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6

OF PIGS AND PAPISTS

In May 1785, Bruce told Drennan of plans to establish a Whig Club in Dublin, which was to have a blue uniform with silver buttons and the motto ‘persevere’. He asked if Drennan was prepared to put his name forward for membership. Drennan’s response was a scathing repudiation and utter rejection of the idea of what he saw as ‘a club of little gentlemen’. He believed the club was hostile to Volunteering and saw the members as a jovial crew in blue coats, mere prattlers who would achieve nothing.1 More importantly, Drennan saw that one of the motives for the formation of the Whig club was to separate ‘all the gentlemen and the chaff of the Volunteers leaving the mechanics and the yeomanry who are the weighty grain to themselves’. He responded to Bruce:

You bid me send my name to be inserted in the Club. My name is William Drennan. But don’t think I will put myself to the expense of a suit for such a purpose if that be a sine qua non. For my part I am more eager than ever in the reform business ... I can’t find men that would form a serious Association – a sacred compact about the matter. I would sign such a Confederation of Compatriots with my blood.2

The establishment of the Whig Club in Dublin was followed by another in Belfast and though many of Drennan’s friends became active in both, he stayed aloof, though he did continue to attend Volunteer reviews in Belfast over the next few years. However, his time in Newry, though eventually lucrative in terms of his medical fees, passed in political inactivity and tedium. The local MP, Isaac Corry, offered to make use of Drennan’s writing talents and Martha encouraged him to accept the offer. After considering the matter, ‘his obstinate republican honesty won the day’ and he refused the proposal.3 He admitted to Bruce that he missed the admiration that came from well-received political commentary. ‘Praise to me is everything but a place like this is as cold as a cucumber.’4 He was candid about his misery and dejection. ‘I lead in this place a very insignificant and I had almost said a disgraceful life – I read little or none – I wish nothing – I correspond with none – I hear nothing but the babble of the day. I haunt after company to deliver me from an ennui and a brooding over maladies some imaginary and others real.’5

Drennan’s sense of isolation seems to have increased when Martha was overcome by depression and lost her zest for writing. Only one letter from her to William survives from 1786. His correspondence with William Bruce also seems to have slackened, as he had little to report from Newry. He seemed desperate for political news from elsewhere. On two occasions, he began his pleas to Bruce for interesting news by saying, ‘there is nothing stirring here [in Newry] but pigs and papists’.6 To put it at its mildest, this was an unfortunate phrase from a man who only a short time previously had called on his fellow Irishman ‘to embrace each other in the mild spirit of Christianity and to unite as a secret compact in the cause of your sinking country’.7

Twentieth-century historians have used this statement as a foundation on which to construct a case against Drennan, that he was a bigot with an obsessive dislike and mistrust of Catholics, which was ‘based on petty or superficial motives’.8 One of Drennan’s main accusers in this regard was L.M. Cullen, who described Drennan as a bigoted anti-Catholic individual and branded him ‘the Wretched Drennan’.9 We will proceed to examine the case against Drennan and assess whether he is guilty as charged. In order to give a fair account of Drennan’s attitudes, we require a review of his entire career including his time as a member of the United Irish society and beyond.

A decade after Drennan’s ‘pigs and papists’ remarks,10 further evidence of Drennan’s alleged anti-Catholic bigotry emerged. The informer Leonard McNally wrote a detailed report to Dublin Castle dated September 1796. McNally states that the Catholics were becoming more extreme in their demands and were forming committees to negotiate with the French in the event of an invasion. McNally identified John Keogh (1740–1817) and Richard McCormick (d. 1827) as leaders of the Catholics. In the last line of his report, McNally states, ‘Drennan declares his hatred of the Catholics charging them with duplicity and ingratitude.’11

Drennan and the United Irish Society had, from the beginning, supported political rights for Roman Catholics. However, as we have noted, back in 1785, while Drennan was prepared to support Catholic claims in debate, in writing he was denying that they even had such claims. Drennan’s comment in Orellana stated:

the Catholics of this day are absolutely INCAPABLE of making a good use of political liberty, or what is the same thing political power. I speak of the sentiments of the most enlightened amongst them … are too wise to wish for a complete extension of the civil franchise … it must require the process of time to enlarge their minds and ameliorate their hearts.12

Later, when Drennan’s fellow United Irishmen were prepared to demand a complete extension of the franchise to all males, including the lower orders of Catholics, he insisted that a national education system was an essential element that must accompany the measure.13 He felt that the lower ranks of the different religious persuasions ‘have strong antipathies’ and he felt that ‘the middle ranking members of each sect can instil into the mind of those beneath them the milk of human nature’. He seemed to believe, in 1785, that the Catholic middle class were too few to do this.14

Drennan’s assertion of the incapability of Catholics to make good use of political liberty was greatly resented by Catholics at the time and was remembered for a long time afterwards. Eight years later, in January 1793, when Martha suggested that Drennan should republish the Helot, he told her:

There is one letter asserting the incapability of the Catholics of Ireland for political liberty or power which was infused in my ear by H. Joy as I well remember and as I could testify from his letters. This displeased many of the Catholics at the time and you may recollect … W. Jones who has indeed been their oldest and most consistent friend, taking me up on this very account in the Belfast paper under the title Zealot. I am apt to believe that the Catholics still owe me a grudge for this and think that my late conversion since I came to Dublin has been brought about by views of interest rather than upon principle, and this with an instinctive horror of republicanism which inspires them, has occasioned rather a dryness and want of confidence respecting me.15

The opinions expressed by Drennan regarding the superior enlightenment of Presbyterians over Catholics and hence, the incapability of the Catholics to use political liberty, was probably shared by many Presbyterians at the time. It was most certainly the view of William Bruce, to whom Drennan had made his ‘pigs and papists’16 comments. Bruce never wavered in this opinion and it is not clear what changed Drennan’s mind. It might have been the French Revolution which showed Catholics to be capable of making a revolution. It may also have been the argument put forward by Wolfe Tone (1763–1798)17 in his Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland when he addressed the idea that Catholics are not prepared for liberty. He asked ‘Were the Polish? Were the French? Peasantries were the same the world over, but the French Catholic gentry are as enlightened as any gentry. Catholic emancipation is not a disease we prepare for by inoculation. Liberty is the vital principle of man: he that is prepared to live is prepared for freedom.’18

Whatever the reason, from the formation of the United Irish Society until the end of his life, Drennan was a passionate advocate of Catholic political rights. However, at the time McNally was reporting, Drennan was far from pleased with his Catholic allies. When ‘a Catholic of some consequence’ asked Drennan to join one of the new committees he refused.19 He had been trying to live on his modest professional income which he believed had suffered because of his very public attachment to the Catholics’ cause. Martha had told him that because of his trial he had lost his expected inheritance from the Hamilton family of Mount Collier and that ‘from that moment Hamilton had never called on one of us’.20 He also felt that his political enemies were trying to ruin him professionally.21 In all the years Drennan had worked in Dublin, he ‘had not received one guinea in professional income as a doctor from any of the Catholic persuasion’.22 He was struggling to make a living and was very resentful that the Catholics, whose political cause he believed had cost him much, had not used his services.

His resentment or ‘hatred’ could not have extended to the entire Catholic community but rather to the well-to-do Catholics of the Catholic Committee who could have afforded his services but chose not to employ him. The unidentified ‘Catholic of consequence’ was surprised, as he had believed that as Drennan lived in expensive lodgings, he was ‘a man of few wants’, yet ‘he affected concern and gave hope of better times’.23 Those better times never came.24 Nonetheless, when the Catholic leader, Richard McCormick, absconded to avoid arrest in March 1798, Drennan described him as one of his friends and expressed the hope that he and his fellows would be successful in escaping.25

As further evidence of Drennan’s anti-Catholic prejudice, some writers point to his observation that, although the Roman Catholic bishop, Thomas Hussey, was ‘someone of the most ancient strain of Ireland and in foreign Courts all his life, [it was strange that he] should smack so strongly of the bogtrotter’.26 This comment has been described as shading into ‘unreconstructed racism’.27 This is a gross distortion of what Drennan had to say about the bishop. He was merely commenting on Hussey’s bucolic accent. Drennan’s remarks were made in an account of a dinner engagement he had had with Hussey and General O’Connell, also a Roman Catholic, formerly in the ‘French service’. He had clearly been very impressed with both men. Drennan observed, they were both shrewd, very generally informed, very pleasant.28

Another writer tells us that, having reviewed Drennan’s correspondence in the period 1791 to 1794, ‘Drennan mistrusts the Catholics who he thought to be a self-seeking and aristocratic party. It was apparently very difficult to retain them as allies after the terms of the United Irish Test with its obvious echoes of the French Revolution had been made public.’29

Drennan believed that many Catholics were much attached to the writings of Edmund Burke who had trenchantly denounced the French Revolution.30 However, many of the negative comments that Drennan made about ‘the Catholics’ were not directed at members of the Church of Rome. Rather, they were directed at leading members of the Catholic Committee. Drennan believed that great efforts were being made to detach them from the United Irish Society. He believed that Edmund Burke was working for a coalition between the ‘Protestant gentry and the Catholics of consequence to keep everything much as it is’.31 This belief had a solid foundation, for we know that Burke had asserted:

To resist the revolutionary contagion, it was necessary to rally in defence of the established order and civilisation all men of sound principle. The Irish Catholics, whether ‘the old gentlemen who still retain their old religion and estates’ or ‘the new race of Catholics who have risen by their industry and their good fortune to considerable opulence’ were clearly from ‘their religious principles, church polity and habitual discipline,’ natural conservatives.32

The administration in Dublin Castle did not take Burke’s advice and instead chose the path which Wolfe Tone described as ‘oppression and persecution’ which he believed had radicalised ‘the great mass of Catholics’.33 No one has suggested that Burke’s assertion that Irish Catholics are natural conservatives is an indication that he was an anti-Catholic bigot. However, the fact that Drennan suspected that Burke might be right is one of the reasons which has resulted in Drennan being labelled a bigot. For his own part, Drennan felt that, in him, the Catholics of Ireland ‘have not had a more constant friend’.34

Despite Drennan’s doubts about the Catholic Committee’s commitment, he was fair minded about their each-way bet. He observed that ‘the truth was and is, the Catholics [Committee] wish to have two strings to their bow, a part to treat with government, a part to allay with us, and if one string cracks, why try the other. This is good and perhaps fair archery’.35

One historian has made the erroneous claim that when Drennan wrote in favour of Catholic Emancipation in the Belfast Monthly Magazine in 1808, this represented a shift in his position. This writer claims, ‘like many Protestant reformers of the 1790s [Drennan] had doubts about Catholics’.36 Here we come to the kernel of the question. To have doubts about the sincerity or steadfastness of one’s allies has nothing to do with prejudice, bigotry or racism. Far from shifting his position in 1808, Drennan could point back nearly a quarter of a century when he sowed the seed of Catholic and Protestant union in Newry in 1784.

We associate although differing in religious opinions because we wish to create a union of power and to cultivate that brotherhood of affection amongst all the inhabitants of this island … We are all Irishmen. We shall ever think an association deserves well of its native land whose chief objective is to unite the different religions in the cause of our common country.37

In 1805, Martha heard rumours that the Catholics had unanimously, but in secret, agreed a new petition to the British House of Lords seeking emancipation. She suggested to her brother that this seemed like a time he might again write a pamphlet in the Catholic cause:

If there is a man who once stirred up an ardent love of reform, who first pleaded for and brought forward the Catholic rights, if still consistent he ceases the favourable moment and with truth, energy, propriety and eloquence forces a healing, perhaps redress – the Catholics ought to erect a statue to him and what would be far better make him independent for life.38

She knew, however, that if he took her advice, he would require great prudence as he would likely be involving himself in ‘an odious, dangerous business’ where he would be cast as a rebel and a lover of blood. Drennan did not expose himself to this danger but he kept a close eye on developments and shortly thereafter informed his sister:

The Catholics, I believe, are to allow their petition to remain on the table, if the ministers promise future support. Lord Moira, who goes between the King and the Prince, wished to be advised of the arrival of their delegates in London. I know two of them Scully and Ryan, very honest and honourable men. I suppose their petition will be put off for the present.39

Drennan’s prediction here was correct and two years later, in 1807, the Catholics agreed yet another petition which no party was willing to present to Parliament on their behalf. Drennan advised them to appeal to ‘that power above King, above Lords and Commons – that is – public opinion’.40 They accepted his advice and he drafted a long address for them, which he hoped they would use as an ‘open and manly appeal to their fellow subjects of Great Britain and Ireland’.41

For as long as the Belfast Monthly Magazine lasted, Drennan advocated Catholic emancipation. In 1809, he was still vigorously condemning the oppression of Catholics. ‘In every country in Europe [the Irish Catholic] was caressed and encouraged. To every country but his own, were his talents acceptable. In the career of science or of military honours, he met with no obstacle but at home. There he was an alien indeed: there he was treated as an enemy to God and to his king.’42

Ian McBride tells us that in 1813, when the emancipationists secured their first majority in the House of Commons, ‘support for the Catholic cause in Belfast was directed by the Friends of Civil and Religious Liberty with William Drennan and Robert Tennant (1765–1837), at their head’.43 In 1819, a year before his death, Drennan wrote a highly complimentary letter to Daniel O’Connell (1775–1847), predicting that O’Connell’s ‘manly spirit, his openness and candour, and his moral integrity, would ensure that his objective [Catholic Emancipation] would be obtained and his name be recorded in history’.44

McNally the informer, in his comprehensive report on the Catholic Committee told his masters in the Castle that Drennan hated his Catholic allies. Whether or not Drennan ever used the term hate, we know that, at least for a time, he was unsure of and harboured suspicions and resentments regarding Keogh, McCormack and their committee. These may or may not have been justified. His ‘pigs and papist’45 remarks in 1786 are unconscionable and can never be justified, particularly in one who claimed to be an enemy of religious sectarianism. In mitigation, however, his comments were made in private correspondence and were not a public statement of his position. They were made in the context of a politically engaged writer who felt isolated and stuck in a backwater who, after having enjoyed acclaim and admiration, was now deeply affected by ennui and conscious of his political irrelevance.

When looking at Drennan’s political career in the round, however, the consensus which has emerged amongst modern historians that Drennan was an anti-Catholic bigot cannot be sustained. Had any of his contemporaries accused him of such he would, no doubt, have described the accusation as ‘a cruel and ignoble calumny’.46 In early 1798, when musing on his mortality and on the arrangements, he would like to be made for his funeral, Drennan wrote to Martha, ‘Let me be buried in any of the country churchyards adjoining this city [Dublin], and let six poor Protestants and six poor Catholics get a guinea piece for carriage of me, and a [Catholic] priest and a dissenting clergyman attend with any other friends that choose.’47

In fact, many years later, when he was interred in Belfast, he was carried to his grave by six Protestant and six Catholics as he had wished.48 Those who have branded him ‘the Wretched Drennan’ and as an anti-Catholic bigot must consider his funeral request to be very peculiar.