The Curse of Cromwell: Ireland’s Conquest and Confiscation

Billy Galligan

Welcome back to Sure, It's Only History. I'm Billy Galligan.

Billy Galligan

If you grew up in Ireland, you probably heard it before you were old enough to know what it meant. The curse of Cromwell on you. It's one of the worst things an Irish person can say to another, and it's been said for nearly four hundred years.

Billy Galligan

Which is a long time to hold a grudge against a man who spent less than nine months in the country. So today, a bite-size look at Oliver Cromwell in Ireland. What he actually did, what he didn't, and why the name still carries that weight.

Billy Galligan

Last time, we looked at the Plantation of Ulster. Six counties confiscated, settlers brought in from England and Scotland, the best land handed to strangers, and a religious fault line planted into the ground. And we said that fault line would eventually crack.

Billy Galligan

It cracked in October 1641. A rising began in Ulster, led by Irish landowners who had lost their land or feared losing more. It started as a plan to seize key forts, but it turned savage very fast. Settlers were attacked, driven from their homes, and killed, in places like Portadown. The numbers were wildly inflated in pamphlets printed in London, with figures running into the hundreds of thousands, far beyond anything the evidence supports. Real numbers were in the thousands. And Catholics were killed in reprisal too.

Billy Galligan

But the damage to the story was done. In England, 1641 became the reason Irish Catholics were not to be trusted, ever. Hold on to that, because it matters for what comes next.

Billy Galligan

From 1641, Ireland spent years in a tangle of wars. The Catholic Confederation set itself up in Kilkenny and ran much of the country. The English were busy tearing themselves apart in their own Civil War, Parliament against the King. Armies of different loyalties wandered Ireland, burning, starving and plundering.

Billy Galligan

Then in January 1649, King Charles I was beheaded in London. England was now a republic, run by Parliament and an army, and the man rising to the top of that army was Oliver Cromwell.

Billy Galligan

Ireland was a problem. Much of it was now allied to the dead King's cause, and Royalists were gathering there. A hostile Ireland on England's back door was a danger to the new republic. And in the mind of a hard-line Puritan like Cromwell, it was also unfinished business. He believed in Protestant England's duty to avenge 1641.

Billy Galligan

In August 1649, Cromwell sailed for Ireland with around twelve thousand men, a big, well-paid, well-equipped army. He landed at Ringsend, in Dublin, on the fifteenth of August.

Billy Galligan

Dublin was already safe for Parliament. Just days earlier, at Rathmines, the Parliamentary garrison had smashed the Royalist army under the Duke of Ormond. So Cromwell arrived with the capital secure, a strong army, and a plan. Move north, take the ports, cut off the Royalists from outside help, and finish the war quickly.

Billy Galligan

He was no stranger to the business of war. He'd won his reputation in England the hard way. And he was about to bring the same ruthlessness to Ireland.

Billy Galligan

The first target was Drogheda, a walled town about thirty miles north of Dublin, held by a garrison of roughly three thousand men, many of them English Royalists, commanded by a veteran named Sir Arthur Aston.

Billy Galligan

Cromwell brought his siege guns, battered the walls, and demanded surrender. Aston refused. On the eleventh of September 1649, the walls were breached, and after hard fighting the town was stormed.

Billy Galligan

Under the rules of war at the time, a garrison that refused to surrender a defended town could expect little mercy when it fell. Cromwell ordered that no quarter be given to those in arms. What followed was a massacre. Around two thousand people were killed, the great majority of them soldiers, but also priests, and by many accounts some civilians caught in the chaos. Aston himself was reportedly beaten to death, and there's a grim old story that it was with his own wooden leg.

Billy Galligan

Cromwell's own report back to Parliament called it, and I'm quoting, a righteous judgement of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood.

Billy Galligan

Now, here's where it gets complicated, and I'd rather be honest about that than give you a simple villain story. Historians still argue about how many civilians died at Drogheda, and about whether Cromwell ordered the killing of non-combatants or whether it happened in the heat of the storming. Some defend him as acting within the harsh laws of war of his day. Others say that defence doesn't survive contact with the evidence, and that he knew exactly what would follow and wanted it to.

Billy Galligan

What's not in dispute is that Drogheda was a slaughter, that Cromwell was proud of it, and that it was meant to frighten the rest of Ireland into submission.

Billy Galligan

A month later it was Wexford. Again a town stormed, again a heavy death toll, probably over a thousand, with many civilians among the dead. Accounts differ on whether the sack came during surrender negotiations or after they'd broken down, and on how much Cromwell controlled his troops.

Billy Galligan

Other towns, hearing what had happened at Drogheda and Wexford, simply opened their gates. Fear was doing the work of cannon. But not everywhere. At Clonmel in May 1650, the defenders under Hugh Dubh O'Neill held out so fiercely that Cromwell lost some of his heaviest casualties of the whole campaign. The garrison eventually slipped away and the town surrendered on terms.

Billy Galligan

By then, Cromwell was gone. In May 1650 he was called back to England, with the Scots threatening, and left his generals to finish the job. He'd been in Ireland for nine months and change.

Billy Galligan

And here's the thing. The nine months aren't really the story. The slow, grinding war that followed is.

Billy Galligan

It took his successors until 1652 or 1653 to finish the conquest, town by town, county by county. Limerick fell. Galway fell. And everywhere the armies went, there was famine and disease. Plague swept through the country at the same time. Estimates vary, but it's widely thought that a large share of the population died, perhaps a fifth or more, from war, hunger and sickness together. For a country that small, it was a catastrophe.

Billy Galligan

Thousands of Irish prisoners, and others, were shipped abroad as indentured labourers to the West Indies, to places like Barbados. How many is debated, and some of the bigger numbers you'll see online are disputed, but it certainly happened, and it was brutal.

Billy Galligan

TO HELL OR TO CONNACHT

Billy Galligan

Then came the land. Remember the Plantation of Ulster? This was the same idea, applied to the whole country, and on a far bigger scale.

Billy Galligan

Parliament owed vast sums to the soldiers who'd fought the war and to the investors who'd put up money for it. They paid them in Irish land. Under the Act for the Settlement of Ireland in 1652, and the decrees that followed, Catholic landowners had their estates confiscated, and many were ordered to move west of the River Shannon, to the poorer, rockier province of Connacht, by a set date in 1654. The phrase that went down in history is to hell or to Connacht.

Billy Galligan

The numbers tell the story. In 1641, Catholics owned roughly sixty percent of the land in Ireland. By the end of the seventeenth century, that was down to around twenty percent. The old Gaelic and Old English landowning class was largely wiped out, and a new Protestant landowning class took its place, one that would run Ireland for the next two hundred years.

Billy Galligan

Which brings us back to the curse. Why does Cromwell still carry that name?

Billy Galligan

Partly it's Drogheda and Wexford, the blood on the walls. But I think it's also what they stood for. Cromwell became the face of everything that came after. The conquest, the confiscations, the plantation on a national scale, the long shadow of the penal laws. A single, easy name for a process that was far bigger than one man.

Billy Galligan

And in fairness, he was a man who rode into Ireland convinced that God was on his side. That kind of certainty is dangerous in anyone.

Billy Galligan

He died in 1658, in his bed, of natural causes. And in a final bit of seventeenth-century justice, after the monarchy came back in 1660, his body was dug up, hanged, and beheaded, and his head stuck on a spike outside Westminster Hall. It stayed up there for years. Whatever you think of him, he did not get a quiet afterlife.

Billy Galligan

I'll finish with a thought. I grew up in Dublin, and when you do, history isn't in a museum. It's down the road. Cromwell's army landed at Ringsend, not that far from where I'm sitting in my head right now, and the layers of everything we've talked about, the Normans, the Plantation, Cromwell, are all stacked on top of each other, in the same streets I walked as a kid.

Billy Galligan

You don't have to be a historian to feel it. You only have to be Irish, and hear someone say, the curse of Cromwell on you.

Billy Galligan

Next time, we'll look at something harder to measure than land and lives. What got lost along the way. The poets, the lawyers, the language. The old Gaelic world, and what happened to it.

Billy Galligan

Thanks for listening, everybody. Sure, it's only history.