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