pencil the place for the first name, a Mr Alexander (presumably someone of local importance), lest other parishioners put their names above his. Also more slips than anticipated were needed, as one held just 264 names: ‘considering the fist that some country fellows write’ he said, ‘I don’t think the columns could be conveniently narrower’. The new parliamentary session was due to open on 5 February 1829, but by January Irwin was worried that their efforts would be defeated by logistical complications. Parchments for engrossing had not arrived; nothing was decided about how or when the petitions would be called in, or who would present them. Irwin exhausted himself combining petitioning with normal 82

Blacker Day Book, ii, ff 66–74 (A.C.M., 5/1948); Blacker to Portadown Brunswick Club, 7 Nov. 1828; Minutes of committee meeting, 8 Nov. 1828 (N.L.I., Brunswick papers, MS 5017, ff 34, 58). 83 Newcastle to Kenyon, 18 Sept. 1828 (P.R.O.N.I., Perceval-Maxwell papers, D3244/G/1/57).

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parish business, and doubtless had evangelical criticisms on his conscience. However the local leaders showed no such anxiety, being at best complacent and sometimes actually hostile. He sent out circulars, but few bothered to reply and three, William Matchett, William Mallagh and Bernard Ruddle, peremptorily refused. Ruddle was a publican whose inn was patronised by Orangemen; Matchett probably was a lodge master and Mallagh definitely was.84 This suggests not so much apathy as disillusionment amongst the plebeian loyalists Blacker intended as members. However, despite the muddle and delay, twelve of the thirteen petitions were successfully presented: the only one which cannot be traced in the Commons Journals and the Mirror of Parliament was from Tartaraghan. Indeed five, from Richmount, Derryanvil Methodists, Portadown town and the manors of Ballyoran and Clanticlew were presented between 9 and 13 February, with that from Seagoe coming on 24 February. Seven more, including the Drumcree petition and a second Portadown petition unrecorded in the Club papers, were presented on 16 March 1829. The Drumcree Lords petition was probably amongst several presented by the Primate on 17 March. Several were handled by Henry Maxwell and, despite his lukewarm attitude, Blacker’s relative, Sir George Hill, also presented some petitions, while Lord Mandeville presented that for Seagoe.85 Considering Irwin’s difficulties the local petitioning effort must be deemed relatively successful. Figures are not available, but the Drumcree petition’s delay may be explained by the large numbers signing. Irwin noted it was ‘numerously signed’ and with each slip holding 264 names, the fact that he had to order more slips suggests a substantial response whatever the reticence of local Orangemen. The Portadown example therefore reveals an operation which largely achieved its local objectives, but which, like its counterparts, was doomed to failure by the wider political situation, which is why Blacker tried to write himself out its history. There is also evidence suggesting that the meditated social unity was equally doomed. Not, as Blacker craftily implied, because lower-class Orangemen preferred signs and ritual; but because their expectations were unrealistically raised that they were participating in a resurrected loyal armed association, only to find themselves agents of Brunswick propaganda. Doubtless some of the ‘fists’ that scrawled on Irwin’s slips outside Drumcree church were similar to those of their fathers who had signed the Drumcree Loyal Association’s offer of service in 1796.86 The crucial point, from a plebeian perspective, is that militaristic banding which promised the possibility of a getting one’s fist on the stock of a musket was more attractive and locally comprehensible than pointing pens at targets in far-off Westminster. Thus, although Brunswick could not allow itself to be ruled by its own rhetoric, it could fall victim to its own propaganda. The same militant rhetoric was apparent at the big county petitioning meetings in December and January 1829. As the new parliamentary session approached, anti-emancipation petitioning meetings were held in various counties. Parish petitions were received from most 84 Meeting of Portadown Orange Lodge, 10 Sept. 1832 (N.L.I., Brunswick papers, MS 5017, f. 98). 85 Commons Journals, 1829, vol. 84 (index); Mirror of Parliament, vol. i, 1829. 86 BNL, 6–8 Sept. 1796.

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southern counties. County petitions came from Ulster and Dublin, with Tyrone being the first northern county to meet on 2 December 1828. December and January saw similar meetings in Fermanagh, Londonderry, Donegal, Cavan and Armagh. Even allowing for partisan exaggeration, large crowds undoubtedly attended. The Newsletter claimed between 30,000 and 40,000 attended the Tyrone meeting and the Star of Brunswick, with reporters present, also emphasised its importance. The Fermanagh figure was put at 30,000, whereas Armagh’s was even higher at 48–50,000. Though Brunswick clubs occasionally petitioned on an institutional basis, their more usual role was doing the background organisation for parish and county petitions. Their stated constitutionality meant the Brunswick name did not appear on the petition, but there was little doubt that the power behind the High Sheriff’s chair came from the clubs. At the Armagh meeting in January 1829, a local landowner, Marcus Synott, addressed the crowd as ‘We Brunswickers’.87 These meetings were virtual replications of Brunswick inaugurals with the same respectable dignitaries trying to rouse the Protestant spirit, yet there were also signs of Orange militarism, indicating the danger of the recently roused popular loyalism. The Ulster inspector of police, Major D’Arcy, reported that 400 Protestants carrying ‘five stand of colours’ had marched into a meeting in Ballyshannon, County Donegal to fife and drum, armed to the teeth ‘with swords, pistols and yeomanry firelocks’. In Fermanagh, similar paramilitary paraphernalia was on show and blank shots were fired.88 In Dublin itself, there was such controversy about an Orange flag flying from the Brunswick club’s headquarters that George Moore was forced to deny in parliament that the movement would harbour any party spirit. For plebeian loyalists, the demarcation lines were unclear between elite-encouraged militancy and upholding the law, locally the responsibility of the same elite. After the Tyrone meeting, wild rumours circulated about Ribbonmen burning ‘all before them’. As tension rose, Colonel Caulfeild, a Brunswick supporter but now acting in his military capacity, ordered yeomen belonging to the corps of a fellow-Brunswicker, Captain Richardson, to surrender their guns. The yeomanry privates threatened resignation, disgusted at first being encouraged to think rebellion was eminent; then, when they acted this scenario out, being humiliated by the very people who had previously solicited their support at Brunswick meetings.89 Suspicions that the government would settle the Catholic question had abounded since November 1828 and on 2 February 1829 the Dublin Evening Mail confidently predicted that the King’s Speech would announce the intention to pass emancipation and suppress the Catholic Association. The Newsletter frantically urged Ulster Protestants to agitate and petition and banish ‘that cursed indifference to our religion and our rights which the infidelity of the age has dignified with the name of liberality’. The final effort in February and March 1829 was characterised by the Brunswickers’ desperation, but paradoxically it also revealed their statis87 BNL, 5 Dec. 1828, 9, 16, 22, 27 Jan. 1829; SOB, 6 Dec. 1828; Notes and cuttings re Armagh meeting, Jan. 1829 (N.L.I., Brunswick papers, MS 5017, f. 84); Mirror of Parliament 1829, i, 91, 124. 88 D’Arcy to Leveson-Gower, 12, 21 Jan. 1829 (P.R.O., HO100/226, ff 100, 123–4). 89 Mirror of Parliament, 1829, i, 97; McCormick to Richardson, Scott to Richardson, 5, 13 Jan. 1829 (P.R.O.N.I., Richardson of Drum papers, D2002/C/17/4, 5).

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tical strength.90 Though Lord Lorton had presented the County Dublin petition to the Lords on 12 February, in late February the Dublin Brunswick club called a general meeting of supporters throughout Ireland. An attendance of 8,000 was claimed ‘of the very highest respectability’ and, although this was not an official act of Dublin Corporation, the mayor and city sheriffs took the chair. The resolutions passed included impassioned appeals to English Protestants, demanding petitioning meetings in every hamlet. The appeal was partly grounded in crude emotionalism which invited their co-religionists to imagine the Irish Protestant predicament: ‘In the Catholic Association we have been threatened with the murderer’s hand, first uplifting the midnight latch, then plunging the steel of POPISH EXTIRPATION into the hearts of inhabitants sleeping.’ It continued: ‘we blame the agitators, the influence of priesthood, and THE COWARDLY AND VACILLATING CONDUCT OF HIS MAJESTY’S MINISTERS’ and appealed to ‘OUR DEAR PROTESTANT BRETHREN OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE’ to ‘unite with us to drive out the apostate ministers who have dared pollute the Royal ear’.91 These notes of desperation sounded in Belfast and Dublin were mirrored in declining numbers of petitioning meetings and in attendances in Fermanagh and Tyrone, hardly surprising given that those counties had now seen four years of various political revival meetings.92 The Northern Whig said tenant farmers had complained at the Tyrone Brunswick meeting in October about ‘being crammed in to such meetings on four occasions’ and missing their work.93 As Fermanagh prepared for still more petitioning in March, Nicholas Ellis sensed subtle divergences in the previously solid south Ulster anti-Catholic phalanx, noting that ‘they [the Protestants] are more outrageous in this Fermanagh than in this county’. Downpatrick loyalists waited anxiously to see if John Waring Maxwell would make it to Westminster to vote. In the event, sickness prevented him and a letter satisfied most supporters, except a ‘Reverend Brunswicker’ who complained that he ‘should have been carried on a couch’.94 Though Lord Enniskillen presented an extensively signed parish petition from Clones on 20 March, even here, near Sam Grey’s own parish, the heat had gone out of Brunswickism. In February, a military observer noted that a Brunswick meeting was ‘not numerously attended’. In March, Ellis was gratified that those who had previously branded non-Brunswickers ‘cowards’, had drifted away. The ultraProtestant gentry were more concerned about their own solidarity as the Cavan M.P. Alexander Saunderson (father of the later Unionist leader, Colonel Edward Saunderson) had ‘ratted’.95 In County Down, Alexander Miller, one of Maxwell’s 90 91

O’Ferrall, Catholic emancipation, p 239; BNL, 13 Feb. 1828; DEM, 7 Feb. 1829. Mirror of Parliament, 1829, i, 91 ‘Address of the loyal citizens and Protestant inhabitants of Dublin to the Protestants of England’, 21 Feb. 1829; Gregory to Leveson-Gower, 4 April 1829 (P.R.O., HO100/226, ff 340, 342, 346). 92 SOB, 7, 28 March 1829. 93 NW, 2 Oct. 1828. 94 Ellis to Barret-Lennard, 22, 27 March 1829 (P.R.O.N.I., Barret-Lennard papers, MIC170/3); Quail to Maxwell, 27 March 1829 (P.R.O.N.I., Perceval-Maxwell papers, D3244/E/7/31). 95 Moore to Thornton, 24 Feb. 1829 (P.R.O., HO100/230, ff 94–6); Ellis to Barrett-Lennard, 21, 22 March 1829 (P.R.O.N.I., Barret-Lennard papers, MIC/170/3); Alvin Jackson, Colonel Edward Saunderson: land and loyalty in Victorian Ireland (Oxford, 1995), p 22.

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supporters, summed up the attitude after the King’s Speech, noting that he did not blame ‘Papists’ for the consequences, as they openly declared that emancipation was insufficient. Advising Maxwell to ensure his Protestant tenants did not emigrate, Millar said ‘the only comfort I will have is to see all the rascally Protestants who supported them turned out of their seats at the next election’.96 Protestant petitions continued to be presented in both houses during March 1829. On 23 March, as the Commons went into committee on the Catholic bill, George Moore presented one from Harcourt Lees, Henry Maxwell followed with parish petitions from Cavan and Down, and congregational ones from Antrim Presbyterians and the Ebenezer Baptist Chapel, and one from Trinity College graduates. On the same day in the Lords, parish petitions were received from Armagh, Down, Cavan, Fermanagh, Donegal, Monaghan, Wicklow, Wexford, Carlow, Cork, Queen’s County, King’s County and Limerick. Yet this effort revealed the weaknesses as well as the strengths of Protestant politics. One of the most numerously signed county petitions, from thirty magistrates and 22,000 Protestant inhabitants and freeholders of the city and county of Londonderry, was presented by Sir George Hill. Hill’s evasion of Brunswick was finally shown as an excuse as he justified his conversion to emancipation on the liberal grounds that circumstances had changed and, as a loyalist, the fact that relief was supported by the throne and most royal dukes set his mind at rest. Moreover, he stated that opinion was divided, even among the petition signers, pointing to a paragraph in its prayer acknowledging that, though penal laws were once necessary, the petitioners were now ‘not insensible to the continued distractions by which their unhappy country is distracted’. Despite the efforts of the Reverend Martin and others to purge the Brunswick movement of liberalism, a similarly progressive loyalism was evident in some southern clubs who, according to the chief secretary, Leveson-Gower, refused to sign petitions, arguing that self defence, their original raison d’être, was guaranteed by emancipation with securities and suppression of the Catholic Association. Petitioning revealed the limitations of Brunswick’s influence in absolute terms and in relation to the Orange societies. On 17 March, George Moore presented a petition to the Commons from 147,000 Irish Protestants, stressing their elevated social position. However, Henry Grattan Jnr disputed this, claiming that the petition was ‘hawked about … from one Brunswick club to another’, and that ‘emissaries of all kinds were specially employed to force signatures’. Leveson Gower reckoned the petition was ‘coeval with the … the Brunswick Clubs, and … emanated from those societies’.97 Moore’s lame riposte – that time constraints prevented double the signatures – confirms that this was Brunswick’s maximum effort. With 148 clubs in twenty-six of Ireland’s thirty-two counties by late 1828, and many branches complying with the recommended membership of 100, the movement’s maximum numerical influence was around 150,000. This was confirmed by a general petition from the Protestants of Ireland to the Lords two days later with 160,000 signatures including thirty-seven peers and ‘many loyal and honest Protestants, who may be taken as a fair representation of the middle and lower classes’. Yet this was relatively poor compared with 96 97

Miller to Maxwell, 9 Feb. 1829 (P.R.O.N.I., Perceval-Maxwell papers, D3244/G/1/59). Mirror of Parliament, ii, 757, 764–6 i, 599–601, 622–5.

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the Orange Order’s capacity. In January 1829, the Belfast Newsletter reported that an Orange anti-emancipation petition attracted 250,000 signatures and could reach 300,000.98 Given that the Grand Lodge had directed county lodges in November to co-operate with Brunswick petitioning, the results suggest that, extensive as the clubs’ efforts were, Orangeism’s mobilising power was greater and the Portadown Orangemen’s reticence was replicated widely. Protestant reactions varied geographically. In parts of southern Ireland, the triumphal Catholic demonstrations after the King’s Speech provoked panic. In County Cork, simultaneous chains of hilltop bonfires fires were reported. Rathkeal, County Limerick saw ‘bonfires and lighted straw as numerous as the stars’. In Enniscorthy, County Wexford, following O’Connell’s arrival in London, Protestant houses were papered with notices reading ‘emancipation or blood’. Some southern Protestants panicked. Lord Kingston demanded that government impose the Insurrection Act, while some Waterford Protestants saw the fires as ‘signal for a general massacre’.99 The new arrangement meant that electoral interests had to re-register qualifying voters. In County Londonderry, Hill and Dawson said most Protestants were reconciled to emancipation, but Barré Beresford was initially confident that the new voters were ‘of the Brunswick calibre and independent’; but he soon found that freeholders were ‘sulky and sour’, asking why they should register ‘as they can trust nobody’.100 Further down the social scale the reaction was less apathetic as plebeian Protestants engaged in sectarian feuding, the tempo of which increased as the Catholic question neared its bitter end game. A typical incident in Ballyconnell, County Cavan, on 16 February, saw petty sessions day degenerate into a pitched battle amongst rival crowds armed with swords and pistols. Catholic celebrations after the Relief Act received Royal assent saw intense rioting on Easter Sunday and Monday which were fair days in many towns. Several hundred Catholics entered Ballintra in Donegal with a burning tar barrel. That town was considered ‘the focus of Orangeism’ and, in selecting it for celebration, ‘the Roman Catholics were wishing to taunt their opponents’. The provocation worked: Orangemen attacked the Catholics with yeomanry muskets.101 Ballybay was quiet during the emancipation debates, but when it passed ‘the exultation of one party and the irritation … of the other’ increased tensions. An inspection of the Ballybay yeomanry was provocatively ordered just before Easter. This appearance of armed Protestants caused the police chief to comment ‘we were very near serious work that day’. Local Catholics refrained from open rejoicing, but on Easter Sunday crowds at Ballybay fair sported green leaves, which ‘uneducated and violent’ Protestants took as triumphal laurel, leading to rioting. As in the Sam Grey affair, some ‘Orange’ magistrates distanced themselves. Mr Evatt ‘positively 98 99

O’Ferrall, Catholic emancipation, p 209; BNL, 16 Jan. 1829. Kingston to Gregory, 11 Feb. 1829 (P.R.O., HO100/226, ff 151–2); Memorial of the Reverend Dunn, 14 Feb. 1829, Croker to Miller, 16 Feb. 1829; Harvey’s report, 17 Feb. 1829 (P.R.O., HO100/230, ff 2–3, 37, 103). 100 Barré Beresford to the Primate, 1, 5, May, 8, 20 June 1829 (P.R.O.N.I., Primate Beresford papers, D3279/A/4/8, 10–12). 101 Joyce to D’Arcy, 18 Feb. 1829 (P.R.O., HO100/230, ff 100–101); Lewin to D’Arcy, 20 April 1929 (P.R.O., HO100/226, ff 218–19); Gahan to Moore, 2 May 1829, Gahan to Gregory, 15 May 1829 (P.R.O., HO100/227, ff 5–7, 61–3).

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refused to assist the police’ in an affray at Carrickmacross. In County Antrim, crowds surged through Ballymena on Easter Sunday yelling ‘to hell with the Papists!’ and police were stoned when they intervened. On Easter Monday armed police patrolled the streets, but the focus shifted as Protestants marched off ‘with music and colours’ to install a new Orange lodge at Clough.102 Such reactions derived less from political changes per se than the fact that they symbolised altered power balances: the tension engendered by months of meetings and marching meant that there must be winners and losers. However, sectarian violence was not a universal response. As with earlier forms of loyalism, a side effect of Brunswickism was the bestowal of political importance on plebeian Protestants. In mid-Ulster some turned this power against the elite. In May 1829, yeomen from Colonel Blacker’s estate withheld their loyalty as a protest tactic during an economic crisis. Using an invented identity – Tommy Downshire’s Boys – they turned their muskets on a barge exporting potatoes. Local liberal Protestants affected amazement that such lawlessness occurred in a district where people, during Brunswick petitioning, ‘were lately running breast-high in support of the King and Constitution’. However, in 1830 the same protestors united with Catholics, ritually burning orange and green flags and holding the area’s loyal reputation as hostage to force magistrates to intervene over grievances including tithes.103 This suggests that plebeian loyalists were less malleable in elite hands than the ultras would have wished and that the collapse of Brunswickism at a political level had the potential to cause collateral damage to landlord-tenant relations. However, sectarian tensions remained sufficiently high to create apprehension about the July parades. Plebeian Protestant disenchantment must have been increased by news that their leaders, who had implied that a renewal of armed loyalism would be needed to suppress a Catholic insurrection, were now prevaricating on displays of loyalty. On 12 May, Cumberland warned Lord Enniskillen, that ‘caution and vigilance’ were necessary, and recommended that public processions should be avoided as disorder could precipitate yet more anti-Orange legislation.104 The Irish executive encouraged this moderation. The chief secretary, Leveson-Gower, told William Gregory that ‘we cannot too soon turn our attention to the prospect of possible disturbance that may arise from the usual July processions in Ulster’. On Peel’s advice, he encouraged ‘leading and respectable members of the Orange societies’ to withdraw as continuing connection would cause ‘more permanent evil’ than allowing the leadership to fall into plebeian hands. Leveson-Gower sensitively avoided seeming to ‘obtrude advice or interference upon men of character and education’. However, he hoped that Enniskillen and others would recognise that, whatever their politics, their social position was endangered by plebeian Orange disorder.105 As the Boyne anniversary 102

Douglass to D’Arcy, 24 April 1829 (P.R.O., HO100/226, ff 202–4); Leveson-Gower to Gregory, 7 May 1829 (N.A.I., Leveson-Gower letter book, M736, vol. 1, 86); Clarke to D’Arcy, 22 April 1829 (P.R.O., HO100/226, ff 215–16). 103 NT, 8, 12, 15 May 1829; Fitzgerald to Downshire, 27 Nov. 1830 (P.R.O.N.I., Downshire papers, D671/C/12/445). 104 Senior, Orangeism, p 239. 105 Leveson-Gower to Gregory, 26 May, 4 June, Leveson-Gower to Peel, 9, 15 July 1829 (N.A.I., Leveson-Gower letter book, M736, vol. i, 131–2, 153, 221, 238).

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neared, trouble threatened in Ulster and in several southern towns with Orange traditions. At Bandon, where the Boyne was still celebrated ‘old style’ on 1 July, the provost noted rancorous party feeling between ‘the lower order of Protestants in the town’ and Catholics from outlying districts. The magistrates successfully prevented parading, but drunken Orangemen later spilled from their lodge rooms with fife and drum, which led to a riot. Similarly in Borrisokane, County Tipperary, which had an Orange lodge and Brunswick club, magistrates had to summon troops to protect Protestants after an affray.106 Often the Protestant gentry viewed the anniversaries with as much apprehension as the government. In Tyrone, the ultra-Tory, Robert Waring Maxwell, took the anti-government line that ‘the breaking of the constitution has not produced harmony here. There is more ill will between the parties than before.’ Nevertheless he feared the consequences of sectarian violence, confessing privately to his brother John that he wished the Twelfth of July ‘was well over’. John had heard similar sentiments from his Down agent about a forthcoming Orange procession: ‘Their greatest enemy could not have devised a better plan to bring them into contempt.’ ‘Some’, he added, ‘might think it proper to agitate, but I would not see your tenantry made the instruments’.107 Yet, on the other hand, with Ulster Orangeism reviving at lodge level along traditional loyalist lines, it would be difficult to get them to confine themselves to dining indoors. Northern leaders like Enniskillen and the Verners understood this, and signed a Grand Lodge statement which merely noted Cumberland’s recommendation without comment, though picked up his phrase about ‘caution and vigilance’ and applied it differently. ‘Vigilance and caution’ could ‘prevent the strength of Protestant Ireland being broken and dispersed.’ The statement warned that the anti-Protestantism driving emancipation would now exploit trouble on the Twelfth of July ‘to crush the last supporters of Protestant loyalty in this country’. Peel saw the Grand Lodge ‘manifesto’ as ‘a servile imitation’ of the Catholic Association’s proclamation against public display while tacitly encouraging it, while Wellington interpreted it as more ‘mischievous’ than Cumberland’s original letter to Enniskillen.108 Senior believes the ‘manifesto’ was ‘equivocal’ in that it did not actually ban parading, but avoided the appearance of the leadership giving sanction. However, Wellington’s observation about differences between Irish and unified Orangeism was probably accurate in recognising enduring tensions. Moreover the determination not to further alienate lower-class opinion surely reflects a strong clerical input: from the twenty-five members of the new Grand Lodge’s first grand committee in November 1828, fifteen were Anglican clergymen.109 After emancipation, many feared the Church’s privileged position would eventually come under

106

Provost of Bandon to Leveson-Gower, 3 July 1829; Considine to Stoven, 7 July 1829 (P.R.O., HO100/227, ff 257–9, 260–2). 107 Quail to J. W. Maxwell, 7 June 1829, R. W. Maxwell to J. W. Maxwell, 17 June 1829 (P.R.O.N.I., Perceval-Maxwell papers, D3244/E/7/45, D3244/F/2/17). 108 Sibbett, Orangeism, ii, 337–8; Peel to Wellington, 23 July 1829, Wellington to Peel, 24 Dec. 1829, Sir Robert Peel: from his private correspondence, ed. Charles Stuart Parker (3 vols, London, 1891–99), ii, 117–18, 118–19. 109 Senior, Orangeism, p 237.

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attack; more immediately, 1829 saw great economic hardship throughout Ireland, including Ulster, which threatened anti-tithe agitation. Rumours proliferated that the Twelfth of July would see a show of Orange strength ‘on an extended scale’, and Ribbonmen gathered near some parade venues, including Lord Enniskillen’s estate.110 Parades occurred at twenty Ulster locations with the largest crowds being at the Armagh demonstration near Blacker’s house, at Caledon in County Tyrone and at Ballybay. In the event, Lords Enniskillen, Donegall and others exerted their influence and early reports were surprisingly encouraging. But news about trouble soon broke. Belfast magistrates tried to stop a parade, but Sandy Row Orangemen walked in defiance and two days of rioting followed. Worse violence occurred at Glenoe in Armagh, at Stewartstown where six lives were lost, and Strabane in Tyrone, and in County Antrim at Portglenone. One of the worst incidents involved Lord Enniskillen himself when he attempted personal mediation. In Fermanagh, both Ribbonmen and Orangemen initially seemed willing to disperse, but the Ribbon party later killed three Orangemen. Despite this, LevesonGower praised Enniskillen’s ‘most meritorious’ conduct in co-operating with the army and magistrates.111 Until now the executive had preferred not to ban parades outright, but rely on the local government influence. However, they were understandably concerned about 12 August, previously the occasion of extensive Protestant mobilisations. Originally it was thought a proclamation would be self-defeating in being inevitably broken, thus encouraging violence, but recent affrays removed these restraints. On 18 July, the viceroy, the duke of Northumberland, decided that a proclamation prohibiting all processions, Orange or Catholic, was the only alternative to martial law in south Ulster. Agreement was reached in the Irish Privy Council, though Primate Beresford objected, seeing the proclamation ‘as reflecting on the Orangemen’. The archbishop of Dublin was present and signed, prompting the chief secretary to note that ‘if he [Beresford] had seen the bodies of Orangemen at the coroner’s inquest in Stewartstown he may not have been so reticent’.112 The day was quiet, even in Derry where Sir George Hill, despite his emancipation vote, retained enough personal influence to dissuade Orangemen and Apprentice Boys from parading. The Grand Lodge had, in fact, retreated from sanguinary displays of loyalty and adopted a policy of stopping any post-emancipation emigration, planning ‘to turn their funds and minds to Protestant Colonization; much better work than processions or dinners’.113 In September 1829, as George Dawson canvassed £10 voters, he told Hill of an encounter with David Gausson, once treasurer of Loughinsholin Brunswick Club. He found ‘old Gausson’ with ‘a large bible open … and also the largest, most expensive and most horrific edition of Foxe’s History of the Martyrs … as much thumbed 110 111

Hamilton to Peel, 6 July 1829 (P.R.O., HO100/230, ff 79–81). Senior, Orangeism, pp 240–1; Jonathan Bardon, History of Ulster (Belfast, 2001), p 247; Leveson-Gower to Peel, 16, 17 July, to Enniskillen, 20 July 1829 (N.A.I., Leveson-Gower letter book, M736, vol. i, 240, 241, 255). 112 Leveson-Gower to Peel, 18, 19 July, to Enniskillen, 20 July 1829 (N.A.I., Leveson-Gower letter book, M736, vol. i, 244–6, 247–8, 255). 113 Hill to Primate Beresford, 9 Aug. 1829 (P.R.O.N.I., Primate Beresford papers, D3279/A/4/32); Primate Beresford to Hill, 17 Aug. 1829 (P.R.O.N.I., Hill of Brook Hall papers, D642/221B).

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and stocked with markers as the bible’. Dawson reckoned this absurd anachronism was ‘the strongest instance of the subsiding of the Brunswick feeling’ proving that ‘the Brunswick union is a rope of sand’.114 This gloating comment, which further underlines Dawson’s ready re-adoption of progressive loyalism, tends to substantiate interpretations which emphasise Brunswickism’s failure. Yet the inability to prevent emancipation and ‘ratting’ disguises the clubs’ achievements and longer-term impact. In reality, they were engaged in an impossible struggle, and it was less the Catholic Association which destroyed their cause as opposition to the ultra-Protestant position the in the Commons and, crucially, in the cabinet. A Brunswick pamphlet of early 1829 boasted that the movement embraced ‘the elite of nobility and gentry together with the loyal yeomen of all degrees’ to ‘present a phalanx of Protestant strength far exceeding in numbers and intelligence any political society that ever existed in Ireland’.115 Though petitioning showed Brunswick’s limits, the fact that it succeeded in achieving a Protestant union, albeit temporarily and incompletely, is the more remarkable considering pre-existing divisions – social, denominational, theological, institutional and regional. This relative success was facilitated by Brunswick’s drawing more on pre-existing loyalist structures than on its original English model. Militarised Irish ‘crisis loyalism’, for example during the eighteenth-century Jacobite scares and the 1798 rebellion, always tended to become more inclusive of all strands of Irish Protestantism, socially and denominationally. Though this fluctuated in ratio to the threat, and quieter periods witnessed intra-Protestant divisions re-emerge, the Brunswick clubs succeeded in making the Catholic Association appear as re-incarnated rebels long enough to secure a decent petitioning response, but no more than that. Harcourt Lees, for all his eccentricity, recognised the problem. Complaining that the issue was ‘by no means understood’, he personally petitioned parliament ‘to elucidate the subject’.116 Gausson may have relished thumbing Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, but for ordinary Protestants, obsessive delving into Jesuitical conspiracies must have been incomprehensible and incompatible with the familiar rebellion rhetoric. Thus the message foundered between oversimplification and over-complication. The impact on plebeian Protestants is hard to assess precisely because their opinions were always presented in propagandist terms. Although Brunswick embraced all classes and types of Protestants with clubs reflecting the available materials in a particular area, nevertheless, its overall social orientation was landed, whether noble patrons or ‘fire and faggot squireens’. Moreover the disposition of power within the entire edifice, from Dublin’s Rotunda to Belfast’s Sandy Row, was decidedly hierarchical even if not enforced heavy-handedly. Whether displayed in Dublin instructions to counties, in county clubs to branches, in branch committees to members or in flattering gifts to Sam Grey, it all flowed in a vertical rather than a horizontal direction. Yet that participation was empowering: ordinary Protestants got an 114

Dawson to Hill, 14 July, 27 Sept. 1829 (P.R.O.N.I., Hill of Brook Hall papers, D642/209, 228). 115 Anon., A brief enquiry … by a lay member of the managing committee of the Brunswick Constitutional Club of Ireland (Dublin, 1829), p 16. 116 Lees to Anglesey, 3 Feb. 1829 (P.R.O., HO100/32A/3/1, f. 53).

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unprecedented sense of numbers beyond their immediate area and saw how necessary they were to the elite. Another important area of impact was upon Anglicanism. The presence of Farnham, Roden and Lefroy in Brunswickism has led to claims that the movement had a strong evangelical dimension.117 This research has shown, however, that the high church element was the key religious influence, and those evangelicals who were involved were those who accepted the need for politician action. The historian of corporate Dublin has noted how the corporation, highly supportive of Brunswickism, remained ‘solidly Erastian’ till 1829 without much evangelical influence. The other side of this Erastian tendency was to perceive ‘Popery’ as the Reverend Martin did, in political rather than religious terms. Indeed such was the input of the ‘blustering declaimers of high church principles’ that, arguably, Brunswickism marked a turning point where, after 1829, many high churchmen seem to have distanced themselves from evangelicals, whose ‘pusillanimous complaisance’ had ‘done more to sap the foundation of our ecclesiastical and civil polity than … our fiercest foes’.118 Although few Irish bishops turned up to vote against emancipation, this was more a recognition of inevitable defeat than disengagement with the Brunswick clubs. Indeed it is notable that the church was only element in Brunswickism to try to keep the movement afloat locally as a protection against tithe agitation. A clergyman at Inch, County Down, preached a wild diatribe on 12 August 1829 against ‘Popery, his majesty’s ministers, and particularly the duke of Wellington [supposedly] plotting for the crown to place it on the head of his son’. As though this bizarre claim was not enough, the preacher then ‘launched into a flaming panegyric against that truly Protestant prince the Duke of Cumberland’. ‘Protestants’, he said, ‘should take care of themselves, and the way to do so was to keep down the Papists.’ Another cleric’s son exhibited rosary beads, ‘mimicking the form of Roman Catholic worship’, buffoonery ‘in which he was most heartily joined by the congregation’. The Northern Whig was convinced that ‘clerical agitation’ ultimately derived from fear that emancipation ‘would lead to, if not the overthrow, at least the modification of the Church’s position’. The reality behind such crude populism and the reason why the clergy backed ‘Orange [Brunswick] clubs being organised in every parish, and foster[ing] party spirit amongst the lower classes’ was dread of an anti-tithe ‘union’ between Presbyterians, who naturally objected, and the ‘most virulent Orangemen’, notoriously ‘the worst payers of tithe’. When contemplating 4 November 1829, Lord Downshire noted ‘all the gentlemen here are adverse to these annoying processions. I have little doubt that if the clergy do not mix up their influence … that these pseudo-religious notions will certainly cease.’119 The Brunswick movement’s agenda needed to make loyalism and Protestantism coeval. Though based on loyalty to king, constitution, Church and Empire, they 117 118 119

R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London, 1988), p 304. Hill, Patriots to Unionists, p 340; cited in: Stunt, ‘Evangelical cross-currents’, p 219. Quail to J. W. Maxwell, n.d. post 12 Aug. 1829 (P.R.O.N.I., Perceval-Maxwell papers, D3244/ E/7/46); NW, 9 Oct. 1828; Downshire to Dufferin, 29 Oct. 1829 (P.R.O.N.I., Dufferin papers, D1071/B/C/14/1/141a).

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could not successfully re-invent ‘rebellion loyalism’: the crisis was different in the era of mass politics and the realities of post-union government made it more difficult to maintain allegiance to traditional foci of loyalty without the older militarised loyalism which required real physical threat. One by one, these pillars crumbled. George III had seen emancipation as an infringement of his coronation oath, George IV succumbed in a brandy infused stupor. The growing support for Catholic relief in parliament showed that the Protestant constitution of 1688 was no match for the constitutional politics of 1828. The United Church of England and Ireland, inaugurated under the terms of the 1801 Act of Union, was proved to be united in name only, while the support of British Protestants, despite the blustering of Tory populists like Lord Winchelsea, who had organised large public meetings in Kent, was ultimately illusory. For some Protestants, perceptions of being abandoned and of having their loyalist rhetoric fail to make a sufficient impact on a British parliament would lead to shifts in position in their relationship with the government. Some deserted Ireland altogether. Beresford noted that County Londonderry Protestants who were emigrating to America became ‘henceforth foes to England as they go away sour and vexed’.120 Therefore, thirty years after Pitt had optimistically called Irish loyalists the ‘Brethren of Britons’ the Brunswick experience showed how far this was from being the case. The long-term effects would include a sense of vulnerability amongst Orange and conservative Protestants that they were no longer masters of their own destiny as they had once been when an Irish parliament sat in College Green. Arguably, when purged of his fanatical rhetoric, the authentic political voice of post-war loyalism was the Irish Protestant nationalism, Whiggery and patriotism of Harcourt Lees.

120

Barré Beresford to Primate Beresford, 1, 5, May, 8, 20 June 1829 (P.R.O.N.I, Primate Beresford papers, D3279/A/4/8, 10, 11, 12).

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In 1814 John Giffard made an extraordinary retrospective claim about Irish loyalism. He equated Orangeism’s spread from Ulster to the rest of Ireland in 1797–8 with the fact that Dublin Protestants had an already extant model, having previously ‘observed the advantages which London derived from Mr. Reeves’s association at the Crown and Anchor.’ Made as the French wars neared their end, Giffard’s implication that Irish loyalists became ‘the Brethren of Britons’ at their commencement begs questions about the role of counter-revolutionary loyalism in shaping Protestant identity during the tumultuous years which saw two wars with France, two rebellions in Ireland and the Act of Union. Though the contemporary parliamentary context of Orangeism facing hostile scrutiny certainly gave motives for Giffard to stress its Britishness, we should not underestimate genuine ideological imperatives. Contemporaneously satirised as ‘the Dog in Office’, Giffard’s wider significance has only recently been recognised. Professor Hill identifies him with iconic figures like Musgrave and Duigenan, as central to the ‘ultra-Protestant’ grouping which emerged after 1801, all passionately committed to union with Britain and the Erastian church-state link, and utterly opposed to emancipation. Epitomising the fragmentation of the earlier broad patriotic consensus, Giffard was once an anti-government patriot who shifted political ground in 1788 when he assumed editorship of the Dublin Journal and was even rumoured to have coined the term ‘Protestant ascendancy’. Contemporary radicals and some historians have suggested he had a role in the origins of the Orange Order. He served as Dublin militia captain in Armagh in 1797 as the early lodges formed, was a founder of the Dublin lodge, became Irish deputy grand master in 1806 and, in the 1810s, actively promoted Orangeism’s spread to the highest levels of British society soliciting the patronage of the dukes of Cumberland and York. His organisation of Dublin’s 1809 royal jubilee celebrations reflected a loyalism which, while adamantine in supporting Irish Protestant ascendancy, represented this position in positive British and imperial terms showing that he, at least, could transcend narrow 1641 memories. Giffard’s background and influential position gives credence to his  Gifard to Gregory, enclosed in Gregory to Peel, 11 June 1814 (B.L., Add Mss 40199, ff 27, 29–35).  Kevin Whelan, The tree of liberty: radicalism, Catholicism and the construction of Irish identity, 1760–1830 (Cork, 1996), pp 117, 127; Stephen Small, Political thought in Ireland, 1776–1798: republicanism, patriotism and radicalism (Oxford, 2002), p 227; Jacqueline Hill, ‘Dublin after the Union: the age of the ultra-Protestants, 1801–22’, in Michael Brown, Patrick M. Geoghegan and James Kelly (eds), The Irish Act of Union (Dublin, 2003), pp 145–7, 152–3.

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claims about the Britishness of Irish loyalism and calls for re-consideration of Linda Colley’s exclusion of Ireland from the newly invented British nation. The research on which this book is based has suggested that unambiguous expressions of Britishness come primarily in the military arena. The analysis of songs, poems and sermons in chapter four suggested that loyalist writers wanted readers to place their recent victory over ‘Catholic rebels’ in 1798 in the context of wider British military and naval war efforts. Yet, even in this self-consciously patriotic context, where writers deliberately strove to fuse current popular fears of insurrection and invasion, Protestant loyalism’s indigenous pre-revolutionary roots often shine through. Though the words of ‘the Orange yeomanry’ were sung to ‘Rule Britannia’, and ‘Croppies’ attacked ‘the Church of England’, nonetheless ‘Providence protected us, from this bloodthirsty clan, and prevented them to act a scene like that of Fortyone’. This research has also revealed that Irish loyalists overtly emphasised their Britishness in the Brunswick movement, but it was an emphasis born of desperation, particularly in the increasingly hopeless latter stages of anti-emancipation petitioning when they appealed to ‘Our dear Protestant brethren of the British Empire’. Yet here too there were differences, as Britons were asked to transcend their own experiences and imagine the death of their Hibernian co-religionists ‘threatened with the murderer’s hand … uplifting the midnight latch, then plunging the steel of Popish extirpation’. The fact was that, by the 1820s, Protestant ascendancy in Ireland which customarily trumpeted the British connection as a key support had become, paradoxically, a hostage to the vagaries of United Kingdom parliamentary politics. As the enthusiasm for royal occasions showed, personal loyalty to the monarch was undisturbed by Ireland’s change from sister kingdom to her incorporation in a composite monarchy. However, the same cannot be said for loyalty to the king’s ministers, as law and order reforms which bit into Protestant privilege and, increasingly from the 1820s, a combination of abandonment of and downright opposition to the Protestant cause, eroded support until even Wellington could be branded an ‘apostate’. The attacks on Protestant monopoly of legal and political power and public displays of loyalty launched by emancipationist administrations increased ultra-Protestant insecurity. It was the perceived apostasy of ‘Protestant’ ministers that really created profound unease with the governmental system. The Enniskillen Orangemen whose placards claimed loyalty to ‘Wellington, Peel and the present administration’ in 1827, would happily have seen them proclaimed as traitors in 1829. The ambiguous nature of Protestant identity mirrored the political weakness of exclusive loyalty. If loyalism was to support and justify continuing Protestant ascendancy, it had to become an identity defined against an enemy which was both Irish and Catholic. Even the ‘True Whig’ anti-autocracy ideology which underlay Cupples’s defensive polemics and Blacker’s couplet on idealised Orange-Catholic relations – ‘We hate them as masters, but love them as men’ – was ultimately belied



Constitutional songs (2 vols, Cork, 1800), ii, 67–8.; ‘Address of the loyal citizens and Protestant inhabitants of Dublin to the Protestants of England’, 21 Feb. 1829 (P.R.O., HO100/226, f. 346).  Erne Packet, 12 July 1827.

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by the political realities. The English Protestant cleric, Sidney Smith, could take an expansive view when he told York electors in 1826: ‘My cry is No Popery; therefore emancipate the Catholics that they may not join with foreign papists in time of war.’ In the real politick of the campaign against O’Connell, distinctions between popery as a political system antithetical to liberty and actual Irish Catholics themselves became harder to sustain, as they were inseparable from the tangible reality of the Catholic Association’s priests and ragged forty-shilling freeholders. The essential nature of exclusive loyalism meant that, although its adherents could justifiably claim to be ‘Britons’, their Britishness never fully supplanted their indigenous identity. What happened during the French wars was an increase in the overlapping of identities, rather than a re-defining. This pattern can be detected in the main military, political and religious issues. The solidly British influences of Reevesite loyalism in 1792–3 were modified by Irish conditions. The manpower mobilisations of 1803–5 were germane to everywhere in the UK; yet in Ireland, the Protestant cause’s partisan requirements ensured that this British phenomenon had a distinctive Irish dimension. Unlike the situation in Britain, national defence patriotism never superseded loyalism, while after the wars echoes of eighteenthcentury political patriotism increasingly informed the rhetoric of spokesmen for the Protestant cause. It was no accident that the Dublin Evening Mail’s predecessor was called The Patriot, nor that Colonel Blacker later lamented the fact that the word had lost its meaning and come to signify ‘a mean jobber of the first class, a regular place hunter’. There was, he wrote, a world of difference between patriotism and nationalism, the first being ‘a nobling and ennobling feeling’, the second, ‘a mere prejudice of the narrowest sort’. Yet, for all that, the loyalism of 1820s, of which Blacker was such an eager exponent, contained unmistakeable elements of nationalism. The Brunswick movement of 1828, though it arose in England and had aristocratic ultras from both countries as its icons, nonetheless had to yield to Irish realities before it could take root there. This tendency was paralleled in the religious sphere. Though voluntary evangelical societies like the London Hibernian Bible Society were institutionally Anglo-Irish, their impact on the ground was, again, conditioned by Irish conditions. Farnham’s moral agents may have sought to implant ‘British’ methods of agriculture as part of the proselytising mission, but the Second Reformation’s signal failure to make the Church of Ireland the church of the majority, again conforms to this pattern. Even when the less legally ambiguous aspects of British Orangeism were applied to the Irish original to save it from parliamentary assault, its essentially Irish character proved resilient in plebeian Ulster loyalists’ adherence to the ‘Diamond System’ and the antique patriotism of Harcourt Lees. With regard to its impact on identity, therefore, exclusive loyalism retained many of its pre-union features in loyalty to the crown, the Protestant Constitution and the link with Britain. The greatest developments towards a more British identity were  Original charter song of the Orange Institution, Third report of select committee on Orange lodges, H.C. 1835 (476), xvi, p 223.  John Cookson, The British armed nation (Oxford, 1997), pp 210–13.  Blacker Day Books, i, f. 59; vi, f. 197; vii, f. 15 (A.C.M., 5/1948).

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seen in the military sphere, indeed it can be argued that the loyalist identity, in its dominant exclusivist form, was as much military as it was Protestant. This aspect also pre-dated union and arose from the war with France and continuity with older Protestant self-defence traditions. Though Irish yeomen readily adopted the union flag after 1801, military convention demanded that they parade under the king’s colours. Yet, even in the military arena, the public celebrations of victories, which they shared with war patriots throughout the United Kingdom, were tainted with exclusivity and could, as in the Vitoria festivities, be made an instrument of exclusion. In terms of its trajectory into the nineteenth century Irish loyalism also bore more differences from than similarities with its British counterpart. It has been argued that the Reevesite loyalism of 1792–3, as well as having continuities with earlier loyalist movements, fed into the broader patriotism of volunteering, Pitt Clubs, royal commemoration and civic voluntarism, transforming its original counter-revolutionary purpose into representing wider more positive national values. However the dominant strain of Irish loyalism proved less adaptable; it retained its original militarism and militancy, through the maintenance of its natal institutions more or less intact. The yeomanry was continued long after the wars ended (until 1834) when its British equivalents, the Volunteer infantry and Yeomanry cavalry, had long been stood down. Orange societies, which had some of the characteristics of loyal associations, perpetuated their semi-military raison d’être through annual parading rituals. War patriotism and civic consciousness also affected Irish loyalism, royal occasions and anniversaries were enthusiastically celebrated, Pitt and Nelson Clubs existed and loyalism could divert into the construction of the civic identities of growing towns. Belfast’s yeomen fit John Cookson’s model of military voluntarism stimulating civic spirit. They raised funds by subscription and spent a fortune on showy regalia and musical equipment for a splendid spectacle during a viceregal visit to the burgeoning town in 1804. Yet they as readily let Orange lodges borrow their instruments to thump out ‘Croppies Lie Down’ and ‘The Protestant Boys’ during Twelfth of July parades. Though such militant and militaristic Protestant loyalism had well-established ceremonial and amateur military precedents in the earlier eighteenth century, it was Ireland’s unique political situation in the early nineteenth century which prised British and Irish loyalism apart. The underlying political and strategic dynamics to the Catholic question were ‘unionist’, whereas Protestant ascendancy, whatever the imperial logic of pro-union promoters like Giffard and Musgrave, was shaped and coloured by the brute realities of Irish sectarian demography. In short, to fulfil its main function as political propaganda for Protestant ascendancy, exclusive loyalism needed to preserve the physical threat of an enemy. Despite the essentially constitutional and political context of the emancipation struggle, it is noticeable how frequently speakers at Brunswick inaugurals adumbrated the problem in terms of 1641, 1690 or 1798. Aside from the politics of Protestant ascendancy, loyalism had a bearing on

 Francis O’Gorman, ‘English loyalism revisited’, in Allan F. Blackstock and Eoin J. Magennis (eds) (forthcoming).  John Cookson, The British armed nation, 1793–1815 (Oxford, 1997), p 10.

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broader political issues regarding the role of the state and its relationship with its citizens. Though in its social and civic and patriotic aspects, loyalism had the potential to create the type of consensus supportive of the established system that historians argue that English loyalism eventually did, the dominant form of Irish loyalism, because it was inseparable from the principle of Protestant ascendancy, could ultimately never fulfil this potential.10 It not only excluded Catholics, but it continually sought to discredit liberals, variously derided as ‘people who call themselves Protestants’ and ‘rascally Protestants’ who, like Charles Brownlow’s ex-Quaker land agent William Handcock, had their very religious identity overturned in nicknames like ‘Papist Handcock’. A counter-factual analysis based on the loyal declarations of 1792–3, could contend that Irish loyalism had a similar consensual potential to its pluralist Reevesite contemporary; that, however, would be to envisage Irish history without 1798 or O’Connell. One of this book’s main findings is that several distinctive strands of loyalty coexisted, and the exclusively Protestant variety, though it became dominant in 1798 and remained the most publicly visible manifestation, never had total monopoly, even during the emancipation crisis. What has been denominated as ‘liberal’ loyalty had antecedents in the patriots of the 1770s who admired the anti-autocratic, ‘political’ side of William of Orange rather than William the military hammer of the Catholics. For Whiggish-minded men of this ilk, popery as a political system (and political autocracy generally) was a greater enemy than the practice of Catholicism. In this analysis, the Glorious Revolution and balanced constitution represented the ideal. In the early 1790s, French republicanism and domestic ‘levelling’ could be represented as replacing popery and absolutism as the main threat to the constitution, which should be adjusted by reform within the established governmental system. Some reformers would have included Catholic relief in these constitutional adjustments, but not all would have agreed. Though never a coherent ‘movement’, the broadly ‘liberal’ variant dominated the earliest manifestations of Irish loyalty in 1792–3. Though ‘liberal’ non-sectarian loyalism was relegated from the public arena of Orange and yeomanry parading and military ritual, its memory as a political resource persisted long amongst Whiggish landed gentlemen. It was no accident that Colonel Edward Saunderson, the architect of the first Unionist parliamentary party in the 1880s, had first sought to oppose Home Rule by means of a non-sectarian, cross-class alliance based on the Irish Loyal and Patriotic Union, before having to court the narrower exclusivist form of Protestant loyalism.11 Although historians have long recognised loyalist and monarchist tendencies amongst elite elements of the Catholic laity and clerical hierarchy in the 1790s, the viability of plebeian Catholic loyalty has not been considered.12 However, the analysis of attempts to mobilise Irish loyalism in chapter two shows that there were systematic and extensive efforts to accomplish this with lower-class Catholics. 10 11

O’Gorman, ‘English loyalism revisited’. Alvin Jackson, Colonel Edward Saunderson; land and loyalty in Victorian Ireland (Oxford, 1995), pp 70–2. 12 Patrick Fagan, Divided loyalties: the question of an oath for Irish Catholics in the eighteenth century (Dublin, 1997), passim; Daire Keogh, The French disease: the Catholic church and radicalism, 1790– 1800 (Dublin, 1993), p 155.

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Indeed, for a brief period before the rebellion, it looked as though the fear of radical and republican dissenters would, with governmental blessing, unite Orangemen and Catholics as loyalists, provided this Catholic loyalty was not linked to emancipation. Catholic parish loyal declarations are often seen as artificial, being either forced or disingenuous. However, when these declarations are set in the context of the available mobilisation models, it emerges that Catholics were not allowed to become active loyalists, in the full and armed sense. On the one hand, this testifies to Protestant susceptibility about the endurance of rebellious tendencies amongst Irish Catholics; on the other, the ‘external’ cause of being excluded as loyalists must be considered along with the usual ‘internal’ explanations for disaffection, like politicisation. The rapid policy changes contingent on General Lake’s promotion to commander-in-chief and Castlereagh’s assumption of the chief-secretaryship in early 1798 saw Catholic loyalty sacrificed in a bid to court Presbyterians by exploiting memories of 1641. Thus, like its ‘liberal’ counterpart, Catholic loyalty lacked the means of public expression, even if the wide response to events which transcended party divisions (like George III’s jubilee and George IV’s visit) showed that elements of broad Catholic loyalty persisted. The re-surfacing of the Catholic question during the union debates, and its renewed agitation in 1804–5, saw ascendancy Protestants deliberately monopolise the institutions of loyalty. Though this strategy arose in the context of militarised manpower mobilisation, it was primarily political. It worked in several ways. First, by dominating the yeomanry and controlling Orangeism, the ultras could render Catholic and liberal Protestant loyalty invisible. Second, as Francis Kirkpatrick’s derogatory terminology (‘Erin-Gaul’ for Catholics and ‘Bonaparte-Protestants’ for liberals) shows, having undermined the loyal credentials of their political opponents by excluding them from public expressions of loyalty, the strategy was to appropriate loyalty during the French wars and make it appear inseparable from Protestant ascendancy.13 Constant repetition in annual parading rituals, songs and sermons, pamphlets and, eventually, in an independent loyalist press, reinforced the message that exclusive loyalism was the only guaranteed safe version. After 1815, though Catholics and pro-emancipation liberal Protestants lacked the institutional structures to challenge the dominance of exclusive loyalism, it has been shown that the rhetoric of inclusive, progressive loyalty remained as a resource which 1820s ‘rats’ like Brownlow, Dawson and Hill readily adopted. Indeed Sir George Fitzgerald Hill’s nuanced loyalism is indicative of the resilient procrustean nature of the liberal strand. In 1796, like many Englishmen who promoted the Whiggish, progressive, commercially orientated loyalism that Amanda Goodrich has identified as paralleling the conservative Anglican variety, Hill circulated handbills appealing to farmers of all religious persuasions to shun the United Irishmen on economic as well as moral grounds.14 By 1798, however, as his copious correspondence in the Rebellion Papers shows, Hill was an ‘arch-loyalist’ and ‘the epitome of Ascendancy’. This impression of uncompromising loyalism is heightened by his Beresford family connections, his raising of yeomanry, and the active magisterial duties which made 13 14

Francis Kirkpatrick, Loyalty and the times (Dublin, 1804), pp 101–6. Hill to Cooke n.d. [c. Nov. 1796] (N.A.I., R.P.620/26/103).

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him a scourge of the United Irishmen. Hill was involved in Wolfe Tone’s arrest, and his oft-repeated comment to Cooke when Tone cheated the gallows by suicide that ‘he would have sewed up his neck and completed the business’ is hardly suggestive of liberalism.15 Yet whatever Hill’s ultra-loyalism during the rebellion, he did not encourage Orangeism in Derry until 1813 and, despite the climate of Protestant monopolisation, retained Catholics in his yeomanry until the same year, only relenting in the face of Catholic Board agitation.16 Even after this, Hill continued to deprecate Orange extremism. In 1825 he told Peel how he successfully induced ‘a large part of the north to relinquish the Orange societies as injurious to Protestant interests’.17 The justification for volte-face like Hill’s – that concurrent suppression of the Catholic Association’s legions of forty-shilling freeholders would make the passage of emancipation safe and Ireland beneficially tranquil – was archetypal liberal loyalism. Consideration of loyalist writings and rhetoric on issues as widely separate as the 1805 Catholic petition and the Brunswick clubs of 1828 shows conclusively that liberal ‘Lundys’ within the gates were consistently seen as being as much a threat to the Protestant cause as the Catholic rebels outside. The political sustainability of exclusive loyalism as a mainstay of ascendancy was repeatedly compromised internally by the antithetical demands of reluctantly indulging the sectarian militancy of lower-class Protestants and keeping loyalism respectable for wider British public opinion. With the government’s drift away from unalloyed support for Protestant dominance of law and order, the old Catholicrebel Protestant-loyalist paradigm became harder to maintain, particularly as the yeomanry was denied the oxygen of permanent duty. Militarised ‘rebellion loyalism’ had proved capable of uniting Anglicans and (some) Dissenters in 1798 and 1803, but after the wars, with evangelical Second Reformation Protestantism intermingling with political Protestantism, it was harder to make exclusive loyalty a rallying point. In the classical republican tradition of eighteenth-century Irish patriotism, ‘Protestantism could become a test of loyalty that distinguished members of one polity from another.’18 In the nineteenth century, when the Brunswick movement tried to unite Presbyterian and Anglican against emancipation, loyalty became a test of Protestantism. Yet, with the continued existence and availability of alternative modes of loyalism, this narrow conception never fully succeeded in achieving universal acceptance. In terms of the broader political impacts of Protestant loyalism, we have seen the importance of intermediaries; indeed the significance of people like the Reverends William Richardson and Philip Johnson, William Blacker, John Giffard, Thomas Knox, and many others cannot be overstated. Their role was a mixture of arbiters, facilitators and conciliators. They were key players in the development and control of loyalism because their influence crossed social and administrative boundaries. The instigators of the Dungannon Association, Thomas Knox and Richardson, had aris15

Marianne Elliot, Wolfe Tone: prophet of Irish independence (London and New Haven, 1989), p 400. 16 Hill to Gregory, n.d. January 1814 (B.L., Add Mss 40212, ff 43–4). 17 Cited in R. G. Thorne (ed.), The House of Commons, 1790–1820 (5 vols, London, 1986), iv 197. 18 Small, Political thought in Ireland, p 134.

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tocratic connections through Knox’s father, Lord Northland. They were linked to the Castle through the Attorney-General, Arthur Wolfe; and to plebeian Orangemen through Richardson’s close contacts. Philip Johnson had similar connections with local Orangemen, aristocratic links with Lord Hertford, whose agent he was, and access to government through Castlereagh. Giffard had a similar intermediary role in Dublin, with his influence running from the Castle to the city’s freemen and later to its Orangemen. Despite the suspicions of radicals like William Drennan, the evidence from this work does not suggest that loyalism was a centralised initiative or an instrument of state repression imposed through intimidation. Though in Ireland, as in Britain, the government periodically encouraged the development of organised loyalism, the process was one of delicate negotiation involving intermediaries to facilitate loyal formations, but, at the same time, meet official concerns about armed associations. The agency of such men meant that government could benefit from voluntary loyalist mobilisation while avoiding the appearance of direct contact with the turbulent lower-class element which must necessarily be included for any chance of success. For their part, the intermediaries had to negotiate with prospective loyalists to ensure they were under control. Lower-class participation in loyalism emerges as empowering in the sense of giving a sense of their importance to the state and by putting the gentry in their debt. Negotiations and compromises between elite and plebeian are evident in Johnson’s attempts to get his parishioners to change their title from Orangemen to loyalists and conform to his conception of moral probity, and in Captain Waddell’s attempts to release County Down Orangemen from their oaths and his reluctant acceptance of their conditions (no service with Catholics) for loyal association membership. It is noticeable that these intermediaries occupy broadly the same social standing, being Anglican clerics, middling gentry figures like Blacker and the Warings and Verners or agents for larger landowners. They were of the type which typically became county magistrates and later raised yeomanry corps. They were, moreover, men whose families were long-established in the locality, which gave them influence both above and below their positions. Blacker’s family trumpeted its Williamite pedigree, the Warings had come with Cromwell’s army, James Watson of Brookhill on the Hertford estate similarly linked his ancestry to the Protestant historical narrative. Ancestry aside, their individual contributions to the loyalist cause increased their influence and reputation exponentially with time. Blacker had 1798 credentials through his early Orange membership and being the first to form yeomanry around Portadown. In the early nineteenth century, his continued Orange involvement at Grand Lodge level was interspersed with service as an active local magistrate and the holding of an official post, Deputy Treasurer, giving access to the Castle and engendering a long-standing friendship with the undersecretary, William Gregory. Blacker’s centrality to the Portadown Brunswick Club showed that his status as an intermediary did not diminish with time. In extreme old age, Philip Johnson and another 1798 veteran, Joseph Atkinson of Crowhill, were virtually wheeled out at Brunswick meetings because of their reputation with local loyalists. Such figures were to be of critical importance in the subsequent development of Irish conservatism. Cultural loyalism is a recurrent theme in the period 1789–1829 which is revealed 270

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as being both as politically important and as vibrant as its nationalist counterpart. Tracts, ballads and poems specifically addressed to a plebeian audience confirm the empowering potential of loyalism. Moreover, by the time of the Protestant political revivals and Brunswick Clubs in the 1820s this took physical forms in terms of increased use of Orange symbols and iconography and in monuments commemorating 1641. Arguably these developments anticipate the later use of loyalist culture by unionists in the Home Rule period. In ideological terms, if the 1790s witnessed the break up of the old patriotic consensus and struggles between loyalists and radicals over the meaning of the constitution, in the early nineteenth century, despite Blacker’s assertion that Orange ideology had always been based on the old Whig principles of 1688, the emancipation struggle and, particularly, the ‘breaking’ of the Protestant constitution in 1829, prepared the ground for another shift towards a more general conservatism.19 Indeed the organisational network of Brunswickism, and the extent to which it shifted loyalism away from past-centred militarism and towards modern political activism, bequeathed a template for Irish conservatism in the 1830s.

19

Small, Political thought in Ireland, p 227; Blacker Day Book, vi, f. 365 (A.C.M., 5/1948).

271

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Lisburn L.O.L 152 minute book, 1795–1895 Edward Rogers papers Werburg Street lodge minutes, 1823–39 Hampshire Record Office Wickham papers National Archives of Ireland Rebellion papers Official papers State of the Country papers Leveson-Gower letter book, MS736 National Army Museum Nugent Mss, 6807 Cornwallis Mss, 6602 National Library of Ireland Lake Mss, MS56 Brunswick papers, MS5107 Nottingham University Library Portland papers, PWJa 216 Public Record Office of Northern Ireland Abercorn papers, T2541 Abercorn papers, D623 Anglesey papers, D671 Atkinson of Crowhill papers, T2701 Barret-Lennard papers, MIC170 Beresford papers, T2772 Primate Beresford papers, D3279 Clogher diocesan papers, DIO (RC) 1 Coopershill papers, D4031 Downshire papers, D607, D671 Dublin [Army] letters, MIC/67 Dufferin papers, D1071 Enniskillen papers, D1702 Fitzgerald papers, T3075 Foster papers (additional), D3084 Foster-Massereene papers, D207 Gervais papers, T1287 Gosford papers, D1606 Hill of Brookhall papers, D642 Hobart papers, T2627 Leinster papers, D3078 Lenox-Conyngham papers, D1449

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284

Index Abbot, Charles (Chief Secretary, 1801–2), 123, 126 Abercorn, Marquis of, see Hamilton, John James Abercromby, General Sir Ralph, 87–8, 89–90, 125 Acheson, Arthur, 2nd Viscount and 1st Earl of Gosford, 64, 115, 160 Act of Attainder, 24 Act of Union, 6, 18, 262–3 Addington, Henry, 1st Viscount Sidmouth, 127, 144 Agar, Charles, Archbishop of Dublin, 133 Aghalee, Co. Armagh, 166 Aldborough, Earl of, 191 Aldermen of Skinners Alley, 43, 113 Alexander, Henry, 76 American Loyalist Bill, 107 American War, 33, 61 Amiens, Peace of, 123 Anglesey, 1st Marquis (Lord Lieutenant 1828–9, 1830–3), see Paget, William Henry Anglicans, 46, 64, 67–8, 79, 88, 93, 97–8, 99, 101, 118, 123, 138–9, 152, 160, 167, 170, 182–3, 184, 188, 192, 205, 206–7, 224, 237, 240, 241–243, 245, 250, 261, 264, 269–70 Anne, Queen, 25, 27 Antidote, the, 181 Anti-Emancipation petitions, 212, 242, 254–5; Statistics by County, 210, 219 Anti-Jacobin Review, 129 Antrim, Battle of, 97 Antrim, County, 59, 63, 71, 84–5, 89, 99, 104–5, 115–16, 127, 156, 159–60, 204, 211, 213, 220, 255, Apprentice Boys of Derry, 154, 164, 197, 207, 214, 228, 232, 243, 259 Arboe, Co. Tyrone, 83 Arianism, 183, 220 Armagh, City, 54, 76, 190, 203, 205, 211–13, 217, 229 Armagh County, 4, 14, 36–7, 45, 56, 59, 64–5, 71, 81, 90, 199, 201, 205, 208–9, 220, 232, 235, 253, 255, 259, 263

Armagh Outrages, 63, 72, 77, 92 Army of Reserve, 125 Ascendancy, see Protestant Ascendancy Ashfield Estate, Co. Cavan, 61, 98 Association for the Discountencing of Vice, 128 Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Levellers and Republicans, 4, 7, 10, 44, 45 Association of Friends of the Constitution, Liberty and Peace, 52–3, 55, 57, 63 Athlone, Co. Westmeath, 209, 242 Athy, Co. Kildare, 52, 93 Atkinson, Joseph, 233, 249–50, 270 Atkinson, William, 94, 116 Auckland, Lord, see, Eden, William Aughnacloy, Co. Tyrone, 120, 172, 176, 226 Aughnahoe Yeomanry, 120 Aughrim Clubs, 28 Aughrim, Battle of, 25, 27, 91, 143, 153, 226 Auriel, Brigade Major, 157 Bagwell family, 133, 145 Baldoyle, Co. Dublin, 63 ballads (loyalist), 119–23, 153–4, 197 Ballinderry, Co. Antrim 63, 79, 166 Ballintoy, Co. Antrim, 54, 137 Ballintra, Co. Donegal, 162, 190, 256 Ballsbridge, Co. Dublin, 127 Ballybay, Co. Monaghan, 256, 259; Disturbances at, 233–6, 238, 243, 246, 250 Ballyclare, Co. Antrim, 102 Ballyconnell, Co. Cavan, 256 Ballyeaston, Co. Antrim, 102 Ballygargin Boys, 142 Ballygawley, Co. Tyrone, 187 Ballyjamesduff, Co. Cavan, 240 Ballymacarett, Belfast, 235 Ballymena, Co. Antrim, 220, 226, 235, 240, 257; Ballymena Controversials, 215 Ballymoney, Co. Antrim, 240; Volunteers in, 55 Ballynahinch, Co. Down, 102, 109, 128, 140, 160; Battle of, 99 Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal, 253

285

INDEX Ballywalter, Co. Down, 212 Baltinglass, Co. Wicklow, 242 Banbridge, Co. Down, 158, 217, 248 Bandon Boyne Volunteers, 34, 48 Bandon Union, 49 Bandon Yeomanry, 157 Bandon, Co. Cork, 47–8, 51, 73, 115, 139–40, 161, 211, 258 Bangor, Co. Down, 104, 211, 235–6 Bann Infantry, 158 Bantry Bay, Co. Cork, 62, 79, 80, 88 Barnewall, John Thomas, 15th Baron Trimelston, 31 Baronscourt, Co. Tyrone, 164 Bartlett, Thomas (historian), 78 Bateson, Sir Richard, 221, 231 Bedford, Duke of, see Russell, John Belfast Brunswick Club, 246–8, 249 Belfast Guardian, 214–15, 217, 219, 221–4, 226–7, 231 Belfast Monthly Magazine, 148, 159 Belfast Newsletter, 76, 82, 100, 102–3, 115, 128–9, 138, 149, 151, 160, 166, 197, 208, 212, 231, 236–7, 246, 253, 256 Belfast, 1, 26, 32, 40–1, 44, 51, 60, 71, 94, 97, 99–103, 109, 116–17, 128, 149–51, 165–7, 180, 182, 184, 186, 204, 221–2, 231, 224, 246, 248, 254, 266 Bell, Alexander (‘Saunders’), 136 Bellaghy, Co. Londonderry, 45, 53–5 Belturbet, Co. Cavan, 188; ‘Belturbet Boys’, 142 Benevolent Orange Society, 191, 216, 220, 222, 229, 238, 246 Bentinck, William Henry Cavendish, 3rd Duke of Portland, 80, 89, 90, 145–6, 158 Beresford Family, 133, 164–5, 268 Beresford, Alderman, 277 Beresford, Barré, 231, 256, 262 Beresford, John Claudius, 113, 116–17, 179, 230 Beresford, Lord John George, Anglican Archbishop of Armagh, 199, 205–8, 211, 213, 222, 238, 244, 252, 259, 262 Beresford, John, 77, 90, 92, 106, 113–14, 115, 150 Bible War, 215 Bill of Rights, 25 Birmingham, 50; Disturbances at, 12 Black Lane Parliament, 43 Blacker, Lieutenant Colonel William, 45, 64, 73, 90, 114, 136, 139, 143, 154, 173–4, 177, 179, 185, 197, 206–7, 213, 216, 218, 220, 225, 249–52, 257, 264–5, 269–70 Blackrock, Co. Dublin, 126, 219

Blackstone, Sir William, 37, 117, 203 Blackwood, James, Lord Dufferin, 212 Blackwood, Sir John, 105 Blandford, Marquis of, 227 Blaney, Cadwallader, 11th Lord Blayney, 238, 250 Blaris, Co. Antrim, 94, 138 Bleary, Co. Down, 139 Blessington, Lady, 185 Boho, Co. Fermanagh, 235 Bollingbroke, 30 Boolavogue, Co. Wexford, 78 Boomer, Cornelius, 237 Borrisokane, Co. Tipperary, 258 Boyle, Henry, 47 Boyle, Richard, 2nd Earl of Shannon, 47, 88 Boyne Society, 28, 60 157, 236–7 Boyne, Battle of, 25–7, 36, 73, 91, 139–40, 143, 152, 157, 169, 222, 226, 258 Brennan, Father Patrick, 84 Bric, John, 200 Bristol, Lord, 31 Bristow, William, 60 British Empire, 130, 254, 264 Brocker, Galen (historian), 134 Brookborough, Co. Fermanagh, 235 Brooke, Sir Henry, 221 Brookhill House, Co. Antrim, 138 Broomhedge, Co. Antrim, 67, Brown Hall, Co. Donegal, 190 Brown Square, Belfast, 235 Browne, Valentine, 1st Earl of Kenmare, 126 Brownlow, Charles, M. P., 177, 191, 201–2, 206, 211, 221, 223, 267–8 Bruce, Reverend William, 97–8, 101, 103 Brunswick Clubs, 7, 19, 212, 224–5, 227–62; (passim), 264–6, 269, 271 Buchanan, James, 98 Bull’s Head Association, 16 Buonaparte, Napoleon, 117, 123, 129, 130, 144, 149, 150–2, 157, 169–70 Burdett, Francis, 166, 191, 221 Burke, Edmund, 35, 40, 48, 59, 75, 77 Burke, Sir John, 188 Bush, Crane, 99 Caledon, Co. Tyrone, 259 Callaghan, Gerard, 202, 241 Calvinism, 23, 34, 237 Camden, 2nd Earl and 1st Marquis, see Pratt, John Jeffreys Camperdown, Battle of, 86, 108 Canning, George, 209, 218 Canticlew, Co. Armagh, 251–2 Cappoquin, Co. Waterford, 84

286

INDEX Carleton, William, 155 Carhampton, Lord, see Luttrell, Simon Carlow, County, 62, 90, 188, 255 Carnmoney, Co. Antrim, 102, 104–5, 129 Caroline, Queen, 179 Carrickfergus, Co. Antrim, 33, 87, 109, 140, 186, 229, 235 Carrickmacross, Co. Monaghan, 257 Carter, Dean, 178, 217, 237 Castle Otway Yeomanry Resolutions, 114 Castlecaufield, Co. Tyrone, 187 Castlefin, Co. Donegal, 115 Castlereagh Yeoman Cavalry, 107 Castlereagh, Co. Down, 104 Castlereagh, Viscount, see Stewart, Robert Cathcart, General Sir William Schaw, 125 Catholic Association (and New Catholic Association), 6, 7, 19, 29, 145, 182, 184–5, 188–192, 197–8, 200, 202, 204, 206–9, 212–13, 219, 222, 223–4, 226–7, 230–4, 236, 240–2, 244–5, 247–250, 253–60, 265, 269 Catholic Bill, 255 Catholic Board, 153–4, 164–5, 167, 170, 198, 269 Catholic Church, 5, 46, 51, 87, 110, 170, 170, 267 Catholic Committee, 31, 41, 43, 45, 59, 85, 146 Catholic Convention, 42–3, 45, 50–1, 53, 198 Catholics, 2, 3, 4, 13, 16, 23–7, 30, 32, 33, 34, 41, 48, 52, 55, 72, 80, 83, 104–5, 108, 117–19, 120–1, 124–30, 134–7, 139, 140, 141, 143–7, 149–50, 154–157, 159–169 (passim), 176, 180–2, 184–6, 188–9, 197, 201–2, 204, 206,209, 212, 221, 225, 230, 242, 244, 247, 253–4, 256, 261, 265–7; Emancipation, 6, 122, 158, 170, 172–179, 214–16, 224, 236–8, 256, 259; Relief, 41–2, 54, 59, 62, 148; United Irishmen, 66; Volunteering, 37, 71 Caulfeild, Colonel, 253 Caulfeild, Henry, 160, 177, 201 Caulfeild, James, 1st Earl of Charlemont, 30, 40, 71, 76, 93, 97, 160–1 Cavan Town, Co. Cavan, 222 Cavan, County, 42, 53, 59, 61, 81, 98, 124, 149, 172, 186, 199, 202; Militia, 107 Chandos, Marquis of, 226, 230, 241 Charlemont Fort, Co. Tyrone, 108 Charlemont, Earl of, see Caulfield, James Charles I, 23–4 Charles II, 23, 104 Cheap Repository Tracts, 10, 11 Chesterfield, Lord (Viceroy), 29

Chetwoode, Eustace, 229 Christian Examiner, 245 Church and King, 11–12, 16, 37, 50 Church of Ireland, 5, 170, 182, 244, 265 Churchill, Sir Winston, 155 Clancarty, Lord, 187–8 Clanmolton, Co. Westmeath, 153 Clare, County, 62, 171, 222 Clare, Lord, see Fitzgibbon, John Clarence, Duke of, 218 Cleland, James, 211–14, 236, 240 Clogher, Co. Tyrone, 189 Clones, Co. Monaghan, 232, 234, 239, 254 Clonfert, Anglican Bishop of, 153 Clonmel, Co. Cork, 45–6, 48–9, 51, 60 Clough, Co. Down, 100, 257 Cobbett, William, 10 Cole, Willoughby, 1st Earl of Enniskillen, 53, 112, 133, 205, 217, 229, 230, 246, 254, 257–9 Coleraine, Co. Londonderry, 65, 100, 102, 109, 115, 235 College Green, Dublin, 18, 25, 29, 77, 140–1, 262 Colley, Linda (historian), 9, 17, 118, 264 Comber, Co. Down, 102, 186 Commission of Suffering Loyalists, 107–8 Common Council, 33 Commons Journal, 210, 252 Connacht, 48, 62, 149, 172, 242 Connolly, S. J. (historian), 31 Constitutional Clubs, 19 Constitutional Songs, 119–20, 123 Convention Act, 61, 145–6 Cooke, Edward, 90, 109, 112–13, 127 Cooke, Henry, Reverend, 182–3, 212, 220, 240, 269 Cookson, John (historian), 12, 266 Cookstown, Co. Tyrone, 56, 105, 129, 222 Corish, Patrick (historian), 78 Cork Brunswick Club, 241, 255–6 Cork City, 45, 119, 211, 225 Cork Mail, 151 Cork, County, 47–8, 81, 107, 128, 172, 188 Cornwallis, Charles, 1st Marquis (Lord Lieutenant, 1798–1801), 80, 82, 87, 110–115, 117 Corry, Isaac, 114, 160 Corry, Thomas Stuart, 238, 243 Cossacks, 200–1, 234 Cox, Sir Richard, 26 Cranmer, Lord, 143 Crawford, William, Sharman, 211 Cremorne, Lord, 177, 199, 200, 238 Cromwell, Oliver, 2, 23, 102, 104, 169, 270

287

INDEX Croppies, 94, 103, 112, 264 Crossgar, Co. Down, 222 Crosslé, Henry, 187 Crosslé, John, 120, 139 Crown and Anchor Tavern, 4, 11, 44, 46, 48, 52, 58, 95, 263 Culfeightrin, Co. Antrim, 84–5, 86, 89, 110 Cullen, Louis (historian), 14 Culloden, Battle of, 28–9, 143 Cumberland, Duke of, 226, 229, 238, 257–8, 261, 263 Cunningham (or Cunninghame), General Robert, 1st Baron Rossmore, 177, 199–200, 233, 234, 238–9 Cupples, Reverend Snowdon, 86, 99, 105, 115, 128, 138–9, 154–5, 166, 169, 180, 186, 264 D’Arcy, Major Thomas, 217, 253 Daly, Reverend Robert, 214, 244 Darby, Meredith, 99 Darley, Frederick, 179 Dawson, Alexander, 202 Dawson, George Robert, 165, 207, 211, 223–5, 231, 241, 245, 248, 250, 256, 259–60, 268 Deacy, Dennis, 183 Declaratory Act, 30 Defence of the Realm Act (1798), 1 Defenders, 4, 5, 13, 37, 42–44, 46, 60–3, 71, 74, 78, 83, 93, 98–9, 111, 136, 142, 149, 158 Delachrois, Nicholas, 183, 185 Delzo, 94 Derriaghy, Co. Antrim, 57, 66, 138, 186, 236 Derry City, 2, 29, 31, 36, 41, 54–5, 73, 115, 139, 141, 143, 151–2, 165, 186, 190, 197, 217, 223, 226–8, 231, 235, 241, 248, 259, 269; siege commemorations, 223–4 Derryanvil, Co. Armagh, 251 Desertmartin, Co. Londonderry, 128 Devlin, Mark, 158 Devonshire, Duke of, 140 Diamond System, 265 Diamond, Battle of, 63, 146, 142 Dickinson, H. T. (historian), 8 Dickson, Reverend William Steel, 56, 58, 93, 182 Dickson, Stephen, 147 Dillon, Lord, 62 Dissenters, 2, 16, 24, 45, 79, 80, 99, 101, 103, 105, 170, 174, 182–3, 207–9, 212, 218, 224, 240, 242, 269 Donaghadee, Co. Down, 104, 212 Donaghmore, Co. Tyrone, 248–9, Donegal, County, 75, 84, 115, 127, 156, 162, 164, 167, 172, 190, 220, 235, 240, 253, 255 Donegall, Lord, 97, 101, 150, 166, 179, 186, 231–2, 241, 259

Donegore, Co. Antrim, 102 Donoughmmore, Earl of, see Hely-Hutchinson, Richard Down, County, 56, 59, 62, 64, 84, 86, 94, 99–100, 104–5, 116, 128, 140, 157, 159–61, 172, 185, 190, 211, 213, 220, 231, 235, 237, 239, 241, 255, 270; Honourable Protestant Loyal Society of County Down, 160 Downpatrick Brunswick Club, 251 Downpatrick, Co. Down, 56, 100, 145, 239, 240 Downshire, Marquis of, see Hill, Arthur Doyle, James, Catholic Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, 184, 207 Dozier, Robert (historian), 8, 10, 11 Drennan, William, 40–1, 53, 55, 57–8, 60, 72, 103, 270 Drogheda, Co. Louth, 36, 151 Dromahair, Co. Leitrim, 162 Dromgoole, Doctor, 167 Drumcree, Co. Armagh, 14, 53, 65, 155, 251; Loyal Association, 252 Dublin Brunswick Club, 245–9, 250–1, 253–4 Dublin, City, 2, 3, 6–7, 25, 27, 31, 34, 40–1, 49–50, 52–4, 59, 63, 73, 75, 81, 85, 88, 90, 93, 102, 107, 108, 110, 112–14, 117, 120, 125–6, 128, 133, 140, 145, 149, 173, 176, 179–80, 184, 186–7, 204, 214, 223, 226, 227, 229–31, 233, 235, 241, 248–9, 253, 263; Castle, 42, 47, 60–1, 75, 95, 124–6, 144, 161, 170–1, 184, 223–4, 270; Corporation, 42, 45, 145, 227, 241, 243–4, 254, 261; Jubilee celebrations, 151, 153–4; Merchants, 49 Dublin Evening Mail, 185, 201, 205, 208, 222, 226, 230, 245, 253, 265 Dublin Evening Post, 45, 150, 106 Dublin Journal, 44, 51, 82, 263 Dublin Loyal Association, 51 Dublin Press, 85 Dublin York Club, 203 Dufferin, Lord, see Blackwood, James Duffy, Michael (historian), 11 Duigenan, Patrick, 36–7, 113, 133, 145, 160, 263 Duncan, Admiral, 86 Dundalk, Co. Louth, 151, 242 Dundas, Henry, 46, 61 Dundonald, Co. Down, 102 Dunfanaghy, Co. Donegal, 163 Dungannon, Co. Tyrone, 3, 43, 53, 55–6, 58, 63, 66–7, 70–1, 82, 151, 217, 226–7; Association, 64–5, 73, 106, 269 Dunkeerin Brunswick Club, 248

288

INDEX French Revolution, 5, 8, 12, 39, 42–3, 58, 68, 70, 97, 101, 190

Dunkeerin, Co. Tipperary, 242 Eastwood, David (historian), 10 Eden, William, Lord Auckland, 90–1 Edinburgh, 149 Egerton, Major-General, 188 Eldon, Lord, 218, 226, 229 Elliott, Marianne (historian), 78 Elliot, William, 92, 147 Ellis, Nicholas, 224, 232–234, 238, 240, 254 Ellis, Thomas, 170, 178, 229, 249 Ely, Marquis of, 226 Emmet, Robert, 6, 125–8 Enlightenment, 97, 135–6 Ennis, Co. Clare, 242 Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, 213, 256; Yeomanry, 140 Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, 2, 73–4, 140, 143, 217, 219, 224, 226–7, 232, 234, 264 Enniskillen, Earl of, see Cole, Willoughby Ensor, George, 202 Erhmann, John, (historian), 11 Evangelicalism, 126, 135–6, 170, 182–3, 198, 214, 243–5, 265 Evans, Reverend David, 180 Evatt, Henry, 201, 203, 256 Evening Herald, 147 Fane, John, 10th Earl of Westmorland (Lord Lieutenant 1790–94), 42–3, 46, 63, 90 Farmers’ Friend, 75 Farney, Co. Monaghan, 201 Farnham, Lord, see Maxwell, Barry, John Fermanagh, County, 53, 84, 120, 149, 155, 189, 204–5, 207–8, 220–1, 226, 234, 239, 253–5 Fingall, Lord, see Plunkett, Arthur James Finvoy, Co. Antrim, 89 Fitzgerald, Lord Edward, 106 Fitzgibbon, John, 1st Earl of Clare, 112 Fitzwilliam, William Wentworth, 4th Earl of, 62, 79, 80 Fletcher, Judge, 165, 167 Flood, Henry, 3, 30, 40 Florida Yeoman Infantry, 104 Fontenoy, Battle of, 28 Forbes, Lord, 242 Fort Edward Yeomanry, 82 Foster, John (Speaker), 109, 113–14, 207 Fox, Charles James, 125, 127, 144 Fox, General Henry, 125–6 Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, 259–60 Freeman’s Journal, 43, 45–6, 51, 55, 61, 74, 84, 107, 179–80, 205 Freemasonry, 59–60, 98, 128, 217

Galway, County, 127, 172, 175, 199 Garrison, Co. Fermanagh, 204 Garvagh, Co. Londonderry, 137, 155, 167; Battle of, 153, 167 Gausson, David, 259–60 George I, 27 George II, 27, 28 George III, 6, 9, 16, 29–32, 37, 56, 97, 118, 121, 129, 150–1, 160, 262, 268 George IV, 130, 179, 213, 218, 243, 262, 268 Gibbons, Grinling, 25 Giffard, Hardinge, 99 Giffard, John, 44–5, 47–8, 50–2, 75, 90, 95, 113, 133, 145, 150, 185, 263, 266, 269–70 Gillespie, Raymond (historian), 137 Ginter, Donald (historian), 11 Glasgow, 1, 175 Glaslough, Co. Monaghan, 239 Glenavy, Co. Antrim, 166 Glendy, Reverend John, 56 Glenoe, Co. Armagh, 259 Globe, the, 147 Glorious Revolution, 12, 24–5, 27, 33, 57, 103, 151, 206, 267 Good Friday Agreement, 14 Goodrich, Amanda (historian), 9, 268 Gordon Riots, 49 Gordon, Daniel, 104 Gordon, Duke of, 227, 224 Gordon, George, 76 Gorey, Co. Wexford, 188 Gosford, Lord, see Acheson, Arthur Goulburn, Henry (Chief Secretary), 174, 180, 187–8, 204, 207, 209, 215 Gowan, Ogle, 216 Graham, Reverend John, 143–4, 152–3, 229 Grand Lodge of Freemasons, 59 Grand Orange Lodge of Antrim, 152 Grand Orange Lodge of Armagh, 184 Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland, 90–1, 95, 99, 108, 113, 116–17, 122, 154, 161, 163, 167, 177–8, 181, 185–6, 189, 191, 226, 229, 234, 246, 256, 258–9, 270 Grand Orange Lodge of Ulster, 229 Grant, Charles (Chief Secretary, 1818–21), 173, 175–6, 178 Grattan, Henry (Junior), 255 Grattan, Henry, 3, 34, 42, 59, 71, 78–9, 80, 113, 117–18, 145–6, 161, 170, 249 Gregg, Alderman James, 227 Gregory, William, 164, 173–7, 190, 221–2, 257, 270

289

INDEX Grenville, William Wyndham, 1st Lord Grenville, 67, 135, 144–5, 158, 167 Grey, Lord, 52 Grey, Sam (of Ballybay), 233–4, 236–7, 243, 246–7, 250, 254, 256, 260 Greyabbey, Co. Down, 102, 104 Guild of St. Luke, 241 Hallsmill, Co. Down, 54 Hamilton, John James, 1st Marquis of Abercorn, 55, 67, 124, 126, 151, 161–4 Hamilton, William, 190 Handcock, William John, 221, 267 Hanover Association, 47 Hanover Clubs, 27 Hanoverians, 29, 31, 103 Hardwicke, Lord, see Yorke, Philip Harrison, Mark (historian), 156 Hart, General, G. V., 162–3, 164 Hawkshaw, William, 180 Hay, Edward, 146 Hayden, Timothy, 185 Hely-Hutchinson, John, 202, 211 Hely-Hutchinson, Richard, 1st Earl of Donoughmore, 59, 144, 179, 242 Henry II, 35 Henry, Reverend Robert, 250, 251 Hertford Estate, Co. Antrim, 64, 66, 86, 138, 156,166, 169, 176 Hertford, Marquis of, see Seymour-Conway, Francis Hervey, Frederick Augustus, 4th Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry, 31 Heyman, Walter Atkins, 47 Hibernian Bible Society, 136, 265 Higginson, Thomas, 63, 66 Hill, Jacqueline (historian), 153, 263 Hill, Sir George Fitzgerald, 75, 77, 100, 145, 151, 154, 164–5, 167, 177–8, 187, 206–7, 209, 211, 213, 219, 223–4, 228, 231, 241, 243, 252, 255–6, 259, 268–9 Hill, Arthur, 2nd Marquis of Downshire, 56–7, 67, 86, 99–100, 102, 108, 113–14, 115–17 Hill, Arthur, 3rd Marquis of Downshire, 159, 180, 201, 211, 217, 231, 240–1, 248, 261 Hillsborough Yeoman Cavalry, 109 Hillsborough, Co. Down, 57, 217, 222; Corporation, 56; Resolutions, 58, 240 Hilltown, Co. Down, 172 Hobart, Robert (Chief Secretary), 46, 61 Hogg, Reverend, 209 Holdcroft, George, 126 Hole, Robert (historian), 8 Home Rule, 244, 267, 271 Hope, General Sir John, 133

Houghers, 27 Howe, Admiral, 119 Hudson, Reverend Edward, 3, 104–5 Hume, Joseph, 184 Hunt, Henry (‘Orator’), 10 Irish Brigade, 27, 28 Inns of Court, 35 Irish Militia, 61 Insurrection Act (1797), 89, 175, 256 Impartial Reporter, 246 Inch Parish, Co. Down, 212, 261 Innes, James, 141 Irish County Constabulary, 171 Irish Evangelical Society, 174 Irish Loyal and Patriotic Union, 267 Irish Privy Council, 259 Irvine, Colonel, 242 Irvine, William D’Arcy, 221, 246 Irwin, Reverend Charles King, 251, 252 Islanderry, Co. Down, 116 Jacob, Archibald Hamilton, 213, 219 Jacobites, 5, 12, 24, 26–28, 29, 32, 38, 42, 110, 260 James II, 2, 24, 73 Jesuits, 260 John Bull, 44, 119, 129 Johnson, Reverend Philip, 57–8, 63, 66, 67, 115–16, 138–9, 154–5, 166, 169, 186, 190, 236, 269–270 Johnson, Samuel, 50 Joy, Henry, 76 Jupp, Peter (historian), 210 Kells, Co. Meath, 126 Kenmare, Lord, see Browne, Valentine Kent, Brunswick meetings in, 262 Kenyon, Lord, 226, 251 Keogh, Daire, (historian), 78 Keogh, John, 46 Kernan, Bishop, 201 Kerry, County, 62, 83–4, 128, 145, 172, 188, 199 Kildallen, Co. Cavan, 220 Kildare Place Society, 244 Kildare, County, 48, 52, 63, 162 Kilkeel, Co. Down, 160 Kilkenny, County, 128, 242 Killead, Co. Antrim, 104 Killinchy, Co. Down, 102; Yeoman Infantry, 104 Killyleagh, Co. Down, 102, 147 Killyman, Co. Tyrone, 138, 203; Killyman Wreckers, 144

290

INDEX Kilrea, Co. Londonderry, 164 Kilrush, Co. Clare, 222 King, Major, 241 King, Sir Abraham, 243 King’s County, 84, 162, 255 Kingston, Lord, 256 Kinsale, Co. Cork, 47 Kirkpatrick, Francis, 120–1, 125, 142–3, 168, 268 Knipe, Captain, 188 Knox, Major General John, 72–77, 81–2, 83–5, 88–9, 91, 92–3, 95–8, 99, 106, 109–10, 142 Knox, Thomas (senior), 1st Viscount Northland, 56, 63–4, 67, 73, 138–9, 180, 270 Knox, Thomas, 64–7, 70, 73, 82, 138, 161, 269 Lake, General Gerard, 72–3, 80, 88, 91, 94, 97, 268 Lambert, Andrew, 119 Lane, Thomas, 100, 104 Larne, Co. Antrim, 102, 104, 139 Latouche, David, 145 Lawless, John (‘Honest Jack’), 232, 233–4, 237 Lawrence, Thomas Dawson, 57 Lees, Sir Harcourt, 174, 186, 188, 190–1, 214, 216, 219–21, 238, 243, 246, 255, 262, 265 Lefroy, Anthony, 241 Lefroy, Thomas Langlois, 226, 261 Leinster, 149, 211 Leinster, Duke of, 52, 55–6, 93 Leitrim, County, 62, 90, 163, 172, 205; Yeomanry, 149 Lennox, Charles, 1st Duke of Richmond (Lord Lieutenant 1897–13), 145–6, 147, 159 Leslie, Colonel, 177, 199, 200–1, 203, 205–6, 222, 238 Letterkenny, Co. Donegal, 163 Leveson-Gower, Lord Francis (Chief Secretary), 255, 257, 259 Liberators, 221 Liberty Boys, 27 Lifford, Co. Donegal, 115 Limavady, Co. Londonderry, 115, 150, 235 Limerick, City, 48 Limerick, County, 49, 90, 123, 145, 171, 255; Loyal Society of, 48, 51; Militia, 160 Limerick, Treaty of, 24 Lisburn, Co. Antrim, 66, 86, 93–4, 102, 115, 128, 138, 141, 159, 166, 180, 186, 190–1, 193, 236, 240; Boyne Lodge, 123 Lisnaskea, Co. Fermanagh, 235 Liverpool, Lord, 145, 173, 187, 209 Llandaff, Bishop of, 126

Locke, John, 37, 50, 117 Loftus, Brigadier-General, 81 London Corresponding Society, 7, 50 London, 149, 247, 256 Londonderry Journal, 75, 197, 232, 247 Londonderry (Yeomanry) Legion, 177 Londonderry, County, 59, 66, 75, 84, 99–100, 127, 164, 204, 211, 220, 222, 235, 253, 256, 262; Militia, 150 Londonderry, Lord, see Stewart, Robert Longford, County, 90, 140 Longford, Lord, 226, 230, 241, 243 Lorton, Lord, 230, 254 Loughgall, Co. Armagh, 63, 204, 218 Loughinsholin, Co. Londonderry – Loyal Association, 76; Brunswick Club, 259 Loughpatrick, Co. Tyrone, 163 Louis XVI, 44 Louth, County, 42, 62, 109, 158, 190, 123, 145, 171, 255; Militia, 160 Lower Iveagh Brunswick Club, 248 Loyal Vinegar Hill Rangers, 211 Loyalism, 1, 9, 45; American Loyalism, 33–4, 110; Catholic Loyalism, 18, 23–24, 29, 31, 35–6, 38, 43, 46, 59, 28–9, 31, 61, 75–6, 78–9, 81–2, 84–8, 92–3, 95, 103, 112, 125, 127, 147, 152–3, 268; Commercial Loyalism, 9, 101, 106, 249; Liberal Loyalism, 42, 55, 59, 71, 83, 117, 164, 165, 221, 242, 267; Loyalism in Britain, 7, 8, 10, 12, 16, 30, 33, 39–40, 50, 57, 66, 68, 95, 106, 115, 118, 130, 148, 191; Presbyterian Loyalism, 16, 24, 46, 55, 89, 93, 97–101, 103–105, 129, 183; Protestant/Exclusive Loyalism, 14, 18–19, 29, 32–3, 36, 38, 44, 47–51, 53–5, 57, 60–1, 64–6, 68, 73–4, 76, 83, 89, 91–2, 95, 99, 110, 111, 113–14, 121–3, 128, 134–5, 139, 141, 144, 146–8, 153–6, 158, 164, 168, 170, 172, 177, 179, 181–3, 187–8, 192–3, 197–9, 203–4, 206–7, 215–6, 221–3, 227, 234–7, 239–41, 249, 251, 253–5, 257–60, 261, 263–4, 266–7, 269–71; Southern Loyalism, 63, 98, 103, 109, 114, 117, 150–1, 157, 171, 173, 175–8, 226, 249, 256; Ulster Loyalism, 1, 14, 53–5, 63, 65–6, 71–2, 75–6, 93, 109, 116, 151, 156, 159, 164, 166, 180, 208, 218, 226, 231, 237, 265; Volunteering and Loyalism, 13, 15, 17, 33–6, 50, 55, 58, 60, 65, 67, 70, 72, 76, 95, 109, 124, 167 Lurgan, Co. Armagh, 73, 190, 222, 235 Lutton, William, 251 Luttrell, Simon, 1st Lord Carhampton, 63, 80, 87

291

INDEX McAuley, Father Bernard, 215 McBride, John, 26 McCary, Father Matthew, 87 McCracken, Henry Joy, 100, 109 McGildowney, Edmund, 84–5, 86, 110–11 McIlveen, Gilbert, 101, 127 McKay, Thomas, 105 McKay, William Kennedy, 215 McKenna, Theobald, 125, 128 McKenzie, William, 122 McMullan, Patrick, Catholic Bishop of Down and Connor, 85 McTier, Martha, 60, 103 McVittie, Charles, 233, 238 Macosquin, Co. Londonderry, 102, 137 Madden, Col. John, 175, 177, 201, 238 Magee, William, Anglican Archbishop of Dublin, 181–2 Maghera, Co. Londonderry, 54, 56, 165, 184, 246 Magherafelt Union Volunteers, 54, 85 Magherafelt, Co. Londonderry, 241; Orange Lodge, 84 Magna Carta, 30 Mahoney, Pierce, 227 Manchester, 16, 50, 175 Mandeville, Lord, 236–7, 244, 252 Mansfield, Francis, 163 Mant, Richard, Anglican Bishop of Down and Connor, 244 Markethill, Co. Armagh, 222 Martello towers, 124 Martin, Reverend John, 243–7, 255 Marxism, 6, 16, 95, 156 Masserene, Earl of, see Skeffington, Chichester Matchett, William, 252 Maxwell Barry, John, 5th Lord Farnham, 124, 149, 202, 214–15, 224, 226, 230, 244–5, 261, 265 Maxwell, Henry, 206–7, 245, 252, 255 Maxwell, John Waring, 183, 185, 189, 211, 212, 254–5, 258 Maxwell, Robert Waring, 189, 239, 258 May, Edward, 127, 166 May, Sir Stephen, 231 Maynooth College, 77, 87, 145 Mayo, County, 128, 149, 172, 175 Maze Races, 67, 116 Meath, County, 42, 62–3, 145 Meath, Earl of, 50 Meigh, Co. Armagh, 139 Methodism, 170, 237, 240, 251 Milford, Co. Donegal, 163 Millenarianism, 172 Miller, Alexander, 254–5

Miller, Reverend Dr, 206 Miller, Rowley, 241 Mirala, Petri (historian), 14 Mirror of Parliament, 252 Mitford, John, 1st Lord Redesdale, 126, 144, 146 Molynaux, William, 30 Monaghan, County, 36, 42, 51, 53, 59, 81, 115–16, 128, 175–7, 189, 199, 200–2, 211, 226, 229, 232, 234, 238–41, 255; Militia, 203 Moneyrea, Co.Down, 102, 104 Montgomery of Rosemount, 104 Montgomery, Reverend Henry, 182–3 Moore, Edward Montgomery, 176 Moore, George Ogle, 227, 228, 231, 255 More, Hannah, 10, 58 Mori, Jennifer, (historian), 9 Morrison’s Hotel, Dublin, 227, 246 Mountjoy, Lord, 63 Mountmellick, Co. Carlow, 49; Volunteers, 205 Mountnorris, Co. Armagh, 188, 235 Moutray, John Corry, 206 Moylan, Catholic Bishop of Cork, 122 Muckamore, Co. Antrim, 102, 137 Mullaghglass, Mountain, 138 Munro, General Henry , 97, 106 Munster, 5, 27–8, 32, 37, 48, 59, 72, 79, 88, 115, 134, 157, 180 Murphy, Father John, 78 Musgrave, Sir Richard, 6, 98, 111, 121, 125–6, 129, 248, 263, 266 Needham, General Francis, 158 Nelson, Admiral Lord, 119, 149 Nelson Clubs, 149–53, 266 Nenagh, Co. Tipperary, 126 Newbliss, Co. Monaghan, 222 Newcastle, Duke of, 259 Newenham, Sir Edward, 126 Newport Pratt, Co. Mayo, 52 Newport, Sir John, 52, 145, 148 Newry Telegraph, 148, 236–7, 251 Newry, Co. Down, 41, 67, 104, 112, 145, 148, 158, 187, 217, 220, 235; Loyal Protestant Association of, 112 Newton, Andrew, 79, 83, 88–9, 102 Newtownards, Co. Down, 97 Newtownbutler, Co. Fermanagh, 226, 235 Newtownbutler Heroes, 142 Newtownhamilton, Co. Armagh, 217 Newtownmountkennedy, Co. Wexford, 242 North, Lord, 3 Northern Star, 45, 64–5, 66, 75, 76

292

INDEX Northern Whig, 213, 214, 217, 231, 237, 240, 254, 261 Northland, Lord, See Knox, Thomas Northumberland, Viscount, 259 North-West Agricultural Society, 235 Nugent, Major-General George, 93–4, 95, 100–1, 108–11, 115 O’Connell, Daniel, 6, 7, 18–19, 32, 85, 136, 146, 170, 172, 174, 179, 182–3, 186, 188, 191–2, 199–200, 205, 207, 215, 221–2, 225–29, 234, 237–238, 242–3, 247, 256, 265, 267 O’Connellites, 139, 190, 208, 217, 224, 230 O’Connor, Charles, 29 O’Donnell, Charles, Catholic Bishop of Derry, 151 O’Driscol, John, 169 O’Gorman, Francis (historian), 11–12 O’Neill, Lord John, 67, 175, 180, 211 O’Neill, Phelim Roe, 121, 137 O’Neillland East (barony of), 250 O’Sullivan, Reverend Mortimer, 167 Oakboys, 5 Ogle, George, 36, 116 Old Pretender, 28 Omagh, Co. Tyrone, 98, 162, 208 Orange Boys of Dyan, 56, 98 Orangeism, 4, 6, 7, 45, 59, 63–4, 66–8, 73, 75– 7, 81–2, 85, 88, 90–1, 96, 123, 133–4, 136, 139–40, 143, 145–8, 150, 161, 164, 166–9, 171, 176, 184, 186, 190, 192–3, 201–4, 208, 213, 215–16, 219, 221, 225, 231–2, 236, 238, 245–6, 250; and Brunswickism, 226–8, 239–40, 247, 249, 252, 256–7, 261, 270–1; and Volunteering, 72, 79, 81–2, 84, 89, 93–6, 109, 112, 125–6, 147, 153, 158, 173, 177, 235, 237, 270 Orange Order, 1, 5, 7, 14–5, 18–9, 28, 54, 65, 74, 81, 99–100, 104, 107–8, 113, 116–17, 120–2, 129, 135, 141–2, 144, 152, 159–63, 174, 186–7, 189, 191, 197–200, 209, 211–12, 217–18, 222–4, 229, 233–4, 246, 258–9, 265–6, 269 Ordnance Survey, 135–6, 138, 220 Ormond Boys, 27 Paget, William Henry, 222–4, 242, 250 Paine, Thomas, 40–1, 50, 57–8, 106 Palatine Settlements, 172 Palmer, Brigade Major, 163 Parnell, Sir Henry, 145, 148 Parnell, William, 147 Parsonstown, King’s County, 175 Pastorini, 187, 189

Patriot Parliament, 24 Patriot, the, 185, 265 Patriotism, 3, 7, 8, 13, 30, 33–5, 38, 118, 128, 149, 150, 152–3, 266 Peace Preservation Act, 190 Peace Preservation Force, 154, 164, 171 Peel, Sir Robert (Chief Secretary 1812–18), 19, 133, 144–5, 148, 154, 161, 165, 168, 171, 174, 184–5, 186–7, 197, 207, 209–10, 213, 218, 224, 227, 257, 264 Peep O’Day Boys, 4, 15, 37, 43, 59, 64, 98, 138, 154 Pelham, Thomas (Chief Secretary 1795–8), 66, 71, 79, 80–1, 82 Penal Laws, 2, 24, 126, 198 Peninsular War, 153 Perceval, 145 Percy, Thomas, Anglican Bishop of Dromore, 97, 99, 100–1, 128 Peterloo, 173 Philp, Mark (historian), 10, 16 Pitt Clubs, 266 Pitt, William, 1, 11, 39, 41–3, 46, 49, 50, 52, 61, 72, 80–2, 107, 112, 117, 127, 150, 262 Plowden, Edward, 155 Plowden, Francis, 146 Plunkett, Arthur James, 7th Earl of Fingall, 122, 125–6, 128 Plunkett, William Coyngham, 174 Pole, William Wellesley, 134, 146 Pollock, John, 57–8 Pomeroy, Co. Tyrone, 105, 143, 180 Ponsonby, Col. William, 164 Ponsonby, George, 80, 144–5, 147, 165 Portadown, Co. Armagh, 53, 64–5, 137, 150, 189, 235, 249, 250–2, 256, 270; Brunswick Club, 249, 270 Portaferry, Co. Down, 55 Portglenone, Co. Antrim, 104, 164, 216, 259 Portland, Duke of, see Bentinck, William Henry Cavendish. Powerscourt, Co. Wicklow, 214 Pratt, John Jeffreys, 2nd Earl and 1st Marquis Camden, 63, 70–1, 73–4, 79, 81–2, 85, 88–9, 90–1, 92–3, 99, 107–9, 127 Presbyterian General Assembly, 208 Presbyterians, 23–4, 26, 34–5, 56, 59, 66–7, 68, 76, 82, 83, 85, 88, 93, 05, 97–8, 100–1, 104, 107, 111, 121, 127, 129, 137, 138–9, 148, 152, 157–8, 166, 182–3, 198, 207, 209, 211–16, 237, 240, 251–2, 261, 269; General Synod, 102–3, 105 Price, Nicholas, 86, 209 Prince of Wales, 59

293

INDEX Protestant Ascendancy, 5, 16–17, 29, 36–8, 42, 48, 50, 51, 53, 58–61, 64, 81–2, 91, 122, 125, 136, 144–5, 147, 149, 152, 155, 157, 164, 168–9, 173, 176, 170, 182, 184, 190, 199, 200–3, 206–7, 214–15, 235, 239, 263, 266–70 Protestant Association, 224, 227 Protestant Constitution, 24, 28, 45, 52, 55–6, 57, 101, 113, 118, 182, 206, 236, 262, 265, 271 Protestant Nationalism, 35, 37, 262 Quebec Act, 34 Queen’s County, 48, 52, 255 Radicalism, 8, 184 Rafferty, Oliver (historian), 78 Randalstown, Co. Antrim, 99 Ranelagh, Co. Dublin, 63 Rasharkin, Co. Antrim, 102, 109 Rathdowne, Earl of, 229 Rathfriland, Co. Down, 183, 217 Rathgael Yeoman Infantry, 140 Rathkeal, Co. Limerick, 256 Rathlin Island, 85 Redesdale, Lord, see Mitford, John Reeves, John, 4, 7, 10, 11, 16, 39, 44, 45, 47–8, 50–1, 58, 63, 65, 66, 67–8, 69, 74–5, 95–6, 150, 263, 266 Reformation, 126, 215, 244–5; Reformation Society, 214–15, 220 Regency Crisis, 39, 47 Reilly, Capt. John Lushington, 158–9 Reilly, William E., 159 Reynolds, James, 56, 58 Ribbonism, 5, 149, 153, 155, 159, 163–4, 165, 167, 169, 172–3, 175–6, 179, 180, 183, 199, 203–4, 209, 216–17, 253, 259 Richardson, Captain, 253 Richardson, Reverend William, 64, 67, 177, 269–70 Richill, Co. Armagh, 137 Richmond, Duke of, see Lennox, Charles Richmount, Co. Armagh, 251, 252 Rightboys, 5, 36, 42, 76 Robinson, Reverend Romney, 238, 244 Rockites, 172–3, 175–6, 180, 182, 187 Roden, Lord, 151, 183, 214, 230, 244, 261 Roper, Dean, 238 Roscommon, County, 62, 172, 175 Ross, Robert, 67 Rossary, Co. Fermanagh, 235 Rosscrea, Co. Tipperary, 109, 171 Rosse, Lord, 175 Rossmore, Lord, see Cunningham, Robert Rotunda, Dublin, 150, 242, 245, 246, 260

Rowan, Archibald Hamilton, 148, 181 Royal Irish Artillery, 107, 150 Royal Navy, 119, 130 Royal York Club, 247 Ruddle, Bernard, 252 Russell, John, Duke of Bedford, 141, 144, 147 Russell, Thomas, 125 Ruthven, Edward Southwell, 159 Sandy Row, Belfast, 235, 259–60 Sarsfield, Sir Patrick, 223 Saul, Co. Down, 84 Saunderson, Alexander, 254 Saunderson, Col. Edward, 254, 267 Saurin, William, 113, 114, 133, 145–6, 174, 185, 229, 230 Scarva Yeoman Infantry, 158 Schoales, Alderman, 55 Schoales, John, 223 Scott, Sir Walter, 1, 130, 169 Scottish Covenant, 36 Scullabogue, Co. Wexford, 99, 143 Scully, Denys, 125, 127, 146 Seagoe, Co. Armagh, 65, 251–2; Yeoman Infantry, 176 Seaver, Thomas, 139, 178 Seaver, Jonathan, 158 Second Reformation, 182–3, 184, 186, 192, 206, 214, 265, 269 Senior, Hereward (historian), 15, 171, 234 Sentry Hill, Co. Antrim, 138 Seven Years War, 31 Seymour-Conway, Francis, 2nd Marquis of Hertford, 57, 63, 67, 115, 159, 180, 270 Shankill Road, Belfast, 235 Shannon, Earl of, see Boyle, Richard Shaw, Robert, 170 Sheehan, Thomas and Remé, 185 Shirley, Evelyn J., 200–1, 203, 238 Sibbett, R. M. (historian), 160, 225, 244 Sidmouth, Viscount, see Addington, Henry Skeffington, Chichester, Earl of Masserene, 100–1 Sligo Journal, 75 Sligo, County, 62, 149, 208, 231, 242 Sligo, Town, 175 Sloan, James, 218 Small, Stephen (historian), 37 Smith, William Cusack, 127 Smithborough, Co. Monaghan, 239 Smyth, Jim (historian), 15 Soldiers of Liberty, 51 Spain, 152–3 St. George, Reverend Henry Lucas, 239 St. John’s Eve (rioting on), 158

294

INDEX Trinity College, Dublin, 151, 207, 244, 255 Troy, Dr. John Thomas, Archbishop of Dublin, 78, 86, 114, 125, 128 True Blue Volunteer Legion, 47 Tullylish, Co. Down, 57, 64 Twelfth of July Commemorations, 122–3, 128, 133, 141, 143, 160, 162, 165, 166, 178, 180, 185, 190, 204–5, 258–9, 266 Tyrconnell, Earl of, 2 Tyrone Brunswick Club, 254 Tyrone, County, 3, 55–6, 59, 64–5, 79, 81, 84, 88, 98, 102, 104, 115, 120–1, 124, 126, 147, 155, 164, 188, 189, 192, 204, 207, 211, 236, 253–4, 258

St. Patrick’s Day parades, 171 St. Thomas, (Dublin) Parish of, 51 Star of Brunswick, 243, 245–7, 250, 253 Steelboys, 5 Stewart, A. T. Q. (historian), 155 Stewart, James (of Killymoon), 104, 162 Stewart, Robert, 1st Viscount Castlereagh, 67, 91–3, 97–8, 109, 113, 115, 122, 159, 166, 270 Stewart, Robert, Lord Londonderry, 97, 116, 212, 231, 241, 243 Stewart, Sir John, 144, 164, 211, 213 Stewartstown, Co. Tyrone, 71, 83, 105, 259 Stopford, Edward, 222 Strabane, Co. Tyrone, 115, 162–3, 259 Stuart, Charles Edward, 28–9, 31, 170 Stuart, James (Editor, Belfast Guardian), 214, 218, 231 Stuart, Henry Villiers, 100 Sunday School Movement, 136, 183 Swanlinbar, Co. Cavan, 149 Synod of Ulster, 107, 182–3, 207, 220, 237 Synott, Marcus, 253 Talbot, Charles Chetwynd, 2nd Earl Talbot (Lord Lieutenant, 1817–21), 173, 174, 176 Tallow, Co. Waterford, 49; Loyal Association, 51 Tamlaght O’Crilly Chapel, 164 Tamlaghtfinlagan, Co. Londonderry, 102 Tandragee, Co. Armagh, 151, 178, 217, 218, 235–6, 237, 240; Tandragee (Yeomanry) Corps, 176 Tandy, James Napper, 61 Tartaraghan, Co. Armagh, 251–2 Temple, Sir John, 24, 27 Tempo, Co. Fermanagh, 235 Tennent, Robert, 166, 167, 234 Tennison, William, 238 Theatre Royal (Dublin), 44, 181 Thompson, E. P. (historian), 8, 14, 156 Thornton, General, 233 Tinhealy True Blues (Co. Wicklow),109 Tipperary, County, 48, 51, 109, 114, 128, 145, 192 Tommy Downshire’s Boys, 257 Tone, Wolfe, 43, 72, 106, 269 Tories, 8, 25, 27, 67, 225–7, 241, 245, 262 Townshend, Lord, 47 Trafalgar, Battle of, 19, 119, 121, 144, 149, 152, 160 Trail, James, 148 Trillick, Co. Fermanagh, 235 Trimleston, Lord, see Barnewell, John Thomas. Trinitarians, 183, 220

Ulster, 5, 25, 28, 34, 45, 68, 80–1, 89, 91, 101, 111, 113, 120, 125, 135, 142, 161–2, 176–7, 182, 187, 204, 211, 216–17, 220–2, 226–7, 235, 240, 242, 245, 253–4, 258–9 Ulster Covenant, 1, 23, 26 Ulster Defence Association (UDA), 1 Ulster (Political) Revivals, 226 Ultras, 179, 181, 183, 185, 192, 197, 199, 203, 211, 221, 226, 228, 234, 236, 242, 249, 254, 263, 268–9 Uniacke, John, 47 Unitarians, 183 United Church of England and Ireland, 262 United Irishmen, 4, 5, 13–14, 40–2, 50, 52, 53, 55–6, 58, 61–6, 70–2, 74, 79, 80–2, 84–5, 88, 92–4, 97–100, 102, 104, 104, 127, 142, 146, 152, 158, 182, 211, 213, 268–9; and Defenders, 76–7 United Kingdom, 118, 122, 124, 128, 143, 149, 150, 153, 210, 229, 264, 266 Unlawful Oaths Act, 154, 184 Unlawful Societies Act, 190, 191 Vance, Patrick, 101 Vendée, 28 Verner Family, 214, 220 Verner, Col. William, 147, 177–8, 187, 201–6 (passim), 208 Verner, James, 81, 91, 134, 139, 142, 161, 187, 216 Verner, Thomas, 90–1, 92, 116–17, 122, 166–7, 180, 229, 237 Vinegar Hill, Battle of, 140 Vittoria, Battle of, 153, 266 Volunteering, 10, 16, 59, 62, 77, 96, 124, 129 Volunteers, English, 74, 123, 15 Volunteers, Irish, 11, 34, 40, 41, 43, 49, 55, 67–8, 71, 85, 118, 198; and United Irishmen, 58; National Volunteers, 4, 41, 42–5, 49, 53, 61

295

INDEX Waddell, Captain Robert, 65, 67–8, 116, 270 Waddell, Major, 231 Wakefield Family, 139 Walker, George, 223, 226, 248–9 Wall, Patrick, 29 Walpole, Horace, 27 Warder, the, 185, 250 Waring, Holt, 139, 159, 207–8, 216, 239 Waringstown, Co. Down, 57, 159; Cavalry, 158 Warrenpoint, Co. Down, 217 Waterford Herald, 75 Waterford, County, 52, 84, 128, 153, 188, 199, 203, 206, 256 Waterloo, Battle of, 144, 165, 169, 170, 203, 238 Watson, James (of Brookhall, Co. Antrim), 138–9, 270 Wellesley, Arthur, 1st Duke of Wellington, (Chief Secretary 1807–9), 140, 152, 153–4, 174, 188, 213, 218–9, 224, 227, 238, 258, 261, 264 Wellesley, Richard, 2nd Earl of Mornington, 1st Marquis Wellesley (Lord Lieutenant 1821–8), 174, 179–81, 184–8, 192 Westenra, Henry, 177, 199–201, 203, 239 Western, J. R. (historian), 10 Westmeath, County, 62, 187, 199, 205, 211 Westminster, 30, 62, 77, 144, 148, 157, 170, 252, 254 Westmorland, Earl of, see Fane, John Wexford Bridge, 143 Wexford, County, 14, 48, 62, 84, 86, 99, 109, 111, 115, 121, 128, 140, 145, 147, 188, 237, 242, 255; Militia, 120 Whelan, Kevin (historian), 14 Whig Clubs, 40 Whigs, 7–9, 25–6, 30, 33–5, 39, 41–3, 50, 52, 56–7, 72, 80, 97, 101, 103, 113, 117–8, 129, 141, 169, 184, 207, 213, 221, 237, 245, 262, 267–8, 271

White Cockade, 23 Whiteboys, 5, 32, 34, 38 Whitworth, Charles, 1st Earl Whitworth, 145 Wickham, William, 123, 127 Wicklow, County, 84, 90, 93, 195, 108–9, 111, 115, 211, 255 William of Orange (William III), 2, 24–6, 27, 32, 35, 47, 103, 138, 140, 151, 169, 179, 181, 198, 224, 237, 249, 267 Williamites, 17, 28–9, 36, 43, 47, 73, 139, 209, 221, 270 Williamite Wars, 2, 24 Wilson, James (of Dyan), 98 Wilson, Richard, 147 Winchelsea, Lord, 270 Wingfield, Colonel, 211 Wingfield, Rev. Edward, 214 Wolfe, Arthur, Lord Kilwarden, 67, 270 Wollaghan, Hugh, 112, 119 Woodhouse, J. O., 189 Woodward, Bishop of Cloyne, 5, 36, 59 Wright, Frank (historian), 155 Wyvill, Christopher 39 Yeomanry, English, 70 Yeomanry, Irish, 15, 62, 68, 70, 76, 79, 87–8, 92–4, 100, 144–5, 160–4, 171, 205, 209, 220, 228, 233, 235–6, 250–1, 264, 266, 269; Orange, 73; in Ulster, 97–8, 146–7, 149–50, 154–5, 171–2, 180, 184, 188–90, 192–3, 223–4 York, Duke of, 150, 154, 184, 206, 209, 263 Yorke, Charles, 124 Yorke, Philip, 3rd Earl of Hardwicke, 123–4, 144 Yorkshire, 50 Youghal, Co. Cork, 46, 48–9, 115, 211; Hanover Succession Society, 47; Loyal Association, 47; Independent Volunteers, 47 Young Pretender, 31

296