hanged in front of his Meeting House and congregation in 1798.16
In the general election of 1790, Londonderry’s twenty-one-year-old son, Robert junior, stood for his father’s former House of Commons seat. He was elected with the help of Sam McTier, Reverend Boyle Moody, Reverend James Porter and many other northern radicals who would soon be active in the United Irish Society. Drennan, now in Dublin, attended the House of Commons and was greatly impressed by what he saw and heard of the new MP. Young Stewart had been canvassing for a year before the election, at a time when he was underage, and Lord Hillsborough tried but failed to have him unseated as a result. Drennan told Sam McTier:
I saw Robert Stewart once in the House and once out of it. He is certainly a most promising young man, and one of the most handsomest [sic] in the House, perhaps one day to become the most able. Lord Hillsborough has petitioned against his minority and we hear he has the best legal opinion over the water in his favour.17
Hillsborough’s petition failed but Drennan’s optimistic predictions relating to young Stewart proved prophetic. He is known to posterity as Lord Castlereagh and went on to be one of the best known and ablest British statesmen of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, his road to political success involved the imprisonment, banishment and execution of many of his former supporters.
By early 1790, encouraged by the great events unfolding in France, Drennan had become a full-blooded revolutionary and Irish separatist and he began planning for a secret political club to forward his agenda. He wrote from Dublin to Bruce in Belfast:
It is my fixed opinion that no reform of parliament and consequently no freedom will ever be attainable by this country but by a total separation from Britain and I think this belief is making its way rapidly but silently amongst both Protestants and Catholics and I think that four quarters of the Kingdom are more unanimous in that opinion than they themselves imagine.
It is for the collection of this opinion the esoteric part, and nucleus of political doctrine that such a society or interior circle, might be formed whose opinions are still halting between, who are for temporizing expedients and patience and partial reform – I think this secrecy is as yet necessary to such an institution – and that the tyrant Britain must be assassinated. Why so soon? Why not let Caesar live his natural life? It is but a few years. Because in those few years the power of resisting oppression will be lost with the will. I think revolution not justifiable in England. I think it is in Ireland and that nothing short of convulsion will throw off the incumbency of our national political and civil grievances.
I think revolutions are not to be dreaded as such terrible extremes and it is the highest probability that it would be as peaceful here as in France, as in Poland as in Ireland in ’79 provided the great and irresistible voice of the whole declares itself explicitly on the subject.
I believe a reform must lead rapidly to a separation and a separation to a reform. The Catholics in this country are much more enlightened and less under the trammels of a Priesthood as is imagined – it is improper to keep up religious controversy, when all should make common cause and it is said that you take up too much time speaking against Popery. I think the people can seldom if ever be mistaken in judgement. If the people are violent, it is because violence is necessary and all the doctrine of all the wise and guarded men in France was not half the consequence of the practical lesson of the people in storming the Bastille.18
In early 1791, things were looking up for Drennan. He found the weather in Dublin much better than Newry or Belfast. He was enjoying better health than he had before his arrival in Dublin. His weak chest and breathing had improved and the constant chest pain he had suffered previously had abated. He was making new acquaintances and his mantelpiece was covered with cards and invitations.19 He struck up a friendship with Dr Emmet’s son, Thomas Addis Emmet, who had studied medicine at Edinburgh a few years after Drennan but had recently qualified as a lawyer. Emmet was about to marry Jane Patten, the daughter of a Unitarian clergyman from Clonmel. Drennan heard a rumour to the effect that Jane Patten’s dowry was £2,000, which he doubted, possibly because the family of a minister would not usually be so prosperous. However, the source of this generous dowry was William Colville, Jane Patten’s unmarried uncle, a wealthy merchant and banker who became her guardian on the death of her father. William Colville was an elder at Strand Street for many years.
Jane Patten’s mother’s maiden name was Margaret Colville. She was of a well-known Northern Presbyterian family. Her grandfather, Reverend Alexander Colville, had been a controversial minister to a congregation at Dromore where he published pamphlets during the subscription crisis of the 1720s. Reverend Colville would have been well known to Thomas Drennan. Addis Emmet and Jane Patten were soon married at Strand Street and their children were baptised there over the next few years. Reverend John Moody officiated at the Emmet wedding ceremony and the baptisms. John Moody’s career in Strand Street lasted more than fifty years He officiated at Drennan’s wedding to Sarah Swanwick in 1801. In 1769, Reverend Moody had baptised Robert Stewart, who went on to be a member of the regime which was responsible for the imprisonment and death of his younger brother, Boyle Moody, in the aftermath of the 1798 Rebellion.
Massacre at Forkhill and Arming the Catholics
In late January 1791, at Forkhill in South Armagh, a few miles from Newry, Alexander Barclay, a Protestant school teacher, his wife and her fourteen-year-old brother were savagely attacked in the Barclays’ home by a group of local men. The three were stabbed repeatedly, their tongues were cut out, the fingers on their right hands were hacked off. The young boy’s leg was severed with a sword. It was immediately assumed that this was a sectarian attack by Catholics and the sole motive for the attack was that the victims were Protestants. Agrarian outrages involving the severing of tongues were not common in late eighteenth-century Ireland. However, it was an atrocity, when it did occur, which was sometimes visited on Catholic peasants by fellow Catholics. The victims, rather than being chosen for their religion, were usually people who were suspected of speaking to the authorities. In fact, the Barclay family were innocent victims of a gang which had originally set out to attack Barclay’s brother-in-law, Captain James Dawson of the Orior Volunteers, who was held responsible for the conviction and execution of two Defenders at the Autumn Assizes in 1790.20
No account of the brutal affair at Forkhill mentions that the attackers had firearms or that their motive was to steal arms from the Barclay family. Yet Sir Richard Musgrave had no doubt that the neighbouring papists, whom he described as ‘a savage race’, were responsible and went on to claim that they ‘had great zeal to collect arms and that a large quantity had been imported into Newry for their use’.21 Musgrave reported that the grand jury and high sheriff of Armagh at their next meeting resolved:
That the rage amongst the Roman Catholics, for illegally arming themselves, has of late taken place, and is truly alarming: In order then to put a stop to such proceedings, and to restore tranquillity, we do pledge each other, as magistrates and individuals and to hereby offer a reward of five guineas, for the conviction of each of the first twenty persons, illegally armed and assembled as aforesaid.22
For Drennan, this brutal incident was a major setback and of course, he had supported and perhaps even helped in arming the Catholics of the Newry Volunteers. He knew that Lord Charlemont and Brownlow would hold a meeting to discuss the atrocity and would ask, ‘why should we tolerate, why should we commit arms and rights to such savages as these Catholics?’ For Drennan this was not the central question; rather, he would ask ‘Why did you make them and keep them savages? For that they are such is without question. All this will put off the day of general freedom – the barbarians and Mr. Burke, and this island will be the last redeemed in all Europe.’23
It is not clear why Drennan mentions Edmund Burke in this context. Burke’s son Richard had recently been engaged by the Catholic Committee as its agent. Richard’s main advisor was, of course, his father. The elder Burke had always argued that the best way to bind Irish Catholics
