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August 15

1649 - Oliver Cromwell arrives in Ireland as Commander-in-Chief and Lord Lieutenant with an army of 20,000, a huge artillery train and a large navy
1715 - On this date, Frederick Hamilton, former MP for Donegal, writes to George I that although the county is well affected, 'The great scarcity of armes in ye country is beyond anything I could have imagin'd till about three days ago that I had occasion to send some men after seven Tories that were hunted out of Fermanagh, & in the barony of Kilmakrenan, I could not get thirty men tolerably armed tho' I believe the country will be able to array seven thousand men'
1755 - Molesworth Phillips, sailor and companion of Captain James Cook, is born in Swords, Co. Dublin
1803 - Edmund Rice opens a school for poor boys in Waterford - precursor of the schools run by the Christian Brothers
1843 - Daniel O'Connell holds meetings for Repeal of the Union, attended by hundreds of thousands, at Trim and the Hill of Tara
1880 - Five people drown in Derrybeg, Co. Donegal when a chapel is flooded during Mass
1882 - Unveiling of O’Connell monument in Dublin
1919 - Birth of Benedict Kiely, novelist, short story-writer and critic, in Dromore, Co. Down
1917 - Birth of Jack Lynch, Taoiseach, in Co. Cork
1998 - Massive bomb explodes in Omagh shopping center; 29 people are killed and hundreds injured
1999 - The Portmarnock Hotel in Dublin wins the Powers World Irish Coffee Making Championship for the second successive year
1999 - Mobs in Derry attack police, loot businesses and torch buildings
1999 - Founder member of the SDLP, Paddy Devlin, dies in Belfast’s Mater Hospital after a long illness.
In the liturgical calendar, today is the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. It is also the feast day of St. Daga, 6th century Bishop of Iniskin, Dundalk.

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From Wikipedia

Cromwellian conquest of Ireland



Oliver Cromwell, who landed in Ireland in 1649 to re-conquer the country on behalf of the English Parliament. He left in 1650, having taken eastern and southern Ireland—passing his command to Henry Ireton.

The Cromwellian conquest of Ireland or Cromwellian war in Ireland (1649–53) refers to the conquest of Ireland by the forces of the English Parliament, led by Oliver Cromwell, during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Cromwell landed in Ireland with his New Model Army on behalf of England's Rump Parliament in August 1649.

Since the Irish Rebellion of 1641, most of Ireland had been under the control of the Irish Catholic Confederation. In early 1649 the Confederates allied with the English Royalists, who had been defeated by the Parliamentarians in the English Civil War. By May 1652, Cromwell's Parliamentarian army had defeated the Confederate and Royalist coalition in Ireland and occupied the country—bringing to an end the Irish Confederate Wars (or Eleven Years' War). However, guerrilla warfare continued for a further year. Cromwell passed a series of Penal Laws against Roman Catholics (the vast majority of the population) and confiscated large amounts of their land.

The Parliamentarian reconquest of Ireland was brutal, and Cromwell is still a hated figure in Ireland.[4] The extent to which Cromwell, who was in direct command for the first year of the campaign, is responsible for the atrocities is debated to this day. Some historians[5] argue that the actions of Cromwell were within the then-accepted rules of war, or were exaggerated or distorted by later propagandists; these claims have however been challenged by others.[6]

The impact of the war on the Irish population was unquestionably severe, although there is no consensus as to the magnitude of the loss of life. The war resulted in famine, which was worsened by an outbreak of bubonic plague. Estimates of the drop in the Irish population resulting from the Parliamentarian campaign vary from 15–25%,[7] to half[8][9] and even as much as five-sixths.[10] The Parliamentarians also deported about 50,000 people as indentured labourers.

Background

The English Parliament, victorious in the English Civil War, had several reasons for sending an army to Ireland in 1649.

An alliance was signed in 1649 between the Irish Confederate Catholics and Charles II (the exiled son of the executed Charles I) and the English Royalists. 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. Their aim was to invade England and restore the monarchy there. This was a threat which the new English Commonwealth could not afford to ignore.
Even if the Confederates had not allied themselves with the Royalists, it is likely that the English Parliament would have eventually tried to reconquer Ireland. 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 Irish Rebellion of 1641.
In addition many Parliamentarians wished to punish the Irish for atrocities against English Protestant settlers during the 1641 Uprising.
Some Irish towns (notably Wexford and Waterford) had acted as bases from which privateers had attacked English shipping during the 1640s.[11]
Parliament had raised loans of £10 million under the Adventurers Act to subdue Ireland since 1640, on the basis that its creditors would be repaid with land confiscated from Irish Catholic rebels. To repay these creditors, it would be necessary to conquer Ireland and confiscate such land.
Cromwell and many 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 Scarampi and later the Papal Nuncio Rinuccini in 1643–49.

The 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 Michael Jones. A combined Royalist and Confederate force under the Marquess of Ormonde gathered at Rathmines, south of Dublin, in order 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 August 2, putting them to flight. Jones claimed to have killed around 4000 Royalist or Confederate soldiers and taken 2,517 prisoners.[12]

Oliver Cromwell called the battle, "an astonishing mercy, so great and seasonable that we are like them that dreamed",[13] 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 August 15 with thirty-five ships filled with troops and equipment. Henry Ireton landed two days later with a further seventy seven ships.[14]

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.[15]

The Siege of Drogheda


Upon landing, Oliver Cromwell proceeded to take the other port cities on Ireland’s east coast, in order to secure an efficient supply of reinforcements and logistics from England. The first town to fall was Drogheda, about 50 km north of Dublin. Drogheda was garrisoned by a regiment of 3000 English Royalist and Irish Confederate soldiers, commanded by Arthur Aston. When Cromwell’s men took the town by storm, the majority of the garrison and Catholic priests were massacred on Cromwell’s orders. Many civilians also died in the sack. Arthur Aston was beaten to death by the Roundheads with his own wooden leg.[16]

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 remembered even today as an example of Cromwell’s extreme cruelty.[17] However, it has recently been argued (for example by Tom Reilly in Cromwell, an Honourable Enemy, Dingle 1999) that what happened at Drogheda was not unusually severe by the standards of 17th-century siege warfare.

Having taken Drogheda, Cromwell, took most of his army south to secure the south western 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 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



Kilkenny Castle. The Irish Confederate capital of Kilkenny fell to Cromwell in 1650


The New Model Army then marched south to secure the ports of Wexford, Waterford and Duncannon. Wexford was the scene of another infamous atrocity, when Parliamentarian troops broke into the town while negotiations for its surrender were ongoing, and sacked it, killing about 2000 soldiers and 1500 townspeople and burning much of the town.[18] Cromwell's responsibility for the sack of Wexford is disputed. He did not order the attack on the town, and had been in the process of negotiating its surrender when his troops broke into the town. On the other hand, his critics point out that he made little effort to restrain his troops or to punish them afterwards for their conduct.

Arguably, the sack of Wexford was somewhat counter-productive for the Parliamentarians. The destruction of the town meant that the Parliamentarians could not use its port as a base for supplying their forces in Ireland. Secondly, the effects of the severe measures adopted at Drogheda and at Wexford were mixed. To some degree they may have been effective in discouraging future resistance.

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 towns of Waterford and Duncannon 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 south east—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 towns walls were repulsed at a cost of up to 2,000 men. The town nevertheless surrendered the following day. Cromwell's behaviour at Kilkenny and Clonmel may be contrasted with his conduct at Drogheda and Wexford.

Despite the fact that his troops had suffered heavy casualties attacking the former two towns, 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 Irish 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 Shannon river into Connacht or (in the case of the remaining Munster forces) into the fastness of Kerry.

The collapse of the Royalist alliance

In May 1650, Charles II repudiated his father’s (Charles I's) alliance with the Irish Confederates in preference for an alliance with the Scottish Covenanters (see Treaty of Breda (1650)). 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. Cromwell left Ireland in May 1650 to fight the Third English Civil War against the new Scottish-Royalist alliance. He passed his command onto Henry Ireton.

Scarrifholis and the destruction of the Ulster Army


The most formidable force left to the Irish and Royalists was the 6000 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 composed mainly of British settlers and commanded by Charles Coote at the Battle of Scarrifholis in Donegal in June 1650. The Ulster army was routed and as many as 2000 of its men were killed.[19] 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.

The Sieges of Limerick and Galway



King John's Castle and Thomond Bridge, Limerick city. Ireton took Limerick in 1651 after a long siege

The Parliamentarians crossed the 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 by an Irish nobleman Ulick Burke of Clanricarde as commander. 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 Kerry attempted to relieve Limerick from the south, but this 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.


Guerrilla warfare, famine and plague

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 tóraidhe meaning, "pursued man") 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. Henry Ireton mounted a punitive expedition to the Wicklow mountains in 1650 to try and 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 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.[21] 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".[22] This tactic had succeeded in the Nine Years' War that had ended in 1603. Fifty thousand [2] Irish people, including prisoners of war, were sold as indentured labourers under the English Commonwealth regime.[23][24] They were sent to the English colonies of America and West Indies. In Barbados, some of their descendants are known as Redlegs.[25]

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 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.[26]

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 in May of that year. 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 April 27, 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".

The Cromwellian Settlement

Cromwell imposed an extremely harsh settlement on the Irish Catholic population. This was because of his deep religious antipathy to the Catholic religion and to punish Irish Catholics for the rebellion of 1641, in particular the massacres of Protestant settlers in Ulster. Also he needed to raise money to pay off his army and to repay the London merchants who had subsidized the war under the Adventurers Act back in 1640.[citation needed]

Anyone implicated in the rebellion of 1641 was executed. Those who participated in Confederate Ireland had all their land confiscated and thousands were transported to the West Indies as indentured labourers. Those Catholic landowners who had not taken part in the wars still had their land confiscated, although they were entitled to claim land in Connacht as compensation. In addition, no Catholics were allowed to live in towns. Irish soldiers who had fought in the Confederate and Royalist armies left the country in large numbers to find service in the armies of France and Spain—William Petty estimated their number at 54,000 men. The practice of Catholicism was banned and bounties were offered for the capture of priests, who were executed when found.[citation needed]

The Long Parliament had passed the Adventurers Act in 1640 (the act received royal assent in 1642), under which those who lent money to Parliament for the subjugation of Ireland would be paid in confiscated land in Ireland. In addition, Parliamentarian soldiers who served in Ireland were entitled to an allotment of confiscated land there, in lieu of their wages, which the Parliament was unable to pay in full. As a result, many thousands of New Model Army veterans were settled in Ireland. Moreover, the pre-war Protestant settlers greatly increased their ownership of land (see also: The Cromwellian Plantation). Before the wars, Irish Catholics had owned 60% of the land in Ireland, whereas by the time of the English Restoration, when compensations had been made to Catholic Royalists, they owned only 20% of it. During the Commonwealth period, Catholic landownership had fallen to 8%. Even after the Restoration of 1660, Catholics were barred from all public office, but not from the Irish Parliament.