Tar, feathers, and the solicitor general

Two hundred years ago tonight, a group of Upper Canada's most prominent men dressed in bedsheets, blacked their faces, and broke into a government official's home at midnight. They dragged George Rolph from his bed, stripped him, held him down, and coated him in tar before emptying his own pillow over him. They had brought their own feathers, but lost them somewhere in the dark. So they tore open Rolph's pillow instead.

This was not a mob of desperate men. It was, by most accounts, a mob of lawyers, magistrates, and a future premier. And when it was over, the king's own solicitor general chose to represent the attackers — not prosecute them.

In the 1820s, Upper Canada — the colony occupying what is now southern Ontario — was governed by a tightly connected group of Tory loyalists known informally as the Family Compact. They filled appointed positions in the courts, the legislature, and the magistracy, and believed their rule provided more stability than democratic selection. They were not wrong that stability had value. They were also not shy about enforcing it. 1

George Rolph had been appointed clerk of the peace for Gore County in 1816. He was an official, not an agitator — but he refused to attend Tory social functions, declined to drink their toasts, and made no effort to use his position to advance the Compact's objectives. His brother John was worse, from the Tories' perspective: elected to the Legislative Assembly in 1824 as a Reformer, John had proposed that the Legislative Council be elected rather than appointed — a direct assault on the Compact's structural advantage. 1

At the time of the attack, John was in England petitioning the Colonial Office to grant citizenship rights to American immigrants who had moved to Upper Canada. In a letter, he told his allies that his enemies were pursuing both him and his brother. He meant the Tories. He was right. 1

The group assembled at the home of James Hamilton, a doctor and magistrate whose property was conveniently close to Rolph's house in Ancaster. They dined. They drank. The idea to tar and feather Rolph was almost certainly proposed by Titus Simons, who had grown up in New England — where the practice was common before his loyalist family fled to Canada during the American Revolution — and thought it appropriate here. 1

Among those present: Alexander Robertson (Simons's son-in-law), George Gurnett, Alexander Chewett, and Allan MacNab — who would later become premier of the Province of Canada. A man named John Paterson was invited, declined, and would later testify about the invitation. 1

The group disguised themselves in sheets, with masks or blackened faces — probably calculated to make witnesses believe the assailants were lower-class, not the lawyers and magistrates they actually were. Before going to Rolph's house, they stopped at a local inn to confront Mrs. Evans's husband. Mrs. Evans was a woman Rolph had taken in after she fled an allegedly abusive husband in England. The men threatened him, accused him of selling his wife, and moved on.

Around midnight, the group broke into Rolph's home. They bound him, blindfolded him, removed his clothes, and applied tar to his body. The feathers they had brought were nowhere to be found. So they tore open one of Rolph's own pillows. The attackers threatened him with castration. They left him half-conscious. 1

At trial, it would later be noted that Mrs. Evans was not in Rolph's bed when the attack occurred.

George Rolph filed a civil lawsuit in 1827 for £1,000 — roughly £91,000 in 2025 terms — against the three attackers he could identify: Titus Simons, James Hamilton, and Alexander Robertson. His brother John served as his lawyer, with William Warren Baldwin as co-counsel. 1

The defence was led by Henry John Boulton, the solicitor general of Upper Canada — sitting not as a government official, but as a private attorney for the men he should theoretically have considered prosecuting. Reformers found this outrageous. Boulton found it unremarkable.

At trial, Allan MacNab and Alexander Chewett — themselves implicated in the attack and also serving as defence lawyers — refused to testify to avoid self-incriminating. George Gurnett and Andrew Steven, the deputy clerk for the Crown, did the same. Judge James B. Macaulay deferred to Boulton's judgment and allowed all of these refusals, which meant Rolph's lawyers could not question the known participants under oath about the identities of others in the mob. 1

Macaulay also ruled that the defendants' suspicions about adultery were irrelevant — neither the adultery suspicion nor any desire to punish Rolph for it constituted legal justification for the attack. That much, at least, the judge got right.

The jury found Simons and Hamilton liable. Robertson was acquitted for lack of evidence. The damages awarded to Rolph: £20 each from Simons and Hamilton. The trial was reported nationally and internationally, with a full gallery for most of the proceedings.

Rolph appealed both the damages amount and Robertson's acquittal to the Court of King's Bench. The timing was awkward: Chief Justice William Campbell was in England for health reasons, leaving only two judges to hear the appeal. 1

Judge John Walpole Willis ruled for a new trial and called for the witnesses who had refused to testify to be held in contempt. Judge Levius Peters Sherwood ruled for the defence, letting the original verdict stand. With Campbell absent, the vote was tied. The appeal failed. 1

During the proceedings, Willis admonished Boulton directly. As solicitor general, Boulton would have been responsible for criminal prosecution if charges had been laid — yet he had accepted fees from the defendants he should have prosecuted. Willis also noted that Boulton had not criminally charged the witnesses who refused to testify, which was itself an offense. Boulton's defense of his own conduct: if he were overruled on the witnesses, any plaintiff in Upper Canada could pay a witness to refuse testimony, then use the refusal to appeal an unfavorable verdict. He seemed more concerned with the procedural precedent than with the men who had tarred and feathered a government official.

In April 1828 — more than a year and a half after the attack — a grand jury recommended criminal indictments against ten defendants: the three civil defendants (Simons, Hamilton, Robertson), the four who had refused to testify (MacNab, Chewett, Gurnett, Steven), and three others (John Law, Peter H. Hamilton, John D. McKay). 1

The Gore County magistrates and the accused pushed hard to keep the case in local courts, where the defendants' friends and allies controlled the process. During the proceedings, MacNab was permitted to cross-examine George Rolph and the grand jury, calling Rolph "ass" and "scoundrel" without rebuke from the presiding judge. 1

John Rolph obtained a writ signed by Willis ordering the magistrates to halt the local proceedings and send the case to the King's Bench. Each defendant was required to post a £50 bond with two separate sureties — an unusual requirement with no overlap permitted among sureties.

The criminal trial was scheduled for September 1828. The attorney general declined to prosecute. Neither Rolph appeared at the hearing, believing it was the Crown's role to pursue the case. The defendants were released. No one was ever criminally convicted for the attack on George Rolph. 1

Boulton's approach was not unusual for the era. Canadian attorneys general at the time generally pursued criminal charges only when an incident had disturbed the public peace; in other matters, victims were expected to seek their own justice in civil courts. The Reformers disagreed with this philosophy sharply. They believed the Crown owed its citizens more than that.

The most immediate political consequence came in the 1828 elections, when Tory politicians lost their parliamentary majority to Reformers. George Rolph won a seat, elected as one of two representatives for Gore County. The perception that the Tories had engaged in political violence — with the Ancaster incident as the plainest example — contributed to their defeat. 1

The Gore County magistrates responded by suspending then dismissing Rolph from his clerkship in April 1829, citing five accusations including his insistence on communicating only through his attorney. Lieutenant Governor Maitland refused their request to remove Rolph; his successor John Colborne affirmed the dismissal anyway. A select committee of the Legislative Assembly condemned the magistrates and recommended reinstatement — but by then, the political landscape had already shifted. 1

The Ancaster incident also triggered what became known as the "Gore District outrages": a second tar-and-feather attack on a man named Jacob Hagle in November 1827; a lawyer's premises broken into and documents destroyed in December 1827; and an effigy of Lieutenant Governor Colborne hung in Hamilton in January 1829. The pattern of incidents was serious enough that the Legislative Assembly formed a select committee to investigate abuse of power by public prosecutors. 1

The individual fates of those involved were unremarkable for the powerful. Titus Simons died in August 1829; before he did, MacNab wrote to his brother suggesting they each pay £10 for their share of the cost of the tar and feathers. Alexander Robertson's reputation was damaged enough that he returned to London by 1832. MacNab, who had called Rolph a scoundrel to his face during grand jury proceedings, went on to become premier of the Province of Canada in 1854.

The men who attacked George Rolph believed they were defending their social order. The act of disguising themselves as lower-class men — sheets, blackened faces, the theatrical performance of being someone else — captures something true about how they understood what they were doing. They knew it was wrong for men of their station. They did it anyway, and then watched their solicitor general argue that it was technically not a criminal matter worth pursuing.

Historians reading the incident later saw the decline of Tory dominance of Upper Canada's political and legal system, and the violence as evidence of that decline — men reaching for force because persuasion and process were no longer reliably theirs to command. 1

The selective prosecution philosophy that let the attackers walk — criminal charges only when the public peace is disturbed — assumed that the public's peace and the ruling class's peace were the same thing. The 1828 elections suggested otherwise. Upper Canada's farmers had a different view of who the law was for.

Wikipedia's Featured Article for June 3, 2026, is Ancaster incident. 2