I KNEW LITTLE OF THIS BEFORE READING BOOKS BY DOUGLAS REED, CROMWELL ALSO BANNED CHRISTMAS ..KILLED PRIESTS- BURNED DOWN CHURCHES…THANK GOD- THE ENGLISH DUG UP HIS DEAD BODY, BEHEADED IT BEFORE PLONKING IT ON A STAKE!
SO MANY BLOODY TRAITORS!
Today in Irish History 11 September, 1649, Cromwell Storms Drogheda
John Dorney remembers the sack of Drogheda and the massacre of the Royalist garrison by the New Model Army in 1649.
On Monday, September the 10th 1649, Oliver Cromwell, encamped outside of Drogheda, with an army of 12,000 New Model Army soldiers and 11 eleven 48 pounder siege guns, summoned the Royalist commander Arthur Aston to surrender the town.
Sir, having brought the army of the Parliament of England before this place, to reduce it to obedience, to the end that the effusion of blood may be prevented, I thought fit to summon you to deliver the same into my hands to their use. If this be refused, you will have no cause to blame me. I expect your answer and remain your servant,
O. Cromwell[1]
Cromwells guns had opened two breaches in the towns medieval walls and he planned simultaneous assaults the next day.
When Cromwell warned of the effusion of blood, he was making a threat. A storm of a fortified place was a notoriously harrowing experience for the attacker and it was commonly understood that if taken by an assault, a town, its garrison and inhabitants would be punished with looting and perhaps massacre.
Aston refused to surrender his garrison of around 3,000 men, composed variously of English Royalist and Irish Catholic troops. By the following evening he was dead, beaten to death with his own wooden leg by Parliamentarian soldiers.
Some of the garrison and many townspeople had escaped over the towns north wall, but most of the Royalist soldiers were dead, many of them executed after they had surrendered. The heads of the Royalist officers were bought back to Dublin where they were put on pikes lining the roads into the city Those who were spared were sent into indentured servitude inBarbados.
The siege of Drogheda was perhaps the most ferocious sacking of a town in Irish history
All the Catholic priests found in Drogheda were clubbed to death, or knocked on the head in Cromwells phrase. As for the civilians, it has never been established how many died in the sack of Drogheda, but it seems clear the number of non-combatant dead ran to several hundred. Cromwell limited himself to concluding that the death toll included, many inhabitants of the town.[2]
The siege of Drogheda was perhaps the most ferocious sacking of a town in Irish history. Even today, viewed through the lense of Irish nationalist memory, it retains its capacity to inspire horror and anger.
But the defenders of Drogheda were not Irish nationalists (the term nationalist did not yet even exist) and Cromwells army were not straightforward English imperialists.
So how did English Parliamentarians come to massacre the English and Irish followers of Charles Stuart at Drogheda? What explains the savagery of the event and why is it still remembered and argued over even today?
A war of many parts
A Confederate Catholic banner, with the slogan, Vivat Carolus Rex, 'Long Live King Charles'
The war in Ireland that raged from 1641 to 1653 was confused and confusing. One Irish participant, Richard Bellings, described it as, a war of many parts, carried on under the notion of so many interests, perplexed with such diversity of rents and divisions.[3]
In one sense it was inextricably tied to the civil war in England between Royalists and Parliamentarians. In another sense it was a separate, Irish, religious war, a contest between native Catholic and settler Protestant, for control of power, land and religious hegemony.
In October 1641, a small group from the Irish Catholic elite rose in revolt, in the name of the King, Charles I, to redress Catholic grievances in Ireland. Not only did their coup fail, but they unleashed the passions built up in the Kingdom of Ireland since English dominance there had been established in the reign of Elizabeth I. Catholics, displaced by Protestant settlers, turned on the newcomers, killing around 4,000 and looting and expelling tens of thousands more from their homes.
The response of the King and of his representatives in Dublin was at first implacable Scottish and English armies were both sent to Ireland in early 1642 and paid back, with at least equal ferocity, the massacres of Protestants in 1641 on the Catholic population.
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