Independent Orange Order

Independent Orange Order, founded in June 1903 as a breakaway movement from the mainstream Orange Order. Its immediate origins lay with the populist revolt of T. H. Sloan and the Belfast Protestant Association: in July 1902 Sloan angrily confronted the grand master of the Belfast Orangemen, Col. Edward Saunderson, accusing him of failing to represent Irish Protestant interests in the House of Commons. These accusations were elaborated in Sloan's successful campaign in the South Belfast by‐election of August 1902, and emerged as a full critique of a trimming and inefficient Irish Unionist leadership. Sloan and his allies were suspended from the Orange Order, and on 11 June 1903 they defiantly established the Independents.

The Independent Order gave expression to popular loyalist resentment at the unrepresentative nature of early Edwardian Unionism, symbolized by the collusion between Ulster Unionism and the ‘romanizing’ policies pursued by the Conservative government. The Independents also secured support from Protestant elements within organized Belfast labour. The adherence of Robert Lindsay Crawford brought to the order a liberal Protestant ideologue, who was able to bind it to the northern tradition of farmer protest. However, while the Independent Order had the potential to develop in a liberal, or even secular labourist, direction, it remained fundamentally a Protestant protest movement.

Although the order grew rapidly in the mid‐Edwardian period, its geographical base was confined to Protestant working‐class Belfast and the liberal Protestant stronghold of North Antrim. The order enjoyed some electoral influence: Sloan was MP for South Belfast until January 1910, and Independent votes helped to return R. G. Glendinning for North Antrim in 1906. But increasing division within the leadership deprived the order of both talent and the capacity to grow in any other than a conventionally Protestant direction. This, combined with the revitalization of mainstream Unionism and the re‐emergence of the home rule threat, served to undermine the order's appeal. It reached a peak of membership, with 38 affiliated lodges, in 1907; only 12 of these remained by the beginning of the third home rule crisis, in 1912. The order had fallen into abeyance by the early 1920s. It was later revived, and remains in existence as a small organization associated with the Revd Ian Paisley, who left mainstream Orangeism in 1962. If the contemporary Independent Order reflects little of the thought of Lindsay Crawford, then it retains the authentic popular loyalist and evangelical Protestant hallmark supplied by Sloan.

Bibliography

Patterson, Henry , ‘Independent Orangeism and Class Conflict in Edwardian Belfast: A Reinterpretation’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 80c/4 (May 1980)

Alvin Jackson