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7

AMONGST THE DUBLIN DISSENTERS

In early August 1789, Irish newspapers carried accounts of the momentous events in France, including the fall of the Bastille. Drennan had no doubt that the news from France would please his sister. However, the French Revolution was alluded to only briefly in their correspondence which, at this time, was almost completely preoccupied with Martha’s deteriorating health. She complained of ongoing problems with her stomach and bowel, an inability to sleep and a return of her old nervous problems. She pleaded with her brother to visit her. He found it difficult to get away from Newry as some of his regular patients were demanding his attention. He wrote to her Belfast doctors giving his advice on what he hoped might be suitable treatments. He was very distressed that notwithstanding his medical knowledge, he could not comfort his sister as he did not know the cause of her bodily ailments or mental distresses.1 From August of that year and for a considerable time thereafter, their correspondence remained one-sided, as Martha seems to have been unable or disinclined to answer William’s pleas for information on her condition. William, for his part, wrote regularly to Martha’s husband, Sam.

When Drennan heard that Dr Moody, who had relocated to Dublin from Newry, was seriously ill and not expected to live, he began to conceive a plan to move to Dublin. He would attempt to establish a medical practice based on Moody’s Dublin patient base, much as he had succeeded in doing in Newry. He was advised by his Dublin friends that this would be no easy task. They told him he would have many rivals in the city. The capital ‘had men of great abilities, knowledge and address, with an education at Dublin College, and city connections’.2 He replied that he knew it would be difficult for him at first but he never lacked courage and he was used to disappointments. He compared his venture into Dublin to the Prince of Orange landing at Brixham. ‘Few came over to William on his first landing, but he conquered at last.’3

Just before Christmas 1789, Drennan arrived in Dublin and his ‘die was cast’.4 He wrote his first letter from the capital to Sam McTier, knowing that he would share his news with Martha. Drennan compared himself to a plant which had been transplanted. Initially, he felt himself wither a little, then at last he felt he had taken root, grown stronger and flourished better than ever.

About the time Drennan was moving south, his friend William Bruce was moving in the opposite direction. Bruce was taking leave of the Unitarian congregation at Strand Street, Dublin. He had been called to be headmaster at the new Belfast Academy and assistant minister to First Presbyterian Rosemary Lane, Belfast. As we have seen, Rosemary Lane was Drennan’s birthplace and the scene of his father’s first ministry. Bruce was already well known to the Belfast congregation and Sam McTier and Martha were amongst many of the members at Rosemary Lane with whom Bruce would have been well acquainted. The congregation that Bruce was leaving had moved from Wood Street to a new meeting house in Strand Street in 1763. Drennan senior had had connections to the Wood Street congregation from his time working with Francis Hutcheson at the Dublin Dissenter academy during the 1720s and in the following decade when he sometimes travelled from Belfast to preach at Wood Street. Travers Hartley (1723–1796), who was a member of Parliament for Dublin was also an elder at Strand Street. He welcomed the younger Drennan to the city with great civility, as he had known his father back in the Wood Street days.5

On his arrival in the city, Drennan affiliated to the Strand Street and Eustace Street congregations. He paid two guineas to each, perhaps in the hope of widening his circle of acquaintances and potential patients. Both congregations had strong republican associations, dating back to the Cromwellian regime of the mid-seventeenth century. The heterodox New Light Unitarian theology they espoused fostered close links, not just with Rosemary Lane but all the New Light Presbyterian congregations in Ulster. These Dublin Unitarians also had strong international links, many of which dated back from more than a century to the Laudian persecution of Protestant Dissenters in the reign of Charles I. A.T.Q. Stewart noted that ‘Some special quality attaches to the Dublin ministers setting them apart from the rest of the Presbyterian body yet connecting them to obscure Dissenting congregations in the English Fenlands, to Rotterdam, Leyden, and to Roxbury and Boston Massachusetts.’6

When Drennan dined at the home of Reverend Philip Taylor (1747–1830) of Eustace Street, he met Isaac Weld (d. 1824) and his elderly mother. She was ‘a fine old lady of eighty who remembered [Drennan senior] when he was resident in Dublin’.7 The old lady was the widow of Reverend Dr Isaac Weld (1710–1778) also of Eustace Street, whose father and grandfather had been dissenting ministers.

The founder of the Weld ministerial dynasty was the famous Puritan divine Thomas Weld (1595–1661). He had left England after having been deprived of his living by Archbishop Laud in 1631. He ministered for ten years in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and was, for a time, overseer at Harvard College. In 1641, he returned to England to support Parliament in the Civil War against the king. Thomas Weld’s son Edmund, a Harvard graduate, was chaplain to Oliver Cromwell when he was Lord Protector and accompanied him to Ireland.8 Edmund Weld’s son, Nathanial (d. 1729) ministered at New Row Dublin and was a friend of Thomas Drennan and Francis Hutcheson. He was also a friend and confidant of Isaac Newton and he named his son Isaac after the great mathematician.

It was not just the Protestant Dissenters of Dublin who welcomed Drennan to the capital. His reputation as author of Orellana served to open the doors of political radicals also. Shortly after his arrival, he dined with James Napper Tandy (1740–1803) and several other city politicians. He regarded Tandy as a prime man in the city and he had no doubt that they would be friends.9 He also dined with the old radical, the Chief State Physician, Dr Robert Emmet, at his home in Stephen’s Green. The two men discussed Henry Grattan’s lack of commitment to the reform of parliamentary representation. Drennan was pleased when, after dinner, a fine young boy of Emmet’s recited one of the Letters of Orellana for the company. Drennan enjoyed the occasion but was not to know that Robert Emmet, the precocious twelve-year-old who entertained them, would be hanged and beheaded for high treason in Dublin in September 1803.

The young boy’s talent for oratory, which he displayed that evening, stayed with him throughout his short life. When the notorious Judge John Toler sentenced him to be hanged, drawn and quartered for rebellion, after a trial lasting several hours, the then twenty-five-year-old Emmet addressed the court. With no time for preparation and no time to gather his thoughts, Robert Emmet made a speech from the dock which has long been recognised as one of the greatest trial speeches in the English language.

After the tedious and boring years of isolation in Newry, Dublin had, for Drennan, a very different and much more interesting and exciting aspect. The newspapers were full of news from Revolutionary France. Opposition papers such as the Dublin Evening Post were enthusiastic about the fall of the Bastille and the emergence of representative government in the form of the French National Assembly. Pro-government organs such as the Freeman’s Journal told of anarchy and lawlessness and the nefarious doings of French atheists.

Domestic politics were enlivened and invigorated because 1790 was a general election year. In May, Drennan had his first experience of how Dubliners relished the hustings. He described the carnival atmosphere to Sam:

I have just seen Grattan and Fitzgerald10 proceeding to the hustings at the head of more than 1,400 men, eighteen of the corporation’s bands of music playing, etc., Grattan advancing on his light fantastic toe, hope elevating and joy brightening his crest, his eyes rolling with that fine enthusiasm without which it is impossible to be a great man. Fitzgerald a fine young fellow, bending to hear what Grattan is saying – both bare headed and at time bowing popularly low – each of them holding an arm of the aged and much respected Hartley;11 while at some distance behind walks Napper Tandy in all the surliness of republicanism, grinning most ghastly smiles and as he lifts his hat from his head, the many headed monster12 raises a shout that reverberates through every corner of the Castle.13

Despite the lively spectacle, he was a little disappointed that there were no slogans calling for a Bill to amend parliamentary representation. Lecky has left us a concise account of why the Irish House of Commons was in need of such a Bill. There were in all 300 members of the Commons. One hundred and fifty-four of them were nominated by fifty-two peers. Sixty-four members were nominated by thirty-six Commoners and thirteen owed their return in great measure to thirteen families.14

The nationwide general election was genuinely contested only in the few constituencies where freeholders had the franchise. Sam McTier was again very active in County Down on behalf of the Stewart interest. Robert Stewart, since losing his seat through his own ineptitude in the election of ’82, had gone on to bigger and better things. Being a widower in 1775, he had married Frances Pratt, daughter of the Earl of Camden. The Earl was the leader of a powerful British Whig family. In eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland, such a marriage was a better and more certain route to achieving high political office than relying on elections, merit or talent. In 1786, Stewart became a Privy Councillor of Ireland. In 1789, he was raised to the Irish peerage as Baron Londonderry which entitled him to sit in the Irish House of Lords.

This meteoric rise of mediocrity was derided by establishment figures and political radicals alike. The Earl of Westmoreland said that Lord Londonderry was ‘almost the only Irishman who received His Majesty’s favour without rendering service’.15 Reverend James Porter, Unitarian minister for Greyabbey, had been a supporter and friend of the Stewarts but satirised Londonderry’s rise to the aristocracy and political apostasy. He lampooned his Lordship in a series of articles in the Northern Star, entitled ‘Billy Bluff and the Squire’. Londonderry was not amused, and Reverend Porter paid a terrible price for the offence he had given. He was hanged in front of his Meeting House and congregation in 1798.16

In the general election of 1790, Londonderry’s twenty-one-year-old son, Robert junior, stood for his father’s former House of Commons seat. He was elected with the help of Sam McTier, Reverend Boyle Moody, Reverend James Porter and many other northern radicals who would soon be active in the United Irish Society. Drennan, now in Dublin, attended the House of Commons and was greatly impressed by what he saw and heard of the new MP. Young Stewart had been canvassing for a year before the election, at a time when he was underage, and Lord Hillsborough tried but failed to have him unseated as a result. Drennan told Sam McTier:

I saw Robert Stewart once in the House and once out of it. He is certainly a most promising young man, and one of the most handsomest [sic] in the House, perhaps one day to become the most able. Lord Hillsborough has petitioned against his minority and we hear he has the best legal opinion over the water in his favour.17

Hillsborough’s petition failed but Drennan’s optimistic predictions relating to young Stewart proved prophetic. He is known to posterity as Lord Castlereagh and went on to be one of the best known and ablest British statesmen of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, his road to political success involved the imprisonment, banishment and execution of many of his former supporters.

By early 1790, encouraged by the great events unfolding in France, Drennan had become a full-blooded revolutionary and Irish separatist and he began planning for a secret political club to forward his agenda. He wrote from Dublin to Bruce in Belfast:

It is my fixed opinion that no reform of parliament and consequently no freedom will ever be attainable by this country but by a total separation from Britain and I think this belief is making its way rapidly but silently amongst both Protestants and Catholics and I think that four quarters of the Kingdom are more unanimous in that opinion than they themselves imagine.

It is for the collection of this opinion the esoteric part, and nucleus of political doctrine that such a society or interior circle, might be formed whose opinions are still halting between, who are for temporizing expedients and patience and partial reform – I think this secrecy is as yet necessary to such an institution – and that the tyrant Britain must be assassinated. Why so soon? Why not let Caesar live his natural life? It is but a few years. Because in those few years the power of resisting oppression will be lost with the will. I think revolution not justifiable in England. I think it is in Ireland and that nothing short of convulsion will throw off the incumbency of our national political and civil grievances.

I think revolutions are not to be dreaded as such terrible extremes and it is the highest probability that it would be as peaceful here as in France, as in Poland as in Ireland in ’79 provided the great and irresistible voice of the whole declares itself explicitly on the subject.

I believe a reform must lead rapidly to a separation and a separation to a reform. The Catholics in this country are much more enlightened and less under the trammels of a Priesthood as is imagined – it is improper to keep up religious controversy, when all should make common cause and it is said that you take up too much time speaking against Popery. I think the people can seldom if ever be mistaken in judgement. If the people are violent, it is because violence is necessary and all the doctrine of all the wise and guarded men in France was not half the consequence of the practical lesson of the people in storming the Bastille.18

In early 1791, things were looking up for Drennan. He found the weather in Dublin much better than Newry or Belfast. He was enjoying better health than he had before his arrival in Dublin. His weak chest and breathing had improved and the constant chest pain he had suffered previously had abated. He was making new acquaintances and his mantelpiece was covered with cards and invitations.19 He struck up a friendship with Dr Emmet’s son, Thomas Addis Emmet, who had studied medicine at Edinburgh a few years after Drennan but had recently qualified as a lawyer. Emmet was about to marry Jane Patten, the daughter of a Unitarian clergyman from Clonmel. Drennan heard a rumour to the effect that Jane Patten’s dowry was £2,000, which he doubted, possibly because the family of a minister would not usually be so prosperous. However, the source of this generous dowry was William Colville, Jane Patten’s unmarried uncle, a wealthy merchant and banker who became her guardian on the death of her father. William Colville was an elder at Strand Street for many years.

Jane Patten’s mother’s maiden name was Margaret Colville. She was of a well-known Northern Presbyterian family. Her grandfather, Reverend Alexander Colville, had been a controversial minister to a congregation at Dromore where he published pamphlets during the subscription crisis of the 1720s. Reverend Colville would have been well known to Thomas Drennan. Addis Emmet and Jane Patten were soon married at Strand Street and their children were baptised there over the next few years. Reverend John Moody officiated at the Emmet wedding ceremony and the baptisms. John Moody’s career in Strand Street lasted more than fifty years He officiated at Drennan’s wedding to Sarah Swanwick in 1801. In 1769, Reverend Moody had baptised Robert Stewart, who went on to be a member of the regime which was responsible for the imprisonment and death of his younger brother, Boyle Moody, in the aftermath of the 1798 Rebellion.

Massacre at Forkhill and Arming the Catholics

In late January 1791, at Forkhill in South Armagh, a few miles from Newry, Alexander Barclay, a Protestant school teacher, his wife and her fourteen-year-old brother were savagely attacked in the Barclays’ home by a group of local men. The three were stabbed repeatedly, their tongues were cut out, the fingers on their right hands were hacked off. The young boy’s leg was severed with a sword. It was immediately assumed that this was a sectarian attack by Catholics and the sole motive for the attack was that the victims were Protestants. Agrarian outrages involving the severing of tongues were not common in late eighteenth-century Ireland. However, it was an atrocity, when it did occur, which was sometimes visited on Catholic peasants by fellow Catholics. The victims, rather than being chosen for their religion, were usually people who were suspected of speaking to the authorities. In fact, the Barclay family were innocent victims of a gang which had originally set out to attack Barclay’s brother-in-law, Captain James Dawson of the Orior Volunteers, who was held responsible for the conviction and execution of two Defenders at the Autumn Assizes in 1790.20

No account of the brutal affair at Forkhill mentions that the attackers had firearms or that their motive was to steal arms from the Barclay family. Yet Sir Richard Musgrave had no doubt that the neighbouring papists, whom he described as ‘a savage race’, were responsible and went on to claim that they ‘had great zeal to collect arms and that a large quantity had been imported into Newry for their use’.21 Musgrave reported that the grand jury and high sheriff of Armagh at their next meeting resolved:

That the rage amongst the Roman Catholics, for illegally arming themselves, has of late taken place, and is truly alarming: In order then to put a stop to such proceedings, and to restore tranquillity, we do pledge each other, as magistrates and individuals and to hereby offer a reward of five guineas, for the conviction of each of the first twenty persons, illegally armed and assembled as aforesaid.22

For Drennan, this brutal incident was a major setback and of course, he had supported and perhaps even helped in arming the Catholics of the Newry Volunteers. He knew that Lord Charlemont and Brownlow would hold a meeting to discuss the atrocity and would ask, ‘why should we tolerate, why should we commit arms and rights to such savages as these Catholics?’ For Drennan this was not the central question; rather, he would ask ‘Why did you make them and keep them savages? For that they are such is without question. All this will put off the day of general freedom – the barbarians and Mr. Burke, and this island will be the last redeemed in all Europe.’23

It is not clear why Drennan mentions Edmund Burke in this context. Burke’s son Richard had recently been engaged by the Catholic Committee as its agent. Richard’s main advisor was, of course, his father. The elder Burke had always argued that the best way to bind Irish Catholics to the Empire was to extend toleration, including the acceptance of Catholics into the British armed forces. Burke was advocating a war against Revolutionary France and he believed that further toleration of the Catholics was unavoidable. He was pleased with the way the Irish Catholics had ‘proceeded with deference and submission to the law, notwithstanding the endeavours of neighbouring countries suggesting to them to wrest [toleration] by force and violence’.24 We cannot be sure what Burke meant by ‘neighbouring countries’ but he was already concerned that what he called the ‘French disease’ had altered the minds of the Irish Catholics that ‘they will not in future bear the lash of Tyranny and oppression’.25

The law was changed to permit the recruitment of Catholics into the army and navy. Within a matter of months after the outbreak of the war with France in 1793, twenty-two new regiments were raised in Ireland.26 By the following year, Irish Catholics made up one third of the strength of the British army. In one theatre of the war alone, the West Indies, 43,000 Irish soldiers perished between 1794 and 1801.27 Had any Irish Catholics who had not been recruited into the army, or the militia, been found in possession of arms during those years, they faced imprisonment, transportation or execution. Both Drennan and Burke agreed that Catholics should have the right to bear arms but for different reasons. Drennan believed that Catholic and Protestant Irishmen should have the right to bear arms to defend their country and their civil and religious liberties. Burke believed that Irish Catholics should have the right to bear arms to defend the British Empire.