The English Revolution and Cromwell’s campaign in Ireland are still hotly debated. This month, we review two books worth reading by anyone who wants to know what really happened…
The beginnings of a passage into enlightenment
WORKERS, APRIL 2009 ISSUE
God’s fury, England’s fire: a new history of the English civil wars, by Michael Braddick, hardback, 758 pages, ISBN 978-0-7139-9632-6, Allen Lane, 2008, £30.
Michael Braddick, professor of history at Sheffield University, has written a splendid new history of the civil wars in Britain in the 1640s. The book is in three parts: the crisis of the three kingdoms (1637-42), war (1642-46), and revolution (1646-49).
Part 1 describes the Scottish Prayer Book rebellion and the politics of reformation, politics and society in Charles’s England, the English and the Bishops’ Wars, the Long Parliament, the Irish rising, the struggle for the provinces and the slide into war. Part 2 studies the battle of Edgehill, the English war efforts in 1643, the Irish Cessation and the Solemn League and Covenant, the battle of Marston Moor, death and its meanings, the battle of Naseby and the New Model Army, the costs and benefits of civil war, and the politics of parishes at war. Part 3 describes postwar politics, attempts at settlement, the Putney debates, the Engagement and the vote of No Addresses, Charles’s starting of the second civil war, his trial and execution, and England’s freedom.
Popular opposition
The people opposed the king’s party on the issues of royal powers, his religious policies, taxation, his foreign policy, and his Catholic advisers.
Charles sought to uphold his supreme power over the people. He refused to work with Parliament or to be subject to its authority. People noted that Charles tried to stay out of war in Europe against Catholics, but was ready to go to war against his own Protestant subjects.
Public opinion was such that, as Braddick writes, “Military mobilization by prerogative power in order to enforce Laudian ceremonialism [outlawing many Puritan practices] would have plenty of opponents.”
Yet in 1649, the king was still unrepentant and uncompromising, and still bent on another war: defeated in England and Scotland, he was as yet unbeaten in Ireland.
Braddick recounts the organised, disciplined and popular assertions of traditional common rights - throwing down enclosures in forests and fens, tearing up hedges, and breaking open the Earl of Middlesex’s deer park and killing his deer. Tactically astute, people gathered in groups of two, thus evading the legal definition of a riot.
More and more people became active citizens. People fought for the idea that “All power is originally and essentially in the whole body of the people of this Nation.”
As Braddick writes, “What was really new and radical … was that fundamental questions were being debated before a public audience.” It was “a decade of intense debate and spectacular intellectual creativity … the beginnings of a passage from the world of reformation to the world of enlightenment”.
Cromwell: an honourable enemy. The untold story of the Cromwellian invasion of Ireland, by Tom Reilly, paperback, 316 pages, ISBN 1-84212-080-8, Phoenix Press, 2000, £10.99.
Historian Tom Reilly was born in Drogheda, the site of one of Cromwell’s most notorious alleged massacres. Showing remarkable independence of mind, he studies Cromwell’s Ireland campaign of 1649-50. He finds that, contrary to myth, Cromwell did not indiscriminately massacre ordinary unarmed Irish people.
Before he started the campaign, Cromwell issued a proclamation, “I do hereby warn … all Officers, Soldiers and others under my command not to do any wrong or violence towards Country People or persons whatsoever, unless they be actually in arms or office with the enemy … as they shall answer to the contrary at their utmost perils.” This was no empty threat: before even reaching Drogheda, Cromwell ordered two of his soldiers to be hanged for stealing hens.
His forces killed the military defenders of Drogheda and Wexford, not the townspeople, acting according to standard 17th century military norms. Yet Jesuit Father Denis Murphy wrote, more than 200 years later, “to none was mercy shown; not to the women nor to the aged, nor to the young.”
Murphy gave vivid descriptions of the killings of priests, but none of any killing of women or children. In fact, there are no eye-witness accounts of indiscriminate slaughter, or of the death of even one unarmed defender or of one woman or child.
Yet a leading historian, Professor Roy Foster, the Carroll Professor of Irish History at Oxford University, wrongly claims that the massacre of Drogheda’s townspeople was “one of the few massacres in Irish history fully attested to on both sides”.
After the Restoration, Cromwell was the main target of political and religious attack. The Royalists attacked him on everything, especially the Irish campaign. Irish nationalists, Catholic publicists and infantile leftists assisted with fabrications and propaganda. The Irish bishops lied that Cromwell’s religious policies could not be ‘effected without the massacring or banishment of the Catholic inhabitants’, so the propagandists had to allege the massacres.
History is not a matter of opinion, or of repeating allegations without investigation. We are obliged to use evidence, primary sources, and eye-witness accounts, and we are duty-bound to stick to the verified facts, at whatever cost to our previous judgements.