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him ‘the Wretched Drennan’ and as an anti-Catholic bigot must consider his funeral request to be very peculiar.

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

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