Captain Rock: The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821–1824

1. Origins of the Movement

26 One Origins of the Movement Contemporaries were practically unanimous in assigning responsibility for the origins of the Rockite movement to the harsh behavior of a single man—Alexander Hoskins, the chief agent of Viscount Courtenay ’s 34,000-acre estates centered around the small town of Newcastle West, about ten miles from the Kerry border in County Limerick.1 A longtime resident of Newcastle who authored a now extremely scarce pamphlet entitled Old Bailey solicitor, which was a relentless indictment of the Hoskins regime, declared that the agent’s administration was “a reign of tyranny and oppression, of meanness and arti- fice, that defies the page of history to produce a parallel.”2 The chorus of bitter complaints against Hoskins arose partly from his abuses and irregularities as a magistrate, usually in connection with his management of the Courtenay estates. Eventually, as many as fourteen out of sixteen local magistrates told a high-ranking police o∞cial that the government should strike Hoskins’s name out of the commission of the peace.3 Echoing this strong opinion among the local landed elite, William Gregory, the civil undersecretary at Dublin Castle, declared flatly in November 1820, “I believe nothing can be more oppressive than the conduct of Lord Courtenay’s agent.”4 Courtenay himself was the antithesis of a “good landlord.” The Courtenays were an old established family in County Limerick. Ancestors of the subsequent Earls of Devon, their original grant went 27 origins of the movement back to the late sixteenth century, when Sir William Courtenay “became possessor of the great estates carved out of the earl of Desmond’s principality.”5 In addition to their Irish property, the family owned a large estate in Devonshire, with a seat at Powderham Castle. The current representative of the family, William Courtenay, the third viscount , was a perpetual absentee from his Irish and English estates because his open homosexuality made an ordinary life as a resident landlord in either country nearly impossible. Courtenay was merely a boy when he became a central figure in one of the most infamous scandals of the late eighteenth century. At the age of ten he became the object of the affections of his older cousin William Beckford, whose merchant father had been lord mayor of London and was generally considered the wealthiest man in England until his death in 1770. From their base in Jamaica several generations of the Beckfords had accumulated a vast fortune from the ownership of West Indian sugar plantations. As the only legitimate son of the lord mayor, William Beckford inherited a fortune of £1 million at the age of twenty-one in 1780, and he initially commanded an annual income of about £100,000. Love letters subsequently written by Beckford to William Courtenay, later the third viscount, were maliciously printed in the newspapers and created a huge scandal beginning in the summer of 1784. The charges of sexual misconduct soon drove Beckford from England to the continent for an extended period.6 William Courtenay, who became the third viscount on his father’s death in 1788, was, like Beckford, flamboyantly homosexual. He ran through much of his inheritance by high living and ostentatious displays of wealth. The widespread homophobia of the time compelled him to reside abroad permanently, first in America, where he purchased property along the Hudson River in New York State, and later in France; he was to die in Paris in 1835.7 Wherever he lived, he never demonstrated the least financial restraint. Among his many costly diversions was that of “making aquatic excursions in the [English] Channel in a yacht most incomparably fitted out” at a personal expense of £20,000.8 Constantly living beyond his means, Lord Courtenay was forced to sell land in order to meet the demands of his creditors. According to a report in the Leinster Journal in January 1806, property belonging to him had recently been sold for £206,000. Continuing extravagance helped to prompt further sales, as in De- Kilfinnane Ballylanders Monagay Monagay Monagay Ardagh Ardagh Ardagh Killeedy Killeedy Killeedy Newcastle Grange Rathronan Rathronan Mahoonagh Limerick City Newcastle West Abbeyfeale Rathkeale Croom Charleville Bruff Kilmallock Hospital Ti p pe r a r y L i m e r i c k C l a r e Cork Ker r y R i v e r S h a n n o n Estates of Viscount Courtenay Parishes...