The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (21 page)

Cromwell’s ferocious ideological clarity and moral zeal were coupled with a sense of urgent political necessity: he knew that resistance in both Ireland and Scotland must be crushed immediately if the new Puritan regime in England was to stand a chance of survival. There were also key economic motives underlying Cromwell’s actions: many of his soldiers had received no pay for years, and the London merchants who had lent large sums of money to the English parliament were growing restless. Cromwell now prevailed upon parliament to begin channelling money towards the restive army; at the same time, he held out the prospect of fortunes available for the taking if only Ireland could be subdued at last. The country was portrayed as being in dire need of economic salvation, its population unable and unwilling to manage its own affairs profitably: ‘For to what purpose was it to plow or sow, where there was little or no Prospect of reaping? – to improve where the Tenant had no Property? This universal Neglect of Husbandry covered the Face of the Kingdom with thickets of Woods and Briars; and with those Vast extended Boggs, which are not natural but only the Excrescences and Scabs of the Body, occasioned by Uncleanliness and Sloth.’
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For the soldiers of Cromwell’s army, many of whom thought of Ireland as a baleful sinkhole for English careers and lives, such comments made a cheering change. No wonder, then, that Cromwell ‘came over and like a lightning passed through the land’.
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The New Model Army, handsomely fed and supplied and now with a chance of actually being paid to boot, was guided by a sense of coherence and discipline that its rivals in Ireland could not match; its cavalry was superb; and its leadership possessed the sort of focused strategic purpose lacking in the enemy. This was an army that knew what it was about; and now, anxious to secure his Dublin bridgehead, Cromwell made his way rapidly north along the coast to Royalist-occupied Drogheda, arriving below the walls of the town on 3 September. By 10 September, the town had been invested and Cromwell dispatched a note to the Royalist commander, Sir Henry Aston, ordering his immediate surrender: ‘Sir, having brought the army of the Parliament of England before this place, to reduce it to obedience, I thought fit to summon you to deliver the same into my hands to their use. If this be refused, you will have no cause to blame me. I expect your answer and remain your servant, O. Cromwell.’
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The demand was rejected and Cromwell promptly brought his artillery to bear on Drogheda’s medieval fortifications. The first assaults were beaten back, but on the following day the parliamentary army breached the defences and poured into the town. For knowledge of what followed, we are indebted to Cromwell himself: in subsequent reports to his parliamentary allies and friends in England he noted that, since the Royalist garrison at Drogheda had already been summoned to surrender and had refused to do so, no quarter could be expected. It was certainly not given, for some two and a half thousand members of the garrison were killed: ‘Being in the heat of action,’ as Cromwell remarked, ‘I forbade them to spare any that were in arms in the town.’
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The sack of Drogheda is remembered principally, however, for the fate of the civilian population. A thousand or so townsfolk had sought refuge at St Peter’s Church: in response, Cromwell ordered that the tower of the building be set alight; pews were piled up against its entrance and torched; those who had taken shelter within it died from suffocation or burning, or threw themselves from the tower to their deaths. Even to a society so accustomed to violence as that of seventeenth-century Ireland, these events were profoundly shocking. For Catholics, they came to represent what the massacres of 1641 had for Protestants: a dreadful and defining moment. Certainly the massacre at Drogheda, in its violence and brutality, was without question a clear and unparalleled violation of the military code of the day.

These events were, on one level, a manifestation of the righteous burning anger that Cromwell felt against anyone – be they Irish or English – who defied the judgement of God. He made no effort, for example, to explain the deaths at St Peter’s in anything other than moral terms and in particular in language that reflected the memory of the rising of 1641: ‘about one thousand Catholics,’ he afterwards told parliament, ‘were put to the sword, fleeing thither for safety…. I believe that this is a righteous judgement of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have dipped their hands in so much innocent blood. And it will help,’ Cromwell added in what sounds like self-justification, ‘to prevent more bloodshed in the future. It was God who gave your men courage. It is good that God has all the glory.’
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Moreover, it is an indication of Cromwell’s purpose that the English population at Drogheda was by no means spared. Indeed, it was sought out for execution: Aston was beaten to death with his own wooden leg; the heads of dead English Royalist soldiers were set on spikes around the town; and survivors were transported to the sugar plantations of Barbados. The killings at Drogheda were bloody and indiscriminate, in other words, but they were not motivated solely or even principally by racial hatred.

While Cromwell connected events at Drogheda explicitly to the rising of 1641, there were also good strategic reasons for the attack on the town. Drogheda, after all, had remained in either Royalist or Parliamentarian hands throughout these years and had not at any time been under Catholic Irish control; and a mingled population of English and Irish, Protestant and Catholic made it a peculiarly inappropriate object of moral vengeance. It was much more likely, therefore, that Drogheda was deemed a suitable target and symbol for rather more practical reasons: it was convenient to Dublin; it opened up the road to Ulster; possession of another east-coast port would serve the campaign well; and the medieval walls, so easily breached by modern armaments, meant that Drogheda could be captured in a rapid, spectacular and morale-boosting curtain-raiser to the Irish campaign.

Parliament responded with approval to Cromwell’s reports: ‘the House doth approve of the execution done at Drogheda as an act both of justice to them and mercy to others who may be warned by it’. And in the short term Cromwell’s tactics had the desired effect, for a number of towns in the vicinity of Drogheda surrendered hastily. Another massacre would follow a month later at Wexford, where it is clear that the army ran amok; here, another two thousand soldiers and civilians were killed; and again, in its aftermath, towns in the path of the army moved rapidly to open their gates to Cromwell. At Kilkenny, for example, financial penalties were exacted from the citizens, the churches were ransacked and the clergy expelled – but the city itself was spared. In the longer term, however, the bitterness generated by Drogheda and Wexford was shared by many and, as a result, resistance to the conquering army could not be so easily eliminated. By the onset of the winter of 1649–50, parliamentary forces were firmly in control of the entire eastern littoral of Ireland from Derry in the north to Cork in the south.

The hitherto divided Catholic hierarchy now turned belatedly to face the Cromwellian advance. In December 1649 it met in conclave in the old monastic site at Clonmacnoise and there, among the relics of an earlier Ireland, issued a sharp condemnation of Cromwell: government policies, the prelates claimed, would result in the enforced removal of Catholics from their land and, ultimately, the extinction of Catholic Ireland itself. The meeting was a clear attempt to resurrect the fractious and unwieldy confederate alliance in opposition to Cromwell – and it was viewed as such. The following month, wintering at Youghal, Cromwell replied in terms that left no room for doubt as to his opinion of the Irish bishops and their wicked ways: the document was entitled ‘For the undeceiving of deluded and seduced people’ and it accused the prelates of directing hypocrisy and false doctrine at their flock: ‘You [the clergy] cannot feed them with the word of God but instead poison them with your false abominable and Antichristian doctrine and practices…you keep the word of God from them, and instead thereof you give them your senseless order and tradition.’
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Cromwell concluded by asserting vigorously the English right both to intervene in and to rule Ireland; and to seek vengeance for the wrongs done to the settlers of Ulster in 1641.

He left Youghal to begin campaigning once more in January 1650; by the spring, the line of control had been extended further west, taking in most of the country’s main centres of population. With a Scottish invasion of northern England threatening, however, Cromwell was forced home, taking ship in May 1650. He had been in Ireland for only a matter of months, and would return to a warm welcome:

And now the Irish are ashamed

To see themselves in one year tamed:

So much one man can do

That does both act and know.
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But such assessments, together with the image of Cromwell as a stable Lord Protector, disguise the difficulties he encountered in these years; from now on the affairs of Ireland would be but one of many problems he would face until his early death in September 1658. Nor were the Irish quite tamed: indeed, it was only with Cromwell’s departure that the true war began. By the end of the summer, three-quarters of Ireland had been nominally occupied. Government forces crossed the Shannon into Connacht in the autumn, but Limerick and Galway, which had invested heavily in modern defences, held out until 1651 and 1652 respectively – by which point disease was afflicting both sides indiscriminately.

After the surrender of Galway, and in the face of overwhelming military superiority, the remaining Irish and Royalist forces resorted to guerrilla tactics. Thousands of irregulars were encamped in the bogs and forests, ready to attack the regular army as it moved around the countryside; and this fragmentation of the enemy made it impossible to strike a decisive blow. These renegade Irish came to be known disparagingly as ‘tories’, after the Irish word for a hunted man – the tory, the priest and the wolf, it was said, were the three principal enemies of the new regime, and all three were tracked across the fields. The guerrillas at least were able to rely on local support – unlike the Irish wolf, which was hunted to extinction at this time – and as a consequence they remained players on the Irish scene well into the future. These brigades retained the ability to cause havoc among the regular forces, destroying supply lines and food depots across the countryside.

The mopping-up of Ireland following Cromwell’s departure was in fact a period of systematic violence and destruction. The response of the army to the guerrilla tactics of the enemy came inevitably in the form of savage reprisals – and the poor, the young and the old suffered disproportionately. The conquered land was divided into protected areas and enemy zones – and woe betide any civilian who strayed into the latter: ‘You may ride 20 miles and discern anything or fix your eye upon any object, but dead men hanging on trees and gibbets: A sad spectacle but there’s no remedy; so perfidious are the people, that we are enforced thereunto for the safeguard of our own lives.’
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Male civilians were routinely hanged for passing information or intelligence or otherwise giving succour to the guerrillas; females too were subject to hanging, though they were more frequently rounded up and shipped off to work the Caribbean sugar plantations – in all, fifteen thousand were deported. The infrastructure of the country was targeted and destroyed: villages lay empty, pockmarked by ruined mill houses and castles and roofless churches; homes were burned and great stretches of the countryside emptied; harvests were seized by troops for their own use and the surplus destroyed. By 1660 famine, fighting and disease had wiped out between a fifth and a quarter of the Irish population.

At the same time, the country began to undergo the greatest social change in its history. In 1652, the Act of Settlement was proclaimed by the English parliament. This was one of the most radical pieces of legislation ever enacted in the history of Britain and Ireland, and its preamble establishes its intentions vividly: ‘Whereas the Parliament of England, after the expense of much blood and treasure for suppression of the horrid rebellion in Ireland, have by the good hand of God upon their undertakings, brought that affair to such an issue, as that a total reducement and settlement of that nation may, with God’s blessing, be speedily effected….’ This was a moment of unprecedented opportunity for the English administration. Ireland was, as Cromwell put it, ‘a blank paper’:
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there was no need for treaty, for negotiation, for compromise of any sort; instead, a new society could now be brought into being. The Act was of course intended as retribution on the participants in the rising of 1641: its opening clauses picked out all those who had taken part and condemned them to death – by some estimations eighty thousand adult males, had the law been applied across the board. But in reality, the Act was focused on the seizure of Irish land: it constituted one of the largest transfers of property anywhere in western Europe in the early modern period.

The result, for the remaining Irish Catholic leaders, was calamitous. In an agricultural society – in Ireland as in all European societies in this era – land was the key indicator of wealth, the basis of status and power. The act of taking land from the Irish elite had the effect of decapitating native society; many remaining members of the country’s Catholic aristocracy now emigrated to the continent to pursue their military careers and join the swelling Irish population in exile. In the short term society became largely demilitarized, denuded as it was of effective local military and political leadership. In the longer term, Irish society became increasingly open to outside influences. This is most notably the case in the language shift from Irish to English, which had begun in the first half of the seventeenth century and now gathered pace in Leinster and Ulster.