In the aftermath of the 1798 Rebellion, Lord Castlereagh created a new Regium Donum scheme with three objectives. Firstly, he wished to reward, those who had committed themselves in support of the State against what he regarded as the democratic party within the Synod. He believed that many of those he deemed the democratic party ‘if not involved in the rebellion were deeply infected with its principles’.15 Secondly, he wished to create ‘a considerable internal fermentation perhaps even a schism to change the temper of the Synod’. Finally, he wanted to buy and consolidate support for the Union amongst the Presbyterian clergy.16
Castlereagh believed that making ‘the Presbyterian clergy less dependent on their congregations for their subsistence would make them better subjects than they have of late years proven themselves’.17 His scheme involved different amounts being paid to differing classes of minsters depending on seniority or the size of their congregations. Drennan and some of the Presbyterian elders and clergy saw this as an attempt to create a dissenting hierarchy.18 Martha agreed with her brother and she denounced the ministers who accepted the bounty as:
Fallen – fallen men – Yes they had a station, a high one for which it was necessary for government to overset them and a hundred a year has done it, without one honest soul daring to spurn the bribe. Neither they nor their families will be half so respectable nor do better than those of their cloth who, not having the third of the sum, could refuse assistance from the contentment produced by £50 at interest. All vanity, all desire of a good name, or the praise attending a disinterested action seems fled. How proudly I would have been the one to refuse this bounty.19
Castlereagh’s allies in the Synod, Reverend Black and Reverend William Bruce, were non-subscribers from the same New Light tradition as Drennan. Both had been active in the Volunteers but both had opposed the United Irish society from the outset. Bruce and Drennan had been close friends but their friendship cooled somewhat, though it was not irrevocably fractured, over Bruce’s denunciation of Drennan’s United Irish test. When Drennan became aware of Black’s and Bruce’s contacts with Castlereagh, he described Bruce as a presbyter bishop and said that Bruce and Castlereagh were ‘walking hand in hand in a new alliance of church and state’.20 He again invoked the names of the great stalwarts of non-subscription of an earlier generation:
Is all this possible? And can the dissenters repair to their meeting house after such a business is completed … Is it possible that any lay dissenter who preserves or is preserved in the salt of his sect can set his foot into a house corrupted with such a pensionary establishment? What would Abernethy, Duchal and Hutcheson have thought of their descendants? But it is a link in the chain of events which is tending to the abolition of such an order of men in the world. Infected, corrupted, papisticated, mankind will grow disgusted with their selfishness and hypocrisy, as they have already done on the continent, and the tyranny of the priesthood will no longer usurp the throne of God or stand between man and his maker.21
Martha heard reports that the laity and elders of the Synod were opposed to accepting Castlereagh’s new scheme and had managed to get it rejected at the Synod. She urged her brother to write a pamphlet to rouse the Presbyterian laity ‘into some sense of justice and honor’ that they might make better provision for their ‘ill-rewarded pastors’. Martha felt that some congregations had treated their ministers so poorly that some poor ministers felt compelled to accept Castlereagh’s scheme. If the people did not reform the manner in which they treated their clergy, ‘the dissenters would soon cease to be the respected and feared body, they had hitherto been’. She asked her brother to consider ‘what pen would have a better chance of effecting this worthy purpose than Drennan’s the acknowledged son of a preacher not yet forgot’.22
Drennan was not inclined to write on this subject because he felt ‘that that order of men [the clergy]’ were ‘losing all hold of the people’ and he therefore thought it ‘improbable that their stipends would be raised by the people’. The Regium Donum would ‘accelerate the beginning schism between laity and clergy’. He thought it probable that most lay dissenters would soon become Deists or Methodists and he imagined that Paine’s Age of Reason had ‘increased indifference to Christian instruction, and the neglect of Christian pastors’. There appeared to be an affinity between democratic and deistical doctrines but Drennan saw no solid foundation for this in reason. ‘The life and doctrines of the unlettered prophet Christ are of a nature that I think would perfectly assimilate with the equality and fraternity of real republicans.’23
Drennan asserted that the priesthood in all ages was the curse of Christianity. There would be no virtue or happiness in the world until the priesthood was abolished. He believed he was living in an era where that order of men were losing influence. He had read Paine’s Age of Reason and he accepted that Christian miracle stories had been invented to chill the ignorant and stupid into belief. Yet William Drennan remained a Protestant Dissenter and regarded himself as a Christian. However, his regular attendance at public worship did not protect him from charges of being a Deist or an infidel for, as he once told his sister, ‘take notice an Unitarian and a Deist here [in Dublin] ranks as the selfsame character and if you deny the Trinity, you will be set down to deny there is a God’.24
Reverend Thomas Drennan had a significant lifelong influence over his son’s religious principles. There is no earthly authority in religious matters and no man should suffer penalties for his religious opinions. These guiding principles led to William Drennan’s activities within the United Irish movement. Drennan regarded the Regium Donum as an attempt by the State to wield influence and authority where it should have none.
4
THE VOLUNTEERS
In February 1778, as Drennan prepared for his graduation, he heard the news that France had recognised American independence and agreed to join the war against the British. Ireland and Britain were swept by fear of a French invasion. Drennan had mixed feelings about the unfolding events. He was delighted that Benjamin Franklin had been well received by the French and that, ‘Persecuted Liberty has sought for and found refuge in the French and Spanish courts.’1 Although he continued to support the Americans, ‘he detested the Bourbon regimes of France and Spain’.2 Determined to fight in the event of a French or Spanish invasion, he joined the militia. Along with six other Irish lads, he received training in musketry from the Sargent at Edinburgh castle.
He planned to return to Ireland after his graduation. When he heard that an Irish militia was forming there, he expressed a wish to have some rank in it. He was misinformed about the militia. The Irish administration could not afford to raise and equip a militia at this point.3 Many of the regular troops who garrisoned Ireland had been sent off to fight the war in America. In response to the threat of invasion in many places around the country, independent companies of Volunteers were established. Ulster and Belfast took to volunteering with enthusiasm. In Belfast, on Saint Patrick’s Day 1778, a corps was established which became known as the Blue Company because of the colour of their regimentals. The Blue Company publicly declared its refusal to accept commissions or pay under the Crown or to take any military oath.4
By April, 15,000 men had joined up nationally but as invasion fears heightened, the number of recruits rose exponentially and by mid-1780, some 60,000 had enrolled almost half of them in Ulster.5 Sam McTier, Martha’s husband, was elected as a commander in the Blue Company which Martha told her brother was ‘very inconvenient because an expensive honour’.6
In August, Drennan took his degree and returned to Belfast. He immediately joined the Blue Company and from there began his keen interest in Volunteer politics.7 Because his correspondence with his sister ceases at this point, we do not know much about his professional life in Belfast over the next four years. It appears that he found it difficult to establish a practice as the town was already well supplied with physicians. He had a significant involvement with a public health campaign in cooperation with the infirmary run by