DAVE MANSHL ical meetings to be attended by the Catholic minority there. Although the march was represented as being non-violent, the main participants were a semi-military order, the Liberators, which O'Connell had organized to protect Catholic tenants from landlord reprisals, and they were, potentially, a means of converting the Catholic Association into a physical force movement. O'Connell had sadly underestimated the latent strength of grassroots Orangeism. As his disciplined bands of marchers approached Ulster Orangemen collocted together in armed troops, and there were fierce clashes when Lawless crossed into Orange territory. The impetus for resistance to Lawless came from the lower classes who had sustained the Orange Order through its periods of official disfavour, and there was nothing that the Ulster gentry could do to prevent them. O'Connell, the constitutionalist, had no desire to get entangled in a struggle with Orange mobs who were more or less a militia without a uniform, since his own rather inadequately armed force would have suffered the fate of the United Irishmen in 1798. As it was, Lawless's expedition was arousing indignation against O'Connell in England and threatening to create a real opposition to Catholic Emancipation in the English parliament. O'Connell saw his mistake and withdrew Lawless. The Orange lobby in England failed to capitalise on O'Connell's error of judgement and Catholic Emancipation went onto the Statute book in the spring of 1829. The Emancipation crisis was another watershed in Irish historical development. The political and economic division between Ulster and the rest of the country became more pronounced. During the Tithe war, the English government (now controlled by the Whig party) brought members of the Orange Order into the armed yeomanry and used them to collect tithes from the Catholic peasants. This gave extra prestige to the Orange Order which was by now gaining adherents among the English aristocracy (many of whom were Irish landowners in a big way) and in the British army. (In fact, fear of the growing power of the Order led the English parliament to ban it once again in the late 1830s). For the time being the Catholic peasants concentrated on gaining their own economic demands (which they eventually won in the Tithe Commutation Act of 1838) and O'Connell's new project, which was for Repeal of the union with England, had to take a back seat for a while. After 1838 the Catholic church 78
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