Defenders (Ireland)
The Defenders were a Catholic agrarian secret society in 18th-century Ireland, founded in County Armagh. Initially, they were formed as local defensive organisations opposed to the Protestant Peep o' Day Boys; however, by 1790 they had become a secret oath-bound fraternal society made up of lodges. By 1796, the Defenders had allied with the United Irishmen, and participated in the 1798 rebellion. By the 19th century, the organisation had developed into the Ribbonmen.
Origin and activities
The Defenders were formed in the mid-1780s by Irish Catholics in response to the failure of the authorities to take action against the Protestant Peep o' Day Boys who launched nighttime raids on Catholic homes under the pretence of confiscating arms which Catholics were prohibited from possessing under the terms of the Penal Laws.Having seen the fighting between the Nappach Fleet, Bunker's Hill Defenders, and the Bawn Fleet, between 1784 and 1785 go largely unpunished, they were encouraged to form their own grouping. At Grangemore, near Ballymacnab, County Armagh, an area that had previously suffered from a Peep o' Day Boys raid, such a grouping was founded and became known as the Defenders. Supplied with arms purchased from a Protestant shopkeeper in Armagh, they embarked on night-watches and patrols keeping an eye out for Peep o' Day Boys.
The Defenders started out as independent local groups, defensive in nature, however by 1790 they had merged into a widespread secret oath-bound fraternal organisation consisting of lodges, associated to a head-lodge led by a Grand Master and committee. The Defenders were greatly influenced by Freemasonry, and were made up of the lower class of Catholics. Each member had to swear an oath, which despite the penal laws which they were subject to, included the swearing of obedience to King George the Third, his successors, and the government. The oath itself was revised several times but kept its central character whilst focusing more on loyalty and solidarity.
By 1786 the Peep o' Day Boys and Defenders were opposed to each other and involved in confrontations.
Escalation of conflict
Conflict between the two groups spread from nighttime to daytime with fights at fairs, markets, and races etc. Throughout the rest of the 1780s fierce fighting predominated parts of County Armagh. Magistrates who were largely anti-Catholic and Protestant juries acquitted Peep o' Day Boys who were brought to trial whilst convicting and punishing Defenders. The government eventually sent the military in to try to end the trouble. Whilst successful in quelling daytime fighting, they failed to have an effect on nighttime disturbances. More troops were dispatched into the most troublesome areas.In 1788, Lord Charlemont's re-organised Volunteer companies in County Armagh became involved in the conflict as Peep o' Day Boys joined their ranks. Despite being recreated to impartially end the trouble without the need of government troops, the new Volunteers only made things worse as they engaged in sectarian activities. Several clashes occurred between the Defenders and the Peep o' Day Boys at times backed up by the Volunteers. By 1789 the disturbances took on a different character focusing on religion itself, with both sides perpetrating atrocities, trying to outdo the other in their barbarism.
Militia Act 1793
Catholic Emancipation from 1778 onward had removed some of the penal restrictions imposed upon Catholics, who were now allowed to vote and join grand juries. However, the declaration of war by revolutionary France against Great Britain in February 1793 was also followed by the passing of the Militia Act which was a form of partial conscription. Wealthier Catholics such as the young Daniel O'Connell joined the Militia as it was proof of their gradual acceptance into the establishment, but it was harder for poorer rural Catholics whose help was needed on a family farm. Although the terms of the Act stipulated that conscripts would serve in Ireland, it was widely believed that men would be sent abroad and the resultant opposition saw thousands taking the Defender oath. Members were usually sworn in catechisms, one such oath went: "The French Defenders will uphold the cause. The Irish Defenders will pull down British laws."The Defenders did not have a centralised leadership but were organised in loosely connected local cells and were limited by their lack of firearms. They sought to obtain them by launching raids on the big and small houses of the Ascendancy. In January 1793 the 'Annual Register' reported that forty farms had been raided for weapons near Dundalk, County Louth. However County Leitrim saw the most Defender activity with raids on Carrick-on-Shannon and Manorhamilton before eventual defeat at Drumkeerin in May 1793. Despite the ensuing wave of repression, the Leitrim Defenders again rose in open rebellion in 1795 and hundreds of soldiers had to be poured into the county to defeat them.
Principles and grievances
Despite their professed loyalism talk in the lodges was of a release from tithes, rents and taxes, and of a French invasion that might allow the repossession of Protestant estates. Early in 1795, there were reports of an upsurge of people taking a Defender Oath that included a reference, "to be true to the French". On Sunday the 12th of July, Laurence O’Connor was arrested on the testimony of a private in the South Mayo Militia that he seduced from his duty with this "treasonous" oath. O'Connor, who had been a schoolteacher in the area, took opportunity in court to defend what he understood as the grievances and principles of the principals of Defenderism.O'Connor spoke of taxes and oppressions of various descriptions, including that of cottagers who, unable to rent land directly from land-holders, were subject to the additional exactions of middlemen. He defined love as "that affection which the rich ought to shew to the poor in their distress"; liberty as ‘that liberty which every poor man had a right to use when oppressed by the rich’; and loyalty as ‘that union which subsisted among the poor". Sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered, he refused to renounce Defenderism, and was consequently denied the last rite by the attendant priest. Already, in 1788, as a secret, oath-bound, society, the Defenders had been condemned in a pastoral by the Catholic Primate Archbishop of Armagh.
Oaths, catechisms and articles of association supplied to Dublin Castle nonetheless suggested that some Defenders were developing a kind of Catholic liberation theology. Apocalyptic biblical allusions and calls to "plant the true religion" sat uneasily with the rhetoric of inalienable rights and fealty to a "United States of France and Ireland". Oblivious to the anti-clericalism of the French Republic, many Defender rank-and-file viewed the French through a Jacobite, not Jacobin, lens, as Catholics at war with Protestants.
Battle of the Diamond
In September 1795 the Peep o' Day Boys, backed up by some Volunteer companies, and Defenders would clash in the short Battle of the Diamond, near Loughgall in County Armagh. The result was around 30 Defenders being killed. The aftermath of the battle saw the Peep o' Day Boys retire to James Sloan's inn in Loughgall, where they would found the Orange Order, a sworn association pledged to defend "the King and his heirs so long as he or they support the Protestant Ascendancy". Meanwhile, of the 7,000 Catholics subsequently displaced from the county, some found shelter on Presbyterian farms in counties Down and Antrim organised by a new group of Volunteer veterans in Belfast, the Society of United Irishmen. The "United men" were pledged to "a brotherhood of affection" and "a union of power among Irishmen of every religious persuasion".Alliance with the United Irishmen
Defenders and United Irishmen began to seek one another out. Religion was not a bar to joining the Defenders, and closer ties began take the form of joint membership. In Dublin, in particular, where the Defenderism appealed strongly to a significant body of radical artisans and shopkeepers, Protestants joined in the determination to make common cause. Early in 1796, the Dublin Defenders sent a delegation to Belfast for the purpose of laying a "foundation" for a union between parties that, while equally hostile to the state, had been "kept wholly distinct".Although James Hope, Thomas Russell and Henry Joy McCracken travelled Ulster and midlands seeking to win over the Defenders, recognising the sectarian tensions, the United directory in Belfast chose emissaries from their small number of Catholic members, the brothers, Bartholomew and Charles Teeling, sons of a wealthy Catholic linen manufacturer in Lisburn, and the priest James Coigly.
What may have been most persuasive was not the United Irish political programme: the abolition of all confessional privilege and universal suffrage. From Dungannon, where he had government command, General John Knox, reported that local republicans had been "obliged to throw in the bait of the Abolition of Tithes, Reduction of Rents etc.". Nothing less would rouse "the lower orders of Roman Catholics".
In the Rebellion of 1798
The precise role of the Defenders as an organisation during the rebellion in the early summer of 1798 is difficult to assess. In Ulster, there were stories of Catholics being driven from Henry Joy McCracken's ill-fated march upon Antrim Town by sectarian taunts. In the aftermath, the Defenders opened their cell-structured organisation to Protestant rebels, enabling them to maintain an outlaw existence until March 1800. Although the accounts are disputed, reports were also circulated of Catholics organised in separate Defender units withdrawing from the rebel camp of Henry Munro on the eve its rout in the battle of Ballynahinch.In Leinster, in counties Wexford and Wicklow, the rebels were led to their first successes, not by a United Irishman, but by a Catholic priest, Fr. John Murphy. Murphy, whose men were described by a British offiicer as Defenders, did submit to the command of a United Irishman, Bagenal Harvey, a Protestant barrister. After their united forces were defeated at New Ross, rebels in the rear massacred loyalist prisoners at Scullabogue and at Wexford Bridge). Despite greater military atrocities, uncertainty as to actual Defender organisation in Wesford, reports of the rebel outrages helped the authorities to discredit the Defenders and induce Protestant defections from the republican cause.