God's Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conques

[earl]

God's Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland by Micheal O Siochru

Paying a courtesy call on the British foreign secretary Robin Cook in 1997, the Irish prime minister Bertie Ahern noticed a painting of Oliver Cromwell in the room. He instantly walked out and refused to return until the portrait of “that murdering bastard” had been removed. You might think that the long and tragic history of Anglo-Irish relations was so full of murdering bastards on both sides that the selection of any particular one was rather arbitrary. But Micheal OSiochru puts the Aherne anecdote at the start of his book to illustrate the continuing demonisation of Cromwell by the Irish, and he strives to discover how far it is justified.

The story begins in 1641, years before Cromwell set foot in Ireland, with the rebellion of the Catholic Irish against the Protestant settler community. This started as a revolt by members of the Catholic elite against the colonial government, but it quickly became a popular uprising. As news of massacres and atrocities spread, terrified Protestant families fled their homes, making for the garrison towns. The rebels attacked these defenceless refugee-columns, and thousands of innocent civilians perished. The death toll is disputed, but inflammatory English news sheets put it at more than 200,000, arousing a nationwide outcry for revenge against what John Milton called “those Irish barbarians”. It was the start of a retaliatory war that lasted for more than a decade

By the time Cromwell landed in Dublin in August 1649, at the head of his New Model Army, Charles I had been executed, and the parliamentarians faced a new alliance of Irish Catholics and English royalists, committed to putting Charles's son Charles Stuart on the English throne. To Cromwell, this aim made their defeat vital. The invasion of England by a Catholic-royalist army seemed a genuine possibility, and if it succeeded it would, Cromwell prophesied, make England “the most miserable place on earth”, not least for Cromwell. He needed a swift, decisive success that would break his foes' morale.

On September 3, he arrived outside the walls of Drogheda, and summoned Aston, the royalist commander, to surrender, warning him that if he refused “you will have no cause to blame me”. Aston replied defiantly, reputedly claiming that the man who could take Drogheda could take hell. Cromwell's siege guns began to shatter the town's defences on September 10, and on the 11th he himself led the storming party. What followed, as OSiochru relates, gave him a reputation for inhuman savagery, at least among his enemies, that has persisted in Ireland to the present. He ordered that no quarter should be given, and the entire garrison of 2,500 officers and men was put to the sword. The glory of his victory belonged, Cromwell proclaimed, “to God alone”.

He justified his act with the argument that it would save lives by persuading other garrisons to surrender. This proved accurate to some degree. Several towns yielded without a fight. Ormond, the royalist commander in chief, reported that the entire kingdom was “terrified beyond imagination”, and desertions from the royalist to the parliamentarian army increased. But in some quarters Cromwell's ruthlessness may have stiffened opposition. Wexford, the base for royalist naval operations, did not instantly capitulate, and its fate ranks with Drogheda's in the popular catalogue of Cromwell's crimes. Yet the two disasters were, OSiochru points out, quite different. At Wexford, Cromwell did not order an assault on the town, much less its destruction. He was negotiating surrender terms with the royalist commander when his troops gained access to the castle and turned its guns on the city. In the ensuing chaos, not only defenders but a great many townspeople were killed.

At Drogheda, too, some of the townspeople had been fatally caught up in the fighting, but there seems to be no evidence that Cromwell ordered his troops to target civilians. On the contrary, he issued a proclamation on landing in Ireland prohibiting his men from harming the civilian population, and he executed some soldiers for pillaging. Not all those engaged in the conflict observed such distinctions. OSiochru quotes Bishop MacMahon, the commander of the Ulster Catholic army, who warned the garrison at Dungiven that if they “shed one drop of my soldiers' blood I will not spare to put man, woman and child to the sword”. Even Cromwell's slaughter of the garrison at Drogheda was not a war crime by contemporary standards. In refusing quarter to enemy troops after their commander had rejected a summons to surrender he acted, OSiochru acknowledges, “entirely within the accepted conventions of warfare at the time”. When garrisons did surrender, even if, as at Ross and Kilkenny, they had resisted at first and inflicted casualties on his troops, Cromwell allowed them to march away with arms and baggage intact.

When, after nine months, he returned to England triumphant, final victory seemed all but won. “The Irish are ashamed/To see themselves in one year tamed”, crowed the poet Andrew Marvell. But, in fact, it was only after the departure of Ahern's murderous bastard that the war entered its most murderous phase, with Irish guerrilla bands, known as “Tories”, pillaging, terrorising and launching surprise attacks on government troops. Brutal reprisals followed, and the country was swept into the cyclone of destruction that regularly accompanies guerrilla warfare - the burning of crops, the killing of livestock, plague, famine, indiscriminate massacres of noncombatants. You could ride 20 miles through Ireland, a traveller reported, and see nothing but dead men hanging on trees and gibbets. It lasted three years, and by the end, when the various guerrilla units eventually laid down their arms, a fifth of the population had died, and a residue of bitterness had accumulated that would last for centuries.

Resentment was compounded by the punitive expropriation of many Irish Catholic landowners that followed the defeat, and the forcible transportation of the remainder to the province of Connacht. This, too, has been regarded as part of Cromwell's vicious legacy. Yet it could be argued that Charles II was equally to blame, since after his restoration, as OSiochru notes, he chose not to repeal but to consolidate the parliamentarian land settlement, depriving thousands of families of their hereditary estates.

Cromwell was both a great Englishman who saved his country from tyranny, and a religious fanatic who believed himself God's executioner. He routinely killed Catholic priests who fell into his hands because he identified the Pope with Antichrist, “whose Kingdom the Scripture so expressly speaks should be laid in blood”. He was not, OSiochru concludes, a monster, but he did commit monstrous acts. Few will dispute that, although as moderns we are hardly in a position to feel superior. The reason Cromwell gave for the slaughter at Drogheda, that it would save lives in the long run, was the justification invoked for the killing of a quarter of a million Japanese civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If Cromwell's deed was monstrous, it is hard to know what word to use for that.

OSiochru's book incorporates original archival research and adds many new details to the familiar story. Unfortunately, it is dismayingly badly written, with tangled syntax and neglect of normal grammatical conventions. Readers should be forewarned of this, and assured that it is worth persevering despite the obstacles the author has placed in their way.

God's Executioner by Micheal O Siochru
Faber £14.99 pp336

Statue rage
The struggle over Cromwell's legacy reached a peak in the 1890s with plans to set his statue outside parliament at Westminster. The fury of the Irish Nationalist party - still mindful of the siege of Drogheda, right - forced withdrawal of a motion asking for public funds. The radical MP John Morley wrote that the climb-down was greeted ‘with anger and disgust from English Liberals; with thick-witted jibes from Unionists...and with wild cries of aboriginal joy from our Irish friends'. In the end, the statue was funded privately by the prime minister, Lord Rosebery.

[earl]

The Big Question: Was Cromwell a revolutionary hero or a genocidal war criminal?

Why are we asking this now?

The 350th anniversary of Oliver Cromwell's death yesterday was marked by the publication of a new book which suggests that the Lord Protector'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 atrocities 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, he says, was guilty of war crimes, religious persecution and ethnic cleansing.

This is surely not the usual account?

In recent years, that's true. 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. David Hume dubbed him the "most frantic enthusiast... most dangerous of hypocrites... who was enabled after multiplied deceits to cover, under a tempest of passion, all his crooked schemes and profound artifices". He has even been called the father of European fascism.

But admirers like Thomas Carlyle painted him as a hero in the battle between good and evil – a man who restored morality in an age dominated by expediency and compromise, who pressed a new political equality and a religious toleration which even extended to readmitting the Jews to England 350 years after they had all been expelled.

What took Cromwell to Ireland?

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.

What did he do there?

The first major town Cromwell and his army encountered when they landed in Ireland was Drogheda. He summoned the royalist commander and invited him to surrender. When he refused, Cromwell's model 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. During the siege there 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.

Wasn't that how wars were fought then?

Historians disagree on that. Some, like Tom Reilly in Cromwell, an Honourable Enemy, 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 not a reaction to the conditions of battle but 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.

Could he have acted differently?

Probably. He had arrived in Ireland in a strong position politically; Charles I had been executed, the mutiny of the Leveller radicals had been crushed, and the Commonwealth declared. Militarily he was dominant too; he had an effective and disciplined army and the opposition was what the poet Milton described as "a mixed rabble, part papists, part fugitives, and part savages". He ought to have been able to pacify Catholic Ireland with minimal violence. On the other hand more than 80 per cent of Ireland was in the hands of those hostile to the Parliamentarian's revolution. There were fears that a force from Ireland might invade England and threaten the settlement which Parliament had established in its victory over the King.

What is the case for the defence?

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 throughout the land. That the civilians killed were, in modern parlance, unhappy collateral damage. That compared to others he was one of the most restrained of all the commanders in Ireland in the early modern period. And that he cannot be held accountable for what happened in Ireland after he had gone.

What happened 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.

So what's the overall verdict?

Cromwell was a paradox. He was a great Englishman who swept away the last remnants of feudalism from England, paving the way for democracy, freedom and tolerance. But the drive and idealism which motivated him to do that were perverted into a ruthless dismissal of the humanity of those who were his political and religious opponents. Drogheda and Wexford were his Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The question of whether evil can be done in the name of good is not one which was peculiar to him or to his time.

Did Cromwell attempt ethnic cleansing in Ireland?

Yes...

* The massacres at Drogheda and Wexford in 1649 rank among the worst in British history

* Non-combatants were killed, and priests tortured, as examples to terrify the Irish nation

* The slaughters were followed by forced expulsions on a mass scale

No...

* The besieged garrisons knew that if they did not surrender there would be no quarter

* The confusion of battle mean that the facts are not clear

* His acts of war must be seen in the context of defending a progressive political settlement

[earl]

Maurice Sweeney Directs 'Cromwell In Ireland' Epic

IFTA winning Documentary filmmaker Maurice Sweeny talks to IFTN about his latest project 'Cromwell in Ireland'. Combining documentary and dramatic re-enactments, 'Cromwell' is set to storm onto the small screen this Tuesday 9th September on RTÉ One.

Airing to coincide with the 350th anniversary of Cromwell’s death on 3rd September 1658, Maurice Sweeney’s ‘Cromwell In Ireland’ examines the life of Oliver Cromwell and a key time in Irish history where almost 500,000 Irish people died from war, plague and famine during his military campaign.

Presented by historian Dr. Micheál Ó Siochrú, the series combines live action, CGI and documentary scenes to create a major docu-drama exploring the human cost of war and the violent impact of ethnic conflict on a ravaged population. The Tile Films production was commissioned by RTÉ, in association with The History Channel, with support from the BCI.

Two of director Maurice Sweeney's documentaries, ‘ Micheál: The Sound of Sunday’ and ‘ Flann O'Brien: The Lives of Brian’, scooped the industry’s top awards at the 2007 IFTA ceremony in Dublin. Following on from that success the director began work on his latest project charting Cromwell’s power struggle in Ireland. Described as Sweeney’s “most impressive and challenging work to date”, the series proved a great test of the writer/director’s skills and experience working behind the camera.

[blueman]

Funny enough the Agent of Rome could draw attention to Cromwell but is happy enough to allow the Vatican to rape, pillage, and destroy lives in Ireland. The suffering of the Irish people since the formation of the Irish Republic is sickening, as the Vatican has been allowed to enslave the Irish people, and use the most vulnerable members of Irish Society to enrich themselves. The Nuns who run the Magdelene Laundries enslaved vulnerable Irish women, and used them to do the dirty work for Rome, and the wealthy people within Ireland, as the girls were used as slave labour to fill the coffers of Rome, and provide slave and free labour for the business community within Ireland. The Industrial schools too were disasterous for the orphans, and weak defenceless kids, with no-one to defend them, and the Anti-Christian Brothers abused them sexually and psychologically for their own ends. The Magdelenes and the kids put through the other Institutions run by Rome were treated disgracefully and their horrendous suffering needs to be addressed. This site needs to stand up for the weak, helpless, vulnerable people of Ireland and needs to give them a voice, and needs to fight not against Cromwell, but against Rome, and all her Agents who have been behind the suffering of the Irish Nation.

[Blue Angel]

This bots becoming quite advanced you would almost swear there was an intelligence guiding it sometimes although at others the use of stock phrases like 'agents of Rome' lets the side down. Although the programmers have managed to avoid the words 'papist and papish' for which we give them credit...

[Jim]

Sept 6, 2008 23:13:41 GMT blueman said:

The suffering of the Irish people since the formation of the Irish Republic is sickening, as the Vatican has been allowed to enslave the Irish people, and use the most vulnerable members of Irish Society to enrich themselves.

Haha yeah because its been peachy up north.

Enslaving vulnerable members of society is a hall mark of any and all religion.

[earl]

Sept 6, 2008 23:13:41 GMT blueman said:

Funny enough the Agent of Rome could draw attention to Cromwell but is happy enough to allow the Vatican to rape, pillage, and destroy lives in Ireland. The suffering of the Irish people since the formation of the Irish Republic is sickening, as the Vatican has been allowed to enslave the Irish people, and use the most vulnerable members of Irish Society to enrich themselves. The Nuns who run the Magdelene Laundries enslaved vulnerable Irish women, and used them to do the dirty work for Rome, and the wealthy people within Ireland, as the girls were used as slave labour to fill the coffers of Rome, and provide slave and free labour for the business community within Ireland. The Industrial schools too were disasterous for the orphans, and weak defenceless kids, with no-one to defend them, and the Anti-Christian Brothers abused them sexually and psychologically for their own ends. The Magdelenes and the kids put through the other Institutions run by Rome were treated disgracefully and their horrendous suffering needs to be addressed. This site needs to stand up for the weak, helpless, vulnerable people of Ireland and needs to give them a voice, and needs to fight not against Cromwell, but against Rome, and all her Agents who have been behind the suffering of the Irish Nation.

Have you ever visited Rome? Lovely place. Beautiful architecture and climate. You are going to have to update your rhetoric, as technically speaking, the Vatican is a separate state to Italy, nevermind being a part of the Italian capital. Associating the Vatican with Rome is the equivalent to associating Belfast with the ROI, and we know you'd never make that kind of mistake. It's got it's own euro coin stamps and all (I wonder if Aodhan has any??). If you are going to be against something, it helps to be read up on it, especially as events have moved on since the 1960's.

Just so you know, I believe that mother church had as big a part to play in Irelands sorry history as anyone else. This programme is on Cromwell and not the RC church. You'll be able to see it on the History channel when it's broadcasted across Britain at a later date if you can't stomach watching 'Rome Telifís Eireann' (RTÉ).

[Wasp]

I agree with blueman, is there any falsehoods in what he has said or has he spoken fact???

[An Fear Dubh]

I have to say Wasp I find your bigotry hard to fathom sometimes.

That Protestant bastion of education Campbell College had its own sordid sexual scandal of sexual abuse and exploitation. Does this then also prove that the northern state is also to be condemned for destroying young lives by rape?

Just because you lump a number of facts from different time lines together does not prove anything. The history of Cromwell in the 1600's is from a very different era than the 1900's. I am prepared to look at everything and not dismiss something in one era because of unrelated events in another era

[Blue Angel]

Sept 8, 2008 21:17:26 GMT Wasp said:

I agree with blueman, is there any falsehoods in what he has said or has he spoken fact???

The question is not how much truth or falsehood is in Blueman's post but in the way he presents it to further an agenda presenting the Irish Republic as some apocaylptic nightmarish state only slightly better than Stalin's Russia.

He is presenting an Ireland that no longer even exsists - he may as well be back in 1912 screaming 'Rome Rule'.

[earl]

Just to remind people, this edition of hidden history is on tonight at 10:15 on RTÉ1.

[Blue Angel]

Not for me Earl - and I don't RTE has quite got to the stage of the BBC where you can watch all the programmes online though you can watch a fair few I've discovered.

[Wasp]

I have to say Wasp I find your bigotry hard to fathom sometimes.

And me yours.

That Protestant bastion of education Campbell College had its own sordid sexual scandal of sexual abuse and exploitation. Does this then also prove that the northern state is also to be condemned for destroying young lives by rape?

That is to be equally condemned as any other sordid scandal. But you are not comparing like with like here, how many Campbell colleges were there with these scandals, how many times did the police cover up for sexual monsters, how many times did the church cover for these monsters??? In the republic the church helped run the country and to an extent still does, so how does pointing these facts make me a bigot?? This confuses me because if anyone from the PUL community speaks out agains the abuse in the republic we are called bigots even though we are speaking facts. Which leaves the opinion of if any truth is said and republicans dont like it then they try to twist it around that we are the bigots. What concerns you more, facts spoken from a unionist or those being abused?

Just because you lump a number of facts from different time lines together does not prove anything.

try the ferns report for starters

Taken from the ferns report.

Before 1990, the panel found, the police were reluctant to investigate claims of sexual abuse by the clergy because they were fearful of challenging the privileged position of Roman Catholic Church authorities.Most Irish schools are run by the church, so even lay teachers found it difficult to sound alarms. In addition, public health authorities failed to follow up on some accusations of abuse and cut other inquiries short.

For nearly three years, the commission, led by a former Supreme Court judge, heard more than 100 accusations of abuse against 26 priests over a 40-year period in one diocese, Ferns, on Ireland's southeast coast.

One-fifth of the report's 271 pages is taken up by testimony, often verbatim and frequently explicit, from the victims. It includes accounts of priests at a Catholic boarding school who measured boys' penises at night, of boys who were forced to perform oral sex on priests and of girls who were molested during confession, one even on a church altar.


or read this;

Church to avoid child abuse suits for €128m

THE Catholic Church has agreed to put €128m into a state-backed abuse fund for children who suffered in residential care. The deal, agreed last night, will allow the religious orders to avoid being sued by hundreds of their victims.
THE Catholic Church has agreed to put €128m into a state-backed abuse fund for children who suffered in residential care.

The deal, agreed last night, will allow the religious orders to avoid being sued by hundreds of their victims.

Last night Auxiliary Bishop of Dublin and chairman of the Irish Bishops Conference's child protection committee, Bishop Eamon Walsh, described the €128m as "a particularly generous offer".

In return for the money, the Government is extending immunity from civil action to priests, brothers and nuns who abused children in residential homes.

This immunity will apply if a victim decides to accept a payment from the "no-fault" Residential Institutions Redress Board.

Where a victim takes the suggested compensation from the board, religious abusers of children, both sexual and physical, will also escape having to face their victims in court.

And the Catholic Church will not endure the public relations disaster of fighting hundreds of their victims in the courts. After more than a year of fraught negotiations, the Church has agreed to make a cash payment of Euro38m to the Redress Scheme in a deal first outlined in the Irish Independent last year.

Property worth €80m, owned by the 18 religious orders involved in providing residential care, is also being transferred into the ownership of the state. A further €10m is being channeled into counselling and pastoral services.

Anybody who was abused in an industrial school, reformatory, children's home or hospital is eligible to apply for compensation.

It is estimated that the compensation scheme could cost up to Euro500m, but some victims last night described the church's gesture as "paltry" and "pathetic."

John Kelly of the Survivors of Child Abuse insisted that taxpayers should not be asked to pay up to 75pc of the cost of religious abuse.

The deal agreed with the Department of Education also allows the religious orders to "back-date" land it has handed over since May 1999.

The history of Cromwell in the 1600's is from a very different era than the 1900's. I am prepared to look at everything and not dismiss something in one era because of unrelated events in another era

I haven't dismissed anything, I simply asked had he said any falsehoods and was he not speaking fact??

[Wasp]

Sorry Earl I am way off topic.

[earl]

Sept 9, 2008 11:11:10 GMT Blue Angel said:

Not for me Earl - and I don't RTE has quite got to the stage of the BBC where you can watch all the programmes online though you can watch a fair few I've discovered.

Not to worry. It'll be on the history channel on British airwaves over the next few weeks as it's being co-produced by them and RTÉ.