Ulster Will Fight?: The British Press and Ulster, 1885–1886

On February 1, 1886, William Gladstone, the "Grand Old Man" of British politics, began his third premiership determined to complete a twenty-year effort to pacify Ireland. Although the introduction of his Irish Home Rule bill was still several months away, some constituencies in Ireland and Britain were already feverish with excitement or fear over the prospects of Irish self-government. Foremost among the latter group were Ulster Protestants. An astute assessor of political opportunity, Lord Randolph Churchill had previously decided, "If the GOMwent for Home Rule, the Orange card would be the one to play. "Churchill would begin the process of playing that card with a much-publicized trip to Belfast on February 22–23, 1886.¹ Prominent loyalists had organized Churchill's visit, which featured numerous addresses from Orange lodges and noisy public affirmations of Ulster's Protestant identity and loyalty.

Churchill did not coin his famous phrase, "Ulster will fight, Ulster will be right," in his keynote speech at Ulster Hall, but he did offer a number of lines sure to inflame sentiment in the audience and to infuriate his critics in equal measure. Perhaps the most remarkable of these came near the end. Although he believed the current storm over Home Rule would blow over, Churchill assured his listeners, if it did not he was of the opinion "that the struggle is not likely to remain within the lines of what we are accustomed to look upon as constitutional action."² Thus, a leading member of the Conservative party, the first but not the last, publicly signaled his support for armed resistance to the government—or at least for the public threat of such resistance. Churchill left Belfast the next morning, and although he never returned to the North of Ireland, he would be forever associated with militant Unionism.³

Churchill's immediate goal in visiting Belfast was to move Ulster to the forefront of the Home Rule debate. The fate of Northern Ireland was only a secondary topic in the public political discussions of 1885–86, but it quickly became a critical theme in Conservative and Unionist oppositional rhetoric and would remain so for the next thirty-five years. Conservatives initially cited Ulster as one of several reasons to reject Irish self-government; when this became inevitable after 1911, they refocused their efforts on saving as much of the province as possible from the anticipated horrors of "Rome Rule. "While Ulster's role in the Home Rule debate was transformed between the first bill and the Third Home Rule bills of 1914, the language and arguments used to advance or deny Ulster's claims remained remarkably consistent.

Home Rule, particularly the 1886 bill, is one of the more intensely studied topics in the history of Anglo-Irish relations, but aside from a few of the major London periodicals the role of the British press in debate over the bill has been surprisingly neglected.⁴ Newspapers have been well utilized in recent years by scholars exploring the construction of Britishness. Less attention has been paid to how these dialogues influenced British reporting on and policy in Ireland. Nowhere was the production of national and imperial identities—as perceived by Britons—more important than in the newspaper press, the locus of the Victorian public sphere. Partisans and commentators in the press deployed various discursive strategies to promote, discount, and analyze the notion that the Protestant people of Ulster would have neither religious freedom nor security of person and property in a Catholic-ruled Ireland.

This, in turn, raises the question of the relationship between the press and public opinion. Public opinion is a notoriously slippery subject even in the present day of scientific polling, and getting a fix on public opinion becomes vastly more challenging when dealing with the nineteenth century. Scholars of media history now generally agree that the press both produced and reflected dominant trends in opinion in a constant dialogue with its readers.⁵ This approach is satisfying principally because it corresponds so well to contemporary understandings of the press and public opinion. Accurately or...