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INTRODUCTION: BRAZEN WALLS OF SEPARATION

This is an account of the life of William Drennan (1754–1820) physician, poet and political radical. Drennan was a founding member of the Dublin Society of United Irishmen in 1791. The new Society lamented ‘the brazen walls of separation’ which had been erected amongst the inhabitants of Ireland by distinctions of rank, property and religious persuasion.1 Drennan composed the Society’s test which had as its purpose ‘the forwarding of a brotherhood of affection, a communion of rights and a union of power amongst Irishmen of every religious persuasion’.2 Many of the Society’s addresses were drafted by Drennan and he was a prolific writer of prose, poetry and pamphlets. He was by far the most active and able literary propagandist with no equal in the Dublin United Irish Society.

Drennan began his writing career in 1780 with an open letter to Edmund Burke (1729–1797) condemning the Irish-born English politician for his hostile reaction to the trade concessions Lord North’s government had made to Ireland. Time and again for the rest of his career Drennan used the device of an open letter to prominent public figures as a way of getting attention for his radical ideas and enhancing his literary reputation.

He established himself as a leading writer in the radical cause with the publication, in 1784, of his Letters of Orellana: An Irish Helot, in which he attempted, with limited success, to breed new life into the flagging Volunteer reform campaign. His letters from this period to his friend Reverend William Bruce tell us a great deal about Drennan’s zeal for Volunteering. He expressed his contempt for the aristocratic leadership of those such as Lord Charlemont and the Whig opposition in the Irish House of Commons whom Drennan did not consider sincere about reform.

Drennan maintained a regular correspondence with his sister Martha McTier (1742–1837) from 1776 to 1819. Brother and sister were accomplished writers and their letters contain fascinating details, insight, observations and commentary on their lives. William Drennan and Martha McTier lived in interesting times and took a keen interest in public affairs and the politics of Ireland, Britain, France and America. They were enthusiastic supporters of the American and French Revolutions. Drennan rejoiced when the Americans defeated the British at Saratoga in 1777 and Martha sang ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’ when the Duke of Brunswick was defeated at Valmy in 1792. Even before the King of France was executed, Drennan believed that the Revolution ‘ought to be cemented and consolidated with his blood’.3

As the foremost propagandist of the United Irish Society, Drennan was an influential figure in Dublin and, through his correspondence with Martha’s husband Sam McTier, he had a profound influence on the policy and strategy of the Belfast United Irishmen.

Although Drennan advocated a brotherhood of affection involving all religious persuasions, a consensus persists amongst historians that he was an anti-Catholic bigot with an obsessive dislike and mistrust of Catholics ‘based on petty or superficial motives’.4 The validity or otherwise of charges of bigotry are carefully examined in this book in the light of the available evidence.

Drennan’s friend Archibald Hamilton Rowan escaped from Newgate prison in 1794 after becoming entrapped in a treasonable conspiracy with Reverend William Jackson, an agent of revolutionary France. Drennan denied all knowledge of the affair. Yet he had read the document which Rowan had passed to Jackson and he also had accurate information about how Rowan had managed to escape from the prison and the country. A few weeks later, Drennan was acquitted on charges of seditious libel. We are told that after the experience of his arrest and trial, ‘he was considerably chastened and from that point on gradually withdrew from the United Irish movement’.5 It is also said that he had developed a distaste for the more extreme views in politics.6 In fact, after his trial, Drennan continued to produce literary propaganda including writing and publishing an open letter to the Earl of Fitzwilliam. With a prudence dictated by the climate of oppression, some of his work appeared anonymously. Some of the most seditious material to appear in the Press, the United Irish newspaper suppressed in early 1798, was written under the pseudonym Marcus. This book will present significant evidence to suggest that Drennan was Marcus.

In the spring of 1798, when ‘most of Drennan’s friends were in prison, he compared himself to a solitary ninepin when all around him had fallen’.7 He did not condemn those of his associates who had absconded to avoid arrest but he assured Martha ‘I am still at my post and here I shall remain.’8 Although informers were accusing him of working with people who had been arrested or fled to avoid arrest, the authorities did not molest him in any way in the run-up to or the aftermath of the 1798 Rebellion.

By early January 1799, Drennan was hurriedly composing an open letter to William Pitt opposing his proposals for the union of Great Britain and Ireland. The letter appeared in print on 24 January 1799 and sold 300 copies in the first morning.9 Later that year, Drennan set about making his own union with England when he travelled to Wem in Shropshire to renew his engagement to Sarah Swanwick. Sarah was from a Unitarian family and ‘liberal in her mind and of a democratical turn in politics’.10 The couple were married in Dublin in February 1800 and set up home in Marlborough Street.

Drennan had been close to the Emmet family but was very much surprised when Robert Emmet’s Rebellion broke out in Dublin in July 1803. Much to Martha’s distress, her dear friend Thomas Russell was executed for his part in the Rebellion. Drennan wrote two epigrams relating to Emmet’s Rebellion. The first was aimed at William Plunket, the prosecutor who had gratuitously and needlessly insulted Emmet at his trial. The second was aimed at Dr James McDonald who had offered a reward for the capture of Thomas Russell who had been his close friend.

Drennan had always held ‘the vain-glorious and venal’ Edmund Burke in utter contempt. He denounced him as the ‘trumpeter’ for the totally unnecessary and long-drawn-out war between France and England.11 He was convinced that Burke was doing his utmost to prevent the alliance the United Irish Society sought of ‘three million discontented Catholics and a half a million disaffected Presbyterian republicans’. When Drennan read Burke’s pamphlet Letter to a Noble Lord he thought Burke had joined ‘insanity with the wiliness of a crafty politician’ and that he was ‘as coarse and vulgar as one of Robespierre’s hirelings’.12

The Unitarian religious tradition which Drennan had inherited from his father was important to him. When defending himself against charges of sedition, Drennan asserted that he ‘gloried to be a Protestant Dissenter and to the best of fathers and the best of religions he was indebted for his veneration of the rights of mankind’.13

Although his father had been a clergyman and Drennan considered himself ‘rigid rather than loose’ in the Unitarian persuasion, he had little time for clergymen in general.14 He once observed that ‘the priesthood in all ages had been the curse of Christianity’. In this he included those Unitarian clergymen with whom he was on friendly terms. He described the Regium Donum as a slow poison injected into the Protestant Dissenting churches and that ministers had become ‘nothing more or less than the pensioners of government’.15 In the aftermath of the Rebellion, Lord Castlereagh introduced a new Regium Donum scheme to create ‘a considerable internal fermentation perhaps even a schism to change the temper’ of the Presbyterian Synod.16 His objective was to weaken what he deemed to be the democratic party within the Synod whom he believed were deeply infected with the principles of the Rebellion. Castlereagh had two allies in the Synod, Reverend Robert Black of Derry and Reverend William Bruce. Drennan denounced what he described as this ‘pensionary establishment’ and Castlereagh’s scheme as an attempt to create a Presbyterian hierarchy.17

When William Pitt died in 1806, Drennan hoped that the new regime might lead to an improved climate in politics. Charles J. Fox, the leader of the Whigs, had joined ‘The Ministry of all the Talents’18 and Drennan wrote him an open letter. He expressed the hope that the race of informers would perish in infamy and famine, that the prison doors would be unbarred and the United Irish prisoners be released and that the unfortunate rebel emigrants would be pardoned and allowed to return. He also looked forward to a free press and Catholic emancipation. Even as he wrote, he knew that Fox was dying and that all his hopes were unlikely to be realised.

In 1807, Drennan became financially independent following the death of a relative who bequeathed him a substantial legacy.19 Within a few weeks, he returned to Belfast where he lived henceforth in moderate affluence. He was unburdened at last of the drudgery of his less than lucrative medical duties. He was now free to do what he most enjoyed and he founded a literary magazine, the Belfast Monthly Magazine. Through the six years of the magazine’s existence, Drennan wrote consistently in favour of the reform of Parliament, Catholic emancipation, against the war with France, in favour of freedom of the press and abolition of the slave trade. These issues had all been part of Drennan’s agenda as a United Irishman but now he pursued them in the context of the Union parliament at Westminster.

Drennan denounced the Union between England and Ireland in print. He thought the corrupt way it had been effected to be most disgraceful. Yet, by 1810, Drennan had a more positive view of the Union and accepted that it ‘had a tendency to ally party feuds and relieve us from the rough riding of some of our Irish unprincipled jockeys’.20 Gerald R. Hall tells us that now ‘Drennan believed that any agitation for repeal was misguided and that reformers in England and Ireland should join forces.’21

Shortly after his return to Belfast, Drennan became involved in what was to prove the most successful and enduring of his public projects, the founding of the Belfast Academical Institution. It would be another battleground where he had to fight Castlereagh, Black and Bruce for the soul of Irish Presbyterianism. The school, which became known colloquially as the ‘Inst’, was an ‘astonishingly ambitious’ project and was the ‘first university established in the British Isles since Trinity College Dublin at the end of the sixteenth century’.22 The Inst was founded and, to some extent, run by former United Irishmen and their sympathisers.

Some of those most closely associated with the school held a dinner on Saint Patrick’s Eve 1816 where, after the speeches, many unashamedly radical toasts were raised including one to the United Irishmen who had escaped to America in ’98. Castlereagh saw this as an opportunity to wrest control of the Inst from Drennan and his friends but he overplayed his hand and did not succeed.

Drennan became terminally ill in late 1819 and died in February 1820. The letters written in the last active year of his life show us clearly that Drennan’s radical principles which inspired his great zeal in Volunteering and his enthusiasm for the United Irish Society and its principles remained with him to the very end.