Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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had dissatisfaction in his ranks. But in July the English government reinforced

him with a little over 2,000 men, and seldom was so modest a force so time-

ly, for Cromwell was not ready to sail until 13 August. Ormond played into

Jones’s hands. Misled by Cromwell’s choice of Milford Haven as the port of

embarkation for his army into believing that it would land in Munster, he sent

Inchiquin south to counter it, and led his own forces in an attempt to capture

Dublin. His intelligence was poor, and he may not have known that Jones

could now engage him with not greatly inferior numbers. Jones took the

initiative; he advanced against Ormond’s quarters at Rathmines, just south of

Dublin, and on 2 August he took him and his small army by surprise. It was a

skilfully conceived and executed attack, under which Ormond’s forces broke

and ﬂed. Ormond himself was nearly captured, and he lost all his guns and

wagons and treasure, amounting to about £4,000 in gold. A fortnight later

Cromwell disembarked his army close to Dublin, unopposed.

Jones’s great victory at Rathmines made the expeditionary force’s task

immensely easier, as Cromwell gratefully acknowledged. There were still

brave men in the ﬁeld against him, and some hard campaigning lay ahead, but

it was to consist of sieges rather than battles, and for these he had the heavy

guns that his predecessors had lacked. His most troublesome enemies in the

coming months were to be the Irish roads, the Irish weather, and the various

maladies that afﬂicted armies in that damp and boggy country. Among the

many who were carried off by sickness before the year was out were Michael

Jones, who succumbed to a fever on 6 December, and Owen Roe O’Neill,

who died exactly a month earlier. O’Neill had made his peace with Ormond

after Rathmines and agreed to serve as his commander in Ulster, but he was

too broken in health to bring him the swift military aid that he needed.

Cromwell’s strategy was to reduce all the towns that mattered on the east-

ern and southern seaboards before he carried his campaign of conquest any

distance into the interior. Whatever his personal feelings about the Irish

nation, he tried to make it clear that he had no quarrel with unarmed civilians,

for he published a declaration which strictly banned plunder and free quarter,

and promised that countrymen who brought provisions to his forces would be

paid in cash at the market rate. He was unable to go on paying his way for long

after the end of the year, but his policy won him considerable support in Lein-

ster and Munster. A fortnight after landing he set out against Drogheda,

where Ormond had chosen to make a stand. Ormond had lately put the vet-

eran English royalist Sir Arthur Aston in command there, while he himself

remained with about 3,000 men at Tecroghan, more than thirty miles away.

His own explanation was that the morale of these troops was too low for him

to trust them in face of the enemy. Cromwell took six days in stationing his

siege artillery before he summoned Drogheda on 10 September. Aston, out-

numbered by nearly four to one, short of powder, and with Ormond ignoring

468 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

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his appeals for help, nevertheless refused the summons contemptuously. By

late afternoon the next day Cromwell’s guns had breached the walls in two

places, and he sent in three foot regiments to storm the town. But they came

up against well prepared and stoutly defended entrenchments within the

walls, and they were beaten back with some loss. Accounts differ as to

whether one assault or two were repulsed, but Cromwell himself and Colonel

Hewson led a ﬁnally successful one on foot. It made enough ground to open a

gate to the cavalry, but even then Aston and his men held out on a steep

mound called Mill Mount. Infuriated, and as he wrote ‘being in the heat of

action’, Cromwell ordered that all who were in arms in the town should be put

to the sword. Out of about 3,100 soldiers there at least 2,800 were slain, most

of them after they had stopped ﬁghting. Friars and priests were killed too, but

there was no general slaughter of civilians, except such as had taken up arms

to assist the defenders. The total death toll probably exceeded 3,000, but not

by much, compared with about 150 killed on the English side. By the rules of

war that were then current, and still defended by Wellington two centuries

later, a garrison that refused a summons after its fortiﬁcations were breached

was not entitled to quarter, but Cromwell had not hitherto conducted his

campaigns in such a spirit. He shared, alas, the prejudice of most of his fellow-

countrymen which viewed the Irish as a savage and inferior people, and held

them collectively responsible for the massacre of protestant settlers. Yet he

can hardly have been unaware that many of Drogheda’s defenders were Eng-

lish and protestant, even if he did not know that the town had actually been

under siege by the catholic rebels at the time of the 1641 ‘massacre’. It is hard

to stomach his pronouncement, in his report on the action to the Speaker, that

‘this is a righteous judgement of God upon these barbarous wretches, who

have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood’, though he showed a

hint of compunction in trusting ‘that it will tend to prevent the effusion of

blood for the future, which are the satisfactory grounds to such actions, which

otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret.’

Ormond himself admitted that Drogheda’s fate did indeed strike terror,

and his forces suffered many desertions. When Cromwell moved against

Wexford, his next major objective, its corporation and citizens were much

divided as to whether to offer him any resistance. Wexford was the home and

base of many privateers, and much of its wealth derived from their plunder of

English shipping. It was also a strongly catholic town and had been very much

on the side of Rinuccini’s faction in the Confederacy. It had had no garrison

when Drogheda fell, and it did not take kindly to the appointment of Colonel

David Synnott as its governor on 28 September by the Earl of Castlehaven,

The Commonwealth at War 469

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, II, 127. Tom Reilly, Cromwell: An

Honourable Enemy (Dingle, 1999) and J. Scott Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland (1999) offer con-

trasting interpretations of the campaign; see also Gentles, New Model Army, ch. 11.

ch15.y8 27/9/02 11:40 AM Page 469

whom Ormond had assigned to defend southern Ireland. Synnott with difﬁ-

culty persuaded the citizens to resist Cromwell, on condition that Ormond

furnished a competent garrison of exclusively catholic troops. Ormond

agreed, so the city was by no means undefended when Cromwell summoned

it on 2 October. Synnott made a show of negotiating terms, but Cromwell

became exasperated when he discovered that his real purpose was to spin out

time while Castlehaven brought in 1,500 reinforcements. Synnott’s procras-

tinations, under cover of which he sent an appeal to Ormond for further

relief, caused Cromwell to break off negotiations, and on the 11th his siege

guns opened a heavy bombardment. Thereupon Synnott and the city magis-

trates proposed articles of surrender, but the terms they offered were so

absurdly favourable to themselves that Cromwell justiﬁably described them

as impudent. In return he offered quarter for their lives to the ofﬁcers and sol-

diers, with leave to the latter to go home if they pledged themselves to ﬁght no

more against the English parliament. Civilian property would be respected,

and the town spared from plunder. These were very reasonable terms in the

circumstance, but they never reached Synnott, for just as they were being pre-

pared Captain Stafford, who commanded Wexford Castle, surrendered

it to the besiegers on his own initiative. It is unlikely that he was unaware of

the renewal of negotiation, since he was one of the four men named by Syn-

nott to conduct it. His motives have been variously guessed, but Cromwell’s

guns had heavily breached the castle walls. The troops who took over the

castle promptly turned its guns on the defenders manning the adjacent city

walls, who shortly abandoned them. The besieging forces then stormed them,

and the garrison was soon in complete disarray. Some of them tried to get

away across the estuary in boats, but in their scramble they so overloaded

them that at least one sank, causing nearly 300 to drown. Others, together

with some armed townsmen, tried to make a stand in the marketplace, where

they were slaughtered indiscriminately. Priests and friars were again killed

without mercy, but there was no general massacre of civilians, other than

those who fought alongside the garrison troops. Among a total of nearly

2,000 who perished there may have been a few innocent civilians, but not

many. The whole action was over in about an hour.

Cromwell’s role in this tragic business is not easy to assess. His remarkable

patience with the devious Synnott over nearly ten days, during which he held

a commanding military advantage, bears out his assurances to parliament

that he truly wished to avoid a repetition of the bloodbath of Drogheda. He

gave no orders for the slaughter that occurred, and he was not on the spot

when it began. The regimental ofﬁcers who took immediate advantage of

Stafford’s surrender of the castle were very likely unaware that a new negoti-

ation of articles of surrender was in process of being initiated.The big

questions are whether Cromwell was physically in a position to countermand

470 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

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the killing of the defenders, and whether he made any attempt to do so. In his

report to parliament there are again some intimations of compunction, yet it

suggests that he saw Wexford’s agony, unplanned by him, as a divine judge-

ment, and forbore to interfere with it

And indeed it hath not without cause been deeply set upon our hearts, that we intend-

ing better to this place than so great a ruin, . . . yet God would not have it so; but, by

an unexpected providence, in his righteous justice, brought a just judgement upon

them, causing them to become a prey to the soldier, who in their piracies had made

preys of so many families, and made with their blood to answer the cruelties which

they had exercised upon the lives of divers poor protestants.

The soldiers got very good booty, he wrote, but added: ‘I could have wished for

their own good, and the good of the garrison, they had been more moderate’.

Drogheda and Wexford are not such indelible stains on Cromwell’s char-

acter as his detractors have often alleged, but they make painful reading, and

not only because of compassion for the victims, for different though they are,

both are out of key with the rest of his conduct as a soldier. At Drogheda he

was strictly within the rules of war, but he did not apply their full rigour in

any other of his campaigns, or during the rest of this one. Coote and

Inchiquin and other commanders in Ireland sometimes acted with compar-

able severity, and brutality towards both armed enemies and hapless civilians

was not conﬁrmed to one side. But the fact that the carnage at Drogheda and

Wexford was by no means unparalleled is not enough to condone it. Nor does

it help much to invoke parallels from the German wars of the time, or the

slaughter of civilians by Rupert’s men in Leicester in 1645, for Cromwell

would not have wished to be judged by such models. He was never guilty of

the slaughter of women and children that legend has attributed to him, and he

consistently tried to spare unarmed civilians from the ravages of war. But he

gave hints that his conscience was not entirely at ease about either Drogheda

or Wexford, and there was nothing remotely comparable with them in the

subsequent actions that he fought in Ireland. His uncharacteristic conduct at

Drogheda (Wexford being a less clear-cut case) is a reminder of the corrosive

effect that assumptions about the inherent inferiority of race or creed, espe-

cially when stoked by persistent lying propaganda, can have even upon hearts

and minds that are otherwise capable of nobility.

At least for a time the terror that he struck through these ﬁrst two operations

weakened resistance to him. He came before the walled town of New Ross on

17 October, and as soon as he opened his bombardment its governor Sir Lucas

Taaffe sued for terms of surrender. Many of the defending troops were

English, and at least ﬁve hundred of them promptly enlisted under Cromwell.

The latter’s own men were short of pay, however, and he felt obliged to issue

The Commonwealth at War 471

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, II, 142.

ch15.y8 27/9/02 11:40 AM Page 471

a proclamation threatening severe punishment against any who were caught

seizing the countrymen’s plough horses and seed corn (presumably with a view

to ransoming them). Good discipline and good politics went together here,

because there were still many people in Leinster and Munster who would

rather support the English parliament’s forces than the remnants of the Con-

federates, and Broghill was of great help in bringing them in. He raised 1,500

foot and a troop of horse in his own family territory, and with the help of

friendly forces in Cork, which had many inhabitants of English origin, he won

control of that major port without bloodshed. He had many friends holding

commands under Inchiquin, and with their collusion he persuaded a succes-

sion of Munster towns, including Youghal, Kinsale, Bandon, and Timoleague,

to declare for the Commonwealth. Inchiquin’s army was in a state of dissolu-

tion by the time the campaigning season ended, and Rupert’s little ﬂeet, which

had been blockaded in Kinsale by Robert Blake, was lucky to get away and

make for Lisbon when a storm forced Blake’s ships out to sea.

By mid-November Waterford was the only port on the east or south coasts

still in royalist hands, and it was a prize worth taking, vying as it did with

Limerick as the second city in Ireland. Cromwell did not expect much resist-

ance when he set out against it, for several inhabitants had let him know he

would be welcome. But despite Waterford’s strong English connections, most

of its population and all its garrison were staunchly catholic, none more so

than its mayor and its governor. Ormond sent them just the help they needed,

and when Michael Jones in his last action tried to storm Duncannon, which

covers the seaward approaches to Waterford, Colonel Edward Wogan (a for-

mer New Model ofﬁcer who had changed sides) threw his men back in seri-

ous disorder. Sickness and the need to garrison captured towns had drained

Cromwell’s effective strength to only 3,000 men, who were all too anxious to

get into winter quarters, and he was far from well himself. On 2 December he

abandoned the only siege that he ever undertook unsuccessfully, and his

woebegone troops marched away in teeming rain.

Yet he was soon heartened by the news that Dungarvan had surrendered to

Broghill in the south and Carrickfergus to Coote in the north. Altogether the

achievement of the four months since Rathmines had been impressive. Water-

ford and its estuary formed the only pocket of resistance along the whole

coast from Derry round to Ireland’s southern tip, though the territory ﬁrmly

under English control did not stretch far inland. Most of Cromwell’s sick sol-

diers would recover, and reinforcements were at last on the way. He con-

tinued to keep his troops in better discipline than Ormond’s unruly and

generally unpaid forces, who made themselves so unpopular that Waterford

and Limerick refused them winter quarters.

The clericalist party that had followed Rinuccini became increasingly con-

cerned over the tendency of the civil population to prefer co-operating with

472 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

ch15.y8 27/9/02 11:40 AM Page 472

the Commonwealth’s forces rather than support the remnants of the Confed-

erates. They largely had themselves to thank, because Rinuccini had put the

church’s interests far above the king’s, and his excommunication of all who

supported Inchiquin’s treaty with the Confederates had made him many en-

emies. His policies had caused rifts not only between the Old English and the

Old Irish but among the bishops themselves. In an attempt to repair the dam-

age, the majority of the Irish catholic bishops met at Clonmacnoise during the

ﬁrst half of December 1649. From there they published a declaration pro-

claiming themselves (not altogether truthfully) united in the defence of their

faith and their king, calling for an end to dissension, and appealing to the

people to support Ormond’s and the king’s cause loyally and generously.

They warned them against putting any trust in Cromwell, who (they said)

was planning to extirpate not only the catholic religion but the Irish people

themselves, along with all their property.

Cromwell was greatly angered by this piece of propaganda, and by virtue

of his ofﬁce of Lord Lieutenant he published a very long counter-declaration.

It has often been quoted to illustrate his bigotry against the Irish, and it does

indeed display ignorance of their past and insensitivity towards their aspir-

ations for the future. But though he gave his authority to the document it is

extremely unlikely that he composed all 6,000 words of it himself, and large

parts of it are quite unlike his authentic writings and utterances in style.

Those, especially near the beginning, which focus on ecclesiastical matters

and attack the authors of the Clonmacnoise declaration as popish prelates,

are couched in a pulpit-rhetoric that suggests a clerical hand, perhaps that of

Cromwell’s trusted chaplain John Owen. But the most interesting pages, and

the ones which seem most stamped with Cromwell’s own tone and thought,

are those which address the laity and challenge the bishops’ misrepresentation

of the Commonwealth’s intentions towards them. Their gist is that England

had no quarrel with the Irish people as such, but only with those in arms

against her, and with the clergy who incited and supported them. The declar-

ation hotly denied that the English government intended, along with extir-

pating the catholic religion, to ‘massacre, banish and destroy the catholic

inhabitants’ of Ireland. That, it said, had been the historic method of the

catholic church in dealing with those who rejected its authority, but a better

might be found:

to wit, the Word of God, which is able to convert (a means that you as little know as

practise, which indeed you deprive the people of ), together with humanity, good life,

equal and honest dealing with men of a different opinion, which we desire to exercise

towards this poor people, if you, by your wicked counsel, make them not incapable to

receive it, by putting them into blood.

The Commonwealth at War 473

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, II, 203.

ch15.y8 27/9/02 11:40 AM Page 473

To the accusation of intended massacre Cromwell replied: ‘I shall not will-

ingly take or suffer to be taken away the life of any man not in arms, but by

the trial to which the people of this nation are subject by law, for offences

against the same.’ Banishment to the plantations would be incurred only by

prisoners taken in arms who would otherwise be liable to the death penalty.

He justiﬁed the conﬁscation of the estates of those who had engaged in rebel-

lion, but to those who had not he promised that their lives, liberty, and prop-

erty would have the protection of the law. To those who had once been in

arms but were so no longer, and to all who would now lay them down and

submit to the state of England, he promised that he would intercede with par-

liament for their merciful treatment. In summary, he declared:

We come to break the power of a company of lawless rebels, who having cast off the

authority of England, live as enemies to human society. . . . We come (by the assistance

of God) to hold forth and maintain the lustre and glory of English liberty in a nation

where we have an undoubted right to do it;—wherein the people of Ireland (if they

listen not to such seducers as you are) may equally participate in all beneﬁts, to use

liberty and fortune equally with Englishmen, if they keep out of arms.

One thing that Cromwell could not or would not understand was the depth

of the devotion that the majority of the Irish felt towards the catholic religion.

He frankly declared that he would not permit the celebration of mass where

he had power to prevent it, but he failed to recognize that this would deprive

most of the nation of the central rite of their faith; their devotion to it, he

thought, was a superstition inculcated by their priests. ‘Alas,’ his declaration

said, ‘the generality of the inhabitants are poor laity (as you call them) and

ignorant of the grounds of the catholic religion’, and like many Englishmen

he probably really believed that they were not so much catholic as uncon-

verted. In all matters secular, however, he really does seem to have envisaged

a kinder treatment of the mass of the Irish people than the Commonwealth

was soon to mete out. One needs of course to be cautious of taking at face

value a public pronouncement by a conquering general whose main purpose

was to loosen the catholic clergy’s hold on lay opinion, but there is other evi-

dence that he really hoped that the bulk of the people might be won over by

decent treatment. Very shortly before issuing this declaration he wrote to his

friend John Sadler, a Master in Chancery, inviting him to come to Ireland as

Chief Justice of Munster at a handsome £1,000 a year. ‘In divers places

where we are come,’ he wrote, ‘we ﬁnd the people very greedy after the Word,

and ﬂocking to Christian meetings.’ They were so accustomed to tyranny and

oppression from their landlords, and so inured to getting nothing done with-

out bribes, that a taste of cheap and impartial justice could win their loyalty,

and then ‘the foregoing darkness and corruption would make it look so much

474 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, II, 205.

ch15.y8 27/9/02 11:40 AM Page 474

the more glorious and beautiful, and draw more hearts after it’.

Sadler, how-

ever, declined the offer, whereupon Cromwell was instrumental in getting

him made Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. The Munster post went

to John Cook, the late king’s prosecutor, who ﬁlled it admirably.

Cromwell spent less than two months in winter quarters. It was a mild

season, and the good recovery that most of his men made from their various

sicknesses enabled him to take the ﬁeld before the end of January. The only

places of importance eastward of Connaught and the Shannon that still held

out against him were Kilkenny, Clonmel, and Waterford, though a number of

smaller strong points had to be reduced before he could tackle these major

objectives. He quickly took the castles of Kilbeheny, Clogheen, and Rehill,

and then appeared before the fortiﬁed town of Fethard on the wild, wet night

of 2–3 February. The governor made a slight show of resistance, but a few

cannon-shots persuaded him to treat, and he surrendered on honourable

terms the next day. The defenders were allowed to march out with the hon-

ours of war, the priests in the town were speciﬁcally included in their safe-

conduct, and protection was promised and given to the property of the

townsmen. On 24 February Cromwell prepared to besiege Caher, a small

town on the river Suir with a massive island fortress. His ﬁrst summons was

ignored, but as soon as he brought up his siege guns the governor surrendered

on terms, which again were generous.

Kilkenny, the old capital of the Confederation, proved predictably a hard-

er nut to crack, though plague was raging in the city. It was in the heartland

of Irish resistance; it had a full circuit of medieval walls, an imposing castle,

and a large garrison, commanded by Ormond’s cousin Sir William Butler.

Cromwell was in no hurry to attempt it, and he spent some weeks in reducing

other minor strongholds in the vicinity, so as to isolate it. For all or most of

this time he must have been aware that parliament had voted on 8 January to

order him to prepare himself to return to England as soon as possible, but he

received no ofﬁcial intimation, and he was most reluctant to leave Ireland

until its reconquest was absolutely assured. For reasons still mysterious he

did not receive the Speaker’s letter formally summoning him home until

22 March, the very day on which he appeared before Kilkenny. He and

Colonel Hewson, with forces from Dublin, threatened the city with a pincer

movement, but Butler rejected his ﬁrst summons. Two attempts to storm the

walls were repulsed with considerable losses to the assailants, the second even

after their capture of Irish Town, the suburb across the river Nore, had made

Butler’s position almost untenable. It was a gallant defence, and Butler ﬁnally

agreed honourable terms of surrender on the 27th. The townsfolk had to pay

£2,000 to be spared the pillage that the besiegers would normally have

The Commonwealth at War 475

Ibid., pp. 186–7.

ch15.y8 27/9/02 11:40 AM Page 475

expected, but that did not save their churches from a good deal of vandalism

by the angry protestant soldiers.

Meanwhile the royalists and Irish still in arms continued to weaken them-

selves by their own divisions. On 8 March Ormond and the commissioners of

trust met the bishops and other Old Irish leaders at Limerick, the most import-

ant inland town still holding out, and the more so after Kilkenny fell. Ormond

demanded that Limerick should admit a garrison under his command, and

threatened to leave the country unless he received the obedience due to the

king’s Lord Lieutenant. But the bishops and their associates faced him with a

catalogue of complaints of military and ﬁnancial oppression, and refused to

let in his garrison. He retired to Loughrea, the base of his commander in Con-

naught, the Marquis of Clanricard, and a long way from the scene of action

in the coming months. He was wearying of his task; he had asked the king to

recall him in the previous December, but Charles had told him to stay, hop-

ing he might give support from Ireland to his own coming adventure in Scot-

land. Ulster was of course the province best placed to assist him, but there the

royal cause was needlessly thrown away. The catholic nobles and gentry met

there in March to appoint a commander to succeed Owen Roe O’Neill, and

their choice fell on Heber MacMahon, Bishop of Clogher, the chief organ-

izer of the recent Clonmacnoise meeting. He was an astute clerical politician,

but he entirely lacked military skill and experience. Understandably, this

thoroughly alienated Colonel Monro’s Scottish forces in Ulster, who since the

regicide had been supporting Charles II. Most of them, including Monro him-

self, went over now to the English parliament, while Viscount Montgomery

threw in his lot with Ormond. To look ahead for a moment, the bishop,

against his ofﬁcers’ advice, committed his army to battle against Sir Charles

Coote’s superior forces at Scarrifhollis on 21 June, and it was utterly routed,

with about 3,000 men killed. This was quite as bloody a business as Dro-

gheda and Wexford, and not a few ofﬁcers were executed after quarter had

been given. Bishop MacMahon escaped but was captured next day, and

eventually hanged on Coote’s orders.

All this was after Cromwell had returned to England. Before he did so he

moved late in April against Clonmel, where he received perhaps the worst

rebuff of his military career from its governor, Major-General Hugh O’Neill,

Owen Roe’s Spanish-born nephew. Hugh was a resourceful soldier with a

nerve of steel, and he managed to increase his little garrison from about 1,300

to over 2,000 during the three weeks that Cromwell spent in forming his siege

lines and planting his batteries. During that time his bold sallies inﬂicted con-

siderable losses on the besiegers. When Cromwell’s heavy guns eventually

opened up, O’Neill got all hands to work at building makeshift defences

where they were opening up a breach, so as to force the attacking troops to

traverse a narrow lane, ending in a deep ditch. So when Cromwell sent his

476 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

ch15.y8 27/9/02 11:40 AM Page 476

men in to storm the town on 16 May they marched into a cleverly set ambush,

raked by guns ﬁring chain-shot from behind the ditch and by musket-ﬁre

from the upper ﬂoors of the surrounding houses. He lost about 1,000 dead

within an hour and perhap 500 more by the end of the day, by which time he

found (as he had at one stage at Waterford) that he was pushing his soldiers

further than they were prepared to go. Around midnight the mayor sent to

him to ask for terms, and he quickly granted favourable ones. He was furious

to discover, after signing them, that O’Neill and his men, who had run out of

ammunition, had slipped away through the besiegers’ lines in the darkness;

nevertheless he honoured the terms that he had granted to the townspeople.

O’Neill made for Waterford, twenty-eight miles away, but the city was

plague-stricken and would not admit him, so his little remnant of the army of

Ulster was forced to break up.

Cromwell sailed for England a week after taking Clonmel’s surrender,

leaving Ireton in command as Lord Deputy. Clonmel was a sour note on

which to end his Irish campaign, but thanks to his efforts, combined with

those of Jones, Broghill, and Coote, the completion of the subjugation of Ire-

land was only a mattter of time. The remaining garrisons in Leinster and

Munster, including Waterford and Duncannon, capitulated during the sum-

mer, and only Limerick and the wilds of Connaught still offered resistance. If

Cromwell had stayed, there can be little doubt that he would have taken

Limerick before the year’s campaigning season ended, for despite its strong

fortiﬁcations the city had hardly any ammunition left and its magistrates were

bitterly divided. Hugh O’Neill, by now probably Ireland’s best soldier, had

the greatest difﬁculty in persuading them to accept him as commander of its

garrison. But Ireton was over-conﬁdent; he thought he could tackle Limerick

and Athlone simultaneously, so he divided his forces. His conduct of his ﬁrst

independent campaign was indecisive, and by the time he concentrated his

efforts on Limerick it was too late in the season for prolonged siege oper-

ations. When at last he set about besieging Limerick in June 1651 he counted

on starving it out, and it was not until late October that he at last prepared to

storm it. In addition to the suffering imposed on the inhabitants by hunger

and plague, his troops were guilty of some unnecessary acts of cruelty. The

terms of surrender that he insisted upon were harsh, especially towards the

principal defenders, seven of whom were executed. He wanted O’Neill’s

blood too, and he twice virtually forced his council of war to vote for the

death sentence. He ﬁnally gave way in face of the admiration most of his ofﬁ-

cers felt for their opponent’s honour and courage as a soldier. But the strain

of the ﬁve-month siege cut Ireton’s own life short, for a neglected cold turned

to high fever, and on 26 November he died.

By that time the king’s cause in Ireland was in terminal disarray, not least

through the action of the king himself. The simmering feud between the

The Commonwealth at War 477

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