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
2
NON-SUBSCRIBING PRESBYTERIAN
The meeting house at First Presbyterian Rosemary Lane, Belfast, Drennan’s birthplace, was the very cradle of non-subscribing Presbyterianism. In 1720, at the installation of the Reverend Samuel Haliday (1685–1739), the new minister refused to subscribe to the Westminster Confession of Faith leading to what has been described as the first subscription crisis. Haliday was supported in his stance by other ministers and congregation elders including Reverend Thomas Drennan, Reverend John Abernethy, Reverend James Duchal, Francis Hutcheson and William Bruce, all of whom Drennan was to mention in his proposed defence when he stood trial accused of sedition in 1794.
Abernethy had founded his Belfast Society in 1703 of which A.T.Q. Stewart had this to say:
Orthodox Presbyterian historians have little good to say about it. While reluctantly recognizing the intellectual abilities of its members, they have deplored their ecclesiastical indiscipline and accused them of opening the door to Schism and heresy. Undoubtedly it created the nucleus of ministers who would come to be called ‘New Light’ and through them it precipitated the great storm over doctrine which would soon break over the Synod.1
It is perhaps of some significance that Haliday’s ‘unusual early career had taken him well outside the bounds of provincial Presbyterianism, and he studied theology at the university of Leyden in the Netherlands’.2 He was licensed at Rotterdam in 1706 and subsequently ordained at Geneva.3 Haliday’s stance at Rosemary Lane was not just another local schism over obscure points of doctrine to which all shades of Ulster Presbyterianism are so prone. Though the controversy had been in gestation in Ireland from nearly twenty years earlier, the issue at stake had been fought over in England in the previous decade from the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The conflict had, in a sense, been imported into England from the Netherlands and had been promoted by two philosophers both of whom had spent time in the Netherlands. The towering figure in the controversy was the philosopher John Locke whom William Drennan often claimed as the inspiration for his political ideas. The other philosopher involved was the flamboyant, irreverent and enigmatic young Irishman John Toland (1670–1722).
Locke had been in exile in Holland in the wake of the Rye House Plot of 1683 which was an attempt to overthrow Charles II and assassinate his brother, the avowed Roman Catholic James Duke of York. Holland was a staunchly Protestant State but probably the only place in Europe where the different sects were free to worship as they pleased and propagate their opinions. Locke’s time there was a period of great intellectual upheaval. Christopher Walker has described what was happening. Essentially, hard-line Calvinism was crumbling as post Calvinists began abandoning the severity and intolerance of the Genevan master and discovering different types of Protestantism in the more humane, tolerant and rational versions of Arminianism and Socinianism.4
The heresy that Reverends Haliday, Abernethy, Drennan and their friends were suspected of was Socinianism. To understand the world view of the