Cromwell

by Antonia Fraser

  But of course this English attitude stretched historically far further back than 1641, nor had Payne Fisher’s peaceful Arcadia ever really existed. Edmund Spenser in his View of the State of Ireland had not failed to express the essentially bellicose view of the Elizabethan English. Reflecting all too presciently on Ireland’s “fatal destiny” – was it in the very genius of the soil or in the influence of the stars? – he observed with English confidence that “no purposes whatsoever which are meant for her good, will prosper or take good effect”. Therefore it was necessary to cut away Irish evils with a strong hand, before any good could be planted, “as the corrupt branches and unwholesome boughs are first to be pruned, and the foul moss cleansed and scraped away before the tree can bring forth any good fruit”. Cromwell, in his crusading speeches and letters, was expressing the habit of mind not only of his own Protestant contemporaries, but also of preceding hordes of Englishmen. And with the prospect of much “good fruit” before them – the various waves of investment of English money in Irish land, from the Adventures of early 1642 onwards, to ripen – it was no wonder that not only Cromwell but the English army as a whole had “set off in July 1649, as Ralph Josselin observed in his diary, with “a wonderful confidence”. The combination of religious proselytizing zeal with future financial profit was a heady one. For this Cromwell, wrote Mercurius Elenticus,

  in warlike Equipage

  Like Guy of Warwick rides,

  He hopes t’extract a Golden-age

  Out of his Ironsides …

  For this “the buff coat, instead of the black gown appeared in Dublin pulpits”, wrote the more friendly Moderate Intelligencer, since “to use two swords well is meritorious …” A second declaration to the people of Dublin forbade all future profaning, swearing, drinking and cursing which were said to be the daily practices of the place, and in place of the former usages of “a bloody enemy”, sought to establish the customs felt appropriate to Puritan England.5

  Nevertheless Cromwell, experienced campaigner as he was, did not for one minute go so far in his religious zeal as to forget that he was a soldier with an operation to carry out. He had spent nearly half a year insisting that the army should be well supplied and well paid. His first declaration to the people of all Ireland evinced his determination that his final successes in this respect should prove their worth: the English soldiers were specifically forbidden to wrong “the Country People”, and these same people were offered a free market in which to sell their goods;6 there were then to be none of the sufferings and resentments inherent in the granting of free quarter, by which the soldiers lived off the land gratis. At the same time the English army would not be permanently dependent on Dublin for supplies, the great weakness of previous forces. This declaration proved a sound shrewd move.

  Having struck this dual note of extirpation of heretical rebellion, and practical efficiency in the doing of it, Cromwell’s immediate problem was to strike north after Ormonde. It was true that Rathmines had been a telling blow to the confederate Royalists. When Ormonde wrote to Jones afterwards for a list of prisoners, Jones responded with the sardonic joke: “My lord, since I routed your army, I cannot have the happiness to know where you are that I may wait upon you [with the list].” But northwards in Ulster, the confederate forces were still extremely strong, to say nothing of the rampant power which Anglo-Irish Protestants and Catholic Irish, temporarily joined together in the cause of the King, exerted over virtually the whole of the south. The key to the north was Drogheda, thirty miles up the coast from Dublin, and thither Cromwell set out on 31 August, the army a bold spectacle in “Venice red” as Ludlow described it in his memoirs,7 bold against the flat rich pastoral land of the northern coastal strip towards Swords, heavily green in August, that peculiarly rich moist green of the Irish grass watered throughout the year. They were marching through an alien land.

  For all the happy reports of John Owen later, left behind in Dublin, that he had carried out “constant preaching to a numerous multitude of as thirsting a people after gospel as ever yet I conversed with withal”, such intelligence only applied to the narrow circle of Dublin itself.*9 ( * Compared by Dr Edward MacLysaght Irish Life in the Seventeenth Century to that of Hong Kong today, whose customs are very different from those of China.8) The capital city, with its riches and English customs, was no clue to the nature of the land itself. And for all the English fantasies of former blisses, it was a country quite unlike England itself. The alien nature of Ireland was not even concentrated on the fact that the vast majority of its toiling population believed in and attempted to practise a proscribed religion. The very spirit of the place represented something quite foreign to a man like Cromwell (who had never left the British mainland and never left it subsequently - Ireland was his only taste of being abroad). In this, Ireland contrasted forcibly with Scotland; there, as has been seen, at least the religious accents were much the same and the priorities and values not unalike.

  For Ireland, as Edmund Campion had written eighty years before, lay “a-loof in the Western ocean”. Its geographical isolation was something on which all contemporary travellers commented; that, and the wide open unenclosed spaces of which the country itself seemed composed. “The cities being rare and farre distant,” wrote that indefatigable observer Fynes Morison; the traveller “must have a guide who may without great trouble inquire them out”. Luke Gernon, a German who visited Ireland in 1620, likened it to a nymph, “a young wench that hath the green sickness for want of occupying”. And he went on to launch a series of strange but effective gastronomic similes: here and there the emptiness was broken by a ruined castle, looking like the remainder of a venison pasty, with broken forts lying about like mince pies, and old abbeys with turrets sticking up, looking like the carcase of a goose.10 Communications not surprisingly were atrocious and mails thus particularly slow and unreliable. There were hardly any coaches (which in any case could hardly have managed the terrain) and lightly-loaded horses had to be used. With a series of mountain barriers, the most effective communications were carried out between the cities by sea, but even the sea was not without its perils: piracy flourished, and round the exposed southern coast ordinary people had actually been known to be captured and sold into slavery.

  Of course there were advantages to such wildness: Ireland was a rare country for sport. Hawking was as popular as it was in England; pheasants, grouse and hares proliferated; woodcock flew among the scrubby trees that had replaced the ancient forests. There might be no rooks, crows or magpies to give a feeling of home to an English soldier (and no nightingales either for that matter) but ospreys and kestrels, rare in England, were both commonplace. Above all wolves abounded, and were actually on the increase in the period of the Civil Wars; a public wolf-hunt was held at Castleknock, now a suburb of Dublin, in 1652, and a price of Ł6 offered per wolf; the rise in the wolf population provided Cromwell later with a venomous comparison to the expansion of the Roman Catholic clergy in Ireland. Altogether, wolf-hounds and all, Ireland as a colony had provided something of a sporting paradise for the Anglo-Irish gentry to enjoy, with horses and horse-racing, shoots in which the ladies shot bravely with their husbands – Lady Broghill was said to do better with a fowling-piece than most men. The soldiers, by and by, could partake of these delights.11

  The people who lived in this wilderness were themselves alien in appearance, ways and customs, as well as religion. They lived in huts, often built into the side of a hill, which Sir William Brereton, travelling in Ireland in the 16305, called “the poorest cabins I have ever seen …” These were the sort of wretched dwellings that were quick to erect, and quick to move; on an open hearth in the centre of the hut burnt fuel made of earth and cow-dung. Irish women wore linen head-dresses, and as Sir William noted, you would often see a crucifix tied to a black necklace hanging between their breasts – “It seems they are not ashamed of their religion.” The men wrapped themselves in frieze cloaks. But the odd thing was that the English way of l
ife, so very different, did not survive intact from prolonged contact with the native ways; it was constantly being vitiated – as it seemed to those who followed after from England. There were Anglo-Irish gentlemen who only bothered to doff their Irishstyle dress to come to Dublin. Sir Henry Piers, a baronet of Westmeath, described “the degeneracy of many English families” as being a great hindrance in the reduction of the Irish people to proper civility. He listed the fostering of children in their tender years to the Irish, and above all inter-marriages, as contributing to this undesirable effect: the very names became Irishified. “Fitzsimmons, McKuddery, Weysley, McFalrene,” he wrote angrily, “from men such metamorphosed what could be expected?”12

  The truth was that as a people the Irish had many charming characteristics: they were generous and hospitable; they were gay; they loved the music of the harp; there was much dancing and story-telling, stories that would stretch back happily into the past for a people much taken up with their pedigrees and genealogy. The indulgent side to this was drinking and gambling, but these were venial social crimes, and perhaps the prevalence of flowing “usquebagh” or whiskey could be explained by what Englishmen called “the dropping weather”, and the usquebagh in turn explained their undoubted quarrelsome tendencies. Indeed many of the vices of which the English traditionally accused them sprang from circumstances over which they had no control. Laziness, the idea that they were naturally slothful and boorish, often sprang from lack of work. The accusation of “indecency” in their dress could be explained by poverty or the national custom of sleeping naked. As for their morals, they were not lower than those of the rest of Europe, and it was noticeable that rape was not among the charges made by the English at the time of the 1641 massacres. As a way of life, it was not only a far cry from the Puritan reform of manners spread unwillingly in England, it was also a way of life which seduced many of the English who came to settle there.

  But such magic needed time to work. Oliver Cromwell had no such time. At the head of an armed expedition, he marched northward convinced that he was crusading against a priest-ridden, drunken, barbarous, vicious bunch of men. In this mood he commenced his siege of Drogheda, called by the English then Tredagh, but in Irish Droched Atha, the Bridge and the Ford. Ironically enough Drogheda itself was very much an English-style city, with its position at the mouth of the river Boyne. “Fair and commodious” Sir William Brereton called it, and its streets and canals even reminded him of Holland. Ormonde had fallen back, but at Drogheda he had deputed Sir Arthur Aston with about two thousand men to hold off Cromwell as long as possible from marauding further towards Dundalk and the north. Aston was an Englishman (he was also a Catholic), a professional soldier who had served in Poland against the Turks before the Civil War and fought for the King at Edgehill. Although Aston was well aware that Cromwell’s forces must outnumber him heavily – Cromwell had in fact about eight thousand foot and about four thousand horse – he was confident that Drogheda’s superior position would enable him to survive the Cromwellian onslaughts, even if he could not hope to beat the Lord-Lieutenant in the field. Or, as he vividly put it, “he who could take Drogheda, could take Hell”. Aston then expected those twin perils of any siege, in Ormonde’s phrase, Colonel Hunger and Major Sickness, to take over and complete the good work for him by weakening the Parliamentary army beyond repair.

  The geography of Drogheda was crucial to the siege. The town itself was totally contained within a formidable town wall, one and a half miles long, twenty foot in height, rising to six foot in width although narrowing to two foot at the top for a soldier to stand there. The main town lay north of the river, but to the south, and still within these impressive fortifications, there was an important additional urban area, situated on a hill, which had to be tackled first by any army coming from the south before they could reach the town proper. In the extreme south-east corner of this outpost, virtually embedded in the city wall, lay St Mary’s Church. From its lofty steeple not only could the defenders obtain a fine view of the town, but they could also indulge in some murderous firing. Flanking the church on the townside was an extremely steep ravine or gully known as the Dale. Then there was the heavily guarded Duleek Gate, the entrance to this southern outpost, and behind that an imposing artificial mound called the Mill Mount.* ( * St Mary’s Church, the Dale Mill Mount, and even the town wall, although much knocked about, can all still be seen today: a visit does much to make the course of the siege of Drogheda intelligible because it makes clear the peculiarly strong defensive position presented by the south end of the town.)

  Arriving at near-by Tecroghan, Cromwell had no choice but to draw up his line of battle and install his guns to the south of the town. He was fortunate in that, thanks to his own care over the preparations, he had a particularly strong artillery train. No less than eleven siege-guns and twelve fieldpieces had been granted by the Council of State on 12 July, and placed under his comptroller of artillery, Captain Edward Tomlins. Yet for all this advantage, and his own numerical superiority, Cromwell hoped to take Drogheda by masterful but pacific methods. He was encouraged in this view by the fact that there were some desertions to his own army from that of the Irish leader Lord Inchiquin. To this end, he kept his own soldiers under extremely tight discipline, and two men who were caught plundering hens from some Irish women on the road from Dublin were hanged.13 In the meantime the country people, being wellpaid, were content to flock to the Parliamentary army and sell it food, as had been anticipated by the Dublin Declaration.

  On 10 September Cromwell issued his first official summons to Sir Arthur Aston to surrender the town, under a white flag, having in his own words “brought the army belonging to the Parliament of England before this place, to reduce it to obedience, to the end effusion of blood may be prevented … If this be refused,” he continued ominously, -“you will have no cause to blame me.” Aston however refused to surrender. Cromwell’s white flag was replaced by one of red, the colour of blood. The great guns installed south of the town on a hill now known as Cromwell’s Mount, began to pound. And the city wall, magnificent structure as it was, began to sag and crumble. Aston at this point undoubtedly had fearful problems. The harbour was blockaded by the enemy, under Sir George Ayscough. He had in all about two thousand, two hundred foot and three hundred and twenty horse, of whom the preponderance were Catholics. Ormonde could send him no more reinforcements. His arms and his provisions were both running short, and the lack of armaments in particular made it difficult to make punitive sallies out of the town. Worst of all, the town of Drogheda was not united behind him. As a microcosm of the troubles of Ireland in the last seven years in which the various factions had always found it so difficult to combine against a common enemy because of their own divergent interests, there were those within who preferred the idea of the English Parliamentary force. Aston’s own grandmother, Lady Wilmot, a woman in whom advancing years had not brought a diminution of spirit, headed a ladies’ plot to betray Drogheda. Aston’s attitude to it all was unsentimentally brisk. Turning Lady Wilmot and her relations out of the town, he threatened otherwise to “make powder of her”, grandmother or no grandmother. Subsequently Ormonde, more gentlemanly than the betrayed grandson, merely banished Lady Wilmot to Mellefont “in the consideration and respect we retain for her years and quality . . ,”14 But the whole incident showed up the dilemma in which Aston found himself.

  The rules of war of the time, with regard to sieges, were clear. If a commander refused to accede to a summons to surrender, and the town was subsequently won by storm, then he put at risk the lives not only of all his men, but of all those who could be held to be combatants. The significant moment was when the walls were breached by the opposing side; thereafter quarter could not be demanded. The reason for the rule was equally clear: it was an age when sieges were long, wasteful in disease and supplies, and men sitting endlessly before a fortress were liable to be debilitated in every sense (as indeed Aston and Ormonde had foreseen in their plans fo
r holding Drogheda; immediately after the siege Cromwell admitted that his troops lying in their wet cold tents had already suffered from that short period of exposure). Therefore a besieged commander often did well to hold out as long as possible, unless he had some marked incentive to surrender. The rule of no quarter once the walls were breached, did provide this important incentive. It was hoped that in the end lives would actually be saved: garrisons would surrender quickly, sieges would be short, and victories brief but not bloody. The rule was well understood at the time. A few months later in Ireland, Lord Broghill, by no means an inhumane man, had the officers of Castleton shot “to affright these little castles from so peremptorily standing out”. And it was a rule still observed in the time of Wellington one hundred and fifty years later. The Duke himself declared that “the practice of refusing quarter to a garrison which stands on assault, is not a useless effusion of blood”.15

  Therefore when Aston told Ormonde that “they were unanimous in their resolution to perish rather than to deliver up the place”, he was making a heroic boast which he might well be called upon to implement. Nor was the civilian population of the town necessarily protected from the rash consequences of the commander’s refusal to surrender – which may do something to explain the Wilmot embroilment. For one thing there was the obvious danger that combatants and non-combatants would become confused in the hubbub of a sack. But the theories of the time were not even particularly conscious of the humanitarian claims of the weak and helpless. Grotius in De Jure Belli ac Pacis, a work first printed in 1625, that attempted to prescribe some limits to the vengefulness of war as a result of the appalling slaughters of the Thirty Years’ War, still postulated that it was lawful to kill prisoners of war, and furthermore that “the slaughter of women and children is allowed to have impunity, as comprehended in right of war and 137th Psalm – ‘Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy children against the storm’”. The massacre of Magdeburg was less than twenty years away, that of Philiphaugh where even Montrose indulged in something at least comparable only four. Monk later committed atrocities at Dundee without a blemish on his reputation. The first regulations of war were introduced to protect soldiers, not civilians. Taken all in all, it was not a pretty age in which to be involved in a siege willy-nilly, and the situation of the civilian inhabitants of Drogheda in September 1649 could at best be said to be highly exposed.