Choosing Religious Atrocities in Ireland

there's something grimly fitting about giving this lecture in this mode it's a distanced make do second best way of lecturing which is all too appropriate for a british historian talking about irish history in britain and especially in england the smaller island to our west is generally an afterthought if i'd been in a lecture theater in london today as these lectures normally are this is the point where i would have asked people to raise their hands if they'd had their schooling in england and if during the course of that schooling they had studied irish history at any point and of course as a lecturer you only ask an audience that kind of question if you're very confident what the result will be for the past five centuries and more the english have generally tried to think about ireland as little as possible and when forced to think about it the dominant thought has often simply been a wish that it would go away as a result of course ireland has periodically thrust itself onto english and british attention the extent to which the brexit crisis of 2017-19 was dominated by the issue of the irish border took most people in britain by surprise the issue simply hadn't featured in the referendum campaign despite the vigorous attempts of a number of irish voices to raise it and the pattern's a repeated one from the catholic emancipation question which first ended pit the youngest premiership and then 30 years later precipitated the great reform act to the home rule crisis which threatened to break gladstone's liberal party in the late victorian age the ever-shifting never-resolved irish question has tormented british politics and when i say it thrusts itself onto british attention i mean often not always that it's done so in the same way that the epidemic which has kept me from my london lecture theater has thrust itself onto our attention by threatening to kill british civil and political life has for centuries been astonishingly peaceful the last pitched battle fought anywhere on the island of great britain was at culloden in 1746 and although british politics has often been hotly contested in the centuries since it's hardly ever been conducted by means of assassination revolution or street fighting irish politics has not always had the luxury of civility it's repeatedly featured the resort to violence and the threat of violence which is often the only way to get england's attention a trap which i'm perhaps falling straight back into by discussing irish history in the context of a lecture series on atrocities my defense for this is that ireland during the era of the religious wars featured not only some of the most ghastly and notorious atrocities of the age but also some of the most consequential some of the atrocities we've looked at so far in this series such as the saint bartholomew's day massacre in france or the persecution of catholics in 17th century japan were shocking and notorious in their time but as time has passed the memories have become less raw and intense have instead become somber and elegant or even trivialized at catholic hands and the massacres of the towns of drokada and wexford in 1649 in which a great many irish catholics were killed by oliver cromwell's english protestant army my reason for doing this i must emphasize is not to suggest that these two sets of events balance each other atrocities don't work that way they do not justify they do not obscure one another those of us who might want to be or might want to seem to be impartial shouldn't fall into the trap of claiming these two events as equivalents the point rather is they've both served similar purposes to the communities who've cherished their memory and used them to build narratives of victimhood and grievance to justify ongoing violence in both cases those narratives have a real foundation and in both cases there's also exaggeration and special pleading but not in the same way and not to the same degree first a little background ireland was invaded by english lords and then by the english king henry ii in the 1160s and 70s and henry and his successors styled themselves lords of ireland a lordship bestowed on them by pope adrian iv who by a remarkable coincidence is the only englishman ever to sit on the papal throne until the 16th century however english control over ireland was mediated and incomplete the island was split between a so-called anglo-irish population descended from the 12th century settlers and based in dublin and several other towns and a gaelic irish population who dominated the west and north of the island in particular and who lived in an anna that the english regarded as wild and barbaric no matter of course that this was the culture which had preserved christian civilization in the wake of the collapse of the roman empire in which had re-evangelized pagan anglo-saxon england from the sixth century onwards the island's ruling class was a mixture of anglo-irish and gaelic irish nobles with great families like the butlers and the fitzgeralds moving seamlessly between the two worlds the long-term arrangement with the english crown was that this ruling class would pay their english lords fealty and a degree of obedience and would pose no threat to them in return they would largely be left alone in the early 16th century the fitzgerald earls of kildare served as lord's deputy of ireland very much in this mold now in an age when the tudors like other rising european dynasties were tightening their control on unruly peripheries this arrangement would probably have come unstuck anyway but in the early 1530s a grumbling long-term problem suddenly became acute when king henry viii renounced his obedience to the papacy and declared himself supreme head of the english church while this was unfolding in 1534 the earl of kildare was arrested and his son raised a rebellion against henry in the name of loyalty to the pope briefly laying siege to dublin the rebellion was suppressed but it was a sign of what was to come both sides of the old settlement in which the english pretended to rule ireland and the irish pretended to obey were breaking down after that rebellion a parliament in dublin obediently copied the english legislation on henry viii's newly claimed title and powers but this move like virtually every other english policy towards ireland for the following 500 years failed decisively to solve the emerging irish question one immediate problem was that henry viii's title lord of ireland had originally been bestowed by the pope which for a king who now declared the pope was antichrist was a little awkward in 1541 a new and shrewd lord deputy an englishman not an irishman that was itself a sign of the new era this little deputy made a bold new attempt to turn nominal english rule into reality the centerpiece of this was that an irish parliament declared that ireland was now a kingdom in its own right and that henry viii was its king it was a new title in theory ireland was an independent sovereign kingdom equal in status to england or to any other realm in christendom it just so happened that the same person was king of both ireland and england rather as if the modern irish public republic were to choose boris johnson as its t-shock while otherwise retaining its constitutional structures or indeed as if the modern uk chose donald trump as its prime minister but as those examples might imply the independence was largely an illusion ireland was a client state a dependency of england which was permitted as much jurisdictional independence as suited london's interests its kings were absentee rulers no lord or king of ireland set foot on irish soil between 1399 and 1690 the most grating symbol of this fictional independence was the notorious pointings law a statute passed by an irish parliament in 1494 which in effect gave not only the king but also the english privy council full control over the irish parliament's business ireland was illegally separate but in fact wholly subordinated polity an island whose contradictions would be a constant engine of conflict the later 16th century from the creation of the kingdom of ireland in 1541 to the death of elizabeth the first in 1603 was when nominal english lordship was turned into a reality partial or ambiguous loyalty was no longer enough especially not in the era of religious wars when protestant england became alarmed and its catholic enemies excited by the possibility of using ireland as a springboard for the invasion of england the obvious way to prevent this would have been to plant the protestant reformation firmly in ireland and some english churchmen most notably thomas cranmer the archbishop of canterbury in the middle of the 16th century were genuinely committed to that project but this commitment was always intermittent all was desperately underfunded and it looked like too slow and uncertain a process for an english state which saw ireland more as an urgent security problem than as an exciting spiritual opportunity queen elizabeth the first instinct was initially to try to keep ireland loyal by soft pedaling the reformation there and when rebellions broke out anyway and she was forced to spend ever-increasing sums suppressing them she became no more inclined to plow extra resources into winning hearts and minds instead she fell back on a policy which had first been employed at scale by her catholic sister queen mary to plant loyalty to england in ireland by planting english men and women there granting them lands confiscated from rebellious lords the policy was unlikely to win favor among either the gaelic irish or the old anglo-irish settlers the old english as they now came to be known in contrast to the new english who'd been sent over by the tudors but plantation did establish groups of reliably loyal subjects across the island and at almost no upfront cost by the 1580s the lines were hardening the new english were protestants and so the old english and the gaelic irish were increasingly robust in their catholicism and increasingly assertive english control was meeting increasingly robust resistance this maybe inevitably came to a head in the so-called nine years war in which control of the isle of the island was decided in the from the mid-1590s onwards hugh o'neal the earl of tyrone would be gaelic high king of ireland became head of a rebellion or revolution which took control of almost the entire island and allied itself with spain then in the wake of the great armada still very much at war with england it was a war that elizabeth the first could not afford to lose and slowly reluctantly she poured in the resources necessary actually to conquer ireland it was not pretty systematic destruction of crops using starvation as a weapon was central to the english strategy but it worked and when the spanish did try to intervene they ended up forcing their irish allies into a dangerously exposed position and precipitating the most decisive english battle victory of the war o'neill himself finally surrendered in 1603 a week after elizabeth the first had died to be succeeded by her scottish cousin king james vi james now found himself king of not two but three formerly independent realms scotland ireland and england and the tensions which that triple role forced on him and his successors are fundamental to the whole story that followed turning victory over a violently subdued population into a lasting peace was tricky and james reached for the traditional tool plantation ulster the northernmost promise province of ireland was the heartland of o'neill's support and it was the least anglicized most gaelic region of the island so naturally it was here that the new plantations were sent in 1609 half a million acres of land in ulster confiscated from former rebels and other gaelic lords was made available to english settlers the city of london formed a company specifically to support the plantation effort one long-term result of which was the refounding of the small settlement of derry with a new prefix which has only partly stuck but in fact english settlement was disappointingly slow the prospects of settling in hostile territory amongst hostile neighbors was unappealing to many in england the new owners often preferred to be absentee landlords the really successful ulster plantation was more informal and came not from england but from scotland gaelic scottish protestants seeking refuge from internecine conflicts in the scottish highlands the mcdonald's the most important amongst them previous english rulers had taken a dim view of scottish presence in ireland but king james naturally had a different perspective and in 1620 he legitimized this new plantation by giving sir randall mcdonald the head of the family the irish noble title of earl of antrim these settlers helped to cement the protestant ascendancy in 17th century ireland but it's important to be clear that that ascendancy had its limits the catholic population the gaelic irish and the old english elite was simply too large and too entrenched to be ridden rough shot over a clever wheeze in 1613 to summon a new irish parliament whose membership was fixed to produce a protestant majority backfired when the catholic members simply walked out king james ever the pragmatist recognized reality changed the structure and abandoned the aggressive program of penal laws that protestant hardliners had been proposing early in the reign of james's son charles the first in 1628 it looked as if this religious de taunt was going to be formalized king charles was desperate for money not least because of ballooning military costs and the irish catholic elite struck a deal in exchange for promises of fresh taxation charles agreed to a series of concessions known as the graces specifically the seizure of catholics land would stop fines for failure to attend protestant worship would be ended and the requirement to take the oath of supremacy which renounced the authority of the pope would be lifted charles promised to relax the enforcement of these laws immediately and to support their full repeal the next time an irish parliament met from a king whose wife was a french catholic princess it looked like a deal that might hold unfortunately creative and pragmatic compromise was not charles the first's strong suit when an irish parliament eventually assembled in 1634 under the presidency of the new lord's deputy thomas wentworth a bulldozer of a politician it turned out that his support for the king and the protestant cause was not tempered by subtlety wentworth in effect tricked the parliament he extracted the taxes and then reneged on the promise to pass the graces into law he spent the rest of the 1630s aggressively promoting the fresh plantation of protestant settlers in the western province western province of connaught and extracting as much taxation from the whole island as he possibly could the wentworth regime was not popular but it was forceful and it was stable what unraveled it was the crisis that was beginning to unfold on the other side of the water in 1637-8 scotland rose in rebellion against king charles's religious policies and reluctant to summon an english parliament to fund his counter-attack charles was casting round for whatever support he could find in 1639 he summoned wentworth back to england to help with the unfolding crisis wanting such a loyal and forceful servant at his side and also thereby leaving a power vacuum in ireland anyway the scottish crisis turned out not to be susceptible of wentworth's kind of solutions a brief war in 1640 left the scots with their heels on charles's throat and compelled him to summon an english parliament who were determined to reverse what they saw as a decade of arbitrary misrule one of their prime targets a symbol of the government's tyrannical style was thomas wentworth he was a tainted for treason and under excruciating pressure and to his own lasting regret king charles accepted wentworth's execution in may 1641. irish observers watching with fascinated horror as events unfolded in england saw two things clearly first ireland was not going to get wentworth back and second the emerging new regime in england was far more aggressively and indeed paranoidly protestant than wentworth had ever been it seemed all too likely that ireland's power vacuum would soon be filled so with hindsight what happened on the 22nd of october 1641 should not have been as surprising as it was on that date there was a coordinated series of risings across the island aimed at protestant planters and other new english centers of power the attempt to take dublin failed but in the other initial heartland of the rising in ulster it was quickly successful it now seems clear that the initial rising was planned by certain members of the old english aristocracy and that it was as they say a continuation of politics by other means the idea was that a coup against the new english whose leaders loudly proclaimed their loyalty to the crown could produce a new reality on the ground in ireland that a weakened charles the first would be forced to come to terms with the rebels the result would be to secure the graces and maybe some further tolerance for catholics there was talk of repealing pointing's law it would be quick it would be clean it would be as bloodless as possible and it would all be thoroughly within the political realm unfortunately the rebels proved unable to to stick to the script if they'd succeeded in taking dublin in that first wave it might have been different but as the rebellion turned into a series of local battles the aristocrats agenda was overtaken by the preferences of the levies and retainers who were fighting for them catholic irishmen whose resentment of the protestant planters had been brewing for decades catholic clergy especially the franciscan friars were preaching up a storm against the settlers advocating driving them out of the island or worse and so in the first stage of the rebellion the settlers faced a wave of fury but fury mostly aided aimed at expulsion they were driven from their houses their lands and goods seized they were mocked and humiliated but at first they were not generally killed aside from a few cases where specific resentments or local grievances made matters worse and in some cases some settlers were treated with considerable care and restraint most famously the protestant bishop of kilmore william beadle a long-term advocate of outrage to the gaelic irish population and one of the very few new english settlers who have actually learnt the irish language himself beagle was put under house arrest together with his family by the rebels but they were not otherwise mistreated and when beedle died of disease early in february 1642 the o'reillys who were holding them permitted beadle's son who was also a protestant clergyman to use the protestant right for his father's funeral indeed his comp his coffin was accompanied by an honor guard of o'reilly's who fired a volley over his grave and shouted requiescatin pache ultimus anglorum which could mean either the best of the english or the last of the english and most likely meant both but by then four months and one hard winter into the rising the wider picture had turned much uglier in some places the rebels met unexpectedly strong resistance and mounting casualties meant scruples were left behind a turning point came in november after the failed rebel assault on lisna garvey in county antrim when several hundred rebels were captured and put to death the single most notorious incident of the whole rising followed immediately from that a group of protestant civilians who were being escorted to the coast to be deported to england were instead marched onto a bridge over the river ban at what's now ported down that original bridge is gone but this is the modern bridge on the same site they were stripped naked at sword point and forced off the bridge into the icy waters those few who showed signs of being able to make the shore were shot from the bridge the numbers are unclear but there were likely at least a hundred perhaps as many as three times that regardless of the numbers it indicated the time for niceties was over in any case the difference between actually killing people and merely turning them out onto the roads without food or shelter in midwinter turned out to be moot miserable bands of protestant settlers straggled towards dublin liable to be stoned beaten even stripped of their clothes as they went some had escorts to guarantee their safety and if most of those escorts didn't behave like those in porter down they weren't always solicitous for their charges welfare either the best guess is that something like 8 000 protestant settlers died from exposure malnutrition or other indirect consequences of revolt during the first two years of the rising maybe half of them during that first winter that out of a total settler population on the island of perhaps 125 000 and as the revolt grew in bitterness and the ambition to mount a bloodless coup dissolved the amount of direct and deliberate killing also steadily increased again the figures are very open to dispute but something in the order of 2000 settlers were killed during that first winter and perhaps as many again over the following year or so it was therefore you might think bad enough but the story that i've told you is a sober and restrained one compared to how it was reported back in england as we've so often seen with atrocities sudden outbreaks of violence are liable to be exaggerated and since news only reached dublin and then britain in drips and fragments that's understandable maybe even innocent the extent to which the exaggerations were seized on weaponized and blown up over the months and years that followed is not quite so innocent with england and scotland in a state of febrile political paralysis with fears of catholic conspiracies already circulating an event which seemed to vindicate even the more paranoid terrors was always going to be received in a particular way a flood of pamphlets and news sheets surged off london's overheated printing presses and let's say that in the winter of 1641-2 playing down the news from ireland was not a good way to sell books meanwhile the english parliament launched an inquiry into the events and this turned out not to be a level-headed attempt to establish the facts but rather a deliberate hunt for inflammatory evidence over 8 000 witnesses were heard from the most shocking and blood-curdling accounts many of them second-hand were the ones that were selected for publication and the fact that they came with the official stamp of a parliamentary inquiry lent them additional authority the stories were told and retold and the images that accompanied them told their own stories some focused on well-attested events not least on the porter down massacre or on the general pattern of expulsion and exposure in this one the gaelic irish taunt the settlers saying now are ye wild irish as well as we others take dubious stories from the depositions and make them concrete the killings of children for example here their brains are dashed out it's an echo of a notorious biblical image as well as a warning of the genocidal ambitions of catholics or here children are roasted on spits before their parents eyes in this one a pregnant woman is raped murdered and her unborn born child ripped from her before being as the caption puts it sacrificed in the fire the work of pagans and devil worshipers the message was plain this is what the irish and all catholics will do to england if they have a chance and it seemed all too likely that they might king charles wanted to raise an army to go to ireland to subdue the rebellion but his english opponents no longer trusted him at all and suspected that he was a crypto catholic himself the fear was that if he went to ireland with an army he wouldn't confront the rebels but joined forces with them and returned to him brew england with protestant blood the irish rising made england's simmering political crisis boil over as king and parliament realized that neither side was willing to trust the other with an army it is no exaggeration to say that the atrocity reports from ireland in the autumn of 1641 led directly to the civil war that began in england the following spring it's only a slight exaggeration to say that the english civil war was fought in the most immediate terms over the question of who had the right to suppress the irish rebellion that at least would explain why the barrage of publicity about the atrocities kept coming even as england's own civil war ought to have provided more than enough news and blood to keep the print shops busy in 1646 the year of parliament's victory in the first civil war sir john temple produced this official history of the rebellion which put the total death toll amongst protestants in ireland during the rising at 300 000 against let's remember a total protestant population of 125 000. mistakes are made with numbers in the heat of the moment but after four years of evidence gathering this mistake was a stretch and yet the claim was repeated when temple's account was reprinted in 1679 in 1698 when it was reprinted five times during the 18th century including immediately after the jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745 and on through the 19th in addition even appeared during the home rule crisis in 1912 when a falsehood continues to be repeated despite being plainly wrong there's usually a good reason typically it's a claim that has what we nowadays call truthiness that is it feels true to a particular audience even if it's not factually correct and so it is with the atrocity stories of the irish rebellion they became a myth perhaps the founding myth of irish protestant identity the anniversary of the rising was commemorated with marches sermons demonstrations for centuries like that other great act of catholic treachery the gunpowder plot it was never to be forgot but to irish protestants its meaning was that they were permanently living in a building filled with gunpowder their neighbors who hugely outnumbered them had once suddenly and viciously turned on them they might do so again the message was if they were to let their guard down even for a moment it was and to some extent even now remains the proverbial predicament of the man who rides a tiger there's no way to reach safety there's no reconciliation to be had at best there is only eternal vigilance it made idealistic projects of conversion and coexistence look naive to the point of ridiculousness and it ensured that the fundamental relationship between ireland's catholic majority and its protestant minority would remain one of profound fear and suspicion that all future atrocities on both sides would be weighed against and interpreted through that history the banners and murals of modern irish protestantism still hark back to it when ian paisley was asked to explain the modern partition of ireland his explanation was to say simply 1641. as so often with atrocity stories the real damage is done not so much by invention and exaggeration though there was certainly that but by selection the 1641 rising in the killings that immediately followed it have lived long in irish protestant memory the decade of war that followed not so much that war the 11 years war or the war of the confederation isn't my subject today i'm not going to dwell on it but we need to notice it that first winter the royalist force in dublin held on and with some english and scottish reinforcements it began to fight back in the spring of 1642 the catholic rebels formed the confederation of kilkenny whose war aims included the total reversal of the reformation and the re-establishment of catholicism the war continued for most of the decade apart from an uneasy truce between 1643 and 1645 there were four principal players catholic irish confederates scottish protestants covenanters english royalists and english parliamentarians because by now england too was embroiled in full-scale civil war the english civil war is vividly remembered for its brutality and bloodshed the largely forgotten irish wars of the same decade were at least as bad atrocity stories did their work both sides demonized their enemies and struck ever more extreme positions add to that the long-standing patterns of irish warfare in which scorched earth tactics were used by all sides and by the end of the decade large parts of the population were exposed to famine to dysentery to typhus and in a fresh outbreak in 1649 to bubonic plague all in all the war-related deaths of that decade may add up to something close to half a million people a fifth or more of the island's population one reason for this was that the stakes were so high not only for the irish themselves but for the scots and for the english neither island britain or ireland could be secure if the other was held by a hostile regime the catholic confederates in ireland were indeed hoping to invade england and to subdue its heretical parliament perhaps an alliance with the king perhaps not the various anglo-scottish protestant forces were all working to turn ireland in their favor live and let live was not a possibility and that is why oliver cromwell having made himself effective master of england and having executed king charles in january 1649 made it his first priority that summer to tackle the long-running irish emergency forces loyal to the new regime had already secured dublin from the royalist army now cromwell himself arrived with 3 000 battle hardened english cavalry backed with first-class field artillery some of the world's most formidable soldiers under the century's most ruthlessly brilliant general his first priority was to secure the east coast and then the south and then he rolled up the major towns one by one suffering relatively low casualties though a hefty toll of disease as this string of victories proceeded many towns surrendered without a fight recognizing that these battles couldn't be won cromwell himself returned to england in 1650 his son-in-law henry iron took command and pressed the advantage resistance was confined to a relatively small area of the west by the end of 1651 the last confederate force surrendered in early 1653. the cromwellian conquest was of course a disaster for irish catholics in its wake over a tenth of the remaining population was driven off the lands to make way for what was supposed to have been a further huge wave of protestant plantation this was the period when the regime offered a substantial bounty of five pounds to anyone who brought in the head of a catholic priest but for all the notoriety that is attract attached to the 1650s two names have come to symbolize the cromwellian tyranny dracoda and wexford some 30 miles north of dublin was the first target of cromwell's campaign it controlled the coast road from dublin to the protestant settler communities in ulster it was a town of some three to four thousand people and it was held against cromwell by a garrison of just under three thousand soldiers a combined force of catholic confederates and english royalists which included some of the most formidable soldiers in ireland cromwell actually suspected the force to be rather larger than it really was cromwell's total force consisted of some twelve thousand men plus heavy guns the city's defenses were medieval curtain walls built to repel archers hopelessly out of date against artillery only this one tower survives today the defenders were also critically short of gunpowder and ammunition though cromwell didn't know the full extent of this they were waiting and hoping to be resupplied if they could hold out just a little longer cromwell decided not to give them the chance he arrived at drokada on the 3rd of september and prepared for an assault on the 10th he issued an ultimatum demanding that the governor surrender so that the effusion of blood may be prevented and adding if this be refused you will have no cause to blame me that was more than an ominous threat it was a clear statement in accord with the contemporary laws of war which stated that if an opportunity to surrender was offered and refused there was no obligation on besieging forces to give any quarter the assault took place on the following evening the 11th of september 1649 and it was hard fought the walls were breached in two places by artillery but in both cases the attackers met fierce resistance and around 150 of cromwell's troops including one of his colonels were killed cromwell wrote that in the heat of the action i forbade them to spare any that were in arms in the town and will never know to what extent this really was a spur of the moment decision fired by anger at his own losses and to what extent a calculated use of exemplary terror regardless the order to give no quarter was issued and it was obeyed even by troops who cannot possibly have heard it there are disputes as to how many of the defenders survived possibly as many as 200 most likely fewer most of the survivors were sentenced instead to penal transportation to barbados aside from a handful who managed to flee west into the countryside cromwell's own account written five days later claimed i believe we put to sword the whole number of the defendants i don't think 30 of the whole number escaped with their lives group barricaded into a tower were offered their lives if they surrendered by junior commander who it turns out didn't have the authority to make that offer they accepted it cromwell overruled him and they were killed another group of defenders took refuge in a church steeple cromwell ordered it set on fire some 30 of them died in the steeple the remaining 50 odd fled outside and were killed as they emerged civilian casualties at drakada are a different matter cromwell claimed that many inhabitants died or whatever that means and one of his military chaplains estimated up to 800 but most modern historians reckon the number may have been somewhat lower the distinction between civilian and combatant was in any case not a clean one these weren't uniformed armies with well-defined rules of engagement what we can say is that cromwell's army deliberately set out to slaughter the defending soldiers but that there was no deliberate policy of killing civilians nor was there a scrupulous care for their welfare and protection amid the sack of the city all of this it should be said was just about within the norms and accepted laws of siege warfare it was admittedly unusual for the accepted legal right to deny quarter to be exercised to this extent and cromwell himself in his previous military career had never done anything like this his next target was the small port town of wexford on ireland's southeastern corner the gateway to the south coast a base from which royalists and confederates were raiding english shipping events there following cromwell's arrival with the smaller force of some six thousand men on the second of october are more confused alarmed by the news from drakada some defenders and civilians were inclined to surrender but the confederate commander instead played for time stringing out negotiations while he quietly gathered reinforcements building up his forces to nearly five thousand men a number which made an assault dauntingly difficult it appears that the actual attack began on the 11th of october without cromwell's direct order it was sparked when an english royalist captain who was commanding a section of the defenses at wexford chose to surrender on his own initiative and cromwell's troops took the chance to launch an assault without waiting for orders it was irregular but it was effective the surprise defenders were routed and cromwell's men suffered negligible casualties unlike at drakada there was no order not to give quarter but few of cromwell's soldiers seem to have wished to accept surrenders cromwell himself reckoned that some 2 000 defenders were killed modern historians might lower that figure to maybe 1500. a comparable number of civilians also died several hundred of those deaths happened as the population especially the women of the town fled towards the harbour and surged onto boats to try to escape many of them were then swamped the town was devastated much more severely than drocker had been to the extent that cromwell's army wasn't even able to bill it there so the two cases are rather different the one a deliberate and systematic policy of slaughtering men in arms the other a disordered massacre of both soldiers and civilians the total death toll at drakada was probably higher the proportion of the defenders killed at wexford was definitely lower but wexford suffered much worse civilian casualties and property damage however the fact that the first two battles cromwell's army fought in ireland both led to such exceptionally bloody massacres is not a coincidence cromwell explaining the dracuda killings to the rump parliament back home said that there were two reasons for it i'm persuaded he said that this is a righteous judgment of god on these barbarous wretches who've imbrood their hands with so much innocent blood and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future the second point is a grimly reasonable one the logic of war arguably the rest of the campaign bear it out after these two massacres a number of other towns surrendered without resistance the earl of ormonde the royalist commander in ireland lamented at how his men were stupefied into cowardice by the massacres one historian calls this the hiroshima justification a spectacular and merciless atrocity can sometimes bring war to a speedy conclusion you may or may not feel that that justifies it but you can at least see the logic but cromwell's first point was maybe the more fundamental one it's that point that he reiterated after wexford when he wrote that righteous justice brought a just judgment upon them that's a lot of moral and legal language to use to describe a chaotic massacre carried out by soldiers acting without orders cromwell's men after all belonged to a self-consciously protestant army they were holy warriors who for eight years had been fed stories of irish atrocities about this running sore of a rebellion which they were at last in a position to avenge this was more than military pragmatism it was justice it was the rough and terrible justice of the god of battles wexford was an even better witness to this truth than rocketer for there it wasn't even an order it was simply how events beyond anyone's control had unfolded for cronwell that meant it was plainly god's will we might be inclined to ascribe it instead to how an army fed on atrocities stories hardened by a previous massacre convinced of the treachery and inhumanity of its opponents will inevitably behave especially since the forces restraining 17th century armies from atrocities in captured cities were never very strong and look to how cromwell's comment blends two different reasons for seeing the massacre as just there's his specific claim that the blood shed by irish catholics had earned this recompense and also the underlying conviction centuries old that the irish were barbarous wretches savages who could only be dealt with in one way as usual cromwell's military judgment was shrewd the ruthlessness of these two sieges very likely won him his victory more swiftly and enabled him to return to england himself in 1650 they also made 1649 and the two names drocketer and wexford as notorious as 1641. this is a decade with something for everyone in modern times the sense that those massacres are an indelible stain on cromwell's reputation has grown he's no longer the hero of constitutionalism whose victorian wig admirers erected a statue to him outside the palace of westminster in 1899 in the teeth of irish nationalist objections nowadays it's routine instead to describe cromwell as a war criminal except of course amongst irish loyalists who still celebrate him as a liberator but this is about much more than one historical figure's reputation as with the stories told about 1641 many irish and catholic accounts of the two sieges are exaggerated they tend to inflate the numbers of dead and to turn complex and confused military encounters into simple morality tales but once again there's a certain truthiness in this the reason that dracoda and wexford have endured an irish memory is that they are symbols of a wider truth and if the symbols themselves don't always fit that truth the wider truth is itself i think beyond dispute that for centuries the english in ireland and ireland's protestant establishment have regarded irish catholic lives as cheap and have seen the island's catholic population as a problem to be suppressed or driven out not as potential converts and certainly not as equals in that sense at least 1649 and 1641 have both served their purposes each side has ample justification to see the other as barbarous wretches so when it comes to ireland's many atrocities and there are plenty more you pays your money and you takes your choice but that's a bleak note to end on so let me add one more element nowhere in europe have historical wounds been kept open and bleeding more copiously than in ireland but even in ireland they can heal four years ago in 2016 we marked the centenary of the easter rising the doomed quixotic rebellion by a handful of irish republicans in dublin during the first world war which ended up triggering the irish civil war partition and the creation of the irish free state the forerunner of the modern irish republic the 50th anniversary of the easter rising in 1966 was a celebratory nationalist festival whose themes were the heroism of the republicans the romanticism of their doomed struggle and the bloodthirsty brutality of the british response the commemorations 50 years later in 2016 came from a different world commentators and popular histories in ireland picked their way through the grim ironies of the rising offering understanding of how it appealed appeared to all sides without feeling the need to justify any of them in general treated the event as a hugely consequential tragedy rather than as a unifying myth the partial resolution of 30 years of civil conflict in ireland a transformed economic and political relationship with britain not least queen elizabeth ii's transformative state visit to the irish republic in 2011 had apparently made something new possible that history might be allowed to be history that transformed outlook is not guaranteed we've seen in the past year how easily old ghosts can be stirred as long as 1641 and 1649 are remembered old fears and hatreds can easily stir again but ireland's bitter maturity towards its history has been hard won even as its larger neighbor to the east continues to remain blithely and willfully ignorant on the subject instead of the mirage of justice that maturity offers a simpler possibility from which much of the world might learn that the many victims of ireland's atrocities might be allowed to rest in peace you

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 97,403

Keywords: gresham, gresham college, education, lecture, public, london, debate, academia, knowledge, history, religious history, religion, history of religion, Alec Ryrie, religious atrocities, Ireland, Catholicism, Protestants, 1641, Oliver Cromwell, 1649, Catholics, Adrian IV, Anglo-Irish, Gaelic Irish, Henry VIII, Hugh O'Neill, Thomas Wentworth, William Bedell, The Irish Rebellion, Drogheda, Wexford

Id: VCDWjPOx220

Length: 54min 47sec (3287 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 01 2020