As the Napoleonic war entered its final stages in 1814, Snowdon Cupples's pamphlet refuting accusations against Philip Johnson included a retrospective account of loyalism on the Hertford estate, stressing its military and defensive nature. Cupples linked the loyal associations of 1793 with contemporary Orangeism by tracing an institutional genealogy through the armed associations of 1796, Johnson's service as an active magistrate and the estate's preponderance of yeomen. The version of loyalism he articulated could have appeared at any time during the eighteenth-century, with its Erastian understanding of the Church and State relationship in ‘our excellent constitution’, and its old Whig conception of William of Orange as ‘our great deliverer’. In 1825, Sir Walter Scott's sneering dismissal of an Irish loyalist who demanded he toast William and Oliver Cromwell completely missed the fact that the man's attitude was conditioned more by contemporary developments than seventeenth-century issues. In 1823 John O'Driscol, a Catholic critic of the established church, noted that Cromwell, once a ‘saint’ in England, remained ‘the patron saint and tutelary spirit of the loyal Protestant ascendancy’, toasted more often than William III. Scott's disdain for the tipsy traveller would have paled beside the reprobation he would have received from any evangelical Protestant clergyman for defining his Protestantism in such a vinous manner. Yet such a cleric would entirely understand the reverence of Cromwell, not so much as military conqueror of Irish papists, but more as a religious warrior who propagated the ‘fervent faith of biblical Christianity’.