Topic Tuesday #139 2015/03/17 "Being Orange on St. Patrick's Day"

Happy St. Patrick's Day! Unless you are from the area of Ireland commonly referred to as Belfast. 
Green is the color of being Irish, or so all the stores would have you believe with the shamrock shakes, shirts, hats, beer, shots, cups, hair, entire rivers and so on. Green is also the color of Catholic Ireland. 

Thanks to the Crown of Ireland Act 1542 the sovereign  Kingdom of Ireland was established with with Henry VIII as the King of Ireland. Henry had broken ties with the Holy Roman Catholic Church over a little dispute in doctrine to secure an annulment from his wife in the 1530s. So with a new sovereignty came the King's religion in a consolidated and rebranded Church of England. This did not go over very well with the Irish, however they were weary from war and had acquiesced for the time being. 

As time marched on, so the throne changed hands. July of 1553 saw the reign of Mary the First. You may know her by another moniker, that of Bloody Mary. The reason you know that name is because of what she was responsible for. She was a Catholic following after her mother Catherine whom Henry broke ties with the Catholic Church to divorce, as she didn't bear him a son. She eventually succeeded her half brother, Edward VI, when he died in 1553, there was a kerfuffle about succession as she was Catholic and that was bad for Church of England branding. As Royal disputes over lineage go, it was violent. Mary had her first cousin, Lady Jane Grey deposed and then beheaded for being made queen before her. This may have been the first blood on her hands, but far from the last. During her five year reign as the first queen regent of England and queen consort of Habsburg Spain, she had more that 280 religious dissenters burned at the stake. When Mary died in 1558 so did her resurrection of Roman Catholicism. Her younger half sister, Elizabeth I took the throne and returned Church of England and protestantism to the realm.  

Fast forward to the 1700's and we see more formalization of the unification of Great Britain with Scotland and England burying the kaber, becoming the United Kingdom of Great Britain; then in 1714 with the death of Queen Anne and the Act of Settlement they were joined further with Ireland but it wasn't until the Act of Union 1800, the Kingdom of Ireland merged with the Kingdom of Great Britain, creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
Things go dicey in 1922 and continued to fall apart until the constituent parts were renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in 1927, five years after the establishment of the Irish Free State. In 1953 the newly formed Republic of Ireland had formed and Ireland  had left the British Commonwealth.  There have been troubles in Northern Ireland ever since. 

Where does the orange come in? you may be wondering. Actually, it already did. The Loyal Orange Institution, or Orange Order, was founded as a Protestant fraternal order in Northern Ireland in 1795 when there was significant conflict between the majority Roman Catholic population and the decidedly smaller, but sanctioned under the crown, Anglican Protestants. The order derived it's name from William of Orange, a Protestant king who defeated a Catholic army at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. They wore orange sashes and were called "Orangemen". The order has been a symbol of an ever present rift between Catholics and Protestants; the green and the orange.  "The Orange and the Green" or "The Biggest Mix-Up" is an Irish folk song about a man whose father was a Protestant (Orange) and whose mother was a Catholic (Green). These stories and the violence and animosity have permeated the area for centuries, and continue with the Order making marches and with interfaith marriages being shied away from if they can.

So, when you wear green on St. Patrick's Day, you might want to add a dash of orange, or avoid those wish sashes of orange and an angry look in their eye. Here in the states, you can pretty much count everyone as Irish today, so to your health! Have a green beer for me.