37 Facts About William Drennan

William Drennan was an Irish physician and writer who moved the formation in Belfast and Dublin of the Society of United Irishmen.

William Drennan was born in the manse of First Presbyterian Church, Rosemary Street, Belfast, in 1754.

William Drennan was the son of Reverend Thomas Drennan and Anne Lennox.

Consistent with a popularisation of Hutcheson by his friend in Edinburgh Dugald Stewart that linked individual conscience in matters of faith with the collective right to resist oppressive government, William Drennan was later to cite John Locke's Treatises on Government as his "prime authority on politics".

William Drennan then returned to Belfast in 1778 and set up practice specialising in obstetrics.

In 1783, William Drennan moved to Newry, and in 1789 to Dublin where he quickly became involved in the patriotic and democratic politics of the capital agitated by news of the Revolution in France.

William Drennan came to national attention with the publication in 1784 and 1785 of his Letters of Orellana, an Irish Helot in the Belfast News Letter.

Employing, as William Drennan had proposed "much of the secrecy and somewhat of the ceremonial of Free-Masonry", the Society spread rapidly across the Presbyterian districts of the north, to Dublin and, in alliance with the Catholic Defenders, across the Irish midlands.

Bruce saw the test as going far beyond what the town had celebrated in the American and French revolutions: William Drennan was proposing universal suffrage.

Bruce recalled that, in his fifth Letter of Orellana, William Drennan himself had cautioned that "the Catholics of this day are absolutely incapable of making good use of political liberty".

Already in 1790, William Drennan had made it clear to Bruce that he was committed to Ireland's "total separation" from Great Britain and therefore willing to vouch for the Catholic majority.

William Drennan was being investigated for knowledge of meetings between his friend Archibald Hamilton Rowan and an agent of the French Committee of Public Safety, the Reverend William Jackson.

From his days in Edinburgh William Drennan sustained a faithful forty-year correspondence with his sister Martha McTier.

William Drennan read, sometimes in advance of her brother, most of the radical writers of her time, including Paine, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Laetitia Barbauld.

William Drennan pleaded only for a "common sense" reading of the United Irish commitment to a democratic franchise.

William Drennan's sister confessed herself "turned, quite turned, against the French," and feared that the Revolution was "all farther than ever from coming to good".

William Drennan saw Tone, Thomas Addis Emmet, and Thomas Russell, leading proponents of a union with the agrarian secret societies, the Defenders, as "entwined in Catholic trammels".

William Drennan had become a licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians in Dublin in 1790 but due, he believed, to his "dabbling in politics", he was never admitted to the Fellowship.

William Drennan wanted it to be "the business of every Irishman to cultivate the democratic spirit, which the Presbyterians first infused into them".

William Drennan believed that the right to representation should no more depend on property than upon a sacramental test.

William Drennan was taken by surprise in Dublin by Robert Emmet's aborted attempt to renew the insurrection in July 1803.

On 8 February 1800, William Drennan made "his own union With England": he married Sarah Swanwick from Shropshire.

William Drennan was, he assured his sister, a spiritual partner, from a Unitarian family, "liberal in her mind and of a democratical turn in politics".

In 1806, his financial independence, secured by an inheritance from a cousin, William Drennan gave up his faltering medical practice in Dublin and, with Sarah, moved back to Belfast.

William Drennan compared it to the French constitution which, together, they had celebrated in 1791: "so full of checks that it will not move".

William Drennan proposed that discipline would rely on "example" rather than on the "manual correction of corporal punishment".

William Drennan was doubtlessly inspired by a man he described as having dedicated his life to banishing "fear and drudgery from junior education", David Manson.

William Drennan's suspicions appeared confirmed when, in 1816, it was reported that at a St Patrick's Day dinner board members and staff had raised a succession radical toasts to Drennan for his services to the cause of Catholic Emancipation and Parliamentary reform, to the French and South American Revolutions, and to "The exiles of Erin" under "the wing of the republican eagle" in the United States.

When Drennan had first returned from Dublin in 1807, William Bruce attempted a reconciliation.

William Drennan proposed Drennan to his Belfast Literary Society, but Drennan declined.

William Drennan found the opportunity for such explanation not only in commentary, but in biographical sketches and book reviews.

Consistent with his father's teaching from the pulpit of Belfast's First Presbyterian, on religious matters William Drennan deferred to conscience rather than to doctrine, or to civil authority.

William Drennan had no sympathy at all for the Sabbatarianism that was the mark of Old Light and evangelical Protestantism: "the abolition of Sunday" he suggested, "would be a blessing".

William Drennan cautioned Catholics against replicating "the errors, the follies, and the crimes of past and present administrations, in perpetuating a distinctness, a separating instead of an associating spirit".

William Drennan proposed organising the campaign through Emancipation Clubs "where the Protestant and Catholic should sit alternatively and a Catholic and Protestant chairman [would be] elected in their turn".

William Drennan urged Irishmen to enter into a "Solemn League and Covenant [to] maintain their country".

William Drennan continued to criticise the manner of the Union's passage, its administration and its deadening effect on political life.