Customer Reviews

Cromwell Hb

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This is a remarkable attempt to revise the accepted view of Cromwell in Ireland. For Reilly, a native of Drogheda, Cromwell was an honourable soldier who did not cause the death of a single unarmed civilian in his hometown. In Reilly's account Cromwell is a reasoned, enlightened "humanitarian" who has been the victim of his enemy's black propaganda. This is a startling thesis which, if it were true, would put generations of historians to shame.

It would be easy to ridicule Reilly's dreadful prose; his enthusiastic description of the McDonald's outlet in modern Drogheda will, unfortunately, remain with me for a very long time. Yet, the main weaknesses of this book are not stylistic, but historical. To be blunt, Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy owes more to Reilly's often expressed desire to "rehabilitate the memory of Cromwell in Ireland" than it does to any generally accepted rules of historical practice.

The author exhibits a profound unfamiliarity with the history of the English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century. In his mind, Cromwell was a democrat, the leader of an oppressed nation which rose up against monarchical tyranny, thereby securing freedom and liberty. This was certainly the view of a number of historians writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it is an untenable position for anyone familiar with an undergraduate textbook written in the last fifty years. In actual fact, Cromwell was no more a democrat than Charles was a tyrant, and the English Revolution was not an expression of the popular will, but the product of a civil war fought between two small groups which were unrepresentative of the wishes of the population as a whole.

Furthermore, Reilly has chosen to write about perhaps the most controversial period of Irish history without consulting a single book or pamphlet dating from the time of the sack of Drogheda. Instead, he bases his thesis on extracts of contemporary sources reproduced, with varying degrees of accuracy, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As such, he makes a number of serious blunders, the most important of which concerns Cromwell's letter to the House of Commons after the battle at Drogheda. The original letter does not survive but the official printed version confirms that "many inhabitants" were among those killed by Cromwell's forces at Drogheda. If this pamphlet is authentic, Reilly's thesis is in ruins. He, therefore, latches onto a nineteenth-century, pro-Cromwellian book which claimed that these words do not appear in the original pamphlet. When it was subsequently pointed out to Reilly that they do indeed appear in the pamphlet in question, he was forced to fall back on another argument from a nineteenth-century defender of Cromwell; the incriminating words must have been added without Cromwell's knowledge, possibly by the printer of the pamphlet. Yet, Reilly provides no evidence for this assertion and does not explain why the printer might have done this or how he avoided punishment for accusing Cromwell of killing civilians.

Even among the limited range of nineteenth and twentieth-century books which he consulted,Reilly found a number of contemporary references to the slaughter of civilians at Drogheda. As such, he is forced to adopt a number of disturbing sleights of hand. He dismisses all accounts of the massacre which were not written by eyewitnesses. At first glance this is entirely reasonable, but when one considers the nature of the sacking of a town it seems churlish to discount all testimony written by individuals who spoke to eyewitnesses or survivors. For example, Reilly dismisses Anthony Wood's testimony that his brother Thomas, who served in the Cromwellian forces at Drogheda, had spoken on numerous occasions of his part in the killing of women and children in the town. Reilly denigrates Anthony Wood as a gossip, buffoon, and drunk, and suggests that we would be unwise to put much faith in him. Yet, if Anthony Wood is unreliable why does Reilly accept his description of the royalist governor of Drogheda, Sir Arthur Aston, as a reprehensible tyrant? The only logical answer is that Wood's description of Aston's character helps Reilly to explain away the fact that Cromwell's men beat his brains out with his own wooden leg after he had surrendered.

In other words, anything which tends to lessen the enormity of Cromwell's actions at Drogheda is accepted uncritically, while any evidence which implicates him in the murder of civilians must pass the highest possible standards of proof. Reilly explains away eyewitness accounts of civilian deaths by magnifying slight inconsistencies between them and by attacking the character and motivations of the witnesses themselves. Once again, Cromwell is innocent until proven guilty while his opponents are guilty until proven innocent. Finally, having, to his satisfaction at least, demolished the evidence against Cromwell, Reilly asserts that there is no contemporary evidence for the massacre of civilians at Drogheda. At times one cannot but feel something approaching admiration for Reilly's ability to deal from the bottom of the deck, but one cannot get away from the fact that he has done too little research to support his extravagant claims. He is completely unaware of John Evelyn's diary entry for 15 September 1649 which tells how he received "news of Drogheda being taken by the Rebells and all put to the sword." Neither is he familiar with a report in a newspaper named Mercurius Elencticus, dated 15 October 1649, which tells how the Cromwellians at Drogheda "possessed themselves of the Towne, and used all crueltie imaginable upon the besieged, as well inhabitants as others, sparing neither women nor children." Had Reilly been aware of these sources he would, undoubtedly, have found some grounds to dismiss them, but when they are read in conjunction with the numerous other accounts of civilians deaths at Drogheda there can be no doubt about what happened in that town in September 1649. This is, in short, a painfully bad book.

Jason Mc Elligott, St John's College, Cambridge.

It's a bit harsh to give this only four stars. Generally most things about this book are excellent. The sources are laid out fairly clearly - a bibliography, mostly 20th century and some nineteenth, and 'Miscellaneous Publications' including such things as a BBC programme, one edition of a newspaper, and a lecture. Each chapter has endnotes, and their references match up with the bibliography, at least usually.

However there are some niggles:

[1] Not many original documents are mentioned, and the presumption is they've been printed accurately. But one can never be sure. To be fair many have probably vanished or decayed or would be difficult to get hold of in the original.

[2] Reilly often enough says such-and-such a person never visited Ireland, or some similar definite statement; how can he be so sure? No doubt he's likely to be right, but ...

[3] He doesn't state the official Irish view of Cromwell. We're not all Irish, and some of us haven't been exposed to the Irish education system. Reilly does lay out clearly the object of Cromwell's military expedition, viz to control Ireland, and take lands from Royalists. But it's left rather unclear. Admittedly a revisionist book doesn't have to deal with every aspect of a topic, but the reason Cromwell's of interest in Ireland is exactly because of what he was supposed to have done. (As an example - take 'plantations'. They couldn't have been for spices, sugar cane, tobacco; were they trees? Or what?) Under the rules of the age, was it accepted that a supporter of a losing side should lose possessions?

[4] He doesn't give details of real or supposed massacres of Protestants before Cromwell got there. (Or subsequent events such as the 'Black and Tans').

[5] He seems to take Cromwell as a great commander as an established fact. But it certainly appears at first sight as though the main advantage he had was simply lots of cannon of various types. Cromwell just battered away at town walls (and these medieval towns were small - 400 yards was a typical narrowest width). The Drogheda commander seems to have not realised what he was up against.

Some of the reviews here lay stress on one or two documents - and it's often a suspicious sign when conclusions hang on the words of just one or two witnesses, or supposed witnesses. Connoisseurs of this kind of thing will recognise parallels with other atrocity stories, though on a much tinier scale, and parallels with later historians repeating parrot-style. Reilly maintains that much of the force of the 19th century Irish 'rebel' movement was based on fake atrocity stories. The whole idea of Ireland as 'the most distressful country that ever yet was seen' needs a bit of realistic debunking.

I'm sure Tom Reilly started something in 1999, though I wouldn't dare guess how long it will be before he becomes mainstream.

Historian Tom Reilly was born in Drogheda, the site of one of Cromwell's most notorious alleged massacres. In this remarkably independent-minded book, he studies Cromwell's Ireland campaign of 1649-50. He finds that, contrary to myth, Cromwell did not indiscriminately massacre ordinary unarmed Irish people.

Before he started the campaign, Cromwell issued a proclamation, "I do hereby warn ... all Officers, Soldiers and others under my command not to do any wrong or violence towards Country People or persons whatsoever, unless they be actually in arms or office with the enemy ... as they shall answer to the contrary at their utmost perils." This was no empty threat: before even reaching Drogheda, Cromwell ordered two of his soldiers to be hanged for stealing hens.

His forces killed the military defenders of Drogheda and Wexford, not the townspeople, acting according to standard 17th-century military norms. Yet Jesuit Father Denis Murphy wrote, more than 200 years later, "to none was mercy shown; not to the women nor to the aged, nor to the young." He gave vivid descriptions of the killings of priests, but none of any killing of women or children. In fact, there are no eye-witness accounts of indiscriminate slaughter, or of the death of even one unarmed defender or of one woman or child.

Yet a leading historian, Professor Roy Foster, the Carroll Professor of Irish History at Oxford University, wrongly claims that the massacre of Drogheda's townspeople was `one of the few massacres in Irish history fully attested to on both sides'.

After the Restoration, Cromwell was the main target of political and religious attack. The Royalists attacked him on everything, especially the Irish campaign. Irish nationalists, Catholic publicists and infantile leftists assisted with fabrications and propaganda. The Irish bishops lied that Cromwell's religious policies could not be `effected without the massacring or banishment of the Catholic inhabitants', so the propagandists had to allege the massacres.

History is not a matter of opinion, or of repeating allegations without investigation. We are obliged to use evidence, primary sources, and eye-witness accounts, and we are duty-bound to stick to the verified facts, at whatever cost to our previous judgements.

Tom Reilly is a small-time journalist in Drogheda, Ireland and locally prominent as the village atheist.

This book is an endless string of special pleading on behalf of Oliver Cromwell whose own letters to Parliament betray him as someone who believed that the killing of Catholic non-combatants "gave glory to God." Conspicuously absent is any reference to Cromwell's speech to his troops in Bristol as they embarked telling them that they were Israelites about to enter Canaan and extirpate its idolatrous inhabitants.

In this book Mr. Reilly reveals himself as thoroughly incapable of sifting and weighing historical sources. He glosses over or dismisses the contemporary accounts of the masscre of Drogheda and paints a Cromwell saddened by his inability to restrain his overzealous troops. Though it is true that the contemporary rules of warfare offered no guarantee of quarter or mercy for a garrison that resisted a seige and had to be taken by storm, no civilized people have ever countenanced the sort of behavior (for instance seizing children for use as human shields) of Cromwell's Model Army. Reilly does include Cromwell's justification that such atrocity will strike terror into the hearts of other towns and thus "will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future." But he leaves out Cromwell's judgement from the very same letter that the killings were "a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches." In his defense, even Reilly blushes to completely exculpate the perfidy at Wexford.

Likewise absent from Reilly's whitewashed narrative is any accounting of the massive demographic and economic upheaval that resulted from the campaign of this "honourable enemy" and its aftermath. According to the English Parliament's own survey after the war, about 47.7% of the Irish population at the beginning of the war was gone. Most of those were killed during the war or executed or sent to English plantations in the West Indies as slaves immediately after. About 2.7% were Catholics who had fled to the Continent (mostly to France and Spain). Cromwell paid his debts, paid his army, and bolstered his power in England with gifts of land in conquered Ireland. Out of a total of 20 million acres in the survey, 11 million were confiscated.

What this book does provide is a pretty thorough summary of the main arguments of generations of Cromwell apologists. That makes the book tangentially useful for teaching logic and historical reasoning but utterly useless for studying Cromwell's Irish Campaign.

Right from the start this work grips you and keeps you interested as it describes the movements by the 17th Century Parlimentarians; Monroe and Inchiquin & Co thoughout the country and also describes the sometimes uneasy alliance of the Irish Confederates (Eoin Ruatha O Neill) with the Royalists led by Ormond right to the defeat of Ormand at Rathmines in Dublin by the Parlimentarian, Michael Jones, which was indeed very welcome news for Cromwell's upon his arrival.

Just when you think you are getting to grips with the already complex story, there are betrayals, turn-coating etc to keep you on the edge of your seat.

A lot of light is shed on the figure of 17th Century History and for someone interested in History and fact and uninterested in emotional opinion, O Reilly, at one stage nearly had me feeling sorry for this man - though I would doubt that that had ever been his objective.

Having grown up - and admittedly not knowing a whole about Cromwell prior to reading this book - there must have been something embedded in my psyche, as there would be with many others here, in that when anyone mentions the name, you might automatically think, "That .... Cromwell" in what he had done in Ireland in 1649/50 and the legacy he left right up to the present.

O Reilly compares and contrasts very well the eye-witness and non-eye-witness accounts of the sieges (massacres) at Drogheda, Wexford, Ross and the rest of the New Model army's Campaign. For an Irishman it was difficult at times to hear that the only humiliation Cromwell really felt during his nine months stay in Ireland was given to him at Clonmel. So it could be dismissed that O 'Reilly - who himself, I believe hails from the lovely town of Drogheda is not out to vindicate Cromwell's actions, but he does show that Cromwell was indeed an intelligent soldier who carried out his orders to the letter. And also from the information in the book, if anyone had the idea that This New Model army were a bunch of sword swaggering morans that systematically slaughtered any moving thing in their way, one can see that he ran a very tight ship with a reference made throughout the book about his instructions to his regiments, 'that none of his troops are to steal food from local people.'

Great book, my only criticism of it would be its lack of maps.