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PRESBYTERIAN RELIGION, HISTORIOGRAPHY, AND ULSTER SCOTS IDENTITY, c. 1800 TO 1914

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2009

ANDREW R. HOLMES
ANDREW R. HOLMES*
Affiliation:
Queen's University Belfast
*
School of History and Anthropology, Queen's University Belfast, 15 University Square, Belfast, BT7 1NNa.holmes@qub.ac.uk
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Abstract

The links between Presbyterians in Scotland and the north of Ireland are obvious but have been largely ignored by historians of the nineteenth century. This article addresses this gap by showing how Ulster Presbyterians considered their relationship with their Scottish co-religionists and how they used the interplay of religious and ethnic considerations this entailed to articulate an Ulster Scots identity. For Presbyterians in Ireland, their Scottish origins and identity represented 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. Ideas about the Scottish identity 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 were expressed through a distinctive denominational historiography inaugurated by James Seaton Reid. The formulation of a coherent narrative of Presbyterian religion and the improvement of Ulster laid the religious foundations of a distinct Ulster Scots identity and its utilization by unionist opponents of Home Rule between 1885 and 1914.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , September 2009 , pp. 615 - 640
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

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2 The best expositor of these themes is I. R. McBride, Scripture politics: Ulster Presbyterians and Irish radicalism in the late eighteenth century (Oxford, 1998).

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19 My understanding of the relationship between race and religion is indebted to Colin Kidd's' The forging of races: race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (Cambridge, 2006).

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33 The Ladies' Association was formed in December 1841 (Missionary Herald of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland (Mar. 1843), p. 15); First report of 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. Adopted at general meeting, April, 1846 ([Glasgow, 1846]).

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43 Subsequent references will be taken from the 1867 edition, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, ed. W. D. Killen (3 vols., 2nd edn, Belfast, 1867).

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48 Ibid., pp. 120–4.

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56 I. R. McBride, ‘Ulster Presbyterians and the confessional state, c. 1688–1733’, in D. G. Boyce, Robert Eccleshall, and Vincent Geoghegan, eds., Political discourse in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ireland (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 169–92; idem, The siege of Derry in Ulster Protestant mythology (Dublin, 1997), pp. 20–32.

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58 Ibid., p. 398.

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62 Reid, History, ii, p. 456.

63 Montgomery, ‘Outlines’, p. 194.

64 Ibid., pp. 201–4.

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84 Witherow, Historical sketch, p. 47.

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86 Grand united church extension bazaar, new Assembly Buildings, Fisherwick Place, Belfast, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, November 15th, 16th, 17th, and 18th, 1905 (Belfast, 1905), p. 7.

87 Thomas Witherow, Derry and Enniskillen in the year 1689: the story of some famous battlefields in Ulster (Belfast, 1873). My reading of Witherow is based on McBride, Siege of Derry, pp. 63–5.

88 Witherow, Derry and Enniskillen, pp. 304–11.

89 George Hill, The Montgomery manuscripts: (1603–1706) compiled from family papers by William Montgomery of Rosemount, Esquire (Belfast, 1869); An historical account of the Macdonnells of Antrim: including notices of some other septs, Irish and Scottish (Belfast, 1873).

90 George Hill, An historical account of the plantation in Ulster at the commencement of the seventeenth century, 1608–1620 (Belfast, 1877), pp. 19–20.

91 Ibid., p. 590.

92 McComb's Presbyterian almanack (1878), p. 88.

93 ‘The archaeology of Ulster’, Ulster Journal of Archaeology, ser. 1, 1 (1853), pp. 1–8.

94 Abraham Hume, ‘Origin and characteristics of the population in the counties of Down and Antrim’, Ulster Journal of Archaeology, ser. 1, 1 (1853), pp. 9–26, 120–9, 246–54, at 13; idem, ‘Ethnology of the counties of Down and Antrim’, Ulster Journal of Archaeology, ser. 1, 4 (1856), pp. 154–63; idem, ‘The elements of population in Down and Antrim, illustrated by the statistics of religious belief’, Ulster Journal of Archaeology, ser. 1, 7 (1859), pp. 116–30.

95 Eamon Phoenix, ‘Francis Joseph Bigger: historian, Gaelic Leaguer, and Protestant nationalist’, in Eamon Phoenix, Pádriac Ó Cléiriacháin, and Eileen McAuley, eds., Feis Na Ngleann: a century of Gaelic Culture in the Antrim Glens (Belfast, 2005), pp. 65–77.

96 [George Hill], ‘Introduction’, Ulster Journal of Archaeology, ser. 2, 1 (1894), pp. 8–10.

97 See Kidd, Subverting Scotland's past; and idem, The forging of races.

98 Croskery, Thomas, ‘Ulster and its people’, Fraser's Magazine, 14 (1876), pp. 219–29Google Scholar. Croskery dealt with the same themes in Irish Presbyterianism (1884).

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100 J. J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985: politics and society (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 1–14.

101 Walker, History, p. 32.

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105 Kidd, ‘Race, empire, and the limits of nineteenth-century Scottish nationhood’, pp. 877, 891.

106 John Harrison, The Scot in Ulster: sketch of the history of the Scottish population of Ulster (Edinburgh, 1888).

107 For Irish Presbyterian attitudes towards evolution see D. N. Livingstone, ‘Darwin in Belfast: the evolution debate’, in J. W. Foster, ed., Nature in Ireland: a scientific and cultural history (Dublin, 1997), pp. 387–408; and idem, ‘Science, site and speech: scientific knowledge and the spaces of rhetoric’, History of the Human Sciences, 20 (2007), pp. 80–3.

108 Hamilton, History, pp. 1–2; James Heron, ‘The making of the Ulster Scot’, in Ford, The Scotch-Irish in America, pp. 555–73; J. B. Woodburn, The Ulster Scot: his history and religion (London, 1914), pp. 17–27.

109 MGA, vi (1885), p. 1006.

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112 MGA, vii (1887), p. 379.

113 MGA, vii (1888), pp. 581–3.

114 MGA, viii (1893), pp. 578–9.

115 MGA, xii (1913), pp. 692–3.

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118 MGA, vii (1886), pp. 12–14, 114–16, viii (1893), pp. 326–17; Walker, Graham, ‘The Irish Presbyterian anti-Home Rule Convention of 1912’, Studies, 86 (1997), pp. 71–7Google Scholar. For the attitude of protestants to Home Rule see Hempton and Hill, Evangelical Protestantism, pp. 161–87; A. Megahey, ‘“God will defend the right”: the Protestant churches and opposition to home rule’, in D. G. Boyce and A. O'Day, eds., Defenders of the Union: a survey of British and Irish Unionism since 1801 (London, 2001), pp. 159–75.

119 James Heron, The story of the Irish Presbyterian Church (Belfast, n.d.), p. 6.

120 Ibid., p. 15.

121 James Heron, ‘The progress of three hundred years’, Addresses on the occasion of the celebration of the tercentenary of Irish Presbyterianism: delivered in the Assembly Hall, Belfast, the third day of June, 1913 (Belfast, 1913), p. 16.

122 Woodburn, The Ulster Scot, p. 398.

123 Ibid., p. 399.

124 The Ulster Scot: his history and religion by James Barkley Woodburn, M.A. … extracts from opinions of the press (London, [1915]).

125 Witness, 15 May 1914.