1798
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THE MEN OF NO POPERY
THE ORIGINS OF THE ORANGE ORDER
The following article
by Jim Smyth is republished from History Ireland Vol
3 No 3 Autumn 1995
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We’ll
fight to the last in
the honest old cause
And guard our religion, our
freedom and laws.
We’ll fight for our country, our
king and his crown,
And make all the traitors and
croppies lie down.
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As the television
documentaries, radio programmes and newspaper features marking the bicentenary
of the French revolution rolled on through 1989, no one can have been left in
any doubt where the pundits stood. The revolution is no longer considered to
have been a good thing. According to current orthodoxies the costs of the
Terror outweighed the benefits of the Rights of Man and Citizen (which would,
in any event have been achieved without the bloodshed). These views are very
different from those enshrined in the ‘Great Tradition’ of historiography which
celebrated the revolution for its contribution not only to the progress of
French civilisation but to the world.
STUDY
OF COUNTER-REVOLUTION IN FASHION
One consequence of the
partial eclipse of the ‘Great Tradition’ is the increasingly fashionable study
of counter-revolution. A similar trajectory is traceable in English
historiography. Over 25 years ago EP Thompson added a postscript to the
paperback edition of his classic The Making of the English Working Class in
which he answered the book’s many critics. Rebutting his detractors with
characteristic gusto, he nonetheless accepted the objection that he had paid
insufficient attention to ‘the flag-saluting, foreigner-hating,
peer-respecting’ side of the plebeian mind. Popular xenophobia, deference and loyalism, Thompson conceded, were too little examined and
less understood. That was in 1968. Today the study of militant loyalism and ‘vulgar conservatism’ in the 1790s is a
booming cottage industry. Thompson’s radical reformers have been overshadowed
by Linda Colley’s flag-saluting Britons.
Irish historians have not followed English and
French trends. The proceedings of two major conferences, held in 1989 and 1991,
to mark the bicentenaries of the impact of the French revolution on Ireland and the foundation of the Society of United
Irishmen, have now been published, and undoubtedly the two hundredth
anniversary of the 1798 rebellion will occasion further gatherings and volumes.
The foundation of the Orange Order in September 1795 has not attracted the same
level of scholarly attention. This may be explained by the sheer scale of the
radical movement. The United Irishmen mounted a more formidable challenge to
the government than either its English or Scottish counterparts, while
inversely Irish popular loyalism, mobilised by the
Orange Societies, never achieved the nation-wide support enjoyed by the British
‘church and king’ associations. Yet the Orange Order survives to this day, it
played a prominent and controversial role in the Irish counter-revolution and
it offers a fascinating example of the dynamics of popular politicisation in
the late 18th Century. Orangeism conformed to
international patterns. As well as stimulating radical revivals across Europe and the British Isles, the French revolution polarised politics everywhere. In
each country the revivified radical movements confronted conservative and
royalist anti-‘Jacobin’ crusades. Sir Richard Musgrave,
the loyalist historian of the rebellion, and himself an Orangeman, made the
point: ‘In the year 1792 when the dissemination of treason and the formation of
seditious clubs in London threatened the immediate destruction of the constitution .
. . loyal societies checked the progress and baneful effects of their
doctrines. The institution of the Orangemen did not differ from them in the
smallest degree’. It is true that in its devotion to the Protestant
constitution, church and crown, as in its opposition to French principles,
domestic ‘Jacobinism’, Thomas Paine and all his works, Orangeism
paralleled British loyalist movements; but its roots lay deep in the Ulster countryside.
ARMAGH: CRUCIBLE OF SECTARIAN CONFLICT
The Orange Order was
forged in the crucible of sectarian conflict in County Armagh. The most densely populated county in the
country, Armagh was a microcosm of late 18th Century Ireland.
Each of the three major religious denominations were represented there in
roughly equal proportions, with a Catholic majority in the poorer south, an
Episcopalian majority in the north, and Presbyterians most numerous across the
centre. Each confessional group had a corresponding ethnic identity,
Irish-Catholic, Scots-Presbyterian and English-Episcopalian, and each was
present to some degree in all areas of the county. That finely balanced
religious demography itself helps to account for the persistent sectarian
tensions. Patterns of settlement, dating back to the seventeenth-century
plantation, created ‘cultural frontiers’, flash points of territorial dispute
and inter-communal strife. All of these elements combined in the circumstances
surrounding the brutal killings of the Protestant schoolmaster, Alexander
Barclay, by the Catholic Defenders at Forkhill in
1791. Part of an ‘improving’ project, Barclay’s school taught
through the medium of English and intruded into a predominantly Catholic,
Irish-speaking, area.
Because of their numbers Catholics appeared more
threatening to their Protestant neighbours, than in counties such as Antrim or Down where they were a clear minority. The Presbyterian
farmers of Antrim and Down who later embraced the
union of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter in the United Irishmen felt safe to
do so; in Armagh it was different. When the Masonic lodges of
Antrim, Down, Derry and Tyrone endorsed parliamentary reform in the
winter of 1792-3, the Armagh masons condemned them. Reform – or innovation
as they denounced it – touched the simultaneous campaign for Catholic relief
too closely for comfort.
LAND
HUNGER?
An explosive religious
geography reacted upon an unstable social structure and local economy. The
formation of Orange Lodge No 1 followed a violent clash between armed
Protestant bands and Defenders at a crossroads hamlet, named the Diamond, near
the village of Loughgall. Up to 30 Defenders were killed that ‘running
Monday’, 21 September 1795, while none of the surviving accounts record any
fatalities on the Protestant side. 
The ‘Battle of the Diamond’ ranks as one of the more bloody encounters
in a sequence of disturbances between the Protestant Peep O’ Day Boys and
Defenders stretching back to the mid-1780s. That endemic unrest used to be
explained by land hunger. Following the repeal of penal laws restricting
Catholic access to landed property in 1778 and 1782, Catholic competition for
leases intensified, driving up prices and provoking Protestant resentment. Then
in 1793 the Catholic Relief Act enfranchised forty shilling freeholders in the
counties, thus increasing the political value of Catholic tenants to landlords.
The ‘land hunger’ explanation of the Armagh troubles has now been superseded by
more sophisticated theories, which stress the destabilising effects of
modernisation and the political dimensions of the Peep O’ Day Boy backlash; but
many witnesses to these events linked land competition to sectarian rivalry.
Rather than simply discounting the land issue as the cause of the disturbances,
it needs to be integrated with newer theories as one cause among several.
‘A
HOTBED OF CASH’
In fact the economic
importance of land was diminishing during this period. Late 18th Century Armagh experienced rapid social change generated by its thriving
linen industry. Much of the linen-led commercial and manufacturing expansion of
the Irish economy at this time centred on Ulster’s ‘linen triangle’, an area comprising west County Down, north Armagh and mid Tyrone. Linen, produced for sale in the market
place by piece-working, wage-earning journeymen weavers, transformed rural
society. By the 1790s in some parts of the county agriculture had become an
adjunct to the textile industry. Land supplemented income from spinning,
weaving and bleaching rather than the reverse. Armagh, noted a contemporary observer, ‘is a hotbed of cash’.
Inevitably the scale and pace of modernisation loosened the deference-based
social controls on which the ‘natural leadership’ of the gentry had
traditionally rested. Apprentices and young journeymen who ‘got the handling of
cash’ before they knew the value of it, enjoyed an independence of action
absent from the forelock-tugging dependency culture of landed society.
Whereas Catholic competition in the land market
allegedly drove up the price of leases, Catholic weavers competing in the
labour market aroused Protestant hostility by allegedly depressing wage rates.
Certainly, substantial Catholic participation in the linen boom is not in
doubt. Prominent Catholic radicals, such as Luke Teeling
in Lisburn and Bernard Coile
in Lurgan, were wealthy linen merchants. The brother
of the Armagh priest, Defender and United Irishman, James Coigly, Bernard Coile employed up
to a hundred ‘hands’ in the county. From the viewpoint of Protestant Ascendancy
the Catholic menace included a threat to the livelihoods of Protestant weavers.
During the 1780s, Peep O’ Day Boys raiding Catholic homes (which were also
their workplaces) in search of illegally-held arms, smashed domestic looms
whenever they came across them. Again, the wholesale ‘wrecking’ of Catholic
cottages by Orangemen in the winter of 1795-6 included the destruction of looms,
webs and yarn. The breakdown of traditional social control lurched into
sectarian economic warfare.
THE
RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS
Rapid economic change,
population pressure and religious geography combined to produce a particularly
volatile situation in late 18th Century Armagh; the disturbances, however, had a political detonator.
Under the penal laws Catholics were denied the right to bear firearms – a
proscription which had symbolic and political in addition to practical
significance. In an age of citizen’s militias and deep distrust of standing
armies, the right of the people to bear arms guaranteed their liberty and
property. That at least was the theory. The Irish Volunteers, first formed in Ulster in 1778, embodied classical Republican and Whig
ideas of armed citizenship, public virtue and legitimate resistance to tyranny.
A few years later the right to bear arms received ratification in the written
constitution of the new American republic. Thus in the mid 1780s when certain
Volunteer companies in Ulster, Dublin and elsewhere admitted Catholics to their ranks, they
unilaterally, and illegally, admitted them to fuller citizenship. According to
another report, at about the same time the Armagh grandee Lord Gosford armed local
Catholics for the less exalted purpose of protecting his orchards from
pilfering!
Arms raids were political. The disarming of
Catholics in County Armagh amounted to a spontaneous and unilateral
attempt by lower-class Protestants to reaffirm Protestant ascendancy by
re-enforcing the penal laws. The Defenders, as the name indicates, began as
Catholic bands formed to defend themselves from attack. But, as the movement
became proactive and politicised and spread into south Ulster and the midlands, its standard tactic of
raiding gentry houses for firearms echoed the original
Peep O’ Day Boy campaign, and in the context of the penal laws that tactic was
likewise charged with political symbolism. In part arms raid represented an
assertion by lower-class Catholics to equal status under the law.
CATHOLICS
‘UNFIT FOR LIBERTY’
At a local level the
Peep O’ Day Boys tried to maintain a system of privilege built upon religious
discrimination. Yet in the 18th Century popular anti-Catholicism could be a
protean, Janus-faced force. Although it fed on the sort of vulgar prejudices
concerning superstition and priestcraft so deftly
parodied in the writing of Wolfe Tone, and although it could degenerate into a
kind of hysterical bigotry personified by Sir Richard Musgrave,
it had a positive side. To Republicans and Whigs, from John Milton in the 1650s
to William Drennan, Volunteer and future United
Irishman, in the 1780s, Catholics were justly excluded from the constitution on
the grounds that toleration could not safely be extended to the intolerant, nor
liberty to its enemies. Those antipathies, historically rooted in Whig myths of
the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 and Irish Protestant folk memories of the
1641 rebellion and of their deliverance from popish tyranny by William of
Orange at the Boyne in 1690, were sustained by contemporary perceptions of the
despotic Catholic monarchy of France. Catholics, wrote Drennan,
were ‘unfit for liberty’. Alongside its popular pedigree, the ‘religion,
freedom and laws’ celebrated by the Peep O’ Day Boys’ successor movement, the
Orange Order, had a radical and subversive potential which troubled the men of
property and the government from the start.
VOLUNTEERS
AND FREEMASONS
While some Volunteer
companies recruited Catholics, others remained aggressively Protestant. The Volunteers
who clashed with Defenders in Armagh in 1788, or at Rathfriland, County Down, in 1792, were denounced as little more than
Peep O’ Day Boys in uniform. The societies of United Irishmen, established at Belfast and Dublin in 1791, were composed of veteran Volunteers;
so too were the first Orange lodges. The decisive Protestant victory at the Battle of the Diamond has been attributed to superior
firepower, occupation of the high ground, and ‘old Volunteer discipline’.
However, the shared institutional ancestry of the Orange and United societies in volunteering and, as we
shall see, Freemasonry, is not as mysterious as it might at first appear.
As a form of participation in public life the
volunteering experience raised levels of political awareness, but it did not
predetermine the content of politicisation. In a way the mere act of
associating was in itself just as important as the politics of a particular
company. It is no accident that Freemasonry underwent one of its most rapid
surges of expansion during the heyday of volunteering, or that it occurred
above all in the Volunteer heartland’s of Ulster and Dublin. Indeed in several cases Masonic lodges and
Volunteer companies merged. Lodges and companies, with their regalia and
uniforms, answered largely the same social and recreational demands, and the
number testifies to the density and richness of popular culture in Ulster. By 1804 there were 43 recognised or
‘warranted’ Masonic lodges in Armagh, 92 in neighbouring Tyrone and 56 in County Down. Masonic secrecy applied only to the internal
ritual and business of the craft, not to membership. For example, in October
1784 a Masonic funeral held at Loughgall – the site
of the original Defender-Peep O’ Day Boy feud – included 1,000 Volunteers and
‘300 Masons in regular procession’. Unsurprisingly such a common style of
association provided others, sometimes Masons themselves, with a ready-made
model.
The fledgling Orange Order (and the Defenders)
borrowed wholesale from Masonic practice and terminology. Orange ‘lodges’,
‘masters’, ‘grand masters’, ‘oaths’, ‘signs’ ‘degrees’, ‘warrants’ and
‘brethren’ all have a clear Masonic lineage. The ubiquity of masonry impressed
contemporaries. Sketching in the background to the Battle of the Diamond Musgrave alleged that ‘in the year 1795, the Romanists, who
assumed the name of masons, used frequently to assemble in the neighbourhood of
Loughgall, Charlemont, Richill, Portadown, Lurgan . . . and robbed the Protestants of their arms’. On
18 September, three days before the battle, a local gentleman informed the
Dublin government that ‘the Protestants who call themselves Freemasons go in
lodges and armed’, while 40 years later a witness before a parliamentary
inquiry recalled that the first Orangemen had employed secrecy ‘to afford
protection, if they could, to those who refused to join the United Irishmen;
for every act of intimidation was used, and the fondness of the people for
associating together, their attachment to Freemasonry, and all those private
associations, gave a particular zest to this mode of keeping them to their
allegiance.’ James Wilson and James Sloan, who along with ‘Diamond’ Dan Winter,
issued the first Orange lodge warrants from Sloan’s Loughgall inn,
were masons.
The ‘fondness of the people for associating
together’, for joining, oath-taking and ‘secret’ collecting, also helps to
explain the apparently baffling phenomenon of Orange and Masonic lodges
defecting to the United Irishmen and vice versa. These crossovers, which can be
accounted for at one level by local political pressures, intimidation and bandwaggoning, were at the very minimum facilitated by the
popular ‘fondness’ for joining, belonging and secrecy.
LOWER
CLASS ORIGINS
Despite its militant loyalism and anti-revolutionary ideology, there are
remarkable parallels between the early Orange lodges and the Defender-United Irish alliance that had
emerged by 1795. Both were popular movements; both had antecedents in
Freemasonry and Volunteering; both thrived in the divided, densely textured,
modernising society and economy of Ulster. The first of these similarities concerned the
government and its supporters most. Dan Winter was a publican and the first
lodge masters included tailors, ‘linen inspectors’ and inn keepers. One early
lodge, No 7, met in a disused lime kiln, other lodges, echoing ‘hedge’ or
‘unwarranted’ masonry, were known as ‘hedgers’ or ‘ditchers’ from their
practice of assembling ‘behind hedges or in dry ditches’. Later apologists
rather implausibly deny any connection between the Peep O’ Day Boys and the
first Orangeman or, even less plausibly, between the Orangemen and the mass
‘wrecking’ of Catholic cottages in Armagh in the months following the Diamond; all of them, however,
acknowledge the movement’s lower class origins. As one sympathetic, but
socially ‘respectable’ chronicler of these years put it, Protestant farmers and
linen manufacturers, all ‘humble men . . . decided to have a system of their
own creation, and to control it themselves . . . an organisation formed and
fashioned by their own hands, in harmony with their own ideas, and outside the
control of landed proprietors, agents, bailiffs, baronial constables, and all
the rest’.
GENTRY
TAKE-OVER
Predictably, that
robust spirit of independence in turn excited the ‘decided antagonism of some
of the gentry’. Local gentry families, such as the Blackers and the Verners, were
involved in the Orange Order within weeks of its formation and the men of
property effected a virtual take-over within about 18 months, a process
culminating in the establishment of a Grand National Lodge boasting several
peers and prominent Protestant ultras, in Dublin in 1798. Nevertheless, Orangeism
began as a popular initiative. The gentry assumed leadership as a means of
reasserting leadership over a volatile tenantry. Generals Lake and Knox grudgingly harnessed the Orangemen as a
counter-insurgency force during a period of crisis. But many magistrates
remained distrustful. From the outset Orangeism had a
respectability problem.
The county elites and the government moved
quickly to co-opt a movement, denounced by Lord Gosford
as a ‘lawless banditti’, because it proliferated at such an astonishing rate.
Some 2,000 Orangemen marched at the first 12 July commemoration at Lurgan-Portadown in 1796; estimates for the 1797
nation-wide membership may have risen to 80,000, many of whom enrolled in the
government sponsored Yeomanry. According to the Authorised
Version: ‘the speed with which Orangeism spread
proves its adaptability to the wants of loyal men in the period’. In Musgrave’s view lower-class Protestants of the established
church were ‘actuated by an invincible attachment to their king and country’. Certainly, the totemic popular appeal of ‘loyalty’ and of the
blessings of the ‘Protestant constitution’ – the ‘great palladium of our
liberties’ – must not be underestimated. But Orangeism’s
greatest appeal was defensive and reactionary, the maintenance of ‘Protestant
Ascendancy’ against the Catholic and Republican challenge: Croppies lie down!
Ireland’s unstable sectarian landscape accounts for
both the vitality and the weakness of early Orangeism.
Like Orangeism, popular loyalism
in Britain proudly proclaimed its Protestant character;
unlike Orangeism the British associations’
Protestantism reflected the religious affiliation of the majority of their
countrymen. In Ireland inter-denominational strife and the size of the
Catholic ‘threat’ drove thousands of lower-class Protestants into the Orange ranks. However, the same sectarian arithmetic permanently
limited the movement’s popular base. Still, the numbers were too impressive for
a government confronted by a serious revolutionary challenge to ignore. Many an
Orange Yeoman saw action in 1798.
Exclusively Protestant, the Orange Order was
not, in its view, sectarian. It brand of Protestantism and anti-Catholicism
(or, strictly speaking, anti-popery) was ostensibly political. Protestantism
stood for liberty. All Protestants, whatever their doctrinal opinions, were
welcome to join the order, although in practice Episcopalians outnumbered
Presbyterians. ‘Popery’ stood for tyranny and a ‘disloyal’ allegiance to a
foreign prince; Catholics per se were entitled to their religious
beliefs. Not that that theory prevented the United Irishmen from inventing an ‘Orange extermination oath’, or Catholics from believing it. Nor did refugees from the Armagh ‘wreckings’
harbour any doubts about the violent sectarianism of the Orangemen.
The gentry take-over of
the Order in 1796-7 and Orangeism’s
counter-revolutionary ideology seem to fit perfectly the Marxist interpretation
of it as an instrument of class rule. That interpretation
treats Orangeism, and sectarianism generally, as a
variety of ‘false consciousness’, which divides the lower classes and
side-tracks them from the pursuit of their ‘objective’ interests.
General Knox, it is true, deliberately encouraged the Orangemen in their feud
with the United Irishmen in Tyrone but on balance the manipulation/false
consciousness thesis (which not all Marxists would subscribe to anyway) is
patronising and too pat. Crucially, it fails to appreciate the self-generating
capacity of popular loyalism. In Musgrave’s
words, rallying ‘round the altar and throne, which were in imminent danger [the
first Orangemen] united and stood forward . . . unsupported by the great and
powerful.’ The threat which Musgrave identified came
from ‘croppies’, democrats and levellers. But to the government the original
lower class Orangemen also represented a potential threat. The men of property
hijacked the movement in order to contain it.
Jim Smyth is a fellow at
Robinson College, Cambridge.
Further reading:
The formation of the Orange Order 1795-1798: the edited papers of Colonel
William Blacker and Colonel Robert H Wallace (Belfast 1994)
DW Miller (ed) Peep O’ Day Boys and Defenders: selected documents on the
County Armagh disturbances 1784-1796 (Belfast 1990)
DW Miller, ‘The Armagh troubles 1785-1795’ in S Clark and JS Donnelly (eds), Irish peasants, violence and political unrest,
1780-1914 (Wisonsin 1983)
H Senior, Orangeism in Ireland and Britain
1795-1836 (London 1966).
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