Ireland 432-1800 Ireland from St. Patrick to the Norman Conquest, 432-1169

According to a confessional census of 1732-3 Catholics comprised some 73% of families and 75% of the population, divided unevenly between the four provinces [Connaught, 91%; Munster, 89%; Leinster, 79% and 38% in Ulster. Although vastly inferior in numbers to the Gaelic Irish the Old English retained more land, wealth and political status after the vicissitudes of seventeenth-century Ireland. Language, cultural differences an attitudes towards the crown had traditionally set the two groups apart although they began to move closer together with the succession of James I, the assault on Old English political power and the emergence of a continentally-inspired post-Tridentine Catholic orthodoxy. This ehtno-cultural marriage of Sean-Ghaill [Old English] and Sean-Ghaeil [Old Irish] under the common name of Éireannach [Irishman] would come to full literary fruition in Seathrún Céitinn’s Foras Feasa ar ´Éireann [c.1633], the book of Genesis of the bible of post-Tridentine Irish Catholic nationalist identity. Similarly, the appearance of the names Céitinn, [Keating] Haicéad [Hackett] and Feritéar [Feritear] among the ranks of the early sevententh century Gaelic literati symbolized the religious and cultural détente between the two groups.

The Catholic polity was traumatized by their successive military defeats throughout the seventeenth century, the deposition of their kings [Charles I and James II] and the often relentless assault on their church, religion, culture, landed possessions and political power, as well as the exile of their military leaders, aristocracy and higher clergy. The ongoing war, Jacobite invasion scares and Protestant distaste for the revolutionary settlement, provided the major impetus for the imposition the penal code. This further assaulted the higher clergy, religious orders and Catholic property and professional classes. Bills introduced in the late-seventeenth and early eighteenth century sought to banish bishops and the religious orders [Jesuits, Dominicans and Franciscans], register the regular clergy and force them to repudiate the temporal power of the Pope in Rome and abjure the exile House of Stuart. Other legislation prevented Catholics from buying or inheriting property, opening schools, being educated abroad or practicing law.

Attempts to drive a wedge between Irish Catholicism and Jacobitism ultimately failed as the Pope continued to recognize the exiled Stuart as the true king of England, Scotland and Ireland and he retained the exclusive right to nominate bishops for the Irish sees. Moroever, Catholic defiance and Protestant unwillingness and inability to vigorously execute the penal laws facilitated a slow but steady recovery. By 1714 the Irish Catholic episcopal bench had been filled and the mission staffed by a clergy of whom some 80% were educated abroad. The clerical colleges of Paris, Nantes, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Louvain, Rome, Salamanca, Prague and Lisbon provided crucial links between Ireland and its exiled diaspora. A vibrant merchant class, flourishing in the wake of penal restrictions on Catholic political participation and land ownership, and an ‘underground gentry’ of surviving aristocracy, gentry, tenant-farmers, middlemen and strong farmers funded this religious renaissance and provided a social cohesion to the defeated Catholic polity. From their ranks would spring the men of the Catholic Committee, the political pressure group who would emerge at the end of the Jacobite period to seek a redress of Catholic grievances and their re-integration into the Hanoverian body politic.

In the meantime, these grievances and the ‘persecution’ mentality of Irish Catholics provided major themes in the pamphlets, poems and songs of the Irish literati and embellished the correspondence of Irishmen with their spiritual and temporal masters in Rome. Many Irish Catholic looked to the exiled Stuart king and his erstwhile allies in Europe for political redemption and the restoration of their lands, political status and the free exercise of their religion. However, as the century wore on and the likelihood of a successful Stuart restoration receded an increasingly vocal pressure-group, represented by the remnants of the Catholic aristocracy, Charles O’Connor, Dr John Curry and their colleagues in the Catholic Committee, sought a strategic accommodation with the House of Hanover and a repeal of penal Legislation.
Protestantism

Figures for the year 1732-3 Protestants comprised some 25% of the population. This was rougly divided between members of the established Church of Ireland and the Presbyterian confession with the highest concentration from Ulster (62%), through Leinster (21%), Munster (11%) and Connaught (9%). Protestants comprised the greater population of Antrim (81%), Derry (76%), Down (73%), Armagh (65%), Fermanagh 58%), Donegal (57%) and Dublin (68%). Anglicans constituted the majority in Derry, Fermanagh, and Dublin and the greatest percentage of the 5,000-strong landed elite. Predominantly New English [post-Reformation] in origin there were prominent exceptions from the the old Irish and old English [including the O’Brien Inchiquin, Butlers of Ormond and Fitzgeralds of Kildare]. Protestant numbers continually fluctuated throughout the 17^th and 18^th centuries as a result of war, immigration to Ulster from Scotland and emigration to North America.

The Church of Ireland, the largest Protestant confession in Ireland, was by law established as the state church and headed by the sovereign. He/she appointed the four archbishops and eighteen bishops who sat in the House of Lords. In addition, the Archbishop of Armagh or Dublin often served as lords justice and members of the Privy Council. By 1720 there were some 600 hundred parish clergy [both rectors and vicars], with an additional 200 curates. This number had risen to 805 parish clergy and some 475 curates ministering in 1,150 parish clergy by the end of the eighteenth century. In reality, however, chronic absenteeism and clergy holding multiple benefices considerably hampered the Church’s ability to minister to its own flocks much less to convert the Catholic natives. Until it received a regular government grant from 1786 onward the church was funded by a parish tithe (encompassing 10% or its value of crops and agricultural produce of all the parish’s inhabitants) and by small dues that were levied by the minister on all births, marriages and funerals in his parish [regardless of their confessional affiliation]. The latter caused deep resentment to both Catholics and Presbyterians, providing a motive for the activities of such secret societies as the Whiteboys, Oakboys, Rightboys and Hearts of Steel.

As in religious matters the Church of Ireland tended to straddle the middle ground between the quasi-republicanism of the Presbyterians and the Jacobitism of the Roman Catholics Its total dependence on the revolutionary land settlement, the political ascendancy of Protestantism and the patronage of the crown and parliament meant that it could not afford [to paraphrase James McGuire] the luxury of a non-juring, Pro-Jacobite element within its communion. Archbishop William King’s State of the Protetants in Ireland under the late King James’ Government (1691) provides the best-known apologia for the Revolutionary Settlement in Ireland and encapsulates the main justification for the Irish Protestant repudiation of James II. It sets particular store on James’s attempted distruction of Irish Protestantism, his subversion of the constitution and rule of law. It laid especial emphasis on James’ own abdication and viewed God’s providence in William’s subsequent victory. It concluded that the treachery of the Roman Catholics was the cause of their own downfall [although Catholics had risen in support of their legitimate monarch to which they and their Protestant counterparts had sworn solemn oaths of loyalty]. King’s work continued to be resurrected and reprinted in the eighteenth century to highlight papist treachery and justify the maintenance of the penal code, being re-issued in periods of Protestant unease during the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

The Church of Ireland survived relatively unscathed from the Revolutionary settlement and seen its Catholic and Presbyterian opposition effectively shackled by the Penal Laws and the Sacramental Test Acts against Dissenters. Prominent Church of Ireland prelates such as Archbishop King of Dublin and Primates Boulter and Stone of Armagh wielded considerable political influence as lords justice throughout the first half of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, the church suffered as well as benefited from political favour and it privileged, established position. Successive governments continued to use it as another font of political patronage and the elevation of English clergymen to high episcopal and clerical office caused much resentment among the native ministry. In spite of the attempts of John Richardson, rector of Belturbet, to promote evangelicization through the Irish language and Henry Maule, bishop of Dromore’s endeavours to strengthen Protestantism by providing free schooling [charter schools] for poor Catholics and Protestants the Church of Ireland singularly failed to expand its demographic base.

Irish Presbyterianism grew from the movement of population from Scotland to Ireland in the seventeenth century, an influx of some 200, 000 between 1600-1700. Presbyterian ministers from Scotland took livings in the more theologically lax Church of Ireland until they were ejected as a result of Lord Lieutenant Wentworth’s drive for greater ecclesiastical conformity in the 1630s. In 1642, a Presbytery was constituted by the Scottish army which had arrived in Ulster to protect Scottish settlers and crush the Irish Catholic insurgents. Irish Presbyterians stoutly resisted Wentworth’s notorious ‘Black Oath’ and signed up en masse to the ‘Solemn League and Covenant’. Dissenting congregations multiplied as a result of the Cromwellian conquest, settlement and the resultant influx of Quakers, Baptists and Independents. Although many non-conformist ministers were weeded out after the Restoration in 1660 the covert activities of Ulster Presbyterians, their perceived republican sympathies, rebellious tendencies and close ideological, political and personal links with the militant Scottish Covenanters meant that they were viewed with alarm and deep suspicion by the minority Anglican establishment.

However, a besieged colonial government, plagued with financial difficulties, beset with ‘popish plots’ and invasions scares could not afford to alienate such a sizeable proportion of the Protestant population. This laissez-faire policy was exonerated by Presbyterian passivity during the Covenanter rebellions in Scotland and their whole-hearted support for King William and the Protestant cause in 1688-91. In return, William and the Whigs sought to reward this loyalty by increasing the Crown’s financial support for the Presbyterian confession and initiating a drive for toleration (often in the teeth of high-church tory opposition). Church of Ireland disdain for the ‘hordes’ of immigrant Presbyterians and creeping toleration resonated from the poison pen of Jonathan Swift. Ulster Presbyterians maintained their strong links with Scotland throughout the eighteenth century, particularly with the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh. This helped to stimulate the intellectual life of the province. By the end of the eighteenth century there was a clamour for the foundation of a university in the north that would not be realized until the following century.

Mindful of political disabilities, petty religious persecution, tithes and increasing economic hardships, the Presbyterian communion provided the lion’s share of those emigrants to Colonial America in the eighteenth century. Presbyterians tended to be much less politically active in the second half of the eighteenth century as a result of the hemorrhaging from the ranks of their gentry to the Church of Ireland and the large numbers emigrating to North America. Those who remained at home provided the backbone of their Irish merchant and manufacturing communities, others played a key role in what scholars have called ‘The Irish Enlightenment’. More some sought to make common cause with their Catholic counterparts by founding and patronizing societies for the preservation and cultivation of Irish language, music and song. They also played a disproportionately large part in movements for religious and political reform that culminated in the United Irish movement.

Rough estimates for literacy levels can be ascertained from a retrospective examination of the 1841 census results. Between 1766-75 literacy levels were particularly high in the predominantly English-speaking provinces of Ulster and Leinster (67% for men, 51% for women in Ulster, 59% and 38% in Leinser, dropping significantly lower in the Irish-speaking areas (45% for men, 20% for women in Munster, 32% and 12% in Connaught). A common misconception among historians is to equate politicization with the spread of literacy. However, this is to underestimate the degree of popular politicization in the early part of the century that manifested in a sermons, popular literature and poems and songs in English and Irish, the latter rarely manifested in print. Moreover, illiteracy should not be equated with either a lack of knowledge of or interest in national or international events. Literacy tended to be an overwhelmingly English phenomenon. The insatiable appetite of the Irish-speaking public for heroic and supernatural tales, history, hagiography, genealogy and devotional material, and overtly pro-Jacobite song and verse, was adequately served by a vibrant oral and folk culture. A manuscript tradition centered on Munster, South-Ulster and the city of Dublin served the needs of a small, influential and culturally vibrant literary elite comprising members of the Catholic clergy, remnants of the Gaelic aristocracy, gentry and strong farmers .

Primarily centered primarily in Dublin the Irish book trade flourished by virtue of it’s exclusion from the British copyright act of 1709. The Guild of St. Luke, whose full membership was confined to members of the Established church, exercised a monopoly over the Dublin trade. Catholic and Quaker ‘quarter brothers’ largely controlled the country trade in books and chapbooks that they sold through country stores and itinerant pedlars. The common subject matter of these included tales of the supernatural and the lives and actions of popular tories, rapparees and highwaymen, providing the staple reading material of the Irish hedge-schools. Protestants histories, pamphlets and published sermons recalled Protestant victories and Catholic defeats at home and abroad, celebrated Protestant providentialism and recalled Catholic treachery. Catholics writings published in Ireland tended to stay clear of overtly political discourse, concentrating instead on works of a purely confessional and antiquarian nature. By the middle of the century, however, some pamphlets questioned received Protestant orthodoxies regarding the Rebellion of 1641 and Jacobite War and pressed for the alleviation of the penal burden.

Although Ireland and Irish political and military events featured in the explosion of popular newspapers in 1640s-1650s London as preserved in the Thomason Tracts the Dublin Intelligence (1690-94), established after King William’s army entered Dublin in 1690, can be regarded as Ireland’s first commercial newspaper. In 1705 the Dublin Gazette was founded as the official mouthpiece of the Irish government. Early newspapers evolved in the early 18^th century from 2-4 half-folio pages primarily featuring foreign news, with a smattering of local coverage. Between 25% and 50% was devoted to advertising. The increased fragmentation of the Irish polity between Whig and Tory soon became reflected in the popular media. During the course of the eighteenth century the increasingly clamorous voices of ‘patriots’ Catholics and United Irishmen were catered for in their own newspapers and from the 1750s onwards the print media spread from the immediate confines of Dublin to other major cities and large provincial towns. Primitive printing technology had initially restricted circulation to a couple of hundred copies. However they reached a much greater audience as a result of their being stocked in Dublin’s numerous coffee houses and taverns. They reached even larger audiences through communal readings and the fact that their pages were mined by the Irish poets for international diplomatic and military news which was subsequently translated into Irish, set to a popular amhrán [song] metre and sung to popular Jacobite tunes. Circulation problems abated in the second half of the century after the replacement of wooden presses with their cast iron successors By the 1780s and 1790s papers such as the Dublin Evening Post or the Northern Star were circulating in their thousands, playing an increasing important role in popular politicisation.

A whole series of factors from the proliferation of woods, marshes, bogs and mountains and the nature of traditional Gaelic society (with incessant warfare, raiding, a glorification of military prowess and an often ambivalent attitude towards the imposition of English common law) help to explain the proliferation of outlaws, highwaymen and violent secret societies in seventeenth and eighteenth century Ireland. The political, military and economic collapse of Royalist, Confederate and Jacobite opposition to the Cromwellian and Williamite regimes usually heralded the start of ‘a tory/rapparee war’ where small groups of disgruntled soldiers, dispossessed Irish aristocrats and gentry used the relative safety of woods, bogs and mountains to wage a ‘war of the flea’ against the superior forces of the government, the new planters and their tenants.

In time the activities of the tories and rapparees degenerated to banditry, localized thuggery and extortion until they were supplemented and replaced by common thieves, footpads and highwaymen. In spite of this de-politicization and the subsequent proclamation and liquidation and impaling by the authorities the tories and rapparees were often lionized in contemporary Irish poetry, folklore and in the chapbooks of the late-eighteenth century. Éamonn an Chnoic, Seán Ó Duibhir, Dudley Costello, Redmond O’Hanlon, Pádraig Fléimoinn, Cathal MacAoidh, Muircheartach Ó Súilleabháin Béara, Dónall Ó Conaill and Séamas Mac Mhuirchidh became the subjects of popular eulogies and laments, ascending the nationalist pantheon along with the exiled Stuart, ‘Wild Goose’ poet and persecuted priest. The thievery, banditry, levelling vandalism and night-walking of the O’Donoghues of Glenflesk, County Cork, the O’Sullivans of Beare, County Cork, the Houghers of Conaught and the Munster Whiteboys became associated in the contemporary Protestant mind with Jacobitism.

The heroic eulogies, laments and popular heroic biographies for dead and executed outlaws provide a counter to the ‘gallows speech’ which also became a staple of popular literature in the eighteenth century. These comprised the last words and dying confessions of convicted criminals that were sold on execution days and widely circulated in the print media. Public executions were not simply a display of brutality to cow the populace but an exercise of power and a didactic, quasi-religious, ritualistic ceremony whose purpose was to emphasize the gravity of the crime committed and empress upon the public the serious consequences of emulating the actions of the condemned. These gallows speeches illuminate the society that produced and consumed them. The speech itself evolved from the set-piece scaffold oration of the mid-late sixteenth century into a distinct genre of popular didactic literature in which first hand accounts, objectivity and veracity were readily sacrificed at the altar of embellishment and dramatization. The condemned man or woman is invariably born of honest parents. Their lapse into crime usually results from the abandonment of an apprenticeship, dismissal or loss of employment and a gradual slide into immorality drunkenness, profanity, embracing a life of 'loose' living or prostitution or consorting with 'lewd' women. This often culminates in being led astray by a malefactor or perpetrating a serious capital crime, usually a robbery or killing. In most cases the condemned person expresses remorse, pleads forgiveness and advises his listeners to avoid bad company and shun temptation. These two traditions co-existed and coalesced in the popular oratory, song-culture from the late eighteenth century onwards and the ‘gallows Speech or Speech from the Dock became a key text in the Irish Republican discourse from Drennan’s ‘Wake of William Orr’ through Robert Emmet’s ‘Speech from the Dock to the defiant of the Manchester Martyrs’. Other example of these shared themes in popular songs and recitations include as The Outlaw of Lough Lane, 'The Convict of Clonmel', 'The Black Velvet Band', 'Sam Hall', 'The Wild Colonial Boy', Brennan on the Moor’, as well as the 20^th century republican songs 'Kevin Barry', 'The Patriot Game' and 'The Ballad of Joe McDonnell'. Indeed, Bob Dylan' reworking of Dominic Behan's 'Patriot Game' (as 'God on our side') the 'last words' of an Irish rebel (Fergal O'Hanlon) left an imprint on global youth culture in the 60s. Likewise, another fine example of this genre is the famous Australian-Irish outlaw Ned Kelly’s Jerilderee Letter.

Aside from the more sporadic, un-coordinated, knee-jerk activities of the tories/rapparees and the apolitical criminality of the footpad, burglar and highwayman Ireland also had its fair share of secret, agrarian, sectarian and political societies in the eighteenth century. These taxed the resources of the state and military, disrupted the relative tranquillity of the Protestant Ascendancy and brought home the rebellious potential of the discontented Catholic majority. The Houghers, a short-lived, violent white-shirted and face-blackened group, first made their appearance in west Galway at the beginning of the second decade of the eighteenth century as a reaction of the increased commercialization of agriculture. This had led to a switch to pastoral farming and resulted in the eviction of large numbers of small farmers and tenants. It later spread into the rest of Connaught and counties Clare and Fermanagh. They engaged in nocturnal maimings and killings of the cattle and sheep and issued proclamations and formally worded letters from their mythical leader Ever Joyce. The tended to target the new owners of estates which had been forfeited by Catholic supporters of the Jacobite cause. This, coupled with recent Jacobite invasion attempts on Scotland, the onging war in Europe and the unsettled question of the succession, added grist to the mill of Irish Protestant concerns. The government reacted with wholesale proclamations, rewards were offered to informants and priests were forced to surrender themselves to the authorities. Military reinforcements flooded into affected areas and arms were placed at the disposal of local forces. The government also offered pardons to those who surrendered and gave security for their future behaviour.

The Whiteboys [Buachaill´Bána] or Levellers commenced operations in the north Munster/south Leinster area in the early 1760s in the midst of the Seven Years’ War, with a second waves of disturbance breaking out in the late 1760s to the 1770s. They assembled in large nocturnal groups to destroy livestock, level fences and attack, mutilate and kill enclosing landlords, tithe-proctors and Protestant clergymen. They committed few murders but perpetrated many cruel tortures and destroyed an enormous amount of property. They also became associated with the recruiting activities of officers from the Irish regiments in the French army. Their white apparel, penchant for white cockades, flags and illicit Jacobite songs and marches gave rise to allegations of Jacobite fellow-travelling and pro-French sympathies. Evidence from pro-Whiteboy and alarmist pamphlets and reports of their Protestant contemporaries would suggest that political disaffection formed part of their political agenda. However, they drew their personnel and political support from the ranks of the labouring and ‘cottier’ classes who attempted to resist the transformation from arable farming to pastoralism, the enclosure of common land and increasing financial burdens of tithes and rentals. Initially, the government was totally helpless, as the local population, either through complicity or terror, refused to cooperate with the magistrates to an extent that it proved impossible to obtain evidence. Nevertheless parliament passed a series of draconian measures making any participation in Whiteboy activity a capital offence. Landlords took the law into their own hands, arming their tenants and forming mounted parties to patrol the countryside. The government also quickly drafted in troops of dragoons into the worst affected areas, hundreds of suspects were arrested and incarcerated. Special commissions and assizes tried and condemned dozens to death, including the Tipperary priest Fr. Nicholas Sheehy who was later eologized in contemporary literature.

Volunteer companies formed to combat the 1770s outbreak and legislation was enacted against ‘tumultuous risings’ and ‘illegal dress’. Many prominent members of the Catholic church hierarchy, aristocracy and gentry sought both to distance themselves from Whiteboy outrages and ingratiate themselves with the government with the result that censures rained from the pulpits of the Catholic episcopate and from the pens of Charles O’Conor, John Curry and the Catholic Committee. Arthur Young looked beyond Whiteboy activities and excoriated the gentlemen of Ireland for their short-sightedness in vigorously persecuting the Whiteboys without attempting to deal with any of their grievances; ‘the gentlemen of Ireland never thought of a radical cure, from overlooking the real cause of the disease, which in fact lay in themselves, and not in the wretches they doomed to the gallows’.
Hearts of Oak .

The Hearts of Oak or Oakboys emerged in north Armagh in the early 1760s and quickly spread to neighbouring Monaghan, Tyrone and southwestward to Cavan and Fermanagh. Thousands were drawn primarily from the Presbyterian, Catholic (and to a lesser extent, Anglican communities). Sporting oak sprigs in their hats [a possible allusion ot the oak leaves which William’s army wore in their hats at the Boyne] they visited the houses of Church of Ireland clergymen and landlords to protest at the growth of the county cess and lesser tithes. The former rose with the expansion of the linen manufacture and the need for demand for new roads, bridges and turnpikes while the lesser tithes comprising dues which Presbyterians and Catholic had to pay to the established church for marriages, baptism and funerals. Violent clashes with the armies and local militias ensued but strong sympathy for their motives and methods among predominantly Presbyterian jurors hampered government attempts at legal containment.

The Hearts of Steel/Steelboys sprung from County Antrim in the 1770s, in reaction to increased rents and fines imposed on the tenants of the huge estate 90,000 acre estate of the absentee Earl of Donegal. The earl evicted large numbers of his tenants who proved unable to meet these huge rent increases. The Hearts of Steel took swift revenge on the ‘land-grabbers’, attacking their houses and properties. The movement spread south and south-westward to encompass Derry, Armagh and Down and they expanded their protests to encompass evictions [and those who took the properties of evicted tenants], local taxation [and those who paid the fines] and inflated food prices. Their violent activities culminated in an attack on the city of Belfast in December 1770 by some 500 Steelboys who successfully rescued a prisoner who was been held in the gaol for houghing cattle. The government reacted with characteristic vigour, military reinforcements flocked to the surrounding area and hundreds of suspects were incarcerated. Attempts to circumvent the refusal of local juries to return guilty verdicts by transferring prisoners for trial to Dublin foundered on the rocks of ‘Patriot’ opposition. The Methodist preacher John Wesley, who had visited Belfast in 1773 expressed sympathy for the Steelboys and surprise at their moderation. The movement dissolved as quickly as it had formed as many of the participants fled to America. Although they left little permanent mark in their wake they have been viewed as a precursor to both the United Irishmen and the Orange Order.

The Rightboys, named after their mythical leader ‘Captain Right’ came to prominence in the mid-1780s and quickly spread throughout Munster and into the counties of Galway, Kilkenny and Laois. Initially aping the activities of their Whiteboy predecessors they increasingly chose to assemble in large unarmed groups, often outside churches and mass-houses, administering oats to prevent the payment of excessive tithes. Showing less of a propensity for violence than the Whiteboys they occasionally resorted to intimidation, ear-cropping, burying their victims up to their necks and mounting victims and prisoners on ‘Cromwell’ [a horse with a nail-studded saddle]. They sought to reduce the level of tithes, rents and taxes, including the financial burdens imposed by the Catholic clergy. The movement enjoyed greater and more widespread support and had a broader social base than the Whiteboys movement, reflecting a move from tillage as a result of Foster’s Corn Law on 1784, and the increasing attempts by landlords to cut out the middlemen and tenant farmers. It also enjoyed the support of some local gentry who resented the rapacity of the Church of Ireland on the earnings of their tenant farmers. However, the image of a riotous and violent mob came to haunt conservative imaginations in the later eighteenth century and would be used to great alarmist effect by those who sought to hamper the conciliation of Irish Catholics. The authorities employing over 2,000 troops in the worst affected areas and passed another act against tumultuous gathering. As a consequence of this dilligance their activities rapidly declined although the mythical Captain Right would linger as a chimera on the horizon of Irish popular political agitation, He would also make occasional fleeting appearances in the pages of 19^th century literature.

The Peep O’Day Boys emerged in the sectarian cauldron of County Armagh in the mid-1780s as a consequence of increasing Catholic involvement in linen weaving at a time when the livelihood of Armagh’s farmer-weavers was being threatened by land hunger and competition from the increasingly mechanized English cotton industry. The determination of plebeian Protestants to assert their traditional supremacy can also be understood in the context of the repeal of some of the penal laws in the late 1770 and an increasing unwillingness to enforce those that remained on the statute books. A series of sectarian faction-fights erupted between Anglican and Catholic groups in south Ulster. The former took to raiding Catholic homes, sabotaging and confiscating linen weaving equipment and searching for and confiscating firearms [hence their name]. In response, Catholic formed themselves into defensive groups know as Defenders. Local magistrates initially appeared to have been even-handed, but juries tended to acquit Peep O’Day Boys while convicting their Defender opponents. A major event in the spiralling sectarian violence between both groups was a clash at Loughgall, County Armagh, in 1795 which culminated in the ‘Battle of the Diamond’. Immortalized in the popular loyalist song tradition, a large concentration of Defenders were repulsed by the Peep O’Day Boys with about thirty fatalities on the Catholic side. This event led to the foundation of the Orange Order, a Protestant supremacist political society and sectarian organization dedicated to the memory and the preservation of the political legacy of William, Prince of Orange. The order soon enjoyed the discreet backing of the local gentry and the government who hoped that it would stiffen the backbone of Ulster loyalists and help drive a wedge between the Presbyterians of Down and Antrim and the the Catholic Defenders of south Ulster and north Leinster. In turn, the Defenders became increasingly politicized in the post-French revolutionary period until they were effectively co-opted into the United Irishmen.

Defenderism emerged as a secret oath-bound, society in Market-Hill, County Armagh, and quickly spreading across south Ulster into Connaught, north Leinster and into the poorer areas of Dublin, where it flourished among artisans, labourers and the working classes. Organized in lodges, with Masonic like rituals and handshakes, its often Janus-headed political ideology combined traditional, retrospective popular Jacobitism [an anti-English, anti-Protestant outlook which sought national independence with continental assistance], with a revolutionary perspective inspired from the French Revolution. It also drew heavily on the radicialism of some earlier agrarian movements such as the Whiteboys and Rightboys which had clamoured for the abolition of tithes, the regulation of rents and wages, and end to increasing pasturization and in some cases a dissolution of the Revolutionary settlement. Although traditionally seen as a largely apolitical adjunct to the United Irishmen preoccupied with immediate economic and traditional recent work by Jim Smyth has shed light on the process of politicization and popular awareness of the French Revolution and domestic political crises. However, this politicization has sometimes been over-emphasized by the failure to appreciate the extent of popular politicization among the greater Catholic populace in the eighteenth century. The Defender movement became constituted as the Ribbon societies or Ribbonism in the nineteenth century a secret oath-bound, quasi-masonic and sectarian movement committed to egalitarianism and the achievement of an independent Ireland, providing a vital link between the United Irishmen, the Young Irelanders and Fenianism.