Below, Tom Reilly, author of Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy throws down a challenge to Irish historians over their treatment of Cromwell. Over here, you can listen to Tom on RTE 1’s Ryan Tubridy show, debating whether the Lord Protector was hero or villain with Professor Ciaran Brady.
I would like to declare open warfare on the seventeenth century experts of Ireland please, or perhaps even challenge them to a duel. Cheers. Thanks
Please allow me to explain. A primary school teacher somewhere in Ireland faces a classroom full of eleven-year-olds. The teacher reaches for the textbook Earthlink 5th Class published by Folens in 2004. (Earthlink is a textbook series from junior infants to sixth class that incorporates the integrated approach outlined by the primary school syllabus on the Irish school curriculum.) On page 87 the following words are printed: ‘Cromwell captured Drogheda. About 3,000 men, women and children were killed.’
That’s the reason for my declaration of war. There’s no other. Just that.
Cromwell has remained the historian’s Hamlet, to be re-interpreted by each succeeding generation, as the founder of liberty or military dictator, the scourge of tyrants, or tyrant himself, the champion of parliament or its betrayer, God’s executioner or God’s reformer.
In Ireland the very name Cromwell has become shorthand for a complex set of attitudes, all resting not so much on the man himself, but on him being symbolic of a defining moment of Irish history. In the demonology of that history, pride of place, without a shadow of a doubt, goes to Cromwell. Because he left such a bitterly divisive legacy, he also left an equally divisive historiography.
Primarily as a result of the work of nineteenth century nationalists (notably John Prendergast and Fr Denis Murphy), Cromwell has for most Irish people become the personification of barbarity, religious intolerance and English conquest. He has been accused of being a war criminal and of being an early ethnic cleanser. They recount tales of thousands of defenceless Irish citizens, men, women and children, all put to the sword at the hands of “Old Ironsides” and his men during their scorched earth campaign.
In actual fact Cromwell was framed.
Cromwell – An Honourable Enemy first saw the light of day in 1999 and has been largely dismissed by most scholars. Although some academics welcomed it with a certain ambivalence, it has certainly not been adopted by many – although it has been received more generously outside Ireland. Yet – and this is most remarkable – it has never been seriously challenged by any historian anywhere.
Michael O Siochru leads the charge of protesters. Yet his recently published God’s Executioner falls abysmally short of presenting a serious challenge to Honourable Enemy. Amazingly he engages in wild speculation. I’m still shocked by his incredible assertions on this matter, with nothing solid whatsoever to back it up. The facts are there for all to see. This is not rocket science.
In fact one wonders at the erudite author’s motivation in making such assiduous efforts to interpret the well-known and oft-quoted contemporary sources in such an inequitable, some might say biased, way. Instead, Ó Siochrú and his ilk should be running to the printing presses to (at least) temper the school textbooks in order that they promulgate a balanced view of the events.
The promotional literature accompanying the book highlights the fact that the same author has scripted the two-part documentary series on Irish television station RTE this September about Cromwell in Ireland.
In this book he has gone out on a limb, put his reputation on the line so to speak, and if this is the best shot he can take to justify a civilian massacre on a large scale, it looks like he will live to regret it. Several experts of the period come to mind who might be inclined to take a different, more even-handed, view of the available evidence.
Of course civilians could have got caught in the crossfire in Drogheda and Wexford, killed as a result of collateral damage, etc. etc. etc. Well, duh! But there was no policy to kill the innocent, nor is there any concrete evidence that suggests such a thing occurred.
Historians have taken a wide birth of my book because I have entered their world and proved them (generations of academics) wrong. I have in fact taught my granny how to suck eggs. First they castigated me, then they dismissed me, then some of them (Taidgh O Hannrachain) even said they said that they knew this all along – it was nothing new!!!.
If they knew this all along, then why in the name of all that is holy are we still delivering nineteenth century propaganda to children in the 21st century?
The historian James Graham Leyburn has said of Cromwell’s campaign in Ireland: ‘What Cromwell did deserves to be ranked with the horrors perpetrated by Gengis Khan. His pacification of Ireland has left scars on that country which have never been forgotten or forgiven.’
Oliver Cromwell is completely innocent of killing the ordinary unarmed people of Ireland and I defy anyone to prove otherwise.
But before I finish, here’s the thing…ask yourself this question…if the facts are open to interpretation (which at the very least they most certainly are) then why do people like O’Siochru, Jason McElligott, Padraig Lenehan etc not take a balanced view?
Contrast this with John Morrill who agrees with me that no civilians died in cold blood at Drogheda but believes some may well have got caught in the crossfire.
And the difference? He’s English. No inherent bias. I rest my case.
Tom Reilly
I can believe that Cromwells conduct of the campaign was normal enough. On the other hand, was the campaign legal in the first place? The English Parliament had every reason to intervene in Ireland: but what claim did it have to rule there? And if it had no such claim, how could it call its war just?
The concept of ‘just war’ needs to be seen in a seventeenth-century context. The English Commonwealth might not have seen its inheritance of the English Crown’s claim to rule in Ireland as the basis of a ‘just war’. The seventeenth-century concept of a ‘just war’ would have been predicated on the idea of doing God’s work, and smiting the Antichrist. In this respect early modern preachers of all religious persuasions, and the authors of various soldiers’ bibles, had no problem in turning the Fifth Commandment (‘thou shalt not kill’) on its head. It might therefore be helpful to draw a distinction between the reasons for the Commonwealth’s military intervention in Ireland (principally to enhance the security of the new regime in London) and the various justifications given at the time to account for the often brutal conduct (thinking more of Wexford than Drogheda) displayed during the campaign. But did Cromwell believe he was conducting a ‘just war’? John Morrill states in the DNB that among other things he ‘justified the massacre [at Drogheda] on the grounds that it would terrorize others into immediate surrender and thus save lives in the long run’. This was a military strategy familiar from the Thirty Years’ War, dating back to ancient times. Cromwell appears to have taken a different tack at Wexford, admitting a massacre had taken place there, but presenting it as revenge for the Protestants he had heard had been massacred by the townsfolk some years earlier. Interestingly, John Morrill notes that after Wexford Cromwell gave ’startlingly generous’ terms of surrender to other Irish towns. But then we get into the debate of the subsequent plantation of former New Model Army soldiers in Ireland after 1649… and…. Complicated stuff, trying to get inside the heads of seventeenth-century people.
[...] way or another been keeping a close eye on my recent online diary entries on Cromwell, reminds me, in his own online diary entries, that there are writers and historians form inside Ireland who do not believe that Cromwellian [...]
Perhaps it would be better if Ireland was till governed according to Cromwell’s wise and kindly strictures, I wonder how Tom Reilly would cope with that? He’d love it of course!
Here is Eugene Coyle’s review of his book.
Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy
Tom Reilly
(Brandon Press, �17.99) ISBN 0863222501
Tom Reilly is a local historian and has published several local history books on Cromwell and Drogheda. This book he claims is a long overdue evaluation of Cromwell’s campaign in Ireland and challenges all the conventional interpretations of events. According to the accepted version Cromwell was appointed Commissioner by the English Parliament to seek out and eliminate all Royalists and Catholic Confederates. In September 1649, he ordered the massacre of the Drogheda garrison and most of the civilian populace in a deliberate policy of terror, partly as a response to the governor’s refusal to surrender. A month later, the garrison and civilians of Wexford suffered a similar fate. These massacres have passed into resentful Irish folk memory. Reilly claims to reveal the untold story of Cromwell in Ireland, to acquit him of the ‘charges of wholesale and indiscriminate slaughter of the ordinary unarmed people of Ireland’ and to express ‘Cromwell’s compassionate policy towards Irish civilians’. Both the Cromwellian and the Interregnum period have been extensively researched and appraised by Irish and English historians since the appearance of Antonia Fraser’s Cromwell, Our Chief of Men (1973). However, according to Reilly the ‘period is left continually unrevised, the dubious traditional viewpoint is now generally accepted as authentic’ but he offers little evidence in support of this claim.
The first hundred pages or so give a fair and reasonably accurate account of Cromwell’s early life and his campaign, including the sacking of Drogheda, from a variety of well-known sources. The Wexford, Munster and Clonmel campaigns are adequately covered and give a good balanced local history background. If the book had simply described the Cromwellian campaign in Ireland as a series of battles it would have provided a local history reference book on the Cromwellian campaign. However, it is written in an emotive, excitable style with irrelevant extraneous material. For example, did you know that Drogheda is the European headquarters of Coca-Cola and has a McDonnells? In the case of Wexford, he alleges that the recent 1798 bicentennial commemorations had a definite Irish republican slant.
Where this book disappoints is in the two chapters on the assessment and analysis of the Cromwellian campaign in both Drogheda and Wexford. In the chapter ‘Drogheda�An Analysis’ the author dismisses both the eyewitness accounts, including that of Cromwell himself, and the contemporary accounts as Royalist propaganda or as having been written for ‘dishonest political reasons’. He contradicts what has been established by a large number of modern professional historians such as Michael Burke, Peter Gaunt, John Morrill, Antonia Fraser and others. For example, Cromwell justified the Drogheda massacre in which nearly 3,500 died as ‘that this is the righteous judgement of God upon these barbarous wretches who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood’. About 2,800 of these ‘wretches’ were Royalist soldiers which left between 500 to 700 civilians and clerics. It is Tom Reilly’s contention that only clerics and armed civilians died and that Cromwell honoured the military procedures of seventeenth-century siege warfare. He also maintains that ‘there is absolutely no evidence to substantiate the stories of the massacre…not those [words] transcribed years later which nationalist historians have so far relied upon’. Yet eyewitnesses record the fate of Drogheda’s garrison commander Aston who had his brains beaten out with his own wooden leg. His head and those of his officers were sent to Dublin on poles. Reilly makes reference to what happened in St Peter’s church and claims it as a part fabrication. In fact, according to Cromwell himself, a party of eighty sought refuge in the tower of the Protestant St Peter’s church and refused to surrender. He ordered that church furniture be piled up and set ablaze. Most died as they tried to escape. It is generally accepted that popular nineteenth century nationalist historians have distorted the accounts. For example, Fr Denis Murphy described tales of young virgins killed by soldiers, Jesuit priests pierced with stakes in the market place and children used as shields during the attack on St Peter’s.
Reilly’s treatment of the massacre at Drogheda is disingenuous and he ignores the conclusion, long recognised by generations of historians, that Cromwell lost his self-control at Drogheda. When Cromwell landed near Dublin on 15 August 1649, he urged his New Model Army to execute ‘the great work against the barbarous and bloodthirsty Irish and the rest of their adherents and confederates’. There may have been good military reasons for behaving as he did, but they were not the motives which encouraged him at Drogheda, during the day and night of organised and approved butchery. Cromwell knew exactly what he was doing at Drogheda whether the order for ‘no quarter’ was given or not. Burke maintains that there was slaughter of civilians on a large scale to ensure that all the clergy were killed as Cromwell stated that there were ‘the satisfactory grounds for such action’.
The historical evidence presented by Reilly is not convincing. He frequently refers to ‘respective partisan nationalist elements’ who are reluctant to accept ‘the rehabilitated version of Oliver Cromwell’ who was ‘merely one in a long line of English oppressors’. The author’s style is often superficial, volatile, tendentious and partisan in the face of known historical evidence. The book adds little to our understanding of the actions of Cromwell at Drogheda or at Wexford. His 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. There is a need for a new book on the Irish Cromwellian campaign but unfortunately but this is not it.
Eugene Coyle
Dear ‘The Jackal’,
What the hell kind of a post was that? You think Coyle’s review actually matters? It’s excellent quality horsehit.
You got he evidence to prove me wrong?
Take your best shot! You”lll fail just as miserably as the rest of them – Coyle included.
Tom Reilly.
Oops. Shudda read it back first. I was just so pissed off with another loon. Here it is again without the typos.
Dear ‘The Jackal’,
What the hell kind of a post was that? You think Coyle’s review actually matters? It’s excellent quality horsehit.
You got the evidence to prove me wrong?
Take your best shot! You”ll fail just as miserably as the rest of them – Coyle included.
Tom Reilly.
Dear Tom Reilly,
Like where do you get off sayin Coyle’s review doesnt matter? You surely knew that when ya started writing this book of complete bull that you would get people who actually know what they are talking about criticising it.
Like obviously i havent actually read your book cos ive better things to be doin than readin some amateur writers fiction novel, but i got the gist of what your tryin to say and well it is total bull. So to sum up what im tryin to say, if your going to start writing a book about an evil tyrant like Cromwell at least get ur facts straight!!
Celtrox.
I respect your views on irish history, i come from a small irish village in the north and would research a lot of local history in saying that a lot of sayings and even songs have been connected with cromwell and his bloody onslaught on the irish people for example
to hell or to connaght.
some are modern and some are from the cromwell period itself, perhaps these songs and rymes are there for a reason to remind us of his impact upon us
yours respectfully
joseph
An up and coming and an emerging Community Historian in the Drogheda area, Brendan Matthews, delivered a lecture to a packed out lecture room at the end of June 2009. Mr. Matthews had a fantastic range of new evidence of what Cromwell got up to in Drogheda and how thousands of men, women and children were then transported to the West Indies between 1653 and 1659, many of them from the Drogheda area. The lecture was absolutley brilliantly delivered by Matthews and he left those that attended in no doubt that this, completely new evidence, was genuinely taken from contemporary documents and that he uncovered this information by looking at this time period from within Drogheda from a Community Historian`s point of view, men that accompanied Cromwell in his ranks had been to Drogheda before the Siege, some had been there in 1635, 36, and 1646, some were married into Drogheda families, some were directly responsible for the ethnic cleansing of the land afterwards, doucuments that are missing from within the Corporation of Drogheda that were never realised before, the huge 50 cannon-gun war ship that was built in honour of what Cromwwell did at Drogheda,etc, etc, etc, etc, Mr. Matthews had a staggering amount of new evidence and it brought the house down at his Millmount lecture and when Reilly tried to speak he was shouted down before Matthews actually stood up for him and told the audience to allow him speak, but whatever Reilly said it meant little; he was shown up by a true Historian who carried out extensive research, as he said himself, in a three month period beforehand and this was after a challenge by Reilly back in February 2009 to all historians that no people from Drogheda were ever transported to the West Indies; however, Matthews went out for the three months and came back with a range of information, as he has done time and time again on many different issues, periods and events in History because thats what he`s brilliant at, researching and presenting a true history of a community. A DVD and CD of this excellent lecture is also available for inspection at Millmount Museum Archives in Drogheda; worth checking out.
I’d just like to take this opportunity to reply to Donal.
I absolutely agree that community historian Brendan Matthews is an incredible guy and that he has unearthed a huge amount of valuable material over the years. Brendan and I compare notes on a very regular basis and are very good friends.
I have no idea how I ended up being cast in the role of a crank these days when I am actually talking complete sense. But hey, that’s Ireland.
A scroll was sent by the mayor and borough council of Drogheda in February of this year commemmorating the citizens of Drogheda that were transported to Barbados.
At that time there was no evidence to support the scroll.
Following Brendan’s lecture, I don’t see a change in that scenario.
Maybe Donal can supply us with the evidence, because Brendan certainly didn’t.
Brendan and I had a good laugh about how people get hot and bothered about this and other Cromwell issues following the lecture.
Thankfully the tide is gradually turning in my direction. Despite O’Siochru’s determination to bring us back to the dark days of Cromwell the murdering bastard, most reputable historians now agree that women and children were not deliberately killed at either Drogheda or Wexford.
I think the problem is that I express myself in a particualr fashion. I seem to piss people off. After ten years of defending Cromwell’s honour this is the only way that I reckon I’ll be heard.
That scroll is an abuse of history. That’s a fact. If it can be proved that the odd vagrant on Drogheda’s streets was transported to Barbados then fine, erect a scroll. But by Jaysus its a tenuous reason.
That scroll was sent because somebody mis-interpreted Cromwell’s letter to parliament in which he says that he sent prisoners he captured at Drogheda to Barbados. But they were soldiers, not citizens. It’s as simple as that.
Get over it.
Tom Reilly