The Ulster Covenant and the pulse of Protestant Ulster

Abstract

The signing of the Ulster Covenant on 28 September 1912 by almost 450,000 men and women was a powerful act of defiance on the part of Unionists in the context of what they perceived as the threat to their way of life represented by the Liberal Government's policy of Irish Home Rule. This article attempts to look beyond the well-studied leadership figures of Carson and Craig in order to fashion insights into the way Ulster Protestant society was mobilised around the Covenant and opposition to Home Rule. It draws attention to hitherto over-shadowed personalities who can be said to have exerted crucial local influence. It also contends that although pan-Protestant denominational unity provided the basis for the success of the Covenant, the Presbyterian community was particularly cohesive and purposeful in the campaign. The article further argues that the risk-taking defiance that came more easily to the Presbyterians, on account of a troubled history, largely evaporated in the new political circumstances of Northern Ireland when it became a separate devolved political entity within the UK from 1921.

Keywords:

• Ulster
• Covenant
• Unionism
• Protestantism
• Presbyterianism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Graham Walker is Professor of Political History at Queen's University Belfast. He has written widely on modern Irish history and politics, including a study of the Ulster Unionist Party.

Notes

1. See also the various booklets produced by the agency, for example, Understanding the Ulster Covenant (2012). Laird, a Unionist Peer, has championed the Ulster-Scots cause over recent years, and some within the Ulster-Scots movement have not been comfortable with what they have viewed as the resulting politicisation.

2. For the most recent scholarly account see Parkinson (2012); see also Boyce and O’Day (2006); and Lucy (1989/2012).

3. Such grievances prompted the establishment of the Presbyterian Unionist Voters’ Association in 1898. See Walker (1996).

4. See Walker (1996). For a recent history of Liberal Unionism in this period throughout the UK, see Cawood (2012).

5. See the booklet published by the Ulster-Scots agency, The Life, Work and Legacy of W.F. Marshall (2012); also Blair (1995). Marshall became minister at Castlerock, near Coleraine, in 1928, succeeding the Reverend J.B. Woodburn of ‘Ulster Scot’ book fame.

6. The latest scholarly biography is Lewis (2006); Carson’s Nationalist antagonist, Joseph Devlin, gestured to the Unionist leader’s complexities by coining the soubriquet ‘the academic anarchist’.

7. See also Orr (2012) for Ballymena.

8. Other notable self-justifying Unionist texts at this time included Logan (1922), and McNeill (1922). See discussion in Jackson (1994).

9. In June 1912 a party of Presbyterians, mainly children, on a Sunday school trip to Castledawson, were attacked by members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH). The incident provoked all the more alarm among Protestants for their belief that the Catholic fraternal society (AOH) was the driving force of Nationalist, pro-Home Rule politics. For an account by the Presbyterian minister in charge of the excursion see Barron (1928); for a contextual assessment see Bew (1994, Chapter 3).

10. For an assessment of his headmastership, see Cassells and Quigg (2010, Chapter 4); and for the reminiscences of another former pupil, see Frazer-Hurst (1962, Chapter 2). I am grateful to Mr Joe Cassells for alerting me to this latter source and to Houston’s writings and speeches.

11. Houston was raised in the Reformed Presbyterian ‘Covenanting’ Church which he attended for many years in Ballyclabber. However, he had joined the mainstream Presbyterian Church by the time of the Covenant and was thus free to take part in politics – and indeed to vote. The Covenanting Church’s members generally did not vote.

12. Unionists might be said to have been long on the look-out for a leadership figure to rival Charles Stewart Parnell who led Irish Nationalism so astutely in the 1880s: for a recent treatment see P. Bew, Enigma. Carson at last fitted the bill when he assumed leadership of what was effectively Ulster Unionism in 1910. For insightful studies of Carson’s leadership see Gailey (1996), and Foster and Jackson (2009).

13. See Houston (1895). Houston’s rhetoric on political occasions also echoed Patrick Pearse, leader of the Easter Rebellion in Dublin in 1916. See below, example of Linlithgow by-election.

14. Some of his letters to the press on the subject were collected in the pamphlet Ulster’s Appeal (Belfast, 1913).

15. The Scotsman, 7 November 1913. ‘Anti Home Rule Meeting in Edinburgh’. See also Parkinson (2012, pp. 95–96). For discussion of Pearse’s revolutionary thought and leadership of the 1916 rebellion see Townshend (2005), especially Chapter 1.

16. For literacy statistics taken from the 1911 census see Woodburn (1914), Appendix 4. For example, the percentage of illiterate persons nine years old and upwards in County Antrim was 11.1% Catholic; 6.4% Episcopalian; 2.8% Presbyterian. For County Armagh the figures were 16.7%, 9.5% and 3.3%, respectively.

17. The Witness, 12 January 1912. See also Sinclair (1912).

18. So too did future Unionist Cabinet Minister and Attorney General in Northern Ireland, John C. McDermott, who signed the Covenant and joined the UVF. See his memoir, An Enriching Life (1979), in which he links the Liberal Presbyterian tradition to both the American War of Independence and the French Revolution; also see Bew (1994, p. 39).

19. Morrison (1920), pp. 93–99; see also quote in Elliott (2009, p. 140); and discussion of Moore and question of Catholics in UVF in Bowman (2007, p. 65).

20. Quotes from Blair (1995) on Marshall. Marshall refers to the Northern Ireland Government led from 1921 by Sir James Craig, later Lord Craigavon. ‘Devlin’ is Joseph Devlin the Irish Nationalist leader in the Northern Ireland parliament who died shortly afterwards in 1934. ‘The brother’ is the Rev. R.L. Marshall, at this time Principal of Magee Presbyterian College in Derry. In a speech in Omagh in 1926 Marshall alleged that ‘our own people’ were not getting a fair ‘crack of the whip’ regarding employment, that jobs were going to people with the ‘Oxford manner’ and the ‘Oxford speech’, and that there had been no proper recognition of the sacrifices made by Ulsterman ‘when our right to fulfil our own destiny was challenged and when death lay in wait for those who took up that challenge’. I am grateful to Dr James Greer for this source.

21. See Bew, Ireland, p. 351, fn. 216 re Thomas McKnight’s Ulster As It Is (1896); also see Akenson (1992).

22. I am grateful to Dr Tim Wilson of St Andrews University for this information on comparative Church attendance. See also Wilson (2010).

23. However, see Christopher Harvie’s astute point about Unionism as ‘a form of ethnic sectarian insurance’ against a global market that was in many ways fragile and uncertain (Harvie, 2008, pp. 103–104)

24. It should nonetheless be noted that many Presbyterians found it difficult to take on the establishment role, and there were lingering grievances over matters like public appointments. Education was also an area in which Presbyterians could cause political trouble for the Unionist government (Walker, 2004a, pp. 66–70 and pp. 113–116). The Rev. J. B. Woodburn, author of The Ulster Scot, made a blistering final speech as Moderator of the General Assembly in 1941in which he criticised the Church for not being ‘militant enough’ and urged it to ‘get a little more iron into its blood and mete out more justice’. In 1956 there was a protest at the Presbyterian General Assembly against the government’s proposal to restrict Family Allowances, a proposal which, had it been implemented, would have disadvantaged Catholics disproportionately (Holmes, 1990, p. 179). In a BBC Northern Ireland documentary on the Presbyterians, ‘An Independent People’, first broadcast in 2013, a former Moderator of the General Assembly, Rev. John Dunlop, and a former Speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly and Alliance Party leader, (Lord) John Alderdice, both reflected critically on the Church’s close association with the Unionist regime and its ideology. See also Dunlop (1995, pp. 53–55).