United Irishmen and Unionists: Irish Presbyterians, 1791 and 1886

When Gladstone decided, some time in 1885, that the only way to achieve ‘social order’ in Ireland was to concede Home Rule, he was disappointed to find that among his most implacable and vociferous opponents were the Irish Presbyterians. In vain he was to remind them that their ancestors had been United Irishmen in the 1790s, the founding fathers of Irish republicanism. His appeal to them to ‘retain and maintain the tradition of their sires’ fell on deaf ears. It seemed to Gladstone as it has seemed to Irish nationalists and to some historians that the Irish Presbyterians had turned their political coats, that the grandsons of the United Irishmen had repudiated the principles of their grandfathers. Lecky, in his monumental History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century , writing in the context of the Home Rule crisis, expressed his magisterial opinion that ‘the defection of the Presbyterians from the movement of which they were the main originators, and the great and enduring change which took place in their sentiments… are facts of the deepest importance in Irish history and deserve very careful and detailed examination’.