In Chris Bambery’s timely new book, The Old Divide: The History of Sectarianism in Scotland, he explores the roots of historical bigotry in imperialism and class rule  

The late nineteenth century saw two fundamental shifts in British society. Both impacted on the influence of Orangeism in Scotland.

The first was that in the 1860s, the Conservative Party under Benjamin Disraeli, reacting to a widening franchise, rebranded itself as no longer the party of rural squires and the brewers but as the national party supposedly one nation, irrespective of class. A crucial part of this was that they revered ancient traditions and institutions, the monarchy above all, and honoured profoundly the nation’s heritage and distinctive character.

This was strongly connected to the second shift, which centred, above all, on the Conservatives being the party of Empire and imperialism. Britain’s industrial hegemony was by the 1870s under challenge from the United States, fresh from the Civil War which had massively expanded its industries, and a unified Germany. Many formerly loyal Liberal employers began to shift across to the party it now saw as protecting vital imperial markets.

The Conservatives and their new allies built up mass support for British imperialism – something now largely forgotten – creating a milieu to which the Orange Order connected.

The 1867 Reform Act, introduced by a Conservative government led by Lord Derby from the House of Lords, but with Disraeli as both Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader in the House of Commons, had extended the franchise further and the Tories needed popular appeal. It is important to point out that the new Conservative government was acting under intense pressure from below.

Some 100,000 people had marched to London’s Hyde Park on the evening of the 23 July 1866. They were met by 1,600-1,800 policemen who had barred the gates. The protesters tore down the railings around the park, entered and the rally proceeded.

A demonstration by the Scottish Reform League in Glasgow on 16 October drew 150,000 people, double the number that had appeared there in 1832. There were also many smaller demonstrations throughout the country.

The League was an unsteady alliance of Liberal leaders, more radical members of the party and the trade unions. The latter demanded ‘manhood suffrage’ which the Liberal leaders opposed.

The Act eventually passed was regarded by working-class members of the League as inadequate. It did, nonetheless, bring a measure of change.

In Glasgow, the 19,925 existing voters were now joined by 27,824 working-class voters. The city now had three MPs although the electors could only vote for two candidates.

The further extension of the franchise saw the Irish community assert themselves. Correspondingly, the Orange Order got a new lease of life with the disestablishment in 1869 of the Church of Ireland by the new Liberal government led by Gladstone in 1869, No longer would it be the State Church, no longer would the monarch appoint the bishops, who no longer would have seats in Parliament.

In response to this, there was a revival of the Order’s activities in Glasgow and the West of Scotland. A year later, Orange leaders were central to the establishment of the Glasgow Working Men’s Conservative Association. The Conservatives supported the teaching of the Bible in the national school system and opposed any talk of disestablishing the Church of Scotland.

The battle lines were drawn in Scotland between the Liberals – though many disliked an amendment providing state funding for the Catholic Church in Ireland – and an alliance of the Tories and the Orange Order, reinforced by visiting delegations from the Irish Protestant Defence Association.

The issue of state funds for the Catholic Church quickly became the central issue, which translated down into cries of ‘No Popery’. A petition in Glasgow against the Bill was supported by the Glasgow Herald with other petitions being sent to Westminster from Edinburgh, Dundee, Airdrie, Greenock and Dumfries; the Church of Scotland’s Glasgow, Edinburgh and Ayr presbyteries opposed it.

In Greenock, anti-Catholic street preachers helped incite violence against the Irish. In December, two armed men, one a British soldier on leave from Ireland, attacked Irish Catholic residents of Glasgow’s East Clyde Street, A labourer, Patrick Lynch, was stabbed to death while trying to find refuge in his sister’s home.

The trade union movement in Scotland was not strong and largely influenced, politically, by Liberalism. For the organised working class in mid-Victorian Britain, the tendency was to see, ‘the landlord class and not the industrial bourgeoisie’ as ‘the main enemy’. This was particularly true in Scotland with an intense hatred of the landed aristocracy shared by the middle class and fuelled by the ongoing Highland Clearances. After the Great Disruption [a massive split in the Church of Scotland in 1843], most adherents went with the Free Church, resenting Aristocratic interference in the appointment of ministers – again shared with the middle class.

The political agenda of skilled workers was, at best, advanced Liberalism until around 1870.

Benjamin Disraeli was busy recasting the Conservative Party in order to adjust to the creation of a wider franchise. Disraeli began to develop a theme he had first outlined as early as October 1867 , in a speech made at Edinburgh in which he had argued  ‘that the opportunities presented by the [1867] Act in a new and uncertain situation amounted to a challenge which only a truly national party could meet’.

In a speech at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester (the cathedral of Liberalism) in 1872 and in another two months later at the Crystal Palace, he outlined the three main planks of the party’s platform: support for the Established Church, an active imperial and foreign policy, and social reform.

The reorganisation of Parliamentary constituencies with new single-member seats created safe seats for Conservatives in the seaside resorts, and in the residential suburbs of hitherto radical cities (with some exceptions such as Dundee which remained a two-member constituency). It also meant propertied men could vote in separate constituencies, with some half a million able to vote plurally. This favoured the Tories by about four to one.

In 1874, Disraeli won a Conservative overall majority for the first time since 1841. Martin Pugh describes the party’s platform as:

In particular, Tories propagated such causes as the defence and expansion of the empire, the monarchy, the church establishment, the defence of religious education, the union with Ireland, private property, and the House of Lords.

Those who dismiss alliances in the West of Scotland between the Conservatives and the Orange Order, either out of hand or as being short lived or localised, fail to place it in the wider shifts within the British ruling class and the Conservative Party in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Placed within that wider, pro-imperialist shift it is not such an ephemeral occurrence.

In the end, free trade imperialism would win out over its imperialist-protectionist rival, but the matter was only settled in 1906 (and re-emerged in the wake of the Wall Street Crash). All sections of capital – industry (except in the West Midlands) and the City of London – saw their collective interest lying in the free trade programme, as did the bulk of the middle class. But the Tories would use their aggressive pro-imperialism to build a base among the middle classes of suburban London and the South East who, pre-1914, were earning substantial rewards in foreign investments, creating what has become known as ‘villa Toryism’.

The City of London, the clearing house of the world, projected its ‘own Global commercial interests as the “national” interest, and in this its own wealth was insulated from domestic decline’.

Among industrialists in the 1890s, there was a partial attempt to follow the lead of US employers in launching an employers’ offensive: But the results for capital were at best mixed. There were victories in particular disputes – most spectacularly against the Amalgamated Society of Engineers in 1896-7 – but they neither destroyed the craft unions nor prevented the continuing spread of organisation and collective bargaining among the unskilled. Moreover, the perceived threats posed by the strategy – best symbolised by the Taff Vale and Osborne judgements – were sufficient to propel the unions in support for an independent Labour Party.

Most employers, however, were content to stick with the existing pattern of class compromises, the politics of class negotiation they had developed with the craft unions from 1850 onwards.

On Clydeside, the champion of class confrontation was William Weir. That of class compromise was, perhaps, William Beardmore.

In the late nineteenth century, employers who looked for confrontation were also keen to use divide and rule. That included using Orangeism. Two years after Disraeli’s death in 1881, the Tories launched the mass membership Queen, country and empire Primrose League (the Primrose was supposedly Disraeli’s favourite flower) which reached some one million members. The League’s motto was ‘Imperium et Libertas’, Empire & Liberty, which featured on many of the badges and insignia issued. Its structure was supposedly modelled on an Orange Lodge in Portsmouth, Randolph Churchill’s constituency.

The Primrose League was able to mobilise volunteer workers, especially among women, who undertook voter registration, canvasing, transporting voters to the poll, and general propaganda, the League helped put the Conservatives on an equal footing, and by the 1890s a superior one, with the Liberals.

Of the period up to the First World War, Martin Pugh argues: it formed the vital bridge between the parliamentary leaders and the mass electorate, which expanded from 3.1 million in 1883 to 7.9 million in 1911. Indeed, the Primrose League brought the party and its ideas into regular contact with many men and women who were not yet voters, but who would be in years to come. This was accomplished more easily by the Primrose League than by the formal party because it sponsored a vast array of social activities to which ordinary people enjoyed easy access.

The Primrose League ‘was for everyone except Atheists and enemies of the British Empire’.

As I was writing this, I came across a picture of a Primrose League garden party at a grand house in Castlemilk outside Glasgow where ‘bunnet’ wearing working men are sitting with men in boaters and Homburgs.

The Primrose League’s Gazette reported 86 Scottish Habitations (Lodges or branches) in 1901 with 85,000 members. Members included the Duke of Athol, the Earl of Breadalbane and the Earl and Countess of Ancaster. Perthshire West had the most habitations with ten; Edinburgh had seven, Berwickshire six, Midlothian, Aberdeen and Dunbarton five, Stirling, Linlithgow, Argyll, Ayr and Dumfries four.

The Primrose League was led by Tory notables; Lord Salisbury when he was party leader. The bulk of its members came from the middle and lower middle class from across the rural agrarian community. It did less well in urban, industrial communities, but it did recruit among the working class, from non-unionised workers and those in non-industrial trades and the service sector.

Bruce Coleman points out:

Of all the issues between the parties, Ireland was the one which gave Salisbury’s in England, not in Scotland, Wales, or, of course, Ireland itself. Conservative publicist Conservative support fell away. Working class Conservatism became a reality after the 1867 Reform Act.

In Blackburn, the Act increased the electorate from under 2,000 to nearly 10,000, largely working-class, male, voters, yet the town continued to return Tory members as before. By the 1890s, the Unionists, because of their working-class support, achieved success in Merseyside and western Lancashire, Birmingham and the West Midlands, the East End of London and towns in which docks, arsenals, and munitions factories loomed large in the local economy like Portsmouth, Woolwich and Sheffield.

Martin Pugh wrote in 1988 at the height of Thatcherism of Tory working class supporters that by the 1890s:

Less conspicuously, workingmen who lived in rural and suburban districts dominated by middle- and upper-class residents tended to lean strongly toward the prevailing Conservatism, as is still the case in the 1980s.

A Liberal vision of golden age of peace and free trade had vanished by 1866. The North’s victory in the Civil War meant the United States was obviously going to assert itself and war had returned to Europe with the rise of Bismarckian Prussia and Louis Napoleon’s support for Italian unity. Both Russia and France were expanding their empires, the economy at home faced a downturn and the Fenians menaced.

In 1866, Disraeli asserted his determination Britain would remain the ‘Number One’ power in the world, writing in The Times:

England is as ready and willing to interfere as in the old days when the necessity of her position required it. There is no Power, indeed, that interferes more than England. She interferes in Asia, because she is really more an Asiatic Power than a European. – She interferes in Australia, in Africa, and in New Zealand…

Accordingly, he authorised a military expedition against Abyssinia (Ethiopia), whose emperor was holding British hostages. It was, to use a modern term, a turkey shoot, but only Britain using its Indian army had the ability to do such a thing. It laid down a marker. Disraeli, realising the importance of India, convinced Victoria to become Empress there.

Disraeli’s imperialism has been described as, ‘forceful, deliberate and chauvinistic’.

He also sensed it could have popular appeal: He acted on the belief that the trappings of imperialism might have as wide an appeal in Britain as they did elsewhere and that such a policy would be acceptable. In I867 he sensed also that a show of aggression, if free from risk, would be popular, and that if it were to symbolize a renewal of past imperial splendour it would serve as a focus for the energies of the whole nation and provide a foundation for national unity more compelling than any other that could be devised at the time. Disraeli himself accepted honorary membership of the Orange Order in Salford in 1872.

Later, the defeats suffered by the British under the Gladstone government, at Majuba Hill in the Transvaal (1881), by the Boers, and General Gordon’s killing at Khartoum (1885), by Muslim forces opposed to British colonial rule, served as worrying signs of Britain’s decline.

The Old Divide: A History of Sectarianism in Scotland (Tippermuir Press 2025), available at £11.99 at

https://tippermuirbooks.co.uk/product/the-old-divide-a-history-of-sectarianism-in-scotland/