John Graham (1774–1844) was a Church of Ireland clergyman, a senior officer of the Orange Order, and a prolific author of poetic and historical works. He opposed Catholic Emancipation and was for more than two decades a prominent champion of the Protestant cause in Ireland.
Early life and Church appointments He was the eldest son of James and Anne (née Hart) Graham of Clones, County Monaghan, born in the parish of Shruel, County Longford, on 21 April 1774.Londonderry Standard, 20 March 1844. Educated at Trinity College, Dublin, he joined both the College’s corps of yeomanry and the recently formed Orange Institution, graduating in July 1798, the year of the United Irishmen’s uprising. In August he set out from Dublin to be ordained at Killala but, finding that district occupied by French insurgents, he joined a troop of dragoons and remained in active service until on 9 September he "saw by the light of the rising sun on the ensanguined field of Ballynamuck the dead bodies of seven hundred Irish rebels and the entire of their French allies prisoner". Returning to Dublin, he was ordained a priest of the Church of Ireland on 24 February 1799.Letter from Graham to the Editor of the Dublin Evening Packet and Correspondent, published in that newspaper on 19 August 1837.
He held successive curacies in Kilrush, County Clare, and the Ulster parishes of Maghera, Tamlaght O’Crilly and Lifford, until in 1824 he was appointed Rector of Tamlaghtard, otherwise Magilligan,Belfast Commercial Chronicle, 13 March 1844; Westmeath Journal, 4 March 1824. where he remained until his death twenty years later.Belfast Commercial Chronicle, 13 March 1844. While at Lifford he was inspector of the local gaol and kept a school where his pupils included James MacCullagh, future Fellow of the Royal Society and recipient of its Copley Medal.Northern Whig, 18 December 1847. Visiting Graham in 1822, Dr Thomas Reid found he had charge of Lifford’s lunatic asylum and was "fraught with information on almost every topic ... and distinguished for learning and talents of the first order". Reid recorded his surprise that, after twenty-three years as a curate, this "excellent individual" had yet to be rewarded with his own parish.Thomas Reid, MRCS London and Surgeon in the Royal Navy, Travels in Ireland in the year 1822, exhibiting Brief Sketches of the Moral, Physical and Political State of the Country, Longman Hurst Rees &c, London, 1823, pp. 210-213, 219-220. Five years earlier Earl Whitworth, the Lord Lieutenant, had regretted the lack of opportunity to give Graham the preferment he desired.Dublin Evening Mail and Correspondent, 4 June 1842.
Graham considered the faith of the Church of Ireland was "in sum and substance" the same as that practised in Ireland from the sixth century until Roman Catholicism arrived from England in the twelfth.Evening Packet and Correspondent, 19 August 1834, reporting Graham’s speech at the dinner held for the Earl of Winchelsea following his admission to the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland (Graham having officiated at the admission). As a boy of fourteen he had witnessed the centenary celebrations of the Apprentice Boys’ closure of the gates of Londonderry against the army of the Catholic James II,Norman Moore, Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, XXII, p. 351. a key moment in the conflict which brought eventual victory to William of Orange. Graham believed the proper legacy of the Orange victory should be the expulsion of Popery from Ireland and comprehensive restoration of the faith established there a millennium earlier. Supremacy for Protestantism and respect for the Orange achievement were the mainsprings of his life’s work.
Early literary work His early writing concerned social, economic and topographical matters and was first published in 1808 as part of Hely Dutton’s Statistical Survey of the County of Clare. Dutton’s preface included the observation that the Survey would have been a superior publication if uniform in quality with John Graham’s contributions.Hely Dutton, Statistical Survey of the County of Clare with Observations on the Means of Improvement, drawn up for the Consideration, and by Direction of the Dublin Society, Dublin, 1808, p. iv.
Commencing in 1813, he produced detailed accounts of the parishes of Maghera and Shruel and of the Kilrush Union for William Shaw Mason’s three-volume Statistical Survey of Ireland,William Shaw Mason, A Statistical Account or Parochial Survey of Ireland, drawn up from the Communications of the Clergy, Vol. I (1814), pp. 575-619, Vol. II (1814), pp. 414-498, Vol. III (1819), pp. 333-369. and in 1823-25 he contributed the chronological section of the Statistical Account of the City and County of Londonderry and the Counties of Tyrone and Donegal published in the North West of Ireland Society’s Magazine. For this latter work he was made an Honorary Member of the Society and presented with a gift of silver plate.Belfast Commercial Chronicle, 19 October 1822. Graham responded by presenting to the Society his 64-line composition, "A Song for the North-West Society": ibid.
From 1816 onward he wrote a series of articles entitled "Annals of Irish Popery by John De Falkirk", tracing Ireland’s ecclesiastical, civil and military history from 1535 to 1691. These appeared in the Dublin Journal and were subsequently published in collected formRev. John Graham, MA, curate of the chapel of Tamlaght O’Crilly, in the Diocese of Derry, Annals of Ireland ecclesiastical, civil and military from the 19th of March, 1535, to the 12th of July, 1691, London, 1817; a second edition was published in 1819. to counter what Graham described as Denis Taaffe’s "false and traitorous History of Ireland"Denis Taaffe, An Impartial History of Ireland from the period of the English Invasion to the Present Time, From Authentic Documents, Dublin, 1810. of which a compendium had been circulated "when the true reformed faith of this realm was assailed by the Popish demagogues of Ireland".
During the same period he composed numerous poems and ballads, examples of which regularly appeared (generally anonymously though often credited as originating in Lifford) in the Anti-Jacobin ReviewNumerous examples appeared in Nos. 54-58 (1818-20) of the Review. and sometimes reached a wider audience in the columns of newspapers and journals such as the Morning Post, The Sun, and the Gentleman's Magazine.
Increasingly his work contained material hostile to "the Romish persuasion" and Catholic emancipation. Sometimes this was expressed in verse but it also appeared in argumentative tracts such as his 1820 Defence of the Orange Society in IrelandAnti-Jacobin Review and Protestant Advocate, Vol. LVIII (March–August 1820). pp. 222-229. and in articles written for The Warder under the pseudonym "An Apprentice Boy".D. J. O'Donoghue, The Poets of Ireland, a biographical and bibliographical Dictionary of Irish Writers of English Verse, Dublin, Hodges Figgis & Co Ltd; London, Henry Frowde, Oxford University Press, 1912, p. 167.
These works were praised by Sir Harcourt Lees, who lamented that his own writing in protest at Jesuit political activity in Ireland was "unsupported except by the Rev. John Graham, the learned but humble Curate of Lifford".Letter from Sir Harcourt Lees to the Editor of The Sun, London, 23 October 1823, of which the relevant portion was published in that newspaper, 7 November 1823. In 1823, at the request of the Editor of the Dublin Evening Herald, Graham wrote "Sir Harcourt’s Vision, An Historical Poem", containing a fictional account of Lees returning to his grotto at Howth and having a vision of various post-1641 historical scenes. Graham subsequently had this printed in 14-page booklet form.Text of "Sir Harcourt's Vision"
Conversely, Graham’s writing attracted the vitriol of the poet Thomas Furlong, an advocate of Catholic Emancipation who dubbed him "crazy Graham", dismissed his poetry as "vile doggerel" and "ribald rhymes", and enjoined his readers to "mark how he stoops laboriously to drain the last low oozings of his muddy brain".Thomas Furlong, The Plagues of Ireland, A Satire, 1824 (quoted by Thomas D. McGee in Historical Sketches of O’Connell and his Friends, Boston, Donahoe & Rohan, 1845, p. 41).
Derriana In 1823 he published Derriana, being an account of the siege of Londonderry and defence of Enniskillen in 1688-89.Derriana, consisting of a History of the Siege of Londonderry and the Defence of Enniskillen, in 1688 and 1689, with Historical Poetry and Biographical Notes &c, printed for the author by William M’Corkell, Londonderry, 1823. Sometimes referred to as the New Derriana it succeeded another Derriana, compiled by George Douglas in 1794,Derriana, A Collection of Papers relative to the Siege of Derry, and illustrative of the Revolution of MDCLXXXVIII, printed and published by G. Douglas, Londonderry, 1794. which had reproduced early accounts of the siege and related matters. Graham wove these accounts into a single diary of the events of 1688-89 incorporating dialogue excerpts from an "old historical dramatisation" of such events (traditionally ascribed to Colonel John Mitchelburne) and adding his own lyrical catalogue of significant figures in the siege (based on an ancient poem discovered at Armagh) with accompanying biographical notes on the individuals named.
Imprisonment By the time of his appointment to Magilligan, Graham was widely known as a senior member of the Orange Order, and he was soon called "Orange Graham" or "the Orange Rector" by locals hostile to his sympathies. Over a period of months prior to February 1826 his family and servants were repeatedly disturbed late at night by sounds of fife music and of footsteps passing and re-passing his glebe-house. Graham and his sons eventually confronted a party of men engaged in the disturbance, Graham snatching the fife from its player and pistol-whipping three of the party. He was accused and convicted of assault, for which he was sentenced to one month’s imprisonment and bound over to keep the peace for three years.Belfast Commercial Chronicle, 29 June 1825.
While he was imprisoned, an "immense number" of intruders entered upon his glebe and pitched tents there for the purposes of holding a so-called "ribbon fair" (an event supposedly organised by Ribbonmen). The police were summoned and, after a long stand-off, were attacked. Four of the attackers, including the owner of the fife seized by Graham, were subsequently sentenced to a year’s imprisonment.Dublin Evening Mail, 18 April 1827. One report of the matter implied that local hostility towards Graham followed his exposure of the "kissing priest", a Catholic clergyman in Magilligan accused of attempting to seduce the wife of a parishioner while she knelt in confession before him.Waterford Mail, 11 April 1827.
Orange Order and political activities