48 The 1641 Rebellion And Oliver Cromwell

The Rebellion of 1641 began as a political rebellion led by the prominent O’Neill family of Ulster, who wanted to recover its property from Protestants and overthrow the Puritan government then holding Ireland. The O’Neills had ordered their followers not to hurt anyone, but there was no stopping the crowd once it was unleashed. What started out as a political protest turned into an all-out attack on Protestant farmers as the Catholic commoners let their resentment bubble over. That November, Irish Catholics killed thousands of Protestants. No one knows how many died; estimates range from 2,000 (as suggested by some historians) to 150,000 (as claimed by Protestant pamphleteers). Many more lost their homes and property.

The attacks on Protestants by Catholics were bad, but they were nothing compared to the way they were described by English propagandists in London. They called it a “massacre.” Pamphleteers inflated the Protestant death toll to nearly 150,000, and used extreme creativity in describing the horrors that the Catholics had inflicted upon them. The English public had always suspected that the Irish were barbaric, and this confirmed their suspicions. Now they were out for blood.

The 1641 rebellion coincided with a crisis in the English Parliament that eventually turned to civil war. King Charles I was beheaded, and the leader who emerged from the crisis was one of the most puritanical Protestants in England—Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell had no problem believing that the Irish Catholics had committed any number of atrocities, so he put together one of the most lethal armies in Europe to punish them.

The Irish leadership at this time was split between the Old Irish— led by Owen Roe O’Neill, Hugh O’Neill’s nephew—and the Old English, led by the earl of Ormond from the Butler family. Although O’Neill and Ormond agreed that Ireland should remain Catholic, they opposed Cromwell for different reasons. Whereas O’Neill wanted Ireland to be independent, Ormond opposed Cromwell because he saw him as a usurper against the real king, Charles II. This ideological difference made it difficult for them to work together and ultimately aided Cromwell’s campaign of conquest.

It took Cromwell until 1649 to clear up things at home sufficiently to launch his Irish campaign, but, when he came, he meant business. Cromwell’s army of 20,000 was efficient, well armed, and prepared for a bloody war. The army’s initial engagements were marked by extreme savagery; Cromwell wanted revenge for the supposed Catholic butchery of 1641, and he wanted to terrify the rest of Ireland into surrendering.

Here were some of Cromwell’s less admirable achievements:

• He destroyed Drogheda, massacred the population, sent the heads of the leaders to Dublin on poles, and sold the survivors to slave plantations in Barbados.

• Also in Drogheda, he burned down St. Peter’s Church to abolish the people who sought asylum inside; he later called his acts “a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches.”

• Again at Drogheda, he had his soldiers kill the garrison commander by beating out the man’s brains with the commander’s own wooden leg.

• He massacred the people of Wexford, including 300 women seeking clemency at the town cross.

• He had all the Catholic citizens of Cork expelled from their homes.

• At Bishop’s Rock in Inishbofin, off the coast of Connemara, he tied a priest to a rock and forced his comrades to watch as the tide washed over him.

Cromwell aimed to terrify the population, and he certainly succeeded. By 1653 the Irish resistance was completely destroyed.

One of Cromwell’s goals in Ireland was to break the power of the Catholic Church, and for a time he succeeded. While on campaign, he had Catholic priests hunted down and banished. Throughout the country he had churches desecrated and their sacred books and art destroyed. The priests who escaped his army had to disguise themselves in order to remain on the island. Although Irish Catholicism was by no means destroyed, it would take decades to recover.

Once English control was firmly established in 1653, Parliament passed an act to confiscate all Catholic-owned land in Ireland. Cromwell wanted to transplant all Catholics to the western province of Connacht so that he could settle his own soldiers and Protestant supporters on the more fertile land of Munster, Leinster, and Ulster. Although the eventual settlement didn’t force all Catholics off their land, thousands of families were forced to leave their homes and resettle on the rocky terrain of Connacht.

Cromwell lingers on in Irish memory. Up until modern times, Irish mothers would use Cromwell as a bogeyman to frighten their children— “eat your greens or Cromwell will get you!” He is also used to explain the sorry state of ruined buildings all across Ireland—“that used to be a beautiful castle, but then Cromwell showed up. . . .”

The radical Protestant initiatives of Cromwell’s Parliament took a back seat after Cromwell’s death. His son, Henry Cromwell, carried the banner for a while, but the English were getting tired of the Cromwells and their Puritanism. In 1660 came the Restoration, in which Charles II reclaimed the throne.

Charles II was more lenient toward the Irish than Cromwell had been. He restored some former supporters to their previous positions— notably the earl of Ormond, who had joined him in exile. He was a Protestant, however, and while he didn’t share Cromwell’s enthusiasm for radical social engineering, he wasn’t interested in restoring land or position to Ireland’s Catholics.

A wave of excitement went through Ireland when James II rose to the English throne in 1685. James II was the first Catholic monarch in England since Mary, Queen of Scots. Former landowners who had lost their positions and property thought that James would restore them to their former glory. James boosted these men’s confidence when he appointed the earl of Tyrconnell, a Catholic, as his viceroy in Ireland.

To show James his support, Tyrconnell raised a Catholic army in Ireland. But Tyrconnell had misjudged—this wasn’t the sort of support that James needed just then. The king’s religion had made his reign shaky from the start. Anti-Catholic and anti-Irish sentiments were strong in England at that point, and an Irish-Catholic army was about the most alarming thing a good English Protestant could have imagined. Things went from shaky to really, really shaky, and in 1688 James fled to France.