1650 Few war criminals have inspired great poems. Adolf Hitler, for example, inspired what must surely be the worst song lyrics ever: ‘Adolf Hitlers Lieblingsblume ist das schlichte Edelweiss’ (‘Adolf Hitler’s favourite flower is the simple Edelweiss’ – Julie Andrews’s as well, ironically, in the anti-Hitlerian Sound of Music).
After winning the Civil War in England, Cromwell – now Lord Protector – embarked on a campaign of conquest in Ireland, using his victorious, battled-trained army and its fearsomely advanced artillery.
The aim was to reduce Ireland to the status of a docile colony, dominated in course of time by a transplanted ruler class (the Ascendancy). For centuries after, Ireland would be what Gladstone called it, ‘the thorn in England’s side’.
Over 600,000 people – some 40 per cent of the Irish population – are estimated to have perished as a result of the three-year conflict. Notably brutal was the massacre of civilians at Drogheda in 1649. With Ireland subdued, Cromwell returned to England, making land on 27 May 1650. In honour of the event, the poet Andrew Marvell penned ‘An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return From Ireland’. Marvell’s loyalty had switched from the king to the Commonwealth, and the poem is supremely ambiguous. It opens:
The forward Youth that would appear
Must now forsake his Muses dear,
Nor in the Shadows sing
His Numbers languishing.
’Tis time to leave the Books in dust,
And oyl th’unused Armours rust:
Removing from the Wall
The Corslet of the Hall.
So restless Cromwell could not cease
In the inglorious Arts of Peace,
But through adventrous War
Urged his active Star.
And, like the three-fork’d Lightning, first
Breaking the Clouds where it was nurst,
Did through his own Side
His fiery way divide.
For ’tis all one to Courage high,
The Emulous or Enemy;
And with such, to inclose
Is more than to oppose.
Then burning through the Air he went,
And Pallaces and Temples rent …
Is this praise (comparing Cromwell to the spear that mortified Christ, and the destroyer of ‘Temples’)? Is it awe? Or is it subtly veiled criticism? Being literature it can, of course, be all three. Cromwell’s reaction to the poem is not recorded.