In 2002, as part of Queen Elizabeth's Golden Jubilee celebrations, the predominantly unionist borough was granted city status alongside the largely nationalist town of Newry.

In 1611 George Carew, 1st Earl of Totnes remarked: "In our travel from Dromore towards Knockfargus, we saw in Kellultagh upon Sir Fulke Conway’s lands a house of cagework in hand and almost finished, where he intends to erect a bawn of brick in a place called Lisnagarvagh.

[15] In 1649 the town was secured by forces loyal to Cromwell's English Commonwealth, routing an army of Scots Covenanters, and their Royalist allies, in the Battle of Lisnagarvey.

Conway's Manor House was not restored (part of the surrounding wall and its gateway with the date 1677 engraved still stands on the south and east side of Castle Gardens).

[26] In 1784, the Scotsman John Barbour began spinning linen thread, and in 1831 his son William moved production to what had originally been Crommelin's bleach green at Hilden.

By the end of the century Barbour's Linen Thread Company was the largest mill of its kind in the world employing about 2000 people to work 30,000 spindles and 8,000 twisting machines.

He successfully challenged the parliamentary nominees of the town and district's principal landlord, the Hertfords, on a platform of a representative reform to include votes for Catholics.

The society won support of working men in the town, and of its leading Catholic family, the Teelings of Chapel Hill, wealthy linen manufacturers.

Bartholomew Teeling (destined to hang) and his brother Charles, were an important connection between the largely Presbyterian "United men" and Catholic Defenders in rural areas.

[37] The other is to the memory of Lieutenant William Dobbs killed in the capture of his vessel, HMS Drake, by the American privateer John Paul Jones[35] (an engagement in Belfast Lough in 1778 that spurred formation of the Volunteer movement).

In 1889, newspapers reported a rival to Barbour's factory: a "splendid new mill" by Robert Stewart & Son to employ over a thousand hands, with the novelty of electric lighting and "toilets on every floor".

Support for the Union, seen both as a guarantee of free trade and as security against Catholic-majority rule, spurred the further growth in the town of the Orange Order and helped return Hertford-approved Conservative candidates to the Westminster parliament.

Despite a reputation of being "the most thoroughgoing rove in the kingdom" and spending almost all of his life on the continent,[41] when cholera struck in 1832 Francis Seymour-Conway (1777–1842) erected a hospital and distributed medicines, blankets, clothing and other necessities throughout the estate.

[25] In 1842, Captain Richard Seymour-Conway (1800–1870), the 4th Marquess of Hertford, inherited 10 by 14 mile Lagan Valley estate on which some 4,000 tenants (and many more sub-tenants) provided an income of £60,000 (or £5 million in today's money).

[49] In 1852, Lord Hertford's agent, the Reverend James Stannus, the Rector of Lisburn Cathedral, had occasion to write to him suggesting a general increase in rents as punishment for the tenants both for an attack on his person and for their defiance in voting for a dissident Conservative, a free-trade "Peelite".

[41] In 1872, charges of "high-handed management of the estate" (the arbitrary fining and eviction of tenants, interference in elections, and discrimination against non-Anglicans) prompted Stannus's son and successor to sue the Belfast paper, the Northern Whig for defamation.

[42] Together with failing agricultural prices, a willingness even of Orangemen to join the Irish National Land League helped turn the tables: in the 1880s agents were proposing to appease tenant with rent reductions.

In a departing gesture, in 1901, Sir John Murray Scott, heir of Lady Wallace, gave the Market House with its Assembly Rooms to Lisburn Urban District Council, for "the benefit of the inhabitants of the town".

The previous year, explosives having been found in her Belfast apartment, Evans had created uproar in court when she demanded to know why James Craig, who at that point had overseen the arming of the Ulster Volunteers (UVF) with smuggled German munitions, was not appearing on the same charges.

They were a token of the determination of local people (in the words of Ulster's Solemn League and Covenant) "to stand by one another in defending for ourselves and our children our position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom, and in using all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland".

[53] The United Kingdom declaration of war upon Germany (August 3), paused resolution of the Home Rule Crisis, and many of Lisburn's Volunteers would go on to serve with the 36th (Ulster) Division.

[59] Brigadier-General William Pain (a former Ulster Volunteer leader) had troops guard the Catholic church and convent, but failed to take strong action to quell rioting elsewhere.

[67] On the day that a 700-year English presence in the south of Ireland ended with the formal hand over of Dublin Castle to the government of the Irish Free State, 16 January 1922, Lisburn celebrated the centenary of the local "hero of the Indian Mutiny", John Nicholson (1822–1857).

[69] Under a marble relief of his final assault on Delhi's Kashmir Gate, a memorial in the Cathedral credited Nicholson with dealing a "death blow to the greatest danger that ever threatened the British Empire".

While some of the town and region linen mills helped produce material for uniforms, boot laces, kit bags, bandages, tents, and parachutes, others were converted to churning out munitions, with women undertaking much of the work.

The town and the surrounding area was flooded by thousands of evacuees all of whom, as one member of the Lisburn Women's Voluntary Service recalled, had to be "fed, housed, deloused, marshalled, bathed, clothed, pacified and brought back to normal".

[88] It was the first in a series of targeted assassinations of security-force personnel in the town that culminated in the 1988 Lisburn Van Bombing: five off-duty British soldiers killed at the end of a charity run in Market Square.

[92] After receiving city status in 2008, in the 2016 reform of local government in Northern Ireland Lisburn was combined with residential areas of broadly similar social and political complexion bordering Belfast to the south and east.

The cross-community Alliance Party held gained one to hold three; the moderate nationalist SDLP retained a seat, and for the first time Lisburn returned a Sinn Féin councillor.

[106] A school for poor children, established by Jane Hawkshaw in 1821 with the support of the 3rd marquess,[25] taught no catechism and made no attempt at religious instruction.