The ‘True Blue’ loyalist lauded in the ballad for making a defiant speech at the annual commemoration marking the shutting of Derry's gates in December 1825 was the County Londonderry M.P. George Robert Dawson. The ritual heart of the ceremony was the burning of an effigy of Lundy, the treacherous city governor who had defected to the Jacobites during the 1689 siege. In the year of Orange dissolution this local ceremony assumed wider significance as the Protestant cause appeared trapped between the Catholic Association and its own internal tensions. These problems underlay Dawson's fiery speech, so belligerent that it attracted the disapproval of his brother-in-law, Peel, who worried that ministerial approval might be implied. Dawson explained that as most Protestants only wanted ‘an assurance of support to express their own feelings’, he used the ceremony to ‘to cheer up the Protestant spirit’ and thus do ‘some good to the cause’. This was not the only contribution to the cause by ‘that uncompromising Protestant Derry Dawson’ as he had recently acted as an intermediary between parliamentary ultras and county gentlemen, urging them to back anti-Catholic M.P.s by petitioning.