Captain Rock: The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821–1824

Conclusion

Conclusion The close examination of the Rockite movement of 1821–24 undertaken in this book has permitted us to delve deeply into the dynamics of Irish rural society in the a◊ermath of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. We have seen in chapter 1 that the cradle of this movement was the great property of some 34,000 acres owned by the profligate Lord Courtenay and centered around Newcastle West in County Limerick. In numerous ways the structure and experience of this estate was typical of many others in the south and west of Ireland in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Substantial middlemen with leases held large portions of the Courtenay property that they mostly sublet to other, smaller tenants; those who actually occupied and tilled or grazed the ground were, in the main, people either mired in poverty or barely rising above it.1 Like the vast majority of their counterparts on other Irish properties, the tenants of the Courtenay estates—regardless of their social status—found the transition from war to peace exceedingly di∞cult to negotiate. What made the payment of rents especially problematic on the Courtenay property was the fact that new rents had mostly been established in the years 1811–13, a period that included the very height of wartime prosperity. Even though the indulgent agent Edward Carte granted substantial abatements beginning in 1814 in response to the first wave of price declines associated with the winding down of inflated wartime demand, he was unable (and perhaps partly unwilling) to keep arrears of rent from soaring over the next several years. By the time that he was dismissed in the summer of 1818, there were well over £60,000 in arrears outstanding, or more than four times the annual rental of the prop337 erty. Among the greatest beneficiaries of the Carte administration were the numerous Protestant and Catholic middlemen who were so deeply embedded on Viscount Courtenay’s estate. These elements in the story of the origins of the Rockite movement—an extravagant, “playboy” proprietor who never showed his face in Ireland, the beginnings of a long-term agricultural depression, an ine∞cient if not corrupt agent who let the financial situation spin out of control, a body of middlemen who paid as little rent as they could get away with, a property on which rapid wartime population growth had apparently promoted fairly rampant subdivision and subletting of holdings—were no doubt common elsewhere in Munster and Connacht during these years immediately before and a◊er Waterloo.2 Had Edward Carte been permitted to continue presiding over this lackadaisical regime, there might have been no agrarian revolt on the scale of the Rockite movement in the region that the agitation came to dominate in the early 1820s. Fateful Choice: Alexander Hoskins The wild card introduced into this fairly standard deck was the appointment of the London solicitor Alexander Hoskins as Carte’s successor by a group of trustees eager to place a financially ailing Irish landed property on a healthier footing. Unfortunately, they chose as the executor of their policy a man whose background, personality, and total lack of judgment soon threw the Courtenay estate and adjoining parts of west Limerick into a frenzy of disorder and violence. While living like a lord and behaving like a Mafia boss, Hoskins used exuberantly the whip hand given to landlords and magistrates by the Irish legal system and employed some of the extralegal resources offered by Irish social life of the time (for example, factions). With these weapons he tried—not very successfully—to compel tenants to pay rent, to frighten or punish his enemies, and to protect himself, his family, and his henchmen from reprisals. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of his “tyranny” (as it was perceived) was the series of assaults waged by Hoskins against prominent middlemen of minorgentry and Protestant background, combined with their vigorous resistance to his regime. From this clash of wills and economic interests there emerged the somewhat unusual spectacle of gentry middlemen mobilizing their own subtenants, many of whom apparently belonged to local factions, to thwart the legal stratagems and extralegal initiacaptain rock 338 tives of the Hoskins administration. (Offsetting this cross-class collaboration there must have been some social conflict between nonelite agrarian groups, but the surviving sources for the extraordinary Hoskins episode have little to say about such...