Amongst the problems Robert Peel faced in 1813 – the second year of his Irish chief-secretaryship – was that of yeomanry bands participating in ‘the ceremonial pageantry … that occurs before certain anniversaries’, meaning Orange parades on 12 July. The commander-of-the-forces, Sir John Hope, agreed and wanted the practice banned. Peel knew that this custom encouraged ‘animosity between the parties’; but also understood that it was ‘a very delicate point to interfere with old-established cases’. The use of yeomanry bands in Orange ceremonial occasions symbolised the militarised Protestant loyalism of 1798. Any interference, especially by public order, would, Peel reckoned, create more disorder than it quelled and ‘people would suppose that we must be on the eve of a general insurrection’. Peel's euphemism for the Twelfth of July may have been tongue-in-cheek, but his assessment of reactions to any interference with the yeomanry's Orange connection was entirely serious. Typically, Peel's analytic mind penetrated the crux of the matter: that such a move would be interpreted as an apocalyptic portent shows the importance of understanding how plebeian loyalists viewed the world. Their attitudes could be problematic both for government control over the yeomanry and for those who would harness popular loyalism. Implicit in this scenario was the loosening of the triple alliance of government, gentry and loyalists, thus compromising the political value of loyalism to the Protestant cause.

The Protestant cause was headed in the Commons by men like Patrick Duigenan and in the Lords by ‘Orange’ peers like Lord Enniskillen and Archbishop Agar, then of Dublin. Backing came from key families with powerful political and ecclesiastical connections, like the Beresfords; and beneath them, rural gentry activists such as the Blackers and Verners of Armagh, the Bagwells of Tipperary and Castle placemen, like John Giffard.