It being the twelfth of July in the year of '49
Five hundred of our Orangemen together did combine
In memory of King William on that bright and glorious day
To march around Lord Roden's park and over Dolly's Brae.
The lines are from Dolly's Brae, a ballad which celebrates the legendary affray that occurred 150 years ago next Monday. It broke out as Orangemen were returning by a circuitous route from a demonstration in the grounds of Lord Roden, grand master of the Grand Lodge of Ireland, at Bryansford, Co Down.
When requested by two priests to reroute, the Orangemen responded, according to the ballad: "Begone, begone you Papish dogs, you've hardly time to pray/ Before we throw your carcasses right over Dolly's Brae . . . "
As the brethren approached Dolly's Brae, a Catholic district near Castlewellan, Ribbonmen blocked their way. "But we loosed our guns upon them and quickly won the day/ And we knocked 500 Papishes right over Dolly's Brae."
While the ballad account lacks historical accuracy, the skirmish was the bloodiest encounter between Catholics and Orangemen since the foundation of the Order in 1795. About 20 Catholics were killed and several homes burned.
Roden had feasted the Orangemen at Bryansford and excited them with loyal toasts. Thus fortified and well armed they headed for Dolly's Brae, from which an Orange incursion had been repelled many years previously. At their head was Lord Roden's agent, accompanied by a magistrate with a detachment of constabulary and soldiers for the protection of the Orangemen. When the people of the glen resisted this foray, the magistrate ordered his men to open fire.
`Horrid massacre'
John Mitchel, writing in his Jail Journal, on a convict ship anchored off South Africa, described the ensuing battle as a "horrid massacre" for which no one was brought to justice. In his Life Story of an Old Rebel, John Denvir, whose parents had emigrated from Co Down, remembered his mother grieving in Liverpool for her former neighbours.
An inquest failed to discover those responsible for the killings. The viceroy, Lord Clarendon - "mobbed and taunted by the newspapers for my Orangeism" - ordered an inquiry. Roden, presiding at Castlewellan Petty Sessions, refused to take evidence against the Orange rioters. This was too much for Clarendon, who dismissed Roden and two of his colleagues from the magistracy. The Lord Lieutenant explained that when he found how much the loss of life "and the brutal outrages committed . . . were attributable to the indiscretion and party spirit of the magistrates, I could come to no other conclusion than that they ought to be removed from the bench".
`State of rabies'
While this provided a small consolation to the victims of aggression, it infuriated Orangemen. "The North is in a state of rabies," Clarendon told the Home Secretary, "because Roden's dismissal is a token that law and order and Roman Catholics are not to be trampled on with impunity." Roden accused the Whig ministers of treachery and reminded them that they had wanted a loyal demonstration. Apparently Clarendon had acquiesced in the arming of Protestants during the tense months leading up to the rising of 1848.
The influential Quarterly Review asserted that arms were supplied to Orangemen - although not on a scale comparable to 1798. It reported that Major Turner, Master of the Horse, had given Dublin Orangemen £600 for the purchase of arms with the secret authorisation of Clarendon.
Isaac Butt, then a unionist barrister and later founder of the Home Rule movement, made similar allegations. He said Clarendon's secretary helped Orangemen to acquire 500 stand of arms.
Captain Kennedy, an army engineer, advanced £500 or £600 to arm the loyalists. Clarendon probably closed his eyes to Kennedy's activity or even secretly encouraged it. All he admitted to was greeting with "fair words" those who promised to support the status quo.
At the time he informed the prime minister, Lord John Russell, that Orangemen "must not be encouraged and yet they ought not to be too much snubbed, for many of these people mean well to the institutions of the country, though hostility to the Catholics is doubtless their moving principle."
Russell had advised the lord lieutenant "in extremis, not to rebuff offers of help from Orange institutions, and to envisage arming the Protestants".
Yet, during the attempted rising in July 1848, Clarendon resisted the temptation to call out the yeomanry, telling the prime minister that "the time may come . . . but that time has not yet arrived".
For some months after the Dolly's Brae affair, however, Clarendon was harassed by Orangemen in Ireland and Roden's Tory friends in Britain. The viceroy - whose Famine record is dismal - included in a list of his achievements "Dolly's Brae and its consequences, among which will be the extinction of Orangeism". But Ulster Catholics were disappointed that he had balked at dismissing all the magistrates implicated.
`Chaos of insolvency'
While religion was used to mask ethnic hatred, objections were raised to paying for Famine relief. In 1849, with Ireland suffering a fourth year of famine and English benevolence dried up, the rate in aid scheme was introduced. Poor Law unions in the less stricken parts of the country were instructed to assist those regions which had collapsed into "a chaos of insolvency". The measure was resented, particularly in the North, and seen as a denial of the integrity of the Act of Union.
A petition from Aughnavallog, Co Down, protested: "Our rulers have thought proper to impose a tax on us for the support of the rebels of the south and west, we that struggled by hard work and untiring industry to maintain ourselves in some kind of independence and to prevent our lands from lying waste as is the case at present in many of the southern counties, where from their improvident habits famine and disease is [sic] depopulating whole districts."
The Dolly's Brae skirmish represented a hardening of sectarian loyalties in post-Famine Ireland. Lord Clarendon's Party Processions Act failed to restrain Orangeism. A commission of inquiry into the 1857 riots in Belfast noted that the Twelfth "is now regarded in the North as the celebration of the triumph of one class over another and the establishment of Protestant ascendancy".