Martha, Drennan shared disgust at the subscription made by Dr. James MacDonnell in Belfast to the reward for the capture of Emmet's confederate, their mutual friend Thomas Russell. In a poem sketched for Martha, Epigraph-on the Living (October 1803), Drennan decries "a man who could subscribe To hang that friend at Last Whom future history will describe The Brutus of Belfast." Constitutionalist reformer Belfast Academical Institution On 8 February 1800, Drennan made "his own union With England": he married Sarah Swanwick from Shropshire. She was, he assured his sister, a spiritual partner, from a Unitarian family, "liberal in her mind and of a democratical turn in politics". In September 1803, just three days before Emmet's trial, their four-month daughter took ill and died. In 1806, his financial independence, secured by an inheritance from a cousin, Drennan gave up his faltering medical practice in Dublin and, with Sarah, moved back to Belfast. In the wake of the 1798 rebellion and its bloody suppression, Drennan resolved to "be content to get the substance of reform more slowly" and with "proper preparation of manners or principles"." As a token of this resolve, in Belfast he led a group of Belfast merchants, and professional gentlemen, including the banker and former United Irishman (and state prisoner), William Tennent and his brother Dr. Robert Tennent, in persuading a town meeting "to facilitate and render less expensive the means of acquiring education; to give access to the walks of literature to the middle and lower classes of society; [and] to make provision for the instruction of both sexes... " in a new institution. His old nemesis William Bruce, now principal of the Belfast Academy, mocked Drennan's proposed system of governance. He compared it to the French constitution which, together, they had celebrated in 1791: "so full of checks that it will not move". The sovereign body of the institution was an annual general meeting of subscribers. They elected both boards of managers and visitors, but with a complicated system of rotation "to preclude the possibility of the management falling into the hands of a few individuals". The academic direction of was likewise entrusted not to a Principal or a Headmaster, but rather to a group of senior teachers sitting as the Board of Masters. Drennan also proposed that discipline would rely on "example" rather than on the "manual correction of corporal punishment". He was doubtlessly inspired by