Cromwellian conquest of Ireland

Cromwellian conquest of Ireland
	Part of the Irish Confederate Wars and Wars of the Three Kingdoms
	; Oliver Cromwell
Date	15 August 1649 – 27 September 1653
Location	Ireland
Result	Commonwealth of England victory
Belligerents
Confederate Ireland; Royalists	Commonwealth of England
Commanders and leaders
Ormonde ; Clanricarde ; Owen Roe O'Neill ; Heber MacMahon	Oliver Cromwell ; Michael Jones ; Henry Ireton ; Edmund Ludlow ; Charles Fleetwood ; Charles Coote
Strength
c. 20,000 to 30,000	~12,000 New Model Army ; ~10,000 locally raised
Casualties and losses
c. 15,000 to 20,000 dead or wounded	c. 15,000 dead or wounded

The Cromwellian conquest of Ireland (1649–1653) was the re-conquest of Ireland by the Commonwealth of England, led by Oliver Cromwell. It forms part of the 1641 to 1652 Irish Confederate Wars, and wider 1639 to 1653 Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Modern estimates suggest that during this period, Ireland experienced a demographic loss totalling around 15 to 20% of the pre-1641 population, due to fighting, famine and bubonic plague.

The Irish Rebellion of 1641 brought much of Ireland under the control of the Irish Catholic Confederation, who engaged in a multi-sided war with Royalists, Parliamentarians, Scots Covenanters, and local Presbyterian militia. Following the execution of Charles I in January 1649, the Confederates allied with their former Royalist opponents against the newly established Commonwealth of England. Cromwell landed near Dublin in August 1649 with an expeditionary force, and by the end of 1650 the Confederacy had been defeated, although sporadic guerrilla warfare continued until 1653.

The Act for the Settlement of Ireland 1652 barred Catholics from most public offices and confiscated large amounts of their land, much of which was given to Protestant settlers. These proved a continuing source of grievance, while the brutality of conquest means Cromwell remains a deeply reviled figure in Ireland.^[1] How far he was personally responsible for the atrocities is still debated; some historians suggest his actions were within what were then viewed as accepted rules of war, while others disagree.^[2]

Background

Following the execution of Charles I in January 1649, the newly established Commonwealth of England took steps to regain control of Ireland. The first and most pressing reason was an alliance signed in 1649 between the Irish Confederate Catholics and Charles II, proclaimed King of Ireland in January 1649. This allowed for Royalist troops to be sent to Ireland and put the Irish Confederate Catholic troops under the command of Royalist officers led by James Butler, Earl of Ormonde.

Secondly, Parliament also had a longstanding commitment to re-conquer Ireland dating back to the Irish Rebellion of 1641. Even if the Irish Confederates had not allied themselves with the Royalists, it is likely that the English Parliament would have eventually tried to invade the country to crush Catholic power there. They had sent Parliamentary forces to Ireland throughout the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (most of them under Michael Jones in 1647). They viewed Ireland as part of the territory governed by right by the Kingdom of England and only temporarily out of its control since the Rebellion of 1641. Many Parliamentarians wished to punish the Irish for alleged atrocities supposedly committed against the mainly Scottish Protestant settlers during the 1641 Uprising. Furthermore, some Irish towns (notably Wexford and Waterford) had acted as bases from which privateers had attacked English shipping throughout the 1640s.^[3]

In addition, the English Parliament had a financial imperative to invade Ireland to confiscate land there in order to repay its creditors. The Parliament had raised loans of £10 million under the Adventurers' Act to subdue Ireland since 1642, on the basis that its creditors would be repaid with land confiscated from Irish Catholic rebels. To repay these loans, it would be necessary to conquer Ireland and confiscate such land. The Parliamentarians also had internal political reasons to send forces to Ireland. Army mutinies at Banbury and Bishopsgate in April and May 1649 were unsettling the New Model Army, and the soldiers' demands would probably increase if they were left idle.

Finally, for some Parliamentarians, the war in Ireland was a religious war. Cromwell and much of his army were Puritans who considered all Roman Catholics to be heretics, and so for them the conquest was partly a crusade. The Irish Confederates had been supplied with arms and money by the Papacy and had welcomed the papal legate Pierfrancesco Scarampi and later the Papal Nuncio Giovanni Battista Rinuccini in 1643–49.

Battle of Rathmines and Cromwell's landing in Ireland

By the end of the period, known as Confederate Ireland, in 1649 the only remaining Parliamentarian outpost in Ireland was in Dublin, under the command of Colonel Jones. A combined Royalist and Confederate force under the Marquess of Ormonde gathered at Rathmines, south of Dublin, to take the city and deprive the Parliamentarians of a port in which they could land. Jones, however, launched a surprise attack on the Royalists while they were deploying on 2 August, putting them to flight. Jones claimed to have killed around 4,000 Royalist or Confederate soldiers and taken 2,517 prisoners.^[4]

Oliver Cromwell called the battle "an astonishing mercy, so great and seasonable that we are like them that dreamed",^[5] as it meant that he had a secure port at which he could land his army in Ireland, and that he retained the capital city. With Admiral Robert Blake blockading the remaining Royalist fleet under Prince Rupert of the Rhine in Kinsale, Cromwell landed on 15 August with thirty-five ships filled with troops and equipment. Henry Ireton landed two days later with a further seventy-seven ships.^[6]

Ormonde's troops retreated from around Dublin in disarray. They were badly demoralised by their unexpected defeat at Rathmines and were incapable of fighting another pitched battle in the short term. As a result, Ormonde hoped to hold the walled towns on Ireland's east coast to hold up the Cromwellian advance until the winter, when he hoped that "Colonel Hunger and Major Sickness" (i.e. hunger and disease) would deplete their ranks.^[7]

Siege of Drogheda

Upon landing, Cromwell proceeded to take the other port cities on Ireland's east coast, to facilitate the efficient landing of supplies and reinforcements from England. The first town to fall was Drogheda, about 50 km north of Dublin. Drogheda was garrisoned by a regiment of 3,000 English Royalist and Irish Confederate soldiers, commanded by Arthur Aston. After a week-long siege, Cromwell's forces breached the walls protecting the town. Aston refused Cromwell's request that he surrender.^[8] In the ensuing battle for the town, Cromwell ordered that no quarter be given,^[9] and the majority of the garrison and Catholic priests were killed. Many civilians also died in the sack. Aston was beaten to death by the Roundheads with his own wooden leg.^[10]

The massacre of the garrison in Drogheda, including some after they had surrendered and some who had sheltered in a church, was received with horror in Ireland and is used today as an example of Cromwell's extreme cruelty.^[11] Having taken Drogheda, Cromwell took most of his army south to secure the southeastern ports. He sent a detachment of 5,000 men north under Robert Venables to take eastern Ulster from the remnants of a Scottish Covenanter army that had landed there in 1642. They defeated the Scots at the Battle of Lisnagarvey (6 December 1649) and linked up with a Parliamentarian army composed of English settlers based around Derry in western Ulster, which was commanded by Charles Coote.

Wexford, Waterford and Duncannon

The New Model Army then marched south to secure the ports of Wexford, Waterford and Duncannon. Wexford was the scene of another infamous atrocity: the Sack of Wexford, when Parliamentarian troops broke into the town while negotiations for its surrender were ongoing, and sacked it, killing about 2,000 soldiers and 1,500 townspeople and burning much of the town.^[12]

The Royalist commander Ormonde thought that the terror of Cromwell's army had a paralysing effect on his forces. Towns like New Ross and Carlow subsequently surrendered on terms when besieged by Cromwell's forces. On the other hand, the massacres of the defenders of Drogheda and Wexford prolonged resistance elsewhere, as they convinced many Irish Catholics that they would be killed even if they surrendered.

Such towns as Waterford, Duncannon, Clonmel, Limerick and Galway only surrendered after determined resistance. Cromwell was unable to take Waterford or Duncannon and the New Model Army had to retire to winter quarters, where many of its men died of disease, especially typhoid and dysentery. The port city of Waterford and Duncannon town eventually surrendered after prolonged sieges in 1650.

Clonmel and the conquest of Munster

The following spring, Cromwell mopped up the remaining walled towns in Ireland's southeast—notably the Confederate capital of Kilkenny, which surrendered on terms. The New Model Army met its only serious reverse in Ireland at the Siege of Clonmel, where its attacks on the town's defences were repulsed at a cost of up to 2,000 men. The town nevertheless surrendered the following day.

Cromwell's treatment of Kilkenny and Clonmel is in contrast to that of Drogheda and Wexford. Despite the fact that his troops had suffered heavy casualties attacking the former two, Cromwell respected surrender terms which guaranteed the lives and property of the townspeople and the evacuation of armed Irish troops who were defending them. The change in attitude on the part of the Parliamentarian commander may have been a recognition that excessive cruelty was prolonging Irish resistance. However, in the case of Drogheda and Wexford no surrender agreement had been negotiated, and by the rules of continental siege warfare prevalent in the mid-17th century, this meant no quarter would be given; thus it can be argued that Cromwell's attitude had not changed.

Ormonde's Royalists still held most of Munster, but were outflanked by a mutiny of their own garrison in Cork. The British Protestant troops there had been fighting for the Parliament up to 1648 and resented fighting with the Confederates. Their mutiny handed Cork and most of Munster to Cromwell and they defeated the local Irish garrison at the Battle of Macroom. The Irish and Royalist forces retreated behind the River Shannon into Connacht or (in the case of the remaining Munster forces) into the fastness of County Kerry.

Collapse of the Royalist alliance

In May 1650, Charles II repudiated his alliance with the Irish Confederacy, and agreed the Treaty of Breda with the Covenanter government in Scotland. This totally undermined Ormonde's position as head of a Royalist coalition in Ireland. Cromwell published generous surrender terms for Protestant Royalists in Ireland and many of them either capitulated or went over to the Parliamentarian side.

This left in the field only the remaining Irish Catholic armies and a few diehard English Royalists. From this point onwards, many Irish Catholics, including their bishops and clergy, questioned why they should accept Ormonde's leadership when his master, the King, had repudiated his alliance with them. The outbreak of the Anglo-Scottish War forced Cromwell to leave Ireland and deal with the new threat, passing command to Henry Ireton.

Scarrifholis and the destruction of the Ulster Army

The most formidable force left to the Irish and Royalists was the 6,000-strong army of Ulster, formerly commanded by Owen Roe O'Neill, who died in 1649. However the army was now commanded by an inexperienced Catholic bishop named Heber MacMahon. The Ulster Army met a Parliamentarian army commanded by Charles Coote, at the Battle of Scarrifholis in County Donegal in June 1650. The Ulster army was routed and as many as 2,000 of its men were killed.^[13] In addition, MacMahon and most of the Ulster Army's officers were either killed at the battle or captured and executed after it. This eliminated the last strong field army opposing the Parliamentarians in Ireland and secured for them the northern province of Ulster. Coote's army, despite suffering heavy losses at the Siege of Charlemont, the last Catholic stronghold in the north, was now free to march south and invade the west coast of Ireland.

Sieges of Limerick and Galway

The Parliamentarians crossed the River Shannon into the western province of Connacht in October 1650. An Irish army under Clanricarde had attempted to stop them but this was surprised and routed at the Battle of Meelick Island.

Ormonde was discredited by the constant stream of defeats for the Irish and Royalist forces and no longer had the confidence of the men he commanded, particularly the Irish Confederates. He fled for France in December 1650 and was replaced as commander by an Irish nobleman, Ulick Burke of Clanricarde. The Irish and Royalist forces were penned into the area west of the River Shannon and placed their last hope on defending the strongly walled cities of Limerick and Galway on Ireland's west coast. These cities had built extensive modern defences and could not be taken by a straightforward assault as at Drogheda or Wexford.

Ireton besieged Limerick while Charles Coote surrounded Galway, but they were unable to take the strongly fortified cities and instead blockaded them until a combination of hunger and disease forced them to surrender. An Irish force from County Kerry attempted to relieve Limerick from the south but was intercepted and routed at the Battle of Knocknaclashy. Limerick fell in 1651 and Galway the following year. Disease, however, killed indiscriminately and Ireton, along with thousands of Parliamentarian troops, died of plague outside Limerick in 1651.^[14]

Guerrilla warfare, famine, and plague

The heavily fortified city of Galway in 1651. It was the last Irish stronghold to fall to the Parliamentarians, surrendering in 1652.

The fall of Galway saw the end of organised resistance to the Cromwellian conquest, but fighting continued as small units of Irish troops launched guerrilla attacks on the Parliamentarians.

The guerrilla phase of the war had been going since late 1650 and at the end of 1651, despite the defeat of the main Irish or Royalist forces, there were still estimated to be 30,000 men in arms against the Parliamentarians. Tories (from the Irish word tóraí meaning "pursuer" or "outlaw") operated from difficult terrain such as the Bog of Allen, the Wicklow Mountains and the drumlin country in the north midlands, and within months made the countryside extremely dangerous for all except large parties of Parliamentarian troops. Ireton mounted a punitive expedition to the Wicklow mountains in 1650 to try to put down the tories there, but without success.

By early 1651, it was reported that no English supply convoys were safe if they travelled more than two miles outside a military base. In response, the Parliamentarians destroyed food supplies and forcibly evicted civilians who were thought to be helping the Tories. John Hewson systematically destroyed food stocks in counties Wicklow and County Kildare, Hardress Waller did likewise in the Burren in County Clare, as did Colonel Cook in County Wexford. The result was famine throughout much of Ireland, aggravated by an outbreak of bubonic plague.^[15] As the guerrilla war ground on, the Parliamentarians, as of April 1651, designated areas such as County Wicklow and much of the south of the country as what would now be called free-fire zones, where anyone found would be, "taken slain and destroyed as enemies and their cattle and good shall be taken or spoiled as the goods of enemies".^[16] This tactic had succeeded in the Nine Years' War.

This phase of the war was by far the most costly in terms of civilian loss of life. The combination of warfare, famine and plague caused a huge mortality among the Irish population. William Petty estimated (in the 1655–56 Down Survey) that the death toll of the wars in Ireland since 1641 was over 618,000 people, or about 40% of the country's pre-war population. Of these, he estimated that over 400,000 were Catholics, 167,000 killed directly by war or famine, and the remainder by war-related disease.^[17] Modern estimates put the toll at closer to 20%.^[18]

In addition, some fifty thousand Irish people, including prisoners of war, were sold as indentured servants under the English Commonwealth regime.^[19]^[20]^[21] They were often sent to the English colonies in North America and the Caribbean where they subsequently comprised a substantial portion of certain Caribbean colony populations in the late 17th century.^[22] In Barbados, some of their descendants are known as Redlegs.^[23]

Eventually, the guerrilla war was ended when the Parliamentarians published surrender terms in 1652 allowing Irish troops to go abroad to serve in foreign armies not at war with the Commonwealth of England. Most went to France or Spain. The largest Irish guerrilla forces under John Fitzpatrick (in Leinster, Edmund O'Dwyer (in Munster) and Edmund Daly (in Connacht) surrendered in 1652, under terms signed at Kilkenny that May. However, up to 11,000 men, mostly in Ulster, were still thought to be in the field at the end of the year. The last Irish and Royalist forces (the remnants of the Confederate's Ulster Army, led by Philip O'Reilly) formally surrendered at Cloughoughter in County Cavan on 27 April 1653. The English Parliament then declared the Irish rebellion subdued on 27 September 1653. However, low-level guerrilla warfare continued for the remainder of the decade and was accompanied by widespread lawlessness. Undoubtedly some of the tories were simple brigands, whereas others were politically motivated. The Cromwellians distinguished in their rewards for information or capture of outlaws between "private tories" and "public tories".^[24]

The Cromwellian Settlement

The English Parliament imposed an extremely harsh settlement on the Irish population, driven by antipathy to the Catholic religion, and to punish Irish Catholics for the rebellion of 1641. Also, Parliament needed to raise money to pay the army and to provide land to those who had subsidised the war under the Adventurers Act back in 1640.^[25]

Under the 1640 Adventurers Act, lenders were paid in confiscated estates, while Parliamentarian soldiers who served there were often compensated with land rather than wages. Although many of these simply sold their grants, the net result was the percentage of land owned by Irish Catholics fell from 60% in 1641 to 20% by the 1660 Stuart Restoration. Thereafter, Catholics were barred from most public office, although not from the Irish Parliament.^[26]

Historical debate

The Parliamentarian campaign in Ireland was the most ruthless of the Civil War period. In particular, Cromwell's actions at Drogheda and Wexford earned him a reputation for cruelty.

Cromwell's critics point to his response to a plea by Catholic Bishops to the Irish Catholic people to resist him in which he states that although his intention was not to "massacre, banish and destroy the Catholic inhabitants", if they did resist "I hope to be free from the misery and desolation, blood and ruin that shall befall them, and shall rejoice to exercise the utmost severity against them".^[27]^[a]

Despite attempts by some to argue what happened at Drogheda was not unusual by the standards of 17th century siege warfare, this has been largely rejected by other scholars.^[28] One historian argues "the Drogheda massacre does stand out for its mercilessness,...ruthlessness and calculation, for its combination of hot- and cold-bloodiness".^[29] Moreover, other critics point out that at the time the killings at Drogheda and Wexford were considered atrocities. They cite such sources as Edmund Ludlow, the Parliamentarian commander in Ireland after Ireton's death, who wrote that the tactics used by Cromwell at Drogheda showed "extraordinary severity".

Cromwell's actions in Ireland occurred in the context of a mutually cruel war. In 1641–42 Irish insurgents in Ulster killed some 4,000 Protestant settlers who had settled on land confiscated from their former Catholic owners. These events were magnified in Protestant propaganda as an attempt by Irish Catholics to exterminate the English Protestant settlers in Ireland, with English Parliamentarian pamphlets claiming that over 200,000 Protestants had died. In turn, this was used as justification by English Parliamentary and Scottish Covenant forces to take vengeance on the Irish Catholic population. A Parliamentary tract of 1655 argued that, "the whole Irish nation, consisting of gentry, clergy and commonality are engaged as one nation in this quarrel, to root out and extirpate all English Protestants from amongst them".^[30]

Atrocities were subsequently committed by all sides. When Murrough O'Brien, the Earl of Inchiquin and Parliamentarian commander in Cork, took Cashel in 1647, he slaughtered the garrison and Catholic clergy there (including Theobald Stapleton), earning the nickname "Murrough of the Burnings". Inchiquin switched allegiances in 1648, becoming a commander of the Royalist forces. After such battles as Dungans Hill and Scarrifholis, English Parliamentarian forces executed thousands of their Irish Catholic prisoners. Similarly, when the Confederate Catholic general Thomas Preston took Maynooth in 1647, he hanged its Catholic defenders as apostates.

Nevertheless, the 1649–1653 campaign remains notorious in Irish popular memory as it was responsible for a huge death toll among the Irish population. The main reason for this was the counter-guerrilla tactics used by such commanders as Henry Ireton, John Hewson and Edmund Ludlow against the Catholic population from 1650, when large areas of the country still resisted the Parliamentary Army. These tactics included the wholesale burning of crops, forced population movement, and killing of civilians. One modern estimate estimated that 200,000 were killed, of which 137,000 were civilians.^[31]

In addition, the whole post-war Cromwellian settlement of Ireland has been characterised by historians such as Mark Levene and Alan Axelrod as ethnic cleansing, in that it sought to remove Irish Catholics from the eastern part of the country. Others such as the historical writer Tim Pat Coogan have described the actions of Cromwell and his subordinates as genocide.^[32] Colonial studies professor Katie Kane suggested that the invasion was comparable to the Native American genocide, drawing parallels between that event and the English treatment of Irish civilians.^[33] The aftermath of the Cromwellian campaign and settlement saw extensive dispossession of landowners who were Catholic, and a huge drop in population. In the event, the much larger number of surviving poorer Catholics were not moved westwards; most of them had to fend for themselves by working for the new landowners.

Long-term results

The Cromwellian conquest completed the British colonisation of Ireland, which was merged into the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1653–59. It destroyed the native Irish Catholic land-owning classes and replaced them with colonists with a British identity. The bitterness caused by the Cromwellian settlement was a powerful source of Irish nationalism from the 17th century onwards.

After the Stuart Restoration in 1660, Charles II of England restored about a third of the confiscated land to the former landlords in the Act of Settlement 1662, but not all, as he needed political support from former parliamentarians in England. A generation later, during the Glorious Revolution, many of the Irish Catholic landed class tried to reverse the remaining Cromwellian settlement in the Williamite War in Ireland (1689–91), where they fought en masse for the Jacobites. They were defeated once again, and many lost land that had been regranted after 1662. As a result, Irish and English Catholics did not become full political citizens of the British state again until 1829 and were legally barred from buying valuable interests in land until the Papists Act 1778.

The Cromwellian government also contributed to the decline and eventual extinction of wolves in Ireland, through such methods as deforestation and anti-wolf legislation, the latter including bounties paid out for killing wolves.^[34]^[35]

Notes

^ The wording of this version is taken from a London edition, Thomas Carlyle notes that another contemporary version copied from the original Cork edition, ends with the phrase "and shall rejoice to act severity against them" and that he states "is probably the true reading" Carlyle 2010, p. 132.

References

^ "Of all these doings in Cromwell's Irish Chapter, each of us may say what he will. Yet to everyone it will at least be intelligible how his name came to be hated in the tenacious heart of Ireland". John Morley, Biography of Oliver Cromwell. Page 298. 1900 and 2001. ISBN 978-1-4212-6707-4.; "Cromwell is still a hate figure in Ireland today because of the brutal effectiveness of his campaigns in Ireland. Of course, his victories in Ireland made him a hero in Protestant England." "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 28 September 2007. Retrieved 25 May 2009.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) British National Archives web site. Accessed March 2007; "1649-52: Cromwell's conquest of Ireland". Archived from the original on 11 December 2004. Retrieved 17 January 2006. From a history site dedicated to the English Civil War. "... making Cromwell's name into one of the most hated in Irish history". Accessed March 2007. Site currently offline. WayBack Machine holds archive here
^ Coyle 1999.
^ Ó Siochrú, God's Executioner, pp. 69 & 96.
^ McKeiver, A New History of Cromwell's Irish Campaign, p. 59
^ Antonia Fraser, Cromwell, our Chief of Men (1973), p. 324
^ Fraser, Cromwell our Chief of Men, p. 326
^ Padraig Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at War, p. 113
^ Reilly, Tom (1999). Cromwell, An Honourable Enemy. London: Phoenix Press. p. 61. ISBN 1-84212-080-8.
^ Reilly, Tom (1999). Cromwell, An Honourable Enemy. London: Phoenix Press. p. 71. ISBN 1-84212-080-8.
^ Fraser, pp. 336–339. Kenyon & Ohlmeyer 1998, p. 98.
^ O Siochru, God's Executioner, pp. 82–91. Faber & Faber (2008)
^ Kenyon & Ohlmeyer 1998, p. 100.
^ McKeiver, A New History of Cromwell's Irish Campaign, p. 167.
^ Mícheál Ó Siochrú, God's Executioner, Oliver Cromwell and Conquest of Ireland, p. 187.
^ Lenihan, p. 122
^ James Scott Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland
^ Kenyon & Ohlmeyer 1998, p. 278. Scott Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland.
^ "From Catastrophe to Baby Boom – Population Change in Early Modern Ireland 1641–1741". 22 January 2014.
^ O'Callaghan 2000, p. 85.
^ Kenyon & Ohlmeyer 1998, p. 134.
^ Higman 1997, pp. 107, 108.
^ Mahoney, Michael. "Irish indentured labour in the Caribbean". UK National Archive. Retrieved 13 March 2016.
^ Irish Times staff 2009.
^ Prendergast, John Patrick (1868). The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland. P. M. Haverty New York. pp. 178, 187. Retrieved 14 March 2016.
^ O'Donovan, Catherine. "The Cromwellian Settlement". Clare County Library. Retrieved 1 June 2024.
^ Lenihan, p. 111
^ Carlyle 2010, p. 132.
^ Morrill 2003.
^ Morrill 2003, pp. 263–265.
^ Richard Lawrence, The Interest of England in Irish transplantation (1655), quoted in Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at War, p. 111.
^ Carlton, Charles, "Civilians". Kenyon & Ohlmeyer 1998, p. 278.
^
- Albert Breton (Editor, 1995). Nationalism and Rationality. Cambridge University Press. p. 248. "Oliver Cromwell offered Irish Catholics a choice between genocide and forced mass population transfer".
- Ukrainian Quarterly. Ukrainian Society of America, 1944. "Therefore, we are entitled to accuse the England of Oliver Cromwell of the genocide of the Irish civilian population".
- David Norbrook (2000).Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660. Cambridge University Press. 2000. In interpreting Andrew Marvell's contemporarily expressed views on Cromwell Norbrook says; "He (Cromwell) laid the foundation for a ruthless programme of resettling the Irish Catholics which amounted to large scale ethnic cleansing".
- Frances Stewart Archived 16 December 2008 at the Wayback Machine (2000). War and Underdevelopment: Economic and Social Consequences of Conflict v. 1 (Queen Elizabeth House Series in Development Studies), Oxford University Press. p. 51. "Faced with the prospect of an Irish alliance with Charles II, Cromwell carried out a series of massacres to subdue the Irish. Then, once Cromwell had returned to England, the English Commissary, General Henry Ireton, adopted a deliberate policy of crop burning and starvation, which was responsible for the majority of an estimated 600,000 deaths out of a total Irish population of 1,400,000."
- Alan Axelrod (2002). Profiles in Leadership, Prentice-Hall. 2002. p. 122. "As a leader Cromwell was entirely unyielding. He was willing to act on his beliefs, even if this meant killing the king and perpetrating, against the Irish, something very nearly approaching genocide".
- Tim Pat Coogan (2002). The Troubles: Ireland's Ordeal and the Search for Peace. ISBN 978-0-312-29418-2. p. 6. "The massacres by Catholics of Protestants, which occurred in the religious wars of the 1640s, were magnified for propagandist purposes to justify Cromwell's subsequent genocide."
- Peter Berresford Ellis (2002). Eyewitness to Irish History, John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0-471-26633-4. p. 108. "It was to be the justification for Cromwell's genocidal campaign and settlement."
- Morrill 2003: "Of course, this has never been the Irish view of Cromwell.
  Most Irish remember him as the man responsible for the mass slaughter of civilians at Drogheda and Wexford and as the agent of the greatest episode of ethnic cleansing ever attempted in Western Europe as, within a decade, the percentage of land possessed by Catholics born in Ireland dropped from sixty to twenty. In a decade, the ownership of two-fifths of the land mass was transferred from several thousand Irish Catholic landowners to British Protestants. The gap between Irish and the English views of the seventeenth-century conquest remains unbridgeable and is governed by G. K. Chesterton's mirthless epigram of 1917, that 'it was a tragic necessity that the Irish should remember it; but it was far more tragic that the English forgot it'."
- James M. Lutz Archived 16 December 2008 at the Wayback Machine, Brenda J. Lutz (2004). Global Terrorism, Routledge: London. p. 193: "The draconian laws applied by Oliver Cromwell in Ireland were an early version of ethnic cleansing. The Catholic Irish were to be expelled to the northwestern areas of the island. Relocation rather than extermination was the goal."
- Levene 2005, pp. 56: "a conscious attempt to reduce a distinct ethnic population".
- Levene 2005, pp. 56―57: "[The Act of Settlement of Ireland], and the parliamentary legislation which succeeded it the following year, is the nearest thing on paper in the English, and more broadly British, domestic record, to a programme of state-sanctioned and systematic ethnic cleansing of another people. The fact that it did not include 'total' genocide in its remit, or that it failed to put into practice the vast majority of its proposed expulsions, ultimately, however, says less about the lethal determination of its makers and more about the political, structural and financial weakness of the early modern English state."
- Aziz Rahman, Mary Anne Clarke and Sean Byrne (2017). The Art of Breaking People Down: The British Colonial Model in Ireland and Canada. "The 1649 warfare by Cromwellian soldiers culminated in acts of genocide against Irish Gaels with the liquidation of the inhabitants of Drogheda and Dundalk, with Cromwell giving them the choice of "to hell or to Connacht"."
^ Kane, Katie (1999). "Nits Make Lice: Drogheda, Sand Creek, and the Poetics of Colonial Extermination". Cultural Critique (42): 81–103. doi:10.2307/1354592. Sir Charles Coote, like Chivington two hundred years later, was a military commander responsible for eradicating an indigenous population whose presence was inimical to the "planting" of government-authorized settlers in a colonial space understood to be somehow empty, at least of a population of any value.
^ Hickey, Kieran. "Wolf - Forgotten Irish Hunter" (PDF). Wild Ireland (May–June 2003): 10–13. Archived from the original (PDF) on 25 March 2014. Retrieved 4 October 2022.
^ Hickey, Kieran R. "A geographical perspective on the decline and extermination of the Irish wolf canis lupus — an initial assessment" (PDF). Irish Geography. 33 (2). Department of Geography, National University of Ireland, Galway: 185–198. Archived from the original (PDF) on 7 September 2012. Retrieved 4 October 2022.

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Scott-Wheeler, James, Cromwell in Ireland, Dublin 1999, ISBN 978-0-7171-2884-6

v t e Wars of the Three Kingdoms
Conflicts	Scottish Bishops' War (1639–1640) Irish Catholic Rebellion (1641) Irish Confederate Wars (1642–1649) First English Civil War (1642–1646) Scottish Civil War (1644–1645) Second English Civil War (1648–1649) Irish Cromwellian War (1649–1653) Anglo-Scottish war (1650–1652)
By area	Bristol Cornwall Dorset Shropshire Tarvin Worcestershire
Related	European Wars of Religion Eighty Years' War (Anglo-Spanish War, 1625–1630) Thirty Years' War (Franco-Spanish War, 1635–1659)

v t e Kingdom of Ireland
History	Timeline of Irish history History of Ireland (1536–1691) History of Ireland (1691–1800)
General and events	Lordship of Ireland British Empire Tudor conquest of Ireland New English Surrender and regrant Reformation in Ireland Desmond Rebellions Plantations of Ireland (Ulster) Nine Years' War (Flight of the Earls) Irish Rebellion of 1641 Irish Confederate Wars Wars of the Three Kingdoms Cromwellian conquest of Ireland (Barbadosed) Williamite–Jacobite War (Wild Geese) Irish Rebellion of 1798 United Kingdom
Acts of Parliament	Poynings' Law Crown of Ireland Act 1542 Counties of Meath and Westmeath Act 1543 Settlement of Laois and Offaly 1556 Act for the Settlement of Ireland 1652 Act of Settlement 1662 Penal Laws Popery Act Constitution of 1782 Acts of Union 1800
Gaelic conquests	Tuadhmhumhain (1543) Uí Echach (1543) Loígis (1543) Clanricarde (1544) Uí Failghe (1550) Uí Díarmata (1574) Clann Aodha Buidhe (1574) Magh Luirg (1585) Airgíalla (1585) Iar Connacht (1589) Umhaill (1593) Deasmhumhain (1596) Mac William Íochtar (1602) Laigin (1603) Bréifne Uí Ruairc (1605) Cairbrigh (1606) Tír Chonaill (1607) Tír Eoghain (1607) Fear Manach (1607) Uí Catháin (1607) Bréifne Uí Raghallaigh (1607) Uí Mháine (1611)
Politics and society	Dublin Castle administration Parliament of Ireland (Irish House of Lords and Irish House of Commons) Privy Council of Ireland Four Courts (King's Bench, Exchequer, Chancery and Common Pleas) Court of Castle Chamber Peerage of Ireland Army Church of Ireland (Ascendancy & Recusancy) Grand Lodge of Ireland Trinity College Dublin Order of St Patrick Jacobites Whigs Tories Irish Patriots Defenders Catholic Committee Orange Order United Irishmen
Monarchs and rulers	Henry VIII (1542–1547) Edward VI (1547–1553) Lady Jane Grey (1553; disputed) Mary I (1553–1558) & Philip jure uxoris (1554–1558) Elizabeth I (1558–1603) James I (1603–1625) Charles I (1625–1649) Commonwealth (1649–1653) Oliver Cromwell (1653–1658) Richard Cromwell (1658–1659) Commonwealth (1659–1660) Charles II (1660–1685) James II (1685–1691) William III (1689–1702) & Mary II (1689–1694) Anne (1702–1714) George I (1714–1727) George II (1727–1760) George III (1760–1800)
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