The phenomenon of religious revival has attracted considerable attention from scholars working in a variety of disciplines. In the Irish context, this is especially true in the case of Presbyterianism whose origin is often traced to the Six Mile Water revival of 1625 and is closely associated with the spectacular revival of 1859. The term revival is usually understood as describing a situation in which religious concerns and feelings acquire a new urgency and which may result in large numbers of conversions and unusual physical and emotional behaviour. An older tradition of interpretation saw religious revivals in terms of fanaticism or mass hysteria, stimulated by political and economic upheaval.

On Saturday 12 February 1881 two horses belonging to Andrew Kettle, executive member of the Land League, were auctioned at a sheriff’s sale at his residence, Kilmore Cottage, Artane, County Dublin. Lord Talbot de Malahide, Kettle’s landlord, obtained a decree to have Kettle’s goods seized and sold to obtain the £40 in rent Kettle had refused to pay. Norris Goddard, solicitor of the Property Defence Association, a landlord defence organisation, opened the bidding on the first horse at £5 but was soon outbid by Kettle’s brother at £20. A second draught horse was then auctioned to Kettle’s brother for £30, thus raising enough to cover the debt and costs.

In the past historians of the Anglo-Irish union have concentrated largely on the leading political figures. Peel, O’Connell, Gladstone, Parnell, Salisbury, Redmond, Asquith and Lloyd George and their Irish policies have all received detailed attention. For the years following the onset of the great agricultural depression, this tendency has been inevitably reinforced by the turmoil of politics following the Third Reform Act and Gladstone’s attempt to introduce home rule for Ireland.

The importance of the Orange Order to Unionism has long been accepted: J. F. Harbinson referred to ‘the marriage of the Unionist Party and the Orange Institution in the early days of the struggle against Home Rule’, while Alvin Jackson has written: ‘The significance of the Orange Order in terms of the ideological and institutional groundwork for Unionism can hardly be overstated.’ The closeness of this association and its nature can be tested for a crucial period of political mobilisation by examining the relationship of James Craig, a Unionist M.P. from 1906 and effective leader of the Ulster Unionists under Carson from 1910, and the Orange Order. This raises questions such as: What was Craig’s motivation for joining the order? What type of relationship did he have with the order? What role did Craig see the order fulfilling in Unionism?

At the opening of a new Orange hall in September 1906 Craig stated that ‘he was an Orangeman first and a Member of Parliament afterwards’ and called ‘for the Protestant community to rally round the lodges, strengthen and support them’. Craig’s biographers, on the other hand, do not consider his Orangeism significant. Hugh Shearman wrote that Craig, in common with other Ulster leaders, ‘had let himself become an occasional emphatic utterer of Protestant sentiments, and he had made great use of the Orange Order’, implying that the order was a tool for Craig. To St John Ervine it was an incidental part of Craig’s Westminster career. Writing of 1919, Ervine noted that Craig ‘started an Orange Lodge in the House of Commons, a surprising society to appear in that assembly’. Patrick Buckland saw it as more of a background influence, in that Craig was a typical product of his society, and while he might have seemed more broad-minded than many Ulster Protestants he ‘had almost unthinkingly absorbed all their conventional notions and had come to share their fears and prejudices’.

Ireland’s political and constitutional relationship to England remains a key theme of late medieval and early modern Irish history. Although it was a relationship in which Ireland was undoubtedly the subordinate kingdom, contemporary justifications for this subordination, and assertions of its basis, are often overshadowed by arguments directed against its validity. The text reproduced below is an assertion of that validity. It offers a highly selective analysis of English policy in Ireland from the twelfth century to the end of the seventeenth, based upon the assumption of Ireland’s legal and constitutional subordination to England. More particularly, it seeks to outline attitudes among the Protestant colonial community towards Ireland’s status, and does so at a precise juncture when such attitudes were deemed to be of imminent and crucial importance.

After the Conquest of Ireland by Henry the 2nd most of the Lands in Leinster & Munster were Distributed among those English who Served in that or the Succeeding Expeditions of our Kings into Ireland. From those English were Derived most of the Great Families in Ireland: Few of the Old native Irish remaining in those provinces besides those of Bryan or Maccarty of any Great Notte or Titles.

Some of the Great English Families were Generally Imployed in the Cheif Government of this Province ‘till the tyme of Henry the 7th but Cheifly those of Ormond or Kildare.