he Duke of Abercorn, who had been prevented by
failing health from taking an active part in the movement of late, and
whose life unhappily was drawing to a close, signed the Covenant at
Barons Court; his son, the Marquis of Hamilton, M.P. for Derry, attached
his signature in the Maiden City together with the Bishop; another
prelate, the Bishop of Clogher, signed at Enniskillen with the Grand
Master of the Orangemen, Lord Erne; at Armagh, the Primate of All
Ireland, the Dean, and Sir John Lonsdale, M.P. (afterwards Lord
Armaghdale), headed the list of signatures; the Provost of Trinity
College signed in Dublin; and at Ballymena the veteran Presbyterian
Privy Councillor, Mr. John Young, and his son Mr. William Robert Young,
Hon. Secretary of the Ulster Unionist Council, and for thirty years one
of the most zealous and active workers for the Loyalist cause, were the
first to sign. But a more notable Covenanter than any of these local
leaders was Lord Macnaghten, one of the most illustrious of English
Judges, whose great position as Lord of Appeal did not deter him from
wholly identifying himself with his native Ulster, by accepting the full
responsibility of the signatories of the Covenant.

Ulstermen living in other parts of Ireland, and in Great Britain, were
not forgotten. Arrangements were made enabling such to sign the Covenant
in Dublin, London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol,
and York. Two curious details may be added, which no reader who is alive
to the picturesqueness of historical associations will deem too trivial
to be worth recording. In Edinburgh a number of Ulstermen signed the
Covenant in the old Greyfriars' Churchyard on the "Covenanters' Stone,"
the well-known memorial of the Scottish Covenant of the seventeenth
century; and the other incident was that, among some twenty men who
signed the Covenant in Belfast with their own blood, Major Crawford was
able to claim that he was following a family tradition, inasmuch as a
lineal ancestor had in the same grim fashion emphasised his adherence to
the Solemn League and Covenant in 1638.

The most careful precautions were taken to ensure that all who signed
were properly entitled to do so, by requiring evidence to be furnished
of their Ulster birth or domicile, and references able to corroborate
it. The declaration in the Covenant itself that the person signing had
not already done so was in order to make sure that none of the
signatures shoul