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SON OF THE MANSE

William Drennan was born in the manse of First Presbyterian Church, Rosemary Lane, Belfast, on 23 May 1754. He was the son of Reverend Thomas Drennan (1696–1762) and Anne Lennox (1718–1806). Thomas Drennan was a ‘New Light’ Presbyterian Minister and Anne Lennox was a co-heiress, with her elder sister, to a moderate estate in County Down.1 Little is known of Thomas Drennan.2 It appears ‘he was the clever son of a poor family, probably first generation emigrants to Ulster from Scotland’.3 He has been described as an ‘elegant scholar, a man of fine taste, overflowing benevolence and delicate sensibility’.4 His father ‘was induced by the early promise of his son’s abilities to spend on his education more than came to his share’.5 Thomas made excellent academic progress and graduated from Glasgow University in April 1717.6 He met Francis Hutcheson (1696–1746) at Glasgow and the two became firm and life-long friends. Hutcheson, who was born near Saintfield in County Down, would eventually establish himself as the greatest Irish philosopher of his own or, perhaps, any generation. He is universally acknowledged today as the Father of the Scottish Enlightenment.

At Hutcheson’s invitation, Thomas Drennan moved to Dublin circa 1720 where together they ran an academy for Protestant Dissenters in that city.7 Hutcheson’s and Drennan’s Presbyterianism had Scottish roots but the families who sent their sons to the Dublin Academy were of English descent and most were members of the Protestant Dissenting congregation based at Wood Street. Some of them had come to Dublin with Oliver Cromwell’s army in 1649 or as settlers in the wake of the Cromwellian invasion of Ireland. Despite the fact that these Cromwellians were a community of Protestants in a Protestant city, they were regarded with suspicion by the Irish government and the Established Church authorities. Like their Dissenting brethren in England, from the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, they faced legal disabilities arising from their refusal to conform to the Established Church.

In their Dublin years, Hutcheson and Thomas Drennan formed an intellectual circle under the patronage of Robert Molesworth (1656–1725), who had been a supporter of William of Orange during the Glorious Revolution and had acted as his Ambassador to Denmark. This group, which often met at Molesworth’s home in Swords, County Dublin, included Hutcheson’s cousin William Bruce, Reverend John Abernethy (1670–1740) and Reverend James Duchal (1697–1761). Bruce was an editor and book publisher by profession and was an elder at Wood Street. Abernethy was called to Wood Street as Minister in 1730 and Duchal was his successor there.

Back in 1705, Abernethy had formed a philosophical, study and reading group in Belfast, which became known as the Belfast Society. This group became notorious to orthodox Presbyterian historians for allegedly opening the door to heresy and schism.8 The Society became the nucleus of a group of ministers who became known as New Light Presbyterians. The central message of New Light sermons and theology was the right to freedom of conscience and private judgement and that religious persecution violated the natural genius of man.

Caroline Robbins in her classic work, The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman, identifies Molesworth as having begun the agitation for reform, which went further than that offered by the Bill of Rights and the Toleration Act with the appearance of his Account of Denmark in December 1693.9 Robbins suggests that there is no doubt that Hutcheson, Drennan, Abernethy and Bruce shared the politics of the Molesworth connection. She had this to say of them: this ‘New Light group preached and published sermons that were widely read, had contributed a quota of tracts and pamphlets to contemporary controversy, and handed to a second generation a patriotic spirit that included all Irishmen in its loyalties, and diffused a liberal philosophy throughout more than one city or country’.10

The New Light Presbyterians referred to themselves as Protestant Dissenters and formed the most intellectual and radical wing of the Presbyterian church.11 They described themselves as:

Created by a love of freedom, [they claimed] they have ever championed the cause that gave them birth. Whether the freedom was that of the coloured slave or the honest religious enquirer, they have fearlessly taken the side of justice, and resisted every attempt to stifle private judgement. An ardent desire to bring about the brotherhood of man has led them to generously support many charitable and benevolent movements of a non-sectarian nature.12

This New Light background has been described as of great importance to William Drennan’s intellectual development.13 The love of freedom, an end to slavery and the slave trade, the right to private judgment in religion, the pursuit of brotherhood and an end to sectarian divisions were important themes of Drennan’s life and work. When he faced one of the major crises of his life, as he stood trial on charges of writing and publishing a seditious libel in 1794, he claimed his father, with Bruce, Ducal, Hutcheson and some of their circle, as the source of his political principles.

While a member of the Molesworth circle, Francis Hutcheson wrote The Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, which established his international reputation. Thomas Drennan remained at the Dublin academy after Hutcheson moved to Glasgow to occupy the Chair of Moral Philosophy in 1730. In 1736, Drennan was appointed assistant minister to the First Presbyterian Congregation, Belfast. After he left Dublin, Thomas maintained strong ties with the ministers and elders at Wood Street. The complex theological, historical and political significance of these connections will be explored in more detail later. However, a straightforward aspect of the connection was that it led to Thomas Drennan’s marriage to Anne Lennox. Anne’s father had been a prosperous merchant in Belfast. Her mother was a descendant of the Scottish Hamilton who had persuaded James I to grant him the O’Neill’s land in North Down.14 When Anne was just twenty-three, she had occasion to travel to Dublin. As her parents were both dead, her wealthy Presbyterian relations were anxious to find a suitable chaperone for her. Thomas Drennan travelled to Dublin regularly to preach at Wood Street. What could be more suitable than the company of a forty-five-year-old clergyman, who was regarded by his friends as a confirmed bachelor? In the event, the family tradition has it that, before their carriage reached Swords, in County Dublin, the couple were engaged. They were married on 8 August 1741.15

Anne ‘brought a respectable marriage portion and, for some years, the couple appeared to live happily and in moderate affluence’.16 Thomas was not good at keeping in touch with his friends and this aspect of his character, along with his reputation as a bachelor and Anne’s relative prosperity, brought forth a somewhat mischievous letter of good wishes from Francis Hutcheson:

Dear Thom

Tho’ I have often heard the rumour of your courtship without believing it, as I never thought your Talent lay in Fortune hunting; yet as late I have had such assurances that you are actually married, as I could not question it any longer. My wife and I congratulate you most heartily and wish you all the joys of that new Relation and wish the same to Mrs Drennan, who shows a much more valuable Turn of Mind in her conduct than most young Ladies in such circumstances.17

The Drennans had eleven children, only three of whom, Martha (1742–1837), Nancy (1745–1825) and William (1754–1820) survived infancy.18 We know a great deal about Martha and William because of their regular correspondence from 1776 until 1819.19 We know almost nothing about Nancy as she was withdrawn and silent and seems to have suffered from life-long depression.20 We do know that, unlike her brother and sister, she took no interest in public or political affairs and she lived to the age of eighty.21

William was educated first by his father and later by the Reverend Mathew Garnet, a Church of Ireland vicar who ran a school at Church Lane, Belfast. Under their guidance, William became a classical scholar of some ability.22 Thomas Drennan was a kindly man.23 Young William loved his father dearly while he lived and venerated his memory after his death. Thomas Drennan died when William was just fourteen years old. A.T.Q. Stewart tells us that all through his life thereafter, William walked with the ghost of his father, whose ‘beckoning shade constantly exhorted him to a high level of virtue, public and private’.24 William himself says that in his later life, ‘in every trying situation’, he ‘was accustomed to look to this best of fathers’, who had, ‘to his last hour desired him never to forsake his political principles’.25

At the age of fifteen, just a year after the death of his father, William went to Glasgow University. He was following in the footsteps of generations of Irish Presbyterians who were debarred from Trinity College Dublin, Oxford and Cambridge on religious grounds. He arrived at Glasgow in 1769. That year, ninety-six students were admitted to the university, twenty-six of whom were Irish. It must have been a difficult time for such a young man, not long after the death of his much beloved father, to find himself away from his family in a strange city. We know little of his life as an undergraduate but he seems not to have had happy memories of his time in Glasgow. Looking back in later life, he told of how the Irish students were in ‘a humiliated and dispiriting situation’ and that they were regarded as nothing more or less than a degraded class.26 He took his MA in 1771 and moved to Edinburgh to study medicine in 1773, graduating from there as an MD in September 1778.

He does not appear to have enjoyed his early years in Edinburgh any more than he did in Glasgow. His family began preserving his correspondence from 1776, seven years after he had left Belfast. At this point, he was still homesick and declaring, that ‘never was there a person who loved Ireland and hated Scotland more than I do’.27 In one of the earliest preserved letters he told Martha:

Never, never had a man a more burning affection for relations, for friends, for country than I have and the pleasure I used to feel on the first day of my return to Ireland is sufficient reward for the pains of purgatory which I suffer here ... I cannot read two pages without thinking of Belfast. I am a continual joke of the lads here for making Belfast the eternal subject of my conversation.28

In the same letter, he mused about his capacity for empathy with his fellow man. He fondly remembered walking with his father and being gently rebuked by the older man for striking down a plant with a stick. He hoped that he had, since that time, caught some of the sympathy which his father felt so much for the fall of a flourishing vegetable.29 He clearly cherished this memory, for very many years later he wrote a poem in veneration of his father which contained these lines:

Not on an insect would he tread nor strike the stinging nettle dead

who taught at once my heart and head? My father!30

Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), although only one year older than Drennan, was one of his teachers at Edinburgh and they became firm friends. Stewart was appointed Professor of Mathematics at the age of only twenty-two. He is regarded today as one of the most important figures of the later Scottish Enlightenment. He became a renowned populariser of the work of Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith and was one of the most admired lecturers and famous Scottish teachers of his day.31

From the time of Drennan’s arrival in Edinburgh, he had breakfast or dined with Stewart frequently and his great admiration for him grew over time. Drennan’s father’s close connection to Francis Hutcheson might have helped cement their relationship and ‘it is not unlikely Stewart may have stimulated Drennan’s own interest’ in Francis Hutcheson.32 It is said that it was under the tutelage of Stewart that Drennan: ‘imbibed the classical tradition of republican theory, in its most famous English embodiment in the works of John Locke, and its contemporary reincarnation in the works of Richard Price and Joseph Priestley.’33

Stewart and Drennan’s friendship continued long after Drennan graduated from Edinburgh. Stewart was in Paris in the summer of 1789 and witnessed the storming of the Bastille. Like Drennan, Stewart became a firm supporter of the French Revolution. He was to pay a price for his unpopular opinions and was eventually virtually ostracised from Edinburgh society.34 Stewart’s reputation as a philosopher eventually undermined this hostility and today an elaborate monument on Calton Hill, Edinburgh, commemorates his contribution to the Scottish Enlightenment.

It is likely that if Drennan and Stewart discussed politics at their breakfast meetings, their focus would have been on the struggle between Britain and America. The American war was raging by this time and Drennan had the pleasure, once a week, of addressing a college literary and public speaking club, the Speculative Society, ‘venting his rancour’ in favour of the Americans. He confided in Martha, ‘poor America – how much do I fear for it – if it be conquered – let us prepare for a universal conflagration. Was not Montgomery vanquished superior to Wolfe the victor? I suppose you have seen his epitaph by order of Congress – it is very good, but he deserves better.’35

Major-General Richard Montgomery (1738–1774) had been killed while attempting to capture Quebec for the American forces on 31 December the previous year. Dublin-born Montgomery was the highest-ranking soldier to die in the American Revolution. Montgomery’s family was connected to the Wood Street/Strand Street congregation, with which Drennan’s father had been connected in the 1720s and 1730s and with which William would also be connected in his Dublin years. Richard Montgomery’s brother, Alexander, was a member of the Irish Parliament for thirty-two years from 1768 and was a supporter of the Volunteer and United Irish movements.

Drennan needed to be careful regarding his support for the American cause. He was aware that one of his fellow medical students had been denied his degree because he had dedicated his thesis to his uncle, John Zubly (1724–1781), a delegate to the American Continental Congress. By January 1778, ‘nothing was going on [in Edinburgh] but the raising of regiments to be devoted to the destruction of America’.36 Drennan observed that every order of men from the lowest to the highest are emptying their pockets in support of the war. Even the Speculative Society, of which he was a member, donated 100 guineas. Drennan absented himself from the meeting and donated nothing.

Martha recommended that William read Dr Richard Price’s Observations on Civil Liberty and the Justice and Policy of the War in America (1776). She told him that with this pamphlet in his ‘hand, or head, he could bid defiance to all the slavish [anti-American] arguments the greatest Scottish genius can oppose to you’.37 This is the same Dr Price who would be the target of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France some fifteen years later.

One Sunday, William was shocked to hear a clergyman pray against the colonists as he was sure that his clergyman father would never have behaved so:

I heard this morning a most virulent prayer to the Father of Mercies against poor America – oh how I pity such – Pray on ye men of blood – but if I ever forget thee O Jerusalem may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, may this right hand forget its cunning. Spirit, gentle spirit of my father, wouldst thou have prayed so?38

Drennan complained that in their race to display their loyalty, ‘every minister in the city have [sic] given what they could spare, to edge the sword of war’ except for Dr Dick of Greyfriars. To bolster support for the war against America, the government had ordered fast days, on which the clergy were expected to promote loyalty to the king and denounce the American rebels from the pulpit. On one such fast day, Dr Dick, ‘this worthy clergyman’, preached ‘how shall I curse whom the Lord has not cursed? How shall I judge whom the Lord had not condemned’?39 Dr Dick may have been in a minority in Edinburgh but it is likely that Drennan would have been aware that many Protestant Dissenting clergy in his native Ulster, and in many other parts of Ireland and England, used their fast-day sermons to denounce the war and support the Americans.

During the early stages of the war, both William and Martha were worried for the Americans, particularly when they heard rumours such as the defeat of Washington with a terrible slaughter on both sides.40 However, the war turned decisively in favour of the Americans, with their victory in the second battle of Saratoga in October 1777. Drennan was delighted and he told Martha, ‘I congratulate the people of Belfast and all mankind for the late victory over Burgoyne.’ He was anxious to know how the news was greeted in Belfast and believed the British defeat would have profound long-term implications for the Empire:

I am persuaded that the event of the war will turn on this great event, and it is probable that future historians will date the fall of the British Empire from the 16th October ’77 – No object can be thought of more melancholy, than a great empire that has thus outlived itself and is now degenerating into a state of political dotage, prophetical of its final dissolution. Was it for this shameful day that Sidney suffered, and that Hampden bled? Were all the glories, triumphs, conquests, spoils, this nation has acquired in the defence of liberty, thus meanly to be blasted in a traitorous attempt to destroy it.41

The statement gives us a clear indication of Drennan’s extremely radical political outlook. He invokes Sidney and Hampden, two heroes of the Real Whigs or Commonwealth tradition of the early eighteenth century. John Hampden had challenged Charles I over the introduction of ‘ship money’ and had died fighting on behalf of Parliament in the English Civil War. Algernon Sidney was a republican theorist, who was executed for treason by Charles II in 1683. Drennan invoked their names to accuse the British government of a traitorous attempt to destroy liberty. In some of his later writings, Drennan used what he called, ‘the sainted name’ of Sidney as a pseudonym.42

Within a short time of his hailing of the American victory at Saratoga, in his letter of 30 January, Drennan appended the date with the words ‘and may the tyrant tremble at the day’.43 This was the anniversary of the execution of Charles I in 1649 and had long been designated by the Anglican Church as the Feast of Charles the Martyr. At church services on the anniversary, the clergy were expected to preach loyalty to the King and to denounce rebellion as sinful. The sermons often involved reminding listeners of the role Protestant Dissenters had played in the overthrow and execution of Charles I. It was rumoured that, as Tories and Anglicans mourned their saintly king, Dissenters secretly celebrated the execution of a tyrant.

On the next government-appointed fast day in March, ‘the Scotch spent in humiliation and prayer’, Drennan and his Irish friends spent the evening ‘making many excellent toasts on the subject of politics’. He told his sister, ‘we concluded with unanimously wishing that all the tyrants in Europe had but one neck, that neck laid on the block and one of us appointed executioner’.44

Toasts in favour of tyrannicide had a long-established provenance, real and imagined, in radical circles. From the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, it was common for Tories to accuse Protestant Dissenters of being covert republicans and regicides. Tory accounts of the Calves’ Head Club, which some suggested was founded by John Milton and celebrated on 30 January by drinking wine from a calf skull, may have been a gothic horror fantasy. However, we know that Drennan’s Belfast friends held an annual celebration each year on 30 January. In 1793, at an event held in the Washington the attendance ‘was very thin’.45 This is not to be wondered at, as the event took place just as news of the execution of Louis Capet,46 just nine days earlier, had reached Belfast.

Edmund Burke had predicted the execution of Louis long before the King was placed under arrest and many commentators have put this down to his keen foresight, which amounted almost to a gift of prophecy. However, Burke would have been very familiar with the accusations of republicanism and regicide often levelled at Dissenters. Sometimes such accusations were unfair Tory propaganda. The annual celebration in Belfast suggests that accusations of support for regicide amongst Dissenters were, in some cases, true, however. Nor can we put the toast of Drennan and his friends down to drink-induced hyperbole. He was presumably sober when he reported the toast to Martha.

Drennan’s enthusiasm for the execution of tyrant kings was not just a foible of youth. Many years later, in December 1792, Drennan met his friend Isaac Corry in the street, who asked him, ‘My dear Drennan, how are you? How many kings have you killed this morning?’47 Drennan does not appear to have been surprised or put out by the question. That same month, just before Louis’ trial commenced, Drennan ventured his view on the affair to Sam McTier: ‘As for Louis it is my opinion in two words [sic], that if he not be executed there will be another massacre, and in mercy to the people, in mercy to the constitution it ought to be cemented and consolidated with his blood.’48

Many of the Irish and British radicals who had welcomed the French Revolution were appalled by the execution of the King. Others such as Wolfe Tone, regarded it as a sad necessity. William Drennan regarded the execution as not only necessary but desirable.

In his student days, Drennan did not let his regicidal revels, nor his support for America, interfere with his medical studies. However, in early 1777, he left Edinburgh temporarily due to his poor state of health. He went to Castlecor, in County Cork, to recuperate from a bout of illness and remained there for most of that year. He drank the spa waters from nearby Mallow and, weather permitting, he went horse riding as his preferred method of taking exercise. Throughout his recuperation, he continued to pore over his medical books. By the end of the year he was back at Edinburgh and applied for permission to graduate. His application was successful and he decided he would submit his thesis with a view to qualifying as a doctor in September 1778.49