Throughout the Victorian period Orangemen upheld conservative, Protestant values with a ‘sacrosanct rigidity’. It was this very system of belief, the Revd J. B. McKenzie of Whitehaven argued, that meant Orangemen ‘would defend the principles of the Bible to the utmost of their power to carry out the progress of work which was so auspiciously inaugurated by William of Orange [Applause]’. While views like these naturally attracted sympathetic contemporaries, among the English and Scots, the Orange Order also epitomised the tension which existed between Victorian notions of religious liberty and law and order; indeed this presented a dilemma to those who would simultaneously defend the Orangeman's right to speak but also abhor his promotion of sectarian strife. Sometimes liberal voices like that of the Barrow Herald, which habitually questioned the relevance and rectitude of Orangeism, conceded that the movement was ‘the outcome of a grand epoch in our national history, when Protestant religion gained its first ascendancy over the Romish Church of England’. On other occasions, certain expressions of Orange outrage served only to alienate those of a liberal disposition. When in 1880 Orangemen in Barrow expressed fury when the apostate Marquis of Ripon was appointed Viceroy of India, the liberal Barrow Herald issued this damning rebuke:

During the later Victorian period, British Orangeism moved away from its plebeian, Ulster roots, and began to assume a position on what might be called the constitutional right of the political spectrum. In the 1830s, a motley collection of ultra-Tory aristocrats had used Orangeism as a ‘rough’ pressure group, and had succeeded in arousing such suspicion that the Order was forced to liquidate itself in the face of a damning Select Committee report. But Tory politicians eagerly addressed the annual gatherings in the increasingly populist arena of mid-Victorian politics, and, because of such connections, Orangeism became more respectable.