The Belfast Protestant Association and the Independent Orange Order, 1901–10

Abstract

For over ten years (June 1895–January 1906) a conservative and unionist government was in office, and, except for the minor devolution crisis of 1904-5, Irish home rule was not a serious issue at Westminster. In Ulster it was a period of relative quiet, undisturbed by the agitation and riots that had attended the home rule bills of 1886 and 1893. After 1886 conservatives and liberal unionists were united electorally and supported unionist parliamentary candidates, though they retained formally separate organisations; liberal home rulers were politically unimportant for most of the period, though they contested seats in Londonderry, Antrim and Tyrone.In the absence of an immediate external threat dissent grew among those not committed to nationalism. T. W. Russell, M.P. for South Tyrone, found himself increasingly at variance with his leaders over the claims of tenant farmers and stood as an independent unionist in 1906; he was later to become a home rule liberal. At the Belfast municipal elections of 1897 the labour movement of the city returned six candidates, and during the following decade contested the North Belfast parliamentary seat in three successive years. A serious and embarrassing challenge to the leadership of Ulster unionism and the Orange Order was offered by the electoral success in 1902 of T. H. Sloan, a shipyard worker and master of an Orange lodge, and by the formation of the Independent Orange Order in the following year. Sloan, who held his South Belfast seat until 1910, contended that official unionist and Orange leaders disregarded working-class interests and were too ready to yield to catholic and nationalist pressure. The radicalism of the new order was strengthened by one of its officers, Robert Lindsay Crawford, who wished it to follow his own evolution towards liberal nationalism. It is the purpose of this paper to trace the origin and growth of the Independent Orange Order, its rôle in the general election of 1906 and the revival of Ulster liberalism, and its relationship with the Belfast labour movement.