In March 1854 the committee of First Belfast Presbyterian Church consented to the erection of a memorial tablet in commemoration of the life of a former member, William Tennent. In and of itself, this was far from remarkable. First Belfast was a long-established congregation with a respectable, wealthy membership and over the course of the nineteenth century its walls were adorned with numerous memorials commemorating both the ministers who served the church and the upright citizens who worshipped under them. What distinguishes William Tennent's memorial, however, is its scale: in contrast to the sober plaques that surround it, it incorporates an elaborate sculpture in which Tennent is depicted reposing, book in hand, under a tree, while, in the rear, two men are busily engaged unloading sacks of merchandise from a ship. Beneath this striking image, an inscription records that Tennent was born near Roseyards, County Antrim, on 26 June 1759; that he died in Belfast, some seventy-three years later, on 20 July 1832; and that he ‘employed the leisure won from an arduous mercantile career in the cultivation of science and letters’. He was, it continues, ‘a consistent advocate of free inquiry and rational liberty […] moderate in times of popular excitement and firm when exposed to the reaction of power’; and ‘he found his chief happiness in the affection of his family and friends’.

Seemingly straightforward, this inscription was composed after much debate by Tennent's family and offers what is, in effect, an equivocal and, in places, sanitized biography. The reference to Tennent's ‘arduous mercantile career’ seems fair enough: by the time of his death Tennent was numbered among the wealthiest businessmen in Belfast. But what of his consistent advocacy of ‘free inquiry and rational liberty’, his moderation ‘in times of popular excitement’ and his resolution when faced with ‘the reaction of power’? Such formulations constitute an ambiguous description of a man who was a founding member of the United Irish movement, a state prisoner in the years following the 1798 rebellion and, until the end of his days, a supporter of Catholic emancipation, parliamentary reform and the cause of liberty.