The 350th anniversary of Oliver Cromwell‘s death at the beginning of September was marked by the publication of a new book which suggests that Cromwell‘s reputation should be reassessed in the light of two massacres he conducted in Ireland. The slaughter at Drogheda and Wexford in 1649 rank among the greatest in Anglo-Irish history, suggests the Irish historian Micheál Ó Siochrú in God‘s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland. England‘s great parliamentarian was guilty of war crimes, religious persecution and ethnic cleansing.
The overwhelming majority of the 150 biographies of Cromwell published over the past century have been favourable. And Cromwell came third in a BBC poll to find the greatest Briton of the second millennium. But in Ireland they have long taken a different view. Cromwell has also viscerally divided thinkers in the past. He is variously a fanatical regicide and the father of English democracy and tolerance. On the other hand, he has even been called the father of European fascism.
Surrender or die In 1641 Irish Catholics attacked the Protestant settler community. Thousands were killed. But news of massacres and atrocities were greatly exaggerated in the English press, which reported that as many as 200,000 had been slaughtered. Cromwell, then an obscure MP, served on a committee to organise relief for the Protestant victims. Within a decade, however, he had become, thanks to the English Civil War, the greatest soldier of the era, and when a new rebellion occurred in Ireland against the Parliament which had overthrown the English king his response was governed by the outrage he still harboured at the earlier atrocity. The first major town the Cromwell army encountered in Ireland was Drogheda. When the royalist commander refused to surrender, Cromwell‘s army seized the town and put the entire garrison of 2,500 officers and men to the sword. It was an act of ruthlessness which sent shockwaves of fear through the rest of Ireland. Other towns surrendered as soon as Cromwell‘s army approached, and their inmates were spared. Only Wexford refused. Parliamentarian troops broke into the town while negotiations for its surrender were ongoing, and sacked it, killing about 2,000 soldiers and 1,500 townspeople and burning much of the town. Some historians suggest what happened at Drogheda was not unusually severe by the standards of 17th-century siege warfare. Other historians, like Micheál Ó Siochrú, suggest that Cromwell‘s resort to extreme violence was a pre-determined exercise in religious and ethnic vengeance. “Even by the standards of the time Cromwell‘s behaviour was beyond the pale,” he has said. Cromwell offered a different justification: by making an example of these two towns he ensured that others would surrender peacefully, saving lives.
Ethnic cleansing His defence says that Cromwell was just a man of his time. What he did in the two sieges was in accordance with well-established military practice. That his decision to make an example of the garrisons at Drogheda and Wexford was intended to prevent more extensive bloodshed. That the civilians killed were unhappy collateral damage. And that he cannot be held accountable for what happened after he left.
After he left, Cromwell‘s forces ordered Irish Catholics to move to live west of the Shannon river only. The alternative to this forced mass population transfer was clear. The Irish were told “To Hell or to Connaught!” It was the greatest act of ethnic cleansing in the British Isles since the Norman Conquest. By the end of 1656 four fifths of the Irish land was in Protestant hands. When Catholics fought back, in guerrilla groups numbering some 30,000 Cromwell‘s generals forcibly evicted civilians who were thought to be helping the resisters and systematically burned the area‘s crops and killed all livestock. Famine followed, exacerbated by bubonic plague. Three years on, a fifth of the population had died.
