The Isles:A History by Norman Davies

Author:Norman Davies
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

The Commonwealth’s treatment of Ireland was infinitely more ‘thorough’ than anything that Strafford might have dreamed of. It cemented the Protestant Ascendancy that was to last until the twentieth century. In the eyes of Irish writers ‘the Curse of Cromwell’ sealed ‘the war that finished Ireland’. In some respects these judgements are unfair. The campaign of 1649 came at the end of a decade when plague and famine had killed far more people than Cromwell ever did; and popular views of the Cromwellian massacres are much exaggerated. Like the massacres of Protestants in 1641, which loom large in the Ulster tradition, the disaster of Drogheda has passed into a Catholic folk tradition that recognizes no nuances. Its immediate effects were less horrific than those of the storming of Sligo in 1645 by Sir Charles Coote or the atrocity of Cashel, which had been laid waste by the Gaelic chief Muireadhach O’Brien, in 1647. But its psychological effects are still with us. That is because it quickly became the symbol of the cumulative calamity of which it was the focal point. The statistics speak for themselves. Forty per cent of Ireland’s population had died since 1641. Eighty per cent of the land found its way into Protestant ownership compared to half that proportion ten years earlier. Hundreds were executed. Thirtyfour thousand Irish soldiers were sent abroad as foreign mercenaries, twelve thousand transported to penal servitude in the West Indies. Thousands of years of the Gaelic heritage were threatened by the closure of bardic schools. Ireland was declared part of the Commonwealth. There was no act of union, though the flag was adapted to the changed circumstances (see illustration). ‘This whole episode illustrates the abiding truth that all that any English government ever intended for Ireland was to keep it from being significant.’48

Scotland, too, paid a heavy price. The Covenanters had raised a dozen armies, and all had come to grief. One of the last acts of the Cromwellian conquests was the murderous sacking of Dundee by the troops of General George Monck (1608–70). All the other Scottish boroughs paid vast ransoms for fear of the same fate. All parts of the country beyond the untameable Highlands were occupied by hostile English garrisons. All Scots suffered from heavy war losses, material deprivation, punitive taxation, and political chaos. Everything and anything that could be looted was carried off to England. The plunder included all of Scotland’s public records and all members of the last Scottish government. Taxes increased tenfold. Vast military works were begun, notably at the fortress of Inverness. After 1649 the Scottish Parliament had fallen into the hands of extreme religious radicals in a ‘Rule of Saints’. But now it lost all authority. Six days after the Battle of Worcester, a committee of ‘the Rump’ in London prepared a bill asserting ‘the right of England to Scotland’. The Scottish monarchy and the Scottish Parliament were stated to be redundant. The royal arms were ritually hanged on the gallows in Edinburgh.

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