Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives 1789622611, 9781789622614

Table of contents :
Contents
Notes on the Contributors
Preface
Introduction
Part I Cromwell at War in Ireland
1 Siege Massacres in Ireland
2 War Criminal Allegations
3 ‘Halt! Halt!’ Oliver Cromwell, Hugh O’Neill and the Siege of Clonmel, April–May 1650
Part II Commanders in Ireland
4 Henry Ireton in Ireland, 1649–1651
5 God’s Wall of Brass
6 Ormond and Cromwell
Part III The 'Settlement' of Ireland
7 Cromwellian Transplantations of the Irish to the Colonies
8 A Scramble for Ireland
Part IV Cromwell's Legacy
9 The Social Memory of Oliver Cromwell in Ireland, c.1660s–c.1730s
10 ‘This day by letters severall from hands’
11 The Folkloric Afterlife of Oliver Cromwell in Ireland
Select Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Cromwell and Ireland New Perspectives

Cromwell and Ireland New Perspectives

Edited by Martyn Bennett, Ray Gillespie and R. Scott Spurlock

L I V E R P O OL U N I V E R S I T Y PR E S S

First published 2021 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2021 Liverpool University Press The right of Martyn Bennett, Ray Gillespie and R. Scott Spurlock to be identified as the editors of this book has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-78962-237-9 cased ISBN 978-1-78962-261-4 epdf Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster

Contents Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives

Contents

Notes on the Contributors vii Preface xi Introduction 1 I Cromwell at War in Ireland 1 Siege Massacres in Ireland: Drogheda in Context Pádraig Lenihan

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2 War Criminal Allegations: The Case for the Defence Tom Reilly

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3 ‘Halt! Halt!’ Oliver Cromwell, Hugh O’Neill and the Siege of Clonmel, April–May 1650 Alan Marshall

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II Commanders in Ireland 4 Henry Ireton in Ireland, 1649–1651: Oliver Cromwell’s ‘Second Self’? David Farr

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5 God’s Wall of Brass: Cromwell’s Generals in Ireland, 1649–1650 135 Martyn Bennett

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Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives

6 Ormond and Cromwell: The Struggle for Ireland James Scott Wheeler

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III The ‘Settlement’ of Ireland 7 Cromwellian Transplantations of the Irish to the Colonies Heidi J. Coburn

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8 A Scramble for Ireland: Cromwell and the Land Settlement John Cunningham

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IV Cromwell’s Legacy 9 The Social Memory of Oliver Cromwell in Ireland, c.1660s–c.1730s 231 Eamon Darcy 10 ‘This day by letters severall from hands’: News Networks and Oliver Cromwell’s Letters from Drogheda Nick Poyntz

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11 The Folkloric Afterlife of Oliver Cromwell in Ireland Sarah Covington

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Select Bibliography

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Index 299

Notes on the Contributors

Notes on the Contributors

Martyn Bennett is Professor of Early Modern History at Nottingham Trent University. Educated at a range of state schools and Loughborough University, he has worked extensively on the Civil Wars in Britain and Ireland. Amongst his publications are The Civil Wars in Britain and Ireland (1996), The Civil Wars Experienced (2000), Oliver Cromwell (2006) and Oliver Cromwell at War: The Lord General and his Military Revolution (2017). Professor Bennett is also the principal presenter of the television series Rediscovering Notts on Notts TV. Heidi J. Coburn completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2017 with a thesis entitled ‘The Built Environment and Material Culture of Ireland in the 1641 Deposition, 1600–1654’. Her Cambridge MPhil in 2013 focused on the immigration of Irish indentured servants to Barbados during the seventeenth century. She is currently an independent academic in Boston where she develops educational history content and continues her research in Irish material culture. Sarah Covington is Professor of History at the Graduate Center and Queens College of the City University of New York and the Director of Irish Studies at Queens College. Specialising in early modern England and Ireland, she is the author of a number of books and articles and co-editor of Early Modern Ireland: New Sources, Methods and Perspectives (2018). She is also the author of a forthcoming book that examines the political, religious, literary and folkloric afterlife and memory of Oliver Cromwell in Ireland. vii

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John Cunningham is a historian of the early modern period, with a particular interest in mid-seventeenth-century Britain and Ireland. He has written articles and essays on topics including the 1641 rebellion and the Cromwellian land settlement, as well as a monograph, Conquest and Land in Ireland: The Transplantation to Connacht, 1649–1680. Eamon Darcy is a historian of early modern Ireland and a member of the Arts and Humanities Institute in Maynooth University. Since the publication of The Irish Rebellion of 1641 and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (2015), Dr Darcy’s research focuses on two interconnected areas: political participation and early modern communications. His current projects include memory and memorisation techniques c.1400–1700 and oral and literate cultures in the early modern Irish world. David Farr is Deputy Head Academic of Norwich School. He is author of full-length studies of Cromwellian military-religious radicals Henry Ireton, John Lambert and Thomas Harrison, as well as four general studies of Britain in the seventeenth century and numerous articles on various aspects of the English Revolution in a range of academic journals. He is currently completing a full-length study of Hezekiah Haynes and the failure of Cromwell’s godly revolution in the east of England. Pádraig Lenihan is a lecturer in history at the National University of Ireland, Galway. The study of Irish, British and continental warfare in the period 1641–1715 forms the backbone of his research and writing career. His four monographs illustrate the range of his interests. Confederate Catholics at War, 1641–1649 (2001) attempted to dislodge politics from providing the primary interpretative framework for evaluating the regime. His 2003 1690 Battle of the Boyne was – in form – that most traditional of histories, the battle narrative, which, none the less, highlighted the timid, limited and reactive manoeuvres by both leaders on the day. Consolidating Conquest: Ireland, 1603–1727 (2008) is a survey of Irish history which won acclaim for the author’s ‘ability to summarise and simplify complex military, political and diplomatic history’. The Last Cavalier: Richard Talbot (1631–91) (2014) is ‘the scholarly and nuanced biography’ of a pivotal and controversial figure. Lenihan’s Fluxes, Fevers and Fighting Men: War and Disease in Ancien Régime Europe, 1648–1789 was published in April 2019.

Notes on the Contributors

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Alan Marshall is Professor of History at Bath Spa University. His most recent book is The Secret State in Early-Modern Britain (2021). He is also the author of ‘“Faisons meieux”: Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington and his Political Tactics’ (in R. Eagles and C. Dennehy (eds), Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington, and his World: Restoration Court, Politics and Diplomacy (2019)); ‘“Plots” and Dissent: The Abortive Northern Rebellion of 1663’ (in J. Clare (ed.), From Republic to Restoration: Legacies and Departures (2018)); ‘Elizabeth Cromwell and Mary Hays’ (in G. L. Walker (ed.), The Invention of Female Biography (2017)); ‘“Memorialls for Mrs Affora”: Aphra Behn and the Restoration Intelligence System’, Women’s Writing 22.1 (2015); and ‘“Pax quaeritur bello”: The Cromwellian Military Legacy’, in J. Mills (ed.), Cromwell’s Legacy (2012). Nick Poyntz is an independent scholar. He has published research on popular protest in the English Civil Wars and on the newsbooks of the early Commonwealth. He is currently researching the life and work of the bookseller, writer and preacher Henry Walker, editor of Perfect Occurrences and Severall proceedings in Parliament. Tom Reilly is a non-academic historian based in Drogheda, Ireland. He has written several articles and three books on Oliver Cromwell’s Irish campaign: Cromwell at Drogheda (1993); Cromwell, An Honourable Enemy (1999) and Cromwell Was Framed (2014). He has also written seven other books, most of which are on local history topics. James Scott Wheeler is a retired army Colonel who served in army aviation and armour units in Vietnam, Europe and the USA. He earned his BA in history from the University of Montana in 1969 and his PhD in European history from the University of California, Berkeley in 1980. In 1987, he was selected to serve as the chief of the International History Division of the Department of History at the United States Military Academy. Scott has published five books, including The Big Red One: America’s Legendary 1st Infantry Division from World War I to Desert Storm and his latest book, Jacob L. Devers: A General’s Life. He and his wife Jane live in the Flathead Valley near Glacier Park, in north-west Montana. He has taught history courses at the Flathead Valley Community College, the University of Montana and the United States Military Academy.

Preface Tom Reilly

Preface

In the eighteenth century, Dr Samuel Johnson concluded that there was no appetite for another book about Oliver Cromwell, because ‘all that can be told of him is already in print’, and so he abandoned his plans for a Cromwell biography. Yet here in the ‘Smart Age’, hundreds of articles and books about the enigma that is Oliver Cromwell continue to tumble from the printing presses with every passing year. When it comes to Ireland, Cromwell has arguably filled a larger space in the story of the tempestuous age-old Anglo-Irish relationship than has been occupied by perhaps any other historical figure. When a ceremony to celebrate the placing of a statue of Cromwell outside the Houses of Parliament was taking place in 1899, Lord Rosebery pronounced that he took ‘Cromwell to be the raiser and maintainer of the power of the Empire of England’. It would be easy to identify the impact of Cromwell’s relationship with Ireland as one that characterised the colonial mentality of the British Empire but that would be to misrepresent the unique events that took place in the mid-seventeenth century and the complex social, religious, political and economic forces that prevailed at the time. Essentially a farmer by profession, Cromwell once reached a lowly status on the social scale when he descended to the station of yeoman, having sold the estate that he had inherited from his father when he moved from Huntingdon to St Ives. Fortuitously, the death of a maternal uncle resulted in him becoming the owner of a more sizeable property in nearby Ely and he was once again elevated to the rank of gentleman. Just a few years later, with no military experience, Oliver Cromwell became a Parliamentarian officer and entered into a multifarious and chaotic wartime revolutionary panorama, and with a swift unmeasured stride left a legacy that has long xi

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reached mythological proportions that have embedded themselves in the historiography, folklore and consequently the DNA of the Irish diaspora. There is literally no corner of Ireland where his influence did not reach; no parish or townland where he is said not to have trod, slaughtered or laid waste. Today the tourist can stand at the fireplace in Oliver Cromwell’s kitchen in his half-timbered house in Ely and connect with the man over the centuries. A comforting sound effect emanates from the fireplace and, although now mechanical, soothing burning crackle noises fill the pleasant room as though wood were burning there like it did when the gentleman farmer himself stood on these very flagstones. To the left of the fire, the kitchen window frames a picturesque view of the characterful, medieval St Mary’s Church just next door, where some of his children were baptised. This reassuring domestic scene is in stark contrast to the horrid scenes of death and destruction that Cromwell would behold in Ireland in a time yet to come. When he acquired this property in 1636 his name had not been heard beyond the local fenlands, and his later reputation that has since been seared deeply into the Irish psyche was still a world away. Here in his little chocolate-box house in the bustling market town of Ely where his family story is told, and where his wife reared his nine children – and darned his socks no doubt – it is virtually impossible to reconcile the image of the genocidal maniac of the Irish imagination with this virtuous pillar of local society who became king in all but name.

Introduction Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives

Introduction

Cromwell lived for just under 59½ years: he was a soldier for 16 years, but only served in the field for nine of them. For over 43 years he was a fairly insignificant county gentleman. Whilst at one point he might have been clinging on to gentility by his fingernails, in his early forties he was, because of a fortuitous inheritance and the controversial reign of King Charles I, beginning to rise in status and about to become a useful political ally in the attack on the legacy of the king’s ‘Personal Rule’. In the post-war period he rose to the position of head of state, which no commoner had before him, and only his son Richard has held since in Britain. By any standards that alone was a dramatic achievement, but added to it is the fact that whilst having never put on a sword in anger until aged 43, he had become, arguably at least, Britain’s greatest cavalry commander. Nevertheless, there are at least two major blemishes on his memory and legacy and both of which are controversial and damaging to his reputation, one of which relates to his brief presence in Ireland. First, the accusation that, whilst Lord Protector, he was a military dictator, levelled at him because of the possibly mistaken and unnecessary policy of placing major-generals into regional civil administration positions in the mid-1650s. The second accusation is that he was a war criminal, partially at least responsible for genocide or perhaps even ethnic cleansing in Ireland. This controversy brings a close lens on to Cromwell’s role in the war in Ireland during 1649 and 1650. This is a particularly sharp focus on a small section of a very military career. However, it is undoubtedly a popular as well as controversial subject, laced still with controversy on both sides of the Irish Sea: a sea that in many but not all cases acts as a dividing line between perspectives on Cromwell. Whilst Cromwell has been used 1

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Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives

in Britain as a sort of bogeyman, it has never reached the scale of the negativity observed in Ireland, up to and including perhaps the present day. This book is an attempt to expand the understanding of Cromwell’s role in Ireland both over the period since 1650 and in the breadth of those few months themselves. The idea for the book came, as many good ideas do, in a pub. Unlike so many such ideas, this one lasted beyond the morning after. The pub was The Minster in Ely, just around the corner from Cromwell’s House. Tom Reilly and Martyn Bennett had both been guests of Matthew Routledge at the impressive museum where they met to discuss Cromwell and Ireland in the wake of their recent publications on Cromwell. Both had dealt, in very different ways, with the issue in a number of books but also felt that it was time to readdress the issue of Cromwell in Ireland head on by assembling a collection of studies on the subject. In the weeks that followed, the two called for expressions of interest in Britain, Ireland and the United States of America. Both were pleased with the very positive response, but also by the breadth of approach which the authors proposed to bring to the subject. Cromwell himself, for once, was not seen as the only actor on this stage. This is important, for in Ireland as in so many cases across Britain, Cromwell is still seen by many as the chief motivator of the whole series of wars and civil war which afflicted the three kingdoms or four nations.1 The other commanders and participants in the 1649–1650 campaign are often forgotten or ignored – some, like Lord Broghill and Charles Coote, because they did their best to ‘blend’ successfully into the new post-Cromwellian regime. This collection of important new work on Ireland explores the broader aspects of Cromwell’s involvement in Ireland. It sets a context for the more controversial aspects of his involvement by exploring the nature of warfare in Ireland in the years prior to and surrounding his intervention – and the suggestion is that he may not have been out of step with the general tone of brutality in the Irish wars. But there are also issues to be explored about his style of leadership, which naturally reflects on his responsibility for the alleged massacres at Drogheda and Wexford in 1649. There is a suggestion that he played his cards close to his chest at precisely this period. Of course, Cromwell, as well as needing to be seen in the context of the duration of the wars, needs to be seen in the 1 ‘Cromwell’ is still frequently the wrong but accepted answer to a number of quiz show questions about parliamentarian leadership during the Civil War period.

Introduction

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context of his commanders, and there is a focus on one of the men who shared his posthumous fate in 1661 – Henry Ireton – and we are led through their relationship. At the same time, there is a need to look at the minutiae of his campaign and to question his reputation as a sound all-round commander, as, for many reasons, after the Battle of Rathmines there were no field battles fought during the Irish war. However, there is more to Cromwell’s legacy than just the period 1649 to 1650 and this book tries to go beyond the study of the campaign itself and military history and provide a wider context by looking at the historical and cultural legacy of those momentous ten months. Moreover, we need to move beyond Cromwell himself – at least the living, breathing Cromwell. There were other protagonists in Ireland at that time and within these essays some of them are covered and analysed – Ormond and Ireton, for example. Cromwell also needs to be set amongst these men and their roles in this part of Irish history. But also, after he had left the country and perhaps even more so after he had died, Cromwell cast a shadow over Ireland’s history and its folklore, which he personally could not shape or control, and this book explores that aspect of his legacy with regard to both those aspects. Naturally, in a book focusing on Cromwell in Ireland, there is a great deal of reflection on what happened at Drogheda and Wexford. Some essays, especially Tom Reilly’s, which focuses on both, deal in detail with at least the former, and, in some ways, this may seem to lead to repetition. There is plenty, however, to demonstrate that each author here has differing perspectives; their selection of what detail to focus on and the interpretations they draw reflects their own perspectives and understanding. Indeed, just as the variety of the essays in this volume shows, there is no single way of viewing Cromwell’s roles and responsibilities for the outcomes of these two sieges, just as there is no single way of interpreting Cromwell’s relationship(s) with Ireland. Therefore, whilst direct repetition was generally removed, the decision was taken to enable the authors to deal with both sieges with little in the way of let or hindrance, even if on occasion they do provide us with the same facts. Yet it remains true that the essays which focus primarily on the military aspects of this period in the collection put Cromwell’s campaign into a series of broader contexts, each aiming to shift somewhat the focus from the Commander-in-Chief to other leaders. One of these contexts is that of personnel. Several essays deal with Cromwell’s contemporaries in Ireland on all sides of the political, religious and military divisions. James Scott Wheeler, who has an impressive record of dealing with Cromwell in Ireland under his belt, has contributed by contrast an essay which explores the role of James Butler,

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Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives

Earl of Ormond.2 Ormond is so often almost a much expected but rarely effective deus ex machina on the Irish stage. In this chapter, the marquis is centre stage and the essay analyses his role and demonstrates Ormond’s true importance to the strategy. Moreover, the essay lauds his success in creating the confederation–royalist alliance in the first place. It is argued that Ormond, whilst to a great extent dependent upon financial aid from France, was able to work with all the varied factions that made up his ‘rainbow’ coalition: something Wheeler presents as remarkable. Each of these factions faced their own problems. Lord Inchiquin’s Protestant forces in the south-west were distrusted and – as Bennett shows – disliked to the extent that many soldiers deserted their Catholic allies. The Earl of Clanricarde, whilst containing the threat from Owen Roe O’Neill before the veteran soldier joined the coalition, had a rather insular view of the war and wanted Ormond to support him in the west, rather than the other way around. Not unnaturally, the confederate forces based around the country were reluctant at best to support a man whose forces they had been fighting off militarily and resisting politically for much of the 1640s. Yet Ormond managed the task of creating a potentially powerful army which would be in a position to go on the offensive before Cromwell arrived. Coming back to the personnel theme, Ormond faced the same problem common to both Charles I and parliament during the war in England: how to reorganise the armed forces in a way which soothed the egos and honour of the officers who were no longer needed in the reformed army. In the end, Ormond’s energetic balancing act fell apart. The mistrust between Protestant and Catholic soldiers could not hold, and as the glue that bound them together – money and wages – dried up so did Ormond’s ability to bring them both into the field. David Farr, the author of a complex biography of Cromwell’s son-in-law, has explored carefully Henry Ireton’s role in the initial and subsequent campaigns in Ireland up until his death in 1651.3 He looks at the very close political relationship between the two men and questions the notion that they always worked hand in hand – the widely perceived contemporary notion that Ireton was Cromwell’s ‘second self’. Farr points out that Ireton’s republican credentials were hardened during the campaign in Ireland and suggests that there may have been conflict between them over Oliver’s policy in Ireland had Ireton not died at Limerick. Bennett also explores this relationship, suggesting that Cromwell may not have been 2 James Scott-Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland (Dublin, 1999); James Scott-Wheeler, The Irish and British Wars, 1637–1654 (London, 2002). 3 David Farr, Henry Ireton and the English Revolution (Woodbridge, 2006).

Introduction

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fully confident in his son-in-law’s abilities at the outset of the campaign and that he may have been forced to rely on him to a greater extent than he wished by May 1650. Martyn Bennett’s essay contextualised Cromwell within the wider cadre of the general officers he assembled for the campaign and those he worked with once there. Bennett has also considered Cromwell in Ireland before in two books on the general’s life and campaigns.4 The men Cromwell took to Ireland were generally younger than he was, and not always more experienced militarily; they were markedly different from some of the commanders they faced, men who had been schooled largely in warfare on the continent. Cromwell’s commanders mostly learned their trade only after the outbreak of wars in Britain and Ireland. Potentially they carried with them a different outlook on warfare and politics. The intention is to remind the reader that Cromwell was not alone. Moreover, somewhat in line with Farr’s approach is the argument that Cromwell did not automatically accord great independent authority to Ireton upon the latter’s arrival in Ireland: like the others in Cromwell’s command team. Like Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill and perhaps to a lesser extent Michael Jones (two men Cromwell had not worked with), Ireton had to earn respect and trust. Tom Reilly has been asking important questions about Cromwell in Ireland for the best part of three decades.5 His often controversial stance on Cromwell had drawn both criticism and praise, often because it distances itself from the work of ‘historians’, a polarity which is becoming harder to maintain the more he has researched his argument over the years. His stance has also in his home town of Drogheda been viewed askance. His essay here continues his theme of trying to clear Cromwell’s name of the charge of genocide or ethnic cleansing at Drogheda and Wexford. Wheeler also covers this most controversial of Cromwellian subjects and presents an argument that somewhat resembles that of Reilly. That is to say that whilst Cromwell obliged his soldiers to kill members of Aston’s garrison, in both hot and cold blood, and whilst he permitted the killing of the ‘religious radicals’ the priests, he did not authorise the killing of lay civilians. None the less, lay civilians were killed, perhaps chiefly accidentally as collateral damage, and possibly even in some isolated cases deliberately by individuals or groups in acts of malicious supposed revenge by victorious soldiers. However, this was not at Cromwell’s volition: and it is probable that these innocents were not killed in any great number. 4 Martyn Bennett, Oliver Cromwell (Abingdon, 2006); Martyn Bennett, Cromwell at War: The Lord General and his Military Revolution (London, 2017). 5 Tom Reilly, Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy (Dublin, 1999); Tom Reilly, Cromwell Was Framed: Ireland 1649 (Lanham, MD, 2014).

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Nick Poyntz’s chapter takes a different tack when dealing with the controversial issues around Drogheda. He has explored the literary contribution to the debate over Cromwell’s role in Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century made by Joseph George Muddiman. Muddiman’s purpose in writing about the Drogheda issue was anchored by both his dislike of Cromwell and his historical rejection of Whig interpretations of the Civil War period such as that of Samuel Rawson Gardiner.6 Gardiner, he seems also to have had a particular dislike of, trying to persuade readers of the Times Literary Supplement that everything Gardiner wrote had to be checked for accuracy. Nevertheless, Poyntz argues that Muddiman is worth re-examination, suggesting that his familiarity with printed early modern texts was extensive. This knowledge and experience he put to work on an analysis of how news of the siege was communicated to London, not only in the form of the texts themselves but also in the information that letters and so on contained. There was a focus on the use of the term ‘many inhabitants’ when discussing casualties at Drogheda. And this almost inevitably leads back to Reilly’s discussion of the phrase and earlier questions over who exactly had written it and when it was written into the record. The later stages of the siege of Drogheda need to be revisited therefore in the context of the assertions made by Reilly and what Poyntz argues about Muddiman’s contribution to the discussion, as well as Wheeler’s depiction of the siege. Pádraig Lenihan’s exploration of the wide range of massacres during the war in Ireland also gives Drogheda a wider context. Lenihan looks at the war as a whole, both qualitatively and quantitatively: tabulating instances of massacre in a way which makes it possible to explore the wide range of incidences. Lenihan’s essay undertakes this task within the term of the two codes of conduct identified by Barbara Donagan and in terms of the issue of personal honour.7 Defining a massacre as the killing outside of combat of six or more soldiers or civilians in the aftermath of a siege, the essay goes on to explore what Lenihan describes as a patchwork of these codes and their relationship to the outcomes of the range of sieges and how the victors dealt with those who fell into their hands as result of a successful siege. The conclusion does not make comfortable reading for those with a belief in moral equivalence, but it does provide a somewhat damning context for Cromwell’s behaviour in 1649.

6 Samuel R. Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War (Stroud, 1991). 7 David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan and Clodagh Tait (eds), Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Context in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2009).

Introduction

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Cromwell’s campaign ended on a sour note as far he was concerned and the siege of Clonmel, generally regarded as a tactical disaster, is explored by Alan Marshall. Marshall has written about the issues of Cromwell in Ireland before, but this is a tightly focused and valuable essay on a much neglected event set within the context of Cromwell’s experience of siege warfare.8 Cromwell, in Marshall’s view, possessed some of the highest qualities of a cavalry general, stating that, on occasion, hastiness and brutality were sometimes required. Timeliness and raw courage were excellent qualities in a cavalry commander, but, Marshall suggests, were inappropriate when leading a siege. Whilst Cromwell had displayed a capacity for conducting a successful short and brutal siege (at Basing House in 1645, for example), and had also shown awareness of the double need for patience and siege artillery at Pembroke in 1648, in Ireland, as Marshall explains, he seems to have come to a single-minded belief that Irish garrisons were susceptible to short sieges concluded by a brutal storm. He had good reason for this: he had dealt with veteran garrison commanders at Drogheda and Kilkenny. The first, however, was conducted at a point when his army was fresh and confident; the latter when the defences were over-extended. Clonmel was far more compact and the commander was a superb leader and garrison commander. This resulted in a mismatch where the preparations made inside the walls were superior to those which had been prepared to meet Cromwell’s assault on Drogheda, and more sophisticated than those constructed outside the walls. Moreover, initial defeat saw Cromwell with little left in his collection of siege skills and thus he seemed to have felt obliged to continue with his blunt and fruitless attacks. Nevertheless, despite Clonmel, Cromwell’s presence in Ireland was crucial: it was perhaps the greatest single contribution to the defeat of Ormond’s grand alliance. We must not forget that Cromwell had masterminded an Ireland-wide strategy with his own coalition of men with very different experience (or no experience at all) of Ireland, which it can be argued at least matched Ormond’s success. Although he had left Ireland by the end of May 1650, and others continued his work, the defeat of significant numbers of Ormond’s men and the capture of an impressive string of major and minor garrisons undermined Ormond’s grand alliance. Whilst it might have been premature to think of the war as being won by the end of Cromwell’s campaign, the heart had been taken out of the republic’s opponents. What followed was an accelerated development of colonialism involving the continued seizure of Irish property. On both 8 Alan Marshall, Oliver Cromwell, Soldier: The Military History of a Revolutionary at War (London, 2004).

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Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives

sides of the Irish Sea, in subsequent periods, this phase of continuing colonisation has borne the epithet Cromwellian. Heidi Coburn’s essay on the post-presence period covers the transportation of erstwhile enemies. This she sets into a broader context, reminding us that this was ‘never linked to the kings of England’, who had practised such dispossession both before and after Cromwell. Instead, perceptions of colonial policy, partly once again because of his deeds in Drogheda where he asserted that military survivors would be sent to the West Indies, would associate Cromwell with slavery. This chapter sets out to challenge the notion, despite admitting that Barbados was inhospitable to those shipped out there. It has also to be remembered that Barbados was not a destination reserved only for Cromwell’s defeated Irish foes: Scots and English people deemed to oppose parliament and the republic also found themselves sent there. The intriguing proposition, raised by John Morrill, that Cromwell may well have been opposed to the policies which now bear his name, does appear here. For some people, the business of transportation was just that, a business, and the purpose of transportation was to further the development of a colonial economy outside the British Isles and the reasons for the workforce being there were less important than their presence. John Cunningham also tackles the issues of the reappropriation of land generally known as the Cromwellian Settlement. Cunningham has covered this subject before, but in this essay, he aims to take the Cromwell out of ‘Cromwellian’.9 This, once again, is no easy task because not only has the settlement been thus labelled for over three centuries but the whole era, as Cunningham points out, is known by this epithet. The Lord Protector dominated the political picture to such an extent that it is difficult to think of the period without having a mental picture of the man at the centre of everything. Thus the challenge of removing his name from this particular aspect of the 1650s is always going to be an uphill struggle. The task of examining the settlement and reassessing Cromwell’s role is therefore even more difficult because we are dealing not only with three and a half centuries of a continuing misunderstanding but also very effective misinformation. This misdirection began with some of the men Cromwell had forged into his effective war machine in 1649 who were more than willing participants in the attempt to focus opprobrium on Cromwell by the Restoration regime. Whilst Bennett has argued elsewhere that Cromwell remained quite ignorant of Ireland’s history and society until 1649, others, 9 John Cunningham, Conquest and Land in Ireland: The Transplantation to Connacht, 1649–1680 (Woodbridge, 2011).

Introduction

9

as Cunningham reasserts, have pointed out that Cromwell had a financial interest in Ireland having invested money in the defeat of the rebellion early in the 1640s. This serves to set both Cromwell and the settlement programme into a much broader context than the 1650s alone. Indeed, the possibility that Cromwell has lent his name to something of which ironically he disapproved, and for which opposition in parliament was prepared to punish him, is examined forensically in Cunningham’s essay. Nevertheless, even though several of the authors are attempting to reassess Cromwell’s intimate involvement in Ireland, two essays demonstrate the power of the potency of Cromwell’s name in Ireland from very different perspectives. Eamon Darcy explores Oliver in the context of the collective Irish memory, whilst Sarah Covington looks at his folklore legacy. Darcy looks closely at the enduring popularity of Seán Ó Conaill’s poem ‘Tuireamh na hÉireann’. Remarkably, the poem has the very modern aspect of seeing Cromwell in a longer historical context, like several of this book’s other authors. Ó Conaill had traced the fatal disunity within Ireland and saw it as a feature of the nation that largely post-dated the creation of the Protestant Church of Ireland. The advent of Protestantism had driven wedges into a society which was, to a significant degree, inclusive, something which perhaps the Confederation of Kilkenny sought to resurrect in 1642. Cromwell was therefore only the latest manifestation of Protestant intervention. One distinctive element of Ó Conaill’s poem is that whilst he saw the post-1649 conquest of Ireland as geographically comprehensive he did not explicitly single out Drogheda or Wexford for mention. Perhaps the most striking element of the poem is that Ó Conaill included the line to describe the post-war situation as a period: ‘gan fhíon, gan cheól, gan dán dá éisdeacht’ [without wine, music or poetry to listen to], which suggests that defeat in 1649–1653 was also very much a cultural conquest that continues to have resonance in the early twenty-first century. Continuing the exploration of the cultural impact of Cromwell in Ireland, Sarah Covington has further developed her exploration of the traces of Cromwell lingering still in the folklore of Ireland.10 The use of folklore, she justifies partly but not wholly, is to fill a gap in evidence that, she suggests, was caused by the fires of the eighteenth century and of 1922, which destroyed so much of the written record of the mid-seventeenth century. Once again, the essay explores the nature of the term Cromwellian, 10 Sarah Covington, ‘“The odious demon from across the sea”: Oliver Cromwell, Memory and the Dislocations of Ireland’, in Erika Kuijper, Judith Pollmann, Johannes Müller and Jasper van der Steen (eds), Memory before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2013).

10

Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives

suggesting that the folklore is replete with references to the ‘associations that accrued around him’ rather than relating to the man himself. Again, there is a greater context, and Covington’s essay points out that Cromwell was often linked not with the past as in ‘Tuireamh na hÉireann’ but with the future monarch William III. Also, with resonances in the other essays within the collection, Covington shows how some of these folklore traditions related to the Cromwellian Settlement and to the indigenous landowners fooling the new incomers, acting therefore as a counterpoint to the notion of encompassing deprivation of Ó Conaill’s poem: suggesting that there was hope. Through these varied essays several common threads run that serve to present a revised picture of Cromwell in Ireland. The chief of these purposes is contextual. Cromwell did not introduce the vicious colonisation process into Ireland. The tradition of his active role in the deliberate deaths of large numbers of Ireland’s innocents is seriously challenged. But this was in place long before and long after he set foot in Ireland. Whilst Seán Ó Conaill might have seen a period of relative cultural assimilation and stability after the initial appearance of colonists from Normandy, England and Wales that lasted until the Reformation, others might disagree and point to the steady attempt, covertly and overtly, to isolate and degrade the native Irish. There is no doubt Cromwell was part of this, but he was not a driver but part of a continuing process. Moreover, as this collection of essays suggests, nor was he alone in conquering Ireland at the mid-point of the seventeenth century: he was joined by other generals in the attempt to bring to a close what he and others regarded as a heinous and unnatural rebellion. The men with him were determined to end the rebellion, for a mixture of reasons, political, religious and personal. Unlike Henry Ireton and Cromwell, not all of these men were the leading figures of the rebellion at home, but an assembly of people from Ireland and from England who united in one aim, which would in part at least, wittingly or unwittingly, secure the safety of the republic. Yet another theme is memory; this is tackled directly by two authors, but it underlines the work of the others too, for we are all living with a mental legacy of the Cromwellian era. It is still a much ill-understood period on both sides of the Irish Sea. Cromwell’s House in Ely, where this book began, had in 2018 a focus for its displays and interpretation that asked the question: ‘hero or villain?’ Visitors were asked to come to a decision whilst they toured the house and vote by dropping plastic counters into a box at the end of their trip. Quite often, it seems, the week’s results were roughly even. No doubt outside the walls of this impressive house the result could be the same if non-visitors were polled.

Introduction

11

Indeed, Cromwell’s house is something of a metaphor for the study of this era. The house is about eight hundred years old and has over that time served many purposes as well as being the tithe collector’s house. Of that eight hundred years, Cromwell was associated with it for about 20 years: one-fortieth of its history; yet it is known as Cromwell’s House. Going back to the issue of hero or villain, it is also equally likely that the weight of such a perception varies significantly on each side of the Irish Sea. This book is part of a larger attempt to explain one element of the inter-mingled histories of Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales. It is not known how this book and its authors will alter the conflicting perceptions of Cromwell as ‘hero or villain’. Moreover, this dichotomy may not shift significantly over time, but if the decision process in making that choice loses some of the geographical imperative, then it might be hoped that this book will have helped with that a little. There is of course a very important context for Cromwell’s intervention in Ireland. The war did not begin when he arrived and it is necessary briefly to set out the background to his arrival and for the essays which follow. War in Ireland can be read as part of the long process of the encroachment of the monarchy and Westminster on the rights, property and liberties of the native Irish Catholic community. The early seventeenthcentury ‘settlement’ of Ulster was not in any way an end-point. The failure of both King Charles and his Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Sir Thomas Wentworth, later Earl of Strafford, to assuage the anger of the increasingly powerless Irish Catholic majority ensured that when Wentworth’s back was turned his government was undermined. Wentworth had devised a plan whereby he would manage a Dublin parliament effectively and persuade it to vote money for the king’s planned renewal of war against Scotland in early 1640. The second part of this plan was to try and influence parliament at Westminster into doing the same. Whilst the first element worked and a seemingly compliant Irish parliament voted to raise four subsidies, the Westminster part failed completely and Wentworth was instead impeached. His opponents in Ireland quickly undermined his funding plan and joined in the legal attack on the earl. However, neither Wentworth’s trial nor his subsequent execution saw any positive changes in Irish affairs. The governments in Edinburgh and Westminster had no intention of sharing the freedoms they were winning from the increasingly powerless Charles I to his Irish Catholic subjects. The political frustration in Ireland built up and a number of plans for rebellion were under discussion during 1641. In the end a plan was devised by which a series of major strongholds in Ulster would be seized and the seat of government, Dublin Castle, would be surprised simultaneously.

12

Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives

The initial rebellion in Ulster succeeded, but the coup d’ état in Dublin failed on the night of 22–23 October 1641, and rebellion spread rapidly across the whole of Ireland. Very quickly this was matched by an aggressive response by the four nations. Local forces attempted to stem the rising tide of revolt and other troops were mobilised and funded in England, Wales and Scotland. The recent controversy over the king’s role in an attempted counter coup in Edinburgh aimed at restoring his power over the government there was hushed up. Even the fact that the king had been defeated in war by his Scottish subjects was likewise ‘forgotten’ in an attempt to present a united face against the Irish rebellion. The main military effort was led by Scotland and an army was sent to Ulster. Ireland was embroiled in a full-scale war by the spring of 1642. Forces loyal to the king and Westminster controlled much of the east coast and the Scots were ensconced in Ulster. However, a good deal of the rest of the country was held by the rebels who created a national government at Kilkenny and established administrations in the four provinces as the year progressed. Each province was also given authority to raise an army and generals were appointed to command them. Support for the loyal forces declined from the summer of 1642 onwards as England and Wales became embroiled in a civil war between the king and parliament. Over the next year, whilst inroads were made into the territory held by English and Scottish forces, some of the most important strongholds such as Drogheda and Dublin remained in their hands. However, even as the war continued into 1643, negotiations between the Confederation of Kilkenny and the king’s lieutenant, the Earl of Ormond, began. In September 1643, a Cessation was signed and much of the fighting came to an end in Leinster, Connacht and Munster. Nevertheless, in Ulster, fighting continued because at around the same time Scotland had joined in the war in England and Wales on the side of parliament. The king and the royalists had hoped to benefit from the Cessation by withdrawing soldiers from Ireland to serve in the war against parliament. Many of the ports of England’s and Wales’s west coast were in royalist hands and soldiers from Ireland sailed to them. However, these soldiers’ loyalty to the king could not be guaranteed and in any case perhaps the most potent force assembled from these veterans was defeated on 25 January 1644 at the Battle of Nantwich and scattered. The Cessation soon began to fray. Later in 1644, the royalist leader in Munster, Murrough O’Brien, Lord Inchiquin, changed sides after the heavy royalist defeat at the Battle of Marston Moor on 2 July 1644. Inchiquin now sided with parliament and rejected the ceasefire. This handed the south-west of the country to the king’s opponents and further fragmented the war in Ireland. The situation was further confused when the king

Introduction

13

subverted Ormond by sending the Earl of Glamorgan to negotiate a treaty with Kilkenny directly. The king was prepared to make concessions to the Catholic community which Ormond was reluctant to offer. The Confederation’s war effort against the Scots in Ulster had achieved little during 1644 and 1645, but the cause as a whole was given a boost when the new papal representative, Giovanni Batiste Rinuccini, brought supplies and a new impetus to the hardline Irish Catholics in the Confederation. However, this intervention alienated the Old English Catholics from their Irish Catholic allies, and relationships within the Confederation became strained. When Glamorgan’s proposed treaty was accidently revealed, the king renounced it, to avoid being associated with any accommodation with the Irish Catholics that would compromise him within England, Wales and Scotland. In the spring of 1646, the war in England and Wales came to an end and the king surrendered to the Scots. Even so, Ormond pressed ahead and concluded negotiations on a new treaty with the Confederation, which might have reinvigorated the king’s cause. However, with Rinuccini’s backing, hardline confederates had bridled against dealing with Ormond because of his resistance to the more liberal terms offered by Glamorgan. Therefore, in September 1646, just as Ormond’s treaty was to be ratified, it was rejected comprehensively by Rinuccini, who threatened to excommunicate anyone who accepted it, and the hardline Irish Catholics in the Confederation followed his lead. During the following year, Lord Inchiquin, now firmly in the Parliamentarian camp, steadily began to dominate Munster and decisively defeated the Confederations’ provincial army at Knocknanuss in November 1647. Following the failure of his treaty and the king’s surrender to the Scots at Newark, Ormond had made peace with Westminster and handed Dublin to parliament’s new governor Michael Jones, who quickly defeated the Confederation’s provincial general Thomas Preston’s army, which had been loosely besieging Dublin in August. Since the end of the war in Britain, the Westminster parliament had been free to devote more resources to the continuing war in Ireland and it now planned to send a new army across the Irish Sea. However, relations between parliament and its New Model Army collapsed, in part because of parliament’s plans to send part of the army over to Ireland. As a result the war there drifted out of Westminster’s focus and the supply of resources waned. This had dramatic consequences: within six months of his great victory at Knocknanuss Lord Inchiquin changed sides again and allied himself with the Confederation. He had come under heavy military pressure from renewed vigour in the Confederation’s armies and not getting the resources he needed from London had stretched his patience.

14

Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives

Given this change of fortunes, Ormond planned a return to Ireland to unite the king’s supporters and the Confederation to bolster Charles’s attempt to renew the war in Britain. However, the Confederation was almost in a state of civil war itself. The Old English and other moderates had rejected the Rinuccini faction, partly at least to secure Inchiquin’s support, and for a while at least they were in the driving seat, forcing the nuncio to join forces with General Owen Roe O’Neill, the commander of the Confederations’ forces in Ulster; as a result, the moderate-led Kilkenny government went to war against O’Neill and Rinuccini. Time and resources were wasted in uniting the three other provincial armies in an ultimately fruitless attack on the Ulster Army. This internecine strife had two outcomes in the short term: on the one hand it deflected the Confederation from tackling Parliamentarian and Scottish forces and on the other left Ormond with little option but to remain in England. By the time the internal conflict within the confederation ended the situation had changed dramatically: the king’s cause in England, Wales and Scotland had been decisively defeated in a second Civil War and Charles would shortly be put on trial. When Ormond finally returned to Ireland it was judged too late to save the king, who was tried for treason, found guilty and executed on 30 January 1649. But Ormond still believed that the Stuart cause was worth fighting for, and he began the difficult task of bringing the various factions in Ireland together. This achievement is outlined by James Scott Wheeler in one of the subsequent chapters. Seemingly against the odds, Ormond created a potent coalition in Ireland, which embraced the Confederation, Inchiquin and potentially even the Scots in Ulster who had already been involved in the Scottish attempt to restore Charles to his throne during the second Civil War. By the end of 1649, even the Ulster Army and Owen Roe O’Neill would be brought onside. To combat this impressive effort, the newly installed republican government in Westminster resurrected the two-year-old plan to send a new army across the Irish Sea. By now, however, the wars in England, Wales and Scotland were over. Scotland was nursing its wounds following its catastrophic involvement in the second Civil War and contemplating how to react to the execution of Charles I. In England and Wales, the monarchy and House of Lords were in the process of being abolished and a republic and free state was being established. There was an urgent need to tackle the new state’s enemies at home and abroad. Lieutenant General Oliver Cromwell set the tone for the approach to this problem, declaring that the Irish situation was the most pressing concern. As a result, a new army was assembled and Cromwell was duly dispatched to Ireland.

Introduction

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Cromwell had spent his short career as a general in the role of second in command – to the Earl of Manchester (1644–1645) and Lord General Sir Thomas, later Lord, Fairfax (1645–1650). In 1648, during the second Civil War, he had operated independently of Fairfax. Whilst the Lord General tackled the counter rebellion in Kent and Essex, Cromwell had captured Pembroke Castle and restored peace in south Wales before marching north and defeating the Scottish army (which under the Duke of Hamilton had invaded England in July) at the Battle of Preston on 17 August. Having demonstrated his ability to hold independent command, Cromwell was the principal contender to lead the army destined for Ireland whilst Lord Fairfax ensured the safety of the new republic at home. All Cromwell needed was a secure port on either the south or east coast. The situation in the south of Ireland was still in flux, as Inchiquin’s forces were still largely in control of much of the coastline on behalf of Ormond’s alliance. On the east coast, Dublin was besieged by Ormond himself with a large coalition army and Drogheda was held by royalist Sir Arthur Aston. However, just before Cromwell sailed, Michael Jones defeated Ormond at the Battle of Rathmines on 2 August, securing the deep-water harbour at Ringsend, ready for Cromwell’s fleet and army.

Part I

Cromwell at War in Ireland

Chapter 1

Siege Massacres in Ireland Drogheda in Context Pádraig Lenihan

Siege Massacres in Ireland: Drogheda in Context

‘Cromwell was a good man. He was deeply religious, and neither greedy nor – except in Ireland – cruel’.1 This encomium from an old book in the Ladybird ‘Adventures in History’ series seems to set Ireland as a place apart where the normal rules of behaviour are suspended and raises a question. Was the moral ambience of war, specifically siege warfare, so very different in Ireland than in England? Before getting to this – the main question – it will be necessary to describe the sack of Drogheda in the context of contemporary expectations of warfare. Such norms existed: ‘War in the seventeenth century was not characterized by unmitigated savagery’.2 After disembarking near Dublin in late August, Cromwell wanted to assail Munster and south Leinster, heartland of royalist and Catholic power in Ireland. If Drogheda were to remain in royalist hands, however, Cromwell would leave Dublin exposed to assault from the north. But capturing Drogheda might delay him for a few precious weeks until too much rain and too little forage would make it difficult for large armies to keep the field. He really needed to take Drogheda quickly. The garrison of 3,000 (which included 400 Englishmen under Lieutenant Colonel Sir Edmund Verney) served under an English governor named Sir Arthur Aston. They held a town enclosed by relatively thin curtain walls and cut in two by the Boyne, with the smaller part lying on the south bank. As his siege cannon fired, Cromwell summoned Aston 1 Lawrence du Garde Peach, Oliver Cromwell: An Adventure from History (Loughborough, 1963). 2 Gregory Hanlon, Italy 1636: Cemetery of Armies (Oxford, 2016), p. 13. 19

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on 10 September, reminding him that ‘if this be refused, you will have no cause to blame me’. By the next morning, his heavy guns had knocked a ‘very great breach’ near the south-eastern corner of the town walls. From behind the breach the garrison beat off one assault but succumbed to a second and ‘began to break and shift for themselves’. The English crossed the Boyne ‘pell-mell’ with the defenders as they fled from breach to bridge.3 Drogheda was lost and won. Cromwell admitted that he ‘forbade’ his troops ‘to spare any that were in arms in the town’ and ‘that night they put to the sword about two thousand men’. We know the fate of Aston and 250 royalists, mostly officers, who were stranded on the south side atop the Mill Mount, ‘being exceeding high, having a good graft [moat] and strongly Pallisadoed’. Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Axtell called on Aston to surrender the Mill Mount and, after some bluster and ‘big words’, Aston did so. He was locked into the eponymous windmill where he and ‘as many … as it could contain’ were ‘afterwards all slain’, on the orders of some officer senior to Axtell.4 The next day, 120 or more royalist survivors in St Sunday’s Tower and the adjacent West Gate were called on to surrender.5 The troops in St Sunday’s ‘submitted, their Officers were knockt on the head [clubbed to death] and every tenth man of the Soldiers killed, and the rest Shipped for the Barbadoes’. Those in the West Gate were also transported. At the end of a list of those killed appended to Cromwell’s letter of 27 September appear the words ‘many inhabitants’. If not written by him, the words form part of a single officially sanctioned publication associated with him, so ‘there is no getting around’ the two words.6 In short, I 3 James Burke, ‘The New Model Army and the Problems of Siege Warfare, 1648–51’, Irish Historical Studies 27.105 (1990), p. 11; Oliver Cromwell, Letters from Ireland, relating the several great successes it hath pleased God to give unto the Parliaments forces there, in the taking of Drogheda, Trym, Dundalk, Carlingford, and the Nury (London, 1649), p. 8. 4 Thomason Tracts, 83 E.533[17]. A perfect diurnall of some passages in Parliament, and from other parts of this kingdome, 1–8 Oct. 1649, p. 2695; Burke, ‘New Model Army’, p. 12: R.S., A collection of some of the murthers and massacres committed on the Irish in Ireland since the 23d of October 1641 (London, 1662), pp. 16–17; Matthew Kelly (ed.), Cambrensis Eversus, 3 vols (Dublin, 1851–1852), iii. 198. 5 Cromwell, Letters from Ireland, pp. 8–9. 6 John Morrill, ‘The Drogheda Massacre in Cromwellian Context’, in David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan and Clodagh Tait (eds), Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2009), pp. 253–254; Micheál Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (London, 2008), pp. 88–90.

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believe that Oliver Cromwell’s soldiers shot, clubbed, hacked, stabbed or incinerated most of the garrison of Drogheda, ‘many in cold blood’, and slaughtered ‘a significant number of civilians’.7 Without question, what happened was a ‘deed of horror’.8 But simply asserting that Cromwell was a ‘bad man’ does not get us very far in explaining this horror.9 Cromwell was no more anti-Catholic than the typical Englishman who held a ‘passionate belief’ in the reality of the popish threat.10 Moreover, he was not more anti-Irish than his fellow Grandees, though he ‘failed to rise above the bigotry of his age in respect of the Irish people’.11The explanation is not to be found in one man’s flawed personality but in the society that produced him and the context in which he operated. Let us begin by asking: what moral justification was there for killing some hundreds of civilians and thousands of disarmed soldiers? Barbara Donagan’s study of the English Civil War suggests that the answer depended on which of two codes were being followed. The first code grew, fitfully, from notions of the Law of Nature and Christian admonitions towards mercifulness. For example, the Dominican Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546) insisted that ‘even in wars against the Turks we may not kill children, who are obviously innocent, nor women who are to be presumed innocent’. De Vitoria did concede that in a sack ‘all the adult men in an enemy city are to be thought of as enemies, since the innocent cannot be distinguished from the guilty’.12 Of course, the Christian message was mixed. Bloodthirsty Old Testament admonitions also form part of the Christian inheritance: Samuel, for example, urged Saul to ‘smite’ the Amalekites and ‘slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass’ (1 Sam. 15:1–3). Moreover, a Christian providential world view, as favoured by Cromwell, could justify what would otherwise be wrong as the working of God’s inscrutable will. A second set of customs, often categorised as the Law of War and/or Law of Nations, had evolved as a ‘contractual etiquette of conduct’ based 7 Morrill, ‘Drogheda Massacre’, p. 245. 8 James Scott Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland (Dublin, 1999), p. 88. 9 Denis Murphy, Cromwell in Ireland: A History of Cromwell’s Irish Campaign (Dublin, 1897), p. viii. 10 Barry Coward and Peter Gaunt, The Stuart Age: England, 1603–1714 (Oxford, 2017), p. 217. 11 John Morrill, ‘Was Cromwell a War Criminal?’, BBC History Magazine (May 2000); Morrill, ‘Drogheda Massacre’, p. 245: John Cunningham, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the “Cromwellian Settlement” of Ireland’, Historical Journal 53.4 (2010), p. 922. 12 J. Lawrance and A. Pagden (eds), Vitoria: Political Writings, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 315–317.

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on practical utility, in which the honour of the parties would be impugned by any breach.13 This was an ‘honourable’ custom between soldiers: the words are those of Sir Edmund Verney who would be stabbed to death by a trooper’s tuck knife after he surrendered at Drogheda.14 The distinction between the two codes, the somewhat ‘more humane’ Christian one and the grimmer honour-based code, is neatly conveyed by Sir James Turner, a Scottish veteran of the Thirty Years War and of the 1640s war in Ulster: let us speak next of those who submit to the Victors discretion, and have no promise of Quarter, who certainly may be put to the edge of the Sword, without any imputation of breach of Faith or promise, yet not without the imputation of cruel inhumanity. They do not indeed transgress against the Laws of War nor Nations, who shed their blood; but they sin against human nature which commiserates frailty and against the Laws of Christ.15 By the second code, it was no dishonour to massacre the enemy if he had been put on notice beforehand. The summons to Aston served as fair warning that quarter would not be granted.16 Is Cromwell therefore absolved of guilt because he acted at Drogheda ‘according to the accepted laws of war at the time’?17 No such ‘laws’ existed. Rather, there existed a patchwork of two partly overlapping codes. Moreover, and crucially, the ‘identity of one’s foe helped determine what restraints on the level of violence might apply’.18 The Irish Context Was warfare – specifically siege warfare – between Irish and English especially vicious? Donagan captures the otherness of Ireland when she asserts that the English were fighting three kinds of war: a civil war in England, a war against a foreign foe in Scotland and a ‘colonial war’ in 13 Barbara Donagan, ‘Codes and Conduct in the English Civil War’, Past and Present 118 (1988), p. 142. 14 Barbara Donagan, War in England 1642–1649 (Oxford, 2008), pp. 140, 165. 15 Sir James Turner, Pallas armata: Military Essayes of the Ancient Grecian, Roman and Modern Art of War (London, 1683), pp. 336–337; Donagan, War in England, p. 165. 16 Morrill, ‘Drogheda Massacre’, p. 242. 17 Burke, ‘New Model Army’, p. 11. 18 Ronald Dale Karr, ‘“Why Should You Be So Furious?”: The Violence of the Pequot War’, Journal of American History 85.3 (1998), p. 879.

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Ireland.19 What happened at Drogheda, Martyn Bennett reminds us, must be seen in the context of ‘the brutality of the war in Ireland’.20 A Jesuit writing to his confreres on the Catholic mainland bemoaned the ‘slaying of children and women as much as men, such is the fury on both sides, the English and our own people’.21 Siege massacres were also perpetrated in England. John Morrill remarks of the storm of Basing House in October 1645 that ‘it is not a huge distance from Basing to Drogheda’.22 Yet it is the difference between most of those who surrendered and only a tiny fraction being spared. A more compelling comparison might be with siege massacres during the Nantwich and Marston Moor campaigns carried out by ‘Irish’ (in fact, most of them were Welsh or English) troops from Ormond’s army disembarked to reinforce the Royalists. Captain Thomas Sandford threatened the defenders of Hawarden that he was ‘ready to use you as I have done the Irish’. At Barthomley Church in Cheshire, ‘one of the most notorious incidents of the war’ occurred in December 1643 when the so-called ‘Irish’ disarmed, stripped and massacred a dozen villagers who had been holding out ‘for their safeguard’ in a steeple. At Hopton Castle in Shropshire (March 1644), the 30 defenders surrendered ‘at mercy’ whereupon the ‘Irish’ stripped and killed them all, except for the commander.23 Many (there is simply no consensus on the numbers involved) soldiers and townspeople were massacred during the Sack of Bolton (May 1644) in what some consider the ‘worst massacre’ of the entire English Civil War, which went ‘went well beyond what was usual’.24 Two of the four royalist regiments had served in Ireland and all four regiments were enraged because the townspeople captured a Royalist officer and ‘hung him up as an Irish Papist’ in full view of the attackers.25 The most notorious siege massacres of the English 19 Barbara Donagan, ‘Atrocity, War Crime, and Treason in the English Civil War’, American Historical Review 99.4 (1994), p. 139. 20 Martyn Bennett, The Civil Wars in Britain and Ireland: 1638–1651 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 329–330. 21 Vera Moynes, ‘“We hope that the Tempest is soon calmed”: Early Irish Jesuits’, History Ireland 26.5 (2018), p. 23. 22 Morrill, ‘Drogheda Massacre’, pp. 244–245. 23 John Barratt, ‘The King’s Irish’: The Royalist Anglo-Irish Foot of the English Civil War (Amherst, 2020), pp. 108–109, 116–117. 24 Will Coster, ‘Massacre and Codes of Conduct in the English Civil War’, in Mark Levine and Penny Roberts (eds), The Massacre in History (Oxford, 1999), pp. 92, 96: Peter Gaunt, The English Civil War: A Military History (London, 2014), p. 184. 25 Peter Young, Marston Moor 1644: The Campaign and the Battle (Kineton, 1970), p. 196; Trevor Royle, Civil War: The Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1638–1660

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Civil War were carried out by troops who had been blooded in the Irish wars. Indeed, it is ‘remarkable’ how many of the documented wartime atrocities in Britain had an Irish connection.26 I propose to test the assertion that Irish warfare, specifically siege warfare, was exceptionally brutal by listing the known instances of massacres in siege operations perpetrated by Irish or English forces. The activities of the Scots Covenanter army are excluded but the Laggan army of west Ulster is included, though it mainly comprised first- and secondgeneration Scottish settlers.27 The simple enumeration of killings will go some way to seeing if they were so commonplace as to be somehow normalized by the time Cromwell came to Ireland. Moreover, the circumstances of some of these mass killings will then be scrutinised to see if the reasons, rationalisations and excuses offered are comparable to those offered by Cromwell after Drogheda. Siege Massacre: Proof and Definition Ample source materials exist from which to compile a list of siege massacres. Irish atrocities are recorded and embellished in the outpouring of newsbooks and pamphlets in London and of course in the Depositions. Nor is it true to say that ‘an architecture of silence surrounds the many reprisals and revenge killings carried out against the Catholic Irish population’.28 English atrocities are compiled, and sometimes exaggerated, by a half-dozen Irish writers, the most important of whom was ‘R.S.’, whose Collection of some of the murthers and massacres was published in 1662. But most evidence for massacres perpetrated on the Irish comes from English pamphlet literature, which can be, literally, shameless. We read in one single-page broadsheet that in May 1642 a Colonel Lawrence Crawford raided Kilsallaghan, nine miles north of Dublin, ‘and killed about 100 (London, 2004), p. 289; David Casserly, Massacre: The Storming of Bolton (Stroud, 2010). 26 Michéal Ó Siochrú, ‘Atrocity, Codes of Conduct, and the Irish in the British Civil Wars, 1641–1653’, Past and Present 195 (2007), p. 70. 27 Stephen Johnson, Exceeding good newes from the neweries in Ireland being the true copie of a letter sent from Dublin the 20, of Aprill, 1642 (London, 1642), unpag.; Harold O’Sullivan, ‘The Magennis Lordship of Iveagh in the Early Modern Period, 1534 to 1691’, in Lindsay Proudfoot (ed.), Down; History & Society: Interdisciplinary Essays on the History of an Irish County (Dublin, 1997), p. 84. 28 William J. Smyth, ‘A Cultural Geography of the 1641 Rising’, in Micheál Ó Siochrú and J. Ohlmeyer (eds), Ireland 1641: Contexts and Reactions (Manchester, 2014), p. 83.

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men, women and children, giving no quarter’. We further read of Colonel George Monck, who fell on Newcastle, six miles south-west of Dublin, and captured 18 or 20 men, ‘besides women and children who died the common death of rebels’.29 A massacre is included only if it probably, not just possibly, took place. It would be impracticable to explain how the evidence was sifted and weighed, case by case. Rather, the standard of proof demanded will be clarified by explaining why the burning and pillaging of Dundalk in March 1642 was not included. The army that took Dundalk was led by Sir Henry Tichborne, governor of Drogheda. One report from Dublin trumpets that Tichborne’s men ‘killed all, men and women, that could be found of all the rebels’.30 Another boasts that the soldiers ‘put almost the whole town to the sword’.31 Tichborne himself is ominously vague: ‘the number of slain I looked not after, but there was little mercy shewed in those times’.32 Harold O’Sullivan, a historian with an unrivalled knowledge of County Louth, thought ‘many’ civilians had been killed in the sack, but offered no proof of his claim.33 On the other hand, two contemporary eyewitnesses guess that about one hundred insurgents were killed in street fighting but make no mention of civilians, or synonyms of civilian like ‘rebels’ or ‘rogues’, being massacred.34 The clincher is that two very detailed contemporaneous Irish accounts of the fighting make no mention of a slaughter at Dundalk, even though they are quick enough elsewhere to enumerate English atrocities.35 29 Anon., A perfect relation of the proceedings of the English army against the rebels in Ireland, from May 12 to the 23. 1642 (London, 1642). 30 Anon., True Intelligence from Dublin, April the 3, touching those important passages have happened (London, 1642), p. 5. 31 R.C., Occurrences from Ireland … being a copy of a letter from Dublin/by an officer of the regiment commanded by Colonell Munke (London, 1642), p. 5. 32 Sir Henry Tichborne, ‘A Letter of Sir Henry Tichborne to His Lady of the Siege of Tredagh’, in Sir John Temple, Irish Rebellion (Cork, 1766), p. 317. 33 Harold O’Sullivan, ‘The Cromwellian and Restoration Settlements in the Civil Parish of Dundalk, 1649 to 1673’, Journal of the County Louth Archaeological and Historical Society 19.1 (1977), p. 24; Harold O’Sullivan, John Bellew: A SeventeenthCentury Man of Many Parts (Dublin, 2000), p. 36. 34 Nicholas Bernard, The whole proceedings of the siege of Drogheda (Dublin, 1736), pp. 92–93. 35 L. P. Murray (ed.), ‘An Irish Diary of the Confederate Wars’, Journal of the County Louth Archaeological Society 5.3 (1923), p. 215; Richard O’Ferrall and Robert O’Connell, Commentarius Rinuccinianus de sedis Apostolica elegatione ad foederatos Hiberniae Catholicos per annos 1645–1649, ed. Stanislaus Kavanagh, 6 vols (Dublin, 1932–1949), i. 297; John D’Alton and J. R. Flanagan, The History of Dundalk, and Its Environs (Dublin, 1864), p. 154.

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The real challenge is one of definition rather than evidence. What is, or is not, a siege massacre? The atrocity, for present purposes, must be associated with a siege, or in other words be analogous to Drogheda and so take place during, or shortly after, the taking of a walled town, castle or fortified house.36 The massacre of settlers who surrendered at Castlebar, County Mayo and were massacred over a week later at Shrule on the border of the same county is just about close enough in time to be included but not the 38 English who surrendered Sligo Castle on promise of quarter and were ‘inhumanely murthered’ three weeks or more later.37 Sir Frederick Hamilton of Manorhamilton, County Leitrim boasted of having killed 300 inhabitants of Sligo town when his raiders surrounded and burnt the town in July 1642.38 However, the slaughter of those living in open or unwalled towns and villages does not count. So much for ‘siege’. For present purposes, a massacre involves the killing of four or more persons.39 Massacre is distinguishable from combat because it is one-sided and the perpetrators exercise overwhelming force. Such force may be a moral advantage over stupefied defenders reduced to that puzzling state of passivity that ‘invites attack’.40 The defenders may have thrown down their weapons after extracting a prior promise that their lives would be spared or they may have surrendered ‘at mercy’ without such a promise of ‘quarter’. In practice, one can seldom be sure who promised what because the surviving victims, or their sympathisers, usually insist that the promise was made, while the perpetrators usually omit mention of any such promises.

36 Deposition of Hugh Gaskein, Trinity College Dublin, MS 831 (Co. Sligo), ff. 129r–130v. 37 Deposition of Edward Braxton, Trinity College Dublin, MS 831 (Co. Sligo), f. 60v. 38 John Rushworth, ‘Historical Collections: Passages Relating to Ireland 1642–43’, in Historical Collections of Private Passages of State, vol. 5, 1642–45 (London, 1721), pp. 504–559; British History Online: www.british-history.ac.uk/rushworth-papers/ vol5/pp.504-559 (accessed 10 Dec. 2018); Dominic Rooney, The Life and Times of Sir Frederick Hamilton, 1590–1647 (Dublin, 2013), p. 137. 39 Three or four constitutes the most commonly accepted number of fatalities it takes for a discrete incident to constitute a mass killing or massacre: R. Philip, G. Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan, ‘Introduction: The Massacre and History’, in Levene and Roberts, The Massacre in History, p. xiii. 40 Coster, ‘Massacre and Codes of Conduct in the English Civil War’, p. 98.

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Siege and Massacre A Franciscan who penned a contemporaneous diary of the war complained that the English and Scots ‘always broke any engagement or promise of quarter [ceathramha] or protection made by them to the Irish, contrary to the law of nations [dlighidh na gcineadhach]’ and they ‘would kill women and unbaptised children, old men, and the sick of all ages’. The diarist’s ‘always’ is misleading because few would be habitually naive or desperate enough to surrender in exchange for an assurance they knew, to a certainty, to be worthless. More often than not, British besiegers kept their promises and refrained from massacre. If massacre was atypical, it was none the less common. From Table 1.1 (see Appendix to Chapter 1) one may conclude that English besiegers carried out somewhat more, and bloodier, siege massacres than their Irish counterparts.41 Typical of Irish massacres would be that at Longford Castle, where, Borlase assures us, ‘many’ were ‘cruelly murther’d after quarter promised’. But the highest plausible count gives no more than eight victims.42 The Irish killed smaller numbers and were, it will be shown, usually more selective in choosing victims. Indeed, the most cogent evidence of Irish siege massacres typically comes from women who witnessed the slaughter of their menfolk. Of course, English forces could be selective on occasion. For example, in August 1642, the insurgents holding Ardmore Castle, County Waterford surrendered ‘at mercy’ for want of firearms. The English hanged 117 of the 154 ‘able men’, keeping the balance for prisoner exchanges, and spared 183 women and children.43 Nor can it be said that English forces simply captured more strongholds and were thereby more exposed to the temptations of atrocity. The Irish captured at least as many, considering the ultimately hopeless isolation of so many Protestant strongholds deep in Catholic territory in 1642 and 1643. In 1642, ten strongholds in County Limerick (King John’s Castle in Limerick city, Newcastle West, Kilfinny, Castlematrix, Loghgur, Castletown, Croom, Callow, Askeaton and Aughinish) were delivered by the defenders on the promise that their lives would be spared. And their lives were spared, though they were usually plundered contrary to the 41 Inga Jones, ‘A Sea of Blood? Massacres during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1641– 1653’, in R. Philip, G. Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan, Theatres of Violence: Massacre, Mass Killing, and Atrocity throughout History (Oxford, 2012), p. 69. 42 Edmund Borlase, The History of the Execrable Irish Rebellion (London, 1680), p. 118. 43 Anon., A journall of the most memorable passages in Ireland (London, 1642), p. 3.

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terms of the capitulations.44 The nearest thing to a massacre followed the surrender of Kilfinny, where the agreement stipulated ‘every English man [that women and children were safe apparently went without saying] to go away with his life & for every Irish man that was there to be at the besiegers mercy’. Three Irish serving the English were subsequently killed by the besiegers.45 The incidence of siege massacre reflects, in part, the ebb and flow of victory and defeat. The Irish perpetrated 10 of their 18 massacres between November 1641 and February of the following year. By the evening of Saturday, 23 October, day two of the 1641 rising, Irish insurgents had secured control of an extensive swath of territory that included Counties Fermanagh, south and east Tyrone, Monaghan, Armagh and south Down.46 In this first flurry, the insurgents usually took prisoners, ‘only pillaged & plundered them’ but after a fortnight or three weeks they ‘began to murther & massacre’.47 An early example came on 15 November, when William Brownlow surrendered Lurgan House but Toole Mac Cann’s men, ‘contrary to their conditions plundered the house, stripped the people, and in a cruel manner Murdered several of them’, sparing only the Brownlows.48 Another example came on Christmas Eve when Tully Castle, 44 Deposition of Ralph Billing, Trinity College Dublin, MS 829 (Co. Limerick), f. 137r. 45 Examination of Anthony Sherwin, Trinity College Dublin, MS 829, f. 376r; Deposition of John Comin, f. 451r; Deposition of Peeter Mainsell, f. 302r; Deposition of Thomas Southwell, f. 268r; Deposition of Thomas Ragg, Robert Ragg and Henry Briggs, f. 254r; Deposition of John Browne, f. 250r; Deposition of Bishop Planke and Ann Reynes, f. 190r; Deposition of Samuel Wishlade, f. 142r; Deposition of Elizabeth Dowdall, f. 142r; Deposition of Richard Lacky, f. 138r; Deposition of Anthony Heatcote, Trinity College Dublin, MS 829 (Co. Limerick), f. 136r; Deposition of Thomas Reymond, Trinity College Dublin, MS 825 (Co. Cork), f. 21r; Deposition of Ann Butler, Trinity College Dublin, MS 812 (Co. Carlow), f. 69r; Deposition of Thomas Kennedie, Trinity College Dublin, MS 811 (Co. Wicklow), ff. 70r–71v. 46 Michael Perceval-Maxwell, The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641 (Dublin, 1994), p. 219. 47 Examination of James Carrell, Trinity College Dublin, MS 839 (Co. Tyrone), f. 85v; Examination of William Skelton; Trinity College Dublin, MS 836 (Co. Armagh), f. 172r. 48 Examination of William Brownelow, Trinity College Dublin, MS 836 (Co. Armagh), f. 202r; Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001); Nicholas Canny, ‘What Really Happened in 1641’, in Jane H. Ohlmeyer (ed.), Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641–1660 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 31.

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on the southern shore of Lower Lough Erne, surrendered to Rory Maguire on condition of safe conduct for the Hume family and the local Protestant settlers who had sought refuge in the castle. Maguire’s men imprisoned everyone in the vaults of the castle and the next day they massacred all the men, women and children, sparing only the Hume family.49 Irish hopes of victory depended on seizing control of the beleaguered coastal enclaves around Dublin, Carrickfergus and Cork before Charles I and his parliament (it would be another few months before they came to blows) sent reinforcements from Britain. That window had passed as early as February 1642 when a 2,000 English advance party disembarked at Dublin. That month the Lords Justices and Council ordered their forces to attack the ‘several places about this city of Dublin’ held by the insurgents and ‘kill and destroy all the men there inhabiting able to bear arms’.50 February’s kill-order did not explicitly include women, children and old men, but the term ‘adherent’ and ‘abettor’ used in later proclamations would be wide enough to encompass them. During the summer and autumn of 1642, English forces laid siege to many Irish-held castles and tower houses which lay closest to their expanding enclaves including Baldongan, Lynch’s Knock, Rathcoffey, Clongowes Wood, Blackwood and Blackhall, all lying on the fringes of the Pale. The defenders were often hopelessly isolated because they could entertain little hope of relief since the insurgents had no field armies capable of relieving such outposts. The English perpetrated 19 of their 31 massacres during the spring and summer of 1642. An example of massacre occurring during the English counterattack would be when at least 200 men, women and children were slaughtered as hatchet-wielding troops broke through the door of Carrickmines Castle, in south County Dublin in April 1642. Clarendon’s Rebellion and Civil Wars alleged that Lieutenant Colonel Gibson granted quarter but the Irish, none the less, were killed afterwards.51 Most English accounts, however, make no mention of Gibson promising quarter but, like The last true newes from Ireland, boasts of ‘rebels put to death, man, woman, and child’ and a priest hacked to pieces ‘as small as Flesh to the Pot’. The pamphlet also offered an inadvertent reminder that this was, in part, a civil 49 Inga Jones, ‘“Holy War”? Religion, Ethnicity and Massacre during the Irish Rebellion 1641–2’, in Eamon Darcy, Annaleigh Margey and Elaine Murphy (eds), The 1641 Depositions and the Irish Rebellion (London, 2016), pp. 131–132. 50 Thomas Carte, An History of the Life of James, Duke of Ormonde, 3 vols (London, 1735), iii. 61. 51 Emmett O’Byrne, ‘The Walshes and the Massacre at Carrickmines’, Archaeology Ireland 17.3 (2003), p. 10.

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war: one Lieutenant Marrett ‘broke the Castle door and entered, where they killed man, woman, and child, but one Welsh woman, whose Brother was one of those that entered the Castle, she being a servant’.52 The excavation of mass graves containing the remains of 20 persons suggests a ‘general free-for-all’ in which enraged soldiers hacked, stabbed and bludgeoned their victims. The ‘large amount’ of coins found with the remains suggests that the victims had hidden coins in their clothing and that the killers were so enraged that they did not pause to strip the corpses.53 Atrocities against Irish troops and civilians tailed off as the reconquest stalled, civil war broke out in England and the Lords Justices were replaced by the reliably royalist James Butler, Earl of Ormond. A pamphlet purportedly written by a former officer of the Dublin garrison complained that clergymen who had hitherto preached against the ‘Rebels cruelties, thereby to excite the Soldiers to resolution in prosecution of the wars against them’ were now silenced. Worse, in a service before the Lord Deputy, senior clerics ‘preached for mercy to be shewed to these merciless Rebels’ and specifically that ‘four sorts of them should be saved’, namely children, women, labourers and ‘all that resist not’. The writer was disgusted with the admonition, grumbling that ‘women are worse than men’.54 Siege massacres (and this is true of massacres in general) would never again be as common or as bloody. Until Drogheda. On the whole, Irish massacres were more discriminating and closer to generally accepted contemporary usages. Let us take two examples. In autumn 1646, the Ulster army, recalled from the north after its victory at Benburb, took in many of the Protestant garrisons stranded on the Catholic side of the 1643 ceasefire line. The captures were bloodless except for that of Sir John Pigott’s Disert O’Lalor in Laois. On 6 October 1646, Owen Roe O’Neill offered Pigott ‘honourable quarter, of life, goods, arms, and castle’ but he proved to be ‘stiff necked’, and stoutly replied that O’Neill would have to take him out of his castle ‘feet first’ [i ndiaidh a chos as].55 The attackers shoved burning straw through the lower windows to choke the interior with 52 W.P., The last true newes from Ireland … how a great castle called Carricke Mayne (within 6. myles of Dublin) was taken by the English, and the rebels put to death, man, woman, and child (London, 1642), p. 4. 53 Mark Clinton, Linda Fibiger and Damian Shiels, ‘Archaeology of Massacre: The Carrickmines Mass Grave and the Siege of March 1642’, in Edwards, Lenihan and Tait, Age of Atrocity, pp. 194–195, 202. 54 Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, A letter from the Earl of Warwick relating the taking of all the forts, and 16 pieces of ordnance from the malignant Cornishmen that had before besieged the city of Exeter (London, 1643), p. 10. 55 Ó Donnchadha, ‘Cín Lae Ó Mealláin’, p. 47.

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smoke, clambered through the windows and slaughtered 40 men, sparing only 10 or 11 men along with ‘women and children’.56 A witness statement taken by the Cromwellian authorities paints a more brutal picture. Twenty ‘gentlewomen’, including Piggot’s widow, were stripped and put under guard together with three men. Otherwise, the Irish ‘killed a great number of men women & children’. The witness went on to recall that he ‘did see Major Piggott killed by three soldiers in a little entry without the grate door & was stripped naked before he was killed’. Stripping Pigott so as not to damage his clothes was a coldly calculated act. The witness also recounted how ‘the Rebells set him with his naked & dead body to the wall, & saw them put a bible into his hands’.57 The Confederate Catholics had failed to capture Dublin in November 1646 and soon afterwards Ormond handed over the capital and its outposts to representatives of the English parliament. Rather than repeat a direct attack on Dublin, the following summer Thomas Preston, general of the Leinster army, began to mop up the outlying garrisons across the Pale. He started with Maynooth Castle, County Kildare in July 1647. Preston lost 16 men, cut down while climbing in through the windows. At this point the two captains and one hundred-strong garrison ‘lost heart’ and ‘submitted themselves to the mercy of the catholics’. An English source confirms that they surrendered ‘at mercy’.58 Preston spared most of the soldiers and all of the many women and children, but hanged 26 officers and men who had ‘committed apostacy against their country and king’.59 In other words, Preston hanged those ‘old’ officers and men who had served under Ormond because he considered them deserters, and, as he said in another instance, ‘we caused the military laws to be put in execution, according to the custom of the country wherein I served [the Spanish Netherlands], which gives no quarter to such men’.60 The Irish followed the usages and customs of siege warfare more closely than did the English. The latter’s behaviour sets the moral parameters within which Cromwell operated at Drogheda. Implicitly or expressly, massacre was justified on one or more of three grounds. 56 J. T. Gilbert (ed.), A Contemporary History of Affairs in Ireland from 1641 to 1652 (Dublin, 1880), p. 129. 57 Examination of Edmond mac Shane Doyne, Trinity College Dublin, MS 815 (Queen’s County), f. 439r–v. 58 Arthur Annesley to ?, 29 July 1647, Report on the Manuscripts of the Earl of Egmont (London, 1905), i. 438. 59 O’Ferrall and O’Connell, Commentarius Rinuccinianus, ii. 670. 60 Preston to Ormond, Kilkenny, 26 Mar. 1643, Report on the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormonde, 8 vols (London, 1902–1920), i. 57.

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Justifying Massacre The first of these grounds is not directly relevant to setting Drogheda in context, namely that the Irish were ‘rebels’. This is by far the most commonly used term of opprobrium. Chidley Coote, for example, in describing the Siege of Birr, uses the term no fewer than 51 times in a written statement taking up 24 folios.61 A keyword search for ‘rebel’ on Early English Books Online for 1642 gives 4,536 ‘hits’ of which 3,714 pertain to Ireland. The significance of the term lies in the fact that a ‘proper’ war must be fought between sovereign powers. Consequently, rebels against a sovereign could not benefit from the protection of the laws of war and could be killed out of hand by martial law. It was for this reason that English forces had shown a greater propensity to perpetrate massacres, of all kinds, than their enemies during the Nine Years War (1593–1603).62 In practice, rebels tended to be recognised as belligerents soon after they became sufficiently well organised and effective enough to respond in kind.63 By 1649, the forces of the English parliament had taken this step, for practical reasons of reciprocity.64 Retrospectively, they accorded belligerent rights after one year’s fighting.65 The authorities who compiled evidence of wartime activities against Catholic landowners focused on what those landowners did in ‘the first year of the war’ before an effective Confederate Catholic government was formed in October 1642. However, Cromwell certainly included the other two grounds justifying massacre – retribution and deterrence – in explaining what he did at Drogheda: 61 Deposition of Chidley Coote, Trinity College Dublin, MS 814 (King’s County), ff. 204r–216v. 62 James O’Neill, ‘Like Sheep to the Shambles? Slaughter and Surrender during Tyrone’s Rebellion, 1593–1603’, Irish Sword 126 (2018), p. 378. For earlier Tudor campaigns, see David Edwards (ed.), Campaign Journals of the Elizabethan Irish Wars (Dublin, 2014). 63 Geoffrey Parker, ‘The Etiquette of Atrocity’, in David Edwards, Empire, War and Faith in Early Modern Europe (London, 2002), p. 149; Stephen J. Stearns, ‘Military Disorder and Martial Law in Early Stuart England’, in Buchanan Sharp and Mark Charles Fissel (eds), Law and Authority in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to Thomas Garden Barnes (Newark, DE, 2007), pp. 117, 123. 64 Elaine Murphy, ‘Atrocities at Sea and the Treatment of Prisoners of War by the Parliamentary Navy in Ireland, 1641–1649’, Historical Journal 53.1 (2010), pp. 29–30, 32. 65 See, for instance, Examination of Nicholas Stafford, Trinity College Dublin, MS 819, f. 10r.

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I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood, and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which are the satisfactory grounds for such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret.66 These two justifications also echo through the English massacres of the 1640s. Let us examine them in turn. In February 1642, the English Lords and Commons (Cromwell sat in the Commons) trumpeted how ‘deeply sensible’ they were of the ‘barbarous Cruelties and Massacres of the Rebels’.67 Pamphlets, newsbooks and, later, Sir John Temple’s canonical Irish Rebellion (1646) exaggerated the numbers and, above all, the horror of the violence, with atrocity tropes drawn from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and from biblical imaginings.68 For instance, in the Second Book of Kings, Elisha prophesies that the heathen would, amongst other things, ‘dash their children, and rip up their women with child’: this trope recurs, word for word, in the deposition of Protestant victims from which Temple derived his authority.69 What really happened was quite bad enough. In County Armagh, the worst hit county, the 600 Protestant victims represented about 10 per cent of the county’s settler population.70 Demonisation of Irish Catholics undoubtedly lowered the threshold of acceptable violence against them. The 1644 Ordnance of No Quarter for Irish ‘relegated the Irish to the category of barbarians unworthy of the protections due to Christians, let alone Englishmen’.71 The Ordnance was grounded in the conviction that the Irish shared irredeemable blood guilt 66 James Scott Wheeler, The Irish and British Wars, 1637–1654: Triumph, Tragedy, and Failure (London, 2002), p. 214. 67 Rushworth, Historical Collections, vol. 4, 1640–42 (London, 1721), p. 577. 68 Covington, Sarah, ‘“Realms so barbarous and cruell”: Writing Violence in Early Modern Ireland and England’, History 99.336 (2014), pp. 488, 490–493: David Edwards, ‘Tudor Ireland’, Routledge History of Genocide, pp. 23, 29: www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315719054 (accessed 9 Dec. 2018). 69 Ethan Howard Shagan, ‘Constructing Discord: Ideology, Propaganda, and English Responses to the Irish Rebellion of 1641’, Journal of British Studies 36.1 (1997), p. 12; Eamon Darcy, The Irish Rebellion of 1641 and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 34, 74. 70 Hilary Simms, ‘Violence in County Armagh, 1641’, in B. Mac Cuarta (ed.), Ulster 1641 (Belfast, 1993), p. 137. 71 Barbara Donagan, ‘Atrocity, War Crime and Treason’, in Gary Sheffield (ed.), War Studies Reader: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day and Beyond (London, 2010), p. 173.

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for the 1641 massacres and this perception informed English parliamentary attitudes both in England and Ireland, which latter, strictly speaking, lay beyond the Ordnance’s scope or jurisdiction. The black legend of 1641 was deployed, for instance, to justify the massacre on the Rock of Cashel in September 1647, which was the single biggest massacre of the 1640s, until Drogheda. Murrough O’Brien Baron Inchiquin, who was parliament’s lord president of Munster, had been rampaging unopposed across the hitherto inviolable core Catholic territories of Counties Limerick and Tipperary, taking strongholds and extorting contributions under threat of destruction. The cluster of church buildings atop the massive Rock overshadowed the town below and presented him with an apparently formidable obstacle. In consequence, Inchiquin agreed to ‘grant quarter unto them with bag and baggage’, but the Irish demanded ‘high terms’, whereupon Inchiquin threatened that ‘not one man of them should come forth alive’.72 Initially, the defenders managed to beat back Inchiquin’s men as they pressed through the doors of the church. Next, the attackers placed ladders against the many windows and swarmed in. For half an hour fighting raged until 50 survivors retreated into the bell tower. They surrendered ‘voluntarily on promise of quarter’ [sponsione pro vita facta] but ‘no sooner had the captains piled the swords in a heap than the order was given to attack and kill them all’.73 One of Inchiquin’s colonels graphically described the butchery: In the Church we killed above 700. men, whereof many were Priests and Friers, besides some women that perished in the action: I am confident so many men were not seen slain in so small a compass of ground these many years; they lay five or six deep in many places, not one Officer or Soldier escaped … Before the storm we understood by many in the Town that on new years day 1644 the Citizens of Cashel murdered 120. Protestants whom they had kept in a dungeon to the knees in dirt a month before because of their Religion only, which is now paid home to them by the Providence of God. The colonel evidently felt the need to deploy the massacre legend to justify the slaughter on the Rock.74 The massacre to which he adverted 72 Alexander Pigot, A full relation of the taking of Roche Castle (London, 1647), p. 4. 73 Reginald Walsh (ed.), ‘A Letter about the Massacre in Cashel Cathedral, 14th September, 1647, Written by Father Andrew Sall, Provincial S.J.’, Archivium Hibernicum 6 (1917), p. 72. 74 Pigot, Taking of Roche Castle, p. 6.

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happened in January 1642 (not 1644) when insurgent forces from outside the town (not citizens) slaughtered 15 men and women (not 120) in the streets of Cashel.75 These 1642 killings were now ‘paid home to them by the Providence of God’. The author was not unduly troubled about who exactly was meant by ‘them’ and the townspeople of Cashel could be considered guilty by association. Cromwell was comparably flexible in attributing guilt. It has been argued that when Cromwell thundered about ‘righteous Judgement’ on ‘Barbarous wretches’ he was not referring to the black legend.76 He may well have known that Drogheda had not been occupied by Irish forces during the putative 1641 massacre and had, indeed, been besieged by them in the winter of 1641–1642. He doubtless knew that many in the Drogheda garrison, including governor Aston, were English royalists. He had also used the term ‘barbarous’ before now to refer to the royalist defenders of Basing House and he may have been enraged because the royalists at Drogheda had not accepted God’s providential verdict against them. All these objections are valid. Yet Cromwell does seem to have subsumed all the defenders and townspeople of Drogheda within the generalised guilt by retrospective association for the massacres of Protestants eight years earlier.77 He was angry against ‘all’ opponents and considered them all implicated in the massacre.78 Cromwell considered the Irish ‘barbarous by nature, corrupted by popish superstition, and collectively responsible for the massacre of protestant settlers in 1641’.79 Hence he could declare them ‘enemies of human society’ undeserving of protection from the law of nations.80 There are two specific arguments for supposing that Cromwell had the 1641 massacres in mind. We know from his later rebuke to the Catholic bishops that he unhesitatingly attributed collective guilt for the ‘most unheard of and most barbarous massacre (without respect of sex or age) that 75 Deposition of Edward Banks, Trinity College Dublin, MS 821 (Co. Tipperary), f. 7r; Deposition of Gylbert Johnstone, Trinity College Dublin, MS 821 (Co. Tipperary), f. 42v; Deposition of Simon Salle, Trinity College Dublin, MS 821 (Co. Tipperary), f. 255r. 76 Cromwell, Letters from Ireland, p. 9. 77 R. Scott Spurlock, ‘Cromwell and Catholics: Towards a Reassessment of Lay Catholic Experience in Interregnum Ireland’, in S. Forrest and M. Williams (eds), Constructing the Past: Writing Irish History, 1600–1800 (Woodbridge, 2010), p. 160. 78 Barry Coward, Oliver Cromwell (London, 1991), pp. 73–74. 79 Austin Woolrych, ‘Cromwell as a Soldier’, in John Morrill (ed.), Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (Harlow, 1990), p. 111. 80 Keith Thomas, Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT, 2018), p. 238.

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ever sun beheld’.81 Cromwell had put his money where his mouth was and subscribed under the Adventurer’s Act of 1642 to help fund the reconquest of Ireland and a punitive peace. In March 1647, he offered to invest his arrears of pay and a further £5,000 to help fund another attempt at conquest. If Cromwell ‘simply shared the attitudes of most Englishmen’ towards Irish Catholics, he did so more fervently than most of his countrymen.82 Furthermore, consider Cromwell’s remark that the defenders of Drogheda ‘imbrued their hands’. The phrase is not all that common and may tell us something of his reading matter and subliminal influences. A search in the date range 1641 to 1648 on Early English Books Online delivers four hits for the keyword ‘imbrue(d) their hands’ in which ‘Ireland’ is also a subject keyword.83 Two of the four are especially suggestive. Cranford’s Teares of Ireland was the first pamphlet of the atrocity genre to include graphic depictions of tortures (burning, ripping, hanging, stabbing and so on), which were drawn, as the title states, ‘to animate the spirits of Protestants against such bloody villains’. Overleaf from the reference to ‘imbrue’ is an illustration of two Irishmen, sporting plumed hats, baldrics, swords and cavalry boots intently cutting off the ‘members’ of a fictitious Protestant minister before they ‘stopt his mouth with them’. The second instance is Temple’s Irish Rebellion, which lacerates the Irish who ‘imbrue their hands in the blood of their English neighbours’.84 The motive of revenge might also be grounded in more recent provocations. In January 1642, a detachment of 20 horsemen and musketeers was ambushed while foraging and forced to take shelter in the house of a settler named Hugh Smyth at Coole, near Fermoy in County Cork. Seeing that the attackers had set the door on fire, the English troops asked an Irish-speaking servant of Smyth’s to ‘call for quarter’. The 81 Nicole Greenspan, Selling Cromwell’s Wars: Media, Empire and Godly Warfare, 1650–1658 (London, 2012), p. 39; Martyn Bennett, Oliver Cromwell (Abingdon, 2006), p. 172; John Gibney, The Shadow of a Year: The 1641 Rebellion in Irish History and Memory (Madison, WI, 2013), pp. 26, 28. 82 David Stevenson, ‘Cromwell. Scotland and Ireland’, in Morrill, Cromwell and the English Revolution, p. 150. 83 Sir John Glynne, Master Glyn’s reply to the Earle of Straffords defence of the severall articles objected against him by the House of Commons (London, 1641), p. 36; James Cranford, The Teares of Ireland (London, 1642), p. 53; Anon., A full relation of the passages concerning the late treaty for a peace, begun at Uxbridge (London, 1645), p. 138; Sir John Temple, The Irish Rebellion (London, 1646), p. 44; Walter Enos, The second part of the survey of the articles of the late rejected peace (Kilkenny, 1646), p. 12. 84 Temple, Irish Rebellion, p. 8.

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insurgent captains Condon and O’Grady granted them ‘quarter for their lives and Clothes and what was about them’. The English soldiers duly ‘delivered up their Arms and immediately after; at their Coming out of the doors the enemy fell upon them & murdered them all’, except for four named persons, all of them Irish, to judge from their surnames – Barry, Flynn, Walshe, and Sullivan.85 Richard Boyle, Earl of Cork spiced up the atrocity, claiming the enemy ‘most savagely hacked and hewed them [the troopers] in pieces, cutting out their tongues and their privy members’. In retaliation, Cork’s son-in-law, David Barry, first Earl of Barrymore, ‘burned and spoiled’ Condon’s country, ‘killing all he could light upon; giving them no other quarter than the Condons gave his men at Coole’.86 Cork later described how ‘Condon’s Quarter’ was granted at Rochfordstown Castle, County Cork in April 1642: So as they entered and gave them Condons quarter at Coole, for they killed their Captain, and all the rest that were in it, being about four hundred, except three Pipers, whom they caused to play before their Captains head, which they brought upon a Pole to Cork, and there they were put out of tune and their musick ended, for they were all hanged up.87 ‘Condon’s quarter’, as it was, and as it was reimagined, legitimised further atrocity. Eamon an Dúna complained bitterly about this vengeful rhetoric of massacre: do gheibhid ceathrú ‘s an cheathrú séantar./A leithsgéal ann gach feall dá ndéinid/gur ceathrú phonncúil Chonndúin chaomhnaid [They offer quarter and then deny it/their excuse for every wrong they perpetrate/that they offer exactly the same quarter as Condon].88 And so to the third justification for massacre. Reciprocity, the fear of reprisals, has always been the underlying imperative to follow codes of conduct in the fighting of wars. One can see its operation when the ‘Ordinance of No Quarter’ was followed and Admiral Richard Swanley 85 Deposition of Andrew Lacy, Trinity College Dublin, MS 824 (Co. Cork), f. 56v; Examination of Teige Sullevant, Trinity College Dublin, MS 824 (Co. Cork), f. 52r; Examination of William Wetherall, Trinity College Dublin, MS 824 (Co. Cork), f. 1r; Examination of Nicholas Whyte, Trinity College Dublin, MS 826 (Co. Cork), f. 54v. 86 Richard Boyle, Earl of Cork, A letter of the Earle of Corke to the state at Dublin (London, 1642), p. 2. 87 Cork, Letter, p. 3. 88 Eamonn an Dúna, ‘Mo lá leóin go deó go n-éagad’, in Cecile O’Rahilly (ed.), Five Seventeenth-Century Political Poems (Dublin, 1952), p. 87.

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threw 70 men and two women overboard from an Irish ship captured near Milford Haven.89 Successive mayors of Wexford (the main privateering port) had to remind the English parliament that they held many English and Scottish seamen. Warnings like this drew on the fear of reprisals, which sooner or later persuaded officers like Vavasour at Cloghleigh to accord even an Irish papist belligerent status, as others had done for Turkish infidels and Dutch heretics. But that fear was only operative if the enemy looked set to be formidable and well organised. If the enemy were a peasant rabble or a native American war party, soldiers could, and did, kill without troubling over consequence. Intuitively, one might assume that officers and soldiers would grow ever more callous over time; for instance, Morrill notes a ‘hardening of attitudes over time’ by the parliamentary army in England.90 But intuition would be misleading in this instance. Soldiers were more likely to be brutal at the beginning of a war in which they entertained expectations of quick and easy triumph. As Costner remarks of the English Civil War, ‘it was victory that tended to lead to massacre’.91 As noted, the natives inflicted massacres mostly during the first months when it seemed they might sweep the settlers out of Ireland, or during the aimsear buadha or ‘season of victory’ of spring 1646 to summer 1647. Over half of the total British massacres were perpetrated in spring and summer 1642, when massive armies, numbering about 45,000 in aggregate, looked set to put down the Insurgency and eyewitness accounts of English atrocities in news books, letters and pamphlets ‘become numbingly tedious’.92 The imperatives of reciprocity could be slow to percolate. In May 1642, Viscount Moore reported capturing Reaghstown, where he ‘gave no quarter but killed all’, even though in the same breath he says that he found 30 ‘of our soldiers’ taken prisoner, ‘whom I released’.93 Mass killings like this could lead to reprisals of the sort that followed massacres by Monro’s Scots at Loughbrickland and at Newry County Down.94 89 Elaine Murphy, ‘Atrocities at Sea and the Treatment of Prisoners of War by the Parliamentary Navy in Ireland, 1641–1649’, Historical Journal 53.1 (2010), pp. 29–30, 32. 90 Morrill, ‘Drogheda Massacre’, p. 243. 91 Costner, ‘Massacre and Codes of Conduct in the English Civil War’, p. 94. 92 Pádraig Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at War, 1641–49 (Cork, 2001), pp. 47–48; James Scott Wheeler, ‘Four Armies in Ireland’, in Ohlmeyer, Ireland from Independence to Occupation, p. 50; Charles Carlton, This Seat of Mars: War and the British Isles, 1485–1746 (New Haven, CT, 2011), p. 136. 93 Viscount Moore to Ormond, Drogheda, 5 May 1642, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Carte 5, f. 208. 94 Thomas Fitzpatrick, The Bloody Bridge (New York and London, 1970), p. 121.

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In addition to reciprocity, other practical military considerations also tended to dampen vengeful impulses sooner or later. It was eminently desirable to encourage an enemy to surrender a stronghold quickly and not put the attacker to the hazards and the loss of life and time imposed by a siege. Mitchelstown Castle in County Cork, ‘summoned and refusing quarter’ in 1645, put the commander of the Irish forces to the trouble of planting his guns and firing a ‘few shot’. The warders of the castle, ‘which was no way defensible’, we are told, then ‘yielded upon mercy’. The commander hanged two or three leaders, one of them a Protestant minister, to punish this ‘unsoldiery obstinacy’.95 The weaker the garrison, the longer it held out, the heavier the losses it inflicted, the more harshly it would be treated. The 1648 Siege of Colchester, for all its ‘brutality’ in an English context, neatly illustrates the ‘contractual etiquette of conduct’.96 At first, Lord-General Thomas Fairfax offered generous terms but his attitude hardened as the siege dragged on so that he finally offered just bare quarter to royalist soldiers and civilians but demanded that officers above the ranks of lieutenant should surrender ‘at mercy’. Of the 70 odd officers in that category, Fairfax shot just two. The implied contract was that most of those who surrendered at mercy and all of those who surrendered on promise of quarter would be spared. English forces often broke that contract, as happened in the following cases. An Irish soldier of the Clongowes Wood garrison was questioned and deposed in Dublin Castle before being hanged. He stated that the warders initially rejected the summons, but the very next day the Castle [Clongowes Wood] was yielded upon promise of quarter and thereupon three and thirty able men came forth which came to this town the rest that remained in the castle he knows not what became of them but thinketh that they were all slain and this examinate’s wife and three children were slain there.97 An English pamphleteer recounted how women on the ramparts of Blackwood Castle, County Kildare ‘did much mischief on our side, by casting of stones down’. The attackers ‘told them they should have quarter, and thereupon they came forth’. The besiegers then ‘quartered both women 95 John T. Gilbert (ed.), Richard Bellings, History of the Irish Confederation and the War in Ireland, 7 vols (Dublin, 1882–1891), iv. 8. 96 Carlton, This Seat of Mars, p. 139: Burke, ‘New Model Army’, p. 7. 97 Information of Richard Greames, Trinity College Dublin, MS 813 (Co. Kildare), f. 71r.

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and children’, that is, they cut them into four quarters in imitation of the punishment for treason.98 The embellishment is implausible but the admission that the attackers broke their promise of quarter is credible. In 1645, parliamentary forces under Charles Coote from west Ulster burst upon Sligo, the northern gateway into Connacht. The garrison of Crean’s Castle, wrote an Irish officer, ‘behaved themselves so gallant as they beat them from it; upon which the enemy sounded a parley; and promised a fair and honourable quarter; whereupon our men came away, and after coming into the street were disarmed, stripped and foully murdered’ together with ‘all the boys and women’.99 When summoned in June 1642, the followers of Valerian Wesley (an ancestor of Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington) of the Dangan, County Meath ‘yielded his castle up to us, standing on the King’s mercy, and had free quarter for their lives’.100 Yet, just over two miles south and a few days later, Lynch’s Knock was the scene of a nasty massacre: We besieged this Castle four days, where we have lost, and have had shot Divers men where the rebels scorned any quarter for they would neither give quarter nor take quarter, Calling us English dogs, and English rogues, and pillaging rogues, and Parliament rogues, & told us they fought for the King, and we fought against the King. At first a field gun made no impact and ‘they jeered us worse than before’ until a shot dislodged a window-frame. The attackers pushed their way through the breach but were ‘quickly forced to come out again’ when the Irish set a fire. The blaze took hold and the next morning all that were alive cried for quarter, which was some seven score persons, men, women & children, most of the women 98 Stephen Stephens, Exceeding happy news from Ireland (London, 1642), p. 4; John O’Donovan and Michael O’Flanagan, Letters containing information relative to the antiquities of the county of Kildare; collected during the progress of the Ordnance Survey, in 1837 (Bray, 1930), p. 45; Kenneth Nicholls, ‘The Other Massacre: English Killings of Irish, 1641–3’, in Edwards, Lenihan and Tait, Age of Atrocity, p. 183. 99 Terence O’Rorke, The History of Sligo: Town and County, 2 vols (Dublin, 1890), i. 160; P. F. Moran, Spicilegium Ossoriense: being a collection of original letters and papers illustrative of the history of the Irish church from the Reformation to the year 1800 (Dublin, 1874), p. 293. 100 Maurice Eustace, A copie of a letter from Sir Maurice Eustace out of Ireland, July 13, 1642 (London, 1642), p. 3.

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and children had quarter, but the men came out of the Castle gave up their arms; We stripped 60 of these rogues, and then killed them, leaving them unburied.101 A second English account baldly states that ‘our men’ broke in and ‘Put all to the sword’.102 An Irish account insists that the killings were in cold blood: some were of opinion they should accept of a quarter, others that it were more honourable to fight out to the last man to avenge themselves of these perfidious round heads, who would never observe quarter unto them.103 The officer in charge of Lynch’s Knock, one Matthew Plunkett, ‘asked if there would be quarter granted to them, it was replied, there would; no says he, I will believe none of you, Let some Honourable man speak, as my Lord Lambert, or the like’.104 Charles, Baron Lambert commanded one of the regiments at the scene and owned an estate in County Westmeath: presumably he was known to Plunkett.105 His only hope of being spared was for Lambert to pledge on his honour that he would keep the rank and file soldiers from killing him. Lambert probably gave the necessary assurances but could not, or did not, restrain his soldiers. On marching out the Irish were disarmed and ‘the lieutenant and all the rest of his soldiers were there executed; the gentlewoman only was saved, she crying out aloud that the rest was as innocent as she, nay better as better deserving it, and by the law of nations were free’.106 Piecing together the various accounts it seems that one woman was spared, and maybe more. Everyone else was slaughtered. The defenders had fought too long and too desperately in a hopeless situation and had killed 20 attackers in this ‘dangerous piece of service’.107 1 01 Letter from Sir Maurice Eustace, p. 4. 102 Anon., True Intelligence from Ireland, Relating many Passages of great consequence (London, 1642), p. 1. 103 Gilbert, Contemporary History, i, part 2, p. 392. 104 Anon., A Briefe relation of the proceedings of our army in Ireland, since the tenth of June to this present July 1642 (London, 1642), p. 3. 105 Perceval-Maxwell, The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, p. 69. 106 Gilbert, Contemporary History, i, part 2, p. 392; Mark Empey, ‘The Diary of Sir James Ware, 1623–66’, Analecta Hibernica 45 (2014), p. 110. 107 Sir John Veel to W. Cadogan, 22 June 1642, Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, The Manuscripts of the Marquis of Ormonde, Preserved at the Castle, Kilkenny, 2 vols (London, 1899), ii. 14.

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The English considered this a heavy and unnecessary price that needed to be discouraged. In March of the following year, Ormond marched south from Dublin with a large column to take New Ross in County Wexford, thereby regaining full control of Waterford Harbour, which constituted an Irish lifeline to mainland Catholic Europe. On the way Ormond’s column took Castlemartin, County Kildare, after granting the garrison ‘fair quarter which they accordingly had’. But at Timolin in the same county ‘our Cannon compelled them to submit to mercy, very few of them escaping with their Lives’.108 An Irish source claims that the soldiers ‘surrendered to the enemy on condition that [they] should be set at liberty, but at least 100 of them were slain in violation of plighted faith’. The slain included women and children.109 In recounting what happened, Ormond’s hagiographer is suspiciously terse.110 Timolin was evidently a small garrison in a hopeless position that had cost Ormond a dozen men and forced him to mount his siege guns. This delay probably cost him his chance to capture New Ross. Ormond would have been within the letter of the ‘laws of war’ in slaughtering the garrison if it really ‘submitted at mercy’ but, as noted, the usual English Civil War punishment (Hopton excepted) for this sort of stubbornness was to shoot or hang an exemplary handful of officers not slaughter the entire garrison and camp followers. Three months after Timolin, Irish soldiers who had ‘stoutly defended’ Cloghleigh Castle in County Cork were eventually forced to surrender. The major in charge of the operation, having received Protestant prisoners from the Irish, put the Irish prisoners under a cavalry guard for their own safety. However, the guards ‘stripped them and fell upon them with Carbines, Pistols, and Swords’. Colonel Charles Vavasour, the major’s superior officer, was incensed by this ‘cruelty’ and ‘vowed’ to hang him, ‘and had certainly done it’ but for the Battle of Manning Ford next day when Vavasour’s army was defeated and he himself captured.111 On the other hand, the siege of Blackwater Castle near Fermoy, County Cork in 1642 illustrates how vengefulness could be trumped by practical considerations, as at Dangan and Castlemartin: 1 08 Borlase, History of the Execrable Irish Rebellion, p. 112. 109 Kelly, Cambrensis Eversus, iii. 191. 110 Thomas Carte, An History of the Life of James Butler, the first Duke of Ormond, 6 vols (Oxford, 1851), i. 403. 111 Borlase, History of the Execrable Irish Rebellion, p. 112; Tadhg Ó Donnchadha (ed.), ‘Cín Lae Ó Mealláin’, Analecta Hibernica 3 (1931), p. 37; Examination of William Wetherall, Trinity College Dublin, MS 826 (Co. Cork), f. 1v.

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Lord Inchiquin drew the horse and foot together and sat down before the Lord Roche his Castle, and battered it all that day and that night, the next day they begged quarter, which my Lord denied … all this whole night and day the Castle was battered and no quarter would be given them, until such time as news was brought, that the enemy was gathered together and fallen upon our quarters at Doneraile, so that we were forced to give them quarter, and turn them out of the Castle with their lives.112 In this instance, the defenders unexpectedly found that their bargaining position had improved and so they extracted a promise of quarter. Vengefulness was in tension with considerations of reciprocity and practicality, not least because it was necessary that those unfortunates offered the promise of quarter should believe or hope that promises would be honoured. Otherwise, defenders, like Matthew Plunkett at Lynch’s Knock, might choose to fight to the last man. Such stubbornness could lead to a vicious circle of desperate resistance leading to even bigger slaughter afterwards. On the other hand, frightfulness may explain why so many other castles were abandoned on the approach of an English column before being summoned at all. It is hard to evaluate the military effectiveness of slaughter as part of a policy of terrorism in 1642–1643, or in 1649. One Irish contemporary believed that the sack of Drogheda had been ‘to the terrifying of all the kingdom’.113 However, the question of efficacy is not relevant for present purposes. More relevant is that Cromwell’s two main justifications for Drogheda, revenge and utility, so closely echo two of the three justifications offered by commanders and propagandists alike throughout the 1640s. Conclusion Cromwell’s order not ‘to spare any that were in arms’ was in accordance with the grim usages of siege warfare. But that is largely beside the present point, which is that he would not have carried out a comparable sack of a royalist town during the English Civil Wars. Ireland truly was considered a place apart and Drogheda ‘an appalling event’.114 Irish accounts of the time speak of ‘more than Turkish cruelty’, ‘slashing slaughter’ [ármhach 112 John Gower, A true relation out of Ireland, of all the passages, and overthrows given to the rebels, from the 1 of June until the 10 of July, 1642 (London, 1642), p. 7. 113 Gilbert, Contemporary History, ii, part 1, p. 50. 114 Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland, p. 88.

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créachtach] that spared ‘neither age, sex, nor quality’ and ‘breach [violatione] of public faith’.115 However, Drogheda was not a uniquely horrific atrocity in the context of the moral no man’s land in which English operations in Ireland were conducted. Only its scale set Drogheda apart from other siege massacres, with four times as many killed as Inchiquin had slaughtered at Cashel. Oliver Cromwell behaved like earlier commanders in Ireland. He was about as brutal as Inchiquin or Monck, probably less so than Tichborne, and certainly less so than Coote. That is faint praise.

115 Gilbert, Contemporary History, ii, part 1, p. 50; Kelly, Cambrensis Eversus, iii. 189; O’Rahilly, Five Seventeenth-Century Political Poems, p. 47; O’Ferrall and O’Connell, Commentarius Rinuccinianus, iv. 296.

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Appendix to Chapter 1 Table 1.1 Siege massacres, November 1641–February 1647 Place Lurgan, Co. Armagh1 Mellifont, Co. Louth2 Rosbeg, Co. Fermanagh3 Longford Castle, Co. Longford4 Lisgoole, Co. Fermanagh5 Tully, Co. Fermanagh6 Oldstone, Co. Antrim7 Cashel, Co. Tipperary8 Clondulane, Co. Cork9 Castlebar, Co. Mayo10

Date Nov. 1641 Nov. 1641 Nov. 1641 Dec. 1641 Dec. 1641 Dec. 1641 Dec. 1641 Dec. 1641 Jan. 1642 Feb. 1642

Victims 5 13 14 8 70 75 60 15 20 65

Perpetrators Irish Irish English Irish Irish Irish Irish Irish Irish Irish

1 Examination of Henry Ogle and Examination of William Brownlow, Trinity College Dublin, MS 836 (Co. Armagh) ff. 264r, 266r. 2 Nicholas Bernard, The Whole Proceedings of the Siege of Drogheda (Dublin, 1736), p. 17. 3 Audley Mervin, ‘Relation’, in John T. Gilbert (ed.), A Contemporary History of Affairs in Ireland from 1641 to 1652, 3 vols (Dublin, 1879–1880), i, part 2, p. 469; Donald M. Schlegel, ‘A Clogher Chronology: October, 1641 to July, 1642’, Clogher Record 16.1 (1997), p. 82; Deposition of Roger Markham, Trinity College Dublin, MS 839 (Co. Tyrone) f. 21v. 4 Deposition of Elizabeth Trafford, Trinity College Dublin, MS 817 (Co. Longford), f. 212r; Examination of Captain Rowry Ferrall, Trinity College Dublin, MS 817, f. 174r; Deposition of Elizabeth Crafford, Trinity College Dublin, MS 817, f. 162r. 5 Inga Jones, ‘“Holy War”? Religion, Ethnicity and Massacre during the Irish Rebellion 1641–2’, in Eamon Darcy, Annaleigh Margey and Elaine Murphy (eds), The 1641 Depositions and the Irish Rebellion (London, 2012), pp. 131–133. 6 Examination of Patrick Hume, Examination of Richard Fawcett, Trinity College Dublin, MS 835 (Co. Fermanagh), ff. 295r, 262r. 7 Ernest William Hamilton, The Irish Rebellion of 1641 (London, 1920), pp. 205–207; Examination of Patrick O’Hara and Examination of John Blair, Trinity College Dublin, MS 838 (Co. Antrim) ff. 36v, 68v. 8 Deposition of Edward Banks, Trinity College Dublin, MS 821 (Co. Tipperary), f. 7r; Deposition of Archibold Cambell, Trinity College Dublin, MS 821 (Co. Tipperary), f. 12r. 9 Richard Boyle, A letter of the Earle of Corke to the state at Dublin (London, 1642), p. 2. 10 Those who surrendered at Castlebar, together with refugees from Killala County Mayo, were subsequently murdered at Shrule while being escorted to Galway.

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Place Ballyanker, Co. Waterford11 Colp, Co. Louth12 Ramsgrange, Co. Wexford13 Carrickmines, Co. Dublin14 Daingean Co. Offaly15 Tipper, Co. Kildare16 Cappoquin, Co. Waterford17 Bert, Co. Kildare18 Rochfordstown, Co. Cork19 Dunmahon, Co. Louth20

Pádraig Lenihan

Date Feb. 1642 Mar. 1642 Mar. 1642 Apr. 1642 Apr. 1642 Apr. 1642 Apr. 1642 Apr. 1642 Apr. 1642 May 1642

Victims Perpetrators 5 Irish 26 English 16 English 200 English 40 English unknown English 10 Irish 8 English 400 English 248 English

Deposition of Henry Bringhurs and Deposition of Thomas Johnson, Trinity College Dublin, MS 831 (Co. Mayo), ff. 187r, 190r. 11 Examination of Christopher Croker, Trinity College Dublin, MS 820 (Co. Waterford), f. 338r. 12 Edmund Borlase, The history of the execrable Irish rebellion (London, 1680), p. 66. 13 Lazarus Haward, A continuation of the diurnal occurrences and proceedings of the English army against the rebels in Ireland (London, 1642), p. 1. 14 Emmett O’Byrne, ‘The Walshes and the Massacre at Carrickmines’, Archaeology Ireland 17.3 (2003), p. 10. 15 Daingean was then known as Philipstown, King’s County. Anon., Admirable, good, true and joyfull newes from Ireland being an exact relation of the last weekes passages in Ireland dated from Dublin May the 8, 1642 (London, 1642), p. 2. 16 R.C., Occurrences from Ireland, pp. 2–3; Anon., A Full relation (London, 1642), p. 1. 17 Deposition of Walter Croker, Trinity College Dublin, MS 823 (Co. Cork), f. 6v. 18 John Rushworth, ‘Historical Collections: Passages Relating to Ireland 1642–43’, in Historical Collections of Private Passages of State, vol. 5, 1642–45 (London, 1721), pp. 504–559; British History Online: www.british-history.ac.uk/rushworth-papers/ vol5/pp504-559 (accessed 10 Dec. 2018). 19 J. T. Collins, ‘Military Defences of Cork’, Journal of the Cork Historical & Archaeological Society 48.167 (1943), p. 65; C. Cremen, ‘Notes and Queries: Rochfordstown Castle’, Journal of the Cork Historical & Archaeological Society 16.87 (1910), pp. 143–146; Richard Boyle, Earl of Cork, A letter of the Earle of Corke to the state at Dublin … (London, 1642), p. 3. 20 Anon., Newes from Ireland, relating how Captaine Vaughan put to the sword 300 armed rebels (London, 1642), p. 3; Henry Jones, A remonstrance of the beginnings and proceedings of the rebellion in the county of Cavan (There is no doubt that one Captain William Vaughan of the Dundalk garrison killed a large number of people, soldiers and civilians in an unnamed castle variously given as two or seven miles from Dundalk between March and July 1642. Newes from Ireland, relating

Siege Massacres in Ireland: Drogheda in Context

Place Wallstown, Co. Cork21 Ballincollig, Co. Cork22 Ballymacpatrick, Co. Cork23 Carriganassig Castle, Co. Cork24 Baldongan, Co. Dublin25 Blackwood Castle, Co. Kildare26 Lynch’s Knock, Co. Meath27

Date May 1642 May 1642 May 1642 May 1642 June 1642 June 1642 June 1642

47

Victims Perpetrators 70 English 70 English 150–300 English unknown English 140 English 68 English 29 English

how Captain Vaughan put to the sword 300 armed rebels (London, 1642), p. 4; Anon. (London, 1642), p. 3. The two distinct accounts of Vaughan’s exploit are probably garbled echoes of a massacre at Dunmahon Castle, which itself has been further distorted and misattributed in folklore. T. G. F. Paterson, ‘The Sack of Dunmahon Castle’, Journal of the County Louth Archaeological Society 11.3 (1947), pp. 164–168. 21 William St. Leger to the Lords Commissioners, 30 May 1642, in James Hogan (ed.), Letters and Papers Relating to the Irish Rebellion between 1642–46 (Dublin, 1936), p. 31. 22 Hogan, Letters and Papers, p. 31. 23 Richard Ryan, Biographia Hibernica: A Biographical Dictionary, 2 vols (Dublin, 1819), i. 42; James Wills (ed.), Lives of Illustrious and Distinguished Irishmen, 12 vols (Dublin, 1840), ii. 416; Adrian Tinniswood, The Verneys: Love, War and Madness in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 2007), p. 155. 24 Elizabeth Warner, Good and true newes from Ireland. Being a true relation of the taking and burning the castles of Downdanel, Montane, and Cargenas (London, 1642), p. 3; Tristram Whetcombe, A true relation of all the proceedings in Ireland, from the end of April last, to this present ... the first of June, 1642 (London, 1642), p. 5. 25 Matthew Kelly (ed.), Cambrensis Eversus, 3 vols (Dublin, 1851–1852), iii. 190; John Busse, A letter from a merchant of Dublin (London, 1642), p. 5; Anon., New intelligence from Ireland, received the 17. of June, 1642 (London, 1642), p. 5. 26 Busse, A letter from a merchant of Dublin, p. 4; John O’Donovan and Michael O’Flanagan, Letters containing information relative to the antiquities of the county of Kildare; collected during the progress of the Ordnance Survey, in 1837 (Bray, 1930), p. 45; Kenneth Nicholls, ‘The Other Massacre: English Killings of Irish, 1641–3’, in David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan and Clodagh Tait (eds), Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Context in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2009), p. 183; Stephen Stephens, Exceeding happy news from Ireland (London, 1642), p. 4; Irene Weld, ‘Blackwood’, National Folklore Collection, Schools’ Collection, vol. 775, p. 169. 27 Lynch’s Knock is now known as Summerhill. I have taken one of the Irish estimates rather than the larger English ones, which run from 80 to 120 killed. Lorcán Ua Muireadhaigh (ed.), ‘An Irish Diary of the Confederate Wars’, Journal of the County Louth Archaeological Society 5.3 (1923), p. 213; Newes from Ireland, relating how Captaine Vaughan put to the sword 300 armed rebels, p. 2.

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Place Blackhall, Co. Kildare28 Strabane, Co. Tyrone29 Rathcoffey and Clongoweswood, Co. Kildare30 Ardmore, Co. Waterford31 Syddan, Co. Meath32 ‘Clonohill’, King’s County/Offaly33 Timolin, Co. Kildare34 Reaghstown, Co. Louth35 Cloghleigh, Co. Cork36 Ballyhoe, Co. Louth37 Dollardstown, Co. Kildare38

Date c.June 1642 June 1642 July 1642

Victims Perpetrators unknown English 200 English 150 English

Aug. 1642 Aug. 1642 Sept. 1642 Mar. 1643 May 1643 June 1643 July 1643 Sept. 1643

117 400 8 100 60–80 38–200 unknown 11

English English Irish English English English English Irish

28 Kelly, Cambrensis Eversus, iii. 93; Gilbert, Contemporary History, i, part 1, p. 27. 29 Kevin McKenny, The Laggan Army in Ireland, 1640–1685 (Dublin, 2005), p. 47; Audley Mervin, ‘Relation’, p. 474. 30 R.S., A collection of some of the murthers and massacres committed on the Irish in Ireland since the 23d. of October 1641 (London, 1662), p. 11; Nicholls, ‘The Other Massacre’, pp. 182–184. 31 Anon., A journall of the most memorable passages in Ireland (London, 1642), p. 3. 32 Mark Empey, ‘The Diary of Sir James Ware, 1623–66’, Analecta Hibernica 45 (2014), p. 111. The figure of 500 is cited in a transcript from British Library, MS Sloane 1008 of letters to E. Borlase. See Dublin City Library, Gilbert Collection, MS 190, p. 70. 33 Deposition of Chidley Coote, Trinity College Dublin, MS 814 (Kings County), f. 209r. ‘Clanaghell’ or ‘Clonahall’, which is probably Cloondallow. Deposition of Chidley Coote, Trinity College Dublin, MS 814 (King’s County), f. 208v. 34 Kelly, Cambrensis Eversus, iii. 191. 35 R.S., A collection of some of the murthers and massacres, p. 14; John Curry, An Historical and Critical Review of the Civil Wars in Ireland (Dublin, 1775), p. 418; P. F. Moran, Historical Sketch of the Persecutions Suffered by the Catholics of Ireland (Dublin, 1865), p. 222; Charles Viscount Moore to James Butler Earl of Ormond, Drogheda, 4 May 1643, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Carte 5, f. 208. 36 R.S., A collection of some of the murthers and massacres, p. 24. 37 Kelly, Cambrensis Eversus, iii. 191; Richard O’Ferrall and Robert O’Connell, Commentarius Rinuccinianus de sedis Apostolica elegatione ad foederatos Hiberniae Catholicos per annos 1645–1649, ed. Stanislaus Kavanagh, 6 vols (Dublin, 1932–1949), v. 186; A. H. Boylan, ‘The Parish of Magheracloone’, Clogher Record 6.2 (1967), p. 365. 38 James Touchet, The Earl of Castlehaven’s Memoirs (Dublin, 1815), pp. 61–62; Deposition of Francis Dade, Trinity College Dublin, MS 813 (Co. Kildare), f. 359v.

Siege Massacres in Ireland: Drogheda in Context

Place Annagh, Co. Cork39 Crean’s Castle, Sligo40 Pilltown, Co. Waterford41 Black Castle, Wicklow.42 Disert, Queen’s County [Laois] Kells, Co. Meath43 Maynooth, Co. Kildare Castlegrace, Co. Tipperary44 Owney, Co. Limerick45 Cashel, Co. Tipperary46 Callan, Co. Kilkenny47

Date June 1645 July 1645 Aug. 1646 Dec. 1645 Oct. 1646 Dec. 1646 July 1647 July 1647 July 1647 Sept. 1647 Feb. 1647

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Victims Perpetrators unknown Irish 200 English unknown English 6 Irish 40 Irish 200–700 Irish 26 Irish unknown English unknown English 700 English unknown English

39 James Anderson, A Genealogical History of the House of Yvery, 2 vols (London, 1742), ii. 256–257; Captain John Hodder to Sir Philip Percivall Cork, 7 June 1645, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Earl of Egmont (London, 1905), i, part 1, p. 256. 40 R.S., A collection of some of the murthers and massacres, p. 8; Commentarius Rinuccinianus, i. 542; Pierfrancesco Scarampi, 14 July 1645, in P. F. Moran, Spicilegium Ossoriense … (Dublin, 1874), p. 293. 41 William Jephson to Sir Philip Percivall, Youghal, 20 Aug. 1646, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Egmont, p. 306. 42 Nicholas Loftus to Sir Philip Percivall, Dublin, 14 Jan. 1646, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Egmont, p. 278. 43 Tadhg Ó Donnchadha (ed.), ‘Cín Lae Ó Mealláin’, Analecta Hibernica 3 (1931), p. 49; Commentarius Rinuccinianus, ii. 495–496; Edmund Hogan (ed.), The History of the Warr of Ireland from 1641 to 1653, by a British Officer in the Regiment of Sir John Clotworthy (Dublin, 1873), p. 64. In December 1646, a detachment of O’Neill’s army made a forced 20-mile night march to the frontier outpost of Kells, where, on a ‘cloudy misty morning’, it ‘suddenly surprized’ the garrison. According to one Irish source, O’Neill’s men spared some 130 officers and men who ‘asked for quarter’ and cut down about 200. According to a second Irish source, the Ulstermen massacred up to 700 men, sparing only a dozen officers. The ‘British officer’ concurs with this latter figure and agrees that the English were ‘all lost to a few’. 44 Anon., A letter from an officer of quallitie of the Parliaments army in Munster to an honourable member of the House of Commons (London, 1647), p. 7. 45 Anon, A letter from an officer of quallitie, p. 7. 46 Colonel Alexander Piggot, A full relation of the taking of Roche Castle together with St. Patricks Cathedral (London, 1647), p. 4. 47 John Rushworth, Historical Collections April 1646 to January 1648, 6 vols (London, 1708), vi. 361.

Chapter 2

War Criminal Allegations The Case for the Defence Tom Reilly

War Criminal Allegations: The Case for the Defence

Out of Ireland have we come. Great hatred, little room, Maimed us at the start. I carry from my mother’s womb A fanatic heart.

W. B. Yeats

Civilian fatalities have been the consequence of wars since time immemorial. In many people’s eyes the 1649 sacking of Drogheda represents Ireland’s Hiroshima and that of Wexford its Nagasaki. A comparison might be drawn from the conclusions of history by linking the motives of the Allied forces in 1945 to that of Cromwell in 1649 where the policy actually became the wholesale killing of civilians to reduce the threat of further resistance and save lives in the long run. Such a contention is predicated on the basis that there was a clear policy to massacre large numbers of innocent civilians in both sets of circumstances. In this chapter I will show that the evidence for a policy to kill the innocent by Cromwellian troops at Drogheda and Wexford is non-existent. Conversely, the proof actually indicates that unarmed civilians died as the result of collateral damage and that the numbers in both towns must have been very modest. This contention is polar opposite to the tradition of history where at best thousands were understood to have been deliberately massacred, and at worst both towns were wiped out en masse, irrespective of policy, and is based on the facts, some of which have only recently been unearthed by this writer. It seems like a shocking miscarriage of historical justice that Cromwell has been (and continues to be) specifically blamed for something 51

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he made great efforts resolutely to avoid during his nine-month military campaign in Ireland. The emphasis here will be on four separate areas of primary evidence that have never been previously examined so closely in the past. Given the effect that even the mention of the name Oliver Cromwell has on anybody of an Irish persuasion, this essay has the potential to have a seismic effect on the entire story and is an objective attempt from a Drogheda native to continue the gradual reversal of the trend of revulsion that has been targeted at this fascinating historical character for centuries. The four areas are: 1 The Town of Drogheda in the Two Years Preceding the Siege

It is quite surprising that in a period as well-mined as this one, no other scholar appears to have made anything of the fact that for two long years before the siege of Drogheda the town was actually occupied by Cromwellian troops. Having been dislodged in July 1649 by the royalists, some of them, albeit a small percentage, even returned under Cromwell in September, one would assume reasonably well acquainted with individual citizens of the town, whom they are alleged to have massacred wholesale. 2 The Account of the Siege of Drogheda by Thomas à Wood

On 28 November 1695, the celebrated antiquarian Anthony à Wood died. He was an Oxford man to the core and during his lifetime he documented several aspects of the history of various Oxford colleges, including the lives of past college luminaries, ecclesiastics, monument inscriptions and details concerning other significant antiquities throughout the city. Upon his death he bequeathed over 1,000 manuscripts of his own work to posterity. One publication that has emerged from this period is usually cited as The Life of Anthony à Wood from the year 1632 to 1672 written by himself. The clear implication of the title is that Mr Wood took the time to write his own biography, but here in posterity the evidence does not support this inference. In the story of Cromwell at Drogheda Wood’s narrative occupies a significant evidential platform. Anthony à Wood’s life story contains the alleged account of his brother Thomas, who fought for the New Model Army at Drogheda in 1649. The Wood brothers’ words are the only ones that have come down to us that provide details of civilian deaths at Drogheda. For centuries eminent historians have relied upon the few lines in Wood’s convoluted and rambling life story to support the tradition that significant numbers of Drogheda’s innocents were massacred in cold blood during the siege. Surprisingly, even a cursory glance at the provenance of his brother’s chronicle renders the ‘evidence’ of Thomas à Wood quite

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impotent. It is quite remarkable that generations of academics have failed to scrutinise this area before and that the task of exposing the obvious flaws contained therein was first undertaken by this writer as late as 2014. 3 The Lack of Pre-Restoration Allegations of Civilian Deaths

Equally extraordinary is the fact that up to 2014 no previous writer of Irish history paid any real attention to the fact that for 11 years after the horrific events of 1649 – with the exception of two royalist hacks – no allegations of deliberate indiscriminate civilian killings were made against Cromwell during his entire military campaign in Ireland. After the Restoration in 1660, the winners did what they did best and rewrote the history books. 4 The Words ‘and many inhabitants’ on the Official Government Pamphlet

The fact that the three words ‘and many inhabitants’ at the foot of a list at the end of Cromwell’s letter in parliament’s official pamphlet about Drogheda had never been examined in detail prior to 2014 should also be a source of concern for the writers of Irish history. My new evidence reveals that the list was in circulation in print five days before Cromwell even wrote his letter, significantly reducing the chances that Cromwell was the author of the three words. Of course, any analysis of these words must be interpreted alongside the recent highlighting by this author that many of the inhabitants of Drogheda were indeed armed and that the primary evidence proves this. Overview The writer of history can know no more than his authorities have disclosed or the facts themselves necessarily suggest. The truth of the fact is beyond argument if one can assume that records are correct. An opinion is potentially changeable – depending on how the evidence is interpreted. By themselves, opinions have little power to convince. However, the vagaries of human nature are unpredictable, and none is immune to the virus of an inherent bias, an engrained perspective, an innate belief. It might be proffered that in order to establish a favourite theory some historians are apt to overlook a troublesome or adverse authority, subtly to misrepresent facts in order to form a foundation for a long-held or desired conviction or to borrow from their own fancy whatever may be wanting for its support and embellishment. Some might not like to admit it, but historians are human too. Where I have offered an opinion, I hope that I have outlined a satisfactory basis for doing so. Most importantly,

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I readily acknowledge the fallibility of a personal viewpoint versus the reliability of an established fact. Herein lies the crux: historians in general often make no clear distinction between the killing of the armed and the unarmed: the soldier and the civilian. It is important to distinguish between the two. One is war, the other a potential war crime (a modern-day term that ill fits a historical event). Experts of the period do not generally articulate the difference between the teenaged girl and the local royalist sympathiser who lived up the street and armed himself for the cause; the harmless old maid and her next-door neighbour; the government-opposed husband who had just secured a sword and deigned to use it. All four examples may well be described as civilians. But what exactly constitutes a ‘civilian’ death? The word ‘civilians’ or derivatives thereof do not break down the contextual demographic. Civilians were killed at Drogheda and Wexford: fact. But if experts continually fail to differentiate between the armed and the unarmed – armed civilians included – the non-experts will continue to believe that large-scale massacres of innocents took place at Drogheda and Wexford, with no regard to age or sex. Some of the Historians’ Various Conclusions Historian Jason McElligott is pretty emphatic: All the evidence suggests that Cromwell slaughtered the garrison and many of the townspeople of Drogheda in September 1649. In doing so he stepped outside the norms of seventeenth-century warfare. To pretend otherwise is an abuse of Irish history.1 John Morrill supports McElligott: 1 Jason McElligott, ‘Cromwell, Drogheda and the Abuse of Irish History’, Bullan: An Irish Studies Review 6.1 (2001), pp. 109–132. Of Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy, McElligott says, ‘It is my contention not merely that this book is fatally flawed from beginning to end … to be frank Reilly’s book owes more to his personal enthusiasm for the memory of Oliver Cromwell than it does to any general accepted rules of historical practice. On every single point that he uses to try to rehabilitate Cromwell – the letter to the House of Commons, the numerous seventeenth-century accounts of the fall of Drogheda, and the rules of war – Reilly has manipulated the facts in order to arrive at his preordained conclusion. Indeed Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy is such a painfully bad book that were it not for the rave reviews it has received in some quarters, such a lengthy deconstruction of the text might seem like taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut’.

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Jason McElligott has given us an outstanding summary of the nationalist and revisionist cases and a totally convincing and necessary explanation of why Tom Reilly’s claim that there was no civilian massacre at Drogheda is not to be trusted. In essence Reilly fails the test of source criticism at almost every turn. He argues a case and unreasonable privileges second – and third-hand evidence that supports his presupposition and unreasonably dismisses contrary evidence. When it comes to first hand evidence, he reasserts an already discredited attempt to deny that Cromwell confessed to the deaths of civilians … And what does this appendix tell us? It tells us that at Drogheda Cromwell’s army killed 60 royalist officers, 220 troopers, and 2,500 infantry, surgeons, ‘and many inhabitants’. There is no getting around these words. Reilly tries to do so … by drawing attention to Carlyle’s false claim in the first edition of [Letters and Speeches] that the appendix is an eighteenth century addition … this claim was simply incorrect. This in itself is fatal to Reilly’s thesis and it is disgraceful that so many reviewers have not checked this. Despite Tom Reilly’s attempt to minimise the number of civilian deaths, there can be no doubt that they took place.2 Morrill’s considered opinion on the Drogheda civilians is as follows: Hugh Peter, close to Cromwell and on his council of war, suggested that the total number killed was 3,552 and he gives the number of military survivors as 400. Cromwell thinks that there was 2,782 killed apart from the ‘many inhabitants’ (although his 2,500 infantrymen and support service men is clearly a rounded number). The implication of both Cromwell and Peter is that about 700–800 civilians died and I see no reason to doubt that figure.3 Pádraig Lenihan is also quite succinct but believes the civilians were innocent ones: So innocent civilians were killed. Having said that, it is dangerous to speculate. I would tentatively suggest about a thousand civilian fatalities’.4 2 John Morrill, ‘The Drogheda Massacre in Cromwellian Context’, in David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan and Clodagh Tait (eds), Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Context in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2009), pp. 253–254. 3 Morrill, ‘Drogheda Massacre’, p. 254. 4 Pádraig Lenihan, letter to Drogheda Independent, 20 June 1999.

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Perhaps the foremost Cromwell expert in Ireland, Micheál Ó Siochrú, says: In total at least 3,000 people died in Drogheda, including the garrison and an indeterminate number of civilians.5 Because of the explosive nature of the alternative it should be the absolute responsibility of the writers of history to discriminate between combatants and non-combatants in this issue. But since in the main they continue not to do so, the traditional ‘massacre of innocents’ stories prevail. Recent research reveals that Cromwell continues to surprise. Regarding the Interregnum, John Morrill has announced, ‘Paradoxically, by blaming Cromwell for the much more lasting horrors of the Commonwealth period in Ireland, we let those really responsible off the hook’.6 Morrill has also argued that the overwhelming driving force behind Cromwell’s antipathy was directed at the royalist element of his enemies in Ireland, not the Catholic element. References to Catholics, papists and the Roman Church are distinctly absent from his correspondence (40 documents in total) from Ireland. There is none in his letters to parliament about Drogheda or Wexford. Morrill says: He’s [Cromwell] very keen, right from the beginning, not to see his enemy as predominantly Catholic. It’s the ethnic and the royalist dimension that he is most concerned with. Cromwell’s dominant perception of the war he’s fighting is anti-royalist, not anti-Catholic.7 Morrill has also suggested that Cromwell was sacked as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1652 because he disagreed with the severity of the Act of Settlement, incongruously perhaps now known as the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland: Cromwell was sacked as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1652 in my view because he opposed the severity of the land settlement. He wanted a much more moderate settlement for the people of Ireland … then the people of Ireland could be allowed an equality of rights.8 5 Micheál Ó Siochrú, Cromwell in Ireland. RTE television documentary first broadcast on 9 Sept. 2008. 6 Morrill, ‘Drogheda Massacre’, p. 263. 7 John Morrill, ‘The Religious Context of the Cromwellian Conquest of Ireland’, lecture delivered to the Cromwell Association, 19 Oct. 2016: www.olivercromwell. org/wordpress/?page_id=21. 8 Morrill, ‘The Religious Context’.

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Also, the idea that according to Cromwell those ‘barbarous wretches’ in Drogheda whose hands have been ‘imbrued with so much innocent blood’ were not Irish Catholics but English royalists has also gained significant traction in recent years. The target of Cromwell’s ire may have been the English royalist defenders of Drogheda who had sought to extend the bloody civil war in England, had arrived in Ireland and ended up fighting against parliament again. Morrill says: He [Cromwell] uses the word barbarous on occasions in England so it’s not reserved for the Irish and I’ve argued elsewhere that he was really inflamed by those who had come over from England to Ireland to continue the King’s war. So, it’s the English royalists, both Catholic and Protestant who he is most incensed by.9 Elsewhere, Cromwell is clear that he blames the Irish clergy for the massacres of 1641 and not the ignorant masses, who he believed had been inveigled into committing atrocities by their clerical masters. He insisted that the ordinary people of Ireland had nothing to fear, Catholic or not, if they didn’t take up arms against parliament. John Cunningham has shown that parliament’s Irish government had to move to prevent Catholic Irish landowners from petitioning Cromwell as Lord Protector for restoration of their lands because he invariably displayed clemency in these cases.10 Many of the agreements that Cromwell had made with the Irish were reneged on by others who came after him. According to Cunningham: While the massacre at Drogheda in 1649 remains a blot on his reputation, in the 1650s Cromwell in fact emerged as an important and effective ally for Irish landowners seeking to defeat the punitive confiscation and transplantation policies approved by the Westminster parliament and favoured by the Dublin government. … 9 Morrill, ‘The Religious Context’. 10 John Cunningham, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the “Cromwellian” Settlement of Ireland’, Historical Journal 53 (2010), p. 928. Cunningham concurs with Morrill regarding Cromwell’s attitude to Irish Catholics. He writes: ‘It should not be presumed that his [Cromwell’s] violent hostility towards Irish Catholics in time of war continued into the period of settlement. Instead, Cromwell’s treatment of Irish Catholics post-conquest and his influence on the enforcement of transplantation to Connacht must be reconstructed from the available evidence’.

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In his extensive dealings with Irish landowners, he displayed a genuine compassion for cases of hardship and a strong aversion to perceived unfairness and injustice. Moreover, it is clear that the Catholics and Protestants who made approaches to Cromwell fully expected to be treated equitably and honourably by him, and nothing that had occurred during the conquest of Ireland was sufficient to dampen their expectations.11 Of course, Cromwell could possibly still be indicted for ‘war crimes’ at Drogheda because he allowed the subsequent murder of captured officers who had surrendered after the promise of quarter.12 But to the non-history scholar whose palate is tickled by the innocent civilian massacre stories, this is just a distraction, a hair-splitting exercise over which historians can cogitate. The Town of Drogheda in the Two Years Preceding the Siege When it comes to Cromwell at Drogheda the very foundation on which an interpretation is based can often be out of kilter with historical reality. In 1649, Drogheda was no quintessential Irish town. Politically, theologically and economically both Dublin and Drogheda were mirrors of each other where the Old English Catholic lords had dominated for centuries. Both were within the Pale and both were substantially shaped by the AngloNormans from the time of the Norman Conquest. Dublin became the centre of English power in Ireland and Drogheda also held parliaments. Poyning’s Law was passed in Drogheda in 1494 in an effort to enforce Ireland’s obedience to the English monarchy. In 1641, the Irish insurgents planned to take both urban centres but were foiled in both cases, as the entire Pale community held fast and remained hostile to the native Irish. The plan to take Dublin was scuppered by deception and the fortress of 11 Cunningham, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the “Cromwellian” Settlement of Ireland’, pp. 919, 937. 12 Cunningham, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the “Cromwellian” Settlement of Ireland’, p. 928. The author concludes: ‘Many of Cromwell’s recent biographers have sought to explain his actions at Drogheda by reference to the laws of war, noting that a garrison which refused to surrender thereby forfeited its right to quarter. The same laws of war also required that articles of surrender be properly observed and that promises made be honestly kept. Although Cromwell adhered to these conventions at Clonmel and elsewhere, in accounts of the conquest such instances of honourable behaviour will always be necessarily overshadowed by the events which occurred at Drogheda and Wexford’.

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Drogheda kept O’Neill’s forces at bay for five months until the unsuccessful siege was eventually lifted. Of Drogheda in 1649, Ó Siochrú writes: The real controversy, however, revolves around the issue of civilian deaths. It seems highly unlikely that while storming a town in the face of stiff resistance, 10,000 parliamentary troops would at all times have distinguished, or been able to distinguish, between enemy soldiers and non-combatants.13 To conclude that this ‘seems highly unlikely’ without factual support is to dispense with the historical context of the town of Drogheda and its role in the story of Britain and Ireland, the contemporary rules of engagement, the clear military orders under which the New Model Army were operating, and the fact that almost immediately preceding the storm the town of Drogheda had been occupied and governed by parliament, Cromwell’s own party. On the morning before Oliver Cromwell swung his legs out of bed to travel to Ireland, the notion of besieging the town of Drogheda – the event that would later become the biggest blot on his career – would never have even occurred to him. That is because Drogheda was under roundhead control that day as it had been for the lengthy duration of two whole years previously. On 11 July 1649, the town of Drogheda was captured by the royalists under Lord Inchiquin and wrested from the hands of parliament, which had been in military occupation since the summer of 1647.14 It was Parliamentarian soldiers who would later be accused of committing civilian atrocities at Drogheda, yet it was Parliamentarian soldiers who had lived peaceably, side by side with these very same inhabitants for two long years beforehand, with no recorded evidence of discord between the military and civilian occupants whatsoever. Indeed, Cromwell’s attacking forces at Drogheda included some members of the same roundhead regiments who had fraternised with the local populace for those two years previously.15 13 Micheál Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (London, 2008), p. 88. 14 Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, vol. 1, 1649–50 (Stroud, 1988), p. 97. Gardiner writes: ‘On 11 July Drogheda surrendered to Inchiquin. Of the 700 foot and 255 horse of which the garrison was composed, no fewer than 600 foot and 220 horse took service with the victorious party’. 15 Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, i. 109. Gardiner tells us that the regiment of parliamentarian Colonel Michael Jones had been in occupation at Drogheda and that when Cromwell arrived in Dublin in August Jones’s regiment

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Cromwell, who would not have been aware of the royalist victory at Drogheda the previous day, left London for Ireland on 12 July 1649 to crush royalist resistance there.16 The Account of the Siege of Drogheda by Thomas à Wood When discussing the horrific events at Drogheda in 1649, one of the ‘go to’ sources for many is the account of the Parliamentarian soldier Thomas à Wood, who fought at Drogheda and therefore could be (and often has been) described as an eyewitness. Wood reputedly tells us that children were used ‘as a buckler of defence’ by the attackers and he describes the gruesome killing of a young local girl, whom he tried to save, but one of his crazed colleagues stabbed her through ‘her belly or fundament whereupon Mr Wood seeing her gasping, took away her money, jewels &c., and flung her down over the works’. Wood’s tract is opportune for the civilian massacre theorists because it conveniently suggests genocide took place. It has generally been used in a primary source context coming directly from an eyewitness. This is a mistake. The stories of Thomas à Wood, which were transcribed decades later by his brother Anthony (rendering it non-eyewitness testimony) in the context of fireside stories with which he regaled his ‘brethren’ are unequivocally untrustworthy. The source is The Life of Anthony à Wood from the year 1632 to 1672 written by himself. My evidence, however, now clearly shows that this book was first compiled (not published) in 1711 by a Doctor Thomas Tanner, 16 years after Anthony à Wood died and 62 years after Drogheda. More significantly, however, is the fact that it might easily have been influenced by the hands of several others. And most interestingly it did not see the light of day until 1772, when a Thomas Hearne edited and published it. That is 123 years after the events!17 Anthony à Wood, a staunch royalist, who was often suspected of joined him on the march north back to Drogheda: ‘His [Cromwell’s] men required rest after their voyage and Jones’s regiment had to be reorganised to fit them to take part in the coming campaign’. 16 Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, i. 96. ‘On 12 July he set out for Bristol with unwonted state, in a coach drawn by six grey Flanders mares and protected by a life-guard, every member of which was either “an officer, or an esquire”. Above him floated a milk white standard, symbolising, as it would seem, his hope to bring back white-robed peace from amidst the horrors of war’. 17 Anthony à Wood, ‘The Life of Anthony à Wood Written by Himself’, in Philip Bliss (ed.), Athenæ Oxonienses: An Exact History of All the Writers and Bishops Who Have Had Their Education in the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1848) (henceforth Bliss, ‘Wood’). In his introduction, Bliss writes: ‘It was judged to be more appropriate

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being a Catholic, had his life’s historical works published after his death in various publications, and all with different editors (including the Revd Sir J. Peshall in 1773,18 John Gutch in 1786,19 Phillip Bliss in 1813,20 Andrew Clark in 189121 and Powys Llewlyn in 1961),22 some of which included the story of his life, which in turn contains the account of his brother Thomas at Drogheda. Wood’s biography was not in fact published by himself in the literal sense but was transcribed by editor Hearne in 1772 from pocket diaries, documents and manuscripts that Wood left to Dr Tanner, among others, on his deathbed. This is not exactly what you would call an authentic primary source directly from an eyewitness. Also affecting the source is the fact that Colonel Henry Ingoldsby, Thomas à Wood’s commanding officer, described Thomas as having ‘an art of merriment called buffooning’.23 Just the type of soldier, as Samuel Rawson Gardiner has suggested, who might make up sensational stories to impress a fireside to the design of this issue to insert the Life of Anthony à Wood as written by his own pen, and in his own manner, than to offer any new account of his life and labours, the materials for which could have been derived from no other source. The Life of Wood, as far as the year 1762, was first published by Thomas Hearne, who transcribed it from the original in the hands of Dr Tanner, and printed it in the second volume of, Thomæ Caii … Vindiciæ Antiquitatis Academiæ Oxoniensis, printed at Oxford in 1730. The additional minutes, or memoirs, which commence with the beginning of the year, 1673, were taken from a manuscript now in the Bodleian Library written by Richard Rawlinson, D.C.L. of St John’s college and intitled, Historical passages from Ant Wood’s Papers. These, it is very evident, were taken from Wood’s pocket Almanacks, and are, in fact, the very materials, from which the author himself would have drawn up the continuation of his life had he lived to carry that design into effect. They were first published under the advice and with the assistance of Thomas Warton, B.D. fellow at Trinity college, the author of the History of English Poetry, by William Huddesford B.D. also fellow of Trinity, and keeper of the Ashmolean museum and appended them to The Lives of Leyland and Hearne, Oxford, 1772, 8vo. In the present edition, such notes as were mere extracts from the Athenæ are omitted, those by the former editors are pointed out by their names or initials and as such now appear for the first time, are enclosed between brackets’. 18 Sir J. Peshall (ed.), The antient and present State of the City of Oxford by Anthony à Wood, with Additions by the Rev. Sir J. Peshall, Bart. (London, 1773). 19 John Gutch (ed.), The History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford, by Anthony à Wood, M.A. published by John Gutch (Oxford, 1786). 20 Bliss, ‘Wood’. 21 Andrew Clark (ed.), The Life and Times of Anthony Wood: Antiquary of Oxford, 1632–1695, Described by Himself (Oxford, 1891). 22 Llewlyn Powys (ed.), The Life and Times of Anthony à Wood (London, 1961). 23 Bliss, ‘Wood’, p. 53.

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audience.24 It is important to analyse Anthony à Wood’s commentary because his is the only contemporary account that gives details of civilian deaths at Drogheda, using his brother’s lurid stories, if they even were his brother’s own lurid stories. In stark contrast to what the Wood brothers purportedly say are the actual words of Oliver Cromwell. As soon as he landed in Ireland he issued orders to his troops not to do ‘any wrong or violence to any person, not in arms or office with the enemy’.25 In the main, commentators on this topic throughout antiquity tend to assume that Cromwell just ignored the fact that many of his troops simply disregarded this order and lost their self-control at Drogheda and Wexford, as indeed did their commanding officer himself. But the evidence does not support this point of view and again we must only deal with the facts. In his declaration to the Catholic clergy in the winter of 1649, after Drogheda and Wexford, Cromwell categorically denies that he has stepped outside the military domain, and on no fewer than ten occasions in that document alone he emphasises that the ordinary unarmed people of Ireland are to be left unmolested.26 On one occasion he even denies that he has actually killed unarmed civilians when he writes: ‘Good now: give us an instance of one man, since my coming into Ireland, not in arms, massacred, destroyed or banished, concerning the two first of which justice hath not been done, or endeavoured to be done’.27 He is also very consistent in this respectful attitude to the civilian population in all of his documented utterances throughout his entire campaign in Ireland. On his approach to Drogheda he even had two of his men hanged for stealing hens from an old woman, a clear breach of his orders. On several occasions throughout his life Cromwell shows his abhorrence of indiscriminate civilian massacres when he hears of them. In Ireland, rightly or wrongly, he unambiguously blames the Catholic clergy for the 1641 massacres of innocent Protestant settlers and outlines his revulsion of such behaviour in no uncertain terms in the above-mentioned declaration. Also, in May 1655, as Lord Protector, he is clearly horrified when he learns of the massacre by the troops of the Catholic Duke of Savoy and of some 200–300 Protestants known as Waldensians who lived in the 24 Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, i. 120–121. 25 Oliver Cromwell, A declaration by the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Concerning his resolutions for the peace and safety of Ireland (London, 1649), p. 2. 26 W. C. Abbott (ed.), The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1937–1947), ii. 196–205; A declaration of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. For the undeceiving of deluded and seduced people (London, 1650). 27 Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 197.

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adjoining isolated Alpine valleys in Piedmont to the west of Turin.28 There is ample evidence throughout his life that Cromwell’s moral threshold was high and even in this narrow context of an appreciation of his character a massacre of ordinary unarmed people at either Drogheda or Wexford at his hands does not accord with his personality. As John Morrill says, ‘The more I read the letters and speeches of Oliver Cromwell, the more convinced I become that, while he was a man capable of self-deception, he was not capable of deliberate and sustained lies and deceit’.29 Those who promote Cromwell as a war criminal perpetuate the idea that he simply lost his moral compass in Ireland and returned to his old self on his return to England. This is not an accurate portrayal. The Words ‘and many inhabitants’ on the Official Government Pamphlet Much store has been put into the military despatches that Cromwell sent back to his superiors in London from both Drogheda and Wexford that outline the events at both towns in detail. In the opinion of many the letter concerning Drogheda in particular has incriminated Cromwell, where he is alleged to have admitted that he killed ‘many inhabitants’ in that town in a list of the slain that appears in the official pamphlet that was printed by parliament on 2 October 1649 to announce officially the news of the fall of Drogheda. In the pamphlet this list appears at the end of Cromwell’s letter, the last line of which reads: ‘Two thousand Five hundred Foot Soldiers, besides Staff Officers, Chyrurgeons, &c and many inhabitants’.30 This official government document needs to be analysed in conjunction with the newsbooks (newspapers) of the day that also carried the exact same list of those killed. When this is done it can be almost categorically said (inasmuch as anything from that period can) that the three words ‘and many inhabitants’ were not the words of Cromwell himself. Up until now, most early modern historians have deemed these lists (there is also a list of the composition of the garrison) 28 Peter Gaunt, Oliver Cromwell (Oxford, 1996), p. 186. Also in Pauline Gregg, Oliver Cromwell (London, 1988), p. 285. 29 John Morrill, ‘King Oliver: Cromwell Four Centuries On’, Cromwell Association, 2013, p. 93. 30 Thomason Tracts, 88:E.575 [7]. Letters from Ireland, relating the several great successes it hath pleased God to give unto the Parliaments Forces there, in the taking of Drogheda, Trym, Dundalk, Carlingford, and the Nury. Together with a list of the chief commanders, and the number of the officers and soldiers slain in Drogheda (London, 1649). ESTC (Wing (2nd edn) L1778).

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in Letters from Ireland … to have been from the quill of Old Ironsides himself (the original letter does not survive). But this writer’s analysis proves that the published list of those slain at Drogheda was in separate circulation to Cromwell’s letter and that it was published in no fewer than seven newsbooks in early October 1649 in isolation, without Cromwell’s letters directly preceding it.31 Furthermore, none of the newsbook writers attributes the list to Cromwell himself. It can also be shown that of the seven publications that printed the list of the slain, only two include the phrase ‘and many inhabitants’. Most significantly, this list of the slain can now be shown to have been first in circulation on 22 September, five days before Cromwell’s letter was even written.32 It can further be proposed that the pamphlet was printed in haste on the same day it was read out in parliament and that these two lists were simply slotted into the available spaces on the 16-page leaflet with clear demarcation lines to separate the lists from Cromwell’s letters. Of course, the caveat here is that somebody wrote the words and these ‘many inhabitants’ may well have been armed and involved in the conflict, a scenario that is perfectly plausible since the Moderate Intelligencer of 6 September says of Drogheda that ‘every man in that kingdom fit to bear arms is in a posture of war’.33 After all, an armed civilian is no longer a civilian. Thus, did the local royalist sympathiser and anti-parliament contrarian get caught up in the fracas and lose their lives as a result.

31 Thomason Tracts, 83 E.533 [15]. Perfect Occurrences of every daie journall in Parliament, No. 144, 28 Sept.–4 Oct. 1649 prints the list with ‘many inhabitants’ included; Thomason Tracts, E.575 [8]. Bernard Alsop, The perfect weekly account, 26 Sept.–3 Oct.1649 prints the list without ‘many inhabitants’; Thomason Tracts, 83 E.533 [16]. The Kingdomes faithfull and impartiall scout, No. 36, 28 Sept.–5 Oct. 1649 prints the list without ‘many inhabitants’; Thomason Tracts, 88:E.575 [14]. Robert Ibbitson, Severall proceedings in Parliament, 25 Sept.–9 Oct. 1649 prints the list without ‘many inhabitants’; Thomason Tracts, 88:E.575 [5]. The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer, No. 331, 25 Sept.–2 Oct. 1649 prints the list with ‘many inhabitants’ included; Thomason Tracts, E.533 [17]. Samuel Pecke, A perfect diurnall of some passages in Parliament, and from other parts of this kingdome, 1–8 Oct. 1649 prints the list without ‘many inhabitants’; Thomason Tracts, E.575 [10]. John Dillingham, Moderate Intelligencer, No. 237, 27 Sept.–4 Oct. 1649 prints the list without ‘many inhabitants’. 32 Thomason Tracts, E.575 [10]. John Dillingham, Moderate Intelligencer, No. 237, Thursday, 27 Sept.–Thursday, 4 Oct. 1649, pp. 2–3 prints the list without ‘many inhabitants’. 33 Moderate Intelligencer, 30 Aug.–6 Sept. 1649, p. 2.

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The Pre-Restoration Allegations of Civilian Deaths Seventeenth-century historians rightly generally disregard (or at least view with acute suspicion) the later accounts of post-Restoration writers who, when writing their memoirs, documented their accounts about this issue years afterwards – like Bulstrode Whitelocke,34 the Earl of Clarendon,35 Dr George Bate36 and the officer in the regiment of Sir John Clotworthy.37 None of these individuals was at either Drogheda or Wexford, they were not qualified to comment, had axes to grind and all allege that Cromwell engaged in deliberate civilian massacres. The most pragmatic way to approach the question of the origin of the deliberate civilian atrocity allegations is to separate the wheat from the chaff and identify the primary sources themselves, those that date from the year 1649 and were written in the weeks and months following the sackings of Drogheda and Wexford. These 1649 sources are well known and mostly comprise the newsbooks of the day, the letters of those in command of the royalist army (Lord Ormond and Lord Inchiquin) and one or two private letters. The Drogheda Corporation records from 1649 still exist and within their pages are the names of hundreds of local inhabitants who simply got on with their lives following the siege. There is no hint whatsoever in the local records that significant numbers of citizens were killed.38 It may therefore occasion surprise for one to learn that in the 11 intervening years between the storming of both Drogheda and Wexford and the Restoration there are just two contemporary accounts that allege Cromwell slaughtered the unarmed civilians of Drogheda and Wexford.39 That being the case, it is not such a wild leap of faith to identify these two individuals as the ones who instigated the civilian massacre stories – or alternatively to identify them as the ones who framed Oliver Cromwell. 34 Bulstrode Whitelock, Memorials of the English affairs, or an historical account of what passed from the beginning of the reign of King Charles the First to King Charles the Second his happy restauration (London, 1682). 35 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, 6 vols (Oxford, 1767–1786). 36 George Bates, Elenchus motuum nuperorum in Anglia: or, A short historical account of the rise and progress of the late troubles in England, 2 vols (London, 1685). 37 Edmund Hogan (ed.), The History of the Warr of Ireland from 1641 to 1653, by a British Officer in the Regiment of Sir John Clotworthy (Dublin, 1873). 38 Revd Thomas Gogarty (ed.), Council Book of the Corporation of Drogheda, vol. 1, From the Year 1649 to 1734 (Drogheda, 1915; repr. Dundalk, 1988). 39 For a detailed analysis of this chronology, see Tom Reilly, Cromwell Was Framed: Ireland 1649 (Lanham, MD, 2014), pp. 187–190.

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Sir George Wharton and John Crouch were royalist propagandists who spewed out their radical anti-government newsbooks, Mercurius Elencticus40 and The Man in the Moon,41 respectively on a weekly basis. Both Wharton and Crouch have been described by many early modern print experts, including historian Jason McElligott, as the purveyors of little news but lots of outlandish absurdity.42 Quite remarkably, elsewhere McElligott and Ó Siochrú use the ‘evidence’ of both Wharton and Crouch to support the civilian massacre theory.43 Analysis of any of their publications will reveal Wharton’s and Crouch’s penchant for lies, slander, slurs, calumny and character assassination, including crass sexual innuendo directed at Cromwell himself and his high-profile parliamentary bosses. Indeed, in his edition of 7 November 1649, John Crouch decides to spread a rumour that 40 Thomason Tracts, 88:E.575 [27]. Mercurius Elencticus, No. 25, 15–22 Oct. 1649. Wharton writes that the New Model ‘possessed themselves of the towne and used all cruelties imaginable on the besieged, as well inhabitants and others, sparing neither women nor children’. 41 Thomason Tracts, E.575 [32]. The Man in the Moon, No. 26, 17 Oct.–24 Oct. 1649. Crouch writes: ‘Their barbarous cruelty in that abhorrid act, not to be paralled by any of the former massacres of the Irish, sparing neither women nor children, but putting them all to the sword. 3,000 indeed they killed, but 2,000 were women and children and divers aged persons that were not able to support themselves, much less unable to resist them, the towne thus gained with the loss of 5,000 of their own’. 42 Jason McElligott, Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England (Woodbridge, 2007), where the author states: ‘All of these men penned propaganda in a variety of formats during their time at Oxford, and they probably knew each other well. It has been noted above that a pamphlet written in 1644 suggested that Birkenhead, Taylor and Wharton met once a week in a tavern in Oxford to muster up whole regiments of lies, slanders and ridiculous quibbles against the Parliament and the city of London’. 43 McElligott, ‘Cromwell, Drogheda and the Abuse of Irish History’, p. 130. Surprisingly, the author writes: ‘A newsbook entitled Mercurius Elencticus tells how the Cromwellians at Drogheda “possessed themselves of the towne, and used all crueltie imaginable upon the besieged, as well inhabitants, as others, sparing neither women nor children.” Had Reilly been aware of these sources he would, undoubtedly, have found some grounds to dismiss them, but when they are read in conjunction with the numerous other accounts of civilian deaths at Drogheda there can be no doubt what happened in that town’. See also Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner, p. 93, who perhaps shockingly presents the details of Wharton’s scurrilous Mercurius Elencticus, declaring: ‘In early October the Mercurius Elencticus, until then the most moderate of the Royalist newssheets (at least in its Irish coverage) made a number of specific and lurid allegations. The dead at Drogheda included women and children’.

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Cromwell’s penis was shot off at Drogheda and goes into some explicit and gaudy details as to how this might affect Mrs Cromwell.44 The polemic of Crouch and Wharton aside, for 11 long years no other document that we know of accuses Cromwell of civilian atrocities. There the matter should really have ended. Indeed, it is worth speculating that if the House of Cromwell, in the guise of his son Richard in the first instance, the second Lord Protector, had survived into the 1660s and beyond it is likely that both Crouch’s and Wharton’s outrageous publications would have been long cast to the mists of time. Instead, of course, the Restoration happened when Charles II restored his royal seat on the throne and it wasn’t long before his father’s killers became the victims of royalist wrath. Not long after the bodies of Cromwell, his Parliamentarian compatriot John Bradshaw and son-in-law Henry Ireton were exhumed and defiled as the chief protagonists of the failed republic, people couldn’t get to the printing presses quickly enough to destroy their reputations. The royalist James Heath was one of the first out of the traps when he published his scurrilous biography of Cromwell in 1660 where the author alleges that Cromwell himself ordered the massacre of 300 women around the market cross in Wexford.45 Heath further alleges that those troops he ordered to carry out the dastardly deed refused and Cromwell, sneering them for their refusal, called up another group of soldiers to complete the task. Few historians take most of what Heath says seriously.46 Interestingly, Heath doesn’t even mention the deaths of any inhabitants of Drogheda in his heavily biased narrative. That particular privilege is left to the Catholic clergy in Ireland, who join 44 Thomason Tracts, E.578 [9]. The Man in the Moon, No. 28, 31 Oct.–7 Nov. 1649. Crouch’s front-page news, usually being in the form of a rhyme, reads: ‘Now Pryde must unto Ireland go, With a new regiment, For Noll (alack and alas for wo) Has lost Lust’s instrument, Which makes his wife to wail and sob, In tears of briny grief, And curse the Cavees that would rob, The puss-ship of relief’. 45 James Heath, Flagellum: or The life and death, birth and burial of O. Cromwell the late usurper: faithfully described. (London, 1669), pp. 85–86. Wing/H1331, reel position: Wing/420:11. 46 John Morrill, ‘Rewriting Cromwell: A Case of Deafening Silences’, Canadian Journal of History 38.3 (2003), p. 578. Morrill writes: ‘In the early 1660s there appeared a scurrilous, mendacious, malicious life of Cromwell under the title Flagellum. It was written by James Heath, an embittered royalist exile (known as Carrion Heath) and it had about as much value as a guide to Cromwell’s life as the National Enquirer does to the lives of those it pillories. It has, quite rightly, been discounted as a reliable source. Heath’s stories are frequently recognizably based on events for which we have more reliable evidence; but it is recognizable only as a pile of vomit can reveal its previous history’.

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in the post-Restoration Cromwell-bashing free-for-all and now ludicrously declared that 4,000 civilians had died in Drogheda without a scrap of primary source evidence.47 Naturally 4,000 dead civilians at Drogheda makes no sense whatsoever, since the population of the town was approximately 3,000 and we already know that upwards of 3,000 soldiers were slaughtered.48 No other source, credible or otherwise, suggests for a moment that 7,000 souls lost their lives at Drogheda. Furthermore, this same body politic of Catholic clergy had already had their say about Drogheda and Wexford in their decrees from Clonmacnoise in the winter of 1649, when there is no mention of this assertion whatsoever. And the difference in the timing? Cromwell was still alive and well, still in Ireland, and he would have dismissed such claims out of hand in the strongest possible terms, one imagines, with any talk of a restoration at that point a long way away. Mass Evacuation of the Town of Drogheda Among the many other fresh revelations that this writer has discovered is evidence from several different sources that suggest that most of the civilian population of Drogheda was not even in the town by the time the 12,000 Roundheads sat down in front of the walls. For instance, during the siege of Drogheda just eight years earlier the Irish rebels, under the command of Sir Phelim O’Neill, surrounded the entire town and reduced the population to eating rats and horses. It is difficult to believe that the citizens would all stay put to have a similar culinary experience so soon afterwards. Furthermore, Ormond was expecting a long siege and ordered all ‘superfluous’ people to depart from the town in order that the provisions (a reported nine months’ supply) stored there would stretch among the soldiers over the several months they expected the siege to last.49 47 Richard O’Ferrall and Robert O’Connell, Commentarius Rinuccinianus de sedis Apostolica elegatione ad foederatos Hiberniae Catholicos per annos 1645–1649, ed. Stanislaus Kavanagh, 6 vols (Dublin, 1932–1949), iv. 295. Ó Siochrú, in his God’s Executioner, curiously relies on this jingoistic ‘evidence’ to consolidate his theory about the massacre of inhabitants at Drogheda: ‘By the 1660s, following the restoration of Charles II, Irish Clerical sources confidently asserted that 4,000 civilians had died at Drogheda, the result of “an unparalleled savagery and treachery beyond that of any slaughterhouse”’ (p. 95). 48 Meave Garrett, ‘Municipal and Central Government in Ireland under Charles II’, unpublished thesis, University College Dublin (1972). 49 Moderate Intelligencer, 30 Aug.–6 Sept. 1649, says that ‘Ormond lies between Tredagh and Trim, intending if he can to be a spectator at the siege of the first,

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Ormond does the exact same thing at Wexford the following month.50 Dean Nicholas Bernard, the Protestant minister at St Peter’s Church in Drogheda in 1649, and an eyewitness, confirms that his family were sent out of the town. Bernard, who saw what happened that day and wrote a detailed account of it later, says nothing of civilian deaths. The Evidence of Dean Bernard The first-hand evidence may be problematic but Bernard – then a local inhabitant of Drogheda – is seen as an excellent witness and his accounts of both sieges (1641 and 1649) are very detailed.51 He was the resident cleric at St Peter’s Church during the 1640s and his writings reveal him to be very much on the Royalist side. Ó Siochrú uses Bernard’s evidence to support the civilian massacre theory and as a consequence his thought process is worth close assessment here. This is mainly because Ó Siochrú uses a single incident at Bernard’s house to extrapolate arbitrarily about the siege in the rest of the town – quite a sizeable leap, especially when the incident is seen in context. Paraphrasing Bernard’s words, Ó Siochrú writes: He [Bernard] describes how, ‘in the heat of prosecution’ immediately following the assault, parliamentary troops shot through the windows of his house, where over thirty Protestants had gathered seeking sanctuary, killing one person, and seriously wounding another. The soldiers broke into the building, discharging their weapons, before the timely intervention of an officer known to the dean restored order. This account raises a number of key issues. According to Bernard, the soldiers fired on civilians sheltering indoors, which belies claims that the parliamentarians only targeted those in arms. Moreover, the group was only saved from further harm when an officer recognised Bernard and identified his companions as Protestants. The implication of this sequence of events for the town’s Catholics do not require any further explanation … Therefore, according to the one surviving civilian if not of both, which by the advantage of the river, he hopes to do rather than by the valour of his men; he hath cleared Tredagh of all superfluous and suspected persons and furnished it well with all necessities, every man in that kingdom fit to bear arms, is in a posture of war’. 50 Philip Herbert Hore, History of the Town and County of Wexford, 6 vols (London, 1906), v. 291. 51 Nicholas Bernard, ‘The Farewell Sermons of Comfort and Concord Preached at Drogheda in Ireland’, published in his book The penitent death of a woeful sinner, 3rd impression (London, 1651).

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account of the storming of Drogheda, troops of the New Model Army deliberately attacked noncombatants in their homes.52 Ó Siochrú fails to reveal the real reason why the Parliamentarians targeted the dean’s house. But Bernard clearly tells us himself. In his tract (where he is called Doctor and is referred to in the third person), the document reads: ‘Then came five or six who were sent from a principal officer – the doctor’s former acquaintance – under pretence of a guard for his house, but had a command for him, as soon as they were entered to kill him, which an earwitness had assured him of’.53 So Bernard’s house was targeted deliberately and this is a key aspect of the dean’s evidence. Furthermore, he was taken prisoner to Dublin following the siege, had several charges levied against him, was interviewed by Cromwell himself and kept in custody for six months. His tract implies that it was Cromwell who saved his life (much to the chagrin of Hugh Peters who seems to have wanted him killed) and that after his imprisonment he was ‘sent up to the army at Clonmel, and permitted to come then with Cromwell into England’. But it was an incident at the house involving the Parliamentarian army that Ó Siochrú uses to shore up his large-scale civilian massacre allegation. Again, it is the parts of the evidence that he omits that change the connotation of the evidence completely. The story that Ó Siochrú paraphrases is repeated here verbatim in Bernard’s words: Then a cornet of a troop of horse came to his relief and pretending that he had an order from the General to take care of that house, the soldiers withdrew, and so at the back door he brought in his quartermaster, whom he left to secure it. About a quarter of an hour after, another troop of horse came to the window, and demanded the opening of the door. The quartermaster, and himself [Bernard], with an old servant (for he had sent his wife and children out of the town) stood close together, and told them that it was the minister’s house and that all inside were Protestants. As soon as they heard the Doctor named, and his voice, one of them discharged his pistol at him wherein being a brace of bullets, with the one the quartermaster was shot quite through the body, and dyed in the place, and the other shot his servant through the throat, but recovered; the Doctor only was untouched.54 52 Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner, p. 89. 53 Bernard, ‘The Farewell Sermons’, pp. 320–321. 54 Bernard, ‘The Farewell Sermons’, pp. 320–321.

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Bernard seems to have been incredibly lucky. Not only did he miss being hit by the brace of bullets, but it later transpired that the officer whom he knew (Colonel Ewers) was admonished for saving his life by others, and he was told in no uncertain terms by his captors that he should expect to die yet. The Protestant minister was a supporter of Ormond’s and had publicly proclaimed both his support for the Stuarts and his hostility for parliament vociferously and often, transgressions that easily explain why he would be targeted by the attackers. But Ó Siochrú implies instead that the attackers simply happened upon the preacher’s house and the incident ensued. To use the death of the quartermaster (obviously a soldier) and the wounding of his servant (presumably a civilian ‘in office with the enemy’) as evidence that a large-scale massacre of civilians took place, as Ó Siochrú appears to do, seems precarious to say the least, especially since Bernard himself says nothing of the deaths of any of the local population. This is not the smoking gun that Ó Siochrú wants it to be. Ó Siochrú also points to the death of a local alderman named Henry Mortimer. Mortimer’s name is mentioned in the Court of Claims, where petitions were drafted to resolve land disputes following the Restoration.55 This is a significant source because here for the first time we actually have names of local inhabitants who were killed during the assault. Quoting from the Court of Claims and after identifying a couple of soldiers Ó Siochrú writes: ‘Alongside these military personnel, however, others, such as James Fleming, are described as “murdered”, while Henry Mortimer, an alderman of the town, was killed “being then about seventy years of age”’.56 Here in a nutshell is the sum total of names of local inhabitants that we know were killed during Cromwell’s attack on the town from a contemporary source, albeit one 13 years after the events. Without question, Fleming and Mortimer are local contemporary names. However, there are several things that we should be sure of before we begin to use these two examples to stretch the story to a large-scale massacre of innocent civilians. First, we don’t know whether or not they were armed. Secondly, we don’t know if they were two of the unlucky inhabitants who were simply caught in the crossfire. We know they died, but we don’t know how or why.

55 Geraldine Talon (ed.), Court of Claims: Submissions and Evidence (Dublin, 2006). 56 Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner, p. 90.

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Wexford When it comes to Wexford, we know that many of the local men, some of whom were ‘privateers’ or what we would call pirates today, took up arms to defend their properties and goods. In stark contrast to Drogheda, having declared for the Catholic Confederacy, Wexford was intrinsically hostile to parliament and toxic to Cromwell’s army. There is no doubt that some women died in Wexford as a result of them cramming into boats and the boats sinking in the harbour in an attempt to flee the place.57 But they clearly died as the result of an accident and not because of a deliberate policy to kill the innocent by the New Model Army. Also, into this anti-Interregnum maelstrom of retribution came the petition of the people of Wexford, who were pleading to Charles II for the restoration of their properties following the Cromwellian Plantation.58 Remarkably, the petition writers seem to have chosen grossly to exaggerate Cromwell’s actions in Ireland in order to receive clemency from their new king. In their petition they claim that after entering Wexford Cromwell ‘put man, woman and child, to a very few’ to the sword, again a scenario that has no supporting contemporary evidence or eyewitness attestation. In the same petition the writers allege that Cromwell ‘put all of the inhabitants and soldiers’ of Drogheda to the sword, an allegation that simply does not stand up. One contemporary writer asserts: ‘There was more sparing of lives, of the soldiery part of the enemy here than at Drogheda; yet of their soldiers and townsmen here were about 1,500 slain and drowned in boats sunk by the multitude and weight of people pressing into them’.59 If 57 Thomason Tracts, 88:E.575 [39]. A perfect and particuler relation of the severall marches and proceedings of the Armie in Ireland, from the taking of Drogheda, to this present (London, 1649) ESTC (Wing (CD-ROM, 1996), P1471). The author, Francis Leach, writes: ‘And the officers were to have their lives, but to render themselves prisoners. Just as my Lord was ready to sign this and send it into the town, such a fear fell upon them, that the soldiers left the wall, and all, both men and women, Officers and Soldiers endeavoured to break themselves to fly over the water in boats, for the safety of their lives. Our men saw this and presently scaled the walls to stop them in their intended flight. They did not find very much opposition, but in lesse than the space of an hour the whole town was cleared and gained’. 58 Hore, History of the Town and County of Wexford, v. 330–331. 59 Thomason Tracts, E.576. A very full and particular relation of the great progresse and happy proceedings of the army of the Common-wealth of England toward the reducing of Ireland, under the command of his Excellency the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland … No. 6, 31 Oct. 1649.

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soldiers were being spared, it is difficult to see how or why ordinary innocent inhabitants were targeted and put to the sword. This significantly reduces the credibility of the petition, which Charles II ultimately ignored anyway. In comparison to Drogheda, Morrill has argued that at Wexford ‘There is much less evidence of killing in cold blood, but much more suggestion that civilians as well as soldiers were killed in hot blood’. With the arbitrary use of the word ‘civilians’ in this context it is disappointing that Morrill does not elucidate further, although his inference is made very clear: Fr Denis Murphy offers the fullest account of later Catholic sources and he had no doubt that there was much gratuitous targeting of civilians, including women. Tom Reilly in contrast thinks none of the catholic sources can be trusted and that (those capsized boats apart) there were few civilian deaths. The truth here can be safely put in the middle. Reilly seeks to discredit all of the Catholic sources by criticising those written in the aftermath of the Land Settlement. So he fails to give proper weight to the near-contemporary testimony of, for example, Bishop Lynch, who was writing within months that ‘many priests’ not a few religious, many more townspeople and two thousand soldiers were killed’. In general I see no reason to doubt that civilians were killed in significant numbers in Wexford.60 There are certain indisputable points that can be made about any Wexfordian shop owners, seamen, cobblers, innkeepers etc. who took up arms to fight the English attackers. First, they were ‘townspeople’. Secondly, they were armed. Thirdly, this made them a legitimate target according to Cromwell’s orders since they were ‘in office with the enemy’. But what we can’t say here is that innocent, unarmed ‘civilians were killed in significant numbers in Wexford’ because that is not what the surviving evidence demonstrates, despite Morrill’s inferences. Conclusion The evidence now being revealed by this writer simply addresses Cromwell’s culpability regarding innocent civilian massacres, on any scale. Some may have died in the crossfire, as the result of collateral damage, others definitely drowned by accident. The subsequent Cromwellian Plantation that devastated Catholic Ireland in a monumental transformation of the Irish landownership environment is another matter altogether and should 60 Morrill, ‘Drogheda Massacre’, p. 261.

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not cloud one’s judgement when discussing the military campaign. Were large numbers of innocent civilians deliberately massacred? Did Cromwell do it, or did he not? Should we still be teaching children that Cromwell indiscriminately slaughtered entire town populations? Purveyors of Irish history will need to embrace this idea because inevitably the narrative outlined here will begin to emerge as the years pass. Those who don’t will be left behind to become part of some insular, embittered partisan clique whose roots are planted firmly in obduracy. Experts can be fallible. So long as people flatter themselves that they must listen to experts simply because they are experts, so long as they are content to swallow the dicta of an authority with closed eyes, so long will history be a delusion and a snare.

Chapter 3

‘Halt! Halt!’ Oliver Cromwell, Hugh O’Neill and the Siege of Clonmel, April–May 1650 Alan Marshall

The Siege of Clonmel, April–May 1650

I A report in the Moderate Intelligencer of 10 July 1649 stated that at about five o’clock that evening the recently made Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and general of the army, Oliver Cromwell, finally set out upon his journey from Westminster to Windsor, by way of Bristol and South Wales, to Dublin and his new command in Ireland. Cromwell left London in great state.1 Some nine months later, following a hard and occasionally very cruel campaign of mostly siege warfare, General Cromwell found himself before the walls of yet another Irish town – Clonmel in Tipperary – and, as it turned out, face to face with one of the most serious misfortunes of his military career. This essay will reconsider the elements that relate to the Cromwellian siege of Clonmel in April–May 1650. This siege, located within the latter stages of the Cromwellian campaign in Ireland of 1650, was notable in many ways, not the least being that it turned into a grave tactical defeat for Cromwell, who left Ireland shortly afterwards. Remarkably enough, it also raises some real doubts about his abilities in this form of contemporary warfare and the tactical failure at Clonmel seems to have given him a 1 Surrounded by a Life-Guard, described as ‘is hardly to be parallle’d in the world’. And it was noted: ‘now have at you my Lord of Ormond … [for] you will have men of gallantry to encounter, who to overcome will be honour sufficient, and to be beaten by them will be no great blemish to their reputations, if you say Caesar or nothing: They say, Republique or nothing’. Moderate Intelligencer, 5–12 July 1649. 75

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severe dent to his own self-esteem, if nothing else, for it is subsequently little mentioned by him in either his speeches or correspondence. Yet the real roots of Clonmel lie not only in Cromwell’s strategic errors on the day, but in his past, and in his soldiering past in particular, especially in the early years of the Civil Wars. We also need to see Clonmel not just through the actions of Oliver Cromwell, but through those of his skilled opponent: the Irish general, and Spanish veteran, Aodh Dubh Ó Néill (Hugh Duff O’Neill). For with severely limited resources, O’Neill took up a very effective defence of Clonmel against the Cromwellian army and neatly gave his opponent something of a bloody nose to remember him by.2 Regrettably, in direct contrast to many of the other more notorious events of the Irish campaign, such as the controversial sieges of Drogheda and Wexford, for instance, the evidence for the siege of Clonmel remains somewhat thin on the ground. Also in contrast to those earlier sieges Clonmel has at its centre that most remarkable of all things: a Cromwellian silence. Many have taken this silence to be deliberate, for when in Ireland, and indeed during most of his military career, Cromwell was unvaryingly prone loudly to proclaim his victories, to use the press to promote his valour and to give all the credit he could to God. Here, however, either Cromwell or the Rump government that he served, when it was faced with the major loss of life in the army on this occasion, seems to have decided to minimise as much as possible any public interest in the events at Clonmel.3 In fact, the letters, and partial letters, in the press of the day were to be much the only official commentary on the events at Clonmel, as the newssheets themselves swiftly passed from Cromwell’s return from Ireland that very same month to deal with the looming threat from Scotland. The official newssheets of the day, of course, all had agendas and mediated their ‘news’ into their own particular vision of the truth: creating thereby what 2 For the military campaign in Ireland and its context, see James Scott Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland (Dublin, 1999); Micheál Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (London, 2008); James Scott Wheeler, ‘Four Armies in Ireland’, in Jane H. Ohlymeyer (ed.), Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641–1660 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 43–65. 3 The hazards of the survival of manuscripts through time might be one simple but important explanation of this, yet this siege does stands oddly with the rest of the campaign in terms of its news base and its manuscript survival rate and even more oddly in terms of the usual Cromwellian religious rhetorical voice, which is simply missing. Several proceedings in Parliament, 23–30 May 1650, pp. 504–505.

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one Royalist was to call ‘our S[t]ate news … [by having] Gablers tell[ing] lyes at random, and pretend[ing] disunity’ or mere ‘State whiffles’.4 At any rate, such military narratives in the era were never as simple as they first appeared, for in reality they were collaborations between the author on one hand and their readers on the other. They were founded upon ideas their readers expected to find in such texts and they also used a shared root of descriptive terms that while it attempted to make contemporary war and conflict at least partially comprehensible to the civilian public was by turns theatrical, rhetorically charged and creatively fashioned for public consumption. Military storytelling as a genre therefore tended to manufacture archetypal figures, and to use specific words and tropes in order to get a political message across.5 This somewhat inevitable creation of the various versions of the events in the contemporary press unavoidably creates uncertainty for us, especially given the already uncertain nature of contemporary military affairs in the first place. But at the time it was clearly intended to reaffirm, and to justify, the correct historical narrative for the contemporary reader.6 It was also meant to bolster the regime’s own views and to trumpet any successes it might obtain. Information about this siege, or indeed any other military event in the era, was even more problematic. For sieges of towns and strongholds were inescapably linked to an unending propaganda war rather than just mere renditions of factual events. Consequently, such stories always had cultural resonance for their readers and they were replete with the ideas of political persuasion, as ‘loyal’ defenders or ‘chivalrous’ participants were fixed in these texts by underlying statements and beliefs in the ideas of unity, or reimagined as supporters or detractors of a common cause. The keywords used in such printed texts were thus meant to orientate their readers as to what the author wanted to achieve in the text: feelings of empathy, hatred or pride for those described and for their actions in war.7 In the case of 4 Mercurius Pragmaticus, 22–30 Apr. 1650 [3]. 5 See John Theibault, ‘The Rhetoric of Death and Destruction in the Thirty Years War’, Journal of Social History 27 (1993), pp. 273–274. In this context, McElligott’s pamphlet on the idea of Cromwell at Drogheda and in Irish history gives us many insights and it illuminates the debates attached to this event: Jason McElligott, Cromwell: Our Chief of Enemies (Dundalk, 1994). 6 The issue of exact dates for the events at Clonmel is an interesting example of the contemporary uncertainty about the siege; the town was even reported to have fallen before it actually did so. 7 See R. Hutton and W. Reeves, ‘Sieges and Fortifications, in John P. Kenyon and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds), The Civil Wars: A Military History of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1638–1660 (Oxford, 1998), p. 200.

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Irish news, of course, this tended to be even more problematic. For here both brutality and providentialism nearly always went hand in hand in order to provide a context in English eyes for information about events.8 The general view of the siege of Clonmel, however, is unusual in that it is certainly lacking in the usual masses of informed detail we would normally desire for understanding such an event. If we compare it, for instance, with the stories of Drogheda and Wexford then Clonmel has about it something of the dog that didn’t bark in the night in Cromwell’s brutal, bloody and mad dash through Ireland. There was no massacre, as in Drogheda and Wexford, and normal terms were eventually offered and taken. Importantly, in contrast with the other two events, there were numerous casualties in the Cromwellian army. And on this matter there are other, more military, issues, as it were, with which we must now deal. During his last three years of campaigning as a soldier (1649–1651) there are certainly some serious questions we can begin to ask about Oliver Cromwell’s military techniques. Flaws that had actually been there from the beginning of his military career now began to be seen as far more obvious.9 In one sense, if we remove Cromwell from the ‘military prodigy’ camp into which he has been well entrenched since at least the Victorian era it can help us explain why this is the case.10 For while Cromwell was a good soldier, he was also one who was accidently thrown up by the Civil Wars, and he was a man moreover who learnt most of his military trade while out soldiering in the field. Above all, he was someone who was always more of a politician than anything else. While this is not to denigrate Cromwell’s military successes, or indeed his often instinctive eye as a trainer and manager of cavalry, such a view does recognise that at least in the art of siege warfare, which was often seen as the real mark of any professional soldier in the era, there are some difficult questions that need to be asked. 8 Essential reading on these questions of language can be found in Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper English Newsbooks, 1641–1649 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 127–183; Nicole Greenspan, Selling Cromwell’s Wars: Media, Empire and Godly Warfare, 1650–1658 (London, 2012), pp. 2–7. 9 The latter part of the Irish campaign and the early stages of the campaign in Scotland, when General Leslie deftly outmanoeuvred him, are obvious examples of this decline – although it did end at Dunbar. Alan Marshall, Oliver Cromwell, Soldier: The Military Life of a Revolutionary at War (London, 2004), pp. 242–245; William Scott Douglas, Cromwell’s Scotch Campaigns, 1650–1651 (London, 1898), chaps 4–5. See also Peter Gaunt, Oliver Cromwell (Oxford, 1997), pp. 229–230. 10 Alan Marshall, ‘Pax quaeritur bello – The Cromwellian Military Legacy’, in Jane A. Mills (ed.), Cromwell’s Legacy (Manchester, 2012), pp. 113–145.

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II The town of Clonmel lies in County Tipperary; its Irish name is Cluain Meala – the ‘honey meadow’ or ‘honey vale’.11 In 1650, it was a walled settlement that lay about 20 miles above Waterford on the River Suir. One Irish officer writing in the 1690s thought it was ‘Naturally Fortyfied, standing on Advantagious ground, very hard to be Attackt; besides it’s Invironed with a very good Wall’.12 By 1650, the population consisted of some 2,000 inhabitants, most of whom were living in a compact area within the walls (but with some growing suburbs), covering some 350 acres of ground. In her research on the town Dr McGrath has estimated that about 750 houses or cabins were located within the town in 1666 and a further 127 dwellings of various sorts lay outside the walls.13 Sir John Davis, who visited the town in 1606, noted that Clonmel was ‘well built and well kept’. The varied industries and economic life of the town also meant that it was a prosperous and socially diverse place, part indeed of the growing urban communities of Ireland. With its numerous craft guilds, a conspicuous clothing trade and links to agriculture Clonmel’s economic life was thriving.14 With the outbreak of the Irish rebellion of October 1641, however, the townsfolk of Clonmel became increasingly vulnerable to the consequences of civil war and looked to their own defence. Swiftly raised taxes (the cess) 11 The context of the town’s population and economic life has been fully dealt with in Dr McGrath’s excellent article on this matter: B. McGrath, ‘Reconstructing an Early Modern Irish Economic Community: Clonmel’s Cess Roll, 1642’, Irish Economic and Social History 44 (2017), pp. 122–142. See also Clonmel Town Walls: Conservation and Management Plan (Dublin, 2009), pp. 5–7, 10–11; and Micheál Ó Siochrú, ‘Civil Autonomy and Military Power in Early Modern Ireland’, Journal of Early Modern History 15 (2011), pp. 31–57. 12 An Irish officer, An account of the nature, situation, natural strength, and antient, and modern fortifications, of the several cities and garrison-towns in Ireland, &c. (London, 1690), p. 7. 13 B. McGrath, ‘The Communities of Clonmel, 1608–49’, in R Armstrong and Tadhg Ó h Annracháin (eds), Communities in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin 2006), p. 104. 14 For full details of the town’s society and economy, see McGrath, ‘Reconstructing an Early Modern Irish Economic Community’, pp. 122–142. See also William P. Burke, History of Clonmel (Waterford, 1907), pp. 43–44; E. Shee and S. J. Watson, Clonmel: An Architectural Guide (Dublin, 1975), pp. 8, 11. For explanation of the corporation and its officers (chartered in 1608), see Robert Simington, The Civil Survey, A.D. 1654–1656, vol. 1, County of Tipperary: Eastern and Southern Baronies (Dublin, 1931), pp. 385–388.

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enabled a militia to be created, but clearly the corporation wished to retain control of any forces raised and these were to be captained by Clonmel’s own prominent citizens and guildsmen in 1642.15 By January 1642, the keys of the town, previously in the hands of the very enterprising Mayor of Clonmel John White, were being handed over to Richard Butler, Ormond’s brother. The Franciscan Abbey was reoccupied but generally the civil administration of the town was left to go on much as normal and the mayor remained by far the most important figure in the community.16 It was not until October–November 1649 that growing fears of the Cromwellian conquest finally reaching the area led to various appeals being made to the Earl of Ormond. As White put it, this was mainly due to the ‘apprehension of the present daunger’.17 Like the good first citizen he was, he also dubiously pleaded the ‘poverty of this towne’, being something ‘well knowen’, which meant it was obviously not able to support a very great number of troops.18 Indeed, when Colonel Oliver Stephenson and his Irish regiment were ordered into Clonmel as the main garrison to protect it, the results were not altogether happy. Disputes and tensions rapidly emerged between the soldiers and the Corporation. A claim was even made that some ‘wounded & sicke officers’, who were in a ‘distressed condition’, when placed in Clonmel were exposed to ‘ill usage’ by the locals. This claim suggests that the local population were at heart resentful of a military presence of any kind.19 Yet when the scouts employed by the town came in to inform White of the Cromwellian army’s capture of nearby Carrick even the townsfolk thought again. They solemnly undertook a ‘protestation and oath in a union for God, Kinge and countrye, and defense of this towne to the uttermost of their power’.20 White still thought Stephenson and his County Clare men were a real problem. They would, or so he told Ormond, rapidly create a ‘rupture’ between the parties in Clonmel if something were not done about them. Instead, he wanted more suitable troops, if any were to be had, and especially suggested that, as Mayor, he should ‘enjoye my Keys, joyne in the wat[c]hword and that the captains of the towne together with the Collonell and his chiefe officers, may by their joint adveise dispose the 15 McGrath, ‘Reconstructing an Early Modern Irish Economic Community’, p. 124. 16 Burke, History of Clonmel, p. 62. 17 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Carte 26, ff. 167, 170. 18 Burke, History of Clonmel, p. 65. 19 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 26, f. 347. 20 Burke, History of Clonmel, p. 66.

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townsemen and garrison uppon service’.21 It seems that the real tensions in the town were less about any approaching Cromwellian army and more about power and the need for the corporation to control its own fate. By the end of November and into early December 1649, Ormond undertook a visit to Clonmel, partially to rearrange matters there and partially to provide winter quarters for elements of his army.22 Stephenson and his men were removed and Ormond shifted into Clonmel two regiments of Ulstermen, formerly of Owen Roe O’Neill’s army. These men were also to be commanded by a new governor: Hugh Duff O’Neill.23 Two troops of horse, commanded by Edward Fennel, an English soldier of fortune, were also sent into the garrison. Regardless of this changing of the guard, the tensions between civilians and soldiers continued and the soldierly presence still worried the town’s government. They continued to complain loudly about the ‘multiplicite’ of soldiers located in Clonmel, and even argued that some of them should be removed and placed into the various minor castles that were scattered around in the local countryside so as to take away the burden.24 In due course, some of O’Neill’s troops were indeed parcelled off in penny packets as garrisons, thereby lessening the numbers of the main garrison at Clonmel.25 Complaints now turned, perhaps inevitably, to the quartering of the remaining soldiers – made much worse, or so it was said, by the fact that these veterans had all brought with them their wives, children and other followers. False musters added to the civilian grousing, to which taxes, a weekly assessment and substantial levies on corn were already severe burdens. Once more, White wrote complaining that he feared that because of this many of Clonmel’s citizens had already ‘deserted’ the town and many more would follow, not only depopulating it but, more significantly perhaps, damaging the town’s economy. Again, although this made little military sense, White suggested the removal of yet another 300 men from the garrison to lighten the townsfolk’s burden. Equally serious was White’s warning of ‘howe destitute of that amunicion and corne is the common magazine of this towne which may prove fatall if not tymelie furnished or provided for’. He also wanted help to bolster 21 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 26, f. 250. 22 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 26, ff. 209–311. 23 For O’Neill’s commission, see Bodleian Library, MS Carte 26, ff. 328, 368. For his troops, see J. T. Gilbert (ed.), A Contemporary History of Affairs in Ireland from 1641 to 1652 (Dublin, 1880), ii. 502–504. 24 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 26, ff. 170, 231r–v; Burke, History of Clonmel, p. 67. 25 Burke, History of Clonmel, p. 67.

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the town’s fortifications. In his response, however, Ormond elided these requests and merely demanded more money.26 What then of the new governor of Clonmel and his military background? Hugh Duff O’Neill was a good example of a professional soldier, who was to prove more than a match for Cromwell. O’Neill had originally been born in exile in Flanders c.1600–1605, and he was thus about 45 to 50 years of age in 1650. His father had been a veteran soldier for the Spanish and O’Neill was brought up in numerous European military camps. Unsurprisingly, he entered into the service of Spain in the regiment of Owen Roe O’Neill.27 With a reputation for daring, but also something of surly nature, O’Neill returned to Ireland in 1642. Unluckily for him, the vicissitudes of war led to his capture at Clones in 1643 and thereafter he spent most of his time in captivity in Derry, until being exchanged after the Irish victory at Benburb (5 June 1646).28 He was then promoted to the rank of Major General and was even thought of as a possible commander of the Ulster army in succession to Owen Roe. Certainly, his exacting military professionalism was not in doubt and this allowed him to gain the confidence of the beleaguered Earl of Ormond who in December 1649 chose him to take command of Clonmel as its governor.29 Entering the town O’Neill brought with him some 1,200 soldiers, and in February–March 1650 these men were later reinforced; mostly this was engineered by the reappearance in the town of some of the recently displaced garrisons. The majority of his soldiers, however, were located in two veteran infantry regiments: Colonel Turlough O’Neill’s regiment, which had fought at the battle of Benburb and were old hands at Irish warfare, and Colonel Philip McHugh O’Reilly’s regiment, who were also 26 Burke, History of Clonmel, pp. 61–68. Lewis Dyve was to blame the ‘want of ammunition’ on the outright ‘disobedience of the townes … the wall[e]d townes … [acting] like free States looke on as unconcernd’ with the war. Lewis Dyve, A Letter from Sir Lewis Dyve &c. (The Hague, 1650), p. 49. 27 For Hugh Duff O’Neill’s biography, see Emmett O’Bryne, ‘O’Neill, Hugh (Aodh Dubh Ó Néill)’ (c.1605–c.1660), Dictionary of Irish Biography, ed. James McGuire and James Quinn (Cambridge, 2009): http://dib.cambridge.org/viewReadPage. do?articleId=a6926 (accessed 22 Aug. 2020). For the histories of the Irish in Spanish service, see Eduardo de Mesa, The Irish in the Spanish Armies in the Seventeenth Century (Woodbridge, 2014), pp. 139, 142–143, 176; B. Jennings, Wild Geese in Spanish Flanders, 1582–1700 (Dublin, 1964); G. Henry, The Irish Military Community in Spanish Flanders, 1586–1621 (Dublin, 1992). 28 Clive Hollick, The Battle of Benburb, 1646 (Cork, 2011), p. 267. 29 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 26, f. 328.

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capable soldiers.30 By now, however, Cromwellian army scouts had begun to reappear and in February 1650 they were skirting past Clonmel and its garrison. O’Neill’s generalship skills were in fact more than capable of dealing with such a threat. He was, after all, a veteran professional soldier well versed in the principles of European warfare, and was even described as ‘An experimented warriour’.31 Although his forces in Clonmel were not that substantial, they were still, or so he thought, good enough to put up considerable resistance against any major assault on the town. Despite the earlier collapse of other garrisons in the face of the Cromwellian army he had already seen enough of European sieges to know that some advantage could lie with the defenders if they could engineer a lengthy delay and let disease and the weather strike. Disease was a perennial problem of warfare in Ireland and with an enemy losing heart as sickness raged through their ranks they might be forced into retreat. Nor was O’Neill a sluggish general content to wait on events, being more than capable of taking the initiative and using both offensive and defensive tactics. This meant patrols, and, later, frequent sallies from Clonmel’s walls in order to disrupt the besiegers. Such ‘martial strategems’ were deliberately intended to unnerve and inflict some losses upon his opponent’s army: a form of degradation of their morale and numbers and typical activity for any defenders of a besieged garrison of the era. O’Neill also hoped for, and he would ask for, a relieving force to help him at some point.32 By now Clonmel had in any case become formidable. It was always naturally well protected to the south, mainly by the presence of the 30 For Turlough O’Neill’s regiment, see Hollick, The Battle of Benburb, 1646, pp. 170, 180, 279. For a full transcription of the muster roll of O’Neill’s army, with the numbers of troops, see P. O’Connell, ‘The Defenders of Clonmel’, in P. O’Connell and W. C. Darmody (eds), Siege of Clonmel Commemoration Tercentenary Souvenir Record (Clonmel, 1950), pp. 19–21. It estimates around 1,214 soldiers in the infantry regiments and in local garrisons. Colonel Turlough O’Neill’s regiment was nine companies of varying strength and Colonel Philip McHugh O’Reilly’s regiment was likewise of varied strength but placed in 17 companies. Fennel’s cavalry troop had only 2 officers, 2 corporals and 16 troopers available while Captain Pierce Butler’s men consisted of 3 officers, 2 corporals and 36 troopers. 31 Gilbert, Contemporary History, ii. 75. 32 Much as Aston had done at Drogheda, O’Neill was to be failed by Ormond in this respect, though with less catastrophic results. Yet Ormond had promised in writing to send relief to the garrison in ‘ten dayes’ if they became besieged. He called upon O’Neill to use his ‘utmost endeavour to defend that place during that tyme’. Bodleian Library, MS Carte 27, f. 18.

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fast-flowing River Suir and by its high walls elsewhere. The walls themselves dated from the fourteenth century, being up to 25–30 feet high and some 5  feet thick. While proving no real match for modern artillery shot, they were still strong enough in places to provide a daunting obstacle. Four gates, and numerous turrets, also gave the defenders some clear advantages, although the gates, while useful in general as access points for sallies forth by the garrison, and for crossfire on any assault, were also targets for any attack. While the south side of the town was protected by the river, to the east lay marshy ground, and on the west side a sharp slope, which would hamper any trenches or the establishment of any artillery batteries.33 This left the all too obvious approach from the north. In the north-west corner of the town lay St Mary’s Church, east of which was the longest and the most vulnerable stretch of the town wall. This was to be the most conspicuous point of attack and was inevitably going to be the main point of defence. In many senses, by this stage Cromwell was nothing if not predictable in his siege warfare. A breach made here would in theory allow him to pour men into streets of the town, and then give them the potential to swing round to open St Mary’s gate for his reserves, at which point the town would fall. Yet this area by being such an obvious target was also an obvious point of interest to the defenders and O’Neill’s plan was to bolster this wall with earthworks where he could, and then should any breach occur rapidly create a retirata behind the breach and use the streets and houses on either side to create a dangerous trap for any incautious general. III A general awareness in the Parliamentary army of the culture of siege warfare had emerged mostly though the experience of the men who became veterans in the course of its wars in England and Wales and, no doubt, for its officers by an occasional reading of the training manuals of the day.34 There was, however, still something of a division of sorts between the amateur warrior soldier like Oliver Cromwell and the much 33 P. Lyons, ‘Norman Antiquities of Clonmel Burgh’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 7th ser., 6 (1936), p. 285; P. Lyons, ‘The Cromwellian Assault on Clonmel’, in O’Connell and Darmody, Siege of Clonmel Commemoration, pp. 16–18. 34 James Burke, ‘The New Model Army and the Problems of Siege Warfare, 1648–51’, Irish Historical Studies 27.105 (1990), pp. 1–29.

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more practical professional military engineer who commonly plied his trade across the Continent. On the whole, this resulted in at least some partial ‘craft knowledge’, which was supplemented by actual experience in siege warfare, rather than any considerable technical skills. The more specialised knowledge of gunnery was still very much an arcane branch of the mathematical sciences, and this was frequently beyond the average gentleman soldier of the type that Cromwell really was.35 Moreover, in Ireland, as it had been in the south-west of England in 1645, its nearest recent parallel, the army’s siege warfare was effectively politics by another name.36 For political objectives always determined it rather than military ones. The main political aim under Cromwell was to end the war as quickly and as cheaply as possible, and likewise the major political constraint upon all of his campaigns throughout his whole career remained the same as the real bane of any politician – a lack of time.37 Besides, Cromwell was a general who was very unwilling to follow the contemporary professional Spanish–Dutch methods by patiently sitting down before the walls of any particular town or fortress and then waiting for its garrison to surrender, while his artillery did its work, and the various complex saps and parallels of the day ground their way ever more slowly towards the walls. Instead, Cromwell seems to have held to a much more political view of sieges. This was that the short, sharp, assault – the storm in all its violence – could in the long run bring with it the best political, strategic and financial benefits to both himself and to the regime he served in London, despite the inevitable cost in casualties. Immediate action would, he hoped, severely unnerve the opposition by simple terror tactics, but primarily it would save expense and time, and it would reduce the ever present fear of disease and prevent any precipitate withdrawal if the 35 See D. R. Lawrence, The Complete Soldier: Military Books and Military Culture in Early Stuart England, 1603–1645 (Leiden, 2009), pp. 314–361; P. Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at War, 1641–49 (Cork, 2001), pp. 165–189. 36 For the campaigns of the army, see J. Sprigge, Anglia rediviva; Englands recovery: being the history of the motions, actions, and successes of the army, &c. (1647). For the south-western sieges, see C. H. Firth, Cromwell’s Army: A History of the English Soldier during the Civil Wars, the Commonwealth and the Protectorate (London, 1902), pp. 168–170. 37 He seems to have shared the sentiment of Napoleon Bonaparte, another political soldier, in this respect: ‘The loss of time is irretrievable in war; the excuses that are advanced are always bad ones, for operations go wrong only through delays’. Conversely, ‘In politics, as in war, the lost moment never comes again’. B. Colson, Napoleon on War (Oxford, 2015), p. 73.

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blockaded garrison grimly continued to hold out and the besieging army’s logistics collapsed. The military tactics of Cromwell’s hero Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden may have influenced him in this respect.38 A reading of the Swedish intelligencer in the 1630s would have at the least taught him that Gustavus’s methods in siege warfare were never to stand entrenching and building Redoubts, at a miles distance: but to clap downe with his army presently, about Cannon shot from it. There would he begin his Approaches, get to the walls, Batter and Storme, presently; and if he saw the place were not by a running pull to be taken; he would not lose above 4 or 6 dayes before it; but rise and to another.39 In other words, Gustavus also rejected the lengthy, formal, Spanish–Dutch methods of siege warfare for something much more dynamic, much more violent and something which seemed to work but also suited his impatient character and his political aims.40 Thomas Fairfax was yet another general who generally shared this point of view.41 Fairfax had been Cromwell’s immediate military superior in 1645–1646 and he was a man whose military views, though not his political ones, Cromwell greatly respected. Fairfax tended to be described as a general who would be ‘up and doing’ and, according to one contemporary 38 C. Firth and G. Davies, The Regimental History of Cromwell’s Army, 2 vols in 1 (Cranbury, 2006). This background has been somewhat dismissed by some historians, but there is little doubt that it did exist. See J. C. Davis, Cromwell (Chatham, 2001), p. 96. For Cromwell’s reading of The Swedish intelligencer in the 1630s and his unfeigned hero-worship of Gustavus, see M. Roberts (ed.), Swedish Diplomats at Cromwell’s Court, 1655–1656: The Missions of Peter Julius Coyet and Christer Bonde (London, 1988), pp. 133, 224. 39 W. Watts, The Swedish intelligencer. The third part &c. (London, 1633), p. 188. 40 For modern interpretations of siege warfare in the period, see C. Duffy, Siege Warfare: The Fortress in the Early Modern World, 1694–1660 (London, 1996); J. Barratt, Sieges of the English Civil War (Barnsley, 2009); P. Harrington, English Civil War Fortifications, 1642–51 (Peterborough, 2009). 41 See Fairfax at Maidstone in June 1648 and initially at Colchester later that same month, when, after trying a quick storm and being repulsed, the general was forced to turn to a ten-week siege in order to break the town. See T. Fairfax, The Lord General’s letter to to [sic] the Honorable William Lenthal Esq; Speaker of the Honorable House of Commons, wherein is fully related, the particulars of the fight at Maidstone (London, 1648); also A. Hopper, ‘Black Tom’: Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution (Manchester, 2007), pp. 85–87.

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commentator at least, as a man whose ‘sucesse hath run a line crosse to that of old Souldiery, of long sieges and slow approaches’.42 There was one other possible influence on Cromwell’s attitude to the sieges he undertook in Ireland and elsewhere, and that was, of course, the Bible. For Deuteronomy, Chapter 20, verses 10–16 actually laid out many of the characteristics of the Cromwellian siege. There the keen reader was advised: 10 When thou comest nere unto a citie to fight against it, thou shalt offer it peace. 11 And if it answer thee againe peaceably, and open unto thee, then let all the people that is founde therein, be tributaries unto thee, and serve thee. 12 But if it wil make no peace with thee, but make warre against thee, then thou shalt besiege it. 13 And the Lord thy God shal deliver it into thine hands, and thou shalt smite all the males thereof with the edge of the sworde.43 These might be seen as simple but effective rules to follow, and as Balthazar Gerbier was to note: ‘The scriptures doe in effect in sundry places warrant so much the proceedings of warriours’.44 For a passionate reader of scripture such as Cromwell such verses would have come as a pointed indication as to how to behave at sieges and perhaps revealed the severe consequences for those who chose to stand against ‘God’ and his helpers.45 Besides this we can point to Cromwell’s own personality for any actual errors in this form of warfare. For his normal hastiness and his basic impatience were all features of a temperament that was on the one hand the spark of his political success yet all too often dictated his vision of siege warfare in Ireland. Cromwell was also ever a general of cavalry. Now, this was a contemporary military arm where smart, often risky, and frequently brutal movements and rapid decisions were the major characteristics of a 42 Joshua Sprigg, Anglia rediviva; Englands recovery: being the history of the motions, actions, and successes of the army &c. (London, 1647), p. 322. 43 Deuteronomy 20:10–13 (Geneva Bible). Deuteronomy is also the base text for The Souldier’s Pocket Bible (1643). 44 Balthazar Gerbier, The first publique lecture, read at Sr. Balthazar Gerbier his accademy, concerning military architecture, or fortifications (London, 1649), pp. 1–2 with his commentary on Deut. 20:11–12. 45 Another soldier who was influenced by these verses was King Henry V. See A. Curry, Henry V: Playboy Prince to Warrior King (London, 2018), p. 62.

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good general. Yet these qualities were not necessarily the characteristics that were as valuable for the master of the siege. Alongside Cromwell’s continual wish to save both time and money, and, as we shall see, his previous experiences in England during the 1640s, this all gave him a somewhat inferior knowledge of the professional’s siege skills. His own impatient personality, his blatant self-righteousness, seen most prominently at Drogheda, his frequent political brashness, and just occasionally his mere obstinacy simply shaped his views of such warfare. Naturally, these were characteristics that could also be exploited by any general who might be better versed in such matters than he was and who was considerably less impressed by his occasionally open braggadocio.46 Cromwell had generally learnt the basics of his military trade when he became a commander in the little regional wars of 1643–1644, where he had begun by commanding inexperienced troops, working with small numbers, and acquiring a penchant for the use of cavalry. In these early years he typically bemoaned his lack of artillery and was generally forced to improvise solutions, but these solutions invariably tended to the swift, brutal, resolution in order to save time and money. The roots of the Cromwellian style of warfare in Ireland therefore are to be found in these small, frequently dirty campaigns, as are the roots of his attitude to siege warfare. One example of Cromwell’s art in embryo can be seen in the siege of Burghley House in July 1643. It is an early form of the Cromwellian techniques in such warfare and reveals that nothing much had really changed by the time he entered Ireland in 1649. Aided by Colonels Hubbard and Palgrave, Cromwell had set down his limited artillery pieces before the stronghold in a battery. The house was protected by a wall and strongly built and defended. He allowed the artillery to begin to play upon this for some 2–3 hours from around three o’clock in the morning but having seemingly got nowhere he then resorted to offering quarter to the defenders via a parley. They could, he insisted, even leave with their weapons intact. This offer was bluntly rejected. An irritated Cromwell ordered preparations for a storm of the place by his infantry. The storm was launched briskly, but it inevitably got into trouble; fierce fighting by the very active and confident defenders then beat back Cromwell’s numerous assaults. But in the midst of this bedlam another parley was tried and the fighting finally died down. After further talks, quarter was agreed and the place was taken. The losses on Cromwell’s side were slight, given the fierceness and bluntness of the action: some 6 or 7 46 Owen Roe O’Neill at Clonmel and a few months later David Leslie in Scotland are obvious examples.

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men slain, but many more of his men were wounded ‘in that so hot and fierce an encounter or assault’.47 Cromwell’s attitudes to siege warfare were governed by such experiences.48 Unlike his development as a cavalry general, where he continually learned and honed his techniques, they arguably remain remarkably static: arrival, a summons and a brutal choice given to the defenders – quarter and surrender, or suffer the consequences of an assault from which he symbolically and personally washed his hands – a reconnaissance and batteries established if artillery was available in order to breach the walls for an assault. Failing this, a more or less immediate resort to the techniques of escalade: a vigorous assault by strong forces, renewed where possible by a reserve especially held back until the forlorn hope went in, then thrown in ‘pell-mell’. It was generally hoped that ‘Breaches of Cannon batteries … for a general assault, will produce a great amazement, or a panique feare among the Defendants’. In the best cases, the breach could be stormed and overwhelmed; in the worst cases, a halt could be ordered and an entrenchment begun in the very heart of the breach itself, so as to hold on to any advantages gained there.49 The actual form of the tactics could be said to have been often hastily undertaken. Occasionally it was ill informed, and it was, to be fair, generally difficult to pull off. Such tactics relied very heavily on his own men’s morale to carry them through the breach, or over the walls, and if this faltered, then, of course, they and their general could be thwarted. If the assault was met by vigour and by wily defenders, Cromwell was reliant on yet further calls for surrender. There were, of course, longstanding rules and the laws of war governing the actions and outcomes of sieges across the Europe of the era.50 The besieged town had some obvious rights and customs in respect of asking for surrender and for suitable terms, but only if it did so in time. It was well known that failure to do this sufficiently early enough could easily 47 John Vicars, Gods arke overtopping the worlds waves, or The third part of the Parliamentary chronicle (London, 1645), pp. 7–8. 48 See also the sources on the fall of Basing House in 1645 extensively quoted in G. N. Goodwin, The Civil War in Hampshire and the Story of Basing House (1882), pp. 238–244. 49 D. Papillon, A Practical Abstract of the Art of Fortifications and Assailing &c. (London, 1645), pp. 118–119. 50 The following paragraphs owe much to a reading of R. C. H. Lesaffer, ‘Siege Warfare in the Early Modern Age: A Study on the Customary Laws of War’, in A. Perreau-Saussine and J. B. Murphy (eds), The Nature of Customary Law: Legal, Historical and Philosophical Perspectives (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 176–202.

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lead to quarter being refused, terms ignored, the town assaulted and sacked, with no quarter being given either to enemy soldiers or to the civilians who were caught up in the fierce assault. For troops who had undergone the horrors of an assault in the breach and who were often brutalised as a result, subsequent matters could quickly get out of hand. Moreover, without good generalship the troops might easily turn to looting, as well as rapine and general destruction. The rules governing sieges had emerged to govern major problems of the military art in the era. They were partly developed to control those governors who surrendered too early in the siege of any strategic fortress. The circumstances as to when and how a governor could surrender was always a difficult issue to measure. It mainly involved questions of military honour, for the length of resistance was measured by professional military judgements on both sides. Professionals tended to share a soldierly creed, as well as personal self-image. Added to this were the more simple questions of expediency and deterrence. For the besieger, the need was inevitably to end the siege as quickly possible, whether by the threat or the actual use of physical violence. Traditionally, as any professional knew, the results of any siege would become notably harsher the longer the place held out and the more the besieging army was prone to suffer outside its walls. Yet it always remained a fine balance as to when to offer terms and when to give up. Custom and usage had thus come to dictate that when a sufficient breach had been made in the town’s or fortress’s walls, and it could be viably assaulted, then it was time to ask for terms. Customs of war were themselves seen as part of honourable military etiquette and military honour was the important, if not the most important, element in such matters. Honour also revolved around questions of reciprocity: dealing with an enemy as one would wish to be dealt with oneself in the same situation and the recognition of the enemy as being on the same level as oneself in military terms. Honour and reciprocity were the real signs of a professional soldier; for a fair dealing with other professionals was meant to be the norm. However, if honour and reciprocity were key areas, how did this work in the context of Cromwell’s Irish wars? It is clear that both of these elements may well have broken down occasionally, or at least have been so degraded or misunderstood in the early stages of these wars that they left an unpleasant legacy. Holding dehumanising views of opponents who fought in the complex ethic violence of the Irish campaigns became common enough. This is particularly true of the Cromwellian army’s attitudes towards and of Cromwell’s view of his opponents, which on the whole tended to rhetorical judgements about their participation (real

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or imagined) in the massacres of 1641. If it came down to the question of how honourable those Irish soldiers were whom the army was facing, and if the Irish were regarded as not worthy of reciprocal or honourable treatment due to their alleged past ‘crimes’, invariably bawled out in the widely read ‘black propaganda’ of previous years, then Cromwell’s sieges in Ireland could and did enter into very dangerous ground indeed. In fact, the army had already been subjected to some eight years of cant and disinformation about the rebellion of 1641. Sometimes it was true, sometimes it was very exaggerated, and any lengthy campaign would naturally contain the degradation of morality, the ‘friction’ as it might be called, that led to war being waged in an ever more brutal manner. Although the Irish wars were already a pretty brutal conflict even before the Parliamentary army got there, concepts of both honour and reciprocity soon broke down, or were not simply offered, and they resulted in atrocity and religiously motivated violence. Prisoners were often shot out of hand and civilians were killed, and an increasing cycle of violence became a norm. War, of course, inevitably degrades and brutalises both victim and perpetrator alike, and a war with a levelling of religious hatred added to it, and badly managed in its major component the siege, was potentially the worst of all.51 IV The second phase of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland was focused on a move beyond the initial Irish coastal areas, now largely secured, but which, as Cromwell noted, had ‘little depth into the country’, to extend English Parliamentary rule further inland. Cromwell had spent his winter at Youghal in December 1650; the sickness and misery at the end of the stalled campaign of late 1649 had brought the first phase of that campaign to a complete halt. However, new recruits and fresh supplies alongside further provision of money had now come in and were to prove essential for the coming year. 51 Clausewitz called this ‘friction’ and noted that in war it ‘is the only concept that more or less corresponds to the factors that distinguish real war from war on paper. The military machine – the army and everything related to it – is basically very simple and therefore seems easy to manage. But … none of its components is of one piece: each part is composed of individuals, every one of whom retains his potential of friction … This tremendous friction is … everywhere in contact with chance’. See M. Howard and P. Paret (eds), Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Princeton, NJ, 1984), Book 1, chap. 7: ‘Friction in War’ (pp. 119–120).

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With January 1650 proving far milder than usual, Cromwell now saw a possible advantage to be gained by an early opening of the campaign. He left his winter quarters on 29 January 1650 with a revitalised army of some 3,000 cavalry and infantry. A letter from Cork noted that the foot in particular were in a ‘gallant posture, well-armed; well-cloathed; and for bread[,] corn and other things th[r]ough the care and goodnesse of the State plentifully provided for’.52 Yet a strict discipline had also been imposed on the men and this had made them, or so it was argued, quick to ‘obey Orders more cheerfully, never men go upon all duty more courageously, never did greater harmony appear, or resolution to prosecute this cause of God, then in this Army; such a consent of hearts and hands, such a sympathy in affection, not only in carnall but spirituall bond, which tyes faster the chaines of Adamant’.53 If morale really was high in the infantry then it was soon to be severely tested. There was certainly to be no resort to free quarter, for this in Cromwell’s eyes had a degrading effect on the troops and the soldiers were under very strict orders to ‘either pay or give Ticket’ for supplies. Yet the continuous Cromwellian demands for further recruits and supplies made to London were largely made because of his acute awareness that campaigning in Ireland was a major drain on these elements of the war. He also needed new troops as soon as possible in order to replace those whom he would be forced to leave behind in the many garrisons he thought necessary to hold on to captured territory. Such actions inevitably began to deplete the field army but militarily were necessary in order to ‘awe the treacherous people whose observance is only from necessity’.54 The main task of spring 1650 was to reduce the fortresses and towns of Munster. The second phase of the war was to be a continuation of the political and military campaign of 1649, with the threat of military violence being used to bolster numerous diplomatic manoeuvres and with as much territory being occupied as possible. Meanwhile, the hapless Ormond’s command was at something of a loss as to how to proceed. He was unable to risk a major battle with Cromwell and was instead reliant upon holding on to as many towns as possible, if he could, and hoping that the Cromwellian army would disintegrate either though poor logistics or disease as it almost had in late 1649. A stalled campaign might then just provide some fresh strategic opening, or 52 A perfect diurnall of some passages in Parliament, and from other parts of this kingdome, 23–29 Apr. 1650, p. 221. 53 A perfect diurnall, 23–29 Apr. 1650, p. 221. 54 A perfect diurnall, 23–29 Apr. 1650, p. 222.

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relief might even come from abroad. An appreciation of the Irish troops’ morale in late 1649 did not make pleasant reading for Ormond, and not much had changed by the spring of 1650. Their leaders were described as ‘Not … confident of our peoples courage (after being baffled in soe many occasions)’ and so they were very reluctant to bring on any battle ‘where all lyes at stake; till their courages be a little recovered by some small successes … either by surprisall, ambush, or other advantages’. But, it was claimed, if ‘we can but protract the war & keepe them wateing we shall destroy them without … hazzrad, especially if England be imbroyled by ye King’s complying with the Scotts’.55 That spring the Cromwellian army battered its way through various strongpoints before Friday, 22 March 1650, when it finally arrived at a plague-hit Kilkenny. Artillery batteries were soon put in place and they commenced firing. One hundred shot now brought about what Cromwell considered a ‘stormable’ breach, and this duly followed, but, he noted with some dismay, in the main storm his men did not perform ‘with the usual courage nor success, but were beaten off with the loss of one captain, and about twenty or thirty men killed and wounded’. In fact, the construction of two inner entrenchments led to a bloody repulse and caught the storming party out. Meanwhile, an attempt on the Irish town area was slightly more successful, but it was actually negotiations rather than violence that really brought this siege to a conclusion. All in all, as Cromwell later noted, such affairs were now beginning to cost far too much ‘blood and time’, which he could now ill afford, given the wider political situation with the Scots, and there were signs of haste in this siege’s preparations which were revealing.56 Even an earlier attempt to get hold of the city through corruption was apparently tried: an offer to betray the garrison was accepted with alacrity but the traitor was inevitably caught and shot.57 Meanwhile, the burdens of war on the army were proving to be increasingly hard on the over-used infantry. Aside from their casualties in combat, Cromwell pointedly noted to the Speaker of the Commons around this time that 55 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 26, f. 70. There is not space here to deal in detail with the second phase of the campaign, but Wheeler is certainly correct to say that a more ‘aggressive royalist leadership’ could, tactically at least, have made some difference. The feebleness of Ormond as a general is notable in this respect. See Wheeler, ‘Four Armies in Ireland’, p. 64. 56 Severall proceedings in Parliament, 11–16 April 1650. Hewson talks of ‘we being not altogether ready’ in the assault on Irish town and he was also wounded on this occasion. 57 Denis Murphy, Cromwell in Ireland: A History of Cromwell’s Irish Campaign (Dublin, 1897), pp. 293–294.

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‘we strain what we can that the foot may be paid, or else they would starve’. Taking such places would, he thought, inevitably ‘swallow up our foot’ both in casualties and in garrisons. Worryingly, the infantry, who were generally much more poorly paid and prone to have lower morale, had already been found wanting and were now apparently becoming ever more prone to openly grumbling at their lot, especially about how much of the main burden of the fighting seemed to be always falling upon them alone and not upon the more pampered cavalry. Cromwell’s opening letter to the defenders of Kilkenny had thus been a mix of zeal and threat but does give us an insight into his ideas at this stage of the war. A threat was imbedded in it to scare the defenders into surrender, although other more reasonable terms were also dangled in front of them: ‘lives, liberties, and estates’. If they refused these terms, however, then ‘blame yourselves’, he noted, for the consequences. Yet even while distancing himself from the possible results of an assault, one letter into Kilkenny noted how he had already promised his soldiery recompense in order to save the city from plunder and to hold them in line: ‘the inhabitants shall give them a reasonable gratuity in money in lieu of pillages’. And he was more than willing to reinforce this by the threat of death over his own men to prevent any marauding. To the garrison commander he outlined the current purpose of the campaign: ‘To reduce you from arms’ and to ‘set the country to quietness, and their due subjections’. Cromwell also wanted, or so he said, ‘to put an end to war, and not to lengthen it’, wishing ‘(if it may stand with God) this people may live as happily as they did before the bloody massacre and their troubles, and better too’.58 After a struggle, then, Kilkenny – once the capital of the Confederates – capitulated at the end of March 1650. It was soon to be Clonmel’s turn. V Then Crumwell, hearing the Lord Lieutenant’s forces [were] dispersed, took his Opportunity of taking Towns and Castles without any great Opposition, and sent two or three Regiments of Horse and foot before him to block up Clonmell at distance. ‘Which was done’, said one contemporary, ‘about a month before himself appeared’.59 Cromwell’s final arrival at Clonmel took place on 27 April 58 W. C. Abbott, The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1937–1947), ii. 227. 59 Gilbert, Contemporary History, ii. 415.

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1650, and he was said to have brought with him some 8,000 infantry, 600 cavalry and 12 field guns. Yet one informant of Ormond’s who had watched the army march away from Kilkenny noted that when Cromwell trudged towards Clonmel ‘he left … two hundred foote and four score horse behind’, and other strong parties had also been sent out to garrison occupied strongholds.60 On that very same day (27 April 1650), White and O’Neill wrote to Ormond that they were now ‘closelye Beseidged by the Enemye’ but that they would ‘endeavour to defend this place as longe as may be’ and this being the case they hoped that Ormond ‘will not fayle us’.61 In this they were to be disappointed and although some attempts were later made to send a relief column they were soon brushed away and retired in some disorder. The Cromwellian order of battle for the coming siege can be partially reconstructed. The cavalry consisted of Colonel Jerome Zanchey’s regiment – a first division consisting of six troops of horse. There was also a second division led by Colonel Thomas Shelbourne, also with six troops of horse. Additionally, Colonel Daniel Abbott’s dragoons were present. For the infantry there were the regiments of Henry Slade; the fourth regiment of Isaac Ewer; Arthur Culme’s regiment, which had been in Ireland for a long while; and the twelfth regiment of John Hewson. Henry Ireton’s regiment of foot was to be the last of these infantry units. All the infantry had previously participated in sieges by now and knew what to expect. Alongside these troops were the gunners who were associated with 12 field pieces, some demi-cannon and some smaller ordnance. Later, when the field guns proved ineffective against the walls, an irritated Cromwell would send for the heavy siege guns from the army’s siege train.62 Given his usual practice, Cromwell ‘sent his Summons to Hugh Duff [O’Neill] to Surrender it [the Town] on good quarters and conditions’. This was a normal convention, invariably followed by Cromwell in this stage of the campaign. O’Neill, equally conventionally, blithely replied that ‘he was of another Resolution than to give up the Town on quarters or conditions, till he was reduced to a Lower Station, and so wished him to do his best’.63 60 Bodleian Library, MS Carte, ff. 27, 240. 61 Bodleian Library, MS Carte, ff. 27, 369. 62 To reconstruct the Cromwellian order of battle we can start with Firth and Davies, Regimental History and Malcolm Wanklyn, Reconstructing the New Model Army, 2 vols (Solihull, 2015–2016). 63 Gilbert, Contemporary History, ii. 415.

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These military courtesies having been observed, the opening of the siege began via the usual approaches: ‘wherein there was difficulty and daily hazard’, noted one commentator, for many sorties and sallies were soon being made against the besieging work parties by O’Neill’s forces. According to one commentator, at least ‘much loss by sallies … [in the Cromwellian army was thereby now] sustained’.64 This ongoing harassment was to continue throughout this period on an almost daily basis as both sides skirmished with one another for an advantage. On one occasion, Daniel Abbott’s dragoons even brought off some enemy horses from under the very walls of Clonmel. Henry Ireton, who was sitting on horseback alongside Cromwell and watching the dragoons at work, immediately asked the general to make them up to proper cavalry troops as a reward and thus increase their pay and status. Cromwell promised to do so, yet it still took a petition some years afterwards by Abbott to finally get his men their reward.65 While losses mounted, a battery of guns was raised and these soon began to ‘play’ upon the north wall in early May in an obvious attempt to degrade then break it down and form an assailable breach. Initially, the hasty Cromwell seems to have been unwilling to bring up his precious siege cannon, mainly it seems due to the difficulties of moving the siege train, or from fears of an ambush, but eventually even he came to the conclusion that the field guns by themselves were simply proving ineffective in their attempts to breach the walls. Several probing attacks were made by his men, but these were swiftly repulsed with some heavy losses, as any breaks made in the walls were plainly not practicable at this point. So the heavy siege guns were now sent for. In the interim, Jenkin Lloyd, Cromwell’s chaplain, was sent post haste back to England carrying letters from Oliver to the Council of State. On Friday, 10 May, they were glad to hear that ‘the Army were set down before Clonmel, that great guns were planted, and His excellency intended to fall upon the place very suddenly, and then come for England’.66 It is also possible that once again the army was beginning to suffer from various diseases – ‘the bloody flux’, as Cromwell called it, had now reappeared, and this, and calls for his return to London as the threat from Scotland 64 See Henry Carey, Memorials of the Great Civil War from 1646 to 1652, 2 vols (London, 1842), ii. 217–218. Daily losses are noted at 300 to 500 men, with the infantry in the trenches bearing the burden once again, but this seems rather high. Even so, Cromwell was soon noted as being ‘wearie of the place’. Gilbert, Contemporary History, ii. 76. 65 The National Archives, Kew, SP63/287, f. 138. 66 A perfect diurnall, 6–13 May 1650, p. 256.

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grew, made him ever more anxious to take the town quickly.67 ‘Noll the Conquerer’, with ‘faire and smooth promises’ for the town to surrender, therefore bethought himself of some simpler, more political, ideas to progress his siege than a costly assault.68 But, as with any secret deals, it soon turned out to be both muddled and vexatious. It is related by some commentators how Cromwell made an attempt to subvert the garrison through corruption. Edward Fennel, the soldier of fortune, had apparently already made contact by some means and offered to betray the town for £500. The plan was that he and his men when on guard would open one of the gates and a group of the Cromwellian soldiers waiting nearby could then enter and take the town. But it was said word of Fennel’s activities about the gates reached the ears of the suspicious O’Neill, and being a mistrustful fellow, when he went on his rounds he simply ordered a mixture of men (both Fennel’s troopers and his own Ulstermen) to take up the guard instead and, so to speak, guard the guards. As a result of this and O’Neill and Fennel’s subsequent conversations, Fennel was persuaded to reveal the plot and simply switched sides again. With the plot uncovered a small assault was beaten back with some losses.69 In the meantime, a second assault was being prepared by allowing the artillery to do its work. Once the breach was made the troops could be launched into it and they would storm the town. By 16 May 1650, the big siege guns were finally in place on the north side of Clonmel near the north gate and they commenced their fire on the wall.70 Apparently, a big enough breach in the northern wall of Clonmel was visible by three o’clock that afternoon, and any possible flanking fire on it was also being suppressed.71 Through personal observation Cromwell reasoned 67 E. Budgell, Memoirs of the life and character of the late Earl of Orrery, and of the family of the Boyles &c., 2nd edn (London, 1732), pp. 51–52. 68 Mercurius Elenticus, 29 Apr.–6 May 1650 [2]. 69 There is some doubt about the whole veracity of this plot and it may well be that it is either partially true or a reflection not of the events at Clonmel but of the later siege of Limerick, where Fennel, who escaped Clonmel with O’Neill, did undertake a similar scheme of betrayal. 70 Marshal Vauban, a later master of siege warfare for Louis XIV, advocated that in such cases batteries should try to cut out the stonework by aiming to create the pattern of an ‘H’ in the walls and, he thought, it would usually take around 1,000 rounds to collapse a wall, fill any outer ditch with rubble, and achieve an acceptable breach for the infantry. See Jean-Denis Lepage, Vauban and the French Military under Louis XIV: An illustrated History of Fortifications and Strategies (Jefferson, NC, 2010), p. 51. 71 Gilbert, Contemporary History, ii. 413.

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that the breach was sufficiently large enough for the major assault to take place. But, fatally as it turned out, no assault was immediately forthcoming. We must presume that Cromwell’s intriguing delay at this point was to allow for the town to surrender in order to save him ‘time and blood’, as it was becoming clear that there was a usable breach in its walls. This would in fact be the obvious point for a normal pause and parley in the whole affair. Yet, with sunset at about eight o’clock that evening, there was arguably more than enough time to marshal a swift assault on the breach. Be that as it may, it was deliberately put off until the next day. Instead of asking for terms, however, O’Neill urgently moved overnight to labour to reinforce the broken wall with a disguised inner earthwork, counter scarp and ditch – behind the breach. One witness described this as ‘a traverse or crosswork, worse than the breach to enter, being completely flanked out of houses within side’.72 O’Neill then packed his musketeers into the houses with their large windows on the front and side of the breach in order to cover it with their fire when the assault was launched, and pikemen were also installed along the barricade. He also brought up his artillery pieces and these were charged with chain shot. This was a devastating anti-personnel weapon that could, if placed correctly, cut down scores of men in the restricted area of combat he was now creating. O’Neill’s plan was to make a retirata – a classical form of defence for any broken walls described in some detail by the many military textbooks of the day. Indeed, one of these books, Carlo Theti’s, Discorsidelle Fortificationi Espugnationi, has an image that could almost be the very works that O’Neill now speedily threw up at Clonmel.73 James Heath’s later somewhat muddled version for the reasons behind Cromwell’s delay and his reluctance to send the troops into the breach straightaway, which turned out to be crucial for the main assault, was that a Council of War and his officers advised Cromwell, or just argued with him, that the breach wasn’t yet practicable. It may be that they also had misgivings about the infantry’s mood faced with such a dangerous assault. Eventually, Cromwell gave up and instead ordered the main assault for eight o’clock the next morning. Afterwards, Heath records, Cromwell, as was his wont, blamed this Council of War and their apparent reliance on ‘the arm of Flesh’ rather than upon God and his providences for the disaster and imposed a fast throughout the army afterwards to purge it of 72 A Briefe relation of some affaires and transactions, civill and military, both forraigne and domestique, 21–28 May 1650, p. 591. 73 Carlo Theti, Discorsidelle Fortificationi Espugnationi, & Disese delle Città, & d’altri Luoghi (Vincenza, 1617), pp. 201–202.

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its sins.74 Whilst on this occasion Cromwell’s alleged anger over his officers’ dithering does sound true, his subsequent reproaches to them afterwards for the army’s sins in not pressing on are even more significant. For given the ubiquity in this army and its commander of using God’s providence as a major tool of understanding about its fate and actions, it would be simply unnatural for them not to have resorted to such rationalisations to provide explanations as to what actually happened in the breach at Clonmel.75 Yet the Godly language on this particular occasion remains considerably muted, if not eliminated, for the official descriptions of Clonmel elide any mention of a ‘judgement’ or a ‘punishment’ for the army’s sins, in direct contrast, for example, to Lord Broghill’s letter of the same period. This makes considerable reference to God for his victory over David Roache and his later hanging of Bishop Eagan, described as ‘this late mercy, wherein the Lord was as visible, as the mercy itself’.76 Where then was the God of battles outside Clonmel when He was to be so constantly cited by Cromwell a few months later in September 1650? That God had been in Cromwell’s thoughts throughout the campaign as a justification for his actions there is little doubt. Even a private letter from Cromwell to Richard Mayor in April looked at the current campaign in Godly terms, with the usual commonplaces towards the spiritual weakness of the army also firmly in place: The Lord is pleased to vouchsafe us His presence, and to prosper His own work in our hands: which is to us more eminent because truly we are a company of poor, weak and worthless creatures … we follow the Lord who goeth before, and gather what He scattereth, that so all may appear to be from Him …We have taken many considerable places lately, without much loss. What can we say to these things [?]. If God be for us, who can be against us? Who can fight against the Lord and prosper? Who can resist his will?77 We must presume that the testing at Clonmel engineered similar sentiments in him. And as H. N. Brailsford noted, ‘one should [always] try to discover 74 James Heath, Flagellum: or, The life birth and death, burial, of O. Cromwel the late usurper, faithfully described. &c. (London, 1679), p. 87. 75 For providence, see Blair Worden, ‘Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England’, Past & Present 109 (1985), pp. 55–99. 76 Severall proceedings in Parliament, 23–30 May 1650, pp. 502–504. 77 Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 235–236. Other references from Cromwell to God do exist in this period (see Writings and Speeches, ii. 196–235).

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rather what … [Cromwell] felt than what he thought’; yet on this occasion such evidence is curiously lost to us in a remarkable silence.78 In the event, the available evidence on the breach does suggest that the officers were right to be cautious. It was indeed to prove far too high for comfort. The debris of the wall certainly allowed the troops to scale it from the outside, but once they dropped inside, behind the rubble, they found themselves caught between getting over the surprise of discovering O’Neill’s newly created inner defence works, rushing forward into a hail of musket and cannon fire or trying to retreat over the crumbling walls, again under fire, which were just too high to scale easily: ‘they met with some difficulty to get back on the wall again, most being pulled up by the hand before they could get back to the top of the breach, by which there was some loss’. Also, as the bullish Cromwell decided to pour still more men into the breach in order to sustain the attack as he had done at Drogheda, on this occasion those already in the breach were trapped. The first assault was to be by the infantry. Sunrise was at four o’clock that Friday, 17 May, and the main assault was planned for eight o’clock that morning. There is little actual detail on how this was managed at Clonmel but the usual form for an assault of this nature was to create a forlorn hope, which would be first to go, and then the main body of the troops would follow through. Generally a forlorn hope was created from infantrymen and dragoons, with the latter on foot. They all tended to be armed with the more reliable firelocks or snaphances rather than with matchlocks. David Papillon recommended that these men should be heavily armoured for protection and that they must ‘advance furiously forward to enter the breach’.79 Any forlorn hope would be further supported by a body of one hundred musketeers, with a body of pikemen also located behind them, and, lying still further back in reserve, an additional body of one hundred musketeers who were to be thrown into the combat as occasion saw fit.80 The soldiers themselves would have been ordered to carry as many faggots as they could, for throwing into ditches and scaling ladders.81 78 H. N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution (Nottingham, 1976), p. 157. See also J. C. Davis, Oliver Cromwell (Chatham, 2001), pp. 112–137. 79 Papillon, Practical Abstract, pp. 118–119. 80 The siege of Nantwich in 1643 gives us a good example of the organisation here: Magnalia Dei: A Relation of Some of the Many Remarkable Passages in Cheshire &c. (1643), p. 9. 81 The assault at Bristol in 1645 provides us with an even more detailed view of the process. The preparations made for that assault give us a very good insight into

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Before Clonmel, as was also usual in such cases, lots had been drawn to see which officers would have the honour of leading the attack. This decision was to be left to God and on this occasion it upon fell upon Colonel Arthur Culme. Culme was to be one of the highest-ranking Parliamentary officers killed in the action. He was shot down in the breach. Culme had seen most of his military service in Ireland and had originally been a captain of Cloughouter Castle in County Cavan when he was captured in October 1641. By 1647, he was being used as messenger to the House of Commons, and he had brought them news of the battle of Dungan’s Hill, for which the Commons duly recompensed him with a reward of £100.82 By May 1648, Culme was back in Dublin as lieutenant colonel to William Flower’s regiment when he was finally made colonel of the foot regiment on 19 October 1648.83 Service in Ireland with this regiment followed. The infantry regiment he led was to see heavy action at Clonmel and it seems to have suffered numerous casualties.84 Culme himself led the assault bravely enough.85 The infantry assault went in at eight o’clock in the morning with the men singing psalms to keep up their morale. But the English soldiers apparently entered the breach without any real opposition.86 Once they were over the rubble, however, they were faced with the new barricade and O’Neill’s men now opened a severe fire into their tightly packed ranks, with their weapons both from atop the barricade and from the houses both on the left and right. A ‘hot fight’ ensued. Eventually, the infantry simply broke, for losses were heavy and they were forced to retire as best they could. what was usually needed and the actions that undoubtedly took place on a smaller scale before Clonmel. See Sprigge, Anglia rediviva, pp. 90–105. 82 John Rushworth, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State, vol. 7, 1647–48 (London, 1721), p. 780; Commons Journal, v. 276; M. Rowe, A diary and relation of passages in, and about Dublin … Brought this day … by Lieutenant Colonell Arthur Culme, one of the present expedition in Ireland (London, 1647). 83 Calendar of State Papers Relating to Ireland: 1647–1660, 32; Historical Manuscripts Commission 8th Report, p. 597. The castle was a strong position, which fell to the Irish rebels in 1641. Edmund Borlase, The History of the Execrable Irish Rebellion (London, 1680), p. 32. 84 Firth and Davies, Regimental History, p. 582. See also Wanklyn, Reconstructing the New Model Army, vol. 2, Regimental Lists, 1649 to 1663, p. 186. 85 J. Casimir O’Meagher, ‘Diary of Dr. Jones, Scout-Master-General to the Army of the Commonwealth, from 13th March, 1649–50 to July, 1650’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 23 (1893), p. 51. It might be that Culme’s early death led to the confusion in the assault. 86 Gilbert, Contemporary History, ii. 415.

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Cromwell’s tactical mistake was now to send more men in after them, pell mell, as he had previously done at Drogheda, rather than pausing and moving up his own artillery to blast a way through. Once again, the infantry went in and the same result took place. Now, neither the threats of the ‘Generall nor the bloudie sworde of inferiour officers was sufficient enough to keepe them from turning tayle’. They retired, bloodied and certainly baffled. At which point, having been kept waiting by the North Gate where he proposed to enter once the breach was taken and his men were in the town, Cromwell rode over and ordered yet another infantry assault. But now the infantry simply refused to return to the attack. They had already been hard pressed on this campaign and had suffered many losses, and unlike the cavalry, or so they argued, had not been cossetted half as much. Not only were they reluctant to go back into the breach they even pointedly complained that the cavalrymen had not done their fair share of such dangerous duties. With the potential for an infantry mutiny blowing up outside the walls, another assault was looking increasingly unlikely. Cromwell therefore turned to his more heavily armoured cavalry and ordered them to do the job for him. The cavalrymen were quickly dismounted and ordered in. Armed with metal pot helmets, back and breastplates, with drawn swords, musquetoons and pistols, they hoped it would give them an advantage. With their officers leading from the front, the hastily formed and dismounted cavalry now went over the rubble of the breach. The first men having clambered in, they too were soon faced with being caught exactly as the infantry had been. Perhaps no one had even told them what to expect in the confusion. They seem to have panicked, calling ‘Halt! Halt!’ to those behind them. But in all the noise this was mistaken as an immediate call for an advance, so that those in front were now pushed forwards as well as being shot at and cut down until the lane was soon full of wounded and dying men. A flank attack was even launched across the breach rubble by the Irish and this pushed those who were now trying to cross it back over the rubble. The victors then furiously turned upon those already caught in the trap and fell upon them with shot, scythe, pikes and stones in a vicious hand-to-hand combat.87 O’Neill’s two artillery pieces, again loaded with 87 Lieutenant Charles Langley famously lost his hand to a scythe at this point. According to the Landed estates database, he went on to own Lisnamrock Castle and had a replacement metal hand ‘made of sheet iron … somewhat in the form of a Dragoon[’]s Gauntlet’: http://landedestates.nuigalway.ie/LandedEstates/jsp/ estate-show.jsp?id=3232 (accessed 30 Nov. 2018). See J. D. White, Anthologia Tipperiensis (Cashel, 1892), pp. 162–163; John P. Prendergast, The Cromwellian

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chain shot, again opened up into the crowd. This type of shot simply cut many of the men in half or off at the knees. All of this chaos lasted about an hour and once again the Cromwellian troops, with great loss, broke and ran. Now even Cromwell’s persuasive powers couldn’t get his men to go back in again. The assault was finally called off. There had been about 3 or 4 hours’ hard fighting. The most that could now be asked of the men was to ‘stand-to’ near the breach itself, hopefully reasonably ‘safe from the enemy’s shot’, in order to prepare the ground for a further attempt the next morning.88 While plans began to move up the artillery overnight as a support for this renewed attack on the breach next day, a disconsolate general Cromwell retired to his tent, doubtless to brood upon God’s wrath.89 According to one witness, this ‘tedious storm, which continued four houres’,90 had seen the army facing the ‘stoutest enemy that was ever found by our Army in Ireland’, and they had been found wanting. As the officer went on to note: ‘it is in my opinion, and very many more, that there was never seen so hot a storm of so long a Continuance, and so gallantly defended, neither in England nor Ireland’.91 Yet another observer at Clonmel noted afterwards that ‘now it is ours, though somewhat at a dear rate’ and the balance sheet was indeed heavy.92 Of the officers who fell in the breach we learn that Major Thomas Jordan,93 Captain Edward Humphries94 and Captain Fruen all Settlement of Ireland, 3rd edn (Dublin, 1922), pp. i–xii; J. J. Howard, Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica, vol. 4, second ser. (1892), p. 185; Mercurius Aulicus, 2–9 February 1645, p. 1368; G. N. Godwin, The Civil War in Hampshire (1642–45) and the Story of Basing House (London, 1882), p. 201. Murphy, Cromwell in Ireland, p. 425 gives details of a John Langley who was carried off the breach at Clonmel by ‘Richard Richards, my comrade’, having been shot in the leg. 88 Ireton asked them to ‘stand their ground’. Gilbert, Contemporary History, ii. 414. 89 Gilbert, Contemporary History, ii. 413. 90 A perfect diurnall, 27 May–3 June 1650, p. 272. 91 A perfect diurnall, 27 May–3 June 1650, p. 277. 92 A Briefe relation of some affaires and transactions, 21–28 May 1650, p. 591; O’Meagher, ‘Diary of Dr. Jones’, p. 51. 93 He might have been the Captain of the same name who fought at Basing House. See Stephen K. Roberts (ed.), The Cromwell Association Online Directory of Parliamentarian Army Officers (2017), British History Online: www.british-history.ac.uk/ no-series/cromwell-army-officers/surnames-j (accessed 30 Nov. 2018). His brother Nicholas, also a former soldier with Waller, had fled with his wife and children from his native Bristol when the city fell. The National Archives, Kew, SP18/101 f. 85r–v. 94 A 4th regiment officer. See Wanklyn, Reconstructing the New Model Army, ii. 179; Firth and Davies, Regimental History, pp. 354–355.

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fell. Cromwell supported Fruen’s widow and children financially by later asking in parliament for some relief to be given them for their loss.95 Ireton’s foot regiment seems to have suffered particularly badly. Major Charles Bolton, who had previously served in both England and Ireland, was severely wounded and later died as result.96 Lieutenant Colonel John Grey97 and Lieutenant Colonel William Lee (Leigh),98 the latter of whom was also of Ireton’s foot regiment, were also amongst the many wounded.99 The emphasis in the reports, of course, was mainly on the officers who were killed or wounded, but naturally enough many ordinary soldiers also fell at Clonmel. Although they tended to be noted down only as ‘divers private soldiers and others wounded’ there was an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 men who are said to have fallen as night closed down the assault and left Cromwell frustrated with the day’s proceedings.100 Then, again, his obvious success had not brought O’Neill much immediate joy. For it was soon clear that not only were his troops nearly out of ammunition but that he had wounded and dead to deal with. After swiftly calling a council of war, O’Neill decided to leave Clonmel to its fate as the place was now obviously untenable. He simply told White to make the best terms he could for himself and the town and O’Neill, ever the consummate professional, decided quickly to retreat with his remaining forces over the river Suir. While Cromwell was planning, despite his rebuff, to renew the attack again the next day, and kept some of his forces watching on the cusp of the breach, at midnight word came through that the mayor of Clonmel wished to speak terms to the English general. A pass for White was immediately issued and he was soon brought to Cromwell’s quarters. After some compliments, White surrendered Clonmel – and the terms for doing so were soon arranged and granted.101 At which point, or so it is said, Cromwell, but only in passing, finally asked if the Irish General 95 The National Archives, Kew, SP25/64, f. 423. 96 The National Archives, Kew, SP18/77, f. 26: a petition from his brother Theobald, who was a London citizen, and sought for relief from the Council of State. Wanklyn, Reconstructing the New Model Army, ii. 184; Firth and Davies, Regimental History, p. 647. 97 Wanklyn, Reconstructing the New Model Army, ii. 182, 203. 98 According to Ludlow, Leigh was an Anabaptist. C. H. Firth (ed.), The Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, 2 vols (Oxford, 1894), ii. 196; Wanklyn, Reconstructing the New Model Army, ii. 183. 99 See Carey, Memorials of the Great Civil War, ii. 218. 100 Gilbert, Contemporary History, ii. 414, 416. 101 Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 252 gives the articles of surrender and the protection for the citizens.

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knew of the mayor’s actions in coming out to him? To which the mayor blithely replied that he did not, for he was already gone some ‘two hours after night fell with all his men’. Upon which Cromwell is reported to have started, frowned and then lost his temper, calling White a ‘knave’ for not telling him this earlier. Admirably daring given the circumstances the mayor merrily replied that he had not been asked about it before. Considerably vexed at discovering he had been duped, Cromwell demanded to know who this O’Neill was. Being told he was an ‘over sea soldier’, born in Spain, Cromwell is purported to have angrily said ‘G–d d––n you, and your over sea!’ And he then demanded the paper of conditions back again, but the Mayor now astutely played on the general’s honour and simply kept them for himself. Despite being obviously furious, Cromwell was forced to keep to the terms agreed, maybe keen to put the mess behind him.102 Yet when daylight broke and he occupied Clonmel he went to view the many bodies of his dead men in the breach – far more than at any other action he was ever involved in – and determined to pursue O’Neill’s forces as best he could. O’Neill and the main body of his troops were long gone towards Waterford, although they were later refused admission there and instead ran for Limerick.103 Meanwhile, Cromwellian cavalry was ordered out in pursuit and it caught up with O’Neill’s stragglers on the road from Clonmel. In a very spiteful manner, they inflicted heavy violence and casualties upon some two hundred of them, some of whom were women, almost certainly by way of revenge for the disasters of the breach at Clonmel.104 VI Cromwell finally left Ireland soon afterwards on 27 May 1650, never to return – although, as we know, of course, that wasn’t entirely the end of his influence there. Yet the events at Clonmel never became a part of his regular politicised and dramatised role as a military general, or a part of the press image used to bolster his public performances. On this occasion, 102 Edmund Hogan, The History of the Warr in Ireland from 1641 to 1653 by a Brittish Officer of the Regiment of Sir John Clottworthy (Dublin, 1873), pp. 110–111. Some plundering may still have occurred. See Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 253; Gilbert, Contemporary History, ii. 79. 103 For O’Neill’s later defence of Limerick, see J. G. Simms, ‘Hugh Dubh O’Neill’s Defence of Limerick, 1650–1651’, in David Hayton and Gerard O’Brien (eds), J. G. Simms, War and Politics in Ireland, 1649–1730 (London, 1986), pp. 21–30. 104 This figure of 200 might have included those who fought and died or were wounded at the wall. Gilbert, Contemporary History, ii. 409.

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his frustrations, his aggression and his hastiness, as well as the shrewdness of his opponent, who had lived to fight another day, all seem to have been swiftly elided. Generally speaking, Cromwell had become well aware of the need to make as much political capital as possible out of his campaigns and his battles and was nearly always keen to do so. Yet in this case we are subjected to that not unimportant art of the Cromwellian silence. One clearly worrying trait was that Cromwell, to save ‘time and blood’, as he put it, had unthinkingly used up his men’s morale with almost continual grinding assaults on Irish towns and fortresses. The relentless nature of the campaign eventually caught up with him and pushed his infantry to mutiny and an outright refusal to re-engage in the breach. This further added to his own real doubts, apparently expressed later, as to whether he would have been able to ‘get … the soldiers the next day to a fresh assault’ if O’Neill had held on. Even his normally reliable cavalry had failed on this occasion. While Cromwell’s brash decision to throw his men at the breach in a pell mell fashion might have worked for him at Drogheda and in other places, here it just proved to be tactically inept, although this is not to take anything from O’Neill’s skilful defence. Certainly, Dillingham’s use of the phrase ‘you may guess shrewdly at Hercules by his foot’, when he wrote to William Sancroft that same month recording the rumours of the many casualties at Clonmel, was a perceptive comment on this particular siege. It was a sharp reminder of Cromwell’s real limitations as soldier of the siege. The underlying Latin tag to which Dillingham was obliquely referring was more commonly expressed as ‘ex pede Herculem’.105 It enabled his reader Sancroft to pick up on more than the mere fraction of the news and the names of the dead and wounded officers (‘they paid dear’) that were eventually released. For the military reputation of Oliver Cromwell had taken a real knock. Dillingham, somewhat spitefully, even went on to note that this was, of course, the same Cromwell ‘who undertook to have Ireland at his command last Michaelmas, as child should keep it with a rod … [but now] can’t assure his soldiers two miles from home, and promise them safe return’.106 While, as Cromwell was the first to acknowledge, being ‘guilty of oversights … can rarely be avoided in military matters’, Clonmel, as seen through the lens of his military career, does shows us some negative facets of his generalship. One was his genuine lack of ideas as a siege general 105 This played ironically on the idea that by simply seeing Hercules’ foot one can reveal his entire size. See J.L.S., A Collection of Latin Quotations from the Most Celebrated Authors &c. (Jersey, 1833), p. 70. 106 See Carey, Memorials of the Great Civil War, ii. 218–219.

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when he was faced with clever opposition. This had been visible earlier at Waterford, but the deficiency of professional training in siege warfare and Cromwell’s overall lack of patience in such matters caused him much trouble. Ultimately, if O’Neill had been better served in having more men available and more materiel, as well as being better supported by Ormond, then Clonmel could have been turned into an even greater debacle than it actually was – and then where would Cromwell’s military reputation in Ireland stand?

Part II

Commanders in Ireland

Chapter 4

Henry Ireton in Ireland, 1649–1651 Oliver Cromwell’s ‘Second Self’? David Farr

Henry Ireton in Ireland, 1649–1651

Henry Ireton was seen as Oliver Cromwell’s ‘second self’.1 The two men, bound by religion and kin, were regarded as a unit. Leveller and royalist portrayals of a Machiavellian Ireton manipulating Cromwell are overplayed, but Ireton was, after God, among the most important influences on Cromwell.2 Ireton and Cromwell had been close since first meeting in 1643, as fellow Puritan officers in parliament’s Eastern Association Army. In 1646, Ireton married Cromwell’s eldest daughter Bridget.3 Cromwell respected Ireton’s intellect and faith.4 They spent much time together and Cromwell indicated how often Ireton also wrote to him at length.5 As the New Model’s political theorist and one of Cromwell’s main advisors, politically and, to a lesser degree, spiritually, Ireton’s words and actions give another context for how Cromwell would have seen Ireland, the Irish, Catholicism and the role of the New Model. Ireton and Cromwell 1 James Heath, Flagellum: or, The life and death, birth and burial of O. Cromwell the late usurper: faithfully described (London, 1665), p. 122. 2 See John Lilburne, An impeachment of high treason against Oliver Cromwel, and his son in law Henry Ireton (London, 1649); Thomason Tracts, 87:E.568[20]. John Lilburne, The juglers discovered … discovering the turn-coat, Machiavell practises, and under-hand dealings of Lieut. Gen. Cromwell, and his soone in law, Commissary Generall Ireton (28 Sept. 1647); Thomason Tracts, 246:669.f.13[76]. The last damnable designe of Cromwell and Ireton (London, 1649). 3 David Farr, Henry Ireton and the English Revolution (Woodbridge, 2006). 4 W. C. Abbott, The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1937–1947), i. 327. 5 H. Cary (ed.), Memorials of the Great Civil War in England from 1646 to 1652, 2 vols (London, 1852), i. 1–3; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 416; ii. 327. 111

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considered Ireland in need of reform and Ireton, as the New Model’s chief political strategist, was therefore most suited for the task. Ireton was, after the departure of Cromwell, Lord Deputy of Ireland until his own death in Ireland in November 1651. Ireton was, however, more than Cromwell’s ‘second self’. Ireton, Commissary-General of the New Model Army, was the leading regicide. John Cunningham has rightly stressed the ‘Iretonian’ rather than ‘Cromwellian’ settlement in Ireland. The nature of Ireton’s relationship with Cromwell, based on their different characters and approaches to politics that can be seen in Ireton’s progression of the process of regicide, reinforces why settlement was, at least initially, ‘Iretonian’.6 Rather than see Ireton’s importance in the initial settlement to late 1651 as representing a fundamentally different approach from Cromwell we could view Ireton’s prominence in the context of their previous working relationship and characters that shaped their different approaches since the New Model’s politicisation. Ireton, regarded by Cromwell as his trusted representative, had freedom to take independent action. Ireton’s ‘journey’ to regicide should remind us of his willingness to adapt to changing circumstances and the self-confidence to take a leading role.7 They were an effective political partnership, with Cromwell’s pragmatism acting as a taming influence on Ireton’s fanaticism.8 It was no different in Ireland. After Cromwell’s departure, Ireton was in command and drafted an initial settlement to the circumstances he faced in 1651. I Ireton shared the prevailing negative English view of Ireland. Ireton – as a providential millenarian radicalised by his experience of the New Model, war and regicide – was, like Cromwell, determined to avenge the 1641 rebellion. Ireton wrote of ‘the original authors of the rebellion’ who could never be forgiven.9 For Cromwell, Ireland could ‘be a precedent to England itself’. John Cook, who had been given the task of prosecuting Charles I, 6 John Cunningham, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the “Cromwellian” Settlement of Ireland’, Historical Journal 53.4 (2010), pp. 919–937; see, in particular, p. 922. 7 B. Taft, ‘From Reading to Whitehall: Henry Ireton’s Journey’, in Michael Mendle (ed.), The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, the Levellers and the English State (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 175–196. 8 Ian J. Gentles, ‘Ireton, Henry (bap. 1611, d. 1651), parliamentarian army officer and regicide’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. https://doi.org/10.1093/ ref:odnb/14452 (accessed 22 Feb. 2019). 9 Historical Manuscripts Commission 36, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormonde, 8 vols (London, 1902–1920), i. 226.

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argued that ‘though Ireland be but the younger sister, yet England might have been the learner and gainer by her’.10 Given Ireton’s central role in driving forward the process of regicide and starting to remodel Ireland it is likely that he and Cook reflected together. Cook praised Ireton as a ‘godly man’.11 Cook stated that he went to Ireland due to ‘the great encouragement that I had from Cromwell and Ireton and many honourable persons in the army, who were pleased to say that Ireland was like a White Paper’.12 Cook’s legal reforms are representative of the measures that Ireton sought.13 Cook’s arbitrary way of proceeding in Munster was shaped by the state of war and the self-justification of the English independents for imposition of order on a ‘barbaric’ country.14 Ireton believed that a war of reconquest sanctioned the godly New Model to impose reforms. Ireton’s words during his time in Ireland indicate that religion and politics, as well as practicalities, shaped his approach. Ireton’s statements with regard to Catholicism and the Irish are part of Independent rhetoric, indicating the brutality of godly rule. Carlin has stressed that the contradictions within Independents’ ideas led them from religious to political justifications. This is evidenced in Henry Parker, Ireton’s close associate. In 1646, Parker started an account of the 1641 rebellion.15 Some of Ireton’s attitude to Ireland may have derived from his relationship with Parker and Ireton probably selected Parker as Secretary to the General Officers in Ireland while planning the campaign.16 Mendle argues that Parker ‘grew 10 Toby Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland: English Government and Reform in Ireland, 1649–1660 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 14, 268–269. 11 There are three versions of Cook’s pamphlet. That the news of Ireton’s death came to him as he was finishing the text, as he comments in the epistle, is shown by the change to the title page to reference Ireton. The first version of Cook’s pamphlet, while it has the section at the end of the epistle focusing on Ireton’s achievements, does not have any reference to Ireton. This is Wing C6019. The two later versions (C6020 and 6025B) have different frontispieces that include reference to Ireton. The version used here is C6020: John Cook, Monarchy no Creature of God’s Making (Waterford, 1651), epistle, no pagination. 12 Geoffrey Robertson, The Tyrannicide Brief (London, 2006), p. 225. 13 Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 256. 14 N. Carlin, ‘Extreme or Mainstream? The English Independents and the Cromwellian Reconquest of Ireland, 1649–1651’, in Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (eds), Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 209–226. 15 Thomason Tracts, 100:E.652[14]. H. Parker, The cheif affairs of Ireland truly communicated (London, 1651). 16 Gerald E. Aylmer, The State’s Servants: The Civil Service of the English Republic, 1649–1660 (London, 1973), p. 261.

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particularly close to Ireton’ who became his ‘patron’.17 Parker, in response to Ireton’s death, sought to justify Ireton’s proceedings in Ireland.18 He, like Ireton, saw Catholicism as a means to delude and control, arguing that ‘Popery hath now long since beene discovered to be an imposture or nothing else but a slie sophisme, to establish Empire in the long Robe, and wrest it from such as they account secular men’.19 This outlook facilitated a practical political response that, as with English royalists, focused justice on the leaders of the church and resistance. Ireton’s self-reflection and self-image as a godly warrior underpinned his justification and drive to impose godly rule on Ireland. Ireton’s self-reflection on his own limitations and the New Model as an embattled godly despised minority had shaped his religious and political outlook since the New Model’s politicisation, seen, for example, at Colchester in 1648 and in the process leading to regicide. Ireton made clear his belief that severity against those that opposed God’s will in Ireland was justified for God was ‘a righteous Judge, pleading the quarrell of the innocent, and a severe revenger of their blood against those that spill it’.20 II On 30 July 1650, Ireton issued A declaration and prolcamation [sic] of the Deputy-General of Ireland.21 Its message was similar to Cromwell’s Declaration of January 1650.22 Barnard argued that Cromwell’s Declaration ‘betrays Ireton’s influence’.23 A search by author on Early English Books Online lists Ireton as an author of Cromwell’s Declaration with a Wing classification reflecting the idea of Ireton being a contributor.24 For 17 Michael Mendle, Henry Parker and the English Civil War: The Political Thought of the Public’s Privado (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 28, 160. 18 Mendle, Henry Parker, p. 160; Parker, Cheif affairs. 19 Carlin, ‘Extreme or Mainstream?’, p. 213. 20 Thomason Tracts, 100:E.654[9]. Mercurius Politicus, No. 88 (5–12 Feb. 1652), p. 1401; Historical Manuscripts Commission, Ormond, i. 225–226 (7 Nov. 1651); Parker, Cheif affairs. 21 Thomason Tracts, 94:E.612[3]. A declaration and prolcamation [sic] of the DeputyGeneral of Ireland (30 July 1650). 22 A declaration of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. For the undeceiving of deluded and seduced people (London, 1650). 23 Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 172; also Toby Barnard, ‘Planters and Policies in Cromwellian Ireland’, Past and Present 61 (1973), pp. 31–69 (see p. 44). 24 Cromwell’s Declaration has a Wing classification of I1031. In the Declaration there is a quotation [page before B2] from Cromwell’s letter at New Ross: ‘And you

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Morrill, Cromwell’s Declaration reads like a Cromwell document. Yet it is likely that Cromwell discussed the Declaration with Ireton given Ireton’s authorship, and Cromwell’s non-authorship, of so many of the New Model’s political statements and the close relationship between the two men.25 In his Declaration, Ireton argued that God was judging the Irish for the 1641 rebellion and subsequent bloodshed. For Ireton, it hath pleased the Lord our God, now a long while to stretch forth his heavy hand over this Nation in general, and the Inhabitants thereof, in those capital Judgements of the Sword and Pestilence … to sweep away, in a maner, whole Towns and Cities, and lay waste almost whole Countreys.26 Ireton was concerned about the impact of the plague on his ‘Soldiers’ and ‘English Protestant people’.27 Ireton’s concept of a limited ‘godly’, similar to Cromwell’s, is clear in his emphasis on ‘our God’, ‘his Peoples’ as opposed to ‘others’ and ‘them’.28 Ireton stressed that God’s judgement was now directed against those he regarded as the godly and ‘not onely the common sort’ but ‘even of those that have more eminently professed his fear’, those ‘we have cause to esteem his own people, dear and precious in his sight’.29 The ‘former discriminating Mercy of his, seems now to be turned into a general displeasure, and universal Indignaton’.30 Ireton made clear that God’s ‘destroying Angel (striking here and there around us) seems to come near us, to the Doors, and even into the Houses or Tents of us that yet survive, even of those that are esteemed best amongst us’.31 Thus Ireton saw the need for self-reflection as God ‘calls upon all men every where to repent’.32 Ireton argued that this extension of God’s judgement was a warning to them to instance in Cromwell’s Letter of the 19. Of October 1649’. While it may be asked why this is not ‘my letter’, there are references to ‘I’ [i.e., Cromwell] throughout other parts of the letter. 25 I would like to thank John Morrill for discussing his ideas with regard to the authorship of this Declaration when writing a study of Ireton in 2013. 26 Declaration … of the Deputy-General of Ireland, p. 3. 27 Declaration … of the Deputy-General of Ireland, p. 3. 28 Ronald Hutton, Debates in Stuart History (Basingstoke, 2004), p. 101. 29 Declaration … of the Deputy-General of Ireland, pp. 3–4. 30 Declaration … of the Deputy-General of Ireland, p. 4. 31 Declaration … of the Deputy-General of Ireland, p. 4. 32 Declaration … of the Deputy-General of Ireland, p. 4.

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restrengthen their faith. For Ireton, God took such action ‘for some ends of good towards them (as for reproving, or restraining, for awakening, or quickening, for humbling, teaching or instructing, for purging or purifying, for trying or perfecting of them’.33 The godly needed to seek out God’s will further through the ‘frequent exercise of Prayer with Fasting (such as is without Superstition) and (suitable to the Faith, Simplicity, Truth and Purity of the Gospel) during the time of this our Calamity’.34 Ireton’s call for self-reflection was in line with his previous New Model experience where ‘fasting and humiliation’ were used to ‘raise consciousness for the trials ahead’.35 Cook wrote that Ireton ‘upon the least losse we received by the Irish, or any disappointment; Oh, sayes he, is not our God angry with us ? let us be servent in prayer to know his minde in every checke or chastisement’.36 Thomas Patient, Ireton’s army chaplain, and Oliver St John, still one of Cromwell’s confidants, both wrote to Cromwell of this plague as a message from God.37 Given his record of self-reflection and responding dynamically during the process leading to regicide we should not underestimate the impact of this ‘Calamity’ on Ireton. The plague arrived in 1649 and peaked in Dublin in the summer of 1651. On 25 August 1651, the Council of Officers called another solemn fast in Dublin.38 After Cromwell’s departure Ireton faced a new phase of conquest in the context of the ravages of plague and the destruction already wrought by conflict and famine.39 Ireton’s shaping of settlement should be seen in the light of what he was experiencing and 33 Declaration … of the Deputy-General of Ireland, p. 6. 34 Declaration … of the Deputy-General of Ireland, pp. 7–8. 35 Ian Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland, 1645–1653 (Oxford, 1992), p. 97; Blair Worden, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Sin of Achan’, in D. L. Smith (ed.), Cromwell and the Interregnum (Oxford, 2003), pp. 37–59 (see p. 42). 36 Cook, Monarchy no Creature, sig. L2r. 37 J. Nickolls (ed.), Original letters and papers of state, addressed to Oliver Cromwell (London, 1743), pp. 7, 26. Patient, in an added personal dimension, informed Cromwell that ‘your grandchild hath been very weake, but is recovered and pretty well’. Given the young ages of Ireton’s four children, this could be a reference to his son Henry or any of his three daughters: Elizabeth (born 1647), Jane (born 1648) or Bridget (born 1649). Ireton’s wife, however, wasn’t reported as arriving in Ireland until January 1651. 38 London, British Library, MS Egerton 1762, ff. 1–2. 39 Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT, 2013), pp. 359–360; Raymond Gillespie, Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 2006), p. 184; Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 78.

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his determination to reflect and respond. Ireton hoped that God ‘would shew us wherein we have especially offended, or do displease him; what his minde and meaning is towards us; what he would have us learn by these his loud and dreadful speakings’. Ireton believed self-reflection would help him shape the settlement. God would direct him ‘what our carriage and dealings should have been, and what he would have it be, towards the generality of the people, and our Enemies here, whether in respect of Justice (for innocent Blood) or of more moderation and mercy towards any’. Ireton made a distinction between ‘our Enemies’ and ‘the generality of the people’ and scope for ‘moderation’. Such a statement reinforces why Ireton drew up his March 1651 Qualifications. Ireton hoped that God would ‘teach’ the godly his minde and will in all things; and give out a true Spirit of Humiliation for, and universal Reformation of those many evils that abound amongst us, and a faithful zeal for it (especially in us the Officers towards those under our charge) and this as in respect of all evils, so especially of those that most crying and prevailing (as Swearing, Blaspheming, Drunkenness, Plundring, Exaction and Cruelty towards people in protection. For Ireton, the godly should set an example. Ireton set aside the first three Tuesdays in August for public humiliation, detailing what he expected and particularly exhorting ‘all true Professors of the Reformed Religion … to be seriously affectionate in this Exercise’.40 This would revitalise the New Model Army, ‘even to Blood and further war’, reinforcing the radicalising effect of this self-reflection for Ireton.41 Ireton’s Declaration and his self-reflection may well have been ‘evidence of a crisis of confidence’ but Ireton sought God regularly, especially at critical times as part of ‘intensive self-examination’.42 In meeting for prayer and self-reflection at Windsor in 1648 Ireton himself most likely preached to his fellow soldiers. Such days of prayer led to more dynamic action.43 40 Declaration … of the Deputy-General of Ireland, p. 12. 41 Declaration … of the Deputy-General of Ireland, pp. 11–13. 42 Worden, ‘Achan’, p. 42. 43 John Cunningham, Conquest and Land in Ireland: The Transplantation to Connacht, 1649–1680 (London, 2011), p. 18; Farr, Ireton, pp. 123–124, 188. A similar approach can be seen by Thomas Harrison, Ireton’s fellow regicide and millenarian, with whom Ireton prayed and reflected with in private. See David Farr, MajorGeneral Thomas Harrison, Millenarianism, Fifth Monarchism and the English Revolution, 1616–1660 (Farnham, 2014), pp. 84–87, 89, 92–93.

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Ireton, in searching God, also hoped for an impact on the ‘poor deluded Popish people of this Nation’. Ireton saw them as ‘captivated and kept in miserable darkness and bondage by their seducing Priests and Leaders’. The ‘Priests and Leaders’, not the ‘deluded Popish people’, had to be made sensible of the great weight of so much crying innocent Blood, whereof (as principals or participants) they generally stand guilty … and of their continued abominable Treachery towards all that concur not with them in their own Superstitions, Idolatry and affected Ignorance, or indeed that worship not the Beast as they do. Ireton felt, as one of the godly, a duty to bring the ‘deluded’ Irish to the ‘true light’ for there remained, through ‘his’ God, salvation for the ‘deluded’. Such was the ‘eminent and glorious hand of God, exalted so consciously and constantly every where against them’ that if ‘they may take shame and confusion to themselves and their Idols, and give glory to the living God, and (if possible) the wrath of God may be appeased towards them, and not utterly destroy them and their Nation’. Ireton reinforced the need of the ‘deluded’ to have ‘their eyes opened’ to his ‘living God’, stressing that the godly needed to be examples as ‘instruments’. They should ‘walk towards them and amongst them, both in word and life, as not to give them occasion of further offence, or stumbling at the Gospel we profess’. Ireton’s Declaration reinforces the depth and public nature of his profession of what he regarded as a godly cause. Alongside his other statements, writings and contemporary accounts of him it reinforces the impression that Ireton saw himself primarily as a godly warrior engaged in a struggle with the forces of the ‘Beast’, specifically the ‘Priests and Leaders’ in Ireland.44 Yet faced by the next phase of conquest and plague Ireton’s self-reflection led him further in constructing a settlement than Cromwell could envisage before his departure. III Ireton’s conduct of war and the terms he agreed with those surrendering to him reinforce the message of his Declaration. Harsh, within the confines of typical behaviour during England’s Second Civil War, and brutal towards Irish ‘Priests and Leaders’, Ireton nevertheless sought pragmatic agreement with the majority to progress settlement. Ireton’s nine letters to General 44 Declaration … of the Deputy-General of Ireland, p. 9.

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Preston while laying siege to Waterford in July 1650 show Ireton’s contempt for the leaders of resistance and his self-image as one of the ‘despised’ godly New Model who represented, and would enact, God’s will.45 Ireton, in Ireland as in England, argued that although a despised minority this merely confirmed the army’s godliness which victory would reinforce.46 Ireton argued that ‘being assured the more you do, from such a Principle, despise us, and the more we were despicable, as to Man, the more will God appear to pull down the Proud, and honour himself in doing it, by the Despised’.47 Ireton hoped that ‘the power of God may appear in our dispised weaknesses, against the pride of men’.48 His words reinforce the centrality of his self-image and self-reflection on his unworthiness that was a key feature of his and New Model millenarianism. Ireton’s desire to move to a post-conflict settlement – for example, the process of removal of local populations – is clear in his terms at Waterford on 6 August 1650.49 Aware of the dangers of troops reforming after they had surrendered, Ireton demanded that they should leave their arms and return to civilian life or leave Ireland. On 12 August 1650, Ireton wrote from Waterford of his softening of his original terms. This was ‘the beginnings of his attempts to develop a comprehensive longer-term strategy for pacifying and settling’.50 In September 1650, Ireton illustrated his negative view of the Irish but also the scope for adapting terms to move towards a settlement. Ireton saw them as a ‘people mark’d out to destruction (by the Lord) for their cruelty and bloudinesse’ and although ‘they stand out in Rebellion against us, we are spoiling & destroying of them’ but ‘as soon as they come into Contribution and Protection with us’ then ‘their very sonnes, brothers, and kinsmen, they spoile and ruine them’ so that the ‘woe in Isa.33.1 is perfectly befallen them’.51 45 Edmund Borlase, The history of the Irish Rebellion (Dublin, 1743), appendix, p. 32. Ireton’s nine letters are: 1 July 1650 (p. 320); 23 July 1650 (pp. 34–36); 25 July 1650 (pp. 36–38); 27 July 1650 (p. 39); 28 July 1650 (pp. 40–41); 30 July 1650 (pp. 42); 30 July 1650 (p. 43); 30 July 1650 (pp. 43–44); 31 July 1650 (p. 45). Ireton, as with his other letters in Ireland, uses no title. 46 Gentles, New Model Army, pp. 99–100. 47 History of the Irish Rebellion, appendix, p. 39. 48 Thomason Tracts, E.778(23). Severall proceedings in Parliament, 22–29 Aug. 1650, p. 692. 49 Cunningham, Conquest, pp. 15–16; History of the Irish Rebellion, appendix, pp. 32–33. 50 Severall proceedings in Parliament, 22–29 Aug. 1650, pp. 710–711; Cunningham, Conquest, p. 16. 51 Thomason Tracts, E.614[12]. Mercurius Politicus, No. 19 (10–17 Oct. 1650), p. 313.

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On 27 December 1650 and 7 February 1651, Ireton wrote to the President of the Council of State enclosing a paper of proposals for expelling the inhabitants from Waterford, Wexford, Kilkenny and other towns and planting them with English. These derived from Propositions by Colonel Richard Lawrence.52 Ireton would have known Lawrence from Lawrence’s post as commissary of provisions in the Eastern Association in 1643 and subsequently in the New Model. Cromwell had known Lawrence’s brother Henry since at least 1631.53 Richard Lawrence arrived in Ireland in 1649 as marshal-general of horse. A published religious radical, Lawrence became one of the leading Baptists in Ireland linked to Ireton’s foot regiment chaplain, Thomas Patient.54 Lawrence, like Ireton, argued that Irish Catholics, responsible for bloodshed since 1641, ‘remained a danger’ and ‘deserved punishment’.55 In 1651, Ireton appointed Lawrence Governor of Waterford, to enact the Propositions.56 Ireton, given his approval of the Propositions, his authorship of key army documents and his knowledge of Lawrence, probably helped shape the Propositions. Ireton’s plans for plantation have been seen as ‘ambitious’ and ‘premature’, but also ‘provided further indications of what was to follow’.57 For Morrill, Ireton’s support of Lawrence placed him at odds with Cromwell, given the 1655–1656 ‘fierce pamphlet exchanges between Vincent Gookin (Cromwell’s confidant while in Ireland) and Colonel Lawrence (brought to Ireland by Henry Ireton)’.58 These pamphlet 52 For Ireton’s letter, see Zachary Grey, An impartial examination of … Mr. Daniel Neal’s History of the Puritans, 4 vols (London, 1734–1739), vol. 4, appendix 47, pp. 78–80; Historical Manuscripts Commission, 13th Report, p. 550. For Ireton’s proposals, see Commons Journal, vi. 546; Thomason Tracts, E.1061[39]. Propositions approved of and granted by the Deputy-General of Ireland to Colonel Richard Laurence (London, 1650); Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, pp. 53–54. 53 Timothy Venning, ‘Lawrence, Henry, appointed Lord Lawrence under the protectorate (1600–1664), politician’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. https:// doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/16178 (accessed 22 Feb. 2019). 54 Richard Lawrence, The Wolf Stript (London, 1647); Richard Lawrence, The Anti-Christian Presbyter (London, 1647); John Cunningham, ‘Divided Conquerors: The Rump Parliament, Cromwell’s Army and Ireland’, English Historical Review 129 (2014), pp. 830–861 (see p. 836). 55 Richard Lawrence, The interest of England in the Irish transplantation, stated (Dublin, 1655); Richard Lawrence, England’s great interest in the well planting of Ireland with English people, discussed (1656). 56 Propositions approved of and granted by the Deputy-General of Ireland. 57 Cunningham, Conquest, p. 17. 58 John Morrill, ‘Cromwell, Parliament, Ireland and a Commonwealth in Crisis: 1652 Revisited’, Parliamentary History 30.2 (2011), pp. 193–214.

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exchanges took place four years after Ireton’s death. Lawrence, in his response to Gookin, indicated that, despite their differences, they still had much in common.59 In October 1654, nearly three years after Ireton’s death, Cromwell, as Protector, appointed Lawrence to oversee transportation to Connaught. In his letter of 27 December 1650 from Waterford, Ireton showed how he had to face the practical issues of the post-Cromwell phase of conquest and attempted to proceed to a settlement. Ireton outlined his concern that English forces were stretched too thinly across a ‘Multitude of Guarrisons’ even ‘though wee manne them very weakly’. This was especially so in ‘the Townes we have gained’ as ‘the Inhabitants being all Irish, or else Old English, (made as much our Enemies by their Religion, and as ill to bee trusted as the other)’. For Ireton, the practical issue of exploiting Ireland needed consideration, for ‘if the Irish should be put out of them before the English be in to looke to them [they] would be purposely spoyled by the Irish’. Ireton argued that they were ‘absolutely free to cast out upon reasonable Warneing’ the Irish, apart from where they were bound by terms, a matter of honour for the New Model.60 Ireton reflected on honour in one of his letters to Preston. Ireton’s self-image as part of a despised minority but with faith that God would ensure their victory is clear, for his enemies had ‘through the Power of God, and his just Hand, been brought to stoop and fall as low as Dirt, even by such despicable Instruments as we are here’.61 Ireton stressed that ‘I am not moved, nor weigh any Men the more for such Ostentation’.62 Ireton informed Waterford’s citizens that they could be removed with 30 days’ notice. For Ireton, the ‘Irish’ and the ‘Papists’ should be removed and be replaced with the godly. He suggested a focus on towns ‘most fit for trading, to be planted (if God see it good) with a Generation of his People’. Ireton stressed the economic benefits of planting selected towns to ‘free [men] for other Service abroad’.63 Ireton had considered the mechanics of plantation and ‘knowing no better nor other Way to effect that, I have fallen upon the Proposal of the Way, and the Termes your Lordship will 59 John Cunningham, ‘The Gookin–Lawrence Pamphlet Debate and Transplantation in Cromwellian Ireland’, in C. Breathnach, L. Chambers, C. Lawless and A. McElligott (eds), Power in History: From the Medieval to the Post-Modern World (Dublin, 2011), pp. 63–80. 60 Cunningham, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the “Cromwellian” Settlement of Ireland’, p. 924. 61 History of the Irish Rebellion, appendix, p. 42. 62 History of the Irish Rebellion, appendix, p. 42. 63 Grey, An impartial examination, vol. 4, appendix 47, pp. 78–80.

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find expressed in the inclosed Paper’, a reference to Lawrence’s Propositions he had authorised. Ireton wanted the ‘speedy’ planting of a ‘Regiment’, having ‘made as good as Choyce of a Collonel as possibly as I could’, i.e., Lawrence. With regard to the rest of the officers, Ireton was ‘confident they will be all sober and good Christians’. It is possible that there had been some element of nomination, for Ireton referred to them ‘being selected out of severall Partes with respect to their Acquaintance and Interest with good People in all Partes’.64 Typically, Ireton had begun the process so that ‘those that are employed may have something at present to show, wherewith to possesse and prepare their Acquaintance, that incline to such a Thinge’.65 Cook wrote that Ireton argued that ‘halfe worke is not pleasing to God’.66 Perhaps as a reflection of his distrust of parliament, but also of his dynamism, Ireton suggested his actions could be confirmed, ‘without troubling the Parliament particularly about it’.67 The Propositions were approved and Ireton suggested the use of troops raised in England as planters but also as a guard for Waterford, Ross and Carrick.68 A January 1651 newspaper report indicates that displacement had begun.69 In May 1651, Ireton was with Lawrence in Waterford.70 On 7 February 1651, Ireton informed the President of the Council of State that his steady progress represented a significant advance of English interests, for ‘God has been pleased to blesse our poor Endeavours with such a series of graduall Successes as have amounted (in the Summe and Issue) to a considerable advancing of your Interest in this Dominion’.71 A pamphlet of 1652 similarly argued that ‘Greater achievements, and acquisitions then these, were scarce ever made any where by any Generall in one summer’.72 For Ireton, God would focus them on the good of ‘his People’ rather than personal glory. Ireton indicated his approval of the Parliamentary Commissioners selected to work with him on 2 July 1650 and who arrived in Ireland in January 1651.73 64 Grey, An impartial examination, vol. 4, appendix 47, pp. 78–80. 65 Grey, An impartial examination, vol. 4, appendix 47, pp. 78–80. 66 Cook, Monarchy no Creature, sig. M1r. 67 Grey, An impartial examination, vol. 4, appendix 47, pp. 78–80. 68 Propositions approved of and granted by the Deputy-General of Ireland. 69 Mercurius politicus, No. 33 (16–23 Jan. 1651), p. 550. 70 Thomason Tracts, E.785[31]. A perfect diurnall of some passages in Parliament, and from other parts of this kingdome, 19–26 May 1651, p. 1048. 71 Grey, An impartial examination, vol. 4, appendix 47, pp. 80–82. 72 ESTC (Wing (CD-ROM, 1996), P3249A). The present posture, and condition of Ireland (1652), pp. 4–5. 73 Grey, An impartial examination, vol. 4, appendix 47, pp. 80–82.

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IV In March 1651, over a year after Cromwell’s Declaration of January 1650, Ireton sought to put the settlement on a more permanent basis by drawing up qualifications to categorise those with whom they sought settlement. He had discussed qualifications with the Commissioners in January 1651.74 The process of classification was ‘thoroughly familiar to Englishmen’.75 Ireton had done this in England with Lambert in their terms at Truro, Exeter and Oxford, and their 1647 Heads of Proposals.76 Described as ‘Ireton’s text’, the ‘Draft of the Act on the Qualifications of Pardon for Ireland’ saw Ireton create five categories of those exempt from pardon reinforcing his focus on ‘Priests and Leaders’.77 Ireton also drafted four clauses linked to allegiance to the English republic and more specifically focused on the practicalities of a land settlement. Targeting the leaders of resistance by its focus on land ownership, the fourth additional clause indicated those, with limited land, would, essentially, be left alone if they were not in arms. On 24 March 1651, Ireton and the Parliamentary Commissioners wrote to the Council of State in support of Ireton’s Qualifications as ‘an inducement to a general laying down of arms and surrendering of garrisons by the enemy’. They would let those ‘manifesting their affection to live under the protection and government of the Parliament … knowe what assurance they shall have for the enjoyment of their religion, lives, libertyes and estates’, without which ‘the war will be much lengthened and made very burthensome to England’ through the need to supply ‘until the land can be competently planted’. Ireton’s Qualifications were so ‘that the justice and mercy of the Parliament might be extended to all the people here’, although ‘in some measure proportionable to theire respective demerits’. They therefore included the ‘inclosed qualification’ for Parliamentary consideration but that ‘nothing is inserted which relates to their religion (humbly conceiving it more seasonable for the Parliament to declare their pleasure in that particular, when the country is more thoroughly settled’.78 74 Robert Dunlop (ed.), Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2 vols (Manchester, 1913), i. 22, 28–29. 75 S. R. Gardiner, ‘The Transplantation to Connaught’, English Historical Review 14 (1899), pp. 700–734 (see p. 701). 76 Farr, Ireton, pp. 83–90; David Farr, John Lambert: Parliamentary Soldier and Cromwellian Major-General, 1619–1684 (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 39, 57–63; Gardiner, ‘Transplantation to Connaught’, p. 701. 77 Cunningham, Conquest, p. 20; British Library, MS Egerton 1048, ff. 123–129. 78 Gentles, New Model Army, p. 376; C. H. Firth (ed.), The Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, 2 vols (Oxford, 1894), i. 486–488; Dunlop, Ireland under the

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Cook, when commenting on Ireton’s achievements, also indicated the need to qualify those opposed to them ‘between such as have been active in the beginning or prosecution of the Rebellion, and such as have only had their hearts, and not in their heads in it’.79 On 14 April 1651, the Council reported Ireton’s letter to parliament.80 On 2 May, parliament referred the letter back.81 On 1 July 1651, the Commissioners informed the Council that many Irish had ‘made application to the Lord Deputy’ to ‘know the Parliament’s resolution concerning them’ and that without this they ‘are easily induced to believe that severity will be used towards them’.82 After Ireton’s death, the Commissioners requested ‘a Commandr in cheife in this Nation’ and ‘what Qualifications the Parliamt shall please to hold forth to the Irish, hath bene longe expected and much desired’.83 It was not until 18 May 1652 that the Council reported the names of the Irish to be excepted from pardon. It was only in August 1652 that an Act for Settling of Ireland, incorporating Ireton’s Qualifications, was passed with Ireton’s ‘actual wording’.84 V Ireton’s March 1651 Qualifications and parliament’s delay in ratifying them was probably a context for the anonymous 1652 The present posture, and condition of Ireland. This sought a Parliamentary declaration of qualifications for the Irish so progress could be made with planting which ‘may prove as difficult, hazardous, expencefull, and tedious, as the war itself’.85 The author argued that ‘if the Lord Deputy Ireton were now living, he would testifie amply to these things’.86 The purpose of Ireton’s Qualifications underpins ­Commonwealth, i. 28–29; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 56, f. 253, ‘The Commissioners from Kilkenny to the Council of State, 24 Mar. 1651’. 79 Cook, Monarchy no Creature. 80 Calendar of State Papers Domestic (1651), p. 147. 81 Calendar of State Papers Domestic (1651), p. 175. 82 Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, i. 7. 83 Bodleian Library, Tanner MS 55, f. 112, Commissioners from Kilkenny Castle to Lenthall, 9 Jan. 1652; Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, i. 114. 84 British Library, Egerton MS 1048, f. 130; C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait (eds), Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660, 3 vols (London, 1911), ii. 722–753; Eamon Darcy, The Irish Rebellion of 1641 and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, Royal Historical Society Studies in History (Woodbridge, 2013), p. 149; Morrill, ‘Cromwell, Parliament, Ireland’, p. 204. 85 Present posture, pp. 2, 9. 86 Present posture, p. 14.

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the argument of Present posture that ‘before some such Declaration made publick to the Irish there is no hopes of planting safely’.87 The content of Present posture suggests someone with first-hand experience of Ireland. Francis Neile printed Present posture. In 1652, Neile also printed The cheif affairs of Ireland, written by Ireton’s ‘client’ Henry Parker, in which Parker justified Ireton’s proceedings in Ireland. The full title of Parker’s work indicates he sought, like Ireton and the author of Present posture, to convince parliament to progress planting.88 Neile had worked for Robert Bostock, Parker’s ‘usual publisher’, for at least 12 pamphlets from 1641 to 1648. Neile printed Parker’s 1648 Of a free trade for Bostock before printing himself Parker’s 1650 A letter of due censure and Parker’s 1651 Scotland’s holy war.89 Was Parker involved in Neile’s Present posture? Present posture’s author stressed the progress made by Ireton: ‘this last Summer, we shall find almost miraculous advantages extorted from the Irish, by the rare wisdom and gallantry of that noble Cheiftain’.90 ‘Col: Laurences propositions’ were also referenced.91 The author recognised the fundamental link between the military campaign and consequent settlement, for ‘where the Souldier ends one work, the Planter together with the Souldier must immediately begin another’.92 Ireland was to be exploited as a conquered country but English rule would benefit Ireland, for ‘we aim not at a meer Empire over them, but an incorporation with them’.93 Whereas ‘in the stiril soil of Scotland we seek the disabling of an Enemie that we may thereby secure England; but in the rich soil of Ireland we aim at founding of new English Colonies, and thereby of inlarging England’. England should exploit Ireland for economic benefit for they had ‘fought to make Ireland English’ and ‘afford us some compensation’ for ‘all our blood and treasure’.94 Furthermore, ‘the prize we strive for in Ireland doubles, yea trebles the value of that in Scotland’.95 Ireton himself wanted Ireland ‘rendred more English’.96 For the author of Present 87 Present posture, p. 14. 88 Parker, Cheif affairs. 89 Thomason Tracts, E.603[14]. Henry Parker, A letter of due censure, and redargution (London, 1650), p. 421; Henry Parker, Scotland’s holy war (London, 1650). 90 Present posture, pp. 4–5. 91 Present posture, p. 10. 92 Present posture, p. 13. 93 Present posture, pp. 19–20. 94 Present posture, p. 7. 95 Present posture, p. 12. 96 A letter from the Lord Deputy-General of Ireland, unto the Honorable William Lenthal Esq (London, 1651), pp. 7–8.

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posture the Irish had to ‘renounce those impious principles of Religion’.97 Underpinning all of this, in line with Ireton’s thinking, would be retribution for ‘the Authors of this Rebellion’ and ‘the general defilement of blood, which has overflowed the Land’. But clear qualifications for the Irish would allow this to be done ‘judicially’ against ‘the principall authors’. God did not want ‘the exterpation of whole communities’ and the ‘planting in Ireland amongst and together with the Irish may stand with piety’.98 As with Lawrence’s Propositions, Ireton’s own ideas about planting and his Qualifications there was recognition in Present posture about the brutality of planting if it was to succeed: for ‘it must not be by Treaties, or parlies, but by terror and strength of hands’.99 VI On 15 July 1651, Ireton wrote at length with regard to God’s favour in the light of heavy losses before Limerick. For Ireton, ‘God hath taught us also (in dreadful language) who it was that gave us passage over this River, by his out-stretched arme’. He reflected negatively on ‘this insolent enemy’ that ‘blaspheming against our God with sacrifycing to their owne’.100 Again there was a self-perception as a despised but godly minority and an increasingly embittered view of the enemy. While this led to a determination to deal brutally with those regarded as responsible it also drove a desire to achieve a settlement. Ireton’s final Limerick terms of October 1651 reflect the pragmatism of his March Qualifications. Ireton declared no pardon or protection for those involved in the 1641 Rebellion, members of the first Confederate Assembly and any Catholic priests. He qualified this by giving these three groups protection for a certain time. In all, 22 individuals were excepted, including Governor O’Neill, two bishops and a priest.101 When considering the extent of mercy Ireton argued that ‘Ireland being a conquered country, the English nation might with justice assert their right of conquest’.102 Ireton wanted O’Neill to die for the ‘blood formerly shed at Clonmel’, where O’Neill was ‘governour’.103 This should be seen 97 Present posture, pp. 12, 21. 98 Present posture, pp. 8, 9, 19. 99 Present posture, p. 31. 100 Sad news from Ireland (London, 1651): Thomason Tracts, E.638[13]. pp. 5–6. 101 Firth, Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, i. 287; Gentles, New Model Army, p. 379. 102 Firth, Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, i. 288–289. 103 Firth, Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, i. 288.

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in the broader context of Ireton’s supposed comment to a leader of the 1648 Colchester siege before execution that ‘Know, your self as all others that engage a second time against the Parliament are traitors and rebells, and they doe employ us as soldiers by authority from them to suppresse and destroy’.104 The executions carried out at Limerick were in line with Ireton’s actions in England.105 On 3 November 1651, after Limerick’s surrender, Ireton further expressed his thoughts with regard to settlement. The native population that posed a threat would be removed and English planters settled. He intended ‘speedily to clear the place of a multitude of People that are most dangerous (either in Quality or Infection) and by degrees it may be rendred more English’. While seeking ‘Ministers’ to ‘finde opportunity of Planters’ Ireton believed there were ‘Inhabitants’ whose ‘carriage all along towards the English People and Interest’ might deserve their ‘admittance to continue here’ and even ‘favourable dealing in point of their Estates’.106 This pragmatic approach to settlement again shows Ireton’s need to deal with realities; Ireland was not a ‘white paper’. Justice was required for the ‘first Rebellion and Murthers’. Exceptions from articles of surrender, by necessity, meant some accommodation. The conditions of war and the process of planting necessitated compromise with the population that might also divide their opponents and facilitate settlement. Ireton’s focus on priests and those in arms is again evident in his 7 November 1651 letter to the Mayor and Council of Galway. Ireton was not prepared to extend ‘mercy and favour’ to ‘the original authors of the rebellion’.107 Ireton again made a distinction with regard to the leaders of resistance and priests and those they had under their influence. Ireton argued that they ‘should not be overmastered by an hungry, starving soldiery’ but ‘the multitude of priests’ were the ‘incendiaries of blood and mischief’ who with ‘other desperate persons (engaged upon their principles in the beginning of this rebellion and in the murders and outrages therein committed)’. Yet the leaders of Galway ‘by your reception and protection of them’ were ‘in the same guilt’ and thus ‘doomed to partake with them in the same plagues’.108 For Ireton the priests and leaders were responsible as ‘they can prevail to overpower and deceive you’ and thus ‘engage you as deep and render 1 04 Farr, Ireton, p. 128. 105 Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, i. 86, 92. 106 Letter from the Lord Deputy-General, pp. 7–8. 107 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Ormond, i. 226. 108 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Ormond, i. 227.

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you as desperate as themselves’ to ‘maintain and protect them and their broken and wicked interests’.109 Ireton’s notion of blood guilt should be seen in the broader context of his November 1648 Remonstrance. Mercy would be shown to those who deserved it, but for those who did not God demanded ‘severity’.110 The executions of the leaders of resistance after Limerick was in line with this.111 Gardiner questioned the notion of a ‘Cromwellian’ settlement. Cunningham rightly placed emphasis on Ireton as the real architect of an ‘Iretonian’ settlement. For Morrill, the ‘Cromwellian settlement’ was precisely a settlement Cromwell ‘did not want’ and Ireton had a very different settlement from Cromwell ‘in mind’. This, as Cunningham has pointed out, does not distinguish between conquest and settlement.112 Ireton’s death does not allow us to see how he would have adapted his position, so any projection of what Ireton’s position would have been from his stance in 1651 is problematic. What happened in Ireland under Cromwell as Protector, especially initially, was a continuation of the displacement and resettlement under Ireton. Gardiner, while questioning the notion of a ‘Cromwellian’ settlement, argued that it was ‘accepted by Cromwell himself’.113 The distancing of Cromwell from the Iretonian settlement should be seen in the context of Cromwell having left Ireland, his political approach and the knowledge of his later conservatism rather than his own relatively undefined position in 1650–1651, or a fundamentally different approach from Ireton’s in 1651. The language both men employed indicated that the Irish should expect to observe the rule and religion imposed on them as God’s judgement. Ireton, in drawing up plans for future plantation, made no distinction between the Old English and the Irish because of their Catholicism. He argued that the Old English were ‘made as much our Enemies by their Religion, and as ill to bee trusted as the other’.114 Nothing in what Ireton wrote indicates he deviated substantially from the 1 09 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Ormond, i. 227. 110 Thomason Tracts, E.472[3]. A remonstrance or declaration of the Army (20 Nov. 1648); Historical Manuscripts Commission, Ormond, i. 227. 111 Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, i. 86, 92. In 1663, the son of James Galway argued that his father was ‘cruelly murdered by the traitor Ireton’. G. Tallon (ed.), Court of Claims: Submissions and Evidence, 1663 (Dublin, 2006), p. 327. 112 Gardiner, ‘Transplantation to Connaught’, p. 707; Cunningham, Conquest, pp. 152–153; Morrill, ‘Cromwell, Parliament, Ireland’, pp. 193, 204. 113 Gardiner, ‘Transplantation to Connaught’, p. 708. 114 Grey, An impartial examination, vol. 4, appendix 47, pp. 78–80.

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views expressed in Cromwell’s Declaration, itself ‘part of the mainstream of English colonising thought’.115 The purpose of Cromwell’s Declaration was to counter the argument of the leaders of the Catholic Church that he had come to Ireland to ‘extirpate the Catholic religion’ and thereby reduce resistance and divide those they faced by offering the prospect of compromise. It did not outline the details of any settlement. A year later, the purpose of Ireton’s Qualifications was to deal with the realities on the ground and start the construction of a settlement. It sought the same isolation of priests and leaders of resistance as Cromwell’s Declaration but by their nature in outlining the mechanics of settlement Ireton’s Qualifications were more defined than the propaganda of Cromwell’s Declaration. Ireton’s formalising of a potential settlement was still reflective of Cromwell’s distinction between those they both held responsible and the deluded masses. By seeking to codify this Ireton simply made the reality of Cromwell’s generalities more obvious in its implications for the Irish. Why settlement was Iretonian rather than Cromwellian also came down to their different characters and approach to politics (and Ireton being in Ireland when conquest was moving to settlement) rather than a fundamentally different attitude to Ireland in 1651. Ireton had to deal with the practicalities of settlement. This also mirrors their respective roles in the politics of the New Model. Cromwell’s pragmatic view and at times hesitancy contrasted with Ireton’s focus on details and action.116 In 1648, Ireton produced his Remonstrance and organised Pride’s Purge while Cromwell remained in Yorkshire.117 Ireton as Cromwell’s ‘second self’, very much like the idea of an Irish ‘Cromwellian’ settlement, owes too much to Leveller bitterness and Cromwell’s post-1653 prominence, which subsequently imprinted him as the dominant figure of the English Revolution.118 Ireton was always more than Cromwell’s ‘second self’ and in Ireland had even more latitude but also the need to take action. Just before Ireton’s death the Commissioners informed Ireton that this ‘is the hardest pinch of want your affairs have been under since your Lordship came to Ireland’.119 A well-connected insider informed Cromwell of how stretched Ireton was by the demands placed on him as commander of the army and 1 15 Carlin, ‘Extreme or Mainstream?’, pp. 222–223. 116 ‘Ireton, Henry’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 117 Farr, Ireton, p. 183; Ian Gentles, Oliver Cromwell: God’s Warrior and the English Revolution (Basingstoke, 2011), p. 75. 118 J. S. Morrill, ‘Introduction: Cromwell redivivus’, in Jane A. Mills (ed.), Cromwell’s Legacy (Manchester, 2012), p. 1. 119 Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, i. 80.

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chief administer. It was speculated how he ‘is not madd as a March hare with the endless inculcation of business, which from morning to morning agayne, he labours under. The pen, tongue, head, or both, or all, being incessantly at worke’.120 Once the settlement was drafted, Cromwell as Protector after December 1653 adapted and worked with it to his changing agenda. It has been argued that ‘in essence he had no ideas of his own’, others drew up the details and then found Cromwell undermining them as he repositioned himself.121 Cromwell was not the architect or driving force but was taken along by others and only intervened directly when he needed to so as to shape matters in line with his moving agenda as an ‘ideological schizophrenic’.122 He was also a ruthless politician, ‘with a confident lack of scruple’, more than ready to jettison previous allies.123 Rather than see Cromwell’s political plasticity over Ireland as Protector representing a fundamental difference with Ireton’s 1651 draft settlement, it can be seen in the context of Cromwell’s political approach since the New Model’s politicisation through to his acceptance of the Nominated Assembly, Instrument of Government, the Major Generals or the Humble Petition and Advice. There were, however, potential political differences between Ireton and Cromwell. Some sought, even later, to exploit these. John Owen’s sermon at Ireton’s funeral had the task of ‘recusing’ Ireton’s ‘reputation’ from ‘vituperative criticism’. Owen, who had served in Ireland for six months as Cromwell’s chaplain, produced a sermon that ‘developed a reading of Ireton’s virtues that confirmed republican modes of heroic description’.124 Others subsequently produced hagiographic praises.125 On 2 December 1651, Ludlow, now the leading Commissioner and about to be appointed Commander-in-Chief, wrote to the Council of the need to replace Ireton. On the same day, Ludlow also wrote to Cromwell. Ludlow, indicating 120 Nickolls, Original letters, p. 17. 121 Farr, Lambert, pp. 137–138; C. Durston, Cromwell’s Major Generals: Godly Government during the English Revolution (Manchester, 2001), pp. 22–24; Hutton, Debates, pp. 112–113. 122 Blair Worden, The Rump Parliament, 1648–1653 (Cambridge, 1974), p. 69. 123 Hutton, Debates, pp. 109, 114. 124 Sean Kelsey, Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649–53 (Manchester, 1997), pp. 54, 91; John Owen, The labouring saints dismission to rest; a sermon preached at the funeral of the Right Honourable Henry Ireton lord deputy of Ireland (London, 1652); Crawford Gribben, John Owen and English Puritanism: Experiences of Defeat (New York, 2016), p. 135. 125 British Library, Add. MS 28602, MEMORIÆ Sacra or Offertures unto the fragrant memory of the Right Honourable Henry Ireton (late) Lord Deputy of Ireland (1652).

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his republicanism and perhaps in the knowledge of the Rump’s imminent move against Cromwell’s title as Lord Lieutenant, related that during ‘discourse with the Lord Deputy in his lifetime, we found his opinion was that presidents of provinces were an unnecessary burthen to the state and country’.126 Ludlow, with his republican agenda, also wrote that ‘we are sure the Lt.-General is so self-denying a gentleman, that he will with more cheerfulness lay it down than he now takes it up, when it shall seem so good to the wisdom of the Parliament or your Excellency’.127 The republicanism of some leading officers around Ireton may also be seen in John Vernon’s reference to him as ‘Deputy General’ rather than Lord General. Ireton himself had shown himself to be more anti-monarchical in the process leading to regicide than Cromwell.128 In his Declaration, Ireton used his official title of Deputy-General. There is a mix of the use of the terms Lord Deputy and Deputy-General, including both within single documents in records from Ireton’s time in Ireland. For example, in the printed version of Ireton’s letter to Lenthall of 3 November 1651 Ireton is referred to as Lord Deputy in the main title but then as Deputy-General in the sub-title. Ireton adds no title to his signature on the actual letter.129 Ireton seems to have had little interest in titles or awards but politically (as in the case of the Rump’s removal of Cromwell’s title of Lord Lieutenant and Lambert’s as Lord Deputy) they had significance.130 The political tension caused by titles and the reality of who held real power is suggested in the Representation of the Officers in Ireland against John Weaver.131 From differing perspectives both Clarendon and Algernon Sidney believed that Ireton may have opposed Cromwell’s elevation to Protector.132 As with potential differences over the direction of settlement in Ireland, without more direct evidence from Ireton care is needing in projecting how he would have reacted to the Rump’s removal of Cromwell’s title or indeed Cromwell’s elevation to Protector. Ireton never seems to have used any title when signing off his letters in Ireland.133 On 10 July 1651, Ireton, with other leading officers in Ireland, wrote to Cromwell with the army 126 Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, i. 94–95. 127 Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, i. 94–95. 128 Nickolls, Original letters, pp. 69–70. 129 A Letter from the Lord Deputy-General. 130 Morrill, ‘Cromwell, Parliament, Ireland’; Farr, Lambert, pp. 111–120. 131 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Portland, i. 671. 132 Farr, Ireton, pp. 244–245. 133 Many letters have not survived, but during his time in Ireland Ireton did not use any title in his manuscript letters to which we still have access.

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in Scotland to warn him to remember ‘Hezekiah’s sin and judgment’ and ‘take heed of makeing it yours’.134 On 25 August 1651, the Commissioners requested an amendment to Ireton’s March Qualifications to give Ireton more discretion in implementing them, as ‘much is changed since the time the Qualifications were first agreed on and presented’. The Commissioners made clear that the Qualifications were a means to end the war and to begin settlement, and as such should be open to adaptation by Ireton.135 Care is needed when making distinctions between what Ireton was putting in place in 1651, which he recognised would need adaptation, and what Cromwell later sought as Protector. While it is right to view the initial terms as ‘Ireton’s settlement’ more than Cromwell’s, it is clear that if he had lived Ireton would have sought further adaptation to enable successful English control, settlement and exploitation of Ireland. He would have done so with the self-confidence brought by his continuous self-reflection and in the strength of his personal and working relationship with Cromwell. Cromwell appears to have taken no action or expressed any opposition to Ireton’s March 1651 Qualifications. If Ireton had lived and continued in Ireland, whether there would have been increasing tension with his father-in-law’s accommodation (as was to be the case with Ireton’s replacement, the ‘milksop’ Fleetwood, until he too, like Harrison and Lambert, was ‘winnowed’ and replaced with Henry Cromwell as Cromwell sought more ‘civilian’ solutions) can only be speculated on. Even Henry Cromwell struggled with his father’s policy direction for Ireland. The continuing tensions between Fleetwood and Henry Cromwell also show that Cromwell’s style of rule led to a lack of clarity no matter whom he worked with.136 Cromwell was essentially a negotiator and ‘coalition builder’ and his position on Ireland was shaped by this as he sought settlement in England. ‘Cromwell’s love of consensus reached by discussion is connected to another aspect of his nature to which less attention has been drawn by historians: that in essence he had no ideas of his own’.137 There was more depth to Ireton than Harrison and 134 Nickolls, Original letters, p. 74; Worden, ‘Achan’, p. 47. For an examination of the use of Hezekiah’s sin in the self-image of some New Model officers, see David Farr, Major-General Hezekiah Haynes and the Failure of Oliver Cromwell’s Godly Revolution, 1594–1704 (London, 2020). 135 Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, i. 29. 136 Hutton, Debates, p. 128. For an examination of this, see Farr, Haynes. 137 Hutton, Debates, pp. 112, 114; Derek Hirst, ‘Security and Reform in England’s Other Nations, 1649–1658’, in Michael J. Braddick (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution (Oxford, 2015), p. 176; J. C. Davis, ‘Oliver Cromwell’, ibid., pp. 226–227, 232–233.

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Fleetwood. He also had a greater personal bond with Cromwell, certainly more so than the talented Lambert. Ireton was more than Cromwell’s ‘second self’, but Cromwell was increasingly, from his victorious return to London from Worcester in September 1651, in a strengthening position and even more able to assert his charismatic power against Ireton if he had lived and had sought a significantly different solution in Ireland than Cromwell was willing to countenance.

Chapter 5

God’s Wall of Brass Cromwell’s Generals in Ireland, 1649–1650 Martyn Bennett

Cromwell’s Generals in Ireland, 1649–1650

Introduction Around 200 people served at general officer rank in Britain and Ireland during the Civil War period (1638–1660). They served in several roles and were appointed for a particular task or range of tasks. Some were powerful magnates chosen for their hoped-for ability to command a vast range of resources – human, economic and materiel. Others had proven their battlefield worth during the wars in continental Europe, and even beyond, in the years before the Civil Wars. This essay assesses the roles of a small number of men selected for a specific task by Oliver Cromwell, both before and during his campaign in Ireland in 1649–1650. By the time Oliver Cromwell landed in Ireland in August 1649, war had raged across the country for almost eight years. Although the series of civil wars across the British Isles had begun in 1639, not one of the other countries had experienced so continuous a period of warfare by this point. It is problematic for study of the period that the war in Ireland had lasted so long before Cromwell’s intervention, and was to last for some years after it, that focus is often on Cromwell’s nine months there, to the expense of the complexity and catastrophic entirety of the war.1 It is also problematic that even within this limited context, the focus is on Cromwell; the others who participated in his campaigns and often went

1 This is exemplified in works such as P. F. Moran’s Historical Sketch of the Persecutions Suffered by the Catholics of Ireland under the Rule of Cromwell and the Puritans (Dublin, 1862) that is almost entirely focused on events before 1649. 135

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on to serve in Ireland afterwards receive much less coverage.2 The purpose of this chapter is to begin to expand our view of these nine months by focusing instead on Cromwell’s generals and putting them into a context which indicates how much these men were products of the wars since 1639, rather than the product of more far-flung conflicts. By 1649, it is probably true to say that the wars across the British Isles had already had cataclysmic results. Apart from the war in Ireland, no fewer than four other wars had been fought. Two brief wars had pitted Scotland against, in theory at least, if not in practice, the other three nations of the Stuart kingdoms. War in Ireland had then followed the October 1641 rebellion. Another war had embraced England and Wales, and eventually Scotland had also been dragged into its maw. In 1648 there was a fourth brief conflict, which whilst largely focused within England and Wales had involved a third Scottish invasion and troops were drawn in from Ireland. The upshot had been the execution of Charles I in Whitehall and a political revolution of far-reaching consequence in the wake of his death. The events which spanned the Irish Sea and North Channel had been inspired by, and had in turn influenced, the war in Ireland. Indeed, it can be argued that the Irish rebellion proved to be a catalyst: for without the need by the Westminster and Edinburgh governments to defeat the Irish rebels in 1642 the wars in England and Wales and the later Scottish involvement may not have happened in the way that they did. The second in command of the New Model Army, Lieutenant General Oliver Cromwell, was appointed to lead the expeditionary force sent by the Commonwealth Council of State in spring 1649; he was given the post of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. The newly created republic had many enemies, within and without its borders. The doubly defeated royalists remained unreconciled to their defeat and some had gone into exile in Ireland with the specific intention of continuing the fight. The Levellers, who contributed so much to the radicalisation of the army and its commanders, had rejected the army’s right to decide the nation’s future and execute the king; they remained a potent source of conflicted loyalty within the army and would shortly lead a mutiny. The Scots had provocatively proclaimed Charles Stuart, Prince of Wales, as the King of Great Britain and the Irish Catholic Confederation had now allied itself with the Marquis of Ormond’s royalists in Ireland and the incoming refugee royalists from England and Wales. Cromwell was confident that as long as parliament 2 Two of the best exceptions to this rule are James Scott Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland (New York, 1999) and Micheál Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (London, 2008).

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continued God’s work He would protect them. ‘He shall find he will be as a wall of brass round about us till we have finished that work he has for us to do’.3 Cromwell set the agenda for the days to come. I had rather be over-run by a Cavalierish interest than a Scotch interest; I had rather be over-run with a Scotch interest than an Irish interest; and I think of all, this is the most dangerous, and if they shall be able to carry on with this work they will make this the most miserable people on earth.4 On 15 August, having dealt with the Leveller-led mutiny at Burford in May, Cromwell took command of the army assembled at Milford Haven, crossed the Irish Sea and landed at Ringsend. The way had been cleared for him by Michael Jones’s spectacular victory at Rathmines, south of Dublin, earlier in the month. The Marquis of Ormond had been attempting to drive a wedge between Dublin and its deep-water harbour at Ringsend as part of an attack on the city itself. The marquis’s defeat and subsequent retreat from Leinster meant that Jones was able to welcome Cromwell into the city. Cromwell was not alone: several other generals accompanied him across the Irish Sea and more would join him, and this essay looks at these other men, focusing on Henry Ireton (1615–1651) and on the three Irish commanders who also served with him, the Lieutenant General of Leinster, Michael Jones (1604/10–1650), Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill (1621–1679) and Charles Coote (1610–1661), who was, like Jones, already fighting in Ireland when Cromwell arrived. The purpose of the chapter is to examine their backgrounds and experience and the way these men worked together, looking at the way they conducted the campaign and the way in which Cromwell was, or was not, inclined to trust them and allow them some degree of independence and initiative in command. Therefore, Cromwell’s knowledge of his chief commanders’ experience and careers will be explored to see how this might have contributed to his attitudes to them. These generals were, like most of the generals from the Civil Wars, young men. After Cromwell, who had marked his fiftieth birthday whilst planning the campaign, Michael Jones was the oldest, at 45, but had been only in his mid-thirties when war broke out in 1639. Ireton was 27 when the wars 3 Jeremiah 1:18 (KJV): ‘For, behold, I have made thee this day a defenced city, and an iron pillar, and brasen walls against the whole land, against the kings of Judah, against the princes thereof, against the priests thereof, and against the people of the land’. 4 Ivan Roots, The Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (London, 1989), p. 7.

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began and just 37 when he went to Ireland. Broghill was very young: just 17 in 1639 and still only 28 when Cromwell persuaded him to join the Irish adventure. Coote, with his mixed experience of war in Ireland, which had several things in common with Broghill’s, had been just 28 when the Bishops’ Wars began and was still only 39 when Cromwell arrived. Two-thirds of the general officers engaged in the Civil Wars as a whole were in their twenties and thirties when the wars began and, in contrast to Cromwell, still largely speaking in the shadows of their fathers in terms of worldly experience. There is no doubt that this collection of God’s instruments, with the sole exception of Henry Ireton, was at best inclusive and at worst riddled with an inconsistent record of loyalties. Not only had none of them except Ireton ever worked with Cromwell before, they had a fairly tangential relationship with the new Commonwealth and its origins. On the face of it, Cromwell’s command structure could be seen as a risk-laden ‘wall of brass’. The Generals By the time Cromwell and his team went to Ireland in 1649, war had been raging in Britain and Ireland on and off for ten years: in Ireland there had been almost continuous fighting for eight years, since the rebellion of October 1641. In the early years of the wars, the initial leaders of the armed forces raised across Britain were veterans of the war on the continent, which was largely concluded after 30 years, just the year before Cromwell landed at Ringsend. Of the English forces that were raised in 1639, 1640 and 1642, the vast majority of the commanding generals were veterans of the Thirty Years War and the Eighty Years’ War that overlapped it. Men like the Parliamentarian lord general the Earl of Essex and Sir Jacob Astley, the king’s major general in 1640 and 1642, had extensive experience stretching back to the 1590s and had fought in both Dutch and Swedish armies during the 1620s and 1630s. This pattern was seen in Ireland too. The veteran generals placed in command of the Confederation of Kilkenny’s armies in the early days of the war of rebellion, Sir Thomas Preston, Owen Roe O’Neill, John Burke and Garret Barry, were also veterans of the continental wars. Some of the early war generals had had as much as 50 years’ experience of warfare dating back to the 1590s. Moreover, the experience was varied: from the Azores to northern Germany, from the wars of Elizabeth against the Spanish to the Eighty Years’ War, and the recently concluded Thirty Years War. They had fought under the masters of the age, the Dutch Prince Maurice and the Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus.

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By contrast, the army Cromwell led to Ireland was different. The generals who accompanied him were not veterans of war on the continent. Cromwell and Ireton were virgin soldiers up until the outbreak of war in England and Wales during the summer of 1642. Broghill was not a continental veteran either, although he had served in the Bishops’ Wars in some obscure capacity. Coote too only had seen similar active service on home soil. Not one of Cromwell’s generals had experience of warfare before the Bishops’ Wars broke out and only half had become involved militarily in the very early stages of the Civil Wars at all. Moreover, these men had a minimal experience of peacetime military command in county lieutenancy or command of Trained Bands forces. The contrast with the older armies was great. None of Cromwell’s men had any pre-Civil War military experience at all and thus all had only seen military service during the recent wars on home turf – in short, over a time period of just nine years at the most. When considered in relationship to the way the wars began, this is a remarkable lack of depth of experience. However, the experience of nine years of warfare is not of little importance; rather it shows that Cromwell’s generals had received their field training at a point when the nature of warfare was in a state of rapid change. Nevertheless, there were other notable contrasts: Cromwell and his commanders were on average just 36 years old when they were appointed to general officer rank whereas the generals appointed early on in the wars were on average about 45 years old. Cromwell was the oldest commander in his team, both in 1649 when he reached 50 and when he had become a general at 44. In the early armies the oldest commanders were possibly Patrick Ruthven, who may have been 69, and Sir Jacob Astley, who was in his early sixties. However, the contrast in age is heightened when looking at their ages when war broke out in 1639 when compared with their predecessors. Even when including Cromwell, aged 40 in 1639, the average was around 30 and still less than 33 when the Civil Wars began in England and Wales in 1642. Other than their recent experience of warfare in Britain and Ireland, Cromwell’s men were inexperienced. For the most part their youth at the beginning of their military careers had largely excluded some of them from holding office. Two had been MPs before the wars and Ireton would become one in the recruiter elections in 1645, but by then he had already held two general officer appointments. Cromwell had been the head of his family since he was 17 and as such had served in urban government and in the 1628 parliament. But even his experience was low key: the higher local and administrative offices in the shrievalty, the lieutenancy or the office of justice of the peace had been closed to Cromwell and his men.

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Coote had assisted his father in the military administration in peacetime Connacht; but even this semi-official role was an exception. The lack of experience in many was simply due to the linked combination of age and of not yet being the head of a family. Office holding was generally undertaken by heads of families, where those families were traditional office holders. Cromwell was the real exception. His family had a tradition of office holding extending back into the previous century. His father and he had been MPs for Huntingdon and sat on the town’s council but Oliver Cromwell had fallen into disgrace in the early 1630s and left his home town for nearby St Ives, where he held, possibly only temporarily, a minor office until the death of his wife’s uncle. His peacetime career was truly only revived in 1640 when he was chosen to run for a parliamentary seat in Cambridge. In terms of education, however, Cromwell’s ‘team’ had form: four of his generals had received post-school education at university, and three of them had been to one of the Inns of Court. This sort of experience would not be so reliant on their age as it was something normally associated with youth. Therefore, both the oldest, Cromwell, and the youngest, Broghill, had been to university. In terms of social status previous to the war it was the youngest of the generals who held a noble title before the war began and only one of them survived to gain one after the Restoration brought an end to the decades of war: Cromwell, Ireton and Jones died before 1660, two of them in Ireland before the war ended. This left just Lord Broghill, who became the first Earl of Orrery in 1660, and Coote, who became the first Lord Mountrath a year later, both having inveigled their way into royal favour despite their Parliamentarian record. Not only is there is a great contrast with the leading generals in Britain but also with the generals who had fought in Ireland since the war had begun. The generals appointed early in the Irish sector had included a range of men on all sides of the conflict who were appointed to general command and had fought on the continent (as may be expected because of their religious persuasion) for the Spanish armies. The initial principal confederate regional or provincial generals were all experienced soldiers and one of them, Garret Barry, was unique in having written on war before the Civil Wars; he had translated Hugo’s Obsidio Bredena in the 1620 and written Discussion of Military Discipline during the 1630s, although others would afterwards. Three had been commanders of Irish brigade tertios in the 1630s: Owen Roe O’Neill, Thomas Preston and Garrett Barry. Barry’s works showed that despite widespread belief that the Spanish tertios were not outdated monoliths compared with the smaller formations favoured by the Dutch and Swedes during the wars, but were capable of some flexibility and were still capable of winning battles. All four of these generals had

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returned from the continent after the rebellion of 1641. Owen Roe O’Neill had been a colonel as early as the 1620s in Spanish service and in the 1630s he had led one of the four Irish tertios in the Spanish forces in Flanders. His compatriots in command of the other tertios included Thomas Preston, who had served as captain under O’Neill in 1605 before becoming a major in the Earl of Tyrconnell’s regiment in the early 1630s and then commanding his own tertio in the middle of the decade. The third commander, Barry, had been in military service since the beginning of the century having served first at sea before taking service in the Spanish armed forces in Flanders, becoming an ensign and then a captain during the 1620s. Similar to the situation in England and Wales, the four were all older at their appointment than Cromwell’s men, most being born in the 1580s, making them men in their late fifties or sixties when they took command in Ireland. By the time Cromwell and his young men arrived Barry was dead and, in any case, had not been actively in command since the cessation of 1643; O’Neill would die shortly after Cromwell’s arrival. Their remaining opponents were likewise of a different calibre from Cromwell’s generals. Cromwell’s opponents in Ireland now comprising not just the long-serving confederate generals but also their new royalist allies like Ormond, were men, some of whom who had been in arms there since the war began and were a very different group from those who had accompanied him. They tended to be older for a start, with four out of the ten whose ages can be determined being in their fifties and sixties when war broke out, and by the time Cromwell arrived those who had survived that long were in their sixties and seventies! However, the picture was mixed. Some had been relatively young in 1639, like Cromwell’s men. Viscount Dillon, the Earl of Ormond and the Earl of Castlehaven were only in their twenties when the Bishops’ Wars began and two were still in their third decade when the rebellion began a couple of years later. Whilst as stated above the commanders had a range of continental experience, their seconds were not so well qualified sometimes, because like Castlehaven they were relatively young at the time. A small number had been involved to some degree in Wentworth’s preparations for the Bishops’ Wars: Lord Taaffe was one of those tasked with trying to recruit members of Wentworth’s army for service abroad. On the other hand, there were some similarities: very few of the Irish generals, chiefly because of being in exile and in military service abroad, had experience of governance or administration; there was just one MP and one justice of the peace amongst them. The same was true of their educational experience outside military training. Cromwell’s men were products of their turbulent times. Unlike many of their opponents

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and their predecessors Cromwell’s men had received what experience they had, like Cromwell himself, during the Civil War period and largely since 1642, without leaving the shores of the British Isles. Cromwell therefore had limited if recent experience to review or analyse when selecting his command team and making use of his seconds. It is no surprise then that some of them, perhaps even Ireton, had to prove their mettle in the field. The Generals in Action Cromwell, even before he had set foot on Irish soil, had to rely on one man he could not select for himself. Lieutenant General Michael Jones’s career as one of Cromwell’s men was to prove brief but eventful. A perfect table of one hundred forty and five victories, which ostensibly is a paean to Cromwell’s time in Ireland, listed Jones’s achievements in the preliminaries to the campaign – before Cromwell arrived and before Jones had been appointed Lieutenant General to the expeditionary force in July 1649 and before it arrived at Ringsend. Perfect table records ten straight victories in a row.5 Jones came from a family with clerical links; he had two Church of Ireland bishops in his family: one was his father, who had been Bishop of Killaloe. Jones received his education at Trinity College and at a London Inn of Court. Like Broghill, Jones had fought for the loyalist, Protestant side in Ireland from 1641, becoming a major in the Earl of Kildare’s Regiment of Foot by 1643, which in its incarnation as Sir Charles Coote’s regiment had fought against the rebels as early as 1641.6 After the Cessation of 1643 he had travelled to Oxford as a representative of Protestant colonists, but within months declined to take up a military position in the royalist forces. He had instead taken up a post in Sir William Brereton’s Regiment of Horse, in Cheshire, serving as Lieutenant Colonel, and by 1645 as the regiment’s colonel.7 In February 1646, he was appointed governor of Chester, but in 1647, after the brief period of Lord Lisle’s deputyship, he left for Ireland, taking on the governorship of Dublin in the wake of Ormond’s departure; he also took command of the Leinster province’s forces, probably with the rank of major-general.8 On 8 August, 5 W. C. Abbott (ed.), The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1937–1947), ii. 141. 6 Sir Charles Coote was the father of General Charles Coote. 7 Alan Marshall, Oliver Cromwell, Soldier: The Military Life of a Revolutionary at War (London, 2004), p. 98. 8 Frank Kitson, Old Ironsides: The Military Biography of Oliver Cromwell (London, 2004), p. 166.

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he defeated the Confederation’s provincial general Sir Thomas Preston at the Battle of Dungan’s Hill only shortly to see the money and resources available to him dry up and cause his campaign to lose momentum.9 Just two years later he defeated Ormond’s army south of the city at Rathmines. Professor Wanklyn considers that Jones was one of only two bright stars in Ireland, Inchiquin being the other, but he also thinks that not only did Rathmines make it possible for Cromwell to land in Dublin Bay but also ensured that he would not fight a large-scale field battle in Ireland. Nor, Wanklyn argues, was Rathmines cataclysmic in itself as it is sometime presented, because once again Jones was unable to exploit the victory and destroy Ormond’s forces.10 Cromwell was presented with Jones as his lieutenant general of horse in the expeditionary force and thus he became the Lord Lieutenant’s second in command. In this role he led the advance guard of the expeditionary forces as it headed towards Drogheda. Even after Jones’s promotion to the post, Cromwell had not finalised his command structure. There is a possibility that he seems to have had second thoughts about Ireton being appointed major general and on 10 September, whilst outside Drogheda, he tried to persuade an older soldier, the 50-year-old Robert Blake, to leave the navy, to which he had been appointed general-at-sea the previous February, and take up the role of major general of foot in the expeditionary force.11 Parliament offered Blake a free choice, but he stayed at sea. Only then did Ireton, a Nottinghamshire man, become the field army’s major general. Ireton had begun the war as a troop captain under Sir Charles White in early 1643. It is unclear how he actually met Cromwell, but it was probably in or around May 1643 when Cromwell was pressing the East Midlands Parliamentarians into a co-ordinated attack on the crucial royalist garrison at Newark.12 It is possible that Ireton’s troop of horse had, with its captain, been absorbed into Cromwell’s growing regiment shortly afterwards, possibly before the Battle of Gainsborough on 28 July 1643. When Cromwell was given the governorship of Ely that summer, Ireton became his deputy. Ireton’s career was then bound up with Cromwell’s regiment and he exercised no completely authoritative 9 Marshall, Oliver Cromwell, p. 199. 10 Malcolm Wanklyn, Warrior Generals (London, 2011), pp. 180, 228. 11 Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 118. Blake, at 49 or 50, was thus a similar age to Cromwell. 12 See ‘“He would not meddle against Newark…”: Cromwell’s Strategic Vision, 1643–1644’, British Journal for Military History 5.1 (2019): https://doi.org/10.25602/ GOLD.bjmh.v5i1.821 (accessed 22 Aug. 2020).

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independent command, despite being quarter-master general of the Eastern Association Army until the regiment was divided into two regiments in the New Model Army in 1645. Cromwell’s appointment as Lieutenant General of the New Model Horse, despite his disqualification by virtue of the Self-denying Ordinance, was in parallel with Ireton’s equally belated appointment as commissary general. Ireton’s role at Naseby as commander of the left or western flank of the New Model Army was not a glorious one. His wing was only saved from complete disaster because it was larger than the royalist horse under Prince Maurice, which swept away a good portion of Ireton’s wing. Ireton himself was wounded and briefly taken prisoner. His recuperation seemed to have been over in time for the storming of Bristol the following September and he played a part in the Parliamentarian victory in the south west. In command of a body of horse in 1646 in the Oxford area, he had made himself known enough for the king to approach him as a possible go-between, a role which he declined. In the second Civil War in England and Wales, Ireton received the capitulation of Canterbury before joining Fairfax at the siege of Colchester. Ireton was politically close to Cromwell and may be perceived as Cromwell’s political vanguard – he was certainly more radical than his Commander-in-Chief Fairfax and proved more politically decisive in the revolutionary days of 1648. This has led David Farr in his essay in this volume to suggest that Ireton was something of a ‘second self’ to Cromwell, yet it remains possible that Cromwell in 1649 wanted greater proof of Ireton’s military capacities rather than his political ones. It is not without significance that in his letters dealing with the storming of Drogheda that Cromwell makes no mention of his senior officers, Jones and Ireton. Both were present at the siege, but we do not know what either of them did. Jones may well have remained outside the immediate area of the siege, with the horse, ensuring that there was no interference from Owen Roe O’Neill or Ormond’s forces in Ulster. But of Ireton we hear nothing. Cromwell does pass on information about some of his colonels both during the siege and in its aftermath, but in terms of their roles in the siege or in relation to the orders he gave them apparently directly rather than through the generals, who would be expected to be responsible, there is silence. In relation to the siege, Micheál Ó Siochrú suggests that Cromwell took full responsibility for the actions of his soldiers. This might, as he argues, be because Cromwell was ill at ease with the killings in both hot and cold blood and in so doing he was exonerating his subordinate commanders, Ireton and Jones.13 Cromwell does use the 13 Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner, p. 87.

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word ‘we’ in a part of a paragraph which opens with a declaration that the foregoing events are ‘a righteous judgement of God’ and thus catches the reader’s eye, but in the later section actually discusses strategy. It was clear that at some point the commanders had thought about dividing their forces to attack the northern part of Drogheda, north of the Boyne, and the southern section on the other side of the river. Cromwell explains that this option was rejected for two chief reasons: first, having the river between the two parts of the army would make communications difficult, and second, it would allow the enemy to attack one or other of the army’s two parts and defeat it, before turning on the other.14 This is but a flimsy indication that the decision-making process was corporate as it always had been in Cromwell’s commands, but it is not without reasonable expectation. Yet it was not until after Drogheda that Cromwell began to acknowledge fully the work of his generals. The Perfect table, the full title of which implies that Cromwell was responsible for all the victories in its pages, is not as focused as it appears: as remarked above, it also makes reference to Jones and to Coote, Ireton and Broghill and refers extensively to Colonel Robert Venables, who had been given enhanced command in Ulster when Cromwell turned southwards from Drogheda.15 As Cromwell marched to Wexford, Jones was again with him: this time, unlike in the Drogheda campaign, we know more of his activities. He was detached en route with a sizeable force of 15 troops of horse to remain on guard against any approach by Ormond from the north and rear of the main army. Cromwell entrusted Jones with attempting to take the fort by the harbour, ten miles away from Wexford itself. Jones was not put to the test for the fort was abandoned by its garrison on the approach of his dragoons.16 The fleeing soldiers made their way to a boat but were then captured with the help of a frigate. Jones was given a second assignment on 9 October: to tackle Castlehaven’s forces on the north bank of river, during the now established siege.17 Thirdly, after the fall of Wexford, Jones was again dispatched, this time to prevent Ormond’s putative relief forces from reaching the town. Ormond retreated and Jones 14 Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 127. 15 A perfect table of one hundred forty and five victories obtained by the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (London, 1650). 16 A letter from the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, to the Honorable William Lenthal Esq; Speaker of the Parliament of England (London, 1649), p. 4. 17 A letter from the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, p. 8; A perfect and particuler relation of the severall marches and proceedings of the Armie in Ireland, from the taking of Drogheda, to this present (London, 1649), p. 9.

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pursued him as far as Enniscorthy, before moving on to New Ross to try and trick the garrison into surrendering.18 After the fall of Wexford, Jones continued to serve alongside Oliver and likewise during the siege of Waterford was again given command over forces which were designed to intercept or deflect any relief attempt. When he approached Carrick to rescue the garrison from attack by Inchiquin, his enemies melted away. This suggests that in Ireland it was not only Cromwell who was regarded as potent if not invincible.19 General Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill, like Cromwell and Ireton, may have considered that the causes of the Irish Rebellion were external. Irish people, he believed, would have normally been loyal, were they not been ‘deluded by the priests’.20 Nevertheless, he wrote it was now ‘impossible … to keep the natives of this Dominion out of armes’.21 Boyle had a vested interest in defeating these rebels. His estates had been overrun by the forces of the Confederation of Kilkenny during the war. He may therefore have accepted Cromwell’s invitation to join the expeditionary force for personal reasons. Toby Barnard believes that unlike his brothers, who went into exile after the death of Charles I, Roger Boyle saw the republic as the only certain way of regaining his lands and defeating the Confederation.22 Broghill’s appointment is an interesting one. Despite having supported Charles I during the early stages of the war in Ireland, first in defence of family property at Lismore and later as second in command and (Lieutenant) General of horse to Lord Inchiquin and sometime governor of Limerick, he had retained very strong personal links to parliament at Westminster.23 This smoothed the way for him to change sides, along with Inchiquin in 1644, but their rivalry, which was focused on political power, soured their relationship. Broghill did not rejoin the royalists in 1647 when Inchiquin did. It would seem that for much of the 1640s 18 The taking of Wexford a letter from an eminent officer in the Army (London, 1649), p. 6. 19 Marshall, Oliver Cromwell, p. 226. 20 Pádraig Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at War (Cork, 2001), p. 203. 21 A letter from the Lord Broghill to the honourable William Lenthall Esq (London, 1651), p. 2; A declaration and prolcamation [sic] of the Deputy-General of Ireland, concerning the present hand of God in the visitation of the plague (Cork, 1650), passim. 22 Toby Barnard, ‘Boyle, Roger, first earl of Orrery (1621–1679), politician and writer’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/3138 (accessed 22 Aug. 2020). 23 Historical Manuscripts Commission 36, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormonde, 8 vols (London, 1902–1920), i. 57.

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Broghill was chiefly concerned with his and his family’s property: in 1644 he had become governor of Youghal on behalf of parliament, where there was a great deal of family interest and property. During the planning stages of Cromwell’s campaign, Broghill’s estates and much of his family’s property remained in the hands of the Commonwealth’s opponents: Youghal, for example, was now in Inchiquin’s hands and at that point in the war Inchiquin was becoming embroiled in Ormond’s treaty with the Confederation. In 1649, Broghill was in England and had probably intended to go to the European continent. However, he was waylaid by Cromwell and persuaded to join the forthcoming campaign. It is likely that the story of Cromwell’s alleged threat to imprison him in the Tower if he had refused was the product of a later construction aimed at the ears of the post-Restoration court to make it look as if his hand was forced, and may be read as fiction alongside the later reports he made about Michael Jones’s deathbed exhortation to Broghill to oust Cromwell. Broghill’s role, as argued by James Scott Wheeler, was to prepare the ground for Cromwell’s supposed Munster landing. Despite having the talent to write a treatise on war later in his life, Broghill was possibly not chosen for his military prowess at this point as much as for his political power or influence in Munster, where it was already clear that Inchiquin’s association with the Confederation was unpopular with Protestant soldiers in the coast town.24 In this way, Broghill was much like the English and Welsh magnate generals of 1642 – men such as William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle, or James Stanley, Earl of Derby – appointed to command because of their political, economic and social clout in the hope that they could raise men and materiel as well as influencing their home territories into supporting the cause. Indeed, it was as a magnate that Micheál Ó Siochrú specifically refers to Broghill and his role in Munster in 1649 within God’s Executioner.25 For this reason it may be seen that Cromwell initially tended to treat Broghill as just one member of a small team rather than a man worthy of independent command. Broghill did not sail to Ireland with Cromwell but followed him there in October. After briefly joining Cromwell in the aftermath of Wexford, he, along with Colonel Robert Phayre, sailed on to Munster and began to take control of the south coast ports of Cork, Kinsale and Youghal.26 24 James Scott Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland, p. 72; Earl of Orrery, A Treatise of the Art of War (London, 1677); Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at War, p. 113; Marshall, Oliver Cromwell, p. 202; Wanklyn, Warrior Generals, p. 211. 25 Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner, p. 203. 26 Kitson, Old Ironsides, p. 179.

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The uncomfortable alliance between Inchiquin’s Protestant soldiers and their Confederation allies was beginning to fray at the edges and Munster was one of those edges. Murrough O’Brien, Lord Inchiquin, was having difficulty holding on to his Protestant soldiers and this was to ease Broghill’s task in later 1649. Broghill pursued Cromwell’s practice of infiltrating the garrisons and exploiting their resentment of perceived subordination to their erstwhile enemies – the Confederation. On arrival, Broghill raised his own forces, a regiment of foot and a troop of horse, from the family estates in Munster. Cork declared for the Commonwealth on 16 October whilst Cromwell was occupied with Lord Taffe and his New Ross garrison. Broghill was taken by Blake’s fleet quickly to Cork where they arrived on 3 November, a bare fortnight after the port’s change of loyalties.27 In Munster, the political as well as military initiative was shifting from Inchiquin to Broghill as the former’s standing was weakened continually by the defection of his soldiers and the loss of Cork. Despite Broghill’s social and political influence as well as his being on the spot, Cromwell was the one calling the shots. The Protestant soldiers of Cork had petitioned him directly regarding their conditions for taking up Commonwealth service, Whilst Cromwell did seek confirmation for his decision from Broghill, Phayre and Sir William Fenton, he replied to the port’s garrison in person, rather than through Broghill or any other members of the Munster ‘team’.28 A few days later, Cromwell began to assemble the army, which he would later hand to Broghill’s command. Two foot regiments, apparently the full complement of ten companies each, under colonels Gifford and Townshend. Lieutenant Colonel Smithwich and Major Widenham were also appointed with the approval of the trio of Broghill, Phayre and Fenton. Broghill had already created the embryo of a horse regiment and Cromwell simply accepted the fact and confirmed Broghill as colonel of this single regiment. Yet even at this stage Broghill was not given overall command: he was merely one of the commissioners for ‘temporary management of affairs there’. In this task, Broghill, Phayre and Fenton were joined by generals at seas Robert Blake and his younger colleague Richard Deane.29 However, Broghill was seen clearly to be the man Cromwell had in mind as the commander. Just over a week later, when he sent a report of the situation in the Waterford area to ‘the commander in chief of the P ­ arliament’s Force 27 Bulstrode Whitelock, Memorials of the English affairs from the beginning of the reign of Charles the First to the happy restoration of King Charles the Second, 4 vols (Oxford, 1854), iii. 127. 28 Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 158–159. 29 Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 165–166.

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at or near Dungarvon’ to his west, Broghill was the recipient. The letter also required a report in return, but it was intercepted before it got to its intended recipient.30 Broghill was successful in capturing Dungarvan before mid-December and was able to bring 1,200 horse and 1,300 foot to join Cromwell outside Waterford, something Cromwell pointed out in an elegiac statement about Broghill’s merits when seeking to persuade parliament to help his subordinate financially (he had earlier asked parliament to fund Broghill’s wife, Lady Margaret Howard, joining him in Ireland).31 Cromwell was particularly forthcoming: ‘his Lordship hath been eminently serviceable unto you … never having shrunk from your interest’. Broghill was clearly now, in Cromwell’s opinion, ‘onside’, and he should be rewarded. Given this positive assessment of Broghill, when Cromwell failed to capture Waterford he moved westwards to meet his newly trusted colleague at Dungarvan. Broghill and Cromwell met on 2 December, but within a week disaster struck the high command. Cromwell’s army was steadily succumbing to illnesses, which proved fatal for many of the soldiers. Amongst them, on 10 December 1649, was Michael Jones. Cromwell and he had become close in the four months since Oliver’s arrival. Possibly because Cromwell appreciated quickly Jones’s achievement at Rathmines on 2 August, the commander had placed great trust in him and was thus saddened by his death.32 No doubt this would impact on Cromwell’s mind once he too became ill over the winter months. With now only the younger and less-experienced Henry Ireton to depend on in any renewed campaign, Broghill’s achievements on the south coast became ever more important and his role in the campaign was extended and even enhanced by Jones’s death. Cromwell’s offensive had already lost momentum because of the sicknesses which pervaded his army and the stubborn resistance encountered at Waterford. The army was sent into quarters along the south coast of Munster. Cromwell had also lost his Scout-Master General Rowe to disease. New troops from England were not to arrive until January, but then again, his opponents could not capitalise on Oliver’s predicament as there were still many desertions from Inchiquin’s d ­ isillusioned and 30 Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 169. 31 Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 177. 32 Whitelock, Memorials, iii. 134, 136; A letter from the Lord Deputy-General of Ireland, unto the Honorable William Lenthal Esq (London, 1651), p. 4; An Exact and Perfect Relation, p. 1; Marshall, Oliver Cromwell, p. 226; Kitson, Old Ironsides, p. 181.

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politically disenchanted army.33 The winter season’s pause in the campaign was quite brief. In late January, Cromwell, his health now regained, organised a three-pronged attack into the Irish Midlands. The centre column, the main army led by the Lord Lieutenant himself, left Youghal on 29 January and headed via Mayallo [Mallow] into Limerick and Tipperary. Cromwell’s column consisted of 12 troops of horse, three of dragoons and only 200–300 foot. To his right (eastwards) was a column spearheaded by Colonel Reynolds, with 16 troops of horse and 2,000–3,000 foot followed by a reserve led by this wing’s commander Major General Ireton.34 It was heading for County Kilkenny. Cromwell left Lord Broghill with a small force consisting of just 600–700 horse and between 400 and 500 foot, with at least two cannon, possibly heavy siege artillery at Mayallo [Mallow] ‘to protect those parts and your interest in Munster’.35 This force is usually portrayed as a defensive column marching to the left of Cromwell to protect its flank. At least at the outset it was to some extent an expeditionary force in itself, continuing to utilise Broghill’s combined personal resources as a soldier and a magnate, intended to develop control of southern Munster and not just simply as a precaution against Inchiquin, whom Cromwell suspected might try to take advantage of his northward thrust in order to regain control of the province. Broghill launched his part of the campaign energetically and brutally. He attacked Old Castle Town and battered it with his guns, which suggested that his two guns were indeed siege cannon. The garrison surrendered having defied only the first summons issued before the bombardment.36 The common soldiers were given quarter for their lives, but the six officers were ‘shot … to death’. Cromwell implied in his report to parliament on 11 March 1649 that this was a deliberate attempt to discourage further resistance as he had set out to do with the vigorous attack on Drogheda. Cromwell also noted that that taxation – contribution – was now being collected in the lands between Broghill’s forces and Limerick.37 Broghill’s role continued to be aggressive and this seems to have at least partially inspired a change of loyalties in yet more of Inchiquin’s Protestant 33 An Exact and Perfect Relation, p. 1. 34 Marshall, Oliver Cromwell, p. 227. 35 A letter from the Lord Lieutenant in Ireland, p. 4; Whitelocke, Memorials, iii. 154; Kitson, Old Ironsides, p. 181. 36 An Exact and Perfect Relation, p. 1. 37 A letter from the Lord Lieutenant in Ireland, p. 4; Whitelock, Memorials, iii. 154, 160.

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soldiers. After a battle with some of Inchiquin’s horse, Broghill tried four captured field officers and executed three of them for having previously served parliament alongside Inchiquin before he had allied himself with the Confederation.38 By this point, Broghill had been joined by Colonel Henry Cromwell, who had sailed from south Wales in early March.39 Cromwell must have been pleased with Broghill’s efforts and considered them to be a success. Towards the bloody climax of Cromwell’s campaign, Henry’s father summoned Lord Broghill’s wing to join him during the siege of Clonmel after he had defeated one of Ormond’s belated relief attempts at Macroom on 10 April.40 Broghill arrived at Clonmel with reinforcements on the eve of the storming of the town.41 Broghill was by mid-1649 clearly capable of independent battlefield action. Shortly after Cromwell’s departure from Ireland he fought a running cavalry action which followed an attempt on his quarters by Lord Muskerry’s horse. Apparently heavily outnumbered, Broghill pursued his attackers, defeated them and then turned on a second force of three regiments; by this point he had just two troops of horse and one troop of dragoons. Nevertheless, he defeated them and finally charged a regiment of foot and fresh troop of horse and succeeded in chasing them off as well. Whitelock suggested from the information he received in parliament that the early part of the action was the ‘first time of a fight of horse to horse in these Irish wars’.42 Officially, in 15 June 1649, Henry Ireton had been given the post of Major General to Cromwell for the Irish expedition. He later would become the second in command during the campaign. Some had expected the role to go to Major General John Lambert, particularly after his successful collaboration with Cromwell in the northern English campaign during 1648, and therefore the choice of Ireton looked almost nepotistic. Marshall thinks the son-in-law’s talents were limited and thus there may have been two causes of Cromwell’s attempt to appoint Blake: the appearance of nepotism and the need for Ireton to prove himself.43 Ireton did not cross to Ireland with his father-in-law but left two days later with 77 ships and headed for Ireland’s south coast. A landing proved impossible, partly at least because although the south coast garrisons under Lord Inchiquin’s 38 Whitelock, Memorials, iii. 168–169. 39 Whitelock, Memorials, iii. 155. 40 Marshall, Oliver Cromwell, p. 230. 41 Kitson, Old Ironsides, p. 183. 42 Whitelock, Memorials, iii. 314–315. 43 Marshall, Oliver Cromwell, p. 203.

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command had already shown evidence of discontent with regard to the alliance with their erstwhile enemies, the Confederation, their loyalties had not yet been undermined by Broghill. On 23 August, Ireton therefore landed at Ringsend to join his father-in-law.44 As with Jones, there is little evidence of Ireton’s role in the Drogheda campaign or the attack on Wexford, but as Cromwell directed his attention to New Ross Ireton was sent ahead with a detachment to besiege Duncannon, one of Waterford’s outlying forts. On 25 October, he was joined by Michael Jones with another 2,000 men. Just two days later, Cromwell arrived at the fort himself. He stayed with his seconds only briefly before returning to Ross, where he remained, having been struck down by illness.45 Duncannon was to prove a difficult task. When Ireton arrived it was almost ready to surrender, but the faint-hearted governor was replaced by Colonel Edward Wogan, a former Parliamentarian, whom W. C. Abbott suspected of formerly having served in Ireton’s own regiment. This was not true; after serving in Sir William Waller’s dragoons Wogan had transferred to Colonel Okey’s dragoons at the creation of the New Model Army. However, given the fate of other former Parliamentarians taken prisoner in Ireland, Abbott may be correct in his interpretation of Wogan’s motivation.46 In 1648, Wogan had sided with the Engagers, and now, possibly motivated in part by the fact that because he had turned coat his life would be forfeit if the town fell, mounted an aggressive defence of the town. On 5 November, he sallied out and captured Ireton’s two guns. The siege ended shortly afterwards, and Ireton went into winter quarters with the rest of Cromwell’s army.47 In the 1650 campaign after the brief period in winter quarters, Ireton led the bulk of the eastern column, following Reynolds’s advance guard.48 He advanced through northern Munster with the task of protecting the eastern flank Cromwell’s centre column and fending off any attack Ormond might mount for the north or east.49 Ireton seized an important passage across the river Suir in early February that made it possible to ship heavy artillery guns and ammunition by water from Youghal into the Irish midlands.50 44 Marshall, Oliver Cromwell, p. 206. 45 Cromwell to Lenthall, 25 Nov. 1649; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 171. 46 Malcolm Wanklyn, Reconstructing the New Model Army, vol, 1, Regimental Lists, April 1645 to May 1649 (Shrewsbury, 2015), pp. 61, 71, 81. 47 Cromwell to Lenthall, 19 Dec. 1649; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 176. 48 Kitson, Old Ironsides, p. 181. 49 Cromwell to Lenthal, 15 Feb. 1650; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 212. 50 Cromwell to Lenthall, 15 Feb. 1650; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 214.

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After taking the castle at Thomastown together with Cromwell, Ireton returned to Fethard where he had left the siege artillery, which was then used to batter the walls of the castle near Gowran garrisoned by Ormond’s own regiment. Once again, upon its surrender, as in the case of Broghill’s conquests, the common soldiers were spared and the officers shot. Whilst not expressly confirmed by the sources, the presence of the heavy artillery which Ireton collected from Fethard, and which he had indeed escorted there, suggests that Cromwell and Henry Ireton were working together from the siege of Kilkenny onwards until the siege of Clonmel, and Ireton was present there.51 The three divisions which had set out from Youghal and the south coast towns at the end of January were assembled for the climax of Cromwell’s campaign in Ireland. As shown elsewhere in this book, the siege of Clonmel was a disaster. Even Parliamentarians acknowledged that it was the hardest fought siege of the Civil Wars, despite Cromwell’s early attempts to focus on the capture of the town during the night following the vain attempts to storm it. After Clonmel and Cromwell’s hurried departure for England, it was Ireton who succeeded his father-in-law in command of Ireland, both of the armed forces and serving as Lord Deputy, despite the possible sensitivity of a familial succession (and the questions about his abilities suggested in this essay and elsewhere).52 Malcolm Wanklyn claims that Ireton was responsible for the long-drawn-out nature of the war after Cromwell left and accused him of a lack of political astuteness in his dealings with enemies.53 The remaining asset that Cromwell was able to employ during his campaign, albeit at a distance, was Charles Coote. Coote had been at war in Ireland on and off during the eight years before Cromwell and Ireton arrived and Broghill returned. His father Sir Charles, who was killed in 1642, had been held responsible for widely publicised atrocities after having begun counter-rebellion operations in Leinster as early as November 1641. This campaign used a strategy, which, Wheeler suggests, was similar to those employed by Tyrone’s opponents late in the Nine Years’ War and involved the complete destruction of supposed hostile communities.54 Much later, after the rejection of the Cessation of 1643 by Parliamentarians in Ireland, the younger Coote met with considerable military success in 1645, capturing Sligo and 18 other towns in Connacht. The Battle of Benburb in June 1646 had curbed the effect of his success, 51 Wanklyn, Warrior Generals, p. 286. 52 Kitson, Old Ironsides, pp. 183–184. 53 Wanklyn, Warrior Generals, pp. 213–214. 54 Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland, p. 13; Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at War, p. 23.

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however, and he had returned to Belfast following Monro’s defeat.55 Since 1645, Coote had been parliament’s President of Connacht and in 1647 he had been appointed Vice-Admiral of the province and given command of the Protestant forces of western Ulster and northern Connacht, In late 1648, Coote had seized the leaders of the Laggan army, which had been wavering in their loyalty to Westminster. The more-experienced leaders were sent as prisoners to London, which, coupled with his disbanding of regiments that were likewise reconsidering their loyalties, potentially deprived Ormond and the king of valuable troops and resources. Coote’s campaign in 1648 was vicious and involved an element of sectarian violence even though it was chiefly intended to be a campaign that aimed to wreck supply lines and deprive the Confederation of vital resources. Coote had an almost completely free hand to do this as it was exactly at this point that the Confederation forces were fighting each other!56 However, it did not all go Coote’s way and during the spring and summer of 1649 he had been hemmed into Derry by the aggressive alliance forces, which captured many of his garrisons and outposts. Indeed, his attempt to decapitate the Laggan army had failed when the commander, Sir Robert Stewart, whom he had sent as prisoner to London, was returned to his command on parliament’s orders.57 However, whilst the failure to supply Coote over the past two years had allowed his various opponents to push him into Derry, Cromwell recognised his importance. Thus was Colonel Venables sent with three regiments to carve a passage to Derry to unite Coote and his forces with the renewed Parliamentarian offensive, following the siege of Drogheda. With Venables’ help, in September 1649 Coote managed to recover all his losses in the north. Even before he got the reinforcements his presence in Derry prevented Ormond from concentrating all of his forces at Dublin; now he was able to prevent Ormond from focusing his opposition to Cromwell’s expeditionary force.58 Upon Cromwell’s departure from Ireland the core of his commanders consolidated their positions in his absence. Coote remained the leading figure in Ulster, with Venables as his second. Broghill was in charge of Munster with Henry Cromwell as his wing-man. Ireton was appointed Lord Deputy, but really had been gifted the overall command by his fatherin-law before that was confirmed. During the campaign, Cromwell had 55 Mary O’Dowd, Power Politics and Land, Early Modern Sligo (Belfast, 1991), pp. 127–128. 56 Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland, p. 46. 57 Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland, p. 55. 58 Wanklyn, Warrior Generals, pp. 207, 212, 228.

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clearly shown that he was flexible in his choice of commanders. Whilst he might respect men for their experience – such as Jones and Coote, with whom he had not worked before but of whom he had no doubt heard good repute – he did have wider motives. Cromwell, as shown above, was initially slow to accept the merits of his generals and clearly required proof of their abilities. It was only after Drogheda, and perhaps even later than that, when he began to acknowledge publicly his subordinates’ work, and it is no coincidence that this recognition was simultaneous with his starting to give them responsibility for detached commands. It is less likely that the young Broghill had made much of a mark on Cromwell as a soldier at this point, but his self-interest in regaining his estates and his desire to regain political influence was harnessed in Munster. The men closest to Cromwell in 1649–1650, the two Henrys, Ireton and Cromwell, who, despite their blood and marital connections to the Commander-in-Chief, both had to deserve their roles. Young Cromwell was apprenticed to Broghill who quickly demonstrated military ruthlessness and skill enough to complement his political importance, but Ireton had to wait until Cromwell failed to entice another, different major general to join the land campaign. Only when General-at-Sea Robert Blake decided to stay with the fleet did Ireton become confirmed in his post. One other thing is worthy of remark. When Cromwell and General John Lambert stood on the roof of Roxborough House on the evening of 2 September, just over three months after the new Lord General’s departure from Ireland, they were joined by George Monck.59 If he had not been forced to surrender Dundalk and thereafter return to England on the eve of Cromwell’s arrival in Ireland, Monck should have been a joint agent with Coote in Ulster and Connacht.60 He was the right sort of age to fit in with the young men’s army. Born in 1608, he was just 31 when the Bishops’ War began and 41 when Cromwell arrived in Ireland. He was a younger son and thus not the head of a family and thus not experienced in administrative or peacetime military office. But there the similarity between him and Cromwell’s team ends. Monck was a man of continental military experience dating back to the 1620s; during the 1630s he was in Dutch service as a regimental officer. Monck’s performance in the Bishops’ Wars won him recognition and promotion and in the Civil Wars he fought first in Ireland as part 59 Martyn Bennett, Cromwell at War: The Lord General and His Military Revolution (London, 2017), pp. 195–198. 60 The true state of the transactions of Colonel George Monk with Owen-Roe-mac-ArtO-Neal (London, 1649), pp. 1–4; Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner, p. 71; Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland, p. 57.

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of the expeditionary force and then returned to Britain to fight for the king until he was captured at the Battle of Nantwich. Thereafter, he was imprisoned until after the war in England in 1647 when he returned to Ireland, where eventually he was appointed major general by parliament. His mixed record of loyalties throughout his career would perhaps have made him akin to some of Cromwell’s men in 1649. Just as in Ireland, Cromwell would show that he chose men for a variety of reasons, chiefly their military prowess, rather than religion or family connections. The generals whom Cromwell chose in 1649 demonstrate that he was a man who required proof of ability but one who was prepared to overlook religious divergence, as he always had professed to do in the First Civil War in England, and even political shape-shifting. Thus the Irish campaign sheds light on Cromwell’s developing leadership qualities and his relationship with other generals. The appointment of Monck in the latter part of the year seems to confirm this.

Chapter 6

Ormond and Cromwell The Struggle for Ireland James Scott Wheeler

Ormond and Cromwell

Perhaps the swiftest and certainly the most thorough conquest of Ireland was carried out by the English Commonwealth from 1649 to 1652. Oliver Cromwell, the commander of the invasion force, needs no introduction to anyone interested in, or even exposed to, Irish history. His name is emblematic for the brutal suppression of Irish and Catholic freedoms, and to this day he is perhaps the best-known figure in Irish history.1 However, the widespread view that he routinely slaughtered innocent civilians needs correction. Cromwell’s chief antagonist in his Irish campaigns, James Butler, Marquis of Ormond, is far less well known, and yet he was the only man in the seventeenth century that united nearly all segments of Ireland’s population in a struggle to protect Ireland from the Cromwellian conquest and to free it from the Westminster government. Ormond2 deserves far greater recognition for his accomplishments than he has received. A man of firm religious and political beliefs, he came the closest to bridging the deep fissure in Irish society between Protestants and Catholics. He also was a far better military strategist than a battlefield commander. This chapter re-evaluates the reputations of these two men by assessing their leadership and roles in the climactic phase of the Irish wars of the 1640s. 1 For an overview of the conquest, see James Scott Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland (Dublin, 1999). 2 For an explanation of why James Butler, Marquis of Ormond, does not include the ‘e’ of Ormond that is used when referring to James Butler after he became the first Duke of Ormond, see Toby Barnard and Jane Fenlon (eds), The Dukes of Ormonde, 1610–1745 (Woodbridge, 2000), p. x. 157

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Background Historians’ views of Cromwell have varied over the centuries. For many, Cromwell was the man who defeated Irish Catholics’ hopes for political equality and religious liberty. He is also consistently portrayed as a ruthless general whose seizures of Drogheda and Wexford in 1649 were accompanied by violent slaughters of the towns’ inhabitants along with the garrisons. To this day, it is fair to say that Cromwell is blamed for the destruction of Gaelic life and the brutal suppression of the Irish Catholic Church. The ‘Cromwellian Settlement’ of Ireland certainly was an unmitigated disaster for the Irish people. I will return to the subjects of Cromwell’s ‘atrocities’, but suffice it to say that some Irish historians, such as Tom Reilly, have taken a very different view of his role in the conquest.3 On the other hand, Ormond has received less attention from historians.4 Two distinct views of Ormond have dominated the historiography of his life: biographers such as Thomas Carte, Lady Burghclere and J. C. Beckett emphasised his consistent loyalty to the Stuarts and his commitment to the Church of England.5 He has also been portrayed as ‘a moderate in an age of extremes’.6 These historians imply that his loyalties to king and church prevented him from making the religious concessions necessary to convince the Confederate Catholics to make peace with the king and to support his efforts against the Parliamentarians in the period from 1643 to 1646, when the confederates might have played a decisive role in the English Civil War. In the end, Ormond’s ‘concepts of conscience and honour’ prevented him from promising the confederates terms that he could never carry out. His key principles were ‘to re-establish royal authority throughout Ireland and to ensure that this was done within the existing framework of the law’.7 A distinctly less-favourable view of Ormond is presented by Irish Catholic historians such as Denis Murphy. Murphy believed that Ormond 3 Tom Reilly, Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy (London, 1999). 4 Barry Robertson, Royalists at War in Scotland and Ireland, 1638–1650 (Farnham, 2014), p. 17. 5 Lady Burghclere, The Life of James Butler, First Duke of Ormonde (London, 1912); Thomas Carte, An History of the Life of James Butler, the first Duke of Ormond, 6 vols (Oxford, 1851), iii. 441–442; J. C. Beckett, Cavalier Duke: A Life of James Butler, First Duke of Ormond (Belfast, 1990). 6 David Edwards, ‘The Poisoned Chalice: The Ormond Inheritance, Sectarian Division and the Emergence of James Butler, 1614–1642’, in Barnard and Fenlon, The Dukes of Ormonde, 1610–1745, pp. 56–57. 7 Robertson, Royalists at War, p. 107.

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was ‘little inferior to Inchiquin in cruelty to his countrymen’. He goes on to agree with the author of the Aphorismal Discovery, who wrote that ‘what hath been the cause of the now destruction of Ireland [by 1652] other than the covetousness, treason, and faction of Ormond and his accomplices, a man of small deserving in martial affairs, weak in his directions, cold in his resolutions, and unfortunate in his actions’. Murphy wrote that ‘the surrender of Dublin and other strong places to the parliament [of England] in June 1647, is, perhaps, the greatest stain on his character as a public man’.8 This negative view of Ormond has been recently echoed by Micheál Ó Siochrú.9 Ormond was one of the most important people in Ireland during the mid-seventeenth century. From 1642 to 1647, he was the royalist leader in the kingdom, fighting to preserve the position of royalist Protestants. From 1649 to 1650, he was the pivotal leader of the Irish–royalist coalition that fought to defend Ireland and to restore Charles II to his father’s throne. His ultimate failure to save the royalist cause was due in large part to the actions of Oliver Cromwell and to the inherent weaknesses of Ormond’s coalition. None the less, Ormond deserves greater recognition for how close he came to accomplishing his goal in Ireland. First Meeting, 1647 Probably the only time Cromwell and Ormond met in person was in August 1647, at Hampton Court in England. Ormond had just surrendered Dublin to the English parliament, turning the city and its environs over to his fellow Anglo-Irishman and Parliamentarian, Colonel Michael Jones. On 28 July, the marquis sailed to England with a safe conduct pass and with permission to remain there at liberty for six months. In his pocket was some of the £5,000 parliament had provided him to settle his debts and to sustain him in his exile.10 Before he sailed, he corresponded with Lord Digby in France, who pointedly told him that he should not go to England ‘unless you had good grounds to hope that you might be a powerful mediator of a peace, or of some great advantage to the public’.11 8 Denis Murphy, Cromwell in Ireland: A History of Cromwell’s Irish Campaign (Boston, MA, 1893; repr. 2012), p. 212. 9 Micheál Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (London, 2008), pp. 140–146. 10 Burghclere, Ormonde, i. 325. 11 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Carte 21, ff. 206–207, Digby to Ormond, 11 June 1647; MS Carte 21, f. 287, Digby to Ormond, 20 July 1647, where Digby advised Ormond to go to France instead.

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By mid-July, however, Digby had received intelligence that ‘there is good hopes of an accommodation in England’.12 Charles I had been made a prisoner by the New Model Army in June 1647. During the summer, the army moved him from place to place and, on 7 June, in Childesly, Cambridgeshire, he met with the army’s three senior generals, Thomas Fairfax (the Lord General), Oliver Cromwell (Lieutenant General) and Henry Ireton (Major General). In the words of Derek Wilson, ‘it was one of those historical confrontations of which we know tantalizingly little’.13 We do know that while Fairfax kissed the king’s hand, Cromwell and Ireton merely bowed, but ‘otherwise they behaved themselves with good manners toward him’.14 The king was then escorted by stages to Caversham, on the Thames. These events occurred as the struggle between the Presbyterians and Independents in the Westminster parliament became a fateful confrontation between the Independent-leaning New Model Army and the Presbyterianleaning parliament. In short, the army and the Independents wanted the kingdom settled in such a way that Charles would still be king and with a religious settlement that would allow Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Independents to live with freedom of conscience and the right to worship privately. The Presbyterians, on the other hand, wanted the king restored, but with a Presbyterian state church with no allowance for Episcopalian or Independent religious practices. These conflicting views of a settlement were further complicated by parliament’s attempts in 1647 to disband the army without settling the soldiers’ large arrears of pay and without granting legal immunity to them for acts committed during the First Civil War. Ultimately, parliament overplayed its hand by raising an anti-army militia and by passing resolutions condemning the position of the army’s leadership and its rank and file. The stand-off between these two factions ended with the army’s occupation of London and Westminster in early August 1647.15 Meanwhile, Cromwell and Henry Ireton began negotiations with Charles I. Cromwell sought a settlement that would restore the king, provide for the material demands of the soldiers and for a religious 12 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 21, ff. 317–318, Digby to Ormond, 17 July 1647. 13 Derek Wilson, The King and the Gentleman: Charles Stuart and Oliver Cromwell, 1599–1649 (New York, 1999), pp. 374–375. 14 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, 6 vols (Oxford: 1731 edition), iii. 52. 15 S. R. Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, 1642–1649 (London, 1893), vol. 3, 1645–1647, pp. 250–352; Ian Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland, and Scotland, 1645–1653 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 169–189.

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settlement to protect the beliefs of not only Protestants but also of the king’s Roman Catholic subjects.16 These terms were enumerated in the ‘Heads of the Proposals’, which the army leaders submitted to Charles I in late July. Sir John Berkeley, the king’s chief negotiator, concluded that ‘never was a crown so near lost so cheaply recovered as his majesty would be if they agreed upon such terms’.17 Charles, however, was negotiating with the Presbyterians in parliament, the government of Scotland, and the army leaders simultaneously, and had no intention of keeping his word to accept any settlement which diminished his power. It was at this point that Ormond met with the king at Hampton Court. Ormond initially stayed at Sir Robert Poyntz’s house in Acton after arriving in England. In late August, he moved to Kingston after receiving permission from Sir Thomas Fairfax to meet with Charles I at Hampton Court.18 During this period, Cromwell met frequently with the king to persuade him to accept a settlement of the kingdom favourable to the army and its Independent allies.19 When Ormond arrived at Hampton Court, the king received him graciously and commended him for his services in Ireland and approved his surrender of Dublin to the Westminster parliament.20 Since anyone seeking to meet with Charles had to receive permission from the army, Cromwell certainly knew that Ormond was allowed to see the king in August, and again in October, and it is likely their paths crossed. Ormond was privy to the king’s multiple negotiations and his scheme of playing his enemies off against one another. He also was ‘featured prominently as part of the overall plan that envisaged the build-up of a new royalist party in Ireland, timed to coincide with the outbreak of royalist risings in England’.21 In September, the Presbyterians presented the king with proposals that insisted on a Presbyterian state church and the surrender by the king of his authority over the armed forces. Ormond told the Earl of Castlehaven in a letter that ‘The old propositions, I mean those sent to Newcastle, were presented to the king this day fortnight [7 September]’. The king was willing to negotiate, but he observed to parliament’s commissioners that 16 Wilson, The King and the Gentleman, pp. 375–376; Gardiner, The Great Civil War, iii. 16–317. 17 Wilson, The King and the Gentleman, p. 378. Wilson cites Berkeley’s memoirs. 18 Carte, Ormond, iii. 311–312. 19 Clarendon, History, iii. 67. 20 Clarendon, History, iii. 71. 21 Robertson, Royalists at War, p. 153.

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‘certain proposals of the army’ were a ‘fitter foundation of peace’.22 The king rejected both the Newcastle Propositions and the army’s Heads of the Proposals, believing, incorrectly, that he had the stronger hand. During the negotiations, Berkeley whispered to his sovereign that ‘your Majesty speaks as if you had some secret strength and power that I do not know of; and since your Majesty hath concealed it from me, I wish you had concealed it from these men also’.23 Ormond encouraged the king in his delusions by offering hope for an Irish–royalist coalition. By late September 1647, Cromwell had concluded that the king was double-dealing. He also had intelligence that the Scots had offered the king an army to put him back in power.24 Ormond was part of this scheme, as the king called him to Hampton Court in October and gave him the mission to negotiate an alliance with the Scots as a prelude to Ormond’s return to Ireland to create a royalist coalition. Ormond had little faith in the Scots’ promises and he understood that if the king accepted their condition of swearing to the Presbyterian Solemn League and Covenant it would be impossible to convince Catholics to support the king’s cause.25 When parliament and the army heard that Ormond was meeting with Scottish commissioners, they forbade his returning to Hampton Court. With his usefulness in England at an end, Ormond moved to France. Before Ormond left England, Charles I reconfirmed his position as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Charles I rejected the last chance he had of regaining his throne when he rejected the Heads of the Proposals. In November, he fled to the Isle of Wight, where he remained in army custody during the English Second Civil War. The Scots again sent an army into England in August 1648, just in time for Cromwell’s forces to smash it at Preston Bridge. Ormond and the Creation of the Royalist Coalition in Ireland, 1648–1649 While the New Model Army was busy subduing the Scots and English royalists, Ormond travelled to France to meet Queen Henrietta Maria and the Prince of Wales. Ormond’s view of the best course of action 22 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 21, f. 449, Ormond to Castlehaven, 21 Sept. 1647. 23 Gardiner, The Great Civil War, iii. 341. Gardiner quotes Berkeley’s Memoirs, pp. 33–35. 24 W. C. Abbott, The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1937–1947), i. 510. 25 Carte, Ormond, iii. 333; Burghclere, Ormonde, i. 332–334.

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for the royalists was for him to create a coalition that could drive the English Parliamentarians, whom he termed rebels, out of Ireland. Once Ireland was secure, the royalists would have a base from which to invade England, thus helping to restore the king to power. In March, the Queen and Prince Charles gave Ormond authority to make any agreement he felt necessary with the various factions in Ireland.26 Shortly thereafter, the Scottish government promised to order the Scots in Ulster to work with Ormond and to provide a check to the Ulster Irish forces led by Owen Roe O’Neill.27 Ormond next developed a plan of action that included making a treaty with the Confederate Catholics, gathering money and munitions in France to take to Ireland and winning over to the royalist cause the most powerful Protestant leader in Munster, Murrough O’Brien, Lord Inchiquin.28 The most important and hardest of these tasks was to come to an agreement with the confederates that would be acceptable to the Protestant members of a coalition. In 1646, Ormond and the confederates had signed a peace, but it was nullified by the papal nuncio Rinuccini because it failed to ensure the free and open worship of Roman Catholicism. Over the next two years, a struggle went on between the Old English Catholics, who were willing to trust Ormond and the king, and the senior clergy and the Ulster Catholics, who demanded clear assurances of freedom of religion and the right of Catholic clergy to exercise jurisdiction in their parishes.29 As the various factions of the Confederate Catholics bickered with one another they forfeited their chance to unite their forces in a campaign to drive first Ormond’s and then Jones’s Protestant garrisons out of Ireland. The confederates were unable to appoint a single commander over their four provincial armies;30 instead, two of their best armies were defeated in 1647 at Dungan’s Hill by Jones and at Knocknanuss by Inchiquin. Pádraig Lenihan noted that ‘it is possible, even likely, that Irish Catholics would have escaped the full impact of the Cromwellian catastrophe but for the 26 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 22, f. 43, the Prince of Wales to Ormond, 10 Mar. 1648. 27 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 22, f. 51, Loudon, Lauderdale, and Lannark to Ormond, 28 Mar. 1648. 28 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 22, ff. 58–59, Ormond’s notes, 5 Apr. 1648. 29 Patrick Corish, ‘Ormond, Rinuccini and the Confederates, 1645–1649’, in T. W. Moody and F. J. Byrne (eds), Early Modern Ireland, 1534–1681 (Oxford, 1976), pp. 327–331. 30 Micheál Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland, 1642–1649 (London, 2000), pp. 51, 109, 116–119.

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failures of the Confederate military effort during the years of opportunity (1643–1647)’.31 The trained and experienced manpower lost in those defeats was irreplaceable. ‘The nearest the Confederates came [to having] a New Model Army was destroyed’.32 Ormond returned to Ireland on 30 September 1648. By then he knew that the Scots had been crushed by Cromwell, but he also knew that a majority of the confederates had agreed to a truce with Inchiquin.33 This decision split the confederates between those who followed Rinuccini and those, including eight Catholic bishops and most Old English, who, ‘with varying degrees of hesitation came to support the truce, when not moved by clear conviction urged by weariness of war and the misery of the country’.34 He also had received intelligence that the moderates in the confederate General Assembly had won over a majority of the assembly to the peace party position and that the newly elected Supreme Council was willing to negotiate a settlement.35 For the next three months, Ormond negotiated with the confederates. The provisions of the Ormond peace of 1646 were agreed upon as a starting point, but the confederates refused to give up their demands for full Catholic religious rights and freedom, and Ormond refused to accept such a settlement. As these negotiations continued, the split between the Old English and Rinuccini deepened. Rinuccini excommunicated those who agreed to the Inchiquin truce and the Supreme Council appealed to the Pope and promised retribution to anyone who aided O’Neill’s Ulster forces.36 Throughout the negotiations, Ormond understood that if he gave in to the full Catholic demands he would lose the support of the Protestant forces of Inchiquin in Munster and the Scots in Ulster. In November, the Lord Lieutenant had to travel several times to Cork to help Inchiquin keep 31 Pádraig Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at War (Cork, 2001), p. 116. 32 Lenihan, Confederate Catholics, p. 220. 33 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 22, f. 99, terms of a truce between Inchiquin and Lord Montgarrett and the confederate Supreme Council, 20 May 1648. 34 Corish, ‘Ormond, Rinuccini, and the Confederates, 1645–1649’, p. 331; Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland, pp. 16–18. Ó Siochrú leans less to an ethnic divide in the confederacy and more to a view that there were three factions, a peace party, a clerical party and a group of non-aligned moderates. 35 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 22, f. 5, Inchiquin to Ormond, 19 Jan. 1648; f. 67, Barry to Ormond, 15 Apr. 1648. 36 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 22, f. 111, for the excommunication in May, and ff. 115–120, for the Supreme Council’s appeal to the Pope; f. 167, Proclamation of the Supreme Council, 13 August 1648.

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his troops loyal to the king and to Inchiquin. These absences from the negotiations in Carrick and Kilkenny caused some confederates to suspect that Ormond was not serious about a peace settlement.37 But Inchiquin had made it clear that his soldiers would remain loyal only if the treaty omitted concessions about Catholic jurisdiction and control of churches not yet in confederate hands.38 As late as mid-December 1648, the two parties refused to come to an agreement. As Ormond told Inchiquin, we are still far apart ‘in matters of religion’, and the confederates refuse to accept secret, private assurances of religious freedom. Further, he noted that ‘these people have forgotten to move seasonably for a cessation’.39 Then word arrived from England about the ‘Remonstrance of the Army’, which declared Charles I guilty of treason for fomenting the Civil Wars and demanded that he be brought to judgement for his crimes.40 The rejection of the Remonstrance by Parliament also triggered the New Model Army’s coup known as Pride’s Purge, giving the army control of the English state. The confederate Supreme Council swiftly notified Ormond that it would accept the peace without the firm religious guarantees.41 In January 1649, the confederate Assembly accepted Ormond’s terms, dissolved itself and created a royalist government with Ormond as Lord Lieutenant. A group of Commissioners of Trust was established to oversee Ormond’s work and to organise royalist war efforts. Rinuccini and the Ulster Irish led by Owen Roe O’Neill refused to accept the peace and the nuncio left Ireland in disgust in February. Ormond as War Leader, 1649–1650 With the alliance with the confederates agreed to, Ormond next tried to convince Owen Roe O’Neill and Michael Jones to join the royalist coalition. He hoped that the king’s situation would cause Jones to break with the army-dominated parliament since, as he observed, the army 37 Bodleian Library, MS Carte ff. 601, 607, 641; 2, 12, and 16 Nov. 1648, Inchiquin to Ormond and his proclamation to his soldiers. Inchiquin was also forced to replace many of his captains who were virulently against the treaty. 38 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 22, f. 641, Inchiquin to Ormond, 16 Nov. 1648. 39 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 23, Ormond to Inchiquin, 18 Dec. 1648; f. 68, Ormond to Inchiquin, 20 Dec. 1648. 40 Thomason Tracts, E.536[8]. An Abridgment of the late remonstrance of the army, 27 Dec. 1648; Gentles, New Model Army, pp. 272–276. 41 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 23, f. 123, Richard Blake to Ormond, 28 Dec. 1648; Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland, pp. 18, 196.

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decided ‘to throw off all obedience and conformity to government’.42 Jones refused Ormond’s entreaties and stood with the Westminster government.43 O’Neill refused to join a coalition that included Protestants in Ulster and Munster and Catholics who had been excommunicated by Rinuccini because of their truce with Inchiquin. He ‘spent most of 1649 skirmishing with the combined royalist/confederate forces’. He also made ‘pragmatic alliances’ with George Monck and Charles Coote in Ulster. In exchange for munitions, O’Neill committed his forces against the royalists who were trying to capture Derry.44 The failure of O’Neill to join Ormond meant that the most competent Irish Catholic army missed the opportunity to eject the Parliamentarians from Ireland while Cromwell was dealing with serious anti-army uprisings in England and before he could organise his invasion force. None the less, the royalists had considerable manpower. Under the terms of the treaty, the confederates were to raise 15,000 foot and 2,500 horse and to support them with a levy of £60,000.45 The biggest challenge facing Ormond was how to sustain a large army in a war-ravaged country. What he needed was significant financial support from France, without which he could not do much more – as he told Lord Jermyn – ‘than to keep the army in quarters. … And that consequently for action in the field (which if early and taken will probably be successful) we must look upon your endeavours abroad to furnish us in the best proportion you are able, as well with money as with ammunition and what other measure for war you can possibly procure’.46 It is remarkable that Ormond was able to deal with all the factions of his coalition while organising a field army. In Connacht, the Earl of Clanricarde commanded the Catholic forces and spent his time preventing O’Neill’s army from sustaining itself in County Sligo. For most of 1649, Clanricarde was unable or unwilling to march his troops to join Ormond and steadily barraged Ormond with requests for money. In Munster, Inchiquin commanded Protestant troops and garrisons that were suspicious of their Catholic allies, and who required a great deal of 42 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 23, Ormond to his George Land, 25 Dec. 1648; f. 532, Ormond to Francis Nugent, 29 Apr. 1649; MS Carte 24, ff. 103–104, Ormond to Jones, 9 Mar. 1649. 43 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 24, f. 129, Jones to Ormond, 14 Mar. 1649; Alma Tyrell, ‘Michael Jones, Governor of Dublin’, Dublin Historical Record (Dublin: The Old Dublin Society, Dec. 1970), pp. 167–168. 44 Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland, p. 202. 45 Carte, Ormond, iii. 430–432. 46 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 23, f. 323, Ormond to Lord Jermyn, 24 Jan. 1649.

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care to prevent their desertion. The former confederate forces in Munster and Leinster were scattered in various garrisons, and the major towns such as Waterford, Limerick and Kilkenny were reluctant to provide their financial assessments. There also were fewer positions for commanders in the unified army than there had been in the provincial armies of the past seven years. Men such as the earls of Clanricarde and Castlehaven wanted commands, as did Sir Lucas Taaffe and Thomas Preston. In the end, Ormond showed a great deal of tact in his dealings with such men and was able to placate most of them. The more militarily able, such as Inchiquin and Castlehaven, received senior posts. Clanricarde continued to serve as the commander in Connacht, and Preston was sent on a mission to France. However, Ormond’s biggest challenge was logistical. He did not have sufficient money or supplies to support the combined force in the field for an extended period of time until late March, and then he had to wait until the grass grew up before his cavalry’s horses could be sustained on campaign.47 By late March, Ormond had developed a campaign strategy to capture Dublin. In a letter to Charles II, he noted that ‘we have a design … relating to the advantage the fleet [under Prince Rupert in Kinsale] may give thereunto if it may be seasonably and safely employed to intercept the coming in of wheat to Dublin’.48 While the city was blockaded, Ormond planned to gather a single army that would then besiege the capital. Unfortunately, Rupert failed to carry out his portion of the plan, leaving Dublin open to reinforcements and supplies from England. The ground plan, however, came to fruition. In late May, Inchiquin’s Munster forces moved to Athlone, from where they put pressure on O’Neill as other royalists marched into Leinster. In Leinster, Castlehaven led a small force in successful efforts to capture places like Athy and continued to put pressure on Jones’s garrisons in the Pale as Ormond moved additional units towards the rendezvous near Trim.49 By the end of May, Ormond had gathered roughly 10,000 foot and 3,000 horse and Inchiquin had driven O’Neill out of Leinster and hedged him in Ulster. However, shortage of money to pay the troops hampered the mobility of the royalist armies, thus giving Jones time to 47 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 24, f. 169, Ormond to Mr. Galbraith, 19 Mar. 1649. 48 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 24, f. 228, Ormond to Charles II, 23 Mar. 1649. 49 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 24, ff. 742 and 748, Castlehaven to Ormond, 14 and 20 May 1649.

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gather supplies and to receive nearly 3,000 New Model Army soldiers from England.50 In June, royalists captured all of Jones’s garrisons except those in Trim, Drogheda, Dublin and Dundalk, and by 28 June Ormond was two miles from Dublin with 5,000 foot and 1,500 horse. At that point, Inchiquin led another 2,000 foot to Drogheda and then Dundalk. The garrisons of both places surrendered when offered lenient terms and many of the soldiers joined Inchiquin. In Ulster, Lord Montgomery of Ards forced Carrickfergus to capitulate, again on easy terms, and many of its garrison joined the royalists. Then, in late July, Ormond sent Inchiquin with some cavalry to Munster to prevent a rumoured landing there by Cromwell. Ormond and his war council next decided to move their army closer to Dublin in order to cut the city’s access to the sea by emplacing artillery at Baggotsrath, overlooking the seaward approach to the Liffey. They decided to do so because they knew that Oliver Cromwell was planning to bring a large army to Ireland with an artillery train that would enable him to breach any defensive works in Ireland. In Ormond’s view, ‘if we can prevent the possibility of relieving it [Dublin] by sea, I believe they will quickly capitulate’.51 Ormond’s strategy of cutting Dublin off from food and reinforcements was sound. Unfortunately for the royalists, Michael Jones’s garrison had been reinforced in June, while the royalists were capturing Drogheda, Trim and Dundalk. Ormond had foreseen this possibility and had unsuccessfully attempted to get Prince Rupert to use the fleet he had brought to Ireland to blockade Dublin.52 Rupert instead focused his efforts on capturing English shipping in British waters. Failure to isolate Dublin from English reinforcements set the stage for the disaster at Rathmines.53

50 Bodleian Library, MS Carte, 24, ff. 794–797, Ormond to Edward Nicholas, 29 May 1649. 51 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 25, f. 39, Resolution of the Council of War, 27 July 1649; f. 59, Ormond to Digby, 19 July 1649. 52 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 23, f. 27, letter to Ormond, 12 Dec. 1648, listing Rupert’s fleet as four ‘great’ ships and four frigates; f. 436, Rupert to Ormond, from Cork, 7 Feb. 1649; Bodleian Library, MS Carte 24, f. 90, Ormond to Charles II, 8 Mar. 1649, noting that there were just two small Parliamentarian frigates in Dublin. He believed they could be ‘surprised and taken’. 53 Carte, Ormond, iii. 441–442.

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The Beginning of Cromwell’s Conquest, Rathmines The decisive battle of the Cromwellian conquest took place near Dublin on 2 August 1649. The Battle of Rathmines shaped the nature of the struggle between Ormond’s coalition and the forces commanded by Cromwell. The victorious Parliamentarian commander, Colonel Michael Jones, provided the following account of the battle: On Thursday the second, we discovered a party of enemy drawn to Baggotsrath, about fifteen hundred foot, besides horse. We found a necessity for removing them, and that speedily; and seeing the nearness of the enemies camp at Rathmines (less than a mile from Baggotsrath) … therefore did I advance with so much a greater strength, about twelve hundred horse and four thousand foot … The enemies work at Baggotsrath we soon entered … most of the enemies foot there were slain and taken, and their horse deserted them after the first charge. Our horse and foot pursuing their advantages, we became at last wholly engaged with their whole army, whom after about two hours fight, we totally routed. We slew on the place and in the chase about four thousand, and have two thousand five hundred and seventeen prisoners, most of them Inchiquin’s English … Ormond narrowly escaped: Of our men there are not twenty missing, many wounded.54 The royalist disaster at Rathmines was not inevitable. For the previous eight months, Ormond had pieced together a coalition that included Old English Catholics, Irish Catholics, Anglo-Irish Protestants, Presbyterian Scots and New English Protestants. Only the Gaelic Irish warlord Owen Roe O’Neill stood aloof. Beginning in May, royalists captured every major Irish town except Dublin and Derry. By the end of July, Ormond’s main army was within five miles of Dublin. Ormond believed that ‘if we can but receive moderate countenance and assistance from abroad, this kingdom will very speedily be in absolute subjection to the king’s authority’.55 54 Thomason Tracts, E.569[1]. Lieut: General Jones’s letter to the Councel of State, of a great victory, 6 Aug. 1649 (printed 11 Aug.), pp. 1–4. 55 James Scott Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland (Dublin, 1999), pp. 40–49; Bodleian Library, MS Carte, 23, f. 303, Ormond to Lord Digby, 22 Jan. 1649; Bodleian Library, MS Carte 25, ff. 1–2, Ormond to Charles II, 1 June 1649; Thomason Tracts, E.545[12]. The Marquesse of Ormonds proclamation concerning the peace concluded with the Irish rebells, 27 Feb. 1649, listing the various armies that made up the royalist’s coalition strength. These numbers did not include O’Neill’s Ulster army of roughly 5,000 men nor the royalist forces in Ulster and Connacht.

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The Parliamentarian victory at Rathmines was due to the aggressive action by Michael Jones and to the tactical ineptitude of Ormond and the other royalist commanders on the scene. Ormond knew that ‘A report was spread in my army that Cromwell himself was landed in the night, and that the whole English power would that day be upon our shoulders’.56 Yet he divided his forces between Finglas and Rathmines. As he wrote after the battle, ‘The better part of the army commanded to other places, or not come up. The lord Inchiquin himself, being gone into Munster with a considerable body of horse, and twelve thousand I expected from Clanricarde and the Lord of Ards not yet come up’.57 These fundamental tactical mistakes allowed Jones to achieve local superiority as well as surprise. After Rathmines The disaster at Rathmines cost Ormond over 4,000 of his best soldiers, his ammunition and artillery, and his personal papers and cyphers.58 He retreated towards Trim, hoping to gather fresh forces before Cromwell landed. Jones, in the meantime, moved his army to Drogheda, which he hoped would surrender without a siege. Anticipating this move, Ormond placed Thomas Armstrong in charge of the town’s defences since the original governor had displayed a pessimistic attitude. Jones, realising that his gambit had failed, and aware that Ormond was gathering superior numbers in order to attack, withdrew to Dublin to await Cromwell’s arrival.59 Although bad news arrived from Ulster, where Owen Roe O’Neill had allied with Sir Charles Coote to break the royalist siege of Derry,60 Ormond still hoped to redeem the situation. In a letter to the Queen, on 8 August, he described his strategy: ‘If we can preserve the towns we have taken I shall not doubt but that the loss upon the place will soon be recovered, I have already rallied a good body of horse, and with it am returning towards those towns and to interrupt the rebels enlarging their quarters by continuance of their victory’.61 56 The Marquesse of Ormond’s letter to His Majestie, concerning the late fight betwixt the forces under his command, and the garrison of Dublin, 24 Aug. 1649, pp. 1–3. ESTC (Wing (2nd edn) O452). 57 The Marquesse of Ormond’s letter … concerning the late fight, pp. 1–3. 58 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 25, f. 128, Jones to Ormond, 3 Aug. 1649. 59 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 25, f. 171, Moore to Ormond, 4 Aug. 1649; MS Carte 25, f. 173, Thomas Armstrong to Ormond, from Drogheda, 7 Aug. 1649. 60 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 25, ff. 212–213, Montgomery of Ards to Ormond, 10 Aug. 1649. 61 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 25, f. 197, Ormond to the Queen, 8 Aug. 1649.

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As this letter indicates, Ormond still envisioned warfare in Ireland as being that of holding regions (or ‘quarters’) to supply forces while conducting minor engagements and sieges to attrite one’s enemies. He badly misunderstood the kind of campaign Cromwell was about to launch and the ability of the English state to sustain its army on an overseas campaign. Twelve thousand veterans of the New Model Army arrived in Dublin in mid-August. They were accompanied by a treasury of £100,000 in cash and sufficient food to feed the Parliamentarian forces for three months. Cromwell also issued a proclamation promising the country folk that his men would pay cash for supplies and that he would hang any of his soldiers caught looting.62 For the next year, the Parliamentarian forces in Ireland were adequately supplied and paid, allowing them to conduct extended field campaigns and sieges. This was an entirely new military situation in Ireland. After reorganising the troops in Dublin, Cromwell led 12,000 men to Drogheda, which he and Ormond realised was the gateway to Ulster. The English navy ferried the siege train to the town at the same time. As the Cromwellians prepared for an assault, Ormond reinforced Drogheda with his best units, to include his own infantry regiment and several of Inchiquin’s Protestant units. He also appointed Arthur Aston town governor due to his reputation as a determined defender of besieged towns. Cromwell decided to attack the suburb on the south side of the Boyne, and his heavy siege guns were in place facing the south-east corner of the town by 10 September, when he summoned Aston to surrender the town ‘to the end the effusion of blood may be prevented … If this be refused, you will have no cause to blame me’.63 Aston refused to surrender, believing that he could successfully defend Drogheda with his garrison of about 2,500 men. On 11 September, after firing over 200 cannon balls at the walls, the Cromwellians created two breaches.64 Then Cromwell’s regiments attacked. On the east side, Colonel Hewson’s men ‘entered the breach. But not so orderly as was appointed; [we] were stoutly resisted, and after a short dispute, did retreat disorderly, tumbling over the breach and down a steep hill that ascends up to the wall’. Having prepared for such a situation, Cromwell had two more regiments 62 Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland, pp. 81–83; J. S. Wheeler, ‘The Logistics of Conquest’, in Pádraig Lenihan (ed), Conquest and Resistance: War in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Boston, MA, 2001), pp. 192–199. 63 Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland, pp. 84–85; Bodleian Library, MS Carte 25, f. 509, Cromwell to Arthur Aston, 10 Sept. 1649. 64 Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland, pp. 83–86; Murphy, Cromwell in Ireland, pp. 54–55.

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on hand behind Hewson’s. On command, they crossed the valley to the breach, picking up Hewson’s men as they advanced. ‘Entering the breach, [they] beat off the enemy, pursued him, entered the great mount, where was their governor, with almost 200 officers and soldiers who were put to the sword’.65 The few defenders not killed were shipped to Barbados.66 The Cromwellians quickly reaped the rewards of the action, with the towns of Dundalk, Carlingford and Trim captured intact as their garrisons ran away at the approach of English cavalry. The gateway to Ulster was open; worse, Ormond lost most of his remaining reliable regiments and commanders, such as Aston and Edmund Verney. With few troops remaining with him, Ormond retreated to Kilkenny to reorganise his army. After sending Colonel Robert Venables into Ulster with forces to capture the royalist garrisons, Cromwell returned to Dublin with most of the army to prepare for the next phase of his conquest. Ormond summed up the situation in a letter to Charles II on 27 September: The rebels are strong in their numbers, exalted with success, abundantly provided with all necessaries, and in the pride of all this … ready to march, to pursue their victories. On the other side our numbers are inferior, discouraged with misfortunes, hardly and uncertainly provided for, the people weary of their burdens, wavering in their affections … and our towns defenceless against any considerable attempt.67 The fear and horror induced by the destruction of Drogheda’s garrison, and tales about atrocities allegedly committed against civilians, spread, weakening the courage of the towns soon to be in Cromwell’s and Venable’s paths. But were the stories of the atrocities against civilians at Drogheda true? Slaughter of Civilians at Drogheda? The evidence is clear that Cromwell ordered his troops to kill Aston’s soldiers. Well over 2,000 were killed, but most in the heat of battle, and not in cold blood. Cromwell also sanctioned the execution of Catholic priests at Drogheda and elsewhere during his campaign, and this is truly a major 65 Thomason Tracts, E.533[15]. Perfect Occurrences, 28 Sept.–4 Oct. 1649, Hewson’s letter from Dublin, 22 Sept. 1649. 66 Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 124–125, Cromwell to Bradshaw, 16 Sept. 1649. 67 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 25, ff. 596–599, Ormond to Charles II, 27 Sept. 1649.

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blot on his reputation. But he did not order the massacre of Drogheda’s civilians, nor is there solid evidence that such a slaughter occurred. First-hand accounts indicate that the town’s civilians were not targeted, although it is probable some were killed in the heat of battle.68 Ormond’s Lieutenant General of Horse, Lord Castlehaven, wrote in his memoirs that Cromwell took the town ‘by storm; and those within, near 3000 men, he put to the sword’.69 But Castlehaven made no mention of the slaughter of civilians. Thomas Carte, the hagiographer of Ormond and no friend of Cromwell’s reputation, made no mention of atrocities against civilians.70 Edmund Borlase, in his history of the Irish wars, published in 1680, also failed to mention heavy civilian casualties.71 Tom Reilly correctly concluded that ‘the townspeople of Drogheda were not indiscriminately massacred’ and that ‘Cromwell’s treatment of ordinary Irish people was always honourable’. He further correctly noted that ‘The Confederate leadership of Ormond, Castlehaven, and Inchiquin … do not mention the butchering of any innocents at either Drogheda or Wexford’.72 His assessment about Drogheda is supported by first-hand accounts. None the less, I concur with Ian Gentles’ conclusion that ‘Drogheda was the moral low point of Cromwell’s life’ because it was so out of line with his normal practice in Britain and in Ireland.73 Ormond, Cromwell and the Southern Campaign Ormond’s detractors give him low marks as a military leader, and it is true that he was not an effective battlefield commander, as shown by his poor decisions at Rathmines. He shared that characteristic with Catholic generals in Ireland in the 1640s. Pádraig Lenihan noted that the Irish officers who had served in the Spanish armies were of mediocre quality. 68 Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 124–128, Cromwell’s letters to Bradshaw and Lenthall, 16 and 17 Sept. 1649; Thomason Tracts, E.53[15]. Perfect Occurrences, 28 Sept.–4 Oct. 1649, pp. 1275–1276, Hewson’s letter from Dublin, 22 Sept. 1649. 69 Castlehaven, The Earl of Castlehaven’s Review: Or His Memoirs (London, 1684), p. 146. 70 Carte, Ormond, iii. 477. 71 Edmund Borlase, The History of the Execrable Irish Rebellion (London, 1680), pp. 223–224. 72 Reilly, Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy, pp. 4, 53, 192; Ó Siochrú, in his God’s Executioner, while believing that Cromwell’s men did commit many atrocities, correctly remarks that ‘doubts persist over what exactly happened that day’ (p. 82). 73 Ian Gentles, Olivier Cromwell: God’s Warrior and the English Revolution (Basingstoke, 2011), p. 113.

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‘They had no experience of cavalry in particular and, more generally, they were notably less competent in conducting large-scale operations’. He goes on to say that ‘There were hints of a deeper malaise affecting Confederate battlefield performance … Officers and soldiers apparently lacked calmacht, the stolid hardiness to stand fast, endure, and control their fear’.74 The evidence supports Lenihan’s comments and explains why the winners of battles lost so few men compared with the numbers killed on the losing side. The one major victory of a Catholic army came at Benburb, in 1646, when Owen Roe O’Neill defeated Robert Monro’s Scots. The performance of confederate armies was in stark contrast to the victories obtained by the armies of Lord Inchiquin (Knocknanuss), Michael Jones (Dungan’s Hill and Rathmines) and Charles Coote (Scarrifholis). By September 1649, O’Neill’s and Inchiquin’s forces were the only reliable ones available to the royalist cause. Ormond’s task at that point was to find a way to get those diametrically opposed commanders to support him while keeping the Old English Catholics in the coalition. Ormond’s strong suit as a military leader was his ability to identify a strategy that had a chance of defeating Cromwell. He had long understood the need to win over O’Neill’s army to the royalist cause. He tried repeatedly in the spring to convince O’Neill to join him in expelling the enemy from Derry and Dublin. For most of 1649, Owen Roe O’Neill, however, opposed the royalists. He also made agreements with the Parliamentarian commanders in Ulster, Charles Coote and George Monck, to help them defend Derry and Dundalk in exchange for munitions. O’Neill’s assistance prevented Derry from being captured by the royalists. After Drogheda, Ormond again approached Owen Roe through his nephew, telling the young man that ‘I believe without O’Neill joining us it will be disastrous for us. The English Parliamentarians have no respect or real use for O’Neill’.75 This approach worked. On 28 August, O’Neill notified Ormond that he desired a settlement and would march if it could be reached. Agreement was reached when Ormond promised to make it possible for the Ulster Catholic lords to recover their lands after a royalist victory. By mid-September, O’Neill was co-operating with Ormond to prevent Carrickfergus from falling to the Parliamentarians.76 The challenge Ormond always faced when dealing with Catholics and Protestants in the same coalition was to keep them working together 74 Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at War, p. 228. 75 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 25, ff. 366, 369, Ormond to Colonel O’Neill, 27 Aug. 1649. 76 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 25, ff. 650, O’Neill to Ormond, 26 Sept. 1649.

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even though they distrusted and hated one another. In June 1649, he laid out his political strategy in a letter to Charles II in which he told the king that he could retain Catholic loyalties by confirming in a future Irish parliament those things ‘already granted (which carries with it all reasonable advantages and security as to temporal interests and very large freedoms for the exercise of their religion)’. On the other hand, the king should ‘not entangle yourself in such further new concessions to them as may lose the hearts of the Protestants without whom your Majesties’ work here, much less in England and Scotland is not to be done’.77 This letter illustrates that Ormond understood the political situation and indicates that he was more open to religious toleration than most of his contemporaries. He saw the need for tolerance of Catholicism if the royalists were to hold Ireland, but in a way that such a policy did not threaten Protestants in the three Stuart kingdoms. Only such a political– religious strategy would allow him to rally the forces still available in his struggle against Cromwell. Further, unlike Charles I, Ormond did not plan to double-deal the Catholics after the hoped-for royalist victory. In September 1649, the immediate threat to the Catholic and royalist cause was Cromwell’s campaign to capture the towns of southern Ireland. Ormond’s strategy was to reinforce Wexford, Ross and Waterford with men and supplies and to keep Inchiquin’s increasingly restless Protestant garrisons from deserting the cause. In this way, he hoped to slow Cromwell’s progress and let wet weather and the diseases of the camp attrite Cromwell’s strength. If this Fabian strategy was to succeed, the towns in Cromwell’s path needed stoutly to resist, forcing the English army to remain exposed to the wet, cold climate of an Irish autumn. In undertaking such a strategy, Ormond was following the advice of men such as Owen Roe O’Neill, who cautioned him not to face the New Model Army in a major battle. Even if he wanted to force a head-on battle, Ormond lacked the money and supplies needed to bring a large enough force together for any length of time. He also knew, as did all Irish and royalist commanders, that Cromwell’s cavalry was far superior to their mounted troops, and in an open fight the results would be disastrous. After Drogheda, Cromwell reorganised his forces for a fall campaign to conquer Leinster and Munster. His soldiers began the march south towards Wexford on 23 September. Over the next eight days the English army moved along the coastal road, taking the castles and towns along the way, to include Arklow, without resistance. As the troops progressed, ships provided supplies to the moving column, and increasing numbers of 77 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 25, ff. 20a–20b, Ormond to Charles II, 28 June 1649.

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Irish peasants brought their produce in to the camp to sell. On 1 October 1649, Cromwell’s host arrived at Wexford.78 Ormond, meanwhile, returned to Kilkenny to raise money and troops. Limerick, Waterford and Galway still failed to provide the assessments laid on them by the Commissioners of Trust. Troops were available throughout Connacht and Munster, but they would not march unless they were paid.79 He also had to worry about the loyalty of towns like Wexford, where a plot by some of the citizens to surrender the town to Cromwell was thwarted.80 Realising by late September that Wexford was Cromwell’s next objective, Ormond moved his field forces to New Ross, on the River Barrow. From there he sent about 1,500 men under the command of David Sinnott to reinforce Wexford. The townsmen initially were reluctant to accept this force, and only the arrival of an English fleet off the port caused them to change their minds.81 Wexford’s defences were strong, with an earthen berm inside its twentyfoot-tall walls. To the east, the harbour provided protection, and Fort Rosslare blocked the narrow entrance to the port.82 The town was not cut off from help, since Cromwell had too few soldiers to interdict the route into the town across a ferry over the River Slaney. As late as 9 October, Ormond was able to send 600 soldiers commanded by his cousin Edmund Butler to join Sinnott. Ormond personally led these reinforcements to the ferry.83 He also hoped that O’Neill’s army would move south to help defeat the enemy, but the Irish chieftain was ill, and his host moved very slowly. Cromwell initially established his camp south-west of Wexford in a marshy area that became water soaked in the October rains. Quickly, hundreds of his soldiers got dysentery, forcing him to move his camp to 78 Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 140–141, Cromwell to Lenthall, 14 Oct. 1649. 79 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 25, f. 360, Taaffe to Ormond, 26 Aug. 1649; MS Carte 25, f. 362, Clanricarde to Ormond, 27 Aug. 1649; MS Carte 25, f. 486, Clanricarde to Ormond, 9 Sept. 1649; MS Carte 25, f. 679, Clanricarde to Ormond, 4 Oct. 1649. 80 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 25, f. 372, Ormond letter, 27 Aug. 1649. 81 Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland, pp. 94–97; Reilly, Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy, pp. 146–150. 82 Thomason Tracts, E.576[6]. A very full and particular relation of the great progresse and happy proceedings of the army of the Common-wealth of England toward the reducing of Ireland, under the command of his Excellency the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, 31 Oct. 1649. This newssheet has two letters written from Wexford on 15 and 16 October 1649. These and Cromwell’s report to Lenthall are the earliest first-hand accounts of the capture of Wexford. 83 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 25, f. 698, Ormond to Sinnott, 9 Oct. 1649.

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a rocky location further south. Ormond’s strategy of weakening the enemy through attrition seemed to be working. If Wexford could hold Cromwell off, and it could have, the outcome might have been considerably different. As it was, Sinnott reported that the town leaders wanted to parley with Cromwell with the aim of surrendering the place without a fight.84 The first good break for the besiegers came when a force led by Michael Jones captured Fort Rosslare without resistance. According to a first-hand account, the abandonment of the fort by the defenders ‘showed our enemies to be void of all counsel, for neither had we cannon to batter, nor provisions to subsist without our navy, nor could our navy force their passage by that fort and the two frigates there riding, nor scarce any otherwise supply us’.85 The English fleet then entered the harbour to unload the cannon and supplies for the army. On 3 October, Cromwell summoned Sinnott to surrender. Sinnott spun negotiations out for seven days, hoping for further reinforcements from Ormond. After conferring with Ormond at the ferry on 8 October, Sinnott wrote to Cromwell refusing to surrender. As these talks were going on, many of the townspeople left Wexford and crossed the ferry to safety. ‘This made the magistrates seek a parley’.86 On 10 October, the English bombardment opened against a castle outside the southern wall. After about one hundred shots, Sinnott asked for a parley and presented a list of ten terms for a surrender. As four representatives from the town were talking to Cromwell, the commander of the castle, Captain James Stafford, surrendered the castle. The English troops in the area quickly entered it and raised their flags. When the defenders on the town walls saw this they abandoned their posts. In turn, the besiegers, without orders, scaled the undefended walls, opened the gates, and drove into the town.87 The badly disorganised defenders retreated in the face of the English onslaught to the town’s centre, where the last effective resistance took place. ‘Upon entering the town … men were put to the sword, and … more drowned by overcharging vessels in the flight’ across the ferry site. ‘Great spoil and havoc was made of many rich commodities’.88 84 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 25, f. 632, Sinnott to Ormond, 7 Oct. 1649. 85 Thomason Tracts, E.576[6]. A very full and particular relation, 31 Oct. 1649, pp. 50–51, citing a letter written 15 Oct. 1649, from Wexford. 86 Thomason Tracts, E.576[6]. 15 Oct. 1649, letter from Wexford. 87 Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 135–140 for the negotiations. 88 Thomason Tracts, E.576[6]. A very full and particular relation, 31 Oct. 1649, p. 53, letter written from Wexford, 15 Oct. 1649.

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Cromwell lost control of his troops when they stormed over the walls. A one-sided battle ensued, culminating with a last stand in the market square. Few attackers died in the fighting, but, according to a first-hand account, ‘There was more sparing of lives (of the soldiery part of the enemy here, then at Drogheda) yet of their soldiery and townsmen here were about 1,500 slain or drowned … Of their priests (which deceived and led them) were many slain’.89 In his report to parliament, Cromwell noted that ‘our forces brake them, and then put to the sword all that came their way’. He estimated that ‘not many less than two-thousand’ were killed.90 Clearly, there was a horrible massacre of the garrison, and the sack of the town made it unsuitable as winter quarters for Cromwell’s troops. However, the evidence indicates that most of the non-combatant townspeople survived. Many had left the place before the assault, and none of the first-hand accounts mentions a slaughter of civilians: ‘Most of them are runaway’, according to Cromwell’s account.91 The letter, written from Wexford on 15 October, indicated that ‘the people within could not be restrained from boating away’ before the assault. There is no mention of a slaughter of civilians, but many priests were murdered.92 Denis Murphy does not agree with these conclusions about the massacre. He maintains ‘There is abundant testimony of contemporary writers to prove that the cruelties practised at Wexford on the clergy and the people were as great as those of which Drogheda was the scene … many priests, some religious, innumerable citizens, and two thousand soldiers were massacred’.93 His account relies on the testimony of Catholic clergy who were not at the battle and who wrote their accounts well after the action. What is clear is that Cromwell lost control of his soldiers when they fought their way through the town, killing many of the garrison and unarmed priests. Tom Reilly correctly concluded that, ‘Yes civilians were killed, but the evidence will show that the majority were likely to have been fully armed and engaged in the conflict. Those that weren’t probably died as a result of accidental drowning. Yes, priests were killed. For this there is no apparent justification’.94 89 Thomason Tracts, E.576[6]. A very full and particular relation, 31 Oct. 1649, pp. 53–56, letter written from Wexford, 16 Oct. 1649. 90 Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 141–143, Cromwell to Lenthall, 14 Oct. 1649. 91 Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 142. 92 Thomason Tracts, E.576[6]. A very full and particular relation, 31 Oct. 1649, pp. 52–55, for the two letters from Wexford. 93 Murphy, Cromwell in Ireland, p. 93; Again, Ó Siochrú agrees with Murphy’s conclusions in God’s Executioner. 94 Reilly, Cromwell, An Honourable Enemy, p. 170.

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Cromwell Triumphant The most important result of the fall of Wexford was the beginning of the disintegration of the royalist coalition. Ormond’s hope that the long-expected arrival of Charles II in Ireland would solidify the alliance was clearly unrealistic. After Wexford, the king negotiated with the Scots for an alliance, and these talks ended with his going to Scotland, repudiating his Catholic subjects and undercutting Ormond’s position. At the same time, Cromwell’s secret agreement with Lord Broghill to subvert the Protestant garrisons in Munster came to fruition, as Inchiquin’s garrisons in Youghal, Cork and Kinsale declared for parliament by the end of October 1649.95 Ormond did not give up. In an appraisal of his strategy in late October, he noted that he could not risk a battle, but instead achieve ‘small successes … through our hardiness and agility … If we can but protract this war and keep them weakening, we shall destroy them without either loss or hazard, especially if England be embroiled by the king’s complying with the Scots’.96 Such resistance relied heavily on the Ulster army; however, shortly thereafter came news that Owen Roe O’Neill had died as he led his men south, reducing the effectiveness of his army, and it was not until late October that a final treaty between the Ulster army and Ormond was signed.97 Cromwell wasted no time in exploiting his Wexford victory. He sent Henry Ireton with a force to capture Duncannon, on the eastern approach to Waterford, while he led a much-reduced army to New Ross. Realising the importance of the place, Castlehaven and Ormond reinforced Sir Lucas Taaffe’s garrison with several thousand soldiers. On 17 October, Cromwell reached New Ross and summoned Taaffe to surrender. Taaffe initially refused, but once Cromwell’s cannon began to fire he changed his mind and on 19 October accepted generous terms. He and the garrison were allowed to depart with their individual weapons, but all cannon and ammunition had to remain.98 95 Thomason Tracts, E.581[3]. Perfect Relation … of the Army in Ireland, 29 Nov. 1649, which contained a letter from New Ross dated 26 Oct. 1649. 96 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 26, f. 70, Ormond’s Assessment, Oct. 1649. 97 Thomason Tracts, E.579[10]. Hewson’s letter from Dublin, 29 Oct. 1649. 98 Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 144–148; Thomason Tracts, E.579[13] for the original letter from Cromwell to Lenthall, 25 Oct. 1649; Ó Siochrú believes Ormond should have attacked Cromwell’s army as it crossed the Barrow on a boat bridge, but such an attack would have exposed Ormond’s forces to a fixed battle with the New Model Army.

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As Taaffe departed, five or six hundred of his soldiers joined Cromwell. These men were Protestants who had served Inchiquin. With New Ross in hand, Cromwell had opened the door to Munster. Ormond’s strategy to attrite his enemies had failed. It failed in part due to the inept resistance of the garrisons of Wexford and New Ross. It failed because of the excellent leadership of the Cromwellian generals – such as Jones, Venables, Ireton and Cromwell – who had learned their craft in the bitter English Civil Wars. It also failed because the Westminster government harnessed English financial and military resources for a long campaign in war-ravaged Ireland.99 Because Cromwell could maintain his army’s strength over the next seven months, all major towns in Ireland except Waterford, Limerick and Galway surrendered to him or his allies. In all cases, the garrisons and the townspeople were spared. Even after protracted and costly sieges at Kilkenny and Clonmel in 1650, Cromwell allowed the defenders to submit without ensuing massacres. When Waterford (August 1650) and Limerick (October 1651) later surrendered to Henry Ireton, the garrisons and inhabitants were spared and sacks prevented. These facts make the massacres at Drogheda and Wexford stand out as aberrations of the way Cromwell conducted operations in Ireland. With the exception of Wexford, when Cromwell granted terms, he maintained his end of the bargains he made. Compared to butchers such as Sir Charles Coote or Lord Inchiquin, Cromwell was an honourable enemy. He also was probably the only military commander in the Irish wars who treated the Irish peasants fairly. The End of Ormond’s Coalition As late as November 1649, Ormond still commanded forces that he estimated to total 18,000 foot and 4,000 horse, but he reported to the king that ‘I can barely draw 5,000 foot and 1,300 horse into the field due to shortages of money and supplies’. This situation forced him to ‘disperse the army into garrisons and lesser bodies where there may be more probability of their subsistence’.100 But his situation became next to hopeless when bad news arrived. On 10 December, the royalists in Ulster were defeated and accepted terms of surrender from Coote and Venables.101 On 15 January 99 James Scott Wheeler, ‘Logistics and Supply in Cromwell’s Conquest of Ireland’, in Mark Fissel (ed.), War and Government in Britain, 1598–1650 (Manchester, 1991), pp. 38–56; Wheeler, ‘The Logistics of Conquest’, pp. 188–199. 100 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 26, f. 300, Ormond to Charles II, 30 Nov. 1649. 101 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 26, f. 351, Lord Montgomery of Ards to Ormond, 10 Dec. 1649; f. 410, Ormond to Montgomery of Ards, 24 Dec. 1649.

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1650, the king told Ormond that he had made a deal with the Scots and was going to Scotland. On 13 January, the king issued a proclamation to his supporters to assure them that he would not consent to anything with the Scots that would prejudice his Catholic and Irish subjects.102 No one, including Ormond, believed this possible. With the loss of most Protestant forces by early 1650, Ormond’s troops were nearly all Catholics. Ormond’s relations with the confederates and the Catholic clergy steadily declined as the Cromwellians continued their campaign in Munster. On 10 April 1650, the last major royalist field force in Munster was destroyed near Macroom. From then on, resistance to the Cromwellians was carried out by partisan groups.103 By mid-summer 1650, Ormond no longer commanded any sizeable forces. In August, the Catholic hierarchy met at Jamestown and determined that it was best for Ireland and the Catholic Church for Ormond to leave Ireland, and in September they promised to excommunicate any Catholic who served him. On 11 December 1650, after appointing Clanricarde as Lord Deputy, James Butler, Marquis of Ormond, departed Ireland.104 Ormond failed to hold Ireland for Charles II. However, he was the most politically consistent leader in the Irish wars. Owen Roe O’Neill, Inchiquin, the Ulster Scots and most Old English leaders made deals at some time or other with the Parliamentarians. His surrender of Dublin to Jones in 1647 was done to avoid a Catholic capture of the capital, a decision with which Charles I agreed. Ormond never wavered in his loyalty to the king and to do what he thought best for the Stuart kingdom of Ireland. While he failed as a tactical commander, he maintained an unlikely coalition against the Westminster government for over a year. He also had a reasonable and coherent strategy to defeat the invader, but he lacked the necessary support of many Catholics, especially after the Battle of Rathmines and the fall of Drogheda and Wexford. As Micheál Ó Siochrú correctly states, ‘Protestants distrusted the marquis because of his alleged leniency towards Catholics, who in turn accused him of withholding vital religious concessions granted by Charles I. In many ways, Ormond faced 102 Bodleian Library, MS Carte f. 512, Charles II to Ormond, 16 Jan. 1650; f. 498, Proclamation of Charles II, 13 Jan. 1650. This was not received by Ormond until Aug. 1650. 103 William P. McCarthy, ‘The Royalist Collapse in Munster, 1650–1652’, Irish Sword (Dublin, 1964), vi. 171–179; The English victories at Macroom (May 1650) and Kilmallock (Mar. 1650) demonstrated the dangers of facing an English army in the open field. 104 Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland, pp. 175–177.

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an impossible task, as any attempt to unite Irish Protestants and Catholics would invariably attract hostile comment from both camps’.105 After the conquest was complete, Cromwell allowed Ormond’s wife to return to Ireland to look after the Butler estates. The Lord Protector of England also never sought to hunt down or kill Ormond. With the eventual restoration of the king in 1660, Ormond returned to Ireland to serve for years as Lord Lieutenant. His role in the brutal decade of warfare in Ireland from 1641 to 1653 definitely needs the sort of re-evaluation that a full biography could provide.

105 Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner, p. 109.

Part III

The ‘Settlement’ of Ireland

Chapter 7

Cromwellian Transplantations of the Irish to the Colonies Heidi J. Coburn

Transplantations of the Irish to the Colonies

As Daniel O’Gary prepared his last will and testament in Barbados in 1653, he considered the fate of his relatives remaining in the British Isles. ‘In case my children should dye and anie of my kindred should come over servante’, the Irishman requested in his will, ‘they should bee sett free out of the aforesaid estate’.1 By the 1650s, Irish servants had been arriving in the West Indies for over 20 years. King Charles I of England sent Irish, English, Scottish and Welsh emigrants there with land incentives to establish a labour force and make Barbados a profitable imperial entity.2 The popular memory of Irish transportation, however, was never linked to the kings of England, but rather to the man who ensured the end of the monarch’s reign. In 1649, Oliver Cromwell decreed that the ‘barbarous wretches’ who survived the Siege of Drogheda would be shipped to the West Indian Island; an act of deportation that he would repeat later that year and again in 1655.3 1 The Will of Daniel O’Gary, 15 Apr. 1653, Barbados Department of Archives, RB6/14. p. 324. 2 For discussion of early Irish immigration to Barbados, see Jill Sheppard, The Redlegs of Barbados: Their Origins and History (New York, 1977), pp. 11–13; Aubrey Gwynn, ‘Early Irish Emigration to the West Indies’, Irish Quarterly Review 18.72 (1929), pp. 648–663. 3 Oliver Cromwell, ‘To the Honourable William Lenthall, Speaker of the Parliament of England, 17 September 1649’, in Thomas Carlyle (ed.), Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations (New York, 1846), p. 128; A declaration of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. For the undeceiving of deluded and seduced people (London, 1650); Hilary McD. Beckles, ‘A “riotous and unruly lot”: Irish Indentured Servants and Freeman in the English West Indies, 1644–1713’, William and Mary Quarterly 47.4 (1990), p. 507. 185

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During the seventeenth century, Ireland had risen to a position of economic significance because it possessed a logistical advantage for a route to the New World.4 Transplantation in Ireland and abroad sought to mould the island into one of England’s most prosperous colonies by restructuring its economic, political and cultural geography. The Irish were sent to numerous sites throughout the empire, including North America, the Amazon, Saint Christopher Island and Montserrat.5 Yet Barbados posed a unique situation: unlike the other settlements, there were no native inhabitants when the English settlers arrived, and it would remain in English control throughout the Interregnum. Cromwell’s declaration at Drogheda in 1649 has fuelled nationalistic arguments for the past two centuries that contend that Irish transportation and servitude in the West Indies were tantamount to slavery.6 The research of John P. Prendergast presented Cromwell as the bogeyman of Irish history whose policy of transportation was an all-out manhunt for Irish slaves.7 At first glance, a long tradition of anti-Irish discourse supports the accusation of ethnic cleansing. English ideas of difference allowed for oppressive policies of religious, sartorial and linguistic suppression by promoting a belief in English cultural superiority.8 The seeds of this were sown by Giraldus Cambrensis in the twelfth century and accepted in varying degrees throughout the following years of English conquest. Cultural criticism of the Irish was reiterated in seventeenth-century travel accounts and land surveys that attacked the soggy bogs, uncultivated 4 William J. Smyth, ‘Society and Settlement in Seventeenth Century Ireland: The Evidence of the “1659 Census”’, in William J. Smyth and Kevin Whelan (eds), Common Ground: Essays on the Historical Geography of Ireland (Cork, 1988), pp. 58–60. 5 Aubrey Gwynn, ‘An Irish Settlement on the Amazon (1612–1629)’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy: Archaeology, Culture, History, Literature 41 (1932–1934), pp. 1–54; Aubrey Gwynn, ‘Documents Relating to the Irish in the West Indies’, Analecta Hibernica 4 (1932), pp. 157, 172–185; Donald H. Akenson, If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630–1730 (Montreal, 1997). 6 For discussion of this, see John Cunningham, Conquest and Land in Ireland: The Transplantation to Connacht, 1649–1680 (Woodbridge, 2011), p. 45. See also W. H. Hardinge, ‘On Circumstances Attending the Outbreak of the Civil War in Ireland on 23rd October, 1641…’, Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy 24 (1873), pp. 379–420; John P. Prendergast, The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (New York, 1868), p. 104. 7 Prendergast, Cromwellian Settlement. 8 For further discussion of this, see Jane Ohlmeyer, ‘“Civilizinge of those rude partes”: The Colonization of Ireland and Scotland, 1580s–1640s’, in Nicholas P. Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 124–147.

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land and dense woodlands of the island’s uncivilised frontier and its inhabitants.9 Nearly 4,000 miles away, in the Caribbean Sea, lay the Irish emigrants’ new home. Barbados’s warm, topaz blue waters with white, sandy beaches was unlike any coastline found in the Atlantic archipelago. During the seventeenth century, blazing heat, dangerous winds, hurricanes, heavy rain and disease tested the early colonists. Although the environment presented a challenge, the English settlers migrated to Barbados to find wealth rather than paradise. The Barbadian climate made a greater impact upon the psyche of the poor labouring population who were routinely exposed to the elements.10 Accounts of Christian servants sent to the Caribbean under Cromwell painted a bleak picture of life on the tropical island. Cruel overseers, long hours and gruelling labour formed servants’ lasting memories of Caribbean life on the sugar plantation. It is from these accounts that the sensationalised accusation of Irish slavery found traction, with an emphatic finger pointed directly at the Lord Protector. Seán O’Callaghan’s To Hell or Barbados presented a woeful tale of ethnic cleansing and Irish slavery – a narrative that had been popularly accepted because of Cromwell’s reputation in Ireland. While there is no doubt that white servants experienced severe, and often deadly, conditions toiling alongside the enslaved Africans in the plantation fields, their proximity to slavery did not imply equivalency. The racial hierarchies that would appear in the West Indies were imposed and solidified under the hand of English lawmakers, merchants and planters throughout the course of the seventeenth century as a reaction to everyday life in the Caribbean.11 Limitation of sources has been a consistent problem for scholars researching this period, specifically the lack of Irish sources and the documentary silences that surround the experience of the Catholic, non-elite population in the Caribbean. For Irish transportation, in particular, there is the desire to track a migrant’s journey from Ireland to the West Indies. Such an investigation, however, unearths fragile connections. Because 9 For examples of such accounts, see Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary (1617); Luke Gernon, A Discourse of Ireland (1620); François de La Boullaye de la Gouz, The Tour of the French Traveller M. de La Boullaye Le Gouz in Ireland, A.D.1644 (London, 1837); Gerard Boate, Irelands Naturall History (London, 1657). 10 For discussion about the climate, see Gary Puckrein, ‘Climate, Health and Black Labour in the English Americas’, Journal of American Studies 13.2 (1979), pp. 179–193. 11 Jenny Shaw, Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference (London, 2013), p. 34.

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many documents were destroyed in the fire of the Public Records Office in Dublin in 1922, names have been lost and lists of Irish prisoners remain elusive.12 The analysis here will raise the question of Cromwell’s blame as far as evidence permits. By reconstructing the Irish emigrant’s experience, it is possible to rebalance the Lord Protector’s role in the transportation procedure and readjust the focus to include a broader network of actors. During the 1650s, mercantile interests accelerated Irish transportation, sending both voluntary and involuntary migrants to the far corners of the growing empire. Irish transportation policy was not a clear-cut act of ethnic cleansing; it reflected a developing consumer economy that embraced unregulated systems of exploitation in the expanding early modern world. Forced Transportation The initial accusation of ethnic cleansing arose from first-hand portrayals of transportation and its traumatic consequences. The poetry of Éamonn an Dúna gives historians one of the most poignant accounts of transportation from an Irish perspective. His words, which have been used in Éamonn Ó Ciardha’s research on the Irish rebels during the 1640s and 1650s, indicated that the Irish population paired transportation with transplantation as a single policy of destruction: Transport transplant mo mheabhair ar Bherla Shoot him, kill him, strip him, tear him. A tory, hack him, hang him, rebel, A rogue, a thief, a priest, a papist[.]13 Unlike the remainder of the poem, the four lines cited above were not written in Irish. The use of English words suggested that the English presence threatened Irish identity, and most particularly its language.14 The disruption of Irish identity caused by English settlement in earlier decades has been widely discussed within the context of the native Irish, Old English and 12 Richard Flatman, ‘Transported to Barbados 1655’, Irish Family History 12 (1946), pp. 46–48. 13 Cecile Ó Rahilly (ed.), Five Seventeenth-Century Poems (Dublin, 1952), p. 90; Éamonn Ó Ciardha, ‘Tories and Moss-Troopers in Scotland and Ireland in the Interregnum Period’, in John R. Young (ed.), Celtic Dimensions of the British Civil Wars: Proceedings of the Second Conference of the Research Centre in Scottish History (Edinburgh, 1997), p. 153. 14 Ó Ciardha, ‘Tories and Moss-Troopers’, p. 153.

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New English.15 In the mid-seventeenth century, the ambiguity of Irishness became even more problematic when government policies of Irish isolation forced officials to distinguish between Irish and English. The victims were abducted at night under the cloak of darkness and ‘driven to the island of Statesy [in the West Indies]’.16 These contemporary accounts described transportation as an organised slave-hunt for innocent Irish who did not even know their crime. In the midst of the Act of the Settlement, transportation was the alternative to the death penalty for non-transplanters.17 In 1656, landowners in Munster who faced the loss of their entire estates conceded that they would prefer transatlantic transportation rather than local transplantation: ‘The claimants made a nose, some of them saying they had rather go to the Barbadoes than in Connaught amongst the rebels’.18 The reorganisation caused by the Acts of the Settlement and Satisfaction shattered the already wounded Irish landscape. Names had been flattened and Anglicised; forests had been destroyed; and manor houses, enclosures and gardens had resculpted the rural landscape into a state of aesthetic obedience. For landowners in Munster, a foreign land across the Atlantic held more promise than continued residence in their spoiled homeland. During the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, Barbados provided a quick solution for a social problem – expelling the worst of society to a far distant corner of the empire. Barbados was a destination offered to all subjects of the empire who were deemed treasonous, morally depraved and vagrant. The English traveller Henry Whistler’s observation of Barbados’s degenerate population became a reference point for later descriptions of the island. In 1654, Whistler pronounced Barbados ‘the Dunghill wharone England doth cast forth its rubidg: Rodgs and hors and such like people are those which are generally Broght heare’.19 Like many men of his 15 See D. W. Cunnane, ‘Catastrophic Dimensions: The Rupture of the English and Irish Identities in Early Modern Ireland, 1534–1615’, Essays in History 41 (1999), pp. 1–19; J. C. Beckett, The Anglo-Irish Tradition (Ithaca, NY, 1976) and Jane Ohlmeyer, Making Ireland English: The Irish Aristocracy in the Seventeenth Century (London, 2012). 16 Ó Rahilly, Five Seventeenth-Century Poems, pp. 85–86, 90–92. Translation provided in Ó Ciardha, ‘Tories and Moss-Troopers’, p. 154. 17 Prendergast, Cromwellian Settlement, p. 524; Robert Dunlop (ed.), Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2 vols (Manchester, 1913), ii. 437. 18 Court at Mallow for the qualifications of the Irish that formerly inhabited the towns of Corke, Youghal and Kinsale. Monday, 1 Sept. 1656. See Prendergast, Cromwellian Settlement, pp. 239–243; Corish, ‘The Cromwellian Regime’, p. 365. 19 Transcription from Neville C. Connel (ed.), ‘An Account of Barbados in 1654’,

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time, Whistler had been drawn to the Americas by the 1648 best-seller, Thomas Gage’s account The English-American, his travail by sea and land.20 Gage’s work describes his time spent in Mexico and Guatemala and conversion to Protestantism following his return to England. This text influenced Cromwell’s Western Design, which Kristen Block deemed a ‘brash advertisement of English Protestant imperial ambitions’.21 The sugar plantation economy in Barbados reflected the wider economic motives for policies of involuntary migration to the West Indies. Cromwell’s Western Design intended to destroy Catholicism’s hold in the New World by securing a position in the Caribbean in which to attack trade routes to the Spanish mainland. Block described the Cromwellian ‘political economy’ as the imagined relationship between the Puritan English state and the economic motivations behind the Western Design.22 In this regard, Gage’s work and the resulting accounts from English travellers during the Interregnum spoke loudly of Cromwell’s economic ideals. The West Indies was not simply a disposal site for criminals: more holistically, it was the frontier for England’s Protestant, imperialistic and economic supremacy. Even in the English popular consciousness, however, the Caribbean was increasingly seen as a place of lost liberty. Reports written by ex-servants – who had been sent to the island by Oliver Cromwell as prisoners of war – depicted Barbados as a site of exploitation. In 1659, Marcellus Rivers and Oxenbridge Foyle, two English gentlemen, petitioned that they had been falsely accused of their involvement in the 1655 Salisbury uprising and sold as indentured servants in Barbados. The men recounted the ‘inhuman’ Barbadian planters who reduced their servants to the ‘most deplorable, and (as Englishmen) … unparalleled condition’.23 As Rivers and Foyle pointed out, their experience proved even more horrifying to the public because they were Englishmen. The abuse Rivers and Foyle received implied the presence of Cromwell’s hidden lust for wealth and power; and the soldiers, officers and merchants’ desire for personal profit.24 In England, people now questioned whether the English Civil War threatened the very principles that ParliaJournal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 5.4 (1938), pp. 184–185. 20 For discussion of Thomas Gage, see Kristen Block, ‘Faith and Fortune: Religious identity and the Politics of Profit in the Seventeenth-century Caribbean’, PhD thesis, Rutgers University (2007), pp. 172–174. 21 Block, ‘Faith and Fortune’, p. 173. 22 Block, ‘Faith and Fortune’, p. 174 n. 11. 23 Marcellus Rivers and Oxenbridge Foyle, England’s Slavery or Barbados Merchandize, represented in a petition to the High Court of Parliament (London, 1659), pp. 1–7. 24 For discussion on the disenchantment of religious polices as a consequence of labour in the English Caribbean, see Block, ‘Faith and Fortune’, pp. 220–224.

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mentarians fought to protect. However, did this public disgust for white slavery apply to non-Englishmen? The parliamentary debates surrounding the Englishmen’s petition structured the racial and religious hierarchies of the Caribbean in law.25 As Shaw argued, ‘The juxtaposition with African experiences was supposed to underscore the horrors that the English men had lived through’ rather than highlight the plight of all those enslaved. Even when MP Thomas Gewen determined that ‘The selling a man is an offence of a high nature’, no one sought to apply this rule to the enslaved Africans.26 Major Knight, an MP from Scotland, provided a sympathetic voice for the transported Scotsmen, but the Irish Catholics – who lacked representation in these debates – were left out of the discussion entirely.27 Horrific tales of brutality in the Caribbean allowed scholars to place unquestioning blame on the Lord Protector. Aubrey Gwynn entitled his two articles on Irish transportation ‘Cromwell’s Policy of Transportation’, thus connecting the man to the distasteful events that followed.28 However, it may be time to question the emphasis placed upon Cromwell and his anti-Irish sentiment. Cromwell’s beliefs did not always agree with pre-established practices of severity. A critic of criminal law, Cromwell called for alterations from parliament in 1656, stating ‘I have known in my experience abominable murders acquitted and to see men lose their lives for petty murders: this is a thing God will reckon’.29 The larger question is if this sentiment of mercy extended to the Catholic Irish population, particularly the common men and women. In 1652, the Rump Parliament voted not to renew Oliver Cromwell’s office of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and, as John Morrill argued, Cromwell might have opposed the subsequent ‘Cromwellian’ settlement.30 This is significant because the settlement offered the legal framework in which to carry out an escalated transportation policy to the colonies. Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton’s investigation on banishment revealed that there were few 25 Shaw, Everyday Life, p. 23; Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 212–213. 26 Leo Francis Stock (ed.), Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, vol. 1, 1542–1688 (Washington, DC, 1924), p. 256. 27 Shaw, Everyday Life, pp. 25–26. 28 Aubrey Gwynn, ‘Cromwell’s Policy of Transportation’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 19.76 (1930), pp. 607–623; Aubrey Gwynn, ‘Cromwell’s Policy of Transportation Part II’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 20.78 (1931), pp. 291–305. 29 As cited in Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, Banishment in the Early Atlantic World: Convicts, Rebels and Slaves (London, 2013), p. 27. 30 John Morrill, ‘Cromwell, Parliament, Ireland and a Commonwealth in Crisis: 1652 Revisited’, Parliamentary History 30.2 (2011), pp. 193–214.

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legal formalities before 1657.31 Although Cromwell was keen to avenge the crimes of 1641–1642, he probably would not have supported the level of severity imposed upon those who had not been rebels.32 If Cromwell opposed a ruthless policy of resettlement in Ireland, would he have also opposed mass relocation of the Irish to the colonies? By 1649, the idea of transporting the problematic Irish to overseas colonies was a 42-year-old solution. In 1607, English statesmen denounced the unlawful behaviour of ‘certain kinde of swordmen Called kerne’ and proposed they might be taken from Ireland and ‘implied to ye planting of Virginia’.33 By the mid-seventeenth century, convict transportation had become a common policy of expulsion that was used throughout the Atlantic archipelago. The catalyst behind this increasing phenomenon has been the centre of debate – while Hilary Beckles attributed it to the decrease of voluntary migration, Russell Menard argued that the growing demand for labour on the plantations simply overtook supply.34 The War of the Three Kingdoms provided another resource for forced migration: prisoners of war. Contrary to military convention, prisoners captured at Preston, Dunbar, Worcester and Drogheda were spared their lives and sent on the gruelling journey across the Atlantic. After the conquest of Ireland, Cromwell’s successors found themselves dealing with a problem they did not anticipate: large gangs of disbanded Irish troops who had a propensity for lawlessness. The question then became what to do with these individuals, or anyone who might be a potential enemy. The post-conquest settlement offered up a solution with a plan of widespread banishment – a plan that went far beyond what Cromwell described in his declaration at Drogheda.35 Interestingly, six years after the storm of Drogheda, the Lord Protector and the English government distanced themselves from a cohesive policy 31 Morgan and Rushton, Banishment in the Early Atlantic World, pp. 27–28. 32 See John Morrill, ‘Oliver Cromwell, Priestcraft and the “Deluded and Seduced” People of Ireland’, in Patrick Little (ed.), Ireland in Crisis: War, Politics and Religion, 1641–50 (Manchester, 2019), pp. 193–210. 33 Gwynn, ‘Documents Relating to the Irish in the West Indies’, p. 157. 34 Richard Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623–1775 (Baltimore, MD, 1974), p. 236; Hilary McD. Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados, 1627–1715 (Knoxville, TN, 1989), pp. 46, 49; Russell R. Menard, Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in early Barbados (London, 2006), pp. 44–55. For a discussion of these debates, see Abigail L. Swingen, Competing Visions of Empire: Labor, Slavery, and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empire (New Haven, CT, 2015), p. 20. 35 Morrill, ‘Oliver Cromwell, Priestcraft and the “Deluded and Seduced” People’, pp. 193–210.

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of transportation. The council hesitated with orders of execution, and transportation was left absolutely up to governors and other officials. When asked for their opinion about a sentence for several Irish Tories, the council stated: and for those you have adjudged to be sent to the plantation islands, and those you have sentenced to be transplanted into Connaught, we have nothing to suppose your proceedings therein, but leave that to your discretion and Rules given you in such cases and as may most tend to the presenting such evils for the future and conduce to the peace and security of the country.36 A life in the colonies was offered to those who resisted transplantation to Connacht, but transplantation was not a hardline policy of Irish isolation. After 1655, those remaining in Ireland recognised a need to maintain a Catholic labouring class. As Patrick J. Corish observed, in the spring of that year, the desire for the complete clearance of Ireland had diminished.37 Colonel Foulke, the governor of Drogheda, allowed Catholics temporary exemption from transplantation for his county’s economic benefit in April 1654: ‘the contribution and other public taxes will be better secured and paid’.38 While orders attempted to restrict Irish migration into Wicklow and called to remove the ‘the loose and dangerous persons’ out of the county, these orders most likely never came to fruition.39 The practical necessity of a Catholic population and the surge of Catholic petitions crippled the transplantation scheme. The ‘pedees or garcones’ (‘nondescript sort of labourers’, as dubbed by Dunlop) remained subject to transplantation after 1655, but many continued as tenants to work the land.40 A similar trend occurred in England; convict and vagrant transportation, once heralded as a policy of redemption, began working against the national interest when the population began to decline.41 In 1657, the English 36 Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, ii. 556. 37 See Corish, ‘The Cromwellian Regime’, p. 374. 38 Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, ii. 422. See also Cunningham, Conquest, p. 46. 39 Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, ii. 602–603; Corish, ‘The Cromwellian Regime’, pp. 374–375. 40 Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, ii. 530. For a brief discussion of landless labourers, see Corish, ‘The Cromwellian Regime’, pp. 374–375. 41 Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1988), pp. 30–31; J. M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London 1660–1750:

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government rejected a proposal to form a joint-stock West India Company to ‘take aboard such servants, or such as by commissions given to Justices of the Peace [as] shall be collected of vagabonds, beggars or condemned persons, & proceed with them to Jamaica’.42 By the mid-seventeenth century, the economic ideology behind transportation began to wane: the unemployed masses could be rehabilitated into productive members of society at home rather than on distant shores. Merchants and Private Profit In August 1656, a letter concerning the Bristol merchant Richard Christmas and his Irish servant Edward Browne asked for the servant’s continued service.43 Browne, although Catholic, had been entrusted with managing Christmas’s affairs in and about Waterford and maintained the ‘best understanding’ of his debts and credits. Christmas’s petition may have been spurred by a proposal issued in February of 1656 to transplant the inhabitants of Carlow, Waterford and Limerick into designated areas of Connacht.44 At first glance, Christmas’s request has little relevance to Irish deportation to Barbados. Edward Browne’s prospective future home was Connacht, not the West Indies. However, transplantation introduced the potential of transportation for those who resisted, and the case of Edward Browne raises a question that must be answered: how much influence did merchants exert upon the resettlement of the Irish population? Patrick J. Corish argued that the national legend of manhunts is founded upon fact, but that a great deal of transportation arose from the merchant’s personal interests.45 Was an increase in transportation so much a government policy as it was a result of individual greed? Historians have recently identified English merchants as the catalysts, or at the very least enablers, of imperial development through the transport of commodities and labour. L. H. Roper placed the merchants under a spotlight – examining their commercial interests and subsequent influence Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (Oxford, 2001), p. 480; Cynthia Herrup, ‘Punishing Pardon: Some Thoughts on the Origins of Penal Transportation’, in Simon Devereaux and Paul Griffiths (eds), Penal Practice and Culture, 1500–1900: Punishing the English (New York, 1965), pp. 121–137. 42 As cited in Swingen, Competing Visions of Empire, p. 20. 43 Prendergast, Cromwellian Settlement, p. 399. 44 Prendergast, Cromwellian Settlement, p. 208. 45 Corish, ‘The Cromwellian Regime’, pp. 362–363. For discussion of the labour market in colonial America, see David W. Galenson, Markets in History: Economic Studies of the Past (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 52–96.

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upon foreign policy and colonial expansion. Many of these aristocrats and merchants ‘held heterodox Protestant religious belief ’; however, he argues that they were not motivated by ideology. For Roper, the state’s role was ‘reactive’.46 Abigail Swingen similarly cast merchants at the centre of the early English empire, yet placed more emphasis upon their ideological motivation: ‘The power and influence of a cohesive group of Londonbased colonial merchants during the Commonwealth and Protectorate periods of the 1650s and the political-economic ideology they espoused provided the ideological foundations of the early English empire’.47 In Gijs Rommelse’s research on Anglo-Dutch relations, The Act of Navigation of 1651 serves as a testament to the merchants’ influence on England’s aggressive Protestant foreign policy.48 As recent historiography begins to readjust the impetus of unfree labour more towards the actions of English merchants, it seems fitting that Irish transportation should receive the same treatment. From a merchant’s perspective, Irish transportation to the colonies required a supply of voluntary as well as involuntary migrants. The separation of these two categories, however, is frustratingly blurred; as Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton argued, ‘The distinction between voluntary, forced and judicial processes is almost impossible to discern’.49 For some emigrants, Barbados offered an opportunity for personal economic gain. Richard Ligon’s A true & exact history of the island of Barbados described an island ripe for entrepreneurial aspirations. His engravings of tropical plants, sugar refining machines and a map of the island illustrated the profit potential of the West Indian territory. Although the book primarily drew the attention of wealthy gentlemen with colonial interests, Barbados may have been presented to poor Irish, by word of mouth, in a similar light to persuade migration. In many cases, merchants had persuaded, rather than forced, men and women to board their ships. The reality of the migrants’ experience was far from the merchant’s glowing accounts. As Irish passengers stepped abroad the ships in Bristol harbour, they may have already grown suspicious 46 L. H. Roper, Advancing Empire: English Interests and Overseas Expansion, 1613–1688 (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 2–3. 47 Swingen, Competing Visions of Empire, p. 197. 48 Gijs Rommelse, ‘Mountains of Iron and Gold: Mercantilist Ideology in Anglo-Dutch Relations (1650–1674)’, in David Onnedkink and Gijs Rommelse (eds), Ideology and Foreign Policy in Early Modern Europe (1650–1750) (Farnham, 2011), pp. 258–259. 49 Morgan and Rushton, Banishment in the Early Atlantic World, p. 60.

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of the merchants’ promises, yet they must have accepted that life in Barbados provided more opportunities than continued residence in their homeland.50 David Harris Sacks’s and David Souden’s research on emigration to the colonies touched upon the developing consumer-oriented economy of the early modern period.51 Many Irish passengers remain nameless and there are no definitive numbers indicating how many boarded ships to the West Indies. Unlike colonists from Virginia or Maryland, West Indian colonists were not concerned with the names, origins or occupations of the emigrants.52 The Bristol registers of indentured servants to foreign plantations, nevertheless, provide an astonishingly complete list of servants leaving the port between 1654 and 1682.53 The information on this register should be taken with a grain of salt – some passengers did not arrive at the stated destination, primarily due to weather conditions or faulty ships.54 David Souden also pointed out that merchants most likely collected the majority of the servants from Ireland after the ships left Bristol.55 However, the very existence of the document in 1654 is immensely significant – the registers were probably a reaction to the September 1654 city ordinance that denounced spiriting: many complaints … oftentimes made to the Maior and Aldermen of the inveigling purloining carrying and Stealing away boyes Maides and other persons and transporting them beyond Seas … without any knowledge or notice of the parents or others that have the care and oversight of them.56 50 Beckles, ‘A “riotous and unruly lot”’, p. 505. 51 David Harris Sacks, The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450–1700 (Oxford, 1991); David Souden, ‘“Rogues, Whores and Vagabonds”? Indentured Servant Emigrants to North Americas and the Case of Mid-Seventeenth-Century Bristol’, Journal of Social History 3.1 (1978), pp. 23–41. 52 Beckles, White Servitude, p. 57. 53 For discussion on the Bristol registers, see Souden, ‘“Rogues, Whores and Vagabonds”?’, pp. 23–41. 54 For cases of ships that were forced to land in alternative destinations, see Peter Wilson Coldham, English Adventures and Emigrants 1609–1660: Abstracts of Examinations in the High Court of Admiralty with Reference to Colonial America (Baltimore, MD, 1984), pp. 146, 164. 55 Souden, ‘“Rogues, Whores and Vagabonds”’, p. 26. 56 David Galenson printed the document in Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 189–190. See also Sacks, The Widening Gate, p. 252.

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The ordinance placed hard penalties upon merchants for kidnapping. John Latimer cited examples of men being pilloried or committed to trial for ‘man spiriting’ and ‘spiriting away two boys’ in September of 1655 and August of 1656.57 Cases suggested that the term ‘spiriting’ implied kidnapping; however, the practice often operated on the periphery of English law. Servants taken by ‘spirits’ had been enticed to sign an indenture under false pretences.58 In 1649, ‘spirits’ were defined as those who took up ‘all the idle, lazie, simple people they can intice, such as have professed idelnesse, and will rather beg than work, who are persuaded by these Spirits they shall goe unto a place where food shall drop into their mouthes; and being thus deluded, they take courage and are transporte’.59 Most of these passengers had been placed aboard ships under this pretext of ‘vagrancy’, which was, unfortunately, a flexible term and therefore easily susceptible to policy abuse.60 Although the ordinance’s intent appeared to be to prevent unlawful transportation, its real objective probably promoted economic exclusion. Much to the distaste of the mercantile elite, merchants involved in spiriting were often interlopers who held other primary occupations. Edward Wilcox, the agent of the Irish husbandman Morris Powers, was listed as a grocer. The Dolphin’s merchant John Blenman was actually a shipbuilder’s apprentice.61 The lack of regulation in the new commercial world that evolved across the Atlantic during the Interregnum allowed interlopers to reap the profits of the expanding white servant trade, which ultimately hurt the mercantile elite. By 1645, arguments for free trade had already been brewing when a pamphlet attacked the Merchant Adventurers because ‘Nothing is more … pernicious and destructive to any kingdom or commonwealth than monopolies … [trade] is dung which being close kept in a heap or two stinks, but being spread abroad, it doth fertilise 57 John Latimer, The Annals of Bristol in the Seventeenth Century (Bristol, 1900), p. 255. 58 See also Sacks, The Widening Gate, pp. 254–255; Frances Parthenope Verney, Memoirs of the Verney Family During the Civil War, 4 vols (London, 1892–1894), i. 154. 59 William Bullock, Virginia impartially examined, and left to publick view, to be considered by all iudicious and honest men. Under which title, is comprehended … (London, 1649), p. 14. 60 John. W. Blake, ‘Transportation from Ireland to America, 1653–1660’, Irish Historical Studies 3 (1943), p. 277. 61 Sacks, The Widening Gate, p. 257. For discussion on English merchants in the Atlantic Trade, see Nuala Zahedieh, ‘Making Mercantilism Work: London Merchants and Atlantic Trade in the Seventeenth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 9 (1999), pp. 143–158.

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the earth and make it more fructible’.62 Shopkeepers saw colonial trade as a way to trade outside the control of the Bristol Merchant Venturers.63 Connections that had once required commission agents were now created through family members. Bristol merchant Anthony Dunn left his wife at home to send him servants after he departed to Barbados.64 It was no coincidence that the men who passed the servant ordinance of 1654 were the same men who dominated Bristol’s trade. As Sacks proposed, the registers were an instrument of economic warfare rather than social improvement.65 The absence of legal formalities during the Interregnum left open a window of opportunity for enterprising individuals. As Blake stated, the ‘Dishonest merchants were thus able to conceal mercenary motives under the cloak of public service’ when the Irish government hoped to export Catholics, Tories, and vagrants out of Ireland.66 For the transport of prisoners, merchants applied to the English council of state for a licence to take a specific number of Irish servants. If granted, the merchants would then negotiate with the Irish council of state. It came to the council to inform prison authorities and commissioners of the negotiated transportation scheme.67 In many cases, the merchants were often the instigators of the system rather than the council. In the case of voluntary Irish migration, a merchant paid for the servant’s passage and hired the ship that would cross the Atlantic.68 Even with these expenditures, the merchant would reap a minimum of £6 (or the equivalent value in sugar or tobacco) from the sale. Merchants were in luck if they found skilled emigrants to place aboad their ships. These labourers were valued at £15 more than their unskilled contemporaries.69 62 Thomas Johnson, A discourse consisting of motives for the enlargement and freedome of Trade (London, 1645), pp. 4, 25. For further discussion, see Nuala Zahedieh, The Capital and the Colonies: London and the Atlantic Economy, 1660–1700 (Cambridge, 2010), p. 42 and Lars Magnusson, Mercantilism: The Shaping of an Economic Language (London, 1994), p. 102. 63 See Sacks, The Widening Gate, p. 267. 64 See Peter Wilson Coldham, The Complete Book of Emigrants: 1607–1660 (Baltimore, MD, 1987), p. 327. 65 Sacks, The Widening Gate, pp. 256–257, 279–282, 252–253. 66 Blake, ‘Transportation from Ireland to America’, p. 281. 67 See Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, ii. 341, 562. See also Blake, ‘Transportation from Ireland to America’, p. 277. 68 For description of the system, see Blake, ‘Transportation from Ireland to America’, pp. 273–274. 69 Peter Wilson Coldham, Emigrants in Chains: A Social History of Forced Emigration to the Americas of Felons, Destitute Children, Political and Religious Non-Conformists, Vagabonds, Beggars and Other Undesirables, 1607–1776 (Baltimore, MD, 2007), p. 5; Sacks, The Widening Gate, pp. 266, 278.

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The economic incentive to bring skilled emigrants was particularly strong in Barbados where the sugar economy demanded a skilled labour force.70 How, and if, the Irish emigrants landing in Barbados satisfied the planters’ demands is another question that will be explored later. A drop in the number of servant registers after 1663 speaks to the economic fuel behind transportation: the introduction of black slavery in sugar plantations, the falling price of tobacco and the effects of the Dutch war disincentivised the white servant trade.71 The Fate of the Irish Emigrant In 1653, Daniel O’Gary hoped to free any relatives who had the misfortune of arriving in Barbados as indentured servants. He understood that many servants would not survive years of hard labour in the harsh landscape under the watchful eye of an abusive overseer. Before the establishment of the Master and Servant Code in 1661, the treatment of servants had been left to the practice of the planter rather than law. Richard Ligon’s account, therefore, provides one of the only means to assess the experience of the indentured servant in Barbados. The day after arriving to the island, the servants are rung out with a Bell to work, at six a clock in the morning, with a severe Overseer to command them, till the Bell ring again, which is at eleven a clock; and then they return, and are set to dinner … At one a clock, they are rung out again to the field, there to work till six.72 According to Ligon’s account, slaves and servants found themselves in a similarly arduous environment; the Irish men were ‘derided by the Negroes and branded w[i]th the epithet of white slavery’.73 The pronouncement of ‘white slavery’ identified the labourers’ shared experience yet visible 70 Hilary McD. Beckles, ‘Plantation Production and White “Proto-Slavery”: White Indentured Servants and the Colonisation of the English West Indies, 1624–1645’, Americans 41.3 (1985), pp. 21–45. 71 Sacks, The Widening Gate, p. 283; Corish, ‘The Cromwellian Regime’, pp. 362–363. For discussion on the early African slave trade, see David W. Galenson, Trader, Planters, and Slaves: Market Behaviour in Early English America (Cambridge, 1986); Galenson, Markets in History, pp. 68–84. 72 Richard Ligon, A true & exact history of the island of Barbados (London, 1657), p. 43. 73 Beckles, ‘A “riotous and unruly lot”’, p. 511.

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separation.74 Although the indentured servants and enslaved Africans worked side by side, opportunities for advancement were only available to the Irish servants, simply because of the colour of their skin. The freshly colonised island initially followed the trends of the world market with the production of tobacco, cotton and indigo.75 In the mid-1640s, it found the means for radical economic success with sugar.76 Sugar transformed the system of land distribution in Barbados, but it did so to the detriment of indentured servants.77 The indentured servants’ hope for land ownership dissipated when land values increased and the island could no longer support small planters.78 The island became overcrowded, and emigrants turned their attention towards the Carolinas and Jamaica. In desperate need to keep sugar production alive, planters continually petitioned the British government for more white servants. It was not until the 1670s that slaves took over the servants’ skilled plantation roles.79 Barbadian legislation between 1644 and 1657 demonstrated the local authority’s concern with the existing servant population, particularly the Catholic Irish servants and their propensity for rebellion. As early as 1644, the Irish were restricted from entering the island. When this act proved ineffective, new policies emerged to thwart continued emigration.80 Daniel Searle’s public proclamation in September 1657 conveyed the government’s frustration with their ineffective control over the Irish servant population.81 The Governor made an order to confiscate all arms and ammunition from Irish freeman and servants and ‘others of the Romish 74 See Shaw’s discussion of this in Everyday Life, p. 97. 75 See ‘A Letter from Barbados in 1640’, reprinted in Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 27.4 (1960), pp. 124–125. 76 Henry Whistler’s journal of the West India expedition, London, British Library, MS Sloane 3926; Neville C. Connel, ‘A Short History of Barbados’, Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 27.1 (1959), p. 7; Vincent T. Harlow, A History of Barbados, 1625–1685 (Oxford, 1926), pp. 25–127. 77 Harlow, History of Barbados, pp. 83–85. 78 Beckles, White Servitude, pp. 141–142. 79 Hilary McD. Beckles and Andrew Downes, ‘The Economics of Transition to the Black Labour System in Barbados, 1630–1680’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18.2 (1987), pp. 225–247; David Galenson, ‘White Servitude and the Growth of Black Slavery’, Journal of Economic History 14.1 (1981), p. 41. 80 Beckles, ‘A “riotous and unruly lot”’, pp. 503–522; Cambridge, University Library, MS Davis, Box 4, ‘Laws of Barbados, 1643–1663’; Bridgetown Public Library, Lucas MSS, ‘The Minutes of the Barbados Council’, Reel 1, ff. 161–162. 81 The proclamation is provided in Gwynn, ‘Documents Relating to the Irish in the West Indies’, p. 237.

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Religion’.82 He additionally denounced the new arrival of 87 Irish rogues. Their Catholic faith made them untrustworthy for militia duty and he deemed them physically unfit for plantation labour.83 In the same year that the Barbadian government ordered the deportation of Irish priests, Cromwell scolded Daniel Searle for letting prisoners free before the expiration of their service.84 Searle had to remind Cromwell of the stipulations of indentured service by arguing that several prisoners were able to gain freedom legally via payment or completing their term of service.85 The fear of returning convicts had been a preoccupation of earlier seventeenth-century authorities. Execution (the verdict that felons previously escaped) became the penalty for returning.86 Cromwell’s anxiety about freed prisoners was not without its reasons: in 1656, deported Irish secretly returned and provided firearms to those at home.87 The London government did not anticipate that the rebelliousness they combated in Ireland would survive in Barbados where severe punishment was used to correct unwonted behaviour. Barbadian planters resisted reformative transportation policies, and not simply those concerning the incoming Irish population. In 1654, Whistler observed that ‘a whore is hansume makes a wife forsume rich planter’.88 When ‘loose wenches’ were sent to the island to remedy the poor servant women’s ‘morally depraved’ behaviour planters saw this as a threat to the local social order.89 The reactions to transportation in the seventeenth century reflected a discontinuity between English policy and foreign colonial interests. While Cromwell hoped to contain problematic subjects of the empire geographically, Barbadian elites sought to displace these individuals once again. In the metropole and colony there was a desire to maintain the illusion of order in one’s immediate sphere of authority, and these aspirations could be in direct opposition with one another. 82 See the 1657 Order of the Governor and Council, printed in Gwynn, ‘Documents Relating to the Irish in the West Indies’, p. 238. 83 Minutes of Council, Nov. 17. 1657, Cambridge, University Library, MS Davis, Box 1. See Beckles, ‘A “riotous and unruly lot”’, p. 507. 84 S. C. Lomas (ed.), The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell with Elucidations by Thomas Carlyle, 3 vols (London, 1904), ii. 438 n. 1. 85 Lomas, The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ii. 438. See also Pestana, The English Atlantic, p. 208. 86 Morgan and Rushton, Banishment in the Early Atlantic World, pp. 24–25. 87 Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, ii. 662–663. 88 Neville C. Connel (ed.), ‘An Account of Barbados in 1654’, Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 5 (1938), p. 185. 89 Shaw, Everyday Life, p. 169.

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Deep-rooted complaints of Irish unproductivity were exacerbated in the Caribbean where hard labour was the rule of success for an economy founded upon sugar cultivation. Uncivilised behaviour and insults were calculated, demonstrating Irish migrants’ awareness of ethnic and religious stereotypes.90 Patrick O’Callaghan was whipped and deported for speaking ‘irreverently and profanely of the Holy Bible and uttering bad expressions of Englishmen’.91 Cornelius Bryan was sentenced to 21 lashes on his bare back in 1656. His crime was refusing a tray of meat with the declaration, ‘if there was so much English blood in the tray as there was meat, he would eat it’.92 He was ordered to be deported for anti-English language the following month.93 Yet this very same man would soon realise that by minimising his Roman Catholic practices and declaring his loyalty to England he could create a window of socioeconomic opportunity.94 Cornelius Bryan became the central character of Jenny Shaw’s work on the multi-ethnic society of the English Caribbean. Bryan was a testament to the tangled and divided experiences of the Irish and African labourers; as a servant he was beaten for his irreverent language and destined for deportation, but he ultimately rose to the position of a planter and slave holder. Irish Catholics could climb the ladder of plantation society by accepting English ideas of difference and concealing their religious beliefs. This was a path to economic independence not available to enslaved Africans by the later seventeenth century. In the Caribbean, a permanent underclass became essential to maintain a reliable workforce, and the best way to achieve this oppressive social hierarchy was to embrace ‘a discourse that privileged apparently biological distinctions over all others’.95 Evidence of the Irish in Barbados is made more difficult because of the lack of a Catholic Church. The absence of priests, who were frequently deported, may have forced the Irish Catholics to blend into Protestant Barbados. Yet wills from Barbados described individuals leaving goods to relatives in Ireland as well pounds of tobacco to nuns, clergy and friars in the surrounding Caribbean islands. Hugh Collam left his clothing and shoes to a group of individuals with suggestively Irish names: Teige Klingsie, Dermott O’Fall, Dermott Mac Conne, James Kelly, Redmond Faghey and Nicholas Meagh – a merchant who had been identified as 90 Shaw, Everyday Life, pp. 143–146. 91 Bridgetown Public Library, Lucas MSS, ‘Minutes’, Reel 2, f. 486. 92 Bridgetown Public Library, Lucas MSS, ‘Minutes’, Reel 1, f. 186. 93 Bridgetown Public Library, Lucas MSS, ‘Minutes’, Reel 1, f. 186. 94 Shaw, Everyday Life, pp. 157–158. 95 Shaw, Everyday Life, p. 34.

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a rebel more than ten years earlier in the 1641 Depositions.96 One of his four servants named William the Barber was to be set free upon his death.97 In 1652, the planter Finn Patrick bequeathed tobacco to the friars in Saint Christopher Island ‘for an obligation they putt upon [him] in former time’.98 The tentative connections between the Irish names in the Barbadian sources raise important questions concerning Irish assimilation in Barbados. Many had been lured on to ships by merchants, kidnapped under the cloak of darkness or deported for their crimes – and yet the evidence that remains suggests the presence of emigrants who escaped lives of servitude and embraced the racial hierarchy that had once chained them. The wills of Daniel O’Gary and others indicate methods employed by the Irish community to ensure physical and cultural survival. Did the Irish in a position of authority make attempts to relieve relatives of servitude? Did they come to participate in the slave labour economy? And although there were no Catholic churches did they find a way to retain their religious identity? The Barbados wills reply in the affirmative. Conclusion Until recently, research on Irish migration to the Caribbean under Cromwell limited itself to ethnically charged stories of kidnapping and forced transportation. The Commonwealth documents provided clear evidence of the transportation of Tories, vagrants, prisoners, women, children and priests. It was a fate issued as an alternative to the death penalty for individuals throughout the empire. England was a growing colonial power in the 1650s and the Irish landscape and population held immense profit potential. While religious and ethnic prejudices certainly justified a ruthless transportation policy, this scheme was not simply an English manhunt for problematic individuals. As Corish argued, much of the transportation policy arose from commercial greed.99 The economic motivations became even more apparent in the context of the servant trade in Bristol and the Irish community’s experience abroad in Barbados. Although Cromwell’s declaration at Drogheda spoke loudly of his conviction to transport those who refused surrender, he may not have 96 Deposition of John Williams, Trinity College Dublin, MS 829, f. 177r–v. Available at http://1641.tcd.ie. 97 Barbados Slave Lists, The Will of Hugh Collam, 4 Jan. 1653, BDA, RB6/13, p. 31. 98 Barbados Slave Lists, The Will of Finyn Patricke, 23 Feb. 1652, BDA, RB6/11, p. 560. 99 Corish, ‘The Cromwellian Regime’, p. 363.

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supported a policy that arbitrarily extended this threat across the Catholic Irish population. The questions surrounding Cromwell’s approval of the post-conquest settlement picks fundamental holes in the idea of ‘Cromwellian’ transplantation to the colonies. English authorities believed that severe discipline would mould the problematic multitudes of society into instruments of the Commonwealth and England would be placed on the path towards economic supremacy. During the early days of the British Empire, banishment offered convicts an alternative to the death penalty as well as an opportunity for redemption.100 Irish transportation can be read within a larger strategy of social improvement for felons and vagrants throughout the two islands – a strategy that ultimately filled the pockets of guileful merchants. The presence of interloping merchants during the early 1650s points to the system’s highly unregulated nature. The movement of people during the seventeenth century presented unique legal, political and economic challenges as well as opportunities. As the empire grew, there were new destinations for both banishment and profit. The merchants played a key role in the parallel stories of the metropole and the colony – not simply in the act of transportation itself, but in pushing personal greed to the forefront of migration practices. The Bristol registers and the cases of the High Court of Admiralty expose the significance of mercantile interest in Irish migration. John W. Blake argued that most passengers were transported as vagrants and ‘because vagrancy was an elastic term which it was left to the justices of the peace to interpret, abuses crept in’.101 Policy abuse, however, was not as state driven as Prendergast, Gwynn and Dunlop proposed. The government never authorised an arbitrary policy of transportation. The Irish council of state detained ships bound to Barbados to confirm that none of the passengers had been unduly labelled ‘vagrants’.102 An ordinance denouncing spiriting in 1654 spoke to the propagation of unlawful transportation practices and, more significantly, the consequences of less-restrictive trade during the Interregnum. Voluntary migrants stepped abroad ships in Bristol with hope for a better life – persuaded by a glowing tale of the opportunity awaiting them across the ocean. For many voluntary and involuntary migrants alike, this ‘better life’ never came to fruition; they were embattled by the alien Caribbean climate and the hard labour of the sugar plantation society. 1 00 Morgan and Rushton, Banishment in the Early Atlantic World, p. 23. 101 Blake, ‘Transportation from Ireland to America’, p. 277. 102 Prendergast, Cromwellian Settlement, p. 288; Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, ii. 578.

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Unlike Virginia, Maryland and Carolina, Barbados could no longer offer indentured servants the land promised to them when they had agreed to go abroad. This is perhaps why Barbados has been seen as a colony of exploitation rather than settlement.103 When discussing Cromwell and the emotional accounts of transportation, the Irish servants’ lived experience in their new home is a crucial part of the story. The shocking accounts of white servants allowed scholars to draw a direct parallel between servitude and slavery. However, fragments of evidence challenge the pre-existing narrative of complete Irish victimisation. The Barbados Council Minutes described a rowdy Irish labourer whose threatening words proved to English planters that the offending Irishman was the same problematic Tory that he had been in Ireland. Treatment of the Irish in the Caribbean was a unique response to issues of everyday life on the island.104 In the economically charged space of Barbados’s sugar society, Irish resistance was detrimental. The Barbadian government saw the ill effects of Irish migration as early as 1644 and hoped to end it. The colonists’ distaste for the Irish immigrant despite a shortage of white labour is noteworthy. It shows the Irishmen’s and Englishmen’s strong connection to the economic and ethnic conflicts of home amidst the demographic and ecological changes of the New World. Recent research successfully adds a layer of ambiguity to the Irish experience, demonstrating that immigrants were not only resistant to authority but also successful in Caribbean society. Productive Irish emigrants avoided ethnic categorisation at a time when a social hierarchy began to solidify according to race rather than religion. In the seventeenth century, the Irish could accept English ideas of cultural difference to escape the lower rung of the social ladder. Daniel O’Gary’s request in 1653 to free any relatives from servitude demonstrates the Irish community’s ability to escape exploitation – in this case through the economic independence of a family member. Moments of cultural survival and the evolution of the Irish from the oppressed to oppressor sets Irish transportation firmly within the complex and contested space of the Atlantic world. For over a century, historians have cast Oliver Cromwell as the villain of a ruthless transportation policy – adding yet another layer of hostility on to the memory of the Lord Protector in Irish popular consciousness. The purpose of this chapter is to loosen the knot binding him to the accusation of ethnic cleansing by drawing out the complexities of forced migration, its actors and its outcomes. By beginning to deconstruct tragedy, Irish 1 03 Beckles, White Servitude, pp. 57, 141–142. 104 Shaw, Everyday Life, p. 18.

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transportation can be integrated more fully into the larger themes of early Atlantic history and imperial expansion. At its core, Irish transplantation to the colonies reflected the emerging consumer-oriented economy in the expanding early modern world.

Chapter 8

A Scramble for Ireland Cromwell and the Land Settlement John Cunningham

Cromwell and the Land Settlement

The customary labelling of the years 1649–1660 in Ireland as ‘Cromwellian’ helps to ensure a wider audience for historical study of this period than might otherwise be the case. As with Thomas Wentworth for the 1630s, Irish history during the Interregnum can after all be approached partly as biography of a larger-than-life Englishman. On the one hand, this renders Cromwellian Ireland more accessible to historians of Britain; Cromwell’s letters to Speaker Lenthall from Drogheda and Wexford fit in a sequence that encompassed his reports on Naseby, Dunbar, Worcester and other landmarks of the wars in England and Scotland. On the other hand, too much focus on Oliver risks reducing both the ‘constructive’ and the ‘catastrophic’ dimensions of what occurred in Ireland merely to points for brief consideration when weighing Cromwell’s wider historical reputation.1 This partly explains why the massacre at Wexford, which Cromwell did not positively authorise, has attracted far less scholarly attention that events at Drogheda, where by his own admission he ordered the slaughter of the garrison.2 Fortunately, recent histories of the conquest have helped better to contextualise Cromwell’s role; they have shed considerable light on the war after May 1650, a prolonged 1 For ‘constructive’ aspects, see Toby Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland: English Government and Reform in Ireland, 1649–1660 (Oxford, 1975). On the ‘catastrophic’, see Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Nationalism and Historical Scholarship in Modern Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies 26 (1989), pp. 338–341. 2 See, for example, Micheál Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (London, 2008), pp. 80–98, where 15 pages are devoted to Drogheda, but only three to Wexford. 207

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and blood-soaked phase of conflict that can no longer be skimmed over as a post-Cromwell mopping-up exercise.3 What about the land settlement? In the most simplistic telling, Cromwell was sole author and chief enforcer. Here again, recent scholarship paints a far more nuanced picture.4 The settlement was enormous and complicated; it was a revolution in landownership. As with any revolution, the agency of any one individual in bringing it about or in steering its course is a knotty issue. In one sense, the settlement simply represented an intensification of English policy towards Ireland since the sixteenth century, as the latest and greatest rebellion opened the way for a larger and lasting transfer of property. The coda was played out in the 1690s, when Irish Catholics again found themselves on the losing side. From this broader perspective, the character of the 1650s land settlement arguably had little to do with Oliver Cromwell. Rather than approaching the settlement via the involvement of one man, it perhaps makes better sense for scholars to continue to reconstruct the land settlement using the broad range of sources available, while writing Cromwell into this history as and where appropriate. The marvellous Down Survey of Ireland website, for example, helps to illustrate the extent to which the settlement was a vast achievement in surveying, map-making and tabulating.5 Indeed, Ted McCormick has described Sir William Petty’s survey as ‘the most important state-backed technological achievement of the 1650s, if not the entire century, and the first scientific survey of any European country’.6 It is just one of the aspects that duly merits detailed attention alongside the high politics of dispossession and plantation. A short chapter is not, however, the place to address all of the many intricacies of the land revolution. The focus here will necessarily be narrower, exploring Cromwell’s connection to the land settlement and, where possible, his role in and attitude towards it. This task is not as straightforward as it may sound. Although a few decades ago John Morrill referred to Cromwell as ‘one of the most accessible and open 3 Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner; James Scott Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland (Dublin, 1999); Tom Reilly, Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy (Dingle, 1999). 4 John Cunningham, Conquest and Land in Ireland: The Transplantation to Connacht, 1649–1680 (Woodbridge, 2011); John Morrill, ‘Cromwell, Parliament, Ireland and a Commonwealth in Crisis: 1652 Revisited’, Parliamentary History 30.2 (2011), pp. 193–214. 5 Accessible at www.downsurvey.tcd.ie. 6 Ted McCormick, ‘Projecting the Experiment: Science and the Restoration’, in Janet Clare (ed.), From Republic to Restoration: Legacies and Departures (Manchester, 2018), p. 194.

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of Englishmen’, in 2015, J. C. Davis could reasonably argue that ‘We barely know Oliver Cromwell’.7 One of the problems highlighted by Davis was that Cromwell’s ‘own’ letters and speeches were ‘often recorded by others and, in the case of more official correspondence, most likely penned by others’.8 As will be explored further below, this circumstance complicates any effort to gauge Cromwell’s outlook towards both the land settlement and individual Irish proprietors. Further difficulty is posed by the sometimes dark terrain between Cromwell’s apparent views on the one hand and government action, or inaction, in distant Dublin on the other. When it came to Irish land, how far did his will as Lord Protector actually matter? As with so much about Cromwell’s life and career, this question defies definitive answer. Yet given the importance of the land settlement to Irish and British history, and the customary identification of Cromwell with it, it is worthwhile to attempt to clarify the nature and extent of his involvement. The Adventurer The Adventurers’ Act of March 1642 was the first of the three main pieces of legislation upon which the land settlement was built. It provided for the raising of £1 million through the confiscation and sale of 2.5 million acres of Irish land. This Act was the English parliament’s most significant response to date to the Catholic rebellion that had broken out in Ireland in October 1641. The money raised was intended to support an army that would pacify the neighbouring kingdom.9 This was a far-reaching and unprecedented intervention by an English parliament into Irish matters. Among the many significant clauses of the Act was one that blocked Charles from granting pardons without the consent of the two houses at Westminster.10 The parliament thus set its face firmly against any king-led compromise with the rebels. Although horror stories of widespread murders and massacres were emanating from Ireland by the spring of 1642, from a British perspective the military picture was 7 John Morrill, ‘Cromwell and his Contemporaries’, in John Morrill (ed.), Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (Harlow, 1990), p. 259; J. C. Davis, ‘Oliver Cromwell’, in Michael Braddick (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution (Oxford, 2015), p. 223. 8 Davis, ‘Oliver Cromwell’, p. 223. 9 On the history of the Adventurers’ Act, see Karl Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land: The ‘Adventurers’ in the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (Oxford, 1971). 10 Henry Scobell, A Collection of Acts and Ordinances (London, 1658), p. 29.

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not quite so bleak. By March, Sir Phelim O’Neill had abandoned his attempt to take the strategic town of Drogheda, and state forces operating out of Dublin had enjoyed some successes in that region. In April, the first detachments of a large Scottish army under Robert Monro landed at Carrickfergus.11 It was in this context, prior to the complication of civil war at home, that Englishmen had to weigh up the pros and cons of investing their money in the Irish adventure. In the lead up to the passage of the Adventurers’ Act, Oliver Cromwell had shown an interest in the Irish problem. Most significantly, on 24 February he was one of 14 MPs appointed ‘to be the Commissioners for Irish affairs’.12 By that point, planning for the ambitious adventurers’ scheme was well under way. Although the details of Cromwell’s Irish-related political activities in 1642 cannot be fully recovered, some glimpses are possible. On 6 June, for example, the Commons entrusted him with the task of perfecting a list of the ‘particular Captains and Officers’ who were designed for Ireland.13 The surviving ‘List of the Field-Officers’ for seven troops of horse and five regiments of foot, printed by Edward Paxton a week later on 11 June, may well be the result of Cromwell’s efforts.14 Within a few months, his dealings with matters military were to move far beyond such paper exercises. The clearest evidence of Cromwell’s engagement with Ireland in 1642 is the fact that he was among those MPs who invested in the adventure. In his authoritative study of the latter scheme, Karl Bottigheimer concluded that 1,533 ‘investor-adventurers’ had initially subscribed a total of £306,718. This group included 119 MPs, who between them subscribed £69,982. Cromwell paid in a total of £850.15 How did a man of Cromwell’s status get his hands on so much money? Research by Andrew Barclay and Simon Healy has helped to solve this conundrum; it appears that Cromwell’s sale of his leases of the dean and chapter lands of Ely in the autumn of 1640 provided him with a cash windfall of £2,000 to £3,000.16 He evidently 11 ‘Chronology’, in John P. Kenyon and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds), The Civil Wars: A Military History of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1638–1660 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 360–363. 12 Commons Journal, ii. 453. 13 Commons Journal, ii. 609. 14 A List of the Field-Officers Chosen and Appointed for the Irish Expedition (London, 1642). The Oliver Cromwell listed as ensign to Captain Edward Massey was presumably Cromwell’s cousin. 15 Bottigheimer, English Money, pp. 54–75. 16 As discussed in Patrick Little, ‘Cromwell and Ireland before 1649’, in Patrick Little (ed.), Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives (Houndmills, 2009), pp. 118–119.

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decided to invest a substantial part of this money on the promise of Irish land. Patrick Little has argued that Cromwell’s decision was not only monetary but also a ‘religious statement’, as he staked his financial survival on success in a war against the enemies of God in Ireland.17 Within the group of 119 MP adventurers, Cromwell was an early subscriber. One contemporary list indicates that by 26 March 1642 he had promised to pay £500.18 By mid-April he had in fact handed over £600: £300 for the adventure and £300 for the ‘sea-adventure’.19 The latter plan involved dispatching up to 18 ships to ‘invade’ Irish rebels on land or at sea, with those involved in the enterprise permitted to retain the proceeds of their pillage.20 Cromwell was one of only a handful of MPs who invested in this aggressive scheme.21 That he continued to pay close attention to the adventurers’ scheme thereafter is suggested by the fact that he subscribed a further £250 on 19 July.22 He thus met an incentivised deadline of 20 July that had been set by parliament. In supplementary legislation, adventurers who paid their subscriptions before the latter date were promised assignments of land measured in Irish plantation acres, as opposed to the English statute acres stipulated in the initial Act.23 Having staked so much on Ireland, Cromwell was evidently determined to maximise his return. The parliament’s doubling ordinance of 1643 provided an even greater incentive to pay additional money, but by then Cromwell’s attention and his resources were otherwise engaged. In 1645–1646, he appears to have been open to going to Ireland to continue his burgeoning military career; Patrick Little has suggested that by then Cromwell had become frustrated at the 17 Little, ‘Cromwell and Ireland’, p. 119. 18 The names of such members of the Commons House of Parliament, as have already subscribed (London, 1642). 19 R. P. Mahaffy (ed.), Calendar of State Papers Ireland: Adventurers, 1642–1659 (London, 1903), pp. 319–320. 20 C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait (eds), Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660, 3 vols (London, 1911), i. 9–12. Although Cromwell apparently paid in the relevant money in mid-April, the parliamentary ordinance authorising the sea-adventure was not approved until 17 June. It seems possible that in June he chose to reassign part of his original payment, diverting it to support the sea adventure. 21 John P. Prendergast, The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland, 3rd edn (Dublin, 1922), pp. 443–448. 22 J. R. MacCormack, ‘The Irish Adventurers and the English Civil War’, Irish Historical Studies 37 (1956), p. 47. 23 Scobell, Collection of Acts, pp. 32–34. A plantation acre is equal to 1.62 statute acres.

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parliament’s lack of vigour in prosecuting the Irish war.24 Amongst other things, it meant that he could not reap any benefit from his adventure for land. It would be 1653 before the adventurers for Ireland finally got around to drawing lots. At that point, following widespread trading and consolidation of debentures in the interim, 1,043 individuals had outstanding claims. Cromwell’s £850 brought him an assignment of 1,257 acres in the barony of Eglish. The latter territory was situated in King’s County (Offaly) in the midlands. Contrary to the impression given by Bottigheimer and others, it seems very unlikely that Cromwell gained possession of much or indeed any of this land.25 He was among 51 adventurers who expected to receive a total of 14,844 profitable acres in Eglish.26 The barony in question had, however, already been subject to plantation under James I and it was largely Protestant-owned in 1641. According to one source, there were only 2,457 profitable acres available for redistribution, equal to just one-sixth of total quantity drawn against the barony in 1653.27 Such gulfs between theory and practice, between legislation and implementation, were to be a common feature of the land settlement. In that sense, at least, Ireland in the 1650s was very far from appearing ‘as a clean paper’.28 The General Within two months of his arrival in Ireland in August 1649, Cromwell was forced to turn his thoughts to confiscation and colonisation. The occasion was the aftermath of the storming of Wexford. In a letter to Lenthall, Cromwell referred to ‘the former inhabitants’, estimating that ‘scarce one in twenty can challenge any property in their houses’: ‘Most of them are run away, and many of them killed in this service’. Cromwell duly expressed a wish that ‘an honest people would come and plant here; where are very good houses, and other accommodations fitted to their hands’.29 From 1641 24 Little, ‘Cromwell and Ireland’, pp. 123–125. 25 Bottigheimer, English Money, pp. 68–70; Little, ‘Cromwell and Ireland’, p. 118. 26 Adventurers’ Allotments, 1658, National Archives of Ireland, QRO 2A.12.34. I am grateful to Dr David Brown for sharing data derived from this source with me. 27 W. H. Hardinge, ‘On Manuscript Mapped and Other Townland Surveys in Ireland … 1640 to 1688’, Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy 24 (1873), p. 100. 28 These words are attributed to Cromwell in the extant version of Ludlow’s memoirs. See C. H. Firth (ed.), The Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, 2 vols (Oxford, 1894), ii. 246. 29 S. C. Lomas (ed.), The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell with Elucidations by Thomas Carlyle, 3 vols (London, 1904), i. 487.

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onwards, Wexford had been defended by companies raised locally from among the townsmen. In October 1649, these townsmen still comprised a substantial component of the town’s defenders. As Cromwell’s men ‘put all to the sword, that came in their way’, the impact on the local population must have been significant.30 Four years later, delinquency commissioners established that among the slain had been the alderman Nicholas Hay, the merchant James Nevill and the gentlemen Nicholas Rochford and Christopher Turner.31 While most of these men were reported to have been ‘in arms’ at the storm, in the case of Nevill the relevant witness examination seems to have been amended for accuracy, with the words ‘being in Actuall armes for the Irish against the english’ struck out.32 As Cromwell’s army ran amok in a town where the distinction between panicking soldier and terrified civilian was necessarily blurred, the killing of unarmed people such as Nevill could hardly have been avoided. Even in the relative calm of 1654, the delinquency commissioners in County Wexford charged with investigating wartime episodes from the 1640s struggled to clarify whether some individuals had been ‘in arms’ for the Catholic war effort, as opposed to simply wearing a sword as a gentleman might.33 On the spot in 1649, Cromwell’s men had far less time to ponder such distinctions. By transforming Wexford into ‘so great a ruin’ they created the colonial ideal: vacant space.34 In an effort to fill it, houses in the town were tendered for sale at just 10 per cent of their usual price.35 Back in London, the parliament also instructed the Council of State to take into consideration ‘the transplanting of several families into Wexford’.36 The case of Wexford points to an aspect of the settlement that is sometimes overlooked, namely that it was not merely concerned with the confiscation and transfer of landed estates in the countryside. In the mid-seventeenth century, a dramatic shift also 30 Lomas, Letters and Speeches, i. 486. 31 The relevant 1641 depositions include: Examination of William Stafford, 4 Jan. 1654, Trinity College Dublin, MS 891, f. 223r–v; Examination of Nicholas Stafford, 6 Jan. 1654, Trinity College Dublin, MS 819, f. 147r–v; Examination of William Stafford, 28 Dec. 1653, Trinity College Dublin, MS 819, f. 248r–v. 32 Examination of William Stafford, 4 Jan. 1654, Trinity College Dublin, MS 819 f. 149r–v. 33 See, for example, Examination of James Dalton, 18 Jan. 1654, Trinity College Dublin, MS 819, f. 200. 34 Lomas, Letters and Speeches, i. 486. 35 John Nickolls (ed.), Original Letters and Papers of State, Addressed to Oliver Cromwell (London, 1743), p. 45. 36 Commons Journal, vi. 315.

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took place in the ownership of Irish urban property.37 Cromwell’s letter from Wexford indicates that he was content to endorse such a change, in the belief that it reflected the will of God. The potential that he spied at Wexford, ‘a seat of good trade’, may also have prompted the letter that he sent to New England to encourage relocation to Ireland.38 Although the end results of this proposal were ultimately modest, it reveals something of Cromwell’s vision for a post-war Ireland: as a haven for those who had crossed the Atlantic to escape ‘the tyranny of episcopacy’.39 Cromwell did not have to look far to uncover what he considered evidence of a similar tyranny in Ireland. Among the documents sent to parliament from Wexford was a copy of the censure issued in 1646 by Nicholas French, Catholic bishop of Ferns, relating to the burial of Francis Talbot, who had died ‘an obstinate Heretick’.40 French was also among the bishops who gathered at Clonmacnoise in December 1649 to issue decrees enjoining unity against the ‘Common Enemy’.41 Cromwell’s Declaration in response to the bishops is well known. Amongst other things, he sought to refute the bishops’ charge that his purpose in Ireland was extirpation and destruction. He insisted to the contrary that people would be judged according to ‘the nature and quality of their actings’. Those who surrendered would enjoy mercy, ‘excepting only the leading persons and principal contrivers of this Rebellion’, while those who held out could expect ‘utmost severity’.42 Cromwell’s Declaration pointed to the likelihood that, regardless of what may have occurred in 1641, some degree of practical compromise with ‘bloody’ Irish rebels would be necessary to end the war. Any such compromise would, however, inevitably impact on the quantity of Catholic land available for confiscation. The Declaration also set out Cromwell’s conceptualisation of the historically close relationship between Ireland and England as one rooted in land tenure and ‘English industry, through commerce and traffic’. As he argued that ‘Ireland was once united to England’, any mentions of royal sovereignty or of common loyalty to the crown were understandably 37 For a useful study, see Mark McCarthy, ‘The Forging of an Atlantic Port City: Socio-Economic and Physical Transformations in Cork’, Urban History 28 (2001), pp. 25–45. See also Micheál Ó Siochrú and David Brown, ‘The Cromwellian Urban Surveys, 1653–1659’, Archivium Hibernicum 69 (2016), pp. 37–150. 38 Lomas, Letters and Speeches, i. 488. 39 Nickolls, Original Letters, p. 45. 40 Commons Journal, vi. 315; The document was reproduced in Edmund Borlase, The History of the Execrable Irish Rebellion (London, 1680), p. 171. 41 Lomas, Letters and Speeches, ii. 8. 42 Lomas, Letters and Speeches, ii. 22.

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omitted by the regicide Cromwell. The union of two countries that he depicted was founded not on vertical ties to a shared monarch but on the ties of English people to Irish property: Englishmen had good Inheritances which many of them purchased with their money; they or their Ancestors from many of you and your Ancestors. They had good leases from Irishmen, for long time to come; great stocks thereupon; houses and plantations erected at their cost and charge … You [the bishops] broke this union!43 From this perspective, the implication of 1641 was that English control over Ireland required a ‘union’ between Englishmen and Irish acres more far-reaching than any scheme hitherto attempted. Many of those English and Scots who already had ‘good Inheritances’ in Ireland initially adhered to Ormond’s royalist alliance. In 1649–1650 Cromwell worked successfully to detach these key groupings from the Stuart cause. His rapid progress from Drogheda via Wexford to Ross by mid-October 1649 encouraged the Protestant forces in key Munster strongholds to switch sides. By mid-November, Cork, Youghal and a number of smaller towns, including what Cromwell referred to as ‘some other places of hard names’, had agreed to submit to the parliament.44 The fact that Cromwell could call on the services of Lord Broghill and Colonel Robert Phayre, influential individuals with long-standing connections to the region, helped to ensure that this process was relatively smooth. In the addresses carried from both Cork and Youghal to Cromwell at Ross, townsmen and officers requested indemnity for past actions and the right to enjoy their estates. In response, Cromwell promised leniency and undertook to render any assistance that he could in relation to protecting ‘charters, privileges, lives and estates’.45 By April 1650, in the face of further Cromwellian military advances, the Protestant forces elsewhere in Ireland were ready to submit. Under articles agreed on 26 April the Ulster Scots and others were guaranteed equal treatment with those royalists in England who had been permitted to recover their estates upon payment of composition fines.46 The conciliatory promises made by Cromwell between November 1649 and April 1650 helped to neutralise the military threat posed by the Protestant component of Ormond’s faltering 43 Lomas, Letters and Speeches, ii. 8. 44 Lomas, Letters and Speeches, i. 502. 45 The relevant documents can be found in Lomas, Letters and Speeches, iii. 412–418. 46 John Cunningham, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the “Cromwellian” Conquest of Ireland’, Historical Journal 53 (2010), p. 924.

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armies. Those same promises would later help to shape Irish Protestant experiences of the land settlement. The Politician Following his departure from Ireland in May 1650, Cromwell was required to shift his attention to the growing threat posed by Scotland. Responsibility for the war effort in Ireland was duly delegated to his son-in-law Henry Ireton. Cromwell was, however, home from the wars when the parliament at last began to devote substantial attention to Irish affairs in the spring of 1652. Three major issues required political resolution: arrangements for the future government of Ireland; the assignment of land both to satisfy the adventurers and to pay the army’s arrears; and the fate of Ireland’s existing population, especially its propertied classes.47 Cromwell had reason for interest in all three issues. His three-year commission as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland was due to expire in June 1652. His military service in Ireland ensured that he was now owed land not only as an adventurer but also as an officer. And the parliament’s approach to dealing with existing Irish landowners had potential to undermine the promises that he had made to Protestants in Munster and elsewhere concerning their property. Although the last of these three issues has attracted considerable attention from historians, it seems to have generated the least heat at Westminster in 1652. On 12 August, the parliament endorsed, with some modifications, a scheme of qualifications that had been drawn up by Henry Ireton in Ireland more than a year earlier. By August 1652, Ireton was long dead and the situation that his qualifications had been intended to address, the possibility of interminable war due to the absence of any clear framework for a cessation of hostilities, no longer existed: most of the Irish Catholic forces had surrendered upon articles in the spring and summer of 1652. Ireton’s plan was a blunt instrument aimed primarily at ‘settling’, or pacification. It fell far short of providing for ‘settlement’, or a detailed blueprint for the reordering of post-war landed society. The parliament’s adoption of ‘An Act for the Setling of Ireland’ accordingly had little immediate effect in terms of moving the settlement forward.48 47 Some aspects of this section are covered in greater depth in John Cunningham, ‘Divided Conquerors: The Rump Parliament, Cromwell and Ireland’, English Historical Review 129 (2014), pp. 830–861. 48 Cunningham, Conquest, pp. 19–22, 29–30. For Ireton, see the chapter by Dr David Farr in this volume. I am grateful to Dr Farr for sharing his essay with me in advance of publication.

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It is tempting to speculate that Cromwell was somehow involved in promoting one amendment that emerged from the Council of State prior to the passing of the Act; it was designed to soften its potential impact on Irish Protestants who had not borne arms during the war.49 For Samuel Gardiner, however, there was ‘no evidence whatever’ to connect any part of this legislation to Cromwell.50 More recently, John Morrill has argued that ‘there is quite a lot of evidence that he was opposed’ to the Act for the Settling of Ireland.51 It seems more likely, however, that it was the other two major issues mentioned above that aroused his opposition in 1652. In May of that year, the question of renewing Cromwell’s commission as Lord Lieutenant became intertwined with a parliamentary initiative to grant extremely generous terms to the adventurers for Ireland. A crucial figure in all of this political manoeuvring was John Weaver, a republican MP who had gone to Ireland in 1651 as one of four commissioners appointed to lead the re-establishment of English civil government. Weaver clashed with leading army officers in Ireland over a range of issues, not the least of which was who should command the forces there following Ireton’s death. He returned to Westminster in April 1652 determined to challenge the increasing dominance of military men within the English regime in Ireland. For the short term, this meant working to block Major General John Lambert from going to Ireland as Lord Deputy in succession to Ireton. On 19 May, a parliamentary vote against renewing Cromwell’s commission duly ensured that Lambert’s appointment also lapsed. For the longer term, the influence of army officers in Ireland was bound up with the question of how much land they ought to be granted there.52 In April and May 1652, efforts at Westminster to encourage the adventurers to begin their plantation gathered considerable momentum. As up to 57 members of the Rump had a stake in the scheme, parliamentary interest in the issue was inevitably strong.53 The relevant committee, which included MP adventurers, proposed to give the adventurers a bonus 49 Cunningham, Conquest, p. 29. This amendment was proposed by the Council of State on 3 August. It meant that under the eighth qualification Protestants who had not borne arms could avoid penalties if they had ‘manifested their good affections … having opportunity to do the same’. By contrast, Catholics would be exempt from confiscation only if they could prove ‘constant good affection’ to the parliament, an unlikely feat. 50 Samuel Gardiner, ‘The Transplantation to Connaught’, English Historical Review 14 (1899), p. 707. 51 John Morrill, ‘Cromwell, Parliament, Ireland’, p. 198. 52 Cunningham, ‘Divided Conquerors’, pp. 834–847. 53 MacCormack, ‘The Irish Adventurers’, pp. 43–58.

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assignment of 500,000 acres on top of their actual legislative entitlements, as well as allowing them to receive all of their lands in the more fertile and accessible provinces of Leinster and Munster. Meanwhile, the army in Ireland was preoccupied with trying to end the war and its officers had not yet had opportunity to make known its views on the land settlement. To make matters worse for it, Weaver was busy arguing both that Irish army pay should be reduced and that some of the men’s arrears should be discounted because of their enjoyment of free quarter. On 21 May, however, the push by Weaver and others to approve a settlement that privileged the adventurers over the army ground to a halt, when parliament voted narrowly to suspend its debate on Ireland.54 One of the tellers for the winning side in the vote was Charles Fleetwood, who was to marry Cromwell’s daughter Bridget a few weeks later.55 It seems reasonable to assume that Cromwell, as MP, adventurer, and army Commander-in-Chief, was keenly interested in these goings on. Morrill has highlighted the fact that he attended the Council of State far more diligently in May 1652 than in any other month that year, being present on twenty occasions.56 Even on a private level, Cromwell had good reason to pay attention. He may have invested £850 in the adventure in 1642, but his arrears of pay from 1649 to 1650 appear to have been much greater than that sum. The men that he had commanded in Ireland were also owed substantial amounts of money, and therefore land in lieu of it. An official calculation from April 1654 shows that, for example, Cromwell’s regiment of horse and his regiment of foot in Ireland were owed a combined total of £71,146.57 As his share, Cromwell was later to receive 5,225 acres of prime land in the baronies of Dunboyne and Ratoath, County Meath.58 He thus had a toe in the adventurers’ camp, but a foot in the army’s. Although many details of the struggle in 1652 over Irish affairs at Westminster remain obscure, it can be characterised as part of the wider struggle between those who championed the interests of the army on the one hand versus republicans who were opposed to the further growth 54 Cunningham, ‘Divided Conquerors’, pp. 847–851. 55 Peter Gaunt, ‘Fleetwood [née Cromwell; other married name Ireton], Bridget, Lady Fleetwood under the protectorate (bap. 1624, d. 1662), daughter of Oliver Cromwell’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. https://doi.org/10.1093/ ref:odnb/65777 (accessed 22 Aug. 2020). 56 Morrill, ‘Cromwell, Parliament, Ireland’, p. 200 n. 33. 57 Resolves of a general council of officers held at Cork-House, April the 6. 1654 (Dublin, 1654), pp. 10, 12. 58 C. W. Russell and John P. Prendergast (eds), The Carte Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (London, 1871), p. 173.

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of army political power on the other.59 In relation to Ireland, the army gradually gained the upper hand, for example, with the appointment of Fleetwood both as Commander-in-Chief and as one of the commissioners for civil government. By the autumn, the officers in Ireland had at last found time and space to formulate their own demands relating to the land settlement. They also struck back successfully against Weaver, with Sir Hardress Waller leading a delegation to London to petition for his removal from government. The army’s demands helped to shape a bill for the land settlement, including a three-province plantation, which was making some progress until Cromwell shut down the parliament on 20 April 1653.60 The degree of progress already made, and the urgency around the Irish land issue, were reflected by the fact that the ‘caretaker executive’ put in place in April felt able to issue three sets of instructions authorising the commencement of plantation and transplantation.61 These instructions formed the basis of the third major piece of legislation relating to the land settlement, which was eventually approved by the nominated assembly on 26 September.62 While it is rarely possible to trace any direct influence that Cromwell may have exerted on these developments, there is no reason to suppose that he was strongly opposed to the main outlines of the Irish land settlement as finalised in 1653. From the summer of 1653 onwards, the implementation of the settlement involved enormous challenges. The first was to ensure that sufficient acres could be identified to satisfy the competing needs of adventurers, soldiers and existing landowners. As part of the effort to grapple with this task, a series of land surveys were undertaken.63 In addition, delinquency commissioners were appointed in each military precinct to determine the war guilt of individual property owners.64 In the enforcement of confiscation and transplantation, the extent to which discretion might be exercised, and who should exercise it, also caused major headaches, particularly for Charles Fleetwood. As with all governors of 59 For a detailed study of the politics of this period, see Blair Worden, The Rump Parliament, 1648–1653 (Cambridge, 1974). 60 Cunningham, ‘Divided Conquerors’, pp. 852–858. 61 Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford, 2002), p. 538. 62 Cunningham, Conquest, pp. 37–40. 63 On this and other relevant details, see Micheál Ó Siochrú and David Brown, ‘The Down Survey and the Cromwellian Land Settlement’, in Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), The Cambridge History of Ireland, vol. 2, 1550–1730 (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 584–607. 64 John Cunningham, ‘Anatomising Irish Rebellion: The Cromwellian Delinquency Commissions, the Books of Discrimination and the 1641 Depositions’, Irish Historical Studies 40 (2016), pp. 22–42.

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early modern Ireland, Fleetwood was faced with the reality that policies preferred in Dublin might be modified or even overturned in London. The first major test of the power and independence of his government came in 1653 as it set about transplanting over 250 Ulster Scots proprietors to the south of the country. This plan was proposed by commissioners based in the north as a way of preventing potential military co-operation between the regime’s opponents on either side of the North Channel. Such a scheme was allowed for by a proviso in the Act for the Settling of Ireland, which stated that individuals who had surrendered under articles could none the less be made liable to transplantation for reasons of public safety.65 Unlike the transplantation of Catholics to Connacht, however, the relocation of the Ulster Scots had not been positively mandated by parliament or by other authorities in London. Against such proposals, the Ulster Scots could plead the protection of the articles granted to them by Cromwell in April 1650. Even before the emergence of the transplantation scheme in May 1653, Hugh Montgomery, Viscount Ardes, had taken his case to the committee for articles in London. In March, equipped with a letter of support from Cromwell, he secured an order for possession of his estate. On his return to Ireland, Ardes was shocked to learn of the government’s intention that he should ‘forfeit two thirds of his estate and be transplanted as to the other third’.66 He promptly returned to London, taking with him his neighbour James Hamilton, Earl of Clanbrassil. These Ulster Scots leaders sought to block the threat from Dublin by enlisting further support from the committee for articles and from Cromwell. Oliver proved happy to help. In July, and again in December, he wrote to Fleetwood to demand ‘a stop’ to Clanbrassil’s relocation. The committee for articles also weighed in, insisting that transplantation would be ‘in diminution’ of the terms granted to the Ulster Scots in April 1650.67 These interventions proved decisive and the scheme was quietly abandoned. In this case, Cromwell’s hand had been strengthened, and Fleetwood’s weakened, by the fact the issue was at least in part a military one, and father-in-law was Commander-in-Chief. The episode with the Ulster Scots helped to set the tone for Cromwell’s subsequent engagement with the land settlement as Lord Protector. The proper observation of articles of war was a question of honour, both that 65 Cunningham, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the “Cromwellian” Settlement of Ireland’, pp. 924–925. 66 Cunningham, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the “Cromwellian” Settlement of Ireland’, pp. 924–925. 67 Lomas, Letters and Speeches, iii. 446.

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of individual officers and of the entire army. As Ian Gentles has explained, ‘Anything less would be highly destructive of military self-respect’.68 The former fighting men who made approaches to Cromwell understood this and sought to benefit from the fact that in September 1652 parliament had passed an act reviving the committee for articles.69 Cromwell’s behaviour towards certain Irish landowners can be understood in this honour context. At the same time, it is worth taking account of J. C. Davis’s argument relating to the importance of Cromwellian negotiation and coalitionbuilding, a setting in which ‘honour has to be at a discount’.70 Cromwell’s approach to Ireland can be seen in part as an effort to balance the demands of honour on the one hand with the need for coalition-building on the other. Just as his success in winning Irish Protestants to his side in 1649–1650 helped to advance his conquest, his honourable assistance to them in 1653–1654 kick-started ‘healing and settling’ in a land where it was very badly needed. In this case at least, the demands of honour aligned well with the need to negotiate a broadening of the regime’s support base. The question of how to respond to Catholic pleas was, however, less straightforward. They too could appeal to a soldier’s honour, but their religion, the blot of 1641 and the destruction wreaked on them by conquest meant that the Catholics could not expect to wield much influence in the emerging Cromwellian coalition of new and old interests in Ireland. To make matters worse for them, the scope for any concessions was severely restricted by the fact that the overall success of the land settlement seemed to depend on their being dispossessed and transplanted. Oliver P. Cromwell’s ability to intervene in the land settlement was increased by his elevation to the office of Lord Protector in December 1653. Although he had to work closely with his council, Blair Worden has stressed that in such dealings Lord Protector Cromwell usually got his own way.71 At the same time, Peter Gaunt has argued that Cromwell became ‘largely absorbed into the formal and anonymous mechanisms of central government’.72 68 Ian Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland, 1645–1653 (Oxford, 1992), p. 421. 69 Gentles, New Model Army, pp. 421–422. 70 Davis, ‘Oliver Cromwell’, p. 236. 71 Blair Worden, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Council’, in Patrick Little (ed.), The Cromwellian Protectorate (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 95–98. 72 Peter Gaunt, Oliver Cromwell (Oxford, 1996), p. 153.

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Surviving documentation that can allow us to explore the connections between the protector and the land settlement thus needs to be handled with caution. Most directly, it should be kept in mind that some letters in which Cromwell seemed to express marked sympathy for individual landowners probably borrowed in part from the wording contained in the landowner’s initial petition. This risks us confusing a petitioner’s emotive self-representation on the one hand with Cromwell’s views on the other. For example, Cromwell’s 1657 letter in favour of William Spenser has been taken by Andrew Hadfield as evidence that he was familiar with Edmund Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland and that ‘he had read the text, undoubtedly in preparation for his campaign in Ireland’.73 Cromwell’s statement that William’s ‘grandfather was that Spencer, who by his writings, brought on him the odium of that nation’ was most likely lifted from William Spenser’s plea.74 It does not necessarily mean that Cromwell had read ‘that Spencer’. On the other hand, Cromwell’s 1655 letter in favour of Patrick Courcy, Baron Kingsale, appears much less formulaic. He explained to Fleetwood that ‘I could not content myself with a bare reference of it [Courcy’s petition] to you, but thought myself obliged to recommend it to your particular care and consideration’. On the matter of transplantation, he pleaded with his son-in-law to draw a distinction between men such as Courcy and ‘the worse of Irish … it being in my opinion a most unmerciful and ungodly thing to put him to such an extremity; wherefore I must again press you on his behalf’.75 This letter suggests that Cromwell viewed transplantation as a relatively extreme measure, and therefore one from which the deserving ought to be exempted. Fleetwood’s reluctance to compromise in such cases surely contributed to his recall a few months later. For Irish Protestants, in particular, Cromwell’s first nine months as Lord Protector were of crucial importance. This was because the Instrument of Government, adopted in December 1653, allowed Cromwell and his council to ‘make laws and ordinances … where it shall be necessary’, until the meeting of the first protectoral parliament, scheduled for 3 September 1654. According to Gaunt, around 180 ordinances were approved in this nine-month period.76 A number of these ordinances were concerned with 73 Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford, 2012), pp. 410–411. 74 Robert Dunlop (ed.), Ireland Under the Commonwealth, 2 vols (Manchester, 1913), ii. 659. 75 Lomas, Letters and Speeches, iii. 465. 76 Peter Gaunt, ‘The Protectoral Ordinances of 1653–1654 Reconsidered’, in Little, Cromwellian Protectorate, p. 107.

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granting Irish land to friends of the regime. The beneficiaries included the officers Richard Lawrence, Robert Hammond, John Reynolds and William Penn.77 At the same time, Protestants from Munster and elsewhere in Ireland worked to win ordinances that would secure them in their lands. On 1 August 1654, Cromwell and his council approved an ordinance that confirmed the guarantees he had given to the Munster Protestants in the winter of 1649, while a month later a further ordinance admitted the rest of the Irish Protestants to compound for their estates.78 These developments meant that by the time parliament met in September, any doubts relating to the status of Irish Protestant landowners had effectively been dispelled. For leading Irish Catholics, the success enjoyed by their Protestant counterparts provided a model for them to imitate. The two most significant groups concerned here were the townsmen of Galway and the officers of the former Leinster army. Both groups possessed extensive property before the war and they had each received relevant promises upon their respective surrenders in 1652. Significantly, however, the instructions for transplantation issued by the council of state and then endorsed by the nominated assembly in 1653 had specified that Catholics entitled to land under articles of surrender would receive their entitlements in Connacht. Despite this setback, both groups looked to London for relief. At least some of Cromwell’s dealings with the Leinster officers can be traced.79 Just as he had earlier done for the Ulster Scots’ leaders, in March 1654 Cromwell wrote to Dublin ordering that the ruling of the committee for articles in the case of Richard Nugent, Earl of Westmeath, be observed. He also sought to remind Fleetwood and his colleagues ‘how much the faith of the army and our own honour and justice is concerned in the just performance of articles’.80 The committee for articles had decided that Westmeath and his comrades should enjoy their estates until the next parliament passed judgement on their case. This provoked a storm of protest from Dublin in April 1654, where it was not unreasonably feared that the making of any concessions to the Leinster officers threatened to derail the land settlement. By this point, the increasingly paranoid Fleetwood had 77 Firth and Rait, Acts and Ordinances, ii. 1131–1142. 78 Cunningham, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the “Cromwellian” Settlement of Ireland’, pp. 925–926. 79 Cunningham, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the “Cromwellian” Settlement of Ireland’, pp. 926–929. 80 Quoted in Cunningham, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the “Cromwellian” Settlement of Ireland’, p. 927.

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identified Cromwell’s willingness to exercise discretion in dealing with Irish landowners as a major problem. He duly commenced a smear campaign designed to block Catholic petitioners in London from gaining access to Cromwell, while also seeking to have responsibility for adjudicating on articles transferred to a more pliant body in Dublin.81 While Fleetwood’s panic was probably an overreaction, the two ordinances passed in favour of the Irish Protestants none the less demonstrated the power that Cromwell and his council could potentially exercise over the land settlement. Even if Cromwell were minded to rescue either the Leinster officers or the Galway townsmen from confiscation, the precedents set thereby would have been too unpalatable both for Dublin and London; leaving such elite Catholic groupings in place would have rendered the intended settlement unworkable. In the event, Cromwell’s most meaningful interventions on behalf of Catholics were focused on individual cases. At least two of the ordinances passed in the months leading up to 3 September 1654 were designed to restore Irish Catholics to their estates. The cause of one of the proprietors concerned, Oliver Fitzwilliam of Merrion, was undoubtedly helped by his English connections, as his wife Eleanor was sister to Denzil Holles. In the face of determined opposition from Dublin, Cromwell and the council approved an ordinance granting the Fitzwilliam estate to Lady Eleanor.82 The other relevant ordinance secured the estate of John Grace of Courtstown in County Kilkenny. Grace’s case seems to have relied upon a letter of favour from Henry Ireton, written after Grace had served as his emissary to a meeting of Catholic leaders in the west in January 1651. Ireton had promised ‘that he should be admitted to a composition for his estates, at an easy rate, and that he would recommend him to parliament in that particular’.83 The ordinance passed on 30 August was just the first step in Cromwell’s efforts to support Grace; over the following two years at least three further letters were sent to Dublin to reinforce Grace’s ultimately successful endeavour to recover his lands from the army.84 Although Cromwell’s engagement with Irish Catholics served to create uncertainty and instability around the land settlement in the mid-1650s, his moderating impact on the transplantation scheme was in the end relatively 81 Cunningham, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the “Cromwellian” Settlement of Ireland’, p. 929. 82 Cunningham, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the “Cromwellian” Settlement of Ireland’, pp. 929–930. 83 Quoted in Cunningham, Conquest, p. 64. 84 Cunningham, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the “Cromwellian” Settlement of Ireland’, pp. 930–931.

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modest. The most significant step towards moderation had actually been taken by Fleetwood’s government in 1653, as it baulked at the prospect of implementing the near-universal Catholic transplantation that appeared to be authorised by the relevant instructions sent from London. The approach approved in Dublin involved focusing state energies on the relocation of landowners and former soldiers. In practice, official attention came to be focused largely on the landed, although there were occasional calls for the adoption of more radical measures.85 While there is no way of knowing how many people actually relocated, for the longer term the significance of the transplantation was that it went close to eliminating Catholic proprietorship in three of the four provinces. Some Catholics admittedly recovered territory across the island after 1660, but overall the economic and political strength of this confessional grouping had been very badly dented. By contrast, Cromwell’s engagement with Irish Protestants shored up their position in 1654 and helped to lay the basis for their acquisition of additional lands alongside the Cromwellian newcomers. This development did much to shape the political configuration of Restoration Ireland. The Regicide and Usurper After 1660, a consolidated Protestant interest worked to hold its landed gains in Ireland while also seeking to distance itself from any taint of association with the ‘usurper’. Catholics meanwhile stressed the hardships that they had endured in the 1650s, on the assumption that the deeds of a government headed by the regicide Cromwell could not but be reversed by the restored monarch. The king’s Gracious Declaration of November 1660 sought to accommodate all entitlements, but those of Protestants were generally privileged.86 Charles II sent far more letters of favour into Ireland than Cromwell had ever done, but just as in the 1650s requisite lands were often not available. This led the Duke of Ormond to exclaim that ‘there must be discoveries made of a new Ireland, for the old will not serve to satisfy these engagements’.87 One prominent group of men inevitably singled out to lose their Irish lands were those who had signed the death warrant of Charles I; the extensive properties that the regicides had acquired in the 1650s were earmarked as a rather generous gift for 85 Cunningham, Conquest, pp. 39–42, 76–79. 86 His Majestie’s gracious declaration for the settlement of his kingdome of Ireland … (London, 1660). 87 Quoted in Sean Connolly, Divided Kingdom: Ireland 1630–1800 (Oxford, 2008), p. 133.

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James, Duke of York. The land concerned here included the 5,225 acres previously granted to Oliver Cromwell in the baronies of Ratoath and Dunboyne, County Meath.88 It might seem safe to assume that Cromwell’s Irish property above that of all others was destined to be forfeited to the crown. Yet such an assumption would be entirely wrong. The main provisions of the Restoration land settlement in Ireland were set out in the Act of Settlement passed by the Irish parliament in 1662. In this voluminous legislation, the third last clause directly addressed Henry Cromwell’s claims to land.89 Two main motivations can be identified for the inclusion of this clause. First, Henry’s conduct in Ireland between 1655 and 1659 had won him many influential friends and admirers among the Old Protestants. As a result, he could rely on support from the Duke and Duchess of Ormond, their son the Earl of Arran, the Earl of Cork, and others. In one letter to the duke, Henry commended his ‘courage in appeareing for my obnoxious name’.90 Secondly, in 1660, the landed Protestants of Ireland circled the wagons so tightly that it made good sense for them to shelter Henry Cromwell. If Henry were excluded from favour for reasons such as the notoriety of his father or his own prominent role in the Cromwellian regime, many others too might be exposed to the risk of losing their lands to Catholics. The property that Henry claimed was not, however, simply confined to what he had acquired in his own right in the 1650s at Portumna and elsewhere; it also included the late Oliver’s County Meath estate.91 Although the precise details are patchy, Henry seems to have got over the hurdle of Oliver’s inclusion in the English Act of Attainder (1660) by asserting that his father had sold his Irish estate to him. This meant that the land in question was protected by a proviso in the Act that made allowances for conveyances made by the regicides.92 In addition, and somewhat dubiously, Henry somehow managed to link this transaction to the £4,000 portion that had been paid to Oliver by the Russell family upon Henry’s marriage in 1653 to Elizabeth Russell.93 Elizabeth’s brother John 88 Russell and Prendergast, Carte Manuscripts, pp. 170–181. 89 An Act for the better execution of His Majesties gracious declaration for the settlement of his kingdome of Ireland (Dublin, 1662), p. 124. 90 Quoted in R. W. Ramsey, Henry Cromwell (London, 1933), p. 366. Henry also acknowledged the help of Clarendon and the king. 91 An Act for the better execution, p. 124. Henry also seems to have been entitled to lands in Co. Meath additional to what he acquired from Oliver. 92 John Raithby (ed.), Statutes of the Realm, vol. 5, 1628–1680 (1819), pp. 288–290. 93 Oliver Cromwell, Memoirs of the Protector, Oliver Cromwell, and of his Sons, Richard and Henry (London, 1820), pp. 723–724.

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and her uncle Sir William Russell of Laugharne also became involved in Henry’s efforts after 1660 to salvage as much land as possible in Ireland. Under the relevant clause of the Act of Settlement, the lands in County Meath were conveyed to Sir William and to Oliver’s former physician Dr Jonathan Goddard, who was acting as a trustee for Henry’s friend and former secretary Sir William Petty. Meanwhile, John Russell was granted Henry’s lands in County Galway, as well as a right to the lands that remained due in satisfaction of Oliver’s adventure of £850 from two decades before.94 Although Henry seems seriously to have contemplated settling in Ireland, he instead opted to reside at Spinney Abbey in Cambridgeshire, which he purchased from Sir William Russell in a deal that again involved the use of trustees.95 It is not clear precisely how much Irish land he elected to hold on to in the medium term; in the will that Henry made in 1673 he simply referred to unspecified Irish property.96 In the mid-1660s letters patent for the estates in County Meath and elsewhere had been secured in the names of Petty and the Earls of Cork and Arran.97 Further archival research is needed to determine how far this well-connected trio may have been still acting on behalf of Henry Cromwell at that point. Conclusion Oliver Cromwell’s personal connection to the Irish land settlement was bookended on the one hand by his initial adventure in 1642 and on the other by his son Henry’s remarkable achievement in keeping hold of Oliver’s estate after the Restoration. In common with many English officers and administrators who set foot in Ireland in the early modern period, Cromwell managed to combine public service with private gain, and to interpret such success as evidence of God’s favour. It need hardly be said that Cromwell’s legacy in Ireland extended far beyond the many acres that he acquired. His role in the conquest will always arouse controversy, and there is no denying that he and members of his immediate family circle played central roles in shaping 1650s Ireland. Although the history of 94 An Act for the better execution, p. 124; Ramsey, Henry Cromwell, p. 362; R. P. Mahaffy (ed.), Calendar of State Papers Ireland, 1660–1662 (London, 1905), pp. 306–307, 491. 95 Ramsey, Henry Cromwell, pp. 362–363. 96 Will of Henry Cromwell, 27 Sept. 1673, The National Archives, Kew, PROB 11/346/324. 97 Fifteenth Report of the Irish Record Commissioners (London, 1825), pp. 59, 86, 101, 161–162, 184, 237.

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key aspects of the land settlement remains to be written, this chapter has sought to explore some of the many instances where Cromwell’s eventful career overlapped with it. Scrutiny of his record suggests that while the ‘Cromwellian’ land settlement was not solely of his making, few men did more to make it happen as it did.

Part IV

Cromwell’s Legacy

Chapter 9

The Social Memory of Oliver Cromwell in Ireland, c.1660s–c.1730s Eamon Darcy

The Social Memory of Oliver Cromwell in Ireland

On 9 April 1663, one month before Thomas Blood’s failed plot to seize Dublin Castle, the assize court at Clonmel heard cases involving people with Cromwellian sympathies. Daniel O’Quinlan, of whom little is known, allegedly denounced the Duke of York and Charles II, exclaiming, ‘I got more by Cromwell than by them’.1 What sentence O’Quinlan received is not recorded although usually the punishment could include time in the stocks or a trip to the gallows. O’Quinlan’s words are noteworthy as they expressed a memory of Oliver Cromwell that has only been briefly mentioned and little analysed in previous studies. Although there is a considerable body of memory studies conducted in Irish history, most of this work focused on events from the 1798 rebellion onwards.2 By comparison, only a small number of works have explained how Cromwell became such a notorious villain in Irish folk memory.3 Toby Barnard has posited that the historical foundations to modern perceptions of Cromwell were laid in the nineteenth century in response to favourable accounts of his career published in England.4 Jason McElligott critiqued 1 Assize records of Clonmel, National Library of Ireland, MS 4,908, f. 3v. 2 Ian McBride (ed.), History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2001); Oona Frawley (ed.), Memory Ireland, 4 vols (Syracuse, NY, 2011–2014). 3 Dáithí Ó hÓgáin, Myth, Legend and Romance: An Encyclopaedia of Irish Folk Tradition (London, 1990), pp. 128–131; Seán Ó Súilleabháin, A Handbook of Irish Folklore (Detroit, MI, 1970), pp. 521, 530–531; Seán Ó Súilleabháin, ‘Oliver Cromwell in Irish Oral Tradition’, in Linda Dégh, Henry Glassie and Feliz J. Oinas (eds), Folklore Today: A Festschrift for Richard M. Dorson (Bloomington, IN, 1976), pp. 473–483. 4 Toby Barnard, ‘Irish Images of Oliver Cromwell’, in R. C. Richardson (ed.), Images of Oliver Cromwell: Essays for and by Roger Howell Jr (Manchester, 1993), 231

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Barnard’s over-reliance on elite accounts and suggested that historians needed to focus more on sources that describe or shaped the attitudes of ordinary people.5 In recent years, work by Sarah Covington has attempted to address this problem by an investigation of antiquarian accounts and by exploring Irish folklore.6 This has enriched our understanding of how Cromwell became the bête noire of Irish history. Some of these works, however, commit a number of what Guy Beiner termed ‘sins’ of memory studies.7 First, there is a sense of inevitability in the formation of historical memories of Cromwell. The investigations follow a neat narrative: Cromwell came, Cromwell saw, Cromwell conquered, and eventually Cromwell was vilified. This means that historians do not consider outliers to the story, such as O’Quinlan, in any great detail, thereby implicitly suggesting a homogeneous social memory of Cromwell. Secondly, there is little to no engagement with Irish-language accounts that provide a visceral insight into the creation of the historical memory of Cromwell among ordinary Irish people. Finally, one of the key legacies of the Cromwellian regime is the transportation of people out of Ireland. Surely, there are memories of Cromwell in Ireland beyond the insular perspective? The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to offer a tentative foray into the social memory of Oliver Cromwell in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It suggests new avenues of exploration through the use of two case studies.8 First, an investigation of Seán Ó Conaill’s poem ‘Tuireamh na hÉireann’ will illustrate its foundational contribution to the cultural construction of the social memory of Cromwell in Ireland. Secondly, a manuscript belonging to the Waddings, first of Ballycogley in pp. 180–206; Toby Barnard, ‘Cromwell’s Irish Reputation’, in Jane A. Mills (ed.), Cromwell’s Legacy (Manchester, 2012), pp. 191–218. 5 Jason McElligott, ‘Cromwell, Drogheda and the Abuse of Irish History’, Bullan: An Irish Studies Review 6.1 (2001), pp. 109–132. 6 Sarah Covington, ‘“The odious demon from across the sea”: Oliver Cromwell, Memory and the Dislocations of Ireland’, in Erika Kuijpers, Judith Pollmann, Johannes Müller and Jasper van der Steen (eds), Memory before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2013), pp. 149–164. 7 Guy Beiner, ‘Troubles with Remembering; or, The Seven Sins of Memory Studies’, Dublin Review of Books 95 (2017): www.researchgate.net/publication/320893806_ Troubles_with_Remembering_or_The_Seven_Sins_of_Memory_Studies (accessed 22 Aug. 2020). 8 Drawing on the parameters outlined in Guy Beiner, Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster (Oxford, 2018), pp. 5–29; Guy Beiner, Remembering the Year of the French (London, 2007), pp. 28–29; Andy Wood, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Sense of the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 25–27.

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County Wexford and later of Tenerife, will be used as a keyhole through which we can view intergenerational memories of Cromwell in Ireland. ‘Tuireamh na hÉireann’ Little is known of Seán Ó Conaill. He hailed from the barony of Iveragh in County Kerry and probably enjoyed the patronage of Mac Carthy Mór.9 Further uncertainty surrounds the date of composition. Cecile O’Rahilly, who edited the poem in 1952, believed that it was composed between 1655 and 1659 as the transportation scheme to Jamaica is mentioned but there is no reference to the restoration of the Stuarts.10 This is curious as Lesa Ní Munghaile’s biographical entry for the Dictionary of Irish Biography gives his lifespan as c.1675–c.1725 and does not comment on when ‘Tuireamh na hÉireann’ was composed. Following on from Ní Munghaile, this chapter will argue that the poem was written much later, but in order to do so it is necessary to consider the broader chronological and cultural contexts. ‘Tuireamh na hÉireann’ consists of 496 lines in the amhrán metre. This metre was less complicated than those utilised by poets of the bardic order and became more frequently used in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There is a lack of consensus on how such poems were performed but it is likely that they were chanted or sung.11 The use of several recurring stock images and phrases, as used in other oral-formulaic compositions, would have further facilitated the memorisation of the poem.12 The poem, with remarkable consistency, uses the formula ‘… X i n-aonacht’, X together. For example, l. 60: ‘ag togbháil teangtha an tuir i n-aonacht’ [collecting languages of the countries together]; l. 134: ‘A dtriúr fear do thuit i n-aonacht’ [their three husbands fell together]. This is interesting 9 Lesa Ní Mhunghaile, ‘Ó Conaill, Seán (O’Connell, John)’, Dictionary of Irish Biography, ed. James McGuire and James Quinn (Cambridge, 2009): http://dib. cambridge.org/viewReadPage.do?articleId=a6313 (accessed 5 June 2018). 10 Cecile O’Rahilly (ed.), Five Seventeenth-Century Political Poems (Dublin, 1952), p. 54. All references to the poem are from O’Rahilly. 11 P. A. Breatnach, ‘Múnlaí Véarsaíocht Rithimiúil sa Nua-Ghaeilge’, in Pádraig de Brún, Seán Ó Coileáin and P. Ó Riain, Folia Gadelica (Cork, 1983), pp. 54–71; Julie Henigan, Literacy and Orality in Eighteenth-Century Irish Song (London, 2012), pp. 31–39. 12 Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, 1960); Milman Parry, ‘Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making: I. Homer and Homeric Style’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 41 (1930), pp. 73–143; Milman Parry, ‘Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making: II. The Homeric Language as the Language of an Oral Poetry’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 43 (1932), pp. 1–50.

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as one of the central themes of the poem was the lack of unity among the various political and ethnic factions in Ireland throughout history. The formula appears again at a crucial moment, signalling Ó Conaill’s key argument that linked the turmoil of the mid-seventeenth century to broader historical crises [ll. 355–360]: An uair do díbreadh an Nuntius naofa do rith pláig is gorta ortha i n-aonacht Tógaim fínné Risdird Béiling nach díth daoine, bíg ná éadaig ná neart námhad do bhain díobh Éire acht iad féin do chaill ar a chéile.

The time they banished the holy nuncio There was plague and hunger together I take the testimony of Richard Bellings it wasn’t want of men, food or clothes nor the enemy’s power that took them from Ireland But they themselves that lost it together. Admittedly, more work needs to be done on the use of such oral formulas in Irish poetry in terms of shaping and facilitating dissemination but it is clear that the poem was extremely popular and potentially reached a wide audience. In the 1750s, Friar O’Sullivan of Muckross claimed that the poem ‘is still repeated and kept in memory on account of the great knowledge of antiquity comprehended in it’.13 Vincent Morley identified 257 manuscript copies of the poem originating across most of the 32 counties of Ireland that were made between 1686 and 1900. The poem’s popularity increased over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the 1780s and 1790s, 43 copies of the poem were produced and 87 in the subsequent two decades.14 ‘Tuireamh na hÉireann’, therefore, was a key text that shaped Irish identities and historical memories and, like many other poems written in amhrán metre, it offers a valuable insight into the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Irish mentalité.15 13 F. Jarlath Prendergast, ‘The Ancient History of the Kingdom of Kerry, by Friar O’Sullivan, of Muckross Abbey’, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society 6.46 (1900), pp. 100–101. 14 Vincent Morley, Ó Chéitinn go Raiftearaí: Mar a cumadh stair na hÉireannn (Dublin, 2011), pp. 127–138. 15 Vincent Morley, The Popular Mind in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Cork, 2017).

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Is it difficult to ascertain the exact reasons for the popularity of any poem due to the nebulous world of early modern orality and reception. Perhaps one of the key reasons was because it located Ireland’s immediate past within a broader historical perspective. Starting with the aftermath of the Flood, the poem blended mythistory and history together to weave a story of the Irish people across the ethnic divide and the several invasions of Ireland. Ó Conaill drew heavily on well-known works such as ‘Foras Feasa ar hÉireann’ and celebrated seventeenth-century Irish identity.16 Key figures in Ireland’s heritage like Milesius, Fódla, Banba and Éire are integrated into broader religious tales such as the destruction of Nimrod’s tower, Moses parting the Red Sea and the arrival of St Patrick in Ireland. In one sense the poem stood on the shoulders of Irish literary giants and as will be illustrated it became a giant to future generations. Another reason for its popularity could be that ‘Tuireamh na hÉireann’ reached across the considerable political divide of seventeenth-century Irish Catholic politics. Unlike the partisanship that coloured the literary productions of Pádraigín Haicéad or the authors of the Commentarius Rinnucinianus, Ó Conaill does not blame any particular faction.17 There are repeated examples in the poem that argued that disunity among Irish nobles led to trouble in times past. Despite the original invasion of the English, Ó Conaill argued that Irish society flourished afterwards as the people were ‘caoin, sibhialta, tréitheach’ [kind, civil (and) virtuous]. The unity between the Saxons and the Gaels was such that ‘bhí an Gaeul Gallda ’s an Gall Gaeulach’ [the Anglo-Irish were Irish and the Irish were Anglo-Irish (l. 280)]. The advent of Protestant reform once more divided the people as the English (‘Saxan’) and their Irish adherents (‘gasra ’Ghaeulaibh’) rejected the true faith and behaved vulgarly, leaving Ireland in disorder (‘Do chuir sin Leath Cuinn trí na chéile’, l. 323). This call for unity and the sense of a shared past presumably appealed to all sides. Several of the key themes discussed by Ó Conaill had a sense of timelessness when viewed through the prism of Tudor, Stuart and Cromwellian conquest and colonisation. Many were still relevant in the eighteenth century after the passage of what became known as the penal laws. The first three lines refer to the absence of the traditional Irish nobility and the destruction of the countryside, the people and 16 Bernadette Cunningham, The World of Geoffrey Keating: History, Myth, and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 2004); Morley, Ó Chéitinn go Raiftearaí. 17 Eamon Darcy, ‘The Confederate Catholics of Ireland and Popular Politics’, in Patrick Little (ed.), Ireland in Crisis: War, Politics and Religion, 1641–1650 (Manchester, 2019).

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the Catholic clergy, as well as the confiscation of Irish wealth. These lines could have been written in the 1580s, after 1603 or 1691. As Guy Beiner reminds us, the immediate past often shaped the interpretation of the present and its passage from event into memory. Thus, ‘Tuireamh na hÉireann’ had the potential at every retelling of the poem to link the past to current events.18 Ó Conaill traced the origins of the Cromwellian conquest to the beginning of Tudor reform. This wrought devastating changes: the Catholic Church had its lands seized (l. 290), the Bible was translated from Latin into English and mass was abolished. ‘[I]s iad so comharthaí dheire an tsaogail’ [These are the signs of the end of the world (l. 295)]. The spread of English common law, dramatically represented by the abrupt interpolation of English legal terms, prompted the Nine Years’ War and later the 1641 rebellion and Cromwellian conquest, ‘ag so an coga do chríochnaigh Éire’ [this was the war that finished Ireland (l. 353)]. The sense that this was an exceptional moment in the Irish past suggests either that Ó Conaill was extremely perceptive or that he composed this poem at a later date. Ó Conaill’s account of the Cromwellian conquest does not focus on the military campaign but on the logistical superiority of the army. This allowed Cromwell and his named adherents, Henry Cromwell, Charles Fleetwood, Edmund Ludlow and Henry Ireton to ‘chríochnaig conquest Éireann’, finish the conquest of Ireland (l. 377). Ó Conaill mentioned some cruelties of local significance committed by Cromwellian forces such as the hanging of Teige O’Connor and Boethius Mac Egan. There is no reference to events at Drogheda or Wexford. Despite this, the poem noted that Cromwell’s conquest covered the length and breadth of Ireland, from Inisboffin to Howth, and the Giant’s Causeway to Berehaven. What followed was a list of the chief families of Ireland of both Irish and Old English stock banished from their patrimonies by the Cromwellians. For example, Ó Conaill notes the expulsion of traditional ruling families such as the Burkes in Galway, the Plunketts in County Meath, the Butlers across south Leinster and many others during the 1650s (ll. 383–400). A brief commentary on the Nine Years’ War and Jacobean Ireland, meanwhile, lamented the loss of prominent Ulster families such as the O’Neills, O’Donnells and O’Cathains (ll. 324–347). Thus, ‘Tuireamh na hÉireann’ provided a broad chronological reference point that could be adapted to local contexts across Ireland. This highlights the poem’s value as a source for the social memory of Cromwell. These individual performances and retellings could represent what Beiner termed ‘vernacular historiographies’: 18 Guy Beiner, Forgetful Remembrance, pp. 49–58.

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stories of the past that were articulated and circulated at local level that were distinct from but not independent of national historiographies.19 It is intriguing that Ó Conaill did not detail the significant devastation his locality experienced in the mid-seventeenth century with the exception of noting the expulsion of prominent families, including his patron Mac Carthy Mór. It was well noted that the region suffered considerably more than the rest of the county. Down Survey cartographers noted the destruction of castles in Iveragh, Ó Conaill’s local barony.20 In neighbouring Dunkerron the surveyors could not name notable freeholders because ‘all the inhabitants being dead, transported or transplanted’.21 An anonymous pamphlet published in 1662 also highlighted the exceptional cruelties committed in the region. It was alleged that soldiers belonging to Colonel Thomas Barrington engaged in extreme butchery including the spearing of small children on pikes, stripping of women and cutting off the ring fingers of married women.22 It is strange that Barrington, who was still a villain in Kerry lore of the 1890s, is not mentioned in a poem that was supposedly written immediately after these events.23 A brief 1673 description of Kerry compiled for the Lord Lieutenant noted the dispersed spread of the native population as a result of the Cromwellian conquest: ‘it was death for any man, woman or child to be seen in it’.24 The devastating demographic impact of the wars of the 1640s and 1650s in the region as noted in these accounts is not reflected in ‘Tuireamh na hÉireann’. That the poem focused on the turmoil caused by the dislocation of prominent local families suggests that Ó Conaill followed a pattern set by earlier poetry that described the Munster and Ulster Plantations 19 Beiner, Year of the French, p. 5; Adam Fox, ‘Remembering the Past in Early Modern England: Oral and Literate Tradition’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 9 (1999), pp. 233–256, 234–235; Wood, Memory, p. 18. 20 See http://downsurvey.tcd.ie/down-survey-maps.php#bm=Iveragh&c=Kerry (accessed 26 Mar. 2019). 21 See http://downsurvey.tcd.ie/down-survey-maps.php#bm=Dunkerrin&c=Kerry (accessed 26 Mar. 2019). 22 R.S., A collection of some of the murthers and massacres committed on the Irish in Ireland since the 23d. of October 1641 (London, 1662), pp. 22–23. 23 F. Jarlath Prendergast, ‘The Ancient History of the Kingdom of Kerry, by Friar O’Sullivan, of Muckross Abbey’, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society 4.38 (1898), pp. 115–131; ‘The Ancient History of the Kingdom of Kerry, by Friar O’Sullivan, of Muckross Abbey’, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society 5.42 (1899), pp. 93–108. 24 W. M. Brady, The McGillcuddy Papers (London, 1867), pp. 183–188.

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under the Tudors and Stuarts. Such highly stylised literary forms were utilised alongside a blend of images of grief that captured poets’ emotional responses. Lochlainn Ó Dálaigh’s ‘Cáit ar ghabhadar Goidhil?’ [Where Have the Gaels Gone?] contrasted the former glory of Ireland, replete with brave soldiers and warriors, with the contemporary population ruled by upstarts. The effect of this social inversion of those who remained in Ireland was portrayed in suitably dramatic terms. ‘Ní fhaic aoinneach d’fhuil Ghaoidhil ní ar bioth lé mbí forbhfaoilidh’ [No one of the blood of the Gaels sees anything at which to rejoice]. The demise of Ireland’s traditions robbed those remaining of their souls ‘gadaidh asda a n-anmanna’ and left them resembling half-dead corpses [cuirp bheómharbha a mbaramhuil].25 The poem ‘Anocht is uaigneach Éire’ [Tonight, Ireland is Desolate] described the impact of the Flight of the Earls: ‘do-bheir fógra a fírfréimhe/gruaidhe a fear ’sa fionnbhan flioch’ [the banishment of {Ireland’s} true race has left wet-cheeked her men and her fair women]. Four stanzas in the middle of the poem describe the loss in bleak terms. Children deprived of laughter, no feasting, no poetry, no banqueting, no learning – all celebrated tenets of Irish aristocratic culture. This left the Gaels without joy at any tidings [ní bhiaid feasda] and full of sorrow [fada leanus an léan dáibh].26 Other poets who described the turmoil of the mid-seventeenth century deployed similar cultural tropes to explain the devastation and social impact of Cromwell’s conquest and the policies pursued by Fleetwood, Ireton and others.27 Similarly, according to Ó Conaill, Cromwellian deprivations left Ireland ‘gan fhíon, gan cheól, gan dán dá éisdeacht’, [without wine, music or poetry to listen to (l. 432)]. He also dramatically captured the emotional effect of this turmoil in one of the opening lines: ‘bí mo chroí-si am chlí dá réaba’ [my heart in my chest is being ripped apart (l. 4)]. Thus, the historical construction of the memory of Cromwell and the Cromwellians in Ireland was rooted in earlier responses to English colonial endeavours and invested with meaning through well-known cultural tropes.28 25 All quotations taken from William Gillies, ‘A Poem on the Downfall of the Gaoidhil’, Eigse 13 (1969–1970), pp. 203–210. 26 Eleanor Knott, ‘The Flight of the Earls 1607’, Ériu 8 (1916), pp. 191–194. 27 ‘Aiste Dáibhí Cúndún’, in O’Rahilly, Five Seventeenth-Century Political Poems, pp. 33–49; Pádraig de Brún, Breandán Ó Buachalla and Tomás Ó Concheanainn, Nua-dhuanaire, vol. 1 (Dublin, 1971), pp. 31–34; Éamonn an Dúna, ‘Mo lá leóin go deó go n-éagad’, in O’Rahilly, Five Seventeenth-Century Political Poems, pp. 83–100. 28 Eamon Darcy, ‘Stories of Trauma in Early Modern Ireland’, in Erin Peters and Cynthia Richards (eds), Early Modern Trauma (Lincoln, NE, forthcoming).

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One of the key themes that shaped the construction of the social memory of the 1650s in Ireland was a central issue that dominated an early seventeenth-century satire, ‘Pairlement Chloinne Tomáis’ (PCT). Two people wrote this satire, some 50 years apart. The first portion (PCT I) dates to around the 1610s and describes two fictional Irish parliaments held in the years 1632 and 1645 by rustics from south-west Munster. The author of PCT I was most likely from Northern Kerry, and probably enjoyed the patronage of Mac Carthy Mór. He wrote the satire as a warning to the remaining Irish nobility of the dangers posed by the Munster Plantations. The influx of English planters of substandard breeding, in the author’s eyes, allowed Irish churls to climb the social ladder, thereby disturbing the natural political order in Ireland.29 Thus, most of PCT I provides an excoriating lampoon of these vulgar churls who now rule the country; this is important to note when reading the opening lines of PCT II. The author of PCT II is also unknown but internal evidence suggests that it was written after the restoration of Charles II c.1662–c.1665. PCT II returns to the themes first mentioned in PCT I, namely the social advancement of Irish churls.30 It opens with a short speech from one of the leading rustics, Sir Domhnall Ó Pluburnáin [Donal O’Blabbermouth], who exclaims: Treise leat, a Chromuil, More power to you Cromwell a rígh chroinic na sgulóg You king in rustics’ chronicles as red linn fuaramuir suaimhnios during your reign we got peace, mil, uachtar agas onóir honey, cream and honour.31 Over the course of PCT II it becomes clear that the author was particularly aggrieved at the social advancement of those families who were traditionally viewed as churls in Irish society, thanks to the transplantation and transportation schemes. These themes also dominated much of Daibhí Ó Bruadair’s entertaining poetry about the impact of the Cromwellian land confiscations. One poem, ‘Do shaoilios dá ríridh gur uachtarán’ [I Thought Him of Nations a Governor Really] excoriated a Cromwellian settler for pretending to be a lord of the noblest celebrity (Taoiseach dob uaisle cáil) when he was actually a boor [go fíreannach tuata bán].32 Another poem contained his pitiful lament when surrounded by Cromwellian churls, ‘Is mairg nach 29 N. J. A. Williams, Pairlement Chloinne Tomáis (Dublin, 1981), pp. xxvi, xxviii. 30 Williams, Pairlement Chloinne Tomáis, p. xlvi. 31 Williams, Pairlement Chloinne Tomáis, pp. 42, 99. 32 John MacErlean, Duanaire Dháibhidh Uí Bhruadair, 3 vols (London, 1910–1917), ii. 14–15.

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fuil na dhubhthuata’ [Woe to Those Who Are Not Gloomy Boors].33 Ó Bruadair’s fixation on the inversion of the Irish social order reflected earlier concerns expressed in PCT I and in some poems composed in response to the Ulster Plantations.34 As a crucial reminder of how people hark back to historical memories when describing the present, when Ó  Bruadair lamented the departure of James II’s army in 1691, he returned to the well-established literary trope of the ruling churls in Ireland, describing Ireland’s new rulers as muck-shovelling sluggards, ‘slapair na sluasaide’.35 This obsession with the rise of the churls and, indeed, some of the very lines from ‘Tuireamh na hÉireann’ also influenced Aogán Ó Rathaille. ‘Mardhna Sheagháin Bhrúin’ followed Ó Conaill’s listing of families stripped of their estates across the country while other poems contain phrases that evokes the language of ‘Tuireamh na hÉireann’.36 Thus, the immediate responses of the Irish literati to the Munster and Ulster plantations shaped subsequent memories of the social upheaval caused by the Cromwellian, Restoration and Williamite land settlements. Most works on memory focus on remembrance as opposed to deliberate forgetting, a point raised by Guy Beiner’s recent work on the forgetting of the 1798 rebellion in Ulster.37 One noteworthy point to make about the Irish cultural response to Cromwell’s deprivations is the silence of the Irish language archive.38 Toby Barnard believed that this is due to the subterranean nature of Irish literature, which only offered fitful expressions of their displeasure towards Cromwell.39 Was it silence or deliberate forgetting that caused this lacuna in the Irish archive? From 1603 until the 1650s there were a number of notable moments in the history of Irish literature, from the Iomarbhágh na bhFileadh (1614–1624), the compilation of the Book of the O’Conor Don (1631) and ‘Foras Feasa ar Éireann’ (c.1634). There was also a small but significant production of Irish language material in 33 MacErlean, Duanaire, i. 130–133. 34 Seán Ó Tuama (ed.), An Duanaire, 1600–1900: Poems of the Dispossessed with Translations into English Verse by Thomas Kinsella (Dublin, 2002), pp. 89–91; Osborn Bergin, Irish Bardic Poetry: Texts and Translations (Oxford, 1974), pp. 231–232. 35 MacErlean, Duanaire, iii. 171. 36 P. S. Dineen, Dánta Aodhagáin Uí Rathaille, 3 vols (London, 1900), iii. 2–5, 6–11, 26–29, 48–57, 66–87. 37 Beiner, Forgetful Remembrance. 38 Bernadette Cunningham and Raymond Gillespie, ‘Lost Worlds: History and Religion in the Poetry of Dáibhí Ó Bruadair’, in Pádraigín Riggs (ed.), Dáibhí Ó Bruadair: His Historical and Literary Context (Dublin, 2001), pp. 18–45; Darcy, ‘Stories of Trauma’. 39 Barnard, ‘Irish Images’, p. 181.

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Louvain.40 A small number of contemporaneous poems provide a visceral insight into the events as they occurred in the 1640s and 1650s.41 After the restoration of Charles II, however, the literary classes are silent and the press at Louvain is still. The careers of two notable poets provide further evidence for this silence. Both men were born in the 1620s and produced poetry about political events in the 1640s and 1650s. First, Geoffrey O’Donoghue (d. 1678) from County Kerry and a participant in the siege of Tralee Castle. A poem he composed c.1658 had the pointed first line, ‘Ní fhuilngid Goill dúinn síothughadh in Éirinn seal’ [The foreigners will not let us settle Ireland in peace], and asked God ‘go gcuireadh gan moill chugainn faoi chlú Gaedhil ’na gceart’ [to restore without delay the Irish to their reputation and rights].42 Despite experiencing first-hand the devastating effect of the wars in his locality, O’Donoghue’s poetry no longer commented upon political events, with one exception. ‘Is barra ar an gcleas’ [This Tops the Trick] warned that despite Charles II’s restoration the land settlement of 1662 was another reminder that those who were part of the Cromwellian administration in Ireland were still in control.43 Second, Ó  Bruadair, also wrote ‘political’ poems during the mid-seventeenthcentury wars.44 Once again, the devastation of Cromwellian policies and their effect on Ó Bruadair can only be measured by the silence of his political poetry after the restoration. Although he composed a number of wedding poems and elegies, little of Ó Bruadair’s surviving poetry described political events in the 1660s and 1670s. With the prospect of a Catholic king in the 1680s, Ó Bruadair began to write poems consistently about political events once more.45 The confident and robust response to Tudor 40 Bernadette Cunningham, ‘The Louvain Achievement I: The Annals of the Four Masters’, in Edel Bhreathnach, Joseph MacMahon and John McCafferty (eds), The Irish Franciscans, 1534–1990 (Dublin, 2009), pp. 177–188; Raymond Gillespie, ‘The Louvain Franciscans and the Culture of Print’, in Raymond Gillespie and Ruairí Ó hUiginn (eds), Irish Europe, 1600–1650 (Dublin, 2013), pp. 105–120; Mary Ann Lyons, ‘St Anthony’s College, Louvain: Gaelic Texts and Articulating Irish Identity, 1607–1640’, Irish Europe, 1600–1650, pp. 21–43; Micheál MacCraith, ‘“Beathaíomh na Bráithre na Briathra”: The Louvain Achievement’, in Seanchas Ardmhaca: Journal of the Armagh Diocesan Historical Society (2007–2008), pp. 86–123. 41 Michelle O’Riordan, ‘“Political” Poems in the Mid-Seventeenth Century Crisis’, in Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641–1660 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 112–127. 42 John Minihane, The Poems of Geoffrey O’Donoghue (Cork, 2008), pp. 20–21. 43 Minihane, Poems of Geoffrey O’Donoghue, pp. 22–23. 44 McErlean, Duanaire, i. 26–51. 45 Cunningham and Gillespie, ‘Lost Worlds’, p. 39.

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and Stuart plantation schemes pre-1641 contrasts sharply with the silence of Irish culture after the Cromwellian regime. Ó Bruadair’s and O’Donoghue’s silence is significant because there is strong evidence to suggest that ‘Tuireamh na hÉireann’ was not composed until the late 1670s or early 1680s. Although a lament, the poem celebrated central tenets of Irish identity and crucially called for unity at a time when Irish Catholicism began to coalesce behind the politics expressed by Peter Walsh and others that a solution to the religious problem could be found with the Stuarts. Furthermore, it is more likely that the ‘fínné’ or testimony (l. 357) Ó Conaill took from Bellings was from his manuscript history of the 1640s; this did not circulate widely until after 1674.46 If this poem was written in the 1650s, then it can be argued simply that it treated the Cromwellian conquest in the same vein as earlier poetry that pointed to the social upheaval caused by English plantations and its emotional impact on the poets themselves. If composed in the 1670s or 1680s, this suggests that Ó Conaill shared the same state of stunned silence, or trauma, of the Irish literati as a result of the unprecedented nature of the Cromwellian conquest. Furthermore, is the failure to refer to Charles II indicative of contemporary misgivings of the restoration land settlement? Was ‘Tuireamh na hÉireann’, therefore, a deliberate attempt to present a clean memory slate for the burgeoning Jacobite movement and the incoming Catholic king, James II? The Waddings of Ballycogley, Co. Wexford Reflecting on the relationship between memory and history, A. T. Q. Stewart noted how ordinary people preferred the mythology of the Irish past to academic studies. ‘For most Irish people’, he argued ‘[history] is simply a family heirloom, a fine old painting in a gilt frame, which they would miss if it was no longer there’.47 A manuscript entitled ‘The Ancient Inheritance of the Waddings of Ballycogley’, now housed in the National Library of Ireland, allows us to take Stewart’s metaphor and use a real example of an heirloom that defined a family’s story and their sense of the past. The manuscript was compiled between Dublin, Wexford and Tenerife by an expatriate family network of gentry status. It detailed their claims to their lost Wexford estates in the hope of their eventual 46 Raymond Gillespie, ‘The Social Thought of Richard Bellings’, in Micheál Ó Siochrú (ed.), Kingdoms in Crisis: Ireland in the 1640s (Dublin, 2001), pp. 212–228. 47 A. T. Q. Stewart, The Shape of Irish History (Belfast, 2001), p. 2; Beiner, Forgetful Remembrance, pp. 4–5.

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recovery. The gathered documents tell the story of how the Waddings of Ballycogley came into possession of their ancestral home, only to be dispossessed by the ‘tyrant Oliver Cromwell’.48 The focus of this section is not to demythologise the experience of the Waddings by testing their account against contemporary records but to understand the complex layers of meaning invested in the creation of a family narrative of what happened to their ancestral lands.49 By the seventeenth century, the Waddings were a well-known merchant family who could trace their roots to Ballycogley, a townland roughly seven and a half miles from Wexford town, from at least 1345.50 They were rooted in the local Wexford gentry having accrued substantial mercantile connections across Ireland.51 Like many Old English families, the Waddings were ‘reluctant’ rebels that became embroiled in the 1641 rebellion.52 From a long-term perspective, the establishment of the Church of Ireland and the rapid progression of lower-calibre (both politically and socially) English-born soldiers and statesmen to positions of authority severely undermined traditional elites whether Irish or Old English.53 In Wexford, there were signs of the increasing polarisation of Irish society along sectarian lines. In the beginning of the seventeenth century one of the long-established families in the region, the Codds, converted to the Established Church.54 Concurrently, Wexford Catholics became imbued with a renewed confidence due to the resurgence of the Catholic Church.55 48 ‘The Ancient Inheritance of the Waddings of Ballycogley’, National Library of Ireland, MS 5,193. 49 Beiner, Year of the French, pp. 20–22. 50 National Library of Ireland, MS 5,193, f. 6; ‘Pedigree of Waddinge of Ballycogly, c.1500–1618’, National Library of Ireland, Genealogical Office, MS 49, f. 12. 51 Kevin Whelan, ‘An Underground Gentry? Catholic Middlemen in the Eighteenth Century’, in James S. Donnelly and Kerby A. Miller (eds), Irish Popular Culture, 1650–1850 (Dublin, 1998), pp. 118–172; Kevin Whelan, ‘The Catholic Community in Eighteenth-Century County Wexford’, in Walter Forde (ed.), Memory and Mission: Christianity in Wexford, 600 to 2000 AD (Castlebridge, 1999), pp. 35–43. 52 Aidan Clarke, The Old English in Ireland, 1625–1642 (Dublin, 2000). 53 Jason McHugh, ‘“For our owne defence”: Catholic Insurrection in Wexford, 1641–2’, in Brian Mac Cuarta (ed.), Reshaping Ireland, 1550–1700: Colonization and its Consequences (Dublin, 2011), pp. 214–240, esp. 221–228. 54 W. O. Cavenagh, ‘Castletown Carne and Its Owners’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 3.1 (1911), pp. 246–258. 55 Patrick Corish, The Catholic Community in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Dublin, 1981); Tadhg Ó h Annracháin, ‘Counter Reformation: The Catholic Church, 1550–1641’, in Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), The Cambridge History of Ireland, vol. 2, 1550–1730 (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 171–195.

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Upon the gradual spread of the 1641 rebellion to Wexford the local gentry mobilised, in the words of Nicholas French, ‘for our own defence’.56 Unsurprisingly, evidence gleaned from the 1641 depositions show hints of the sectarian nature of the insurgency. Allegedly, the patriarch of the Wadding family, Richard, led the seizure of the Protestant Codd household in Castletown, over 40 miles from Ballycogley.57 One of Codd’s Protestant neighbours accused Wadding of confiscating his house too.58 Another deponent claimed Wadding redistributed the lands of dispossessed Protestants in Wexford to confederates.59 From the immediate beginning of the rebellion, Wadding became a key figure for what would become known as the Confederate Catholics of Ireland and its administration at a local level.60 Wadding is alleged to have taken the confederate oath and to have served on the local council as a justice of the peace, a treasurer and a procurer of arms.61 His most notable military engagement was his involvement in the siege of Duncannon, where he enlisted the support of some of his tenants and sourced arms.62 While Wadding’s social status determined his role in the local war effort, there is no concrete evidence to determine his reasons for joining the rebellion. In light of Wadding’s involvement in the wars of the 1640s, it is unsurprising that his lands were earmarked for confiscation. The family lore claimed that Wadding was involved in an Ormond-led conspiracy against the Cromwellian regime and that this landed him in further trouble.63 The Books of Survey and Distribution and the 1659 ‘Census’ of Ireland report that Wadding’s Ballycogley demesne had been awarded to Richard Ouseley, originally from Shropshire, a justice of the peace for the Cromwellians in 56 Nicholas French, The bleeding Iphigenia ([London, 1675]), p. 69. 57 Examination of Nicholas Codd, Trinity College Dublin, MS 819, f. 52; Examination of Nicholas Codd, Trinity College Dublin, MS 818, f. 207v; Examination of James Grant, Trinity College Dublin, MS 819, f. 54v. 58 Examination of Henry Masterson, Trinity College Dublin, MS 818, f. 132. 59 Examination of Nicholas Stafford, Trinity College Dublin, MS 819, ff. 265–266. 60 Examination of Nicholas Stafford, Trinity College Dublin, MS 819, f. 54; J. T. Gilbert (ed.), History of the Irish Confederation and Wars, 7 vols (Dublin, 1882–1891), ii. 219. 61 Examination of Robert Brown, Trinity College Dublin, MS 819, f. 51v; Examination of John Jephson, Trinity College Dublin, MS 819, f. 53v; Examination of Nicholas Rochford, Trinity College Dublin, MS 818, f. 138; Examination of William Stafford, Trinity College Dublin, MS 819, f. 177. 62 Examinations of Richard Hore, Trinity College Dublin, MS 818, f. 209; Trinity College Dublin, MS 819, f. 55. 63 National Library of Ireland, MS 5,193, f. 97.

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Kerry.64 Instead, Wadding was granted an alternative but less profitable estate of 499 acres in the barony of Gallen in County Mayo.65 He did not appear before the Court of Claims in the 1660s, probably due to its famed bureaucratic delays, but Wadding did petition the Court to reinstate his ownership of Ballycogley.66 Later Wexford folklore from the 1680s suggested that most tenants stayed behind after the land transplantations as they were in demand among the new Cromwellian landowners.67 Presumably this too was the case for Wadding’s tenants while he vacated his property. Had the estate remained in the family, the lands should have passed from Richard to his son John. As John died without issue the lands should have become the property of his cousin, also called John. The loss of the ancestral lands became a topic of interest for Richard Wadding’s nephew, Luke Wadding, later Catholic bishop of Ferns. Luke’s father and Richard’s brother Walter died during Cromwell’s storming of Wexford. In 1651, Luke left for the Irish college in Paris to pursue a career in the church. By 1672, he was back in Wexford as acting bishop of Ferns. The Popish Plot proved a key turning point for Luke as he was arrested at the height of the crisis. Although he escaped punishment, Luke penned a number of carols that were later published under the title A smale garland of pious and godly songs (Ghent, 1684).68 It is easy to detect Wadding’s frustration at the status of Irish Catholics, particularly those still waiting to be restored to their ancestral lands. Some of the carols explicitly describe the suffering endured by those expelled from their lands during the 1650s. One wonders whether his description of the dispossessed speaking 64 Richard J. Kelly, ‘The Name and Family of Ouseley’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 40.2 (1930), pp. 132–146; Séamus Pender, Census of Ireland, 1659 (n.p., n.d.), p. 534; ‘Commonwealth Records’, Archivium Hibernicum 6 (1917), pp. 175–202, 181; ‘The Down Survey of Ireland’: http://downsurvey.tcd.ie/ landowners.php#l1=Wadding,+Richard&mc=52.287514,-6.553051&z=11 (accessed 12 July 2018); Robert Simington, The Civil Survey, A.D. 1654–1656, vol. 9, County of Wexford (Dublin, 1953), pp. 301, 303, 304. 65 Robert Simington, The Transplantation to Connacht, 1654–1658 (Dublin, 1970), p. 211. 66 National Library of Ireland, MS 5,193, ff. 3–6; Geraldine Tallon, Court of Claims: Submissions and Evidence, 1663 (Dublin, 2006). 67 Robert Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2 vols (Manchester, 1913), ii. 542; Herbert Hore, ‘An Account of the Barony of Forth, in the County of Wexford, Written at the Close of the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of the Kilkenny and South-East of Ireland Archaeological Society 4.1 (1862), pp. 53–84 (p. 72). 68 Barry Crosbie, ‘Wadding, Luke (1628–87), Catholic bishop of Ferns’, Dictionary of Irish Biography, ed. James McGuire and James Quinn (Cambridge, 2009): http:// dib.cambridge.org/viewReadPage.do?articleId=a8830 (accessed 28 Mar. 2019).

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‘but of thorns, and of briars of your state/ye tell your misfortunes, and count your losses/your great heavy burthens, and most bitter crosses’ is a literary imagining of his family’s plight.69 Another, ‘The banish’d man his Adieu to his country’, describes the great sadness felt by those forced to leave their home country: ‘In strange countries unkind I shall never find/New faces, new places, to pleasure my mind. … From the heavens I will crave this blessing to have/That I may die with my friends near my grave’.70 Luke’s and his family’s experience of the upheavals of the 1650s undoubtedly shaped these compositions, which offer evidence on how one family’s story could be communicated to broader audiences. The lyrics were set to well-known airs. This hints at their potential dissemination, but evidence on their reception is wanting. While composing A smale garland Luke and his nephew (also called Luke and also a clergyman) began to gather legal documents that underpinned the family’s claims to their lands. The originals were copied and the copies were bound into the volume now called ‘The Ancient Inheritance of the Waddings of Ballycogley’. The family in Dublin housed this manuscript, which was collated between the 1680s and 1710s. Eventually, after the death of Fr Luke Wadding (the nephew), the manuscript passed to his sister and then to his brother, Thomas Wadding, a merchant living in Tenerife. The collation of legal documents from deeds, indentures, wills, petitions and statements provides a valuable insight into the creation and cultivation of intergenerational family memory. The family shaped the memory of their ancestors’ behaviour as inherently loyal to the English Crown and strategically ignored their role in confederate governance during the 1640s. A copy of a petition dated to 1661 as part of Richard Wadding’s attempts to recover his property claimed that his actions in the 1640s ‘contributed unto the interests of England and their armies’.71 There is no mention of Wadding’s involvement in the seizure and distribution of confiscated property, or the capture of Duncannon. At first glance and bearing in mind the perspective offered by the 1641 depositions, it is unsurprising that Wadding’s involvement in the seizure of Protestant property was glossed over. A closer investigation, however, suggests that Richard Wadding’s actions were altruistic and hints at his personal motivation in joining the rebellion. Copies of wills from members of the Codd family, who had converted to the Church of Ireland, are also included in the dossier as are numerous leases between the two families. Digging deeper, the royal herald’s Wexford visitation of 1618 reveals 69 Luke Wadding, A smale garland, of pious and godly songs (Ghent, 1684), p. 8. 70 Wadding, A smale garland, p. 72. 71 National Library of Ireland, MS 5,193, f. 6.

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that Richard Wadding was the cousin of the patriarch of the Codd family, Nicholas; Wadding’s paternal aunt Margaret was Codd’s mother.72 A copy of a certificate from 1694 from the ‘Protestants inhabitants’ of Wexford showed that the Waddings’ neighbours campaigned for the restoration of their lands, including their kinsmen, the Codds.73 Thus, while one could be tempted to view Wadding’s actions through the lens of sectarianism offered by the 1641 depositions, here it is possible to see the rich tapestry of the Irish past at local level and the complex interplay of familial and religious communities. Perhaps Wadding’s seizure of the Codd estate was an attempt to protect his extended family or at least their financial interests. Overall, this manuscript highlighted the family’s loyalty to the English Crown since the original twelfth-century invasion of Ireland and that their status was respected across the confessional divide. At the end of the volume is a short note written by Thomas Wadding to his son, also called Thomas, giving the manuscript a historical interpretation. Thomas claims that the family ‘lost all for our Loyalty [to the Stuart monarchy] and Catholick Religion’ and that this happened during ‘the usurpation of the tyrant Oliver Cromwell’.74 Publicly, among Spanish audiences, Thomas Wadding blamed Cromwell for his family’s downfall. In a 1738 statement delivered before the Spanish authorities at Tenerife Thomas claimed that the family were stripped of their Ballycogley estate by ‘aquel hereje tirano, rebelde y cruel usurpador llamado Cromwell, con título de Protector, invadió a Irlanda repartió entre sus secuaces todas las haciendas de dicha mi prosapia’.75 He also briefly lamented the fall of James II as this meant that the temporary restoration of the family to their lands was undone. This would lead one to believe that the family staunchly supported the Jacobites. This may have been the case in public, but privately Thomas passed on some pertinent advice to his son. The family, he claimed, had great hopes that the restoration of the Stuarts would resolve the situation. Instead, Charles II refused to act. Thus Thomas warned his son that Charles II’s nephew may not do anything if he became king: 72 ‘A visitation begune in the countie of Wexfford the 15 of Aprill Ano 1618 by Daniell Molyneux’, National Library of Ireland, Genealogical Office MS 49, ff. 6, 12; National Library of Ireland, MS 5,193, f. 93. 73 National Library of Ireland, MS 5,193, f. 107. 74 National Library of Ireland, MS 5,193, ff. 154, 157. 75 Micheline Walsh, Spanish Knights of Irish Origin: Documents from Continental Archives, 4 vols (Dublin, 1978), iv. 64. [trans.: that heretical tyrant, [the] rebel and cruel usurper Cromwell, with the title of Protector, invaded Ireland and divided among his followers all of the lands of my said ancestral estate].

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Should the nephew prove as ungrateful as his said uncle we shall never be the better for him, for no estates did ever the said King restore to those that lost them in his Father’s defence. To the contrary, he left them in possession of Cromwellian rebels even those who had a hand in sending his father, Charles I, headless to his tomb.76 There is a hint in Thomas’s note to his son of a reluctant acceptance that Ballycogley was lost to the family forever. Thus, Thomas shared the family’s claims to their ancestral lands with his son and reminded him that at some point in the future, he too would have to take over as patriarch. ‘You’ll remember me’, he wrote, ‘with a Pater Noster & Ave Maria’, and signed his note as ‘your most affectionate father’.77 This reminds us of the intimate religious and family connection that this manuscript betrays and reveals the passing of the intergenerational baton from father to son. The Cromwellian land settlement was just a brief but significant episode in the long history of the Wadding family in Ireland and beyond. Thomas’s note to his son, and the statement from 1738, are intriguing for a number of reasons. First, Cromwell is publicly named as the villain in his family’s story (as well as the Cromwellian ‘rebels’). Secondly, while there is considerable emphasis on the popularity of Irish Jacobitism in the early eighteenth century, for the Waddings, privately, the Stuarts had also played a role in the family’s misfortunes. Thirdly, and unsurprisingly, Thomas’s public telling of the family story did not reflect the nuances of the manuscript. According to a note recorded by Fr Luke Wadding, the family was partly restored to their lands in 1677. These were immediately leased to Viscount Dillon but were confiscated again after the Williamite revolution.78 The attempts of the Waddings’ Protestant neighbours to campaign for their restoration are not mentioned in Thomas’s statement from 1738. Instead, Thomas blamed ‘los reyes protestantes’ [Protestant kings] who had lost their way after becoming heretics and claimed that his lands were once again lost as result of Protestant greed.79 Thus, the intricacies of the local experience of religious pluralism in Wexford were glossed over in the Waddings’ public representations to Spanish authorities. This allows us to see how details could be forgotten or excluded to shape a family’s narrative and to suit later political needs. 76 National Library of Ireland, MS 5,193, f. 157. 77 National Library of Ireland, MS 5,193, f. 158. 78 National Library of Ireland, MS 5,193, f. 100. 79 Walsh, Spanish Knights, iv. 64.

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By looking at the family history of the Waddings of Ballycogley it is possible to see the cultural construction of their memory of the 1650s. It was embedded in the political and social events that preceded the crisis of the mid-seventeenth century and the hotly contested debates over land during Charles II’s reign. Crucially, although Cromwell is denounced as a tyrant, his actions and those of his ‘rebels’ are blended into broader critiques of misgovernance in Ireland. The Waddings were betrayed by the Stuart monarchy as well; thus, to this family the story of their demise reflected what they considered to be the failure of the Old English to remain in situ as the traditional rulers of Ireland. The question remains, to what extent did other exiled Old English and Irish families share this view? Further work in Continental archives may shed more light on this issue and indicate whether the Waddings were typical or exceptional in this regard. Conclusion By way of conclusion, it is worth returning to Daniel O’Quinlan’s claims that he ‘got more’ by Cromwell than the Stuarts. Did O’Quinlan embrace the significant social changes brought in by Cromwell and his followers because he benefited from them on a personal level? Is O’Quinlan one of the many tenants who remained on vacated estates, such as those noted in the folklore around Wexford, and climbed the social ladder? Is O’Quinlan a real-life example of the churls excoriated in ‘Pairlement Chloinne Tomáis’ and Irish poetry for masquerading as gentry or aristocrats, despite their ‘base’ breeding? How many more people of humble stock owed their social advancement to Cromwellian policies? While we may never know the answers to these questions, it is clear that more work needs to be done to understand the persistent concern about people like O’Quinlan among Irish poets. What has emerged is that some of the key tenets of memory studies on Cromwell may need to be revised. First, Toby Barnard argued that there was little evidence of a tradition hostile to Cromwell until the nineteenth century.80 By tracing the dissemination and influence of ‘Tuireamh na hÉireann’ this essay has illustrated the cultural construction of the foundational ‘text’ of the social memory of Cromwell in Ireland. This contextualised Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland with the various plantation schemes conducted by the Tudor and Stuart regimes. Thus, it is difficult to extricate the early modern social memory of Cromwell as a distinct and coherent unit, particularly after the Williamite land settlement. The use of similar tropes, imagery 80 Barnard, ‘Irish Images’, pp. 183–184.

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and emotive expressions shaped and coloured the representation of these profound changes. This aided the retelling of these stories in subsequent years as these memories were placed on a continuous timeline of the Irish past. Furthermore, the ‘silence’ of the Irish language archive may reflect the largely oral culture that underpinned cultural expressions of memory. Based on a comparison of their literary outputs pre-1641 and post-1660, it is arguable that the Irish literati were in a state of stunned silence or trauma. Crucially, this essay also argued that if ‘Tuireamh na hÉireann’ was composed in the late 1670s, at a time when the Restoration land settlement left many Irish commentators disillusioned, then the failure to refer to Charles II may reflect a subtle criticism of the Stuarts; something privately communicated by a father to his son in Tenerife. Secondly, Barnard expressed his bewilderment at why Cromwell became the key villain among the extensive rogues’ gallery who served the colonial order. He posited that Cromwell was blamed for actions committed by his followers such as Fleetwood and Henry Cromwell.81 An investigation of the social memory of Cromwell in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries illustrates, however, that there was an awareness at a popular level of the key characters and their influences at a high political level. Furthermore, the actions of the Cromwellians were contextualised within broader critiques of Tudor and Stuart rule. Subsequently the social memory of Oliver Cromwell and the Cromwellians became a literary framework to explain the social upheaval of the early eighteenth century. Thus, it is difficult to pinpoint the vilification of Cromwell. The lens of memory studies, however, enriches our understanding of popular perceptions of these profound changes. This suggests that historians interested in the Cromwellian folklore need to understand the construction of early modern social memory of the 1650s in order to understand later memories. When viewed through this lens, one can tentatively suggest that the early modern Irish obsession with the maintenance of the traditional social hierarchy shaped popular perceptions of what happened as a result of the policies pursued by Cromwell’s adherents. This, arguably, placed greater emphasis on the losses sustained by the traditional ruling families. Was this a greater ‘tragedy’ to the Irish order than the atrocities committed in Cromwell’s name in Ireland? The social memory of Oliver Cromwell, therefore, does not follow a neat narrative that suits national historiographies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Finally, it is important to note that the aim of the discussion of ‘Tuireamh na hÉireann’ is not to suggest that it created a fixed social 81 Barnard, ‘Cromwell’s Irish Reputation’, p. 197.

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memory of Cromwell. Rather, the use of the amhrán metre and the sheer number of known copies of the work suggests that this poem provided the literary scaffolding that allowed for the creation of a heterogeneous social memory. More work needs to be done on the differences between the 257 manuscripts identified by Vincent Morley to investigate whether there are variations that illustrate how local communities dynamically remembered the past in fluid ways.82 Might different versions reflect varying local concerns or are they gradually updated to incorporate later events? By using ‘Tuireamh na hÉireann’ and the Wadding family manuscript as case studies, this chapter has shown the dynamic interplay between top-down and bottom-up narratives that could be adapted to personal, local and national contexts and political needs. Controversial statements or even traitorous words could be forgotten, suppressed or quietly uttered between friends and family. While there were broader social narratives that supported the cause of the Jacobites among the Irish at home and abroad, telling stories of the past allowed the Wadding family to challenge and subvert this prevailing politics. The Wadding family manuscript provides a fascinating insight into how individuals and their families could shape their own stories of the past and underlines the heterogeneity of social memory. Although more work needs to be done, this essay has identified some important threads that now need to be stitched into the broad fabric of social memory in early modern Ireland.

82 Beiner, Year of the French, pp. 28–29.

Chapter 10

‘This day by letters severall from hands’ News Networks and Oliver Cromwell’s Letters from Drogheda Nick Poyntz

Cromwell’s Letters from Drogheda

I Oliver Cromwell’s dispatches to William Lenthall of 17 and 27 September 1649 about the siege of Drogheda have loomed large in the debate over the extent of casualties amongst the garrison and inhabitants of the town. Neither of the original letters survives, but they were both read to the House of Commons on 2 October, and printed by John Field as Letters from Ireland, to be sold by Edward Husband.1 The first letter was a detailed account of the siege and included Cromwell’s justification for not sparing the garrison, arguing that it was a ‘righteous Judgement of God upon these Barbarous wretches who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood, and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future’. The second letter ended with a detailed list of casualties, including the phrase ‘and many inhabitants’. These three words have been a particular point of controversy amongst historians. Thomas Carlyle argued the phrase did not appear in the original pamphlet source and had been added in an eighteenth-century reprinting, an assertion corrected by S. C. Lomas in her 1904 edition of Carlyle’s collection of Cromwell’s letters and speeches.2 S. R. Gardiner, while recognising Carlyle’s mistake, played down the significance of the phrase by contrasting it 1 Thomason Tracts, E.575[7]. Letters from Ireland, relating the several great successes it hath pleased God to give unto the Parliaments forces there, in the taking of Drogheda, Trym, Dundalk, Carlingford, and the Nury (London, 1649). 2 S. C. Lomas (ed.), The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell with Elucidations by Thomas Carlyle, 3 vols (London, 1904), i, pp. 474–476. 253

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with evidence from Dr Nicholas Bernard, minister at St Peter’s in Drogheda.3 C. H. Firth suggested that the casualty list may have been added by Husband and Field, but was taken to task by J. G. Muddiman, who noted that the list had appeared in a newsbook, the Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer, on 2 October – the day before Letters from Ireland was published.4 Tom Reilly has subsequently sought to reopen the question of whether the phrase was Cromwell’s own words. His initial argument, drawing on Carlyle’s and Firth’s suggestion that the words were added to Letters from Ireland and did not appear in the original letter, has been robustly criticised by Jason McElligott, John Morrill and Micheál Ó Siochrú.5 Most recently, Reilly has suggested a different ground for treating the phrase with caution, with an impressive reconstruction of how the casualty list appeared in a number of newsbooks in early October, through which he argues it could be a standalone list created and circulated separately from Cromwell’s letter.6 While these accounts differ in how they interpret the two letters, all of them place significant weight on Cromwell’s own words as a source for understanding what happened at Drogheda. This is not surprising, given how central a role Cromwell played in the storming of the town. Unlike at Wexford, where he was still negotiating a surrender with the garrison’s commander at the point the town’s walls were abandoned and troops broke in, Cromwell personally led soldiers through the breach in Drogheda’s south wall. As an eyewitness, commander and combatant his account is clearly of huge importance. However, many accounts assume that Cromwell’s letters were not just parliament’s official account of the siege but also the first full list of those killed to be published. Ó  Siochrú, for example, states that in response to conflicting rumours about the siege, newsbooks sympathetic to parliament ‘published Cromwell’s report, including his full casualty list’.7 3 J. B. Williams (pseudonym of J. G. Muddiman), A History of English Journalism to the Foundation of the ‘Gazette’ (London, 1908), pp. 124–128. 4 J. B. Williams, ‘Fresh Light on Cromwell at Drogheda’, Nineteenth Century and After 72 (1912), p. 481; W. C. Abbott (ed.), The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1937–1947), ii, p. 131; Thomason Tracts, E.575[5]. The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer, No. 331, 25 Sept.–2 Oct. 1649. 5 Jason McElligott, ‘Cromwell, Drogheda and the Abuse of Irish History’, Bullan: An Irish Studies Review 6.1 (2001), pp. 109–132; John Morrill, ‘The Drogheda Massacre in Cromwellian Context’, in David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan and Clodagh Tait (eds), Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Context in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2009), pp. 242–265; Micheál Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (London, 2008), pp. 77–93. 6 Tom Reilly, Cromwell Was Framed: Ireland 1649 (Lanham, MD, 2014), chap. 3. 7 Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner, p. 93.

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And yet as Muddiman established, Cromwell’s letter to Lenthall was not the first casualty list to be published. It was a newsbook, rather than official pamphlets ordered to be printed by parliament, that first shared details of the casualty list, and it was newsbooks that continued to disseminate it in different forms. Placing Cromwell’s words at the centre of accounts of the siege risks missing the significance of what these other sources can tell us about him, the storming of the town and contemporary politics and society more widely. This chapter argues that the debate over Cromwell’s letters to Lenthall is an example of what Patrick Little has described as an over-reliance by studies of Cromwell on Carlyle’s and W. C. Abbott’s collections of his writings and speeches.8 Increasingly, historians are seeking to balance Cromwell’s own account with that of his contemporaries, looking at his life from new perspectives such as those of fellow backbench MPs in the early 1640s, or family and household members in the 1650s.9 Recent studies have returned to sources that have previously been discounted or overlooked, such as James Heath’s Flagellum, to suggest new ways of understanding key episodes in his life.10 This chapter draws on both of these approaches to look at Cromwell’s letters to Lenthall from a different perspective: as one piece of news within a much wider news network stretching from Drogheda to London and beyond, and spanning a variety of forms covering word of mouth, manuscript and print. The appetite for news from Ireland in mid-seventeenth-century England – and the role that news and memory of events there played in shaping politics and culture in both countries – has long been recognised by historians. Joad Raymond has outlined the role that the scarcity of information about the 1641 rebellion, and the consequent appetite for news, played in the creation of the first weekly newsbook and its competitors.11 Keith Lindley, 8 Patrick Little, ‘Introduction’, in Patrick Little (ed.), Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives (Houndmills, 2009), pp. 2–3. 9 Recent examples include: S. K. Roberts, ‘“One That Would Sit Well at the Mark”: The Early Parliamentary Career of Oliver Cromwell’, in Little, Oliver Cromwell, pp. 38–63; Andrew Barclay, ‘The Lord Protector and his Court’, in Little, Oliver Cromwell, pp. 195–215. An important early example of this approach is John Morrill, ‘Cromwell and his Contemporaries’, in John Morrill (ed.), Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (Harlow, 1990), pp. 259–281. 10 Andrew Barclay, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Cambridge Elections of 1640’, Parliamentary History 29.2 (2010), pp. 155–170; Andrew Barclay, Electing Cromwell: The Making of a Politician (London, 2015). 11 Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–1649 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 111–120.

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Kathleen Noonan and Ethan Shagan have analysed how the rebellion and subsequent events in Ireland were reflected and reshaped in contemporary English print more widely.12 David O’Hara has shown the prominence of news from Ireland in newsbooks throughout the 1640s.13 Eamon Darcy has traced how accounts of the 1641 rebellion influenced popular memory and historiography of the uprising, and Sarah Covington has shown the longer-term impact of Cromwell on folklore and the Irish landscape.14 However, as Raymond has put it, it is also important ‘to study the processes that generate the products, and not the products alone’. Four of Raymond’s suggested principles for understanding both products and processes are particularly instructive in this case: first, that news networks spread news through different routes in different quantities; second, that news spread in this way is aggregated and turned into different forms at key nodes within the network; third, that the perceived value of news increases when it is scarce; and fourth, that news can be ‘pretty unstoppable’ despite the geographical and bureaucratic obstacles placed in its way.15 This chapter looks at the processes through which Cromwell’s letters to Lenthall and other news from Drogheda reached London and were publicised, by reassessing an account that pre-dates Reilly’s by around a hundred years: that of Joseph George Muddiman, a London solicitor, also known by his pseudonym of J. B. Williams, whose work has been criticised by subsequent scholars.16 Muddiman’s first book, A History of 12 Keith Lindley, ‘The Impact of the 1641 Rebellion upon England and Wales, 1641–5’, Irish Historical Studies 18.70 (1972), pp. 143–176; K. M. Noonan, ‘“The Cruell Pressure of an Enraged, Barbarous People”: Irish and English Identity in Seventeenth Century Propaganda’, Historical Journal 41 (1998), pp. 151–177; E. H. Shagan, ‘Constructing Discord: Ideology, Propaganda, and English Responses to the Irish Rebellion of 1641’, Journal of British Studies 36 (1997), pp. 4–34. 13 David O’Hara, English Newsbooks and Irish Rebellion, 1641–1649 (Dublin, 2006). 14 Eamon Darcy, The Irish Rebellion of 1641 and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (London, 2013); Sarah Covington, ‘“The odious demon from across the sea”: Oliver Cromwell, Memory and the Dislocations of Ireland’, in Erika Kuijper, Judith Pollmann, Johannes Müller and Jasper van der Steen (eds), Memory before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2013). 15 Joad Raymond, ‘News Networks: Putting the “News” and “Networks” Back In’, in Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham (eds), News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2016), p. 110. 16 Muddiman abandoned his pseudonym in 1920. See J. G. Muddiman, Tercentenary Handlist of English and Welsh Newspapers, Magazines and Reviews (London, 1920) and J. G. Muddiman, ‘The Beginnings of English Journalism’, in A. W. Ward, A. R. Waller, W. P. Trent et al. (eds), The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, vol. 7, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1920), chap. 15.

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English Journalism to the Foundation of the ‘Gazette’, drew on his research on the Thomason and Burney collections in the British Museum to trace a narrative spanning the development of corantos in the 1630s, newsbooks in the 1640s and 1650s, and the eventual creation of the newspaper. In his chapter on the newsbooks of 1649, Muddiman argued that news of the brutality of the siege – first publicised, in his analysis, in a pamphlet by Henry Walker and then spread by other newsbook editors – prompted parliament to suppress the news filtering back from Ireland, by sweeping away existing newsbooks and replacing them with state-written alternatives.17 Muddiman elaborated on this argument in a series of essays between 1910 and 1913. In an article in the Dublin Review, he reconstructed a day-by-day chronology of when news from the siege arrived in London and was published between 18 September and 15 October.18 In a chapter in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, he set out how key information about the siege was publicised by Henry Walker’s various newsbooks.19 He expanded this narrative to cover a wider range of newsbooks in two essays in The Nineteenth Century and After.20 To understand the context for his account, the chapter starts by weighing Muddiman’s undoubted prejudices against his sensitivity to the source material in order to test how much reliance can be placed on it. II Joseph George Muddiman was born in Leighton Buzzard in late February 1861, the son of Alexander Phillips Muddiman and Elizabeth Muddiman (née Williams – hence his pseudonym, which was the name of a cousin).21 He was only 5 years old when on 1 August 1866 his mother Elizabeth died of diphtheria, having caught it from a visit to her sister.22 At some 17 Williams, History of English Journalism, pp. 124–128. 18 J. B. Williams, ‘The Truth concerning Cromwell’s Massacre at Drogheda’, Dublin Review 146 (1910), pp. 302–313. 19 Muddiman, ‘The Beginnings of English Journalism’. 20 Williams, ‘Fresh Light on Cromwell at Drogheda’, pp. 471–490; J. B. Williams, ‘More Light on Cromwell at Drogheda’, The Nineteenth Century and After 73 (1913), pp. 812–828. 21 England and Wales, Civil Registration Birth Index, 1837–1915, vol. 3b, p. 384. For an explanation of the pseudonym, which was the surname and initials of his cousin Joseph Batterson Williams, see J. G. Muddiman, ‘The Licensed Newsbooks, 1649 and 1650’, Notes and Queries 167 (1934), pp. 113–116. 22 Northampton Mercury, Saturday, 11 Aug. 1866, p. 5; Buckingham Advertiser and Free Press, Saturday, 18 Aug. 1866, p. 4.

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point before 1871 he was sent to live with Alexander’s older sister, Ann, and her husband Henry Barber, 40 miles away in Wareside.23 By this stage Alexander was living with his assistant, Annie Griffiths, whom he would marry in October 1874.24 Alexander and Annie would go on to have three children: Alexander (born in 1875), Gwendoline (born in 1877) and Arthur (born in 1885). Although Gwendoline died young, Alexander and Arthur would arguably surpass Joseph in terms of their careers.25 Alexander joined the Indian Civil Service, governed the United Provinces and was knighted in 1922.26 Arthur – going by his middle name Bernard – emigrated to Canada in 1907, where he became a trade commissioner and wrote a celebrated study of writers and artists in the Aesthetic movement called The Men of the Nineties.27 Joseph’s career path as a jobbing solicitor, by contrast, was set early on in his life and may not have been his own choice. After moving away from home, he attended Wareside Grammar School, where his uncle Henry was headmaster. Of the 21 pupils at the school in 1871, seven were Henry and Anne’s nieces and nephews. This reflected the declining state of the school’s endowment.28 It was not a distinguished establishment: the School Inquiry Commission of 1866 was unimpressed, criticising the pupils’ ‘most rudimentary kind’ of attainments in Latin and French. Henry had been brought in to replace the previous headmaster, who lacked a degree.29 However, his teaching was clearly sufficient at least to have improved the school’s record in Latin, as in 1876 this was one of the subjects on which Joseph was tested by the Law Society as part of the preliminary examination to be admitted as an articled clerk. The others were reading aloud, English dictation, English composition, arithmetic, another language and – naturally 23 England Census 1871, class: RG 10; Piece: 1351; Folio: 128; p. 8; GSU roll: 828290. Henry was one of the witnesses at Alexander’s wedding. He had married Alexander’s sister Ann Amelia Muddiman on 18 April 1854 in Aylesbury. England and Wales, Civil Registration Marriage Index, 1837–1915 (1854). 24 London Metropolitan Archives, Church of England Parish Registers, 1754–1931, p. 84. 25 England and Wales, Civil Registration Death Index, 1916–2007, vol. 3b, p. 215. 26 P. G. Robb, ‘Muddiman, Sir Alexander Phillips (1875–1928)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/978019 8614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-35140 (accessed 22 Aug. 2020). 27 B. D. Tennyson, The Canadian Experience of the Great War: A Guide to Memoirs (Lanham, MD, 2013), p. 294; B. Muddiman, The Men of the Nineties (London, 1920). 28 England Census 1871, class: RG 10; Piece: 1351; Folio: 128; p. 8; GSU roll: 828290. 29 Schools Inquiry Commission (London, 1868), xii. 143.

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– history.30 Joseph passed, and achieved the required certificate.31 However, he deferred the start of his clerkship.32 He then moved to London to attend University College School.33 The school magazine – which might have been an obvious outlet for someone who would go on to be a regular contributor to periodicals – has no trace of him.34 On 28 January 1881, he matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford.35 Other than rowing for his college in Torpids in February 1883, his life at university remains unclear.36 He finished his BA in 1885, then completed his clerkship and was articled as a solicitor in 1891.37 In 1908, Muddiman published the book for which he perhaps remains best known: A History of English Journalism to the Foundation of the ‘Gazette’. For the rest of his life Muddiman combined his legal work with researching books and articles about the seventeenth century, publishing a history of the Restoration journalist Henry Muddiman, a transcript of the clerks’ journal from the trial of Charles I, a collection of sources about the Bloody Assizes and many articles on topics ranging from the Popish Plot to Oliver Cromwell’s head.38 30 The Weekly Notes, 18 Dec. 1875, p. 616. 31 Hertford Mercury and Reformer, Saturday, 10 June 1876, p. 3. 32 Articled clerks normally served five years before qualifying as a solicitor and were required to pass an intermediate and final exam after the preliminary test. Muddiman did not take his intermediate exam until 1889, four years after graduating from Oxford, and took his final exam in 1891. For more on legal training in this period, see H. Kirk, Portrait of a Profession: A History of the Solicitor’s Profession, 1100 to the Present Day (London, 1976), chap. 3 and V. R. Parrott, ‘Pettyfogging to Respectability: A History of the Development of the Profession of Solicitor in the Manchester Area, 1800–1914’, PhD thesis, University of Salford (1992), chap. 4. For Muddiman’s exams, see Solicitors’ Journal, 34, 30 Nov. 1889, p. 84; Solicitors’ Journal, 35, 11 July 1891, p. 612. 33 University College School, London, Register 1831–1891 (1892), p. 204. 34 University College School Magazine [later, The Gower] (Apr. 1873–July 1936). 35 J. Foster, Oxford Men and Their Colleges, 1880–1892 (Oxford, 1893), p. 431. 36 Torpids 1883, Exeter College Boat Club Album (1878–1889), Exeter College Archives, ECV/PA3/02. I am grateful to Penny Baker, College Archivist at Exeter College, for locating this photograph and for her help in narrowing down which of the crew pictured may be Muddiman. 37 Solicitors’ Journal, 35, 11 July 1891, p. 612. 38 J. G. Muddiman, The King’s Journalist, 1659–1689 (London, 1923); J. G. Muddiman, Trial of King Charles I (London, 1928); J. G. Muddiman, The Bloody Assizes (London, 1929); J. G. Muddiman, ‘Depositions about the Popish Plot’, Notes and Queries 147 (1924), pp. 113–115; J. G. Muddiman, ‘Cromwell’s Head’, Notes and Queries 150 (1926), pp. 353–354.

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Subsequent historians have been critical of Muddiman’s account of the siege of Drogheda. Joad Raymond, for example, has convincingly unpicked his assertion that the Licensing Act of 1649 was an attempt by the Council of State to censor news of the casualties at Drogheda, showing how Muddiman’s argument was an over-reaction to Gardiner’s narrative of the siege.39 His attack was certainly forceful, noting Gardiner’s ‘imperfect … reading’ and ‘untrue rendering’, and may in part have been prompted by professional jealousy.40 Muddiman’s books were well reviewed, but did not enjoy the same reputation as Gardiner’s.41 He would return to attacking Gardiner – this time anonymously as ‘Historian’ – in a vehement series of letters to the Times Literary Supplement in 1919, denouncing him as a ‘subtle and dangerous partisan … nothing that he says can be trusted. Every reference should be checked’.42 He resumed the attack again in Notes and Queries in 1923.43 But Muddiman’s narrative was also a reaction to the rehabilitation of Cromwell’s reputation over the course of the nineteenth century.44 He was a Tory and royalist, who looked back with horror on the actions of the regicides, as he would repeatedly refer to those presiding over Charles I’s trial. A History of English Journalism, for example, was prefaced with an engraving of Charles II, despite the fact that that the book was principally about the 1640s and 1650s and had little to say about newspapers after the Restoration.45 He was also critical of nonconformist sects such as Anabaptists and Fifth 39 Williams, ‘The Truth concerning Cromwell’s Massacre at Drogheda’, p. 310; Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper, pp. 74–75. 40 Williams, ‘Fresh Light on Cromwell at Drogheda’, pp. 472, 487. 41 For examples of reviews, see Western Daily Press, Friday, 25 Sept. 1908, p. 7; Evening Standard, Saturday, 26 Sept. 1908, p. 4; Western Times, Tuesday, 6 Sept. 1908, p. 3; The Independent 67 (1909), p. 761; The Athenaeum 2 (1911), p. 210. Muddiman was awarded a pension of £50 in the 1929 civil list (Daily Herald, Thursday, 18 July 1929, p. 7). Gardiner had been given a pension of three times this in the 1882 civil list, at Lord Acton’s instigation. H. Paul (ed.), The Letters of Lord Acton to Mary, Daughter of the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, 2nd edn (London, 1913), p. 119. 42 Times Literary Supplement, 25 Sept. 1919. 43 ‘Historian’, ‘S. R. Gardiner’s Historical Method’, Notes and Queries 13.1 (1923), pp. 23–25, 45–48, 69–70, 86–88, 107–108, 127–129, 149–150, 169–171, 185–188. 44 Blair Worden, Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity (London, 2002), chaps 7–10; Blair Worden, ‘Thomas Carlyle and Oliver Cromwell’, Proceedings of the British Academy 105 (1999), pp. 131–170; J. S. A. Adamson, ‘Eminent Victorians: S. R. Gardiner and the Liberal as Hero’, Historical Journal 33.3 (1990), pp. 641–657. 45 Williams, History of English Journalism, p. ii.

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Monarchists.46 Gardiner’s combination of Gladstonian liberalism and his sympathetic account of Cromwell was no doubt particularly toxic in Muddiman’s eyes. And yet it would be a mistake to dismiss all of Muddiman’s narrative about how the news from Drogheda spread. His knowledge of seventeenthcentury printed sources was extensive, based on lifelong study in the British Museum’s Reading Room: a five-minute walk from his school in Gower Street, and backing on to the house at 30 Bloomsbury Street where he spent his final years.47 He anticipated in some respects the focus of more recent scholars on the material and social context of newsbooks.48 Muddiman was sensitive to the forms that printed news took and the roles involved in its production, distinguishing between newsbooks and later newspapers and between licensers, authors, printers and sellers.49 He also anticipated another emerging concern in the historiography of news, namely geography and the networks and means through which news was disseminated and consumed.50 His work was underpinned by a detailed understanding of the Post Office, carrier routes and the role of intelligencers and the nodes they formed in news networks.51 This is perhaps no surprise given the environment in which Muddiman spent his early years. His father Alexander was a bookseller, stationer and printer, employing two men and four apprentices at a joint house and premises in the High Street in Leighton Buzzard.52 The shop brimmed with the finest letter paper, envelopes and Indian ink.53 Weeks before his son’s birth, Alexander had also established a new enterprise: the Leighton Buzzard Observer and 46 Muddiman, The King’s Journalist, pp. 22–36. 47 Certified copy of death certificate for Joseph George Muddiman, 26 May 1939. General Register Office, COL597661/2018. 48 D. F. McKenzie, ‘Typography and Meaning: The Case of William Congreve’, in P. D. McDonald and M. F. Suarez (eds), Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays (Amherst, MA, 2002), pp. 198–236; D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge, 1999); Raymond, Invention of the Newspaper; S. B. Dobranski, Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade (Cambridge, 1999). 49 Williams, History of English Journalism, pp. 7–19, 47–48, 158–171. 50 B. Dooley and S. Baron (eds), The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (London, 2001); Joad Raymond (ed.), News Networks in Seventeenth-Century Britain and Europe (2006); Raymond and Moxham (eds), News Networks in Early Modern Europe. 51 Williams, History of English Journalism, p. 9; Muddiman, The King’s Journalist, pp. 9–14. 52 England Census 1861, class: RG 9; Piece: 1005; Folio: 62; p. 10; GSU roll: 542735. 53 Leighton Buzzard Observer and Linslade Gazette, Tuesday, 1 Jan. 1861, p. 1.

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Lindlade Gazette, a weekly newspaper published on a Tuesday and costing a penny unstamped or tuppence stamped. The newspaper was a mixture of adverts for local businesses and, much like the seventeenth-century newsbooks that Muddiman would go on to study, intelligence in the form of correspondence from across England and the wider world. The first issue, for example, covered everything from a tour of the graveyards at Sebastopol to a ‘terrible boiler explosion’ in Leeds. III Together, Muddiman’s various accounts of how news of the siege of Drogheda reached London are a sensitive analysis of mid-seventeenth century news, the forms it took and the networks through which it travelled between Ireland and England. He looked not just at Cromwell’s various letters but also at newsbook accounts of the siege and other contemporary letters, using them as sources both for news and for context on when key pieces of information arrived in London, and how they were spread. Muddiman was careful to establish how long news would have taken to reach London from Drogheda in 1649. After reaching Dublin from Drogheda, either inland through Ballyboughal and Swords or via the coast, there were a number of routes across the Irish Sea.54 The main passage covered by packet ships was Dublin to Holyhead, which in 1649 was operated by Captain Stephen Rich, but there was also a weekly service which had opened in June that year to take dispatches between Waterford and Milford Haven.55 Ships also went from Dublin to Liverpool and Chester. Both ports seem to have catered more for passengers and private goods compared with Holyhead, the road to which from Chester was difficult.56 All of these routes could be unreliable. Privateers were still operating in the Irish Sea, and severe weather or simply the wrong winds could make crossings impossible. The Council of State also had doubts over the quality of its packet service: on 29 September, it wrote to Cromwell asking him to investigate Captain Rich.57 Once in England, news faced 54 Reilly, Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy, p. 54. 55 G. Ayres, History of the Mail Routes to Ireland until 1850 (Morrisville, NC, 2011), pp. 18–20. 56 E. C. Watson, The Royal Mail to Ireland: or an Account of the Origin and Development of the Post between London and Ireland through Holyhead, and the Use of the Line of Communication by Travellers (London, 1917), pp. 39–42. 57 Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Interregnum, 1649–50 (London, 1875), pp. 324–235. Rich would defend himself robustly. See The answer of captain Stephen Rich, commander of the state packet barques, and post-master of Dublin, to a

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a long journey to London of 40 hours or more in the winter, and a little less in the summer.58 The siege of Drogheda began on 3 September and came to an end on 11 September. Muddiman established that news of the progress of the siege had reached London by 18 September, when the Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer reported that a church in the town had been taken.59 On 21 September, Henry Walker’s Perfect Occurrences drew on intelligence from a letter from Liverpool, dated 14 September, to announce that the town’s wall had been breached.60 On 22 September, Walker published this letter, in which the author asserted that all ‘in the posture of soldiers’ were put to the sword, but those in houses or in ‘a quiet and orderly posture’ were given quarter, alongside another letter from Dublin dated 12 September.61 After this, the weather delayed further news from reaching London, with ships in Dublin stuck in port due to a ‘constant Easterly wind’.62 The Perfect Summary noted on 27 September that no further letters had yet arrived.63 Muddiman identified that the next news about the siege did not reach London until 28 September, when Captain Samuel Porter (one of the original officers in Cromwell’s Ironsides) arrived in the city having travelled from Drogheda.64 He was carrying at least three letters: a letter from Hugh Peter to Henry Walker written on 15 September, Cromwell’s scandalous information of Evan Vaughan, late post-master of the same city (London, 1649). ESTC (Wing (CD-ROM, 1996), R1365A). 58 Watson, The Royal Mail to Ireland, p. 44. 59 Williams, ‘The Truth concerning Cromwell’s Massacre at Drogheda’, p. 305; Thomason Tracts, E.573[26]. The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer, No. 329, 11–18 Sept. 1649. 60 Thomason Tracts, E.533[6]. Perfect Occurrences, No. 142, 14–21 Sept. 1649. 61 Williams, ‘The Truth concerning Cromwell’s Massacre at Drogheda’, p. 307; Thomason Tracts, E.574[18]. Two letters one from Dublin in Ireland, and the other from Liverpoole (London, 1649). 62 Thomason Tracts, E.533[8]. A perfect diurnall of some passages in Parliament, and from other parts of this kingdome, 17–24 Sept. 1649, sig. 15a3v; Thomason Tracts, E.574[17]. A modest narrative of intelligence: fitted for the republique of England & Ireland, 25 vols, 15–22 Sept. 1649. 63 Thomason Tracts, E.533[14]. A Perfect summary of exact passages of Parliament, 27 vols, 24 Sept.–1 Oct. 1649. 64 Williams, ‘Fresh Light on Cromwell at Drogheda’, p. 406. Porter would go on to be paid £100 for his troubles by the Council of State at the order of the Commons. See Journal of the House of Commons, vol. 6, 1648–1651 (London, 1802), p. 305 and Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Interregnum (1649–1650) (London, 1875), p. 336.

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letter to John Bradshaw of 16 September, and Cromwell’s first letter to William Lenthall of 17 September.65 Peter’s letter is the source of the infamous phrase ‘none spared’, quoting a figure of 3,552 ‘enemies slaine’. Henry Walker published it on 29 September, claiming that it was also read to the Commons on the previous day (although the Commons Journal does not record this). Cromwell’s letter to Bradshaw mentions refusing quarter and putting to the sword ‘the whole number of the defendants’. His letter to Lenthall recounts the events of the siege in more detail and includes his order that ‘being in the heat of action, I forbade them to spare any that were in Arms in the Town’. Muddiman also identified that a second, more detailed set of news about the specifics of the Drogheda siege began to arrive in London from 1 October onwards. Perfect diurnall, for example, stated that ‘this day by Letters severall from hands, the particulars of the late great successe of our forces in Ireland was fully certified’.66 Amongst the letters that arrived on 1 October was Cromwell’s second dispatch to Lenthall, but it could not be read by the Commons that day as the House was not sitting. When the Commons returned on 2 October, Cromwell’s first letter to Lenthall of 17 September and a list of the defenders of Drogheda was read to MPs, as was his second letter dated 27 September including, as the Commons Journal noted, ‘a List of the Officers and Soldiers slain at the Storming of Drogheda’.67 It is possible, as Reilly has suggested, that the list read out was a separate piece of intelligence and not part of Cromwell’s letter to Lenthall. However, the fact that his previous letter of 17 September also enclosed a list – in that case of those defending Drogheda – suggests he was following a similar practice in his second letter. The Commons ordered both to be printed, and they were published on 3 October under the title Letters from Ireland. IV Muddiman also noted that Letters from Ireland was not the first point at which a detailed list of those killed during the storming of Drogheda appeared in print. The day before its publication, on Tuesday, 2 October, 65 Thomason Tracts, E.574[28]. A letter from Ireland read in the House of Commons on Friday September. 28. 1649 (London, 1649); Thomason Tracts, E.533[13]. A perfect diurnall, Sept.–1 Oct. 1649, p. 24; Thomason Tracts, E.575[7]. Letters from Ireland (1649). 66 Thomason Tracts, E.533[17]. A perfect diurnall, 1–8 Oct. 1649. 67 Journal of the House of Commons, vol. 6, 1648–1651 (London, 1802), p. 300.

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the Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer had printed a casualty list.68 Published by Robert White, and in 1649 sold by Humphrey Blunden, the identity of the Intelligencer’s editor remains unclear: both Richard Collings and Captain Thomas Audley have been proposed.69 Muddiman suggested that the list may have been transcribed by someone present in the Commons when it was read the same day.70 However, he did not spot that it was a different list from that published in Letters from Ireland. The version in the Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer reads as follows: Of Horse Of Foote Sir Arthur Ashton Commander-in-chiefe. Collonel William Warren. Sir Edmund Verney. Collonel of Collonel Waller. Ormond’s Regiment. Collonel Burne. Collonel Flemming. Two of the Lord Taffes brothers Lieutenant Collonel Finglesse. one an Augustine Frier. Major Fitz-Gerald. Forty foure Captains. Sir Robert Harpoole. Two hundred and Twenty Fourscore Captains, Lieutenants Reformadoes and Troupers. And Cornets. Two thousand five hundred foot soldiers besides State Officers Chirurgions and many Inhabitants. The list in Letters from Ireland was different from this version in at least six respects. It gave a different title for Ashton, a different rank for Verney and missed out Harpool. It gave eight rather than 80 other cavalry officers. It mentioned lieutenants and majors of horse and ensigns and lieutenants of foot where the first did not, and mentioned only one brother of Lord Taaff, rather than two: Sir Arthur Ashton, Governor. Sir Edmund Verney Lieutenant Col: to Ormonds Regiment. Col: Fleming, of Horse. Lieutenant Col: Finglass, of Horse. Major Fitzgerald, of Horse. Eight Captains Lieutenants Cornets of Horse. 68 Thomason Tracts, E.575[5]. The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer, No. 331, 25 Sept.–2 Oct. 1649, p. 1518 (second instance; a typographical error means this edition has two pages labelled 1518). 69 Raymond, Invention of the Newspaper, p. 27. 70 Williams, ‘Fresh Light on Cromwell at Drogheda’, p. 481.

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Col: Warren, Walls, Byrne of Foot, with their Lieutenants, Majors, &c. The Lord Taaffs brother, an Augustine Fryer. Forty four Captains, and all their Lieutenants, Ensigns, &c. Two hundred and twenty Reformado’s and Troopers. Two thousand Five hundred Foot Soldiers, besides Staff Officers, Chyrurgeons, &c. and many Inhabitants. It is possible, as Muddiman suggests, that the Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer’s source for this was Cromwell’s letter being read aloud in the Commons, and that the differences stem from errors in transcription. However, in the same issue the editor was at pains to point out he had ‘for the most part waved the Parliament news’ and would continue to do so until he could tell ‘with what safety (in relation to their Counsailes) this Pen may walk upon this Paper which I conceive, was never more uncertaine then at this present’.71 It seems more likely that the editor of the Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer received the list separately, from another correspondent. Subsequent printed accounts of the siege certainly show how newsbooks drew on, and reshaped, sources other than Cromwell’s letters to meet the demand for news from Ireland. The publication that Tuesday of the first version of the list in the Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer was the start of a week-long period during which successive newsbooks rushed to share the news. By 1649, long-running newsbook titles had each settled on a fixed day of publication each week. On Wednesday, 3 October, the same list and account that the Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer had printed the previous day appeared in the Perfect Weekly Account, written by Daniel Border and printed by Bernard Alsop.72 However, it omitted the phrase ‘and many inhabitants’.73 On Thursday, 4 October, a third version of the list was printed in John Dillingham’s Moderate Intelligencer, published by Robert Laybourn. The details were identical to those in the Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer, although missing all of the final line (not just ‘many inhabitants’).74 However, they were contained in a different, much longer letter from Dublin written on 22 September and pre-dating Cromwell’s second dispatch to Lenthall by 5 days: 71 Thomason Tracts, E.575[5]. The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer, No. 331, 25 Sept.–2 Oct. 1649, p. 1518 (first instance). 72 Raymond, Invention of the Newspaper, p. 33. 73 Thomason Tracts, E.575[8]. Perfect Weekly Account, 26 Sept.–3 Oct. 1649; Thomason Tracts, E.575[10]. 74 Moderate Intelligencer, No. 237, 27 Sep.–4 Oct. 1649, ff. 5v–6v.

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In which slaughter there fell Sir Arthur Ashton a Papist, as were most of the Garrison, the reason given of his death is said to be the rage of Colonel Castles Souldiers for the death of their Collonel, also for that Ashton gave not a civill answer when summoned, Sir Edward Verney also was slain, who had the charge of the mount, also Col. Fleming, Lieuten. Col. Finglas, Major Gerald, Sir Robert Harpool, Captains, Lieutenants, and Cornets of Horse 80, where their Horse were we knew not, probably they went as common men. Of foot, Collonel William Warren, Col. Waller, Col. Burne, the Lord Taffs Brother an Augustine Frier, of Captains and inferiour Officers of foot 44, 220 Reformadoes, 2000 within the Town were put to the Sword, the rest had that kinde of execution leapt over the wall, who were about 500, which make in all about 2900. On Friday, 5 October, Border included the same account and list that he had published in the Perfect Weekly Account in the Kingdomes faithfull and impartiall scout, his other newsbook published by Robert Wood and George Horton, again not including the final phrase.75 Meanwhile, on the same day, Henry Walker gave a fourth version of the list in Perfect Occurrences, published by Robert Ibbitson and John Clowes.76 Walker claimed that it arrived in London on 28 September. However, he may have muddled the list with Hugh Peter’s and Cromwell’s initial letters, which arrived on that date. He would presumably have published the list alongside Peter’s letter had it arrived at that same point. The list had much of the same content as the version in Letters from Ireland but gave different or additional numbers for certain categories of officer: for example 6 captains, 8 lieutenants and 8 cornets from the cavalry, and 41 captains and 44 lieutenants from the infantry. It also said ‘with many inhabitants’ rather than ‘and many inhabitants’: News came this day that the Lord Lieutenant had taken Tredagh and there slain Sir Arthur Aston (the Governour.) Sir Edmund Varney, Lieutenant Col to Ormonds own Regiment of Horse. And also, Col Fleming, Lieut Col Finglasse, Major Fitzgarret, And Capt. Sir Robert Harpoole, all of Horse. And 6 Captains, 8. lieutenants, and 8. Cornets of Horse more. And of Foote, Col Warren, Col Wall, Col Byrine. And 75 Thomason Tracts, E.533[16]. The Kingdomes Faithfull and Impartiall Scout, No. 36, 28 Sept.–5 Oct. 1649. 76 Perfect Occurrences, No. 144, 28 Sept.–5 Oct. 1649 (incorrectly given as Friday, 4 October on the title page); Thomason Tracts, E.533[15]. p. 1273.

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the Lord Taffes 2 Brothers, one of them being an Augustine Fryer. And 41. Captains, 44. Lieutenants, and all the Ensignes and other Officers of 44. Companies, some very few only excepted. 220 Reformadoes and Troopers. And 2500. Foot-Souldiers, besides Staff-Officers, and Chiurgions, with many Inhabitants. If Walker had wished to reproduce the list published in Letters from Ireland, he could have done so given the gap between the latter’s publication and the printing of that week’s edition of Perfect Occurrences. It seems plausible, instead, that he sourced this version of the list from another correspondent in Ireland. On Monday, 8 October, Samuel Pecke’s Perfect diurnall, published by William Cooke, printed a fifth version of the list without the phrase ‘many inhabitants’ but with an additional 26 named individuals.77 This was set out at the end of an account stitching together Cromwell’s first letter to Lenthall of 17 September with a separate, first-person account not in Cromwell’s voice: A List of the principall Officers slain in Drogedah Sir Arthur Ashton, Governour. Sir Edmund Verney, Lieu. Col to the Lof Ormond. The Horse commanded by Major Butler Lieu col Finglas, Cap Plunket the Lord Desmes sonne, and Col. Fleming, slaine Of Foot Col Warren, Col Wall, Cap Butler, Major Tempest, Major Fitzgerald, Major Wilkins, Lieu. col Gray, ––– Stevens, Cap Lieu Street Cooly, Bagnall, Captains Col Burne, Li. Col Boile, Major Doudle, Cap. Croker, Benss, Fisher, Geffes, Barnes, Captaines. The Lord Taff’s brother, a Frier of the Order of S. Augustine. In all 44 captains, all their Lieutenants and Ensignes, 220 Reformadoes and troopers, 2,500 Foot Souldiers. Finally, on Tuesday, 9 October – a full week’s news cycle having passed – the version in Letters from Ireland appeared in the first edition of Severall proceedings, printed by Robert Ibbitson.78 This would go on to be one of the three newsbooks officially licensed under the Licensing Act of 1649. 77 Thomason Tracts, E.533[15]. A perfect diurnall, 1–8 Oct. 1649, p. 2815. 78 Thomason Tracts, E.575[14]. Severall proceedings in Parliament, 25 Sept.–9 Oct. 1649.

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This and subsequent editions were licensed by Henry Scobell, clerk to the Commons. While the style and content of subsequent issues bear the mark of Henry Walker’s hand, the first issue consisted solely of summaries of the Commons Journal and may be Scobell’s work alone. The list was identical in every respect to that in Letters from Ireland save for the fact that it missed out the words ‘and many inhabitants’. In summary, there may have been up to five different versions of the casualty list circulating in London during early October 1649 – with Cromwell’s neither the first to be sent nor the first to be published. The version published by John Dillingham in the Moderate Intelligencer was part of a letter from Dublin written on 22 September, a full five days before Cromwell’s second letter to Lenthall. This suggests that both Cromwell and other correspondents may have been drawing on a common source – perhaps a list drawn up on the scene that may have gone through more than one iteration as more information about the casualties was established in the days after the siege. The first version to be printed was the list published in the Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer, potentially transcribed with errors from Cromwell’s letters, but more plausibly a list from a separate correspondent that had also reached London on 1 October. There was also the version set out by Henry Walker in Perfect Occurrences, again plausibly a separate list from a different correspondent. The fact that the first three versions to be printed – those in the Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer, Letters from Ireland and Perfect Occurrences – included the phrase ‘and many inhabitants’ is highly significant. Its appearance in letters from what may be three separate correspondents adds weight to the argument by McElligott, Morrill and Ó Siochrú that the phrase can be relied upon. And finally there was the letter from Samuel Pecke’s correspondent, which also seems to have reached London on 1 October given its placement at the start of that issue of the Perfect diurnall, which covered events from 1 to 8 October – but which Pecke would have to wait a week to publish. V Reconstructing the news network that stretched from Drogheda to London and beyond also sheds light on the political difficulty the phrase ‘and many inhabitants’ posed for the Council of State. From its creation in February 1649 onwards, the Council took active steps to prevent the publication of material that was hostile or unfavourable to the Commonwealth. Early in 1649, a proof copy of Eikon Basilike was confiscated, and by March daily searches for copies of it were being carried out at

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printers and booksellers.79 In April, warrants were issued for the arrest of Samuel Sheppard and William Wright (writer and printer of Mercurius Elencticus) and the writers and printers of The Man in the Moon and Mercurius Pragmaticus.80 In June, a warrant was issued for the arrest of Marchamont Nedham.81 Leveller publications received similar attention from the Council. In March, the Rump referred the Leveller pamphlet The Second Part of Englands new chains discovered to the Council as an ‘Obnoxious Publication’.82 In May, the Council asked the Rump to dismiss Gilbert Mabbott from his post as licenser because of his track record in licensing ‘divers dangerous books’.83 By the time news from the siege of Drogheda reached London, then, the Council of State already had a well-established record of taking action against what they saw as seditious publications. By late September 1649, the Council also had a fresh set of legal powers to deploy. John Bradshaw was rumoured to have started work on a new framework for managing the press as early as April 1649: The order against unlicensed bookes is suspended for the present, thinking thereby to catch the authors but hould a blow, some are wiser then some. That Scarlet Cutthrot, and Scelestick Regicid Bradshaw, I here hath desired to have the managing of that businesse and will take some such new course as was never taken yet.84 On 12 May, the Council of State agreed that Bradshaw should ‘prepare and bring in an Act prohibiting the printing of invective and scandalous pamphlets against the commonwealth’.85 The eventual ‘Act against Unlicensed and Scandalous Books and Pamphlets, and for better regulating of Printing’ was finally passed by the Commons on 14 September.86 Anyone 79 Jason McElligott, Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England (Woodbridge, 2007), p. 165–166; Thomason Tracts, E.546[4]. Mercurius Pragmaticus, No. 44, 27 Feb.–5 Mar. 1649, sig. 2r. 80 Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Interregnum, 1649–50 (1875), p. 530. 81 Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Interregnum, 1649–50 (1875), p. 537. 82 Journal of the House of Commons, vol. 6, 1648–1651 (London, 1802), pp. 174–175. 83 Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Interregnum, 1649–50 (1875), p. 127. 84 Thomason Tracts, E.550[13]. Mercurius Pragmaticus, No. 49, 3–10 April 1649, sig. 4r. 85 Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Interregnum, 1649–50 (1875), p. 137. For a full account of the preparation of the Act, see McElligott, Royalism, Print and Censorship, pp. 168–174. 86 Journal of the House of Commons, vol. 6, 1648–1651 (London, 1802), pp. 295–296.

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found involved in unlicensed printing could be fined, or imprisoned if they could not pay the fine: £10 for authors, £5 for printers and £2 for booksellers. Buyers caught in possession of unlicensed books faced a fine of £1. Printers could also face confiscation of their presses and had to enter a bond of £300 and print the name of the relevant licenser on all of their publications. Licensers previously involved in regulating the book trade had their licences stripped away to be replaced by three licensers: the clerk to parliament, the Secretary to the army and anyone else appointed by the Council of State. At the end of September, the Council of State was already making robust use of its powers to attempt to manage the news coming back from Ireland. A report in Mercurius Elencticus describes committees being established in late September at Dublin and Chester to search letters going to and from Ireland.87 At around the same time, Walker and the publishers of Perfect Occurrences, Robert Ibbitson and John Clowes, found themselves the subjects of a warrant from the Council of State for printing without a licence.88 On 2 October, the Council of State wrote to the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Common Council of the City of London reminding them of their responsibility to apprehend and proceed against those responsible for ‘foolish, malignant, seditious, and treasonous pamphlets and invectives’.89 Other newsbook editors would have been intensely aware of the risks of falling foul of the new Act if they published unlicensed news about Drogheda. In the edition of the Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer published on 2 October, the editor specifically mentioned the letter from Hugh Peter that Henry Walker had published on 29 September, flagging the words 87 Thomason Tracts, E.574[19]. Mercurius Elencticus, No. 22, 17–24 September 1649, p. 170. 88 Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Interregnum 1650 (1876), p. 16. As Muddiman identified, this is probably misdated: Perfect Occurrences had ceased to be published by February 1650, the point at which the warrant is included in the State Papers. Although the powers of arrest mentioned are the same as those in the September 1647 printing ordinance, these had been maintained by the Licensing Act. The level of fines cited is from the 1649 Act and makes clear the source must post-date it. It may relate to the edition for 28 September, which closed by saying that it had not yet been decided who would take up the licensing appointments under the Act and apologised for publishing under the old licence. Alternatively, it may be linked to Walker’s publication on 29 September of Hugh Peter’s letter of 15 September with its phrase ‘none spared’. This was printed by Ibbitson, and while it claimed to be licensed by Scobell, at this early stage the individuals authorised to license publications under the 1649 Act were still being confirmed. 89 Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Interregnum, 1649–50 (1875), p. 328.

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‘none spared’ as the offending phrase, as one of the items he had not been willing to reproduce.90 While this did not stop the Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer publishing its own, separately sourced letter and casualty list, other newsbook writers seem to have taken a very deliberate decision to omit details of civilian deaths. Daniel Border – either with access to the same letter or copying the version the Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer had published – seems to have excised the phrase ‘and many inhabitants’ in both the Perfect Weekly Account and the Kingdomes faithfull and impartiall scout. It is unclear whether the list in the letter printed in Samuel Pecke’s Perfect diurnall simply did not contain the phrase or whether he too removed it. What does seem clear, however, is Henry Scobell took the decision to remove the phrase from Severall proceedings. As clerk to the Commons he was able to draw directly on the version sent by Cromwell, and the fact that the text in his version is identical to that in Letters from Ireland suggests that he did so, but with one crucial omission. However, despite the Council’s active efforts to check news leaving Ireland and the chilling effect of the Licensing Act that was clearly felt by some newsbook editors, this was not sufficient to prevent details of civilian deaths from circulating. Royalist newsbooks seized upon the suggestion with predictable results. Mercurius Elencticus, for example, began its edition of 15 October with explicit echoes of the casualty list, accusing the attackers of ‘inflicting all crueltie imaginable upon the besieged, as well inhabitants as others’, cutting off the garrison’s flesh and genitals after they had been disarmed, murdering women and children, and torturing an Augustine parson. This was contrasted with the regime’s claim to be supported by God and to be restoring the Church.91 On 24 October, the Man in the Moon claimed Cromwell’s troops placed four officers’ wives and their children in the path of cannon fire and bombarded them, and – again echoing numbers published elsewhere – that 2,000 of the 3,000 killed in the siege were women and children.92 The following months would see the Council of State pursue and suppress these and other royalist newsbooks, with The Man in the Moon the final title to be put out of print, in early June 1650.93 90 Thomason Tracts, E.575[5]. The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer, No. 331, 25 Sept, 1649, p. 1516. 91 Thomason Tracts, E.575[19]. Mercurius Elencticus, No. 24, 8–15 Sept. 1649, pp. 185–188. 92 Thomason Tracts, E.575[32]. The Man in the Moon, No. 26, 17–24 Oct. 1649, p. 213. 93 McElligott, Royalism, Print and Censorship, pp. 175–182.

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VI In late June 1649, the Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer reported that: the generall Demand of the People is, What is your Newes from Ireland? The sellers of the weekly sheets make answer, and cry aloud in the streets, Newes hot from Ireland.94 Looking again at Cromwell’s letters to Lenthall in the context of the news network that stretched from Drogheda to London and beyond, four themes emerge. The first is the value, as other studies have found, of reassessing accounts of Cromwell’s life that have been underused or dismissed. While Muddiman’s work needs to be read carefully in the context of his hostility to Cromwell, Hugh Peter, Henry Walker and other important Independent figures, his years spent in the Reading Room of the British Museum mean his work is grounded in a close reading of printed sources that is sensitive to the news network within which they were produced and consumed. The second is that seeing Cromwell as a central source for what happened at Drogheda risks insights from other sources being distorted or underplayed. Set in the context of how news flowed from Drogheda to London, Cromwell was for contemporaries one of a number of people communicating intelligence from Ireland by letter and word of mouth. He was not the first to write with the casualty list: the correspondent from Dublin published in the Moderate Intelligencer was ahead of him by five days. Nor was Cromwell’s account the first to be published. A combination of weather conditions delaying ships and the Commons not sitting on the day letters reached London meant the Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer was the first to break the news. As Raymond has argued, the laws of supply and demand affect how readers perceived its value, something that is ‘particularly marked when there is a blackout in a normally dense network’.95 For contemporary readers, the speed with which news reached them may have been just as valuable as its mode or source. Henry Walker’s rush to print Hugh Peter’s letter of 15 September – which reached London at an inconvenient time, on the day that Perfect Occurrences had gone to press – is an example of how the desire for ‘newes hot’, rather than cold, was seen as a priority by those sending and distributing it. 94 Thomason Tracts, E.561[18]. The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer, No. 317, 19–26 June 1649, p. 1401. 95 Raymond, ‘News Networks’, p. 110.

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The third is the extent to which the three words ‘and many inhabitants’ can be trusted as an accurate account of what happened during the storming of Drogheda. If this chapter’s analysis is right, it was not just Cromwell’s second letter to Lenthall that contained this phrase. It may also have been contained in letters from two other sources, reproduced in the Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer and Perfect Occurrences, suggesting that it was a feature of the original version circulating in manuscript or through word of mouth in Drogheda and then in Dublin. If this is the case, then Reilly’s argument that there is ambiguity over the provenance of the list – and that if Cromwell did not write it its significance is reduced – is hard to sustain.96 Finally, by establishing the timeline of when different versions of the casualty list were printed – and which did and did not include the phrase ‘many inhabitants’ – a case study emerges of the different ways in which the Council of State sought to regulate the press from 1649 onwards. As Jason McElligott has argued, the English state had significant tools available to it to suppress writers, printers, sellers and carriers of news, where it wanted to.97 The Council of State’s pursuit of royalist newsbooks was robust, targeting printers in particular through regular searching by the Stationers Company and other agents authorised to enter ships and premises. For other titles, though, the threat of being summoned by the Council of State and receiving significant fines seems to have been a significant deterrent. The way in which newsbooks printed later in the week that followed the first version of the list being printed dropped the phrase ‘and many inhabitants’ – together with their previous reticence about repeating the phrase ‘none spared’ – suggests that the Council of State did not always have to resort to breaking down doors to shape and control the news.

96 Reilly, Cromwell Was Framed, pp. 159, 177–178. 97 Jason McElligott, ‘“A Couple of Hundred Squabbling Small Tradesmen”? Censorship, the Stationers’ Company, and the State in Early Modern England’, Media History 11.1/2 (2005), pp. 87–104; McElligott, Royalism, Print and Censorship, chap. 8.

Chapter 11

The Folkloric Afterlife of Oliver Cromwell in Ireland Sarah Covington

The Folkloric Afterlife of Oliver Cromwell in Ireland

To assess Oliver Cromwell’s Irish legacy without paying heed to folklore is to capture only a fraction of the man’s afterlife.1 In folklore, Cromwell is a huge, looming, ever-haunting presence – and not always a bad man (nor exactly a good man). He assumes many guises, from the clownish to the demonic; he haunts the landscape – perhaps above all the landscape;2 and he appears indirectly, in the form of magpies (‘Cromwell’s crows’) or through association with his largely evil co-conspirators the ‘Oliverians’. Most famously, he is remembered through the massacres that took place in Drogheda and Wexford, and for an order which he most likely did not proclaim (‘To hell or Connaught’). And the ‘curse of Cromwell on you’, which is inflicted in English folklore as well, ensured his lasting malevolence. In short, Cromwell in Ireland emerged as a powerful and iconic historical legend manifested in prophecies, curses, ruins and evil birds; while he was certainly presented as an ogre, and more so in the ideologically hardened context of the nineteenth century, his attributes across the folklore – sinister, friendly, tricky, buffoonish – extended well beyond the interpretive perimeters that historians and polemicists used to contain him. This essay attempts to offer a new perspective on Cromwell’s legacy, utilising the sometimes surprising evidence of folk narratives as they 1 For an overview of Cromwell in English and (briefly) Irish folklore, see Alan Smith, ‘The Image of Cromwell in Folklore and Tradition’, Folklore 79 (1968), pp. 17–39. 2 Sarah Covington, ‘“The odious demon from across the sea”: Oliver Cromwell, Memory and the Dislocations of Ireland’, in Erika Kuijper, Judith Pollmann, Johannes Müller and Jasper van der Steen (eds), Memory before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2013), pp. 149–164. 275

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pervaded a commonly shared if heavily diverse form of popular memory. Focusing on the strictly historical legacy, Toby Barnard has already provided us with two definitive assessments that account for Cromwell’s Irish reputation among antiquarians and historians.3 We also know much, thanks to Barnard and Blair Worden, about the historiography that has framed Cromwell’s larger reputation, including his nineteenth-century lionisation by Carlyle or Froude, or in Ireland his demonisation by John P. Prendergast or P. F. Moran. But while historians acknowledge the overwhelming number of popular and folkloric stories about Cromwell, they tend to avoid engaging in those tales or their meanings. As will be seen, this traditional aversion is quite understandable. But apart from the fact that many acceptable historical sources are themselves based on oral traditions, folklore allows us to witness different perceptions of Cromwell and the exploitation of those perceptions by historical actors. For these reasons alone, historians must include folklore if they are to capture a fuller sense of the past, just as they must understand that while memory may deviate from historical facts it can sometimes capture truths that are much deeper than those which facts alone convey. It is also imperative to open up alternative historical source bases such as folklore, family records or material culture, given the paucity of records related to Cromwell and Cromwellian Ireland that arose after the notorious conflagration of the Public Record Office in 1922: a catastrophe that has had longstanding effects on our understanding of the man and the period, even if present attempts are being undertaken to restore and recreate that archive.4 But folklore is also important in offering us further clues into the manner in which Cromwell was remembered and certain actions interpreted by the larger culture, just as it reminds us how strange and complex many of those perceptions of him could be. On the one hand, Cromwell was uniquely incorporated into larger and universal motifs, thus ensuring his memory across time; yet folklore is also deeply local, allowing him to be embedded in site-specific places whenever references were made to the hooves of his horses ‘still imprinted on the church floor’, or modest cabins where it was claimed that he had 3 T. C. Barnard, ‘Irish Images of Cromwell’, in R. C. Richardson (ed.), Images of Oliver Cromwell: Essays for and by Roger Howell, Jr (Manchester, 1993), pp. 180–206; Toby Barnard, ‘Cromwell’s Irish Reputation’, in Jane A. Mills (ed.), Cromwell’s Legacy (Manchester, 2012), pp. 191–217. 4 See the Beyond 2022 Project: https://beyond2022.ie (accessed 22 Aug. 2020). See also Micheál Ó Siochrú, ‘Rebuilding the Past: The Transformation of Early Modern Irish History’, Seventeenth Century 34.3 (2019), pp. 381–404.

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once spent the night, even if he had never been to those places at all. And while folk tales also convey a timeless and archaic quality, they also helped to construct meanings around a figure that could be adjusted to the particular needs and interests of different social groups belonging to a historical moment in time. After briefly addressing the approaches and methods by which we may understand Cromwell through those prisms, this essay will survey and interpret some of the vernacular tales or songs that shaped and perpetuated his Irish afterlife. Many of these tales were not related to Cromwell at all, but rather all the associations that accrued around him and came to be known under the larger encompassing term ‘Cromwellian’. But all this was still to remember the man, however indirectly. Fair or not, Cromwell came to be inextricably linked to land confiscations, the new utilitarian order of things, the beginning of the penal laws, the massacres and violence that ‘finished Ireland’ and, not least, those who accompanied him in conquest and earned malevolent reputations that sometimes surpassed his own. Cromwell was also joined at times with (and could be overshadowed by) memories of William III, just as previous conquests, of the Elizabethans, for example, came to be subsumed under his mnemonically powerful name. But instead of ‘correcting the record’ of folklore – important as that may be at times – one should explore these tales on their own terms, to allow us glimpses into oral culture and the complex processes of memorialisation by those without access to dominant forms of historical discourse. Whether these tales are historically accurate or not is therefore beside the point, particularly as they remind us how Cromwell cannot be extricated from the myths that created and shaped him: myths, moreover, that were not always too far off the mark. Before proceeding, one should be clear as to what is meant by ‘folklore’ (béaloideas in Irish).5 Whatever the term used to describe oral tradition (though folklore will be used here), it does not connote, as it once did, the stories of a socially cohesive communal body which perpetuated the primitive ‘survivals’ of a misty long-ago world; nor do songs, legends and the verbal arts necessarily belong to a ‘subaltern’ world of the voiceless and socially powerless. Folklore does present a kind of alternative history; but if the term is expanded to include, as Alan Dundes once defined it, ‘Any group of people sharing a common linking factor’, then folklore could apply to the tales told by Protestant Anglo-Irish elites and dispossessed Irish 5 See, for Ireland, Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, Locating Irish Folklore: Tradition, Modernity, Identity (Cork, 2000); Diarmuid Ó Giolláin (ed.), Irish Ethnologies (Notre Dame, IN, 2017).

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poets as much as to the poor and displaced.6 At the same time, folklore could also traverse class and religious lines (and reinforce them as well), even if stories of fleeing priests or miraculous bells, for example, tended to belong to a distinctly Catholic narrative tradition. I have written elsewhere of the condescending misconceptions that historians hold regarding folklore and their avoidance of the methodological approaches that can be usefully applied to folklore as a source.7 In Ireland especially, those historians who fall under the banner of revisionists also dismissed myth (or, really, Catholic myths), leading to a diminution of or aversion to the historical value that folklore could contain. As Guy Beiner has demonstrated, however, folklore is important not only when it comes to the study of history but also of memory – especially since memory, unlike history, is a looser and more capacious mode of remembrance, emotionally richer and more immediate, often incorporating the sacred within itself; it also focuses on a broader range of imaginative and heterogeneous narratives in which to explain how things came to be the way they were, or were not.8 Memory (in whatever forms it takes) is above all communal, a ‘body of cultural knowledge relating to the past’, and one which tends to circle around certain tropes which exert a highly charged and potent aura: in Ireland’s case, few more potently so than that of ‘Cromwell’.9 6 Alan Dundes, ‘The Devolutionary Premise in Folklore Theory’, Journal of the Folklore Institute 6 (1969), p. 13. 7 Sarah Covington, ‘Towards a New “Folkloric Turn” in the Literature of Early Modern Ireland’, Literature Compass 15.11 (2018): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/ doi/abs/10.1111/lic3.12497 (accessed 22 Mar. 2019); Sarah Covington, ‘Dung Beetles and the “Vulgar Traditions”: New Sources, Methods, and Perspectives’, in Sarah Covington, Vincent Carey and Valerie McGowan-Doyle (eds), Early Modern Ireland: New Sources, Methods, and Perspectives (London, 2018), pp. 213–232. For a fuller discussion of the methodological issues of historians using folklore, see Guy Beiner, Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster (Oxford, 2018), chap. 1; Guy Beiner, Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory (Madison, WI, 2007), p. 33. For examples of historians who utilise folklore, see Clodagh Tait, Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550–1650 (London, 2002); Raymond Gillespie, Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester, 1997), esp. p. 6. See also Raymond Gillespie and Myrtle Hill (eds), Doing Irish Local History: Pursuit and Practice (Belfast, 1998), esp. Introduction. More generally, see Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 3rd edn (Farnham, 2009), pp. 122–129. 8 Amos Funkenstein, ‘Collective Memory and Historical Consciousness’, History and Memory 1 (1989), p. 6; Beiner, Remembering the Year, p. 27. 9 Beiner, Remembering the Year, p. 28; Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge, 1995), p. 108.

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There are many other mythical or historical figures who haunt the memories of Ireland, of course, from Cú Chulainn to Patrick Sarsfield to Daniel O’Connell (especially Daniel O’Connell).10 Ireland had also known English ogres long before Cromwell ever appeared on the scene. But, in the litany of villainy, Cromwell not only stood out but practically nullified all else who came before and after him. I have speculated elsewhere the reasons why;11 but important too are the ways in which Cromwell himself stoked a considerable degree of self-mythologising in his letters and speeches. For one, he fully believed in the providential destiny – what we would perhaps call the myth – that bolstered and justified his actions. Micheál Ó Siochrú has further demonstrated how Royalists from the other side and during the campaign also encouraged propaganda that exploited rumour and tales circulating in the oral culture, while the massacre at Drogheda, though very real, was heightened to feed into stories that ‘added to Cromwell’s growing reputation for cruelty in Ireland’.12 In the early summer of 1650, after Cromwell had returned from Ireland, Andrew Marvell would himself compose the most famous (if poetically ambiguous) piece of mythmaking in his ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’, which proceeded to supernaturalise Cromwell and his excursions in Ireland, all in the service of a larger ‘national mythmaking’.13 But Cromwell’s iconic persona had also been established long before he even appeared in the country, with satirical royalist poems and newsbooks from the 1640s focusing on ‘Noll the Brewer’, a false slander emphasising his low-born origins.14 Visual culture in turn heavily contributed to the ‘construction’ of Cromwell, as Laura Knoppers has demonstrated, with portraits emphasising not only his striking appearance but his large and ‘intolerable’ nose: a detail that earned him the nicknames of His Noseship, among other choice sobriquets.15 10 Ríonach uí Ógáin, Immortal Dan: Daniel O’Connell in Irish Folk Tradition (Dublin, 1995), p. 19. 11 Covington, ‘“The odious demon from across the sea”’, p. 150. 12 Micheál Ó Siochrú, ‘Propaganda, Rumour and Myth: Oliver Cromwell and the Massacre at Drogheda’, in David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan and Clodagh Tait (eds), Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2009), p. 281. 13 Blair Worden, ‘The Politics of Marvell’s Horatian Ode’, Historical Journal 27 (1984), pp. 525–547. 14 Laura Lunger Knoppers, ‘“Sing old Noll the Brewer”: Royalist Satire and Social Inversion, 1648–64’, Seventeenth Century 15 (2000), esp. pp. 32–52. 15 Laura Lunger Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645–1661 (Cambridge, 2000), p. 52.

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Royalist confederates of the 1640s would, of course, have been aware of the brewer and the nose. But, in later popular culture, that nose, and its association with the devilish metal of copper, would also seep down into the popular culture, as it appeared in the riotous folkloric performance of the mummers play.16 In those itinerant, plotless and raucous performances, a bumbling minor character entered the action with the words, ‘Here come I, Oliver Cromwell, with my large copper nose/I have conquered many nations, As you may all suppose’. Accompanied by his more dominant companion Beelzebub, the mumming Cromwell, identified often by a makeshift cardboard snout, was eventually dragged away, yielding to the central mock-battle actions undertaken by more noteworthy figures such as St George. Mummers’ plays originated in seventeenth-century England, though their ritual elements, rhymes and repetitions probably extended back long before then; migrating over to Ireland and gaining increasing popularity in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mummers reached their popularity in those English-speaking regions of the Pale and the north that were in closest contact and proximity with their neighbour across the sea. But mummers would also come to incorporate more indigenous elements, including the Irish wren boys tradition as well as new characters, including St Patrick, who vanquished St George. Cromwell too was a distinct and predominant addition to the Irish mumming pantheon, with Henry Glassie once noting that the mumming Cromwell was particularly evident in performances along the Fermanagh–Donegal border, which would have been interesting in its own right.17 Yet while eighteenth-century mummers arguably belonged to what Helen Burke has termed the popular and politicised ‘riotous performances’ of the age,18 the fact that his persona was actually depoliticised, with him presented as a largely comic and impotent buffoon, allowed for mummers to be received across a broad audience, his actual deeds ‘forgotten’ even if the name itself, and the nose, continued to live on. Cromwell was also remembered early on, and more bitterly, by those whose lands had been dispossessed, and who attributed the loss to him. If we are to broaden the meaning of folklore to include any tradition shared and transmitted through the generations by a common group of whatever social class, then the middling sort as well as the low-born were perpetuators of these narratives of Cromwellian loss. Or, in the case of Protestant 16 See Alan Gailey, Christmas Rhymers and Mummers in Ireland (Ibstock, 1968). 17 Henry Glassie, All Silver and No Brass (Bloomington, IN, 1983), pp. 69, 75. 18 Helen Burke, Riotous Performances: The Struggle for Hegemony in the Irish Theater, 1712–1784 (South Bend, IN, 2003), pp. 44, 121, 128.

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planters, of gain: Elizabeth Bowen, for example, recounted a piece of folklore accounting for the origins of Bowen’s Court, her County Cork family home then crumbling in the final death-throes of the Anglo-Irish Ascendency. Bowen famously described her ancestor, the Cromwellian colonel Henry Bowen, as receiving the land as a gift from a guilt-ridden Cromwell, who had just wrung the necks of Bowen’s prized hawks in a fit of temper.19 Bowen most likely gained his property through more prosaic (not to mention devious) means; still, Elizabeth’s narrative served to provide a kind of origin myth-legend, a narrative ‘once upon a time’ that legitimised and set the tone for the generations of Bowens to follow. If Bowen’s was an origin story that began indirectly with Cromwell, then those from the opposite end of the spectrum told stories of dispossession, and also attributed that loss to him. So prevalent were their long memories that they became a sometimes-mocked theme in Irish history. George Berkeley, for example, was behind the well-known (folk) tale of the kitchen-maid who refused to take out the ashes because she was of ‘Milesian descent’; or Lady Morgan in The Wild Irish Girl who described the tendency of many to castigate the ‘new men’ who were not known in Ireland ‘till the wars of Cromwell’.20 Much of the attribution of Cromwell to a ‘blighting alien rule’ might have been factually incorrect but it did capture the sense that many had of the deep and unparalleled breach that had culminated in the seventeenth century and came to be embodied by him alone; while Ireland had been settled by newcomers long before he arrived, he did represent a new dispensation that played itself out not simply in the massacres of Drogheda or Wexford but in the economic violence manifested in the forfeit and acquisition of land and in the surveying work of such utilitarians as William Petty with his Down Survey.21 A powerful narrative in this way came to be forged out of a charismatic name which served on the one hand as a synecdoche for all that had been taken away, and on the other as a mnemonic device that allowed generations to remember their lost land. The 1798 hero Myles Byrne, for example, would recount how his ‘poor father’ used to ‘show me the lands that belonged to our ancestors now in the hands of the descendants of the sanguinary followers of Cromwell’, though his father also gave due credit to the ‘scoundrel’ Charles II, who ‘preserved’ those men’s ‘plunder 19 Elizabeth Bowen, Bowen’s Court (Dublin, 1998), p. 68. 20 Lady Morgan, The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale (Boston, MA, 1808), p. 144; National Folklore Collection, Main Manuscript Collection, 465, p. 256. 21 William Smyth, Map-Making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland, c.1530–1750 (South Bend, IN, 2006), pp. 166–197.

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and robberies’.22 Buttressing these oral traditions were the property deeds or genealogical papers that families retained through the centuries, and in the case of post-Williamite exiles took to the continent with them. To retain legal papers as well as stories in this manner thus signified hope that they would come in handy when it came time to reclaim those lands: a hope that could assume near-messianic levels, and which erupted in times when the question of land became a foremost issue in politics. During one of these moments, in the period of the Land League (1879–1882), these stories and remembrances were revived – not invented – to assert families’ rightful inheritance against the ‘usurping’ landlordism.23 And whenever land and landlordism were invoked, Cromwell was not far behind. Tales in the National Folklore Collection contain echoes of those earlier times, particularly with elderly informants speaking in the 1930s of the stories from their youth. One tale details, for example, how the Pratt family, first arriving in 1641, received its estates in Meath from Cromwell; this much was correct. The story then claimed, incorrectly, that the Pratts ‘got the Cabra estate’ in Cavan, when in fact it reverted to Colonel Thomas Cooch, whose daughter married one of the Pratts from Meath, the estate eventually reverting to their son.24 Folklore, however, adds more colour and variety: in one story, Pratt is farming the land when he encounters a Cromwellian soldier who holds the new deed of ownership; asked by the soldier about the quality of the land around Cabra, Pratt answers that ‘it wouldn’t feed snipe’. The soldier then offers to sell Pratt the land for 50 pounds, and Pratt agrees (‘And the Pratts are there ever since’).25 Lacking the precise details of the Cabra land transfer, we will never fully know what happened; but the story does convey the fact that many Cromwellian soldiers did decide to sell the land deeds they had been given for their service and return home, turning over their titles to the opportunists – or, rather, men such as Charles Coote or Lord Broghill – who chose to amplify their holdings considerably. In order fully to trace Cromwell’s afterlife, one must also approach it through indirect references or to those instances where the name ‘Cromwell’ is simply referred to as the ‘usurper’. Jonathan Swift, for example, did 22 Miles Byrne, Memoirs of Miles Byrne, ed. Stephen Gwynne, 2 vols (Dublin, 1907), i. 3. 23 Séamas Mac Philib, ‘Legends of Irish Landlords in their International Context’, Béaloideas 62–63 (1994–1995), pp. 79–88. 24 Bernard Burke, A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1863), 1221. 25 National Folklore Collection, Main Manuscript Collection, vol. 924, p. 425.

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not name him, but in A Tale of a Tub he alluded to Cromwell’s rule as ‘a state of ears’, in reference to the cropped hair and preachings of his men.26 Swift also noted the ruins that the Cromwellians left behind, which would become a memorialising signature of that age (though ruins were not wrecked by Cromwellians alone). Nature was also perceived as aiding and abetting Ireland’s conquest by Cromwell. Wrens, for example, had a long reach in Irish history and mythology, but one tradition held that hatred for the bird derived from the time when the ‘Irish’ quietly approached Cromwell’s troops for an attack but were betrayed when the birds proceeded to perch on their drums and create a tapping noise that alerted the Cromwellians and set them on their subsequent murderous spree.27 The story is significant not least in that it creates a precedent of avian (or wren) hatred that began in the time of the ‘Cromwellians’. A sharper folkloric memory collected around Cromwell’s underlings, who either terrorised the locals or took charge of great swathes of the land. ‘The men that were with Cromwell were worse than he was himself’, claimed one individual, interviewed in the twentieth century.28 A traditional song warned that people should ‘beware of Broghill, the day he smiles/His mercy is murder, his word never holds’.29 Meanwhile, Daniel Axtell, a colonel under Cromwell who had bloodied himself in Drogheda and would eventually be drawn and quartered as a regicide, was (and remains) remembered in Kilkenny as a kind of Cromwellian Colonel Kurtz. Working within the freedom of martial law, Axtell served as governor for a time and was alleged to have sent a number of inhabitants to Barbados; hanged 50 people in Thomastown square; personally tortured Francis Frisby, the Duke of Ormond’s butler, by ‘burning Matches between his Fingers’; captured and hanged Thomas Shertel, captain of horse in the king’s army, despite promise of safe conduct, ‘because he had a good estate within two miles of Kilkenny’; ordered the deaths of 40 men, women and children near the wood of Kildonan; and so on.30 The National Folklore Collection, however, holds an especially large amount of material on a more successful Cromwellian, Charles Coote, whose presence in the archive might be attributed to the regionalism of 26 Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub and Other Works (London, 1889), p. 152. 27 Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions of Ireland, 2 vols in 1 (London, 1887), p. 58. 28 National Folklore Collection, Irish Manuscript Collection, vol. 924, p. 425. 29 National Folklore Collection, Main Manuscript Collection, vol. 250, p. 330. 30 William Carrigan, The History and Antiquities of the Diocese of Ossory, 4 vols (Dublin, 1905), iii. 44.

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the interviews conducted by collectors in the earlier twentieth century. But Coote would be sui generis in any case. His father, also Charles Coote, was well known for providing the basis for the central character in Henry Burkhead’s 1646 play entitled ‘A Tragedy of Cola’s Furie OR, Lirenda’s Miserie’.31 But the first Charles Coote tended to fall away in the folklore, with many tales simply describing ‘the famous Charles Coote of Cromwell fame’: a man who carried with him the taint of Cromwell, and whose evil could be explained by it as well.32 Not all tales were negative, with one twentieth-century informant describing Coote as obtaining his estates after exhibiting ‘bravery in Cromwells war’.33 But more typical was the description of him as ‘a bloodthirsty ruffian, and … just as bad if not worse than Cromwell ever was’.34 Tales offered by a local in the 1930s described him as a man who shot dead 100 people in Trim (in fact, local tour guides still describe the bullet holes wrought by Coote’s men on the walls of Trim Castle) or dressing a woman in straw and when she refused to yield information setting the straw alight.35 Almost worse, he was described as being an ardent follower of Cromwell until Charles II came to power, after which he and his Cromwellian cohorts exercised their sleazy machinations to retain the land they had acquired in the previous decade (even if they were joined by non-Cromwellians such as Ormond). Some tales were historically accurate as they recounted the origins of Coote’s territory, with one informant describing how Coote ‘was one of Cromwells greatest supporters, [until he] then turned Loyalist and welcomed Charles [who] made him Earl of Mountrath [and] gave him a great amount of land in this County [Laois] and that is how he became landlord of these districts’.36 More striking is the memory of those who owned land before Coote’s arrival, with another twentieth-century interviewee stating that ‘[in] Cromwell’s time the McCostigans [actually the Costigans, who would later turn tory] were disposed [sic] and their lands acquired by Sir Charles Coote’.37 Coote’s reputation as ‘a planter of Cromwell’s’ and ‘a terrible tyrant’ in this way gave 31 Patricia Coughlin, ‘“Enter Revenge”: Henry Burkhead and Cola’s Furie’, Theatre Research International 15.1 (1990), pp. 1–17. 32 National Folklore Collection, Schools’ Collection, vol. 825, p. 106. 33 National Folklore Collection, Schools’ Collection, vol. 825, p. 295. 34 National Folklore Collection, Main Manuscript Collection, vol. 924, p. 425. 35 National Folklore Collection, Main Manuscript Collection, 1479, p. 338. 36 National Folklore Collection, Schools’ Collection, vol. 823, p. 143. 37 National Folklore Collection, Schools’ Collection, vol. 825, p. 204; but see also Schools’ Collection, vol. 826, p. 174. For the Costigans, see John P. Prendergast, Ireland from the Restoration to the Revolution, 1660–1690 (London 1887), pp. 72–73.

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rise to dozens of inventive tales in the years to come, his reputation resting largely on property acquisitions and his tyrannical ownership of them.38 Coote also lived on in the memory as a ghost – ghosts being carriers of unwelcome memory. He was said to be cooped up in the ‘Bawn’ or Castle Coote, after having fallen from his horse and broken his neck while chasing a priest (in reality he died of smallpox in 1661). In another story he is annoyed by the chimney smoke that blows over from a neighbour’s house, so he orders the man’s ‘ancestral’ house to be ‘tossed’ down (this recounted from a 90-year-old storyteller in the 1930s); on the other hand, and attesting to the power of prayer to resist ‘tyrants’, the neighbour hears the news and proceeds to pray, directly causing Coote to drop dead, ‘powerless to execute his command’.39 And in the end, justice prevailed, with even Coote’s ghost vanishing. ‘There are many stories current in the locality of the terrible deeds done by Coote in his day’, another storyteller recounted, this time referring to Coothall, also in County Roscommon; ‘but the river Boyle [in reality the River Suck] flows peacefully by the old Ghost tower now, and there is not perhaps a quieter country village in Ireland than the one this tower overlooks today’.40 Eventually, the Coote land would diminish as well. One tale describes how Coote obtained land and then hanged its owner-turnedtory, Colonel O’Reilly, from a tree. But 250 years later, and in that region, a local elder would comment on how ‘Time works many changes’, since ‘the O’Reillys are not all gone yet – but thanks be to Heaven not a descendant of Coote owns as much land as would sod a lark in the county Cavan’.41 The triumph by which this story ended demonstrates that not all folklore was a litany of victimhood. In this, oral tradition differed from much Irish-language poetry, where dispossession resulted in aggrievement and tragedy (as it was indeed tragic, for post-Cromwellian figures such as Dáibhí Ó Bruadair or Ruaidhrí Ó Flaithbheartaigh). But how was one to resist a Cromwell who was likened in one song to ‘a wild tornado’s blast’ (similar to Marvell’s depiction of him as ‘three-fork’d lightning’)?42 Folklore of the lower orders, which could be said to comprise what James Scott has called a ‘veiled discourse’,43 confronted this challenge by forging 38 National Folklore Collection, Schools’ Collection, vol. 232, p. 191. 39 National Folklore Collection, Schools’ Collection, vol. 1018, p. 215. 40 National Folklore Collection, Schools’ Collection, vol. 232, p. 192. I wish to thank Dr Pádraig Lenihan for his assistance on Cootehall and Castlecoote. 41 National Folklore Collection, Schools’ Collection, vol. 1013, p. 196. 42 National Folklore Collection, Main Manuscript Collection, 465, p. 256. 43 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT, 2008), p. 137.

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narratives of everyday subversions and resistance. To cite one example, Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin described hearing a story of Cromwell having a run-in with a leprechaun, who repeatedly changed his wine into salt water.44 Other stories detail Cromwell being outwitted by non-fairies: the seventeenth-century French traveller François de la Boullaye recounted a story he heard about a ‘troublesome person’ whom Cromwell encountered, a man named Richard Magner, who had been active in the 1640s confederate rebellion; Cromwell handed the man a sealed letter and ordered him to deliver it but when Magner secretly opened the message and read its message – ‘execute the bearer’ – he proceeded to hand it over to one of Cromwell’s own officers, who had preyed upon his – Magner’s – land. Told of the bait and switch, Cromwell was ‘extremely chagrined’ and attempted to apprehend Magner, ‘who took care to get out of his reach’. Significantly, the story would be repeated in Haverty’s nationalistically minded Irish-American Illustrated Almanac of 1880, and orally chronicled in the twentieth century as well.45 Other tales, meanwhile, described humble folk tricking Cromwellian soldiers – or Cromwell – out of land, or displaying qualities of such boldness that the land was allowed to remain in their hands. One Cromwellian soldier arrives, lost and exhausted, in Mooncoin, County Kilkenny and asks a local where ‘Sun Lodge’ was; when the local replied that the lodge was hundreds of miles away (and not the mile away it actually was), the Cromwellian threw up his hands and turned over his land title to the property; ‘and the witty old man’ maintained the estate for generations after.46 Another man named Nixon obtained his land by offering a disgruntled Cromwellian a horse and a loaf of bread,47 while a tinker (a universal folklore motif) received his possession by offering Cromwell directions in return for land.48 Of course, these events never happened, even though they do indirectly capture the arbitrariness that could reside behind many land transfers. But the stories nevertheless provide narratives of ‘everyday resistance’, as opposed to larger and more collectively organised 44 Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, ‘The Leipreachan and Fairies, Dwarfs and the Household Familiar: A Comparative Study’, Béaloideas 52 (1984). I wish to thank Kevin Whelan for directing me to this reference. 45 Charles Smith, The Ancient and Present State of the County and City of Cork, 2  vols (London, 1774), i. 296. National Folklore Collection, Schools’ Collection, vol. 364, p. 305; Haverty’s Irish-American Illustrated Almanac (Washington, DC, 1880). See also Violet Alford, Sword Dance and Drama (London, 1962), p. 52. 46 National Folklore Collection, Schools’ Collection, vol. 826.1, p. 331. 47 National Folklore Collection, Schools’ Collection, vol. 859.1, p. 242. 48 National Folklore Collection, Schools’ Collection, vol. 862.1, p. 313.

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riots or rebellions, that undermined existing power structures and offered agency to those oppressed by them.49 Despite these resistances, attempts were made in tales to explain the reasons why Ireland had been conquered in the first place. A more complex and surprising tale that accounts for Cromwell’s actions in Ireland appeared in sources from the nineteenth century onwards, though it assumed many variations. At the core of it, Cromwell, newly arrived in Ireland and not yet sure of his plans, attends a wake; after he offers the dead man’s widow money for her husband’s corpse, she initially refuses in outrage, until she eventually relents when the price becomes right. Cromwell then exclaims, in different versions, ‘We’ll take Ireland with roasted apples, so long as we are able to buy the Irish up for money’; or, in another version, ‘when a thing like that could happen it [is] a sign that Irishmen could be bought’.50 An intriguing and unfortunately unanswerable question arises as to whether this tale originated among the natives or newcomers;51 whatever the case, it proceeded to be disseminated widely, across Catholic audiences as well, attesting to a sense that the Irish had brought on the conquest themselves by their sins: a perspective that could be attributed, perhaps, to the ‘false guilt’ that Frantz Fanon once described as common to the colonised psyche; or, more likely, to the biblical Jews seeking God’s atonement – but still suffering his punishments – after falling into the sin of the golden calf. Antiquarians and travel writers took note of these oral traditions, commenting on their ubiquity and the presence of Cromwell in them. De Toqueville, in his journey through Ireland in the early nineteenth century, described how his companion would ‘tell me what had been the fate of a great many families and a great deal of land, passing through the time of Cromwell and of William III, with a terrifying exactitude of local memory’.52 The brilliant scholar and Ordnance Surveyor John O’Donovan also commented (sometimes with annoyance) on the multitude of Cromwell references in his travels.53 But remembrances of Cromwell in 49 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT, 2008), pp. 32–33. 50 Séamus Ó Catháin, ‘Cromwell’, in Henry Glassie (ed.), Irish Folk Tales (New York, 1985), pp. 213–214. 51 I wish to thank Dr Críostóir Mac Carthaigh for bringing this to my attention. 52 Alexis de Toqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland, ed. J. P. Mayer (New Haven, CT, 1958), p. 175. 53 Gillian M. Doherty, The Irish Ordnance Survey: History, Culture and Memory (Dublin, 2004), pp. 122–138; Stiofán Ó Cadhla, Civilizing Ireland: Ordnance Survey, 1824–1842: Ethnography, Cartography, Translation (Dublin, 2007), pp. 170  ff.

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oral traditions would take a new turn in the nineteenth century, particularly with increasing attention paid to folklore: a term not invented until 1846, even though works by Charlotte Brooke or Thomas Crofton Croker had long been published. The study and use of folklore fit in well with the rise of nationalism in all its forms across Europe, and in Ireland no less so.54 But those who opposed this nationalism, and particularly so if it carried a Catholic element, also looked to the past to forge new traditions, and it was among them that Cromwell increasingly began to appear as heroic. Some of this might have been a response to the hero-worshipping portraits emerging of Cromwell in England at the time, which would culminate in Carlyle’s effusive embrace of his hero. The Orange Order, for example, in responding to the Protestant ‘second reformation’ and the sectarianism of the 1820s might have originally emerged in opposition to the United Irishmen but it quickly evolved into its own stand-alone ideological entity, equipped with origin tales (around the Battle of the Diamond) and folk rituals. For Orangemen, William III – King Billy – remained the foremost Protestant deliverer, of course, but Cromwell could increasingly appear as well, in toasts or tales. The most famous Orange portrait, however, was a piece of ‘fakelore’, invented from on high, only to re-enter and be reclaimed by oral song tradition.55 Lieutenant Colonel William Blacker, described as ‘a steady and consistent Protestant politician’ and ‘sincere and exemplary Christian’,56 enjoyed a long and colourful career, though he is perhaps best known for ‘Oliver’s Advice’, a ballad that alludes to the probably false story of Cromwell crossing a river (allegedly at or near the battle of Edgehill) and ordering his troops to ‘Put your trust in God; but mind to keep your powder dry’. Blacker’s Cromwell, speaking in the first person, is also unloosed from his own time frame, as he describes the men of 1798 as ‘the spawn of Treason, the ’scap’d of ninety-eight’, or references William III or Lord Roden (residing in Slieve Donard and beloved by Orangemen) as leaders of ‘Gideon’s chosen few’. In this way, Cromwell is fitted to present times, his mixture of ‘piety and practicality’ serving the martial needs of those fighting the ‘treasonous’ rising tide. As for folklore’s role in Ireland’s nationalist movements, there has existed considerable debate related to the extent to which Young Irelanders 54 For nationalism and folklore, see Ó Giolláin, Locating Irish Folklore, pp. 63–78. 55 Dominic Bryan, ‘Drumcree and “The Right to March”: Orangeism, Ritual and Politics in Northern Ireland’, in T. G. Fraser (ed.), We’ ll Follow the Drum: The Irish Parading Tradition (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 191–207. 56 Dublin University Magazine 17 (May 1841).

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such as Charles Gavan Duffy fomented and perhaps even created popular nationalist sentiment through such means as their ballad anthologies (not to mention their political speeches and writings), or whether the ‘popular mind’, heterogeneous as it was, already contained those motifs and themes which nationalists would exploit.57 Mary Helen Thuente has provided some clues in her discussion of important differences between traditional oral lore and the kind of tales shaped by political actors. Folk tales (not to mention later Irish-language poetry), for example, tended to be personal if at times allegorical and supernatural, whereas tales shaped or created by cultural nationalists were often a ‘call to action’ spoken on collective terms. In popular song tradition, a despairing fatalism contrasted to Young Irelanders’ focus on ‘strains of victory proud’. Popular lore could also be intensely sectarian and local, which clashed with the liberalism and translocalism of many nationalist leaders. The Romantic cultural nationalism of Young Irelanders (many of whom, like Thomas Davis, were Anglo-Irish Protestants) as well as the Gaelic League would in this way reconfigure these tales to serve their own definition of national identity.58 Davis’s intentions in fact were stated overtly: he wished to ‘create a race of men full of a more intensely Irish character and knowledge’. Folklore was in this regard seen as useful, according to Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, as a ‘national resource when the nation [did] not have its own state’, given its potential to contribute to a process of nation-building.59 Oral traditions, later written down, emerged as central, for example, in burnishing the myth of Daniel O’Connell, by creating a national and Catholic hero who crossed regional lines even if stories also embedded him in distinct and historically resonant spaces (as he did himself, when he chose particular locales for his monster meetings). O’Connell was not universally appreciated, particularly by physical-force nationalists; but his portrayal as a cunning trickster, a betting man and a wit, a liberator who stood up for the downtrodden and his fellow countrymen, contributed to his status as a folk hero, and one who united people and gained them, by his example, a measure of self-respect.60 57 Mary Helen Thuente, ‘The Folklore of Irish Nationalism’, in Thomas E. Hachey and Lawrence J. McCaffrey (eds), Perspectives on Irish Nationalism (Lexington, KY, 1989), esp. pp. 43–44. 58 Ó Giolláin, Locating Irish Folklore, esp. pp. 29–30, 103–104; Timothy J. White, ‘Where Myth and Reality Meet: Irish Nationalism in the First Half of the Twentieth Century’, European Legacy 4.4 (1999), pp. 49–57. 59 Ó Giolláin, Locating Irish Folklore, p. 63. 60 Uí Ógáin, Immortal Dan, p. 166.

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By contrast, and not uncoincidentally, Cromwell began to emerge as a heightened villainous counterpart, not least in his own reputation for ‘aggressive puritanism’ against the Catholicism of O’Connell. Cromwell’s folkloric villainy was also picked up and embellished by writers such as P. F. Moran, particularly in its religious aspect.61 Yet Cromwell had to be strategically ‘forgotten’ as well, if Ireland, as Richard Dorson once wrote, was to ‘ sweep away the incrustations of English culture … to find her own roots’.62 This was a construction as much as it was a discovery, with a new emphasis on the mythology – on Déirdre, Cúchuláin and other heroes – that represented the country before the ‘Saxon’ (or Norman, for that matter) came in. Despite the previous and considerable collecting efforts of Thomas Crofton Croker, Patrick Kennedy or Jeremiah Curtain, folk tales of the Literary Revival and men such as Douglas Hyde ‘remain[ed] practically unexploited and ungathered’, though they too could serve the ends of a new national identity.63 The result was a picture that Hyde, Yeats and Lady Gregory wished to present in a quest to recover ‘the old bricks that lasted eighteen hundred years [and were] destroyed’ and to ‘make new ones if we can on other ground and of other clay’.64 But while Hyde took care to state that in his own folklore anthologies he would ‘give the exact language of my informants, together with their names and various localities’, no mention was made of Cromwell. Hyde’s Beside the Fire: A Collection of Irish Gaelic Folk Stories does not mention Cromwell at all, while the Christian-oriented Legends of Saints and Sinners mentions Cromwell once, in the context of a monastery in County Mayo wrecked by ‘Cromwell and his band of destroyers’.65 The fact that Hyde collected these tales from ‘Gaelic’ speakers means little either, given that Cromwell – Cromail in Irish – appears overwhelmingly in those National Folklore Collection sources as well. Yeats’s Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, Irish Fairy Tales and Celtic Twilight never mention Cromwell either, even though his ‘Curse of Cromwell’ would certainly acknowledge the man and his ‘murderous crew’. That poem, however, was written in a different personal 61 P. F. Moran, Historical Sketch of the Persecutions Suffered by the Catholics of Ireland under the Rule of Cromwell and the Puritans (Dublin, 1907). 62 Richard M. Dorson, ‘The Question of Folklore in a New Nation’, Journal of the Folklore Institute 3.3 (1966), p. 92. 63 Douglas Hyde, Beside the Fire (London, 1890), pp. x, xvi, xvii. 64 Douglas Hyde, ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland’, in The Revival of Irish Literature: Addresses by Sr Charles Gavan Duffy, KCMG, Dr. George Sigerson, and Dr Douglas Hyde (London, 1894), p. 129. 65 Douglas Hyde, Legends of Saints and Sinners (London, 1915), p. 13.

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and historical context, in 1937, with Yeats describing Cromwell as the ‘Lennin [sic] of his day’, and the poem itself a reflection of the writer’s ‘watching romance & nobility dissapear’ [sic].66 Yeats, who read in and deeply understood folklore and the scholarship behind it, sought early on to reclaim that ‘romance & nobility’, to bring that faraway world of old tales into the present, to ward off a past which he attributed in great part to the ‘Cromwellian’. ‘The flood-gates of materialism are only half-open among us as yet here in Ireland’, he wrote; ‘perhaps the new age may close them before the tide is quite upon us’.67 As Thuente put it, Yeats was in this way alive to the past, though ‘history [for him] resided in the motifs and patterns of oral legend rather than the facts of written history’.68 In his imaginative vision, personalities assumed a dominant form, emerging from the deep past but also, in the case of Parnell, being crafted as legends in the present. But there was no room for Cromwell or his wickedness here, and so he was ‘forgotten’, or at least erased out of the past that Yeats wished to present. Cromwell, for all these efforts, nevertheless continued to persist in the folklore, escaping the control of those who wished to shape or omit him in particular ways. Much of the folklore that accumulated around him, for example, was overwhelmingly Catholic, as it described hidden bells, haunted ruins and heroic priests – all of which suited those who conjoined nationalism with Catholicism. But other Cromwells were more overtly ‘folkloric’, grafting him on to older universal motifs. Cromwell was thus a shoemaker’s son who rose to command English soldiers and conquer Ireland – a shoemaker belonging in the Aarne–Thompson classification index but also possibly being a reference to the shoemaking leprechaun. In another tale, he is also a ‘cobbler who repaired boots’, though he lives for a time in Ireland, where he sets up shop at the crossroads (another universal motif); eventually he ‘gets up in the world’ and returns to England, only to come back with soldiers and conquer Ireland.69 Regional tales continued to claim him for their own, just as mummers and Cromwell’s copper nose persisted as well: evidence of the capacity for tales to continue down 66 R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, vol.2, The Arch-Poet, 1915–1939 (Oxford, 2005), p. 576; Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (Cambridge, MA, 1995), p. 483; Joep Leersen, Remembrance and Imagination (Notre Dame, IN, 1996), pp. 191–195. 67 W. B. Yeats, ‘Nationality and Literature’, Uncollected Prose, vol 1 (New York, 1970), p. 268. 68 Mary Helen Thuente, W. B. Yeats and Irish Folklore (Totowa, NJ, 1980), pp. 257, 259. 69 National Folklore Collection, Main Manuscript Collection, vol. 924, p. 445.

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their own variable paths, incorporating yet also deviating from attempts to impose any one singular meaning on to them. The folklorist Ríonach uí Ógáin’s has commented that ‘folklore shapes historical truth to conform to its own experience and outlook’.70 And so it has been with Cromwell. To dismiss folklore is to therefore turn away from exploring this ‘experience and outlook’ that interpreted the past and Cromwell, not in binary terms of good or bad but in a way that captured his effect on all of Ireland’s social classes. It may be valuable to chip away at the myths that accrued around Cromwell, to scour the documents in order to get at some solid core of truth that would definitively reveal, once and for all, his innocence or criminality, his justifications or his war crimes. But to explore the myths around Cromwell is productive as well, for it is those myths which open up a larger picture to reveal what he meant not to us but to people who used myth to construct valuable stories and account for the undeniable historical ruptures that his regime, in great part, enacted. In England, Cromwell was an enormously powerful folkloric figure as well, but while his bogeyman image appeared similar in being derived from the historical fractures he inflicted there, his Irish afterlife was entirely distinct. In Ireland, the lore of him frequently incorporated Catholic elements, using faith as a mode of resistance; it also told of land being wrecked (with ruins) or property being arbitrarily and illegally obtained: an issue that carried no more importance than in Ireland. His name became a code word for rupture, usurpation and family loss – that is, when it was not being subverted to fit comical forms. Cromwell’s presence in folklore is therefore important as it demonstrates how popular memories created a lasting historical indictment of him, and one which influenced past historians and politicians who sought to accept or reject (or shape) that judgement. For its historical significance and the very real information it conveys, folklore can therefore no longer be sidelined or rejected as a source, especially when it furthers our understanding of the perceptions that frame troubling past events. Beneath all its variations, these tales contain core narratives and remarkably consistent themes and truths that must be attended to; and anyway, it is not as if historians are exactly free from their own narrative embellishments – their own stories – when it comes to Cromwell and his troublesome legacy in Ireland.

70 Uí Ógáin, Immortal Dan, p. 19.

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Farr, David, Henry Ireton and the English Revolution (Woodbridge, 2006). ——. Major-General Thomas Harrison, Millenarianism, Fifth Monarchism and the English Revolution, 1616–1660 (London, 2014). Fissel, Mark (ed.), War and Government in Britain, 1598–1650 (Manchester, 1991). Frawley, Oona (ed.), Memory Ireland, 4 vols (Syracuse, NY, 2011–2014). Gailey, Alain, Christmas Rhymers and Mummers in Ireland (Ibstock, 1968). Gardiner, Samuel Rawson, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, 4 vols (Stroud, 1988). ——. History of the Great Civil War, 1642–1649 (Stroud, 1988). Gaunt, Peter, Oliver Cromwell (Oxford, 1997). Gentles, Ian, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland, 1645–1653 (Oxford, 1992). ——. Olivier Cromwell: God’s Warrior and the English Revolution (New York, 2011). Gillespie, Raymond, Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester, 1997). ——. Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 2006). Gillespie, Raymond, and Myrtle Hill (eds), Doing Irish Local History: Pursuit and Practice (Belfast, 1998). Greenspan, Nicole, Selling Cromwell’s Wars: Media, Empire and Godly Warfare, 1650–1658 (London, 2012). Gregg, Pauline, Oliver Cromwell (London, 1988). Hopkins, David M., Voices of the People in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, 2012). Hore, Phillip Herbert, History of the Town and County of Wexford (Wexford, 1906). Hutton, Ronald, Debates in Stuart History (London, 2004). Kelsey, Sean, Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English Revolution (Redwood, CA, 1997). Kenyon, John P., and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds), The Civil Wars and Military History of England, Scotland and Ireland, 1638–1660 (Oxford, 1998). Kitson, Frank, Old Ironsides: The Military Biography of Oliver Cromwell (London, 2004). Kuijpers, Erika, Judith Pollmann, Johannes Müller and Jasper van der Steen (eds), Memory before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2013). Le Roy Ladurie, Emanuel, The Peasants of Languedoc, trans. John Day (Urbana, IL, 1976). Lenihan, Pádraig, Confederate Catholics at War (Cork, 2001). ——. (ed.), Conquest and Resistance, War in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Brill, 2001). Levine, Mark, and Penny Roberts (eds), The Massacre in History (Oxford, 1999). Little, Patrick (ed.), Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives (Houndmills, 2009). ——. Ireland in Crisis: War, Politics and Religion, 1641–1650 (Manchester, 2019).

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Lunger Knoppers, Laura, Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print 1645–1661 (Cambridge, 2000). McBride, Ian (ed.), History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2001). McElligott, Jason, Cromwell Our Chief of Enemies (Dundalk, 1994). ——. Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England (Woodbridge, 2007). Marshall, Alan, Oliver Cromwell, Soldier: The Military Life of a Revolutionary at War (London, 2004). Mendle, Michael, Henry Parker and the English Civil War: The Political Thought of the Public’s ‘Privado’ (Cambridge, 1995). Mills, Jane A. (ed.), Cromwell’s Legacy (Manchester, 2012). Moody, T. W., F. X. Martin and F. J. Byrne (eds), A New History of Ireland (Oxford, 1976). Morrill, John (ed.), Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (Harlow, 1990). Murphy, Denis, Cromwell in Ireland: A History of Cromwell’s Irish Campaign (Boston, MA, 1893; repr. London, 2012). O’Dowd, Mary, Power Politics and Land, Early Modern Sligo (Belfast, 1991). Ó Giolláin, Diamuid, ‘Locating Irish Folklore: Tradition, Modernity, Identity (Cork, 2000). ——. (ed.), Irish Ethnologies (Notre Dame, IN, 2017). Ó hÓgáin, Dáithí, Myth, Legend and Romance: An Encyclopaedia of Irish Folk Tradition (London, 1990). Ó Siochrú, Micheál (ed.), Kingdoms in Crisis: Ireland in the Seventeenth Century (Dublin, 2001). ——. God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (London, 2008). Ó Tuama, Seán (ed.), An Duanaire, 1600–1900: Poems of the Dispossessed with Translations into English Verse by Thomas Kinsella (Dublin, 2002). Ohlmeyer, Jane H. (ed.), Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641–1660 (Cambridge, 1995). Peters, Erin, and Cynthia Richards (eds), Early Modern Trauma: Europe and the Atlantic World (Lincoln, NE, forthcoming). Raymond, Joad, The Invention of the Newspaper English Newsbooks, 1641–1649 (Oxford, 2005). Reilly, Tom, Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy (Dublin, 1999). ——. Cromwell Was Framed: Ireland 1649 (Lanham, MD, 2014). Richardson, R. C. (ed.), Images of Oliver Cromwell: Essays for and by Roger Howell Jr (Manchester, 1993). Shaw, Jenny, Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference (London, 2013). Simington, Robert, The Transplantation to Connacht, 1654–1658 (Dublin, 1970). Smith, D. L. (ed.), Cromwell and the Interregnum (Oxford, 2003).

Select Bibliography

297

Smyth, William J., and Kevin Whelan (eds), Common Ground: Essays on the Historical Geography of Ireland (Cork, 1988). Tait, Clodagh, Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550–1650 (London, 2002). Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, 2007). Wanklyn, Malcolm, Warrior Generals: Winning the British Civil Wars (London, 2010). Wheeler, James Scott, Cromwell in Ireland (Dublin, 1999). Williams, N. J. A., Pairlement Chloinne Tomáis (Dublin, 1981). Wilson, Derek, The King and the Gentleman: Charles Stuart and Oliver Cromwell, 1599–1649 (New York, 1999). Wood, Andy, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Sense of the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2013). Woolrych, Austin, Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford, 2002). Worden, Blair, The Rump Parliament (Cambridge, 1974). Young, John, R. (ed.), Celtic Dimensions of the British Civil Wars: Proceedings of the Second Conference of the Research Centre in Scottish History (Edinburgh, 1997).

Journal Articles Barnard, Toby, ‘Planters and Policies in Cromwellian Ireland’, Past and Present 61 (1973). Bendix, Regina, ‘Of Names, Professional Identities, and Disciplinary Futures’, Journal of American Folklore 441 (1998). Burke, James, ‘The New Model Army and the Problems of Siege Warfare’, Irish Historical Studies 27 (1990). Cunnane, D. W., ‘Catastrophic Dimensions: The Rupture of the English and Irish Identities in Early Modern Ireland, 1534–1615’, Essays in History 41 (1999). Cunningham, John, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the “Cromwellian” Settlement of Ireland’, Historical Journal 53 (2010). ——. ‘Divided Conquerors: The Rump Parliament, Cromwell and Ireland’, English Historical Review 129 (2014). Donagan, Barbara, ‘Atrocity, War Crime, and Treason in the English Civil War’, American Historical Review 99.4 (1994). Gardiner, Samuel Rawson, ‘The Transplantation to Connaught’, English Historical Review 14 (1899). Joyner, Charles W., ‘Oral History as Communicative Event: A Folkloristic Perspective’, Oral History Review 7 (1979). Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, ‘Folklore’s Crisis’, Journal of American Folklore 441 (1998). Lunger Knoppers, Laura, ‘“Sing Old Noll the Brewer”: Royalist Satire and Social Inversion, 1648–64’, Seventeenth Century 15 (2000). McCarthy, William P., ‘The Royalist Collapse in Munster, 1650–1652’, Irish Sword 6 (1964).

298

Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives

MacCormack, J. R., ‘The Irish Adventurers and the English Civil War’, Irish Historical Studies 37 (1956). McElligott, Jason, ‘Cromwell, Drogheda and the Abuse of Irish History’, Bullán: An Irish Studies Review 6.1 (2001). McGrath, B., ‘Reconstructing an Early Modern Irish Economic Community: Clonmel’s Cess Roll, 1642’, Irish Economic and Social History 44 (2017). Morrill, John, ‘Cromwell, Parliament, Ireland and a Commonwealth in Crisis: 1652 Revisited’, Parliamentary History 30 (2011). Smith, Alan, ‘The Image of Cromwell in Folklore and Tradition’, Folklore 79 (1968). Theibault, John, ‘The Rhetoric of Death and Destruction in the Thirty Years War’, Journal of Social History 27 (1993). Worden, Blair, ‘The Politics of Marvell’s Horatian Ode’, Historical Journal 27 (1984).

Index Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives

Aarne-Thompson (classification index), 291 Abbott, W.C., historian, 152, 255 Abbotts, Colonel Daniel, 95, 96 Act against Unlicensed and Scandalous Books and Pamphlets, and for better regulating of Printing, 270 Act of Navigation, The, 1651, 195 Act of Settlement and Satisfaction, 189 Act of Settlement, 56, 124, 189, 226, 227 Acton, 161 Adolphus, Gustavus, of Sweden, 86, 138 Adventurer’s Act, 1642, 36, 209, 210 Aesthetic movement, 258 Africans, (enslaved), 187, 191, 200, 202 Alsop, Bernard, 266 Amazon, the, 186 Amhrán metre, 233, 234, 251 An Act for the Settling of Ireland, 124, 216, 217, 220 An Dúna, Éamonn, 37, 188 An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland, 279 Anabaptists, 260 Anglo-Irish protestants, 169, 277, 281, 289 Anglo-Irish, 235 Anglo-Normans, the, 58

Index

Anocht is uaigneach Éire, 238 Aphorismal Discovery, 159 Ardmore Castle, Co Waterford, 27 Ards, Lord Hugh Montgomery of, 168, 170, 220 Arklow, 175 Armagh, county, 28, 33 Armstrong, Sir Thomas, 170 Arran, earl of, 226, 227 Askeaton, 27 Astley, Sir Jacob, 138, 139 Aston, (Ashton) Sir Arthur, 19, 20, 22, 35, 171, 172, 265, 267, 268 Athlone, 167 Athy, 167 Atlantic archipelago, 187, 192 Atlantic ocean, 189, 192, 197, 198, 205, 206, 214 Audley, Captain Thomas, 265 Aughinish, 27 Axtell, Colonel Daniel, 20, 283 Azores, the, 138 Baggotsrath, 168, 169 Bagnall, Captain, 268 Baldongan, 29 Ballyboughal, 262 Ballycogley, 232, 242, 243, 244–245, 246, 247, 248, 249 Banba, (Irish figure), 235 299

300

Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives

Barbadian government, 201, 205 Barbados, 20, 172, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 194, 195, 196, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 283 Barber, Ann, 258 Barber, Henry, 258 Barber, William the, 203 Barclay, Andrew, historian, 210 Barnard, Toby, historian, 114, 146, 231, 240, 249, 250, 276 Barnes, captain, 268 Barrington, Colonel Thomas, 237 Barrow, river, 176 Barry, David, first earl of Barrymore, 37 Barry, Garret, 138, 140, 141 Barry, named Irish soldier, 37 Barthomley Church, Cheshire, 23, 142 Basing House, 23, 35 Bate/s, Dr George, 65 Beckett, J.C., 158 Beckles, Hilary, historian, 192 Beiner, Guy, historian, 232, 236, 240, 278 Belfast, 154 Bellings, Richard, 234, 242 Benburb, 30, 82, 153, 174 Bennett, Martyn, historian, 23 Benss [sic] Captain, 268 Berehaven, 236 Berkeley, George, 281 Berkeley, Sir John, 161, 162 Bernard, Dean Nicholas, 69–71, 254 Beside the fire: A Collection of Irish Gaelic Folk Stories, 290 Birr, siege of, 32 Bishop of Killaloe, (father of Lieutenant General Michael Jones), 142 Bishops’ Wars, 138, 139, 141, 155 Blacker, Lieutenant Colonel William, 288 Blackhall, 29 Blackwater Castle, 42 Blackwood Castle, County Kildare, 29, 39

Blake, John W., historian, 198, 204 Blake, Robert, General-at-sea, 143, 148, 151, 155 Blenman, John, 197 Bliss, Phillip, 61 Block, Kristen, 190 Blood, Thomas, 231, Bloody Assizes, 259 Bloomsbury Street, London, 261 Blunden, Humphrey, 265 Boile, (Boyle), Colonel, 268 Bolton, Mayor Charles, 104 Bolton, sack of, 23 Book of the O’Conor Don, 240 Books of Survey and Distribution, 244 Border, Daniel, 266, 267, 272 Borlase, Edmund, 27, 173 Bostock, Robert, 125 Bottigheimer, Karl, historian, 210, 211 Bowen, Elizabeth, 281 Bowen, Henry, 281 Bowen’s Court, 281 Boyle, river, 285 Boyle, Roger, earl of Cork, Lord Broghill, 37, 99, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 145, 146–152, 153, 154, 155, 179, 215, 282, 283 Boyne, river, 19, 20, 145 Bradshaw, John, 67, 264, 270 Brailsford, H.N., 99 Brereton, Sir William, 142 Bristol Merchant Adventurers, 194, 197–198 Bristol registers, 204 Bristol, 75, 144, 194, 195, 196, 198, 203, 204 Bristol, September 1654 city ordinance, 196–197, 198 British Empire, 204 British Isles, 135, 136, 142, 185 British Museum, 257, 261, 273 Brooke, Charlotte, 288 Browne, Edward, 194 Brownlow, William, 28 Bryan, Cornelius, 202 Burford, 137

Index Burghclere, Lady, 158 Burghley House, 88 Burke family (Galway), 236 Burke, Helen, 280 Burke, John, 138 Burkhead, Henry (playwright), 284 Burne, (Byrne, Burne, Byrine), Colonel, 265, 266, 267, 268 Burney collection, 257 Butler estates, the, 182 Butler family (south Leinster), 236 Butler, Edmund, 176 Butler, Major, 268 Butler, Richard, 80 Byrne, Myles, 281 Cabra estate, 282 Cáit ar gabhadar Goidhil?, 238 Callow, 27 Cambrensis, Giraldus, 186 Cambridge History of English and American Literature, The, 257 Cambridge, 140 Canada, 258 Canterbury, 144 Caribbean Sea, 187 Caribbean, the, 187, 190, 191, 202, 203, 204, 205 Carlin, N, 113 Carlingford, 172 Carlow, 194 Carlyle, Thomas, 55, 253, 254, 255, 276, 288 Carolinas, the, 200, 205 Carrick, (on-Suir) 80, 122, 146, 165 Carrickfergus, 29, 168, 174, 210 Carrickmines castle, 29 Carte, Thomas, 158, 173 Cashel, rock of, 34 Cashel, town, 34–35, 44 Castle Coote, 285 Castlebar, Co Mayo, 26 Castlehaven, earl of, 141, 161, 167, 173, 179 Castlemartin, Co. Kildare, 42 Castlematrix, 27

301

Castles, Colonel, 267 Castletown, 27, 244 Catholic Church, 129 Catholic rebellion, 1641, 34, 57, 58, 62, 69, 79, 91, 101, 112, 113, 115, 120, 126, 136, 138, 141, 142, 209, 214, 215, 221, 236, 242, 243, 244, 250, 255, 256, Cavan, county, 282, 285 Cavendish, William, earl of Newcastle, 147 Caversham, 160 Celtic Twilight, 290 Census of Ireland 1659, 244 Cessation of 1643, 141, 142, 153 Cheif [sic] Affairs of Ireland, The, 125 Cheshire, 23, 142 Chester, 142, 262, 271 Childesly, Cambridgeshire, 160 Christmas, Richard, 194 Church of England, 158 Church of Ireland, 142, 243, 246 Clanricarde, earl of, 166, 167, 170, 181 Clare, county, 80 Clarendon, Edward Hyde earl of, 29, 131 Clark, Andrew, 61 Cloghleigh Castle, 42 Cloghleigh, officer, 38, 42 Clones, Co Monaghan, 82 Clongowes Wood, 29, 39 Clonmacnoise, 68, 214 Clonmel, 75–76, 78, 79–83, siege of: 94–107, 126, 151, 153, 180, 231 Clotworthy, Sir John, the officer in the regiment of, 65 Cloughouter Castle, Co. Cavan, 101 Clowes, John, 267, 271 Codd family, 243, 244, 246–247 Codd, Nicholas, 247 Colchester, siege of, 39, 114, 127, 144 Collam, Hugh, 202 Collection of some of the murthers and massacres, 24 Collings, Richard, 265

302

Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives

Commentarius Rinnucinianus, 235 Commisioners of Trust, (royalist), 165, 176 Commissioners for Irish Affairs, 122, 123, 124, 129, 132, 210, 161 Commons Journal, 264, 269 Commons, House of, 33, 93, 101, 210, 253, 264, 265, 266, 269, 270, 270, 273 Commonwealth and Protectorate, 56, 136, 138, 147, 148, 157, 195, 197, 203, 204, 269, 270 Condon, Captain, 37 Condon’s Quarter, 37 Confederate Catholic Supreme Council, 164, 165 Confederate Catholics (Confederation of Kilkenny forces), 31, 32, 72, 94, 126, 136, 138, 140, 141, 143, 146, 147, 148, 150, 151, 154, 158, 163, 164, 165, 166, 173, 174, 181, 244, 246, 280, 286 Connaught/Connacht, 40, 121, 140, 153, 154, 155, 166, 167, 176, 189, 193, 194, 220, 223, 275 Cooch, Colonel Thomas, 282 Cook, John, 112–113, 116, 122, 124 Cooke, William, 268 Coole, Cork, 36, 37 Cooly, Captain, 268 Coote, General Sir Charles (1610–1661), 40, 44, 137, 138, 139, 140, 145, 153, 154, 155, 166, 170, 174, 180, 282, 283–284, 285 Coote, Sir Charles (1541–1642), 140, 142, 153, 284 Coote, Sir Chidley, 32 Coothall, 285 Corish, Patrick. J., 193, 194, 203 Cork, city, 29, 92, 147, 148, 164, 179, 215 Cork, county, 36, 37, 39, 42, 281 Cork, earl of, 226, 227 Corporation of Clonmel, 80, 81 Corporation of Drogheda, 65 Coster, Will, author, 38

Council of State, (English) 96, 120, 122, 123–124, 130, 136, 198, 213, 217, 218, 223, 260, 262, 269, 270, 271, 272, 274 Council of state, (Irish), 198, 204 Council of War (Rathmines), 168 council of war Drogheda, 55 Council of war, at Clonmel, 98, 104 Courcy, Patrick, Baron Kingsale [sic], 222 Court of Claims, 71, 245 Courtstown, 224 Covington, Sarah, historian, 232, 256 Cranford, James, contemporary author, 36 Crawford, Col Lawrence, 24 Crean’s Castle, Sligo, 40 Crofton Croker, Thomas, 288, 290 Croker, Captain, 268 Cromwell, Bridget, 111 Cromwell, Elizabeth, wife of Oliver Cromwell, 67 Cromwell, Henry, 132, 151, 154, 155, 226–227, 236, 250 Cromwell, Richard, 67 Cromwell’s Policy of Transportation, (Gwynn), 191 Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, 80, 91, 157, 169, 189, 235, 236, 237, 242 Cromwellian Ireland, 207, 276 Cromwellian Plantation, the, 72, 73 Cromwellian Settlement, 128, 157, 158, 191 Croom, 27 Crouch, John, 66, 67 Cú Chulainn, 279 Cúchuláin, 290 Culme, Colonel Arthur, 95, 101 Cunningham, John, historian, 57, 112, 128 curse of Cromwell on you, 275, 290 Curtain, Jeremiah, 290 Dangan, county Meath, 40, 42 Davis, J.C., historian, 209, 221,

Index Davis, Sir John, 79 Davis, Thomas, 289 De la Boullaye, Francois, 286 De Toqueville, Alexis, 287 De Vitoria, Francisco, Dominican, 21 Deane, Richard, 148 Declaration and proclamation [sic] of the Deputy General of Ireland, (Ireton) 114, 115, 117, 118, 131 Declaration by the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Concerning his resolutions for the peace and safety of Ireland (Cromwell) 62, 114–115, 123, 129, 214 Declaration, King’s Gracious, 1660, 225 Depositions, 1641, 24, 203, 244, 246, 247 Derry, 82, 154, 166, 169, 170, 174 Desmes, [sic] son of Lord, 268 Dictionary of Irish Biography, 233 Digby, Lord, 159–160 Dillingham, John, 106, 266, 269 Dillon, Viscount, 141, 248 Discorsidelle Fortificationi Espugnationi, 98 Discussion of Military Discipline, 140 Do shaoilios dá ríridh gur uachtarán, 239 Dolphin, the, 197 Donagan, Barbra, historian, 21, 22 Donegal, county, 280 Doneraile, 43 Dorson, Richard, 290 Doudle, (Dowdall) Major, 268 Down Survey of Ireland, 208, 237, 281 Draft of the Act on the Qualifications of Pardon for Ireland, 123, 124, 126, 129, 132 Dublin, 19, 24, 25, 29, 30, 31, 42, 58, 70, 75, 101, 116, 137, 142, 154, 159, 161, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 174, 181, 188, 209, 210, 220, 223, 224, 225, 242, 246, 262, 263, 266, 269, 271, 273, 274 Dublin Bay, 143 Dublin Castle, 39, 231

303

Dublin government, the, 57 Dublin Review, 257 Duke of Savoy, 62 Dunbar, 192, 207 Dunboyne, 218, 226 Duncannon, 152, 179, 244, 246 Dundalk, 25, 155, 168, 172, 174 Dundes, Alan, 277 Dungan’s Hill, 101, 143, 163, 174 Dungarvan, 149 Dunkerron, 237 Dunlop, Robert, historian, 193, 204 Dunn, Anthony, 198 Eagan, Bishop, 99 Early English Books Online, 32, 36, 114 East Midlands Parliamentarians, 143 Eastern Association Army, 111, 120, 144 Edgehill, 288 Edinburgh government, 136 Eglish, barony of, 212 Eighty Years War, 138 Eikon Basilike, 269 Éire, (Irish figure), 235 Eleanor, Lady, 224 Elisha, Bible ref, 33 Elizabeth I, 138 Elizabethans, 277 Ely, 143, 210 English Act of Attainder, 226 English Civil Wars, 21, 22, 23, 24, 30, 38, 42, 43, 57, 76, 78, 79, 118, 135, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 144, 153, 155, 156, 158, 160, 162, 165, 180, 190, 210 English Journalism to the Foundation of the ‘Gazette’, 257, 259, 260 English Lords, 33 English parliament, 31, 38, 91, 159, 209 Enniscorthy, 146 Episcopalians, 160 Essex, Lord general, earl of, 138 Europe, 42, 89, 135, 288 Ewer/s, Colonel Isaac, 71, 95

304

Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives

Exeter College, Oxford, 259 Exeter, 123 Faghey, Redmond, 202 Fairfax, Lord general Thomas, Commander-in-chief, 39, 86, 144, 160, 161 Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, 290 Fanon, Frantz, 287 Farr, David, 144 Fennel, Edward, 81, 97 Fenton, Colonel, 148 Fermanagh, county, 28, 280 Fermoy, 36, 42 Fethard, 153 Field, John, 253, 254 Fifth Monarchists, 260–261 Finglas, 170 Finglessse, (Finglass, Finglas), Lieutenant Colonel, 265, 266, 267, 268 Firth, C.H., 254 Fisher, Captain, 268 Fitz-gerald, (Fitzgerald, Gerald, Fitzgarret), Major, 265, 266, 267, 268 Fitzwilliam, Oliver, 224 Flagellum, (Heath), 255 Flanders, 82, 141 Fleetwood, Charles, 132, 133, 218, 219–220, 222, 223, 224, 225, 236, 238, 250 Fleming, James, 71 Flemming, (Fleming), Colonel, 265, 266, 267 Flight of the Earls, 238 Flower, William, 101 Flynn, named Irish soldier, 37 Fódla (Irish figure), 235 Foras Feasa ar hÉireann, 235, 240 Foulke, Colonel, 193 Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, 33 Foyle, Oxenbridge, 190 France, 159, 162, 163, 166, 167 French, Nicholas, Catholic bishop of Ferns, 214, 244

Frisby, Francis, 283 Froude, James, Anthony, historian, 276 Fruen, Captain, 103–104 Gaelic Irish, 169 Gaelic League, 289 Gaels, 235, 238 Gage, Thomas, 190 Gainsborough, battle of, 143 Gallen, barony of, 245 Galway, 127, 176, 180, 223, 224, 236 Galway, Council of, 127 Galway, county, 227 Gardiner, Samuel Rawson, 61, 128, 217, 253, 260, 261 Gaunt, Peter, 221, 222 Gavan Duffy, Charles, 289 Geffes, Captain, 268 Gentles, Ian, historian, 173, 221, Gerbier, Balthazar, 87 Germany, northern, 138 Gewen, Thomas, MP, 191 Giant’s Causeway, 236 Gibson, Lieutenant Colonel, 29 Gifford, Colonel, 148 Gladstonian liberalism, 261 Glassie, Henry, 280 God’s Executioner, 147 Goddard, Dr Jonathon, 227 Gookin, Vincent, 120–121 Gower Street, London, 261 Gowran, 153 Grace, John, 224 Gray, Lieutenant Colonel, 268 Gregory, Lady, 290 Grey, Lieutenant Colonel John, 104 Griffiths, Annie, 258 Guatemala, 190 Gutch, John, 61 Gwynn, Aubrey, historian, 191, 204 Hadfield, Andrew, 222 Haicéad, Pádraigín, 235 Hamilton, James, earl of Clanbrassil, 220 Hamilton, Sir Frederick, 26

Index Hammond, Robert, 223 Hampton Court, 159, 161, 162 Harpoole, Sir Robert, 265, 267 Harris Sacks, David, historian, 196, 198 Harrison, Major General Thomas, 132 Haverty (almanac), 286 Hawarden, 23 Hay, Nicholas, 213 Heads of Proposals, 123, 161, 162 Healy, Simon, historian, 210 Hearne, Thomas, 60, 61 Heath, James, 67, 98, 255 Henrietta Maria, Queen, 162–163, 170 Hewson, Colonel John, 95, 171–172 High Court of Admiralty, 204 High Street, Leighton Buzzard, 261 Hiroshima, comparison to Drogheda, 51 His Noseship, 279 Holles, Denzil, 224 Holy Bible, 31, 87, 202, 236 Holyhead, 262 Hopton Castle, Shropshire, 23, 42 Hopton, 42 Horton, George, 267 Howard, Lady Margaret, (wife of Lord Broghill), 149 Howth, 236 Hubbard, Colonel, 88 Humble Petition and Advice, 130 Hume family, 29 Humphries, Captain Edward, 103 Huntingdon, 140 Husband, Edward, 253, 254 Hyde, Douglas, 290 Hyde, Edward, earl of Clarendon, 29, 65, 131 Ibbitson, Robert, 267, 268, 270, 271 Independents, 113, 160 Indian Civil Service, 258 Ingoldsby, Col Henry, 61 Inisboffin, 236 Inns of Court, 140 Instrument of Government, 130, 222 Interregnum, the, 56, 72, 186, 190, 197, 198, 204, 207

305

Iomarbhágh na bhFileadh, 240 Ireton, Henry, 67, 95, 96, 104, 111–133, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 160, 179, 180, 216, 217, 224, 236, 238 Irish College (Paris), 245 Irish Fairy Tales, 290 Irish mentalité, 234 Irish Sea, 136, 137, 262 Irish Tories, 193, 198, 203, 205 Irish-American Illustrated Almanac of 1880, 286 Irish-royalist coalition, 159, 162, 165, 166, 174, 179, 180 Iveragh, barony of, 233, 237 Jacobean Ireland, 236, 251 Jacobite movement, 242, 247 Jamaica, 194, 200, 233 Jamestown, 181 Jermyn, Lord, 166 Jones, Lieutenant General Michael, 137, 140, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 149, 152, 155, 159, 163, 165–170, 174, 177, 180, 181 Jordan, Thomas, 103 Kelly, James, 202 Kennedy, Patrick, 290 Kerry, county, 233, 237, 239, 241, 245 Kildare, county, 31, 39, 42 Kildare, earl of, 142 Kildonan, 283 Kilfinny, 27, 28 Kilkenny, 93, 94–95, 120, 138, 146, 150, 153, 165, 167, 172, 176, 180, 283 Kilkenny, county, 224, 286 Kilsallaghan, 24 King Charles I, 29, 112, 136, 144, 146, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 169, 175, 181, 185, 225, 248, 259, 260 King Charles II, 67, 72, 73, 136, 159, 162, 163, 167, 172, 175, 179, 180, 181, 182, 225, 231, 239, 241, 242, 247, 248, 250, 260, 281, 284

306

Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives

King John’s Castle, Limerick, 27 King’s County (Offaly), 212 Kingdome’s Weekly Intelligencer, 254, 263, 265–266, 269, 271–272, 273, 274 Kingdomes faithfull and impartiall scout, 267, 272 Kingston, 161 Kinsale, 147, 167, 179 Klingsie, Teige, 202 Knight, Major MP, 191 Knocknanuss, 163, 174 Knoppers, Laura, 279 Kurtz, Colonel, 283 Ladybird ‘Adventures in History’, 19 Laggan army, 24, 154 Lambert, Major General John, 41, 123, 131, 132, 133, 151, 155, 217 Land League, the, 282 Laois, county, 284 Latimer, John, 197 Laugharne, 227 Law of Nations, 21 Law Society, 258 Law/s of War, 21, 22, 32, 42, 89 Lawrence, Colonel Richard, 120–122, 125, 126, 223 Lawrence, Henry, 120 Laybourn, Robert, 266 Lee (Leigh), Lieutenant Colonel William, 104 Leeds, 262 Legends of Saints and Sinners, 290 Leighton Buzzard Observer and Lindlade Gazette, 261–262 Leighton Buzzard, 257, 261 Leinster officers, 223–224 Leinster, 19, 137, 167, 175, 218, 223, 236 Lenihan, Pádraig, historian, 55, 163, 173, 174 Lennin, [sic] Russian Revolutionary), 291 Lenthall, William, 131, 207, 212, 253, 254, 264, 266, 268, 269, 273, 274

Letter of due censure, 125 Letters from Ireland, Cromwell’s letter, 64, 253, 254, 264, 265, 267, 268, 269 Levellers, 136, 137, 270 Licensing Act 1649, 260, 268 Liffey river, 168 Ligon, Richard, 195, 199 Limerick, city, 105, 126, 127, 146, 149, 167, 176, 180, 194 Limerick, county, 27 Lindley, Keith, 255 Lisle, Lord, 142 Lismore, 146 List of the Field-Officers, 210 List of the Officers and Soldiers slain at the Storming of Drogheda, 264 Literary Revival, 290 Little, Patrick, 211, 255 Liverpool, 262, 263 Llewlyn, Powys, 61 Loghur, 27 Lomas, S.C., 253 London Inn of Court, 142 London, 24, 85, 92, 133, 154, 160, 195, 213, 219, 220, 223, 224, 255, 257, 259, 262, 263, 267, 269, 270, 273 London, Common Council of the City of, 271 Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Cromwell, 75 Loughbrickland, 38 Louth, county, 25 Louvain, 241 Lower Lough Erne, 29 Ludlow, Edmund, 130–131, 236 Lurgan House, 28 Lynch, Bishop, 73 Lynch’s Knock, 29, 40–41, 43 Lyoyd, Jenkin, Cromwell’s chaplain, 96 Mabbott, Gilbert, 270 Mac Carthy Mór, 233, 237, 239, 269 Mac Conne, Dermott, 202

Index Mac Egan, Boethius, 236 MacCann, Toole, 28 Macroom, 151, 181 Magner, Richard, 286 Maguire, Rory, 29 Mallow, 150 Man in the Moon, The, 66, 270, 272 Manning Ford, battle of, 42 Manorhamilton, 26 Mardhna Sheagháin Bhrúin, 240 Marrett, Lieutenant, 30 Marshall, Alan, historian, 151 Marston Moor, 23 Marvell, Andrew, 279, 285 Maryland, 196, 205 Master and Servant Code, 1661, 199 Maurice, Dutch Prince, 138, 144 Maynooth Castle, Co Kildare, 31 Mayo, county, 126, 245, 290 Mayor, Richard, 99 McCormick, Ted, historian, 208 McCostigan (Costigan) family, 284 McElligott, Jason, historian, 54–55, 66, 231, 254, 269, 274 McGrath, Dr. B., 79 Meagh, Nicholas, 202 Meath, county, 226, 227, 236, 282 Men of the Nineties, The, 258 Menard, Russell, historian, 192 Mendle, Michael, 113 Mercurius Elencticus, 66, 270, 271, 272 Mercurius Pragmaticus, 270 Merrion, (Dublin), 224 Mexico, 190 Milesians, 281 Milesius, (Irish figure), 235 Milford Haven, 38, 137, 262 Mill Mount, 20 Mitchelstown Castle, 39 Moderate Intellingencer, The, 64, 75, 266, 269, 273 Monck, General George, 25, 44, 155, 156, 166, 174 Monro, General Robert, 38, 153, 174, 210

307

Montserrat, 154, 186 Mooncoin, 286 Moore, Viscount, 38 Moran, P.F., 276, 290 Morgan, Gwenda, historian, 191, 195 Morgan, Lady, 281 Morley, Vincent, historian, 234, 251 Morrill, John, historian, 23, 38, 54, 55, 56, 57, 63, 73, 115, 120, 128, 191, 208, 217, 218, 254, 269 Mortimer, Henry, 71 Muckross, 234 Muddiman, Alexander (son), 258 Muddiman, Alexander Phillips, 257–258, 261 Muddiman, Arthur (Bernard), 258 Muddiman, Elizabeth, (née Williams) 257 Muddiman, Gwendoline, 258 Muddiman, Henry, 259 Muddiman, Joseph George, 254, 255, 256, 257–273 mummers, 280, 291 Munghaile, Lesa Ní, 233 Munster forces, 167 Munster Plantation, 237, 239, 240 Munster protestants, 223 Munster, 19, 92, 113, 147, 148, 149, 150, 154, 155, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 170, 175, 176, 180, 181, 189, 216, 218, 239 Murphy, Fr. Denis, 73, 158, 159, 178, 179 Muskerry, Lord, 151 Nagasaki, comparison to Drogheda, 51 Nantwich, 23, 156 Naseby, 144, 207 National Folklore Collection, 282, 283, 290 National Library of Ireland, 242 Nedham, Marchmont, 270 Neile, Francis, 125 Nevill, James, 213 New England, 214 New English protestants, 169, 189

308

Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives

New Model (Commonwealth) Army, 52, 59, 70, 72, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 129, 130, 136, 144, 148, 152, 160, 162, 164, 165, 168, 171, 175 New Ross (Ross), 42, 122, 145, 146, 148, 152, 175, 176, 179, 180, 215, New World, 186, 190, 205 Newark, 143 Newcastle Propositions, 161–162 Newcastle West, 27 Newcastle, (Dublin), 25 Newry, 38 Nimrod’s tower, 235 Nine Years War, 32, 153, 236 Nixon, (land buyer) 286 Noll the Brewer, 279 North America, 186 North Channel, 136, 220 Notes and Queries, (Muddiman), 260 Nottinghamshire, 143 Nugent, Richard, earl of Westmeath, 223 Ó Bruadair, Dáibhí, 239–240, 241, 242, 285 Ó Ciardha, Éamonn, 188 Ó Conaill, Seán, 232, 233–238, 240, 242 Ó Dálaigh, Lochlainn, 238 Ó Flaithbheartaigh, Ruaidhrí, 285 Ó Giolláin, Diarmuid, 289 Ó Pluburnáin, Sir Domhnall (Donal O’Blabbermouth), 239 Ó Rathaille, Aogán, 240 Ó Siochrú, Micheál, historian, 56, 59, 66, 69–71, 144, 147, 159, 181, 254, 269, 279 Ó Súlleabháin, Amhlaoibh, 286 O’Brien, Murrough, Lord Inchiquin, 34, 43, 44, 59, 65, 143, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 159, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 179, 180, 181 O’Callaghan, Patrick, 202 O’Callaghan, Seán, 187 O’Cathain family, 236

O’Connell, Daniel, 279, 289 O’Connor, Teige, 236 O’Donnell family, 236 O’Donoghue, Geoffrey, 241, 242 O’Donovan, John, 287 O’Fall, Dermott, 202 O’Gary, Daniel, 185, 199, 203, 205 O’Grady, captain, 37 O’Lalor, Disert, 30 O’Neill family, 236 O’Neill, Aodh Dubh (Hugh Duff), 75, 76, 81, 82, 83, 84, 95, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 107, governor of Limerick, 126 O’Neill, Colonel Turlough, 82 O’Neill, Owen Roe, 30, 81, 82, 138, 140, 141, 144, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 169, 170, 173, 175, 176, 179, 181 O’Neill, Sir Phelim, 59, 68, 210 O’Quinlan, Daniel, 231, 232, 249 O’Rahilly, Cecile, 233 O’Reilly clan, 285 O’Reilly, Colonel Phillip McHugh, 82 O’Reilly, Colonel, 285 O’Sullivan, Friar, 234 O’Sullivan, Harold, historian, 25 Obsidio Bredena, Hugo’s, 140 Of a free trade, 125 Okey, Colonel, 152 Old Castle Town, 150 Old English Catholics, 58, 128, 163, 164, 169, 174, 181, 188, 236 Old English families, 243, 248 Old Ironsides, Cromwell, 64 Old Testament, 21 Oliverians, 275 Orange Order, the, 288 Ordinance of No Quarter, 37 Ormond, James Butler, earl of, 23, 30, 31, 42, 65, 68–69, 71, 80, 81, 82, 92, 95, 107, 136, 137, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 151, 152, 153, 154, 157, 158, 159, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178,

Index 180, 181, 182, 215, 225, 226, 244, 265, 267, 268, 283, 284 Ouseley, Richard, 244 Owen, John (Cromwell’s chaplain), 130 Oxford, 52, 123, 142, 144 Pairlement Chloinne Tomáis (PCT), 239, 249 Pale, the, 29, 31, 58, 167, 280 Palgrave, Colonel, 88 Papillon, David, 100 Parker, Henry, Secretary to the General Officers in Ireland, 113–114, 125 Parliamentary Commissioners, 122, 123–124, 128, 132 Parnell, Charles Stuart, 291 Patient, Thomas, 116, 120 Patrick, Finn, 203 Paxton, Edward, 210 PCT I, 239, 240 PCT II, 239 Pecke, Samuel, 268, 269, 272 penal laws, 235, 277 Penn, William, 223 Perfect diurnall, 264, 268, 269, 272 Perfect Occurrences, 263, 267, 268, 269, 271, 273, 274 Perfect Summary, 263 Perfect table of one hundred forty and five victories, 142, 145 Perfect Weekly Account, 266, 267, 272 Peshall, Rev Sir J., 61 Peter/s, Hugh, 55, 70, 263, 264, 267, 271, 273 Petty, Sir William, 208, 227, 281 Phayre, Colonel Robert, 147, 148, 215 Piedmont, west of Turin, 63 Pigott, Sir John, 30, 31 Plunket, [sic] Captain, 268 Plunkett family (Meath), 236 Plunkett, Matthew, 41, 43 Pope, the, 164 Popish Plot, 245, 259 Porter, Captain Samuel, 263 Portumna, 226 Post Office, the, 261

309

Post-Williamite, 282 Powers, Morris, 197 Poyning’s Law, 58 Poyntz, Sir Robert, 161 Pratt family, 282 Prendergast, John. P., historian, 186, 204, 276 Presbyterian Scots, 169 Presbyterian Solemn League and Covenant, 162 Presbyterians, 160, 161 Present posture, 125–126 Preston, 192 Preston, Elizabeth, (wife of Ormond), 182, 226 Preston, Sir Thomas, 31, 119, 121, 138, 140, 141, 143, 167 Pride’s Purge, 129, 165 privateers, 72, 262 Propositions approved of and granted by the Deputy-General of Ireland to Colonel Richard Laurence, 120, 122, 126 Public Record Office, (Dublin), 188, 276 Puritan English state, 190 Puritan officers, 111 R.S. contemporary writer, 24 Rathcoffey, 29 Rathmines, 137, 143, 149, 168–170, 173, 174, 181 Ratoath, 218, 225 Raymond, Joad, 255, 260, 273 Reaghstown, 38 Rebellion and Civil Wars, 29 Red Sea, 235 Reilly, Tom, historian, 55, 73, 158, 173, 178, 254, 264, 274 Remonstrance or declaration of the Army, 128, 165 Representations of the Officers in Ireland against John Weaver, 131 Restoration Ireland, 225 Restoration land settlement, 226, 249 Restoration, the, 53, 65, 67, 68, 71, 140, 147, 225, 259, 260

310

Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives

Reynolds, Colonel, 150, 152, 223 Rich, Captain Stephen, 262 Ringsend, Dublin, 137, 138, 142, 152 Rinuccini, Cardinal (Papal Nuncio), 163, 164, 165, 166 Rivers, Marcellus, 190 Roache, David, 99 Roche, Lord, 43 Rochford, Nicholas, 213 Rochfordstown Castle, 37 Roden, Lord, 288 Rommelse, Gijs, 195 Roper, L.H. historian, 194–195 Roscommon, 285 Rosslare, 176, 177 Rowe, Scout-Master General, 149 Roxborough House, 155 royal herald, the, 246 Rump government, the, 76, 131, 191, 217, 270 Rupert, Prince, 167, 168 Rushton, Peter, historian, 191 Russell family, 226 Russell, Elizabeth, 226 Russell, John, 226–227 Russell, Sir William, 227 Ruthven, Patrick, 139 Saint Patrick, 235 Salisbury uprising, 190 Sancroft, William, 106 Sandford, Captain Thomas, 23 Sarsfield, Patrick, 279 Saxons, 235 Scarrifholis, 174 School Inquiry Commission (1866), 258 Scobell, Henry, 269, 272 Scotland, 22, 76, 96, 125, 132, 136, 161, 175, 179, 181, 191, 207, 216 Scotland’s holy war, 125 Scots, the, 136, 162, 163, 164, 169, 174, 179, 181, 191, 215, 220 Scott, James, 285 Scottish Covenanter Army, 24 Scottish government, 161, 163

Searle, Daniel, 200–201 Sebastopol, 262 Second Book of Kings, 33 Self-denying Ordinance, 144 Severall proceedings, 268, 272 Shaw, Jenny, historian, 191, 202 Shelbourne, Colonel Thomas, 95 Sheppard, Samuel, 270 Shertel, Thomas, 283 Shropshire, 23, 244 Shrule, Co Mayo, 26 Sidney, Algernon, 131 Sinnott, David, 176–177 Slade, Colonel Henry, 95 Slaney, river, 176 Slieve Donard, 288 Sligo Castle, 26 Sligo, 26, 40, 153 Smale garland of pious and godly songs, 245, 246 Smithwich, Lieutenant Colonel, 148 Smyth, Hugh, 36 Souden, David, 196 south Wales, 75, 136, 151 Spain, 82, 105, 190 Spanish forces, 141, 173 Spanish Netherlands, the, 31 Spenser, William, 222 Spinney Abbey, Cambridgeshire, 227 St Christopher Island, 186, 203 St Ives, 140 St Mary’s Church, Clonmel, 84 St Peter’s Church, Drogheda, 69, 254 St Sunday’s Tower, Drogheda, 20 St George, 280 St John, Oliver, 116 Stafford, Captain James, 177 Stanley, James, earl of Derby, 147 Statesy Island, 189 Stephenson, Colonel Oliver, 80, 81 Stevens, ----, (killed at Drogheda), 268 Stewart, A.T.Q., historian, 242 Stewart, Sir Robert, 154 Street, Captain Lieutenant, 268 Stuart conquest, 235 Stuart Plantation, 242

Index Stuarts, the, 71, 136, 175, 181, 215, 238, 242, 247, 248, 249, 250 Suck, river, 285 Suir, river, 79, 84, 104, 152 Sullivan, named Irish soldier, 37 Swanley, Admiral Richard, 37 Swedish Intelligencer, The, 86 Swift, Jonathan, 282 Swingen, Abigail, historian, 195 Swords, 262 Taaffe, brothers of Lord, 265, 266, 268 Taaffe, Lord, 141, 148 Taaffe, Sir Lucas, 167, 179–180, Talbot, Francis, 214 Tale of a Tub, A, 283 Tanner, Dr Thomas, 60, 61 Teares of Ireland, , 36 Tempest, Major, 268 Temple, Sir John, 33 Tenerife, 233, 242, 246, 247, 250 Thames (river), 160 The Ancient Inheritance of the Waddings of Ballycogley, 242–243, 246 The Barbados Council Minutes, 205 The English-American, his travail by sea and land, 190 The last true newes from Ireland, 29 The Life of Anthony á Wood from the year 1632 to 1672 written by himself, 52, 60 The Nineteenth Century and After, 257 The War of the Three Kingdoms, 192 The Wild Irish Girl, 281 Theti, Carlo, 98 Thirty Years War, 22, 138 Thomason collection, 257 Thomastown, 152, 283 Thuente, Mary Helen, 289, 291 Tichborne, Sir Henry, 25, 44 Times Literary Supplement, 260 Timolin, Co. Kildare, 42 Tipperary, county, 34, 75, 79, 150 To Hell or Connaught, 275

311

To Hell or to Barbados, 187 Torpids, 259 Tory (English), 260 Townshend, Colonel, 148 Tragedy of Cola’s Furie OR, Lirenda’s Miserie, 284 Tralee Castle, 241 Tredagh, (Drogheda), 267 Trim Castle, 284 Trim, 167, 168, 170, 172, 284 Trinity College Dublin, 142 True & exact history of the island of Barbados, A, 195 Truro, 123 Tudor conquest, 235 Tudor Plantation, 241–242 Tudor reform, 236 Tudors, the, 238, 249, 250 Tuireamh na hÉireann, 232, 233–238, 240, 242, 249, 250, 251 Tully Castle, 28 Turner, Christopher, 213 Turner, Sir James, 22 Tyrconnell, earl of, 141 Tyrone, county, 28 Tyrone, earl of, 153 Uí Ógáin, Ríonach, 292 Ulster Army, 30, 82, 163, 179 Ulster Catholic Lords, 174 Ulster Catholics, 163, 165 Ulster Plantation, 237, 240 Ulster Scots, 163, 164, 181, 220, 223 Ulster, 40, 144, 145, 154, 155, 163, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170, 171, 172, 174, 215, 236 United Irishmen, 288 United Provinces, the, 258 University College School, 259 Vavasour, Colonel Charles, 38, 42 Venables, Colonel Robert, 145, 154, 172, 180 Verney, Sir Edmund, 19, 22, 172, 265, 267, 268 Vernon, John, 131

312

Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives

View of the present state of Ireland, 222 Virginia, 192, 195. 196, 205 Wadding family, 232, 242, 243, 244, 247, 248, 249, 251 Wadding John, (cousin of John), 245 Wadding, John, 245 Wadding, Luke, (Catholic bishop of Ferns), 245–246, 248 Wadding, Margaret, 247 Wadding, Richard, 244–245, 246–247 Wadding, Thomas, 246, 247–248 Wadding, Walter, 245 Waldensians, 62 Wales, 84, 139, 141, 144 Walker, Henry, 257, 263, 264, 267, 268, 269, 273 Waller, (Wall) Colonel, 265, 266, 267, 268 Waller, Sir Hardress, 219 Waller, Sir William, 152 Walsh, Peter, 242 Walshe, named Irish soldier, 37 Wanklyn, Malcolm, historian, 143, 153 Wareside Grammar School, 258 Wareside, 258 Warren, Colonel William, 265, 266, 267, 268 Waterford Harbour, 42 Waterford, city, 79, 105, 107, 119, 120, 121, 148, 149, 152, 167, 175, 176, 179, 180, 194, 262 Weaver, John, 131, 217–218, 219 Wellesley, Arthur, Duke of Wellington, 40 Wentworth, Thomas, 141, 207 Wesley, Valerian, 40 West Gate, Drogheda, 20 West India Company, 194 West Indies, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 194, 196 Western Design, Cromwell’s, 190 Westminster government, (English parliament) 57, 136, 146, 154, 157, 159, 160, 161, 166, 180, 181, 192, 200, 201, 209, 216, 217, 218

Westminster, 75 Wexford Catholics, 243 Wexford, 38, 51, 54, 56, 62, 63, 65, 67, 68, 69, 72, 73, 76, 78, 120, 145, 146, 149, 152, 158, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 207, 212, 213–214, 215, 236, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 254, 275, 281 Wexford, county, 42, 213, 233 Wharton, Sir George, 66, 67 Wheeler, James Scott, historian, 147, 153 Whistler, Henry, 189–190, 201 White, John, Mayor of Clonmel, 80, 81, 95, 104–105 White, Robert, 265 White, Sir Charles, 143 Whitehall, 136 Whitelock, Bulstrode, 65, 151 Wicklow, 193 Widenham, Major, 148 Wight, Isle of, 162 Wilcox, Edward, 197 Wilkins, Major, 268 William, III, 277, 287, 288 Williamite land settlement, 249 Williamite revolution, 248 Wilson, Derek, historian, 160 Windsor, 75, 117 Wogan, Colonel Edward, 152 Wood, Anthony á, 60, 61, 62 Wood, Robert, 267 Wood, Thomas á, 52, 60, 61, 62 Worcester, 133, 192, 207 Worden, Blair, historian, 221, 276 wren boys, Irish, 280 Wright, William, 270 Yeats, W.B. 51, 290–291 York, James, Duke of, 226, 231, 242, 247 Yorkshire, 129 Youghal, 91, 147, 152, 153, 179, 215 Young Irelanders, 288, 289 Zanchey, Colonel Jerome, 95