ran for three weeks with no such positive outcome. Many factors contributed to making this a chaotic and confused failure. Grattan was not prepared to help on this occasion as he now wanted the Volunteers to leave politics to the parliamentarians. Charlemont and his allies attended the Convention only to ensure that Frederick Hervey, the Bishop of Derry, who they regarded as an extremist and a maverick, should not unduly influence the proceedings. The bishop was an unequivocal supporter of Catholic rights. The government took the precaution of having several of its friends, including the staunch Protestant George Ogle, attend with a view to sowing division, particularly on the Catholic question.23 One of Ogle’s spoiling tactics was to mislead the Convention by stating falsely that the Catholic leadership had told him they were not seeking any relief of grievances at this time.
The Bishop of Derry tried to keep the rights of Catholics to the forefront but he was frustrated by the Charlemont moderates and the Ogle spoilers, and it looked like the Convention might have to adjourn having agreed to nothing. In desperation, the Bishop suggested that Henry Flood, who had stayed away from the Convention, should be called in to help mediate an agreed programme. Flood duly arrived and saved the day by convincing the Convention to adopt a superficial reform programme that said nothing about the Catholic question. Charlemont was hoping that Flood’s programme would be referred back to the country which could then petition parliament through constitutionally convened county meetings.24 However, Flood suggested that he and another MP, William Brownlow, would go straight over to the House of Commons and present the programme in the form of a Bill.
When Flood stood up in the House to introduce his Bill wearing his Volunteer uniform, he gave the government just the opportunity they were waiting for. The Attorney General set the tone for the government response by declaring, ‘I do not intend to go into discussion of this Bill ... if it originates with an armed body ’tis inconsistent with the freedom of debate for this House to receive it. We sit here not to register the edicts of another assembly, or to receive propositions at the point of a bayonet.’25
When Flood reported back to the Convention, the more radical element within it wanted to denounce the House of Commons. Charlemont managed to convince the majority that the Convention should adjourn and refer the reform programme to the county committees. The Volunteer movement never recovered from the fiasco that was the Dublin National Reform Convention of 1783.
Drennan did not attend the Convention but he was apparently given a comprehensive report on the proceedings from William Bruce. No record of Bruce’s report seems to have survived but Drennan’s trenchant reaction prefigures differences that would later emerge between his radicalism and Bruce’s moderation. Drennan told Bruce:
You have been wise dearest friend, very wise and you admire Flood because you are a transcript, not a faint one, of his prudence and wisdom but I almost fear to say it – times of reformation require impetuosity of spirit. Our religious reformation required such a man as Luther. Flood is too wise, to cool, perhaps too selfish to be a Luther in civil reform.
I was going to say that your assembly would have been less wise by adopting the passions as well as the reason that characterize every popular assembly but perhaps more successful than it has been as Mr. Flood’s convention. – I am presumptuous in saying so to anyone but a friend – It is the people which government fear – the rude illiterate voice of the people not Mr. Flood. You have not represented the people.
When Mr. Flood said ‘stay here in solemn convention until I return from Parliament’ was there not one high sounding enthusiastic voice to cry aloud ‘and why not go along with you – let us in the name of the just God – Let us the delegates of the people go up to the House of the People – Let us go up in slow and peaceable procession, and let the acclaim of the surrounding multitude re-echo the justice of our cause and their cause in the ears of our enemies – Let us march unarmed but undaunted into that House which is our own and in awful and terrible silence wait until the voice of the People and the voice of God was uttered by that man and then with a shout that would reverberate thru’ those polluted walls call upon them to give us our rights – I am sometime so enthusiastic as to think that more might have been obtained by some showy method as this without losing one drop of blood. We are the slaves of our eyes and our ears – The hearts of the ministers would have withered within them and 60,000 Volunteers would not have been insulted by quondam usher of a boarding school.’26
The final barb was directed at Barry Yelverton the Attorney General who had once been an assistant master at the Hibernian Academy.
Just how much damage had been done to the morale and status of the Volunteer movement by the debacle that was the National Reform Convention of 1783 became all too apparent a year later when yet another Volunteer Convention gathered in the Exchange Rooms, Dublin, on 25 October 1784. There was no need to adjourn to a bigger venue on this occasion. There were only thirty-six delegates present. Just fourteen counties and eight towns were represented. Even more indicative of decline was the lack of interest from Ulster. Only two counties, Antrim and Donegal, and two towns, Belfast and Lisburn, sent delegates. The small delegation from Ulster included ‘Rev. Sinclair Kelburn of the Belfast Third Congregation, Rev. William Bruce of Lisburn and William Drennan’.27 The best this meeting could rise to was to adjourn until January 1785 and circulate resolutions urging those counties who had not nominated delegates to do so for the next meeting.
Immediately on returning to Newry, Drennan put pen to paper. During November and December, a series of letters appeared in the Belfast Newsletter signed ‘Orellana an Irish Helot’. Later, Drennan published the collection as a pamphlet. Even in an era when pamphleteers were not shy about loquacious titles, Drennan’s title was as enigmatic as it was long-winded. The title he chose was: Letters of Orellana, an Irish Helot, to the seven northern counties not represented in the National Assembly of Delegates, held in Dublin, 1784, for obtaining a more equal representation of the people in the Parliament of Ireland.
One plausible explanation for Orellana has been posited by A.T.Q. Stewart. He suggests that it represented a play on the title of a book that Drennan would have read and admired. This book was Oroonoka: The Royal Slave by Aphra Behn. Stewart tells us:
In eighteenth century atlases, the river which we now call the Amazon was marked as the Orellana ... thus, the two great rivers of South America were the Orellana and the Orinoco. In Mrs. Behn’s novel (published in 1678) Oroonoka was the grandson of an African king, captured by the master of an English trading vessel and carried off to Surinam ... There he stirs up the other slaves to revolt and escape from their miserable condition. The novel is remarkable as the first expression in English literature of sympathy for the oppressed negroes.28
The use of the term ‘helot’ had been described as ‘nicely provocative’, because in ancient Sparta, helots were state slaves who could neither be sold or set free. Kenneth R. Johnson tells us ‘As the helot population outnumbered the Spartans by more than ten to one, the government lived in fear of a helot revolt so much so that each new magistrate opened his term by formally declaring war on them, which allowed them to be summarily executed in case of any disturbance.’29
Drennan’s objective in Orellana was to encourage, to provoke and to shame the seven Northern counties who had stayed away from the recent convention in Dublin to attend the next meeting scheduled for 20 January 1785 and to reassert their demands for reform of Parliament. Drennan addressed his readers as ‘fellow slaves’. He blesses his God because he is sensible to his own condition of slavery, for he says ‘bondage must be felt before the chains can be broken’.30 ‘Every nation under the sun must be placed in one of two conditions. It must be free or enslaved.’ The first letter ends with the slogan, ‘Awake, arise for if you sleep you die!’ All seven letters carry a similar message that if a people wishes to be free, it must show that it is determined not only to gain freedom but to maintain that freedom when achieved. However, the letters are not without self-contradiction. One stark example of this is the treatment of the issue of the political rights of Roman Catholics. At one point Drennan calls for
