In Ulster where, because of their greater numbers, Protestants were less fearful of sharing political rights with Catholics, combinations of Presbyterian tradesmen, merchants, and tenant farmers protested against an unrepresentative parliament and against an executive in Dublin Castle still appointed, through the office of the Lord Lieutenant, by English ministers. Seeing little prospect of further reform and in the hope that they might be assisted by republican France, these United Irishmen sought a revolutionary union of "Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter" (i.e. of Catholics and Protestants of all persuasions). Their resolve was broken with the defeat of their uprising in 1798, and by news of rebel outrages against Protestant Loyalists in the South.