DRUMMOND, HENRY (1786–1860), English banker, politician and writer, best known as one of the founders of the Catholic Apostolic or “Irvingite” Church, was born at the Grange, near Alresford, Hampshire, on the 5th of December 1786. He was the eldest son of Henry Drummond, a prominent London banker, by a daughter of the first Lord Melville. He was educated at Harrow and at Christ Church, Oxford, but took no degree. His name is permanently connected with the university through the chair of political economy which he founded in 1825. He entered parliament in early life, and took an active interest from the first in nearly all departments of politics. Thoroughly independent and often eccentric in his views, he yet acted generally with the Conservative party. His speeches were often almost inaudible but were generally lucid and informing, and on occasion caustic and severe. From 1847 until his death in 1860 he represented West Surrey in parliament. Drummond took a deep interest in religious subjects, and published numerous books and pamphlets on such questions as the interpretation of prophecy, the circulation of the Apocrypha, the principles of Christianity, &c., which attracted considerable attention. In 1817 he met Robert Haldane at Geneva, and continued his movement against the Socinian tendencies then prevalent in that city. In later years he was intimately associated with the origin and spread of the Catholic Apostolic Church. Meetings of those who sympathized with the views of Edward Irving were held for the study of prophecy at Drummond’s seat, Albury Park, in Surrey; he contributed very liberally to the funds of the new church; and he became one of its leading office-bearers, visiting Scotland as an “apostle” and being ordained as an “angel” for that kingdom. The numerous works he wrote in defence of its distinctive doctrines and practice were generally clear and vigorous, if seldom convincing. He died on the 20th of February 1860.
DRUMMOND, HENRY (1851–1897), Scottish evangelical writer and lecturer, was born in Stirling on the 17th of August 1851. He was educated at Edinburgh University, where he displayed a strong inclination for physical and mathematical science. The religious element was an even more powerful factor in his nature, and disposed him to enter the Free Church of Scotland. While preparing for the ministry, he became for a time deeply interested in the evangelizing mission of Moody and Sankey, in which he actively co-operated for two years. In 1877 he became lecturer on natural science in the Free Church College, which enabled him to combine all the pursuits for which he felt a vocation. His studies resulted in his writing Natural Law in the Spiritual World, the argument of which was that the scientific principle of continuity extended from the physical world to the spiritual. Before the book issued from the press (1883), a sudden invitation from the African Lakes Company drew Drummond away to Central Africa. Upon his return in the following year he found himself famous. Large bodies of serious readers, alike among the religious and the scientific classes, discovered in Natural Law the common standing-ground which they needed; and the universality of the demand proved, if nothing more, the seasonableness of its publication. Drummond continued to be actively interested in missionary and other movements among the Free Church students. In 1888 he published Tropical Africa, a valuable digest of information. In 1890 he travelled in Australia, and in 1893 delivered the Lowell Lectures at Boston. It had been his intention to reserve them for mature revision, but an attempted piracy compelled him to hasten their publication, and they appeared in 1894 under the title of The Ascent of Man. Their object was to vindicate for altruism, or the disinterested care and compassion of animals for each other, an important part in effecting “the survival of the fittest,” a thesis previously maintained by Professor John Fiske. Drummond’s health failed shortly afterwards, and he died on the 11th of March 1897. His character was full of charm. His writings were too nicely adapted to the needs of his own day to justify the expectation that they would long survive it, but few men exercised more religious influence in their own generation, especially on young men.
DRUMMOND, THOMAS (1797–1840), British inventor and administrator, was born at Edinburgh on the 10th of October 1797, and was educated at the high school there. He was appointed to a cadetship at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, in 1813; and in 1815 he entered the Royal Engineers. In 1819, when meditating the renunciation of military service for the bar, he made the acquaintance of Colonel T. F. Colby (1784–1852), from whom in the following year he received an appointment on the trigonometrical survey of Great Britain. During his winters in London he attended the chemical lectures of W. T. Brande and M. Faraday at the Royal Institution, and the mention at one of these of the brilliant luminosity of lime when incandescent suggested to him the employment of the lime light for making distant surveying stations visible. In 1825, when he was assisting Colby in the Irish survey, his lime-light apparatus (“Drummond light”) was put to a practical test, and enabled observations to be completed between Divis mountain, near Belfast, and Slieve Snaght, a distance of 67 m. About the same time he also devised an improved heliostat, and in 1829 he was employed in adopting his light for lighthouse purposes. In 1831 he entered political life and was appointed superintendent of the boundary commission. Four years later he was made under-secretary of state for Ireland, where he proved himself a most successful administrator, and did much to promote law and order. It was he who in 1838 told the Irish landlords that “property has its duties as well as its rights.” In 1836 he proposed the appointment of a commission on railways in Ireland, and took a large share in its work, which resulted in the recommendation, not, however, carried out, that the state should construct a system of lines throughout the island. Drummond’s health was undermined by overwork, and he died at Dublin on the 15th of April 1840.
See Life by J. F. M‘Lennan (1867); Life and Letters by R. Barry O’Brien (1889); and Sir T. A. Larcom in Papers on the Duties of the Royal Engineers, vol. iv. (1840).
DRUMMOND, WILLIAM (1585–1649), called “of Hawthornden,” Scottish poet, was born at Hawthornden, near Edinburgh, on the 13th of December 1585. His father, John Drummond, was the first laird of Hawthornden; and his mother was Susannah Fowler, sister of William Fowler (q.v.), poet and courtier. Drummond received his early education at the high school of Edinburgh, and graduated in July 1605 as M.A. of the recently founded university of Edinburgh. His father was a gentleman usher at the English court (as he had been at the Scottish court from 1590) and William, in a visit to London in 1606, describes the festivities in connexion with the visit of the king of Denmark. Drummond spent two years at Bourges and Paris in the study of law; and, in 1609, he was again in Scotland, where, by the death of his father in the following year, he became laird of Hawthornden at the early age of twenty-four. The list of books he read up to this time is preserved in his own handwriting. It indicates a strong preference for imaginative literature, and shows that he was keenly interested in contemporary verse. His collection (now in the library of the university of Edinburgh) contains many first editions of the most famous productions of the age. On finding himself his own master, Drummond naturally abandoned law for the muses; “for,” says his biographer in 1711, “the delicacy of his wit always run on the pleasantness and usefulness of history, and on the fame and softness of poetry.” In 1612 began his correspondence with Sir William Alexander of Menstrie, afterwards earl of Stirling (q.v.), which ripened into a life-long friendship after Drummond’s visit to Menstrie in 1614.
Drummond’s first publication appeared in 1613, an elegy on the death of Henry, prince of Wales, called Teares on the Death of Meliades (Moeliades, 3rd edit. 1614). The poem shows the influence of Spenser’s and Sidney’s pastoralism. In the same year he published an anthology of the elegies of Chapman, Wither and others, entitled Mausoleum, or The Choisest Flowres of the Epitaphs. In 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death, appeared Poems: Amorous, Funerall, Divine, Pastorall: in Sonnets, Songs, Sextains, Madrigals, being substantially the
