William Francis Butler

“ In mid-May Cromwell, with Fairfax, Harrison, Waller, Goff and Okey—all but one of them regicides—have to abandon the preparations for the Irish war, and go hunting mutineers from Andover to Oxford. The mutinies are quelled (mainly by a trick on the part of Cromwell, of which you will find scant mention in later histories) , but the wrongs from which they spring remain. This Commonwealth—as they call it—has dammed up its wealth in its own House of Commons. The golden stream has not been allowed to descend to the people. ”

“ All this went on from 1653 to the death of Oliver Cromwell in 1658. You may search the entire modern history of man on earth and find nothing more terrible, nothing more savage, nothing more relentlessly cruel, than the record of these nine years—from 1649 to 1658—in Ireland. ”

“ In such a nature hate must be stronger than love, and, much as Ormond loved the King, he hated the King's Irish Catholic subjects with far more intensity of feeling. Two years earlier he had surrendered Dublin to the English Parliament rather than give it to the Catholic Royalists at Kilkenny. It may have been that by this act he hoped to bring about a treaty between the King, then a prisoner, and the victorious faction in England. But, if this were so, never was action more mistaken. Dublin in the hands of the Independent faction meant easy access at any time into Ireland ”

“ Ormond now, in presence of Cromwell, was painfully aware of his own weakness. He dared not trust an army, the greater part of which did not trust their leader, to fight in the open against the solid strength of Cromwell's forces, neither could he lay waste the country, because on it he depended for his own supplies, and the sea was open to his enemy. He adopted the alternative of placing garrisons in the principal fortified towns, while he himself kept the field with a small army of observation. This plan had many disadvantages. It allowed the invader to attack when and where he pleased. ”

“ The war in Ireland went on for three years after Cromwell's departure. It reduced the country to a desert. Then came what was called the settlement. The land was divided among the army; the old proprietors were driven out of their homes, and forced across the Shannon, the terrible alternative of Hell or Connaught being, in the language of the time, given to them. Thousands of women and children were sold into the worst form of tropic slavery ever known. "An universal confiscation," says Isaac D'Israeli, "is a bloodless massacre." ”

“ Oliver Cromwell in Ireland
Wherever the traveller pursues his route in Ireland—along the coast line which borders the Irish Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, over the inland plains of the central region, or yet through the mountains and valleys which lie between that central plain and the sea—there is one ever-present object in the landscape, whose presence after a time ceases to attract attention through the simple fact of its perpetual recurrence. ”

“ History has strange ironies if we probe it deep enough.
If the death of the King had paralysed the Royalist and Presbyterian parties in England, its effect in Ireland and Scotland had been very different. King Charles the Second had been proclaimed in both countries, and the Catholics in one Kingdom and the Presbyterians in the other had, with few exceptions, rallied to the royal cause. After seven years of devastating civil war the treaty known as the peace of 1648-9 had been concluded at Kilkenny, between the Confederated Catholics and Ormond, the King’s Lieutenant. ”

“ It gave widest scope to the invader to use his money in practising upon the elements of treachery and disunion existing among the Irish confederates. It enabled Cromwell to make the fullest use of his heavy artillery. It gave him also the sea-board for his lines of advance, since the chief towns were all upon the coast, and his march north or south could be attended and partly covered by the fleets of the Parliament. There was at this moment in Ireland only one man who had intellect to know what to do and military knowledge which would have enabled him to do it. ”

“ The exact date upon which Cromwell landed in Dublin is disputed, but it is certain that he and his army were all there by the last week in August, and in the early days of September he moved north for Drogheda.
Of his work in Dublin, during the ten or twelve days Cromwell spent there, we know little, but enough has come down to show that never had his matchless powers of dissimulation been exercised to greater effect, and never did he succeed better in deceiving with words of hypocritic kindness the victims upon whose destruction he was then wholly bent. ”

“ The sense of desertion and betrayal, which the treason of the Cork garrisons had spread through Ormond's army, had not affected the Irish troops in Clonmel. They were all old soldiers of Owen O'Neill's army, veterans of the victory of Benburb, heroes of that sole unconquered force which their great dead leader had raised, disciplined, and maintained for seven years against immense odds. ”

“ I scarce know one officer of forty among us that hath not been sick, and how many considerable ones we have lost is no little thought of heart to us." All these sentences, so ominous of the condition of the army, not yet three - months in the country, were omitted from the despatch when read to Parliament. As a set off against the now desperate condition of his troops came the news to Cromwell that Inchiquin's garrisons in Youghal, Cork, Mallow, Kinsale, and Bandon had revolted from the Royal cause and declared for the Parliament. ”

“ One hundred years earlier the King and his nobles had combined together to rob the Church, the most active agent in this great conspiracy of plunder being Mr. Thomas Cromwell, the Surrey blacksmith's son. Exactly one hundred years later another great combination or conspiracy arose, this time the object being to rob the King and the nobles, and what was left of the Church. The classes which coalesced for this second confiscation were the two which the intervening century had produced or strengthened—the small country gentleman and the city trader. ”

“ The people—that strange, dull, hapless, helpless multitude—always hoping, always credulous, always deceived, and always ready to be deceived, had come to ask themselves what the whole of this vast business of Rebellion had been about. ”

“ From the moment Dublin passed into the hands of the King's enemies the King's fate was sealed. But the strangest part of this terrible blunder of Ormond's was the part which Dublin was doomed to play against him, when he came back to Ireland after the King's death, as Lord Lieutenant for Charles the Second. ”

“ People have grown so accustomed to those relics that few stop to think or to ask what they were, or why they are ruined? It seems so natural they should be there. Are they not Irish? Do not the jackdaws nest in them? ”

“ Cromwell himself caught the infection. "I have been crazy in my health," he writes on November 13th. On the 14th he urges that fresh troops be sent from England. "We desire recruits may be speeded to us," he says. "It is not fit to tell you how your garrisons will be unsupplied, and no field marching army considerable, if but three garrisons more were in our hands. It is not well not to follow Providences. Your recruits and the forces desired will not raise your charge if your assignments already for the forces here do come to our hands in time. ”

“ Sequestration of royalist lands, sale of crown lands, dean and chapter lands, and forfeited properties, had only made a change of masters; the people —the peasants, the hewers of wood and drawers of water—were poorer than they had ever been before. ”

“ For the rates at which the confiscated land should be allotted to the adventurers were already fixed; and, as early as February, 1642, the Lords and Commons were holding conferences at which all the details of the confiscation were arranged, the company prospectus was being issued, and among the chief allurements held forth to the intending investor was the promise that the old Irish and the Norman English "would be rooted out by a new and overwhelming plantation of English." ”

“ The human memory is and has been too lazy to wish to charge itself with the study of any Irish business, preferring the blot explanation, as a writer who is doubtful of his orthography will frame his words in undecipherable characters. ”

“ When the great guns opened fire, and their shot made breaches in the single wall, he repaired the damage and loopholed the neighbouring houses for musketry. "He did set all men and maids to work," says a contemporary writer, "townsmen and soldiers, to draw dunghills, mortar, stones, and timber, and make a long lane a man's height, and about eighty yard's length, on both sides up from the breach, and he caused to be placed engines on both sides of the lane, and two guns at the end of it, invisible, opposite to the breach, and so ordered all things against a storm. ”

“ The wretched inhabitants were duped into a pretended negotiation. The Commissioners were sent out to Cromwell, one of them being the traitor Stafford, who has already arranged to admit the storming parties into his portion of the defences. "The townsmen," says the historian, "were first made aware of Stafford's treachery by seeing the enemy's colours floating on the summit, and its guns turned against their walls." All was confusion in the town. The Cromwellian troops poured in over the walls and began a slaughter equal to that of Drogheda ”

“ Their valiant husbands, sires, and sons,
Had battled for their own.
The winter was now approaching, and already sickness of a grave character had broken out in the army. There was no time to lose if the Munster garrisons were to be gained and winter quarters secured. Waterford, Dungarvan, and Kilkenny were held by the Royalists. Ormond was in the neighbourhood of the latter city, where he had been joined by a strong force of O'Neill's Ulster army. On October 17th Cromwell led his troops to New Ross, where he intended to force a passage over the River Barrow. ”

“ The defences were of the poorest nature. It was only on the 23rd of August, more than a week after Cromwell had landed, that Ormond decided to hold the place. The garrison represented the best men in his army. It is a matter of dispute to what nationality they belonged. Ludlow, a writer at the time, says they were English, and Hume and Carlyle repeat the statement; but other writers say they were Irish. Probably they were of both nationalities. The senior officers were chiefly English. Sir Arthur Aston, an old Catholic Royalist of great distinction, was in chief command. ”

“ In order to upset the Parliament, Cromwell, a year before, secretly incited the officers and soldiers of the Army to mutiny. "They now," says Hume, "practised against their officers the same lesson which they had been taught against the Parliament." Whalley's regiment is mutinous in London; Scroop's, Harrison's, Ireton's, and Skippon's regiments are on the warpath in Salisbury, Oxfordshire, and Gloucestershire. They want their pay, and the end of this bogus Parliament. The old chains, they say, have been broken; they do not want new ones ”

“ It is dated "7 o'clock at night, 10th September." "About 8 of the clock" of that morning, Aston had received and replied to a summons from Cromwell to surrender. "Since this summons," he goes on, "I have heard no answer but by mouth of cannon, the which hath ever since without intermission played upon our walls and works. They have eight pieces of battery, the least whereof shoot 12 pounds, and one of 30 pounds bullet. They have made a very great breach near the Church, and I am confident their resolutions are to gain it immediately by an assault. The soldiers say well. Pray God they do well. ”

“ Belly food will prove scarce among us, but my endeavours shall never be sparing."
Three days later Lady Wilmot and her family were removed from Drogheda by order of Ormond. It was one of his many mistakes. Cromwell's soldiers did not always draw distinctions in Irish sieges between men and women. This, then, was the state of Drogheda three days before Cromwell attacked it. There was scarcity of food and powder, no shot, and the Governor's grandmother was one of the many traitors already in league with the enemy. ”

“ They intend not to meddle with any man's property, nor break down any pales or enclosures, but only to till what is wild and untilled and make it fruitful for man. They do not intend to defend themselves by arms." To all of which Authority, in shape of the—local justices and two troops of horse, answers by riding at them, dragging them to prison, pillory, and the rest of it. ”

“ Four thousand men had already preceded this formidable force, making in all, when added to the former garrison of Dublin about 20,000 men—strong, fierce, and fanatical men, thirsting for Irish blood. The military chest contained £200,000 in cash. Chaplains Peters and Owen were of the company; and already, long in advance of the invasion, everything that bribery and intrigue could arrange had been set afoot to sow dissension and to purchase treason in Ireland How well these efforts succeeded we shall presently discover ”

“ Then he came to Ireland. Clarendon says of him that "no man in the Royal Army was of a greater reputation," and Hume makes frequent mention of his name and services.
But in all his long record this service at Drogheda was the most hopeless he had ever engaged in. Only in the last few years has it been possible to understand how hopeless it was. In the Bodleian library there are three letters written by Aston to Ormond a week. before Cromwell sat down before Drogheda. ”

“ There only remained the wreck of Owen O'Neill's old army to still offer resistance. Of these about 2,500 men held Clonmel, Kilkenny, and Fethard; a few other towns in South Tipperary also held small garrisons. These Cromwell determined to attack before the winter had ended. ”