Captain Rock: The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821–1824

4. Pastorini and Captain Rock: Millenarianism and Sectarianism

119 Four Pastorini and Captain Rock Millenarianism and Sectarianism Anti-Protestant Animus Disputed Part of the reason why students of Irish history have undervalued the important role of millenarianism and sectarianism in providing an organizational and ideological basis for the Rockite movement may be that the negative testimony of certain contemporaries has been given far too much weight. A considerable number of contemporaries belonging to the middle and upper classes strongly resisted the notion that anti-Protestant animus figured prominently in the mentality of Rockites or motivated their behavior. Thus a gentleman in the Churchtown district, reporting to Dublin Castle in April 1822 that nearly the whole of County Cork had once again become tranquil, declared flatly that “there was not at any time the slightest tincture of hostility to the government nor any of the spirit of religious bigotry pervading the mass of the community in this county.”1 Although few Protestant clergymen would have credited the Catholic farmers and laborers among whom they lived with quite so much religious tolerance , even some parsons derided the idea that Protestants were considered enemies by the Rockites. Using commonsensical logic, the Reverend John Orpen pointed out in March 1822 that many of his Catholic neighbors had “suffered severely” at Rockite hands, while he—a parson, a small tithe owner, the occupant of an unguarded house, and a zealous magistrate—had been le◊ unmolested.2 Even the receipt of “a terrible denunciation of Capt[ai]n Rock’s vengeance if I persevered in having divine service for the soldiers in Kanturk barracks ” failed to shake Orpen’s convictions on this point. A◊er mentioning the threat in May 1823, he also observed that “outrages appear in this part of the country to be committed with equal severity on every class, rank, & description of persons. The poorest labourer who infringes on Capt[ain] Rock’s laws is treated with as much vengeance as the Protestant gentleman who has the audacity to demand a portion of his rent.”3 Catholics of superior social status o◊en expressed similar views even more insistently. To them, the anti-Rockite pulpit oratory of priests and their edifying speeches at public executions gave the lie to charges that the agrarian rebels aimed at the destruction of Protestantism and the ascendancy of Catholicism. As the Dublin Evening Post, a Catholic paper whose columns were filled with news about the Rockite movement, boasted in February 1822, “There has been scarcely a barony meeting through the counties of Cork, Kerry, Limerick , or any district menaced with disturbance in which the thanks of the resident nobility and gentry have not been voted to the Catholic clergy for their incessant and laborious attention to their duties.”4 The same newspaper was quick to notice the loyal conduct of particular priests, such as Father Prendergast of Ballingarry, Co. Tipperary, who initiated a subscription to rent a barracks for troops in that village, and Father Rochford of Monagay, Co. Limerick, who rushed from his chapel along with some parishioners and assisted in the capture of eight Lady Rocks almost red-handed.5 Individual priests who had been victimized by Rockites for showing hostility to the cause also received publicity.6 The sectarian prophecies of Protestant doom in 1825 associated with the name of Pastorini presented a special problem. Many Catholics of standing denied that the country people really believed in these predictions, and scouted the notion that such addled thinking played a significant part in the agrarian strife of the early 1820s. John Dunn, a politically prominent Catholic in Queen’s County and a large landholder in the Ballinakill district, who claimed to be well acquainted with the views of the lower orders, was asked about the credit given to Pastorini’s prophecies before a parliamentary committee in captain rock 120 June 1824. Replied Dunn tersely: “The people laugh at them they meet with; nothing beyond that. The pastoral address of the Roman Catholic bishop of the diocese lately disabused them of any idea that they might have had of their truth.”7 What Dunn was really telling the committee was that no person “of the least respectability” treated the prophecies with anything but ridicule;8 this threw into question his original assertion. Newspaper editors sympathetic to the cause of Catholic emancipation seized upon the killing of the “opulent farmer” John Marum in the highly disturbed Kilkenny barony of Galmoy as clear...