What about sanctimonious Cromwell and his Ironsides that
put the women and children of Drahada to the sword with the
Bible text God is Love pasted around the mouth of his Canon?
James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922 Long ago there lived a terrible bad
man named Oliver Cromwell, and about the middle of the 16th
century he came to Ireland with a band of soldiers and
adventurers. They committed great slaughter
and other file deeds. They also drove the farmers and
peasants out of their homes to the poor lands of Conuct or a
well known place with a climate considerably hotter.
This man Cromwell placed his soldiers and adventurers in
large tracts of the best lands from where the Irish farmers
were driven. These men were called landlords.
These landlords, after some time, divided some of their
estates into small farms and placed tenants on them, from
whom they got huge rents. Collector Kathleen Gibney
address Bohemeen County Mead Informant Tommy Gibney
Oliver Cromwell. His name is celebrated as an
important figure of parliamentary democracy in the
United Kingdom. Cromwell dispatched a king.
It was the first republican and an advocate for democracy in
Ireland. However, his lasting effect is
one of a genocidal tyrant. His consideration of the Irish
people as inhuman was self professed, and the inhumanity
for which he inflicted arguably places him in a position of
contempt higher than any royal. An Irish folklore.
This contempt is plain to be seen.
Cromwell is written as a personal friend or assistant of
Satan, if not the devil Incarnate, on Khuga, A Kriyagna
era, the war that finished Ireland.
This is what a conquest of the country during the War of the
Three Kingdoms was dubbed, an ethnic cleansing headed by one
man. But this episode's purpose is
not to daub Cromwell with fruitless emotional hatred.
That'll get us nowhere. Instead, the aim is to look at
the facts, the what, where, and why of Cromwell's campaign in
quotation marks of Ireland between 1949 and 1950.
The short horror of only nine months left the lasting effect
which saw the displacement of many native Irish, at best in
the conduct or farther afield to Barbados in the form of
indentured servants. But these people were perhaps
lucky. Many died.
But while most of us know Cromwell to be, as it pertains
to our history, an awful bad bastard altogether, many of us
don't know exactly the why. And it is our duty for us to
understand our history, particularly now.
In this present, we are learning in real time that truth is the
first casualty of war, But it is the assault on truth and on
reality which allows oppressors to bend the world to their whim
in hindsight or even in present tense.
This episode does not wish to dwell on the past, but to
confirm what we know and consider it in terms of our
present. Cromwell's campaign on Ireland
was unjust, cruel and a de facto attempt at genocide,
displacement and settler colonialism based purely on
religion and ethnicity. Still, it is somehow debated
whether or not Britain carried out an ethnic cleansing in
Ireland, as if the truth of the situation was literally scorched
from the earth with his coming here.
And whilst many Irish accounts from the time are rightly
subject to scrutiny on the grounds of hyperbole, emotion,
religious spin or a lack of concrete evidence, this does not
take away from the facts. Faced with the prospect of an
Irish alliance with Charles the 2nd and hot on the memory of the
Ulster Rebellion, which saw the murder of Protestant settlers in
Ireland in an effort to reclaim stolen land, Cromwell carried
out a series of massacres to subdue the Irish.
Once he returned to England, the English Commissioner, General
Henry Irritant, Cromwell's son-in-law, adopted A deliberate
policy of crop burning and starvation in the country in
1641. When all was said and done,
total excess debts for the entire period was estimated by
Sir William Petty, the 17th century economist, to be 600,000
out of a total Irish population of 1,400,000 people.
That's around 42% of the populace. 42% were murdered.
A conscious ethnic cleansing occurred in Ireland.
It was validated by religion and by the superpower of the time,
Britain. This is not a fact to be debated
as a matter of opinion. Critics of this fact often point
to arbitrary laws in place at the time, which point to the
inhumanity as fair but fair only under the supposition of a
people as near subhuman. Once again, this is an episode
on the past, but I do not need to express why it is important
in the present. The evidence we are using is not
from nationalistic pundits. From that time or now.
The admission of ethnic cleansing comes straight from
the horse's mouth, Cromwell's own words taken from his own
diary entries during the time of the bloody affair.
Aside from this, our key resource which will underpin the
episode will be the research of John Morrow, the professor of
British and Irish history at Cambridge and the former head of
the Cromwell Society in the UK. Even he has to admit there's a
whiff, A genocide and more than some physical words on Cromwell
and the Iron Sides. The Irish can never forget it
and the English can never remember it.
This is what writer and philosopher GK Chesterton had to
say on Cromwell's conquest between 1649 and 1650.
And all of this is not to discount that Cromwell was
important to parliamentary politics in the UK.
Just because someone was important and righteous in one
regard does not mean he wasn't a tyrant.
In other regards, virtues don't cancel out sins.
Just as someone's face is clean, it doesn't mean that they're
ours isn't. And just for the crack as well,
to keep the show functioning as it usually does, going to
sprinkle in some Duke is folk stories.
This is a serious topic, but we're still trying to have some
fun with it. These folk stories are funny and
not to be taken as anything close to fact, and maybe just to
give you the vibe of what Cromwell is perceived as on a
colloquial level here in Ireland.
So if I start talking about collectors and informants,
that's likely a National Folklore Collection story.
I'm pretty sure you'll know by the vibe of them.
I'll just give you a taste or one right now.
Cromwell and a Crow. There is an old church not far
from this school and it is supposed that Cromwell plundered
it. One day Cromwell came to the
church and he left his soldiers outside and went into the church
himself. He was a long time in the church
and the soldiers were wondering what was keeping him.
A few of his soldiers crept to the door and looked in, and they
saw Cromwell talking to a crow. Cromwell was very angry because
the soldiers saw him and he went outside and took his scarf from
his neck and threw it around the necks of the soldiers and hanged
them across his shoulder. Collector Francis Faye address
Clonmore County Loud. So Cromwell, his characteristic
never went anywhere without his scarf, as you know, loved
Autumn, and he must have been gigantic.
He hung a few soldiers across his neck.
That's the sort of flavor You'll not you'll know the difference.
You'll know by you'll know by the tone of my voice and the cut
of my jib, whether I'm being very, very serious or not.
Is this a serious thing? Cromwell's early life I was by
birth a gentleman living neither in considerable height nor yet
in obscurity. Is that Cromwell's voice?
I know he's from the north of Illegal and he's from the north.
No, I'm joking. This is about Cromwell's time in
Ireland, of course, but it's probably important to sum up the
guy and what led him here. Born to a political family,
Cromwell's father was of modest means but still a member of the
landed Gentry. The family initially acquired
great wealth as occasional beneficiaries due to the
disillusion of the monasteries, and this was to dissolve of
Catholic institutions by Henry the Eighth.
Cromwell would join parliament representing the area of
Huntingdon, but became involved in disputes locally, sold most
of his properties and moved to a farmstead nearby which was a
significant step down in society for the Cromwells.
In 1631 it was said that Cromwell was treated seemingly
for depression, perhaps as a result of this dispute, and
religion seemed to be his saving grace.
In a letter to his cousin, he gives an account of a spiritual
awakening, describing himself as being the chief of sinners and
how he was now among the congregation of the first born.
He expressed belief that he was saved from his previous sins by
God's mercy, that the Reformation hadn't gone far
enough and that much of England was still living in sin, and
that Catholic beliefs and practices must be fully removed
from the church. And now not to get it twisted.
Early on in this this episode, I have no problems with
Protestantism and actually think the Reformation comes from a
good place. Now it's mainly be planting as
in Unfortunately as with all things religion kind of gets
conflated into it was Protestant planters that were put into
Ireland. Protestant English planters and
the the nodal religious thing don't have a problem with don't
particularly love Catholicism either.
It's when either or there's a start bullying either way still
problems with religions. I mean we want to give everyone
freedom of religious choice but but oftentimes it seems that
instead of it's it's either like one one is being the oppressor
or the other one's being the oppressor.
Which isn't very godly in my in my understanding and estimation
of it. It's perhaps of note, as I was
saying, that John Merrill was once the head of the Cromwell
society in the UK, and yet he himself cannot permit the
ignorance surrounding the atrocities Cromwell spearheaded.
He says, and I quote the depth of hatred that still exists in
Ireland is matched only by unawareness in non Catholic
English circles of what Cromwell did in Ireland.
So the demands of English viceroys led to violent
rebellion. Rebellion led to the
confiscation of rebel lands and the introduction of the English,
Scottish and planters, IE settlers.
The early Stewart period saw a significant drop in violence,
but not of injustice or resentment from the native Gale.
In the 1630s Charles the First Lord Deputy, the Lord Stratford
was sent to Ireland to make it less of a financial drain on
England and to sweeten the Irish up.
To make things just a bit less unfair, he granted more
religious freedom to the Catholics and raised their
revenues by making the English settlers return.
Some of their I'll gotten gains as the tide in Britain turned
against monarchy. Strafford was executed by the
Parliament, leaving room for Protestant colonists to take
their revenge. The Catholics face renewed
persecution. With English government tied up
in the autumn of 1641. The Protestants seized the
opportunity for a preemptive strike.
But ulsters dispossessed Catholics rose in rebellion,
killing 3000 Protestants, with nearly as many fleeing to
England. Their horror stories, dreadful
enough, were grotesquely exaggerated by the English press
and an Anglo Scottish army was dispatched to protect remaining
British Protestant planter communities.
To pay for this army Parliament passed an act guaranteeing 1/5
of the landmass of Ireland to those who lent £2,000,000.
Just over 1000 so-called adventurers raised the full sum.
Oliver Cromwell was to make good on these claims.
So Cromwell was heading over to Ireland with the understanding
that 1/5 of Ireland as a landmass was to be given to to
these investors landlords. Most of the land in County
Wexford was taken by Cromwell and given to some of his
soldiers and followers. Some of these held on to the
land they got and married and it fell to their children.
Others sold it. Later on it is told of
Castleboro that a soldier who had got the deeds of the farm,
getting tired from walking, met a man named Cairo, and he gave
him the deeds and rights to Castleboro for a horse and some
money to take him back to Cromwell's army.
The Rasgarland estate was given to the Lee family by Cromwell,
who told Lee someplace near Wellington Bridge that he would
give him the land at each side of the road as far as his horse
would carry him. The horse, without stopping,
dropped dead near Balon Ebola and so Lee became landlord all
over that land. Some of the former Lee's evicted
all the tenants around his own home and levelled out the
ditches and houses until he had a farm of 2000 acres.
The people who were evicted went to other countries.
Very few planters settled around here.
Mr. Lee was a bad landlord and was known as Leveller Lee.
It is not the custom to divide farms amongst families in the
County. Wexford, the landlord, used to
make his tenants vote for whoever he wished under threat
of eviction. If they refused, he sent his man
and sowed grass seed in their land and then evicted them.
Some people paid tides. Tenants near Protestant churches
had to pay some money for the upkeep of the clergy.
There were no battles fought around here, but people resented
paying tides and only paid under compulsion.
The landlord of this district was Mr. Lee of Rose Garland.
The family had been resident in the district since the time of
Cromwell. Mr. Lee was well known for his
terrible temper, for the cruelty he inflicted onto his tenants.
Five of Lee's tenants in Bally Lannon could not pay the rent on
time and they were thrown out of their houses.
One time he evicted all the small farmers who lived near his
house for no reason and he levelled the houses and made the
farms into a huge field. This field has not been divided
since, and it can still be seen. The children and grandchildren
of the evicted people are now back in a different part of the
land. No one could shoot game on Lee's
land, for he held game rights and if anyone did so, they would
be prosecuted. Tithes were collected in this
district long ago for the upkeep of the landlord.
Bayless usually collected the tithes, and for this people
resented their collection, and fights often took place on their
account. The people paid the tithes in
money, but if they had not enough money, their goods were
seized. One day, as Lee was walking out
near his farmland, which is a few miles away from his home, he
saw some children playing ball on the farmland wall.
He was very angry at this, and he dealt the nearest child to
him a blow with his whip on their leg.
The child's legs swelled up until it was nearly as big as
his body and he could not walk. The other children ran home in
terror. Mr. Lee relented almost as quick
as his anger had flared out, and he got a doctor later to cure
the child. Lee was called Cromwell by his
tenants and his son was called Young Cromwell Location,
Hilltown, County Wexford, that was collected in the class of
teacher Simon Murphy, the Ulster Rebellion satellite,
the fuel which had piled up in an occupied Ireland in October
1641. Ireland would now become chiefly
the theatre of the War of the Three Kingdoms between Ireland,
England and Scotland. For the next seven years,
warfare throughout Ireland was sporadic but vicious.
The diary of an anonymous English soldier in the winter of
1641 to 1642 includes sickening detail of how he and his fellows
shot or hanged civilians and losers and burned the villages
that they passed through. One British historian says the
diary displayed the casual cruelty of an S S officer on the
Russian front in 1942. This violence can be matched by
confessed activities of the same kind on the other side of the
native Irish, although Merrill admits the worst atrocities were
perpetrated by the English on the Irish.
And let us not forget, Ireland was being colonized by the time
of Charles the First execution in January 1649.
Ireland was more devastated, exhausted and bitterly divided
even than England. With Britain now not under the
control of a monarchy, the Royalists had fled to Ireland
and were in an uneasy alliance with the Catholic Confederate
Group, a group they were once fighting.
An army loyal to the Long Parliament and Cromwell
controlled the Dublin area. Eh, But more than 80% of Ireland
was in the hands of those hostile to this English
revolution, whether it be the native Irish or Protestant
royalists that just wanted to see the return of the Crown.
It really was a motley crew and the enemy of my enemy and all
that. Jazz.
Cromwell's Expeditionary force was intended to reverse this
situation by incorporating Ireland into the English
Commonwealth, placing it firmly under the direct rule from
England. And it was also to carve up
enough land to pay up the cost of the conquest and reward
English speculators and D mobbed soldiers and all those people
that have paid up to £2,000,000 Cromwell's bell.
It is supposed that Cromwell blew the bell out of a church
near here, and the bell rang from the church through the air
until it fell in a field nearby. There is a little wood there
now, and if you stand in the place where the bell sank in the
ground, it will open up and swallow you.
Every student of Irish history knows well what happened at
Drahada, but many of us may not know that Cromwell arrived at
Clonmore, Thar Parish, County, loud on the day previous to the
attack and leveled a beautiful church which stood near the
crossroads. Failing to destroy the church
bell, Cromwell ordered his men to have it buried, and tradition
states that having buried it in the little plantation on the
lands of Peter McGuire of desire, it still lies buried
there and chimes out the commencement of each century.
Cromwell made Clonmore his camping ground on that day and
slept at the very spot where stands dwelling House of the
late John Dolan that came from collector Donald Butterley.
So Cromwell was only actually in Ireland from the 15th of August
1649 to the 26th of May 1650, and in that short time he
accomplished a more complete control of Ireland that had been
achieved under any English monarch.
This led to the most rootless process of ethnic cleansing that
had ever been seen in Western European history, with the
arguable exception of the Norman Conquest.
In the next five years, perhaps 3/4 of the land held by a
predominantly Catholic native Irish people was confiscated,
redistributed and given to Protestant Englishmen.
At a stroke, the proportion of the land of Ireland held by the
former fell from 3/5 to 1/6. Cromwell spent his time securing
control of the east of Ireland from Drahada, 30 miles north of
Dublin, to Cork in the South. When he left, only four major
Irish towns remain to be taken Waterford, Limerick, Athlone and
Galway. His successors, first his
son-in-law Henry Irezon, and then Charles Fleetwood, were
left with a messy, bloody mopping up Operation Scarlet St.
Long ago, when Cromwell came to Drahada, the inhabitants ran up.
Peter St. Cromwell's men, however,
overtook them and slew many of them.
Many of them sought refuge in the church on the top of the
hill, St. Peter's Church, but in vain
Cromwell's men followed them and killed every man, woman and
child. He then marched onto Scarlet
Street, where he slew so many that the street ran red with
blood. From that day to this the people
call this street Scarlet St. location Drahada, Candy Loud
Teacher, Sister Magdalene. At the heart of Cromwell's
conquest was his storming of Drahada and Wexford.
They came to represent a grisly legend, a scar on the collective
consciousness. In Ireland.
In Drahada, more than 3000 were killed in Wexford.
Not less than 2000, they died from artillery bombardment, from
gunshots, from sword or dagger Truss, or purely by bludgeon
hitting them across the head. Most brutally and inhumanely was
the killing of Sir Arthur Aston, commander of the Drahade
Garrison. Aston was clubbed to death with
his own wooden leg. Many, perhaps most, were killed
in the hot blood of battle, but the others were killed in cold
blood after they had surrendered or after they'd been captured.
Milk Cromwell landed in Wexford at Maudlin Town, which was at
the time the entrance to Wexford.
There was a man named Stafford who sold the town to Cromwell.
Cromwell knocked down several churches in Wexford.
He knocked down Saint Patrick's Church and Saint Patrick's
Square. He knocked down another at
Celtskar Abbey. He knocked down others at Kiln,
McRae and Kildavan. Where the blood of the priests
he killed is still to be seen under the Arch of the Kildavan
Church. He killed a lot of people in the
Wexford Marketplace, namely the Bullring.
His soldiers got young Catholic children and put them up on
their bayonets. One of the children smiled down
at Cromwell and he told his soldiers to stop quickly.
Another day, a young girl was coming through the fields at the
back of Cromwell's Fort carrying a vessel of milk.
One of Cromwell's soldiers stopped her and drank the milk.
She went home crying, and on our way home she met none other than
Oliver Cromwell, who asked her what was the cause of her crying
and she told him. He then asked her could she
identify that soldier and she said that she could.
Cromwell got all his soldiers out in a line in front of the
girl. She picked at the man and
Cromwell stabbed him with his BNS in the stomach, out of which
spurted the milk. After this event, Cromwell told
his soldiers that this was a warning that none of his
soldiers could do anything without his permission.
That Milky story comes from collector George Murphy address
Wexford, County Wexford from informant Mr. Patrick Davis.
The principal evidence against Cromwell comes from his own
reports during the time sent to the Speaker of the English
Parliament. They are the words of a general
insensitive to the suffering of the Irish people.
Conditioned by the relentless propaganda of the last 10 years
into believing that Irish Catholics were collectively
responsible for the torture and killing of 1000 unarmed
Protestant settlers, he convinced himself that this was
a righteous religious force. Cromwell was not a radical who
wished purely for there to be no monarch in England.
Uh, don't give him that credit. He was fighting not for
politics, but for his faith. It appears, much like his
epiphany during his period of depression, that Cromwell felt
like an agent of God and likely spoke with the confidence of
one. It is said that Cromwell had a
firm and frightening belief in Providentalism, A belief that
God was actively directing the affairs of the world through the
actions of chosen people, whom God had provided for such a
purpose. So Cromwell obviously considered
himself chosen by God. So Cromwell's strength was that
he knew how to discipline a pious cavalry.
He knew how to lead and train his men using moral authority.
It seemed he had the assuredness of someone who felt that God was
truly on their side. He thought he was doing the
right thing and that God was working through them.
He heavily relied on biblical imagery and sought meaning and
messages from Bible passages to validate his decisions,
including Psalm 17 and 105. They that are implicable and
will not leave troubling the land may be speedily destroyed
out of the land and SI 8IN which kingdoms fall and only the godly
survive. For Cromwell, the army was God's
chosen instrument. Cromwell believed himself, as it
seems to be the divinely ordained instrument of God's
retribution. He wrote this of Rahada in the
He's of action. I forbade them to spare any that
were in arms in the town, and I think that night they put to the
sword about 2000 men, divers of the officers and soldiers, being
fled over the bridge into the other part of the town, where
about 1000 of them possessed Saint Peter's steeple and two
other towers. I ordered the steeple of Saint
Peter's to be fired, where one of them was heard to say in the
midst of the flames. God damn me, God confound me.
I burn, I burn. The next day the other two
towers were summonsed when they submitted, Their officers were
knocked on the head, and every 10th man of the soldiers killed
and the others shipped as slaves to Barbados.
The last Lord's day before the storm, the Protestants were
thrust out of the great church called Saint Peter's, and they
had a public Mass there. And in this very place near 1000
Catholics were put to the sword, fleeing to their for safety.
I believe all the Friars were knocked promiscuously on the
head, but two, the one of which was Father Peter TAFE, whom the
soldiers took and made an end of.
The other, was taken into the round Tower under the repute of
a Lieutenant. And when he understood that the
officers in the tower had no quarter, he confessed that he
was indeed a Friar, But that did not save him.
So all of those taught to be soldiers, priests and Franciscan
Friars were quickly executed. In addition, there was the
burning alive of those who took refuge in the Tower of Saint
Peter's Church. Rather than starve or buy them
out with a promise of quarter, Cromwell's men piled the wooden
pews of the church under the tower and set the church ablaze.
Cromwell's crusade of Ireland was effective, and it was
effective precisely because of its inhumanity.
Cromwell's reference to the 1000 killed in or near Saint Peter's
Church is difficult to square with the military accounts, and
significant numbers of civilians must have been included in that
figure. A week later Cromwell wrote that
he was sending a list of the officers, and he named nearly
100, and notes the numbers killed beyond that were 220
cavalrymen, 2500 foot soldiers, besides staff officers,
surgeons, and the town's many inhabitants.
Cromwell knew that a large part of the Garrison and all its
senior officers were English Catholics, and that the rest
were drawn from Ormond's regiments, whose first duty in
the 1640s had actually been to fight against Irish rebels.
The following quotation, therefore, represents Cromwell's
attribution of racial guilt to all The Irish for the slaughters
of 1641 where a judgment on the civilian casualties to whom he
wrongly but plausibly believed had been caught up in that
Ulster rebellion and massacre in 1641 to 1642.
I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon
these barbarous wretches who haven't brewed their hands in so
much innocent blood, and that will tend to prevent the
effusion of blood for the future, which are the
satisfactory grounds for such actions which otherwise cannot
but work remorse and regret. His report on the slaughter at
Wexford, to the speaker, is even more graphic.
We intended better to this place than so great a ruin, hoping the
town might be of more use to you and your army.
Yet God would not have it so, but by all unexpected Providence
in his righteous justice brought a just judgement upon them,
calling them to become a prey to the soldier who I'll their
piracies had met prey so many families, and made with their
bloods to answer the cruelties which they had exercised on the
lives of poor Protestants. The soldiers got a very good
booty in this place. However, I could have wished for
their own good and the good of the Garrison that they had been
more moderate. Cromwell is also not ambiguous
to the fact that the atrocity will be followed up by an ethnic
cleansing course. The town is so now in your power
that of the former inhabitants, I believe scarce one in 20 can
challenge any property in their houses.
Most of them are runaway and many of them were killed in the
service and it may be wished that an honest people would come
and plant here, where there are very good houses and other
accommodations to be fitted to their hands.
By August 16. 52 The reduction of Ireland had been effectively
completed. To all intents and purposes,
Ireland was at the mercy of the British state.
In that month Parliament passed the Act of Settlement,
proclaiming that it was not their intention to extrepate the
whole nation, but to pardon all husbands, men, ploughmen,
labourers, artificers, and other of the inferior sort, and to
punish those of higher rank, according to their respective
demerits. But great swathes of people, at
least 100,000, were exempted from pardon of life in the
state. So those of the quoted.
Inferior source were said to be banished and those higher born
all their estates and property. They were only allowed to have
land equivalent to 1/3 of the value of their current estates
in such place in Ireland as Parliament would decide.
So they were shunted off to Connacht or County Clare.
There was also a punishment. Of death for anyone that was
found within a mile of the coast or of the River Shannon.
All clergy and. Friars are banned from Ireland
on punishment of death or enslavement.
In three of the four provinces of Ireland, Ulster, Leinster and
Munster, there weren't to be any Catholics at all.
This was an ethnic cleansing of huge scale.
But deciding who was to be punished proved beyond the
resources of the English state. So rather than the 100,000
quoted, probably only 200 people were executed under the ACT, but
200 people executed under the legislative tyranny of the
English state on grounds purely of religion.
Though the big case. Against Cromwell, if you take it
from a completely sort of neutral standing and and and
even forget about the fact that England should have never been
in Ireland in the 1st place, it was that he behaved radically
different in Ireland than anywhere else that he behaved in
Britain in any of the wars in England or in Scotland.
There wasn't anything nearly on the scale of the massacres that
occurred in Rahada and Wexford. Particularly the death rate in
these military engagements in England were usually between 5
and 10%, but at Rahada and Wexford it was almost 80%.
By Cromwell's own admission these included non combatants,
so citizens of the town and in the knowledge that these people
weren't militants. There is detailed testimony.
From royalist sources that several Protestant officers
surrendered on quarter and subsequently were killed and
there is some credible Catholic testimony from Wexford of
atrocities against civilians after the town had been secured.
So Cromwell and his forces were murdering civilians after they
knew that the town had been captured.
And since Merle is taking a very solicitor like court like
unemotional, fact based approach to Cromwell's time in Ireland,
these are just of the accounts that one can verify.
Catholic Bishop Nicholas French, who was near the town, gave a
vivid account of scourgings, tortures and hangings of unarmed
civilian priests and Friars. Cromwell had undertook this
mission knowing full well what the outcome would be, and there
was always this assumption that the best of the land would be
carved up and given back to those who had invested in the
tyranny. Mud Cabin Long ago when Oliver.
Cromwell was robbing and killing in Ireland.
He was riding one day into our club.
He met a man on the road and asked him his name.
My name is Oliver. Carney said the man.
Well, said Cromwell. You're the first man of my own
name I met since I came to this country.
Go out to the rock and climb on top of it and all the land you
see from there I will give you. I want nothing from you.
But my own little house, said the man.
A poor man I. Found you and a poor man.
I will leave you, said Cromwell. When all the rest of the town
was in flames, a little mud cabin was left standing.
It was still there until some years ago, and there was still a
family of carnies living in it. Collector George Bass, age 14,
address Balanagari, Lower County Wexford.
Informant Mr. Andrew Kinsella, age 66, address Tober Patrick,
County Wicklow. It should be.
Added as well that another key feature of genocide and ethnic
cleansing that Oliver Cromwell inflicted on to the population
in Ireland between 1650 and 1660 was the destruction of harps and
organs. Cromwell was also scorching
native Irish culture from the land.
Harps were burned and Harpers were forbidden to congregate,
and Harpers and minstrels who had once entertained kings were
reduced to travelling from place to place, begging for a living
where they could. By the end of the 18th century
traditional Irish Harpers had became nearly extinct and it's
very likely a lot of traditional Irish music was lost.
If you want a little bit more on that, we did an episode called
Invention of Music which deals in all things music and Ireland.
Cromwell ordered nobody by any means in military or religious
orders to be spared whilst he was in Ireland.
Cromwell did in Ireland what was technically in accordance with
well established military codes of practice at the time.
It could be suggested that Cromwell was heavy-handed at the
beginning of his conquest of Ireland, so that when he reached
further towns that people would be more likely to surrender.
Knowing how aggressive he had been in some of his first sieges
on the 10th of September 1649, a week after arriving at the town
walls, Cromwell summons the Governor of Drahada to
surrender. Within 24 hours his message was
clear. No surrender and no quarter.
This idea of no surrender and no quarter was actually in accord
with the laws of war at the time.
It's also interesting and shocking to note that there was
an ordinance of no quarter to the Irish at the time and this
was a decree of the English Long Parliament in response to the
Irish Catholic Confederation threats to send troops from
Ireland to support King Charles the First during the English
Civil War. And effectively what this decree
meant was and that even if you promised people wouldn't be
executed after they surrendered you, you could go back on those
claims as long as they were Irish.
In the strictest of terms, Cromwell cannot be called a warm
criminal. And just in the strictest of
terms under the circumstances that what he did war, legal war
practices. But barbaric laws do not condone
barbarism. You're still you're still a
prick under prick laws, you know what I mean?
Lord Gormanstown. In the time of Cromwell, the
government gave the land to his soldiers and made landlords of
them, And then those landlords got rich with every farmer
paying his rent to them. It is, said Cromwell went.
To Lord Gormanstown and asked him who he was.
He said he was Lord Gormanstown today, whoever he'd be tomorrow,
Cromwell said he would be Lord Gormanstown tomorrow because he
had tables and food ready for Cromwell's army collector,
Evelyn Butterly. So essentially, after those
first barbaric sort of unyielding warfare, Cromwell
showed restraint. And if people surrendered, you'd
go a bit easier on them. Even if it is a folk story of
Lord Gorman's town, If you bend over, I won't kick you in the
ass. Cromwell did write in his diary
that the sack of Drahada would tend to prevent the effusion of
blood for the future. I suppose it can be debated what
he meant by that. You might read it in a way that
he's saying that he's killing, he's killing future terrorists
for want of a better word, that he he killed so many because
then they wouldn't rise up again.
Or perhaps he meant, as Merrill states here, that Drahada and
Wexford were akin to a Harashima and Nagasaki, that the
application of an economy of evil to save more lives in the
long run. This, of course, is a morally
contested view, but it is interesting to note that in some
of the folk stories there, it's kind of he's nice to the kids,
you know, he he that soldier stole the girl's milk and he
stabbed that soldier. So I don't know, baby, baby,
baby, that's the thing. He was karma, was probably a
crazy religious nut, but maybe a crazy religious nut that that
stood in his weird warped morals.
After Cromwell left Ireland, it didn't get much better.
There were several more atrocities after his departure.
General Fleetwood introduced a policy of reprisal which pre
echoes Nazi cruelty. If an English soldier was killed
by snipers or bandits, then the nearest community was given 24
to 48 hours to hand over those responsible for summary
execution or they would all be seized and transported into
slavery. So, Jesus, if you were living in
a town and an English soldier got killed beside your town, you
better rat, or you better know who to rat on, or else you're
heading off the Barbados. Not in a fun way, but anyhow,
the whole English political and military establishment in
Ireland can be blamed for this. Cromwell and.
The Devil. When Cromwell was in Kilkenny,
the devil told him everything that happened.
One day the Catholics were talking of how they would kill
Cromwell. The devil was listening to it,
but one of the Catholics that was outside the room saw the
Devil listening to what they were saying.
The Catholic took the sword from a scabbard and threw it at him
and drove him out to the window. And ever since, that window has
been black. As he was going to.
The Protestant's house, his footprints remained on the
doorstep. It is he, the Devil that told
Cromwell everything that the Catholics were going to do.
The Devil told Cromwell that he was going to be killed.
When Cromwell heard this, he put one of his men on his throne and
dressed him like himself. The next day the Catholic went
to the Tower and he saw a man like Cromwell.
He took his sword again and threw it at him, and he cut the
head right off the man. When the Catholic saw the head,
he knew it wasn't Cromwell's. The Catholic did not go away.
When Cromwell saw the headless man on his stone chair, he went
up to see him. When the Catholic saw Cromwell
looking at the man, he threw his sword again.
And he killed Cromwell this time.
And that is how Oliver Cromwell was killed.
Informant Miss Mary Deegan, EH, addressed New Park County
Kilkenny. So that's an idea there of how
hearsay and folk stories you can't really rely on them.
Oliver Cromwell, of course, did eventually die, but it was from
some form of malaria and a kidney stone disease.
So someone he wasn't killed in Ireland.
He was only here nine months. He went home.
But I did find it funny in my research that he was buried, of
course, and when the monarchy was restored, Royalists dug him
up his rotting corpse and hung him or hanged him as his right
to say. It's just crazy.
Anyway, the last in effect of Cromwell's tyranny in Ireland is
felt and there are myriad quotes and instances one could pull
from Irish people, politicians and poets, even the Teflon
T-shirt purzier, and asked for Cromwell's portrait to be taken
down before he had a meeting with the British MP Robin Cook.
But perhaps most affecting of all is a quote from Englishman
Winston Churchill. He himself spent his first few
years of childhood in occupied Ireland at the viceroy's
residence. Now Arasanuktaran is marred by
criticism surrounding his callous reaction to the Bengal
famine in 1943. And despite the Churchillian
notion which supported colonialism and an imperial race
predestined by moral character to rule and refashion the world
in a British image, it is poignant that even he had this
to say in 1957 of Cromwell's conquest of Ireland.
Cromwell's record. Was a last in Bain, by an
uncompleted process of terror, by an iniquitous land
settlement, by the virtual proscription of the Catholic
religion, by the bloody deeds already described.
He cut new gulfs between the nations and the creeds.
Hell or Conuct were in the terms he thrust upon the native
inhabitants, and they for their part, across 300 years, have
used as their keenest expression of hatred the curse of Cromwell.
On you, Upon all of us, there still lies the curse of
Cromwell. Churchill 1957.
I mentioned at the start. Of the podcast GK Chesterton's
remark on Cromwell's genocide that the Irish can never forget
it and the English can never remember it, and perhaps this is
the flaw baked into many stalwart colonial and Western
attitudes. For one to forgive and forget,
there must be evidence of a changed behaviour.
And whilst Ireland's government shies away from criticism of
colonial oppression, Britain, America and other colonial
powers still centuries on, aids bets and benefits for them.
And we as a nation, at least on a governmental level, are siding
with them. The.
Displacement of a. People for a new settler
colonial habitation. Much of what you see on the news
today could read like a history book, or vice versa.
And some people confusedly take Ireland's position as subjects
of ethnic discrimination in the past as a hall pass for
political silence, as if our ancestors punishment absolves us
from rather than inspires us to assist others presently facing
the same moral crimes and injustices.
It would be ignorant of us to assume that baked into our DNA
is not only that of the displaced Irish, but the
settlers of Cromwellian and other such plantations.
We have to choose which footsteps to follow in into the
future. Our goal shouldn't be to join or
cower to the colonial ranks, but to defy them.
It should be as. Easy for us to understand the
resistance movements in other countries, as it is for us to
understand the resistance during the Ulster Rebellion, or indeed
the resistance of the rebellion which led to the country that
we're currently living in. I sing you a song.
Of peace and love. The winners write the history.
And the losers write the songs is our prayer.
When we were savage, fierce and wild, she came like a mother to
her only child, who took us from primeval slime, who kept our
hands from wanton crime, who sent us to heaven in their own
good time. Our father's off to a naughty
boy. Guns and.
Pikes a dangerous time. Oh, Irish men.
Forget the past. And think of the time.
That's coming faster. When we'll all.
Be civilized, neat and clean and well advised.
Oh, won't Mother England be surprised?
And if I need to spell it out, rebalanced.
From the rivers of the. Sea.