Review
A spirited defense of arguably the greatest villain of Irish history, says Sean McMahon.
- Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy
- Brandon
Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy
Noll Cromwell, as his English followers called him, is revered as the man who effectively obliterated the power of the Crown.
In Ireland he is not revered at all but gives his name to the most virulent curse known in a country not unacquainted with vituperation. He arrived here at Ringsend on 15 August 1649 and left on 26 May having caused the deaths of thousands of people in Drogheda, Wexford and Clonmel. Reilly’s bright, extremely well-researched and inevitably controversial book is not primarily concerned with what Cromwell did but is meant to act, considering the culture of the time, as a vigorous defence. With such a brief Radovan Karadzic should consider hiring Reilly at the Hague.
The Irish expedition was necessary and had to be finished with all due dispatch. The self-regarding Charles I had been beheaded on 30 January but the supporters of his son, Charles II, in Ireland and Scotland were still a threat to the Commonwealth, and memories of the, admittedly exaggerated, massacres of Ulster planters, were still vivid. Popery, Cromwell, like all his Puritan fellows, regarded not only as a murderous error but also of a source of actual physical pain that drove otherwise normal men to unforgivable extremism. He fell victim to the endemic dysentery in October and indeed during the whole Irish expedition he was generally ill, often confined to bed. The only real cure was to be successful and this meant the visceral comfort that massacre alone could contrive.
Drogheda (or Tredah as Cromwell calls it) is the prosecution’s main platform. Yet Reilly makes a very good case for the possibility that the majority of the people slain were not civilians in spite of Cromwell’s reported words ‘…and many inhabitants’. The rules of the game as played at a the time were that the besieged defenders were already dead; Drogheda and the other nuisances had been given the chance to yield with little loss of life as did Belfast, Carrick-on-Suir, Kilkenny and Cashel. The penalty that the soldiers in Drogheda, Wexford and Clonmel paid for the delaying of victory was death and as for the mere inhabitants – they had little say anyway. As with Wexford the defence requires such close reasoning on Reilly’s part that a good advocate, Daniel O’Connell, say, could emotionally erase the arguments in the jury’s minds.
The more significant effects of the Cromwellian ‘settlement’ (the 17th century equivalent of ethnic cleansing) were not alone the civic massacres but the plantations, the priest-hunting and the ‘hell-or Connacht’ option, which deprived the displaced of any coastal land or access to the Shannon. To quote the proverb cited by Reilly himself people convinced against their will are ‘of the same opinion still’. In spite of a well written and remarkably readable book and a sharp sense of contemporary history I feel that the ‘curse of Cromwell’ retains its blistering power and has not been watered down to the ‘mild imprecation of Cromwell’.
