GETTY IMAGES/BRIDGEMAN IMAGESRobert Walker’s portrait of Oliver
Cromwell in 1649. Cromwell
showed no mercy during his
attack on Ireland that year
O
n 15 August 1649,
Oliver Cromwell
landed at Ringsend
on the outskirts of
Dublin, accompanied
by 12,000 men of the
New Model Army and
the largest train of siege artillery yet seen
in Ireland. The English Commonwealth
regime needed a military victory over the
fledgling alliance of English royalists and
Irish Catholics to bolster flagging domestic
popularity following the execution of
Charles I in January. Cromwell marched
north and besieged Drogheda, a strategic
town at the mouth of the River Boyne,
garrisoned by 3,000 troops.
On 10 September, the garrison
commander, an English officer named Sir
Arthur Aston, rejected a summons to
surrender and Cromwell’s forces attacked
the town the next day. The storming of
Drogheda by the New Model Army, and
the subsequent massacre of soldiers and
civilians, shocked contemporary opinion
across Europe and established Oliver
Cromwell’s reputation for cruelty. And yet,
despite the widespread condemnation of
his actions, as well as some half-hearted
attempts at justification, doubts persist
over what exactly happened on that day.
Most historical accounts have relied
heavily on secondhand reports or
uncorroborated (and highly partisan)
evidence, with all the attendant problems
of bias. A number of the victorious
parliamentary soldiers wrote of their
experiences at Drogheda, but few of the
surviving defenders recorded their views;
unfortunately, with one exception,
the town’s inhabitants left no diaries or
letters describing the tragedy. The
following reconstruction is based
exclusively on the eyewitness testimony of
three men from very different backgrounds- Oliver Cromwell, commander-in-chief of
the New Model Army; Garrett Dungan, a
soldier in the town’s garrison; and Dean
Nicholas Bernard, a resident Anglican
clergyman – in an attempt to break
through the layers of misinterpretation
that distort perceptions of one of the most
controversial episodes in Irish history.
The key evidence consists of letters
composed by Oliver Cromwell, who led his
troops through the breach in the town’s
southern walls. Less than a week later, he
wrote to William Lenthall, speaker of the
House of Commons at Westminster,
describing the day’s events in vivid detail.
Cromwell conceded that the enemy
provided stiff opposition, inflicting
“considerable” losses, before they began to
retreat in some disorder, with the
parliamentarians in hot pursuit. Aston and
300 men occupied a fort called Millmount,
on top of a steep hill, but they subsequently
surrendered without a fight and were
immediately executed. The slaughter
continued elsewhere as English soldiers
rampaged through the streets and,
according to Cromwell, “being in the heat
of action, I forbade them to spare any that
were in arms in the town”. The victims
included two clergymen killed the
following day in cold blood.
Cromwell believed that God alone
deserved all the glory for a victory
obtained through harsh but justifiable
means. In a reference to the massacre of
Protestant settlers by Catholic insurgents
at the outbreak of the rebellion in 1641, he
claimed that the large numbers slaughtered
at Drogheda constituted “a righteous
judgement of God upon these barbarous
wretches, who have imbrued their hands in
so much innocent blood”.
In fact, the rebels never controlled the
town during the 1640s, and the garrison in
1649 contained significant numbers of
English royalists and Irish Protestants, as
well as Irish Catholics. The Westminster
parliament, however, affirmed the invasion
of Ireland on the need for vengeance, and
Cromwell’s severity also set a marker for
the campaign of conquest. He expressed
the hope that the tactics adopted might
discourage further resistance and “prevent
the effusion of blood for the future”.
Despite the self-congratulatory tone of
the letter, Cromwell implicitly conceded
that something terrible had happened at
Drogheda and that without “the
satisfactory grounds to such actions”, the
scale of the slaughter could not “but work
remorse and regret”. This sentence, largely
ignored by historians, strongly suggests a
man ill at ease with his conscience. As
always, Cromwell found solace and
comfort in his religious convictions, the“Cromwell believed that God alone
deserved all the glory for a victory
obtained through justifiable means”