Cromwellian conquest of Ireland

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Cromwellian conquest of Ireland
Part of the Irish Confederate Wars and Wars of the Three Kingdoms
Oliver Cromwell, who landed in Ireland in 1649 to re-conquer the country on behalf of the English Parliament. He left in 1650, having taken eastern and southern Ireland - passing his command to Henry Ireton
Date August 1649 - April 1653 Location Ireland Result English Parliamentarian conquest of Ireland, defeat of Royalist alliance and crushing of Irish Catholic power
Belligerents
English Royalists and Irish Catholic Confederate troops	English Parliamentarian New Model Army troops and allied Protestants in Ireland
Commanders
James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormonde (1649 - Dec. 1650) Ulick Burke, Earl of Clanricarde (December 1650-April 1653)	Oliver Cromwell (1649-May 1650) Henry Ireton (May 1650-Nov. 1651) Charles Fleetwood (Nov. 1651 - Apr. 1653)
Strength
Up to 60,000 incl. guerrilla fighters, but only around 20,000 at any one time	c.30,000 New Model Army troops over 1649-53, approx. 10,000 troops raised in Ireland or based there before campaign.
Casualties and losses
Unknown, c.15-20,000 battlefield casualties, and over 200,000 civilians, from war-related famine or diseases	8,000 New Model Army soldiers killed, more from locally raised units.

The Cromwellian conquest of Ireland (1649-53) refers to the re-conquest of Ireland by the forces of the English Parliament, led by Oliver Cromwell during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. 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's forces 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 Roman Catholics and confiscated almost all of their land. The Parliamentarian reconquest of Ireland was extremely brutal, and it has been alleged that many of the army's actions during the reconquest would today be called war crimes or even genocide. Cromwell is still a hated figure in Ireland. It has recently been argued by one historian that many of the actions taken by Cromwell were within the then-accepted rules of war, or were exaggerated or distorted by later propagandists.^[1] These claims are not accepted by most historians.^[2] The Parliamentarian campaign, which Cromwell largely headed, is estimated to have resulted in the death or exile of about 15-20% of the Irish population ^[3].

[edit] Background

The English Parliament, victorious in the English Civil War, had three main reasons for sending an army to Ireland in 1649.

• The first and most pressing reason was the alliance signed in 1649 between the Irish Confederate Catholics and Charles II (the exiled son of the executed Charles I) and the English Royalists. This allowed for Royalist troops to be sent to Ireland and put the Irish Confederate Catholic troops under the command of Royalist officers led by James Butler, Earl of Ormonde. Their aim was to invade England and restore the monarchy there. This was a threat which the new English Commonwealth could not afford to ignore. Secondly, even if the Confederates had not allied themselves with the Royalists, it is likely that the English Parliament would have eventually tried to reconquer Ireland anyway. They had sent Parliamentary forces to Ireland throughout the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (most of them under Michael Jones in 1647). They viewed Ireland as part of the territory governed by right by the Kingdom of England and only temporarily out of its control since the Irish Rebellion of 1641.
• In addition many Parliamentarians wished to punish the Irish for the massacres of English Protestant settlers in 1641.
• Thirdly, the Parliament had raised loans of £10 million under the Adventurers Act to fight the civil war since 1642, on the basis that its creditors would be repaid with land confiscated from Irish Catholic rebels. To repay these creditors, it would be necessary to conquer Ireland and confiscate such land.
• Fourthly, Cromwell and many of his army were Puritans who considered all Roman Catholics to be heretics, and so for them the conquest was partly a crusade.

[edit] The battle of Rathmines and Cromwell’s landing in Ireland

Main article: Battle of Rathmines

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 Colonel 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. Oliver Cromwell called the battle, "an astonishing mercy, so great and seasonable that we are like them that dreamed",^[4] as it meant that he had a secure port at which he could 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 August 15 with thirty five ships filled with troops and equipment. Henry Ireton landed two days later with a further seventy seven ships.^[5]

Ormonde's troops retreated from around Dublin in disarray. They were badly demoralised by their unexpected defeat at Rathmines and were incapable of fighting another pitched battle in the short term. As a result, Ormonde hoped to hold the walled towns on Ireland's east coast to hold up the Cromwellian advance until the winter, when he hoped that "Colonel Hunger and Major Sickness" (i.e. hunger and disease) would deplete their ranks.^[6]

[edit] The Siege of Drogheda

Main article: Siege of Drogheda

Upon landing, Oliver 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 50 km north of Dublin. Drogheda was garrisoned by a regiment of 3000 English Royalist and Irish Confederate soldiers, commanded by Arthur Aston. When Cromwell’s men took the town by storm, the majority of the garrison and Catholic priests were massacred on Cromwell’s orders. Some civilians also died in the sack. Arthur Aston was beaten to death by the Roundheads with his own wooden leg.^[7] The slaughter of the garrison in 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. 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.

[edit] Wexford, Waterford and Duncannon

Kilkenny Castle. The Irish Confederate capital of Kilkenny fell to Cromwell in 1650

Main articles: Sack of Wexford, Siege of Waterford

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 Parliamentarian troops broke into the town while negotiations for its surrender were ongoing, and sacked it, killing about 2000 soldiers and 1500 townspeople and burning much of the town.^[8] Cromwell's responsibility for the sack of Wexford is disputed. He did not order the attack on the town, and had been in the process of negotiating its surrender when his troops broke into the town. On the other hand, his critics point out that he made little effort to restrain his troops or to punish them afterwards for their conduct.

Arguably, the sack of Wexford was somewhat counter-productive for the Parliamentarians. The destruction of the town meant that the Parliamentarians could not use its port as a base for supplying their forces in Ireland. Secondly, the effects of the severe measures adopted at Drogheda and at Wexford were mixed. To some degree they may have been effective in discouraging future resistance. The Royalist commander Ormonde thought that the terror of Cromwell's army had a paralysing effect on his forces. Towns like New Ross, Carlow and Kilkenny subsequently surrendered on terms when besieged by Cromwell's forces. On the other hand, the massacres of the defenders of Drogheda and Wexford probably prolonged resistance elsewhere, as they convinced some Irish Catholics that they would be killed even if they surrendered. Such towns as Waterford, Duncannon, Clonmel, Limerick and Galway only surrendered after determined resistance. Cromwell was unable to take Waterford or Duncannon and the New Model Army had to retire to winter quarters, where many of its men died of disease – especially typhoid and dysentery. (The port towns of Waterford and Duncannon eventually surrendered after prolonged sieges in 1650).

[edit] Clonmel and the conquest of Munster

Main article: Siege of Clonmel

Henry Ireton. Cromwell passed the command of Parliamentarian forces in Ireland to Ireton in 1650. He died of disease at the siege of Limerick in 1651

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. Cromwell's behaviour at Kilkenny and Clonmel contrasted sharply with his conduct at Drogheda and Wexford. Despite the fact that his troops had suffered heavy casualties attacking the former two towns, Cromwell respected surrender terms that included guaranteeing the lives and property of the townspeople and the evacuation of armed Irish troops who were defending them. The change in attitude on the part of the Parliamentarian commander may have been a recognition that excessive cruelty was prolonging Irish resistance. 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 and they defeated the local Irish garrison at the battle of Macroom. The Irish and Royalist forces retreated behind the Shannon river into Connaught.

In May 1650, Charles II repudiated his father’s (Charles I) alliance with the Irish Confederates in preference for an alliance with the Scottish Covenanters (see Treaty of Breda (1650)). This totally undermined Ormonde’s position as head of a Royalist coalition in Ireland. Cromwell published generous surrender terms for Protestant Royalists in Ireland and many of them either capitulated or went over to the Parliamentarian side. This left in the field only the remaining Irish Catholic armies and a few diehard English Royalists. From this point onwards, many Irish Catholics, including their Bishops and clergy, questioned why they should accept Ormonde's leadership when his master, the King had repudiated his alliance with them. Cromwell left Ireland in May 1650 to fight the Third English Civil War against the new Scottish-Royalist alliance. He passed his command onto Henry Ireton.

[edit] Scarrifholis and the destruction of the Ulster Army

Main article: Battle of Scarrifholis

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. In addition, MacMahon and most of the Ulster Army's officers were either killed at the battle or captured and executed after it. This eliminated the last strong field army opposing the Parliamentarians in Ireland and secured for them the northern province of Ulster. Coote's army there was now free to march south and invade the west coast of Ireland.

[edit] The Sieges of Limerick and Galway

Main articles: Siege of Limerick (1650-51) and Siege of Galway

King John's Castle and Thomond Bridge, Limerick city. Ireton took Limerick in 1651 after a long siege

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 defences and could not be taken by a straightforward assault like Drogheda or Wexford. Ireton besieged Limerick while Charles Coote surrounded Galway, but they were unable to take the strongly fortified cities and instead blockaded them until a combination of hunger and disease forced them to surrender. An Irish attempt at relieving Limerick from the south was routed at the battle of Knocknaclashy. 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.

[edit] Guerrilla warfare, famine and plague

The heavily fortified city of Galway in 1651. It was the last Irish stronghold to fall to the Parliamentarians, surrendering in 1652.

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.

The guerrilla phase of the war had been going since late 1650 and at the end of 1651, despite the defeat of the main Irish or Royalist forces, there were still estimated to be 30,000 men in arms against the Parliamentarians. Tories (from the Irish word tóraidhe meaning, "pursued man") operated from difficult terrain such as the Bog of Allen, the Wicklow Mountains and the drumlin country in the north midlands, and within months, made the countryside extremely dangerous for all except large parties of Parliamentarian troops. Henry Ireton mounted a punitive expedition to the Wicklow mountains in 1650 to try and put down the tories there, but without success.

By early 1651, it was reported that no English supply convoys were safe if they travelled more than two miles outside a military base. In response, the Parliamentarians destroyed food supplies and forcibly evicted civilians who were thought to be helping the tories. John Hewson systematically destroyed food stocks in counties Wicklow and Kildare, Hardress Waller did likewise in the Burren in Clare, as did Colonel Cook in county Wexford. The result was famine throughout much of Ireland, aggravated by an outbreak of Bubonic plague.^[9] As the guerrilla war ground on, the Parliamentarians, as of April 1651, designated areas such as County Wicklow and much of the south of the country as what would now be called free-fire zones, where anyone found would be, "taken slain and destroyed as enemies and their cattle and good shall be taken or spoiled as the goods of enemies".^[10] This tactic had succeeded in the Nine Years' War that had ended in 1603. In addition they began selling prisoners of war as indentured servants to the West Indies (especially Barbados, where their descendants are known as Redlegs). A total of 12,000 Irish people were sold as slaves under the English Commonwealth regime.^[11]

This phase of the war was by far the most costly in terms of civilian loss of life. The combination of warfare, famine and plague caused a huge mortality among the Irish population. William Petty estimated (in the Down Survey) that the death toll of the wars in Ireland since 1641 was over 618,000 people, or about 40% of the country’s pre-war population. Of these, he estimated that over 400,000 were Catholics, 167,000 killed directly by war or famine and the remainder by war-related disease.^[12]

Eventually, the guerrilla war was ended when the Parliamentarians published surrender terms in 1652 allowing Irish troops to go abroad to serve in foreign armies not at war with the Commonwealth of England. Most went to France or Spain. The largest Irish guerilla forces under John Fitzpatrick (in Leinster), Edmund O'Dwyer (in Munster) and Edmund Daly (in Connacht) surrendered in 1652, under terms signed at Kilkenny in May of that year. However, up to 11,000 men, mostly in Ulster, were still thought to be in the field at the end of the year. The last Irish and Royalist forces (the remnants of the Confederate's Ulster Army, led by Philip O'Reilly) formally surrendered at Cloughoughter in County Cavan on April 27, 1653. However, low-level guerrilla warfare continued for the remainder of the decade and was accompanied by widespread lawlessness and banditry. Undoubtedly some of the tories were simple bandits, whereas others were politically motivated. The Cromwellians distinguished in their rewards for information or capture of outlaws between "private tories" and "public tories".

[edit] The Cromwellian Settlement

Main articles: 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 Protestant settlers in Ulster. Also he needed to raise money to pay off his army and to repay the London merchants who had subsidized the war under the Adventurers Act back in 1642.

Anyone implicated in the rebellion of 1641 was executed. Those who participated in Confederate Ireland had all their land confiscated and thousands were transported to the West Indies as indentured servants. 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 - William Petty estimated their number at 54,000 men. The practice of Catholicism was banned and bounties were offered for the capture of priests, who 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 (see also: The Cromwellian Plantation). Before the wars, Irish Catholics had owned 60% of the land in Ireland, whereas by the time of the English Restoration, when compensations had been made to Catholic Royalists, they owned only 20% of it. During the Commonwealth period, Catholic landownership had fallen to 8%. Even after the Restoration of 1660, Catholics were barred from all public office, but not from the Irish Parliament.^[13]

[edit] Historical debate

The Parliamentarian campaign in Ireland was the most ruthless of the Civil War period. In particular, Cromwell's actions at Drogheda and Wexford earned him a reputation for cruelty.

However, pro-Cromwell accounts argue that Cromwell's actions in Ireland were not excessively cruel by the standards of the day. Cromwell himself argued that his severity when he was in Ireland applied only to "men in arms" who opposed him. Accounts of his massacres of civilians are still disputed, although there is evidence from contemporary sources that Drogheda was regarded as a massacre even then and this is the view most often taken by historians.

Formally, Cromwell's command issued in Dublin shortly after his arrival states the following:

"I do hereby warn....all Officers, Soldiers and others under my command not to do any wrong or violence toward Country People or any persons whotsoever, unless they be actually in arms or office with the enemy.....as they shall answer to the contrary at their utmost peril".

The purpose of this order was, at least in part, to ensure that the local population would sell food and other supplies to his troops.

Cromwell's critics point to his response to a plea by Catholic Bishops to the Irish Catholic people to resist him in which he states that although his intention was not to

massacre, banish and destroy the Catholic inhabitants, if they did resist I hope to be free from the misery and desolation, blood and ruin that shall befall them, and shall rejoice to exercise the utmost severity against them.

It has also recently been argued, by Tom Reilly in Cromwell, an Honourable Enemy,^[14] that what happened at Drogheda and Wexford was not unusually severe by the standards of seventeenth century siege warfare, in which the garrisons of towns taken by storm were routinely killed to discourage resistance in the future. The Journal History Ireland dismisses this view: "His [Reilly's] general thesis that Cromwell may well have had no moral right to take the lives at Drogheda or Wexford 'but he certainly had the law firmly on his side' does not stand up to examination." Similarly, John Morrill commented, "A major attempt at rehabilitation was attempted by Tom Reilly, Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy (London, 1999) but this has been largely rejected by other scholars."^[15] Moreover, historians critical of Cromwell point out that even at the time the killings at Drogheda and Wexford were considered atrocities. They cite such sources as Edmund Ludlow, the Parliamentarian commander in Ireland after Ireton's death, who wrote that the tactics used by Cromwell at Drogheda showed "extraordinary severity".

Cromwell's actions in Ireland occurred in the context of a mutually cruel war. In 1641-42 Irish Catholic rebels killed between 4,000 and 12,000 Protestant settlers before they fled. These events were magnified in Protestant propaganda as an attempt by Irish Catholics to exterminate the English Protestant settlers in Ireland. In turn, this caused English Parliamentary and Scottish Covenant forces to take vengeance on the Irish Catholic population. A Parliamentary tract of 1655 argued that, "the whole Irish nation, consisting of gentry, clergy and commonality are engaged as one nation in this quarrel, to root out and extirpate all English Protestants from amongst them".^[16] One historian has gone so far as to say that, "It [the 1641 massacres] was to be the justification for Cromwell's genocidal campaign and settlement."^[17] The English Parliament passed an Ordinance of No Quarter against Irish Catholics in 1642, sanctioning the killing of captured rebels.

The war, as it developed, saw atrocities on all sides. The Scottish Covenanter soldiers under the command of General Monroe, sent to Ireland by the Scottish Parliament, in 1642 massacred up to 3,000 Catholics at Island Magee on 9th January 1642. When Murrough O'Brien, the Earl of Inchiquin and Parliamentarian commander in Cork, took Cashel in 1647, he slaughtered the garrison and Catholic clergy there (including Theobald Stapleton), earning the nickname "Murrough of the Burnings" (Inchiquin switched allegiances in 1648, becoming a commander of the Royalist forces). After such battles as Dungans Hill and Scarrifholis, English Parliamentarian forces executed their Irish Catholic prisoners. Similarly, when the Confederate Catholic general Thomas Preston took Maynooth in 1647, he hanged its Catholic defenders as apostates. In England the wars had ended with such atrocities as the Siege of Colchester in 1648.

Seen in this light, some have argued that the severe conduct of the Parliamentarian campaign of 1649-53 appears unexceptional, given that Cromwell could not afford to fight a long campaign. Most Irish people in 1650 would have considered Drogheda and Wexford to be culturally-English towns. Had there been no rebellion in 1641 and no continuing opposition in 1650, which was led by the gentry who were about to lose their lands, the loss of life in the wider population could have been minimal.

Nevertheless, the 1649-53 campaign remains notorious in Irish popular memory as it was responsible for a huge death toll among the Irish population. The reason for this was the counter-guerrilla tactics used by such commanders as Henry Ireton, John Hewson and Edmund Ludlow against the Catholic population from 1650, when large areas of the country still resisted the Parliamentary Army. These tactics included the wholesale burning of crops, forced population movement and killing of civilians. This policy caused famine throughout the country from 1651 onwards and it is these commanders, much more than Cromwell himself, who could with reason be accused of war crimes and genocide by modern standards for the conduct during this period.

In addition, the whole post-war Cromwellian settlement of Ireland has been characterised as what we now call "genocidal", or near-genocidal, in that it sought to remove Irish Catholics from the eastern part of the country ^[18] The aftermath of the Cromwellian campaign and settlement saw extensive dispossession of landowners who were Catholic, and a huge, (but temporary) drop in population.

[edit] 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 identity. The bitterness caused by the Cromwellian settlement was a powerful source of Irish nationalism from the seventeenth century onwards. After the Stuart Restoration in 1660, Charles II of England restored about a third of the confiscated land to the former landlords, but not all, as he needed political support from former parliamentarians in England. A generation later, during the Glorious Revolution, many of the Irish Catholic landed class tried to reverse the remaining Cromwellian settlement in the Williamite war in Ireland (1689-91), where they fought en masse for the Jacobites. They were defeated once again, and many lost land that had been regranted after 1660. As a result, Irish and English Catholics did not become full political citizens of the British state again until 1829 and were legally barred from buying valuable interests in land until 1778-93.

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Tom Reilly, 1999, Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy ISBN 0-86322-250-1
2. ^ History Ireland, review of "Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy" History Ireland
3. ^ Padraig Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at War, p112
4. ^ Antonia Fraser, Cromwell, our Chief of Men (1973), p. 324
5. ^ Fraser, Cromwell our Chief of Men, p.326
6. ^ Padraig Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at War, p.113
7. ^ Fraser, pp.336-339. Kenyon, Ohlmeyer, The Civil Wars, p. 98
8. ^ Kenyon, Ohlmeyer, The Civil Wars, p100
9. ^ Lenihan, p.122
10. ^ James Scott Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland
11. ^ Kenyon, Ohlmeyer, The Civil Wars, p134
12. ^ Kenyon & Ohlmeyer The Civil Wars, p.278. Scott Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland
13. ^ Lenihan, p. 111
14. ^ Dingle 1999
15. ^ John Morrill. "Rewriting Cromwell: A Case of Deafening Silences." Canadian Journal of History. Dec 2003: 19.
16. ^ Richard Lawrence, the Interest of England in Irish transplantation (1655), quoted in Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at War, p111
17. ^ Eyewitness to Irish History. Peter Berresford Ellis. John Wiley & Sons Inc 2002. Page 108. ISBN-13: 978-0471266334
18. ^ Genocide in the Age of the Nation State: Volume 2. Mark Levene. 2005. Page 55, 56 & 57. A sample quote describes the Cromwellian campaign and settlement as "a conscious attempt to reduce a distinct ethnic population". ISBN-13: 978-1845110574
    Profiles in Leadership, Alan Axelrod. Prentice-Hall. 2002. Page 122. "As a leader Cromwell was entirely unyielding. He was willing to act on his beliefs, even if this meant killing the king and perpetrating, against the Irish, something very nearly approaching genocide"
    Nationalism and Rationality. Albert Breton. Cambridge University Press 1995. Page 248. "Oliver Cromwell offered Irish Catholics a choice between genocide and forced mass population transfer"
    Ukrainian Quarterly. Ukrainian Society of America 1944. "Therefore, we are entitled to accuse the England of Oliver Cromwell of the genocide of the Irish civilian population.."
    Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627-1660. David Norbrook. Cambridge University Press. 2000. In interpreting Andrew Marvell's contemporarily expressed views on Cromwell Norbrook says; "He (Cromwell) laid the foundation for a ruthless programme of resettling the Irish Catholics which amounted to large scale ethnic cleansing.."
    Rewriting Cromwell - A Case of Deafening Silences. Canadian Journal of History. Dec 2003. John Morrill. "Of course, this has never been the Irish view of Cromwell. Most Irish remember him as the man responsible for the mass slaughter of civilians at Drogheda and Wexford and as the agent of the greatest episode of ethnic cleansing ever attempted in Western Europe as, within a decade, the percentage of land possessed by Catholics born in Ireland dropped from sixty to twenty. In a decade, the ownership of two-fifths of the land mass was transferred from several thousand Irish Catholic landowners to British Protestants. The gap between Irish and the English views of the seventeenth-century conquest remains unbridgeable and is governed by O.K. Chesterton's mirthless epigram of 1917, that "it was a tragic necessity that the Irish should remember it; but it was far more tragic that the English forgot it."
    International Institute of Social History Website (Based in the Netherlands), "Roman Catholic Irish were subdued to ethnic cleansing policy by Oliver Cromwell. After his suppression of a rebellion against the English in 1649 he ordered that the Irish were allowed to live west of the Shannon river only. During the guerrilla warfare that followed thousands of Irish died or were sold as indentured labourers in America. King Charles and the English parliament had promised the land of Irish rebels in return for war loans under the Adventurers Act in 1642. The number of land-owning rebels had grown during Confederate Ireland, and The 'Act for the Attainder of the Rebels in Ireland' of 17 September 1656 was a part of this policy. Unlike Charles, Cromwell's Puritan religion was harshly anti-Catholic and naturally this had a great impact in a country where most were Catholic. By the end of 1656 four fifths of the Irish land was in Protestant hands."
    War and Underdevelopment: Economic and Social Consequences of Conflict v. 1 (Queen Elizabeth House Series in Development Studies), Frances Stewart, Oxford University Press. 2000. "Faced with the prospect of an Irish alliance with Charles II, Cromwell carried out a series of massacres to subdue the Irish. Then, once Cromwell had returned to England, the English Commissary, General Henry Ireton, adopted a deliberate policy of crop burning and starvation, which was responsible for the majority of an estimated 600,000 deaths out of a total Irish population of 1,400,000."
    James M Lutz, Brenda J Lutz, 2004, Global Terrorism, Routledge:London, p.193: "The draconian laws applied by Oliver Cromwell in Ireland were an early version of ethnic cleansing. The Catholic Irish were to be expelled to the northwestern areas of the island. Relocation rather than extermination was the goal."
    Mark Levene, 2005, Genocide in the Age of the Nation-State, I.B.Tauris: London: [The Act of Settlement of Ireland], and the parliamentary legislation which succeeded it the following year, is the nearest thing on paper in the English, and more broadly British, domestic record, to a programme of state-sanctioned and systematic ethnic cleansing of another people. The fact that it did not include 'total' genocide in its remit, or that it failed to put into practice the vast majority of its proposed expulsions, ultimately, however, says less about the lethal determination of its makers and more about the political, structural and financial weakness of the early modern English state.

[edit] See also

• Wars of the Three Kingdoms
• Irish Confederate Wars
• British military history
• Early Modern Ireland 1536-1691

[edit] External links

• Article Cromwell in Ireland from site on British Civil Wars
• Article Cromwellian conquest of Ireland from Military History magazine

[edit] Main Sources

• History Ireland [1]
• Gentles, Ian, The New Model Army, Cambridge 1994.
• 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.
• Fraser, Antonia Cromwell Our Chief of Men, Panther, St Albans 1975
• Stradling, R.A., The Spanish monarchy and Irish mercenaries, Irish Academic Press, Dublin 1994.