Читать книгу May Tyrants Tremble - Fergus Whelan - Страница 13

5

IF YOU SLEEP YOU DIE!

In December 1782, Drennan moved to Newry and set up in medical practice. He hoped to take advantage of the fact that Dr James Moody, one of the local physicians, had moved to Dublin and Drennan anticipated that he might be able to attract the custom of Moody’s former patients. He arrived in Newry with letters of introduction to a dozen principal inhabitants of the town. He took ‘genteel, commodious lodgings at Mrs. Maxwell’s in Market Street’. He soon made friends with the departing doctor’s brother, Reverend Boyle Moody (1752–1799), the local non-subscribing minister.1 He told William Bruce: ‘I consider myself as very happy in acquaintance or rather intimacy with Boyle Moody – he is one of those agreeable, lively well-informed men with whom it is always a pleasure to be connected particularly in a county town where the seeds of rational society are but thinly scattered.’2

Boyle Moody and his older brother, the Reverend John Moody, a Minister at Strand Street, Dublin, had both been educated at Dr Joseph Priestley’s Warrington Academy. William Bruce, who was at this time working as assistant minister to John Moody at Strand Street, had also been educated at Warrington. Drennan admired Boyle’s singing voice and his preaching ability. A few months later, when Sam McTier had occasion to meet Boyle Moody, he formed a somewhat different view of Drennan’s new friend. After Sam had spent an evening drinking with him in the tavern, he described Moody as, ‘a very great coxcomb and an empty fellow’, who did not ‘live as a clergyman ought’.3 Empty fellow or not, Boyle Moody had been an active member of the Volunteers and later the Society of United Irishmen. He was imprisoned during the 1798 Rebellion and died the following year from a fever contracted in prison. A Dr Campbell quotes a letter dated 1800, which goes some way towards explaining the reason for the arrest and subsequent death of Boyle Moody. ‘His crime was his profession, his liberal principles, his avowed friendship with the Catholics, nothing else is alleged.’4 The Non-subscribing Presbyterian congregation at Newry still exists and they display a plaque which, while it acknowledges Boyle Moody’s service as its minister from 1779 until 1799, makes no mention of why or how his ministry came to an abrupt end.

Other than Boyle Moody, Drennan found the young men of the town genteel and dressy, not much cultivated by education but very civil and obliging to himself. The young women Drennan encountered were ‘not much inferior to those in Belfast. They were exceedingly affable and conversable, and he was sure all of them improvable on acquaintance’.5

Fortunately, Drennan’s and Martha’s correspondence resumes at this point. She kept her brother ‘Will’ informed of the fluctuations in her precarious state of health. She constantly reassures him that all the reports of his progress in Newry reaching Belfast are positive. For his part, Drennan kept Martha appraised of his efforts to court the acquaintance of those local families whom he hoped might employ him as their physician. Martha told him of his family’s efforts to ensure that he would have a wardrobe suitable for a respectable young Doctor of Medicine. His sister Nancy had taken his Volunteer coat to the tailor to have the gold braid removed and new lining and lapels sewn on. However, the tailor must have been a Volunteer, for ‘he refused to perform this [sacrilegious] operation’.6

It is perhaps not surprising that one of the established local medical doctors, John Templeton, did not welcome Drennan to town and maintained a hostile attitude towards him. This hostility resulted in a very unpleasant stand-off between them, when Drennan was called to the sick bed of an elderly gentleman, a Mr Montgomery, one of Templeton’s patients. Usually in such a situation, doctors would be expected to consult each other in terms of comparing opinions and ensuring prescriptions and treatments were compatible. This Templeton resolutely refused to do.

Montgomery died and it is far from clear whether Drennan was appalled or amused by how the burial of the deceased was conducted. He told Martha:

I attended Mr. Montgomery’s public funeral and walked before the rest in a very disagreeable procession, preceded only by a ragged beggar-looking fellow who kept jingling a little bell in his hand as if to appraise the whole town that the deceased and the doctor were just a coming. This is a constant ceremonial in funeral solemnities in this place, and not satisfied with this, there is always one of these bell ringers informing everyone by their papistical bell, who had died and what hour and when he is to be interred. I observe that these fellows always pull off their hats most respectfully on meeting me in the street, as if certain of my being a future friend of theirs, and looking upon themselves as acting pretty much in the same vocation.7

About this time, William Bruce informed Drennan that Dr Priestley’s dissenting academy at Warrington had closed for want of pupils. Drennan suggested to Bruce that this provided an opportunity to draw up a plan to open such an academy in Belfast. Nothing came of this at the time but obviously the idea stayed with Drennan for a very long time. Over thirty years later, Drennan succeeded in opening the Belfast Academical Institution and ironically, one of the most vehement opponents of the project would be William Bruce.

Martha was ambitious for her brother and often urged him to resume his political writings with a view to enhancing his public reputation. Her aspiration was that one day he might be a Member of Parliament and she looked forward to him being referred to as ‘Sir W[illiam] D[rennan]’. He considered a writing comeback in 1783 when he witnessed a massive increase in emigration, which apparently resulted from the end of the war in America, coupled with the effects of a major economic downturn. He considered writing a series of open letters to Lord Charlemont, ‘on the questions of emigration, Volunteering etc’. He was preoccupied with his medical duties at this point and suggested that if he was to resume political writing, he would confine himself to short pieces. He felt that, ‘a natural interruption of letters might give relief to the reader who has not even the patience to finish a sixpenny pamphlet and assist the writer when he became tired of his subject or his subject tired of him’.8

He sent a draft paper to Martha but she was not impressed. She felt it lacked design and it was not clear in its conclusions and she felt that Drennan was arguing against his own feelings. Nor did Martha feel it was a ‘fit’ subject for a patriot and suggested he should find another topic. If, and when, he should find such a suitable subject, he should attach a flattering introduction to Lord Charlemont. She strongly advised him not to claim authorship at first. Rather, he should wait till the work gained recognition and then claim it. The heavy workload in his medical practice prevented him from acting on her suggestions at the time.

An unforeseen circumstance not only delayed his return to writing but nearly terminated his writing career and his life. He was suddenly stricken with a serious illness which he was fortunate to survive. It would be more than a year later, when he had fully recovered his health, that he had found his ‘fit’ subject to resume his writing. He then employed his ‘natural interruption of letters’ formula and Martha’s concealed authorship stratagem, for the new work. He sent seven relatively short letters anonymously to the Belfast Newsletter, which he later published as a pamphlet under his own name. The title of the pamphlet was Letters of Orellana, an Irish Helot, the work that was to establish his national reputation.9

Although Will and Martha both often expressed worry about their respective poor health, it was Martha’s ongoing illness which caused them both the most concern. In May 1783, Martha and Nancy stopped at Newry on their way to Bristol via Dublin. They hoped the change of air and the spa waters of Bristol might be beneficial to them. After a pleasant stopover at Drennan’s lodgings, the sisters endured a most unpleasant coach journey on the road to Dublin. They arrived, ‘sick, sore, crammed and sorry at the Man of War Inn’, fifteen miles north of Dublin city. They both felt so miserable that they quit the coach and spent the night at the Man o’War. The following day they made their way to Dublin where they were warmly received by William Bruce’s family. They were frustrated by having to delay in Dublin awaiting the departure of their ship but enjoyed their time with the Bruces. When they finally embarked on 2 June, they were accompanied by William Bruce’s brother, Sam.10

In Belfast three days later, on Thursday 5 June, Anne Drennan received a letter from Newry pressing her to come immediately, as her son was dangerously ill with a fever. At three o’clock, within an hour of receiving the summons, she and Sam McTier set out on the road, reaching Newry after midnight. The next morning, they found Will in a terrible condition in the seventh day of his fever. They greatly feared for his life. They nursed him through several nights as his condition continued to worsen. Sam described to Martha how very ill her brother was, on the Sunday following their arrival:

What a melancholy object poor Will is this day, shouting with pain and trembling so that in the drawing room I hear his teeth gnashing together. We have a nurse keeper to assist us, George [Will’s man servant] and I can do no longer without one, and your mother is so affected she is of little use. He purges greatly without being sensible to it. We have terrible work watching and cleaning him, not the smallest trifle can he do for himself, even when we lift him to the close stool George or I were obliged to wipe for him.11

Eventually the crisis passed and Drennan began a slow recovery and to regain his strength. Dr Haliday had warned Sam that the patient would continue to rave a little until he was fully recovered. Will at first proved troublesome and cross, accusing Sam of trying to starve him when he discouraged him from eating solid food before he was ready. Sam and Mrs Drennan stayed in Newry until early July. Just before they set off for Belfast, Mrs Drennan wrote to Martha enclosing a short note she had encouraged Will to write. He told his sister:

My mother has asked me to add a few lines if I am able. I am just newly arisen from the dead after an interment (for such surely is a gloomy bed surrounded by three physicians, a surgeon, an apothecary and two nurses) which has lasted no less than five weeks on Saturday. I am gathering strength daily and my head is grown more clear and serene.12

Sam and Dr Haliday could see some silver lining in the cloud of Drennan’s suffering. Sam had no doubt that ‘the attack would add vigour to his constitution that before it was a stranger to’ and that he would possibly be stronger than ever. Dr Haliday observed that ‘it was worth Will’s while to have fever for the sake of those unaffected testimonies of regard his situation drew from the good people both in Newry and Belfast’.13

When Mrs Drennan and Sam were leaving Newry, there was heavy election canvassing going on in relation to filling two seats in the House for County Down. The mobs were gathering each night but the quarrelling and breaking of heads (which Sam liked), was yet to begin.14 The contest was a three-cornered fight, involving Edward Ward, son of Lord Bangor, and the two sitting MPs, Robert Stewart of Mount Stewart, supported by the Whigs and dissenters, and Lord Kilwarlin, son of the Earl of Hillsborough, supported by the High Church interest and the Tories.15

When fully recovered from his illness, Drennan wrote some squibs and letters to the freeholders of County Down in support of Stewart. As well as his political commitment to the independent interest, Sam was hoping for employment through the patronage of Stewart. He arranged to have Drennan’s letters printed in Belfast and worked hard in Downpatrick as Stewart’s election agent.

To preserve anonymity, Drennan signed himself ‘Sidney’, after Algernon Sidney the republican theorist and Whig martyr. Martha reported that Sidney’s letters were much admired in Belfast but many thought William Bruce was the author.16 Others were touting the names of Crombie and Haliday as Sidney’s identity. The dilemma Drennan now found himself in was one which was to dog him throughout his writing career. He felt he needed to balance his desire for literary fame as a radical propagandist with his anxiety not to alienate and lose the custom of his more conservative patients. He told Martha, ‘it might perhaps be of service to me to be known as the author by the Stewart party here but would not at all with the other. They are indeed so unconnected with each other that the one would scarcely know anything that the other did’.17

The latter remark shows how polarised politics were amongst well-to-do Protestants, even in a relatively small town like Newry. Martha warned him not to reveal himself as Sidney for, in her view, ‘Newry or its people are not to be trusted.’18

Stewart ran a very lacklustre and disorganised campaign. Martha, William and their friends, who were Stewart’s natural supporters, were appalled when, after promising to stay independent, he tried to do a deal and made commitments to Lord Kilwarlin. Martha regarded those commitments as ‘full of madness and folly’ and she believed that he had no right to give them. Stewart’s conduct was such that Martha felt he deserved to lose the election.19

Drennan was also disgusted at Stewart’s behaviour:

I sicken at the Down elections. I like none of the candidates. Stewart as little as any. Had it not been for his nauseous neutrality which is not to be forgiven he and Ward, I believe would have had the country. I don’t believe he regards the independent interest a fig and his whole ambition was to please both parties and to be returned by both. He has nearly met with his merited punishment.20

In the event, Kilwarlin and Ward defeated Stewart and Sam was left disappointed and unemployed but not greatly surprised.

While sister and brother shared their dismay regarding the conduct of the Down election, Martha reported on what she felt were more interesting political goings on in Belfast. In preparation for yet another Volunteer convention in Dungannon, a committee was sitting to consider appropriate resolutions that might form the subject for deliberation at the forthcoming convention. Letters were sent to prominent reformers both at home and abroad. Amongst those whose advice was sought were the Duke of Richmond, Dr Price, Dr John Jebb and Christopher Wyvill in Britain, Dr Franklin and Abbé Raynal in Paris and Charlemont, Flood and Grattan in Ireland. Martha thought the responses of Richmond and Dr Price were very satisfactory and useful. They had not heard from Paris by the time she reported but she felt that the Irish responses were poor, trifling, polite, short and unsatisfactory.21

The reason the Irish responses were so cool was because Charlemont and Grattan had no enthusiasm for further political involvement of the Volunteers. Flood was anxious to keep the Volunteers onside as part of his rivalry with Grattan but he had never been a supporter of reform or broadening the franchise, much less the extension of political rights to Roman Catholics. The third Dungannon Convention was held on 8 September and 272 corps attended, as did fifteen MPs. Charlemont and Grattan stayed away. Flood started out for Dungannon but never made it due to an attack of gout. In the event, the Convention ‘achieved little beyond issuing the summons for a National Reform Convention in Dublin for 10th November’.22

In November, the National Reform Convention of the Volunteers met in the Exchange Rooms in Dublin but, because of the large attendance, it had to move to the much larger venue at the Rotunda. The earlier successful convention in Dungannon in 1782 ended in one day, having agreed several resolutions and a way forward. The Dublin Convention ran for three weeks with no such positive outcome. Many factors contributed to making this a chaotic and confused failure. Grattan was not prepared to help on this occasion as he now wanted the Volunteers to leave politics to the parliamentarians. Charlemont and his allies attended the Convention only to ensure that Frederick Hervey, the Bishop of Derry, who they regarded as an extremist and a maverick, should not unduly influence the proceedings. The bishop was an unequivocal supporter of Catholic rights. The government took the precaution of having several of its friends, including the staunch Protestant George Ogle, attend with a view to sowing division, particularly on the Catholic question.23 One of Ogle’s spoiling tactics was to mislead the Convention by stating falsely that the Catholic leadership had told him they were not seeking any relief of grievances at this time.

The Bishop of Derry tried to keep the rights of Catholics to the forefront but he was frustrated by the Charlemont moderates and the Ogle spoilers, and it looked like the Convention might have to adjourn having agreed to nothing. In desperation, the Bishop suggested that Henry Flood, who had stayed away from the Convention, should be called in to help mediate an agreed programme. Flood duly arrived and saved the day by convincing the Convention to adopt a superficial reform programme that said nothing about the Catholic question. Charlemont was hoping that Flood’s programme would be referred back to the country which could then petition parliament through constitutionally convened county meetings.24 However, Flood suggested that he and another MP, William Brownlow, would go straight over to the House of Commons and present the programme in the form of a Bill.

When Flood stood up in the House to introduce his Bill wearing his Volunteer uniform, he gave the government just the opportunity they were waiting for. The Attorney General set the tone for the government response by declaring, ‘I do not intend to go into discussion of this Bill ... if it originates with an armed body ’tis inconsistent with the freedom of debate for this House to receive it. We sit here not to register the edicts of another assembly, or to receive propositions at the point of a bayonet.’25

When Flood reported back to the Convention, the more radical element within it wanted to denounce the House of Commons. Charlemont managed to convince the majority that the Convention should adjourn and refer the reform programme to the county committees. The Volunteer movement never recovered from the fiasco that was the Dublin National Reform Convention of 1783.

Drennan did not attend the Convention but he was apparently given a comprehensive report on the proceedings from William Bruce. No record of Bruce’s report seems to have survived but Drennan’s trenchant reaction prefigures differences that would later emerge between his radicalism and Bruce’s moderation. Drennan told Bruce:

You have been wise dearest friend, very wise and you admire Flood because you are a transcript, not a faint one, of his prudence and wisdom but I almost fear to say it – times of reformation require impetuosity of spirit. Our religious reformation required such a man as Luther. Flood is too wise, to cool, perhaps too selfish to be a Luther in civil reform.

I was going to say that your assembly would have been less wise by adopting the passions as well as the reason that characterize every popular assembly but perhaps more successful than it has been as Mr. Flood’s convention. – I am presumptuous in saying so to anyone but a friend – It is the people which government fear – the rude illiterate voice of the people not Mr. Flood. You have not represented the people.

When Mr. Flood said ‘stay here in solemn convention until I return from Parliament’ was there not one high sounding enthusiastic voice to cry aloud ‘and why not go along with you – let us in the name of the just God – Let us the delegates of the people go up to the House of the People – Let us go up in slow and peaceable procession, and let the acclaim of the surrounding multitude re-echo the justice of our cause and their cause in the ears of our enemies – Let us march unarmed but undaunted into that House which is our own and in awful and terrible silence wait until the voice of the People and the voice of God was uttered by that man and then with a shout that would reverberate thru’ those polluted walls call upon them to give us our rights – I am sometime so enthusiastic as to think that more might have been obtained by some showy method as this without losing one drop of blood. We are the slaves of our eyes and our ears – The hearts of the ministers would have withered within them and 60,000 Volunteers would not have been insulted by quondam usher of a boarding school.’26

The final barb was directed at Barry Yelverton the Attorney General who had once been an assistant master at the Hibernian Academy.

Just how much damage had been done to the morale and status of the Volunteer movement by the debacle that was the National Reform Convention of 1783 became all too apparent a year later when yet another Volunteer Convention gathered in the Exchange Rooms, Dublin, on 25 October 1784. There was no need to adjourn to a bigger venue on this occasion. There were only thirty-six delegates present. Just fourteen counties and eight towns were represented. Even more indicative of decline was the lack of interest from Ulster. Only two counties, Antrim and Donegal, and two towns, Belfast and Lisburn, sent delegates. The small delegation from Ulster included ‘Rev. Sinclair Kelburn of the Belfast Third Congregation, Rev. William Bruce of Lisburn and William Drennan’.27 The best this meeting could rise to was to adjourn until January 1785 and circulate resolutions urging those counties who had not nominated delegates to do so for the next meeting.

Immediately on returning to Newry, Drennan put pen to paper. During November and December, a series of letters appeared in the Belfast Newsletter signed ‘Orellana an Irish Helot’. Later, Drennan published the collection as a pamphlet. Even in an era when pamphleteers were not shy about loquacious titles, Drennan’s title was as enigmatic as it was long-winded. The title he chose was: Letters of Orellana, an Irish Helot, to the seven northern counties not represented in the National Assembly of Delegates, held in Dublin, 1784, for obtaining a more equal representation of the people in the Parliament of Ireland.

One plausible explanation for Orellana has been posited by A.T.Q. Stewart. He suggests that it represented a play on the title of a book that Drennan would have read and admired. This book was Oroonoka: The Royal Slave by Aphra Behn. Stewart tells us:

In eighteenth century atlases, the river which we now call the Amazon was marked as the Orellana ... thus, the two great rivers of South America were the Orellana and the Orinoco. In Mrs. Behn’s novel (published in 1678) Oroonoka was the grandson of an African king, captured by the master of an English trading vessel and carried off to Surinam ... There he stirs up the other slaves to revolt and escape from their miserable condition. The novel is remarkable as the first expression in English literature of sympathy for the oppressed negroes.28

The use of the term ‘helot’ had been described as ‘nicely provocative’, because in ancient Sparta, helots were state slaves who could neither be sold or set free. Kenneth R. Johnson tells us ‘As the helot population outnumbered the Spartans by more than ten to one, the government lived in fear of a helot revolt so much so that each new magistrate opened his term by formally declaring war on them, which allowed them to be summarily executed in case of any disturbance.’29

Drennan’s objective in Orellana was to encourage, to provoke and to shame the seven Northern counties who had stayed away from the recent convention in Dublin to attend the next meeting scheduled for 20 January 1785 and to reassert their demands for reform of Parliament. Drennan addressed his readers as ‘fellow slaves’. He blesses his God because he is sensible to his own condition of slavery, for he says ‘bondage must be felt before the chains can be broken’.30 ‘Every nation under the sun must be placed in one of two conditions. It must be free or enslaved.’ The first letter ends with the slogan, ‘Awake, arise for if you sleep you die!’ All seven letters carry a similar message that if a people wishes to be free, it must show that it is determined not only to gain freedom but to maintain that freedom when achieved. However, the letters are not without self-contradiction. One stark example of this is the treatment of the issue of the political rights of Roman Catholics. At one point Drennan calls for unity across the confessional divide and an end to religious animosity: ‘I call upon 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 renowned for his radical politics and had been closely associated with an earlier generation of English and Irish radicals, such as the celebrated English radical John Wilkes and Charles Lucas of Dublin who was sometime called ‘the Wilkes of Ireland’.49 Gawen Hamilton had sent his son to Cambridge and placed him under the care of John Jebb, probably after Wilkes, the most famous and certainly the most able of all the English radicals. Rowan had also spent some time at Joseph Priestley’s Warrington Academy and considered himself a life-long friend of the good doctor.

It is not surprising, therefore, that on arriving in Ireland in 1784, Rowan joined his father’s Volunteer Corps at Killyleagh. Rowan had sought and received John Jebb’s advice on the content of the address which Charlemont had quashed. What perhaps offended Charlemont the most was Jebb’s advice to Rowan that ‘no reform can be justly founded which does not admit the Roman Catholics and does not restore to the people their full power’.50 Rowan told Drennan that he believed Charlemont was nervous and surrounded by other tremulous advisors.51 Drennan had already come to that conclusion. He had lost respect for his Lordship but was very impressed by Archibald Hamilton Rowan. He told Bruce, ‘I do not like Lord Charlemont ... He is not a man of nerve – I like Rowan better – he has somewhat of the Long Parliament in his countenance, some of the republican ferocity.’52

The Long Parliament referred to the English radicals who had defeated Charles I and helped to bring about republican government in England under Oliver Cromwell. Drennan’s political friendship and admiration for Rowan which began with those brief encounters in Newry in 1785 was to have very significant implications for both men and for the radical politics in Ireland in the following decade. They would each play an influential role in the foundation and development of the United Irish Society in 1791. Many of the formative documents issued by the Dublin Society of United Irishmen in the early 1790s were drafted by Drennan and appeared under the names of William Drennan and Archibald Hamilton Rowan. Rowan escaped the gallows by absconding from Newgate in 1794, having been sentenced for distribution of a seditious libel written by Drennan. That same year, Drennan would be acquitted on charges of publishing the same seditious libel.

William Hamilton Drummond, Rowan’s first biographer who knew both Drennan and Rowan, was much struck by the remarkable contrast between them. ‘The one being of Herculean size, warm impetuous, but highly polished withal; the other low in stature, cold in manner, slow deliberative, but lodging in his breast the element of a lofty and noble spirit.’53

Rowan has been described as a handsome giant who could have been a model for Hercules. Drennan’s son William said his father stood only five foot five and would have been considered plain.54 Despite these obvious physical and personality differences, there were less obvious but far more fundamental similarities between them which enabled them to work well together in a common cause over a prolonged period. They shared a background in Ulster New Light Presbyterianism. Neither had compunction about acknowledging their Unitarianism when it was still illegal to do so. They would have regarded themselves as the inheritors of the traditions of Francis Hutcheson and the New Light clergy of Drennan’s father’s generation. They had both been enthusiastic supporters of the American Revolution and would have been avid readers and admirers of the English Unitarian radicals, Doctors Price, Priestley and Jebb. Drennan admired the writings of Price, Priestley and Jebb from afar, whereas Rowan had been a friend of Priestley while Jebb had been his teacher and political mentor. Jebb kept up an active correspondence with Rowan and one of the last letters he ever wrote, dated September 1785, consisted mostly of advice on how his former student should fight for reform amongst the Volunteers.55 John Jebb died in 1786 and his Political Works were published posthumously in London the following year. Drennan was pleased to see that, in the last of his published letters, in August 1785, Jebb mentioned Orellana with approval.56

Drennan’s other positive impression of Rowan is illustrative of the way his thinking was evolving regarding the next stage of the struggle for reform. He told his sister, ‘Rowan is a clever fellow, looks just the thing for a constitutional conspirator.’57 It was clear that now Drennan was contemplating a totally new approach. His mind was now turning to a conspiracy involving ‘sincere and sanguine reformers’. He felt that the political part of Volunteering had been stifled by Charlemont and that all thoughts of reform had been banished from the public mind. Two weeks after the January Convention, he had told Bruce:

I should like to see the institution of a society as secret as the Free-Masons, whose object might be by every practicable means to put into execution plans for the complete liberation of the country. The secrecy would surround the proceedings of such a society with a certain awe and majesty and the oath of admission would inspire enthusiasm into its members ... The laws and institutes of such a society would require ample consideration, but it might accomplish much.58

At about this time also, John Chambers, a Dublin-based printer, wrote to Drennan seeking permission to republish Orellana in the capital, a request to which Drennan was happy to accede. This contact was to have significant implications for the future of Drennan’s literary career. John Chambers would later be an important member of the United Irish Society. He printed and distributed many of Drennan’s later works. He also printed other radical and even seditious materials throughout the 1790s, including the United Irishmen’s most incendiary publication, the Press. This paper, to which Drennan contributed, was founded in September 1797 and suppressed in March 1798. Chambers, like many of Drennan’s United Irish comrades, was imprisoned at Fort George in Scotland from 1798 until 1803 and thereafter exiled from Ireland under the Banishment Act.