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.

[1] 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.

[11][12] 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.

[13] In 1813 Tennent and Drennan formed the Friends of Civil and Religious Liberty which demanded inquiry into the disturbances that marked that year's Twelfth of July Orange celebrations (the town's first serious sectarian riots).

They were outraged at the comparatively lenient six-month prison sentences handed to two Orangemen for killing two counter demonstrators[14] Their victims, among a largely Catholic crowd, happened to be Protestants, likely Presbyterians.

[15] Many Presbyterians viewed the still largely Anglican (Church of Ireland) Orange Order as auxiliaries of the landowners and, in Belfast, of the Chichesters (the proprietary Lords Donegall) who had the corporation in their "pocket".

Charged with assault he helped seal his own fate when, on bail, he encouraged the prosecution of the magistrate who was to try his case, Lady Donegall's brother-law, and the town's appointed Sovereign, Thomas Verner, for the attempted rape of a poor Catholic women, a pedlar, who had brought wares to his house.

The school was to be open to pupils regardless of sex, class or religion; discipline would rely on "example" rather than on corporal punishment; and direction would be entrusted, not to an autocratic headmaster, but to a board of senior teachers.

[20] Presiding over a St. Patrick's Day eve banquet attended by member of Inst's staff, management and board of visitors, Tennent spoke of passing onto a new generation the spirit of 1782 (the Volunteers) and 1792 (the Rights of Man celebrant United Irishmen).

[24] On his return to Belfast, he married a niece of the Henry Joy McCracken (executed in 1798), became a leader of the Friends of Civil and Religious liberty, and campaigned for Catholic Emancipation.

John, an officer in the service of Napoleon, was killed in battle in Germany, as it happened, on the same day, 18 August 1813, as his brother Robert was arrested at the town meeting in Belfast.