What Were the Characteristics of Ulster Unionism From the 1880’s Until The Partition?
To pertinently answer this question, certain issues and characters must be understood before an attempt to respond to the essay title is possible. The time frame to which this essay pertains to is from 1880- 1921 (When the Partition occurred). To understand the question it, a definition of Characteristics must first be found. Characteristics can be defined as a feature that helps to identify, tell apart, or describe recognizably; a distinguishing mark or trait. In this case, an exploration of how the characteristics of Ulster unionism evolved and changed over this period must be undertaken. What then is Ulster unionism? Within Ireland, the strongest opposition to home rule came from the Protestants of Ulster Since the Union, Ulster had become much more prosperous than the other provinces. Tenant farmers had greater security than elsewhere, had a valuable cash crop in flax, and escaped the worst of the potato famine. Industry flourished, and Belfast was a thriving port. Ulster unionism was the opposition to home rule, emanating from Ulster. Within this period there were several key figures, with reference to the issue of unionism, the first was Gladstone. William Ewart Gladstone became British prime minister in 1868. "My mission is to pacify Ireland", he immediately affirmed. Among his first measures was the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, recognition that it was inappropriate to have a formal link between the state and a denomination supported only by a small minority of the Irish people. His Land Act of 1870 gave greater security to some tenants, and those who left their holdings could claim compensation for improvements they had made. However, the act proved unsatisfactory in practice, and agitation for land reform steadily increased. Equally important was the demand for home rule. Gladstone’s advocacy of Home Rule for Ireland was a notable recognition of Irish demands, but wrecked his third ministry (1886) after a few months. Many anti–Home Rule Liberals allied themselves with the Conservatives, and the slow decline of the Liberal party may be traced from this date. Gladstone also split with the Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell because of the divorce case in which Parnell was involved.
By 1885 Gladstone “had committed himself to what was vaguely termed ‘Justice for Ireland’ as part of the Kilmainham Treaty.” (Peter and Fiona Somerset Fry) During the elections of 1885 Parnell, urged Irishmen living in England to vote Conservative when the elections came. In the election the liberals may have lost twenty seats as a result. In any event, their majority over the Conservatives was eighty-six- exactly the number of seats the home rule party commanded, Parnell had put Home rulers into the position which all third parties in the House of Commons hoped to attain: he held the balance. He could either keep a party out of office or keep them in. Parnell had as Gladstone put it ‘set the Home rule argument on its legs’. In January 1886 Gladstone formed a government, with the support of the Home rule party, and prepared his first Home Rule Bill providing for the government of Ireland by an executive in Dublin responsible to an Irish parliament. As Mike Cronin comments in his book a history of Ireland “It is clear that in the second half of the nineteenth century unionists across the country felt threatened by talk of home rule.” In Ulster especially as in severing the link with Britain and the Empire, would destroy their comparative economic wealth. “In the demands for home rule, and amidst the overriding power of the Catholic church, unionists could see little which appealed to them” (Mike Burn). Gladstone’s home rule spurned an alliance between the forces of British conservatism and that of Ulster Unionism. In 1886, the conservative Lord Randolph Churchill spoke in Belfast, and in uttering the phrase ‘Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right’ and “encapsulated the spirit of unionist resistance for the decades ahead” as the ideal of home rule was fought over. When determining unionist reaction to the first home rule bill, there are three main topics of concern; the first of these being religious for many Ulstermen the ‘phrase of the day’ was ‘home rule is Rome Rule’, Ulster was predominantly protestant. In February 1886 Rudolph Churchill crossed to Ulster stating boldly that there were English hearts- ‘aye, and English hands’- which would not leave the protestant Ulstermen in the Lurch. The second of these was the economic argument: Rudolph Churchill wrote that the ‘orange card was the one to play’; and with the emergence of a hybrid orange order, unionist activities started on the increase, The Belfast New- Letter declared that though the Loyalists did not want civil war they were not afraid to resort to it ‘rather than to submit to be ruled by boycotters and moonlighters’. “Reports came in of enrolments of Orange volunteers between eighteen and sixty, and of drilling with and without arms, from various parts of North East Ulster.” (Robert Kee) On the 8th of May 1886 Major Saunderson declared to a large and enthusiastic meeting of the Loyal and Patriotic Union in Dublin, to make one appeal ‘that appeal was to their own strong right arms’ (Saunderson). He famously quoted that “We are prepared to stand or fall’ he declared, “for weal or woe, with every loyal man who lives in Ireland.” “The bill was greeted by severe rioting in Belfast. Sectarian violence was no novelty in the city, but the 1886 riots were the worst the city had seen” (Irelands Eye) The area where unionism was the strongest, namely Ulster, had a great number of industries, which depended on Britain as a source of raw materials and as a vast market because of the size of the British Empire overseas. Politically many unionists believed that a nationalist- dominated parliament in Dublin would be a disaster, that home rule would lead to total chaos and was only the first step on the road to a republic being created. Mike Cronin describes how in the 1880’s “opposition [to the first home rule bill] grew increasingly vociferous and organised.” Many political organisations were set up after the First Home Rule Bill of 1886, the Ulster Loyalist Anti- repeal Union, the Ulster Defence Union and the plethora of Unionist Clubs. From these incidents and unionist arguments, a character of the Ulster Unionists is starting to form; Ulster Unionism was mainly protestant, the very fact that the unionism is originating in Ulster, with the emergence of an orange order suggesting, it is those who were more ‘economically’ effected by home rule, were protesting, the very fact that violence was threatened with the rumours of an ‘orange’ army rising against the state and the Belfast riots suggests that they were willing to use violence as a means to an ends, though the unions (such as the Ulster Loyalist Anti- repeal Union) hint at a willingness to pursue other avenues, but as Robert Kee insinuates “the men of Ulster were not primarily concerned with democratic reasoning, nor in the long run with the interests of other Irish protestants. They were thinking as history had trained them to think, in terms of their own interests.”
