Old Orangeman was a product of eighteenth-century Enlightened thought and became an eloquent warning voice against the perils of toleration and liberalism. He had been associated with the Order from its birth. He knew both its leading men and their deadly enemies, including Theobald Wolfe Tone. Most striking, perhaps, is Old Orangeman's carefully argued justification of the Order as a timely and irreplaceable bulwark against the rising tide of democracy and radicalism.
These 'Letters from an Old Orangeman' are not just a personal memoir or a one-sided history, but a carefully argued political treatise on the necessity of mobilising and organising the 'reactionary democracy' in an age of popular politics. Their republication now is an important contribution not only to the history of sectarian discord in Ulster and Ireland. It supplies an important source for the study of popular conservatism and the psychology of counter-revolution in the United Kingdom and beyond.
Montanus feared that he, who had 'rocked the cradle' of the Institution, might now be fated to 'follow its hearse'. His letters instead provide an unrivalled insight into one of Ireland's most tenacious and consequential survivals.