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COPYRIGHT 2006 Ontario Historical Society
Abstract
In April 1912, the third Irish Home Rule Bill was introduced in the British House of Commons. The north of Ireland erupted with protests opposing Home Rule for Ireland, claiming it would mean "Rome Rule." Ulster Protestants were particularly opposed to Irish Home Rule and made certain that its implementation would fail. Orange Canadians were interested in events in Ireland to such an extent many became active participants in those events, through moral, material, and even physical support of the Ulster unionist opposition to the implementation of Irish Home Rule. This Orange Canadian response and demonstration of fidelity with their Irish co-religionists is often overlooked by historians of the Canadian Order. Canadian Orangemen maintained strong connections with their brethren in Ireland, and viewed themselves as a North-American counterweight to the strong support Irish nationalists found in the United States. These determined expressions of support for the stance taken by their Orange brethren in Ireland continued over such a long period of time, and were demonstrated with such intensity, that these expressions of fidelity and support to Irish Protestants generally should not be viewed as a fleeting chant, or as anachronistic, but should be viewed in the larger context of transnational Orange solidarity and brotherhood.
Resume: Au mois d'avril 1912, la troisieme Loi d'Autonomie irlandaise fut introduite a la Chambre des Communes britannique. Cela provoqua de violentes protestations en Irlande du Nord, beaucoup craignant que cette Loi d'Autonomie se reduise en fait a >. Les protestants en Ulster etaient particulierement opposes a cette loi, et ils s'employerent a faire echouer son application. Les Orangistes canadiens s'interessaient non seulement aux evenements qui se deroulaient alors en Irlande, mais ils y prirent aussi une part active, apportant leur soutien moral, materiel et meme physique a l'opposition unioniste en Ulster. Cette action des Orangistes canadiens en faveur de leurs coreligionnaires irlandais est souvent negligee par les historiens de l'Ordre au Canada. Les Orangistes canadiens maintenaient des relations etroites avec leurs freres en Irlande, et se consideraient comme le contrepoids en Amerique du Nord de l'aide importante que les nationalistes irlandais recevaient des Etats-Unis. Le soutien des Orangistes canadiens a leurs freres irlandais a ete resolu, continu et sans faille. On ne doit pas le considerer comme une reaction ponctuelle, ephemere ou anachronique, mais au contraire lui redonner sa place dans le contexte de la fidelite, de la solidarite et de la fraternite orangiste internationale.
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In 1911, over one million Canadians identified themselves as being of Irish heritage. (1) Across eastern Canada, the place-names of Irish towns and counties testify to the influence of Irish settlement during the nineteenth century. Throughout Ontario and New Brunswick in particular, townships with names like Cork, Carlow, Dublin, Dundalk, Dunboyne, Duntroon, Dungan-non, Donegal, Erin, Fingal, Killarney, New Dundee, Newry, Maynooth, Enniskillen, Tyrone, Tyrconnell, and Shannon dot the provincial countryside. Those nineteenth-century Irish emigrants brought with them not only the names of the places they left, but also the culture, traditions, and institutions of those places. One such institution which made its way across the Atlantic was the Protestant fraternal society known as the Orange Order. Although Orange lodges were established in every Canadian province, and the Order was successfully inculcated into the country's social fabric, it was nevertheless a fraternal institution replete with paradox and contradiction. For some, the Orange Order's adaptation to a North American setting and successful growth mirrored and reflected Canadian national development. (2) For others, the Order represented an organized sectarianism, fostering division, discrimination, and bigotry on an unparalleled level. (3)
While numerous historical works concentrate on the nineteenth-century origins and activities of the Canadian Orange Order, and chronicle the transformation and adaptation of the Orange Order to a North American setting, virtually no scholarly works have examined Canadian Orangemen's response to the crisis which erupted in Ireland in 1912-1914 over the issue of Home Rule. Moreover, many questions about one of Canada's most powerful fraternal institutions remain unexamined. How did Canadian Orangemen view themselves, their role in national affairs, and their role in the British Empire? Was the Orange Order in Canada strictly a nativist institution concerned with only local issues, as many historians have portrayed it, or did it concern itself with matters relating to the Empire? To what extent were Orange Canadians, or more specifically Orange Ontarians, concerned with political events in Ireland? To what extent did Orange Protestant Canadians support the political aims and tactics of their co-religionist brethren in the north of Ireland, particularly with regard to their determined opposition to the implementation of Irish Home Rule? Greater insight into these and other questions is possible through an examination of the responses of Canadian Orangemen, and Protestant Ontarians generally, to the crisis which developed over the 1912 proposal for Irish Home Rule. (4)
This paper argues that events in Ireland, particularly the effort to establish a Home Rule parliament in Dublin, were of primary concern to Orange Canadians. Members of the Canadian Orange Order were unquestionably committed to opposing those issues which they felt adversely affected Canadian society: the separate schools issue, marriage laws, the Jesuit Estates Act, the Northwest Rebellions, the Fenian threats, and any form of clerical control over Canadian society. They were also deeply committed to defending those institutions and connections they felt most aptly benefitted Canadian society: loyalty to the Crown, the preservation of British institutions, the maintenance of the British connection, preservation of the Protestant faith, and preservation of the Empire. Yet, Orange Canadians also were interested in events in Ireland to such an extent many became active participants in those events, through moral, material, and even physical support of the Ulster unionist opposition to the implementation of Irish Home Rule. This Orange Canadian response and demonstration of fidelity with their Irish co-religionists is often overlooked by historians of the Canadian Order. Canadian Orangemen maintained strong connections with their brethren in Ireland, and viewed themselves as a North-American counterweight to the strong support Irish nationalists found in the United States. These determined expressions of support for the stance taken by their Orange brethren in Ireland continued over such a long period of time, and were demonstrated with such intensity, that these expressions of fidelity and support to Irish Protestants generally should not be viewed as a fleeting chant, or as anachronistic, but should be viewed in the larger context of transnational Orange solidarity and brotherhood. Of course, some historiographical and contextual background is needed in order to understand fully such a vibrant organization, their supporters, and the causes to which they subscribed.
The Irish first arrived in what is now Canada in the late sixteenth century, establishing seasonal camps on the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland to facilitate fishing on the Grand Banks. More permanent Irish settlements developed in eastern Nova Scotia in the 1760s, but consistent Irish immigration only began in earnest with the cessation of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, when Irish emigrants found favorable rates on empty timber ships returning to Canada. Historical geographers Cecil Houston and William Smyth note that
Irish settlement occurred first in parts of the Maritime colonies in the 1760s, but after 1815, when the mass movements began, it took place on several fronts--eastern Nova Scotia, the Gulf of St Lawrence region and Saint John Valley of New Brunswick, the St Lawrence and Ottawa valleys of Lower Canada, and the southern peninsular Upper Canada [Ontario]. (5)
Houston and Smyth clearly found that in the heaviest wave of Irish migration after 1815, Irish Protestants predominated, stating; "Protestants were more prominent and Ulster ports combined with Cork as the main source of emigrants." (6) Tragically in 1845, and most especially in 1847, much of Ireland suffered devastating starvation as a result of the potato blight causing the Great Famine. The famine set off a near tidal wave of emigration, with well over one million Irish emigrating. This wave of emigration consisted mainly of Catholics from the south and west of Ireland, with many arriving in Canadian ports like Quebec City and Saint John, or their respective quarantine stations at Grosse Isle and Partridge Island. Irish-Protestant fears of Catholic encroachment were only heightened after this massive influx of Irish-Catholic immigrants during these potato famine years of 1845 to 1852. The subsequent clashes and riots between Irish Catholics and members of the Orange Order, which occurred during the nineteenth century, astounded most colonial Canadian settlers, if not for their ferocity then certainly for the consistency with which they arose. (7) In Toronto alone, no less than twenty-two riots occurred between Orangemen and Irish Catholics from 1867 to 1892. (8)
By 1871, the year of the first Canadian census, roughly 850,000 people of Irish heritage lived in Canada, with over sixty percent of them being Irish Protestants. (9) Over eighty percent of those of Irish heritage lived in either Ontario or New Brunswick. Ontario was "home to two-thirds of the Irish in Canada, and three-quarters of Canadian Irish Protestants." (10) By the dawn of the twentieth century, the Irish, and those of Irish descent, had moved across Canada. They settled in every province and in every major city, but those in Ontario and New Brunswick predominated, as did the Protestant majority. Murray Nicolson's examination of the 1901 Canadian census found that of the 988,721 who declared themselves to be of Irish heritage, those of Irish-Catholic descent only made up "37.9 per cent of the Irish national group." (11) Even well into the twentieth century, those of Irish-Protestant descent outnumbered those of Irish-Catholic descent by a ratio of almost two to one.
As Irish Protestants emigrated to Canada in large numbers after 1815, they acquired and filled in the vacant upland spaces not already occupied by the established Yankee loyalist families in eastern and central Upper Canada (present-day Ontario). Historian Donald Akenson asserts that during the 1834 provincial parliamentary election the Irish Protestants of Leeds County developed a collective ethnic consciousness coalescing around the effort to elect one of their own to the vacant provincial seat. Ogle R. Gowan, the father of the Canadian Orange Order, won the election with the support of his Irish-Protestant shillelagh-wielding poll workers in what Akenson described as a "violent exercise in representative government." (12) Akenson insists this election episode helped these Irish-Protestant immigrants develop an ethnic consciousness:
Thus eventually political contracts (and later economic and social ones) come to be negotiated collectively. The banding together of the Leeds county Irish is a beautiful, almost laboratory case of how the corporate activity of individuals who perceived themselves as a group evolved and how, through collective action, they came to dominate the local scene. The change was part of a true intellectual revolution, which occurred at the everyday level. People came to conceive of their society and to understand their position in it abstractedly. They saw themselves as members of collectivities which existed irrespective of the membership of any specific individual. (13)
This electoral expression of Irish-Protestant ethnic solidarity contrasts dramatically with historian Donald Mackay's assertion that; "Since the majority who settled in Canada took up farming, there were, for example, few Irish ghettoes and the raw Irish politics of cities like Boston and New York were foreign to the Canadian experience." (14) Through their collective assertiveness, the Irish Protestants of Leeds County were able to wrest local control away from the Yankee family elites in a traditional demonstration of Irish power politics. Nonetheless, by the late nineteenth century, an exclusively Irish Protestant identity was no longer definable, as it likely coalesced into a larger British Protestant identity concerning itself with not only parochial matters, but also with imperial matters as well. The institution most obviously associated with, and emblematic of, this transformation was the Protestant fraternal society known as the Loyal Orange Order.
Originally founded in 1795 in Loughgall, Co. Armagh, Ireland, the Orange Order came of age in the late eighteenth century when intense agrarian violence cut across much of Ireland. Various secret oath-bound societies such as the Whiteboys, the Ribbonmen, Thrashers, the Defenders, and the Peep o' Day Boys exacted revenge against landlords and tax collectors, or anyone careless enough to harass one of their members. (15) Although most of these secret societies "were motivated by agrarian grievances, some, especially from the north of Ireland, had a distinct sectarian tinge." (16) The Orange Order sprang-up from the Peep o' Day Boys, and became a more formal fraternal organization by adopting many Masonic rituals and traditions, notably the hierarchical series of degrees through which a member passed to remain in good standing. As Orange Order lodges were established across Ulster, and Ireland, they served as a defensive garrison network to protect Protestant ascendency and interests. In this fashion, the Orange Order served a similar role as it moved to Canada.
Only four years after its founding in Ireland, Orange Order members serving as British soldiers met in Halifax in 1799, in what is considered to be the first known meeting in British North America. (17) The following year, in 1800, additional Orange member British regulars came together in Montreal. Within a few years, and particularly after 1815 with the steady influx of hundreds of thousands of Irish Protestants, the Orange Order gained a tenacious hold in Canada. The ritual regalia and Masonic traditions transferred to North America, and replicated themselves easily in the devoutly Protestant areas "along the north shore of Lake Ontario and the Fundy coast of New Brunswick." (18) The most obvious and demonstrative Orange tradition which made its way to North America was unquestionably the reverence for and celebration of King William of Orange's victory over Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland on 12 July 1690. Orangemen proclaimed repeatedly that this victory preserved the Protestant faith for Britain. The annual...
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