Presbyterianism came to Ireland with the arrival of Scottish settlers to Ulster in the early years of the seventeenth century.Footnote 1 Despite opposition, at times intense, from the Episcopal Church of Ireland, Presbyterians consolidated a separate ecclesiastical and political identity in the north-east over the following century. In terms of church structures, the first presbytery in Ireland was constituted on 10 June 1642 by chaplains of the Scottish army sent to quell the 1641 rising, and the Synod of Ulster was formed in 1690, which remained the largest Presbyterian body in Ireland until 1840. Presbyterianism in Ulster was sustained from Scotland, by both ministers and periodic bursts of immigration, and reflected the Reformed theological consensus of Scottish Presbyterianism. This consensus was enshrined in the doctrinal standards of the Westminster Assembly, especially the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Shorter Catechism, which had been adopted by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in the 1640s and eventually by the Synod of Ulster. Presbyterians in Ireland were also willing signatories of the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643. This document united them with their Scottish co-religionists and English opponents of Charles I, binding them to establish a uniformity of Presbyterian religion throughout the British Isles and to extirpate popery, prelacy, and heresy. This was a British and ‘unionist’ document, but for Scots and Irish Presbyterians it was a union based on religious uniformity, rather than the military and political goals favoured by the English.
The restoration of the monarch and episcopacy in 1660 led to further hardships for Presbyterians in Ireland. At the end of the century, however, they played a conspicuous role in support of William during the siege of Derry from April to July 1689 and were steadfast supporters of the Williamite Settlement. Throughout the eighteenth century, Presbyterians continued to be supporters of the principles of the Williamite Revolution and Whig in politics. Despite their loyalty, and the fact that the established church in Scotland was declared Presbyterian in 1690, Irish Presbyterians found themselves in an Anglican confessional state, legally excluded from full participation in political life and perceived as second-class citizens, which led some to active involvement in Irish republicanism in the 1790s.Footnote 2 In terms of religion, the Reformed theological consensus of the previous century was weakened in the eighteenth century and led to the emergence of theologically liberal forms of Presbyterianism known as ‘Moderatism’ in Scotland and ‘New Light’ in Ulster.Footnote 3 The latter asserted liberty of conscience, opposed subscription to man-made statements of faith, especially the Westminster Confession, and eventually drifted towards Arminian theology and, in some cases, Arianism. Though both churches became more tolerant and moderate in their theology, Scots remained subscribers, and this difference contributed to a deterioration of relations between the two churches in the closing years of the eighteenth century that culminated in the termination of ministerial communion in 1818.Footnote 4 As a consequence, the Scottish theology of the seventeenth-century Confession tended to be associated in the eighteenth with the ‘Old Light’ party within the Synod of Ulster and theologically conservative offshoots of Scottish Presbyterianism. By the 1750s, the Seceders, and to a lesser degree the Covenanters or Reformed Presbyterians, had established a presence in Ireland from Scotland and became the growth sector of Presbyterianism for the rest of the century.Footnote 5
Despite the obvious links between Scotland and Ireland, scholars of the nineteenth century have not attempted to compare and contrast religious developments or to examine how Scottish and Irish Presbyterians understood their relationship with each other. This article addresses this gap in the historiography by uncovering some of the religious and ideological connections between these Victorian Presbyterian communities. It does so by showing how Presbyterians in the north-east of Ireland considered their relationship with their Scottish co-religionists and how they used their sense of ‘Scottishness’ to formulate an Ulster Scots identity. As the first three sections demonstrate, Presbyterians in Ireland increasingly referred to their Scottish background as a way of characterizing the process of religious reform that occurred within their church from the 1820s. This involved Irish Presbyterians re-forging links with Scottish Presbyterians and returning to the Reformed theology of the seventeenth century. For Presbyterians in Ireland, ‘Scottishness’ came to represent a collection of ideas that could be deployed at certain times for specific reasons – theological orthodoxy, civil, and religious liberty, and certain character traits such as hard work, courage, and soberness. It is also clear that the Irish Presbyterian discussion of its Scottish character was framed within different settings: a moral tale of the origins, indigenization, and exploits of the Scots in Ulster; the development of British identity and civil and religious liberty that began with John Knox, was asserted by the Solemn League and Covenant, and sealed by the Williamite Revolution; and, finally, a commitment to the world-wide Presbyterian family.
By contrast to these neglected themes, scholars have focused a significant amount of attention on the transformation of Presbyterians from republican United Irishmen in 1798 to unionists by 1886.Footnote 6 All but one of the original founders in 1791 of the Society of United Irishmen in Belfast were Presbyterians and the 1798 rising in Ulster is often characterized as a Presbyterian rebellion against the Anglican confessional state, though Presbyterians were found on both sides of the conflict for a variety of reasons. The political transformation of Presbyterians was facilitated by the general reasons for the growth of unionist opinion after 1800 – the economic prosperity of the north-east, the benefits conferred by the expansion of the British Empire, the development of Irish nationalism, the growth of British identity, and the democratization of the state through such measures as Catholic Emancipation and the extension of the franchise. An important additional factor is the growth of evangelical religion that united Presbyterians with other Protestant groups, including their Anglican enemies in 1798, on the basis of a shared religious experience, missionary activity, and anti-Catholicism.Footnote 7 In the late 1820s and 1830s, Henry Cooke, the dominant figure in nineteenth-century Presbyterianism, developed a policy of pan-Protestant unity with the established Church of Ireland in defence of the Union and the Protestant character of the British state.Footnote 8 Cooke ‘fused together in his own person a particular combination of conversionist theology, social conservatism, and anti-catholicism which would eventually come to dominate popular politics in the north of Ireland’.Footnote 9 Cooke's articulation of these themes found a ready audience amongst a significant number of Presbyterians, especially the laity, who made common cause with other Protestant groups in supporting the Conservative party and who joined the Orange Order in increasing numbers from the late 1870s.Footnote 10 Cooke's anti-Catholicism, evangelical religion, and unionist politics were shared by the overwhelming majority of Presbyterians, yet the majority of his ministerial colleagues and a sizeable proportion of the professional middle classes and better-off tenant farmers supported the Liberals.Footnote 11 They did so on the basis of the anti-Episcopal and anti-Erastian principles of seventeenth-century Presbyterianism and because members of the Church of Ireland continued to dominate land ownership and to be overrepresented in public appointments. They supported the Liberal party because it was committed to free trade, on which the prosperity of north-east Ireland was based, and advocated the legalization of ‘tenant right’. However, they profoundly disagreed with Gladstone's Home Rule policy and formed a distinctive Liberal Unionist tradition in the north-east. They had a variety of reasons for doing so, including their fear of the ascendancy of the Roman Catholic Church in any Home Rule arrangements, which reflected the traditional anti-Catholicism of Presbyterian theology.Footnote 12
The threat to the Union and the threat of ‘Rome Rule’ not only united political groupings within Presbyterianism but also, more generally, created a unionist coalition of various political, social, and religious groups throughout Ireland.Footnote 13 Reflecting this coalition, unionism had a complex set of identities – Imperial, British, Irish, and Ulster – that could be utilized for different reasons depending on circumstances.Footnote 14 This complexity was consistent with the nature of British identity more generally, which encompassed the English, Welsh, Scots, and Irish, as well as colonial populations. Consequently, rather than serving as a substitute, Scottishness complemented and reinforced the British identity of Presbyterians in Ireland. Furthermore, the strength of Presbyterian attachment to the Scottish origins and character of their theology and identity was used by unionist opponents of Home Rule after 1885. As befitted the unionist coalition, the leadership called on different groups at different times, depending on the audience they wished to influence. Presbyterians were important because they represented the prosperous and politically liberal middle class of the north-east who could convince Scottish Presbyterians, especially those belonging to the Free Church, that their support for Gladstone and Home Rule was misguided.Footnote 15 On Ulster Day, 28 September 1912, 471,414 men and women pledged themselves to oppose Home Rule by signing documents directly modelled upon the Solemn League and Covenant. The seventeenth-century document had been reinterpreted in a much more positive and progressive Whiggish sense by Thomas Sinclair, a prominent Presbyterian layman and Liberal Unionist, who drew on his denomination's historical narrative of support for civil and religious liberty. The Covenant of 1912 gave unionist opposition a more general sense of defiance and potential rebelliousness; an evocation of what Graham Walker has termed ‘the martyr spirit’.Footnote 16
The Ulster Covenant demonstrated both the cultural power of Presbyterian religion and that unionist opposition to Home Rule increasingly centred on the province of Ulster. As part of this ‘Ulsterization’ of unionism, the political turmoil of the late nineteenth century, and a broader Victorian interest in racial origins, authors on both sides of the Atlantic actively promoted an Ulster-Scots or Scots-Irish identity.Footnote 17 According to Ian McBride, the ‘Ulster “character” which emerged was dour but hospitable, shrewd, self-reliant, steadfast and industrious, blunt of speech, and gifted with the capacity to govern less fortunate peoples’.Footnote 18 The exploits of the Ulster Scot in the cause of civil and religious liberty were celebrated in a narrative that encompassed, amongst other events, the Ulster plantation, the Covenanters, the siege of Derry, and the American Revolution. As demonstrated below, it was Presbyterian historians such as W. T. Latimer, James Heron, and J. B. Woodburn who gave the standard accounts of the Ulster Scots. This article suggests that the Presbyterian understanding of the Scottish character of their religion, and their central role in the evolving history of the northern province and the British state, provided an important source of a separate Ulster Unionist identity. Unlike Anglicans who sought to articulate their concerns in an all-Ireland and broadly Protestant context, Irish Presbyterians, whether politically Liberal or Conservative, had a distinct provincial culture and ecclesiastical organization that corresponded with Ulster unionist opposition to Home Rule. Furthermore, this article also demonstrates that though the Presbyterian authors who discussed an Ulster Scots identity used a language of race, their opposition to Home Rule was essentially religious. A distinction may be drawn between the vocabulary of race, employed by virtually all writers in this period, and the belief that race was a biological given, which was used by some Victorians to characterize different groups of people.Footnote 19 Racial differences were important, but Presbyterian authors claimed that they were based on religious differences, rather than inherited biological or physiological characteristics.
To examine these issues in more detail, the article is divided into four sections. The first shows how ideas about the Scottishness of Presbyterianism were reawakened for a more general audience in the first half of the nineteenth century during the campaign for religious reform and revival within the Irish church and the growing interest in missionary activity. The next two sections examine the flowering of Presbyterian historiography in the nineteenth century and especially the influence of James Seaton Reid on the understanding of Scottishness within Irish Presbyterianism. The final section examines those writers who did not support the dominant narrative of Scottishness within Presbyterianism, and attempts by other scholars to construct an Ulster identity. This leads to a discussion of the religious origins of a distinct Ulster Scots identity and its utilization during the Home Rule crises of 1885–6, 1892–3, and 1912 to 1914.
I
During the first half of the nineteenth century, Presbyterianism in Ulster underwent a far-reaching process of religious reform and revival that saw the triumph of a distinctive form of Presbyterian evangelicalism.Footnote 20 The roots of this process were firmly within the Presbyterian theological tradition as represented by ‘Old Light’ ministers within the Synod of Ulster and the Seceders. It was encouraged by the emergence to social and cultural prominence of evangelicalism, a movement of renewal and reform within transatlantic Protestantism that traces its origins back to British Puritanism and German Pietism and which found expression in the eighteenth century through Moravian missionaries, English Methodists, and various revivals of religion in America and Scotland.Footnote 21 This movement for reform within Presbyterianism had a profound impact upon church life, leading to the formation of the present-day General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland in 1840 and the 1859 revival. Nineteenth-century Presbyterian evangelicals such as Thomas Witherow, professor of church history at the Presbyterian Magee College, Derry, between 1865 and 1890, rode this wave of religious vitality, comparing in 1858 their prosperous state with the previous two centuries of persecution and internal controversies.
The first century spent by our forefathers in this province was a battle for existence against Prelacy from without: the second was a battle for truth against heresy from within: it were well if the third on which we have now entered would be, not simply a defensive but an aggressive movement – a long well-sustained battle for the Gospel of Christ against sin and ignorance at home, and against unbelief and heathenism away through the world.Footnote 22
The reformation of Presbyterianism in the 1820s and 1830s united political conservatives, liberals, and the unaligned in the task of promoting religious revival. They desired to return their church to the Reformed theology of the Westminster Confession and the spiritual experience of the Scottish founders of Irish Presbyterianism in the early seventeenth century.Footnote 23 For them, Scottishness was intimately related to correct church government, confessional orthodoxy, and missionary example. With Henry Cooke at the vanguard, Presbyterian evangelicals waged a campaign against Arian influence within the Synod, forcing seventeen ministers and congregations to leave in 1829 to form the Remonstrant Synod of Ulster. Reflecting the conservative character of Presbyterian evangelicalism, Cooke's supporters interpreted the expulsion of the Remonstrants as a return to the beliefs and practices of seventeenth-century Presbyterianism.
This process of reformation sharpened denominational identity and self-confidence, leading to a more general interest in global Presbyterianism. At the first meeting of the Synod after the Remonstrants had been expelled, a committee of four leading evangelicals was established to correspond with Presbyterian churches in Continental Europe and America about the practicality and means of establishing ‘ecclesiastical intercourse’.Footnote 24 This allowed Presbyterians in Ireland to transcend their specific location and to participate in a self-conscious denominational network that emphasized values such as education, missionary activity, and philanthropic concern. These links were developed and strengthened over the course of the nineteenth century as the Presbyterian churches in each area sent delegations to attend the annual meetings of sister denominations. This process culminated in the formation in 1876 of the Alliance of the Reformed Churches holding the Presbyterian System (later the World Alliance of Reformed Churches), a union of Presbyterians against ‘infidelity and saceradotalism’.Footnote 25 Irish Presbyterians led calls for the formation of the Alliance and hosted its third meeting in Belfast in 1883. The Irish Presbyterian sense of ‘Scottishness’ was related to their place within this global community of Presbyterians.
Though formal ecclesiastical links with the Scottish General Assembly had been severed in 1818, Scottish and Irish Presbyterians found other avenues of communication. Home and foreign missions were the first links to be developed as they were a product of the rise of evangelicalism.Footnote 26 In 1820, the Synods of Ulster and Munster formed the Presbyterian Society of Ireland ‘to revive and extend the Presbyterian interest in the south and west of Ireland’.Footnote 27 One of the first acts of this new body was to prepare an address to all friendly denominations, particularly Scots Presbyterians, in an attempt to obtain funds. Henry Cooke and James Carlile were sent to Scotland on a fundraising trip and came back with £547 13s 1d collected through a committee in Edinburgh and by the presbyteries of Glasgow and Paisley.Footnote 28 Both the Synod of Ulster and the Secession Synod in 1824 permitted representatives of the Scottish Missionary Society (SMS) to address their annual meetings and collect funds, and it was with the support of that Society that Hope Waddell and Thomas Leslie became the first missionaries of Irish Presbyterian origin to work overseas.Footnote 29 In 1835, Waddell wrote from his Jamaica base to the Dublin minister and prominent missionary enthusiast, W. B. Kirkpatrick, asking him to organize contributions to the work of the SMS as it would, amongst other things, demonstrate gratitude to Scotland for establishing Presbyterianism in Ireland.Footnote 30
Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, Irish Presbyterians continued to ask their Scottish co-religionists for material and spiritual assistance in the evangelization of Ireland. For instance, the Home Mission of the Synod of Ulster sent an address to the members of the Church of Scotland in 1833 asking for funds, and individual ministers were delegated by the Synod to undertake fundraising trips in Scotland later in the decade.Footnote 31 At a special meeting of the Synod to discuss missionary activity in September 1833, speeches on the use of the Irish language in missionary work amongst Catholics in Ireland were delivered by two Church of Scotland ministers, one of whom was the noted Gaelic scholar, Norman McLeod.Footnote 32 Societies were also established in Scotland to support the Home Mission of Irish Presbyterians, including the ‘Glasgow Ladies’ Association, in aid of the Home Mission of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland', under the patronage of the duchess of Argyll, and the ‘Glasgow Irish Students’ Association for promoting the interests of the home Mission in connexion with the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland'.Footnote 33 The conviction underlying these ventures, and the missionary activity itself, was that Presbyterianism was the only church capable of winning Ireland for evangelical Christianity.
Meanwhile, the Church of Scotland was undergoing a similar movement of reform and revival in this period.Footnote 34 Buoyed by the rise of Presbyterian evangelicalism on both sides of the North Channel, the way was open for the renewal in 1836 of ministerial communion between the Synod of Ulster and the Church of Scotland, especially as the Synod had renewed full subscription to the Confession for all new ministers.Footnote 35 In June 1836, Henry Cooke travelled to the Scottish General Assembly, and, in a speech laced with phrases such as ‘true sons of the Church of Scotland’ and ‘our Mother Church of Scotland’, defended the principle of established churches and the regium donum, the state subsidy received by the Irish church. Pre-figuring language and themes used by unionist opponents of Home Rule in the 1880s, he also vindicated the record of Scottish Presbyterians in Ulster from the seventeenth century who, he claimed, had brought loyalty, peace, and prosperity to the most rebellious and backward of Irish provinces. Later in the same speech he remarked that Irish Presbyterians ‘derive our origin from your bosom; we have adopted, fully, your doctrine, government, and worship; we have partaken, in other days, of your weal and woe’. Reflecting the growing confidence of his denomination, Cooke concluded his speech by remarking, ‘After years of separation, we are re-united; and, though in different lands, and in different outward circumstances, we form, in spirit and communion, one Presbyterian Church.’Footnote 36
Whether politically conservative or liberal, Irish Presbyterians shared a commitment to the Union with Great Britain, evangelical activism, and theological orthodoxy. Consequently, they overwhelmingly supported the evangelical party within the Church of Scotland. Led by the greatest churchman of his age, Thomas Chalmers, this party, comprising over 450 ministers and around two-thirds of the lay members of the established church, finally withdrew in 1843 to form the Free Church of Scotland. The Disruption of 1843 was the culmination of a ten-year conflict between church and state over the spiritual independence of the church and the right of church members to appoint their own ministers without interference from landlords or other patrons.Footnote 37 Irish Presbyterians kept abreast of developments within the Scottish church and the twin themes of the spiritual independence of the church and non-intrusion were repeatedly rehearsed in print and at public meetings.Footnote 38 In 1840, petitions in support of the stance taken by the evangelical party were adopted by twelve presbyteries; a well-attended non-intrusion meeting was held in May Street church, Belfast, in February; and in 1842, Chalmers himself visited the town.Footnote 39 A prominent theme of the Irish response to events in Scotland was martyrdom, of the self-sacrifice of worldly comfort for a religious principle. Unsurprisingly, the martyr spirit of the seventeenth century was employed. A speech delivered to Chalmers on his visit to Belfast by some of his former students from Ireland referred to the fact that it was a privilege for Scottish and Irish Presbyterians to be ‘descendants of the blessed martyrs’. As a consequence of the stand taken by their forefathers for Presbyterian principles, they pledged their support to Presbyterian evangelicals in Scotland and could not ‘prove recreants to the cause for which Scotland shed her best and noblest blood, or dishonour the memory of those who the world was not worthy’.Footnote 40 When the Disruption finally occurred, the Irish General Assembly recognized the Free Church ‘alone as the legitimate representative of those from whom the Presbyterian Church in Ireland has always regarded it the noblest distinction to be descended’ and only resumed links with the Scottish Established Church in 1885.Footnote 41
II
Direct contact through missionary activity and delegations was only one way in which Irish Presbyterians drew upon their Scottish links, but perhaps the most ideologically potent means was through the writing and reading of history. In that context, the most important figure in nineteenth-century Irish Presbyterian historiography was James Seaton Reid – minister of the Synod of Ulster (1819–37), professor of ecclesiastical history, church government, and pastoral theology at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution (1837–41), and regius professor of ecclesiastical and civil history at the University of Glasgow (1841–51).Footnote 42 Reid is best known for his magisterial three-volume History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, volume I of which was published in 1834, volume ii in 1837, and volume iii completed in 1853 by his successor in Belfast, W. D. Killen.Footnote 43 His History was highly praised by W. E. H. Lecky and J. A. Froude, and Thomas Witherow described it as ‘the one great literary work which has done credit to our Church in this country in the first half of the present century’.Footnote 44
To understand Reid's History, it is important to place its publication in a local and a British context. In local terms, it was written against the backdrop of the Arian controversy and the reformation of Presbyterian church life. Reid was a prominent evangelical and moderator of the Synod in 1828. As clerk of the Synod after 1829, he was instrumental in implementing the various schemes for reform within the denomination, including the task of reorganizing the system of presbyteries in 1834.Footnote 45 His scholarship, therefore, ought to be read as a vindication of the evangelical party and their claim to be direct descendants from the Scottish founders of Irish Presbyterianism in the early seventeenth century. His moderatorial sermon in 1828 stated that his contemporaries must imitate their godly Scottish forefathers and emphasized the role of the ordained ministry in promoting religious revival.Footnote 46 Reid returned to these themes in volume i of his History, which clearly argued that adherence to doctrinal purity and scriptural Presbyterianism had produced spiritual and numerical growth in the seventeenth century. The poor quality of original Scottish settlers had been transformed by a godly ministry, beginning with Edward Brice in 1613 and followed by the likes of Robert Blair, Josias Welsh, Andrew Stewart, and John Livingstone. Their ministry led to the Six Mile Water revival of 1625, and Reid was the first Irish historian for over a century to offer a sustained account of this religious awakening.Footnote 47 He was eager to point out that the revival was promoted by ministers who had a personal relationship with Christ, were committed to Reformed theology and the Presbyterian form of church government, and were zealous and faithful in their pastoral duties.Footnote 48 Reid clearly regarded them as exemplars for nineteenth-century evangelical ministers who, he believed, should be at the forefront of the reform movement within the Synod of Ulster.
In broader terms, Reid's scholarship fits into the well-established pattern of British Whig historiography and, more importantly, into the Scottish inflection of that tradition in the early nineteenth century.Footnote 49 Specifically, it ought to be seen as an Irish manifestation of the flowering of the historiography of Presbyterianism in Scotland and its criticism of Sir Walter Scott's portrayal of the Covenanters.Footnote 50 The greatest exemplar of this historiographical tradition was Thomas McCrie, a minister of the conservative Original Secession Church in Scotland.Footnote 51 In his biographies of John Knox (1811) and Andrew Melville (1819), McCrie attempted to counter the claims of ‘Neu Licht’ Seceders who dismissed the principle of an established church and who repudiated, in some respects, the theology of the Westminster standards. According to Colin Kidd, the ‘assertive patriotism’ of McCrie, and other early nineteenth-century evangelicals, ‘was intended as a reminder of the Kirk's historic responsibilities and as a clarion call to action in the face of the enormous pressures which threatened to engulf traditional Scottish society’.Footnote 52 This feeling found ultimate expression in Chalmers who proposed a parochial solution to Scotland's immense social problems, yet who, thereby, uncovered the subordination of the Kirk to the state that ultimately led to the Disruption. When McCrie died in 1835, the Synod of Ulster passed a resolution mourning his death and lamenting the untimely loss of such a significant ‘historian and defender of the Reformation’.Footnote 53
Reid concurred with McCrie's commitment to the Reformed theology of seventeenth-century Scottish Presbyterianism, his high estimation of the character of those reformers, and their indispensable role in the constitutional development of the United Kingdom. McCrie and his fellow historians of Scottish Presbyterianism argued that by protesting against the political tyranny and spiritual absolutism of Catholicism, Erastian Episcopalianism, and the Stuarts, the Scottish Reformers of the sixteenth century and the Covenanters of the seventeenth were not only upholding scriptural Presbyterianism and promoting a revival of religion but were also the true originators of British civil and religious liberty.Footnote 54 In similarly Whiggish terms, Reid argued that the Presbyterian presence in Ulster was integral to Britain's constitutional history. He felt compelled to write his work as he believed the absence of such an account represented a ‘chasm’ in the history of the church in the United Kingdom. In the preface to volume i, he wrote that the significance of the history of Irish Presbyterians ‘is so intimately connected with all the more important changes in the civil affairs of Great Britain during the last two centuries, and the cause of constitutional freedom is so much indebted to their noble efforts at the [Williamite] Revolution’. He also noted that their influence had rendered a wild and unruly province peaceful and prosperous compared ‘to the other parts of the empire’, and that Presbyterians ‘have been so generally characterized by probity, peaceableness, and industry, as well as an enlightened attachment to the principles of civil and religious liberty’.Footnote 55
The history of Presbyterianism was ultimately the history of Ulster and its indispensable role in the evolution of the British constitution and the struggle for civil and religious liberty in the British Isles. Reid shared with Irish Presbyterian historians of the eighteenth century such as James Kirkpatrick and John McBride a veneration of William III and stressed the importance of Presbyterians in the campaign against James II, especially during the siege of Derry.Footnote 56 In the preface to volume ii, he noted that he had consulted original documents hitherto ignored in order to trace that ‘successful resistance to the arbitrary government of James the Second, by which the revolution was consummated on the plains of Ulster’.Footnote 57 Reid later praised the efforts of William to address Presbyterian grievances and ascribed the subsequent prosperity of Presbyterianism in Ireland to his encouragement.Footnote 58 Henry Montgomery, the most prominent Irish Unitarian of the period and leader of the Remonstrant Synod, concurred with Reid's analysis at this point. Montgomery agreed that Scottishness could be defined in terms of civil and religious liberty and moral character. He praised the boldness of John Knox in asserting the will of the Scottish people, and was overjoyed about the enthronement of William III and the role played by Presbyterians in upholding civil and religious liberty at Enniskillen and Derry.Footnote 59
Where Reid differed from McBride, Kirkpatrick, and his Arian opponents in the nineteenth century was in his positive description of the Solemn League and Covenant. Reid's discussion of the 1630s and 1640s was the occasion for him to contrast Scottish and Ulster Scots support for civil and religious liberty with popish tyranny and prelatic persecution. Reid admitted the Covenant was very much a product of its time and unsuited to the nineteenth century, which, predictably, attracted the censure of his Reformed Presbyterian contemporaries.Footnote 60 However, they also praised his characterization of their forefathers as the true originators and defenders of British civil and religious liberty.Footnote 61 Reid reoriented his readers' attention from the specific concerns of the Covenant towards the principles it enshrined and the results it produced both in Ulster and the rest of the British Isles. It ‘ascertained and united the friends of civil and religious liberty’ and gave them renewed confidence. Reflecting his commitment to the cause of religious reform within the Synod, Reid also claimed that the Covenant ‘revived the cause of true religion and piety, which had lamentably declined under the iron sway of the prelates’ and civil war. It also began a Second Reformation in Ulster that was discernible in the increased number of church buildings and zealous ministers, ‘the improving manners and habits of society, and in the growing attention of the people to religious duties and ordinances’.Footnote 62 Unsurprisingly, Montgomery did not agree with Reid's interpretation. Referring to the Covenant he stated that ‘it would be very difficult to find any thing in human Records, more blood-thirsty and intolerant than this Solemn League, entered into in the desecrated name of Religion, and under the plea of advancing Civil Liberty!’Footnote 63 He pointed out the irony that the Covenant was adopted by Presbyterians in Ireland who had been severely persecuted by Anglicans but who now, in turn, began to persecute and deny to others the liberty of faith and worship they had sought for themselves.Footnote 64
III
Although Reid told a story with which Presbyterians were already familiar in broad outline, he established a compelling narrative that provided a model and inspiration for others to follow. His concerns were reflected in the work of other Presbyterian writers and historians in Ireland whose aim was to encourage greater attachment amongst church members to the history and character of the denomination. William McComb, the publisher and poet laureate of Irish Presbyterianism, provided a synopsis of Reid's History in his Presbyterian Almanac.Footnote 65 James Meikle used Reid as the basis of his reflections on the role Presbyterians played in the struggle for religious liberty in his historical novelettes Our Scottish forefathers (1837) and Killinchy, or the days of Livingstone (1839).Footnote 66 W. D. Killen, professor of ecclesiastical history, and later president of the Presbyterian College, Belfast (also known as Assembly's College), from 1841 to 1902, produced an array of works vindicating the scriptural character of Presbyterianism in the abstract, and the particular influence of Scottish Presbyterians in Ulster, most notably in his edition of Patrick Adair's seventeenth-century account of the rise of Presbyterianism in Ireland (1866), The ecclesiastical history of Ireland (1875), and The history of congregations (1886).Footnote 67
Other writers accepted Reid's narrative while simultaneously extending his chronology. Reid began in the seventeenth century, while others, including Scottish Presbyterian scholars, illuminated earlier religious links between Ireland and Scotland through the kingdom of Dalriada, Columba, Iona, and the Culdees. The pioneer in this exploration of the early church in Scotland and Ireland was the noted Free Church Gaelic scholar, Thomas Maclauchlan, whose The early Scotch Church: the ecclesiastical history of Scotland, from the first to the twelfth century (1865) was described as ‘the completest and most satisfactory ever yet produced’ on the subject.Footnote 68 At the first meeting of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches in Edinburgh in 1877, Maclauchlan drew attention to the fact that through ‘the Scoto-Irish Church they could trace the principles of Presbyterianism further back in Scotland and Ireland than in any other part of the world’.Footnote 69
For Scottish Presbyterians, this sense of reciprocity and gratitude was channelled into continued support for missionary activity. In his review of Killen's Ecclesiastical history, A. F. Mitchell, professor of ecclesiastical history at St Andrews and a conservative Church of Scotland minister, asked, ‘Why, when we have our days of special prayer for missions to the heathen, should we have no season of special intercession for those who are bound to us by so many endearing associations from the days of Patrick and Columba to those of Ussher and Bedell, of Blair and Livingstone?’Footnote 70 This theme was taken up enthusiastically by Hamilton Magee, a Presbyterian missionary to Irish Catholics in the south of Ireland from 1848 to 1908 and superintendent of the Dublin Mission of the General Assembly. In his writings, Magee attempted to indigenize Presbyterianism in Ireland by drawing attention to the importance of the early Christian period and St Patrick. Like other Presbyterian writers, he argued that Patrick was neither a Romanist nor a ritualist, but a type of evangelical who presided over a non-hierarchical church, teaching doctrines that were eventually carried to Iona by Columba and diffused by the Culdees. For Magee, Scottish supporters of the evangelization of Ireland were ‘repaying an ancient and almost forgotten debt’ and that the ‘kindly light of Iona was kindled by the hands of Irishmen’.Footnote 71 Furthermore, Magee argued that evangelical Protestants, and Presbyterians certainly, should not feel ashamed of celebrating the life and legacy of Patrick, not least because the sixteenth-century Reformation in Scotland ‘consisted largely in shaking off, as of a deadly incubus, by the giant hand of a quickened and united people, the accumulated superstitions of ages, and a return to the Scriptural faith and simple polity of the Culdee, whose influence had never quite died out of the national heart’.Footnote 72
These Scottish-Irish connections were cultivated and led to the formation of the Scottish Association for Irish Missions in 1883.Footnote 73 Amongst the Scottish patrons of the Association were luminaries such as Horatius Bonar, John Cairns, James Elder Cumming, Robert Rainy, and Alexander Whyte. Under the convenorship of the Revd Jackson Smyth of Armagh, it raised £3,584 10s 11d in its first year.Footnote 74 To support its aims, Magee published a pamphlet, Scotland and Ireland (1887), originally delivered as a lecture in the previous year but the themes of which, especially the Ulster plantation, he deemed particularly important in the light of the first Home Rule crisis. Once more, the Columban church and Culdees paved the way for the sixteenth-century reformation in Scotland, though Magee also focused on the benefits of the plantation in the form of social and economic prosperity, civil and religious liberty, religious blessing, and the diffusion of Presbyterianism to other lands. For a Scottish audience, he highlighted the providential role of Irish Presbyterianism in the extension of the gospel to all the inhabitants of Ireland, discerning that this had been God's intention when he had brought representatives of the Columban Church of Scotland back to Ireland in the early seventeenth century.Footnote 75
Irish Presbyterian pride in their Scottish character and Presbyterianism was further reinforced by membership of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and their connections with American Presbyterians. The inaugural meeting of the Alliance in Edinburgh agreed that the writing of the history of Presbyterianism in various parts of the world was necessary in order to encourage the revival of true religion.Footnote 76 Consequently, Irish Presbyterians published historical studies especially for the Alliance – the layman, Richard Cunninghame from County Donegal, contributed to the Alliance's periodical, The Catholic Presbyterian, and Thomas Croskery produced his Irish Presbyterianism (1884) for the Belfast meeting of the Alliance.Footnote 77 American Presbyterians also provided an impetus for historical studies in Ireland. Correspondence between the Presbyterian Historical Society in America and the Irish General Assembly in 1877 regarding the old records of Irish Presbyterianism led to the formation of a Committee for Historical Purposes, the publication of the Records of the General Synod of Ulster (1897–8), and, eventually, to the Presbyterian Historical Society of Ireland in 1907.Footnote 78
The same themes on which Reid had dwelt are evident in the works of Thomas Witherow who has good claim to rival his predecessor as the finest historian produced by Irish Presbyterianism.Footnote 79 A lifelong political Liberal, evangelical, and theological conservative, Witherow's publications ranged widely in the political and ecclesiastical history of Ulster. In the opinion of another Presbyterian historian, Witherow's writings ‘had the effect of rendering the members of our Church better Christians and more consistent Presbyterians’.Footnote 80 The relationship between Scottishness and theological orthodoxy was asserted in his most valuable work, the two-volume Historical and literary memorials of Presbyterianism in Ireland (1879–80). Regarding orthodoxy, Witherow pointed out that the earliest ministers in Ireland had been ordained in Scotland and had accepted the Scots Confession (1560) and later the Westminster Confession.Footnote 81 He extended the connection between Scottishness and orthodoxy to the eighteenth century and the role of Scottish Seceders in upholding scriptural Presbyterianism and Reformed theology.Footnote 82 Other writers followed. In 1886, Thomas Hamilton, then minister of York Street congregation and from 1889 president of Queen's College, Belfast, maintained that Presbyterianism had been the bulwark of evangelicalism since Scottish ministers had first set foot in Ireland and that the Christ-centred gospel of ministers like Robert Blair ‘was never more conspicuous than it is among their ecclesiastical successors in these closing years of the nineteenth century’.Footnote 83
In a memorable passage published in 1858, Witherow also claimed that Presbyterian religion had made Ulster prosperous and moral.
The striking contrast between the present and the past, reminds us how God has blessed the Church of our fathers, and made it a blessing to this land. It is Presbyterian industry that has made the desert smile: it is Presbyterian teaching that has given a high tone of morality to the sober and industrious peasantry of the province: it is Presbyterian principles permeating the population that have every where infused the feelings of self-respect and independence, and which make it so difficult for any man who bears the Presbyterian name to bend his neck to any yoke of bondage.Footnote 84
Many of Witherow's Presbyterian contemporaries applied this analysis to the growth of Belfast, which was designated a city in 1888. In 1905, the Presbyterian Church erected a new Assembly Hall in the city.Footnote 85 Built in Scottish baronial style, the building was opened by the ninth duke of Argyll, and symbolized an assertive Presbyterianism, proud of its role in developing one of the most prosperous cities in the British Empire. In a booklet published to accompany a fundraising event in the new building, the anonymous author commented that the phenomenal growth of Belfast was ‘an object lesson of the thrift, enterprise, and stubborn perseverance of the Scotch Presbyterian’ that had ‘transformed a barren waste into a smiling and prosperous province’.Footnote 86
Finally, Witherow emphasized the crucial role Presbyterians played in the struggle for civil and religious liberty, especially in his most popular work, Derry and Enniskillen (1873), which offered a continuous narrative of the various campaigns of the Ulster Protestants between 1688 and 1690.Footnote 87 Following Thomas Babbington Macaulay, Witherow's interpretation of the siege was progressive, rather than cyclical – a narrative that saw tolerance and forbearance flourishing in Ireland within the British Empire, and was an explicit criticism of the zero-sum interpretation of Irish history offered by Tory and Orange interpreters. He wrote from a self-confessed Protestant standpoint, but aimed to be even-handed, and criticized Tories and High Church prelates for persuading William to place legal restrictions upon Presbyterians who, as a result, emigrated in their thousands to America.Footnote 88
IV
As noted above, the vision of Scottishness proposed first by Reid and continued by Killen, Magee, and Witherow was not accepted by all Presbyterians, especially the minority of theological liberals who had been forced out of the Synod of Ulster in 1829. The Revd George Hill, Unitarian minister of the Remonstrant congregation in Ballymoney and historian of the Ulster plantation, had little time for equating Scottishness with theological orthodoxy, the improvement of Ulster, or civil and religious liberty. In his edition of the Montgomery manuscripts (1869) and his study of the Macdonnells of Antrim (1873), Hill displayed his sympathies with the Gaelic Catholic natives removed by the planters.Footnote 89 His magnum opus, An historical account of the plantation in Ulster at the commencement of the seventeenth century (Belfast, 1877), depicted the plantation as a catastrophe. He directly challenged traditional Presbyterian understandings of the early seventeenth century by arguing that Ulster was an attraction to settlers, not a barren wasteland, that the natives were well equipped and knowledgeable, and that the connection between Scotland and Ulster had retarded Ireland's progress since the third century.Footnote 90 Despite the wholehearted support of government and the appalling misery caused by the plantation, Hill argued, on the basis of Nicholas Pynnar's Survey of 1622, that it had been a failure. The eventual prosperity that Ulster enjoyed ‘was only secured by a very heavy and dreadful sacrifice of the general interests of Ireland as a nation’. The legacy of the plantation was plain to see in the horrors of the 1640s, 1688–90, and 1798:
The dragons' teeth, so plentifully, and as if so deliberately sown in this Ulster plantation, have, indeed, sprung up at times with more than usually abundant growth, yielding their ghastly harvests of blood and death on almost every plain, and by almost every river side, and in almost every glen of our northern province.Footnote 91
By painting such a picture, Hill was roundly criticized by theological conservatives who explained his hostility by the fact that he was ‘blinded by his heartless creed, and by his miserable antipathy to evangelical Protestantism’.Footnote 92
Hill may have denigrated the conception of Scottishness promulgated by theological conservatives, but he was part of a more general trend within educated circles in the north of Ireland to discuss and formulate a distinct Ulster identity. The most obvious forum for this was the first series of The Ulster Journal of Archaeology (UJA), published between 1853 and 1863. The journal included members of the main religious groups in Ulster and aimed to explore the distinctiveness of the province in an attempt to preserve its physical, ethnological, musical, literary, and oral traditions, which were seemingly in danger of eclipse by economic and industrial developments.Footnote 93 Especially important were the ethnographic studies carried out by an Ulster-born Anglican vicar in Liverpool, Abraham Hume. In a series of articles, Hume examined the origins and ethnological and religious characteristics of the population in counties Antrim and Down. He concluded that, in terms of race, religion (specifically Presbyterianism), respect for law and order, and prosperity, Ulster differed from the rest of Ireland; ‘In short, except geographically, Ulster is not Irish at all.’Footnote 94 The first series of the UJA ceased publication in 1863, but was revived in 1897 by a group of enthusiasts, including many Presbyterians, and led by the Protestant nationalist and eccentric, F. J. Bigger.Footnote 95 In a conscious nod towards the original project, George Hill penned the introduction to the second series, emphasizing the non-controversial character of the journal and the richness of the historical, literary (especially Irish language sources), and archaeological materials that existed in Ulster. Amongst other factors, he attributed this to Ulster's close proximity to Scotland, though he focused on the ancient kingdom of Dalraida and the person of Columba, rather than Presbyterianism.Footnote 96
The interrogation of an Ulster identity is important as it made the language of race more prominent in the Presbyterian narrative of Scottishness, notwithstanding the extensive discussion of this subject over the previous century by Scots Presbyterians in particular.Footnote 97 The language of race was employed in 1876 by Thomas Croskery, a professor at Magee from 1875 to 1886, in an important article in Fraser's Magazine, ‘Ulster and its people’. This was Croskery's attempt ‘to sketch the characteristics of an energetic and self-reliant race who have received perhaps less attention than they deserve’. He suggested that there were two ‘very different’ races in Ireland – Irish Celts and Ulstermen. The latter was a mixture of English, Scots, and Irish, the Scottish component of which was ‘the solid granite’ on which Ulster society rested. The character of this Ulsterman was a mixture of Norse persistency and Celtic impulsiveness – masculine, solid, sober, shrewd, possessed of moral tenacity, and able to stand alone. Croskery demonstrated to his satisfaction how these characteristics had led to the success of Ulstermen at home and overseas, especially in India and America. Unsurprisingly, the influence of Presbyterianism had ‘fixed the religious tone of the whole province’.Footnote 98
The use of the rhetoric of race in some publications occurred at a time when Home Rule became the dominant issue in Irish political life. As indicated at the outset, Presbyterians were to provide for the unionist coalition many of the historical and cultural resources for the formation of a separate Ulster identity. This period saw the publication of the classic Ulster Scots texts, starting with John Harrison's The Scot in Ulster (1888) and culminating in J. B. Woodburn's The Ulster Scot: his history and religion (1914). It also saw the flowering of a similar form of literature in America, where Reformed Protestants were asserting an Ulster Scots or Scotch-Irish culture in the context of the perceived threat of the Irish Catholic diaspora along the eastern seaboard.Footnote 99 Within both contexts, an Ulster Scots identity was suffused with a language of race; indeed some historians have sought to stress the racist character of unionist opposition to Home Rule.Footnote 100 Though certain features of loyalism may support such a view, the broader charge is flawed and reductionist.Footnote 101 In the Victorian and Edwardian eras, generally speaking, the term race ‘had multiple, imprecise and overlapping definitions’.Footnote 102 According to one commentator, the ubiquity and power of the language of race in Victorian culture was owing to ‘its flexibility rather than from its rigidity’.Footnote 103 There was a trend away from an earlier humanitarian understanding, as typified by Abraham Hume, to a more ‘racist’ scientific alternative associated with certain forms of biological evolution.Footnote 104 In that context, it may be helpful to distinguish between ‘race’ as a category of analysis and ‘race’ as a biological given that was used by some Victorians to characterize different people groups. The Irish Presbyterian writers who discussed Ulster Scots identity used the language of race, but it was religion that formed the basis of their opposition to Home Rule.
In Scotland, race was an important part of identity politics in the nineteenth century. Colin Kidd has argued that though Presbyterian religion was more important than race in articulating Scotland's identity, both ‘Presbyterian and racial patriotisms tended to blend together, sustaining a distinctive but proudly pro-British ethnicity, variants of which flourished in Lowland Scotland and, by the late nineteenth century, in Ulster.’ Indeed, over the nineteenth century, race became a much more important element in Scottish identity, providing Scots with ‘a powerful, but ambiguous, metanarrative which underwrote a wealth of constitutional possibilities, including a kind of nationalism’. The dominant narrative of nationhood for both Scottish unionists and home rulers was Teutonic, rather than Celtic.Footnote 105 Significantly, the most identifiably ‘racist’ work on Ulster-Scots identity was by a Scot, John Harrison, who asserted that race was the difference between Ulster and the rest of Ireland.Footnote 106 Harrison's prioritizing of racial categories reflected a greater salience of such rhetoric in Scotland and would not be replicated by Irish Presbyterians, who, more generally, were much more guarded in their response to some forms of biological evolution.Footnote 107 In addition, they were more prepared to emphasize the extent of racial mixing as it undermined the arguments about a pure Irish race and asserted the right of Presbyterians and the other settler populations to call themselves Irish.Footnote 108
Despite a shared language of race, the relationship between Presbyterians in Scotland and Ulster came under increasing strain from theological and political developments. Addressing the Irish General Assembly in 1885, the Free Church remarked that they lived in ‘a day of doctrinal fluctuation, when fixity of creeds is undervalued’, and asked their Irish co-religionists to assist them in contending for biblical Christianity.Footnote 109 This address came five years after a Free Church professor, William Robertson Smith, had been removed from his teaching post for advocating modern approaches to the biblical text. Despite calls for co-belligerence against error, Presbyterians in Ireland were increasingly alarmed at the spread of critical attitudes towards the Bible in the Free Church and were particularly impatient with Robertson Smith.Footnote 110 Though Irish Presbyterianism in general remained conservative, some of the faculty of the colleges in the early twentieth century gradually came to accept the methodology of higher criticism and some of its conclusions. This included the appointment of two Free Church professors from Scotland to the Magee faculty, David Smith to the chair of theology in 1909 and James Strahan to the chair of Hebrew in 1915.
Concern with theological error was compounded, perhaps overshadowed, by the ambivalent attitude of many Scots towards the opposition of Irish Presbyterians to Home Rule. In particular, Free Church Presbyterians wanted to ensure Gladstone's support for their campaign to disestablish the Church of Scotland and were thus unwilling, for pragmatic reasons, to oppose his home rule proposals.Footnote 111 In 1887, the Free Church stated that they did not feel competent to offer advice to their Irish co-religionists on this question and, though not indifferent to the ‘trials and disquietudes which our brethren in Ireland have … been called to experience’, wished to refrain from discussing divisive political questions. They did, however, believe that much of the future prosperity of Ireland would be determined by how the Presbyterian Church in Ireland reacted.Footnote 112 The Irish response to this equivocation was firm and showed a certain degree of exasperation.Footnote 113 They agreed that much of the future of Ireland would be determined by their reaction to events, but observed that it would also depend on British churches ‘and especially upon the attitude and bearing of our co-religionists in Scotland toward us of their kith and kin, and toward all our fellow countrymen’, particularly as their Irish forefathers had been planted directly from Scotland. To emphasize these links and their relevance to contemporary realities, they noted the beneficial influence on Ireland of Scottish-supported legislation relating to Sabbath observance, temperance, education, the equality of churches, and land tenure. Given such links, the Assembly asked whether they were ‘asking too much from Scottish Presbyterians, when we plead that they will not deprive their kindred in race and religion across the Channel of their heritage in Britain's glories, and their assurance of equal treatment under Britain's laws?’ They also tackled directly the reticence of the Free Church to discuss political issues, especially as the Irish church had done so when it ‘appeared to us to affect the interests of the Church of Christ, or the safety of society’ in areas such as church patronage in Scotland. At the time of the second Home Rule crisis in 1892–3, they received the support of the Original Secession Church in Scotland and an address signed by 488 office-bearers in the United Presbyterian Church (UPC) declaring ‘cordial sympathy’ with their ‘uncompromising resistance’ to the Home Rule proposals.Footnote 114 By 1912–14, however, the UPC had united with the Free Church and their letter to the Irish Assembly in 1913 was non-committal on the issue of Home Rule.Footnote 115
It was against this backdrop that Presbyterians in Ireland reasserted their Scottish connections in an attempt to win support from their co-religionists for the unionist cause. Harrison's work signalled the beginnings of a stream of lectures and publications on the history and character of the Ulster Scots, the majority of which were written by Presbyterians, many of whom were from a Liberal Unionist background. One of the most persistent advocates of this identity was W. T. Latimer, minister of Eglish, County Tyrone, who was a prolific local historian, theological conservative, political ‘radical’, and something of a contrarian.Footnote 116 In 1899 he published in pamphlet form an illustrated lecture, The Ulster Scot: his faith and his fortune, but gave his definitive interpretation of the Ulster Scot in a two-part article published in The Northern Whig in January 1911.Footnote 117 Latimer acknowledged the extent of racial mixing in Ireland, though he believed that the population could be divided into two distinct races – the Irish dominated by a Celtic element and the Ulster Scot dominated by the Teutonic – both of which were legitimately Irish. The Ulster Scot was a mixture of two-fifths Celtic and three-fifths Teutonic, and was characterized by Latimer as strong, vigorous, and persevering. After demonstrating the ethnic origins of the race, Latimer supplied an overview of Presbyterian history. Written amidst growing political tensions in Ireland and employing metaphors from evolution, his concern was with politics and Presbyterian commitment to civil and religious liberty. He charted how the hardy and courageous characteristics of the Ulster Scots were forged by their precarious position in Ulster during periods of persecution by Archbishop Laud, Charles II, and James II, and in periods of military strife as at Derry, Enniskillen, Newtownbutler, and the Boyne. ‘They had all the qualities of a warlike race to begin with, and these qualities were developed by practice. By a kind of natural selection the weak ones went to the wall, the strong ones outlived their enemies, and produced a race vigorous, resolute, and stubborn.’ Reflecting his political liberalism, Latimer clearly stated his antipathy to Tory politics, but he also reflected the traditional anti-Catholicism of Presbyterian theology. On this basis, he was an implacable opponent of Irish Home Rule ‘as that would mean government by the Irish bishops, directed by Rome’.
Latimer's religious opposition to Home Rule was expressed in the resolutions passed with overwhelming majorities by the Presbyterian Church in Ireland during the three Home Rule crises and by religiously minded Protestants in general.Footnote 118 Moreover, as demonstrated in the previous sections, Presbyterians also believed that their religion had forged the provincial character. According to James Heron, Killen's successor in Assembly's College, the Protestant presence in Ireland had been negligible before the arrival of Scottish ministers, since when ‘Presbyterian faith has been the most powerful agent in Ulster history, and has given moral and religious tone to the community.’Footnote 119 This Heron attributed to the character of the Ulster Scot, which had been shaped by religious instruction in the Shorter Catechism.Footnote 120 Heron returned to this theme in his lecture for the tercentenary commemoration in 1913 of the arrival of Edward Brice as the first Presbyterian minister in Ulster.
In the strong, independent, firm-fibred character of the true Ulsterman, strong and sturdy just because it is God fearing, and fed on such a diet as the Shorter Catechism, you have the secret of Ulster history, the basis of Ulster society, the core of that persistent distinctive individuality which the typical Ulster Scot carries with him wherever he goes.Footnote 121
The centrality of Presbyterian religion was asserted in the pinnacle of the Ulster Scots canon, J. B. Woodburn, The Ulster Scot: his history and religion (1914). Woodburn, the Presbyterian minister of Castlerock, County Londonderry, and the brother of a Magee College professor, noted the ethnic mixture of the Irish population and accorded climate an important role in shaping the Ulster Scot. Woodburn also discussed racial differences between north and south, which, he claimed, were based on religion, rather than inherited characteristics. It was Presbyterian religion originating with Columba and the Culdees, proclaimed by Knox in the days of the Scottish Reformation, and asserted by the Covenanters, that was the main source of difference between Ulster and the other three provinces. Ireland had given Christianity to Scotland and in return they ‘repaid that debt many centuries later’ by sending Presbyterian religion to Ulster, which provided the Reformation ‘that made the Ulster Scot what he is’.Footnote 122 The ‘religion of the North’, he claimed, inculcated ‘freedom of life and conscience, and must produce a more robust race of men than the South with its traditional and enervating Catholicism’.Footnote 123 Woodburn's book was well reviewed in both the Irish and British press.Footnote 124 The most conspicuous feature noted by reviewers was its dispassionate tone, with only one oblique reference in the text to the Home Rule crisis. Yet its contemporary relevance was clear. Latimer disagreed with minor points, but recommended that every Presbyterian buy and read the book as it ‘ought to strengthen the cause with which we are identified in these times of turmoil and trouble’.Footnote 125
Amidst the political crises that engulfed Ulster Protestants in 1885–6, 1892–3, and 1912 to 1914, a new urgency and importance was attached to the Scottishness of Irish Presbyterianism in terms of religious orthodoxy, the prosperity of Ulster, and civil and religious liberty. This article has demonstrated that Presbyterians in the north of Ireland before 1885 had developed a strong sense of provincial identity within the United Kingdom that was founded upon their Scottish origins and Presbyterian religion. Though there were dissenting voices, this robust, yet flexible, set of principles and rhetoric was deployed by unionists more generally in their campaign against Home Rule. In doing so, however, the broader sympathies of Presbyterianism were sidelined. Irish Presbyterians looked to Scotland for their origins and theological identity, and throughout the nineteenth century also saw themselves as part of a transatlantic religious community that emphasized their theological, philanthropic, and educational character. Moreover, Presbyterian Liberal Unionists in particular employed ethnic and religious concepts as well as those derived from broader constitutional and economic discourses that were sidelined as Ulster Protestantism more generally became increasingly insular. The Scottishness propounded by Presbyterians before 1885 had given them confidence and a place within a transatlantic Presbyterian community. Owing to political pressures during the Home Rule crises, that identity became much narrower and much less empowering.
