Burke in Belfast: Thomas MacKnight, Gladstone and Liberal Unionism

Abstract

Ulster Unionist political mobilisations have traditionally been driven by Orange/Tory populism, and its critics have argued that Ulster Unionism is simply an archaic leftover from the era of Protestant ascendancy. In this interpretation, self-identified Liberal Unionists such as those Ulster Liberals who refused to embrace Gladstonian Home Rule after 1886 are seen as dupes or bigots who have deserted the authentic traditions of their United Irish ancestors; this was Gladstone’s own view of his erstwhile Ulster followers. This view has in turn been criticised. John Bew argues that nineteenth-century Belfast produced an eliteled ‘civic Unionism’ in which Whigs deriving from the conservative wing of the late eighteenth-century ‘Patriot’ movement and moderate Peelite conservatives could share the belief that Union and Empire allowed Irishmen to participate in a wider British culture of reform and improvement driven by enlightened administrative elites, and the somewhat naïve expectation that Orange populism and Catholic discontent would be rapidly dispelled through popular education and scientific-technical progress.¹ Paul Bew similarly argues that throughout the nineteenth century significant elements of the British and Irish ruling elites justified the Union as a Burkean project aimed at reconciling Irish discontents by containing the warring elements within a wider political framework which would permit their gradual accommodation to British civility.²