For God and Ulster: The Solemn League and Covenant 1912–62

On 28 September 1912, Unionists in Belfast staged perhaps the greatest propaganda coup in their history: the ceremonial public signing of the Solemn League and Covenant. This one-page manifesto committed its signatories to a sacred obligation to use whatever means necessary to stop Irish Home Rule and fight the British in order to remain British themselves. Over 100,000 men flooded the grounds of Belfast City Hall and Donegal Street, waiting their turn to affix their names to Ulster's twentieth century refusal to bow to the pressures and directives of the government in London. 1912 marked a new phase in the never-ending Irish Question and the Covenant created consequences that lasted long after the ink had dried. This paper will investigate the ramifications the Covenant created for three individuals: Sir James Craig – later Lord Craigavon – the first prime minister of Northern Ireland; Colonel Frederick H. Crawford, the noted gun-smuggler and militarist who theatrically signed the Covenant in his own blood; and ‘Buck Alec' Robinson, the infamous Protestant criminal and one-time mobster for Al Capone. The era of the Covenant and its influence on the consolidation of Unionist power and masculine imagery in Northern Ireland helped to shape the views these highly disparate Ulstermen held about violence, sectarianism, imperialism, loyalty and a Protestant man's place in the North of Ireland for the next fifty years. The Covenant's sacred meaning in the modern lore of Protestant Ulster helped to fashion a world where a known criminal, a self-declared swashbuckler and a Unionist politician could live, thrive and establish their own sources of social, cultural and political power, all of which, in their way, emphasized a broader aim of making Protestant men of Northern Ireland a force with which to be reckoned.