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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 to help with dates, proof, authors etc. and though she invited her brother to laugh at her suggestion, she felt he ‘could clear his character and do himself honor by enlisting early as the religious adversary of T[om] Paine’.6

Drennan said he would be glad to see what he called the Presbyterian Patriarchs7 answer to Paine but he did not trouble his heart and his head much about the question. When he went into detail about his own religious sentiments, he was at least partly in sympathy with Paine:

The Romish church are consistently politic in … denouncing knowledge, and debate, and disquisition, for the restless power of reason once introduced brings in doubt and is apt to beget incredulity in the place of that serene and all confiding faith which makes everyone a Christian in the same degree, and thus preserves the unity and the peace of the church universal. Trust like a Papist for if you doubt as a dissenter the same restless faculty that rejects the Athanasian creed … will begin to nibble at the incarnation, the miraculous conception etc., and thus Priestley lifts the latch for Paine to enter.

I like the morality of the gospel so well that I have not the least occasion for the supplementary proof of miracle: perhaps the ignorant and stupid may be alarmed into belief and chilled into conviction, and for this purpose perhaps they were from time to time invented.8

For Drennan, miracle in the proper sense of the word was God contradicting himself and he agreed with Isaac Newton and Priestley after him, that it was ‘necessary for the scythe of infidelity to clear off the weeds of superstition to prepare the soil for the growth of new Christianity’.9 He thought his own sect of Protestant Dissenters was the best acquainted with the principles of religion but the Quakers were the best practitioners, in their simplicity, their fraternity, their equality and their charity to each other.

In 1799, Drennan made a comprehensive declaration of his beliefs in relation to the Christian religion as follows:

It is a pure system of morality not beyond man to discover or enounce, not so much beyond man as the discoveries of Newton appear to be, particularly when very pure systems of morals had gone before in almost all nations and I believe Christianity properly called has scarcely appeared on this earth since the death of Christ, and that the very first and noblest principle of religion the unity of God, has been scarcely ever generally and never nationally acknowledged by Christians, though the foundation article of the Mahometan religion. I believe the priesthood in all ages has been the curse of Christianity, and I believe there will never be happiness or virtue on the face of the earth until that order of man be abolished and until there be a greater equality of property which may deliver the rich and the poor from the vices incident to their conditions.10

He had friends in the Presbyterian ministry but even they were not spared his strident anti-clericalism. Drennan was always opposed in principle to the Regium Donum, the royal bounty bestowed on the Presbyterian clergy by the government. He once described it as slow poison pouring into the Protestant Dissenting church. He told Martha:

In our churches I always considered the increases of the Regium Donum as hush money, a bounty to be quiet and to have very tolerably answered its end. I think them [the Presbyterian clergy] nothing more or less than pensioners of government, these once formidable puritans in name and nature, these upright independents now depend and bow in exact ratio which the bounty bears to the sum of their income.11

In 1792, Reverend Robert Black of Derry came to Dublin seeking an increase in the payment. Drennan believed that if Black was successful, the Presbyterian religion would ‘be contaminated by the corruption of our pastors’.12 Black had been threatened with being tarred and feathered and accused of coming to Dublin ‘to sell the Presbyterian clergy to the government for a pension, on condition of their repudiating the Catholics’.13 Drennan felt that the clergy of the North might lose some of their influence ‘by courting dependence on a rascally government’.14

In the aftermath of the 1798 Rebellion, Lord Castlereagh created a new Regium Donum scheme with three objectives. Firstly, he wished to reward, those who had committed themselves in support of the State against what he regarded as the democratic party within the Synod. He believed that many of those he deemed the democratic party ‘if not involved in the rebellion were deeply infected with its principles’.15 Secondly, he wished to create ‘a considerable internal fermentation perhaps even a schism to change the temper of the Synod’. Finally, he wanted to buy and consolidate support for the Union amongst the Presbyterian clergy.16

Castlereagh believed that making ‘the Presbyterian clergy less dependent on their congregations for their subsistence would make them better subjects than they have of late years proven themselves’.17 His scheme involved different amounts being paid to differing classes of minsters depending on seniority or the size of their congregations. Drennan and some of the Presbyterian elders and clergy saw this as an attempt to create a dissenting hierarchy.18 Martha agreed with her brother and she denounced the ministers who accepted the bounty as:

Fallen – fallen men – Yes they had a station, a high one for which it was necessary for government to overset them and a hundred a year has done it, without one honest soul daring to spurn the bribe. Neither they nor their families will be half so respectable nor do better than those of their cloth who, not having the third of the sum, could refuse assistance from the contentment produced by £50 at interest. All vanity, all desire of a good name, or the praise attending a disinterested action seems fled. How proudly I would have been the one to refuse this bounty.19

Castlereagh’s allies in the Synod, Reverend Black and Reverend William Bruce, were non-subscribers from the same New Light tradition as Drennan. Both had been active in the Volunteers but both had opposed the United Irish society from the outset. Bruce and Drennan had been close friends but their friendship cooled somewhat, though it was not irrevocably fractured, over Bruce’s denunciation of Drennan’s United Irish test. When Drennan became aware of Black’s and Bruce’s contacts with Castlereagh, he described Bruce as a presbyter bishop and said that Bruce and Castlereagh were ‘walking hand in hand in a new alliance of church and state’.20 He again invoked the names of the great stalwarts of non-subscription of an earlier generation:

Is all this possible? And can the dissenters repair to their meeting house after such a business is completed … Is it possible that any lay dissenter who preserves or is preserved in the salt of his sect can set his foot into a house corrupted with such a pensionary establishment? What would Abernethy, Duchal and Hutcheson have thought of their descendants? But it is a link in the chain of events which is tending to the abolition of such an order of men in the world. Infected, corrupted, papisticated, mankind will grow disgusted with their selfishness and hypocrisy, as they have already done on the continent, and the tyranny of the priesthood will no longer usurp the throne of God or stand between man and his maker.21

Martha heard reports that the laity and elders of the Synod were opposed to accepting Castlereagh’s new scheme and had managed to get it rejected at the Synod. She urged her brother to write a pamphlet to rouse the Presbyterian laity ‘into some sense of justice and honor’ that they might make better provision for their ‘ill-rewarded pastors’. Martha felt that some congregations had treated their ministers so poorly that some poor ministers felt compelled to accept Castlereagh’s scheme. If the people did not reform the manner in which they treated their clergy, ‘the dissenters would soon cease to be the respected and feared body, they had hitherto been’. She asked her brother to consider ‘what pen would have a better chance of effecting this worthy purpose than Drennan’s the acknowledged son of a preacher not yet forgot’.22

Drennan was not inclined to write on this subject because he felt ‘that that order of men [the clergy]’ were ‘losing all hold of the people’ and he therefore thought it ‘improbable that their stipends would be raised by the people’. The Regium Donum would ‘accelerate the beginning schism between laity and clergy’. He thought it probable that most lay dissenters would soon become Deists or Methodists and he imagined that Paine’s Age of Reason had ‘increased indifference to Christian instruction, and the neglect of Christian pastors’. There appeared to be an affinity between democratic and deistical doctrines but Drennan saw no solid foundation for this in reason. ‘The life and doctrines of the unlettered prophet Christ are of a nature that I think would perfectly assimilate with the equality and fraternity of real republicans.’23

Drennan asserted that the priesthood in all ages was the curse of Christianity. There would be no virtue or happiness in the world until the priesthood was abolished. He believed he was living in an era where that order of men were losing influence. He had read Paine’s Age of Reason and he accepted that Christian miracle stories had been invented to chill the ignorant and stupid into belief. Yet William Drennan remained a Protestant Dissenter and regarded himself as a Christian. However, his regular attendance at public worship did not protect him from charges of being a Deist or an infidel for, as he once told his sister, ‘take notice an Unitarian and a Deist here [in Dublin] ranks as the selfsame character and if you deny the Trinity, you will be set down to deny there is a God’.24

Reverend Thomas Drennan had a significant lifelong influence over his son’s religious principles. There is no earthly authority in religious matters and no man should suffer penalties for his religious opinions. These guiding principles led to William Drennan’s activities within the United Irish movement. Drennan regarded the Regium Donum as an attempt by the State to wield influence and authority where it should have none.