Lord Ponsonby … an Irish diplomat from Co Kilkenny who saved the besieged Jews of Rhodes in the mid-19th centuryPatrick Comerford
I was writing last Friday (7 November 2025) about the Jewish community in Rhodes, how they suffered during the Holocaust, and how the Jewish quarter in Rhodes became the setting for the closing scenes in the film Escape to Athena (1979).
I have visited Rhodes half a dozen times or more. But during one visit Rhodes many years ago that was abandoned when a ferry I had booked never sailed, I came across the story of an Irish-born peer and diplomat, who was from a well-known Co Kilkenny family and a bishop’s brother, and how he saved the Jews of Rhodes from a violent outburst of prejudice 185 years ago.
It is a story about the Jewish community in Rhodes, but also has links with the island of Corfu and with many of the Irish Philhellenes, whose contribution to Greek history has been a subject of my research for many years.
In February 1840, the Jews of Rhodes were falsely accused of ritually murdering a Christian boy who had gone missing while walking alone. The incident became known as the ‘Rhodes blood libel’.
After the boy went missing on a walk, the Jews of Rhodes were accused of kidnapping and murdering him. A number of Jewish men were arrested, beaten and tortured and accused of taking Christian children captive for ritual sacrifice.
After the Jewish Quarter in the Old Town of Rhodes was besieged during Passover that year, the British Government decided to intervene on behalf of the Jewish community. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, sent a dispatch on 5 May to the British ambassador in Constantinople, Lord Ponsonby, asking him to communicate the British concerns about events in Rhodes to the Ottoman government ‘officially and in writing’ and to ‘request … an immediate and strict inquiry to be made … especially into the allegation that these atrocities were committed at the instigation of the Christians and the European consuls.’
John Ponsonby (1770-1855) was an Irish-born diplomat from Bessborough, Co Kilkenny. As a young adult, he was visiting revolutionary France in 1791 when he was seized by a mob in Paris but, it is said, his youth and beauty saved him from being hanged as an aristocrate. He returned to Ireland, entered politics as a Whig and a supporter of Catholic Emancipation and an opponent of the Act of Union.
His father was the Speaker of the House of Commons in Grattan’s Parliament and with Henry Grattan was a founder of the Whig Club in Dublin in 1789. John Ponsonby was the MP for Tallow, Co Waterford (1793-1797), and Dungarvan, Co Waterford (1798-1801), in the years immediately before the Act of Union, and in Westminster for Galway City (1801-1802) after the Act of Union.
At the time of the blood libel allegations against the Jews of Rhodes, one of Ponsonby’s brothers, Richard Ponsonby (1772-1853), was Bishop of Derry (1831-1853) and he had previously been Bishop of Killaloe (1828-1831) and Dean of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin.
His other siblings included Major-General Sir William Ponsonby (1772-1815), who was killed at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and the Hon Mary Ponsonby (1776-181), who married the Prime Minister, Charles Grey (1764-1845), 2nd Earl Grey.
John Ponsonby succeeded to his father’s estate and title as Baron Ponsonby when his father died on 5 November 1806. He was based in Corfu from 1818, when he held an appointment in the Ionian Islands from 1818. The Secretary to the Senate of the Ionian Islands at the time was Sir George Ferguson Bowen (1821-1899), from Taughboyne (Churchtown), near Lifford, Co Donegal.
The Treaty of Paris in 1815 had turned the Ionian islands, including Corfu, into the United States of the Ionian Islands under British protection, and the islands were given a new constitution under British rule in 1817. The islanders elected an Assembly of 40 members, who advised the British High Commissioner.
Four other Irish-born politicians and administrators who played key roles in shaping 19th century political life in Corfu: Sir Richard Church (1784-1873) from Cork; Sir Charles Napier (1782-1853) from Celbridge, Co Kildare; George Nugent-Grenville (1789-1850) from Co Westmeath, 2nd Baron Nugent of Carlanstown; and Sir John Young (1807-1876) from Bailieborough, Co Cavan, later Lord Lisgar.
British rule continued until the islands were united with Greece in 1862, and the British legacy in Corfu has been described as afternoon tea and cricket. But Ponsonby’s papers provide little evidence of his activities there or indeed of any aspect of his career before the 1820s.
Back in London, King George IV was jealous of Ponsonby and the attention he was receiving from the king’s mistress, Lady Coyngham. And so, Ponsonby was sent abroad once again, holding diplomatic posts in Argentina (1826-1828), Brazil (1828-1829), Belgium (1830-1831) and Naples (1832).
Ponsonby was sent to Constantinople as the British ambassador in 1832, and a year before the crisis in Rhodes he was given the peerage title of Viscount Ponsonby of Imokilly, Co Cork, on 20 April 1839.
Ponsonby’s immediate response to Palmerston’s instructions on the ‘Rhodes blood libel’ created a consensus within the European diplomatic corps in Constantinople that the persecution of the Jews of Rhodes had to cease. Emboldened, Ponsonby, who was by far the most powerful diplomat in Constantinople, intervened with the Ottoman court on behalf of the Jews of Rhodes.
An Ottoman inquiry cleared the Jewish population of all the accusations. The Turkish governor of Rhodes, Yusuf Pasha, was dismissed for not having upheld the law, and Ponsonby praised the investigation as one during which the ‘affair of Rhodes was examined with fairness’. He called the verdict ‘a signal proof of the justice and humanity with which the Sublime Porte acts.’
Ponsonby had married Lady Frances Villiers, seventh daughter of George Villiers, 4th Earl of Jersey, in 1803. They had no children and she died in London on 14 April 1866. John Ponsonby died in Brighton on 21 February 1855, and he is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, London.
But there was another family connection with the Greek islands and the Irish Philhellenes. John Ponsonby was a near contemporary and a second cousin of Major-General Sir Frederick Cavendish Ponsonby (1783-1837) who was also involved in British rule in Corfu.
Sir Frederick Ponsonby was a son of Frederick Ponsonby (1758-1844), 3rd Earl of Bessborough, and a brother of the famed or notorious Lady Caroline Lamb. Ponsonby was severely wounded at the Battle of Waterloo. Ponsonby was appointed inspecting field officer in the Ionian Islands on 20 January 1824, and he was promoted major-general on 27 May 1825, commanding the British troops in the Ionian Islands. He left Corfu at the end of 1826 when he was appointed Governor of Malta.
During his time in the Ionian Islands, his son, the future Major-General Sir Henry Frederick Ponsonby (1825-1895) was born in Corfu on 10 December 1825 and was baptised there. He later became Queen Victoria’s Private Secretary.
As for Bessborough House, near Piltown, Co Kilkenny, the home of the Ponsonby family for generations and that gave them their family title, it became a seminary or theological college for the Oblate fathers in the 1940s. They sold it to the Department of Agriculture in 1971, and it since 1980 it has been Kildalton Agricultural College.
