Colonel Edward Saunderson, the original leader of Irish Unionism, and the most prominent defender of Irish landlords in the late 19th century, has suffered undue neglect. This book, the first detailed account of his life to appear since the Edwardian era, explores the political traditions of the Saunderson family as well as the development and repercussions of the Colonel's career. The twin poles of Saunderson's life, landownership and the Union, represent the central themes of this study. Saunderson's Unionism was intimately bound with this status as a landed proprietor, and the party...

This study of the Irish Unionists in the Edwardian House of Commons fills an important gap in Anglo-Irish parliamentary history in the generation before 1914, and is the first to examine the role of parliamentary action within the political strategies of Edwardian loyalism. In reconstructing a forgotten parliamentary party, Jackson sheds new light on the development of organized Unionism in Ireland, and on the bond between loyalism and British Conservatism.