Henry Munro was the rebel commander of the United Irishmen at the battle of Balinahinch. He was executed for treason in Lisburn Co Antrim on 16th June 1798.
Earlier this year Dr Ian Paisley in what I consider to be a Papal fashion excommunicated Henry Munro from the Anglican Church. He branded him a Unitarian. Gerry Adams had claimed that Munro was a Presbyterian. Dr Paisley rejected this and asserted that Munro and his fellow United Irishmen were Unitarians. Unfortunately we can lay no claim to Henry Munro. Both Adams and Dr Paisley were wrong. However Dr Paisley's central point is valid: most of the leadership of the Society of United Irishmen were Unitarians. Munro, by being an Anglican, was one of the exceptions that proved the rule.
It is generally accepted that Wolfe Tone was the founder of the United Irishmen. Unitarians know that generally accepted truths can be exposed as false when subjected to examination. Tone was an effective emissary for the United Irishmen. His high reputation today was the result of keeping a good diary and of the efforts of his wife Maltida to build her husband's posthumous reputation. Others have a better claim to be founders of the Society of United Irishmen. For instance, Samuel Neilson, William Drennan, Archibald Hamilton Rowan, Oliver Bond or Henry Jackson had more status in the organisation than Wolfe Tone. The French government regarded Arthur O'Connor as the leader of the United Irishmen. Every one of these men was Unitarian. Rev William Steele Dickson was a Non-subscribing Presbyterian. The unfortunate Henry Munroe, who was hanged, had replaced Rev Dickson as the commander of the rebels in county Down, after Rev Dickson was arrested. For the rest of this address the term , ‘Unitarian’,, ‘Non-subscribing’ and ‘New Light Presbyterian’ will be used interchangeably. While not all Non-subscribers are Unitarians all Unitarians are Non-subscribers. Even today this congregation has close links with your Non-subscribing brethren in Ulster, and two hundred years ago the links were even stronger.
Samuel Neilson, William Drennan and Oliver Bond, whom I mentioned earlier as leading figures in the movement, were all the sons of dissenting Ministers. William Drennan and Archibald Hamilton Rowan were members of this congregation which, in their day, was located at Great Strand street. I strongly suspect that Oliver Bond and his father-in-law Henry Jackson were also members of the Great Strand Street Unitarians, but I have yet to prove that. It was members of this congregation who supported Mrs.Ann Bond, Oliver's Bond's wife, who was also the daughter of Henry Jackson, after her husband was murdered in his prison cell and her father had fled the country' in 1798.
The United Irishmen was the first avowedly democratic and anti-sectarian organisation in Irish history. However religious tolerance, democratic, egalitarian and radical politics were part of this congregation long before the 1790's when the United Irishmen emerged.
This congregation was originally located in Wood Street off Bride Street and you had another ancestor congregation based at New Row off Patrick Street. Both were established in 1649 by officers of Oliver Cromwell's army when they arrived in Ireland to suppress the forces of the Roman Catholic Confederation of Kilkenny who had formed an alliance with English Royalists. The Wood Street congregation was described as an ‘English’ Presbyterian congregation, while the New Row congregation was termed ‘Independent’. The term ‘English Presbyterian’ is misleading. There was a large party of conservative Presbyterians in England at the time of the English Civil War who wanted to replace the Anglican Church as the Established church with a Presbyterian Church Establishment. They were willing to agree that Charles 1 would remain as king in exchange for the disestablishment of the Church of England and the establishment of Presbyterianism as the British State religion. The Wood Street Congregation wanted no part of this. Wood Street was opposed to any form of established church or state religion and believed that a congregation was a gathering of believers who would choose their own minister. They wanted no priest, bishop or civil magistrate to tell them what to believe. For them the State had no role interfering with a man's conscience. Shortly before the English founders of Wood Street had come to Dublin they had supported the trial and execution of Charles 1, who was seen by the army as the cause of terrible bloodshed. He was the first head of state to be executed for war crimes against his own people. A British QC has recently reevaluated the kings' trial and pronounced it fair and just. He claimed that it compared well in justice terms to the trials at Nuremburg and of Milosovic and Sadam Hussain. The Wood Street dissenters were regarded by their Anglican neighbours in Dublin as republicans, fanatics and regicides and the congregation at New Row had some Fifth Monarchist sympathies. The Fifth Monarchy, along with the Leveller, Diggers and Quakers, were amongst the more radical doctrines to emerge from the English Revolution. Fifth Monarchism originated amongst soldiers in the New Model Army who had won the war for parliament. They believed that the second coming of Christ would be preceded by an overthrow of the old political order. They believed that a thousand years of harmony, an age of virtue for mankind and the rule of the godly would begin in 1666. They believed these events were promised in Daniel and the Book of Revelations. For them the execution of Charles I was a necessary step towards the millennium. Such ideas now appear bizarre. One hundred and forty years later the great champion of reason, science and Unitarianism Joseph Priestley would interpret the American and French revolutions and the execution of Louis as the prophecies of Revelations fulfilled.
It was not so long ago that ultra secularist Karl Marx suggested that a state of pure communism and the classless harmony would follow the overthrow of the capitalist order and the rule of the supposedly incorruptible proletariat. Perhaps Marx had a touch of the Fifth Monarchy man about him.
The Wood Street and New Row congregations had come to Dublin after fighting a civil war which had turned the world up side down. They had overthrown a tyrant. They had fought for their parliament and demanded an extension of the democratic franchise. They worked closely with Levellers, Fifth Monarchists, Quakers and Baptists. All these sects made common cause in support of the English republic and opposition to monarchy. For them the State had no role in enforcing religious belief. Their outlook on religious matters was essentially tolerance of heterodox views. Individuals could hold contrary religious views and should not be persecuted for them. Political differences should be tolerated. The desire to change society for the better was regarded as a duty. To royalists, any desire to change society, or change the government, was the crime of treason punishable by death.
A hot headed assistant minister, Jeremiah Marsden, tried to preach the Fifth Monarchy at New Row in Dublin in 1666. This was not a clever thing to do in the reign of Charles 11 who had suppressed protestant dissent and was keen to have revenge on those he held responsible for executing his father. Before coming to Dublin, Marsden had been involved in the Famley Wood plot to overthrow the Restoration which led to the execution of 26 Dissenters in Yorkshire in 1663. Marsden died an unrepentant Fifth Monarchist in Newgate prison in 1680.
Many in Wood Street, New Row and the fellow Protestant dissenters were exponents of ‘The Good Old Cause'. By this was meant: no rule by one man; a constitutional republic; annual election of a parliament responsible to the people; general manhood suffrage; the right to a trial by jury; no arbitrary power; no capital punishment or imprisonment for debt; freedom of the press. The Good Old Cause also comprehended freedom of conscience in religious matters. If female suffrage and freedom of conscience for Atheists and Roman Catholics were added, then the Good Old Cause would be as relevant to democracy today as it was in the mid-seventeenth century.
John Owen (1616-1683) is said to have been our first minister. He came to Ireland as chaplain to Oliver Cromwell. He was later chancellor of Oxford University and has been described as an intellectual and a physical giant. Owen was lucky to survive the restoration and did not share the fate of Hugh Peter, Cromwell's other chaplain, who was executed by Charles II. Owen was on good terms with the leaders of the Rye House plot and Monmouth's rebellion. If he was involved with either affair he escaped detection. Hundreds of Dissenters were charged with treason and put to death in the aftermath these events. The object of the plot and rebellion was to prevent James II overturning the Protestant reformation and turning England into an absolutist monarchy.
This congregation welcomed the Glorious Revolution which brought William of Orange to the throne in 1688. For them the defeat of James II was a victory over absolutism, arbitrary power and a victory for parliament and the people’s liberties. William was offered the crown by parliament but in return was forced to grant a measure of religious toleration to most Dissenters. This did not extend to Unitarians, who were regarded as non Christian heretics because they denied the divinity of Christ.
Dr Daniel Williams a Welshman got the call to Wood Street in 1667 and stayed for twenty years. He fled Ireland in fear as did many Irish Protestants during the short reign of James II. When Dr Williams died in 1716 he left his considerable fortune for various charities and he gave £1,000 to both the New Row congregation and Wood Street to finance the preaching of the Gospel in Irish. Dr Williams had sponsored the education of John Toland (1670-1721) a native Gaelic speaker from Donegal. Toland rejected his Roman Catholicism at the age of 14. He then associated himself with the Wood Street congregation. Dr Williams sponsored Toland's education at the Universities of Glasgow, Leiden and Oxford. Toland returned to Dublin briefly in 1697, but he fled the city when his book ‘Christianity not Mysterious’ was burnt by the pubic hangman. The book argued that people should use their reason to interpret scripture and if there is anything contained in scripture which is contrary to reason it is the product of forgery and priest craft. Toland believed that priests are the hirelings of tyrant kings who wish to keep people in ignorance and slavery. The Roman church had persecuted Galileo for asserting the primacy of scientific evidence over religious superstition. Toland believed that the Church of England and its doctrine of passive obedience, and its insistence that kings were above the law, was also the enemy of progress and human liberty. Toland was a radical republican, a great scholar and philosopher. He is said to have had a profound influence on Voltaire and the German Enlightenment. He republished the classic works of the commonwealth republicans such as John Milton, Algernon Sidney, Harrington and Ludlow. This was a courageous thing to do at the beginning of the eighteenth century in the reign of the high Tory Queen Anne. If you have any doubts about the importance to modem political thought of John Toland just Google him (or better still read my research). He was one of the most erudite thinkers this country has ever produced. When Toland studied the oldest manuscript in Irish he discovered that Saint Patrick had not come to a pagan country in the early fifth century. Patrick had to use a shamrock to explain the Trinity as the people he was confronting were Christians who had never heard of that doctrine. Toland postulated that the pre patrician Irish Christians were Unitarians.
Thomas Emlin was a minister at Wood Street in 1705 when he was jailed for publishing his Unitarian opinions. His story has been told from this pulpit before. His relevance to the United Irishmen is that in the fallout from the Emlin affair there was a split between conservative Presbyterianism and the liberal New Lights. This congregation was New Light as was the Rosemary Street congregation in Belfast. Both of these congregation, which are still thriving today, were the cradles of the Society of United Irishmen.
In 1720 the Wood Street congregation established a school in Drumcondra Lane, which was run by Francis Hutcheson and Thomas Drennan, father of William, and one time minister at Rosemary Street
Francis Hutcheson's time at Wood Street School was his most creative period, and it was there he wrote ‘An Inquiry concerning the origin of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue'. This established him as one of the greatest philosopher of his generation. He was appointed Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow in 1730. He numbered amongst his students David Hume and Adam Smith, the two giants of the Scottish Enlightenment. Smith described Hutcheson as 'undoubtedly and beyond all comparison the most acute, the most distinct, and the most philosophical of all my teachers'. In his turn, Adam Smith became tutor to and dear friend of the United Irishman Rev William Steele Dickson.
Hutcheson developed a following in America, where his theories regarding resistance to tyranny were particularly popular. The Founding Fathers established the new American republic in 1774, and Hutcheson's ideas provided the bedrock of the new democracy. His optimistic view that human nature was essentially good encouraged the Non -Subscribing Presbyterians to reject Calvinism and the idea of hell or eternal damnation. His observation that 'an action is best when it produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number’, was used by William Drennan when proposing the formation of the Society United Irishmen. Most of the 78 Presbyterian ministers who joined the United Irishmen imbibed the democratic principles of the Scottish Enlightenment as students at Hutcheson's Glasgow University. This included Reverend William Steele Dickson mentioned earlier and the Revs Alex Gowdy, Archibald Warwick and James Porter who were hanged in 1798 following the rebellion.
In 1794 the government had attempted to smash the United Irishmen and charged Archibald Hamilton Rowan and William Drennan with seditious libel. They hoped to hang both of them for distributing a pamphlet. Drennan composed an address intended for the jury. In it he claims his fathers friend Hutcheson and other notable Unitarians as influences.
"I am the son of an honest man a Minister of that gospel which breathes peace and good will amongst men a Protestant Dissenting Minister in the town of Belfast. My father was the friend and associate of good and may say great men. Of Aberneathy, of Bruce, of Duchal and Hutcheson.”

Drennan was here invoking the names of the great intellects of Irish Unitarianism All of them had been associated to a greater or lesser extent with your own Wood Street congregation. Abernathy, Bruce and Duchal had served as ministers there, while Drennan and Hutcheson had run the school. Besides being members of this congregation, founders of the Dublin United Irishmen, and escaping the gallows, Drennan and Hamilton Rowan had another thing in common: both of them were life long opponents of the slave trade.
In the 1740s Charles Lucas was the first politician to get elected to Dublin Corporation and later parliament ‘by cajoling the very scum of the people'’, otherwise known as the men of no property. His friend James Digges La Touche, later claimed 'from this time you might hear the lowest tradesmen call themselves free citizens...independent...our Dublin citizens since that memorable year (1749) they now read newspapers and even the votes of the commons, and have been more than once audacious enough to crowd the streets around the parliament house'. Thus it appears that Lucas invented working class street politics a discipline of which he was an avid practitioner in the 1970's.
Lucas was supported in his campaign against corruption in Dublin Corporation by the Dublin Dissenters, and when he was forced to flee the kingdom for questioning the authority of the King he was replaced on the corporation by his ally the New Light Presbyterian Thomas Read. His opponents accused Lucas of supporting the interests of the Independents (the Wood Street and New Row dissenters) who, they alleged, were trying to pull down the Established Church. They also used the ‘king killer’ slur, by reminding the citizens of Dublin that ‘such people had been responsible for the execution of Charles I’. Even La Touche, who was himself no Tory, felt the need to warn the city commons to 'beware of those who pretended to love liberty, but claimed a right to dissent from the Established Church who constantly Drink in Public the Rights of the City of Dublin and in private the Memory of Oliver Cromwell'. La Touche was mistaken regarding the Dublin dissenter attitude to Cromwell. Lucas regarded Cromwell as an arbitrary tyrant. Long before this John Toland had accused Cromwell of ruling by the sword rather than the law. The Fifth Monarchy men and the Levellers regarded Oliver Cromwell as a tyrant from the moment he made himself Lord Protector. Cromwell's son, Henry, when he was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, had purged members of the Wood Street and New Row dissenting congregations from all political and military influence because they could not be trusted to support the Cromwell's rule by one man.
When Lucas died in 1771 the workers and the guilds of Dublin gave him one of the largest funerals the city had ever seen.
Any of you who were educated in Ireland will know how the United Irishmen were defeated in 1798. In spite of the overwhelming support of the common people of all religions. In spite of conspicuous gallantry in the field and formidable if ad-hoc leadership, the rebels were defeated.
I told you previously how a few years later the workers of Dublin and Kildare under the influence of the Unitarians and the leadership of Robert Emmet made one last doomed effort to achieve the rights of man and set up a secular democratic republic. I did not know then that both of Robert Emmet's siblings were married to Unitarians or that the house in which he was captured had strong Unitarian connections. Neither did I know that when most eminent Unitarian of them all, Joseph Priestley, was burned out of Birmingham by the ‘Church and King mob’ this congregation offered him refuge and a job as minister for £300 per year. Nor did I know that Priestley and Tom Paine, the author of the Rights of Man, were made honorary members of the United Irishmen on the proposal of members of this congregation. If you want to know more you will have to read my research.

In August of 1827 seventy six year old Archibald Hamilton Rowan stood up in his pew in the small Presbyterian Church at Killyleagh in County Down to defend Unitarianism. He wished to respond to a fundamentalist attack from reverend Henry Cooke. Cooke was crusading to purge the New Light Presbyterian ministers and to lead their congregations into the Presbyterian mainstream. Cooke ordered the congregation to leave the church. These people had once been fiercely proud and independent, and at one time would not have been dictated to by any priest. On pike Sunday, thirty years before, under the leadership of Henry Munroe in the place of the arrested Unitarian minister Steele Dickson, members of the Killyleagh congregation dressed in their Sunday best, had won the battle of Saintfield but were crushed at the battle of Ballinahinch.
Now they were demoralised. They obeyed Cooke's instruction. They walked away leaving their former United Irish leader who had also been their neighbour, benefactor and friend ‘standing erect in the pew alone his testament unread'’. Thus was Unitarianism defeated by what it most abhorred - ‘an intolerant high priest’ and a servile congregation. The Book of Revelations was not prophecy after all but fantastical illusions. There would be no good old cause, no Fifth Monarchy, no ‘age of virtue’ for the world, and no time of plenty for humankind. There would be no non-sectarian democratic politics for modern Ireland.
My research traces an unbroken line of religious tolerance, democratic politics and scholarship in this congregation from 1649 until Robert Emmett was arrested in a Unitarian safe house in Dublin in 1803. You might shudder at political extremism. That is to misunderstand the world that our antecedents inhabited. Every citizen was required by law to believe religious fictions. To seek the truth through scientific and scholarly research, and to proclaim that truth ,could lead to a prison cell. To express the view that people should choose their government, and had the right to replace or change a government ,was treason punishable by the gallows. Democracy, religious and scientific freedom, universal suffrage, the end to slavery and human bondage did not come about by accident. The forward march of humanity has changed the common person from a vassal in chains to a citizen with rights. It has been a great honour for me to record that the Dublin Unitarians were to the fore in that march over two centuries. Toland, Hutcheson, Drennan and Hamilton Rowan – and, I am convinced - Oliver Bond, were members of the Dublin Unitarian Church. We should thank Dr Paisley for putting the record straight. When you claim the freedom to reject religious sectarianism and fundamentalism, when you challenge received wisdom and dogma; when you assert that no person should wear shackles on their limbs or their intellect; when you insist that governments are answerable to the governed, you are standing on the shoulders of giants.

Fergus Whelan
November 2007