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