The Irish Confederate Wars and the Cromwellian Conquest

I. Ireland before 1641

In the early seventeenth century Ireland was a kingdom under the English crown, governed by a lord deputy in Dublin and a parliament that met at intervals. Its population of perhaps one and a half to two million was divided by religion and origin. The majority were Catholic and of Gaelic Irish descent. A substantial Catholic group, the Old English, descended from the Anglo-Norman settlers of the twelfth and later centuries, held land and influence in the towns and the Pale around Dublin. A growing Protestant minority, the New English, consisted of settlers, officials and soldiers who had arrived since the Tudor reconquest, and in Ulster there were also Scottish Presbyterian settlers.

The Reformation had made little progress among the native population. The established Church of Ireland, Protestant in doctrine and episcopal in government, was the church of the minority, while the great majority of the population remained Catholic, served by a clergy trained on the Continent in Irish colleges at Louvain, Salamanca, Rome, Paris and elsewhere. The Catholic Church in Ireland was reorganised in the early seventeenth century under the influence of the Council of Trent, with resident bishops and a growing number of priests and friars.

The plantations of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had transferred large amounts of land from Catholic to Protestant owners. The most extensive was the Plantation of Ulster, begun in 1609 after the flight of the Gaelic earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell in 1607, which settled English and Scottish Protestants on land confiscated from the native Irish in six counties. Further plantations took place in Leinster and Munster, and under the lord deputy Thomas Wentworth, from 1633 to 1640, the crown sought to extend plantation to Connacht, threatening the titles of the Old English as well as the Gaelic Irish.

The Irish Catholics sought security of their land titles and toleration of their religion through negotiation with the crown. In 1628 Charles I promised a series of concessions known as the Graces, in return for subsidies, but most were not implemented. The outbreak of the Bishops' Wars between Charles and the Scottish Covenanters in 1639–40, and the increasing power of the English Parliament, which was strongly anti-Catholic, alarmed Irish Catholics, who feared that a Puritan Parliament would impose harsher measures against them.

II. The Rising of October 1641

On 23 October 1641 a group of Gaelic Irish gentry in Ulster, led by Sir Phelim O'Neill, Rory O'More and Lord Maguire, rose in arms. They planned to seize Dublin Castle, but the plot was betrayed and the attack on Dublin failed. In Ulster, however, the insurgents seized towns and forts, and within days much of the province was in their hands. Sir Phelim O'Neill claimed to act in the king's name and produced a forged commission from Charles I.

The leaders intended a political rising, aimed at securing concessions for Catholics. But the rising quickly became a popular movement in which the native Irish attacked the Protestant settlers who had taken their lands. Settlers were robbed, stripped, driven from their homes and in many cases killed. Notable killings occurred at Portadown, where around a hundred settlers were drowned in the river Bann in November 1641, and at other places in Armagh, Tyrone, Cavan and Fermanagh. Many more died of exposure and hunger during the winter as refugees.

The number of Protestants killed has been the subject of great controversy. Contemporary Protestant accounts gave figures ranging up to two hundred thousand or more, far exceeding the total settler population. Modern historians estimate that around four thousand were killed directly and perhaps a further eight thousand died of the consequences of displacement, figures that represent a substantial proportion of the settler population of Ulster.

III. The 1641 Depositions

In December 1641 the lords justices in Dublin appointed a commission of clergymen, headed by Henry Jones, dean of Kilmore, to collect sworn statements from refugees concerning their losses. The commission took around eight thousand depositions over the following years, recording losses of property, the names of attackers, and accounts of killings and atrocities. The depositions, now held at Trinity College Dublin, run to some nineteen thousand pages.

The depositions have been both a source of controversy and an invaluable historical record. In the seventeenth century they were used, in selective and sensational form, to support Protestant accounts of a general massacre. Sir John Temple's The Irish Rebellion, published in 1646, drew on them to present the rising as a Catholic plot to exterminate Protestants, and this account was widely read and repeatedly reprinted. Catholic writers rejected the depositions as hearsay and exaggeration. Modern historians recognise that many depositions contain hearsay, but they also contain first-hand evidence of great value for the social history of Ireland. Between 2007 and 2010 Trinity College Dublin, with the universities of Aberdeen and Cambridge, transcribed and published the entire collection online as the 1641 Depositions project.

The reports of massacre in Ireland had a profound effect in England and Scotland. They intensified anti-Catholic feeling, and the question of who should command the army needed to suppress the rising became one of the issues that divided Charles I from Parliament and led to the outbreak of the English Civil War in August 1642. In Scotland the Covenanters sent an army to Ulster in April 1642, under Robert Monro, to protect the Scottish settlers.

IV. The Confederation of Kilkenny

In late 1641 the Old English Catholics of the Pale, after initial hesitation, joined the rising. In March 1642 the Catholic bishops met at Kells and declared the war just, and in May 1642 a synod at Kilkenny laid down the principles of a Catholic association. In October 1642 a General Assembly met at Kilkenny and established the Confederate Catholics of Ireland, a government with an elected assembly, a Supreme Council, provincial councils and armies. The Confederates took an oath of association pledging loyalty to the king, the defence of the Catholic religion, and the protection of the lives, liberties and estates of the members. Their motto was Pro Deo, pro Rege, pro Patria Hiberni unanimes, "Irishmen united for God, king and country".

The Confederation controlled most of Ireland for much of the 1640s. Its armies were commanded by experienced soldiers who had served in the Spanish and French armies on the Continent, among them Owen Roe O'Neill, a nephew of the Earl of Tyrone who had served in Flanders and who commanded the army of Ulster, and Thomas Preston, who commanded the army of Leinster. The Confederation's opponents included the royalist forces under James Butler, Marquis of Ormond, who held Dublin for the king; the Scottish army in Ulster; and Protestant forces in Munster led by Lord Inchiquin, who changed sides more than once.

The Confederates were divided over their aims. The Old English and the moderate party sought a settlement with Charles I that would secure their land titles and toleration for Catholic worship, in return for which they would send troops to support the king against Parliament. The clerical party and many Gaelic Irish sought more extensive concessions, including the public exercise of the Catholic religion, the restoration of churches to Catholic use, and the reversal of the plantations. In 1643 the Confederates agreed a truce, the Cessation, with Ormond.

V. Rinuccini and the Divisions of the Confederation

In October 1645 a papal nuncio, Giovanni Battista Rinuccini, archbishop of Fermo, arrived in Ireland with money and arms from Pope Innocent X. Rinuccini insisted that any settlement must provide for the full public exercise of the Catholic religion and the return of church property to the Catholic Church. When the Supreme Council concluded a peace with Ormond in March 1646, known as the first Ormond Peace, which offered only limited concessions, Rinuccini and the clergy denounced it, and Owen Roe O'Neill's victory over the Scottish army at Benburb in June 1646 strengthened the nuncio's position. The clergy threatened excommunication against those who accepted the peace, and it was rejected.

The division between the nuncio's party and the moderates paralysed the Confederation. In 1648 the Supreme Council concluded a truce with Inchiquin, and Rinuccini excommunicated its supporters, leading to a civil war within the Confederation between Owen Roe O'Neill's army and the forces of the Supreme Council. In January 1649 the Confederates concluded a second peace with Ormond, granting the free exercise of the Catholic religion, and dissolved the Confederation. Rinuccini left Ireland in February 1649, the month after the execution of Charles I in London.

Rinuccini's report on his mission, preserved in the Vatican archives and published in the nineteenth century as the Commentarius Rinuccinianus, together with his letters, is a major source for the period. Historians such as Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin have studied the nuncio's mission as part of the history of the Counter-Reformation in Europe, emphasising his conviction that the Irish war was an opportunity to restore the Catholic Church to its full rights in a kingdom where it had been suppressed for a century.

VI. Owen Roe O'Neill and Benburb

Owen Roe O'Neill was born around 1590 into the ruling family of Tyrone and left Ireland as a young man after the defeat of the Gaelic lords in the Nine Years' War. He served for nearly forty years in the Spanish army in Flanders, where the Irish regiments formed part of the forces fighting the Dutch in the Eighty Years' War. In 1640 he commanded the defence of Arras against the French, a siege that established his reputation as a careful and capable commander. He returned to Ireland in July 1642, landing in Donegal with a small group of veteran officers, and was chosen to command the Confederate army of Ulster.

O'Neill spent several years training his army, which was poorly equipped and often short of supplies, and avoided battle until it was ready. On 5 June 1646, at Benburb on the river Blackwater in County Tyrone, he met the Scottish army of Robert Monro. Using the terrain and the late afternoon sun to his advantage, O'Neill attacked and routed the Scots, who lost between two and three thousand men, while the Irish losses were light. The victory was the greatest Irish success of the war, and Rinuccini sent the captured standards to Rome. O'Neill did not exploit the victory in Ulster but marched south to support the nuncio against the Ormond Peace.

O'Neill's relations with the other Confederate leaders were often strained. He was regarded by the Old English as the champion of the Gaelic Irish and of the clerical party, and his long service abroad separated him from the political society of the Pale. In 1649, after the dissolution of the Confederation, he briefly concluded a truce with the parliamentary commanders in Ulster, and he then reached an agreement with Ormond to join the royalist coalition against Cromwell. He died at Cloughoughter in County Cavan on 6 November 1649 before he could bring his army into the field, and his death deprived the Irish of their most experienced commander.

VII. Ormond and the Royalist Cause

James Butler, twelfth Earl and later first Marquis and Duke of Ormond, was the head of the great Old English family of Butler, but had been raised a Protestant at the English court as a royal ward. Many of his relatives remained Catholic and were members of the Confederation. As lieutenant general of the royal army in Ireland and from 1644 as lord lieutenant, Ormond represented the king's interest and sought to bring the Confederates into alliance with the royalists while preserving the position of the Church of Ireland and the Protestant settlers.

Ormond's position was difficult. He was obliged to negotiate with the Confederates on the king's behalf while resisting concessions that would alienate English Protestant opinion. In June 1647, unable to hold Dublin against the Confederates, he surrendered the city to the parliamentary commissioners rather than to the Catholics, and left for England and then France. He returned in September 1648 to conclude the second Ormond Peace and to lead the coalition of royalists and Confederates against the Commonwealth. After the defeat at Rathmines and the collapse of the coalition, he left Ireland in December 1650 and joined Charles II in exile. At the Restoration he returned as lord lieutenant and played a central role in the land settlement of the 1660s.

VIII. The Siege of Limerick

The siege of Limerick in 1650–51 was the longest of the Cromwellian campaign. Limerick, a walled city on the Shannon, was defended by Hugh Dubh O'Neill, the defender of Clonmel. Ireton's army first besieged the city in the autumn of 1650 but withdrew for the winter, returning in June 1651. The siege lasted until October. Plague broke out within the city, killing many of the inhabitants and defenders, and the besiegers also suffered from disease. Ireton built forts and batteries around the city and blockaded it by land and water.

The city surrendered on 27 October 1651. The terms excluded a number of named persons from mercy, including the Catholic bishop of Emly, Terence Albert O'Brien, a Dominican friar, who was hanged together with several officers and members of the city council. O'Brien was among those beatified in 1992. Hugh Dubh O'Neill was condemned to death but his sentence was commuted, and he was later released to Spain. Ireton himself died of fever at Limerick on 26 November 1651, a month after the surrender.

IX. Transportation and the Tories

After the surrender of the Irish armies, the Commonwealth authorities arranged for large numbers of Irish soldiers to leave the country. Between 1652 and 1654 around thirty-four thousand soldiers were shipped to Spain, France, Poland and other countries, where they served in Continental armies. Their departure removed a large part of the military population of Ireland and contributed to the establishment of Irish communities abroad.

The authorities also transported prisoners, vagrants and others to the English colonies in the Caribbean, especially Barbados, where they served as indentured labourers on the sugar plantations. The numbers transported are uncertain, and estimates vary widely; historians generally place the figure in the range of ten thousand or more over the 1650s. Those who remained in Ireland and took to the hills and woods as tories were hunted by the army, and bounties were offered for their capture or death.

X. Cromwell's Campaign

After the execution of Charles I and the establishment of the Commonwealth, the English Parliament resolved to reconquer Ireland. The motives were several: to punish those held responsible for the massacres of 1641; to eliminate the royalist and Confederate alliance that threatened the new republic; to repay the investors who had advanced money for the war under the Adventurers' Act of 1642 in return for promises of Irish land; and to secure the Protestant interest in Ireland. Oliver Cromwell, the leading commander of the New Model Army, was appointed lord lieutenant and commander-in-chief.

Cromwell landed at Dublin on 15 August 1649 with around twelve thousand men, a well-supplied siege train and money to pay his troops. Ormond's royalist army had been defeated outside Dublin at Rathmines on 2 August by the parliamentary commander Michael Jones, which secured the city as Cromwell's base. Cromwell's first objective was Drogheda, a walled town north of Dublin, defended by a garrison of about three thousand royalist troops, both English and Irish, under the command of Sir Arthur Aston, an English Catholic royalist.

XI. Drogheda and Wexford

Cromwell's army reached Drogheda on 3 September and began a bombardment of the walls near St Mary's church on 10 September. On 11 September, after the garrison had refused to surrender, the army stormed the breach. The first assaults were repulsed, but Cromwell led a renewed attack in person, and the defenders were driven back. Cromwell ordered that no quarter be given to those in arms. Aston was killed and his head beaten in with his own wooden leg. The garrison was killed, including soldiers who had surrendered in the Millmount fort and those who had taken refuge in the steeple of St Peter's church, which was set on fire. Catholic priests and friars found in the town were killed.

Cromwell reported to the Speaker of Parliament that about three thousand five hundred had been killed. He wrote: "I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgement 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." He referred to the massacres of 1641, although the garrison of Drogheda, which included many English royalists, had had no part in them. The number of civilians killed at Drogheda has been debated. Some historians, notably Tom Reilly, have argued that the victims were almost entirely soldiers, while others, including Micheál Ó Siochrú, have argued that civilians were also killed in substantial numbers.

On 11 October 1649 Cromwell's army took Wexford, a port that had served as a base for privateers. While negotiations for surrender were in progress, the castle was surrendered by its commander, and Cromwell's troops entered the town. In the confused fighting that followed, around two thousand soldiers and civilians, including priests, were killed, many drowned while trying to escape across the harbour. Cromwell did not order the killing at Wexford but did not attempt to stop it, and he described it as a just judgement on the town.

XII. The Completion of the Conquest

After Wexford, Cromwell took New Ross, and several towns in Munster changed sides when the Protestant royalist garrisons declared for Parliament. His siege of Waterford failed in late 1649, and his army suffered heavily from disease during the winter. In 1650 he resumed the campaign, taking Kilkenny in March. At Clonmel in May 1650 his army suffered its heaviest losses of the campaign, perhaps two thousand men, when it stormed a breach defended by Hugh Dubh O'Neill, though the town surrendered after the garrison withdrew by night.

Cromwell returned to England in May 1650 to face the Scots, who had proclaimed Charles II king. He left the command in Ireland to his son-in-law Henry Ireton, who continued the conquest. Owen Roe O'Neill had died in November 1649, and the Ulster army was defeated at Scarrifhollis in June 1650. Limerick surrendered in October 1651 after a long siege, and Galway in May 1652. The last organised Irish forces surrendered in 1653, although guerrilla resistance by bands known as tories continued for some years.

The war of 1649–53 was accompanied by famine and an outbreak of plague, which began in Galway in 1649 and spread through the country. The parliamentary army adopted a scorched-earth policy against the tories, destroying crops and livestock. The combined effects of war, famine and disease caused a great loss of life. William Petty, who later conducted the land survey, estimated that the population of Ireland fell from about one and a half million in 1641 to around eight hundred and fifty thousand in 1652, though modern estimates of the loss are lower, generally between fifteen and twenty per cent of the population.

XIII. The Cromwellian Settlement

The Act for the Settlement of Ireland, passed by the English Parliament in August 1652, declared that those who had taken part in the rising of 1641 or its massacres were to be executed and their lands forfeited, and that other landowners who had not shown constant good affection to Parliament were to lose part or all of their lands, with compensation in land in Connacht and Clare for those who were allowed to keep a portion. Around fifty thousand to sixty thousand people were sent to the West Indies as indentured servants or soldiers to serve abroad, and thousands of Irish soldiers were permitted to leave for service in the armies of Spain and other Continental powers.

Catholic landowners were required to move west of the river Shannon by May 1654, to the province of Connacht and County Clare, where they were to receive land in compensation, a measure known as the transplantation. The confiscated land in the other provinces was distributed to the Adventurers who had invested in the reconquest and to the soldiers of the army in lieu of arrears of pay. To carry out the distribution, William Petty conducted the Down Survey of 1655–56, the first systematic land survey of Ireland, whose maps are now available online through Trinity College Dublin. The effect of the settlement was to reduce the proportion of Irish land held by Catholics from about sixty per cent in 1641 to around twenty per cent by the 1660s, a figure that was only partly modified after the Restoration.

The practice of the Catholic religion was prohibited during the Interregnum. Priests were banished on pain of death, and many were transported to Barbados or imprisoned on the island of Inishbofin. Catholic worship continued secretly in private houses and in the open air at places later called Mass rocks. The Catholic Church in Ireland lost many of its clergy, and several bishops and priests executed during these years were later beatified by the Catholic Church in 1992 among the Irish martyrs.

XIV. Scripture in Cromwell's Ireland

Cromwell and his officers understood the war in Ireland in providential terms. They regarded victory as a sign of God's favour and defeat as a sign of his displeasure, and they interpreted events through the narratives of the Hebrew Scriptures. Cromwell's letters after Drogheda and Wexford describe the victories as the work of God, and he presented them as a just retribution for the blood shed in 1641. The principle that bloodshed requires retribution was associated with texts such as Genesis 9:6, "Anyone shedding man's blood, by man will his own blood be shed", and Numbers 35:33, which declares that the land cannot be cleansed of blood except by the blood of the one who shed it.

Cromwell's own religious convictions were shaped by Puritan piety and by his reading of the Psalms and the prophets. He frequently quoted Psalm 68:1-2, "Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered", and he referred to his army as an instrument of providence. In his declaration of January 1650, addressed to the Irish Catholic bishops who had met at Clonmacnoise, Cromwell rejected their claims, denied that he intended to extirpate the Catholic population, and argued that the English had come to Ireland to maintain the lawful authority of England and to bring the authors of the 1641 rising to justice. He also stated that he would not permit the celebration of the mass where Parliament had power, while professing that he would not meddle with any man's conscience.

The Confederates and the Catholic clergy also interpreted the war in religious terms. They regarded it as a defence of the Catholic faith and of the Church's rights, and they drew on the example of the Maccabees, who resisted a foreign power that sought to suppress their religion. The Catholic bishops at Clonmacnoise in December 1649 declared that the Parliament's intention was the extirpation of the Catholic religion and called on Catholics to unite in its defence.

The Bible itself had a particular history in Ireland. The Irish translation of the Greek Scriptures, begun in the 1570s and completed by William Daniel, archbishop of Tuam, was published in Dublin in 1602–03. The translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, undertaken by William Bedell, bishop of Kilmore, in the 1630s, was not published until 1685. Bedell, an English Protestant bishop who learned Irish and supported preaching in the language, was one of the few Protestant clergy treated with respect by the insurgents in 1641. He was imprisoned by the insurgents in the castle of Lough Oughter and died in February 1642, and the Catholic insurgents allowed him an honourable burial, firing a volley over his grave.

XV. The Restoration Settlement

The restoration of Charles II in 1660 raised Catholic hopes that the Cromwellian confiscations would be reversed. The king owed a debt to the Irish Catholics who had served him in exile, and some of them had fought in his armies on the Continent. But the new owners of Irish land, including many former parliamentary officers who had supported the Restoration, were politically powerful, and the crown could not dispossess them without risking another upheaval. The Act of Settlement of 1662 and the Act of Explanation of 1665 restored some Catholic landowners, especially those who could show that they had been innocent of rebellion or who had the patronage of Ormond and the court, but the majority of the confiscated land remained in Protestant hands. A court of claims sat in Dublin in 1663 to hear the petitions of dispossessed Catholics, but it closed before all could be heard.

The religious settlement of the Restoration re-established the Church of Ireland with its bishops, and Catholic worship was again tolerated in practice, though not in law, for much of the reign of Charles II. The Catholic clergy were able to return, and the Catholic Church was gradually reorganised, although the Popish Plot of 1678–81 led to renewed persecution, including the execution of Oliver Plunkett, archbishop of Armagh, at Tyburn in 1681.

XVI. Historical Assessment

The Confederate Wars and the Cromwellian conquest have been among the most contested subjects in Irish historiography. For centuries Protestant and Catholic, unionist and nationalist accounts presented the events in contrasting ways, the former emphasising the massacres of 1641 and the latter the atrocities of Cromwell and the confiscations. Cromwell became in Irish popular memory a figure of exceptional brutality, and the phrase "the curse of Cromwell" became proverbial.

Modern scholarship has sought to place the events in their wider context. Historians such as Aidan Clarke, Nicholas Canny, Jane Ohlmeyer, Micheál Ó Siochrú and John Morrill have treated the wars in Ireland as part of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, linked to the conflicts in England and Scotland, and as part of the European wars of religion. They have emphasised the role of the Confederation as a functioning government, the diversity of interests among the Irish Catholics, and the influence of Continental military practice and Counter-Reformation religion. The violence of the conquest has been compared with that of other conflicts of the period, including the Thirty Years' War.

Ó Siochrú's study God's Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland, published in 2008, argued that Cromwell's conduct at Drogheda and Wexford was severe even by the standards of the day, and that the conquest as a whole involved deliberate policies of destruction. Other historians have noted that the laws of war of the period permitted the killing of a garrison that refused to surrender a town taken by storm, and that Cromwell's actions were in line with practice elsewhere, although they agree that the killing of prisoners, priests and civilians went beyond these rules.

The consequences of the Cromwellian settlement shaped Irish history for centuries. The transfer of land to Protestant ownership created the Protestant Ascendancy that dominated Ireland until the late nineteenth century. The anniversary of the rising on 23 October was observed in the Church of Ireland as a day of thanksgiving from 1662 until the nineteenth century, with sermons that recalled the events of 1641. The memory of 1641 strengthened Protestant fears of Catholic rebellion, and the memory of Cromwell strengthened Catholic resentment of English rule.

For summaries of the events, readers may consult the Grokipedia entries on the Irish Confederate Wars, the Irish Rebellion of 1641, Confederate Ireland, the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland and the Siege of Drogheda.

XVII. Chronology

In 1609 the Plantation of Ulster began. In 1628 the Graces were promised. From 1633 to 1640 Wentworth governed Ireland. On 23 October 1641 the rising began in Ulster, and in November the killings at Portadown took place. In December 1641 the depositions commission was appointed. In March 1642 the Adventurers' Act was passed, and in April Monro's Scottish army landed in Ulster. In October 1642 the Confederation was established at Kilkenny. In September 1643 the Cessation was agreed. In October 1645 Rinuccini arrived. In March 1646 the first Ormond Peace was concluded, and in June O'Neill won at Benburb.

In 1648 the Inchiquin truce divided the Confederation. In January 1649 the second Ormond Peace was concluded and Charles I was executed. On 2 August 1649 Ormond was defeated at Rathmines. On 15 August Cromwell landed at Dublin. On 11 September Drogheda was stormed, and on 11 October Wexford. In May 1650 Clonmel fell and Cromwell left Ireland. In October 1651 Limerick surrendered, and in May 1652 Galway. In August 1652 the Act of Settlement was passed. In 1653 the last Irish forces surrendered, and in 1654 the transplantation to Connacht began.

XVIII. Bibliography

The following studies, editions and reference works underlie this account.