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

by Jonathan Bardon

  All authority collapsed in a climate of fear and want; the native Irish, inflamed by rumour, religious passion and a lust for revenge, fell ferociously on the planter families of Ulster. The most notorious massacre was at Portadown in the middle of November. William Clark told how Manus Roe O’Cahan drove him

  with such other English as they could find to the number of threescore persons which belonged to the said Parish of Loughgall and put them all in the Church there ... imprisoned for the space of nine days with at the least 100 men, women and children during which time manie of them were sore tortured by strangling and halfe hanging ... after which time of imprisonment hee with an 100 men, women and children or thereabouts were driven like hogs about six miles to Porte of Doune to a river called the Band and there they forced them to goe upon the Bridge ... and then stripped the said people naked and with theire pikes and swords and other weapons thruste them down headlong in to the said river and immediately they perished and those of them that asayed to swim to the shore the rebels stood to shoot at.

  Elizabeth Price confirmed that the prisoners were driven

  off the bridge into the water and then and there instantly and most barbarously drowned the most of them. And those that could not swim and came to the shore they knocked on the head, and so after drowned them, or else shot them to death in the water.

  Like William Clark, Mrs Price was kept alive because she was thought to be hiding money; in an effort to find it, her tormenters ‘had the soles of her feet fried and burnt at the fire, and was often scourged or whipped’.

  After the massacre at Portadown other Protestant settlers were herded into a house at Shewie nearby and burnt to death. Ann Smith and Margaret Clark escaped through a hole in the wall; they were knocked on the head and left for dead, but survived to give evidence of the atrocity.

  Ellen Matchett described a similar incident where settlers were burnt to death in a house where they had taken refuge. She herself was ‘miraculously preserved by a mastiff dog that set upon these slaughtering and bloody rebels’. She survived with others in hiding, emerging ‘sometimes to get the brains of a cow, dead of disease, boiled with nettles, which they accounted good fare’.

  Anne Blennerhasset saw colonists hanged from tenterhooks in Fermanagh. By the southern shore of Lower Lough Erne the Maguires slaughtered the entire garrison of Tully Castle after promising quarter. The most horrific massacre took place near Augher in south Tyrone: here nearly four hundred Scots who surrendered were put to the sword.

  The bloodshed was not all one-sided. Sir William Cole and his men made a sally from Enniskillen and, having rounded up two hundred Irish, butchered them all.

  The native Irish had overwhelmed most of Ulster. Now they were advancing on Dublin. Would the Old English, for centuries loyal to the crown but smarting from constant oppression, now join Sir Phelim? What would the Westminster parliament, at loggerheads with King Charles I, do to avenge the Ulster massacres?

  Episode 95

  THE CONFEDERATION OF KILKENNY

  On 23 October 1641 the Ulster Irish had risen in revolt. In the weeks that followed thousands of British colonists had been driven out; thousands more had been massacred; and the whole of the north, apart from Enniskillen, Derry, Lisburn, Belfast and parts of Co. Antrim, had fallen to the rebels.

  The victorious insurgents took Dundalk and began to lay siege to Drogheda. The Lords Justices in Dublin Castle announced the existence of ‘a most disloyal and detestable conspiracy by some evil-affected Irish papists’.

  The Catholic Old English gentlemen had responded to the Dublin government’s call to arms. As they marched north to Drogheda, however, they wondered whether they too were being branded as ‘disloyal and detestable’. For years they had been persecuted on account of their religion, and, despite their long record of loyalty to the crown, they had been threatened with the confiscation of their lands. As they approached the walled town, they turned aside. In December 1641 they had meetings with the Gaelic Irish commanders at Tara and Knockcrofty. The momentous decision they arrived at was to join the native Irish rebels of Ulster. For centuries these Old English lords, descendants of the Norman colonists, had fought loyally for the English government. Now they had been pushed too far. Richard Bellings, who had been at the meeting, knew how significant it was:

  And thus, distrust, aversion, force, and fear united the two parties which since the conquest had at all times been most opposite, and ... publicly declared that they would repute all such enemies as did not assist them in their ways.

  Protestant refugees from the surrounding countryside poured into Drogheda. One defender reported:

  Miserable spectacles of wealthy men and women, utterly despoiled and undone, nay, stripped stark naked, with doleful cries, came flocking in to us by multitudes, upon whom our bowels could not but yearn.

  Help came in the spring of 1642. The Westminster parliament had voted to rush troops to Ireland. The Earl of Ormond brought over a large English army and sent troops from Dublin to relieve Drogheda. His commanding officer reported: ‘The number of the slain, I looked not after, but there was little mercy shown in those times.’

  Meanwhile the Scots cautiously responded to an urgent plea from London to send a relief army to Ulster. On 15 April 1642 Major-General Robert Monro, after landing at Carrickfergus with 10,000 men, swept southwards with his Scots army in pursuit of the Irish. A hardened veteran of the religious wars in Germany, he simply slaughtered his captives, first at Kilwarlin Wood, then at Loughbrickland, and finally at Newry. There he shot and hanged sixty men and his troops, scouring the countryside about, made sure any Irish they caught, one officer reported, were ‘cutte downe, with sume wyves and chyldrene for I promis such gallants gotis but small mercie if they come in your comone sogeris handis’.

  The crown forces now held Dungannon, much of the east coast, and some southern ports. In Derry and north Donegal colonists banded together in the ‘Laggan force’ to win some notable victories. Nevertheless, most of Ireland fell under the control of the rebels. One after another, the counties of the west and the south joined the insurrection. The O’Flahertys of Connemara joined rebels in Mayo in February to slaughter around a hundred Protestants at Shrule.

  Long promised, Irish exiles sailed from the European mainland to join their compatriots in arms. Many were experienced veterans from the Spanish army. The most distinguished was Owen Roe O’Neill, nephew of the great Earl of Tyrone; sailing from Dunkirk up the North Sea and around Scotland, O’Neill landed at Doe Castle in north Donegal in July 1642. Cardinal Richelieu released all Irishmen serving in the French army to return to fight in their native land. Many travelled with the Old English commander Thomas Preston, who sailed in to Wexford in August.

  It was on 22 August 1642 that the English Civil War broke out. Now that the forces raised by the Westminster parliament were marching against Charles I’s Cavaliers, the English government in all parts of Ireland was in peril. Certainly there were as many as 37,000 Protestant men in arms in Ireland. But their loyalties now were dangerously divided between king and parliament.

  Leading members of the Catholic hierarchy met in Kilkenny. These clergy declared that all Catholics who did not take part in this just war would be excommunicated. In October elected men from all over the island formed the Confederation of Kilkenny. The Confederation’s Supreme Council acted as the government of Ireland, appointed generals, issued writs and minted a new coinage.

  There is little doubt that at this moment the Confederate Irish, working together, could have seized control of the entire island. Fatal hesitation, conflicting aims and wasting disputes, however, prevented them from achieving that objective.

  Episode 96

  ‘YOUR WORD IS SANCTA MARIA!’

  Few periods of Irish history are as confusing as the 1640s. During most of this time the English Civil War raged. In Ireland these were years of massacres, innumerable sieges, dozens of battles, hundreds of skirmishes; this was a time of religious
hatred, burnt crops, smoking ruins, when the defeated and the innocent were cut down without mercy again and again. Generals and their men changed sides, sometimes with bewildering frequency. In command in Cork, the Protestant Lord Inchiquin, known as ‘Murrough of the Burnings’, fought for Charles I, then for parliament, then again for Charles I, and finally became a Catholic. Major-General Robert Monro and his Scots troops in Ulster were royalists, then parliamentarians, and then royalists again.

  After a string of successes the Gaelic Irish and the Old English Catholics had united to form the Confederation of Kilkenny in October 1642. The Confederates could have taken control of the whole island, but they failed to seize the moment. Instead of driving their opponents into the sea, they opened negotiations with Charles I. Their view was that King Charles was more likely to give them religious freedom than parliament’s Puritans and Roundheads.

  The Confederates’ faith in King Charles—like almost everyone else’s—was completely misplaced. Pointless negotiations dragged on for years. On behalf of the king, the Earl of Ormond negotiated a ‘cessation’—that is, a truce—with the Confederates on 15 September 1643. This did not mean an end to the fighting, however. Many Protestants on both sides of the Irish Sea were horrified that the king had done a deal with Catholic ‘malignants’, and more of them came over to the side of parliament. The Confederation of Kilkenny, indeed, promised the king £300,000 to support the royalist war effort. One Englishman wrote:

  Most of all the Irish cessation made the minds of the people embrace [parliament]; for when ... the agreement was proclaimed, accepting the sum of £300,000 from these idolatrous butchers, and giving them, over the name of Roman Catholic subjects now in arms, a sure peace ... and to exterminate all who should not agree to that proclamation; we thought the popish party was so far countenanced, as it was necessary for all Protestants to join more strictly for their own safety.

  Monro, saying he would take orders only from the Scottish government, fought on. Then, as the Roundheads began to turn the tide against the Cavaliers in England, parliamentary armies began to make inroads into Confederate territory. One was led by Murrough O’Brien, Lord Inchiquin, who after an unsuccessful meeting with King Charles, returned to Ireland, declared for parliament, and ruthlessly drove all the Catholics out of Cork, Youghal and Kinsale.

  Meanwhile divisions began to weaken the Confederate cause. The Old English Catholics, despite everything, remained loyal to Charles I. Owen Roe O’Neill, the veteran Confederate commander in Ulster, along with many other Gaelic Irish, sought complete Irish independence. The arrival in Kerry of the pope’s representative, Archbishop Giovanni Battista Rinuccini, swung the pendulum in O’Neill’s favour. Rinuccini brought arms, 20,000 pounds of gunpowder, 200,000 silver dollars, and a determination to stop the Confederation of Kilkenny making a deal with Charles I.

  For the past four years Owen Roe O’Neill had been training his Ulster army in modern fighting methods. He was ready when Monro moved out of Antrim to march south in June 1646. With fresh Scottish reinforcements, Monro advanced with 6,000 men and six field pieces drawn by oxen. On the River Blackwater, at Benburb, O’Neill attacked from the rear. As his men were pounded by Monro’s cannon, Owen Roe harangued his men:

  Let your manhood be seen by your push of pike! Your word is Sancta Maria, and so in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost advance!—and give not fire till you are within pike-length!

  With no guns but an equal number of men, the Irish steadily pressed the Scots back to the river, slaughtering them. Monro escaped only after he had cast away his coat, hat and wig. Between one-third and one-half of the Scots were killed, the Irish sustaining only trifling losses.

  When the news reached Rome, Pope Innocent X himself attended a Te Deum in Santa Maria Maggiore to thank God for the triumph. The Battle of Benburb was the greatest and most annihilating victory in arms the Irish ever won over the British. Monro ruefully observed: ‘For ought I can understand, the Lord of Hosts had a controversie with us to rub shame in our faces.’

  Yet this great victory at Benburb was thrown away. Though all the north was now at his mercy, Owen Roe instead turned south to help Rinuccini take control of the Catholic Confederation in Kilkenny. Fatally divided, the Confederates would soon be in no condition to face the victors in the English Civil War—the Roundheads and their leader, Oliver Cromwell.

  Episode 97

  ‘THE RIGHTEOUS JUDGMENT OF GOD’

  During the summer of 1647 the green fields of Ireland were once more drenched red with blood. At least 3,000 Irishmen were cut down at Dungan’s Hill in Co. Meath and another 4,000 died at Knocknanuss Hill in Co. Cork. And these were only two battles out of an endless series of armed engagements.

  By the end of 1648 the Catholic Confederation of Kilkenny had joined with Presbyterian Scots in Ulster and royalists, both English and Irish. These men, bitter enemies until recently, now united behind their king. But in England the cause of Charles I was lost. Soon he was on trial for his life, and on 30 January 1649 the king was executed. Parliament, after setting up the Commonwealth in May, could now concentrate resources on crushing opposition across the Irish Sea. Oliver Cromwell, parliament’s greatest general, relished his appointment as commander-in-chief and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. He had at his disposal a war chest of £100,000, a great train of artillery and 12,000 ‘Ironsides’—seasoned veterans of many victories.

  As the invading army prepared to board more than a hundred vessels at Milford Haven, Irish royalists made a desperate attempt to seize Dublin to deny Cromwell a safe landing. They got to within less than a mile from the city centre, but they were driven back in what is now Baggot Street and routed at Rathfarnham.

  Cromwell faced no opposition when he stepped ashore from his frigate on 15 August 1649. From the outset he made it clear that he intended to avenge the 1641 massacre of Protestants in Ulster:

  You, unprovoked, put the English to the most unheard of and most barbarous massacre without respect of sex or age, that ever the sun beheld, and at a time when Ireland was in perfect peace.

  He opened his campaign by besieging the walled port of Drogheda. For an entire week Cromwell positioned his cannon with infinite care. Then, on three sides, the guns battered the walls, some firing cannon-balls weighing sixty-four pounds. After almost two days the breaches in the walls were judged large enough for an assault. Cromwell reported that he drove most of the garrison

  into the Mill-mount, a place very strong and of difficult access.... The governor, Sir Arthur Aston, and divers considerable officers being there, our men getting up to them were ordered by me to put all to the sword; and, indeed, being in the heat of the action, I forbade them to spare any that there were in arms in the town.

  Cromwell’s own estimate was that some 2,000 were put to the sword. Governor Aston was clubbed to death with his own wooden leg. Only sixty-four parliamentary troops had fallen in the fighting. The killing didn’t stop there. A hundred took refuge in the tower of St Peter’s; Cromwell ordered the church to be set on fire, and all inside were burned to death. All priests and friars found in the town were killed—or, as Cromwell put it, their ‘heads were knocked promiscuously together’. With Cromwell at Drogheda was Lieutenant-General Edmund Ludlow; he observed:

  The slaughter was continued all that day and the next, which extraordinary severity, I presume, was used to discourage others from making opposition. And truly I believe this bitterness will save much effusion of blood.

  For Cromwell, the slaughter was more than this—it was God’s revenge for the Ulster massacres of 1641:

  I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood, and that it 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.

  Cromwell sent Colonel Robert Venables to the north. The royalist Colonel Mark Trevor inflic
ted severe losses with a cavalry attack at night outside Lisburn, but these Ironsides were not to be deflected. Soon only Charlemont, Enniskillen and Coleraine remained in royalist hands. The Lord Lieutenant himself then forged his way southwards, down the coast to the port of Wexford. Cromwell lost only about twenty men in taking the town, but another massacre followed—the total number of soldiers and townspeople slain was not far short of 2,000. Next he besieged the walled town of New Ross at the junction of the Barrow and Nore rivers. After enduring two days of bombardment, the people of the town sued for terms. One of their requests was for freedom of worship. Cromwell gave this famous reply:

  For what you mention concerning liberty of conscience you mean a liberty to exercise the Mass, I judge it best to use plain dealing, and to let you know, where the parliament of England have power, that will not be allowed of.

  Cromwell’s subjugation of Ireland would take more than another two blood-soaked years.

  Episode 98

  THE CURSE OF CROMWELL

  Having taken the walled towns of Drogheda and Wexford and slaughtered their garrisons, Oliver Cromwell relentlessly pressed on. Opposed to him were the royalists, many of them Protestants and English, and the Catholic Confederation of Kilkenny. Towns along the Munster coast surrendered to him without a fight. Kilkenny capitulated at the end of March 1650. But parliament’s commander-in-chief did not have everything his own way. Cromwell lost some 2,000 men during his assault on the Tipperary town of Clonmel in May 1650. A few days later he returned to England, leaving his son-in-law Henry Ireton in charge.