retracted but to no avail. All copies of Toland’s book were seized and further imports banned. Toland fled Dublin to avoid arrest and was never to return to his native land.
Toland rescued the works of the English Commonwealth republicans such as John Milton, Edmund Ludlow, Algernon Sidney and James Harrington and ‘fashioned them so they would be acceptable to a later generation’.20 The first edition of Harrington’s republican classic Oceana was published in 1656 and dedicated by the author to Oliver Cromwell. Toland republished it in 1702 with an account of Harrington’s life. Harrington was always a great favourite of Francis Hutcheson who, in his lectures to students, endorsed many of Harrington’s suggestions. When William Bruce was preparing a reprint of Toland’s Life of Harrington in Dublin in 1737, he wrote to Reverend Thomas Drennan: ‘Our subscription to Harrington goes on apace. It will be the prettiest and cheapest book that will be printed in Ireland.’21 When the book appeared, the subscription list included the names of Reverend Haliday, Reverend Abernethy and Professor Francis Hutcheson.
The prosecution of Thomas Emlyn
In June 1702, less than four years after Toland left Dublin, Reverend Joseph Boyse, who was then the Minister in charge at Wood Street, with one of the elders, approached his assistant minister Thomas Emlyn at his home. Although Emlyn had never expressed any anti-Trinitarian views, the elder was correct in suspecting that his friend had indeed lost his belief in the Trinity. When Emlyn confirmed the suspicion, he offered to leave the congregation, which he had served for eleven years, for the sake of peace. He was forced to leave for England but while there, he heard that he was being denounced from the same pulpits which had attacked Toland a few years previously. He published a defence of his position which left him vulnerable to charges of blasphemy. He returned to Dublin to settle his affairs and was promptly arrested.
His trial began on 10 June 1703 and before the court sat, Emlyn claimed that he had been ‘informed by an eminent gentleman of the Long Robe’ that he would not be permitted to speak freely but it was designed to run him down like a wolf without law or game.22 That was how the trial was conducted. There were seven or eight bishops present of whom two, Dublin and Armagh, took the bench. Emlyn observed that a jury of tradesmen was being asked to decide on ‘abstruse points of divinity of which there were many disputes among the learned of the age’. The Queen’s Counsel behaved with ‘great heat and fury’ and when he made the ludicrous assertion that ‘presumption is as good as evidence he was seconded in this by the Chief Justice’. Emlyn’s Counsels were intimidated and were ‘interrupted, contradicted and so brow beaten that they eventually withdrew’.23 When Emlyn tried to speak for himself, the Chief Justice cried ‘speak by your Counsel’ even though by this time he had none. The Chief Justice warned the jury that if they were of a mind to acquit the defendant ‘my Lord bishops are here’.24
After his inevitable conviction, Emlyn was asked to retract his opinions and when he refused, he was sentenced to a year in prison and a £2,000 fine. This was so beyond Emlyn’s means that it amounted to an indefinite prison sentence. Emlyn was to spend two years and one month in the common gaol and in all that time, none of the bishops who had taken such an interest in him came to see him to rescue him from his error.25
Boyse began to regret his role in the affair and worked for Emlyn’s release, finally achieving it in late 1705. Emlyn left Ireland never to return. In a caustic review of the affair, the Whig bishop Benjamin Hoadley concluded: ‘The non-conformist accused him, the conformist condemned him, the secular power was called in and the cause ended in an imprisonment and a very great fine, two methods of conviction about which the Gospel is silent.’26
Two matters relating to the persecution of Thomas Emlyn contributed to the schism which would reveal itself at Reverend Haliday’s installation at Rosemary Lane nearly two decades later. Firstly, the Synod of Ulster, running scared of further accusations of heresy, imposed acceptance of the Westminster Confession on all newly ordained ministers. It was probably in reaction to the Synod’s decree that Abernethy founded his Belfast Society. He and his fellow Society members would never accept the Westminster Confession or indeed any other man-made confession of faith. Many orthodox Presbyterians suspected that this was because Chapter II of the Confession restates the traditional doctrine of the Trinity and three persons in one God. However, Abernethy’s view was that all confessions of faith are man-made and therefore might contain human error. For him, it is the duty of every Christian to seek truth in the Scripture and not allow one’s conscience to be bound by what others have decided is truth.
Abernethy, Haliday, Drennan senior and their fellow non-subscribers recognised no earthly authority in religious matters and believed no one should suffer penalties for holding particular religious opinions. The latter point goes a long way towards explaining why many non-subscribers, including William Drennan himself, were opposed to the Penal Laws against Roman Catholics.
3
DRENNAN’S RELIGIOUS OUTLOOK
William Drennan was only fourteen years old when his father died but he would have been familiar with the non-subscription controversy and his father’s Unitarian theology. In his later life, Drennan claimed that he was always ‘rigid rather than loose in that persuasion’.1 It is likely that the Drennan family library would have held copies of John Locke’s work as well as Abernethy’s sermons and Hutcheson’s works published by William Bruce. When Drennan senior’s generation had passed on, the mantle of the intellectual leadership of Protestant Dissent devolved to England, to figures such as Dr Richard Price, Joseph Priestley and John Jebb.
Price, Priestley and Jebb were greatly admired by William Drennan and many Irish Protestant Dissenters, particularly the Non-subscribers. They were regarded by their contemporaries as Socinians. Because Unitarianism was illegal and because Socinian had become a pejorative term, Price, Priestley and Jebb described themselves as Rational Dissenters. On occasion, the Northern Dissenters wrote to Dr Price for advice on political matters. He advised the Belfast committee of the Volunteer movement in 1783 that they should seek to extend the franchise to ‘Papists of Property’ and argued that any danger from Catholics was more likely to be the result of alienating penal laws rather than religion.2 We have seen previously that Price and Priestley had written in support of the American Revolution and been attacked savagely for their support for the French Revolution.
It may be presumed that, as the son of a clergyman, Drennan, when a child, was in the habit of attending Sunday services. In adulthood, he was asked to be an elder of the Newry congregation due to his punctual attendance at public worship there.3 In his Dublin years, he served as an elder at Great Strand Street and took a deep interest in the affairs of the Presbyterian Synod.
His sister Martha was impressed when, in early 1796, she read Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason. She thought Paine ‘a smart, impudent imposing writer who ought not to be despised’. Most of what Paine had said on the Old Testament had been Martha’s thoughts in childhood and what he said ‘on the New could not stagger any rational Christian’. Martha’s use of the qualification ‘rational’ is important. The Age of Reason, most of which Paine ‘had composed in the shadow of the guillotine in Paris in 1793 was a sustained invective against State religion and all forms of priest-craft’4 and had indeed staggered many orthodox Christians. Many Roman Catholics and Anglicans were enraged but E.P. Thompson has observed that ‘for all the brash provocations of its tone, Paine’s work contained little that would have surprised the eighteenth-century Deist or advanced Unitarian’.5
Although impressed by Paine, Martha saw an opportunity for her brother to gain some public credit by publishing a response to him. She saw weaknesses in Paine’s polemic particularly in relation to his dealing with the New Testament. ‘He appeared to hurry over his subject as if predetermined to laugh at it rather than confute it.’ She suggested to her brother that he could answer Paine ‘well with wit and humour – the only way that would secure readers’. She had enlisted a Biblical scholar, Reverend William Bryson (1730–1815), who was prepared
