The Loyal Orange Institution, commonly known as the Orange Order, is an international Protestant fraternal order based in Northern Ireland and primarily associated with Ulster Protestants. Due to the spread and outreach of Orangeism, there are lodges around the world, with lodges in England, Scotland, Wales, Republic of Ireland and the United States, as well as in parts of the Commonwealth of Nations, including West Africa, New Zealand and Australia. Historically, Orange lodges have existed in mainland Europe, Central America, South America, the Caribbean and Asia.
The Orange Order was founded by Ulster Protestants in County Armagh in 1795, during a period of Protestant–Catholic sectarian conflict, as a fraternity sworn to maintain the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. The all-island Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland was established in 1798. Its name is a tribute to the Dutch-born Protestant king William of Orange, who defeated the Catholic English king James II in the Williamite–Jacobite War (16891691). The Order is best known for its yearly marches, the biggest of which are held on or around 12 July (The Twelfth), a public holiday in Northern Ireland.
The Orange Order is a conservative, British unionistTwelfth Resolutions 2013 . Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland. Retrieved 12 July 2014. and Ulster loyalistSmithey, Lee. Unionists, Loyalists, and Conflict Transformation in Northern Ireland. Oxford University Press, 2011. p. 56McAuley, James. Very British Rebels?: The Culture and Politics of Ulster Loyalism. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015. p. 98 organisation. Thus it has traditionally opposed Irish nationalism/republicanism and campaigned against Scottish independence."Scottish independence: Orange Lodge registers to campaign for a 'No' vote" . BBC News. 25 June 2014. Retrieved 12 July 2014. The Order sees itself as defending Protestant civil and religious liberties, whilst critics accuse it of being sectarian, triumphalist, supremacist and anti-Catholic. It does not accept non-Protestants as members unless they convert and adhere to its principles, nor does it accept Protestants married to non-Protestants."... No catholic and no-one whose close relatives are catholic may be a member." Northern Ireland The Orange State, Michael Farrell Orange marches through Catholic neighbourhoods are controversial and have on occasion led to violence, such as the Drumcree conflict.
History
The Orange Order celebrates the civil and religious privileges conferred on Protestants by William of Orange, the of the Dutch Republic who became King of England, Scotland, and Ireland in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The Order regularly commemorates the victories of William III and his forces during the Williamite War in Ireland in the early 1690s, especially the Battle of the Boyne.
Formation and early years Since the 1690s, commemorations had been held throughout Ireland celebrating key dates in the Williamite War such as the Battle of Aughrim, Battle of the Boyne, Siege of Derry and the second Siege of Limerick. These followed a tradition started in Elizabethan England of celebrating key events in the Protestant calendar. By the 1740s, there were organisations holding parades in Dublin such as the Boyne Club and the Protestant Society, both seen as forerunners to the Orange Order.
Armagh disturbances
Throughout the 1780s, sectarian tension had been building in County Armagh, largely due to the relaxation of the Penal Laws. Here the number of Protestants and Catholics (in what was then Ireland's most populous county) were of roughly equal number, and competition between them to rent patches of land near markets was fierce. Drunken brawls between rival gangs had by 1786 become openly sectarian. These gangs eventually reorganised as the Protestant Peep o' Day Boys and the Catholic Defenders, with the next decade in County Armagh marked by fierce sectarian conflict between both groups, which escalated and spread into neighbouring counties.
Battle of the Diamond
In September 1795, at a crossroads known as "The Diamond" near Loughgall, Defenders and Protestant Peep o' Day Boys gathered to fight each other. This initial stand-off ended without a battle when the priest who accompanied the Defenders persuaded them to seek a truce, after a group called the "Bleary Boys" came from County Down to reinforce the Peep o' Day Boys. When a contingent of Defenders from County Tyrone arrived on 21 September, however, they were "determined to fight". The Peep o' Day Boys quickly regrouped and opened fire on the Defenders. According to William Blacker, the battle was short. The Defenders suffered "not less than thirty" deaths.
After the battle had ended, the Peep o' Days marched into Loughgall, and in the house of James Sloan they founded the Orange Order, which was to be a Protestant defence association made up of lodges. The principal pledge of these lodges was to defend "the King and his heirs so long as he or they support the Protestant Ascendancy". At the start the Orange Order was a "parallel organisation" to the Defenders in that it was a secret oath-bound society that used passwords and signs.
One of the very few landed gentry who joined the Orange Order at the outset, William Blacker, was unhappy with some of the outcomes of the Battle of the Diamond. He says that a determination was expressed to "driving from this quarter of the county the entire of its Roman Catholic population", with notices posted warning them "to Hell or Connaught". Other people were warned by notices not to inform on local Orangemen or "I will Blow your Soul to the Low hils of Hell And Burn the House you are in". Within two months, 7,000 Catholics had been driven out of County Armagh. According to Lord Gosford, the governor of Armagh:
A former Grand Master of the Order, also called William Blacker, and a former County Grand Master of Belfast, Robert Hugh Wallace have questioned this statement, saying whoever the Governor believed were the "lawless banditti", they could not have been Orangemen as there were no lodges in existence at the time of his speech.William Blacker, Robert Hugh Wallace, The formation of the Orange Order, 1795–1798: Education Committee of the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland, 1994 , p. 37 According to historian Jim Smyth:Later apologists rather implausibly deny any connection between the Peep-o'-Day Boys and the first Orangemen or, even less plausibly, between the Orangemen and the mass wrecking of Catholic cottages in Armagh in the months following 'the Diamond' – all of them, however, acknowledge the movement's lower-class origins.The Men of No Popery: The Origins of The Orange Order, Jim Smyth, History Ireland Vol 3 No 3 Autumn 1995
The Order's three main founders were James Wilson (founder of the Orange Boys), Daniel Winter and James Sloan."James Wilson and James Sloan, who along with 'Diamond' Dan Winter, issued the first Orange lodge warrants from Sloan's Loughgall inn, were masons." The Men of no Popery, The Origins Of The Orange Order , by Jim Smyth, from History Ireland Vol 3 No 3 Autumn 1995 The first Orange lodge was established in nearby Dyan, and its first grandmaster was James Sloan of Loughgall.A New Dictionary of Irish History from 1800, D.J. Hickey & J.E. Doherty, Gill & Macmillan, Dublin 2003, p. 375 Its first-ever marches were to celebrate the Battle of the Boyne and they took place on 12 July 1796 in Portadown, Lurgan and Waringstown.McCormack, W J. The Blackwell Companion to Modern Irish Culture. Wiley-Blackwell, 2001. p. 317.
United Irishmen rebellion The Society of United Irishmen was formed by liberal Presbyterians and Anglicans in Belfast in 1791. It sought reform of the Parliament of Ireland, Catholic Emancipation and the repeal of the Penal Laws. By the time the Orange Order was formed, the United Irishmen had become a revolutionary group advocating an independent Irish republic that would "Unite Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter". United Irishmen activity was on the rise, and the government hoped to thwart it by backing the Orange Order from 1796 onward.The Cause of Ireland: From the United Irishmen to Partition, Liz Curtis, Beyond the Pale Publications, Belfast, 1994, p. 9
Irish nationalist historians Thomas A. Jackson and John Mitchel argued that the government's goal was to hinder the United Irishmen by fomenting sectarianism, thereby creating disunity and disorder under pretence of "passion for the Protestant religion".Thomas A Jackson, Ireland Her Own, pp. 142–43 Mitchel wrote that the government invented and spread "fearful rumours of intended massacres of all the Protestant people by the Catholics".Mitchel, John. History of Ireland, from the Treaty of Limerick to the Present Time: Vol I. 1869. p. 223. Historian Richard R Madden wrote that "efforts were made to infuse into the mind of the Protestant feelings of distrust to his Catholic fellow-countrymen". MP Thomas Knox wrote in August 1796 that "As for the Orangemen, we have rather a difficult card to play ... we must to a certain degree uphold them, for with all their licentiousness, on them we must rely for the preservation of our lives and properties should critical times occur".
The United Irishmen saw the Defenders as potential allies, and between 1794 and 1796 they formed a coalition.Welsh, Frank: The Four Nations: A History of the United Kingdom, pp. 230–31 Despite some seeing the Defenders as "ignorant and poverty-stricken houghers and rick-burners", the United Irishmen were indebted to the Armagh disturbances as the Orangemen had scattered politicised Catholics throughout the country and encouraged Defender recruitment, creating a proto-army for the United Irishmen to utilise.
The United Irishmen launched a rebellion in 1798. In Ulster, most of the United Irish commanders and many of the rebels were Protestant. Orangemen were recruited into the yeomanry to help fight the rebellion and "proved an invaluable addition to government forces". No attempt was made to disarm Orangemen outside the yeomanry because they were seen as by far the lesser threat. It was also claimed that if an attempt had been made then "the whole of Ulster would be as bad as Antrim and Down", where the United Irishmen rebellion was at its strongest. However, massacres by the rebels in County Wexford "did much to dampen" the rebellion in Ulster. The Scullabogue Barn massacre saw over 100 non-combatant (mostly Protestant) men, women, and children imprisoned in a barn which was then set alight, with the Catholic and Protestant rebels ensuring none escaped, not even a child who it is claimed managed to break out only for a rebel to kill with his pike. In the trials that followed the massacres, evidence was recorded of anti-Orange sentiments being expressed by the rebels at Scullabogue. Partly as a result of this atrocity, the Orange Order quickly grew and large numbers of gentry with experience gained in the yeomanry came into the movement.
The homeland and birthplace of the Defenders was mid-Ulster and here they failed to participate in the rebellion, having been cowed into submission and surrounded by their Protestant neighbours who had been armed by the government. The sectarian attacks on them were so severe that Grand Masters of the Orange Order convened to find ways of reducing them. According to Ruth Dudley Edwards and two former Grand Masters, Orangemen were among the first to contribute to repair funds for Catholic property damaged in the rebellion.Ruth Dudley Edwards: The Faithful Tribe, pp. 236–37. Harper Collins, London, 2000.William Blacker, Robert Hugh Wallace, The formation of the Orange Order, 1795–1798: Education Committee of the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland, 1994 , , pp. 139–40