Who was King William of Orange to the N. Irish Orangemen (Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland), and how did they come to claim the Dutch national color of bright Orange as the symbol of a movement to remain unified with Britain?
I've spent time in both N. Ireland and the Netherlands but haven't been succesful in sussing out the historical sentiment that links the Dutch national / royal color 'oranje' (oh-rahn-ye) to N. Irish unionist movement (advocating for remaining unified with Britain and politically separate from the Republic of Ireland), beyond factual statements about it having to do with William of Orange.
But who was William of Orange to the unionists that they chose the symbolic color of a different country than Britain whom they wanted to remain with? What is/was the sentiment? And how did the Dutch feel about it, if at all?
This stems from the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688, when James II was deposed by Parliament in favour of his daughter Mary, and her husband William of Orange became William III.
James II was a Catholic, and had pushed through acts of 'toleration' which raised popular fears of a return to the 'Catholic tyranny' typified by his father Charles I before the civil war. In Ireland, James II made Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnel, the Lord Deputy in Ireland. He set about purging Protestant officers from the Irish army and replacing them with Catholics, doing the same in the government, and laying siege to Protestant towns when they dissented and rebelled. Following the Glorious Revolution, James II went to Ireland with a French army, where he assumed that the majority Catholic population would support him, and provide a base for him to retake England, but his force was defeated by William III and his Anglo-Dutch army at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, supported by the Irish Protestant militias who had rebelled against James II. For the Irish Protestant Unionists, therefore, William of Orange is portrayed as a liberator who turned up just in time to save them from Catholic oppression.