In September 1795, at a crossroads in County Armagh called the Diamond, a dispute over who had the right to walk down a road ended in bloodshed and the founding of an institution that is still arguing about who has the right to walk down roads. Few origin stories have aged so consistently.
The setting was a county in which Protestants and Catholics had been jostling for linen-weaving work, land and leases. The Penal Laws had loosened just enough for Catholics to compete, which is the sort of progress that tends to produce a fight. Two gangs emerged to do the fighting. The Protestant Peep o’ Day Boys earned their name by raiding Catholic homes at dawn, ostensibly in search of weapons, and presumably in the hope of catching everyone at their least defensible. The Catholic Defenders existed to defend against them, a job description that was at least honest.
For several years the two sides indulged in the usual rural hobbies: arson, intimidation, and the occasional murder, all conducted with the grim punctuality of a seasonal trade. By September 1795 they had worked up to a proper confrontation near Loughgall, at a spot where the road widened enough to hold an argument and a body count.
Accounts of the Battle of the Diamond differ, as accounts of Irish battles tend to, depending on whom you ask and how recently they’ve eaten. The broad story is that a large Defender force gathered, a Protestant force met them, and a short, brutal fight ended with the Defenders routed. Casualties are usually put at around thirty Catholics dead, though the precise figure depends on the loyalties of the historian, and one suspects the dead were not consulted. The Protestant side lost very few, which was noted with satisfaction by those who had won and with something less than satisfaction by those who hadn’t.
What happened next is the more consequential bit. That evening, in the house of a man called James Sloan in nearby Loughgall, a group of victors formed what they called the Orange Society, named after William of Orange, the Dutch king who had beaten the Catholic James II at the Boyne a century earlier. It is a peculiar thing to name a new organisation after a man who’d been dead since 1702, but nostalgia has always been Ulster’s most reliable export.
The aim was mutual protection and the defence of Protestant interests, with a heavy side order of loyalty to the Crown. The Order grew fast, spreading through lodges, with passwords, regalia, oaths and ritual, which gave men something to do on the evenings they weren’t being threatened. Within a few years it had links to the gentry, the militia and the establishment, which is what happens when a gang acquires a banner and a constitution.
The mythology afterward was of a plucky defence against aggressors, and the Defenders’ version was of a massacre. Both can be true, in the way that two accounts of the same disaster usually are.
The joke, if it is one, is that the Order began as a response to a quarrel about territory and has spent the following two centuries quarrelling about territory. Founders at least get credit for consistency.
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