Before the holidays had come to a close, Hugh and Alice had become engaged, but the course of true love in their case was destined to the proverbial fate. All Miss McClory’s friends were scandalized at the thought of her consenting to marry a Protestant.
Religion, among Catholics and Orangemen, in those days, consisted largely of party hatred. He was a good Protestant who, sober as well as drunk, cursed the Pope, and on the 12th of July wore orange colors, and played with fife and drum a tune known as “The Battle of the Boyne.” And he was a good Catholic who, in whatever condition, used equally emphatic language regarding King William. No more genuine expression of religious feeling was looked for on either side.
There is a story told in the McClory district which illustrates the current religious sentiment. Two brother Orangemen, good men after their lights, had long been fast friends. They seldom missed an opportunity, in the presence of Catholics, of consigning the Pope to an uncomfortable place, to which he himself has been wont to consign heretics.
It happened that one of the two Orangemen fell sick, and when he was at the point of death his friend became greatly concerned about his spiritual state, and visited him. He found him in an unconscious condition, and sinking fast; and putting his lips close to the ear of his sick friend, he asked him to give him a sign that he felt spiritually happy. The dying man, with a last supreme effort, raised his voice above a whisper, and in the venerable and well-known formula cursed the Pope. His friend was comforted, believing that all was well.
Whether this gruesome story be true or not, it goes to illustrate the fact that blasphemous bigotry had largely usurped the place of religion. But bitter party feeling did not end with mere words. Bloody battles between Orangemen and Catholics were periodically fought on the 12th of July, the anniversary of the battle of the Boyne, 343 and on the 17th of March, Saint Patrick’s day. Within six miles of McClory’s house more than a dozen pitched battles were fought, sometimes with scythes tied on poles, and sometimes with firearms. One of these murderous onsets, known as the battle of Ballynafern, took place within sight of McClory’s house.
At Dolly’s Brae a battle was fought in 1849, in presence of a large body of troops, who remained neutral spectators of the conflict till the Catholics fled, and then joined with the victors in firing on the flying foe.
The scenes of these struggles, such as Tillyorier, Katesbridge, Hilltown, The Diamond, etc., are classic spots now. Each has had its poet, and ballads are sung to celebrate the prowess of the victors, who were uniformly the Orangemen, inasmuch as they used firearms, while the Catholics generally fought with pikes and scythes.
Hugh Brontë had not yet discovered the deep and wide gulf that yawned between Protestants and Catholics, and so he made light of the religious objections of which he had heard so much from Alice. But the Catholic friends of Miss McClory, who had heard the Pope cursed by Protestant lips almost every day of their lives, could not stand by and see a Catholic lamb removed into the Protestant shambles. They came to look on Brontë as a Protestant emissary, more influenced by a fiendish desire to plunder the Catholic fold than by love for their beautiful relative.
Hugh Brontë, in his eager simplicity, wanted to supersede all opposition by getting married immediately, but so great a commotion ensued that he had to return to the kilns at Mount Pleasant, leaving his matrimonial prospects in a very unsatisfactory condition.
Troops of relatives invaded the McClory house daily, and ardent Catholics tried in vain to argue down Alice McClory’s newly kindled love. All the Roman Catholic neighbors joined in giving copious advice, and little was talked of in fairs and markets, and at chapel, but the proposed marriage of Alice McClory with an unknown Protestant heretic.