William of Orange allied himself to
two popes: Pope Innocent XI (1676/89) and Pope Alexander VIII (1689/91).
These two Popes were more than happy to support William III in his
fight against the Catholic James II, and he was equally happy to support
them in their war against France’s Louis XIV.
William of Orange allied himself to
two popes: Pope Innocent XI (1676/89) and Pope Alexander VIII (1689/91).
These two Popes were more than happy to support William III in his
fight against the Catholic James II, and he was equally happy to support
them in their war against France’s Louis XIV. [part 1]
The Alliance between King Billy and the Pope
In fact part of the cost of William’s army and equipment was paid for
by Pope Innocent XI under the treaty of Augsburg. And when William won
his victory at the battle of the Boyne it was the Catholics all over
Europe who celebrated: a Te Deum was sung in St Peter’s in Rome, in the Catholic capitals of Madrid and Brussels, and in the Catholic Cathedral of Vienna.
Indeed the whole of Catholic Europe, except France, rejoiced in
William of Orange’s Boyne victory. For the struggle between King Billy
and James II was not in reality a battle between Protestantism and
Catholicism; only the mugs who slaughtered each other on the battlefield
believed that. The Battle of the Boyne was part of the grand strategy
of the papacy to defeat Louis XIV.
The fighting in Ireland was only another chapter in the struggle
between Louis XIV and the Pope. The Catholic King James II took Louis’
side against the Pope and Louis provided him with 7,000 French soldiers
to strengthen his army in Ireland. William of Orange took the Pope’s
side and allied himself to the Catholic King of Spain, among others, in
the fight to curtail France’s power. After the Boyne he continued to
fight on the Pope’s side until the war against France ended with the
Treaty of Ryswick. Yet to this very day the Orange Order promotes the
myth that their great Protestant hero, King Billy, fought to “overthrow
the Pope and popery at the Boyne”. Utter nonsense.
It gets worse: although the Presbyterians had been his most loyal
supporters, William of Orange agreed to laws passed by England’s
parliament under which the Presbyterians were persecuted. Under
William’s rule both Catholics and Presbyterians were banned from
practising their religions. The Anglican Church, to which Catholics and
Presbyterians were forced to pay tithes, became the official and only
Church permitted to worship legally in Ireland.
In 1704 the Test Act was introduced. Presbyterians were banned from
holding office in Law, Army, Navy, Customs, Excise and Municipal
Employment. This law was enforced all over Ireland. Presbyterian
ministers were jailed for three months if caught preaching a sermon;
they were not allowed to perform marriage sermons and were fined £100
(an enormous sum in those days) for celebrating the Lord’s Supper.
In 1713 another law was passed by which Presbyterian Schoolmasters
could be imprisoned for teaching, and Presbyterians and Catholics were
forbidden from marrying Anglicans or holding prayer meetings. These laws
were approved by William of Orange. It is ironic to think that before
the Battle of the Boyne James II had passed an act of parliament in
Dublin granting freedom of religious worship to all, only to have the
Protestant William of Orange replace it with legislation which oppressed
both Catholics and Presbyterians alike.
Thus, the Presbyterians, who were the very backbone of William’s
protestant support in Ireland, were stabbed in the back by their hero
King Billy. Since his only real concern was to keep his backside firmly
seated on the English throne, any loyalty due to his Presbyterian
supporters was quickly forgotten. Religion, when all is said and done,
is a very useful card in the political power game played by the ruling
classes.
Absentee Landlords
The laws by which Ireland was now governed were formed to favour rich
landlords and the (Anglican) Church of Ireland. In the first eighty
years of the 18th century many of the richer land-owning
Catholic families changed their religion to protect their land from
confiscation, and many of the Catholic clergy did likewise in order to
protect their positions.
6,000 rich landlords rented their estates to middlemen for a
guaranteed annual sum. While these wealthy landowners moved to Dublin,
London and Paris to live a life of luxury, their agents and middlemen
squeezed the Irish tenant farmers for all they were worth. There was no
security of tenure for the tenant farmer; if he had a lease then he
would be forced each year to bid against others for the land he had
rented, thus forcing the rents to increase far above what the land was
worth.
If the tenant had no lease, his position was even worse. He and his
family could be evicted without notice, on the whim of the landlord.
Many tenant farmers were forced into the humiliating position of
allowing their wives and daughters to be summoned to the landlord’s bed
at his behest. Catholic, Presbyterian and Anglican landlords all behaved
in the same shameful manner. And Catholic and Presbyterian tenant
farmers suffered the same oppression.
Common suffering at the hands of their feudal landlords made many
Irish Catholics and Protestants realise they had more in common with
each other than they had with their religious leaders or the Crown.
Angered by the humiliation and poverty inflicted on them, they began to
unite. They operated ‘hedge schools’, where children were educated in
isolated farmlands, behind hedges where they were hidden from view.
Then the agrarian uprisings began. Beginning in Munster, resistance
groups called Whiteboys were formed. These consisted of both Catholics
and Protestants, who extracted vengeance on landlords who evicted poor
tenants. Similar groups, called Oakboys, consisting almost entirely of
Protestants, were formed in Derry, Fermanagh and Armagh. The government
and the landlords did everything to defeat these groups, but despite
shootings and hangings, transportation and imprisonment, the resistance
continued.
All this seething anger and resentment was bound to culminate in rebellion, and it did so at the end of the century.
The Orange Order
There were two significant developments in the last decade of the 18th
century. One was the creation of the Orange Order; the other was the
formation of The Society of United Irishmen. In 1784 there arose in
Ulster an extreme Anglican Protestant organisation whose purpose was to
drive Catholic tenant farmers out of the most fertile farmland in
Ulster. The organisation was called The Peep of Day Boys because of the
practise of raiding Catholic farmhouses at daybreak. Catholic farmers
were warned to abandon their homes under threat of death.
In response the Catholics formed a group called The Defenders to beat
off their attackers. The struggle continued sporadically for a few
years until the Anglicans, always better armed than their adversaries,
succeeded in their aim. To this day all the best farmland in Eastern
Ulster is Protestant-owned, while the poorer, low-yielding hill-top
farms are worked by Catholics. It should be emphasised that The Peep of
Day Boys was an Anglican Organisation and evolving from this The Orange
Order was formed in 1795.
It is commonly believed that the Orange Order was a type of farmer’s
union for the protection of the poorer tenant farmers. This is a
misconception. For several years no Presbyterians were allowed to join
the Orange Order. That only changed when the ruling classes saw in it
the very weapon they needed to divide and rule the Irish working class.
The Orange Order was set up originally by Anglicans, the Church of
the landlords and aristocrats which oppressed both Catholics and
Presbyterians. It was founded on ignoble principles to further the
interests of the rich landlords and aristocrats and to keep the poor in
their place. It became the bastion of big businessmen and rich merchants
who later encouraged Presbyterians to join, fooling them into thinking
it was in their own interests to do so.
It was also used as a counter measure to the Society of United
Irishmen which was endeavouring to unite both Catholics and Protestants
in a campaign for an independent republic of Ireland. In later years,
when workers tried to fight for their rights to a better standard of
living the Orange Order was used as an army of bully-boys to smash the
unions. In 1912, British labour leader Ramsay MacDonald wrote:
“In Belfast you get labour conditions the like of which you get in no
other town, no other city of equal commercial prosperity from John
O’Groats to Lands End or from the Atlantic to the North Sea. It is
maintained by an exceedingly simple device… whenever there is an attempt
to root out sweating in Belfast the Orange big drum is beaten…”.
The United Irishmen
It was Abraham Lincoln who said: You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.
There were many Irish Protestants who acknowledged that Irish Catholics
had been unjustly persecuted for centuries and who believed that the
best hope for all Irish people lay in forming an independent republic in
which all were free to practise whatever religion they wished, or
practise no religion at all.
Foremost among these was a young Irish Protestant lawyer from Dublin named Theobald Wolfe Tone. When Tone published An Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland in 1791 he was invited to Belfast to discuss his views with the Liberals there. On October 14th they formed the Belfast Society of United Irishmen. The following month a Dublin branch was formed by James Napper Tandy.
These began as debating societies complaining about the Penal Code
which oppressed both Catholics and Presbyterians, and the tariff
restrictions which put Belfast businessmen at a disadvantage to their
English competitors. Tone’s ultimate ambition was to establish a free
and independent Ireland and he knew that he could not achieve this
without the help of the working class, as we see from his famous
utterance: “…we will free ourselves by the aid of that large and respectable class of the community – the men of no property.”
Inspired by Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man the movement
became more revolutionary, working with similar movements in England and
Scotland, and seeking help from France. The government got wind of what
was going on and banned further meetings of the United Irishmen. Wolfe
Tone was exiled to America from whence he sailed to France to continue
his plans of rebellion, and sought aid from Napoleon.
An uprising was planned in 1798 but ended in disaster. It failed for
several reasons. The Society had been infiltrated by informers who kept
the Government fully aware of what was happening; owing to stormy
weather the French help was too little and too late; many of the
middle-class leaders of the rebellion were arrested on the eve of the
rebellion; and some chickened out at the thought of the noose going
around their necks.
As a result the rebellion was mostly leaderless and piecemeal in its
actions and was doomed to defeat. It did have some success initially; in
Wexford several Catholic priests fought bravely alongside the rebels
with remarkable success, winning a few battles before they were
surrounded and defeated at Vinegar Hill. Astonishingly, the Catholic
bishops condemned the rebels for trying to overthrow the authorities. It
was the view of the Catholic Church at that time that loyalty to
Protestant England was the best strategy for increasing the influence of
Catholicism in Ireland (England had already granted the Catholics their
own seminary at Maynooth).
The ruling class in Ireland and England were horrified by the thought
of Protestants and Catholics uniting together. The Anglican Archbishop
of Armagh wrote: “The worst of this is that it stands to unite
Protestant and Papist, and whenever that happens, goodbye to the English
interest (rule) in Ireland forever.”
An example had to be made of The United Irishmen: Wolfe Tone was
captured and sentenced to death, but he committed suicide rather than
give his enemies the pleasure of hanging him; 30 Presbyterian clergymen
were either hanged, imprisoned or exiled, homes were burned to the
ground; men were hanged indiscriminately or flayed to death, and the
sadistic practise of pitch-capping was used whereby a cloth bundle
containing tar was fixed to the prisoner’s head and set alight so that
the molten tar ran down his face and body. When no tar was available
gunpowder was rubbed into the man’s hair, which was then set alight.
Most of this barbarity was perpetrated by the local militia and
yeomanry, many of whom were Catholics, commanded by Protestant
magistrates who were the toadies of the rich landowners. It is fair to
say that the Scottish and English soldiers who were sent to restore
order were appalled by what they saw. Glasgow-born General Sir John
Moore, on witnessing this horrifying cruelty, commented “If I were an Irishman I would be a rebel too.”
In 1802 there was one last doomed attempt by the United Irishmen, led
by 25-year-old Robert Emmet, to capture Dublin Castle and spark off a
rebellion. The attempt failed and Emmet was sentenced to death. His
speech at the trial has echoed down the generations as a rallying call
to those of all nationalities who fight for their country’s freedom: “When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then and only then, let my epitaph be written.”
Thus ended the United Irishmen’s courageous attempt, carried out
against all odds, to rid themselves of English imperial rule and create a
better and more egalitarian country for Irish Catholics and Protestants
alike. It must go down as one of the noblest and most praiseworthy
chapters in the history of the Irish people.
Orange Propaganda
The English ruling classes were in a state of panic. They had just
been kicked out of their American colonies, and now there was a
revolution in France. The French peasantry and citizenry had overthrown
their aristocratic masters and taken over the running of their own
country. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the French army commanded by some
little upstart general called Napoleon was knocking seven bells out of
every other army on the continent of Europe. There was a very real
danger that the revolution would spread to England and that would be
game over for the English aristocracy. This outcome would be all the
more likely if the Irish Catholics and Protestants were to successfully
unite and kick the English out of Ireland. An independent Republic of
Ireland would soon lead to the English workers declaring a Republic of
England. It was absolutely vital for them to stop Ireland from gaining
its independence.
The Act of Union, 1801, had already removed the Irish parliament from
Dublin to London. The next step was to prevent the Irish Catholics and
Protestants from ever uniting forces again by building an unbreakable
barrier of bigotry between them. This was done by a combination of
bribery and propaganda. First, the Presbyterian clergymen had to be
persuaded to stop agitating for an independent Ireland. No problem –
give them money! Each Presbyterian minister was given an annual
allowance of £75, a lot of money in those days, on condition that he
became a loyal Unionist. Soon the Presbyterian clergy were the
staunchest advocates of the Unionist cause.
Next, the Belfast businessmen, hell-bent on independence, had to be
placated. This was done by removing trade restrictions, tariffs and
custom duties which had made it extremely difficult for Irish business
to compete with England. When the Belfast businessmen started to get
rich they too began to see that it was in their own interest to defend
the Union.
It now remained to win over the Presbyterian working class to the
Unionist cause. This was achieved by relentless, unceasing and blatantly
false propaganda. Although the Society of United Irishmen was a
Protestant concept, and mainly Protestant led, it was now being branded
as a Catholic plot to gain dominance in Ireland. From every pulpit the
Presbyterian clergy denounced the United Irishmen and all they stood
for. They warned Protestants of the horrors that awaited them if they
ever came under Catholic rule. Powerful preachers such as the reverends
Thomas Drew and Hugh (roaring) Hannah terrified them with tales of the
torture and agonising death by fire that was in store for them if the
Catholics took over.
The reason why preachers like Drew and Hannah were so convincing is
because they genuinely believed that what they were saying was true.
They believed it because the dreaded Spanish Inquisition, although very
much a spent force, was still in existence (it officially came to an end
in 1834). In all the long history of man’s inhumanity to man there is
no more horrifying chapter than that of The Holy Office of the
Inquisition, to give it its official title; an almost
five-hundred-year-long reign of terror from which no man or woman, not
even the most rich and powerful, was safe. Torture, garrotting, burning
at the stake or being buried alive was the inevitable fate of anyone who
fell foul of the Inquisition. Not even corpses were immune. Dead bodies
were often dug up, tried and burned.
It was only too easy to implant mental images of these horrors in the
minds of the Protestant community in Ireland, so it is no surprise that
when the Anglican Orange Order opened its membership to all
non-Catholics the Presbyterian businessmen and workers joined up en
masse. Thus was history turned upside-down. William of Orange, who had
so treacherously betrayed the Presbyterians of Ulster and driven many
thousands of them to emigrate to America because of persecution under
his government, was now remembered as their hero and saviour from
Catholic tyranny. The Ulster Presbyterians, once the most determined
group fighting for separation from England, were now the most strident
advocates of the Union. You’ve got to hand it to the British ruling
classes; they are past masters when it comes to manipulating the hearts
and minds of the people.
[To be continued…]
