you Churchmen [Anglicans], Presbyterians, and Catholics to embrace each other in the mild spirit of Christianity and to unity as a secret compact in the cause of your sinking country – For you are all Irishmen.’31
Yet in his fifth letter, he states that ‘the Catholics of this day are absolutely incapable of making a good use of political liberty’. He goes on to state, almost in the fashion of George Ogle, that the most enlightened amongst the Catholics ‘are too wise to wish for a complete extension of civil franchise to those of their own persuasion’. He is not suggesting that Catholics should be forever denied political rights, rather that ‘it must require the process of time to enlarge their minds and meliorate their hearts into the capability of enjoying the blessing of liberty’.32
Michael Brown is correct to identify this argument as a trope of the Scottish Enlightenment, that only involvement in commercial society fits people for democratic government.33 However, Brown’s suggestion, that Drennan’s analysis amounts to ‘a static rendition of Catholic history’,34 is hard to accept. Drennan’s suggestion that, in time, Catholics will be capable of enjoying the blessings of freedom hardly amounts to a static rendition of history. Brown’s assessment of Orellana is that Drennan is guilty of conceptional confusion and contradiction. His summation of the reasons for this is convincing. ‘Such contradictions were necessary in covering over the cracks in the coherence of Drennan’s argument. He was struggling to hold together a Volunteer movement which was made up of a disparate alliance of interests.’35 Drennan knew that the movement could split on the Catholic question. He knew also that many Irish Protestants did not share the radicalism or liberalism of the advanced Presbyterians and that his own views on the constitution and the American war were not shared by at least some of his fellow Volunteers.
Drennan was not engaged in writing a coherent work of political philosophy. He was engaged in producing literary propaganda which had a primary and a secondary objective. He was prepared to use any argument, regardless of inconsistency, which he thought might appeal to his politically heterodox target audience. He admitted that some of Orellana was a rant but he felt justified that a writer should ‘suit oneself to the temper of the readers’.36 The primary objective was to encourage a good Northern response to the January 1785 meeting. His secondary object was to enhance his reputation as a political writer. He was remarkably successful in relation to both objectives. When it became apparent that attendance at the convention was going to be full and respectable, his family friend Dr Haliday said the success was fully owing to the Irish Helot. When the Convention met, there were twenty-seven counties and thirteen towns represented at the meeting held on 20 January and all nine Ulster counties were represented.37
In relation to his literary reputation, he was prepared to hasten slowly and he heeded Martha’s earlier advice about claiming his work only after it had gained recognition. In fact, he did not even tell Martha that he was the ‘Helot’. When she became aware he was the author, she assured him the letters were well-received in Belfast but she expressed her disappointment, perhaps because he had not been direct or hard hitting enough. She seems to have been disappointed that he did not call for the withdrawal from Parliament of those politicians who were supported by the Volunteers. Martha told him:
They [the letters] were read with eagerness and pleasure and more than your partial sister were disappointed by the last newspaper. I did suppose that by the great care you had taken not to be known, even by me, that something was yet to appear to make this great caution necessary – an address perhaps to some well-known character a call upon Lord C[harlemont], Flood, or the benumbed Robert Stewart to speak to the people and direct them out of the House.38
Martha went on to suggest that if he wanted to be known, ‘now was the time to reap any benefit from the discovery which may be made by a single whisper’.39 Drennan was not at all concerned by Martha’s criticism because his work was being praised by many, including the Bishop of Dromore. The Constitutional Society of Dublin had resolved to reprint it. He could also see that his work had a positive effect in Newry, where over sixty people signed the requisition for a meeting with a view to selecting delegates for the Convention. As he still wished to keep the custom of his more conservative patients, he was pleased that he was scarcely known as the Helot in Newry. However, his desire for public recognition eventually won out and he permitted the editor of the Newsletter to disclose the author’s identity.
Drennan’s ambivalence in relation to the question of the political rights of Catholics arose from the conflict within himself as well as a desire to please both the liberal and conservative Protestants within the Volunteers. He had been educated in the stadial theories of the Scottish Enlightenment which held that involvement in commercial activity made men fit for political liberty. He believed that without education and without the guidance of an enlightened middle class, the lower orders would be prone to, at best, manipulation by their landlords and priests and, at worst, might descend into sectarian barbarism. Yet he also knew enough about the attitudes of his fellow Protestants and Presbyterians that he foresaw that the greatest barrier to unity among them was ‘the rock of religion and indulgence of Catholics’.40
When the rights of Catholics were debated at Newry, Drennan supported Captain Black, a voting delegate of the Roman Catholic [Volunteer] company. They managed between them to get a slim majority in favour of the Catholics. Drennan had feared that a positive resolution against the Catholics might have been proposed by a Mr Dawson and may have been easily carried, had not the delegates listened to Drennan’s argument with much greater attention.41
We shall see presently that Drennan’s political expedient in Orellana, that Catholics were ‘incapable of a good use of liberty’,42 would come back to haunt him. Some years later when, as a member of the Society of United Irishmen, he argued trenchantly for male suffrage43 to include Roman Catholics, his then protagonist, his erstwhile friend William Bruce, reminded him that the author of Orellana had held a different point of view.
Notwithstanding the obvious inconsistencies contained in Orellana, Drennan was successful in both his primary and secondary objectives. Despite government hostility and threats of prosecution, the Dublin Convention of January 1785 was well attended and widely representative. Many observers gave Drennan the credit for the triumph. He was chosen as a delegate from Belfast because of the prestige he had garnered by being acknowledged as the ‘Helot’. When he arrived in Dublin for the Convention, he was told that ‘Orellana had fixed the admiration of the nation.’44 One of his chief flatterers was the author, Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744–1817). He had many invitations which he could not accept and had he been able to stay longer he would have had the honour of seeing and talking with great men.45
Despite Drennan’s personal success, the Convention accomplished nothing and it would soon become clear that the tide had turned against the Volunteers. Throughout 1785, Lord Charlemont made sure that pro-reform and pro-Catholic resolutions were avoided by the Volunteers. Thanks to his Lordship’s efforts, the Volunteers became politically irrelevant. At a Volunteer review held on the Plains of the Falls in Belfast on 13 July, Charlemont refused to accept an address from the Killyleagh corps calling for reform of parliament and relief for the Catholics. Charlemont told them politely that he could not agree on the elective franchise for Catholics but assured them that they would shortly meet in a civil capacity and pass an address to parliament on the general reform question.46 This response did not impress Archibald Hamilton Rowan, a relatively recent recruit to Volunteering, who had drafted the address. Rowan bluntly informed Charlemont that ‘citizens with Brown Bess47 on their shoulders were more likely to be attended to’.48
Within a few days of his disagreement with Charlemont, Hamilton Rowan gave an account of the affair directly to Drennan at Newry. The pair had first met earlier that year when Rowan stopped at Newry on his way to visit his father Gawen Hamilton at their ancestral home at Killyleagh castle. Rowan was an independently wealthy man who had been born, raised and educated in England but had always considered himself an Irishman. He had recently settled in Ireland with his wife, Sarah, and their young family, having lived in France for the previous few years. His father, Gawen, was
