You bid me send my name to be inserted in the Club. My name is William Drennan. But don’t think I will put myself to the expense of a suit for such a purpose if that be a sine qua non. For my part I am more eager than ever in the reform business ... I can’t find men that would form a serious Association – a sacred compact about the matter. I would sign such a Confederation of Compatriots with my blood.2
The establishment of the Whig Club in Dublin was followed by another in Belfast and though many of Drennan’s friends became active in both, he stayed aloof, though he did continue to attend Volunteer reviews in Belfast over the next few years. However, his time in Newry, though eventually lucrative in terms of his medical fees, passed in political inactivity and tedium. The local MP, Isaac Corry, offered to make use of Drennan’s writing talents and Martha encouraged him to accept the offer. After considering the matter, ‘his obstinate republican honesty won the day’ and he refused the proposal.3 He admitted to Bruce that he missed the admiration that came from well-received political commentary. ‘Praise to me is everything but a place like this is as cold as a cucumber.’4 He was candid about his misery and dejection. ‘I lead in this place a very insignificant and I had almost said a disgraceful life – I read little or none – I wish nothing – I correspond with none – I hear nothing but the babble of the day. I haunt after company to deliver me from an ennui and a brooding over maladies some imaginary and others real.’5
Drennan’s sense of isolation seems to have increased when Martha was overcome by depression and lost her zest for writing. Only one letter from her to William survives from 1786. His correspondence with William Bruce also seems to have slackened, as he had little to report from Newry. He seemed desperate for political news from elsewhere. On two occasions, he began his pleas to Bruce for interesting news by saying, ‘there is nothing stirring here [in Newry] but pigs and papists’.6 To put it at its mildest, this was an unfortunate phrase from a man who only a short time previously had called on his fellow Irishman ‘to embrace each other in the mild spirit of Christianity and to unite as a secret compact in the cause of your sinking country’.7
Twentieth-century historians have used this statement as a foundation on which to construct a case against Drennan, that he was a bigot with an obsessive dislike and mistrust of Catholics, which was ‘based on petty or superficial motives’.8 One of Drennan’s main accusers in this regard was L.M. Cullen, who described Drennan as a bigoted anti-Catholic individual and branded him ‘the Wretched Drennan’.9 We will proceed to examine the case against Drennan and assess whether he is guilty as charged. In order to give a fair account of Drennan’s attitudes, we require a review of his entire career including his time as a member of the United Irish society and beyond.
A decade after Drennan’s ‘pigs and papists’ remarks,10 further evidence of Drennan’s alleged anti-Catholic bigotry emerged. The informer Leonard McNally wrote a detailed report to Dublin Castle dated September 1796. McNally states that the Catholics were becoming more extreme in their demands and were forming committees to negotiate with the French in the event of an invasion. McNally identified John Keogh (1740–1817) and Richard McCormick (d. 1827) as leaders of the Catholics. In the last line of his report, McNally states, ‘Drennan declares his hatred of the Catholics charging them with duplicity and ingratitude.’11
Drennan and the United Irish Society had, from the beginning, supported political rights for Roman Catholics. However, as we have noted, back in 1785, while Drennan was prepared to support Catholic claims in debate, in writing he was denying that they even had such claims. Drennan’s comment in Orellana stated:
the Catholics of this day are absolutely INCAPABLE of making a good use of political liberty, or what is the same thing political power. I speak of the sentiments of the most enlightened amongst them … are too wise to wish for a complete extension of the civil franchise … it must require the process of time to enlarge their minds and ameliorate their hearts.12
Later, when Drennan’s fellow United Irishmen were prepared to demand a complete extension of the franchise to all males, including the lower orders of Catholics, he insisted that a national education system was an essential element that must accompany the measure.13 He felt that the lower ranks of the different religious persuasions ‘have strong antipathies’ and he felt that ‘the middle ranking members of each sect can instil into the mind of those beneath them the milk of human nature’. He seemed to believe, in 1785, that the Catholic middle class were too few to do this.14
Drennan’s assertion of the incapability of Catholics to make good use of political liberty was greatly resented by Catholics at the time and was remembered for a long time afterwards. Eight years later, in January 1793, when Martha suggested that Drennan should republish the Helot, he told her:
There is one letter asserting the incapability of the Catholics of Ireland for political liberty or power which was infused in my ear by H. Joy as I well remember and as I could testify from his letters. This displeased many of the Catholics at the time and you may recollect … W. Jones who has indeed been their oldest and most consistent friend, taking me up on this very account in the Belfast paper under the title Zealot. I am apt to believe that the Catholics still owe me a grudge for this and think that my late conversion since I came to Dublin has been brought about by views of interest rather than upon principle, and this with an instinctive horror of republicanism which inspires them, has occasioned rather a dryness and want of confidence respecting me.15
The opinions expressed by Drennan regarding the superior enlightenment of Presbyterians over Catholics and hence, the incapability of the Catholics to use political liberty, was probably shared by many Presbyterians at the time. It was most certainly the view of William Bruce, to whom Drennan had made his ‘pigs and papists’16 comments. Bruce never wavered in this opinion and it is not clear what changed Drennan’s mind. It might have been the French Revolution which showed Catholics to be capable of making a revolution. It may also have been the argument put forward by Wolfe Tone (1763–1798)17 in his Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland when he addressed the idea that Catholics are not prepared for liberty. He asked ‘Were the Polish? Were the French? Peasantries were the same the world over, but the French Catholic gentry are as enlightened as any gentry. Catholic emancipation is not a disease we prepare for by inoculation. Liberty is the vital principle of man: he that is prepared to live is prepared for freedom.’18
Whatever the reason, from the formation of the United Irish Society until the end of his life, Drennan was a passionate advocate of Catholic political rights. However, at the time McNally was reporting, Drennan was far from pleased with his Catholic allies. When ‘a Catholic of some consequence’ asked Drennan to join one of the new committees he refused.19 He had been trying to live on his modest professional income which he believed had suffered because of his very public attachment to the Catholics’ cause. Martha had told him that because of his trial he had lost his expected inheritance from the Hamilton family of Mount Collier and that ‘from that moment Hamilton had never called on one of us’.20 He also felt that his political enemies were trying to ruin him professionally.21 In all the years Drennan had worked in Dublin, he ‘had not received one guinea in professional income as a doctor from any of the Catholic persuasion’.22 He was struggling to make a living and was very resentful that the Catholics, whose political cause he believed had cost him much, had not used his services.
His resentment or ‘hatred’ could not have extended to the entire Catholic community but rather to the well-to-do Catholics of the Catholic Committee who could have afforded his services but chose not to employ him. The unidentified ‘Catholic of consequence’ was surprised, as he had believed that as Drennan lived in expensive lodgings, he was ‘a man of few wants’, yet ‘he affected concern and gave hope of better times’.23 Those better times never came.24 Nonetheless, when the Catholic leader, Richard McCormick, absconded to avoid arrest in March 1798, Drennan described him as