In January 1822, a band of 400 Irish peasants ‘acting under crude military discipline’ attacked a troop of fifty British soldiers and police in the hills above Bantry, in County Cork, forcing them to retreat to the town. Many farmworkers were said to have abandoned their homes to establish themselves in the mountains, and rumours told of an army of ‘a thousand Whiteboys’
In February, the acting British home secretary, Lord Londonderry, formerly Viscount Castlereagh, announced in parliament that ‘nothing short of absolute rebellion’ now prevailed over much of south-west Ireland.1 He was not exaggerating. Accustomed to trouble further afield, the Empire found itself seriously challenged between 1821 and 1824 by rebellion nearer home. Extensive armed resistance occurred in the rural areas of Ireland, chiefly in Munster and Leinster, accompanied by a wave of millenarian excitement.
This formidable rebellion came at the end of more than twenty years of unrest in the wake of the revolt of 1798. Serious agricultural disturbance had occurred, notably in the provinces of Limerick and Tipperary. ‘Rebellion was in the field’, Londonderry continued in sober tones. ‘It was characterised by every mark belonging to insurrection; resistance to the law, defiance of the constituted authorities, and every component principle of rebellion.’ Some 300 people were detained that month for crimes committed in Munster, and ships were prepared to take them to Australian exile.
The British authorities in Dublin no longer referred to ‘disturbances’ or ‘outrages’ - the familiar words used to play down the continuing resistance. They were now obliged to admit that Munster was on the verge of open rebellion. The old tradition of the Whiteboys clearly survived, but this was something new. ‘A combination of men acted together in great numbers, and with a wonderful unanimity’, wrote a nineteenth-century historian. ‘They appeared continually in large masses on the hills and in the vales, and might, at almost any time at night, be met with on the high roads. They were said to be under the command of Captain Rock; and all the notices of vengeance or quittance of lands were signed in his name.’2
‘Captain Rock’ was the movement’s leader; but no one ever discovered who he was. His name joins the long list of pseudonyms with which Irish rebels have cloaked the identities of their hydra-headed leadership. Thomas Moore, the Irish poet, famous for his tale of Lalla Rookh, burnished the rebel image by writing The Memoirs of Captain Rock - a book, first printed in Paris in 1823, that detailed peasant grievances over the centuries.3
Other influences were at work in these years. The peasant Catholic rank and file had in their hands a religious tract, circulating in cheap editions, and apparently the work of an Italian, Signor Pastorini.4 In a chapter analysing the Book of Revelation, the author claimed that all Protestant churches would be destroyed by violence in 1825. This ‘revelation’ was received with enthusiasm in several parts of Ireland, and credulous Catholic peasants prepared themselves for this encouraging eventuality. Signor Pastorini, commented an anonymous voice in County Limerick in January 1822, ‘has done more towards the subversion of the British Empire than Bonaparte with all his legions’5 So strong was the belief in Pastorini’s prophecy that convicts waiting at Cork to be transported to Australia were said to be glad to be leaving; they would avoid the bloody scenes that were to come. They were unaware that they would soon witness comparable events in the prison territory of New South Wales.
The chief aim of Captain Rock’s men - beneficiaries of this atmosphere of prophetical fervour - was to create a climate of violence that would drive the Protestant settler landlords from their farms and their mansions. Catholic tenants would then be able to occupy their land rent-free. Fears of rebellion and massacre rose to such a peak, and so quickly, that in 1824 many Protestants were afraid to go to church on Christmas Day.
The new lord-lieutenant in Dublin in 1822 - the man in charge of repression in Ireland - was General Richard Wellesley, the elder brother of the Duke of Wellington. Last heard of as the governor-general of India at the time of the humiliation of the Maratha chiefs in 1803 and 1804, Wellesley had arrived in Dublin in December 1821 on the eve of the rural insurrection that threatened the privileges of the landlords. ‘Those who dared to be obedient to the law’, he complained in May 1822, were being ‘punished by the control of a predominant power, exercising lawless, cruel, and savage tyranny.’
Wellesley was soon to unleash a savage tyranny of his own, pushing through parliament a series of repressive measures: the imposition of martial law, the suspension of habeas corpus, and a fresh insurrection act. The gaols were soon filled with those awaiting execution or transportation. Wellesley was less of a killer than many of his colleagues. Henry Goulburn, the chief secretary, was notably fierce, expressing the hope that ‘before any amnesty is granted or any general remission of punishment takes place, sufficient example ought to have been made to prove to the deluded people that punishment will always follow crime’. However, William Gregory, the under-secretary, was less vindictive, writing despairingly in April that he did not know ‘what can be done with so many persons under sentence of death. It will not be possible to execute them all.’
A special assize court sat during the period of martial law, and thirty-six death sentences were imposed. Wellesley suggested that transportation should replace hanging whenever possible, and 200 convicted prisoners to were sent off to the Australian gulag. In September, hearing that several prisoners awaiting execution in Cork had been unsafely convicted, Wellesley asked for them to be reprieved. ‘I am always happy to find any reasons for respite of capital sentences’, he said. Three days later, Goulburn gave him the bad news: ‘the messenger did not reach Cork in time’.
Captain Rock’s rebellion brought in its train a far-reaching police reform that would transform the policing of the Empire. The Irish Constables Act imposed by Wellesley established an armed police force in Ireland, county by county, with chief constables appointed by the government. Opponents of the Act perceived it as a serious threat to the constitution, which had not hitherto countenanced a large government-controlled police force.6 The Irish Constabulary created in 1822, and reorganised in 1836 (it became ‘Royal’ in 1867), became the model for the colonial police forces of the Empire.
Sir Charles Jefferies, historian of the colonial police, wrote without apology in 1952 that
From the point of view of the colonies there was much attraction in an arrangement which provided what we should now call a ‘para-military’ organisation. . . armed, and trained to operate as an agent of the central government, in a country where the country was predominantly rural, communities were poor, social conditions were largely primitive, and the recourse to violence by members of the public who were ‘agin the government’ was not infrequent.
The Royal Irish Constabulary was to provide individual recruits for the colonial system, many of whom were trained at the Constabulary depots in Ireland (and, after 1922, when it became the Royal Ulster Constabulary, in Ulster).7
The new paramilitary police force was in place just in time. In October 1823, the year after Captain Rock’s rebellion had begun, the London government asked urgently for a reduction in the number of troops held in Ireland, since reinforcements were needed in the Caribbean. Quamina Gladstone’s slave rebellion had broken out in Guyana, and repercussions were expected in Jamaica.
Captain Rock’s rebellion was eventually crushed not so much through the use of repressive legislation (for the authorities had insufficient troops to enforce the insurrection act) as through the visitation of a devastating famine. Unlike the government-enforced starvation imposed on the Maroons of Dominica in 1813, the Irish peasants were the victims of the overly wet autumn of 1821, and the subsequent failure of the potato crop in 1822.
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