Cromwell, the Lord Protector

by Antonia Fraser

  The first effect of the Cromwellian cannonade was to beat down the steeple of St Mary’s, and the tower at the corner of the wall. It was then decided, in Cromwell’s own words, “to do our utmost the next day to make breaches assaultable, and by the help of God to storm them”. The site chosen for this first assault was the church itself. As Cromwell said, it was not so much that it was an easy position to take (it clearly was not) but that having stormed it with their foot, they could hold it successfully against the enemy’s horse and foot until their own horse could enter. No other point in the town had a similar advantage. The assault began at 5 o’clock in the evening of n September. But from the first, the plan did not go smoothly. For one thing, the breaches made were too small to allow the horse to enter, so that it was the Parliamentary foot versus the combined forces of horse and foot on the other side. The enemy put up an exceptionally stiff resistance. Worst of all, Colonel James Castle, in command of a regiment of Parliamentary foot, was shot in the head and soon died, while a number of other officers and men were killed “doing their duty” (Cromwell’s words). As a result of this, coupled with the reckless courage of the defenders (which Cromwell in rather disgruntled tones noted God had granted them) and the natural “advantages of the place” the Cromwellian forces were obliged to retreat and abandon their breach altogether for the time being.16

  It is legitimate to speculate that this preliminary unlooked-for rejection, at the moment when Cromwell’s whole Irish military policy still swayed in the balance, was the weight which now brought it down on the side of violence. Although some of his men now got through near the Duleek Gate, and killed forty or fifty of the enemy, they still could not reach the town proper. It was time for the second assault on the church, if possible more bloody than the first, and still the dispute was fiercely hot, and still the English were being driven back. It was at this point that Cromwell himself, seeing their disheartenment, rushed into the breach, and held it until reinforcements under Colonel Ewer came up. Finally, and at much cost, with seven or eight thousand men of the Cromwellian army at last pouring through the walls, the church and surrounding entrenchments were seized.

  It was at this point, according to the evidence later given to Ormonde, that some offer of quarter was given to and accepted by certain Irish officers and soldiers, who agreed thus to lay down their arms. The matter, not surprisingly in the heat of battle, is obscure. It is true that Colonel Wall, the Irish leader, was killed. After this, some individual offers of mercy may have followed, so that some Irish officers may have laid down their arms genuinely believing that they would be spared. Two things however are certain. First, that no quarter at this point could possibly have been expected by the rules of war. Second, that no such offer was ever made officially. Ludlow in his memoirs specifically denies it was made. Whitelocke heard that “they all agreed in the not giving of quarter”.17 As for Cromwell, it is extraordinarily unlikely that, even if it had been put to him, he would ever have agreed to such a thing.

  For Cromwell was by this time in a white heat of passion. After the seizure of the church, Aston and those defenders with strength and spirit left to go, had fled across the traverse of the hill to the Mill Mount, and ensconced themselves once more in its huge squat fortification. Pursued by the Parliamentarians, there were some tentative approaches for surrender. But at this point the infuriated Cromwell rushed up, and ordered all to be put to the sword. In this manner, nearly every man was killed, including the defiant Aston, who was bludgeoned to death with his own wooden leg which the soldiers erroneously believed to be stuffed with gold-pieces. Blood-lust, that terrible emotion, now swept across the Parliamentary ranks, nor did their commander do anything to quell it, nor perhaps could much else have been expected in that cruel context. As the Parliamentary hordes swept through the streets of Drogheda, for it was too late now to cut off the commodious northern part of the town by its drawbridge, one thousand people died in the streets. Orders were given that all who had borne arms should be put to death, and although civilians were thus officially spared,* ( * It must be emphasized that Cromwell gave no direct orders for the massacre of the civilian inhabitants: when he related the casualties in a letter to Parliament, he did not mention them, and it was the Parliamentary printer preparing it as a pamphlet for public circulation who added the words at the end: “And many inhabitants.”18) undoubtedly many perished, either by accident or because the line of demarcation between combatant and noncombatant was impossible to draw in the hectic conditions of a sack where it was human nature for any man, civilian or otherwise, to hold a weapon in his hand.

  The friars and priests of Drogheda were another matter. Their fate was extreme. No orders were given to spare them. They were treated as combatants, and perhaps, poor wretches, some of them had fought to preserve their cause. But they died almost to a man. More horrible still was the fate of those defenders of another church, in the north of the town, St Peter’s, which also refused to surrender. Clustered in the steeple, those inside found their refuge turned into a huge funeral pyre, as the wooden pews of the church were gathered beneath them and set alight. The voice of a miserable human torch was heard crying out: “God damn me, God confound me; I burn, I burn.” Cromwell repeated the words afterwards in his battle report to Parliament without emotion. But one who jumped free and only broke a leg, was given quarter “for the extraordinariness of the thing”. By nightfall there were still men lurking on top of the city walls, and it was intended to abandon these and let them be starved into submission. But when some of their numbers were unwise enough to fire downwards and kill a few Parliamentarians, Cromwell ordered the officers amongst them to be “knocked on the head”, and every tenth man of the soldiers to be killed;* ( * From this type of reprisal derives the word “decimation”, which has come to mean, in popular usage, the destruction of a large number, but originally meant on the contrary that only one amongst ten of mutinous, cowardly or rebellious soldiers died.) the rest were to be sent to Barbados. According to the Verney family memoirs, some of the Mill Mount officers were put to death with more variety. Sir Edmund Verney, who was supposed to have been granted quarter, was enticed out of Cromwell’s presence and run through. And when Colonel Boyle was dining with Lord More the next day, one of Cromwell’s soldiers whispered to him that he must now come outside and meet his end. As Boyle rose from the table, Lady More asked him in surprise where he was going. With perfect savoir-faire, Boyle turned and replied: “Madam, to die.”19 It was an answer in the great tradition of those Cavaliers who had died with honour and a jest on their lips in the Civil War.

  Altogether somewhere between two and four thousand people died at Drogheda: Cromwell gave two, Dr Bate four, and the official verdict was nearly three thousand. At least there can be no argument as to how Cromwell looked on the whole affair afterwards. In his letter to Parliament via the Speaker concerning the battle, he wrote: “I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgement of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood; that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which are satisfactory grounds to such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret.” He then proceeded to his proverbial exhortations to Parliament to attribute all the glory of this victory to God. However for once God’s mercy was seen to have pursued a somewhat fluctuating course: “That which cause your men to storm so courageously, it was the Spirit of God, who gave your men courage, and took it away again; and gave the enemy courage, and took it away again; and gave your men courage again, and therewith this happy success. And therefore it is good that God alone have all the glory.”20 Baldly, even brutally, Cromwell had summed it all up from his own point of view. First of all, the Irish, those massacrists of 1641 (who Cromwell had somehow convinced himself were now congregated within the walls of Drogheda) had richly deserved their fate, or as Jones was supposed to have boasted beforehand, he would sacrifice the flower of the Irish army to the ghost of the English the
y had killed. Secondly, the massacre of Drogheda was in any case also an excellent practical move, which would help on the progress of peace in Ireland as a whole.

  Leaving aside the historical inaccuracy of Cromwell’s first point, his second point, if grim, did have much force. Drogheda, by rubbing in the lesson of a siege and a storm, undoubtedly frightened many lesser garrisons into peaceful submission. Cromwell hardly needed to underline the point in his message of summons to Dundalk soon after Drogheda, calling on them to surrender and “thereby prevent effusion of blood”. The terrified garrison, like that of Trim, simply abandoned their position. As Ludlow commented in his memoirs, “the extraordinary severity I presume was used to discourage others from making opposition”. Ormonde made the same point from the other side in his letter to King Charles n: “It is not to be imagined how great the terror is that those successes and the power of the rebels [i.e. the English] have struck into this people … [they] are yet so stupefied, that it is with great difficulty I can persuade them to act anything like men towards their own preservation.” Henry Fletcher, in his comparatively balanced seventeenth-century biography of Cromwell, defended his subject against the accusation of cruelty along the same lines: he had acted merely as a surgeon, only opening a vein to preserve “the whole Body of the Nation”. Militarily, then, the sack of Drogheda could fairly be said to have done what Cromwell wanted, and what was more, the achievement came at the outset of his expedition. In September 1649 the English situation was still far from secure in Ireland, for all the Rathmines victory, but Drogheda showed from the outset that Cromwell, one way or another, intended to be master. As Whitelocke commented of this delicate period: “if the Parliament had lost but one battle, all who were engaged with them had been in danger of ruin”.21

  But that, alas, cannot be the end of the story. It is not only that the propaganda war against Cromwell in Ireland began at this point with Ormonde, who described the events of the sack as “making as many several pictures of inhumanity as are contained in the Book of Martyrs or the Relation of Amboyna”,22 two extremely emotive comparisons to seventeenth-century Englishmen. They referred respectively to Foxe’s famous Book of (Protestant) Martyrs, and the pamphlet or Relation describing the atrocities of the Dutch against the English settlers in the East Indies in 1619 which had a great effect on English public opinion. Many and terrible were the Irish stories which grew and grew out of the fearful doings of that day and night at Drogheda; there were tales of young virgins killed by soldiers, of Jesuit priests pierced with stakes in the marketplace, of children used as shields by the assailants of the church, although Oliver’s own mercy was said to have been stirred by the sight of a tiny baby still trying hopelessly to feed from the breast of its dead modier. Propaganda is one thing. Personal guilt is another. It is personal guilt which interests the biographer. The conclusion cannot be escaped that Cromwell lost his self-control at Drogheda, literally saw red – the red of his comrades’ blood – after the failure of the first assaults, and was seized with one of those sudden brief and cataclysmic rages which would lead him later to dissolve Parliament by force and sweep away that historic bauble. There were good military reasons for behaving as he did, but they were not the motives which animated him at the time, during the day and night of uncalculated butchery. The slaughter itself stood quite outside his usual record of careful mercy as a soldier, and as he said himself, under other circumstances would have induced “remorse and regret”.

  And so quickly over, in the heat of the moment, in a foreign land, occurred the incident that has blackened Oliver Cromwell’s name down history for over three hundred years. Even so, it is important to realize that at die time the reaction to the news in England itself was one of delight and rejoicing. The ministers gave out the happy tidings from the pulpits; 30 October was set aside to be a day of public thanksgiving. More practically, an additional body of troops was ordered to be sent across the Channel. All public expressions were those of satisfied acclaim: the heinous Irish rebels had received their just rewards.

  * * *

  With Drogheda, Dundalk and Trim emasculated, Cromwell harried a little of Meath and Westmeadi, waiting for news of Colonel Venables from Ulster. Perhaps he visited Trim, perhaps Ballinlough, more certainly Trubly Castle. To this period accrue many legends, the most prominent being the story of Lord Plunkett who was watering his horse at the ford at the same time as Cromwell and saw the reflection of the Englishman’s dreaded countenance in the stream. He hurled his naked blade at the tyrant but in vain; Lord Plunkett, son of the Earl of Louth, was captured and condemned to death. However when he asked to die with his good sword in his hand against any two of Cromwell’s officers, the General was moved by his spirit to grant him pardon, on condition that there should always be an Oliver in the Plunkett family. Not all the details of this engaging tale can be correct, there had already been Olivers among the Louths since die ist Earl of Louth a hundred years earlier.23 Nevertheless throughout Cromwell’s time in Ireland there is a steady substratum of stories of clemency shown towards personal courage beneath the layers of harsher tales, to which pleasant tradition this belongs. Soon Cromwell heard with delight that Venables had captured Carlingford and Newry with small cost, and later Belfast; with Sir Charles Coote established in Down in Antrim, the north was secured. It was time for Cromwell to turn towards the soudi where a more formidable resistance might be expected in southern Leinster and Munster, based on their prolific seaports.

  But first Cromwell called in again on Dublin, there to be united with Mrs Cromwell, who brought with her not only the delights of her company, but also a quantity of household goods and furniture. According to the Venetian Ambassador, she fully intended “to enjoy … the title and command of Vicereine, if the plan [the subjugation of Ireland] succeeds”. Perhaps it was some of this same furniture which was seized on Cromwell’s march soudi, during a raid down from the hilly passes of the Wicklow mountains carried out by the buccaneering Christopher Tothill; even Cromwell’s own horse fell a victim, although its master was not astride at die time, and Tothill subsequently refused to exchange it for Ł100, regarding it as a useful souvenir.24 In other respects the expedition down the fair Wicklow coastline was staid; Cromwell had a formidable well-equipped body of men, and the fleet sailed majestically down beside them in support. On the way to Wexford, there was a pause to take Enniscordiy Castle, a neat little castle in another orderly quayside town, a miniature version of Drogheda. It surrendered without a blow. So it was on down the wooded riverside road to the port of Wexford, close to the extreme soudi-east tip of Ireland.

  Wexford, with “its brave spacious harbour” in the words of Sir William Brereton “capacious of many thousand sail”, had a twofold importance for the invaders. In the first place it was the natural jumpingoffand jumping-in place for the Continent, and as such must be quelled, added to which the inhabitants were suspected of having recently dipped their fingers in the muddy waters of piracy. Secondly, the season, that ineluctable factor of all foreign campaigns, was drawing on, and the weather was already markedly wet and windy. The army was not improving in health as a result, and “the country sickness” or dysentery was taking a fearful toll. It was necessary to think of winter quarters, for which Wexford provided the obvious focus. Wexford was reached on I October by the van of the army, and the rest followed the next day; over seven thousand foot and two thousand horse now encamped in the north-west corner of the city. Their camp was “almost drowned in rain and dew” as they waited for the furious storms to subside in order to unload their siege-guns and ammunition from the ships now blockading the harbour: so wrote Robert Wallop the regicide, who accompanied the expedition, in the anonymous narrative believed to be his.25

  Within Wexford itself, the split between military governor and town population, already noted in the case of Aston and the inhabitants of Drogheda, was much magnified. Indeed the town had already wished to surrender and only the arrival of that governor in the shape of Colone
l David Sinnott with an extra one thousand, five hundred men, at the orders of Ormonde, had stiffened its weakening backbone. Even so, the civic dignitaries of the town were far more inclined to peace than war, and as Sinnott told Ormonde: “to speak the truth nakedly, I find and perceive them rather inclined to capitulate and take conditions of the enemy”. There were many Catholics within Wexford who preferred the prospect of Cromwell to that of Ormonde’s confederation. Some of the inhabitants under Hugh Rochford tried to negotiate with Cromwell, and the Mayor and Aldermen made their feelings clear by serving Cromwell with placatory offerings of sack, strong waters and strong beer throughout his negotiations with Sinnott. When the fort of Rosslare, which guarded the harbour, was evacuated by the defenders “by the bounty of Heaven”, Cromwell had some reason to hope for a tranquil acquisition of the whole town.