Another side to the popular 18th-century Irish history than the professions of religious tolerance proclaimed by the Presbyterian United Irishmen existed. Sectarian hostility was endemic, particularly in the Ulster counties where the population numbers of Catholics and Protestants were close in numbers. The widespread phenomenon of agrarian violence, usually directed at landlords or their agents because of rent increases, enclosures of commonages, evictions, and so forth, assumed a sectarian character in Ulster where Protestant tenants feared Catholic tenants would replace them by their willingness to pay higher rents and accept lower conditions. A popular Protestant group was the "Peep o' Day Boys" while the Catholics counted on the Defenders. Both groups engaged in numerous confrontations in the latter decades of the century. One severe encounter between the groups, at which the Protestants prevailed, the "Battle of the Diamond" in Loughall, County Armagh, on September 21, 1795, prompted the formation of a more formal Protestant defense organization, the Orange Order, which was encouraged by government authorities as an antidote to the many Protestant United Irishmen. In the original oath of membership, prospective members promised "to the utmost of my power, support and defend the king and his heirs as long as he or they support the Protestant ascendancy." Note the conditional character of Orange loyalism: loyalty depended on the sovereign's defense of the Protestant Ascendancy. Such conditional loyalty reflected an element of Whigism in the Orange Order that was nonexistent in Tory monarchism, or in the support of continental absolute monarchy. The Orange Order grew in numbers in the next few years to more than 170,000 members, and it existed throughout the country. Its tactics of intimidation forced the flight of thousands of Catholics from several Ulster counties.
World History
