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 should be duplicates.  When the lists were closed—­they were kept open for some days after Ulster Day—­they were very carefully scrutinised by a competent staff at the Old Town Hall, and it is certain that the numbers as eventually published included no duplicate signature and none that was not genuine.  Precisely the same care was taken in the case of the Declaration by which, in words similar to the Covenant but without its pledge for definite action, the women of Ulster associated themselves with the men “in their uncompromising opposition to the Home Rule Bill now before Parliament.”

It was not until the 22nd of November that the scrutiny and verification of the signatures was completed, and the actual numbers published.  They were as follows:  In Ulster itself 218,206 men had registered themselves as Covenanters, and 228,991 women had signed the Declaration; in the rest of Ireland and in Great Britain 19,162 men and 5,055 women had signed.  Thus, a grand total of 471,414 Ulster men and women gave their adherence to the policy of which the Ulster Covenant was the solemn pledge.  To every one of these was given a copy of the document printed on parchment, to be retained as a memento, and in thousands of cottages throughout Ulster the framed Covenant hangs to-day in an honoured place, and is the householder’s most treasured possession.