In the north the native Irish appointed Bishop Heber MacMahon as their leader. But it was hopeless: the parliamentarian cavalry slaughtered his men at Scariffhollis, overlooking Lough Swilly, on 21 June 1650. The victor, Sir Charles Coote, put his prisoners, senior officers included, to the sword. Later captured in Enniskillen, Bishop MacMahon was hanged and his head was then fixed on one of the gates of Derry.
In the south Ireton besieged Limerick for two months. He brought in heavy guns by sea, including mortars firing exploding shells. A battery of twenty-eight guns pounded the city for days. When citizens attempted to leave, Ireton had them hanged, including one little girl. On 27 October the city surrendered. Apart from nearly a thousand men of the garrison killed in the fighting, Ireton reckoned that about 5,000 persons had perished ‘by the sword without and the famine and plague within’. Galway was the last city to submit, in May 1652.
Boats had to be dragged by oxen to the lakes of Killarney before Lord Muskerry would surrender Ross Castle in June 1652. Fighting did not actually stop until February 1653 when the western islands of Inishbofin, Inishturk and Clare Island surrendered.
The destruction of war was evident everywhere. Dr William Petty, the army’s physician-general, estimated that 504,000 native Irish and 112,000 colonists and English troops had perished between 1641 and 1652. Petty reckoned that another 100,000 Irish men, women and children had been forcibly transported to the colonies in the West Indies and in North America.
Famine swept through the country, and then bubonic plague began to take its toll. Colonel Jones wrote:
It fearfully broke out in Cashel, the people being taken suddenly with madness, whereof they die instantly; twenty died in that manner in three days in that little town.
Colonel Richard Lawrence wrote:
About the years 1652 and 1653 the plague and famine had swept away whole countries that a man might travel twenty or thirty miles and not see a living creature, either man, beast, or bird, they being either all dead or had quit those desolate places.
Campaigning troops had routinely destroyed stores of food and seized the rest for their own use. Colonel George Cooke, governor of Wexford, reported in 1652:
In searching the woods and bogs we found great store of corn, which we burn, also all the houses and cabins we could find; in all of which we found plenty of corn: we continued burning and destroying for four days.... He was an idle soldier who had not a fat lamb, veal, pig, poultry or all of them, every night to his supper. The enemy in these parts chiefly depended upon this country for provision. I believe we have destroyed as much as would have served some thousands of them until next harvest.
Feeding on corpses of cattle, horses and—no doubt—people, packs of wolves grew fat and numerous. In December 1652 a public wolf hunt was organised in Castleknock on the very outskirts of Dublin. Military commanders received orders to organise wolf hunts in their area. One captain leasing land in Co. Dublin paid part of his rent in wolves’ heads, each one worth £5. By March 1655 £243 5s 4d had been paid out in rewards for killing wolves. The going rate was £6 for a she-wolf, £5 for a dog-wolf, and £2 for a cub.
Retribution did not end with the fighting. People wondered when the trials and executions would stop. Despite his possession of a safe-conduct, the poet and musician Piers Ferriter was hanged at Killarney, together with a bishop and a priest. Theobald Burke, Viscount Mayo, faced a firing-squad in Galway city. In February 1653 Colonel Robert Venables reported: ‘It hath pleased God to deliver into your hands the ringleader in the late bloody massacres and rebellions, Sir Phelim O’Neill.’ Convicted in Dublin, he was hanged, drawn and quartered.
By 1654 more than 200 men had been tried and executed by Cromwell’s special commission. Catholic priests had been given twenty days to get out of Ireland. Many who dared to stay were hunted down and put to death. For the majority of the Irish, the greatest fear was confiscation of their lands. For Cromwell was now putting into effect his threat that he would send Catholics ‘to Hell or Connacht’.
Episode 99
‘TO HELL OR CONNACHT’
The Gaelic poet Seán O’Connell described Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland as ‘the war that finished Ireland’. This was close to the truth. Much of the island had been laid waste. The government made an appeal for charitable donations for
the great multitudes of poore, swarming in all partes of this nation, occasioned by the devastations of the country ... that frequently some [are] found feeding on carrion and weeds, some starved in the highways, and many times poore children, who lost their parents, or deserted by them, are found exposed to, and some of them fed upon by ravening wolves and other beasts of prey.
Cromwell had once declared that the Catholics of Ireland could go ‘to Hell or Connacht’. In his Act of Settlement in 1652 he spelled out what he meant by this. Large numbers of people were entirely exempt from life or pardon. Of the remainder, only those who could prove ‘constant good affection’ to the cause of parliament could keep their estates. However, very few in Ireland could prove constant support for parliament over the past ten years. Hence almost all Catholic landowners were to lose their estates entirely and get smaller ones west of the River Shannon—in the province of Connacht.
Cromwell was not just concerned to punish. He had to find the cost of his conquest, a sum reaching £3,500,000. His soldiers were owed £1,750,000 in back pay. ‘Adventurers’—men who had adventured or lent money to the government—were due to receive 2,500,000 acres of Irish land in return for their investment. It was quite clear that the only way to meet the English government’s debts was to confiscate most of the land held by Catholics.
Under the Act of Settlement about 80,000 men were liable for the death penalty—that is around half the adult males then living in Ireland. In fact the government did not attempt this kind of carnage. Hundreds, not tens of thousands, were executed. Otherwise, the price paid by the Catholics of Ireland was very high.
A general search of the countryside was ordered for those who had not transplanted themselves to Connacht. Courts martial condemned to death some who had failed to move in time. Edward Hetherington, sentenced by a court sitting in St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, was hanged with placards on his chest and back bearing the words ‘For Not Transplanting’.
Miserable groups of Catholics gathered at Loughrea in Co. Galway. Here five commissioners had to consider their claims to land in Connacht, supposed to be a specified fraction of the estates they been forced to give up. Each claimant carried with them passports and certificates issued by revenue officers. Some of these certificates survive:
Sir Nicholas Comyn, numb at one side of his body of a dead palsy, accompanied only by his lady, Catherine Comyn, aged thirty-five years, brown hair, middle stature; having no substance, but expecting the benefit of his qualification ...
Pierce, Viscount Ikerran, going with seventeen persons, four cows, five garrans, twenty-four sheep and two swine, and claiming against sixteen acres of winter corn ...
Ignatius Stacpole of Limerick, orphant, aged eleven years, flaxen haire, full face, low stature; Katherine Stacpole, orphant, sister to the said Ignatius, aged eight years, flaxen haire, full face; having no substance to relieve themselves, but desireth the benefit of his claim before the commissioners of the revenue ...
The legislation demanded the complete clearance of Catholics of every class from the counties lying between the River Boyne and the River Barrow. This proved impossible. In practice, towns such as Dublin, Drogheda, Carlow and Wexford could not survive without Catholic tradesmen. And the new owners of land wanted humble Catholic labourers to stay on to help them get their farms up and running.
Protestants who had not shown ‘constant good affection’ to the cause of parliament were supposed to lose some of their estates. In the end they were let off with fines, most of which were never paid. What is clear is that Catholics almost disappeared as a property-owning class east of the Shannon. Indeed, out of 380 Catholics who had
owned land in Co. Wexford before the war, 297 were left with nothing at all by 1657.
In lieu of their back pay, 33,419 soldiers got what were called ‘debentures’—pieces of paper entitling them to Irish land. Many sold these, usually at great loss, to land speculators. About 12,000 stayed to become Irish farmers. Quite contrary to Cromwell’s plans, these men went native very quickly. They were thinly scattered across the countryside and defied an ordinance forbidding them to marry Irish girls. Many, in time, became Catholics. Forty years later a visiting Englishman commented on the survival of Irish culture: ‘We cannot wonder at this when we consider how many there are of the children of Oliver’s soldiers in Ireland who cannot speak one word of English.’
Meanwhile, many Irishmen who had lost everything took to the hills and bogs to live as bandits—or, as they were called at the time, ‘tories’.
Episode 100
PRIESTS AND TORIES
While Cromwell still ruled, Catholic worship was illegal in Ireland. Around a thousand priests left the country; those who stayed were in peril of their lives; many were executed; and people who sheltered priests ran the risk of imprisonment. Inishbofin Island off the coast of Galway became an internment camp for priests. A Jesuit priest described conditions in 1656:
We live, for the most part, in the mountains and forests ... to escape the cavalry of the heretics. Catholics flock to us, whom we refresh by the Word of God and consolation of the Sacraments.... In spite of all the precautions used to exercise our evangelical ministry in secret, the Cromwellians often discover it; and then the wild beast was never hunted with more fury, nor tracked with more pertinacity, through mountains, woods and bogs, than the priest!
Outlawed worship was confined to a ‘Mass rock’ in a remote place. Edmund O’Reilly, Archbishop of Armagh, recalled: ‘I made for myself a small hut in a mountainous district, one here, another there, so that no one else should suffer for my sake.’ Even so, he managed to maintain twenty-two priests in the county of Armagh: ‘They visit the sick by night; they celebrate Mass before and round about dawn, and that in hiding places and recesses, having appointed scouts to look around and with eyes and ears agog to keep watch lest the soldiers come by surprise.’
The restoration of Charles II in 1660 ushered in a new era of toleration for all. Presbyterian ministers were allowed to return, and Catholic worship became public again. Catholic gentlemen who had lost their estates in Cromwell’s time now hoped to get them back. Charles, however much he sympathised with them, was in no position to face down the Protestants who now owned most of the land of Ireland. The only notable Catholic who got his estates back was the Earl of Antrim.
Around 34,000 Irish Catholic soldiers left the country to serve in the armies of France and Spain. About 12,000 were transported to the West Indies—often they married black slaves there, and amongst their descendants on St Kitts and Montserrat today the Irish accent is very distinct. Other defeated soldiers and men who had lost their lands lived as outlaws. They were known as ‘tories’, from the Irish word tóraidhe, which means a ‘pursuer’ or bandit.
Tories continued their banditry throughout the reign of Charles II. One of the most notorious was Redmond O’Hanlon. Imprisoned for stealing horses, he bribed his way out of Armagh jail, and, according to a popular biography published in 1681, this ‘Incomparable and Indefatigable Tory ... despairing of mercy or pardon ... resolved to abandon himself to all Lewdness and to become a perfect bird of Prey.’ His robberies became so outrageous that landowners cut down the Glen Woods, O’Hanlon’s hideout just south of Poyntzpass, and paid thirty men ninepence a day for three months to track down the outlaw. Wounded, O’Hanlon had to lie up on Ram’s Island in Lough Neagh, but soon he resumed his brigandage in Co. Fermanagh. At the funeral of a gentleman he murdered in 1679 the clergyman denounced O’Hanlon as
a cunning and dangerous fellow who though Proclaimed as Outlaw with the rest of his Crew and summs of Money upon their heads, yet he raigns still and keeps all in subjection so far that ’tis credibly reported he raises more in a year by contribution à la mode de France, than the King’s Land-Taxes and Chimney Money come to.
Reports of O’Hanlon’s daring now appeared in London newspapers as he extended his plundering activities into Down, Leitrim and Roscommon in October 1679. Eventually Redmond O’Hanlon was shot dead by his foster-brother, who had been handsomely bribed by Dublin Castle to do the deed.
In a few years most of the tories had been rounded up and killed. Sir William Stewart of Newtownstewart, Co. Tyrone, reported in March 1683:
There was never such a winter for country sports as the last, and I have enjoyed them in much perfection. I have very good hawks and hounds, but we have not had more success in any sport than tory-hunting. The gentlemen of the country have been so hearty in that chase that of thirteen in the county where I live in November, the last was killed two days before I left home.
Later this nursery rhyme became popular:
Ho! Brother Tadhg, what is your story?
I went to the wood and shot a tory,
I went to the wood and shot another,
Was it the same or was it his brother?
I hunted him in, I hunted him out,
Three times through the bog and about and about,
Till out of a bush I spied his head
So I levelled my gun and shot him dead!
The disappearance of tories was a sign that Ireland was becoming more peaceful and prosperous.
Episode 101
RESTORATION IRELAND
In 1682 several writers were commissioned to compile what were described as ‘statistical accounts’ of districts of Ireland for a ‘Grand Atlas’. The publication of the volume on Ireland fell through, but a few of these descriptions survive. They demonstrate that the island was enjoying a remarkable recovery following the destruction and dislocation of Cromwell’s time. In his description of Oneilland barony in north Armagh William Brooke observed:
The soile of this Barony of O’Nealand is very deep and fertile, being productive of all Sorts of grain, as wheat, Rye, Barly, Oats, &c. The vast quantity of wheat that is yearly carried hence into the County of Antrim, besides the maintenance of above two thousand Familys with bread ... most whereof being English, do plainly demonstrate it to be the granary of Ulster ... and as it Excells all the rest for Corn, so it challenges the preference for fruit trees, good sider being sold here for 30 shillings the hogshead.
As under the terms of their leases tenants were made to plant apple trees, Brooke predicted that ‘this County twenty or thirty years hence will be little inferiour to the best sider county in England’. In and about Lurgan, he continued, ‘is managed the greatest Linnen manufacture in Ireland’, helping to make this barony ‘a paradise of pleasure’.
William Montgomery described a peaceful and flourishing settlement in the Ards peninsula:
The inhabitants doe Manure & Dung the land with sea oar by them called Tangle which being spread on it and plowed down makes winter grain & summer Barly grow in aboundance without weeds cocle or tares; the roads are pleasant & smooth in depth of winter.
The salt marsh was so valued for its medicinal herbs that Lord Montgomery had refused an offer of £2,000 made by the ‘Netherland Dutch’ to lease it.
Richard Dobbs of Carrickfergus was impressed by the industry of the people of Islandmagee;
The people here think that no profit can be made but by ploughing, in which the men spend their whole time, except the summer in bringing home firing; and the women theirs, in spinning and making linen cloth, and some ordinary woollen for their family’s use.
He was amazed at their bravery in lowering themselves by horse leathers down the cliffs at the Gobbins to collect gulls’ eggs to supplement their diet of oatmeal.
These accounts help to show that it was during the Restoration era that the plantation in Ulster really took off. Every year Scots and English families strengthened the British colony in the north, and towns th
ere at last began to grow.
Roderic O’Flaherty was probably surprised to be invited to contribute a statistical account of West Connacht. A Catholic, and a leading member of the ruling family of Connemara, he had lost nearly everything as a result of the Cromwellian confiscations. Severed from his ancestral territory, he now made a meagre living as a scholar and a writer. He explained:
I live a banished man within the bounds of my native soil; a spectator of others enriched by my birthright; an object of condoling to my relations and friends, and a condoler of their miseries.
Normally O’Flaherty wrote in Latin—this statistical account would have to be written in what was to him a foreign language, English. He also had to be very careful not to express any opinions about recent events. This landscape of the far west he was asked to describe was very different from the fertile plains on the other side of the country. Gaelic scholars of the past had felt it beneath their dignity to tell how those on the bottom rung of society scratched a living from the ground. O’Flaherty was the first to do so. He showed—in rather halting English—how hard poor people worked in order to raise corn planted in traditional ridges in the rain-soaked, thin, infertile and rock-strewn soils of windswept Connemara:
A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process Page 28
