question immediately suggests itself, why was Ireland so much more violent than England in its response to the same social crisis? Donnelly’s book suggests that the answer lies in the historical religious and cultural antipathies in rural Ireland.
In the counties affected by the Rockite rebellion, the landed were almost wholly Protestant and frequently English – especially in the case of their agents. The poor were Catholic and in these areas still predominantly Irish-speaking. Donnelly shows that many Rockites saw the rebellion not only as an emergency response to deteriorating living standards, but also as an opportunity for a historic victory over what they understood as their hereditary oppressors. The Rockites combined Catholicism, Jacobitism and elements of United Irish republicanism in their thinking
The Rockites combined Catholicism, Jacobitism and elements of United Irish republicanism in their thinking
A confused “ideology”
Among the Rockites, many of whom seem to have been literate, we find a confused range of views, combining Catholicism with traditional Irish Jacobitism and the republicanism introduced to the countryside by the United Irishmen some twenty years earlier. Donnelly pays particular attention to the influence of the prophecies of “Pastorini” (in fact an English Catholic Bishop named Charles Walmesly) who forecast that 1822 would see the end of Protestantism and the triumph of the True Faith.
All of this was quite disturbing to the “official” Catholic nationalists, largely composed of the better-off Catholics under Daniel O’Connell in the Catholic Association. In Captain Rock we find them stressing that the rebellion was purely agrarian and denying that it had anything to do with Catholic or Irish aspirations. O’Connell was not above defending Rockites in his capacity as a lawyer but Donnelly shows that he was well paid for his endeavors with money the Rockites would extort from the rich.
A sign of things to come?
Something that is not broached in the book, but which struck this reviewer, was the similar geography of the Rockite rebellion with the war of independence one hundred years later –both were largely concentrated in southwest Munster. Moreover, one is struck by the similarities between the organisation of the Rockites and the IRA at local level.
Upon entering the Rockites, recruits swore to obey the orders of his local “captain” and not inform on his comrades as well as, in some cases, to “have a Roman Catholic King and French Government”. IRA Volunteers, also largely groups of young rural men, swore comparable oaths to obey orders and to uphold the Irish Republic. The fit is not exact, many would dispute the prevalence of sectarianism in the IRA of the 1920s, but the parallels are there.
Historians such as Tom Garvin and Peter Hart have previously noted this congruence of geography and organisation between rural secret societies and the IRA. The continuities between the agrarian rebels of the 19th century (through the “tithe war” of the 1830s and the “land war” of the 1870s) and the nationalist guerrillas of the 20th may be worth looking into further.
James Donnelly’s book is fascinating glimpse into pre-famine Ireland. It was a world where the majority were certainly oppressed by the social and religious order but their sometimes murderous actions are a reminder that the oppressed can sometimes be as cruel and vengeful as their oppressors.
 Famously narrated by Marxist historians Eric Hobsbawm and George Rude in the 1969 book, “Captain Swing”.