Cromwell, the Lord Protector

by Antonia Fraser

  The hideous hardship consequent upon any such major removal involving a lengthy and onerous journey to unknown territories, was made still worse by the timing of the Act. It was necessary for the transplantation to be completed by those concerned before 1 May 1654 on pain of death. As a result, many not only had to travel in winter time, but were also unable to sow the fields of their new domains in time to assure the next year’s harvest. In the meantime the fruits of the previous year’s yield had to be abandoned to the incomers. It was no wonder that the offices from which the whole complicated process was being organized were choked with appeals for stay of execution, some on grounds of injustice, others of sheer humanity. It seemed from the tone of these appeals that as in some scene of a melancholy parable the lame, the halt and the blind were being cast out into highways and by-ways – and so indeed they were, except that they had to face in addition to their Biblical fate, the mournful rigours of an Irish winter. For as the greedy new owners started to arrive at the properties, it was hardly likely that they would listen sympathetically to pleas of injustice which, if heard, would deny them the benefits of their acquisition.

  The sufferings of the peasants should in theory at least have been even more cruel than those of their former masters, and indeed the fact that so many of the native Irish were too poor to employ the scriveners who might lodge appeals for them, did contribute materially to their grievances. On the other hand paradoxically the very lowliness of their station often protected them from the worst consequences of removal. Quite simply, the land had to be worked by someone. Since English workers failed to arrive, for all the ardent Protestant hopes of the English Parliament, the new owners had perforce to make do with the old labourers. Thus the deliberate separation of nations envisaged by the Act broke down on a homely practical point. A monk, living in disguise in the household of the Governor of Limerick, overheard him laying down three good reasons for retaining the Irish peasants in situ; first, deprived of their priests and their gentry, they would quickly be converted to Protestantism; secondly, they would prevent the English degenerating themselves into peasants, because, thirdly, they were so very useful. Nevertheless, for all this unintentional amelioration, the result of the transplantations has been described recently as “a transference of the sources of wealth and power from Catholics to Protestants. What it created was not a Protestant community but a Protestant upper class.”29

  From the soldiers’ point of view too, the drawing of the lots to give them their new homes was by no means always satisfactory. For one thing, there were many different grades of Army arrears, including those of the men currently under arms, those who had been under Jones in Dublin and in Derry under Coote and Monk, and then the further arrears for English service before 1649, for which payment had also been staved off with promise of eventual satisfaction from Irish land. Lastly, there was the former Protestant army of Munster. Over the actual drawing of the lots human nature was not always seen at its best. Some of the Munster officers had helpfully declared themselves anxious to accept the will of God on the subject, i.e. the dictates of the lot, in that they would be far more content with a barren mountain sent by the Lord than with a fruitful valley of their own choice. But when the Lord did send them a barren mountain, or at least an area of Kerry near the lakes of Killarney, they were furious, and in terms which no modern tourist would agree with, designated their selection as “a refuse country”. The Leinster and Ulster agents then had the satisfaction of reminding the officers of their previous pious utterances. Furthermore, so out of touch was London with what was actually going on in Ireland, that the opportunities for injustice at the moment of handover were increased by sheer ignorance of Irish conditions. Sometimes when the soldiers arrived and found the previous occupants still inhabiting their dwellings, there was unpleasant violence. Indeed, one of the great arguments used to insist on the ejection of the Irish to a quite different quarter of the country by Colonel Richard Lawrence, a member of the Commission of Transplantation, was the bitterness that the sight of their former properties in alien hands would provoke in them. The English settlers would have to endure the curses of the Irish dispossessed every time they passed their old home, and the Irish were a famously tenacious race.30

  Nevertheless for all these bitter concomitants, the settlement did proceed, if slowly. The method used was to exchange a lot, once drawn, for a soldier’s debenture which he would surrender. In return he received a certificate of satisfaction. In this method, under the auspices of Fleetwood, and later of Henry Cromwell, the settlement of the Army was achieved in three stages in September 1655 and July and November 1656. As Fleetwood put in his official announcement on the subject: “And great is your mercy, that after all your hardships and difficulties you may sit down.” It was in no sense a blemish upon their past services that they were now being disbanded: “Look upon it as of the Lord’s appointing.”

  Unfortunately there were still further problems in the working out of the Lord’s appointing to be faced, including the fact that many of the officers had bought out their men’s debentures, either out of a desire to build up a body of land as an estate for themselves, or out of sheer helpfulness towards their subordinates in distress at lack of ready cash.* ( In this manner great estates were built up, as many officers were also under another hat Adventurers. Captain Henry Pakenham, for example, of Abbott’s Dragoons, built up his Westmeath estate by three methods: land owing to him as an Adventurer, military debentures, and outright acquisition by purchase.32) Some officers went further and cheated their men. And those who did enjoy the rewards of their labour were confronted with the problem of domestic bliss. As in Scotland, the English soldiers were forbidden to wed the girls of the country. But of course many did so, employing a series of ruses to circumvent this distasteful denial of local delights. “Wives would be presented as Protestant converts, and the practice became so widespread that Ireton had to have the brides examined by a board of military Saints to make sure that the conversion had been on a sufficiently serious level. Soldiers who could be proved to have broken the law and wed an unashamedly Irish colleen, could in their turn be sent to Connaught, brides and all.31

  In all these hardships, there was more to be noted of English territorial rapacity and blindness to the sheer natural rights of the Irish, than calculated oppression. And not every Englishman remained indifferent to the sufferings of those turned out of their homes and condemned to a new life in what was virtually a wilderness. In 1655 Vincent Gookin wrote his famous pamphlet The Great Case of Transplantation discussed by a wellwisher to the good of the Commonwealth of England. A man of admirable commonsense, lacking any personal land hunger and with the quality, rare in English circles, of actually liking the Irish, Gookin pointed out the fatal dissensions which the English policy was sowing in the whole fabric of a country. Irish husbandry was being wrecked, the Irish (already explained to Europe by Nouvelles Ordinaires as Italian banditti) were being turned into brigands and all this because it was the only alternative they had to sheer starvation. As for those incarcerated in their native enclave of Connaught, their western coastline gave them ample opportunity to solicit seditious foreign aid. What indeed had the wretched Irish to lose by outright resistance to the forces of transplantation, so crudely were they administered? Many were reckoning that even if death were the penalty for refusal, they might as well die valiantly in the homes of their ancestors as woefully on the road to Clare or Connaught. “Can it be imagined,” Gookin wrote, “that a whole nation will drive like geese at the hat upon a stick?” And his final words were even more prescient: “The unsettling of a nation is easy work; the settling is not. It had been better if Ireland had been thrown into the sea before the first engagement in it, if it is never to be settled.” But the response of the English Army was to convince themselves that Gookin must have been bribed.33

  Oliver Cromwell himself, from whom this settlement derived its name, has not merited the consequent opprobrium. It was the whole
attitude of the English to the Irish which lay at the root of the transplantations, certainly not the inspiration of one man. What was more, in this instance, Cromwell personally had little to do with the implementation of a policy which he had not instigated, and which was dictated so firmly by English financial considerations. The detailed lines of the settlement were also laid down before he became Protector. He persisted throughout the Protectorate in envisaging Ireland as a kind of glorified arena for future Protestant colonization, a prospect he had already toyed with in the 16405 when it was rumoured that he himself had considered emigrating. These dreams were of a somewhat visionary nature, and corresponded but little to the realities of storm and stress taking place within the country itself. But since Cromwell never visited Ireland again, he, like so many of his English contemporaries in the same happy position, never had to match dream to reality.

  Thus Ireland’s Natural History, published in 1652 and dedicated jointly to Cromwell and Fleetwood, looked forward to the replanting of the country not only by Adventurers, but further Protestant settlers from Europe, possibly some exiled Bohemians or even some Dutch. That was just the sort of plan which commended itself to Cromwell’s imagination. In January 1655 there was an idea of planting the town of Sligo from New England, and land was set apart for those families who were thus expected to arrive; only a very few did finally turn up at Limerick in 1656. On the whole the feelings of the proposed settlers were best expressed by a communications from the people of New England to Cromwell as early as 1650. It referred to Oliver’s already formed desire that they should recolonize the island – “that desolate Ireland which hath been drenched and steeped in blood, may be moistened and soaked with the waters of the sanctuary”. Their response was on the surface dutiful: “hoping that as we came by a call of God to serve him here, so if the Lord’s mind shall clearly appear to give us a sufficient call to remove into Ireland, to serve him there, we shall cheerfully and thankfully embrace the same”. But their detailed demands were more difficult to satisfy; it was not only that they objected to the possible presence of native Irish amongst them (for that prerequisite would now be satisfied by Government policy) but their stipulations concerning their new situation were healthily worldly, including that “in regard we come from a pure air, we may have a place in the more healthful part of the country”.34 In the event, therefore, for all Cromwell’s visionary enthusiasm, it was decided that the call of God was not clear enough; so this interesting attempt to reverse the traditional crossing from Ireland to the New World never actually succeeded.

  If Cromwell’s concern for Ireland was along such mystic lines of Protestant colonization, his practical interventions were all along the lines of mercy. It was not only towns like captured Fethard which were able to appeal to his clemency with success. Individuals too, who were fortunate enough to catch at his sympathies with their cases, could have their lot ameliorated. He protested strongly, although it seems vainly, on behalf of Richard Nugent, Earl of Westmeath whose articles of surrender as Irish commander of Leinster were being breached by the civil authorities “being sensible how much the faith of the army and our own honour and justice is concerned in the just performance of the articles”. Where even Cromwell’s interventions failed to succeed, this again merely proved how strong the system was that was bringing about these miseries, and how little one individual could do to alter it, for better or for worse. Already the target for hundreds of private petitions for assistance in England, Cromwell now received the equivalent solicitations from Ireland. A typical case was that of William Spenser, grandson of the poet Edmund Spenser, but unlike his progenitor reared as a Catholic, who was trying to preserve his estate at Kilcolman on the Blackwater from the acquisitive grasp of the soldiers. Spenser’s own petition pointed out that he had only been seven years old at the time of the rebellion, and had moreover “utterly renounced the Popish religion since coming to the years of discretion”. To this Oliver added his own personal plea based on Spenser’s distinguished ancestry: this was the grandson of the man “who by his writings touching the reduction of the Irish to civility brought on him the odium of that nation”. Furthermore the gentleman concerned was “of a civil conversation”, and even his extremity had not brought him “to put upon indiscreet or evil practices for a livelihood”.35 Yet even this strong piece of pleading did not save Spenser’s lands since they had already been designated for the soldiers.

  The case of the Catholic and Royalist Lord Ikerrin, turned out with his wife and child into utter poverty, was an even more striking example of Cromwell’s personally compassionate temperament, since here were no political arguments to his ancestry, only the sheer humanity of the issue. Lord Ikerrin had suffered fearful tribulations, including illness, in spite of which he was ordered to leave without delay. A personal appeal to the Protector got this pleading back on his behalf: “we being very sensible of the extreme poor and miserable condition in which his lordship now is, even to the want of sustenance to support his life; we could not but commiserate his sad and distressed condition by helping to a little relief… Indeed, he is a miserable object of pity, and therefore we desire that care be taken of him.”36 But by the Restoration, poor Lord Ikerrin was dead and his estate of Lismalin had gone to the soldiers: it is pleasant to record that in 1666 his son (described however as “an innocent Protestant”) got the estate back.

  The most remarkable case of private mercy was that of Lady Ormonde, wife of the arch-Royalist General and heiress of the Desmond family, whose love match to Ormonde had united Butler and Desmond estates. She, of all ladies, might have been allowed to suffer. But in May 1653 she wrote off boldly to the Lord-General from Caen, the seat of her exile, “having by a very general fame received assurance of your Lordship’s inclinations to make use of your power for the obliging of such in general as stand in need of protection and assistance from it . . .”, and in August made a personal visit. Nor was she disappointed in her hopes, particularly as a leading Puritan in Dublin discoursed on her virtues. Cromwell decided that it was terrible that this worthy lady should “want bread” for the bad luck of having “a delinquent lord”. So first she received back some property and money belonging to Ormonde to relieve her distress, and later some of her own, all merely on the condition that she would not use it to aid her husband. By 1655 she was able as a result to fetch her children from London. Even Ormonde’s mother, Lady Thurles, who was actually a Catholic, was also helped, for although she lost her dower lands, she avoided transplantation.37 As for Lady Ormonde, Cromwell evidently respected her persistence, like the judge and the importunate widow of the parable.

  He was all the more infuriated therefore when a piece of Thurloe’s espionage gave him cause to believe that his patronage had been deliberately betrayed. To Lord Broghill, Oliver suddenly burst out in one of his sharp tempers on the subject of Lady Ormonde: “You have undertaken indeed for the quietness of a fine person,” he said tauntingly and after discoursing on Lady Ormonde’s ingratitude, coupled with his own generosity, he exclaimed: “But I find she is a wicked woman, and she shall not have a farthing of it.” In the extremes of his rage, he even threatened to have the distinguished lady “carted [dragged at the cart-tail] besides”. Broghill, who knew his Protector, kept a cool head at all this frenzy and merely asked what were the grounds of his fury. He received the gruff reply: “Enough.” Cromwell then proceeded to throw down a highly incriminating intercepted letter of Royalist intrigue, which started off with a series of endearments to Ormonde. At the sight Broghill merely smiled. The grounds were not enough. For the letter turned out to be in the hand of the wayward and extremely beautiful Lady Isabella Thynne, Ormonde’s mistress. At this piece of intelligence, Oliver’s anger turned to “a merry drollery”. Lady Ormonde’s reputation was saved (if that of Lady Isabella was sacrificed.)38

  How regrettable, then, that at a later date after the Penruddock rising, amongst those implicated were Lady Ormonde’s sons, Lord Ossory and Lord Richard Butler
, Lord Ossory in particular having received favours from Cromwell at his mother’s instance. He was now put in the Tower, despite all Lady Ormonde’s pleas to the Protector. Nevertheless Oliver continued to display much courtesy towards his interlocutrix: when Lady Ormonde offered her own life in exchange for her son’s, he replied that he “begged to be excused in that respect”, adding that no one in the world frightened him more than Lady Ormonde. In reply Lady Ormonde enquired why she, who was so innocent, should be represented as someone who was so terrible. To this Cromwell responded with an elaborate piece of flattery: “No Madam, that is not the case; but your worth has gained you so great an influence upon all the commanders of our party, and we know so well your power over the other party, that it is in your Ladyship’s heart to act what you please.” Lady Ormonde could only reply that she supposed his words must constitute a compliment. Nevertheless this gallant fencing was all she could get out of the Protector for some time, despite the care he took in escorting her to her chair or coach after audiences – very unlike other great persons, she noted. It was not until Ossory was gravely ill of plague that he was allowed to go abroad to Holland. At last Lady Ormonde could relax her vigilance and devote herself to “tillage and country life” at Dunmore.39