I once spent a fruitless evening at the House of Orange when it was on Belfast’s Dublin Road. The irony of the location was not lost on me. As a metaphor it was a powerful one.
It was the 1990s, and the Orange Order was at the centre of another marching season storm. I was there as editor of this paper, with my counterpart from the News Letter, to try and reason with them. We also met representatives of residents in Portadown who had had their full of Orange triumphalism.
It wasn’t really the job of newspaper editors to treat with the Orange Order, or those opposed to their so-called right to march, but our readers had a vested interest in settling things through dialogue rather than violence.
The library, where I was parked before our meeting, had a healthy section on Catholicism – more histories of the papacy, I suspect, than the average parochial house. I didn’t check, but I bet there was a bookmark at the entry for Pope Alexander VIII who celebrated King Billy’s victory at the Boyne by ringing the bells in St Peter’s.
The entries for the notorious Borgia popes – God loves a sinner – will also have provided fodder for speeches laying out the iniquities of the Roman Church.
We left without securing peace in our time. But Geoff Martin was gifted with a jar of orange marmalade, and I was given a pot of blackberry jam. The Orange Order and the Royal Black Institution understood the power of merchandising ahead of their time.
We were treated with courtesy, but sad to say, the Orange Order in Portadown subsequently refused to meet me.
The Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland (good to know it will not have to rebrand when the country is once again united) says it is committed to protecting the principles of William’s Glorious Revolution “which enshrined civil and religious liberty for all”.
The phrase ‘for all’ is used without irony. But Order membership is restricted to adult males. Women and children have their own associations, and Catholics need not apply.
The Orange Order says its core values include “religious tolerance and respect”. You can make your own mind up on that.
Like the members of the cult who can see only good in Boris Johnson, King Billy’s status as the embodiment of “civil and religious liberty for all” is visible only to those who believe the pope is the anti-Christ and that All Kinds of Everything is a republican anthem.
You can’t blame King Billy for the Orange Order, he was dead 90 years before it was founded. But his reputation as a champion for liberty is about to take another knock.
A year before the Battle of the Boyne, William III was gifted shares in the Royal African Company – thousands of men, women and children (186,827 to be precise) were seized by the company and enslaved. It operated under a royal charter, and King Billy was the company’s governor.
Next week, on July 1, his descendent King Willem-Alexander is expected to make a formal apology for the Dutch royal house’s role in the slave trade. The House of Orange earned the equivalent of £800 million from the trade which was developed by William of Orange.
A further reckoning is to come when a UK study, supported by William’s successor King Charles, is completed.
Unlike other port cities, Belfast rejected the slave trade. But slavery played a significant role in enriching its sister city, Glasgow. The city council there has commissioned a study to look at its slaving past.
And in critics’ sights is a statue of King Billy near Glasgow’s medieval cathedral. The lines of a battle between those who believe the statue should be removed, and the Orange Order in Scotland, are already being mapped out.
Grand Master Jim McHarg told The Times this week: “It is news to me that King William was involved in the slave trade.” News indeed.
The plinth on King Billy’s statue says he saved Europe from the ‘yoke of slavery intended by the French'. That is no consolation to the hundreds of thousands he and his minions enslaved.
Or, to put it another way, he stood for civil and religious liberty for all, but only if you are European, white and Protestant.
Never mind the royals, it’s time the Orange Order distanced itself from the slaver king and genuinely embraced liberty ‘for all'.
