In 1771, an English Catholic bishop named Charles Walmesley published an adventurous exercise in prophetic prediction with the misleadingly anodyne title The general history of the Christian Church. Written under the pseudonym ‘Signore Pastorini’, Walmesley's General history was actually a blow-by-blow commentary on the Book of Revelation. While claiming to faithfully relay the Catholic eschatological tradition, Walmesley was in fact a daring innovator. He divided church history into seven ages, marked by the seven seals, trumpets and vials from St John's Apocalypse.

Walmesley believed he and his readers were living in the fifth age, spanning from about 1525 to 1825. This fifth age of the Church was dominated by immorality, heresy and schism (in that order), and characterised by violent Protestant persecution of Catholicism. Happily, at least for Catholics, the vial of heavenly wrath would soon be poured out on Protestants, who were symbolised by the locusts with scorpion tails (cf. Revelation vi, ix). Unsurprisingly, anti-Catholic England found itself particularly in the crosshairs of heavenly retribution, since, according to Walmesley, ‘among the Reformed nations none drank more deeply of the cup of error, than England’.

Like many British and Irish Catholics who lived through the eclipse of Jacobitism and the disaster of Culloden, Walmesley urged resignation, prayer and non-resistance. Only God could vindicate, and only in God's time. Luckily, however, a true reading of the Apocalypse of St John revealed that God would soon vindicate Catholics, and very soon. The ‘fifth vial’ of wrath would be poured out, and the ‘Kingdom of the Reformation’ would come to an end in 1825, 300 years from the beginning of the Protestant-afflicted fifth age of the Church. Walmesley was suspiciously vague about the details of the cataclysmic judgement just on the horizon. He clearly did not intend to inspire concerted political action, much less armed uprisings by Catholics. But as prophecy in general (and the Book of Revelation in particular) so often does, the predictions of ‘Pastorini’ took on a life of their own that was at least independent of the original authorial intent, and perhaps even remote from or contrary to it.

In the aftermath of the failure of rebellions in 1798 and 1803, and with so many Irish Catholics still landless and poor, it is unsurprising that such a hopeful (if potentially macabre) message of deliverance appealed to a wide audience across the Irish Sea. While The general history was first published in Ireland in 1790, it was in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century that the ‘prophecy of Pastorini’ (that is, the looming destruction of Protestantism) spread far and wide, mainly by broadsheet printings and excited word of mouth. Transported from recusant England to a new and very different context, Pastorini was explicitly politicised, transforming into a powerful catalyst in the increasingly sectarian and anti-Protestant quest for land reform, and then for Catholic Emancipation.

The little-known story of the remarkable and multi-faceted part that Pastorini played in early nineteenth-century Ireland is the subject of Thomas P. Power's hefty book, The apocalypse in Ireland. The fruit of painstaking and extensive research, Power's erudite account will delight and surprise students and historians of Ireland, and those interested in the history of sectarianism, Irish cultural history, political theology, apocalypticism, the history of Catholic Emancipation and the emergence of ‘a popular Catholic nationalism’ (p. 351). Walmesley's career as a papal loyalist who looked askance at the ‘enlightened’ Catholics of England, and the popularity of his apocalyptic writings are well-known to historians of early modern English Catholicism. While there is some work on Pastorini and Ireland (John Mulleoy and, especially, James S. Donnelly), Power's book is a definitive and exhaustive account, fresh with provocative and well-supported claims. Walmesley's writings and episcopal career are of under-estimated importance in the history of English Catholicism. Power's book, however, shows that Walmesley's impact in Ireland, through Pastorini and prophecy, was deeper, more profound and more wide-reaching. Most importantly, and central to the book's argument, is that Pastorini played a not-insignificant role in the rise of a confident, sectarian Irish Catholic nationalism that triumphed politically in the success of Daniel O'Connell's Catholic Association. This emergent form of Irish Catholicism also triumphed ecclesially, in the construction of a robust and authoritarian ‘Tridentine’ Church in Ireland (and to various extents abroad) that was, perhaps paradoxically, less hindered under the rule of a Protestant Empire than was the institutional Church in putatively Catholic lands (pp. 293–7).

Power notes that in virtually all histories of this period, ‘Pastorini has been viewed as a marginal or eccentric addition to the main events’ (p. 2). The first few chapters establish that this is not the case, and in fact the Pastorini prophecy became central for the ‘Rockite’ land reform movement (the followers of ‘Captain Rock’). The ‘Ribbonmen’ and especially the Rockites movement c. 1821–4 ‘maintained an agenda of traditional grievances’ but added a distinctively anti-Protestant apocalypticism. This new tradition of protest ‘developed into a concerted campaign to overturn the entire system’ (p. 141). The ‘prophecy’ of Pastorini was one factor – albeit a powerful one – that helped push Irish Catholics away from the ‘narrow vision’ of the past (epitomised by Jacobite restorationism) and into a new symbolic framework that promised the radical reversal of, well, everything: ‘Protestant/Catholic, foreigner/native, ruler/ruled, and master/servant with the economic, political, and religious precedence that came with that reversal’ (pp. 54–5).

This fascinating tale, which encapsulates so many events, personages and themes in Irish life in the first third of the nineteenth century, peaks with Power's account of the relationship between Pastorini and two events: the (unrealised) cataclysmic year of 1825, and the achievement of Catholic Emancipation in 1829. Though some Protestants complained that Catholics were making Pastorini's prophecies come true by their own actions (p. 384), there was no great bloodletting in 1825, no return to the frenetic violence of 1641. And yet, Pastorini had not in fact said the Catholics would or should violently rise up to eliminate ‘the Kingdom of the Reformation’ in 1825 – merely that that kingdom would be eliminated 300 years from the dawning of the Reformation.

Pace the efforts of the ‘Second Reformation’, the closest the prophecy came to being fulfilled on the Irish stage is seen in the significant number of Protestant-to-Catholic conversions (whether genuine or under pressure) and the high rate of Irish Protestant immigration to the USA and, especially, Canada. Nevertheless, as Power well establishes in chapter v (‘Annihilation: the Bugaboo year’), the widespread popularity of Pastorini terrified Irish Protestants, many of whom boarded up their homes on Christmas Eve 1824 (p. 213). The sectarian, potentially violent rhetoric surrounding the prophecy was also an important ingredient in the further disintegration of any hopes for the ecumenical Irish nationalism that animated figures like Wolfe Tone (pp. 375–6).

The documentation marshalled by Power paints a clear picture of the clashing, yet ultimately actually symbiotic, relationship between the sectarian and apocalyptic fervour that pervaded Irish Catholic popular religion and popular politics, and the disdain for Pastorini by well-to-do Catholics and their prelates (paired with their promotion of civil, and, at times, theological tolerance; cf. pp. 298–312). Daniel O'Connell, the great Irish ‘liberator’, embodied this dual reality in his person and career. The portrait of O'Connell that emerges in The apocalypse in Ireland epitomises this collision between constitutional, above-board political action and the potentially chaotic or revolutionary disruption symbolised by the Pastorini prophecy. O'Connell was nothing if not a deft operator, and he simultaneously assured listeners that ‘Pastorini was nothing to me’ (the subtitle of chapter vi) while also capitalising on the prophecy's political and mobilising potential out of the other side of his mouth (see, for example, pp. 210–11, 249, 263–6, 274, 284–6). As one Protestant complained in 1829, ‘enlightened Roman Catholics’ (who were, incidentally, the enemies of Walmesley in the final decade of his life) should take ‘offence and disgust’ at O'Connell's ‘harping upon Pastorini's prophecies’ (p. 283). If O'Connell didn't laugh at Pastorini, he certainly laughed about him, always retaining a kind of plausible deniability: he was not the wrong kind of Catholic, and he was not encouraging the wrong kind of Catholicism. And yet, the danger of mass, enraged mobilisation simmering under the surface in Catholic Ireland, symbolised by sectarian talismans like Pastorini, was an effective political bargaining chip.

Quibbles are bound to arise in a study of such length and topical breadth, but my quibbles are minor. Power overestimates the ‘dominant’ position of Thomism in Catholic thought in this period, in my view (pp. 197–8). Some statements regarding Catholic theology and ‘Tridentine’ Catholicism would benefit from further qualification. The earlier parts of the book, concerning Walmesley's life and context, would have been enriched by visits to some of the small Catholic archives in England, but these can be difficult to access for consistent stretches, and some relevant material related to Walmesley is uncatalogued. Ultimately, however, this is a book about Ireland and almost entirely about events which occurred after the death of Walmesley. And, at over 450 pages, it would unfair and unrealistic to expect Power to have written more.

The apocalypse in Ireland is a dense and rich book, aimed at specialist historian readers. It can enhance and inform the teaching and scholarship of historians of Britain and Ireland, cultural and political historians, religious studies scholars and theologians. The story that Powers tells, however, has moments of stark pathos. Midnight raids, terror and intimidation, the intrigues of secret societies, the maiming of people and animals, social humiliation and alienation, and sometimes deadly violence were inflicted by Protestants upon Catholics, and by Catholics upon Protestants. Behind the inspiring story of Daniel O'Connell and Catholic Emancipation, of a people beginning to effectively throw off centuries of persecution, humiliation and marginalisation, Powers's work forces us to ask uncomfortable questions like: ‘Which people?’ and ‘At what cost?’.