William Drennan (23 May 1754 – 5 February 1820) was an Irish physician and writer who moved the formation in Belfast and Dublin of the Society of United Irishmen. He was the author of the Society's original "test" which, in the cause of representative government, committed "Irishmen of every religious persuasion" to a "brotherhood of affection". Drennan had been active in the Irish Volunteer movement and achieved renown with addresses to the public as his "fellow slaves" and to the British Viceroy urging "full and final" Catholic emancipation. After the suppression of the 1798 Rebellion, he sought to advance democratic reform through his continued journalism and through education. With other United Irish veterans, Drennan founded the Belfast [later the Royal Belfast] Academical Institution. As a poet, he is remembered for his eve-of-rebellion When Erin First Rose (1795) with its reference to Ireland as the "Emerald Isle".
Enlightenment education
William Drennan (an Anglicization of the Irish clan name Ó Draighnáin) was born in the manse of First Presbyterian Church, Rosemary Street, Belfast, in 1754. He was the son of Reverend Thomas Drennan (1696-1762) and Anne Lennox (1718-1806). With his older sisters Martha (Martha McTier) and Nancy, he was one of only three of their eleven children who survived infancy.
Like his father, Drennan studied at the University of Glasgow, a centre of the Scottish Enlightenment. Through his father's mentor, the Irish moral philosopher Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), a new generation of Scottish thinkers had drawn on the republican ethos of Presbyterian resistance to royal and episcopal imposition to defend what Drennan called "the restless power of reason". 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, Drennan was later to cite John Locke's Treatises on Government as his "prime authority on politics".
After graduating with an MA from Glasgow, Drennan studied medicine in Edinburgh under the experimental chemist Joseph Black and William Cullen "the most influential physician of his generation". He then returned to Belfast in 1778 and set up practice specialising in obstetrics. As a visiting physician to the Belfast Charitable Society poor house, in 1782 he proposed smallpox variolation, the practice, then widespread, of inoculating the skin of healthy people with smallpox to prevent a more serious case of the disease. (Sixteen years later Edward Jenner advertised the much safer practice of using cowpox for this purpose, with a paper on his own inoculation experiments in England).
In 1783, 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.
Radical democrat
Volunteer and the Letters of Orellana
Sharing the sympathies of many Ulster Presbyterians (few without kindred in the colonies), Drennan greeted news of Britain's first defeat in the American War of independence (Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga in 1777) as cause to "congratulate the people of Belfast and all mankind". He joined the Volunteers. Ostensibly formed to secure Ireland against a French invasion, the Volunteer companies were soon arming and parading in support of the "inalienable rights" of Irishmen. A convergence of Volunteers upon Dublin in 1782 helped Henry Grattan secure London's recognition of Ireland's legislative independence, but failed in 1783 to secure parliamentary reform.
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. Addressed to his "fellow slaves", they were the earliest expressions of his support for political engagement with the country's Catholic majority. If the Irish parliament remained an almost exclusively an Anglican (Church of Ireland) assembly in the pocket of the Kingdom's largest landowners it was because no counterweight could be found in the absence of the great body of the nation that the English-dependant "feudality" had dispossessed.
Now was the time for patriot Churchmen and Presbyterians to display "zeal in politics and moderation in religion" and as Irishmen, "nurtured by the same maternal earth", to join with Catholics in a "sacred compact".