new regime might lead to an improved climate in politics. Charles J. Fox, the leader of the Whigs, had joined ‘The Ministry of all the Talents’18 and Drennan wrote him an open letter. He expressed the hope that the race of informers would perish in infamy and famine, that the prison doors would be unbarred and the United Irish prisoners be released and that the unfortunate rebel emigrants would be pardoned and allowed to return. He also looked forward to a free press and Catholic emancipation. Even as he wrote, he knew that Fox was dying and that all his hopes were unlikely to be realised.
In 1807, Drennan became financially independent following the death of a relative who bequeathed him a substantial legacy.19 Within a few weeks, he returned to Belfast where he lived henceforth in moderate affluence. He was unburdened at last of the drudgery of his less than lucrative medical duties. He was now free to do what he most enjoyed and he founded a literary magazine, the Belfast Monthly Magazine. Through the six years of the magazine’s existence, Drennan wrote consistently in favour of the reform of Parliament, Catholic emancipation, against the war with France, in favour of freedom of the press and abolition of the slave trade. These issues had all been part of Drennan’s agenda as a United Irishman but now he pursued them in the context of the Union parliament at Westminster.
Drennan denounced the Union between England and Ireland in print. He thought the corrupt way it had been effected to be most disgraceful. Yet, by 1810, Drennan had a more positive view of the Union and accepted that it ‘had a tendency to ally party feuds and relieve us from the rough riding of some of our Irish unprincipled jockeys’.20 Gerald R. Hall tells us that now ‘Drennan believed that any agitation for repeal was misguided and that reformers in England and Ireland should join forces.’21
Shortly after his return to Belfast, Drennan became involved in what was to prove the most successful and enduring of his public projects, the founding of the Belfast Academical Institution. It would be another battleground where he had to fight Castlereagh, Black and Bruce for the soul of Irish Presbyterianism. The school, which became known colloquially as the ‘Inst’, was an ‘astonishingly ambitious’ project and was the ‘first university established in the British Isles since Trinity College Dublin at the end of the sixteenth century’.22 The Inst was founded and, to some extent, run by former United Irishmen and their sympathisers.
Some of those most closely associated with the school held a dinner on Saint Patrick’s Eve 1816 where, after the speeches, many unashamedly radical toasts were raised including one to the United Irishmen who had escaped to America in ’98. Castlereagh saw this as an opportunity to wrest control of the Inst from Drennan and his friends but he overplayed his hand and did not succeed.
Drennan became terminally ill in late 1819 and died in February 1820. The letters written in the last active year of his life show us clearly that Drennan’s radical principles which inspired his great zeal in Volunteering and his enthusiasm for the United Irish Society and its principles remained with him to the very end.
1
SON OF THE MANSE
William Drennan was born in the manse of First Presbyterian Church, Rosemary Lane, Belfast, on 23 May 1754. He was the son of Reverend Thomas Drennan (1696–1762) and Anne Lennox (1718–1806). Thomas Drennan was a ‘New Light’ Presbyterian Minister and Anne Lennox was a co-heiress, with her elder sister, to a moderate estate in County Down.1 Little is known of Thomas Drennan.2 It appears ‘he was the clever son of a poor family, probably first generation emigrants to Ulster from Scotland’.3 He has been described as an ‘elegant scholar, a man of fine taste, overflowing benevolence and delicate sensibility’.4 His father ‘was induced by the early promise of his son’s abilities to spend on his education more than came to his share’.5 Thomas made excellent academic progress and graduated from Glasgow University in April 1717.6 He met Francis Hutcheson (1696–1746) at Glasgow and the two became firm and life-long friends. Hutcheson, who was born near Saintfield in County Down, would eventually establish himself as the greatest Irish philosopher of his own or, perhaps, any generation. He is universally acknowledged today as the Father of the Scottish Enlightenment.
At Hutcheson’s invitation, Thomas Drennan moved to Dublin circa 1720 where together they ran an academy for Protestant Dissenters in that city.7 Hutcheson’s and Drennan’s Presbyterianism had Scottish roots but the families who sent their sons to the Dublin Academy were of English descent and most were members of the Protestant Dissenting congregation based at Wood Street. Some of them had come to Dublin with Oliver Cromwell’s army in 1649 or as settlers in the wake of the Cromwellian invasion of Ireland. Despite the fact that these Cromwellians were a community of Protestants in a Protestant city, they were regarded with suspicion by the Irish government and the Established Church authorities. Like their Dissenting brethren in England, from the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, they faced legal disabilities arising from their refusal to conform to the Established Church.
In their Dublin years, Hutcheson and Thomas Drennan formed an intellectual circle under the patronage of Robert Molesworth (1656–1725), who had been a supporter of William of Orange during the Glorious Revolution and had acted as his Ambassador to Denmark. This group, which often met at Molesworth’s home in Swords, County Dublin, included Hutcheson’s cousin William Bruce, Reverend John Abernethy (1670–1740) and Reverend James Duchal (1697–1761). Bruce was an editor and book publisher by profession and was an elder at Wood Street. Abernethy was called to Wood Street as Minister in 1730 and Duchal was his successor there.
Back in 1705, Abernethy had formed a philosophical, study and reading group in Belfast, which became known as the Belfast Society. This group became notorious to orthodox Presbyterian historians for allegedly opening the door to heresy and schism.8 The Society became the nucleus of a group of ministers who became known as New Light Presbyterians. The central message of New Light sermons and theology was the right to freedom of conscience and private judgement and that religious persecution violated the natural genius of man.
Caroline Robbins in her classic work, The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman, identifies Molesworth as having begun the agitation for reform, which went further than that offered by the Bill of Rights and the Toleration Act with the appearance of his Account of Denmark in December 1693.9 Robbins suggests that there is no doubt that Hutcheson, Drennan, Abernethy and Bruce shared the politics of the Molesworth connection. She had this to say of them: this ‘New Light group preached and published sermons that were widely read, had contributed a quota of tracts and pamphlets to contemporary controversy, and handed to a second generation a patriotic spirit that included all Irishmen in its loyalties, and diffused a liberal philosophy throughout more than one city or country’.10
The New Light Presbyterians referred to themselves as Protestant Dissenters and formed the most intellectual and radical wing of the Presbyterian church.11 They described themselves as:
Created by a love of freedom, [they claimed] they have ever championed the cause that gave them birth. Whether the freedom was that of the coloured slave or the honest religious enquirer, they have fearlessly taken the side of justice, and resisted every attempt to stifle private judgement. An ardent desire to bring about the brotherhood of man has led them to generously support many charitable and benevolent movements of a non-sectarian nature.12
This New Light background has been described as of great importance to William Drennan’s intellectual development.13 The love of freedom, an end to slavery and the slave trade, the right to private judgment in religion, the pursuit of brotherhood and an end to sectarian divisions were important themes of Drennan’s life and work. When he faced one of the major crises of his life, as he stood trial on charges of writing and publishing a seditious libel in 1794, he claimed his father, with Bruce, Ducal, Hutcheson and some of their circle, as the source of his political principles.
While a member of the Molesworth circle, Francis Hutcheson wrote The Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, which established his international reputation. Thomas Drennan remained at the Dublin academy after Hutcheson
