Drogheda, 11 September 1649. In this depiction of the second Commonwealth assault as seen from the Royalist positions, James Castle’s Regiment has stormed across the southern breach. The usage, in hand-to-hand combat, of clubbed muskets in preference to swords was common to both armies.

‘The Road to Wexford’. Here a body of Coalition cavalry under Sir Thomas Armstrong engage a detachment of Parliamentarian horse in an attempt to defeat them before they can reach the protection of the town. The confused nature of the combat is reflected by the fact that whilst the Parliamentarian troopers are using ‘cold steel’, a number of the Irishmen are forced to use clubbed pistols as weapons.

PRINCIPAL COMBATANTS: Protestant forces of Oliver Cromwell (Parliamentary Army) vs. Royalist-Catholic Confederacy

PRINCIPAL THEATER(S): Ireland

DECLARATION: None

MAJOR ISSUES AND OBJECTIVES: Cromwell sought to suppress Catholic opposition in Ireland during the Second English Civil War.

OUTCOME: Submission of Catholic forces in Leinster Province in Ireland, followed by general submission to parliamentary government.

APPROXIMATE MAXIMUM NUMBER OF MEN UNDER ARMS: Parliamentary Army, 12,000; Royalist-Catholic Confederacy, 8,700

CASUALTIES: Parliamentary Army, 1,900+ killed or wounded in battle, in addition to about 2,000 dead from disease; Royalist-Catholic Confederacy, 9,200 killed (some by execution) or wounded

TREATIES: Articles of Kilkenny, May 13, 1652

Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) is usually given the lion’s share of credit for the English Parliament’s subjugation of Ireland between 1649 and 1652. His magnetic leadership, political determination, careful logistical preparation, and lightning military strokes played an unquestioned role in the ultimate victory. But it is sometimes forgotten that the groundwork for that victory had been laid over a period of several years by other commanders. Nor was the conquest ultimately secured until more than two years after the lord lieutenant himself had departed from Ireland.

 

The government of the English republic justified its invasion of Ireland on three grounds: 1) to reclaim it as an English possession; 2) to avenge the slaughter of 12,000 English settlers in the revolt of 1641; and 3) to prevent its becoming a royalist base of operations against the republican regime.

 

When the invasion was finally launched in 1649, Oliver Cromwell benefited from the political and military disunity of the Catholic Confederate forces. Their unwillingness to cooperate with Protestant royalist leaders such as Murrough O’Brien (1614–74), earl of Inchiquin, and James Butler (1610–88), earl of Ormond, combined with inept leadership by Owen Roe O’Neill (1582–1649), commander of the Catholic army in Ulster, James Tuchet (1614–84), earl of Castlehaven, commander in Munster, and Thomas Preston (1585–1655), viscount Tara, commander in Leinster, eventually gave Cromwell the opportunity to win his major triumphs. In August 1647 Colonel Michael Jones (fl. 1649–52), leading a force of 6,500 men supported by nine cannons, took the offensive against Thomas Preston’s Leinster army and shattered it at the battle of Dungan’s Hill. In November Inchiquin met and destroyed the 8,200-man Confederate army of Munster. Only Owen Roe O’Neill’s army in Ulster remained intact. However, the Catholic cause briefly took on a new lease on life with the return of Ormond to Ireland in September 1648. Negotiating a peace with the Confederates (excluding O’Neill), he and Inchiquin combined with Theobald Taaffe (d. 1677) and Thomas Preston to raise a joint force of 16,000–20,000 men. Enjoying the protection of a small royalist navy of 12 warships under Prince Rupert (1619–82), they prepared to besiege Colonel Jones in Dublin. But Ormond’s coalition did not move fast enough. Already in May and June the first wave of parliamentary reinforcements from England had arrived, raising Jones’s field strength to more than 8,000 men. Unhampered by the excessive caution that characterized Ormond, Jones launched a surprise attack on August 3, 1649, against Ormond’s outpost at Baggarath, less than a mile from Dublin. News of the rout of these 1,500 defenders demoralized Ormond’s main force at Rathmines, already weakened by Inchiquin’s withdrawal to defend Munster from a rumored English landing. About 600 royalist troops and six cannons were lost, as well as many prisoners taken. It was a stupendous reversal of royalist fortunes, carrying with it incalculable psychological and strategic consequences. Had Jones not won the battle at Rathmines, Dublin would have been lost, Cromwell would have had nowhere to land his forces, and the invasion of Ireland might have been indefinitely postponed. None of Cromwell’s later victories would equal Jones’s in importance.

 

During the previous six months Cromwell and the Rump Parliament had carefully laid the groundwork that enabled them to exploit fully the opportunity now handed to them. Conscious that Ireland was a graveyard for English military reputations, Cromwell had refused to accept the leadership of the expedition and appointment as lord lieutenant until he was guaranteed the manpower, money, and supplies necessary for success. Nor did he set sail before he had accumulated a war chest of £100,000, 12,600 troops, vast quantities of food, supplies, horses, and oxen, and an awe-inspiring artillery train of 56 great guns. It took 130 ships to deliver this invasion force across the Irish Sea. Without the formidable parliamentary navy, Cromwell could not have contemplated the invasion in the first place. The navy would continue to play a critical role in the conquest, not only ferrying men and supplies from England during the next several years but also neutralizing the small royalist navy under Prince Rupert.

 

Initially it was thought that Ireland could be conquered quickly on a budget of £20,000 a month. In the event the price of subjugation came to £6.8 million for the seven years from 1649 to 1656. In line with the policy of making the country pay for its own conquest, close to half the sum spent in Ireland was raised there. Indeed, it was the impossibility of conquering Ireland out of existing sources of revenue that led the republic in 1652 to adopt the fateful policy of paying its military and civilian creditors in Irish land and transplanting most of the native population to Connacht, the poorest of the four provinces.

 

There was another dimension to Cromwell’s preparation of the Irish project in 1649: diplomacy. During the spring and summer of that year he directed much of his energy to sabotaging the royalist coalition under the marquess of Ormond. With Cromwell’s apparent approval, Colonel George Monk (1608–69) engineered a three-month cessation of hostilities with Owen Roe O’Neill in Ulster. Equally important was Cromwell’s personal success in detaching Roger Boyle, lord Broghill (1621–79) from the royalist cause. Finally, Cromwell negotiated the desertion of a number of officers from the earl of Inchiquin’s army in Munster but persuaded them to postpone announcing their desertions until he could squeeze the maximum tactical benefit from them.

 

Cromwell’s military plan was to take as many ports on the east coast as possible, starting with Drogheda in the north and ending with Cork in the south, before moving inland. His first target, Drogheda, was in a pathetically weak condition after Ormond’s recent defeat, but it was still not an easy target. Sitting athwart the deep channel of the River Boyne, it was girdled by ancient stone walls that on the south side were 20 feet high and four to six feet thick. Below the wall plunged a steep ravine. The key factor in Cromwell’s success was his heavy artillery, with which, after two days of bombardment, he blasted two large holes in the south wall at its eastern extremity. The defenders had not been idle during the bombardment, but had dug three lines of earthworks arching back from the breaches that Cromwell was opening up. The first regiment that poured into the town was hurled back after a quarter hour of furious fighting. Not until Cromwell himself accompanied his men on foot for a second assault was the garrison overrun. Perhaps on account of this harrowing and perilous experience, Cromwell, once inside the battlements, ordered all the defenders put to the sword. Some of his men, having already offered quarter and accepted the surrender of the royalists, defied their commander’s order and let their prisoners escape. Much of the massacre was actually perpetrated a day later in cold blood. The death toll was about 3,500 soldiers, civilians, and clergy.

 

There was a rational motivation for Cromwell’s severity. He thought that the terrible fate of Drogheda would convince the Irish that further resistance was futile. Events would prove him wrong.

 

In the short term his next experience, at Wexford, seemed to vindicate the policy of terror. The news of Drogheda and of Cromwell’s tremendous firepower demoralized the enemy before he even arrived. As soon as he had shattered the walls of the outlying castle, the town signalled its intention to surrender. But having taken the castle, the English troops lacked the patience to wait for the conclusion of negotiations. Without orders they at once launched an assault on the town itself and slew 2,000 soldiers, townsfolk, and priests.

 

After Wexford the victories came much more slowly. There were over 350 garrisons in Ireland, and many of them held out with great stubbornness against the invader. Every conquered garrison had to be occupied, which reduced the number of soldiers available to besiege the next garrison. A second factor continually drained the amount of manpower available to the invader: disease. The English soldiers were afflicted first by dysentery and then by bubonic plague. The “bloody flux,” or “country sickness,” as dysentery was variously known, had infected 4,000 soldiers by the end of September 1649 alone. Many died, whereas others were so weakened that they were good for little else than garrison duty. By its nature dysentery attacks violently and without warning. In November, for example, a large part of the army, under attack by Inchiquin’s army, were forced to fight with their breeches down because of the “flux.”

 

Owing to these combined factors Cromwell’s field army declined to 5,600 men after Wexford. The ravages of dysentery, exacerbated by bitterly cold, wet weather, go far toward explaining Cromwell’s first major setback, at Waterford in December. Waterford was the only Irish city that successfully resisted a Cromwellian siege. Part of the credit went to the brilliant tactics of Colonel Edward Wogan (fl. 1650s), who successfully deceived Lieutenant General Jones’s forces. More significant, however, was the fact that Waterford was the only city where Cromwell was deprived of his heavy artillery, the weather having made it impossible for him to haul his guns overland. Nevertheless, the resistance at Waterford showed that the terror of Drogheda and Wexford had already worn off. Far from preventing further bloodshed, the atrocities had sharpened the resolve of royalists and Catholics to resist the invader with every sinew. The site of Cromwell’s second major setback was Clonmel. In April 1650 he besieged the town and three weeks later unleashed his artillery. But the countermeasures taken by the defenders illustrate how quickly the Irish had learned to neutralize heavy siege guns. At the point where Cromwell opened a breach in the town’s walls, the defending commander, Major General Hugh O’Neill (d. c. 1660), enlisted every available person within to build a twin set of makeshift walls out of rubbish, stones, timber, and mortar running back 80 yards from either side of the breach. At the end of the lane created by these two walls he dug a deep ditch and planted his own guns behind it.

 

Not suspecting these preparations, Cromwell ordered the storm to begin. It was May 16, 1650. The town was eerily silent, and there was no opposition as the men climbed through the gap in the wall singing a hymn. Before those at the front of the assault force realized that they were in a trap, the whole lane was crammed with troops. At that point O’Neill sent a small party to seal off the breach. His main force then fell on those trapped within with muskets, pikes, scythes, and stones. They also hurled long timber posts among the helpless invaders and let loose with their two artillery pieces from the end of the lane, cutting the English soldiers between the knees and the stomach with chained bullets. By the end of the day Cromwell had lost 1,500 men and still had not broken the town’s resistance.

 

Later that night, however, O’Neill and his troops, their ammunition exhausted, slipped out of the town. At midnight the townsmen offered to treat for surrender. Ignorant of the fact that the defending soldiers had stolen away, Cromwell quickly granted the town easy terms.

 

Only after he had made the agreement did he discover the deception. Angry as he was he stuck to his terms. A week later Cromwell reluctantly left Ireland after a stay of barely nine months. The English Parliament required him at home to cope with the looming threat from Scotland. He had come to Ireland intending a sharp, quick conquest, but as his campaign wore on he found the Irish unexpectedly stubborn. Despite notable diplomatic successes in winning over the Munster towns under Inchiquin’s control, and despite very able support from Sir Charles Coote (c. 1622–72) in Ulster, Lieutenant General Jones around Dublin, and Lord Broghill in Munster, his victories became ever more costly. His initially well-paid and well-supplied army shrank alarmingly from the dysentery that tore through its ranks and from the necessity to leave behind defenders in every garrison that was overrun. Recruits were slow to arrive from England. Had it not been for defections from the enemy he would have had almost no men left to put into the field by the end of 1649.

 

In principle the war should now have been no more than a mopping up operation, for the Irish resistance appeared to be in an advanced state of disintegration, while bubonic plague now raged across the breadth of the country. The royalist coalition had for all purposes flown apart, and Ormond’s authority was nugatory. The final disaster was the loss of Owen Roe O’Neill’s former army under the incompetent leadership of its new commander, Bishop Eamon McMahon (fl. 1650s), at the hands of Sir Charles Coote in June 1650 at the Battle of Scarrifhollis. A total of 3,000 Catholic soldiers were lost. By the end of the year Ormond had left the country.

 

With the royalist-Catholic cause in ruins, why did the Irish not see sense and capitulate? In reality their leaders would have been happy to bring an end to the killing and physical destruction of their country but for one stumbling block: Cromwell’s and the English Parliament’s refusal to let them practice the Catholic religion. Ireland consequently descended deeper into the maelstrom of violence.

 

At the end of 1651 the Confederate Irish adopted a classic pattern of guerrilla warfare against the occupying power. Control of the garrisons paradoxically weakened Parliament’s grip on the country. Pinned down by their responsibilities, the soldiers found it less and less safe to venture outside the walls of their fortresses. The enemy, whose numbers never seemed to diminish, were by contrast free to roam at large, wreaking havoc when and where they chose. In order to cope with “the motions of a restless, desperate enemy” the English army swelled to more than 33,000 men in 1651, nearly three times the number Cromwell had brought over in 1649. Yet as late as the summer of 1652 the parliamentary commissioners reported that they were still occasionally engaging enemy armies larger than their own.

 

In this guerrilla phase the parliamentary commanders strove to deny food to their enemy and so render them hateful to the rural population. Houses and grain were burnt and cattle destroyed. By 1651 four-fifths of the fertile land lay wasted and uninhabited. In 1652 Parliament began implementing its policy of replacing the native population with Protestant settlers. More than half the landmass of Ireland was transferred to English investors, adventurers, and soldiers. Yet so great had the devastation been that the conquerors found themselves occupying a graveyard. Destroying the population through starvation, sickness, or deportation had the effect of reducing the value of the land almost to zero.

 

Irish resistance formally ended with the signing of the Articles of Kilkenny on May 12, 1652. All who had had a hand in the massacres of Protestants in 1641 and unarmed people thereafter were excepted from pardon. The rest who had borne arms against Parliament had the option of leaving the country or submitting to the parliamentary yoke. No member of the popish clergy was allowed to reside in the areas controlled by Parliament. Yet the dream of eradicating Roman Catholicism and planting a Protestant yeomanry proved to be a chimera: Most investors and soldiers refused to settle there.

 

The guerrilla war continued unabated, and as late as 1655 the three provinces reserved to the English—Leinster, Munster, and Ulster—still swarmed with Tories, as the Irish rebels were called. Staggering quantities of treasure and manpower had been poured into the formal subjugation of Ireland. Yet Cromwell, the ruler of the English republic, had come no closer than his Elizabethan and Jacobean predecessors to bending the country to his will.

 

Further reading: Ian Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland, 1645–1653 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Jane H. Ohlmeyer, ed., Ireland from Independence to Occupation 1641–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); J. G. Simms, War and Politics in Ireland 1649–1730 (London: Hambledon Press, 1986).

 

 

Cromwell in Ireland (By the day)
This map shows Cromwell’s campaign in Ireland from 15 August 1649 to 27 October 1651. The time steps at intervals of one day. This map was used at DRH 2003 to show how data can be extracted from a temporal database and combined with GIS data to create a time map.