John Graham (1774–1844) was a Church of Ireland clergyman, a senior officer of the Orange Order, and a prolific author of poetic and historical works. He opposed Catholic Emancipation and was for more than two decades a prominent champion of the Protestant cause in Ireland.
Early life and Church appointments
He was the eldest son of James and Anne (née Hart) Graham of Clones, County Monaghan, born in the parish of Shruel, County Longford, on 21 April 1774. Educated at Trinity College, Dublin, he joined both the College’s corps of yeomanry and the recently formed Orange Institution, graduating in July 1798, the year of the United Irishmen’s uprising. In August he set out from Dublin to be ordained at Killala but, finding that district occupied by French insurgents, he joined a troop of dragoons and remained in active service until on 9 September he "saw by the light of the rising sun on the ensanguined field of Ballynamuck the dead bodies of seven hundred Irish rebels and the entire of their French allies prisoner". Returning to Dublin, he was ordained a priest of the Church of Ireland on 24 February 1799.
He held successive curacies in Kilrush, County Clare, and the Ulster parishes of Maghera, Tamlaght O’Crilly and Lifford, until in 1824 he was appointed Rector of Tamlaghtard, otherwise Magilligan, where he remained until his death twenty years later. While at Lifford he was inspector of the local gaol and kept a school where his pupils included James MacCullagh, future Fellow of the Royal Society and recipient of its Copley Medal. Visiting Graham in 1822, Dr Thomas Reid found he had charge of Lifford’s lunatic asylum and was "fraught with information on almost every topic ... and distinguished for learning and talents of the first order". Reid recorded his surprise that, after twenty-three years as a curate, this "excellent individual" had yet to be rewarded with his own parish. Five years earlier Earl Whitworth, the Lord Lieutenant, had regretted the lack of opportunity to give Graham the preferment he desired.
Graham considered the faith of the Church of Ireland was "in sum and substance" the same as that practised in Ireland from the sixth century until Roman Catholicism arrived from England in the twelfth. As a boy of fourteen he had witnessed the centenary celebrations of the Apprentice Boys’ closure of the gates of Londonderry against the army of the Catholic James II, a key moment in the conflict which brought eventual victory to William of Orange. Graham believed the proper legacy of the Orange victory should be the expulsion of Popery from Ireland and comprehensive restoration of the faith established there a millennium earlier. Supremacy for Protestantism and respect for the Orange achievement were the mainsprings of his life’s work.
Early literary work
His early writing concerned social, economic and topographical matters and was first published in 1808 as part of Hely Dutton’s Statistical Survey of the County of Clare. Dutton’s preface included the observation that the Survey would have been a superior publication if uniform in quality with John Graham’s contributions.
Commencing in 1813, he produced detailed accounts of the parishes of Maghera and Shruel and of the Kilrush Union for William Shaw Mason’s three-volume Statistical Survey of Ireland, and in 1823-25 he contributed the chronological section of the Statistical Account of the City and County of Londonderry and the Counties of Tyrone and Donegal published in the North West of Ireland Society’s Magazine. For this latter work he was made an Honorary Member of the Society and presented with a gift of silver plate.
From 1816 onward he wrote a series of articles entitled "Annals of Irish Popery by John De Falkirk", tracing Ireland’s ecclesiastical, civil and military history from 1535 to 1691. These appeared in the Dublin Journal and were subsequently published in collected form to counter what Graham described as Denis Taaffe’s "false and traitorous History of Ireland" of which a compendium had been circulated "when the true reformed faith of this realm was assailed by the Popish demagogues of Ireland".
During the same period he composed numerous poems and ballads, examples of which regularly appeared (generally anonymously though often credited as originating in Lifford) in the Anti-Jacobin Review and sometimes reached a wider audience in the columns of newspapers and journals such as the Morning Post, The Sun, and the Gentleman's Magazine.