Protestants, Presbyterians and Partition: a discussion of Ulster terminology
Studies of Northern Ireland generally refer to two categories of people, 'Catholics' and 'Protestants'. However, the Protestant population comprised two main groups, Presbyterians and Episcopalians, and this Note argues that recognition by historians that these communities were not automatic allies will help to create a more nuanced interpretation of the Partition of Ireland. In particular, it may not be generally recognised that Presbyterians were the largest Protestant denomination in the nine counties of Ulster.
In 2024, the centenary year of the Boundary Commission that attempted to revise the Irish Border, I returned to an essay that I had published in 1999, to review arguments and conclusions from a quarter of a century earlier.[1] I had attempted to assess the work of the Boundary Commission by looking at its use of the available statistical and geographical building blocks along the Border, from counties down to townlands. However, the reconsideration seemed to point to the need to look more closely at the way in which the Commission categorised populations in just two groups, 'Catholics' and 'Protestants'. Because that it is the framework in which almost all analysis of Northern Ireland has been conducted for over half a century, it is easy to overlook the basic point that, in denominational terms, Ulster people can – and, perhaps, in certain contexts, should – be grouped in more subtle ways.
Protestants As with almost all analysis of Northern Ireland affairs in the past hundred years, the Boundary Commission assumed a straight division of the population between Catholics and Protestants, and further took for granted that the former were Nationalists and the latter Unionists – this latter indeed being a reasonable deduction from election results.[2] That umbrella term, 'Protestant', so automatically used as one of the basic categorisations for the people of Ulster / Northern Ireland seemed worthy of some closer examination, especially in relation to the deliberations and controversies of 1924-5. This Note aims to highlight several points. The first is a reminder that there were two principal strands within Ulster Protestantism, one which accepted the authority of bishops and the other which bluntly repudiated them. The second, discussed below in a reappraisal of basic census tables, stresses that, even within the confined cockpit of the Six Counties, there were notable contrasts in the composition of Protestant communities in different districts. The third is to suggest that these local concentrations of one or the other denomination may have created an additional dimension, even if one that was hardly needed, to Unionist resistance to the Boundary Commission and its proposed tinkerings. "No surrender!" and "Not an inch!" may sound to outsiders like slogans of impenetrable immobility, but they may also reflect the essential nature of Ulster Unionism as a coalescence of two traditions, both derived from the sixteenth-century Reformation, that had long been in competition, and were sometimes in open conflict – and remained, at least latently, mutually suspicious. (These points are illustrated in the Table at Note 86 below, and the two maps that follow the text.)
"In Ireland religious terminology has always been, and still is, full of pitfalls," F.S.L. Lyons observed in 1971. The modern secular mentality (which I share) tends to regard 'Catholic' and 'Protestant' as essentially tribal labels, an interpretation that ignores their historical experience and their underpinnings as belief systems. In fact, there were two major Protestant groups, the Episcopalians (Church of Ireland, in communion with the Anglican Church in England)[3] and the Presbyterians, who were derived from the Church of Scotland and, from 1843, in alliance with the Free Church. (There were also some relatively small local clusters of Methodists, Baptists and other groups.[4]) In the nineteenth century, the term 'Protestant' was exclusively used – some might say hijacked – to describe members of the Church of Ireland alone. This created the bizarre terminological anomaly by which Presbyterians and Methodists, whose theology was arguably more 'Protestant', were sidelined and downgraded as 'Dissenters'. In practice, the umbrella term 'Protestant' was used throughout the nineteenth century in apposition to Catholic and nationalist organisations, but Daniel O'Connell was punctilious in his provocative invitation to them to attend his 1841 Belfast Repeal meeting, which was addressed to "Protestants, Presbyterians, and Dissenters."[5] Lyons also objected to the umbrella term 'non-Catholic', "frequently bestowed by Roman Catholics upon all who are not of their persuasion" as similarly implying that one communion represented the default position from which others consciously diverged.[6]
It is important to stress that Episcopalians and Presbyterians were something more than the Coca and Pepsi brands of an essentially interchangeable product. Although both traced their origins to the sixteenth-century Reformation, the Church of Ireland drew its inspiration from the initial revolt of Martin Luther which evolved – like its Anglican sister – into a complex compromise intended to accommodate those who hankered after the old faith. Presbyterianism owed its inspiration to a later wave of Reformation thought, the uncompromising theology of John Calvin.[7] In particular, Presbyterians rejected the concept of, and any pretensions to authority by, bishops, and its adherents rejected Episcopalian rituals as "nonsensical" and "unscriptural", the latter term constituting a condemnation that went far beyond some mere difference of opinion.[8]
Reviewing interpretations of the late-twentieth century Northern Ireland problem, J.H. Whyte concluded that the use of those overarching terms, Catholic and Protestant, by two important social science studies in the early years of the Troubles influenced subsequent scholars, since researchers sought to relate their findings to established work.[9] The streamlining of categories was defensible: Peter Brooke, a student of the intellectual history of Ulster Presbyterianism, accepted that, by 1970, there was "a distinct Ulster Protestant political society, but not a distinct Ulster Presbyterian political society".[10] However, there was one inconvenient aspect to this analytical amnesia. Most academic publications dealing with the Troubles devoted some space to the Reverend Ian Paisley's Free Presbyterian Church, and particularly its virulent hostility to Catholicism.[11] Perhaps this specific focus may have unwittingly coloured attitudes in the wider world to mainstream Ulster Presbyterianism. In fact, Paisley's adherents represented less than one percent of the Northern Ireland population and there is much to be said for Brooke's argument he belonged to "a tradition [of emotional revivalism] which, although it overlaps with the Presbyterian tradition, is independent of it". Paisley himself was the son of a Baptist minister who trained at a Bible college in Wales and flourished an honorary degree from a university in South Carolina. His Church incorporated some Baptist theology and, despite its title, it hardly conformed to the model of Presbyterian government: it was dominated by Paisley himself, who served as Moderator – not the most appropriate title – more or less continuously for 57 years.[12]
By and large, social scientists focusing upon the post-1968 Northern Ireland problem could be forgiven for subsuming Presbyterians in a wider Protestant political activity. No such excuse can apply to the examination of earlier decades. Historians of Ulster / Northern Ireland generally make allowance for Protestant diversity, but it is not always evident in more general narratives and interpretations of the Irish past. Whereas Episcopalianism emphasised obedience, Presbyterianism was inherently democratic, a political theory made all the more dynamic by the claim of an individual's direct relationship with God that overruled all pretensions to earthly authority. Furthermore, their God was the stern deity of the Old Testament, whom they imported wholesale from the eastern Mediterranean to the north of Ireland. D.H. Akenson argued that the "major component … of the Ulster-Scots mindset has been the conceptual grid that the Presbyterians of Ulster assimilated from the Hebrew scriptures.… the fundamental conceptual framework of Ulster-Scots society has been so deeply embedded in the mental fabric of everyone who has lived in the culture that only relatively rarely have individuals found it necessary to refer directly to the 'Old Testament' grid." There was an example at an Ulster Day rally in 1913, when the Belfast minister Robert Patterson declared that there was a "parallel between the people of Israel in those olden days and the people of Ulster at the present time". The Biblical framework also drew upon apocalyptic imagery from the New Testament, foundations that have been sometimes revealed in the cautious approach to interfaith understanding.[13] Thus it is important to recognise, for instance, that the Covenant, signed by the vast majority of Ulster Protestants in 1912, was a term with deep Biblical roots, denoting God's promise to protect and preserve his chosen people. It was an essentially Presbyterian concept, and one that had made a seismic impact in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Scotland, the ancestral home of many Ulster people. The initial intention in 1912 had been to adapt the wording of the original Scottish documents, but their antique language made this impracticable: nonetheless, the rewritten document described the men of Ulster was "humbly relying on the God whom our fathers in days of stress and trial confidently trusted".[14] The formula dug deep into the collective experience of all Ulster Protestants, but it was expressed in Presbyterian language.
Presbyterians In the eighteenth century, the civil rights of Ireland's Presbyterians had been subject to discriminatory legislation which was irksome, even if not as repressive as the penal laws against Catholics.[15] In the early seventeen-nineties, during the heady days of the French Revolution, middle-class Ulster Presbyterians joined the United Irishmen, a reform movement that sought alliance with the Catholics against the Episcopalian ascendancy. By 1797, the United Irishmen had become – in the eyes of the authorities, at least – an oath-bound secret society, which was to be eradicated by mass floggings and almost fifty hangings, including the execution of several ministers. But Presbyterian dissension flared again the following year in uncoordinated insurrections in Antrim and Down. It is noteworthy that the 1798 rebellions in north-east Ulster were largely suppressed by militia from Monaghan: to a considerable extent, this was a struggle for dominance between the two main Reformation streams.[16]
Historians like to avoid melodrama, and prefer to narrate episodes such as 1798 in neutral terms – an unemotional laundry list of uprisings, repression, executions. Yet the passion that underpinned the Presbyterian mindset can only be fully understood by appreciating that the rebellions in Antrim and Down were not some form of prequel to the cantankerous and theatrical demonstrations that marked the early career of the Reverend Ian Paisley almost two centuries later.[17] Taking up arms against established authority risked not only being cut down by government forces but also a painful death on the gallows where the corpses of the protesters would be left to rot. Being an Irish Presbyterian was a serious business, and it could be a deadly serious business. However, while the rebellions in Antrim and Down were indeed largely Presbyterian outbreaks, this is not to say that they represented the whole of their community: by 1797, clergy were generally hostile to the United Irishmen.[18] Declining enthusiasm for the French Revolution led many Presbyterians to doubt the wisdom of breaking all links with Britain, and the repression of 1797 weakened their ranks too. As Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh would put it, the intellectual legacy of seventeen-nineties among Ulster Presbyterians was the "congealing" of a "peculiarly north-east brand of non-revolutionary and anti-separatist nonconformist radicalism".[19] It would not always sit easily in the subsequent Unionist alliance with the socially stratified and politically conservative Church of Ireland. There were corrosive social distinctions between the two communions. Episcopalianism was associated with the landowning class and tended to predominate among the professions, while Presbyterianism was the religion of many of the tenant farmers and the manufacturers of north-east Ulster. For much of the nineteenth century, Presbyterians opposed the pretensions of the Church of Ireland as the established Church and many were active in successive tenant-right movements.[20]
The central decades of the nineteenth century were a time of much progress both for the Presbyterian Church and for its members. One of the weaknesses of the Presbyterian emphasis upon the sovereignty of individual conscience was that the movement suffered from splits and secessions when its members could not agree on sometimes abstruse theological points. However, the two main Ulster streams were able to unite in 1840: Alvin Jackson, one of the few authors of a general history to note the importance of this development, argues that the creation of the Irish General Assembly was "an essential precursor to the unification of Protestant identity".[21] That was probably true of the long-term, but in the immediate decades, Presbyterians used their newly achieved unity to work towards social and political parity with the Episcopalians.[22] There was a drive to build new churches and also a concentration on providing proper accommodation for clergy: the minister in his comfortable manse reinforced his status in the community.[23] A theological training college opened in Belfast in 1853, and Presbyterianism was spiritually refuelled by a successful revivalist campaign across Ulster in 1859, even though the anarchic enthusiasm that it generated largely ensured that the episode was not repeated.[24]
Perhaps equally noteworthy about the eighteen-forties were the two crises that Irish Presbyterianism managed to surmount. In 1843, the Church of Scotland dramatically fractured in two, a schism that lasted for nearly ninety years. The rock that caused the Disruption was the right of patrons to appoint ministers as a piece of private property irrespective of the views of the congregations upon whom the appointees were imposed. The democratic wing, who called themselves 'non-intrusionists', eventually felt that they had no alternative but to secede, and over four hundred ministers dramatically walked out of the General Assembly in Edinburgh to form the Free Church.[25] Their courageous sacrifice of their homes and incomes fuelled the naturally disputatious appetites of Scots Calvinists around the world: the issue of patronage did not arise in Canada, but Presbyterians there split anyway over the question of which 'mother church' they should recognise in their homeland. In Ulster, there was no such ambivalence. Essentially, the issue that was fought over within the Church of Scotland was a conflict between the lairds and the middle classes, parallel to the confrontation between landowners on the one hand and the tenant farmers and merchants on the other that was embodied in the rivalry between the Church of Ireland and the Presbyterians. Within twenty-four hours of the Disruption, a delegation arrived from Ireland to pledge allegiance to the breakaway Free Church. Soon afterwards, at their own General Assembly in Belfast, "[w]ith the impulsive ardour of the Irish character", the North of Ireland Presbyterians set about raising £10,000 in support of their Scottish brethren.[26] In 1867, two historians of the Presbyterian Church of Ireland could report that "its numerical strength has never been sensibly affected by secessions from its communion". This would remain true: in 1911, of around 450,000 Presbyterians across the thirty-two counties, barely 9,000 were members of secessionist bodies. In an inherently fissiparous communion, this was a remarkable achievement.[27]
Irish Presbyterians also came through a far larger disaster in that same decade, as their official history noted in bald and somewhat unfeeling terms twenty years later. "Owing to their peculiar circumstances, they suffered less from the famine of 1846-7 than almost any other class of religionists."[28] The "peculiar circumstances" were primarily geographical: Presbyterians were concentrated in the part of Ireland that suffered least in the Hungry Forties. The General Assembly did not believe this was an accident, pointing out in 1847 that "we humbly regard it as an illustration of the industry and general comfort promoted by our beloved Church, that in Ulster, where our principles are most widely disseminated, the visitation has appeared in a much less aggravated form than in those provinces in which the Romish system still, unhappily, maintains its degrading and paralyzing ascendancy".[29] Modern historical research has established that this was, at the very least, a smug exaggeration. There was severe distress in Monaghan and also in Donegal, where the Poor Law Unions of Dunfanaghy and Glenties on the Atlantic coast were among the worst-hit districts in Ireland. In Fermanagh, the Enniskillen workhouse was full by May 1847 and paupers were turned away. The Presbyterian core areas of Ulster were to some extent cushioned by diversification in agriculture, and the availability of alternative employment in weaving. Yet too much should not be made of this. An economic depression hit the linen trade in 1847. Wage rates in Belfast were close to subsistence levels, and the onset of dearth forced prices beyond the pockets of ordinary workers. The influx into the city of destitute refugees from the countryside was followed by epidemics of diseases such as typhus. And if the north of Ireland was indeed blessed by its Calvinist theology, it certainly received few favours from its climate: the winter of 1846-7 was exceptionally cruel. On balance, it would certainly seem that Presbyterians were more likely to escape starvation than the desperately poor Catholic peasantry, but their stereotypical qualities tended to reduce their numbers in another crucial respect: literacy, skills, the desire for self-improvement redisposed them to emigration, and they were sufficiently part of the cash economy to save the money needed for the fare.[30] However, the more commercial and industrial sectors of the Northern Irish economy did come relatively comfortably through the disaster – Belfast inaugurated new docks in 1849 – and this gave colour for the myth of Presbyterian resilience in the Famine years.
During the early Victorian decades, Presbyterians aspired to social equality with members of the Church of Ireland. Civil disabilities were formally abolished with the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828, although anomalies remained. Presbyterian marriages were not formally legalised until 1844, after an Episcopalian sought to evade conviction for bigamy by claiming that his first wedding, conducted by a minister, was invalid.[31] In the early eighteen-thirties, the magistrates in the Belfast area were all members of the Church of Ireland; by 1867, there were seventeen Presbyterian Justices of the Peace around the city.[32] Nonetheless, appointments to the magistracy continued to be a sore point for Presbyterians: in 1881, the General Assembly complained that even in Antrim, where they constituted a majority of the population, they had only twelve out of 122 members of the local bench.[33] They also sought parity of esteem in parliamentary representation. In 1852, the retirement from the House of Commons of their only MP triggered an angry outburst from a Belfast newspaper. "It is an outrageous disgrace to our northern Presbyterianism, that, in despite of its numbers, its wealth, and social importance, its members have hitherto been content to play into the hands of cliques and factions in 'Church and State', keeping their own body without a place in the parliamentary councils of the empire, as if Presbyterians were a colony of aliens, existing in this country only through the sufferance of Prelacy and feudal power." Here, again, there was steady progress: three Presbyterians had sat at Westminster in the twenty years before 1852, but the figure would rise to fifteen between 1852 and 1886.[34] Yet resentments over status and patronage lingered into the twentieth century. The Reverend J.B. Armour, who became a Home Ruler because he felt that the Union was manipulated in favour of the Episcopalians, offered this consolation to those of his co-religionists who feared that the Third Reform Bill would usher in a Catholic tyranny. "As far as the Presbyterian Church is concerned, its members cannot possibly under Home Rule have a less share in the offices of emolument and dignity than they have had all down the years from 1800 to 1912."[35]
One key to Presbyterian advancement was education. In 1845, Sir Robert Peel's government decided to get around the problem of the Episcopalian grip on Ireland's only university, Trinity College, Dublin, by establishing two new institutions at Cork and Galway, with a third somewhere in the North. (The first two were aimed at the Roman Catholic middle class, who largely shunned them on clerical orders.) Peel was determined that the Ulster college must not be located in Armagh, headquarters of the Church of Ireland archbishop, where an attempt had been made to establish a second university in the seventeen-nineties. "It must be Presbyterian, or it will be worse than useless," he insisted.[36] While Queen's College, Belfast was hardly a degree factory – in 1871, there were 371 students, of whom 285 were Presbyterians – it probably opened doors to professions like Law that had been dominated by adherents of the Church of Ireland.[37] A second institution, Magee College in Derry, was founded in 1865 to provide both liberal arts and Presbyterian theological training in the west of the province.[38]
Although university training was for relatively small numbers, it represented the apex of a pyramid of the community's commitment to education. In 1891, the illiteracy rate among Presbyterians was half that among members of the Church of Ireland, and one quarter of the percentage of Catholics who could not read or write.[39] In 1867, the historian and theologian W.D. Killen could assert that "Presbyterians constitute the bone and sinew of the Irish Protestant population, as they have more general competence, as well as more diffused intelligence, than any other religious community." Sound basic education was connected with success in business, enabling Killen to celebrate challenges to Episcopalian hegemony in the countryside. "Of late, in various parts of Ulster, as the old gentry of the country have disappeared, Presbyterians, enriched by trade, have been rapidly filling up their places; and, in some instances, prosperous Presbyterian merchants may be seen occupying the baronial halls of the ancient aristocracy."[40]
Indeed, by the later eighteen-sixties, there were strong indications that the Church of Ireland's position as the establishment faced inevitable overthrow. Killen even saw an opportunity for ecumenical annexation: "how glorious would be the results of a union of Irish Protestants!" All that was necessary was the recognition by Episcopalians "that their hierarchy, though supported at vast expense … has done comparatively little to advance the cause of evangelical Protestantism". Ten bishoprics had been phased out after 1833 without noticeably harming the Protestant cause, "and it must now be obvious that the prosperity of religion in no way depends upon the existence of the episcopal order…. The reconstruction of the Church of Ireland upon a Presbyterian basis would add immensely to its vigour as an ecclesiastical institute," providing a "new argument of tremendous power against the iron despotism of Popery".[41] The political struggle over disestablishment between 1868 and 1870 undoubtedly emphasised the gap between the two main Protestant denominations, but in the longer run, the freeing of the Church of Ireland from State control removed a major irritant between them.[42] In 1904, Killen recalled that Episcopalians had been "accustomed to look down on other denominations".[43] No doubt it was not simply the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland but its partial disendowment that forced some degree of humility upon its grandees. Episcopalians quickly adopted a synodical form of government and a constitution which provided for the election of bishops – but they were still bishops, not Presbyterian elders. Some distrust lingered: J.B. Armour of Ballymoney, the Presbyterian minister who backed Home Rule from 1893, suspected the Church of Ireland clergy of hankering after ritualism.[44] But Killen praised the Irish Episcopalians as "much sounder Protestants" than their Anglican counterparts across the Irish Sea, "not so easily infected with the theology of Newman and his party".[45] However, if the two organisations operated in parallel after 1871, they still did not converge. It was not until 1911 that the General Assembly and the General Synod cautiously engaged in "friendly interviews", but more formal discussions of inter-Church co-operation had achieved very little by 1915, when the Presbyterians simply declined to reply to a communication from the bishops. In 1919, the General Assembly approved a proposal for united Communion Services in the major centres that would embrace all the Evangelical churches to mark the formal conclusion of the Peace. These ceremonies never happened. And these fruitless initiatives, it will be remembered, took place during the Partition decade when Protestant political unity was rock-hard and defiant.[46] For their part, in the later nineteenth century, Presbyterians acted as if they were an established church, in subtle ways encroaching upon Episcopalian territory. Churches were no longer boxy meeting houses, often likened to barns, but came to embody Gothic architecture and assertive spires: Fisherwick church in Belfast's Malone Road speaks of this new confidence displayed by its congregation when it moved from the city centre in 1901. Calvinism had never had much time for church music, but Presbyterian temples now resounded with the throaty notes of organ pipes: as Killen cheerfully put it, organ music drowned discordant singing.[47]
"The Presbyterian is happiest when he is being a radical."[48] The individualism implicit in A.T.Q. Stewart's aphorism requires a broader gloss. "The system of Presbyterian polity was important in itself", wrote D.W. Miller "…because the goal was the conversion not of individuals but of the whole secular order. The Presbyterian enthusiast hoped to impose godly discipline upon both the elect and the unelect".[49] It was this thinking that led Presbyterians (and Northern Protestants generally) to arrogate to themselves the term 'people', notoriously expressed, if on a broader canvas, in James Craig's 1934 description of Stormont as "a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people", and it explains the unquestioning assumption of Ulster Unionists that they had the right to control the whole of Tyrone and Fermanagh, notwithstanding its inconvenient Catholic majorities.[50] Hence, throughout the nineteenth century, Presbyterian radicalism applied less to national issues, such as Repeal, Home Rule or independence – which, if achieved, would condemn them to minority status – than to social and political questions. True, there were some notable Presbyterian Nationalists. In 1848, John Mitchel, son of a minister from County Londonderry, sought to revive the ecumenical idealism of half a century earlier, although with a notable lack of success. (His father, it may be noted, was not part of the General Assembly.) The product of a Belfast mercantile background, J.G. Biggar was one Parnell's earliest allies in parliamentary guerrilla warfare, and also one of the first Home Rulers to perceive the weaknesses of his leadership – although 'Joey' undermined his Calvinist credentials by converting to Rome. Another Home Rule MP, Isaac Nelson, was a Presbyterian minister, whose father was said to have fought in 1798. In a blunt display of his dictatorial authority, Parnell ignored the protests of the local priests to parachute Nelson into the representation of Mayo, a constituency which in fact he never visited. J.B. Armour retained the loyalty of his congregation in the Antrim town of Ballymoney, but his insistence that Home Rule represented the "Presbyterian principle" of self-government struck few responsive chords elsewhere.[51] Desmond Bowen's statement that a "small but sturdy minority of Presbyterians" who supported Home Rule does justice to their courage but hardly reflects the extent of their marginality.[52] Just two Presbyterian ministers welcomed Daniel O'Connell when he invaded Belfast in 1842, and neither was a member of the General Assembly. When Armour sought to persuade the General Assembly to endorse Home Rule in 1893, his sole supporter in the ensuing debate was shouted down.[53] Presbyterians were also wary of becoming too deeply involved in radical causes that required co-operation with Catholics. The Tenant Right movement of the eighteen-fifties, although boosted as "The League of North and South", was launched at a time of heightened sectarian tension across the whole of the United Kingdom, and it failed to strike deep roots in Ulster. Thirty years later, "when Presbyterian tenants found that they could not join the Land League agitation without at least implicitly sanctioning the national claim, they simply disappeared from its ranks and sought redress of their grievances in isolation from their Catholic counterparts". Indeed, the Land League played a relatively small part in the tenant campaign in the north of Ireland.[54]
Crucially intertwined with Presbyterian support for the Union with Great Britain was their pride in the prosperity that they believed it had helped them to create. The thunderous preacher Henry Cooke focused upon the region's chief city: "before the Union, Belfast was a village; now it ranks with cities of the earth…. All this we owe to the Union…. Look at Belfast, and be a Repealer, if you can."[55] As W.D. Killen put it in 1867, if anyone needed to be reassured about "the temporal advantages of their peculiar polity, they require only to look abroad upon the face of the northern province. Little more than two centuries ago, it was the most barbarous and desolate in the land; now, it is the most enlightened and prosperous." In a pious allusion to the horrors of 1641, Killen added that "if, in the mysterious providence of God, the time shall ever again come when Irish Presbyterians must suffer persecution for their principles, it will, no doubt, be seen that not a few will again submit, for Christ's sake, to the spoiling of their goods, and to the repetition of the tragedies of the martyrs of the Covenant."[56] Others were less willing to acquiesce in the inevitability of the persecution that they saw as inherent in the imposition of devolution and majority rule upon Ireland. Cooke foreshadowed Alvin Jackson in regarding Presbyterian coalescence as a vital step in the defence of the Union against the machinations of Daniel O'Connell. "The time will never come when the mass of Presbyterians, now united in the General Assembly, will become sharers in any department of the present conspiracy against the Queen, the country, and the constitution."[57] Those emotive terms, 'conspiracy' and 'Covenant', would surface again in 1912. Deep in the Presbyterian psyche lay the roots of a conviction that 'Ulster' – their Ulster – possessed the right to resist, to assert its loyalty through rebellion. This mindset was reinforced by the subtle annexation of 1798. The Presbyterian pamphleteer, J.J. Shaw, argued in 1886 that the men of '98 had fought for Catholic Emancipation, parliamentary reform and equal citizenship, all benefits that were delivered – eventually – through the Union. It is no surprise to learn that Shaw was a former academic – he had been an early professor of metaphysics at Magee College – for his argument was a little bit too clever for its own good: the United Irishmen had definitely not taken up arms for incorporation with Great Britain.[58] Nonetheless, two traditions were fused in support of militant support for the Union, through what David W. Miller termed "contractarian" theory, the belief that loyalty was a two-way process. "All our progress has been made under the Union," the Belfast Chamber of Commerce told Gladstone in 1893. "Why should we be driven by force to abandon the conditions which have led to that success?"[59] Their challenge was echoed by James Craig in 1911: "why should Ulster be asked to place in jeopardy the position she has manfully won for herself by enterprise and enterprise, by patience and perseverance?"[60] "There was not a section of the community more resolutely opposed to Home Rule than the Presbyterian Church in Ireland," the Magee College Professor Francis Petticrew stated in 1893. In 1912, the Belfast industrialist William Crawford summarised the Presbyterian position: "their Church was practically unanimous in the profound conviction that Home Rule in Ireland would mean Rome Rule in Ireland, and that this would mean an outside domination so powerful, so unscrupulous, and so intolerable as to bring about in a few years the ruin of their Church and their country." "They would resist Home Rule to the end, and they meant all they said," Petticrew had warned in 1893.[61] In 1912, they put that resolve to the test.
S.J. Connolly's verdict that, for Presbyterians, "the nineteenth century saw a long drawn out and complex readjustment of political allegiances" is undoubtedly true in the wider perspective. Nonetheless, it is still necessary for historians of Partition to explain the sudden coalescence of two contrasting Protestant streams into a single political entity called Unionism in the immediate context of 1886 – or, at the very least, to emphasise its significance. The dramatic realignment took place after two decades in which there are clear signs of a de facto electoral alliance between Catholics and Presbyterians. The pre-1885 restrictive franchise made it virtually impossible for Ulster Catholics to function as an independent political entity and hence, as explained by a background article in The Times during the Home Rule crisis, they "supported the Presbyterian Liberals against the Conservatives", which presumably explained the election of two Presbyterian lawyers in previously Conservative County Monaghan at the general election of 1880, and the 61-vote majority that returned a Presbyterian minister over the Marquess of Hamilton in Donegal: Presbyterians were the third largest denomination in both counties, constituting only one-eighth of the population of Monaghan and one-tenth in Donegal. However, even though largely class-based, this particular alignment in the triangular politics of Ulster was less secure than it might have looked. Disestablishment removed one obstacle to Presbyterians working with Episcopalians: "we could not be angry for ever," said James Musgrave, chairman of the Belfast Harbour Board and a longtime critic of the Church of Ireland. "We have to do with what is occurring in our own day." Probably more disruptive of the anti-Conservative entente was the dramatic impact of the Land Courts in reducing rents from 1882. As tenant discontent subsided (although, as later Ulster revolts would demonstrate, it did not entirely disappear), so the bond that united Catholic and Presbyterian tenant farmers became weaker. In any case, Parnell's energetic campaign that carried Tim Healy to victory in the 1883 Monaghan by-election signalled that Ulster Liberalism would have no role in his Nationalist movement. Frank Callanan, Healy's biographer, argued that this perceived Home Rule 'invasion' of the northern province "prompted the beginning of concerted unionist resistance", thereby preparing the way for the more general realignment that followed three years later. There is reason to suspect that the tectonic plates of Ulster politics were already moving before Gladstone's dramatic conversion to the concept of a parliament in Dublin.[62]
At first sight, the challenge of explaining the Presbyterian accommodation with the Episcopalians in 1886 seems easy enough, for the obvious answer lies in their shared opposition to Home Rule. "Gladstone's conversion to Home Rule had changed most Ulster Liberals into Conservatives overnight."[63] In fact, A.T.Q. Stewart's striking verdict is not strictly accurate. Presbyterians, many of whom had previously regarded Gladstone "with a feeling … next to idolatry", generally became Liberal Unionists, many of them no doubt hoping for an eventual return to a reunified Liberal party. Although it was obviously in the joint interests of the two parties to present a common electoral front against the Nationalists, there was "much discontent" in 1892 when the Conservatives selected candidates for East Belfast and North Antrim – both Presbyterian areas – "without any consideration for the Liberal Unionists". In relation to the city, the Belfast News Letter made the point in explicitly denominational terms, revealing a continuing sensitivity about parity of esteem in parliamentary representation. "In Belfast, the basis and majority of the population are Presbyterian; and the justice of the demand to have one Presbyterian representative in the House of Commons cannot he assailed with the remotest hope of success. It is not unreasonable for nearly one-half of the population to ask for one-fourth of the representation."[64] Not until 1895 did the Liberal Unionists join a Conservative-led coalition at Westminster, and it would be a further decade before the Ulster Unionist Council was established as an umbrella organisation in the province.[65]
However, if Presbyterians were not immediately transmuted into true-blue Tories, their secession from the Gladstonian camp certainly tore the organisational heart out of Liberalism in the north of Ireland. At the preceding general election of 1885, only one of the Liberal candidates in Ulster was not a Presbyterian.[66] In the four constituencies of Antrim, the most Presbyterian county, Liberal candidates polled 10,647 votes, against 16,292 for the Conservatives. Thereafter, Liberals only contested the North division, where they primarily drew on the Catholic vote from the Glens, and did not attempt even token candidatures in the other three Antrim constituencies. Nonetheless, given the radicalism of the Presbyterian gene pool, a Liberal resurgence was not impossible, especially in the decade of Unionist ascendancy at Westminster that followed 1895, when the threat of Home Rule, although not eradicated, seemed to be in abeyance. This was demonstrated by the political career of T.W. Russell, who came to Ulster from Scotland in 1860 at the age of nineteen to work in a candle factory. His Presbyterian background propelled him through the temperance movement into politics and parliament, first as a Liberal and then as a Liberal Unionist. Although appointed a junior minister in 1895, probably to keep him on a leash, Russell broke away five years later to lead an embryo splinter party that voiced tenant grievances. In 1902-3 'Russellite' candidates won by-elections in Fermanagh and Down, but the passage of the Wyndham Land Act undercut his support, and only one of his nine candidates was elected in 1906: North Antrim returned a renegade Independent who joined the Liberal party at Westminster. The landslide that year was so comprehensive that the new government could ignore the Irish Nationalists and, for the next four years, the threat of Home Rule again seemed to recede. Russell himself also returned to the Liberals, and they too harnessed him with a minor appointment. Russell's insurgency has largely vanished from the history textbooks, but it was an alarming sign of the potential for the disruption of the Unionist coalition that was inherent in Presbyterian radicalism.[67] It was all the more alarming because the rural insurrection coincided with a revolt against the Unionist establishment among urban workers. At the 1902 Belfast South by-election, shipyard worker and Methodist lay preacher, Thomas Sloan, defeated the party's official candidate, a landowner with a double-barrelled name. One spin-off was the foundation of an Independent Orange Order, although this breakaway group was more likely to criticise Westminster Tories for being too indulgent to Catholics than to flirt with Liberals.[68] Sloan's support for a major strike in 1907 was presumably the source of later Unionist concern about the possibility of a Labour-Nationalist alliance in the Northern legislature, which was a contributory cause of the decision to opt for the secure laager of Six Counties rather than the more problematic and nearly balanced Nine. Alongside these Unionist fissures, an Ulster Liberal Association remained in nominal existence, maintaining varying levels of activity. Recent research indicates that many of its key members were Presbyterians. It enjoyed something of a renaissance after 1906, but it faltered after 1912 when the overarching issue of the Union once again came to dominate.[69]
How durable would that anti-Home Rule pan-Protestant alliance prove, and how far could it contain differences of response to other issues? The Orange Order, which transcended denominational boundaries, clearly played a key role in ensuring Protestant solidarity, and was easily mobilised to give effect to the Presbyterian concept of the assertion of legitimate authority by the sovereign people. However, the Order had been regarded as a Church of Ireland organisation for much of the nineteenth century, and only attracted a substantial Presbyterian membership from the eighteen-eighties, in response to the perception of an increasing Catholic-Nationalist threat.[70] Evidently, a common front with fellow Protestants in defence of the Union did not necessarily imply that Presbyterians would agree with their allies on all other issues. In 1893, the General Assembly declared itself "unalterably hostile to the creation of a Dublin Parliament", but added that it favoured "a good Local Government Bill" and called "for the abolition of dual ownership in Irish land and for the making of every tenant the proprietor, on equitable terms, of the land he tills".[71] By the standards of contemporary political debate, these were indeed radical demands, and both of them were implicitly anti-Episcopalian. Elected county councils would end local administration by the Grand Juries, in which members of the Church of Ireland leisured class were prominent. Gladstone's 1881 Land Act had indeed created (or, in Ulster, recognised) a form of property rights by tenants over the land that they occupied, but to talk of "dual ownership" – let alone to require its abolition – was mildly revolutionary. It is a wry tribute to the imperative dominance of the Union issue that both demands were conceded by the next Conservative government, county councils in 1898, and the large-scale easing out of landlordism by the Wyndham Act of 1903.
It is important to keep in mind that Ulster Protestantism was not always as internally solid as it outwardly appeared. In 1912, for instance, a Presbyterian convention in Belfast strongly protested against being placed under Dublin rule, in an appeal to the Liberal government "with whose policy, apart from the question of Home Rule, so many of us are in general sympathy".[72] In what may seem an uncharacteristic display of caution, Presbyterian leaders forced the revision of an early draft of the Covenant that used the word "never" in relation to Home Rule. "They objected to undertaking such a responsibility without the possibility of modifying it to meet the changes which time and circumstance might bring about": the oath was duly modified to specify defiance of the "present conspiracy", wording that provided a handy escape clause in 1916 when the Six Counties Unionist leadership decided to dump Cavan, Monaghan and Donegal.[73] Thus, even at the crescendo of Ulster Unionist resistance to the threat of Home Rule, there were indications that the pan-Protestant alliance might fracture on other issues in the future.
Partition How far, and in what ways, can it be suggested that the existence of this solid bloc of Presbyterians in the north of Ireland influenced the larger issue of Partition, and may provide a context for understanding the episode of the Boundary Commission? Although we need to bear in mind the existence of the dual stream of Ulster Protestantism, it is also possible to over-stress its importance as a formative element in the high tide of Unionist defiance after 1912, simply because Episcopalians shared with Presbyterians their total determination to resist Home Rule. It is certainly true that James Craig, the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, was the product of an upbringing and education that were entirely Presbyterian. As Patrick Buckland pointed out, Craig's invective during the Home Rule crisis of 1912-14 (he dismissed the Liberal government as "a caucus, led by rebels") was "fully in keeping with the Presbyterian tradition which had done much to shape Ulster Unionism".[74] But, by then, adherents of the Church of Ireland had apparently imbibed the same theoretical structure that assumed the sovereign right of a Protestant people to establish their own provisional government, so much so that even Peter Brooke, the historian who argued that Ulster Presbyterianism had originally constituted "a distinct political society", accepted that it fused into a wider sectarian identity during the twentieth century.[75] The counterpoint to Brooke's useful insight is that core elements of Presbyterian way of looking at this world and the next – D.W. Miller termed them "contractarian" – had permeated that wider Protestant identity, a process of coalescence which was obviously in an advanced state by 1912. Partition was in large measure the projection of that older concept of a self-contained Presbyterian society on to the map of Ireland. Once an autonomous Six-County statelet was achieved, a separate Presbyterian political identity was no longer necessary and, indeed, everything was to be gained by forming part of a united defence against irredentist Irish Nationalism.
In 1912, Unionist leaders began to think in terms of a mass oath-taking ceremony that would proclaim Ulster's refusal to bow to a Dublin parliament. When Craig found it difficult to find the right formula for the pledge, his attention was drawn to the "the old Scotch Covenant" by a Belfast businessman, B.W.D. Montgomery, who personified the integrated Unionist identity that had emerged since 1886. Proud of his own Scots ancestry, Montgomery was the son of the Church of Ireland rector at Dromore in County Down, and he had been active in the pan-Protestant Ulster Defence Union of 1893. The eventual version was the work of Thomas Sinclair, a veteran Presbyterian who had helped reorganise the Church's finances after the withdrawal of State funding, the Regium Donum, as part of the 1869-71 disestablishment settlement.[76] Yet, as noted above, even at the point where Presbyterian political thinking seemed to have permeated the wider Ulster Protestant mainstream, the leaders of the Presbyterian Church maintained an autonomy of strategy, successfully arguing against an open-ended commitment. In the event, only the title and the symbolism of mass gesture survived. Similarly, it is possible to argue that tensions between southern Unionists and the defenders of Ulster in the 1917-18 Irish Convention reflected cultural differences between the two traditions. Certainly, the fact that ninety percent of Ireland's Presbyterians lived in Ulster made it easier for politicians like Craig to acquiesce in the abandonment of the Southern minority to Catholic rule. But the retreat from the original strategy of blocking Home Rule altogether to the defence of the Protestant laager in the North was, in effect, dictated by necessity. Hence Partition was embraced with equal determination by Edward Carson, the Dublin lawyer with his Ascendancy accent, who had dreamed in early life of ordination in the Church of Ireland. The Ulster Unionists accepted this somewhat unlikely outsider as their leader at a rally in September 1911 where he pledged himself to a "compact", with "every one of you, and with the help of God".[77] The vocabulary of Presbyterian ideology had become the shared coded language of the Protestant North.
Nonetheless, it is helpful to remember that, however inflexible it might appear politically, Ulster Protestantism was not denominationally monolithic, and that Presbyterians maintained their semi-subterranean existence. J.H. Whyte insisted that to understand late-twentieth century Northern Ireland, it was necessary to recognise that "the two communities [Catholic and Protestant] are not mirror images of each other". Indeed, he argued, consciousness of their own diversity made many Protestants all the more suspicious of the power of the (seemingly) monolithic Church of Rome.[78] Historians have too often lost sight of this potential fissure in the Ulster Unionist identity. Take, for instance, the formation by Sir James Craig of the initial six-member cabinet charged with the launching of Northern Ireland in 1920. Curiously, basic research tools reveal very little information about the denominational affiliation of prominent Ulster politicians. Two historians of the province, Patrick Buckland and Jonathan Bardon, provided analyses of the ministerial team that he selected – and which would essentially remain in place, with only marginal changes, until 1937. But their discussions of Craig's colleagues are in modern secular terms, of social class and regional interest.[79] It is also striking that so few entries in the excellent Dictionary of Irish Biography or the indispensable Oxford Dictionary of National Biography go beyond conveying the general designation that Ulster Unionists were Protestants – indeed, if they go as far to specify even that, since their Unionism is often taken as virtually predicating their adherence to some form of Reformation tradition. The secular and increasingly agnostic twenty-first century may be missing a vital dimension of the past.[80]
However, enough information may be deduced to suggest that Craig selected a balanced cabinet, with three members from each Protestant stream – but that its heavyweight core came from his own tradition. Of the Prime Minister's own background, there is no doubt, most notably in his parents' decision to send him to a Church of Scotland boarding school in Edinburgh, which effectively insulated him from anglicisation in speech or (so it was claimed) in thought.[81] The Minister of Finance, Hugh Pollock, a devout Presbyterian, was generally regarded as Craig's ablest colleague, while the Minister of Labour, J.M. Andrews, a member of a small secessionist church, would ultimately succeed him as Prime Minister.[82] Of the three Church of Ireland members, Edward Archdale came from a landowning family in Fermanagh, and was in fact the sole cabinet member from the west of the province. As Minister of Agriculture (and, until 1925, Commerce as well), he held an important portfolio but advancing years limited his energies. The grandee Lord Londonderry owned estates in County Down, which was over-represented in Craig's team. His Westminster experience was an asset to a political system as it started from scratch, but it also became a distraction. He resigned in 1926, having fought a valiant battle to establish a secular school system, an initiative that Presbyterians strongly opposed. The Home Affairs Minister was the Belfast solicitor, Richard Dawson Bates, who was probably appointed because he had been the key organiser of Unionist resistance. A hard and narrow personality, for good or ill he alone would come to match the Presbyterian cabinet ministers in political weight. Initially, however, Londonderry thought he had insufficient "support and standing in the Six Counties" to justify his appointment, while others regarded him as an "ass".[83] It is a curious example of the filter of history – or, at least, of historians – that the textbooks examine Craig's first cabinet in terms of economic and regional interests within Northern Ireland, but make no comment on an aspect that would have been obvious to every sentient Ulster person, their denominational balance.
Thus the case may be made that historians have forgotten that the challenges facing Craig in the harnessing of the Protestant majority to the task of devolved government went beyond the need to balance diverse regional interests within a highly localised province and embraced the more fundamental requirement to maintain the underlying Presbyterian-Episcopalian alliance that was the foundation of Unionism.[84] Even more to the point, the denominational contrast characterised the regional differences, most notably that – in Orange terms – Antrim was Presbyterian and Fermanagh Episcopalian. In relation to the Boundary Commission, there were obvious reasons of overall defensiveness that inclined Ulster Unionists to total resistance to any change in the Border, but it is worth keeping in mind that potential internal fissures also reduced the scope for compromise.
Accounts of Partition usually cite census figures from 1911 indicating the relative strength of Catholics and Protestants in the nine counties of Ulster and the two cities.[85] Less emphasised, but very striking, are the contrasting proportions of Presbyterians within the non-Catholic share of the population. Across Ireland as whole in 1911, 26.1 of the total population were Protestants, and 38.3 percent of those were Presbyterians. But in the historic province of Ulster, Presbyterians constituted 49.5 percent of the Protestant population, while in the other three provinces they were less than 8 percent of an already small minority of just under 9 percent. (In 1911, in rounded terms, there were 421,000 Presbyterians in the Nine Counties, 367,000 members of the Church of Ireland, 49,000 Methodists and scattering of smaller congregations: thus the fact that Presbyterians fell just short of fifty percent of the Ulster Protestant community did not negate their primacy.) Indeed, it was this imbalance between their own province and the rest of the island that had tended to reconcile Ulster Presbyterians to some division of Ireland that would safeguard their regional security.
Yet in considering Unionist reactions to the Boundary Commission of 1924-5, it may also be useful to bear in mind local differences within the north of Ireland. The table that follows gives for each location, in the first column, the percentage of Protestants in each district (nine counties and two cities) in 1911 and, in the second column, the Presbyterian percentage of the Protestant community:[86] The information is also presented on the two maps that follow the text.
It should be stressed that these are proportions within relatively small overall numbers, where a few thousand people one way or the other would make a disproportionate statistical difference. In Belfast, there were just short of 300,000 Protestants (or, technically, non-Catholics, for the city was home to a small Jewish community), while there were slightly over 150,000 in Antrim. But in other areas, Protestant totals were small: 17,000 in Cavan, 18,000 in Monaghan, 27,000 in Fermanagh.[87] (One of the statistical oddities of Partition is that the 35,500 Protestants of County Donegal assigned to the Free State outnumbered their Fermanagh coreligionists who went with the North.) Yet even allowing for accidental agglomerations, the uneven distribution of Presbyterians is striking. They were particularly concentrated in the east Ulster counties of Antrim and Down, and were the largest Protestant group in Belfast, where they outnumbered the Church of Ireland even though Methodists held the balance. In west Ulster, too, they formed the majority among Protestants in County Londonderry and were the largest group in the city of Derry, where minor sects just pushed them below the fifty percent mark. However, they were outnumbered by Episcopalians in Armagh and Tyrone, while there were barely twelve hundred of them in Fermanagh.
It is difficult not to feel that these contrasting balances formed an element in Unionist resistance to the establishment of the Boundary Commission and, subsequently, to its recommendations. It is worth remembering that Craig sometimes sounded much less inflexible on the boundary issue than his public position of "Not an inch!" would suggest. In January and February 1922, he had attempted to engage in direct talks with Collins to settle the Border: the initiative failed when it emerged that the Big Fella wanted to talk counties while Craig only contemplated the adjustment of townlands. As late as November 1925, he told the influential British civil servant Thomas Jones that "as between the old and the new boundary he had no deep convictions. It was the toss of a penny." To some extent he had by then boxed himself in, having called an election in April of that year in which his Unionist party had lost seats in Belfast but gained votes in the threatened Border counties.[88] Armagh, Fermanagh and Tyrone were the counties most likely to be targeted for transfer of Catholic-majority Border areas, in artificially excavated tranches, all of which contained Protestant minorities. Even if there had been any willingness among Unionists as a whole to make concessions, it would have been extraordinarily difficult for a Northern Ireland government that was predominantly Presbyterian in tone to abandon populations that were much more Episcopalian in character. Even if historians reject the hypothesis, they should at least be aware of the denominational context that would have been obvious to the inhabitants of Ulster at the time.
Tailpiece I freely acknowledge that there is hardly the depth of information here, let alone of analysis, that might point to some radical reappraisal of Northern Ireland politics, either at the time of the Boundary Commission in the mid-nineteen twenties, or in any period since. For all practical purposes, the politics of Ulster / Northern Ireland since 1886 can indeed be viewed as a confrontation between two blocs labelled 'Catholics' and 'Protestants'. Nonetheless, we may add something to the texture of our understanding if we are able to keep in mind that key prominent political participants and some local majority Protestant districts may be more specifically characterised as Presbyterian or Episcopalian, especially during the crucial decades that saw the emergence and survival of Northern Ireland. Outsiders (of whom I am one) may too easily assume that they have grasped the essentials of the Northern Ireland situation once they have digested those two basic labels and weighed their import – as the Boundary Commission sought to do – through census tables and ballot papers. It can come as a shock to discover that Ulster is viewed in very different terms by those who actually live there, that they use a form of sectarian telepathy to identify and categorise the people they encounter through instinctive cultural osmosis, derived from "a complex interplay of clues – name, face, dress, demeanour, residence, education, language, and iconography".[89] The perceptive travel writer Dervla Murphy found herself, within two weeks of crossing the Border on only her second-ever visit to the North, "in the vaguely embarrassing position of being able to distinguish between Catholics and Protestants by appearance – or is it by 'aura'?"[90] Surnames offered a superficially attractive form of labelling. As late as 1962, according to the sympathetic Quaker observers D.P. Barritt and C.F. Carter, there was "a presumption that an Irish name will belong to a Catholic, a Scots name to a Presbyterian, and an English name to some kind of Protestant."[91] In fact, there have been so many crossovers between the communities that nomenclature could prove a delusive snare: Terence O'Neill was a leading Unionist, Gerry Adams is a prominent Republican. People were more effectively tagged according to the place where they worshipped, for church attendance remained high in Northern Ireland throughout the twentieth century. In this way, Presbyterianism became both a label in its own right and a contributing element to the wider Protestant category.[92]
This Note primarily focuses on the decade of Partition with particular reference to the Boundary Commission. Nonetheless, it is pertinent to suggest that, despite its apparent absorption into the wider Protestant identity, Presbyterian Ulster has continued to form part of a bedrock that occasionally becomes visible. Firmly a product of the Episcopalian and landowning tradition, Terence O'Neill, Northern Ireland Prime Minister from 1963 to 1969, attempted to introduce overdue reforms. A recent historian suggests that O'Neill set out "politically to offset his aristocratic demeanour by rooting himself in an earthy Ulster Presbyterian tradition".[93] He did not succeed and, after the brief interregnum, the Unionist leadership passed to Brian Faulkner, who came from a manufacturing background and who retained throughout his life "a deep respect for and an attachment to the simple Presbyterian faith in which I was brought up".[94] There remained marked differences between the two main Protestant streams. A survey in 1966, on the eve of the Troubles, found that Presbyterians were twice as likely to be regular churchgoers as members of the Church of Ireland. Buckland observed that Presbyterians were not attracted to the speculations of the New Ulster Movement, which was formed in 1969 and spawned the Alliance Party.[95] Once again, it should be stressed that official Unionism's most extreme critic, Ian Paisley, was condemned by the leaders of the mainstream Presbyterian Church, but his Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) had its roots in a breakaway hard-line group, and achieved its first electoral successes in the very Presbyterian county of Antrim. Paisley himself evoked memories of Protestant resistance in 1912, for instance in 1981 hinting at the creation of a paramilitary defence force in a series of rallies which he called the "Carson Trail".[96] In its long march from the fringes to the heart of Ulster politics, the DUP would eventually absorb a broader range of Protestant attitudes, much as had happened around 1912. Yet, on the ground, that narrow ground of the Six Counties, that Presbyterian identity remained distinct, even if it was rarely the focus of academic research.[97] Touring Northern Ireland in the mid-nineteen seventies, Dervla Murphy became aware of the potential for "considerable animosity between the Church of Ireland and the Presbyterian Church": at local level, there was sometimes tension between their clergy and friction over issues such as Sunday observance.[98] The survival of Presbyterianism and its doggedly devoted followers retain their implications for political discourse in the province. As John Bew observed in 2007, "certain doctrines about the relationship between the government and the governed – grounded in Presbyterian Covenanting theology as well as contractarian thought" still emerged from time to time in Northern Ireland, and "the full implications of this ideological heritage have yet to be fully acknowledged".[99] Perhaps, as so often, the last word should be left with A.T.Q. Stewart, who captured the essence of the point in 1977. "The political independence of Ulster Presbyterians was always more significant than either their nationalism or their unionism, and this is still true today."[100] The Presbyterians may often seem invisible in the textbooks and perhaps they may sound irritating when they do intrude, but we cannot fully comprehend Ulster history and certainly will fail to understand the emergence of the Northern Ireland polity unless we recognise the negative creativity of their obstinate presence.
Map 1: percentage of Protestants in the nine counties and two cities of Ulster. (Source: the 1911 census). 
These figures are relatively well known, appearing in many textbooks and specialist studies. They show that Protestants formed a majority in the four counties of Antrim, Armagh, Down and Londonderry (Derry on this map) and in the city of Belfast. They represented sizeable minorities in Fermanagh and Tyrone, as well as in the city of Derry. It is likely that cross-Border migration increased the Protestant population in Fermanagh by the time of the Boundary Commission in 1925, but that it still did not constitute a local majority.
Map 2: Presbyterians as a percentage of the overall Protestant population. (Source: the 1911 census)
This information is perhaps presented for the first time, and amplifies the generally recognised point that Presbyterians were concentrated in eastern Ulster. They formed the majority of the Protestant population in the counties of Antrim, Down and Londonderry. They were the largest Protestant group in the two cities: in Belfast, for instance, 11.6 percent of the population were Methodists or adherents of smaller sects, many of which would be more closely aligned with Presbyterianism than with the Church of Ireland. Particularly striking is the position in Fermanagh, where only one Protestant in every 21 was a Presbyterian. It may be suggested that for Northern Ireland's first Prime Minister, the Presbyterian Sir James Craig, it would have been particularly difficult to agree even to small boundary changes in Fermanagh.
ENDNOTES
[1] Ged Martin, "The Origins of Partition", in M. Anderson and E. Bort, eds, The Irish Border… (1999), 57-111.
[2] About all that the Boundary Commission had to say on the point was its acceptance of the general claim "that Roman Catholics can be reckoned as wishing to be under the Government of the Free State, and that all others, who are with insignificant exceptions … members of one or other of the Protestant denominations, can be reckoned as wishing to be under the Government of Northern Ireland". The existence of various Protestant denominations was recognised, but no political significance was attached to their diversity. G.J. Hand, ed., Report of the Irish Boundary Commission 1925 (Shannon, Ireland, 1969), 60.
[3] The term 'Episcopalian' invites comment. Many modern academics use 'Anglican', reflecting the fact that the Church of Ireland forms part of a wider Communion that loosely looks to Canterbury. Although the concept existed in the 19th century (the Oxford English Dictionary traces the first example of 'Anglicanism' to 1846), 'Anglican' does not seem to have been widely used in Ireland. Strictly speaking, members of the Church of Ireland ceased to be Anglicans (in the sense of members of the Henrician 'anglicana ecclesia', a term which had first appeared in Magna Carta) when the United Church of England and Ireland was dissolved in 1871. Modern use of the term may imply that Irish Episcopalians simply represented an English garrison, which would be at best a half-truth. T.M. Healy and Thomas Sexton had some fun in the House of Commons in 1885 demanding to know how British government agencies addressed the Church of Ireland (a name that they resented). The answer was eventually clarified as "Protestant Episcopalian Church of Ireland" (Hansard, 21 July 1885, 1405-6). I regard 'Episcopalian' as a particularly pertinent term in a discussion of relations with the Presbyterians. Episcopacy was not only the key difference in organisational principles between the two groups, but was of crucial importance in the ordination of clergy. The 1912-15 conversations between the two Churches broke down over the mutual recognition of orders.
[4] There were appreciable Methodist minorities in the counties of Fermanagh where they constituted 6.5 percent of the total population in 1911) and Armagh (4.2 percent in 1911). On his appointment as Rector of Enniskillen in 1861, William Connor Magee encountered "a great deal of Methodism". Many of his Church of Ireland parishioners "hate the Wesleyans with a perfect hatred.… This town is split into sects – religious, political, and social – beyond any place I ever knew of." In 1898, there were eighteen Methodist churches in Belfast, where Wesleyans were 5.5 percent of the population in 1911. Elsewhere they were little more than a sprinkling, with some local concentrations in Lisburn and Portadown. J.C. Macdonnell, The Life and Correspondence of William Connor Magee … (2 vols, London, 1896), i, 71, 73; W.E. Vaughan and A.J. Fitzpatrick, eds, Irish Historical Statistics… (Dublin, 1978), 67-8. There have never been many Quakers in Ulster but – as elsewhere – they have exercised a positive influence out of proportion to their numbers. Ironically, one of their most prominent notable products was Bulmer Hobson, who was educated at the Friends' School, Lisburn. Active in the IRB from 1904, he remained a member of the Society of Friends for another decade. P. Maume, "(John) Bulmer Hobson", Dictionary of Irish Biography.
[5] W. McComb, ed. P. Maume, The Repealer Repulsed (2003 ed., Dublin, cf. 1st ed., Belfast 1841), 157.
[6] F.S.L. Lyons, Ireland since the Famine (rev. ed., London, 1973, cf. 1st ed., 1971), 18n. To add to the complexity of terminology, both Episcopalians and Presbyterians accept the Nicene Creed, which refers to "one holy catholic and apostolic Church". The Presbyterian Church of Ireland describes itself as "a particular Church of the visible catholic or universal Church of Jesus Christ". However, as two Quaker commentators mildly put it, the repetitive use of the full title "Roman Catholic" would be "awkward". D.P. Barritt and C.F. Carter, The Northern Ireland Problem (Oxford, 1972 ed., cf. 1st ed. 1962), 1n.
[7] A.T.Q. Stewart regarded the religion of the early Scots settlers in north-east Ulster as "Calvinism in its most uncompromising form", a fair comment although it is not easy to imagine a compromising form of Calvinism. A.T.Q. Stewart, The Narrow Ground… (London, 1989 ed., cf. 1st ed., 1977), 79.
[8] B.M. Walker, Ulster Politics: the Formative Years, 1868-86 (Belfast, 1989), 32. J.B. Armour of Ballymoney, the Presbyterian minister who backed Home Rule from 1893, was partly motivated by a suspicion that Church of Ireland clergy were still "hankering after a ritual quite out of keeping with Reformation principles". J.R.B. McMinn, Against the Tide… (Belfast, 1995), introduction.
[9] J. Whyte, Interpreting Northern Ireland (Oxford, 1991 ed., cf. 1st ed. 1990), 19. I take as an example one of the most wide-ranging analyses of the Troubles, J. McGarry and B. O'Leary, Explaining Northern Ireland… (Oxford, 1995). Their chapter on religion ("Warring Gods?", 171-213) identified Presbyterians in a census table, but did not specifically refer to, let alone discuss, their mainstream, even in its brief summary of the 'chosen people' interpretation of D.H. Akenson (204-5, and discussed below). Elsewhere, there were two passing allusions, one of which stated that "Ulster Protestantism, heavily influenced by Presbyterianism, has … always had a strongly anti-hierarchical thrust" (236). In the past half-century, most political scientists seemed content to sprinkle a little Presbyterian pepper in the Protestant stew, without further analysing the ingredients. One problem with this is that the scattered allusions assume an understanding of the distinct Protestant denominations which may sometimes represent little more than caricature. Thus Geoffrey Bell (The Protestants of Ulster, London, 1976) made only a handful of allusions to Presbyterians, most of them in relation to 1798. One of the few specific pieces of information quoted a 1969 opinion poll, which reported that 78% of Northern Ireland Catholics favoured closer links between the churches, but only 34% of Episcopalians and 28% of Presbyterians. Bell commented (62-3): "Those who prided themselves on being part of the ascendency had no wish to bring in others; those who judged themselves God’s people had no wish to petition the Almighty to extend his favours." A century after disestablishment, it is unlikely that this was true of members of the Church of Ireland, many of whose members were working class, and it was a simplification of the defensive mentality of most Presbyterians. An early example of a historical analysis that used the straight Catholic / Protestant distinction is F. Wright, "Protestant Ideology and Politics in Ulster", European Journal of Sociology, xiv (1973), 213-80.
[10] P. Brooke, Ulster Presbyterianism… (Belfast, 1994 ed., cf. 1st ed., Dublin 1987), 146.
[11] E.g. McGarry and O'Leary, Explaining Northern Ireland, 202-3.
[12] Brooke, Ulster Presbyterianism, 173. There are sensitive discussions of Paisley's religious formation by Patrick Maume, "Paisley, Ian", Dictionary of Irish Biography, and by D.C. Shiels,"Paisley, Ian Richard Kyle, Baron Bannside (1926–2014)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
[13] D.H. Akenson, God's Peoples … (Ithaca, NY, 1992), 102; J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912-1985… (Cambridge, 1989), 9. In 1988, the Presbyterian General Assembly concluded that the view of "the Pope of Rome as the personal and literal fulfilment of the biblical figure of 'the Antichrist'" was "not manifestly evident from the Scripture". This has an echo of the traditional Scots legal verdict of 'Not Proven'. P. Grant, Breaking Enmities… (Basingstoke, 1999), 27. The historian Desmond Bowen mildly regarded the debate as unhelpful: D. Bowen, History and the Shaping of Irish Protestantism (New York, 1995), 502. The Westminster Confession of 1646 described the Pope as "that Antichrist, that man of sin, and son of perdition, that exalts himself, in the Church, against Christ and all that is called God". The Presbyterian Church of Ireland still formally regards the Westminster Confession as "founded on and agreeable to the Word of God": The Code: the Book of The Constitution and Government of The Presbyterian Church in Ireland (Belfast, 2016 ed., cf. 1st ed. 1980, superseding 10 earlier versions dating back to 1825), e.g. sections 202, 205.
[14] Widely quoted, e.g. A.T.Q. Stewart, The Ulster Crisis (London, 1967), 62. There were several Covenants in the first century of the Scottish Reformation, e.g. 1581, 1596, 1638. Ulster used the title, "Solemn League and Covenant" which was in fact a treaty between the Scots and the English Parliament concluded in 1643. Conveniently for 1912, a handy short guide had recently appeared: D.H. Fleming, The Story of the Scottish Covenants in Outline (Edinburgh, 1904). J.J. Lee's definition of the covenant as "the traditional Presbyterian technique for reminding God whose side he was on" is amusing but inaccurate: in 1912, Ulster Protestants signed the Covenant to bring home to British politicians that God was already on their side, and that He would stay there. J.J. Lee, The Modernisation of Irish Society 1848-1918 (Dublin, 1973), 135.
[15] S.J. Connolly, Religion, Law and Power… (Oxford, 1992), 161-71. Edith Mary Johnston wrote that Presbyterians were "feared [by the English Anglican establishment] for their numbers, organisation and concentration, as well as for the political implications of their theological views and expansionist ambitions.… The Catholic was feared for what he represented; the Presbyterian for what he was." E.M. Johnston, Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin, 1974), 35.
[16] J. Bardon, A History of Ulster (Belfast, 1992), 220-3, 230-9. The previous year, General Knox, the British commander at Dungannon, had explained that his policy was "to increase the animosity between Orangemen and the United Irish. Upon that animosity depends the safety of the centre counties of the North. Were the Orangemen disarmed or put down, or were they coalesced with the other party, the whole of Ulster would be as bad as Antrim and Down." H. Senior, Orangeism in Ireland and Britain, 1795-1836 (London, 1966), 66-7. Massacres of Protestants in County Wexford largely put an end to Presbyterian hopes for political alliance.
[17] A supporter of Catholic Emancipation and parliamentary reform, Thomas Ledlie Birch may seem to 21st-century readers the sort of Presbyterian minister with whose opinions we might sympathise. In fact, he held a millenarian view of the French Revolution and, regarding kings as "the butchers and scourges of the human race", he assured the Synod of Ulster in 1793 that the decision to go war with France meant that "the final overthrow of the Beast … is almost at the door … the Beast and his adherents are to be cut off, as a prelude to a peaceful reign of 1,000 years". He also predicted that the Second Coming would happen in 1848. Elected chaplain to the insurgents of County Down in 1798, he urged them to "drive the bloodhounds of King George the German king beyond the seas. This is Ireland, we are Irish, and we shall be free". Thanks to family influence, he survived a court-martial and was permitted to emigrate to the United States. J. Quinn, "Birch, Thomas Ledlie", Dictionary of Irish Biography; Brooke, Ulster Presbyterianism, 107.
[18] Drawing upon unpublished research by A.T.Q. Stewart, Richard McMinn argued that Presbyterian support for radicalism in the 1790s was in retreat after the concession to Roman Catholics of the right to vote in 1793. R. McMinn, "Presbyterianism and Politics in Ulster, 1871-1906", Studia Hibernica, xxi (1981), 127-46, esp. 133-4.
[19] G. Ó Tuathaigh, Ireland before the Famine 1798-1848 (Dublin. 1972), 26. J.C. Beckett noted that 1798 was remembered by Ulster Protestants "without any of the rancour commonly associated with Irish historical events", with even "the most ardent unionist" taking pride in having an ancestor who took part in the rebellions. This attitude was part of the assimilation of 1798 into the threatened resistance of 1886 and 1912. Beckett was born and raised in Belfast and became Professor of History at Queen's. J.C. Beckett, The Making of Modern Ireland 1603-1923 (London, 1969 ed., cf. 1st ed. 1966), 265.
[20] "The Episcopal clergy, before the disestablishment, generally made common cause with the landlords. The Presbyterian clergy, most of whom were either farmers' sons or more remotely the descendants of farmers, were more associated with the tenants, and were with them in favour of a thorough reform in Irish land tenure." T. MacKnight, Ulster as It Is …. ( 2 vols, London, 1896), i, 219. Walker, Ulster Politics: the Formative Years, 1868-86, 15-38 has much to say about Presbyterian attitudes to the Church of Ireland in the two decades before the 1886 Home Rule crisis.
[21] A. Jackson, Ireland 1798-1998… (Oxford, 1999), 66. In 1854, a handful of isolated ministers in the Presbytery of Munster also fused with the General Assembly. J.S. Reid, ed. W.D. Killen, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland ..., iii (Belfast 1867), 500. My overview approach emphasises the unity of Ulster Presbyterians. Peter Brooke's detailed study drew attention to internal disputes and divisive theological debates, but he also conceded that the Synod of Ulster, the principal forerunner of the General Assembly, was "remarkably stable". Brooke, Ulster Presbyterianism, 90, and see below. See also S.J. Connolly, Religion and Society in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dundalk, 1985), 16-17.
[22] Two sympathetic English tourists, Mr and Mrs S.C. Hall, reported in 1843 that around 450 Presbyterian congregations out of a total of approximately 550 adhered to the General Assembly. The remainder formed four smaller groupings. Mr and Mrs S.C. Hall, Ireland: its Scenery, Character…, iii (London, 1843), 79.
[23] Presbyterian clergy were eligible to receive (and all but a hardy few did) the Regium Donum (royal bounty), originally granted by Charles II and placed on a regular footing by William III as a sweetener for their civil status as second-class Protestants. A form of ecclesiastical minimum wage, in the mid-19th century it was set at £75 per annum. The Belfast newspaper editor Thomas MacKnight claimed that the Regium Donum "was too small to constitute an effective endowment, but large enough to check the voluntary contributions of the people" (MacKnight, Ulster as It Is, i, 26).The Regium Donum was phased out after 1871 as part of the wider disestablishment settlement, in which the Presbyterian Church received a capital sum as compensation. Most clergy were paid stipends by their congregations. As a boy in the 1930s, Brian Faulkner admired his local minister because he drove a Riley sports car.
[24] Brooke, Ulster Presbyterianism, 156-9 offered a more pessimistic view. He saw the 1859 Revival as "a planned event" engineered by clergy to assert control over their congregations. He also argued that it opened the way for enthusiastic smaller churches to gain a foothold, making the episode a "substantial step towards religion becoming a subjective personal commitment rather than the organising principle of a political community". However, the General Assembly was not inhibited in its denunciations of Home Rule after 1886. Peter Gibbon advanced the more general hypothesis that the decline of the traditional home-based weaving industry formed part of a process by which "the [Presbyterian] Church lost its ability to provide cultural and political leadership". P. Gibbon, The Origins of Ulster Unionism… (Manchester, 1975), 56. I do not understand the postulated connection.
[25] S.J. Brown, Thomas Chalmers and the Godly Commonwealth in Scotland (Oxford, 1982), 282-349.
[26] T. Brown, Annals of the Disruption… (Edinburgh, 1844), 544-5. The characterisation of the Ulster Presbyterians as impulsively Irish contrasts with the usual stereotype that they were hard-headed Scots. Ulster Presbyterians had only resumed formal relations with the Church of Scotland in 1836, after a lengthy doctrinal disagreement, so perhaps too much should not be made of the 1843 decision. However, it is worth noting that the Disruption in Scotland was not another secession, but an attempt at peaceful internal revolution. The plan was to encourage almost all ministers and congregations to quit the existing Kirk structure, which would then collapse as a hollow shell, enabling those who had withdrawn to return and take possession of a renewed national Church. Thus the gesture of the Ulster General Assembly deputation was the equivalent of one national community recognising another. There is some similarity here with the attitude of Ulster Protestants (of all denominations) in 1912, who regarded themselves as a potentially sovereign entity that was entitled to question the legitimacy of a Liberal government forcing Home Rule upon them. The point should not be over-emphasised: it is a parallel that illustrates a mindset and not a predictive forerunner, and I know of no evidence that 1843 was remembered in 1912.
[27] Reid, ed. Killen, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, iii, 515; Lyons, Ireland since the Famine, 18.
[28] Reid, ed. Killen, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, iii, 516-17.
[29] C. Kenealy and G. Mac Atasney, The Hidden Famine… (London, 2000), 125.
[30] C. Kenealy, This Great Calamity … (Dublin, 1994), 128-33; Kenealy and Mac Atasney, The Hidden Famine, passim.
[31] In his introduction to McComb, The Repealer Repulsed, ix, Patrick Maume states that the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh was behind the defence. The marriage dispute of the 1840s in some respects foreshadowed the furore over the Ne Temere decree of 1908: in both cases, an assertive Church seemed to claim the right to disrupt mixed marriages involving Presbyterians. The English novelist, W.M. Thackeray, visited Belfast in 1842, during the marriage controversy. Noting that the three main denominations were "pretty equally balanced" in the city, he identified a key element in North of Ireland polemic: "whereas in other parts of Ireland where Catholics and Protestants prevail and the Presbyterian body is too small, each party has but one opponent to belabour: here the Ulster politician whatever may be his way of thinking, has the great advantage of possessing two enemies on whom he may exercise his eloquence and in this triangular duel all do their duty nobly." Thackeray also noted "great differences and quarrels" among Presbyterians. The community's established mouthpiece, the Northern Whig, had recently been challenged by a radical newcomer, the Banner of Ulster. He relished the former's issue of 13 October 1842, which denounced its critic as "a polluted rag, which has hoisted the red Banner of falsehood". W.M. Thackeray, The Irish Sketchbook of 1842 (Dublin, 2005 ed., cf. 1st ed., London, 1843), 267-8.
[32] Reid, ed. Killen, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, iii, 517-18n.
[33] McMinn, "Presbyterianism and Politics in Ulster, 1871-1906", 139-40.
[34] J.H. Whyte, Independent Irish Party 1850-9 (Oxford, 1958), 44; L. Kirkpatrick, "Irish Presbyterians and the Ulster Covenant", in G. Doherty, ed., The Home Rule Crisis 1912-14 (Cork, 2014), 241-75, esp. 246. Ulster Presbyterians were insistent about their right to identify with Ireland. A General Assembly deputation that lobbied British politicians in 1893 stated that "the great body of them were not Englishmen or Scotchmen merely resident for a time in Ireland for the purposes of trade or business in the country, but native Irishmen, whose forefathers had tilled its lands and pursued its industries for nearly 300 years". This was probably an allusion to the Yorkshire-born shipbuilding magnate, Sir Edward Harland, who had been MP for Belfast North since 1889. The Times, 19 April 1893. (Slightly expanded version in Belfast News Letter of the same date.)
[35] J.B. Armour, "A Presbyterian View" in J.H. Morgan, ed., The New Irish Constitution… (London, [1912]), 462-71, esp. 469. He may have been the anonymous Presbyterian minister who claimed in 1892 that out of 272 'top people' (as we might say today) in Ireland, only 14 were Presbyterians. McMinn, "Presbyterianism and Politics in Ulster, 1871-1906", 136-7.
[36] N. Gash, Sir Robert Peel … (London, 1972), 479-80. The Belfast Academical Institution had functioned as a shadow university from its foundation in 1815.
[37] Walker, Ulster Politics: the Formative Years, 1868-86, 33. The establishment of Queen's probably diverted the flow of Ulster students to Edinburgh's Medical School: A. Grant, The Story of the University of Edinburgh during its First Three Hundred Years (London, 1884), 492. Irish students do not seem to have been numerous at Glasgow University in Victorian times. However, in the early-19th century, its Medical School relied upon Ireland to supply cadavers for dissection: "there was hardly any other Medical School in the United Kingdom so well supplied with subjects as that of Glasgow, the abundant communication with Ireland partly accounting for this." J. Coutts, A History of the University of Glasgow... (Glasgow, 1909), 518.
[38] In 1846, Martha Magee, widow of a minister, bequeathed an endowment of £20,000 for the establishment of a Presbyterian college to teach arts and theology. This windfall awkwardly coincided with the founding of Queen's College, Belfast, and it was two decades before the institution opened its doors, drawn to Derry by additional local support. Numbers were small, and Magee College experienced various setbacks, such as its exclusion from the National University of Ireland in 1908 and the decision in the mid-1960s to locate Northern Ireland's second university at Coleraine: https://presbyterianhistoryireland.com/history/magee-college-marking-its-150-years/.
[39] Walker, Ulster Politics: the Formative Years, 1868-86, 33. Percentage illiteracy statistics are based on the over-5s: Presbyterian 5.7; Church of Ireland, 11.4; Catholics 24.0. Methodists, at 4.9 percent, were even better schooled. Literacy was virtually confined to the ability to read and write in English, a limitation that helps to account for the lower score among Catholics, many of whom (in the older age groups) spoke Irish as their first language.
[40] Reid, ed. Killen, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, iii, 515, 516-17. Killen's portrayal of Presbyterians as the virtuous core of Ulster Protestantism was often repeated, e.g. by the Reverend John Orr in 1893: " The Irish Presbyterians were amongst the most industrious, peaceable, intelligent, and thrifty of the population, giving little trouble to the authorities, and in proportion to their numbers contributing an exceedingly small percentage to the criminal and pauper classes." The Times, 19 April 1893. James Craig, first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, was the son of a distiller who established himself as a country gentleman in County Down.
[41] Reid, ed. Killen, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, iii, 519.
[42] Presbyterians invoked memories of Episcopalian dominance as part of their resistance to Home Rule, assuring their Scottish kin in 1913: "Irish Presbyterians suffered for generations under ascendency, and they are determined not to submit to a new ascendency more intolerable than that from which they have been delivered." The Times, 26 July 1913. Cf. P. Murray, The Irish Boundary Commission… (Dublin, 2011), 16-17.
[43] W.D. Killen, Reminiscences of a Long Life (London, 1901), 114. "What kept a Protestant alliance from developing was traditional resentment of the established church by Presbyterians, rather than any lessening in suspicion of Roman Catholics." "We are the Established Church," Archbishop Trench declared as late as 1865, "because we are the Church which the State believes to be true". Bowen, History and the Shaping of Irish Protestantism, 350; G. Daly, "Church Renewal…", in M. Hurley, Irish Anglicanism… (Dublin 1970), 24.
[44] J.R.B. McMinn, Against the Tide… (Belfast, 1995), introduction.
[45] Killen, Reminiscences of a Long Life, 81. The crude truth was that, in a country so dominated by a traditional form of Roman Catholicism, there was no major gap in the liturgical market for Protestant ritualism. A boarding school for boys, St Columba's, was established in 1843 by supporters of the Oxford Movement, but its trustees were quickly forced to abandon any Tractarian affiliation. "There was never much enthusiasm for the development of Ritualism in the Church of Ireland, when fear of cultural assimilation was great," Bowen concluded. Questionable practices were confined to a handful of parishes in Dublin. Bowen, History and the Shaping of Irish Protestantism, 326-9. J.B. Armour of Ballymoney, the Presbyterian minister who backed Home Rule from 1893, was partly motivated by a suspicion that Church of Ireland clergy were "hankering after a ritual quite out of keeping with Reformation principles". S.J. Brown, "The Oxford Movement in Ireland, Wales and Scotland": https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/42720983/Brown2016OUPOxfordMovementInIrelandWalesAndScotland.pdf.
[46] J.M. Barkley, "Anglican-Presbyterian Relations" in Hurley, Irish Anglicanism, 67-9.
[47] Stephen A. Royle drew attention to Fisherwick church in F.W. Boal and S. A. Royle, eds, Enduring City… (Belfast, 2006), 187; Killen, Reminiscences of a Long Life, 122-4. Episcopalian superiority died hard. F.S.L. Lyons noted that "the Gothic revival afflicted the Presbyterian Church … with an exuberance of red brick … perhaps, in its brash and over-emphatic earnestness a fitting frame for the Gothic oratory which rolled down from the pulpits each Sabbath day". F.S.L. Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland 1890-1939 (Oxford, 1982 ed., cf. 1st ed. 1979), 127. At Dunfanaghy in Donegal, the Presbyterian minister insisted in 1875 that the church be built in the Romanesque style because it represented "the early Irish type of church building". The architecture was an assertion that Presbyterianism was the original form of Christianity on the island. A. Rowan, The Buildings of Ireland: North West Ulster (Harmondsworth, 1979), 255
[48] Stewart, The Narrow Ground, 83.
[49] D. W. Miller, Queen's Rebels: Ulster Loyalism in Historical Perspective (Dublin, 2007 ed., cf. 1st ed., 1978), 83.
[50] It should, of course, be noted that Irish Catholic and Nationalist theorists applied the term 'people' in the opposite sense but with precisely the same exclusionary intent.
[51] B. Hourican, "Nelson, Isaac"; L. Lunney, "Armour, James Brown", Dictionary of Irish Biography. Mention may also be made of Mabel Washington McConnell (born 1884), a Belfast Presbyterian who was in the GPO in 1916. She was the mother of Garret FitzGerald, who negotiated the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement.
[52] Bowen, History and the Shaping of Irish Protestantism, 355. Thomas MacKnight thought that "ten at most" of over 600 Presbyterian ministers supported Home Rule. MacKnight, Ulster as It Is, ii, 230. According to Francis Petticrew, a Magee College theologian, there had been 621 Presbyterian ministers on the eve of the first Home Rule shock. "About 20 of these had always been Conservatives; the remaining 600 were earnest Liberals and were warm followers of Mr. Gladstone", but 590 of them immediately became "ardent Liberal Unionists". The Times, 19 April 1893.
[53] McComb, ed. Maume, The Repealer Repulsed, 143; Kirkpatrick, "Irish Presbyterians and the Ulster Covenant", 251.
[54] Miller, Queen's Rebels: Ulster Loyalism in Historical Perspective, 78. The Land League played only a small part in tenant discontent in the north of Ireland. R.W. Fitzpatrick, "Origins and development of the land war in mid-Ulster, 1879-85" in F.S.L. Lyons and R.A.J. Hawkins, eds, Ireland under the Union… (Oxford, 1980), 201-35.
[55] McComb, ed. Maume, The Repealer Repulsed, 193-4.
[56] Reid, ed. Killen, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, iii, 518. Bernadette Devlin, the radical student Nationalist who became prominent in the Troubles, saw them in a different light. Her family in Cookstown, County Tyrone, Catholic and poor, regarded the "Scots Presbyterians" as "imported into Ireland [in the 17th century] to keep the natives in order". B. Devlin, The Price of My Soul (London, 1969), 11.
[57] McComb, ed. Maume, The Repealer Repulsed, 183.
[58] R.F.G. Holmes, "United Irishmen and Unionists…" in W.J. Shiels and D. Wood, eds, The Churches, Ireland and the Irish … (Oxford, 1989), 171-89, esp. 189; D. Murphy, "Shaw, James Johnston", Dictionary of Irish Biography.
[59] Bardon, A History of Ulster, 405.
[60] P. Buckland, James Craig … (Dublin, 1980), 20.
[61] The Times, 19 April 1893; 2 February 1912.
[62] Connolly, Religion and Society in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, 32; The Times, 18 March 1886; MacKnight, Ulster as It Is, ii, 323; F. Callanan, T.M. Healy (Cork, 1996), 87-8. The 1880 Monaghan MPs were both Presbyterian solicitors, and outsiders. John Givan, from County Tyrone, was a trustee of Magee College (Thom's Official Directory…, 1884, 804). His acceptance of a government appointment triggered the 1883 by-election. William Findlater was imported from Dublin by the local Liberal organisers in place of the Catholic Charles Russell in the belief that "a presbyterian candidate … would command more support than a catholic", an indication that the Catholic vote provided the core of Liberal strength in the constituency. D. Hogan, "Findlater, Sir William", Dictionary of Irish Biography. J. Magee, "The Monaghan Election of 1883 ...", Clogher Record, viii (1974), 147-66 confirmed the collapse of the Liberals at the by-election and explored the resulting sectarian tensions. The Reverend John Kinnear, narrowly elected for Donegal in 1880, is claimed as the first serving clergyman to sit in the House of Commons: https://presbyterianhistoryireland.com/history/rev-dr-john-kinnear-mp/.
[63] Stewart, The Ulster Crisis, 49.
[64] Belfast News-Letter, 3 March 1892. The Ulster Liberal Unionists maintained a separate organisation until Partition. For their priorities, C.B. Shannon, "The Ulster Liberal Unionists and Local Government Reform, 1885-98", Irish Historical Studies, xviii (1973), 407-23.
[65] As Thomas MacKnight put it in 1896, "the Irish Presbyterian clergy opposed to Home Rule were nearly all Liberal Unionists, and the Protestant Episcopal clergy who agreed with them in deprecating this policy were for the most part Conservatives". This seems to have been true of the laity as well. MacKnight, Ulster as It Is, ii, 269-70, 304. In Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), Lady Bracknell insisted that Liberal Unionists "count as Tories. They dine with us. Or come in the evening, at any rate."
[66] Walker, Ulster Politics: the Formative Years, 1868-86, 201. The remaining Liberal candidate was a member of the Church of Ireland.
[67] J. Loughlin, "Russell, Sir Thomas Wallace", Dictionary of Irish Biography. A Russellite candidate also polled well in the 1903 South Antrim by-election, where the formal Liberal organisation had apparently collapsed in 1886. Alvin Jackson described the Russellites as "an alliance of thrusting farmers, Presbyterian malcontents and some tactically minded Catholics". Jackson, Ireland 1798-1998, 231. To call North Antrim politics complicated would be an understatement. J. R. B. McMinn, "Liberalism in North Antrim, 1900-14", Irish Historical Studies, xxiii (1982), 17-29.
[68] A. Morgan, Labour and Partition… (London, 1991), 43-59; P. Maume, "Sloan, Thomas Henry" and P.J. Dempsey and S. Boylan, "Crawford, (Robert) Lindsay", Dictionary of Irish Biography.
[69] C. Morrissey, "'Rotten Protestants'… the Ulster Liberal Association, 1906-1918", Historical Journal, lxi (2018), 743-65. William James Pirrie, the Harland & Wolff boss, broke with the Unionists after 1902, and received a peerage from the incoming Liberal government in 1906. Tyrone North elected Liberal MPs from 1895, but they were not opposed by Nationalists and presumably benefited from a local pact.
[70] "The Orange Order provided a convenient framework, not only for political organization, but if need be for a private army." Stewart, The Narrow Ground, 167.
[71] Kirkpatrick, "Irish Presbyterians and the Ulster Covenant", 250-1.
[72] P. Buckland, ed., Irish Unionism, 1885-1923… (Belfast, 1973), 78-9.
[73] R. McNeill, Ulster's Stand for Union (London, 1922), 104-5; Miller, Queen's Rebels: Ulster Loyalism in Historical Perspective, 97. In 1920, Unionist delegates from the abandoned Border counties complained: "The facts about the three Counties were as clear when the Covenant was signed as they are today…. Why were we asked to come in and sign if, when the emergency comes, we are to be thrown over?" Buckland, ed., Irish Unionism, 1885-1923, 413, and cf. the defence of F.H. Crawford, 410.
[74] Buckland, James Craig, 32.
[75] Brooke, Ulster Presbyterianism, 146.
[76] McNeill, Ulster's Stand for Union, 61; B. Hourican, "Sinclair, Thomas", Dictionary of Irish Biography. Sinclair was the founder, in 1886, of the Ulster Liberal Unionist Association.
[77] E. Marjoribanks and I. Colvin, Life of Lord Carson (3 vols, London, 1932-6), ii, 77. Carson's father, who "lived and died a devout Presbyterian", blocked his son's "leaning" for ordination, despite the fact that his own two brothers had both become clergymen in the Church of Ireland. "I should have been a parson", Carson once grumbled after an all-night session of the House of Commons. Balfour joked that the alternative career would not have brought him relaxation, since he would certainly have been made a bishop. This is an aspect of Carson's make-up that is not emphasised in modern biographical accounts. Carson's mother came from a landed background, which explained his attraction to the Church of Ireland. Marjoribanks, Life of Lord Carson, i, 6, 9.
[78] Whyte, Interpreting Northern Ireland, 49-50. In an unpublished seminar paper of 1977, Whyte went so far as to declare that: "It is because Protestant distrusts Protestant, not just because Protestant distrusts Catholic, that the Ulster conflict is so intense." Quoted P. Buckland, A History of Northern Ireland (Dublin, 1981), 100. It is only fair to add that academics use seminars to try out in discussion ideas to which they may not be definitively committed. Whyte, who was noted for balanced assessments, did not go so far in his subsequent magisterial book, Understanding Northern Ireland.
[79] Buckland, A History of Northern Ireland, 32-3; Bardon, A History of Ulster, 496-7. The same comment applies to the discussion in B. Follis, A State under Siege: the Establishment of Northern Ireland, 1920-1925 (Oxford, 1995), 46-8. This important study mentions Presbyterians only in passing.
[80] Having contributed to a biographical dictionary, I can testify to the constraints of the strict word limits that such projects impose: it is frequently necessary to slaughter cherished information that the writer may regard as vital to understanding the person memorialised. I pay tribute to David Harkness, whose "Pollock, Hugh McDowell (1852–1937)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, specifies that Pollock was "a devout Presbyterian", a fact that emerges obliquely in D.G. Boyce, "Craig, James, first Viscount Craigavon (1871–1940), prime minister of Northern Ireland". The information that J.M. Andrews was a member of a small breakaway Presbyterian church (in the 'Remonstrant' tradition), which is surely of interest and may be of significance, is to be found in the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._M._Andrews (consulted 22 November 2024).
[81] Buckland, James Craig, 5-6.
[82] Andrews succeeded Pollock as Minister of Finance in 1937 and Craig as Northern Ireland's second Prime Minister in 1940: his 3-year term of office was not spectacular. His brother had been the chief engineer in charge of the design of the Titanic. J.M. Andrews was identified in the 1911 census as a Unitarian. Unitarians formed part of the wider Presbyterian tradition, having broken away (as the Remonstrant Synod) in 1830 following a controversy over the interpretation of the Holy Trinity.
[83] Brooke, Ulster Presbyterianism, 167 for Presbyterian opposition to Londonderry's education project: his reforms would not have affected Catholic schools, which were independent of the State. For Richard Dawson Bates, Follis, A State under Siege: the Establishment of Northern Ireland, 1920-1925, 48; Jackson, Ireland 1798-1998, 343. It is hard to trace personal information about Bates, but he was identified as a member of the Church of Ireland in the 1911 census. He was grandson of John Bates, a prototype machine politician who dominated Belfast local affairs from 1832 until his downfall for reckless financial mismanagement 23 years later. Sir Dawson Bates (as he became) applied his inherited organisational skills to the creation of the Ulster Unionist Council; notably, one of his failures as Minister of Home Affairs was his refusal to intervene in a corruption scandal in Belfast Corporation in 1926. I. Budge and C. O'Leary, Belfast: Approach to Crisis... (London, 1973), 41-72; Bardon, A History of Ulster, 533. In 1925, Craig enlarged the cabinet, adding Milne Barbour, Minister of Commerce, who was active in the Church of Ireland, and Anthony Babington, descendant of Episcopalian clergy, as Attorney-General. Given the shortage of experience and talent in Ulster politics, they may have been the best selections available, but the possibility should be considered that Craig felt the need to dilute the Presbyterian appearance of his team.
[84] Buckland observed that "it was by no means a foregone conclusion that the single-minded Unionist alliance which had fought against home rule would hold together after partition. Ulster Unionists had themselves long been divided and had found coherence only in opposition to nationalism and Catholicism. During the fight against home rule, these differences had been obscured". It is a reflection that needs to be borne in mind in all generalisations about Ulster Protestantism. Buckland, A History of Northern Ireland, 60.
[85] Vaughan and Fitzpatrick, eds, Irish Historical Statistics, 67-8. There are useful presentations of the information in Buckland, A History of Northern Ireland, 3 and M.W. Heslinga, The Irish Border as a Cultural Divide … (3rd ed., Assen, Netherlands, 1979, first published as a doctoral dissertation, Utrecht, 1962), 77.
[86] Vaughan and Fitzpatrick, eds, Irish Historical Statistics, 67-8.
[87] Detailed evidence was presented to the Boundary Commission in 1925 that 2,100 Protestants had moved into Fermanagh from the Free State, perhaps the major challenge to the continuing utility of the 1911 census figures. Murray, The Irish Boundary Commission, 179-80.
[88] Buckland, James Craig, 74-7; T. Jones, ed. K. Middlemas, Whitehall Diary: iii, Ireland 1918-1925 (London, 1971), 242; Bardon, A History of Ulster, 507-8. It would have been difficult for Craig to have accepted any Boundary Commission recommendations after his public utterances, but he could be ingenious in his interpretation of formulae, as the Protestants of Cavan, Monaghan and Donegal could testify.,
[89] Whyte, Interpreting Northern Ireland, 21. I quote here the recollections of Irish artist Ursula Burke, from Clonmel in County Tipperary, who studied (with her partner) at Belfast School of Art from 1997 to 1999. She found the experience "incredibly stimulating" but the city, which she had never visited, was challenging: "we did not have a clue about how complex that territory is, of what we were getting into.… In terms of culture shock, we might as well have been arriving in Baghdad. … you had to learn a whole other language.… You really had to get the symbolism – how every little detail could be used to identify you: your clothes, your shoes, your hair.… I was a red-headed Southerner. I might as well have carried a big sign. Before I even opened my mouth and they heard my accent they had me placed…. Before I went to Northern Ireland, I wasn't particularly aware of having an identity. I never had to question myself in that way." Irish Arts Review, Spring 2024, 70-2.
[90] D. Murphy, A Place Apart (London, 1979 ed., cf. 1st ed. 1978), 69-70: "the Catholic face seems to me on the whole more humorous, more happy and less 'controlled'." Samuel Black, chairman of the Belfast Police Committee, claimed in 1864 that he "could tell a man's religion by his face, but not always". Budge and O'Leary, Belfast: Approach to Crisis, 83.
[91] Barritt and Carter, The Northern Ireland Problem, 52. Barritt and Carter told the story of a Presbyterian minister with an 'Irish' surname – characteristically an O' or a Mc- – who was preaching for a 'Call' – that is to say, he was being considered by a congregation for possible appointment. He received the friendly advice that, since he possessed "a curious name", it might be a good idea to take "a wee burl at the Pope" in his sermon. 'Burl' was a Scots word, cognate with 'whirl' and used as a noun to refer to the noise made by a whistle. The episode apparently dated from the mid-twentieth century.
[92] Various surveys between 1962 and 1978 suggested that over 90 percent of Northern Ireland Catholics attended weekly Mass, with 50 to 55 percent of Protestants attending church once a week, rising to perhaps two-thirds once a month: as outlined in note 95, Presbyterians were more faithful than Episcopalians. Prime Minister Terence O'Neill closed his December 1968 "Ulster stands at the crossroads" speech with a plea to "all our Christian people whatever their denomination to attend their places of worship on Sunday next to pray for the peace and harmony of our country". No such appeal would have made sense in England at that time. Church attendance rates among all Protestants were probably higher c. 1912, mainly through social pressures but also in response to a sense of threat from resurgent Catholic Nationalism. In recent times, churches also organised sports clubs and social activities for their members, making it "possible for many people to find all the corporate activities they need for their leisure time without going outside their church". These organisations provide further identifiers, but I do not know how far they were active in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Barritt and Carter, The Northern Ireland Problem, 21, 143-4; Whyte, Interpreting Northern Ireland, 26-7.
[93] M. Mulholland, Northern Ireland at the Crossroads … (Basingstoke, 2000), 71. Although well-intentioned, O'Neill could be simplistic. In his autobiography, he observed that "a southern Englishman has far less in common with an Ulster Presbyterian than an American has. This partly explains our incredible success in attracting American industry to Northern Ireland." The Autobiography of Terence O'Neill (London, 1972), xii. American companies were also investing in the Republic of Ireland at the same time.
[94] As a boy, Faulkner was sent to a Church of Ireland boarding school in Dublin (St Columba's), which meant that "I can feel equally at home with the services of the Episcopal Church as with my own". B. Faulkner, ed. J. Houston, Memoirs of a Statesman (London, 1978), 13.
[95] 60 percent of Presbyterians reported attending church at least once a month, compared with 31 percent of Episcopalians. Among the politically active (e.g. members of Belfast City Council), the figures were far higher: 89 and 59 percent. Their devotion were perhaps less about bearing witness and more about being seen. Budge and O'Leary, Belfast: Approach to Crisis, 244; Buckland, A History of Northern Ireland, 136.
[96] But David C. Shiels perhaps goes too far in his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography essay in suggesting that Paisley "has a rightful claim to be remembered as the most significant unionist politician since Edward Carson". James Craig would be an alternative candidate.
[97] For some exceptions, Whyte, Interpreting Northern Ireland, 28-9.
[98] "We are so accustomed to thinking of in terms of Orange versus Green that we tend to forget the Presbyterian versus Church of Ireland game [sic]." She met a woman who had agreed to open her garden to visitors on a Sunday to raise money for a Church of Ireland charity. Local Presbyterians "lapsed into a state of shock" and eventually sent a representative to distribute religious texts to the "godless neo-papists" who were sinfully profaning the Lord's Day. "If it were not for a shared antipathy to Catholicism, these divisions within Protestantism would no doubt be more obvious." Murphy, A Place Apart, 47, 108-9.
[99] J. Bew, Introduction to Miller, Queen's Rebels: Ulster Loyalism in Historical Perspective (2007 ed.), 11.
[100] Stewart, The Narrow Ground, 164.