Cromwellian Conquest of Ireland
Cromwell landed at Dublin in August 1649 and reconquered Ireland in nine months, and the campaign is remembered for two sieges. The context was the English civil wars. Ireland had been in rebellion since 1641, when a rising by Catholic gentry produced massacres of Protestant settlers whose scale was enormously exaggerated in English pamphlets, and by 1649 an alliance of Irish Confederates and English royalists held most of the country and had declared for Charles II. Cromwell arrived with some 12,000 veterans, a siege train and, unusually, the money to pay them. Drogheda was stormed in September after its governor refused to surrender. Under the laws of war as then understood, a garrison that refused terms and was taken by storm forfeited quarter, and Cromwell had the defenders killed — some 3,000 people, including civilians, and priests killed on sight. He described it in his despatch as a righteous judgement. Wexford followed in October, where his soldiers began the killing while negotiations were still going on and some 1,500 died. The intended effect was to make other towns surrender, and many did. The war continued after Cromwell left in 1650, becoming a guerrilla campaign against tories and ending in 1653 with famine, plague and transportation to the West Indies. The settlement that followed confiscated most Catholic-owned land, shifting it from about sixty per cent to under ten, and moved landowners west of the Shannon. The population may have fallen by fifteen to twenty-five per cent. The memory is still live.
- Year: 1649 CE
- Category: Military
