Captain Rock: The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821–1824

9. Repression of the Movement

290 Nine Repression of the Movement Apart from the tithe war of the early 1830s, the Rockite movement confronted the authorities with their greatest challenge of the early nineteenth century. With the exception of the tithe war, no other agrarian upheaval mobilized so many rebels or produced so much violence against both persons and property. Although the army had no serious di∞culty in smothering the open insurrection in northwest Cork in January 1822, the suppression of incendiarism and other major kinds of agrarian crime long proved exceedingly arduous. The burnings in particular ba±ed the authorities almost completely. “Such is the description of warfare carried on by the insurgents,” declared a Cork gentleman in February 1823, “that the utmost exertions of the magistrates, military, and police cannot counteract their plans or prevent their depredations.”1 Many murders were also committed with impunity. This was especially true of County Kilkenny, where events tended to be overshadowed by happenings farther south. In three Kilkenny baronies from 1822 to mid-1824 a total of twenty-two murders took place, but as the king’s counsel Thomas Goold pointed out reproachfully in May 1824, not a single person had yet been punished for any of these killings.2 In countless raids Rockite bands seized the firearms of thousands of gentlemen and well-to-do farmers and then concealed them so effectively that o∞cial attempts to recover the stolen weapons were practically useless. Thus a massive military 291 repression of the movement search of three to four thousand houses for unauthorized weapons early in 1823 yielded exactly one pistol and one unserviceable gun.3 Some military leaders considered troops to be so ineffective against the Rockites that they warmly endorsed the idea of forming private armed associations headed by the resident gentry. The extension of this practice in north Cork, insisted Major General Sir John Lambert in January 1823, “would be of much more use than all the numerous military detachments for various reasons.”4 Among the reasons, presumably , were the soldiers’ lack of local information, unfamiliarity with the terrain, and inadequate mobility. Weakened Condition of the Local Magistracy But it was unrealistic to expect a great deal of enterprise or zeal from the resident gentry and local magistrates. In general, the Anglo-Irish gentry were no longer capable of the kind of local initiatives in repression that they had sponsored in the late eighteenth century. Their numbers had been thinned by absenteeism and emigration. Their political cohesiveness had been weakened by the divisive issues of Catholic emancipation and tithe reform. And above all, their local authority had been increasingly circumscribed by the expanding power of the centralizing state. The self-confidence needed for effectiveness was demonstrably in short supply. Thrown into an unseemly panic by the initial insurrectionary phase of the Rockite movement, many gentlemen had fled with their families from their rural residences into the safety of the towns. Though most returned a◊er the insurrection had collapsed, they o◊en barricaded themselves inside their country houses and rarely ventured abroad if they could avoid it, especially at night. The parish priest of Doneraile blamed the wave of agrarian crime in his district in late 1822 partly on the timidity of the resident gentry, who only “muster strong on a hunting day” and who showed the common people how panic-stricken they were by seeking “security within the barricaded doors and windows of their houses.”5 Similar complaints were frequently voiced by Protestants about other disturbed districts. For example, local magistrates gave the Tralee Association little support against Rockites in that vicinity. Of the ten magistrates residing in Tralee, only two acted “promptly and with decision ”; five others were incapacitated by old age or bad health, and the remaining three simply refused to stir themselves.6 Some magistrates (probably a small minority) were corrupt and used their o∞cial positions to reap personal gain. Known as “trading magistrates ,” several such men in County Cork were said to pocket from£100 to £300 a year in “illegal fees.”7 For a variety of reasons other magistrates and gentlemen were willing to turn a blind eye to serious transgressions or even to intervene on behalf of well-known agrarian offenders. This was a venerable di∞culty. Writing in April 1822, the Limerick landlord Thomas Studdert claimed that “nothing was more common before the happy introduction of the Insurrection Act than...