Robert Tennent (sometimes spelled Tennant) (1765–1837) was an Irish physician, merchant and philanthropist in Belfast. Representative of a politically radical Presbyterian current in Ireland, in the years following the Acts of Union he was renowned for his confrontations with the local Tory establishment. Among the numerous civic initiatives with which he was associated, the most lasting proved to be Royal Belfast Academical Institution and what is today the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast.
Biography
'Old Light' religion, radical politics
Tennent was born 9 August 1765 in Ballymoney, County Antrim, the son of the Reverend John Tennent and Ann Patton and brother to Isabella (Tennent) Shaw, William Tennent, Anna Tennent, Margaret Tennent, John Tennent, James Tennent and Samuel Tennent. The Rev John Tennent had been one of the first Scottish Anti-Bugher Presbyterian ministers to settle in Ulster. Seceders from the established Church of Scotland, they had refused to accept a sacramental test (the Burgher Oath), affirming the religion "presently professed in this kingdom", as a condition of public office. In Ireland, where such tests secured the Anglican ("Protestant") Ascendancy their monopoly of position and influence against both Presbyterians ("Dissenters") and the kingdom's dispossessed Roman Catholic majority, such defiance had potentially radical implications.
Rev. Tennent was an early subscriber to the Northern Star, the paper of Belfast's first United Irishmen, Presbyterians frequently of a New Light latitudinarian persuasion. Robert (active in the Hibernian Bible Society) was to maintain his father's Old Light theological views, while championing the Star's patriotic and reform agenda.
During the 1790s, a decade in which the French Revolution contributed to the democratic agitation and, ultimately, insurrectionary designs of the United Irishmen, he was overseas. After medical training had gone to the West Indies (with which Belfast maintained an extensive trade) and worked as an agent for several properties in Jamaica. In 1793, he joined the Royal Navy as a surgeon. In that capacity he was, by his own account, a sympathetic witness to a naval mutiny at Table Bay, on the South African Cape, in November 1797. Just as in English waters the Nore mutiny followed the relative success of the "floating republic" at Spithead, so the mutiny of four ships of the line at Table Bay followed on the concessions won by the crews of eight warships further along Cape coast at Simon's Bay. Again as at Nore, the mutiny Tennent recorded witnessed tested the outer limits of command and were severely dealt with.
Philanthropist and reformer
In 1799, the year after the suppression of the United Irish rebellion, he returned to Belfast. His younger brother John was in exile in France enrolled in the service of Napoleon. His elder brother William was a state prisoner at Fort George, in Scotland. In his brother's absence, he looked after his business interests, becoming a partner in the New Sugar House in Waring Street. After William's release in 1802, he established himself in practice, becoming with doctors James MacDonnell, James Lawson Drummond and William Drennan (an original instigator of the United Irishmen), a pillar of the town's medical establishment.
Together with his brother, who recovered his position as Belfast's leading merchant banker, the four doctors became active as trustees, committee members and treasurers of in a variety of philanthropic societies including the Belfast Charitable Society, the Belfast Dispensary and Fever Hospital (forerunner to Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast), the Society for Promoting Knowledge (the Linen Hall Library), the Mechanics Institute and House of Industry, the Belfast Harp Society, the Belfast Historic Society, and the Belfast (from 1835, Royal Belfast) Academical Institution. At the centre of a group of former Volunteers, unrepentant United men, and veteran reformers, they saw themselves as "natural leaders" of a townspeople still at odds with the Ascendancy.
In 1808, with Drennan, the botanist John Templeton and the dissident Quaker John Hancock, Tennent began publication of the Belfast Monthly Magazine. In what it described as "the spirit of true constitutional patriotism", the journal (which was to run for 77 issues) detailed and protested rack-renting and absentee landlordism, slavery in the colonies, the continued war with France, the government's corrupting "courtship" of the Presbyterian clergy, and failure to deliver on the promise of political equality for Catholics.