The Other View

1798: Ulster Presbyterians and All That

By Gordon Lucy

"The defection of the Presbyterians from the movement of which they were the main originators, and the great and enduring change which took place in their sentiments", wrote the famous historian of the eighteenth-century Ireland, W.E.H. Lecky, "are facts of the deepest importance in Irish history and deserve very careful and detailed examination".

That Ulster Presbyterians were the main originators of the Society of United Irishmen cannot be denied. William Drennan, a Belfast Presbyterian doctor and poet of radical views, first suggested the idea of such a society as early as 1785. Drennan is usually credited with being the first person to call Ireland ‘the emerald isle’.

Drennan, like so many of the United Irishmen was a son of the manse. His father had been the friend and assistant of Francis Hutcheson, the Ulster Presbyterian philosopher who held the chair of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow and may be regarded as the Father of the Scottish Enlightenment.

It was in 1791, prompted by the second anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, that Drennan revived his idea and the society was formed in Belfast in October of that year. Wolfe Tone was present at the meeting at which the society was formed, but only as a visitor and guest. Contrary to popular opinion, the lapsed Anglican was not a prime mover.

Samuel McTier, Drennan’s brother-in-law, was the first chairman of the society. Robert Simms was the society’s first secretary. A second society was set up in Dublin the following month.

January 1792 saw the publication of the first issue of the Northern Star, the organ of the Belfast Society of United Irishmen. McTier, Simms and Neilson were all Presbyterians.

The principle aim of the Society of United Irishmen was the reform of the Irish Parliament, a point illustrated by the United Irish test:

Many mistakenly regard the following formation espousing republican separatism as the classic and definitive statement of the aims of the United Irishmen:

The truth is that this formulation produced by Wolfe Tone in 1795, was not even an accurate statement of his own views. He had not always subscribed to the view that England was ‘the never-failing source of all our political evils’. Two years previously he had publicly disavowed republican separatism.

While some United Irishmen did embrace separatism, most probably did not. Drennan regarded himself as a republican but appreciated that many of his colleagues did not share his enthusiasm. Drennan had a very full appreciation that innumerable ties linked Ireland and Great Britain. Among these were ‘the sociality of manner, language and law’. He also believed any conflict between Great Britain and Ireland would be a civil war.

It is, however, appropriate to regard the doctrine of the union of all dominations as being central to United Irish ideals. Nevertheless, many United Irishmen viewed Roman Catholics and Roman Catholicism with distrust, contempt and ridicule. Tone frivolously observed that:

When the Pope was dethroned and exiled from Rome in 1798 Tone prematurely hailed the event as marking the emancipation of mankind from the yoke of religious and political superstition.

A suspicion that Roman Catholics might prove to be most unreliable allies pervades William Drennan’s correspondence. He feared that the Roman Catholics had ‘two strings to their bow’. They could make common cause with the United Irishmen in order to extract concessions from the government and they could also do business with the government directly. Thus, in Drennan’s estimation, the Roman Catholics had the best of both worlds. While Drennan was perfectly willing to concede that this was ‘good, and perhaps archery’, he feared that the Presbyterian United Irishmen could well find themselves abandoned by their putative allies. Drennan’s fears, arguably, were ultimately realised.

In Ulster the Presbyterians provided the leadership. Presbyterian tenant farmers and labourers provided the movement’s rank and file.

The rebellion, or ‘Turn Oot’ in Ulster Scots, in Ulster occurred in the Presbyterian heartland of Antrim and Down. More than a score of Presbyterian clergy were directly implicated in the rising, and of these four were executed and the rest banished to France and America.

This is not to suggest that all Presbyterians supported the United Irishmen. Many did not. For example, the Rev William Bruce, the man whom Drennan first outlined his ideas for a political society in 1785 was not a United Irishman in 1798. The minister of the First (New Light) Congregation, Belfast, and principal of the Belfast Academy was loyal to the Crown and served with the Yeomanry.

The further west one travelled in Ulster the less likely Presbyterians were to embrace the United Irishmen. Presbyterian United Irishmen were very thin on the ground, if non-existent, in Armagh, Tyrone and east Donegal.

What propelled so many Ulster Presbyterians into the United Irishmen were grievances essentially the same as those which drove thousands of their coreligionists

During the course of the eighteenth century to carve out a new future for themselves in the new world.

During the American War of Independence many Ulster Presbyterians, including William Drennan who was a medical student at Edinburgh at the time, followed closely of that conflict. This is not very surprising when one considers King George III’s Revolution as ‘a Presbyterian war’ and the observation of one of his German mercenaries who wrote:

Events in America gave radicalism tremendous fillip in Ireland, especially in Ulster, in the 1770’s and early 1780’s. Harcourt, the Lord Lieutenant, observed, ‘The Presbyterians in the north are in their hearts Americans’. The revolution in France gave radicalism a second wind in the 1790’s. William Wordworth’s initial response to the French Revolution as expressed in his famous lines – ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / but to be young was very heaven!’ – would have found a ready echo in the hearts of many Belfast Presbyterians.

Wolfe Tone in July 1791 noted that perhaps a degree of hyperbole that Tom Paine’s book celebrating the ideals of the French Revolution – the Rights of man – was ‘the Koran of Belfescu (Belfast)’.

With Some justice William Drennan described the United Irishmen as ‘a constitutional conspiracy’. Initially, the Society of the United Irishmen was an open and legitimate organisation with the aims that were perfectly constitutional. Admittedly, it was an era when the Government viewed all extra-parliamentary activity as suspect.

After the outbreak of war with revolutionary France in 1793 an understandably fearful Government clamped down on those espousing the ideals of a country with whom it was at war. That in due course the United Irishmen were to enlist French support vindicated the Government’s fears.

In January 1794 Archibald Hamilton Rowan, the proprietor of the Northern Star, was tried on a charge of distributing a seditious paper, fined £500 and sentence to two years imprisonment. In June that same year William Drennan was tried but acquitted of seditious libel.

In May 1795 the United Irishmen met secretly in Belfast and adopted a new constitution. In effect, driven underground, the Society transformed itself into a clandestine revolutionary and military organisation. Many Belfast Presbyterians stepped back. Drennan’s trial greatly dampened his revolutionary ardour. Some recoiled as a result of events in France, especially after the execution of Marie Antoinette, the September Massacres and the beginning of the Terror.

The brutal disarming of Ulster by General Lake from March 1797 onwards and the hanging of William Orr of Farranshane, a substantial County Antrim Presbyterian farmer, in October 1797, however, had precisely the opposite effect on many others. Although Orr was almost certainly guilty of administering the United Irish oath, he was found guilty as a result of witnesses who perjured themselves and a jury that was intoxicated. Orr, who proclaimed that he went to his death ‘in the faith of a true Presbyterian’, became a martyr. ‘Remember Orr!’ was a potent slogan in mobilising support for rebellion in Antrim and Down in 1798. Orr’s death was of far greater value to the United Irish movement than all its French inspired idealism and ideology.

As many as thirty thousand people, and possibly more, lost their lives during the course of the 1798 rebellion. Although normally regarded as a single event, there is much merit in regarding the 1798 as a series of very loosely connected events.

(To be continued)

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