Of all the aspects of Belfast life that William and Robert Tennent were involved in, arguably the most significant was politics. Certainly, their political activities were long remembered. In his mid-century pamphlet, Memoirs of the Rea family from the period of the Irish rebellion in 1798 till the year 1857, A. H. Thornton identified Robert Tennent as a member of a distinct faction, including such individuals as Dr Drennan, John Templeton, John Sinclair and John Barnett, who ‘assumed the office of dictators of the people, and directors of public opinion’, declaring themselves at one point to be ‘the natural leaders of the people’. Likewise, when the prominent Unitarian liberal William John Campbell Allen died in January 1888 the Belfast News-Letter noted that he ‘was always consistently identified with the Liberal party’, and that he had come to the fore during the period of the reform bill, when ‘the Tennents […] and others […] formed the inner circle of the Liberal directorate in this town’, while the Northern Whig noted that he was ‘a consistent Liberal’ who ‘in his earlier days took an active part in the organisation of the party in Belfast, being intimately associated with the Tennents […] and other liberal magnates of the times’. ‘Natural leaders’, ‘liberal directorate’, ‘liberal magnates’: the phrases differ, but the point remains the same – the Tennents formed part of a recognized coterie, which played a prominent role in the politics of early nineteenth-century Belfast.

This chapter, and the one that follows, will examine the political activities of the Tennents and their associates, demonstrating the extent to which they did, indeed, form a distinct faction with a shared and well-defined set of advanced pro-reform views, and tracing the ways in which they sought, as Thornton put it, ‘to affix upon their native town the impress of their party’. In so doing, these chapters will contribute to the development of a more nuanced picture of Belfast politics in the age of reform.