THE ULSTER CONFUCT Prote&tant peasants in the border districts of Ulster by a series of petty incidents, motivated by the peasants' hunger for land. The organization of the Orange Order during 1795-6 was carried out with virtually no aid from the gentry, and a series of attacks were mounted on Catholic dwellings in Armagh in this period. The effect of this was to convince the Catholics that they had nothing to ope for from te government or gentry, and drove them into the republican camp of the United Irishmen whose approaches they had previously ignored. This merger of the republican and the Catholic forces provided the middle-class radicals with an underground army, and changed the Defenders from being an agrarian secret society into a revolutionary movement. The rapid spread of the United Irishmen throughout the country put great pressure on the British administration to allow the Irish gentry to recruit a force of yeomen to combat the threat of revolution. The Orange Order which included among its goals, in its first public pronouncement, the maintenance of the Constitution, the Protestant religion and the Established Church, was the obvious recruiting ground, and the gentry found themselves in late 1796 in command of corps of armed Orangemen. Efforts were made to give the Order a post-facto respectability by the gentry being placed at the head of the lodges, and by a gentlemen's lodge being formed in Dublin. By the end of 1797 the movement included a wide cross section of all the strata of society benefiting from the «ascendancy», and the Order had spread from Ulster into the Dublin area and the midlands. The Orange yeomanry now joined with the British army in a two year campaign of repression designed to disarm and terrorise all the potential revolutionaries, which was taken to mean the Catholic population as a whole .. The repression was most successful in Ulster, for when the United Irishmen finally sprang their rebellion in May 1798, the major revolt was in Wexford in the south-east where the rising soon turned into a jacquerie involving the massacre of some Protestants, which did not help the cause in the North where memories of the « massacres of 1641 » were still alive. The only rising in Ulster was in Antrim and it was quickly put down - Belfast remainted quiet because it was occupied by a large guarrison. The greatest contribution that the Orange lodges made to the British government's containment of the revolutionary potential of the United Irishmen was its arousing among all classes of Protestants, by an appeal to the tradition of 1690, of an Orange spirit which matched, and indeed often exceeded 69
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