William Johnston, firebrand who rid Orangemen of hated Westminster legislation

Professor Roy Foster, the doyen of modern Irish historians, has described William Johnston of Ballykilbeg as ‘the most celebrated Orange firebrand of his day, a founder of newspapers, Member of Parliament and scourge of Popery’ and accused him of ‘hating “reasonableness” above all things’. Is this characterisation even remotely fair?

Johnston was a minor and usually impecunious Co Down landlord who never exhibited any great aptitude for either farming or managing his finances. Ballykilbeg was the name of his small estate near Downpatrick. Born on February 22, 1829, Johnston’s Orangeism was virtually hereditary. His great-grandfather, William Johnston of Killough, is credited with being the founder in 1733 of the first Orange Society in Ireland, the Loyal Society of Blue and Orange. Johnston joined the Orange Order in May 1848, the same year in which he entered Trinity College, Dublin. From Trinity he was to graduate with a BA in 1852 and an MA in 1856. He was subsequently called to the Bar.

By the mid-1850s Johnston was a deputy grand master of the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland, had founded the Down Protestant Association and was the publisher of the Downshire Protestant newspaper. In 1857 he sought to enter Parliament as the Member for Downpatrick but was obliged to bow to the superior resources of Richard Ker, brother of a major local landowner. Despite this setback, in the 1860s Johnston emerged as the leading campaigner against the unpopular Party Processions Act of 1850. The act had been passed by Lord John Russell’s Liberal administration in response to the events at Dolly’s Brae on July 12 the previous year. The intention of the legislation was to ban Orange parades. While scarcely welcoming the legislation, the aristocratic and cautious leadership of the Orange Order was anxious to remain within the law and was not disposed to challenge it.

Rank and file Orangemen grew increasingly dissatisfied with their leadership’s timidity. Johnston shared their frustration and offered alternative leadership. In July 1866, he held a great jamboree on his estate to celebrate the Twelfth. Similar jamborees were held that year at Lisburn, Kilwarlin, Waringstown, Lurgan, Portadown and Dungannon.

In 1867 Johnston decided to challenge the legislation directly by organising and leading a large – 14,000 Orangemen from 117 lodges participated – but peaceful and orderly Twelfth parade from Newtownards to Bangor in clear defiance of the Act. On his arrival in Bangor he made a speech boldly stating he and his followers would tolerate no longer legislation which deemed a Twelfth demonstration illegal but allowed Irish nationalists to march through Dublin with complete impunity. Orangemen, he asserted, were ‘tired of hole and corner meetings’ and calls from genteel Orange leaders, ‘assembled at small tea parties’, to ‘for God’s sake keep quiet on the 12th of July’.

Contrary to the shrewd advice of their chief secretary for Ireland, the Conservative government insisted on prosecuting Johnson for defying the law. Determined on martyrdom and refusing to be bound over to keep the peace, Johnston was sentenced to two months imprisonment in Downpatrick Gaol at the Spring Assizes in February 1868.

While he was in prison Johnston’s supporters adopted him as the candidate of the United Protestant Working Men’s Association of Ulster for the Belfast constituency in the forthcoming general election. On July 12, 1868 with the election in prospect, Johnston engaged in some early electioneering: ‘We will have an Orange Party please God, after a while in the House of Commons ... for all the good some of the Ulster members do the Orange cause, they might as well have been selected from the Deaf and Dumb Institute’.

The Representation of the People (Ireland) Act of 1868 had little impact in Ireland as a whole but it enfranchised large numbers of skilled artisans and working men in the boroughs. In Belfast the act created a greatly expanded electorate. Throughout the United Kingdom the impact of the expanded electorate on elections was viewed with some trepidation. Lord Derby, the Conservative leader, confessed to his fellow peers in the House of Lords that the English legislation of 1867 was akin to ‘taking a leap in the dark’. Men understandably wondered how Belfast’s newly enfranchised skilled artisans and working men would vote.

With a vigorous campaign and a populist programme directed at new voters, Johnston humiliated the Conservative Party by heading the poll in the double-member constituency with an impressive 5,975 votes when the election took place in November. The two official Conservative candidates, Sir Charles Lanyon, the celebrated architect, and John Mulholland, head of a major linen firm and future Lord Dunleath, managed to poll only 3,540 and 1,580 respectively and were pushed into third and fourth place by Johnston’s Liberal running mate, Thomas McClure, whose portrait hangs in the Reform Club and who polled 4,202 votes. The newly enfranchised electorate had decisively endorsed Johnston and his opposition to the Party Processions Act.

Wasting little time, the new independent Conservative member for Belfast introduced a bill for the repeal of the act in 1869 but was unsuccessful. However, in 1872 Gladstone’s administration quietly repealed the offending legislation. Thus within four years Johnston had achieved the rare feat of realising the object for which he had sought election within the lifetime of a single Parliament.

William Johnston’s status as a folk-hero rests on his successful opposition to the Party Processions Act and his assertion of the right of Orangemen to march. But some interesting questions remain: To what extent was he a firebrand? Was he the scourge of Popery? Did he ‘hate “reasonableness” above all things?’

The Illustrated London News found Johnston to be ‘a person of slight, spare figure somewhat below the middle height, of remarkably quiet, even gentle demeanour; and when he spoke he did so in soft measured tones, used no extravagant language, though he was pointed and free in the expression of his opinions…’. Apart from some belligerent speeches at the time of the first Home Rule crisis, parliamentary colleagues rarely had reason to view Johnston as other than a mild-mannered and amiable soul. He had the ability to maintain cordial relations across party boundaries and sustain friendships with nationalists such as J G Biggar and John Redmond.

Johnston was no bigot, his quarrel being with Roman Catholicism rather than Roman Catholics. He urged tolerance towards Roman Catholics and treated his Roman Catholic tenants fairly. Although bitterly hurt when his daughter converted to Rome, he nevertheless escorted her to her freely chosen place of worship every Sunday. By contrast Gladstone, the great Liberal, treated a sister who converted to Rome with unconcealed contempt.

In supporting the right to march he did not seek anything for himself which he sought to deny to his Roman Catholic neighbours. He supported Gladstone’s Land Act of 1870 but, strangely for a landlord, thought it did not afford tenants sufficient security. He believed in and supported the secret ballot, female suffrage and ‘tenant right’ when many ‘reasonable’ men opposed such dangerous innovations.