Phases in Ulster History, part 1

PHASES IN ULSTER HISTORY

BY

D.R. O°;CONNOR LYSAGHT

(Work suspended — 1977)

CHAPTER 1 —- PLANTATION

Northern Ireland is in crisis. This is the viewpoint that is being pushed by the bourgeoisie of Britain and of Ireland and is accepted generally by too many. This book will try to give a different point of view : that the crisis of Northern Ireland is merely the climax of the central crisis in Irish political life.

THE BACKGROUND TO THE ULSTER PLANTATIONS

The current struggle in Northern Ireland is the historical product of the partition of Ireland, itself the result of the plantations that were themselves merely the longest lasting, if not the most successful, of the attempts of the ruling classes of England and, later, Scotland, to subdue the neighbouring island.

These began as a late part of the expansion of European feudalism. It had been established, finally, in Britain, albeit under a strong state machine after the Norman conquest thereof, in 1066. Yet the reasons that had led to that conquest — essentially ones of aristocratic land hunger maximised, in this case, by a wish to escape the English royal authority — continued and provided the basis for new invasions. First, south Wales was invested by the Norman barons. Then came a problem; the rest of Wales was mountainous : too difficult for entrepreneurs to conquer for too little reward. To the north of England was Scotland, but, here, Norman barons were invited to take land by the kings thereof to defend them against both the English monarchs and against the Highland clans. This weakened the incentive for military conquest by such barons, who became a bulwark of the Scottish state against their less fortunate peers. Ireland was different. It was a rich, open country struggling to pass from tribalism to feudalism, with several tribal chiefs seeking to become the supreme liege lord (High King).

It was, indeed, a classic opportunity for feudal adventurers — far more than England in 1066, but comparable to Prussia in the same period.

At the time of the Norman invasion, Ireland was not a nation. A people at such a stage of social development as has been described would have to enjoy certain major objective benefits such as would advance artificially its political progress beyond that normally related to developing feudalism. The 12" century Irish did have some of the six characteristics that

are held together definitively to constitute a nation. They had a common language, a common territory and a common psychology “manifested in a community of culture’. However, they were decisively backward in the other qualities of nationhood. Their common economic life was of an extremely low standard, consisting of little more than a number of fairs for exchanging craft goods, cattle and slaves. Because of this, their communal stability was even less effective. Two hundred years of war against the Viking invaders was followed by nearly that length of time spent in civil war between rival “High Kings with opposition” for the control of the potential national territory. The equal lack of economic development of each claimants territorial base made it difficult for any one of them to achieve permanent power against his rivals. The resultant struggles handicapped, further, the economic development of their territories. This fact retarded, in its turn, the development of an historically evolved Irish nation. Although all this has been denied by most traditional Republicans, there is some evidence that it is now being accepted by many of them.

There is a further reason to explain, here, the absence of nationhood — and, hence, nationalism among the Irish of the 12 century. As between their society and that of Belfast of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there is a clear contrast. Whereas the former was struggling from barbarism to feudalism, Belfast and its hinterland enjoyed the conditions of industrial capitalism. However, there are two definite connections. In the first place, neither the Gaelic Irish nor the Protestant Ulster communities constitute nations. More to the pint, the quality of which the major lack thwarts their nationhood is the same (though its lack is more of a norm for early feudalism than for industrial capitalism) : it is stability.

In the circumstances, then, it was probably inevitable that one or another defeated claimant to all Irish sovereignty would seek to redress the balance in his favour by calling on support from outside. It was even more inevitable that he would look to the disgruntled elements of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy for such a recruitment to his cause. But, after this, there were further possibilities arising from the relative strengths of the parties involved and of which the one least satisfactory to the Irish was that which occurred.

For while neither the feudal nor the tribal forces were able to win an immediate outright victory over their enemies, the Norman expedition that supported (for its own ends) the exiled King of Leinster in 1169 was a threat to the King of England as well as to the current High King of Ireland. The former monarch was simultaneously a vassal of the King of

France; his power had been founded on an expedition by his great-grandfather that was very similar to that which his own vassals were executing currently. As a French vassal with an independent personal power of his own he was able to check the authority of his liege lord.

In the same way, an English vassal with such an (Irish) personal power might check his own authority. A weak, squabbling Ireland was not an immediate threat; an Ireland fully feudalised under a strong monarchy was one. So Henry Il, King of England, moved to assert his sovereignty and get recognition of it from all the Irish parties involved, including both the High King and the Norman invaders.

But although Henry could get his authority recognised, he was not strong enough (any more than were his heirs for some three and a half centuries) to assert it. Thus the result of the Irish feudal adventure was different from others. In Prussia, Sicily, the Levant, and, indeed, England itself, the adventurers were able for various reasons, to ignore effectively their metropolitan power. In Spain, on the other hand, the Christian monarchs controlled their crusaders after one of these had founded Portugal in 1140. Ireland fell between the two stools; there, the English feudal state was strong enough to interfere yet not strong enough to impose a firm settlement on its vassal.

As it began, so it has continued. The basic problem of Anglo-Irish relations has been not so much English (later British) brutality as its rulers’ continuing need to interfere combined with an essential lack of seriousness about the problem beyond their immediate short-term aims.

Its one abiding interest in Ireland, its permanent excuse for not letting well alone, has been that the latter shall not get into the hands of a power strong enough to be a threat to it.

Otherwise, and at different times, Ireland has been for England a milch cow from which the English feudal monarch could extract what he needed to finance his wars with the King of France, a centre to relieve the home pressure of frustrated, demanding younger sons of nobles, a market for British goods, a supply of rent for the British nobility and a laboratory for interesting social and potential experiments that could not be tried in Britain itself. But there has never been any real Irish policy on Britain’s part beyond the principle of the right to meddle. More precisely, every attempt to formulate policy Britain has allowed to be wrecked by the residues of previous ones, whether it be Pitt’s method of Union and Emancipation, Gladstone’s one of Home Rule or Heath’s of phased disengagement. There is no reason to expect, in the foreseeable future, any exception even to prove the rule.

However, for the first three and a half centuries after the original Norman invasion, Britain’s policy on Ireland was simply one of keeping it quiet and getting out of it whatever money it could. In practice, the English feudal monarchy supported its own settlers when they needed backing and when it didn’t cost too much to back them — but it made no serious plan to subdue the country effectively. Its authority dwindled to the Pale — the area along the coast around Dublin that stretched from Dundalk to Dalkey.

The sixteenth century meant a change in all this. Under the Tudors, the English monarchy took, for a time, a vanguard role in advancing the transition from feudalism to capitalism. In this task its powers were at their zenith. Henry VIII of England — the first English King to style himself King (rather than Lord) of Ireland — felt both ready and able to initiate a change of policy. On the one hand, he sought security by winning the loyalty of the native Irish chiefs; on the other, he tried to impose religious uniformity with his newly schismatic England. This policy continued spasmodically to the end of the century and of his dynasty.

It was not very successful (though it was more successful with the Irishised feudal barons who already held their land in fief than with the tribal chiefs who still had to go through the motions of receiving it from their people). It was under Henry’s Catholic daughter, Mary I, that the first attempts at an alternative policy were begun.

It is interesting that the policy of planting Ireland with British colonists — that policy so associated with the expansion of the Protestant religion — should have been initiated by the impeccably Catholic Mary Tudor. However, this fact is significant only as a piece of evidence in contradiction to the traditional insistence on the religious nature of England’s ~ oppression of Ireland. Otherwise, the importance of the plantation itself was minimised by its swift liquidation at the hands of the local Irish tribes. The plantation of Munster by Mary’s Protestant successor, Elizabeth I, was more successful, but it lasted only 10 years. Other Elizabethan plantations failed even more dismally; several of these were attempted in the Crown estate of the Earldom of Ulster — an early colonial fief that had been inherited by the monarchy — in Cos. Antrim and Down. It was not until the next century, the next reign and a new, Stuart, dynasty on the English throne that there was established a lasting plantation; that of nearly the whole province of Ulster. Its success, limited, as it was, to its area, is still being felt today. It is, indeed, the reason for this work.

THE PLANTING OF COS. ANTRIM AND DOWN

The plantations of Ulster are still an event, or more accurately, a series of events, that are wrapped in mystery. Part of this is related to the apparent inconsistency that the six counties that were planted as an act of conscious English Government policy differed in two cases from those that now constitute the state of Northern Ireland. Cos. Donegal and Cavan were included in the Royal Plantation after 1609. Cos. Antrim and Down were not. More than this : Cos. Antrim and Down are not only within the 6 County state, they are the integral part of that state. If they did not exist, some three quarters of the Protestant two thirds of the Northern Irish community would not exist; those remaining in the four counties left would be even with British support — unable to withstand the pressure from the equal number of Catholics therein for inclusion in the Republic. The discrepancy is even greater when the economic fact of the two counties’ industrial pre-eminence is taken into account.

Presented with this, the left has tended to ignore it. In an aside in his The Irish Question and the British People (1963), that has not been reprinted in its expanded version, The Irish Crisis (Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1972), C. Desmond Greaves remarked on it simply as a matter of interest, albeit one implying that, because of it, the counties concerned had not been planted at all. This comparison was heightened by the B.I.C.O. whose slant on the mater is that: “Antrim and Down were more thoroughly settled with Scottish planters [than the six stateplanted counties] by a spontaneous migration” — The Home Rule Crisis, B.I.C.O., Belfast, 1972, p.67. These two points of view represent the basic excuses for the crude one-nation and for the two nation dogmas respectively. For the traditional one nation ideologue, Ireland has to have been a nation at all times; there can have been no really successful homogeneous plantation in any part of it. On the other hand, the two-nation dogmatist insists equally strongly on the total difference between the natives and the “spontaneous” settlers. (He also gives the latter the benefits of all doubts — but more of this later).

Now, it is simply untruthful to deny that migrations occurred (at first from England, almost as much as from Scotland), to the Counties of Antrim and Down as much as to the plantations elsewhere in Ulster. However, the nature of this settlement has also to be considered. For the time being it is enough to remark that the migration was supervised carefully by the holders

of the country that was to be settled. In turn, these holders were bourgeois, aristocratic, or would-be aristocratic adventurers linked closely, not to the British monarchy, but, in some cases, by blood, to a more formidable ally, the opposition to that monarchy that was about to humble it. Until 1603, the most consistent resistance to the English was centred among the Irish of Ulster. It was their leading noble, the O’Neill, Hugh, Earl of Tyrone, who headed the most powerful coalition of Irish magnates ever yet to have opposed their common oppressor. From 1600, his generalship was outmatched by Lord Mountjoy who defeated him first in the battle of Kinsale and then beat him by ruthless counter-insurgency tactics, particularly in Cos.

Antrim and Down. O’Neill surrendered shortly after the accession of James I to the English throne in 1603. He and his allies were regranted most of their lands by Mountjoy on the King’s behalf.

However, there were, inevitably, enough lands outside the ancestral territory of O’Neill to provide spoils for the leading offices of Mountjoy’s victorious army. This was true particularly of the lands of the earldom of Ulster where there had been some small scale settlement both official (English) and unofficial (Scottish, encouraged by the MacDonnell family) during the previous century.

Despite these spasmodic moves, Ulster in general and its eastern counties in particular were both in 1603 the least populated parts of Ireland. Even before Mountjoy’s final “scorched earth” campaign, in 1599, the armed population of Ulster was not more than 8,600 which implies a population for the whole province of around 35,000. Mountjoy’s campaign led to a major famine which reduced the population further.

The Earldom of Ulster (as distinct from the whole province) was, if anything, rather less populated than the lands to its west; although colonised since the 13" century, there had been little done to it beyond the building of such strongholds as Larne and Carrickfergus. The Elizabethan settlements had been fiascos. The early Scottish migrations, though slightly more lasting, have been described by Michael Perceval-Maxwell (a Unionist historian of a Unionist family) thus:- “Although it may have reflected the growing pressure on Scots to look abroad for the opportunities lacking at home, the sixteenth century migration represented little more than a

portion of what was to come” ~ M. Perceval-Maxwell, The Scottish Migration to Ulster in the Reign of James I— Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1973, p.10.

The obsequious nineteenth century historian of the Hill family, Hugh McCall, describes the north-east at the end of the fifteenth century:- “From the little village of Belfast to the great seaport of Olderfleet (Larne) and for many miles of country on each side, was an almost interminable waste of furze and forest, with here and there a solitary farmstead, rude in construction as the migration of an Indian hunter. A few main roads there were but the pedestrian travelled, the carriage of merchandise being usually conducted by means of mountain-bred ponies — a hardy race of animals capable of carrying great weights of goods on their backs at a pace of four or five miles an hour.

Outside these pathways there was such a dense growth of elm, oak and ask that one of the native chiefs said: ‘A man might almost make his way from MacArt’s port to Lisnagavaragh [Lisburn — D.R. O’C.L.] on the tops of trees” — McCall, The House of Downshire : A Stretch of the History from 1600 to 1868, containing Authentic Details of the Founding of Tenant- Right in Ulster, William Johnston, The Standard, Lisburn, 1881, pp.6-7.

Despite the obvious neo-colon prejudices of the two authors quoted above, there is no reason to doubt their words. The present solid neo-colon majority in the lands of the old Earldom of Ulster — even allowing for interchanges of names — backs up their assertions.

On top of the normal scarcity of population came Mountjoy’s campaign. The Earldom was not spared. Such chiefs as the Scottish squatter MacDonnell, and O’Neill’s, kinsman Sir Con O’Neill of Clandeboye, both supported the Irish cause. Accordingly, the scorched earth policy applied to their lands as well as to those of the interior. Sir Arthur Chichester, Governor of Carrickfergus, boasted that amongst other achievements, he had laid waste the dwellings of native farmers and the cabins of labourers for twenty miles each side of Carrickfergus (from roughly Camlough to Lisburn).

The policy was successful. In 1601 Sir Con O’Neill was captured and imprisoned and in 1602 McDonnell surrendered to the English and acknowledged the authority of Queen Elizabeth.

With the end of the war the next year, the Crown had to face up to the task of settling its Ulster lands to enable them to act as a permanent bulwark against the Irish of the interior.

Several of Mountjoy’s officers were ready to take on the task. Chichester took a tract extending from Belfast to Islandmagee. Moses Hill, who became Provost-General of the Army of Ulster, got 2,000 acres of property in Co. Antrim and 40,000 acres in Co. Down where he began to build the town of Hillsborough. A third general, Sir Fulke Conway, got the manor of Killultagh, between the two former estates, whereon he built the town of Lisburn. All three established landed houses; from Chichester are descended the Earls and Marquesses of Donegall, from Hill, the Earls of Hillsborough and Marquesses of Downshire and from Conway’s cousins (who inherited his lands) are descended the Marquesses of Hertford. Besides these territories, there were others still held by the native nobles. Sir Con O’Neill was in prison, but his lands were not yet forfeit to the crown and they extended from the Lagan Valley to the Ards peninsular in north Co. Down. Another Irish noble, McQuillan, held the 50,000 acres of Galgorm in Mid-Antrim. Sir Randal MacDonnell held some 300,000 acres of land in north Co. Antrim, covering the coastline from Larne to Coleraine.

But these native landlords, like their English rivals, had to develop territories that had been first neglected and then ravaged by Mountjoy’s scorched earth policy. Two of them were unable to do so. McQuillan sold his territory to three British adventurers, Adair, Colville and Fortescue. In 1606, Con O’Neill was persuaded to obtain his liberty at the cost of surrounding one third of his lands each to James Hamilton, the agent of the Scots Government in Ireland under the union of its Crown with that of England, and a Scots adventurer Montgomery. He agreed also to plant half the land remaining to him. In practice, he was unable to do the last. Instead he got into debt and surrendered more land to them and to Hill over the next ten years until he was landless. (Again, a new dynasty was founded; Hamilton became the ancestor of the Barons and Marquesses of Dufferin). Other native landlords did the same as O’ Neill.

By the end of the first decade of the 17" century, most of Cos. Antrim and Down were in the hands of new English or Scots undertakers, with two major exceptions. One was north Antrim, where MacDonnell organised his own plantation from 1607. The other was south and west Down, where the Irish Sir Arthur Magennis, Viscount Iveagh, held lands tenanted predominantly by his fellow natives.

To explain how MacDonnell and the settlers managed to overcome the difficulties that found them and to establish the local dynasties they did establish is to explain the pre-history of the Ulster Custom.

THE SETTLER’S LEASES

If the basis of the plantation of Cos. Antrim and Down has been ignored, this has merely exacerbated the confusion that surrounds the economic relationships that insured its survival and that were essential for the survival of the Protestant ascendancy in six of the eight planted counties of Ulster. This confusion is exposed the more vividly in the variety of explanations for these relationships — in particular that one which is often used to cover all of them : the Ulster Custom. The difficulty about considering this matter is that the issue only became one of conscious political significance in the nineteenth century. Before this, there was little theoretical analysis done on it. Although there was much prodigal struggle to maintain it or, its precursor, in the last years of the eighteenth century, it was not a major issue in, for example, the programmatic statements of the United Irishmen.

Since the Custom began to be an issue, several explanations for it have been given. In 1848, the spokesman for the Ulster tenants, James MacKnight, justified their claims by insisting that it proceeded logically from the terms of the plantation settlements. This is undoubtedly the basic truth of the matter. However MacKnight’s account ignores such elementary questions as to how what began essentially as a contractual right became in two and a half centuries a purely customary one. It remains true that most alternatives to this are even less satisfying. Thus, in 1849, Conway E. Dobbs tried to reply to MacKnight by introducing a form of chicken-egg confusion into the subject by insisting that the Custom was a result of the comparatively high standard of living enjoyed by handloom linen weavers after 1700.

But he, again, ignored the question as to how handloom linen weaving came to be established in the areas wherein the Custom occurred. Since these assertions, there have been other explanations. C. Desmond Greaves rejects MacKnight’s view and regards the Custom as being essentially an extension of the tenancy customs prevalent in pre-plantation Irish society. He does not explain why it should be the most thoroughly planted parts of Ireland that continued to enjoy the Irish customs that had been destroyed elsewhere. Finally, the MacKnight thesis is given adjusting by the B.I.C.O., and its tame “Workers” who develop it 10

to cut out awkward facts and to answer most questions — albeit inaccurately - by ascribing it to the existence of a non-existent strong tenant movement in Reformation Scotland and its influence. With all their weaknesses each of the explanations for the background to Ulster tenant right 1s related to a certain truth. MacKnight recognises that it had its roots in the fact of plantation, Dobbs that in its nineteenth century form it developed later than that. Even Greaves’ relating of it to the Irish tribal system has a possible basis in fact, since Chichester, after succeeding Mountjoy as Lord Deputy, may have had ideas for a general codification of Irish land custom on such lines and, thus, may have adopted the ideas in his private and state plantation schemes. The B.I.C.O./Workers’ Ass. line is based on inaccuracies as regards the original plantations but may be related to the situation of the revived and increased migrations from Scotland to Ulster after 1660. Then the struggle for the Scottish reformation was indeed being maintained by the peasants rather than by the landlords. Nonetheless, even then, as will be seen, peasant militancy did not involve head-on confrontation with the landlords in the settlement. But the question remains: what was the nature of the origin of the Ulster Custom? Indeed, what was that Custom? Specifically it was the right of the tenant of landed property to sell his interest in it to his successor. It was associated eventually with two other demands : that of “fair rent” (as distinct from rackrent) and “fixity of tenure”. These three demands were made to establish a certain minimum security for tenants at will at a time when the old leasehold system of the plantations was breaking down due to increased demand for land from an increased population and, as a result, threatening to reduce the position of the heirs of the settlers to that prevailing amongst the majority of the Irish.

However, in the beginning, the circumstances were totally different. There was no land famine in early seventeenth century Ulster; just the opposite. In his article in Irish Economic and Social History Volume II (1975), W.H. Crawford writes of the Royal Plantation (but it was, if anything, truer of the east coast ones):- “From the beginning landlords faced severe financial problems. To exploit the potential of their estates they needed tenants but they were to be disappointed by the scale of immigration from Britain, certainly up to the Restoration” - W.H. Crawford, “Landlord —Tenant Relations 11

in Ulster 1609-1820” — Irish Economic and Social History, Volume IT (1975), Belfast 1975, p.7. And again:- “Much property was purchased as a speculation rather than as an investment. Landlords were glad to lease large portions of their estates to men of substance at a relatively low rent so long as they paid regularly. To obtain good tenants they had to offer additional beneficial terms in their leases” — ibid., p.8.

How the original undertakers (in Cos. Down and Antrim) reacted to this problem is less certain than the solution given it by the undertakers in the Royal Plantation in the second decade of the 17" century. However, Hill seems to have set his land on the leasehold system and incorporated in the terms thereof provision for low rents and long terms of contract.

More important is the fact that the Articles for the later Plantations were based partly on a Project drawn up by Chichester himself after becoming Lord Deputy, and, presumably, following his own practice. They included a ban on tenancies — at — will and provisions that all the leases provide a “fair rent” and that more than half provide “fixity of tenure” to the minimum extent of 21 years or 3 lives. There was no reason for the original undertakers to be less generous. Chichester, MacDonnell, Conway and Hill, Hamilton and Montgomery all wanted quick returns from their territories, they could not afford too great an outlay of capital and their territories’ lack of population prevented an immediate imposition of the rack-rents that would be imposed so much outside Ulster in the next century. In other words, tenants had to be encouraged to come by guaranteed (not as much, immediately, though ultimately low) rents and long leases ~ both in the private and in the Royal Plantations.

As for the custom proper, it seems to have developed outside the terms of the leases, hence its extra-judicial nature. James B. Woodburn in The Ulster Scot (Allenson, London, 1914, p.67) maintained that it was started by the settlers on the Royal Plantation selling out informally and illegally to the native Irish. Crawford places it later, as arising in the early eighteenth century and as being the inclusion in the sale of a lease to the right to first refusal of the next lease of the land. The two explanations do not exclude one another necessarily. Nor do they contradict either that the Ulster tenant settlers were placed in a superior position to the peasants elsewhere in Ireland as a result of the needs of the plantations or that the nineteenth century emphasis on customary right was caused by the relative weakness of the Ulster tenant (compared to his position in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) rather than by his relative strength. 12

Two final points need to be made. The Ulster tenancy’s special rights arose in the original plantations from the landlords’ utilitarian response to their concrete economic needs — not immediately from religious motives. Hill found some 400 native Irish on his lands; he gave them the same terms as he gave his ex-soldier tenants and those whom he brought from his native Devonshire. In the same way, MacDonnell remained a Catholic whilst settling his lands with Scots Presbyterians. It was the government that pressed for a more dogmatic line.

Hamilton and Montgomery got their grants confirmed only on condition that they restricted their leases to Protestants. MacDonnell got an earldom for his Protestant tenancy policy. In Cos. Antrim and Down, however, such pressure was generally unnecessary. The plantations there were settled either on virgin land or on land cleared utterly of its original occupiers.

Immigration was a necessity if the new undertakers were to get profit from their land; the source from which such immigration had to be made tended to ensure that the immigrants be Protestants. The second point is that discussion of the settlers’ leases tends to concentrate on the rural ones. In practice, the planters encouraged town as well as farm — building. Indeed, the terms for town-settlers were often even more satisfactory than those for farmers.

“In many towns and villages, for example, settlement was encouraged by the grant of three life leases which were renewable on the fall, or death, of each life : the lessee then paid a fine usually equivalent to one year’s rent in order to insert a new life in the lease. In effect, therefore, these building leases were perpctuities; landlords were granting away potential future income in the hope that the success of a town would attract more settlers to the estate” — Crawford, ibid., p.8. It is clear that such terms provided a superior scope for amassing capital than did the more permanent rural leases. This is true both of the plantations in Cos. Antrim and Down and of the state-sponsored plantations to the west and south.

THE ROYAL PLANTATION IN ULSTER

In 1607, Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and his ally, Rory O’Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell, fled from Ireland fearing arrest and execution. An unsuccessful attempt at rebellion was then made by the other Irish nobles. It was suppressed and their lands and the much larger 13

territories of the fugitive earls were declared forfeit to the Crown. It was agreed that the area seized should be planted in the manner being operated successfully in Cos. Antrim and Down. This new plantation was less successful than its immediate predecessors for three reasons, Firstly, the size of the area to be planted was much greater than that of the Earldom of Ulster.

Secondly, and further to this, whereas the plantations in Cos. Antrim and Down had been very much private enterprises of individual adventurers who sought to muster sufficient tenants for their needs from their own connections, the new plantation was organised on a plan imposed by the Anglo-Irish state involving undertakers many of whom had established themselves already and merely wanted more. Finally, the territories now to be planted were occupied by perhaps as many as 31,000 natives.

These last played a particularly important role in the history of the royal plantation. The native Irish freeholders of the Crown had to pay twice the rent of English and Scots undertakers and one and one thirty times the rent of English and Scots servitors (or lesser undertakers). Unlike these settlers, they could not sub-let their land. The servitors and undertakers could only give leases to other settlers, not to the native Irish. Yet these laws were impossible to enforce, so Chichester (now Lord Deputy) ignored them in his estates in Co. Donegal. While the settlers were ready and willing enough to take the good land in the valleys, they left the Irish to hold tenancies on the hills and to survive on the newlydiscovered potato. Whether or not this breach of the law extended to allowing the Irish in these areas the long leases enjoyed by the settlers is uncertain. However, if the Ulster Custom did develop from a widespread sale of leases to native Irish, such sales would have presumably included the settlers’ terms in such leases. Under Charles I, though a fine was levied for such breaches of the Charter, the document itself had to be amended to allow landlords to lease up to % of their land to Irish tenants. Even this was found to be inadequate:- “Many more natives were admitted as tenants than could be accommodated on only the fourth part of each proportion and simply from two causes : that British settlers could not be caught in sufficient numbers and that Irish tenants could readily pay much higher rents than the others.” — George Hill, The Plantation of Ulster, Belfast 1871, p.448. (This quotation is further and more definite evidence that, at least in the royal plantation, the low rents 14

associated with the settlers’ leases tended to be limited very much to settlers — except where those settlers had sold out to natives).

In 1618, the settler population in Cos. Down and Antrim was 10,000; that of the settlers in the six counties of the royal plantation has been estimated variously at twice and more than three times that amount. However the settler community in the former area was far more stable than the latter which had to co-exist, if possible, with their own number, if not more, of Irish natives. One more aspect of both plantations has to be considered. At this stage, the colonies were not overwhelmingly Scottish. In the east, Chichester, Conway and Hill tended to favour their own nationals, English settlers, though MacDonnell, Hamilton and Montgomery were equally determined to settle their lands with Scots. In the royal plantation, Scots undertakers were granted initially only 81,000 out of 155,000. However, in both cases, this proportion was increased in favour of Scots settlers. Both Chichester and Hill began to look to the exploited Scots peasantry for recruits to work their lands. While there were many cases in the Royal Plantation of Scots tenants holding land from English undertakers, there were few cases otherwise. However, the big Scottish immigration would come in the second half of the sixteenth century. 15

CHAPTER 2 — ULSTER PLANTATION AND PROTESTANT ASCENDANCY

The first chapter considered the causes and immediate results of the Protestant settlements in Ulster at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It explained how these settlements were based on specific leases to whose who participated in them and how the terms of these leases were related to what would become known as the “Ulster custom” or “Ulster tenant right”.

This chapter will describe the completion of the main process of settlement in Ulster. It will go on to show how the leases enjoyed by the participants in that settlement produced a peaceful, and, eventually, a stable settler community distinguished from the rest of Ireland less by political-cultural sentiment than by Britain’s failure to extend the system outside Ulster and the resultant development of penal laws, military expenditure and rack-rents.

THE ULSTER RISING OF 1641 AND ITS DEFEAT

Despite an abortive Irish rising in 1615, both private and royal plantations survived peacefully and put down stronger and deeper roots than any previous English plantation in Ireland. This was partly because, unlike their predecessors, they enjoyed a generation of peace up to 1641. In that period, the main cause for strife was the colonial administration’s policy of persecuting Dissenters (whose numbers included Scots Presbyterians, of course).

This policy was particularly intense in the 1630s under Lord Deputy Wentworth. It led many Scots settlers to return to Scotland when their cousins rose under the Covenant in 1638, only to return when Wentworth was recalled to England in 1640. They were thus in time for the first major Irish revolt for nearly four decades.

This fulfilled the worst fears of the settlers. The bulk of horror stories publicised in England were not true; John Milton proclaimed the murder of nearly three times as many Protestants as dwelt in the whole of Ireland. On the other hand it is unlikely, to say the least, that there were no massacres of settlers, even though advocates of this view can point to the absence of reports on such from the colonial government during the last quarter of 1641, when the massacres are said to have occurred. The Irish of the Royal Plantations had real grudges against their supplanters; though English propagandists —- mainly of the bourgeois revolutionary cause — could not be expected to recognise this, it should be possible to do so, today. The rising was simply a repayment, albeit with interest, for Mountjoy’s campaign and the land grabs of his associates and their successors. So, until more definite evidence 16

otherwise is presented, it is probable that the most accurate estimate of the numbers of settlers involved is that their total population was 100,000 (out of an all-Irish total estimated, later, by the settler, William Petty, at 220,000 for all Ireland) that 4-5,000 were killed and that 8- 10,000 died of ill-usage. This number represents a total liquidation of from one seventh to one eighth of the planter population. It is quite catastrophic enough to act as an explanation of the fears and a reinforcement of the settler mentality of those who survived.

That they did survive was due partly to the relatively homogeneous planted territory in Antrim and north Down. In the royal plantations only the towns of Derry, Coleraine and Enniskillen and some settled pockets in Co. Donegal survived the attack. However, Lisburn, Belfast, Carrickfergus and Antrim Town all withstood the natives and the settlements in north Down were not touched by the trouble. A pale area around Belfast became a more effective base for anti-Irish strategy than the pale of Dublin had ever been. The settlers there contained the Irish until, worn down partly by their own disputes, the latter could be defeated by the armies of the victorious English Republicans.

Even then, the planters’ problems were not over. Those who had saved them from the native Irish were, in their own way, almost as hostile to them as those they had defeated. During most of the period of the united Republic of Britain and Ireland that was established on the execution of Charles 1 in 1649, state power was held by the radical wing of the English bourgeoisie (not the English petty bourgeoisie which it crushed). The leadership of this class professed the Protestant religion of Independency (originally Anabaptism, now Congregationalism). This had little support amongst Irish Protestants who were generally Episcopalian (if of English stock) or Presbyterian (if Scots) and who tended to maintain these faiths as a refuge against besieging Catholicism. . Accordingly, the planters found that massacre by Catholics, or (more especially, after the first attacks) fear of such massacre, was followed by a less brutal, but, in its way, an equally determined religious repression of Episcopalian and Presbyterian (as well as Catholic) clergy.

Nor were the Republic’s own plantation schemes much help in reinforcing the Ulster settlements. The under-populated Ulster plantation was ignored in favour of an overambitious scheme to clear and settle the provinces of Leinster and Munster. This was too large an order to enforce; in practice the settlements concerned tended to be based, in the 17

manner of those of the sixteenth century, on inadequate clearances and the exploitation of the natives who were allowed to stay for that purpose.

By 1659, in Ulster, English was the majority language only in “some towns, e.g. Derry, Carrickfergus and Coleraine, east Donegal, the barony of Coleraine, and the area between Lisburn and Larne” — Padraig O’Snodaig, Hidden Ulster, Clodhanna Tea, B.A.C., 1973.

O’Snodaig adds that only in Cos. Antrim and Tyrone were there (narrow) majorities of English speakers. These facts give a fair guide to the extent of the Ulster colony at this time.

However, for a full picture they should be modified by remembering one case. In the MacDonnell plantation in north Co. Antrim, many of the original settlers were, though Protestant, also Highland Scots, kinsmen of the MacDonnells who probably spoke a form of Gaelic. From this it is clear that Co. Antrim, at least, was in 1659 already the major settler stronghold. The point remains that the settlement was now forced back to the centres that had opposed the Irish most successfully in 1641.

It was, then, not the Republic but the restored British monarchy that created the conditions for the revival of the fortunes of the Ulster settlers on a far more permanent basis.

THE SECOND WAVE OF SETTLEMENT

The revival of the Plantations in Ulster at an even more successful level than their original development was due to three things: one permanent, one relatively permanent (it had been a long-term part of the plantation policy) and one conjunctural. They were (in the same order) the closeness of Ulster to Britain compared with America, the settlers’ leases and the British (particularly the Scottish) religious situation.

The first of these is readily understood. Ulster was closer to Britain than America; once the Irish Rising had been crushed, it was a natural centre of attraction for British immigrants and, all things being equal, it was more attractive than the plantations on the other side of the Atlantic. Of course, other things weren’t so equal; to the most radical of potential British emigrants, America was attractive precisely for its remoteness from Britain and, in any case, even the settlers’ leases were less satisfactory than the possibility of getting one’s own American freehold. Nonetheless, the closeness was there and did undoubtedly influence many in choosing to go to Ulster rather than further afield.

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It could not work on its own. Settlers had to be tempted to come. To do this, the settlers’ leases with their long tenures remained a necessary part of the settlement. It is wrong to see this as a boon wrung from the landlords by their turbulent tenantry. The fact was that if the landlords didn’t stick to the plantation terms and, perhaps, even better, then they didn’t have any tenantry, turbulent or otherwise. W.H. Crawford, in his article, remarks on this:- “Throughout the province ... there does seem to have been a real shortage of capital to finance the development of property and so land was worth very little unless a tenant could be found to invest time and labour to improve it. Tenants were likely to leave an estate in search of a better bargain and landlords were ready to permit a tenant to sell to a newcomer rather than deny him, only to find that he had slipped away leaving the land waste” — Crawford, op. Cit., p.10.

It might be objected that, in pure economic theory, the landlords might have abandoned the plantation policy, except where it had maintained itself against the Irish, and brought in Irish tenants, either on rank-rent or on the settlers’ leases. Certainly, after 1660, the Anglo-Irish state machine was in no position to oppose such moves; as long as it maintained the connection with Britain, it was responsible to the Protestant landlords. However, there were two objections to such a course being followed. In the first place, any leasing to the Irish would have to be on rack-rent terms, since the settlers’ leases necessitated that a large number of tenants be on an estate if the landlord was to get a living and there were not enough Irish to make up such a population. Secondly, the facts of recent history encouraged the landlords to try to work the plantation terms as intended. The Irish had risen in arms; they had killed perhaps one seventh of the settler population (aud many settlers, including landlords, probably believed that the proportion of victims were even higher). To encourage Irish tenants would be to encourage security risks. Though, no doubt, Irish did become tenants on plantation lands, they were not encouraged by the landlords, but, as before, became tenants through buying the interest of a tenancy from disgruntled settlers. However the success of the revived plantations reduced the numbers of such opportunities. McCall (op. cit., p.27) estimates that, in 1705, after the end of the period of large-scale plantation, the Protestant population of Ulster had increased four times, since the Irish Rising, to 350,000, whereas the Catholic population had less than doubled, and was now only 150,000.

That this success was, after all, unstable and dependent on all its preconditions can be seen.in the character of the fluctuations of the third factor. Under the Republic, Ireland had been that 19

part of the British isles where there was the least religious freedom; under Charles II, the position was reversed. This was true especially vis-a-vis Scotland where a policy of active persecution of the Presbyterian majority began to be followed. Although both the settlers’ leases and, of course, the geographical position of Ulster had been the same under the Republic, the new persecution encouraged immigration from Scotland. This went to Ireland because there, though Episcopalianism enjoyed a special position, its oppression of its rivals was not enforced consistently under the restored monarchy. Indeed, it was under Charles II, in 1672, that the Presbyterian ministers of Ireland began to receive the Regium Domum (Royal Bounty) or small state salaries. In a see of a persecuting bishop of the state church, such ministers were imprisoned, of course, but this was a mild and irregular compared to the massacres of whole congregations that were taking place in contemporary Scotland. James Seaton Reid, the historian of Irish Presbyterianism, summaries it, thus:- “{The Irish Presbyterians] were not only opposite in their principles and policies to the prelatic way, as others of their persuasion in the other two kingdoms but they were in a manner strangers in another country, being of the Scotch (sic) extraction, and on both these accounts being hated and despised by those of the English who were prelatical. They generally were of a humble extraction and sort of people, yet Providence ordered their liberty and quiet when others, more deserving and who had greater ground of expectation were deprived of it. Thus the ministers with the people, having by the wonderful providence of God an open door given them, continued in the exercise of their ministry; and their assemblies daily grew so that within a while every congregation erected a house for their meeting together, and began to celebrate the sacrament in their public assemblies” — James Seaion Reid, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, Volume II, Mullan, Belfast, 1867, p.325. There is no doubt that those who emigrated to Ulster at this time were victims of a repression against a bourgeois struggle that was now being maintained by its plebeian supporters. (This fact is reflected in the ferocity of the Scottish Episcopalian repression compared to that of the nation’s counter reformation a century before). However, it is not apparent that demands for land as well as Church reform played an important part in the overall programme of these oppressed Covenanters (whether this was despite or because of the boon given them by the English revolutionary armies in their destruction of Scottish feudal dues is uncertain).

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Secondly, the most radical of those radicals who came to Ulster did not put down roots there since their position was put in jeopardy almost immediately.

In the early 1680s, Charles II defeated his Whig opponents under the Earl of Shaftesbury and began to enforce Episcopalian (perhaps as a prelude to Catholic) supremacy in Britain and Ireland. This new Irish persecution was still mild compared to that under which the Scots suffered, but its effect on the Presbyterians in the Ulster plantation was detrimental to the settlement. Many began to sell up, and leave their new holdings for America, greater religious tolerance and no landlords.

It was this fact that the plantations were still settlements whose participants had still to put down roots ~ that forced the capital-hungry landlord to maintain the terms of the original plantation leases throughout the seventeenth century. Their tenants’ objective position was strong enough to render unnecessary any direct confrontation to maintain their rights at this time. The landlord had to keep his tenants on the land despite state policies and in opposition to the native Irish so he kept the leases as they had been rather than risk driving them away.

No major increase in the level of rents occurred until 1715 — and, even then, the rises would promote emigration from some areas, rather than struggle therein.

This power of the tenants (and the nature of this power) resulted in two further developments.

Firstly, the way that they enforced their rights, when they had to do so, did not strengthen the militancy of their class. There is no reason to doubt that it was the potential trouble-makers, the most active and conscious elements amongst the tenants, after all, who were most ready to take the boat for better conditions across the Atlantic, thus enforcing the terms of the settlers’ leases not for themselves but for their more quiescent fellows who remained.

Secondly, and following on this, there is the fact that Ulster from the seventeenth century onwards, was the exemplary Irish province for law and order compared to the territories completely dominated by the “mere Irish”.

In this period, too, this law and order helped encourage a fourth reason to keep the Ulster tenants at home to fight eventually there, rather than in America for bourgeois politics against state and landlords. This new reason was the linen industry. Just when it began in Ulster is not yet known, but it appears to have been established as early as 1669. Crawford (op. cit., p-10) suggests that it was helped by the English Cattle Acts of 1667 and, later, of 1681, which 21

banned the export to Britain of the cattle which had been the staple of the Ulster economy.

At the same time, as the industry’s historian, Conrad Gill, has remarked, it was eminently suitable for development under the terms of the settler leases. The flax plant was more productive per acre than any other crop and it worked well in rotation with potatoes so as to provide further opportunities for the economic farming encouraged under the leasehold. In turn, too, the marketing of the product of the crop provided opportunities for the merchants of Ulster’s new towns and villages to amass capital.

THE WILLIAMITE WAR

In the midst of nearly a century of steady progress, the war between James II and William II appears as an interlude in Ulster history, although the result was to ensure the survival of the Ulster colony. However, it should be examined if only because it is a source of myth both for the heirs of that colony and for their opponents.

The confusion arises from that fact that, more than anywhere else, the struggle had a dual nature. In the overall international sphere James was fighting consciously, unlike his allies of the Irish “Patriot Parliament”, in a probably doomed attempt to make Britain and Ireland satellites of France, trying, in doing so, to liquidate many, if not all, the gains of the Civil Wars of the 1640s, and, perhaps, even the achievements of the other successful contemporary bourgeois state, the Netherlands. This was not a struggle to re-establish feudalism, as some people would claim, but to establish a form of sterile society fixed in transition between feudal and bourgeois government forms: a sort of Spain, in fact. In the struggle to defeat this, Derry and the Boyne are victories worthy of honour by Marxists.

However, at the same time, in Ireland, the international aspects of the struggle has been dwarfed disproportionately by the fact that it was also a primitive attempt to overthrow British rule and the land settlements and religious ascendancy associated with it. In this matter, James was merely an uneasy ally of the “Patriots”.

It was, too, this matter, rather than the European issue that insured the ever-lasting loyalty of the Protestants to William of Orange and his memory (Even Conor Cruise O’Brien has had to admit this.) As late as the 1930s, the Unionist majority in the Stormont Parliament was unable to recognise formally the fact that William had the support of the contemporary Pope in his progressive struggle. The only international aspect of his achievement that they 22

recognise is the fact that it helped the British to found the empire that “civilised” the African and Indian equivalents of the native Irish. And, as for William himself, his own religious views would probably keep him blackballed from any Orange Lodge as a “Lundy”. This charge has the more justification in that the original Colonel Lundy was kept in his service without mishap for years after the siege of the city that he had deserted.

ASCENDANCY

The immediate effect of the Williamite post-war setthement on Ulster society was less, both than its long-term mythological effect on that society and its immediate effect on Irish society as a whole. In the latter case the settlement after the defeat of the Stuarts and their “Patriot” allies meant the finalising of a system of national oppression of Irish Catholics by British and Irish Episcopalians. Ulster’s place (or, rather, the place of its Presbyterian majority) was clearly fixed between the two groups. Under the test clause of the Anti-Catholic Act of 1704, the Presbyterians were deprived of the right to hold political or legal office — local or national — under the Crown. (They could still select people to hold such offices). On the other hand, after the reign of William III’s sister-in-law, Queen Anne, persecution of them was over.

Unlike the Catholics, Presbyterians were free to do anything as long as it did not involve taking political office. The Presbyterians, then, were to hold a position in 18" century Irish society analogous to that of non-commissioned officers: inferior to the commissioned ones but in authority over the ranks.

One other direct result of the Williamite victory was the decline in immigration to Ulster.

This continued for a few years after the end of the Irish war in 1692 because of a major Scottish famine in 1695. Nevertheless, the persecution of the Scots Presbyterians had ended with the reign of Charles Stuart. The incentive for them to settle in Ulster was gone.

On the other hand, there remained incentives to the settlers themselves to leave for new plantations. Between 1682 and 1748 about 170,000 Protestants left Ulster for America. This was around twice the number left in the settlement after the Rising in 1641 and nearly % the estimated Protestant population of Ulster in 1705. The initial incentive had been religious persecution that had begun during the last years of Charles II, though it was reduced under James I (who wanted Presbyterian support for his Catholic settlement), and William. On the other hand, Anne was a fanatical Episcopalian who, if she didn’t initiate the Test Clause in the 1704 Penal Act approved its insertion and who stopped the Regium Domum. Emigration 23

from Ulster rose. After Anne’s death in 1714, the Domum was restored and though the test clause continued in operation active persecution of Presbyterians was ended. However, almost simultaneously, new pressures were imposed on the tenantry. For the first time since the original plantations, rents began to be raised from 1715, particularly in Co. Derry, where the landlords were London companies and better able than individuals to fight their tenants.

In fact there was little fighting. The rent rises and a series of bad harvests led to continuing emigration until the end of the 1740s. By 1739 the numbers of Ulster emigrants to Presbyterianism there was estimated at 5,000 a year — but this was probably a maximum. The settlement was not yet stable enough to encourage its most conscious and active elements to defend their rights there rather than risk the Atlantic crossing to a still freer society.

However, the threat of losing tenants by emigration became less of a deterrent than previously to many landlords as they could find new tenants ready to pay increased rents both from a steadily expanding Protestant population and, in the west and central Ulster areas, where these disputes were most prevalent, from the Catholics. On the other hand, again, the emigrating tenants were able to maintain the custom of selling the interest in their estates to those who wished to succeed them. Thus Ulster Custom was expanded partly because, as yet, it was a custom of inter-tenant relationships and did not directly affect the landlord.

Because of these disputes those areas mainly in the old royal plantations that suffered them did not enjoy the same rate of economic growth as the north-east of Ulster. Even so, the areas affected had their life disrupted by them less than on the scale of disorder that prevailed in contemporary rural Ireland outside Ulster. So, in the province, the linen industry continued to develop, albeit inwardly. [t was helped by Britain both positively by its ending of duties on Irish linen in 1696 and negatively by its continuing ban on Irish cattle and by its ban on imported Irish woollen goods form 1699. (British capitalists had a long-standing interest in the woollen trade as they didn’t have in linen). Production of linen continued to develop in Ulster within the framework of society ordered by the settlers’ leaseholds; such landlords as The Earl of Hillsborough (head of the original undertaker family Hill) and Brownlow (of Lurgan) gave much time and thought to encouraging it. Protestant tenant farmers devoted increasing amounts of labour time to weaving; in a couple of generations many of them had abandoned their lands without regrets.

The Irish linen trade developed also outside Ulster as a result of the British Acts. However whereas in Ulster it was based on cottage production sustained by the colonial leasehold, it 24

was based elsewhere on factory production sustained by government subsidy. In fact, capitalism in eighteenth century Ireland, developed outside Ulster, without any direct connection with relationships prevailing between landlords and tenants. This applied to the Catholic merchant class that became a major political force after 1760.

It is as well to examine this fact and its basis since it provides both part of the environment of and the contrasts to the Ulster situation. In the north, a majority of the tenantry among the settled population were in an effective conspiracy with the landlords against the native Irish who wished to regain their lands. Elsewhere in Ireland there was generally (and increasingly through the 18" century) a single division at once between invader and native, Protestant and Catholic and landlord and tenant. Outside Ulster, the pattern of conquest had replaced the remains of tribal-feudal transactional organisation with a form of feudal super-exploitation: the rack-rent system. By 1691, the Catholic majority owned only 22% of all Irish land. The laws that composed the Penal Code were aimed (amongst other things) to reduce this percentage even more drastically. Under the first (1695) Act in the Code, Catholics were forbidden to bear arms. The Act of 1704 (which included the anti-Presbyterian test clause) forbade Catholics to purchase land. In 1709, their rights to new leaseholds were limited to ones of 31 years or less (this was a new legal handicap to any Ulster Catholic who aspired to any but the shorter plantation leases). In 1728, the Catholics lost the right to vote in elections.

(They had long been disqualified from holding office). These Acts were effective enough; by 1703 the year before new sales of land to Catholics was forbidden) Catholics owned only 14% of Irish land. By 1775, the percentage owned by Catholics was 5%.

The class of landowner that had its position strengthened legally by the Penal Code shared neither a common religion, nor, generally, a common language with its tenants. Its members might conceivably have introduced the Ulster settlement forms of tenancies to their estates, but quite part from the Penal Code, they could not be sure that they would have the time to recoup their losses; there had already been two attempts to overthrow the colonial state in the seventeenth century; there might be more in the eighteenth (as there was, eventually). They might have cleared their lands and introduced the Ulster system with British tenants, but these became more difficult to recruit after 1691, when British Protestants of all denominations were in a stronger position. In any case clearance was a further expense.

Besides both these solutions ignored one fact; the landlords drew up the Penal Laws to allow them to exploit the natives in peace and with the maximum possible return; new Protestant 25

immigrants would either reduce their cake or increase claimants to it. Finally there was a real lack of law and order over large areas of the three Catholic provinces of Ireland. In the emergency of the British Jacobite Rising of 1745, Ireland was defended by a militia of 65,000 well-armed Protestants (a far larger army than that of the Jacobite Rebels in Britain). Such measures did no more than maintain an acceptable level of violence for the colonial state. The western counties of Ireland were particular centres of unrest (to the garrison, as for Merlyn Rees and Roy Mason now; “brigandage”) throughout most of the first half of the eighteenth century. All these factors mean that only a very exceptional landlord would try to do more than get as much short-term profit as possible from his estate: in other words, rack-rent it. As a corollary, increasing numbers of these landlords lost even a resident’s interest in their lands over and above the financial one; they became absentees. Between 1691 and 1785, the amount of rent leaving Ireland rose from £91,652 to £1,200,000.

Despite its large proportion of absentees, this class was yet able to produce enough individuals to staff (although with admixtures of British talent) the British colonial government in Ireland, representing the peculiar interests of what came to be known as the Protestant Ascendancy over and above those of Britain. Eventually it became an interest independent of and surviving the landlord class from which it had sprung.

By 1760, there were, then, two aspects of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland; that in Ulster and that which prevailed elsewhere. In the former, a Protestant colon community developed in privileged distinction from the original inhabitants that it had dispossessed; in the latter, a class distinguished by its religion as well as by its economic position exploited the majority,.

The latter, too, as well as the Episcopalian landlords of Ulster staffed the administration that maintained this dual Ascendancy, albeit with the Ulster Presbyterian colons in secondary position. However, even this difference in position provided a measure of stability for the Ulster community that was not matched by the Ascendancy class elsewhere in Ireland.

This stability provided the basis for an industrial expansion that would ultimately have to be continued in different circumstances such as would negate the development of the working class politics normal to advanced industrial growth. In the eighteenth century the historical progress based in that stability seemed to move in a different direction, towards class confrontation between Protestant landlords and Protestant tenants as a prelude to an alliance 26

of republican capitalists and tenants with a new, Catholic, capitalist class in what would become an all-Ireland bourgeois national democratic revolution.

THE CRISIS OF THE ASCENDANCY

By 1760, changes were taking place in the politics of both native and settler communities in Ireland. A new Catholic capitalist class was developing. How far it was developing, how far it was stimulated by the Penal Code is unclear. On the one hand the operation of these laws made it difficult for ambitious Catholics to do anything except go into trade. On the other, the ban on land-owning restricted access to a major source of collateral necessary to largescale borrowing of capital. Accordingly, despite several outstandingly wealthy figures, the Catholic capitalists did not multiply as they would from ‘Grattan’s’ parliament onwards.

Nonetheless, they existed. However, because of the penal laws, this class was without direct links to the peasant majority of Irish Catholics and, as a result, it possessed political ideas that were less violent yet practically more explosive than those of that majority. The new Catholic bourgeoisie was not as immediately interested in overthrowing the regime as the peasantry and the surviving Irish noble families had been. It wanted a place in the sun. It wanted to be able to buy landed estates, to be able to see its sons go high in some profession other than its Church, to be able to get them enlisted in the Army that would affect their destiny more directly than the Irish Brigades of the French monarchy. Members of this class were found mainly in the provisions trade, first with the British colonies and, after the Cattle Acts were repealed in 1760, with Britain. The trade expanded as Britain needed more provisions to supply its fleet in its wars with France and to reduce its dependence on its own agricultural produce and release agricultural labourers for the factories of the industrial revolution. The Catholic bourgeoisie grew strong and confident. In 1759, it established a Catholic Relief Association and, from 1760, its Church switched its loyalty from the Stuart pretender to George III. Instead of an utopian (or, perhaps, rather an arcadian) demand to return the state in favour of an archaic order, they began to demand that the state make a society fit for their class interests. Whether it could do so remained to be seen.

In the same period, the cross-class political cohesion of the Ulster plantations was weakening.

As the population continued to grow, many of the larger tenants began to sub-let parts of their lands. Many landlords fought back by refusing to re-lease the lands concerned to the same tenant and either trying to lease directly to the former sub-tenants or clearing the lands to bring in wealthier tenants who would be able and willing to work it. Chichester, the Earl of 27

Donegall, tended to choose the latter method. In 1757, a number of his tenants resisted and forced the land-grabber concerned to depart. Other social clashes occurred. In 1762 came the Great Turn-out of Ulster weavers in opposition also, to middlemen, this time, in their trade as it developed. A year later, again, began the Oakboys’ agitation in Co. Armagh which was directed against tythes and the law by which householders were forced to mend local roads. Then, in 1770, came the “Land War” of that year, centred mainly, once again, on the old Chichester estates, when Donegall and other landlords tried, once more, to turn to their advantage the ending of leases by making the terms of the new ones so prohibitive that they could evict the old tenants and bring wealthier ones into their place.

Such agitations were comparatively new in Protestant Ulster, where the normal response to repression on the part of the settlers had been to take the emigrant ship. This has been stated specifically of both the “Turn Out” and the “Land War”. On the first, Conrad Gill has declared: “Before there had been no sign of discontent, it was, indeed, the quietness and smoothness of northern trade that threw the authorities off their guard. If trade unions had existed for long in the north there would certainly have been employers’ societies as well, and it is significant that the employers only began to organise themselves in 1761. Moreover, we shall notice later some new developments in trade at this time which would lead naturally to a growth of capitalism. Thus there is reason to believe that combination and the system which produced it were of recent growth in Ulster. The very newness of the system — with the sense of subjection and loss of status that it would bring — was no doubt with many weavers the chief cause of discontent... “The existence of combination acts can readily be explained. They were aimed against workers in the south, and at first had no reference to Ulster” — Conrad Gill, The Rise of the Irish Linen Industry, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1925, p.142.

As to the Land War, it is James McKnight’s words: “No landlord in Ulster, within the boundaries of the great or minor Plantations, which were established after the close of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, originally doubted the ‘tenant’s right’ to the absolute, uncontrolled disposal of his own interest in the soil, any more than he doubted the validity of his own title as a landlord. The first attempt to disturb this right occurred towards the middle of the last century in the County of Antrim and it produced the 28

formidable organisation known in Irish history under the denomination of ‘The Hearts of Steel” — James McKnight, The Ulster Tenant Right, McGlashan, Dublin, 1848, p.39 (Present author’s emphasis). It appears that, despite all the courage and determination shown by the Ulster plebeians in this period, the net results were not impressive. The original agitation on the Chichester estates seems to have been moderately successful. The Oakboys gained some concessions but were then suppressed. The result of the turn-out is not recorded by Gill — probably because it was less inspiring and memorable than the struggle itself. As for the Land War, the actual clearances were not as extensive as planned partly because of intervention by a Government alarmed at the split in its northern garrison. Nonetheless, some 30,000 were, in fact cleared; like their precursors in the western counties, they took the boat to America, where they were soon to pay back the state power that had upheld their exploiter as some of the best soldiers in the Continental Army that won American independence. Of the total Irish emigration to America in the 18" century, Ulster was to have supplied half the number.

By comparison, the Catholic Relief Association and its successive organisations achieved more positive results. Although they had little Governmental backing, they were on the attack with support from an increasingly powerful and wealthy section of the community who were struggling for effective legal recognition of its members’ improved position. In 1768, the Limerick-Killaloe Navigation Company Act allowed Catholics hold shares in the company named. In 1772, all waterway and insurance companies were allowed the benefit of Catholic investment. However, land, professions, and above all, service under the Crown remained closed to Catholics.

Even these advances, combined with the relative stagnation in the position of the Protestant bourgeoisie, might at a later date have led to an immediate decline in radical politics and an upturn in sectarianism among the latter. In the 1770s this was not the case for three reasons.

Firstly, the main centres of Protestant radicalism outside Armagh — the County of the Oakboys — were in the homogenous Protestant area of the original plantations of the Chichesters and the Hills. In most of this area, the Catholics were not obvious rivals for lands or professional status. In Belfast, now about to enter its period as the centre of bourgeois democratic politics in Ireland, the poor-house was almost exclusively patronised by 29

Catholics. In Co. Armagh on the other hand, where the linen industry was less developed and where, particularly in the south, there was a strong Catholic population looking enviously from the hills at the valley farms held by Protestants, the memory of 1641 was more nearly conscious if only because the basis for that Rising was always visible. There may well have been personal connections between the rank and file of the Oakboys in the 1760s and of the Protestant sectarian Peep o’Day Boys in the 1780 and eventually, the Orange Societies from 1795. (There seems to have been a more certain link between those who had mobilised in the “Great Turn-Out” and the Orange Societies — which implies an actual defeat of the earlier struggle). However, and the second reason arises from the first, there was nothing comparable to the Orange Societies to stimulate, organise and direct potential sectarianism in the 1770s even in Co. Armagh. Above all, while pressed by both Catholics and Dissenters seeking to stop being ruled in the same way, the Episcopalian Ascendancy class was no longer itself so able or so willing to rule in that way. It had always been ridden with personal rivalries and feuds and there had always been within it a large minority which resented British limitations on Irish trade and the Irish parliament. With the Catholics and the Dissenters disaffected more effectively than before, many of the minority among the Ascendancy sought to seek allies among their rival religions (but others, notably Henry Flood, who might well serve as ideologist for the Lindsay-Baird “independence” wing of modern Loyalism, preferred to accept whatever honours the establishment would offer them rather than make the link). The moves to coalesce between members of the opposition in the Episcopalian Ascendancy, the Dissenters and the Catholics in the name of a potential Irish nation reached its climax with the Leinster Episcopalian, Wolfe Tone.

The opportunity for such a possible coalition which in practice, could not overcome immediately the long-established divisions between the component religious interests came in 1778, when France allied with the American colonists against Britain. The latter had to pull its regular troops out of Ireland and, as in 1746, rely for military garrison on its Ascendancy.

But times had changed. The new Irish Volunteer force became the spear-head of an alliance between the Protestants (both Episcopalian and Dissenter) who made up their ranks and the Catholics (who were often admitted to them illegally) directed against the dominance of the 30

British Parliament over the Irish. In 1780, the 1704 “Test” against the Dissenters was repealed. Two years before this, the Catholics were given legal permission to lease land for 999 years and, in 1782, they gained the right to buy land outright. In the same year, Grattan passed through the Irish Parliament (for the rest of its days to be known as “his” Parliament though he was never more than a leader of the opposition) a Declaration of Rights:- “That the Crown of Ireland is an imperial crown, inseparably annexed to the crown of Great Britain, on which connection the interests and happiness of both nations depend, but the Kingdom of Ireland is a distinct Kingdom with a Parliament of her own — the sole legislature thereof. That there is no body of men competent to make laws to bind the nation except the King, Lords and Commons of Ireland. Nor any other Parliament which has any authority or power of any sort whatsoever save only the Parliament of Ireland. To restore his Majesty that we humbly conceive that in this right, the very essence of our Liberties exist, a right that which we, on the part of all the people of Ireland do claim as their birth-right and which we cannot yield, but with our lives”.

Poynings Law of 1494 and the Declaratory Act of 1720 which, together, asserted the authority of the British over the Irish Parliament were repealed and Irish merchants were declared to be allowed to trade on equal terms with their English rivals. The British Parliament accepted this, ending the first stage of what must be considered a classic example of the two-stage revolutionary approach albeit applied to bourgeois revolution.

“Grattan’s” Parliament remained chosen on the same corrupt basis; only 72 of its 300 members were freely elected and even then on a purely Protestant franchise. It did not wish to change matters and it was helped in its reluctance by new divisions among its coalition allies. The Volunteers had voted in 1781 in favour of relaxing the remaining penal laws; now they began to be less eager. When Parliament rejected proposals for its reform and for full Catholic emancipation, the Volunteers, inspired by Flood chose to disperse rather than to challenge it. In 1784, the Volunteers of Liberal Belfast voted down a motion for immediate Catholic Emancipation. At the same time, a section of the Catholic nobility declared their loyalty and satisfaction with the new status quo.

The Parliament itself encouraged apathy to develop from this division and futility by economic policies, such as Foster’s Corn Law of 1784 (which gave bounties to exports of 31

cereal) and the encouragement of the cotton and woollen industries, and by demagogic opposition to proposals for a customs union with Great Britain. However these measures were only auxiliary to a general economic boom which had begun some years earlier and which covered many fields for which the Parliament made no provision.

In the border counties of Ulster, deference was helped further by the revival of sectarian passions through the rise of the Protestant Peep-O-Day Boys encouraged by many landlords who had been alarmed by the tenant militancy of the previous twenty years.

It would take a new foreign revolution, in a Catholic country this time, to break, even for a short time, these conservative pressures.

(to be continued) 32

CHAPTER 3 : THE ULSTER PROTESTANT COMMUNITY IN THE IRISH

BOURGEOIS REVOLUTION OF 1798

The first two chapters examined the early history of the Protestant settlement of Ulster. The first related the original plantations to the overall development of British interference in Ireland. The second explained how these plantations developed as part of an overall system of Protestant Ascendancy through which the British ruling classes kept Ireland subservient and how Ascendancy created a communal stability enabling the facts of class division to force the more plebeian Presbyterians into an uneasy alliance with the new capitalist leaders of Catholic Ireland. This Chapter will continue the story of this alliance to its collapse with the defeat of the Irish bourgeois revolution of 1798-1803. It will show how the course of that revolution and its eventual result was accompanied by a weakening of the revolutionary will of its Ulster Presbyterian wing which decreased stability began to force back itself and the bulk of its community towards a position close to that of the original planters.

THE RISE OF THE IRISH NATIONAL BOURGEOISIE

By 1789, the frustrations of continuing the settlement of 1782 were beginning to mount to press for a new and more revolutionary change in Irish society.

The leading motive forces that would wish to execute such a move were threefold. On one side was an even smaller and less influential group of Episcopalian professional people than in the 1770s. On the other side stood a Catholic bourgeoisie that was growing stronger and less patient. In between was a Presbyterian bourgeoisie that had been formally enfranchised politically, but was without effective political power due to the nature of the Governmental control of “Grattan’s” Parliament and was still plagued by having to pay tithes to the established (Episcopalian) Church. Behind all these was a working class that was (illegally) organised in trade unions, aspiring politically as a class only to the legalising of these, and on other matters subservient to the capitalists. Outside the towns was the peasantry, militant but disorganised, potentially decisive but divided like the capitalists with deepening divisions 33

between Catholics and (mainly Ulster) Episcopalians, with the Presbyterians remaining in between. Against all these was the reformed Ascendancy regime which was supported mainly by the mass of Episcopalians (estimated by Theobald Wolfe Tone as being “not above one tenth of the population”) and, more decisively, by the government of Britain, the colonial power. It was Britain’s decisive role in maintaining this regime that stimulated the national and democratic revolution of the 1790s.

The reason for the hostility of the developing Irish national bourgeoisie to this mling caste and to the foreign power that maintained it has to be understood. The developing capitalist class had no immediate perspective for taking the lead in the agrarian agitations that were currently in progress, for replacing rack-rent in the south with the Ulster custom and, even less the abolition of absentee - let alone residential landlordship. (No doubt some of its members anticipated that their political demands would achieve this in fact). The most that it was prepared to consider until many had left its vanguard with the alternatives of seeking peasant support or disbanding was tithe reform : the removal of the burden of paying tithes to the established Episcopalian Church from the vast majority of non-Episcopalian land holders.

This measure was supported by Grattan, though not by his parliamentary allies - the Whig Party, Nor did the various religious wings of the developing Irish bourgeoisie have any major disagreement with the economic policy of the regime they opposed. Partly because of their earlier agitation, the colonial administration acted to encourage Irish industries and, within the rent system, Irish agriculture. British colonial exploitation of Ireland was centred on the £1,000,000 of absentee rents. The government that was staffed mainly by relatives or clients of the exploiters of these rents was ready enough - and able to persuade its employers - to try to maximise the economic prosperity (and, hence, it hoped, the contentment) in which the rents themselves could be increased with less trouble than otherwise.

Hence, the regime made every effort to improve Irish industries and agriculture. Whether because of its measures - the encouragement of cereal growing, the protection of wool and cotton - or, more likely because of an international boom, the parliament that it controlled gained credit for major advances in cotton, iron, brewing and glass.

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In particular, cotton production, based on raw material imported from the British Empire, and on water powered factories, replaced linen as Ireland’s major textile industry. In 1780, a water-powered cotton mill was opened at Prosperous, Co. Kildare. In 1784, the north-east had its first such mill at Whitehouse, Co. Antrim, near Belfast. In 1790, “James Wallace, a Yorkshireman, introduced the first steam-engine ever to be seen in Ireland into Lisburn” (E.R.R. Green, The Lagan Valley 1800-1850, Faber and Faber, London, 1949, p.48).

The one defeat that the government had in its economic policies occurred not because of its attempt to suppress the economy but because it attempted to link the expansion of that economy to the interests of Britain. The Commercial Propositions introduced by the British prime minister, William Pitt, in 1785 had been an attempt to open the imperial market fully to Irish traders on the condition that these traders contribute through their taxes to maintain the navy that protected that market. The propositions were defeated precisely on this latter point.

A common British-Irish navy was too much of an extension of direct British control over Ireland and too reminiscent of the situation before 1782 for the Irish capitalists - even with their will distorted in “Grattan’s parliament” - to accept.

The prosperity associated with “Grattan’s” parliament did not buy off the vanguard of the bourgeoisie who benefited from it. Rather, as generally tends to happen, the growth of economic well-being increased confidence and the readiness to make new political demands.

What these would be was anticipated in the controversy over Pitt’s commercial propositions.

The Irish bourgeoisie was developing a national consciousness. It was developing this because, as in pre-Revolutionary France, it was deprived of any direct say in its country’s government and, because, unlike in France, this deprivation was not a purely internal matter but was maintained, albeit casually, by an external colonial power-Britain.

In other words, then, as indeed, for over a century afterwards, the mass of the Insh bourgeoisie (let alone the Irish people as a whole) were deprived of control of their country’s government because that government had been developed to maintain the submission of Ireland to its neighbour and had grown up as a bureaucratic oligarchy without any check from the people it had to rule and, at this time particularly, with only an ultimate check from the people for whom it ruled. Any moves for more representative control of this interest by the 35

people of Ireland were opposed by it and were achieved only by permission of the government of the neighbouring island - as if, indeed, 1782 had never happened. Ireland was governed by a small land-owning and professional clique of Irish and Englishmen. The ideas of political liberalism that were then developing - representative institutions and the career open to the talents - had no chance of advancing until this regime was smashed. It was not to be so for more than a century and then its destruction meant for twenty-six of Ireland’s thirty-two countries the breaking of, at least, the political connection with England.

But although there was developing in the 1780s a relatively strong Irish bourgeoisie united by a common opposition to the colonial bureaucracy, this class was divided on religious times in the degree to which it found it necessary to oppose. The Catholics were still excluded from the parliamentary franchise and from the professions. The Dissenters (mainly, with a few exceptions, identical with the Presbyterians) were almost entirely liberated but were excluded in fact from the magic circle of the government. The Episcopalian minority was not barred from government by its religion, but its bourgeois members tended to be excluded because bourgeois - in favour of the land-owning class; nonetheless, they enjoyed considerable municipal power through the sectarian municipal corporations. These divisions were reduced during the 1780s but were not eliminated. In particular, the division between the Episcopalian capitalists and the rest was expressed in Dublin by the hostility of the Episcopalian Dublin corporation to Catholic emancipation in the next decade.

Besides these splits there were two other types of division that existed amongst those opposed to the Ascendancy regime, and which had increased rather than decreased since 1782. Not only was there, as yet, little connection between the bourgeois nationalists and the agrarian agitators but the Irish peasantry was divided, particularly in Ulster, on religious lines. The transition progress towards a greater division of estates directly under the landlord (against which the Steelmen had risen in the 1770s) had proceeded to its end. The landlords’ triumph in this resulted in a decline in leaseholds (limited to a few tenants) in favour of a wider range of tenancies - at- will. In a future generation the holders of such tenancies would claim a customary right to sell the value of their tenancies to their landlords, on their departure - even their eviction - from their holdings. However, the growth of religious sectarianism associated with the change was probably caused as much as otherwise objectively by population growth aided by the defeats of the weavers’ strike of the sixties and the peasant agitations of the seventies. Subjectively, however, this growth was stimulated by the readiness on the part of 36

the landlords in the mixed religious areas to strengthen their position in the class struggle by encouraging disputes between the peasants and weavers of different religions. (In particular the Co, Armagh weavers were vulnerable to such divisions, suffering from a net decline in real wages between 1779 and 1801, and having no obvious class opponent — due to their trade’s underdevelopment - on which to blame this). As W.H. Crawford writes:- “The sectarian troubles in the linen country in the last fifteen years of the [eighteenth] century made all but the most strong-minded of the landlords realise that their social influence depended on their support of Protestant against Catholic, instead of on the administration of impartial justice to all their tenant” op. cit., p.15.

Even the still homogeneously Presbyterian and liberal area around Belfast felt the repercussions of these sectarian divisions, as the local Volunteers showed in 1791 and 1798.

The tenants there, too were suffering the demoralising after effects of defeats.

Besides the divisions between the capitalists and the peasants and amongst the peasants themselves, a further, though, as yet, less politically important division as growing as a result of the very development of Irish industry. As this developed so did the militancy of the organisations formed by the workers employed in it. It continued despite the common opposition to these organisations of the government (which had enacted increasing penalties against these combinations for years) and the national bourgeoisie (whose leaders were to call on their own militia to enforce their opponents’ laws in this matter). As yet, the capitalists’ struggle against their workers’ combinations was a struggle against an annoyance rather than a life or death battle. However the problem was becoming acute and would prove decisive in the next century,

THE RISE OF THE UNITED IRISHMEN

In 1789, the news of the French Revolution and, in particular, the storming of the Bastille in Paris provided a focus on which the attention of Irish capitalism generally and its vanguard in particular would be centred during the next nine years. On the one hand, the Catholics had an example of a mass movement bringing democratic reforms to an autocratic state. On the other, many Protestants were inspired to consider the fact that these reforms were far more radical than those that they identified with the constitutions of the Protestant states of Britain and the Netherlands, and were executed by, as yet nominal, Catholics.

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However there was no immediate reform movement begun beyond the constitutional Whig Party of the left wing of which Grattan was a leading member. As in the original struggle associated with him, the development of the Irish bourgeois revolution was restrained once more by the lack of any pressure for its advance within its vanguard. Already the dispersal of its leadership in 1782 had given the feudal and bureaucratic interests time to set foundations for the religious divisions amongst the developed Ulster capitalist interests such as would tend to handicap them in participating in such a revolution — and help make most of them its opponents later. Now, even with the French example across the water, the most progressive elements (with a few individual exceptions such as the Ulster Republican, William Drennan) remained loyal to Whig constitutionalism.

It is worth remarking on this as both it and the later blood letting of 1798 have to be accepted by any consistent defender of the Irish revolution. It is a fact that the appearance of the revolutionary class as all-wise and beautiful is simply emotional propaganda. Very often, in practice, the old regime has long experience of bluffing people and wealth at its disposal to present an attractive face to the world and to persuade it to accept and ignore its blemishes. It can make a more attractive and even a more intelligent appearance to the innocent. In French history for example the revolutionary terror of 1793-4 is notorious. The white terror of 1815 is often forgotten. In many matters, the rising classes are in their speeches and their actions often stupid and self-contradictory and, in the moment of truth, as openly bloodthirsty as their opponents. Their seizure of power is not defensible by reference to the balance sheet of morality or short-term aesthetics but by reference to the objective needs of mankind. They represent the only hope for all humanity to advance however little different they may appear in their revolutionary actions compared to their opponents in their counter-revolutionary ones. That is their justification.

In this case after 1782 the lack of political experience of the Irish national bourgeoisie was expressed in its failure to keep on the offensive and to allow its opponents to regroup. Even after 1789, it remained generally confident of the willingness and ability of the left-wing of the governing classes, represented in the Whig Party, to convince a decisive number of its opponents of the essential correctness of its demands.

This view was shared by a young Episcopalian lawyer of petty bourgeois extraction from Co.

Kildare. Theobald Wolfe Tone, who began a hectic political career of eight years as a 38

pamphleteer for the Whig Party in the general election of May 1790. His Review of the Conduct of Administration during the Seventh Session of Parliament has been described accurately by his conservative biographer, Frank MacDermott (Theobald Wolfe Tone, Anvil Press, Tralee, 1969, p.38) as “a rehash of speeches made by the parliamentary opposition”.

Padraic Yeates, of Sinn Fein the Workers Party, has tried to prove that in this work Tone “was quick to establish a democratic base to his principles” However, the passage he quotes to back his case, is, as he admits “far less inflammatory than many used in [the Parliament in] College Green “ (Let the Nation Stand, Repsol, Dublin, 1974, p.9). Yeates’ case must be regarded as “not proven”.

This can be stated more definitely in that Tone’s initial breach with the Whigs came only with his second pamphlet, in which he asserted the basis of the programme for Irish politics which is recognisable as the views he would hold to the end of his life. This work was written in July 1790, two months after the Whigs had been defeated in the general election.

Its occasion was an international crisis that looked like causing an Anglo-Spanish war. It was entitled An Enquiry How Far Ireland is Bound as of Right to Embark in the Impending Contest on the Side of Great Britain, or, more simply and famously, The Spanish War. In it, Tone attacked both the parliamentary parties for voting money supplies to Britain for it to prepare for a war that would be fought, as he remarked, in the interests of the East India Company “which is professed to a monopoly of commerce to the East, to the utter exclusion of this country “[Ireland]. He ended:- “What should Irish policy be, by British example? First of all, take care of ourselves. We invade none of her rights; we but secure our own, why then should we fear her resentment?

But the timid will say; she may withdraw the protection of her flag from us, and I answer, let her do so; everything is beneficial to Ireland that throws us on our own strength. We should then look to our internal resources, and scorn to sue for protection to any foreign state; we should spurn the idea of moving, a humble satellite round any power, however great, and claim it at once, and enforce, our rank among the primary nations of the earth. Then should we have, what, under the present system, we never shall see, A NATIONAL FLAG, and spirit to maintain it”. Tone never repudiated these politics though he remained a member of the Northern Whig Club and would later beg favours and jobs from leading members of the Whig party that had 39

denounced them. Less excusable to modern minds (and MacDermott makes great play of it) was his attempt to persuade the British Government against which he had written his pamphlet to finance an old scheme of his to colonise the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii). Again however, this scheme was not contradictory to his views on Irish politics — only to his plans to participate in them. It must be added, too, that, in practice, few of his contemporary revolutionaries regarded the rights of men as applying to coloured people — as the Haitians discovered when they looked to the French Revolutionary Government for freedom.

The Sandwich Island scheme was rejected by the British government. After one attempt at a left-wing discussion circle had failed, Tone joined with the Republican, Drennan, in preparing a set of motions to be presented to the Belfast Volunteers on Bastille Day, 1791 as a political basis for a more active movement:- “1, That the constitution of Ireland exists only in theory, in as much as the people deprived of their natural weight in the scale of Government, because they are not duly represented in Parliament, and, therefore, that a more general extension of the elective franchise is indispensably necessary. “2. That the weight of English influence in the Government of this country is so great as to require a cordial union among the people to maintain that balance which is essential to the preservation of our liberties and the extension of our commerce.

“3. That, satisfied as we are that the true greatness and happiness of Ireland can arise solely from complete internal union of all her people, we lament the mistaken policy which has so long divided them, and that we shall heartily co-operate in all measures tending to the abolition of distinctions between Irishmen equally invidious and unjust and which have been uniformly the source of weakness and misery and disgrace to the country”.

In a private commentary on the above Tone stated:- “... They certainly fall short of the truth, but truth itself must sometimes condescend to temporise. My unalterable opinion is that the bane of Irish prosperity is in the influence of England. I believe that influence will ever be extended while the connection between the countries continues. Nonetheless, I know that opinion is for the present too hardy, though a 40

very little time may establish it universally. I have not made it a part of the resolutions. I have only proposed to set up a reformed Parliament as a barrier against that mischief which every honest man that will open his eyes must see in every instance overbears the interest of Ireland, I have not said one word that looks like a wish for separation, though I give it to you and your friends as my most decided opinion that such an event would be a regeneration for this country’. Tone wanted democracy as a means to achieving separation rather than vice-versa. That this strategy was, perhaps, too advanced for his intended supporters was shown when the Belfast Volunteers rejected not the second (the most Nationalist) of his three motions but the third one, which was aimed against the principle of Ascendancy. Perhaps as a result of this, when he established the United Ireland Society in Dublin later in the year, he made what had been his second Belfast resolution, the first of the three motions (the other two relating to parliamentary Catholic emancipation) on which that society’s activities were to be based.

Certainly as a more immediate retort to the Belfast Volunteers’ rejection of emancipation, Tone wrote his pamphlet, An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland. In this, his work most acclaimed by contemporaries at the time, he bases his argument for Catholic emancipation even more clearly on his statement:- “The misfortune of Ireland is, that we have no National Government in which we differ from England, and from all Europe”.

Further evidence that the United Irishmen were primarily nationalists can be seen from a letter written by Thomas Wright, the second Secretary of the Dublin United Irishmen to the English left-wing Whig Club, the Friends of the People the following year:- “As to any union between the two Islands, believe us when we assert that our union rests upon our mutual Independence. We shall love each other if we be left to ourselves. It is the union of mind which ought to bind these nations together. Reciprocal interests and mutual wants will ever secure mutual affection; but were any other union to be formed, and force only could effect it, you would endanger your Liberties, and we should lose our rights, you would feel the influence of the Crown increased beyond all sufferance, and we should lose the name and energies of a People, with every hope of raising to its merited station in the map 41

of mankind, this noble and neglected island ‘for which God has done so much, and man so little’” — James Connolly (ed.); 798 Readings, V, Dublin 1898, pp.76-79.

This letter may not have been seen at all by Tone. At this time he was playing little part in the Society of United Irishmen as he had been appointed Secretary of the General Committee of the Catholics — party on the strength of his pamphlet on their behalf. He organised (though he did not initiate) a campaign aimed at establishing the final emancipation of Catholics by means of a petition to be prepared by a Convention of Catholic representatives from all over Ireland: “The Back Lane Parliament” of December 1792. The petition was sent direct to the source of power — Britain. In tum the government of the latter brought pressure to bear on its colonial regime. However, the leadership of the Committee defaulted on insisting on a major part of Catholic relief : the right of Catholic M.P.s to attend Parliament. (Tone himself would have preferred an alternative compromise — by which the franchise would have been denied the bulk of the peasantry, the 40 shilling freeholders. This was to be implemented under the 1829 Emancipation Act). What was more the opening of war between Britain and France the same year as the new Relief Act enabled a number of the reforms — particularly those regarding control of the municipal corporations — to remain paper ones.

Under cover of the War, the administration passed a Convention Act to prevent any revival of the Catholics’ “parliament”, imprisoned the former Chairman of the Dublin United Irishmen, Archibald Hamilton Rowan, and under threat of prosecution caused their former secretary, James Napper Tandy, to flee to France. Finally, in 1794, two parallel matters occurred. An attempt by the British Government to finalise Catholic emancipation, but without disturbing its agents in Dublin allowed the second aim to be used by those agents to frustrate the first.

At the same time, Tone’s involvement with a French spy was exposed and he agreed to leave Ireland rather than be tried for treason. The Society of United Irishmen went underground.

THE UNITED IRISHMEN — THE JACOBIN RISING

Up until this date, the Irish radical movement had been (despite some conspiratorial ideas of Drennan) a constitutional movement of the urban bourgeoisie and liberal landlords. It included the United Irishmen, the Volunteers and the Catholic Committee. It extended from Tone and Drennan on the left to (objectively and more because of his position than his political inclination), the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Dr. James Troy, on the right. It had not made more than a general appeal on political issues to the peasant majority of the Irish.

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In 1792, the eighth point of a nine point Declaration published by the General Committee of the Catholics had asserted that the parliamentary franchise should be conferred only on those sworn to defend the existing “arrangement of property in the country” . Tone’s readiness to sacrifice the 40 shilling freeholders as the price for full Catholic emancipation has already been stated. Further, in March 1793, the Belfast Northern Star edited by the United Irishman, Samuel Neilson, published a statement by the Belfast Volunteers boasting of their part in enforcing an eviction on the Hertford (Conway) state.

The movement thus constituted and programmed had won limited successes. It had failed, basically, because the British Government was determined to maintain its control of Ireland through its trusted agents whom it was not, in the last resort, prepared to sacrifice by allowing the immediate end of Ascendancy.

If the national struggle was to be continued to victory at all, its leadership would have to develop a perspective of smashing the state by involving the mass of the population — and, probably, aid from revolutionary France. This meant an underground organisation and an enlistment of the anti-tithe (and potentially anti-landlord) peasant movement. Tone had already hinted at this in the document that caused his exile. He left comrades ready to put it into action. Such a policy was bound to alienate the right wing. In any case the Archbishop of Dublin had already left the movement. His presence therein had been an honorary one and he had.

sabotaged it several times by proclaiming Catholic loyalty to the state even against the General Committee. In 1795, the same parliament that had refused the final measure of Catholic emancipation gave him and his clergy their reward for services rendered : an Irish Catholic seminary and college, at Maynooth, Co. Kildare.

It was also to be expected that left-wing Whigs such as Grattan (who may well have initiated the idea of a Catholic Convention) would be unwilling to break fully with the Irish parliament. However, besides these cases there were defections of people who had been to the fore in the actual movement of the United Irishmen. Drennan, Archibald Hamilton Rowan, William Sinclair, the ex Secretary of the Belfast Club, and Musgrave of the Belfast iron founding 43

family all played little or even a disapproving part in the developments of their former movement towards actual revolution. (Sinclair’s family are said, however, to have given surreptitious aid to the National cause for some years after 1795). Similarly, John Keogh of the Catholic Committee (though not a United Irishman), urged Tone to seek help from France in his exile — but would denounce such schemes in 1798.

In Rowan’s case, part of the reason was his experiences as a fugitive exiled in post- Thermidorean France. There, he wrote his wife:- “{ own to you candidly, when it is of no avail, that my ideas of reform and of another word which begins with the same letter are very much altered by living for twelve months in France and that I never wish to see either the one or the other procured by force”.

Other defectors were influenced by issues nearer home. In particular these affected Drennan who had pioneered Irish Republicanism before Tone, who had, with Rowan, gone further than Tone in Adventurism in proclaiming an openly Republican National Guard after the French model while negotiations were proceeding on Catholic relief, but who lost his nrve when real revolution was an immediate necessity. His career can be said to parallel that of the Girondins in contemporary France — or to anticipate that of Plekhanov in Russia of a century later. There were objective forces influencing him and his fellow defectors in their turn from the Republic. While the war hurt some trade (particularly cotton, which was based on imported raw materials), it stimulated the supply of provisions (where the Catholic bourgeoisie made its money) and the production of linen (where many Ulster Presbyterian capitalists, including Sinclair profited still). In the textile industry, too, Ulster capitalism’s growing dependence on steam power (and British coal) discouraged its holders further from rebellion.

What was more, the cotton slump soon became a reason for opposing the French rather than opposing the British government’s war with them. In 1799, France declared war on the U.S.A. to try to blockade the latter’s exports to Britain and Ireland. These exports included raw cotton for processing.

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To the economic factor was added, for Ulster Protestants, an emotional consideration. As a result of the emigrations of the previous hundred years, many families in the Province had friends or relations in America. They tended naturally to support its side against the newer Republic. There were further reasons why many Ulster Protestants should become less enthusiastic about the struggle for independence, and in particular, about its leadership’s tendency to ally it to the land struggle. In September, 1795, the counter-revolutionary struggle of the Protestant tenants against their Catholic equals was formally institutionalised. After an indecisive fight at Markethill, Co. Armagh, a group of Episcopalian landlords, peasants, local businessmen and clergy united to organise to make future clashes more decisive for their coreligionists and, specifically, to maintain Ascendancy. The new body was the Orange Society ~ later the Orange Order. It was taken up by the colonial administration to divide and weaken the peasant movement and the Republicans who were allied to it increasingly. (Similar organisations began and were also encouraged accordingly; that it was the Orange Society that survived and absorbed them seems to have been a matter of luck). Naturally, even the resigning United Irishmen did not become Orange. However, the increased sectarian tension that the Society and its rivals helped create and increase had its debilitating effects on those who tried to maintain non-sectarian principles.

What was more the administration, even in its less subtle officials did not simply help organise Orange lodges. It used other means to stimulate division. The Catholic peasantry was poor enough for it to possess a considerable backward element. Encouraged by their bishops and without any previous encouragement that they might look towards the Republic for liberation, this section was recruited into the County militias. These bodies — particularly that of Co. Monaghan — were used against the Protestants of Belfast by General Gerard Lake at the end of 1797. Though Lake’s crude methods did not get big results in military terms (arms dumps discovered, etc.), they did contribute to anti-Catholic hostility.

The lapsed United Irishmen of Belfast are significant because, though few in numbers, they were the direct ancestors of a group that would have considerable prestige, and influence (again, although not members) a century after : the Liberal Unionists.

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Having said that, it is worth connecting the contemporary picture by two points — firstly the Presbyterian Girondins’ defection was matched by that of the Catholic leader, John Keogh.

Secondly, the defection of Drennan, Sinclair and the rest was not copied by a hard core of Presbyterians which included Russell, Neilson, Simms and Henry Joy McCracken. These, with Tone, who tells of the event, at McArt’s fort, above Belfast, “took a solemn obligation .... Never to desist in our efforts until we had subverted the authority of England over our country and asserted her independence”. Another Protestant revolutionary, seemingly unknown to the bourgeois Tone, but who remained loyal to the Republic, was the weaver, James, “Jemmy’, Hope. With a reduced base in the urban bourgeoisie; the Jacobin wing of Irish Republicanism prepared to unite with the peasant revolutionary Defenders on the explicit basis of the ending of tithes (and on even wider agrarian reforms implicit as James Connolly has remarked, in the demand for universal suffrage). Tone, in France, worked hard to mobilise support for a French invasion to help the planned rebellion. He prepared schemes for the revolutionary government to confiscate not only the revenues of the colonial state but Church lands, lands owned by absentees, the “casual property of emigrants” and “the property of Englishmen in Ireland”. In fact, Tone’s first successful mobilisation of a French force was stopped from invading by adverse winds in December 1796. It was only after this, the following year, that an alliance of the United Irishmen with the Defenders was made. By this time, the repression was mounting and, in the north-east, anyway, the latter group was far weaker than it had been.

On the other hand, when the Rising finally did come, in 1798, the strength of the initial plebeian Catholic insurrection in the south-east and its ability to impose its own spontaneous but crude programme upon the Protestant (albeit mainly landlord) minority in their areas for a matter of weeks was unforeseen by the United Irishmen or their Protestant supporters.

The result increased further the demoralisation of Protestant Ulster. Though Henry Joy McCracken led out a section of the Antrim Volunteers, Tone’s other friend, Robert Simms, deserted when called upon to lead the Rising in Co. Down. Simms’ last minute replacement, Henry Monroe, seems, from admittedly contradictory evidence to have lost the crucial Battle of Ballinahinch because he mistrusted his Catholic followers too much to adopt their proposal 46

for a night attack. Outside the relatively homogeneous Protestant areas around Belfast, the north remained quiescent.

Finally, two French forces arrived. One landed in Connacht — the least developed area of Ireland economically and politically, defeated larger British forces, but could not hope to revitalise the struggle that had been defeated elsewhere in Ireland. It surrendered. Three weeks later, the French ship from which Wolfe Tone hoped to mount a decisive attack on the British occupation forces was captured in Lough Swilly off Co. Donegal. Tone was captured, and died mysteriously in prison.

Meanwhile the captured leaders of the United Irishmen on the home front agreed under threat of death to record their political views to the Ascendancy houses of Parliament. William MacNeven, one of the Society’s leading triumvirate which included, also, Arthur O’Connor and Thomas Addis Emmett, and himself a member of the rising Catholic middle class, stated under examination by the Lord Chancellor, John FitzGibbon, Earl of Clare:- MacNeven: “If we were an independent republic and Britain ceases to be formidable to us, our interest would require an intimate connection with her”.

Clare: “Such as subsists between England and America?”

MacNeven: “Something like it, my lord” — Origins and Progress of the Irish Union, Athol Books, Belfast, 1974, p.21.

Emmett, like Tone, a bourgeois Episcopalian, and a founder member of the Society, declared:- “T think that if Ireland were separated from England, she would be the happiest spot on the face of the globe” — ibid. p.39.

After nearly two centuries, the Irish have still to have the opportunity to test the truth of Emmett’s belief for themselves.

THE AFTERMATH OF 1798

The most obvious immediate after-effort of the defeat of the United Irishmen’s Rising was to increase the divisive tendencies that had contributed to that result in Ulster. Thus Dickey, one 47

of the leaders of the northern United Irishmen could express, whilst awaiting execution, his loss of faith in the good intentions of the Catholic allies for which he had once hoped. More naturally considering her family’s recent political development, similar fears were expressed by Drennan’s sister, Mrs. McTier. William Sinclair became even more positively pro-British.

The year following the Rising, he was showing the Viceroy, the Marquess Cormmwallis, over his new linen mill. Part of Sinclair’s new enthusiasm may have been caused by his belief in a new British initiative. The Government in London considered that the United Irish Rising had exposed the failure of the reformed Ascendancy regime. Its answer was not major reform, such as it would not allow its own nationals, but a parliamentary union, within which it would be possible to give the Irish Catholics full, formal emancipation, outnumbered as they would be by British Protestants. Many of the defeated revolutionaries and their sympathisers welcomed this as being better than anything they could have expected to come out of their defeat. Samuel Nielson and Henry Joy McCracken’s sister, Mary Anne, both expressed hopes of it. (So, too, did Hamilton Rowan, but he had not needed the defeat of 1798 to stop being a revolutionary).

They soon found that their hopes were false. The Union was forced through the two parliaments involved but no serious attempt was made to overcome the barrier to Catholic emancipation raised by the King’s hostility itself stimulated by the Irish bureaucracy.

What was more, and only partly because of this failure, the said bureaucracy remained in control. Although both the above-mentioned Republicans and the Catholic hierarchy had welcomed the Act of Union, while many Ascendancy supporters (including a large minority of Orangemen) opposed it, it was to the latter that the British continued to look for administration. This was to be shown well by Pitt, the British premier, who had resigned over the King’s opposition to Catholic emancipation. He returned to power in 1804 with a promise not to introduce emancipation and with a government that included Sir John Foster, an opponent both of the union and of emancipation as Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer. He felt still, probably, that emancipation should come. However, as usual, with British would-be reformers of Ireland, he had other priorities.

48

By that date Nielson had died. Nonetheless, he had lived long enough to see that the Union had disappointed his hopes. He wrote his wife after a year of it:- “You seem to forget that my conduct is out of the range of forgiveness, and I am by no means sorry that it is so. Notwithstanding the darkness of our prospect at present, I look to the liberation of my country with as much confidence as I ever did”. 1° January 1802, quoted in Madden, The United Irishmen, Their Lives and Times (Second Series, Volume 1), Madden London, 1843, p.295. and, again:- “The opinions which I hold, and the principles for which I have suffered are at present out of vogue and unfashionable; as many, I know, will despair of their success. If they are wrong, they should not succeed; and if they are right, they must and will succeed for it is God who rules the world” — 13" June, 1802, ibid. p.304.

Some 40 years later Emancipation was at last achieved and the O’Connell “Moral Force” Movement for the Repeal of the Union approached its climax. Mary Anne McCracken declared her support for it:- “Happily a new light has now broken on the world, which his perhaps of all modern discoveries and improvements the most important, that of effecting by reason what was formerly attempted, and often in vain, by force and even when successful was dearly purchased by its unhappy and demoralising results” ~ letter to Madden in Madden, Antrim and Down in 98, Cameron Ferguson and Co., Glasgow, p.80.

Her old friend, Jemmy Hope agreed:- “Witness the physical — force men of 1798 (myself among the number) appealing to moral force in 1843 a fact that no writer of Irish history ought to overlook”.

(One descendant of Henry Joy and Mary Anne McCracken who followed a political career maintained this line. Though their niece’s husband, R.E. Tennant was a Whig (and anti- 49

Repeal) M.P. for Belfast between 1847 and 1852, his grandson Henry Harrison was to be a Protestant Parnellite Home Rule M.P.).

Yet, the tradition of Neilson, McCracken and Hope was already being superseded in the politics of Belfast by that now being reinforced by the Orange Societies and, even, by that developed by the United Irishmen’s erstwhile comrades, Drennan, Sinclair and Musgrave.

Of these Sinclair anticipated his descendant’s politics most clearly. Four years after showing Cornwallis over his new factory he joined the yeomanry to oppose a new and even more plebeian rising organised by Hope and Robert Emmett, younger brother of Thomas. That he was not alone in his community as to his views can be seen in the fact that Thomas Russell could get no support from the north-eastern Protestants in his attempt to mobilise them for the revolt. This change was only the start of a longer process.

To be continued) 50

CHAPTER 4 ~- THE DIVISION OF THE IRISH BOURGEOISIE: THE DEFEAT OF

THE ULSTER TEXTILE WORKERS

The first chapters of this work examined the roots of the Ulster plantation, its founding, expansion and maintenance as part of a system of colonial ascendancy and the brief emergence of its political vanguard as a part of the leadership of the abortive Irish bourgeois national democratic revolution. This chapter and the succeeding ones will consider how the factors that produced the said emergence were revised decisively — how the Ulster Protestant community developed in increasing opposition to the claims of the Catholic majority of the Irish, how, in doing so it revived the old colonial Ascendancy traditions within the conditions set by a major regional industrial revolution.

If this process is to be understood, it is necessary to recognise that its aspects cannot be separated. To relate the unionism of most Ulster Protestants simply to their ability to use the improved connection with Britain to develop its local economy ignores two facts. In the first place, their entrepreneurs had begun to build upon British coal and entrepreneurial talents before the Union (as with Wallace’s venture in Lisburn). Secondly, the Unionism of Protestant Ulster is an hegemonic ideology that affects far more than its community’s political allegiance. It is specifically a right-wing capitalist ideology that draws some of its most dedicated support not just from its community’s petty bourgeoisie but from the proletarians thereof. Despite an industrial revolution that created in several firms a scale of socialised production equivalent to that of pre-Revolutionary Petrograd, the Ulster Protestant worker remained not just un-Bolshevik but anti-Bolshevik. Of course the same political truth can be stated of the Irish Catholic worker; however, he was based on a less developed economy, although, in practice, his support was given, objectively if not subjectively, to, at least, the democratic side in British politics. It is true, too, that in some matters, particularly those affecting women’s rights, the Protestant ideology of Unionism is in advance of the Catholic ideology that has dominated the twenty-six county republic, however this superiority is purely quantitative; Protestant freedom is limited by its religious context in a manner unknown in a society with a more secular base. (This can be seen, today, by the role of the advance guard of Loyalism — the Democratic Unionist Party — on reforms on gender issues).

In short Ulster Unionism — Britain’s justification for maintaining the Six County state is not the ideology of a nation but of a reactionary all-class alliance in British politics the strength 51

of which lies in a base that, under other conditions, would maintain a more dynamic and revolutionary relation of forces.

Because of this the examination of the development of this base, parallel with its reactionary superstructure, (though, as will be shown, the relationship often appears revised) is an important part of any study of the events contribution to the making of Northern Ireland.

THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE UNION WITH BRITAIN

By itself the parliamentary union of Great Britain and Ireland did not make the Irish economy into the poor relation of Britain that it became in the nineteenth century. At the same time, it played a part in this decline and, indeed, was the occasion for its most disparate point of deterioration. Ireland in 1801 faced a future in which industrialisation was bound to be more difficult than it would be in Britain,. This was not simply due to the miseries as much as to the economic stress of rackrent. Although this tended to weaken the prospects for the development of an Irish home market, the country could expect to enjoy the benefits of British expansion at least to the extent of the marketing needs of its productive capacity, even without the union. In fact, Irish agriculture was booming and would go on booming until the 1840s. Most landlords were happy enough to let well alone and not to “release” (a euphemism for “evict”) their tenants to swell the urban labour force. The new industries outside north-east Ulster where the disintegration of the system of plantation leases did provide mobility, could not look to any pool of labour that would keep its costs down.

Besides high land and labour costs, Ireland suffered from a shortage of easily-exploited mineral resources. It was to be the needs and the techniques of the mid-twentieth century that caused the discovery and development of the mineral wealth that did exist there. One hundred years earlier even such an advocate of Irish industrial expansion as Sir Robert Kane, was ignorant of the country’s full potential. Up to around 1810, most Irish industrial expansion was based on water-power. When steam power techniques began to be adopted in the British cotton industry. Ireland could not supply its own coal to enable its factories to compete. Worse still, it was for years handicapped by an economic remnant of the independent parliament: an import duty on British coal that was not ended until 1831.

Despite this, Ulster showed its exceptionality, once more, by developing steam powered mills 52

based on the coal supplies of south-west Scotland. Such were the advantages of its closeness to its supplier that, in 1833, two years after the trade in coal had been freed, the commodity cost 30% more in Dublin than in Belfast. Even in 1839, coal prices in Dublin were three to four times those in the mining county, Yorkshire.

But if Irish industry was weak enough without the Union, the latter did intensify the weakness in two ways. The more important of these was the Union’s effect on Ireland’s capital resources. By moving the centre of state power ~ already a far stronger and more interventionist state than that of Britain — from Dublin to London, it destroyed the political and capital basis which had sustained the ascendancy’s schemes of economic development. The Irish government apparatus became responsible to a parliament that was composed overwhelmingly of British members. The final authority for intervention in the Irish economy was now in London.

Irish capital began to look thither and, as it got little encouragement from its rulers, it began to move to the more easy profits of British capitalism and, even, colonial investment. The landlords were particularly ready to move their receipts out of Ireland; by the time of the famine, the absentee rental totalled £6-7,000,000. It is worth noticing that Ulster landlords, despite the civilising effect of what was now Ulster “custom”, seem to have proved as ready as their peers elsewhere to take their rents out of the country. At the same time, though data is inadequate on this point, it seems probable that capitalist profits in that province were high compared to those elsewhere in Ireland.

The second negative effect of the Union was its removal of the Irish protective tariffs, This was not of long-term importance; Ireland’s economic weaknesses would have made the maintenance of its industry a major problem even had protection continued. Nonetheless, its ending hastened the moment of decline. Had it continued, the Irish capitalists might have been able to use the time to deal with their endemic problems, perhaps to import coal from south Wales, for example. No such respite was granted.

This applied to Ulster as well. And it is here that it is necessary to begin to consider more fully why it was that the mainly Protestant industrialists of the north-east were able to survive the ending of protection and, even, of the increased flow of rents to Britain. As has been shown, this class had certain strengths compared to its opposite numbers elsewhere in 53

Ireland. By 1813 it had already developed steam-power. Within 10 miles of Belfast alone there were industries, including fifteen steam-powered mills. Three years earlier employment in that area had risen from 8,000 in 1790, to 24,000. By 1811 the same region was using more than three quarters of all Irish raw cotton imports. Probably Ulster capital depended for accumulation, less on the local landlord class, than capital elsewhere in Ireland. Thanks to the weakening effects of rural sectarianism the Ulster, particularly the Co. Armagh peasantry and artisans tended to be more mobile and were, potentially, more scabby than [reland’s homogenous peasantry elsewhere.

Yet none of this emanated to a qualitatively superior position for Ulster industry compared to that of all Ireland ~ or, even of Ireland outside the north-east. Its capital accumulation was not immediately so very great even in comparison to that of Irish industry elsewhere. Its mobile labour force was, in the first two decades of the nineteenth century merely a potential rather than an actual benefit to the Ulster industrial bourgeoisie which still had to deal with a revived and active trade union movement in its province as in the south. Even the new steam mills were to prove uneconomic in competition with the similarly powered cotton mills of Britain. That the Ulster entrepreneurs managed to transfer production successfully from cotton to linen whilst the rest of Ireland failed in this must be ascribed to certain factors peculiar to their province. These enabled them to utilise the mobility of their potential labour force to a degree that neutralised the power of that class’ organisations. How this was accomplished is the theme of this chapter. To understand it requires consideration not only of the economic, but of the religious and political situation in Ireland and, in particular, in Ulster, in the first decades of the nineteenth century.

THE POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE UNION

Without the political context created by the parliamentary union, or more precisely, the revised form of Ascendancy that developed under that union, the ability of the Ulster industrialists to discipline their workers at the necessary time would have been reduced — perhaps decisively. Jt was the Union and the policies executed within it by the dominant partner (Britain) towards the dominated one (Ireland) that encouraged the deepening of the sectarian divisions within the latter. These divisions were an essential part of the dividing of the Ulster workforce which led, in turn to its weakening against its employers.

54

The Act of Union gained its support, as it was opposed, by a cross-section of Irish society.

Both the Catholic bishops and, as has been shown, a number of the leaders of the United Irishmen joined the Ascendancy bureaucrats in supporting it. On the other hand, a large minority of the Ascendancy (including its Orange wing) opposed the change. Within a few years, the Union Government had re-divided Ireland so that support for the union tended to coincide with Protestant (especially Anglican) religious views. It did this by abandoning its promise of Catholic emancipation and making as its priority the winning of the anti-Union wing of the Ascendancy. Thus Foster, the architect of Ascendancy protectionism, was made Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer in 1804, despite his opposition to the parliamentary union that was to undo his earlier tariff measures. Even more significant was the appointment in 1807 of the former leader of anti-Union Orangeism, William Saurin, to be Attorney General — a post he was to hold for 15 years. Such appointments were merely the early and extreme expressions of the United Kingdom’s continuing of the Ascendancy Parliaments’ sectarian approach to state patronage; though the examples became less blatant, the same reality continued throughout the nineteenth century.

While the Orangemen were wooed, the Presbyterians were given a benefit in the shape of an increase in their clergy’s Regium Domum in 1802.

It was only after the Protestants had been rewarded that the United Kingdom government began to seriously try to honour its original promise to emancipate its Catholic subjects.

Even then, it hedged the new offer with qualifications; the Catholic clergy was to receive state salaries while the Monarch was allowed the right to veto their appointments. The older members of the hierarchy, headed by Archbishop Troy, were ready to support this measure.

However they were forced to withdraw their acceptance as a result of popular and essentially nationalist campaigns led by Troy’s co-adjutor, Dr. James Murray, and, from outside the clergy by the young Catholic lawyer, Daniel O’Connell. The policies of the government of the United Kingdom had indeed to stimulate rather than to neutralise the nationalist feelings that the formation of this unit had been aimed towards eliminating.

The national movement that prevented Britain from getting Catholic emancipation on its own terms was in 1829 to achieve that reform on the terms demanded by its leaders (and envisaged in 1793 by Wolfe Tone). Later it was to attempt, and fail, to achieve the repeal of the Union. The politics of this movement must be examined. Like those of the United 35

Irishmen they were generally liberal and the movement’s leader O’Connell was seen by his European contemporaries as the man who fused successfully the Catholic religion and the less extreme and insurrectionary ideas of the French revolution. Though activist his movement was always constitutional; it was totally opposed to the plebeian Catholic Ribbonmen who maintained, more than it did, the anti-constitutional (and anti-Protestant) spirit of ‘98. This constitutionalism was probably to help its disarming against the determined and establishment-supported threats of the Orangemen and was certainly to contribute to the defeat of its ultimate aim, Repeal of the Union. Finally, it was, in a way that the United Irishmen had not been, a Catholic movement, based, organised and mainly officered by Irish Catholics. In fact it was the political inheritor of the politics of the Catholic Association of the 1790s, except insofar as it had risen in the world and had its politics influence the hierarchy. The most articulate of the clerical leaders of the movement was Dr. James Doyle, from 1816 to his death in 1841, Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, who wrote under the pseudonym, J.K.L.

(the initials: James, Kildare-Leighlin). He was in complete disagreement with the politics of the older generation of Catholic Bishops such as Troy. The latter, according to the Dictionary of National Biography “ viewed with great disapprobation and alarm the growth of popular principles; even on the demand for Catholic relief he acted to curb his congregation’s militancy.” Though Doyle opposed the Ribbon societies, he did so whilst offering himself as leader and spokesman for a far more effective strategy. He encouraged and. defended the popular militancy feared by Troy as long as it was not organised in secret societies. Unlike Troy, too, he was prepared to oppose the state power in the name of the people of Ireland, particularly in the case of the former’s attempt to use Catholic emancipation as an excuse to control the Catholic Church in that country. Thus he stated to a Committee of the House of Lords in 1825: “As an individual, I would object to any arrangement, even sanctioned by the Pope, which would go on to give an influence, direct or indirect to the sovereign in the appointment of Roman Catholic bishops in Ireland" - "Minutes of Evidence before Committee of Lords Appointed to Inquire into the State of Ireland”, 21° March 1825, Parliamentary Reports 1825, Volume VI, p.227. 56

He had already written to the Lord Lieutenant: “We will never cease, my Lord, whilst our tongues can move, our pens can write, to keep alive in the whole empire, as well as in our own people a sense of the wrongs we suffer, and to exhibit to an indignant world, all the privations we endure. Our fetters are too galling, our chains are too closely riveted, our keepers are too unfeeling for us to remain silent, or permit these to enjoy repose.” A Vindication of the Religious and Civil Principles of the Irish Catholics, Coyne, Dublin, 1823, p.45.

Despite such statements, Doyle was, after 1829, to oppose O’Connell’s concentration on the priority of repealing the Union. He regard this issue as a diversion from more immediate aims of economic reform. In any case, he had a posthumously justified expectation that, in the circumstances of the contemporary relationship of political forces, the Repeal Movement would be defeated. Nevertheless, he was not against repeal in principle as Troy would have been. His views on the theology of national revolution would seem to place him closer to the more pro-nationalist bishops of the Irish War of Independence:- “When Genoa revolted under Doria, and when numberless other states in Italy changed their constitutions or their sovereigns, the father of the faithful deplored the crimes which were committed and mingled his tears with the blood of his children; but he interposed only by his advice; he deposed no prince, he excommunicated no people.

“When the power of Spain enforced a defective title to the throne (of Portugal) which the untimely death of King Sebastian and the sterility of a holy churchman had left without an heir, the papers looked silently at the unrighteous occupation. But when a just and glorious revolution placed the house of Braganza on the throne of Portugal, Rome, which was induced to countenance the expelled monarch, withdrew its opposition to the rightful sovereign, and consoled the heart of that most faithful country, by giving to its pastors that canonical institution which for some time had been withheld...

“But to show that the popes do not at present attempt to exercise any temporal power in political affairs and that Religion in their hands is not made any longer the hand-maid of policy, we are only to refer to the present contest in South America — There whole nations have rebelled against their sovereign and in his conduct towards them, the Pope has manifested to all the earth that his kingdom is not of this world. He sees in these regimes a 37

vast portion of his family struggling to become independent of their lawful king. He must lament, nay deplore, all the evils which have occurred and which still continue to affect that portion of his Church; but like the good Samaritan, he is only employed in pouring wine and oil into the wounds of his children, dispensing to them all the blessings which they can receive, whilst he leaves heaven, to which they have appealed to decide the justice or injustice of their contest.” — Letters on the State of Ireland, Coyne, Dublin, 1825, pp. 261- 264, This ideology was the most liberal of any Catholic community at that time. In general, and particularly since 1801, when Pope Pius VII had signed a concordat with Napoleon Bonaparte, the Catholic Church’s relations with the various state powers had been governed by a principle, under which the Pope’s spiritual authority (including certain powers over education) was recognised by the states whose usually reactionary political authority was, in return, upheld by the Church. Such an open agreement was not possible for Ireland where the local hierarchy had to reckon with a nationalist population, and, until 1829, an openly anti- Catholic state. The Papacy had to tolerate a certain independent policy in the direction of the comparative liberalism of what J.K.L. called “Cisalpinism” (as distinct from the prevalent Catholic ideology “Ultramontanism”). Hence O’Connell’s movement became an inspiration to European Liberal Catholics.

The O’Connellites were opposed both by the reunited Ascendancy establishment and by the insurrectionary and consciously Catholic Nationalist Ribbonism. Partly to maintain its position against the latter political threat, it developed, until Catholic emancipation, neutrally, if not positively favourably to the Irish trade unions, leaving it to heaven “to decide the justice or injustice” of the causes of the two sides in trade disputes. This was to be a decisive factor in its failure to expand support for repeal of the Union beyond the Irish Catholics.

Such a possible expansion of support was already doubtful for other reasons. Even before the Act of Union, the Ulster Protestants had been divided not only between Episcopalians and Presbyterians but, increasingly, on the national and democratic issue. The pressures of wartime prosperity, the Franco-American dispute, the use of Catholic militias to crush Protestant Belfast and the use, or, at least, tolerance, by landlords of the rural sectarianism in Ulster’s provincial border areas that climaxed in the founding of The Orange Society in 1795 all contributed to this. They were capped by the Rising of ’98, with its attacks (and, as usual, 58

more harrowing reports of attacks) inflicted by Catholics on Protestants. Many of the revolt’s leaders were doubtful about their Catholic allies either at the time or else in retrospect when defeat magnified the pro-British and conservative tendencies and discredited still more those that had encouraged rebellion.

In particular, within four months of the rising in Co. Antrim and Down, the Presbyterians had their conservative potential reinforced. On 10 October 1798, the Evangelical Society was founded to represent and organise the religious forces that were developing against what was then the dominant tendency in Ulster Presbyterianism. The theoretical bases of Evangelical practice were formal political quietism and dependence on the “Word of God” as expressed in the Bible. In both these matters it opposed the Presbyterian majority, the Arians, who tended to a more analytical approach which had encouraged the practice of free political speculation in Belfast — a practice obviously more conducive than Fundamentalism to liberal politics. This political of significance of the Evangelical-Arian dispute was immediately hidden by both sides’ concentration on theological issues. The formal disputes concerned the nature of the Trinity (was it all part of one Godhead, as in the Bible, or was The Son merely the first of human beings, as the Arians declared), the existence of Original Sin (defended by the Evangelicals : doubted by the Arians) and the need for justification by faith and regeneration by the Holy Spirit. However, as matters developed, the two sides tended to reflect political causes on the right and on the left. In the early days of the struggle, the Arian party included individuals from all sides in the political spectrum; its leader, Dr. Black, who died in 1817, was a friend of Viscount Castlereagh, the renegade Whig who ended his life as a guiding spirit of European counter-revolution. But the programme of Evangelicalism, with its emphasis on reformation practice contained its own right-wing appeal. It included in its demands strict adherence to the “Westminster Confession of Faith” of 1647, (a manifesto of Presbyterianism aimed at copper-fastening its control on British Protestantism mainly in despite of the left-wing conventicles of its time and in alliance with the British monarchy) which made specific reference to the Pope as “Anti-Christ”. This narrowness coupled with its political quietism alienated liberals and radicals from the Evangelical wing of Presbyterianism. It was not just coincidence that Henry Montgomery, the leading Arian of the 1820s would be a Whig nor that Henry Cooke his leading Evangelical opponent would be a Tory. Nor was it to be accidental that, while the Orange Society kept the rural Episcopalian plebeians in line with Ascendancy politics, organised Evangelicalism was to play an 59

ideological role in a process that would bring the bulk of Presbyterians into the same political camp as the Orangemen. That this development was allied and eventually fixed with a growth of support for the parliamentary union was natural enough. A large number of Orangemen had opposed the act, in the name of colon self-determination, and the same tendency kept reviving at intervals for another seventy years. Yet the policy of the government of the United Kingdom was, as has been seen, to woo the Episcopalians and, if to a lesser extent, the Presbyterians, before the Catholics. This policy was successful because supported by objective factors. The union was a logical political expression of the needs of the Ulster cotton interests as they were developing well before 1801. More important was the fact recognised by the more intelligent Ascendancy interests that Ascendancy was impossible without the backing of Great Britain.

In 1798, it had been Britain that saved the day for the counter-revolution. The Protestant interest could survive as a client of Protestant Britain : not otherwise. Even the drain of capital (the most disastrous economic result of the Union) was unlikely to be reversed for an unstable colon regime. The more anti-Catholic meant logically the more pro-British. Despite regular attempts to revive Foster and Saurin’s 1801 position, this equation has held true until today. But while it was natural for Orangeism to become pro-British, its eventual dominance of the Unionist camp was stimulated by further developments. Just as Orange anti-Unionism survived as a force with recurring upsurges into the 1870s, so, too, a liberal unionist tradition continued until it was crushed in the decade afterwards between Orange Unionism and democratic Irish Nationalism. Nonetheless, in Ulster particularly, and at least from the parliamentary reform of 1832, the liberal unionists were a minority compared to the Tories.

In the Presbyterian Church Evangelicalism was in the Ascendant from 1829 and its leaders soon formalised an alliance with Orangeism.

The original impetus for the movement had gone. The war and the Rising were over. The threat of Catholic hegemony was non-existent as long as the Union existed. Despite this, evangelicalism with its programme for reviving the spirit of the Reformation (including anti- Catholicism) flourished alongside the more officially encouraged Orangeism. Certainly the continuance of the principles of Ascendancy in the Union bureaucracy encouraged this.

However, it would not have developed as far as it did if it had not satisfied the interests of 60

the Ulster landlords (who had encouraged Orangeism in the first place) and of the industrialists of the province.

THE DEFEAT OF ULSTER LABOUR : THE TRIUMPH OF EVANGELICALISM

Rural Orangeism had developed out of the defeat of a peasant movement and the landlords’ us of religion to keep it defeated. Evangelicalism and, eventually, urban Orangeism would develop out of a similar history of struggle in the industrial sphere. After a mysterious gap of a quarter of a century from the Great Turn-Out of the 1760s, trade unionism in Ulster was seen to advance from the late 1780s. In the next decade it clashed with the local Volunteers and with such United Irish leaders as Samuel Nielson. Nonetheless it survived these movements, particularly in the cotton industry, as the war boom provided the most suitable conditions for workers to organise. Even so, by 1802, the Belfast Newsletter warned against the growth of trade unionism. The next year Henry Joy McCracken’s surviving brothers swore to oppose it. From 1814, the wars and the accompanying boom were over. Class divisions were intensified as industrial receipts declined. As in contemporary Britain, the years up to 1820 composed a period of strikes, riots and occasional murder for class purposes.

“Not only were the weavers in Belfast organised, but those in the country around Lisburn as well. In April 1815, a large number of workers from the Maze marched into Belfast and left their webs unwoven at the warerooms as a protest against reduced wages. When the magistrates attempted to arrest the leaders rioting broke out. The most serious outrage took place in February 1816, when some twenty men attempted to blow up the house of an unpopular manufacturer in Belfast. Two men who had been found guilty of taking part were hanged in Belfast in September. In April 1817, Gordon Maxwell of Lisburn, the president of the Muslin Weavers’ Society was fatally shot on the Malone Road. Before his death, he accused his employer, John McCann of the crime. McCann was put on trial for his life but acquitted. In 1818, there was another big strike, although conditions had somewhat improved”. Green, op. cit., p.101.

This last improvement was merely temporary. 1818 was in fact the last year in which wages and conditions in the cotton trade were decided by general compact between union and employers. From the next year onwards this custom was replaced by a free-for-all which had 61

the immediate effect of reducing wages in the Ulster cotton industry by one third. The repeal of the anti-trade union Combination Acts in 1824 did not arrest this process. After 1825, as James Campbell would report to the Parliamentary Committee on Combinations of Workmen, the cotton trade was altogether “free” from trade unions. (Select Committee on Combinations of Workmen, 1838, Evidence Volume 1, p.229). By 1839, the textile weavers’ money wages had dropped by another third, despite a rise in prices over the previous decade.

The relationship between this struggle and its defeat and the Ulster Protestant community’s contemporary move rightwards has not been investigated to the same extent as the conditions for the birth of the Orange Society. However, in some ways, the latter event parallels the former. In particular, the essential political question of Evangelicalism was of less use to the employers only than the open scab politics of the Orange Lodge (which was boasting in 1813 of its strike breaking acts).

Both Orangeism, and Evangelicalism had their anti-Catholicism given food enabling both to strengthen themselves and, hence, the employers. As early as 1813, Belfast had its first sectarian riot. From this date onwards, too, the religious divisions among the workers of that town were encouraged by a new development. Between 1813 and 1851, the population of Belfast rose from 28,000 to 100,300. More significantly, during the earlier part of this period, the increase seems to have been mainly a Catholic one; in 1812, Catholics composed 7 one seventh of Belfast’s numbers : by 1834, they were two fifths thereof. (The comparative figures for the percentage of Irish immigrants in the population of their major British centres — Glasgow and south Lanarkshire were one eighth and just over one tenth respectively) Even more significantly, much of Belfast’s influx was composed of weavers or aspiring weavers from the religiously - mixed areas of south and central Ulster where the textile trade was less developed and more vulnerable to the slump. How far these people were brought to the Lagan valley by the capitalists specifically to scab against the militant weavers of this mainly Protestant area remains unclear. With the example of Orangeism before them, it would be surprising if no capitalist had the idea. What is more certain is that the labour struggles in this area between 1815 and 1820 were fought on a definite class basis; the recorded confrontations were between employers and employed rather than between different 62

groups of workers. It was not until 1825, the year that the local textile workers’ organisation collapsed finally that Belfast suffered its second religious riot. The same year, too, Belfast businessmen founded their own special Orange Lodge.

Whether or not it was the growth of Belfast’s Catholic population or its bourgeoisie’s fear of its militant workers, Belfast’s ideological radicalism was declining steadily both during and after the strikes. In 1817, the McCrackens’ Whig cousin Henry Joy, wrote proudly that a Belfast meeting had called for parliamentary reform “not with boldness and discretion for which this town was formally characterised ... but with the most becoming temperance and moderation” — Henry Joy, Introduction to Historical Collections Relative to the Town of Belfast, 1817 included in Belfast Politics by Henry Joy and William Bruce, Athol Books, B.1.C.0O., Belfast, 1974, pp.80-81.

This liberal decline paralleled — if it did not reflect — the advance of Evangelicalism in the Presbyterian church. “For at least a quarter of a century before the commencement of the Arian controversy [that is, roughly, from 1800 — D.R. O’C.L.], congregations had been scanning with increasing vigilance the doctrines propounded from the pulpit; and on the occurrence of a vacancy, the very suspicion of a ‘New Light’ [Arianism] was almost sure to destroy the prospects of a candidate” —Reid, op. cit. Volume III, p.461.

Henry Cooke, the rising leader of Evangelicalism himself succeeded an Arian in his living, That this was so was understandable enough in view of the middle class fear of Catholics and of the workers. The weavers, themselves, of course did not share the latter fear, but tended, and increasingly so, to the former; the defeat of their struggles to sustain their wages did the rest. In addition, there was the disorientation of society under pressure of industrialisation.

In turn, many Presbyterian ministers were tempted, without pressure from their congregations other than the negative one of the latters’ desertion, to abandon the apparently dry reasonableness of Arianism for the inspirational gimmickry of the Evangelicals.

By 1825, “Orthodox [i.e. Evangelical - D.R. O’C.L.] candidates were generally preferred when vacancies occurred in the congregation of the Synod of Ulster” ~ Reid, ibid., p.422.

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The political tendencies of this move, were shown immediately in the decline of the Synod’s support for Catholic Emancipation. In 1815, the Presbyterian Synod gave the cause its last unequivocal support. Thirteen years later, on the eve of the Emancipation’s actual achievement, the most the Synod could do was send a motion to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland to assure him of “mutual good will to our fellow Christians”.

After 1820, the defeated and still weakening weavers tended to turn naturally to the consolations of religion. The textile bourgeoisie had a real interest in encouraging this turn and in helping ensure that the religion to which their workers looked would be inspirational rather than analytic. Such a tendency could not have hindered the collapse of the textile union in 1825. The final result of it was made clear by 1835. In that year, John Boyd, a cotton handloom weaver, declared to the Select Committee on Handloom Weavers:- “Through a long period of privation and suffering, the energy of mind [the Belfast weavers] were formerly possessed of is broken” — Evidence of John Boyd before the Select Committee on Handloom Weavers, 3-6/4/35 , Report of Parliamentary Committees, 1835, Volume XII, p.98. However humane they may have claimed to be, the textile employers were bound to welcome such a decline in morale, They had two particular justifications for doing so.

In the first place their victory over the weavers could only reduce the sum total of all conditions that threatened their wellbeing; it could not end other conditions besides that of a militant labour force. In particular, the cotton slump that had stimulated that labour force’ militancy continued after it had been crushed. After the dropping of the last tariffs in 1824, the crisis intensified. The whole Irish cotton industry was threatened by British competition for a restricted market. That the Ulster cotton firms had beaten their employees most decisively and were best able to weather the storm, was shown very clearly after 1820. Despite the repeal of the Combination Acts, the Ulster textile trade remained a centre of subservient labour in the midst of ruthless labour struggles that took place all over Ireland. In particular, Belfast labour as a whole remained quiet when the Dublin workers staged Ireland’s first general strike in 1826, a year 64

after the town’s second sectarian riot. Later, it played no role in Docherty’s Spinners’ Union after 1829. The economic benefits of this to the employers (and its exact obverse to the workers) can be seen from evidence given the Parliamentary Committee on Handloom Weavers. From this, the decline of the weavers’ wage rates in Belfast can be compared to that in Drogheda, Co.

Louth, whose textile industry had been in the eighteenth century a major rival of that of the Lagan valley but was outpaced by it decisively in 1835. The figures given in the evidence show that, whereas, between 1812 and 1835, weavers’ pay in Drogheda had been cut by three fifths, in Belfast, the reduction was nearer four fifths. The situation in the Belfast textile trade had enabled its proprietors to exploit their workers more than elsewhere in Ireland. (In Britain at this time weavers’ wages fell less than in Belfast but more than in the rest of Ireland : in Bolton, Burnley and Shipton they fell by just seven tenths between 1812 and 1834, in Manchester by 65% between 1812 and 1835).

From this, they were able to weather the economic storm. It was after 1820 that Ulster capitalism (as distinct from Protestant capitalism generally in Ireland) began to develop its own specifically provincial banking system. The Northern Bank was founded in 1824, the Ulster Bank, in 1836. At the same time it must be recognised that this aspect of economic expansion is, in itself, inconclusive evidence. The continuing rise of the Irish national bourgeoisie, stimulated and led by Daniel O’Connell, was expressed in that bourgeoisie founding its own banking companies. In 1825, Catholic businessmen founded the Provincial Bank; in 1834, O’Connell founded the National Bank. Only time would show the relative values of nationalism and sectarianism in economic growth.

What was decisive about the Belfast textile firms’ increasing their capital accumulation relative to their payments in wages was that they were enabled thereby to break from the cotton processing in which they were uncompetitive despite all reductions in labour costs, and, instead, to initiate a new and more economic form of linen production. The technological change that allowed this to happen was the “wet” flax spinning process. In 1828, this was introduced to the Belfast textile trade by the Mulholland brothers. Their cotton mill was destroyed by fire. When they rebuilt the premises they rebuilt them as a linenspinning concern. This began the revolutionising of the whole Ulster textile trade which 65

enabled it finally to supersede its southern Irish rivals and regain its status as the linen peer of the cotton and woollen industries.

This achievement preceded by one year the decisive victory of Evangelicalism in the Presbyterian Synod. 1825 had seen not only the collapse of the textile workers’ union in Ulster and Belfast’s second sectarian riot but the beginning of a final offensive by Henry Cooke and his allies: the opening of the cold war between them and the Arians under Montgomery. What was already the Evangelical majority in the Synod agreed in this year to begin to codify the laws of their church. The committee that executed this work based it on the “Westminster Confession of Faith”. Successive Synods passed its proposals. At the Cookstown Synod of 1829, the majority passed a measure banning from the Presbyterian ministry candidates who did not accept its line on the Trinity, Original Sin, Justification by Faith and Regeneration by the Holy Spirit. Montgomery and the Arians receded from the Synod to form their own Church.

In his handling of the Arian controversy, Cooke has been criticised, most notably by the Unionist historian, J.B. Woodburn. Woodburn considered Cooke to be too hasty in pressing for a decisive victory over what was clearly a declining group. This strategy forced out of the Synod many who might not have left had a more patient policy prevailed. How far Cooke was trying consciously to drive out a liberal opposition to him, it is, of course, now impossible to say. The Evangelicals’ establishment of their hegemony over the Presbyterian Synod highlighted the forces that had enabled the Mulhollands to switch from cotton to linen. The achievement of Catholic emancipation in the same year provided a contrast that polarised economic, political and social, as well as religious, divisions in Ulster itself and in Ireland as a whole.

Thirty years previously it could have had a different effect.

By 1829, Ireland — and Ulster — were divided. That this division would continue in being and deepen was to be ensured in the next thirty years.

(To be continued) 66

CHAPTER 5 — THE MAKING OF A LABOUR ARISTOCRACY

The first chapters of this book examined the original plantation of Ulster in its historical environment, the development of its planter population as a component part of a system of Protestant Ascendancy over the Irish Catholic majority, its association with the democratic aspirations of that majority and, in the last chapter, its return to identification with Ascendancy politics as part of its bourgeoisie’s defence of their industries.

This chapter will consider how this revived adherence to the Ascendancy continued to justify itself first to the Ulster industrial bourgeoisie and, then, to the Protestant workers that, while it exploited, it admitted as junior partners in a political alliance to suppress twice over the latters’ Catholic peers.

THE BRITISH CONTRIBUTION

Such developments were not the direct result of conscious British policy. Certainly, in the thirty years after 1829, this involved a number of disastrous errors in connection with Ireland.

The Great Famine is a particular blot on its reputation. Even so, as far as the Protestant hegemony in Ulster was concerned, the British governments did not try consistently to increase it. In fact one of their earliest reforms, in 1836, was precisely the forced disbandment of the Grand Orange Lodge. This was less impressive than it sounds; the local lodges continued and the Grand Lodge itself was revived semi-clandestinely in 1844, after O’Connell’s repeal agitation had been defeated at Clontarf, to balance Sir Robert Peel’s Conservative government’s attempt to pay off the Catholic hierarchy by subsidising Maynooth seminary. In 1848, too, the Whig government of Lord John Russell armed the Orangemen for possible action against the rebellion of Young Ireland. On the other hand, this strengthening of Orangeism caused the Lodges to overreach themselves — most notably by the provocative march that led to the Dolly’s Brae brawl in 1849 — and the same government passed the Party Processions Act in 1850, which banned such processions, formally for all but, in practice for the Order. In 1857, after this law had failed to prevent a major riot, magistrates were forbidden Orange membership. Apart from this history of advance and retreats, the only definite move by the British parliament to advance Protestant hegemony in Ulster was the establishment of the Belfast Town Police Force in 1845 : this 67

force became notorious as the partial agent of the Conservative and generally anti-Catholic Belfast Town Council until its dissolution in 1865.

Britain’s responsibility in advancing the Ulster Protestant cause at Catholic expense, is more definite than its conscious acts. In the first place, Britain was Ireland’s colonial metropolis.

What was more, its population was overwhelmingly of the same religion (Protestantism, whether Episcopalian or Dissenter) as Ireland’s minority in the north-east. Simply by its existence, the Union gave this minority a moral support in its actions and enabled it to go further in asserting itself than it would have done had it not existed. Just as British colonial rule had planted Ulster in the first place, so the fact of parliamentary union handicapped any conscious attempts to administer Ireland even-handedly as between Catholic and Protestant.

In addition, the Union set the stage for the practices that would ultimately be covered by the term Orangeism in its more specific economic aspects. Both the British metropolis and its growing colonial empire outside Europe gave Ulster manufacturers a ready-made market.

This enabled them to ignore their home orders both in Ireland as an whole and in Ulster itself.

Thus, on the one hand, they could turn their backs on Irish markets outside Ulster and, indeed, follow this contempt by a tendency to political contempt for the masses of Catholic Ireland. On the other hand, they did not have to worry unduly about the stability or the wealth of the population in their province. They were able to tolerate religious dissension and, even, at first, though not so necessarily later, a market limited by the lowest wage rates that the workers in the area could be persuaded to accept. The Protestant industrialist of Ulster could and did act towards his employees of all denominations as irresponsibly as was explained by the knowledge that all he had to do was employ their labour power that he might profit by it elsewhere.

It was in these ways that Britain, though it did not consistently sponsor what would become specifically Orange hegemony, held the ring for the developments that would lead to this.

INDUSTRIALISATION AND ASCENDANCY

If Britain did not change matters for the better, there was no force in Ireland itself that could do so. The developing Catholic-based national movement did not neutralise the anti- Catholicism of the Orange Lodges and Evangelicals for over a decade after the Emancipation 68

Act. As will be shown, the latter were on the offensive, and the moderation of their Catholic opponents did not encourage them to moderate their own demands.

As for the Protestants outside Ulster, their most influential figures were landlords or civil servants who tended to agree with the more extreme wings of Ulster Protestantism.

As in Britain, as in Ireland, so in Ulster itself. The Mulhollands’ achievement, followed by the achievements of the Ewarts, Grimshaws and other textile magnates following their examples, provided in itself a strengthening of the forces that had sustained it. Whereas cotton spinning had been a heavy job that required male labour to work it, linen spinning could be done by women. The employers took full advantage of this. A whole new, inexperienced labour force replaced the older one. Class disorientation was increased.

This had two obvious results. Firstly, trade unionism in the textile trade remained not so much weak as literally non-existent. Even in 1829, John Docherty, the cotton spinners’ union organiser in Britain tried and failed to organise the Belfast spinners. Later, in 1834, the Owenite agitation for general trade unionism had more success. It affected sections of the Belfast labour force and even mobilised in Mulholland’s new linen mills. The strikers were sacked and quickly replaced. As late as 1853 “‘an eminent linen manufacturer residing near” Belfast was quoted as declaring that there were still no linen workers’ unions, (TE. Cliffe Leslie “Trade Unions and Combinations in 1853”, p.13, from Transactions of Dublin Statistical Society, Volume II, Hodges and Smith, Dublin 1853). The situation did not change until a linen boom was stimulated by the cotton slump caused by the American Civil War in the 1860s — and, even then, it seems that organised militancy was not achieved finally until the 1870s. The effect of this on wages was inevitable:- “The spinner could make no more than 2d or 1d a day where previously she had been able to earn 4d to 6d” — Green, op. cit., p.116.

The weakening of the economic position of the spinners was accompanied by an equivalent continued decline in that of the linen weavers.

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“The flax-spinning mills brought the weaver no additional prosperity as the cotton mills had done forty and fifty years before. His earnings remained static at about a shilling a day.

Wages began to rise after the great decrease in population consequent on the famine, but the manufacturer counteracted this by the belated introduction of the power loom”, ibid., p.118.

“Tt is certain that the wages of linen weavers in general remained very low until 1845, and were lower at that time than they had been twenty years earlier” — Gill, op. cit., p.327.

This economic weakening of the position of the north-east Ulster textile worker caused him (and her) to retreat still further into the religious milieu : to become, however impoverished absolutely, relatively part, within his or her environment, of a labour aristocracy that was the readier because of its original defeats to throw itself on the mercy of its employers if of the same religion, rather than with the unemployed who threatened to usurp its jobs. As all textile employers were, in fact, Protestants (both Episcopalian and Dissenter), they tended, naturally, in an era in which their own liberal views were already eroding, to accept their workers’ prejudices especially as they encouraged the latters’ weakness. They structured employment along the lines of their own religion. Apart from a few linen mills in the Falls area (built relatively late the better to exploit the local population’s greater poverty and lesser expectations), Catholics were either excluded totally from employment (in the case of weavers : orders) or were segregated in the less skilled jobs. The Protestant mill-workers’ residential area (particularly Sandy Row, built in the 1840’s, within explosive distance of the Catholic Falls) became necessarily centres of opposition to Catholicism, the religion of those who might some day supplant the Protestant spinners with their employers. Though the weavers remained home producers, outside the mills, they, too feared competition, and, in the context of class war defeat, as in the early days of Orangeism in Co. Armagh, they centred these fears on the Catholics rather than on the employers who exploited both.

These latter certainly benefited from the vertical division that separated their workers from those of other religions and allied employer and worker on sectarian lines. Between 1838 and 1853, the number of Irish linen mills doubled; early all the new ones were situated within 15 miles of Belfast. What was more, this growth occurred in a trade that was almost unique among Irish and even among Ulster industries in its workers’ “freedom” from organisation.

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The Belfast textile employers were perfectly aware of this. At the Committee on Handloom Weavers, in 1835, Alexander Moncrieffe, a muslin manufacturer elected at a meeting of Belfast textile entrepreneurs to put their point of view, reported that wage rates in the town would enable an employer to save 5% “taking into consideration the expense attendant on establishing and carrying on branches there”. He mentioned, too, “one house I have reason to believe came over, not because the wages were lower but to avoid the operation of trade unions” — Evidence of Alexander Moncrieffe before the Select Committee on Handioom Weavers 6-7/4/1835, Report of Parliamentary Committees, 1835, Volume XIII, pp.116-117.

This was exceptional amongst the Belfast trades. James Campbell, three years later, exempted the textile trade from the numbers of those Belfast industries “checked by combination” (Select Committee _on Combinations of Workmen, op. cit., p.229). The message was repeated by Cliffe Leslie’s informant in 1853 who proclaimed his trade to be “free” but added “that in Belfast almost all classes of mechanics have their unions”.

Such information has to be qualified. Outside the militant printers, in fact, by 1864, most trade organisations in Belfast were linked to the Orange Order and, hence, responsible to landlord and, increasingly, capitalist control on a regional, if not a directly, vocational, basis : a form of corporatist organisation that anticipated the ideals of Mussolini and Pius XI. Even so, to the Protestant industrialists, direct control without even the Orange distortion of trade unionism was preferable to that which prevailed outside the textile trade.

For linen was unique in being Ulster’s growth industry in the 1830’s and 1840's — apart from shipbuilding and Mackie’s engineering works of which the latter’s employment practices owed much to those in the linen trade.

Moncrieffe recognised, though he exaggerated, the cause of this lack of class organisation amongst the textile workers:- “T think trades unions are not likely to exist to any extent in Belfast, for this reason, there is so much political difference between the men that they cannot permanently co-operate together; for instance, there are a number of men Roman-Catholics and a number Protestants; suppose there was a mandate to come from the unions to Roman-Catholics (supposing a union to exist in Belfast), he would consider the mandate of his priest to be 71

paramount in authority and importance to the mandate of the other. Well, suppose it were to come to an Orangeman : he is, I think, morally bound to obey the injunctions of the Grand Lodge, and therefore he would consider that paramount to the trades unions : so that these conflicting principles operate in a way that trades union are not likely to exist to any great extent in Belfast”. Q. “You consider an Orangeman bound to obey the injunction of his lodge?”

A. “T think he would do it: I will not say what he is imperatively bound to do, but I think he would be inclined to do it”.

Q. “Then the weavers in Belfast are a good deal divided between Catholics and Protestants ?” A. “Yes”. - Evidence of the Select Committee on Handloom Weavers, op. cit., pp.120- 121. This did overstate matters, though its exaggerations were more obvious than real. Trade unionism in Belfast did exist outside the textile trade. However, it did so in fields of which Moncrieffe had less knowledge and about which, in any case, he was not testifying.

Moreover, as has been said, much of this unionisation, outside the printing and some other trades, was Orange rather than of the workers. A further objection to Moncrieffe is that, in the textile trade, economic boom would lead eventually to the workers overcoming their backwardness in the name of, at least, genuine trade union consciousness. Here again, this development was made among what had been established as an overwhelmingly Protestant and Orange work-force. A more definite objection is that the equation of “Protestant” and “Orange” was too glib for the conditions of 1835. Yet this merely anticipated the consummation of trends that existed already in Ulster society.

Further positive evidence for Moncrieffe as witness of a general recognition of the connection between religion and. working-class quietism in the textile trade can be found in the fortunes of the trade’s own entrepreneurs. Before 1798 these had been, if not Republicans, then at least liberals. With the final triumph of linen, their numbers divided.

Nearly half Ulster’s linen employers were Conservatives by 1885. What was more this proportion included most of Belfast’s linen magnates and the most successful ones such as the Mulhollands — who began the change to linen — and the Ewarts who overtook them as the province’s largest linen factory owners. This was to be expected: Conservatives were less 72

inclined than Liberals to shrink from using religious discrimination as a necessary means to keep their workers disorganised.

Not only Moncrieffe and his fellow-employers could anticipate the final alliance between Ulster Protestantism and its Orange wing. The Evangelical majority in the Presbyterian Synod was eager to achieve this. Though, in 1829, only the six central theological points of the “Westminster Confession” had been accepted by the Synod as required for all ministerial candidates, the Confession’s spirit was upheld by the members. For their overwhelming majority, the idea that the Pope was Anti-Christ was no empty formula. Support for the proposition meant, logically, alliance with all other Protestant groups against the main enemy — the Pope and his supporters, particularly those (like O’Connell and his followers) who seemed to flaunt their error rather than staying decently obscure. At the Coleraine Synod of 1831, Montgomery and his allies were denounced for being willing to ally with Catholics.

The same Synod voted an address to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland which accepted, though it regretted, his suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act. At Monaghan, the next year, a motion on marriage clarified the position: “Often have inducements been held out to us to make common cause with the Romish church against the Irish Ecclesiastical Establishment, in which we have uniformly refused to join”. With such an outlook predominant within the Synod, it was perfectly logical, and, indeed, among Presbyterians, uncontroversial, when, two years later, Henry Cooke (albeit in his private capacity) “pronounced the banns of marriage” between the Episcopalian and Presbyterian Churches at an Orange meeting at Hillsborough, Co. Down. The next year, at Belfast, the Synod agreed that candidates for the ministry should be required to accept the entire “Westminster Confession”.

This triumph of Evangelicalism did not mean, necessarily, that the Synod itself or its successor, the General Assembly which replaced it after a reunion between it and a breakaway Presbyterian group in 1840, would henceforth follow a line wholly reactionary. In fact as a formally democratic body — perhaps, until 1842 the most democratic body in Ulster both Synod and Assembly were capable of bowing to pressure from their lay members. In 1848 the latter passed a motion that called for the Ulster Custom to be given legal status. The trouble was that any such liberal move would always tend to have its support weakened by any over-enthusiastic response from Ireland’s Catholic majority. For most Presbyterians, reform was fully acceptable only if granted freely by the Protestant rulers of the British isles, It was not a coincidence that, in the National Land League’s agitation of 1879-1881 which 73

made impossible the future long-term survival of Irish landlordism, the General Assembly would keep quiet in the face of an overwhelmingly Catholic mass movement. In short the Presbyterian Church in Ireland lay and clerical had become an open partner in maintaining Protestant Ascendancy. If this was the case for the Irish Presbyterian Church it was still second in this to the Episcopalian Church of Ireland. Though Britain attacked its Orange allies, during the late 1830s and early 1840s, and though it limited their freedom during the 1850s and 1860s, the Lodges’ influence more than compensated in the towns for what was lost in the countryside.

Among the Episcopalian linen workers around Sandy Row, the Order was particularly attractive both as a substitute — however inadequate in fact - for lost rights and as a means of asserting their monopoly of their remaining rights against the Catholics of the nearby Falls Road. Other developments to this end were less dramatic if equally effective. The most important — because the most general — affected the workers in most Belfast trades other than textiles (which have already been considered), printing, and a few others. Particularly after the decline of the Owenite union movement in the 1830s, and under pressure from the Order’s banning between 1836 and 1848, the Lodges converted themselves into trade organisations of (Protestant) workers. This was in form rather than in content; the Order itself remained an allclass religious sectarian body in its policy. However the existence even of pseudo-trade unionism may have alienated some investment in the 1830s and 1840s, from entrepreneurs outside the textile industry. It was its prevention of trade unions, not the existence of pseudounions that helped maintain and advance the latter.

Two other developments helped the Order to grow. From 1825, when Belfast No. 7 Lodge was founded, it extended a specific appeal to businessmen. By 1868, Belfast had four businessmen’s Lodges. Meanwhile, in 1834, Cooke’s proclamation of the “banns of matriage” between the main Protestant Churches encouraged an existing process of Presbyterian participation in the Order.

Despite these last expressions of a strengthening of a base among the bourgeoisie, membership of the Orange Order remained predominantly composed of plebeians and landlords. However, its tenets were upheld openly by many Presbyterians and, even more, by 74

Episcopalians who were not members. In 1854 one such Episcopalian, Richard Davison, senior (Conservative) MP for Belfast became patron of the Christchurch Protestant Association, which included amongst its objectives the undoing of Catholic Emancipation.

Later still, in 1881, the hierarchy of the Episcopalian Church of Ireland was still denouncing that democratic measure. Both Episcopalian and Dissenting Conservatives agreed in 1848 in refusing to renominate the third (Conservative) Mayor of Belfast specifically for collecting funds for the building of Belfast’s fourth Catholic Church. Matters had changed since 1831, when subscribing for the third such church had stil] been uncontentious.

So Ulster’s material expansion was based on a Protestant workforce that was allied to its masters against the claims of its Catholic class equals for the same job opportunities and with a common ideology that was aimed at maintaining such an alliance. This was done most obviously (and successfully) in the textile trade, by organisations outside the mills, but, in other firms, through the Orange Order’s anticipation of twentieth century corporatism. In these conditions the “marriage” of Presbyterian and Episcopalian within an Orange hegemony was politically an accomplished fact. This accomplishment has now to be seen in relation to the policies of the opponents of the revived Ascendancy alliance: the Catholic majority of the Irish and the Irish and Ulster Liberals who tried both to support the Union and oppose Ascendancy.

THE EDUCATION DISPUTE : THE CATHOLIC BACKLASH

The Evangelical victory in the Synod, though definite, had not yet been formalised before its leaders showed themselves ready to act accordingly to the belief in the unity of Protestants without — indeed against — Catholics.

In 1831, the British introduced a secular system of national primary education for Ireland. It was accepted almost unanimously by the Catholic population, including O’Connell, the majority of the Bishops and, even, Edmund Ignatius Rice, the founder and head of the Christian Brothers Order. Only Dr. John MacHale, the coadjutor of the diocese of Killala, was opposed it. On the other hand, the Protestants were equally united against it; only Montgomery and his fellow “non-subscribing” Presbyterians supported it. The Episcopalian Church acted to use its established position to subvert the new system’s secularism. The 75

Presbyterians, whose church did not have the same status, had to be more open in their attack.

The Monaghan Synod of 1832 called for “an open Bible in all schools”. The Derry Synod of 1834 voted down a compromise proposal on the matter for the specific reason that it truckled to Catholicism. Later the same year, a special Synod at Belfast announced a scheme for an all-Irish system of specifically Presbyterian schools. Finally, in 1840, the Belfast Synod (the last before the Synod’s supersession by the General Assembly) agreed to a new compromise.

Under this, Presbyterian schools were accepted as part of the national system of education whilst, in the supposedly secular ones, freedom was given to read the Bible, albeit subject to parental veto in the case of the individual student. This was the result, in fact, not only of the Presbyterian agitation but of Episcopalian diplomacy. Cooke’s “marriage” alliance had shown its effectiveness. How far this triumph for Protestantism affected the attitude of the Catholic Church to the national system cannot be established clearly. All that is certain is that the Synod’s triumph preceded the first major breach in “Cisalpinism” — the relative liberalism that had prevailed in Irish Catholicism since the beginning of the century. Up to January 1841, Pope Gregory XVI, accepted the Irish national schools system as emanating from lawful authority. Now he gave that system’s Episcopal opponent the right to opt out of it and run their own diocesan schemes. As Archbishop of Tuam, McHale used this dispensation to organise in his archdiocese with the aid of the Christian Brothers a network of Catholic schools. Other bishops began to follow his example.

This was a major reverse to Cisalpinism. It had been tolerated by the Papacy as a necessary policy in a state (the United Kingdom) in which its supporters were a minority and of which it still hoped to convert (the British) majority. Lukewarm, at best, about the Irish national questions, the Pope allowed his bishops to support that cause in order to keep the loyalty of their flock. Once it was clear that Britain would change the rules under pressure to maintain Protestant privilege, Cisalpinism was doomed, in the eyes both of the Irish people and the Papacy. As sees fell vacant, Cisalpine bishops were replaced by Ultramontane ones.

This process was hastened among the laity by the activities of Daniel O’Connell. By 1840, he and the economic crisis had between them reduced the power of the trade unions, though without the benefits that had accrued to the Ulster textile trade from a similar class victory.

From 1839, he was under attack from the left on another front: the demand for parliamentary 76

reform that was being put by the Chartist movement, which Patrick O’Higgins was trying to establish in Ireland. O’Connell had not relied on open alliance with the clergy in his attack on trade unionism, although Archbishop Murray intervened on his side. Against Chartism, his alliance with the Church was more open. In the twenties, he and the hierarchy had been untied against the Ribbonmen, a movement that combined revolutionary and sectarian views.

Now they were attacking a less equivocally democratic movement.

This process was pushed further by O’Connell’s defeat in the early 1845’s. With the victory of the Conservative Party under Peel in the general election of 1841, O’Connell turned from co-operation with the previous Whig government in exchange for limited reform to outright agitation for Repeal of the Union. This strategy collapsed in 1843, when a mass meeting at Clontarf was banned decisively by the government and O’Connell imprisoned for a short period. On his release, he was faced by a group within his movement centred on the periodical, The Nation and demanding a less constitutional line than that he had maintained.

This was the Young Ireland Society. O’Connell outmanoeuvred the Young Irelanders precisely by appealing to the Catholic sectarianism that he used against the Chartists and that was being encouraged anyway by the growth of Ultramontanism. He mobilised this in a campaign against the government’s scheme to establish a secular system of Irish university colleges. Young Ireland was isolated. It organised, if that word can be used, an unsuccessful putsch a year after O’Connell’s death, and left a number of cadres who, would, ten years later, found what became the Irish Republican Brotherhood.

In his last years, in fact, O’Connell had helped reverse the religious-political system of alliances that he had followed for most of his life. Whereas he and J.K.L. had allied to fight the Catholic revolutionary strategy of Ribbonism, constitutional Nationalism would be from now on in alliance with the specifically sectarian demands of the Church and against a revolutionary movement that would tend to be lukewarm towards clericalism.

As a further reinforcement of this, the Great Hunger weakened and demoralised the Irish rural Catholics sapping their revolutionary vitality (as Young Ireland found to its cost) and leaving them open to a greater dose of opiate. In 1850, the Catholic bishops in Synod at Thurles put the seal on the new hard-line clericalism.

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The main importance of the defeat of Irish Cisalpinism was its effect on Irish Catholicism rather than in inter-denominational relationships. The Protestants’ position had been effectively determined before 1840. Nonetheless. the decline of Catholic liberalism did give an extra justification to Catholicism’s opponents within the Irish and particularly the Ulster- Protestant community. The linkage of Catholicism and constitutional Nationalism was one more obstacle in the Protestant Liberals’ development towards the democratic position of self-determination. On the other hand, Republicanism with its integral policy physical force had equally little appeal to the relatively prosperous Ulster Protestants. The developments among Irish Nationalists in the 1840s did not force the Ulster Protestants to change their politics. They did provide a further barrier to their changing back.

THE STRANGE DEBILITY OF LIBERAL ULSTER

What is really remarkable about Irish Liberalism outside the Nationalist movement is that it survived at all. The movement’s policy of being against both Ascendancy and the Repeal of the Union with Britain that provided the context necessary for that Ascendancy provided little appeal to any class to provide a base for it. On the one hand, it opposed the aspirations of the Catholic majority of the Irish; on the other it attacked the policies that maintained the privileges of the Protestant minority whether landlords, bureaucrats, capitalists and, indeed, workers. ‘Until the achievement of Catholic Emancipation, many pro-union liberals were able to cooperate with the National movement towards this aim. After 1829, however, they broke with O’Connell over his demand for Repeal. Besides such as these, sorne Nationalists, like J.K.L., disagreed merely on the timing, in that there were pressing reforms to be made in the condition of the people — particularly the ending of tithes to the established Church. Other Nationalists went further, like Feargus O’Connor, the future Chartist leader, who urged radical social moves by the government to overcome Irish poverty and who broke with O’Connell on this. All these remained dedicated in principle to Repeal of the Union.

Many, though not all, the non-Nationalist Irish liberals agreed, generally, with J.K.L. though not usually with O’Connor, except on the central point; their aim was to use reform precisely to help abort the demand for Repeal. They wanted to reduce, if not end, Ascendancy, the better to win the mass of the Irish to the Union. The trouble was that most Irish supporters of the Union backed it increasingly and precisely because it maintained Ascendancy. The 78

liberals could not appeal to the Irish Catholics because they distrusted the insurrectionary potential and the danger that any popular agitation amongst them would turn against the Union. What prevented Irish liberals, as yet, from becoming a mere group of cranks were three interests. There was the British government which was itself normally Whig, or Liberal between 1830 and 1866. There was what seems to have been (the figures are based on 1885 statistics at the end of a period of Ulster Liberal revival) a continuing majority of Ulster (though not Belfast) linen employers. Finally there were the Dissenting tenant farmers of Ulster, particularly Co. Antrim. In practice these were inadequate foundations. The Whig governments were ready enough to act under mass pressure from O’Connell as their Liberal heirs would act under similar pressure from Parnell; they knew their Irish supporters had little support and ignored them. The liberal magnates (liberals more by inheritance than interest or conviction) were embarrassed by the fact that their wealth came from the Ascendancy practices they claimed to abhor; politically they often tended to seek to outdo the Ulster Conservatives at their own game rather than building a Liberal Party. As for the tenant farmers, Thomas MacKnight, editor, for thirty years of the Northern Whig, described their politics all too accurately:- “Sometimes through calling themselves Liberals, they had apparently less public spirit than the Orangemen. They considered every question form the point of view of their own farms.

They appeared to think of no other. Much, however can be said in their excuse. Their forefathers had been sent over to do a great work of colonisation and it was admitted that they had done their work well. When the occupiers under whatever name were given votes, without in Ulster possessing any security of tenure, they became more and more dependent on the landlords. They were far away from the great industrial and populous centres of the Kingdom. They were left to themselves with very little sympathy except where they could be used as voting machines” — Thomas MacKnight, Ulster As It Is, Volume I, MacMillan, London, 1896, p.219, So Irish Liberalism tended to be a second best choice in a country of which the real division was between Nationalist and Tory-Conservative depending on local deals and the goodwill of (often absentee) landlords. Only after the Ballot Act of 1872 would Irish Liberalism’s base get firm support in Ulster and neighbouring constituencies and, even then, it would be a provincial and rural manifestation squeezed between the mass parties of the traditional ideologies. 79

A further result of this weakness was that Irish liberalism was unable to formulate a clear programmatic alternate to Nationalism and Toryism. Apart from a vague commitment to land reform ~ which for most liberals as such tended to mean little more than legalising the “Ulster Custom” ~ it did not face up to what abolishing the Ascendancy within the Union would mean, until 1886, when Irish — or, as it was by then, purely Ulster Liberalism was effectively about to disintegrate.

Despite this, liberalism had a certain support among many Ulster bourgeoisie, such as the Sinclairs and the Musgraves who recalled proudly their ancestors’ activities before 1798, whilst tending to deplore the rebellion itself. Having no interest in landlordism, such men could support land reform, albeit of the moderate kind described and to be granted at the will of the government. In this, too, they would get support from many Conservatives, though any permanent alliance was prevented by Irish liberalism’s traditional Dissenter belief in ending the state’s Establishment of the Episcopalian Church.

For this reason, and because of the spasmodic opposition of the government to the Orange supporters of the Conservatives, liberalism in Ulster was not destroyed during the 1830s and 1840s. Admittedly, the signs of its decline were obvious and it can now be seen that its fate was never in doubt. Thus Ulster Liberalism’s leading periodical, the Northern Whig tended at this time to be identified with the Non-Subscribing Church whilst the Presbyterian majority followed, then, as now, the Conservative Belfast Newsletter. Ulster’s leading agrarian Radical, William Sharman Crawford, never managed to win a constituency in the province.

Indeed, for most of his parliamentary career (1841-1852), he represented the English borough of Rochdale. In the first general election held under the bourgeois franchise established by the Reform Act of 1832, Belfast returned two Tories.

However, this last victory was aided by personal disputes. In 1835, O’Conneil agreed with the Whigs to support their government in return for immediate reforms. Some changes in the Irish administration were achieved, in fact, though most Irish reform bills were either defeated or mutilated in the House of Lords — then, as now, dominated by the Conservatives.

However, the immediately apparent vindication of the British government as a reforming medium and the support of the Marquess of Donegall enabled the Liberals to take both Belfast seats in the general election of 1837. This victory was reversed the next year, 80

however, after the Conservatives had appealed against it successfully. From 1841 to 1852, the Belfast Liberals could gain only one of the two seats. Worse still, when the Belfast Town Council was established in 1842, all the councillors elected to it were Tories.

The weakness of Ulster liberalism was reflected in its political reaction to the renewal Repeal campaign under the 1841 Conservative government. In 1833, young Thomas Babington Macauley had made a parliamentary debating point against O’Connell’s early demand for Repeal. He remarked that if Repeal was agreed the Protestant majority in Ulster (who were of course opposed to such a move) should be allowed a separate state machine in Derry. This had little immediate repercussion, though it would be traced by later, interested, generations as the birth of what has become the influential myth of two Irish nations. It is not even certain whether Macauley’s off-hand remark affected Ulster liberalism’s attempt to counter both O’Connell’s later Repeal agitation and the Conservative-Orange opposition to it. At all events, two days after O’Connell’s defeat at Clontarf, the Northern Whig published what is, indeed, the archetypal manifesto of “Two Nations-ism”:

“QUTLINE OF A PETITION TO THE QUEEN

“That your petitioners are not, nor ever have been, advocates of the Repeal of the Union which they degenerate as destructive to both countries.

“They do not anticipate it as likely to take place.

‘Nevertheless, if any circumstance do induce your Majesty and Parliament to grant such a measure, we earnestly entreat that Ireland may be constituted not one, but two distinct kingdoms, with Belfast as the capital of the Northern division of the island.

“Besides we observe that the advocates of Repeal urge the distinction of the Saxon and the Celtic races, as a reason for discussion.

“We are a people in a great measure of the Saxon race, or largely intermixed with that race; and we, therefore, humbly submit, that those who advocate, on such grounds, a separation from Great Britain, cannot wish, or, at least, fairly demand, that the new kingdom they propose to form should contain subjects of a race which they profess to regard with hostile jealousy. “We ourselves, indeed, disavow and deprecate any such hostile feelings, as characteristic of barbarians and heathens, rather than civilised and Christian nations.

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“We believe, that both Great Britain and Ireland are inhabited by a mixed race, descended from Saxons, Danes, Normans, Milesians, and others, mingled with the descendants of various Celtic tribes as hostile to each other, in former days as to any foreign invaders “We wish the difference of race, and former contests, there arising to be practically buried in oblivion. “And we desire to continue as fellow-subjects with all the inhabitants of the British isles “But, we deprecate being formed into a distinct kingdom of Ireland, when a large portion of the inhabitants of this island have been trained to regard as with unfriendly feelings as aliens and intruders. “Whether these and other reasons for our wish, appear to any one satisfactory or not, we humbly submit, that if a separate legislature be conceded to a certain portion of the United Empire, or the sole ground that such is their earnest wish, it would be most unreasonable not to concede the same, on the same ground to another portion.

“We beg here again to declare our aversion to any dissolution of the Union and our sincere hope that it may never take place.

“We petition for the erection of the kingdom of the North of Ireland (or Ulster), merely as the less of two evils, on the supposition(we trust most improbable) of the impossibility of maintaining the existing Union”.

The rationalist approach as expressed here is applied to the formal errors of nationalism to cover the social realities that that approach merely expressed. It could not, yet, point to the economic benefits of the union (as future declarations of its kind would do) because these benefits were not yet decisively clear; the process of economic growth in the north-east as distinct from the rest of Ireland was only beginning and imvolved, then, too many, disagreeable aspects to be described. Indeed, since, in so far as they were communal, these aspects were actions of Protestant exclusion against Catholics, rather than vice-versa, the liberal sponsors of the Petition had every reason to ignore them. As a result, their work remained, if anything, less relevant to their time than it is today, when it represents a strong strand in Irish pro-imperialist thinking.

The fact of O’Connell’s defeat and later imprisonment enabled the petition’s sponsors to avoid putting its popularity to the test. Indeed, almost immediately, they divided amongst themselves when the Radical MP for Belfast David Ross, declared himself in favour of Federalism, or what would become, later a “Home Rule” relationship of Ireland to Britain.

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Although backed by Sharman Crawford, he was forced by his party to refrain from contesting the next (1847) election in favour of Robert Tenant, who, though married to a niece of the McCrackens, was a totally orthodox unionist Liberal. He was to be Belfast’s last Liberal MP bar one. For the narrow base of Ulster liberalism was further restricted. On the one hand, Nationalism was dividing between sectarian constitutionalism and physical force, on the other Orangeism was reviving to oppose both.

Nonetheless Irish liberalism did for a time seem to have a prospect of reviving. In 1847, O’Connell died, leaving a defeated party led only by his incompetent sons. The next year, Young Ireland failed to achieve its aims with physical force.

On top of this, for the first time since the tithe agitation of the 1830s, and on a wider basis, the land question became of agitational importance. Until then, the Irish liberals, though in favour of land reform, had not been active in demanding it. They feared the extraparliamentary pressure that would be necessary to achieve it (the more so because so many peasants didn’t have votes) and feared, even more, what such pressure could be used to achieve besides. This fear played into the hands of the Nationalists (who might fear physical force, but not mass agitation), into the hands of the Whig and Conservative governments of the day, and into the hands of the Irish Conservatives whose relatively broad, plebeian support in Ulster made them prone to disunity on the issue.

From 1847, however, the land question could not be ignored. The Great Hunger had left considerable dissatisfaction among those peasants who remained after mass immigration and deaths. This would not have been significant had not large numbers of landlords (many of whom were buyers of bankrupt estates) decided to run their estates “economically” — which meant necessarily with large-scale evictions. This was a phenomenon all over Ireland. In Ulster, the customary system of tenant right that had superseded the old colonial leaseholds was now being eroded by rent increases and evictions of all who resisted them.

From 1847, tenant leagues began to be established. Their demand at first was for the implementation of the Devon Commission’s (1844) recommendations: that the “Ulster Custom” by which landlords paid for the improvements made by departing tenants be given 83

the force of law. An attempt by Sharman Crawford to get such a measure passed by Parliament was defeated. Nonetheless, the crisis was real enough for the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church to back his demand in 1848 and, again, in 1850. What was more, to emphasise the problem’s bipartisan appeal, the Assembly chose as its spokesman on this issue, the Earl of Roden, “Orange hero” of Dolly’s Brae. Still evictions continued and increased : by 1850 they reached 104,000 throughout Ireland. Agitation increased proportionately. In August 1850, a Conference in Dublin voted to form a united organisation for all Ireland to implement a radical programme of land legislation : the “3Fs” — a Fair Rent, Fixity of Tenure and the Freedom of the tenant to demand money from his “interest” in his holding (even regardless of actual improvements).

The new movement developed despite the resurrection of religious differences almost immediately. In September, 1850, the Pope announced the appointment for the first time since the Reformation of a Catholic Hierarchy of bishops for England. This stimulated what Karl Marx termed “a factitious excitement among the shallow-headed, stupid and hypocritical portion of the English people” (Karl Marx, “Lord John Russell”, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Britain, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1962, p.463). The Whig Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, fearing for his electoral support against the traditionally ultra-Protestant Conservatives introduced and finally passed an Ecclesiastical Tithes Act, rendering the new English Catholic bishops liable to prosecution. Amongst this law’s supporters was Sharman Crawford. On the other hand, a number of Irish Catholic MPs established a Catholic Defence Association to oppose it. Meanwhile and, perhaps, also because of the Act, parish priests began to take an active part in supporting tenant right candidates against Conservatives and Whigs in bye-elections. This stimulated the fusion of the Catholic Defence Association and the Tenant Right League. Crawford supported this, despite supporting the Ecclesiastical Tithes Act. His ally, Dr. James MacKnight, a liberal Presbyterian opposed the Conservatives’ appeal for Protestant Ascendancy with the call to support specifically Presbyterian candidates The general election of 1852 revealed this alliance’ weakness. While the new Irish Party won seats elsewhere in Ireland, in Ulster, the Conservatives gained three. Among them was Belfast which became, finally, a Conservative — and, soon, an Orange parliamentary stronghold, (encouraged by the victorious MP Davison, and his Christchurch Protestant Association). The Presbyterian tenant farmers, as Thomas MacKnight remarked, showed 84

themselves less public spirited than the Orangemen and, though he did not say this, less inclined to democratic politics than the Catholics. Sharman Crawford himself was defeated standing for his native County Down.

The defeats in Ulster were followed by a further, and even more decisive disaster. A few months after the election, the Conservative government fell and was replaced by the coalition of Whigs, Radicals, and Free Trade Conservatives (or Peelites) that would become eventually the Liberal Party. Two of the Catholic Defence Association’s former leaders, John Sadleir and William Keogh, accepted junior posts in the new government. The majority of the Irish Party’s MPs condemned them. The Ulster Protestant tenant leaders (including Crawford) supported them, partly (as in James MacKnight’s case) because the new Prime Minister, the Earl of Aberdeen was a Scots Presbyterian, but also because too definite non-participation in the imperial government was too akin to straight Irish Nationalism. (In defeat, even the old Federalist Crawford was ready enough to accept unionist prejudices). They broke finally with the Irish Party. Their strategy and that of the new ministers did not get any land reform; indeed Sadleir and Keogh used their new offices as reasons for not fighting for their programme. The Irish Party’s remaining MPs were weakened at a critical moment and received further blows that kept morale low. The decline of tenant hardship during the decade reduced the pressure on them from their supporters and they themselves failed, as Parliamentarians first and foremost, to maintain the agitation that had put them into Westminster. In 1859, they split finally on the question of whether to support a new Conservative government. Already, though it was not yet clear, they had begun to be superseded by a new turn to physical force by Irish Nationalists : Fenianism.

Separate from the Catholic MPs, Ulster Liberalism continued to decline during the 1850s and early 1860s. In the middle of the latter decade it had no MPs at all. This decline was helped by further developments of the previous pattern.

THE RISE OF HARLAND AND WOLFF

The capitalist prosperity that had been developed in the Belfast textile trade thanks to the divisions of its workforce helped to strengthen some other industries besides linen even where the said divisions did not exist, as yet.

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The engineering firm of Mackies was founded in the 1840s with an all-Protestant workforce.

The most notable early beneficiary was the trade of ship-building. This had developed in Belfast since 1791, though at first it had been slow to grow compared to that in other Irish cities. Thus Cork build the first steamship constructed in Ireland in 1816 — Belfast built one only in 1819. However, as the differences in militancy between the Belfast textile workers and Irish workers elsewhere began to increase so did Belfast ship-building overtake its Irish rivals.

Dublin ship-building workers were particularly militant. In 1840, Belfast was the first place in Ireland to build an iron boat. By 1850, it was the first shipbuilding centre in the country.

In 1851, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (A.S.E.) was founded. It had a branch in Belfast, as well as in Dublin and (thought smaller) in Cork, Derry and Drogheda.

Shortly after its foundation, the A.S.E. began a series of disputes with the local shipyard owner, Hickson. In 1854, Hickson hired a new manager, Edward Harland, a brilliant engineer and inventor, who was to describe, thirty years later, how he won the battle with his workers:- “T had been engaged to supersede a manager summarily dismissed. Although he had not given satisfaction to his employers, he was a great favourite with the men. Accordingly, my appearance as manager in his stead was not very agreeable to the employed. On inquiry, I found that the rate of wages paid was above the usual value, whilst the quantity as well as the quality of the work done were below the standard. I proceeded to rectify these defects, by paying the ordinary rate of wages, and then by raising the quality of the work done. I was met by the usual (sic) method ~ a strike. The men turned out. They were abetted by the former manager; and the leading hands hung about the town unemployed, in the hope of my throwing up the post in despair.

“But, nothing daunted, I went repeatedly over to the Clyde for the purpose of enlisting fresh _ hands. When I brought them over, however, in batches, there was the greatest difficulty in inducing them to work. They were intimidated, or enticed, or feasted and sent home again.

The late manager had also taken a yard on the other side of the river, and actually commenced to build a ship, employing some of his old comrades; but beyond laying the keel, little more was ever done. A few months after my arrival, my firm had to arrange with its 86

creditors, whilst I, pending the settlement, had myself to guarantee the wages to a few of the leading hands whom I had only just succeeded in gathering together. In this dilemma, an old friend, a foreman on the Clyde, came over to Belfast to see me. After hearing my story, and considering the difficulties I] had to encounter he advised me at once to ‘throw up the job’.

My reply was, that ‘having mounted a restive horse, I would ride him into the stable’.

“Notwithstanding the advice of my friend, I held on, the comparatively few men in the works, as well as those out, no doubt observed my determination. The obstacles were no doubt great; the financial difficulties were extreme, and yet there was a prospect of profit from the work in hand, provided only the men could be induced to settle steadily down to their ordinary employment. I gradually gathered together a number of steady workmen and appointed suitable foremen. I obtained a considerable accession of strength from Newcastle. On the death of Mr. Toward, his head foreman, Mr. William Hanston, with a number of the leading hands, joined me. From that time forward, the works went on apace; and we finished the ships in hand to the perfect satisfaction of the owners” — E.J. Harland, “Shipbuilding in Belfast”, from Samuel Smiles, Men of Invention and Industry, John Murray, London 1884, pp.302-304. Harland’s account continues to describe how, in 1859, he bought the firm from Hickson and Low, in 1862, he took into partnership Gustave Wilhelm Wolff, a young man with influential connections in the shipping trade (particularly the White Star Line).

What he does not mention are the social results of his achievement. There is, of course, no reason why he should have done so. At the same time, there is no reason to suppose that he would have been embarrassed. As his political career shows, after his retirement from active business in 1877, he was like most of the biggest Ulster businessmen, such as the textile magnates Mulholland and Ewart, an outspoken Conservative. As late as June 1886, when an alliance of Conservative and Liberal unionists was developing in opposition to the first Home Rule Bill, and after nearly two decades of Liberal supported reforms, he was able to declare in a public speech:- “Tf during the thirty years he had known Ireland, she had been left simply to enjoy the present Constitution and if law and order had maintained there with the same impartiality as in England and Scotland, the whole of Ireland would have been as prosperous, contented and as loyal as Ulster” — Northern Whig, 23" June, 1886.

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Harland’s workers were worthy of him politically as industrially. The foreign scabs whom he used to defeat the local workers, were in, effect, a new colon interest. They were treated as a special caste, distinguished from the mass of the Belfast workers by two factors. The first was, by Belfast standards, their high wages, which kept them apart, and, being awarded freely by their employer, also kept them loyal to him (though they soon joined the A.S.E.). The second was their religious homogeneity: they were all Protestant; the textile workers, though segregated within their factories on lines in which skill and religion merged, were employed, except in a few factories owned by zealots on a less exclusive basis. (Later on, as business expanded, the shipyards did employ Catholics, but on the basis of “last in, first out’; the Protestant foremen always gave preference to their coreligionists).

Even more genuinely than the Protestant linen workers were the shipyard workers a labour aristocracy. The shipyard workers’ consciousness of their Protestantism was stimulated by the time of their arrival in Belfast as well as by the anti-working class nature of the event.

They came after the liberal defeat of 1852, when Conservative, Orange and Evangelical were preparing for new advances under the leadership of the Episcopalian Christchurch Protestant Association and such younger Presbyterian ministers as Hugh Hanna.

So, once established, the shipyard workers gravitated naturally to the reactionary and racist camp of Orange Conservatism in which, by their numbers and prestige as the best paid labour aristocrats they established themselves as leading figures. As early as the general election of 1857, they gave their services to block liberal supporters’ access to the polling booths. The same year, their intervention increased the savagery of the sectarian riot. By 1871, the Protestant skilled workers of Harland and Wolff were supplying the entire membership for their own Orange lodge. Harland himself used this skilfully. Never an Orangeman, he kept the Order at arm’s length. When, in 1864, a riot penetrated his shipyard, he locked out those responsible. Nevertheless, he surrendered to the rioters’ call to keep the skilled jobs Protestant.

THE ULSTER RELIGIOUS REVIVAL — THE FINAL TOUCH

Harland and Wolff's proved that Orangeism had to have precedence over trade unionism and could limit the qualitative development of working class consciousness, though, within those limits, despite Moncrieff's prophecy of 1836, it could co-exist with it.

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The same lesson was to be demonstrated by the textile workers. By 1853, their demoralisation and resulting religious rivalry was stili helping to keep them “free” from organisation. Though satisfactory to the employers, this could not last. In the 1860s, demand for linen was to be increased as a result of the cotton shortage caused by the American Civil War. As a result, the more skilled (and, normally Protestant) linen workers would be, though only in the next decade, able to establish lasting trade unions. In the meantime, events had occurred to keep this development within the bonds of the dominant Belfast Conservative (and Orange) politics.

The handloom remained a normal part of the production of linen until the 1850s. By then, after more than thirty years the weavers’ wages began to rise. In response the employers moved to bring them into the factory system through the power loom. In 1853, the members of these in Ulster were 218 : by 1859, they were 3,633.

This swift proletarianising was far more catastrophic than that which accompanied the change form cotton to linen. It involved a number of social crises represented most notably by the raising of the marriage age, as the ability to maintain or amass dowries diminished. The frustrations aroused thus received the same ready answer from the Episcopalians and the Ulster-Evangelicals as did the very different situation of the shipyard workers.

The immediate result was the religious revival of 1859, the largest mass movement in Ulster between 1798 and 1913. It was predominately a movement of de-classed weavers and petty bourgeoisie, starting in Co. Antrim and spreading through Cos. Down and Armagh, though the spinners of Sandy Row were affected very notably. Its immediate result was that of sectarian quiescence; 1859 was not a year of riot. Nonetheless, the result was to strengthen Orangeism and Evangelicalism and to unite them more closely than before among the textile workers and small capitalists of the north-east.

It might be conjectured that these classes might have broken from sectarian politics without the Revival. The evidence against this, however, is the role of the shipyard workers, who were swiftly unionised and untouched by the Revival (though not by the propaganda that stimulated it) and who raised the Orange banner nonetheless. In any case the Revival did occur and its victims were affected by it with the results described.

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British coal, money and imperial markets, then, were essential to Ulster industry. Yet they would not have been supplied had Belfast labour been as militant as Irish labour generally in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Slump conditions and rivalry from Belfast’s new Catholic citizens for a declining number of jobs weakened this militancy among the ‘Protestant workers. Evangelicalism and Orangeism strengthened and were strengthened by the situation and kept militancy low. In turn, the coal and the capital helped Protestant Belfast and its hinterland to turn their backs on the Irish Catholic majority, encouraging their bourgeoisie to reassert the views of Protestant Ascendancy. At the same time, the effect of these views on the home market of Belfast, both economically (in earnings) and politically (in loss of stability) was less catastrophic for the bourgeoisie by reason of the markets of the British empire. So it was that the Union, Orangeism and Capitalist Prosperity began to walk hand in hand in Ulster to the end of the Nineteenth century and into the Twentieth.

(To be continued) 90

CHAPTER 6 : THE INDIAN SUMMER OF ULSTER LIBERALISM

The first chapters dealt with the original plantation of Ulster in its historical environment, the development of its planter population as a component part of a system of Protestant Ascendancy over the Irish Catholic majority, that population’s brief identification with the democratic aspirations of that majority and, in the last two chapters, its return to support for a form of Ascendancy politics as a necessary aspect of its industrialisation.

The subject of this chapter is Ulster liberalism in its last revival. In the 1870s and early 1880s a party claiming to inherit the radical non-nationalist traditions of 1798 grew in strength so that many of its members expected its eventual hegemony in Ulster politics.

When this did not occur they blamed the failure on the rise of the “Home Rule” movement among the Catholics. It is necessary to examine how far this Ulster Liberal Association did maintain the traditions to which it laid claim and how far its expectations were justified.

THE ORANGE-LIBERAL ALLIANCE

By 1868, Ulster liberalism had suffered more than seventy years of steady decline at the end of which it was only a shadow of what it had been at the beginning of the century. Its bourgeois support was limited mainly to some of the province’s less enterprising businessmen. The Mulhollands, the Ewarts, Harland and Wolff and Corry the city’s largest shipowner were all as firm Conservatives as, and because, they headed thriving and expanding industries. Its rural tenant support had been even less impressive since 1852. By the beginning of 1868, only one of Ulster’s 29 parliamentary scats was held by a Liberal : that of Co. Cavan held by the future Orange leader, Edward Saunderson. The party in Ireland was crushed between Conservatives, with their Orange links and increased, if disorganised, numbers of Irish nationalists, whose ideology was particularly strong among Ulster Catholics.

Yet, already, the 1860s had provided the basis for a revival of Ulster liberal fortunes. The American Civil War had cut raw cotton supplies to Britain and raised demand thereby for Ulster linen. By 1863 a state of full employment, by the standards of the times, was reached in Belfast.

There was enough prosperity to enable its actual producers to enjoy some of it. Despite a major sectarian riot in 1864, embryo (trade union) class consciousness grew. The Orange 91

Trades Associations began to co-exist with branches of genuine British-based trade unions and, in the process to lose whatever trade union functions they once exercised, In November 1867, the workers of Belfast were rioting for bread — not religion.

Even before this, British liberalism itself had been consolidated and strengthened. From 1852, the government of the United Kingdom had been in the hands of the Whig Party, which reflected an alliance between finance-capital and progressive landlords, backed by the Radicals, who represented finance capital and, on the other side a moderate Conservative group of industrial capitalist interests (Peelites). From this condition arose the new Liberal Party that reflected the same general interests, but with a shift of power to the industrialists.

Based on the oldest established industrial capitalism (“the workshop”) of the world and with as yet only a prospect of serious competition from the USA and from Germany, British Liberalism reflected the aims of a bourgeoisie that was far more confident (and, hence, readier to consider democratic change) than its equals in Europe. The very existence of this Liberal Party encouraged the remaining Ulster liberals to continue in their struggle. Its most decisive help to them before 1868 was the disbanding of the Belfast Town Police Force in 1865. Even though Ulster liberals had external and objective reasons for confidence, their perspectives were severely limited. In their natural weaknesses and insecurity, they compared more to continental than to British Liberals. On the one hand, the increased rigour of the Catholic Church’s control, on the other hand the Fenian Movement and its Risings of 1866 and 1867 revived Protestant folk memories of 1641 and 1798. It did not signify that these pressures strengthened liberal influence in the Catholic population. From 1865, the ultramontane and anti-Fenian Archbishop of Dublin, Cardinal Paul Cullen was leading the hierarchy in supporting the Liberal Party. Ulster Liberalism became more Unionist and less ready to ally with Nationalists, as it had in 1852.

Either they were to sentence themselves to further years of work for uncertain result, or they were to seek allies elsewhere. The only Irish alternative to the Nationalists was the Conservatives and, more particularly, their plebeian (Orange) supporters. Although the latter’s hostility to Catholicism was somewhat extreme it only expressed violently what many Ulster liberals believed. After all, the Orange lodges included many who would vote liberal 92

in other countries; they, themselves, claimed to stand for liberty even if their understanding of what constituted liberty had to be corrected.

This new outlook was expressed in the Northern Whig. It had been founded in 1824 as an upholder of Presbyterian liberalism. During its first forty years, it opposed particularly the Orange Order, of which it demanded the suppression on several occasions. At the same time, it opposed Repeal of the Union and alienated many Catholics. By 1866 its readership was mainly among those who had broken from mainstream Presbyterianism with Montgomery.

In the latter year, Thomas MacKnight came from Britain to edit the Northern Whig and the paper started to woo the Orangemen. It was able to do so on one particular issue : the 1850 Party Processions Act banning provocative political demonstrations. Passed as a result of Orange-inspired riots, it was used against the lodges. However, with the rise of Fenianism, the nationalists demonstrated even more frequently outside Ulster and were rarely prosecuted.

MacKnight began to expose this uneven distribution of justice, using it as an argument to repeal the Act entirely. The Northern Whig took up the cause of the Orange Order within Liberal circles. This strategy soon began to gain results. From 1866 to 1868, the Conservatives held government office, backed by 28 Ulster MPs and, in the final year, with the former MP for Belfast, Lord Caims, becoming Lord High Chancellor of England. Despite Ulster Protestantism’s apparently strong position, the government’s chief worry about Ireland was the threat from the Liberals that the established (Episcopalian) Church of Ireland would be disestablished. Not only was the Party Processions Act not repealed but the Government operated it as before, ignoring the Nationalists but imprisoning under it, most notoriously, the Orange leader, William Johnston (of Ballykillbeg) for leading a procession in the Orange stronghold of Bangor, Co. Down. The Orange lodges whose strength had risen along with the new model unions, thanks to the 1859 Revival, were not going to accept this.

The Reform Act of 1867 extended the franchise to the skilled workers, who, in Belfast, composed the most active elements of the Orange Order. In the 1868 general election, the Liberals formed an electoral bloc with Johnston against the Party Processions Act. The leaders of the Orange Order (and such of its Presbyterian supporters as Henry Cooke’s most outspoken political heir, the Rev. Hugh Hanna) denounced this move in the name of 93

Episcopalian Establishment. Nonetheless the manoeuvre was successful. Johnston was elected as an Independent Conservative, and his running-mate the Liberal, Thomas McClure , was returned as Belfast’s second MP. Liberals were elected also to the mixed Catholic- Protestant borough Constituencies of Newry and Londonderry.

The alliance of “Left” Orangeism with Liberalism worked well enough for four years of the new Parliament. William Gladstone’s Liberal Government ended the Irish Episcopalian Establishment and passed a Land Act that legalised the Ulster Custom and limited the right of the landlord to “vexations disturbance” of his tenants. Finally, in 1872, the Party Processions Act was repealed. Almost immediately after this in September of the latter year, Johnston proclaimed himself officially a Conservative and a follower of Disraeli. The Northern Whig (and its editor in his memoirs) affected to believe that he would not have done so had it not been for the delay in repealing the Act. During the previous four years he had been under some pressure from Hanna and the more right-wing Orangemen and had, for a period in 1871, even lost his position as Orange Grand Master of Belfast. However, by the time of his return to Toryism, he had succeeded in overcoming his rivals. What is true is that the Liberals were beginning to lose the momentum that they had gained; whereas, in the Belfast municipal election of 1870 they had won 7 out of 10 seats contested, in that of 1871, they won only 2 (and one of these was Joseph Biggar, the Home Ruler). Probably Johnston, an efficient Populist noted this and acted accordingly.

Liberalism was not helped by events that affected directly the Catholic community. All this reinforced Protestant fears. In 1870, the Church, in the process of losing its temporal possessions in Italy passed in the first Vatican Council, the Decree of Papal Infallibility by which the Pope, speaking Ex Cathedra on matters of faith and morals is to the faithful, infallible. (This is a rather vague formulation; it is doubtful whether the Pope has spoken Ex Cathedra more than once since the decree was proclaimed. Nonetheless, its effect is towards his overall elevation). All the Irish bishops supported this decree with one exception : Archbishop MacHale who had pioneered the first advance in Ireland of the Ultramontaneism of which it was the crowning act.

From 1871, too, more direct danger existed, on the Ulster Liberals’ left flank. After the defeat of the Fenians, constitutional nationalism began to revive more effectively than before.

Since the famine, there had appeared a distinct, solid, class of Irish bourgeoisie outside Ulster 94

and Dublin. The gombeenman developed out of the after-effects of the Great Famine and out of the development of the money economy throughout Ireland, following it. With little incentive to develop Irish industry, he built his capital on high interest loans to the peasantry, and, so, represented a particularly usurious — and, hence in turn less than usually enterprising, class of merchant capitalist. However, he was a capitalist and as such (more particularly, as a rival exploiter of the peasantry) he was hostile to the landlords. He also resented their control of government patronage. For these reasons he supported first the Home Government Association and, then, from 1871, the Home Rule League with their demands for a vaguelydefined distinct Irish Government with powers resembling those of the government of the new Dominion of Canada. This bourgeoisie had few common interests with the industrialists of Ulster, whose enterprises were, at this ttme, more obvious for their strength than for their weakness. (It was particularly mistrusted, too because, in Belfast, the main centre of Catholic enterprise was the drink trade — partly because it was the only major trade left to it - making it in turn a butt for temperance-conscious Protestants). It did not even offer extra inducement to Ulster capital in expanded markets or investment. It was at this time, when the gombeenman began to come to political prominence, that the last tiny flame of Orange separatism — a motion put to the Belfast Orange Lodge — flickered and died.

The Northern Whig’s reaction to the new fact was to denounce Irish nationalism as equalling Fenianism (and, hence, the Paris Commune) and to try to appeal to the Catholic hierarchy to oppose it. However, it was handicapped in this by the fact that it (and the Liberal Party) could not support the hierarchy in its demand for a confessional university system — whereas the Home Rule League could and did. The Bishops began to return to Irish Nationalism whence they had been repelled by the Fenians.

By 1874, Ulster Liberalism had lost its seats in Derry and Newry in bye-elections. In the general election of this year, it lost its Belfast seat. It was saved, and in fact, strengthened partly by the introduction of the ballot and the corresponding reduction in the effectiveness of landlord and employer interference. Both MPs for the County of Derry were Liberals in the new Parliament. James (son of William) Sharman Crawford was returned for Co. Down.

Liberals won seats, too, in the small boroughs of Carrick, Coleraine, Dungannon, and, again, Newry. However, outside Ulster, the Irish Liberals were defeated by the Home Rule League.

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In the United Kingdom, as a whole, the Conservatives got their first overall majority since 1846,

THE ULSTER LIBERALS AND THE LAND WAR

Under Benjamin Disraeli, the Conservative Party ruled the British Isles from 1874 to 1880.

The class forces that composed it were the same as in the Liberal Party, but their relationship was different. In Conservatism, particularly since the departure of the Peelites, the landed interest dominated. The party had a permanent overall majority in the House of Lords which had opposed the Liberals in such matters as the ending of the purchase of army commissions, the Ballot Act and the Irish Land and Church Disestablishment Acts, all of which had hurt the landlords of Britain and Jreland. In power, however, the conservatives were able to execute mild reforms in urban housing and trade unionism, where the landed interest was not affected directly. Such a government could not be expected to do very much to reform rural Ireland. Disraeli’s declared Irish policy was one of “benign neglect’. He excluded from his cabinet both the Irish Lord Lieutenant and the Chief Secretary, save for one year, when the latter’s ability, rather than his post justified it. The Government’s positive contribution to the situation there was its attempt to win specific Catholic denominational support as such by subsidising the confessional secondary school system and by giving the degrees of the Catholic University of Dublin the same formal recognition as those of Peel’s “Godless Colleges” through the establishment of the Royal University of Ireland. It was as opposed as the Liberal Party, at that time, to all “Home Rule” proposals. Naturally, too, it was totally uninterested in further land reform. The Irish Question remained unsolved. In the House of Commons, the Home Rule League moved slowly leftwards; Joseph Biggar and Charles Stewart Parnell began to disrupt its proceedings by filibustering. Outside, after 1877, Gladstone’s original land settlement was weakened qualitatively by an agricultural depression. Food prices fell, rents could not be paid and evictions increased.

There were two differences between the new crisis and previous ones. In the first place, the depression reflected developments on the world market rather than in internal conditions of production. Though the depression itself ended, Irish agriculture had still to face competition 96

from the large scale and superior food producing techniques of America and Australia. The landlords had either to accept lower rents or to clear their lands even more determinedly to catry on larger-scale agriculture directly. What was more, the difficulties even of the latter possibility were increased considerably. Since 1846, the landlords had been clearing their estates to make profits from cattle-rearing; now such profits were reduced by the frozen meat trade from the southern hemisphere. All this weakened both the objective strength of landlordism and its own subjective will to survive.

This landlord weakness was met by an increased strength in its opponents. The new Irish bourgeoisie was more determined than the landlord O’Connell had been to smash landlordism. Many Fenians were prepared to support a campaign against it, either to end it (like Michael Davitt) or to end a bastion of British power (like John Devoy). The left (Parnellite) wing of the Home Rule League was ready to sponsor such a campaign. In September 1879, after a summer of agitation, the Irish National Land League was founded.

Up to then the government had done nothing to ease distress. “Benign neglect’ was becoming malign. It was only in December 1879, that the Duchess of Marlborough, the wife of the Lord Lieutenant, opened a relief fund. Apart from this, rural disturbance was met by coercion. In between the two extremes were the Liberals, at this time led by the Whig Marquess of Hartington, who called, a few days before the actual founding of the Land League, for a general land purchase scheme for the whole United Kingdom. He did little beyond this.

The Ulster Liberals, through the Northern Whig, did what they could to build around this demand. On 9" September, the paper’s first leader demanded secure rents and “some intermediary between landlord and tenant to bring about a gradual conversion of an appreciable proportion of tenants into proprietors”.

Nearly a month later it restated its position as distinct from that of the Land League:- “The Tenant-right Associations of Ulster have taken no part in Mr. Parnell’s anti-rent agitation. They disapprove of his incendiary language just as much as several Roman Catholic prelates in the South have disapproved of such language. They believe that, so far from doing good, Mr. Parnell’s policy by alarming and alienating moderate men, will do 97

harm to that great question of land reform which was uniting the tenant-farmers of the United Kingdom in one body under the leadership of the Marquess of Hartington and his friends.

They believe that they are the worst enemies of the tenant-farmers who tell them that they can refuse to pay any rents at all under the threat of shooting landlords and their agents. The farmers will have to pay rents. It will, under any circumstances, be the duty of the Government to make the law respected, even, if necessary, by a military occupation of county after county. This the Roman Catholic clergy know very well. This the tenant-farmers of Ulster know very well. Neither one class nor the other encourage an agitation likely to lead to violence, from which the tenant farmers themselves would be the first and the worst sufferers” — Northern Whig, 2"? October, 1879.

On the 29" of the same month, the Whig’s first leader called for:- “A Liberal Government ... to set about the establishment of a peasant proprietary on the truest Liberal and the truest Conservative principles”.

Just over a week later, on 7” November, it defended the landlords again:- “During the last three weeks we have had almost daily to announce the names of various landed proprietors in Ulster ready to meet their tenants in a thoroughly sympathetic spirit; and we have no reason whatever for believing that, where reductions of rents are really necessary, they will not generally be made”.

On7"J anuary, 1880, it remarked of rent strikers at Carraroe, Co. Galway:- “To save them, at all events [from starvation — D.R. O’C.L.) ought to be the first consideration of the Government, and of all people who feel any obligations to their fellowcreatures, and, we presume, fellow-Christians. The law may be allowed to take its course afterwards. Just at present, in such places as Carraroe, and it is not a very exceptional locality, the less we hear of writs of ejectment the better. They will be sure to come in due Constitutionality was at the centre of the Ulster Liberals’ land policy, but, subject to this, they were prepared to go quite far. At a meeting of tenant-farmers at Ballymoney in January, - 1880, a comprehensive programme of demands was announced and supported by the party.

The list included “genuine tenant right Ulster custom (including, fair rent, fixity of tenure and 98

free sale)”, peasant proprietary throughout the United Kingdom and, as an immediate measure, provisions for rent abatement and public works.

It was soon tested. In the general election of April 1880, the Liberals won 9 out of the 29 Ulster seats: their largest number at any time in the period between 1852 and 1885. This was despite a loss of three out of the four boroughs that they had held. (Dungannon was the exception), and the bad showing of their candidate in Belfast who came fourth after both the sitting Conservatives and an Independent Orange candidate.

The victories themselves contradicted the 1868 strategy. Four of the the Liberals’ seats were for the counties of Monaghan and Donegal which had been left them by the Nationalists and which the latter would later claim successfully. In the more generally Protestant area of the modern Six County unit, it held 5 out of the twenty-three seats — all in areas of mixed religion: Tyrone, Armagh, the two Derry County seats and the borough of Dungannon. In 1885 after the Party had lost one of its Monaghan seats to the Nationalist, Timothy Healy, it was compensated by winning one of the seats for the overwhelmingly Protestant Co. Antrim, but, by then, it would be supporting a coercionist policy against the majority of the Irish.

Even land reform was a doubtful attraction for Ulster Protestants against the sectarian appeal of Conservatism. The general election’s overall result was to restore a Liberal majority to the House of Commons. Under pressure from within the Party, Hartington conceded his claim to be Prime Minister in favour of Gladstone. The latter’s new government introduced a Compensation for Disturbances Bill to benefit evicted tenants. It was defeated in August by the Conservative majority in the House of Lords.

The next month, at Ennis, Co. Clare, Pamell announced a new strategy for the Land League: a strike of peasant, worker and rural capitalist against evicting landlords and those who aided them by accepting the lands cleared by the former : a refusal by the rest of the countryside to work for such or to supply them with goods. From the name of the first landowner to be treated successfully, it took its own title : the Boycott.

Theoretically, this was an expression of moral force. In fact, in many cases after the first, it was backed by physical force, and was always the expression of a mass feeling that might, if 99

it were strategically necessary, find its outlet in what the philistines (such as the Northern Whig) call crimes. It was not the restraint shown in the boycott that was to influence the government, it was the organised mass nature of the restraint — the fact that it could turn to mass violence with equal effect ~ that would decide the current battle in the war for the land in Ireland. The Northern Whig could not avoid the fact that the new crisis had been sparked by the actions of the Lords against its own government. Until the end of the year it concentrated its fire on the Conservatives and their Orange allies who tried to kill any hope of land reform by a typical “No Popery” scare. At certain times, it was even prepared to defend the Land League against the former. The Liberals also acted to try and steal the League’s thunder by a new tenant right agitation which gained some Orange support. Despite all this, in the new year, the government introduced a new Coercion Bill before any land legislation, and the Whig fell into line behind it:- “Tt cannot be said that in asking for these coercive powers the Government made more than they were expected to do. The question really merges into one of confidence in the Administration. If coercion be necessary, it ought, of course, to be applied at once. That it should be accompanied with remedial legislation is true; but it cannot be expected that it can be delayed until the Irish Land Bill becomes law”. — Northern Whig, 25" 5 anuary, 1881.

It continued to defend coercion when it was used to arrest Michael Davitt (5" February) and John Dillon (9" March). At the same time it maintained its all for an all-Britain land reform:- “We hope with Sir William Harcourt that, before this Parliament has come to an end, the Liberal Party will make a determined effort to deal with the English land question on a broad and determined basis” — Ibid., 24 March, 1881.

However, once a Land Bill was introduced, it was perfectly prepared to use the Land League and its methods as arguments to threaten the Conservatives and the House of Lords:- “If the [Land] Bill be defeated we must look forward to another autumn and winter of agitation worse than what we experienced last year, and even moderate men who have kept aloof from the extreme agrarian agitators may be reluctantly driven into their ranks” ~ ibid., 11™ May 1881. 100