Founded on March 17, 1565 In Ireland. According to several early published histories of the Order, including especially the three-volume history by John O’Dea (in 1923), the AOH can trace its foundations to centuries before that official start date of 1836, indeed all the way back to 1565. At that time, so the AOH’s national historian writes, Ireland became one of many battlefields between the forces of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation in Europe. As the English Tudor monarchs asserted greater control over the island, their agents seized the lands of Gaelic septs and began the process of plantation—that is, bringing in English and Scottish Protestant colonists who would dispossess the Catholic natives and control the island into the twentieth century. In the first of these planted areas—in the counties of Laois and Offaly in the Irish midlands—a Gaelic prince of the O’More family—known as Rory Oge—put together a band of men, known as “Defenders” who fought to retain his Gaelic inheritance and to preserve the Catholic faith under the banner of "Friendship, Unity, and True Christian Charity.”From which, obviously, you all have derived your modern-day motto. Through the next two hundred and fifty years, secret societies (including the eighteenthcentury Whiteboys and the nineteenth-century Ribbonmen) carried on this tradition of underground resistance to the English monarchy and its Protestant faith. But before one assumes too direct a line of development from the Reformation era through the eighteenth century to the foundation of the AOH, let me offer up a few notes of caution. First, the early accounts of your organization were written in an era when historians, especially historians with a nationalist agenda, drew connections to the past by reading backward from their present conditions. And don’t get me wrong: I’m not bashing nationalist histories as an Irish phenomenon. These were—and to some extent—still are written. (As someone who teaches graduate students about the study of nationalism, I’m especially aware of this in the case of German historians who wrote in Germany immediately after the second German Empire was declared in 1871.) In the case of Ireland, late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writers saw the nationalist movement of their time dominated by Catholics and often demanding civil and human rights for Catholics in a British state. They believed that all past resistance to English or British authority was necessarily “national” in origin, including being rooted in religion, whether this involved Rory Oge resisting Queen Elizabeth I or the Whiteboys lashing out against Protestant landlords and tithe collectors, who collected taxes on behalf of the Anglican Church. But more recent research has raised questions about such assumptions. For instance, Rory Oge—apparently—wasn’t opposed to doing business with Elizabeth or her deputies at all: as late as 1575, ten years after he was supposed to have founded his Defenders, he was willing to cut a deal with Lord Deputy Sidney in exchange for the restoration of his family’s historic land rights. His strong resistance, which led Sidney’s subordinates to engage in some very ugly mass murders, was apparently motivated—at least in part—by the Tudor state having promoted some of his family’s former clients (such as the O’Dempseys) at the expense of the O’Mores. Meanwhile, eighteenth-century secret societies associated with what is known generically as “Whiteboyism” were not primarily motivated by religious concerns or nationalist programs. Just to be clear: what is called “Whiteboyism” was a form of rough justice, in which local groups gathered at night—taking oaths of mutual loyalty and secrecy and sometimes wearing costumes, such as the long white shirts that gave the Whiteboys their name—and attacked their enemies in an effort to enforce community norms. They would threaten violence unless certain demands were met. From the 1760s until the 1830s, every decade witnessed at least one substantial outbreak of agrarian violence. But, as we have come to learn in the last twenty years or so, Whiteboys and their counterparts were primarily motivated by localized economic grievances, not some pre-nationalist program to get the English landlords out of Ireland. More often than not, their members were from the lower end of Ireland’s very complicated social ladder. These small tenants and agricultural laborers only paid rent indirectly to Protestant landlords. There were often two or three tiers of middlemen, many of them wealthier Catholics, between them, and it was these middlemen who were actually the direct targets of Whiteboy violence. They were targeted because they extorted higher rents from their subtenants or paid their laborers lower wages than the subtenants and laborers believed to be right. And even when there were religious aspects to such violent outbursts—tithe collectors were often attacked by Whiteboys (some accounts talk about bits of their ears being chopped off or the collector being buried up to neck in brambles)—the aim seems to have been at least partially economic. Attackers usually demanded that tithes be lowered NOT done away with, which one might expect if the motivation for the attacks was purely religious. At the same time, the above points shouldn’t lead anyone to discount entirely the secret society origins for the AOH. By its very nature, evidence of society activity is, well, SECRET. But there is sufficient circumstantial evidence to suggest that the AOH may have grown out of traditions that were contemporaneous with the Whiteboy activity I just mentioned. In southern Ulster in the 1770s and 1780s, land tensions overlapped with religious tensions, mainly because the population of Catholics and non-Catholics who were among the poorer and middling sorts was more equivalent than in other parts of the island. As such, Protestant agrarian groups, such as the Peep-o’-Day boys—a precursor to the more famous Orange Order—led to the growth of a Catholic group known as the Defenders. To my knowledge, there is no credible, direct link between this group and the Defenders of Rory Oge. Still this group WAS self-consciously designed to protect Catholics from Protestant aggression, and their ideology also became increasingly laced with French revolutionary republicanism. Code words, signs, and catechisms were drawn up to help identify friend from foe, and Defender lodges provided social outlets as well as rudimentary political education for their members. Ultimately, the Defenders linked up with the society of the United Irishmen and were at the center of the bloodiest Irish rebellion of them all: the Rebellion of 1798. Increasingly, historians such as Ruan O’Donnell in Ireland and Jim Patterson here in the States, are showing that anti-English, pro-republican ideologies did not die but went underground after 1800. Their evidence remains patchy, but it has been growing over the course of the last decade, and I find it persuasive. Meanwhile, referring to a slightly later period of time and one that more directly speaks to the AOH, Tom Garvin has outlined the activities of a group known as the Society of the Ribbonmen through the 1810s through the 1830s. This shadowy organization seems to have been strongest in Ulster, the north midlands, and in Dublin—in short, in the very same areas where the Defenders were concentrated, and they seemed to espouse a similar ideology. It is quite possible that it was from this tradition, as O’Dea and others wrote decades ago, that Hibernianism eme
Posted on: Fri, 28 Jun 2013 11:38:55 +0000