Oliver Cromwell landed in Ireland with his New Model Army on behalf of the English Parliament in 1649. Since the Irish Rebellion of 1641, Ireland had been mainly under the control of the Irish Confederate Catholics, who in 1649, signed an alliance with the English Royalist party, which had been defeated in the English Civil War. Cromwell defeated the Confederate and Royalist coalition in Ireland and occupied the country - bringing to an end the Irish Confederate Wars. He passed a very harsh series of Penal laws against Catholics and confiscated almost all of their land. The Parliamentarian re-conquest of Ireland was accompanied by great loss of life and is remembered with bitterness in the Irish popular memory.
The Battle of Rathmines and Cromwell’s landing in Ireland
By the end of the period known as Confederate Ireland in 1649, the only remaining Parliamentarian outpost in Ireland was in Dublin, under the command of Michael Jones. A combined Royalist and Confederate force under James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormonde gathered at Rathmines, south of Dublin, in order to take the city and deprive the Parliamentarians of a port in which they could land. Jones however launched a surprise attack on the Royalists while they were deploying on August 2, putting them to flight. Around 3000 Royalist or Confederate soldiers were killed in the subsequent rout. Cromwell called the battle, "an astonishing mercy", as it meant that he had a secure port at to land his army in Ireland, and that he retained the capital city. With Admiral Robert Blake blockading the remaining Royalist fleet under Prince Rupert of the Rhine in Kinsale, Cromwell landed on on August 15.
The Siege of Drogheda
Upon landing, Cromwell proceeded to take the other port cities on Ireland’s east coast, in order to secure an efficient supply of reinforcements and logistics from England. The first town to fall was Drogheda, about 50km north of Dublin. Drogheda was garrisoned by a regiment of 3000 English Royalist soldiers, commanded by Arthur Aston. When Cromwell’s men took the town by storm, the entire garrison and some civilians were massacred on Cromwell’s orders. Arthur Aston was famously beaten to death by the Roundheads with his own wooden leg. The sack of Drogheda was received with horror in Ireland, and is remembered even today as an example of Cromwell’s extreme cruelty. However, it had recently been argued (for example by Tom Reilly in Cromwell, an Honourable Enemy, Dingle 1999) that what happened at Drogheda was not unusually severe by the standards of seventeenth century siege warfare. See also: siege of Drogheda
Having taken Drogheda, Cromwell sent 5000 men north under Robert Venables to take Ulster from the remnants of a Scottish Covenanter army that had landed there in 1642. The Parliamentarians were joined by an army of British settlers based around Derry, commanded by Charles Coote.
Wexford, Waterford and Duncannon
The New Model Army then marched south to secure the ports of Wexford, Waterford and Duncannon. Wexford was the scene of another famous atrocity, when Cromwell’s men broke into the town during negotiation and killed around 2000 of its inhabitants. On this occasion Cromwell did not order the killings, but his officers were guilty of indiscipline for not stopping an attack on a town which was in the process of surrendering. Perhaps because of the example set at Drogheda and Wexford, the New Model Army had a far more difficult time in taking fortified towns after this point. It was unable to take Waterford or Duncannon and had to retire to winter quarters, where many of its men died of disease – especially typhoid and dysentery.
Clonmel and the conquest of Munster
The following Spring, Cromwell mopped up the remaining walled towns in Ireland’s south east – notably the Confederate Capital of Kilkenny, which surrendered on terms. The New Model Army met its only serious reverse in Ireland at the siege of Clonmel, where its attacks on the towns walls were repulsed at a heavy cost. The town nevertheless surrendered the following day. Ormonde’s Royalists still held most of Munster, but were outflanked by a mutiny of their own garrison in Cork. The British Protestant troops there had been fighting for the Parliament up to 1648 and resented fighting with the Irish Confederates. Their mutiny handed Cork and most of Munster to Cromwell. The Irish and Royalist forces retreated behind the Shannon river into Connaught. Cromwell left Ireland in May 1650 to fight the Third English Civil War. He passed his command onto Henry Ireton.
Scarrifholis and the destruction of the Ulster Army
The most formidable force left to the Irish and Royalists was the 6000 strong army of Ulster, formerly commanded by Owen Roe O'Neill
, who died in 1649. However the army was now commanded by an inexperienced Catholic Bishop named Heber MacMahon. The Ulster army met a Parliamentarian army composed mainly of British settlers and commanded by Charles Coote at the battle of Scarrifholis in Donegal in June 1650. The Ulster army was routed and as many as 4000 of its men were killed. This eliminated the last strong field army opposing the Parliamentarians in Ireland.
The Sieges of Limerick and Galway
Ormonde was discredited by the constant stream of defeats for the Irish and Royalist forces and no longer had the confidence of the men he commanded, particularly the Irish Confederates. He fled for France in December 1650 and was replaced by an Irish nobleman Ulick Burke of Clanricarde as commander. The Irish and Royalist forces were penned into the area west of the river Shannon and placed their last hope on defending the strongly walled cities of Limerick and Galway on Ireland's west coast. These cities had built extensive modern defenses and could not be taken by a straightforward assault like Drogheda or Wexford. Ireton was unable to take the strongly fortified cities of Limerick and Galway and instead blockaded them until a combination of hunger and disease forced them to surrender. Limerick fell in 1651 and Galway the following year. Disease however killed indiscriminately and Ireton along with thousands of Parliamentarian troops, died of plague outside Limerick in 1651.
See also sieges of Limerick
Guerrilla warfare, famine and plague
The fall of Galway saw the end of organised resistance to the Cromwellian conquest, but fighting continued as small units of Irish troops launched guerrilla attacks on the Parliamentarians. These men were known as "tories" (from the Irish word toraidhe meaning, "pursued man"). In response, the Parliamentarians destroyed food supplies and forcibly evicted civilians who were thought to helping the tories. The result was famine throughout much of Ireland, aggravated by an outbreak of Bubonic plague. The combination of warfare, famine and plague caused a huge mortality among the Irish population. William Petty estimated the death toll of the wars in Ireland since 1641 as over 400,000 people, or about one third of the country’s population. The last Irish and Royalist forces formally surrendered in Cavan in 1653.
The Cromwellian Settlement
See Also: Act for the Settlement of Ireland 1652 and Act of Settlement 1662
Cromwell imposed an extremely harsh settlement on the Irish Catholic population. This was because of his deep religious antipathy to the Catholic religion and to punish Irish Catholics for the rebellion of 1641, in particular the massacres of British Protestants.
Anyone implicated in the rebellion of 1641 was executed. Those who participated in Confederate Ireland had all their land confiscated and in some cases were transported to the West Indies as slaves. Those Catholic landowners who had not taken part in the wars still had their land confiscated, although they were entitled to claim land in Connaught as compensation. In addition, no Catholics were allowed to live in towns. Irish soldiers who had fought in the Confederate and Royalist armies left the country in large numbers to find service in the armies of France and Spain. The exercise of the Catholic religion was banned and priests were executed when found.
The Long Parliament had signed the Adventurers Act in 1642, which said that the Parliament's creditors could reclaim their debts by receiving confiscated land in ireland. In addition, Parliamentarian soldiers who served in Ireland were entitled to an allotment of confiscated land there, in lieu of their wages, which the Parliament was unable to pay in full. As a result, many thousands of New Model Army veterans were settled in Ireland. Moreover, the pre-war Protestant settlers greatly increased their ownership of land. Before the wars, Irish Catholics had owned 60% of the land in Ireland, whereas by the time of the English Restoration, they owned only 20% of it. Also, even after the Restoration, Catholics were barred from all public office, including the Irish Parliament.
Long term results
The Cromwellian conquest completed the British colonisation of Ireland. It destroyed the native Irish Catholic land-owning classes and replaced them with colonists with a British Protestant identity. Irish Catholics did not become full citizens of the British state again until the 1830s and did not re-acquire significant land-ownership in Ireland until the late 19th century. The bitterness caused by the Cromwellian settlement was a powerful source of Irish nationalism from the seventeenth century onwards. A generation later, during the Glorious Revolution, Irish Catholics tried to reverse the Cromwellian settlement in the Williamite war in Ireland, where they fought en masse for the Jacobites. They were defeated once again.
See also
Main Sources
- Reilly, Tom, Cromwell, an Honourable Enemy, Dingle 1999
- Scot-Wheeler, James, Cromwell in Ireland, Dublin 1999
- Lenihan, Padraig, Confederate Catholics at War, Cork 2001.
- Ohlmeyer, Jane, Kenyon John (ed.’s) The Civil Wars, Oxford 1998.
- Canny, Nicholas P, Making Ireland British 1580-1650, Oxford 2001.
