His appearance and manner were at the time considered noteworthy, he stood six feet two inches (1.88 m) in height, and was always carefully and respectably dressed, a familiar feature in his apparel being a green necktie, which he wore "even in his last confinement".
The prosecution made the most of this "proof" of the "treasonable" aim of the United Irishmen to "seduce from their allegiance" the "men who are the Kingdom's only safeguard against the foreign foe".
[1] It was widely believed at the time that the authorities wished to make an example of Orr to act as a deterrent to potential recruits for the Society of United Irishmen.
Or you may find him tossing on the surface of the ocean, mingling his groans with the tempests, less savage than his persecutors, that drive him to a returnless distance from his family and his home—without charge, or trial, or sentence!
My comfortable lot, and industrious course of life, best refute the charge of being an adventurer for plunder; but if to have loved my country—to have known its wrongs —to have felt the injuries of the persecuted and to have united with them and all other religious persuasions in the most orderly and least sanguinary means of procuring redress – if those be felonies, I am a felon, but not otherwise.
Had my counsel (for whose honourable exertions I am indebted) prevailed in their motions to have me tried for high treason, rather than under the Insurrection Law, I should have been entitled to a full defence, and my actions would have been better vindicated; but that was refused, and I must now submit to what has passed.
Lastly, a false and ungenerous publication having appeared in a newspaper, stating certain alleged confessions of guilt on my part, and thus striking at my reputation, which is dearer to me than life, I take this solemn method of contradicting the calumny.
With this last wish of my heart nothing doubting of the success of that cause for which I suffer, and hoping for God's merciful forgiveness of such offences as my frail nature may have at any time betrayed me into, I die in peace and charity with all mankind.
The witness Wheatly, who subsequently went insane, is believed to have died by his own hand, made an affidavit before a magistrate admitting that he had sworn wrongly against Orr.
[1] Two of the jury made depositions stating that they had been "induced to join in the verdict of guilty while under the influence of drink"; while two others swore that they had "been terrified into the same course by threats of violence".
[1][3] His fate "excited the deepest indignation throughout the country”; and it was commented on "in words of fire" by the national writers of the period, and for many years after the rallying cry of the United Irishmen was: "Remember Orr".
[1][7] The journalist Peter Finnerty, who published an attack on Yelverton and Camden for their conduct in the matter, was later convicted of seditious libel, despite an eloquent defence by Curran.
[9] William Drennan the United Irishmen poet wrote, on Orr's death: hapless land!Heap of uncementing sand!Crumbled by a foreign weight:And, by worse, domestic hate.
[7] William Orr's place in Ulster folk history has been researched by the historian Guy Beiner, who considers it to be an example of "a complex mode of social memory that could be labelled 'social forgetting'".