God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland

by Micheal O Siochru, Faber, 336pp, £14.99
“Even in these times, when all the talk is of putting history behind us, the easiest way to tell the difference between the Irish and the English is to utter the word ‘Cromwell’,” said Fintan O’Toole in the Observer. In England the name evokes “democracy, popular rights and national pride” – while in Catholic Ireland “it is still a swearword”. In his “forensic and fastidious account” of Cromwell’s bloody Irish campaign of 1649-50, Micheal O Siochru sets out to discover whether “Old Ironsides” was really the demon the Irish make him out to be. “The fascination of the book is that, even when it is put through the wringer of low-key, unemotional and carefully documented analysis, the myth turns out to be mostly true.”

By the time Cromwell landed in Dublin in August 1649, at the head of his almost indestructible New Model Army, Charles I had been executed and the parliamentarians faced a new alliance of Irish Catholics and English Royalists, said John Carey in the Sunday Times. “Cromwell needed a swift, decisive success that would break his foes’ morale.” In his first battle, at the walled town of Drogheda, Cromwell led the storming party and personally supervised the slaughter of about 2,500 soldiers. The atrocity was repeated at Wexford, where Cromwell’s troops ran amok and slaughtered both defenders and townspeople alike. It was only then that the war entered its “most murderous phase”, with a cycle of guerilla attacks and brutal reprisals that after three years left a fifth of the Irish population dead. According to one account, “you could ride 20 miles through the country and see nothing but dead men hanging on trees and gibbets”.

It is possible “to explain, if not to excuse” Cromwell’s lapse into brutality, said Toby Barnard in the Literary Review. He arrived in an Ireland already mired in slaughter: he was determined to exact vengeance for the Irish Catholic uprising in 1642 that had left 5,000 Protestant colonists dead (parliamentary propaganda had inflated that figure to 150,000). Following a series of remarkable victories in England and Scotland, he and his soldiers saw themselves as “agents of an angry God”. O Siochru's book “fluently” recounts this grim story. It also lends it “a queasily contemporary ring”, by highlighting the role of propaganda and religious zeal, said O’Toole. God’s Executioner is “the most authoritative account yet written of an episode that reminds us of the barbarism that is inflicted in wars against ‘barbarians’”.

FIRST POSTED SEPTEMBER 15, 2008