Anglo-Irish Civil War- - -The Cromwell Years

Elizabeth's last defence against the Spanish was as successful as the first. Mountjoy beat Tyrone at the Battle of Kinsale and isolated the Spanish expeditionary force, leaving the islands again secure against foreign invaders.

After her death in 1603, the kingdoms of Scotland and England both came under King James of Scotland who took up office in England as a descendant of Henry VII through his eldest daughter, Margaret.

James had been brought up as a Protestant but viewed the democratic Presbyterian form of church government as incompatible with the hereditary right of a king to rule. His reign in Scotland was a continuing attempt to use the turbulent nobles against the Presbyterians so neither challenged his power.

He had some success, getting an agreement from the Presbyterian General Assembly that its individual ministers would not attack him directly from the pulpit until complaints had been officially investigated. He also managed to introduce some Protestant bishops into the Scottish parliament but must have been envious of Elizabeth's control of her Church with minimum fuss except from a few puritans.

When he came to power in England, the English Church continued to be the model that he used in dealing with religious questions. And if there was discontent, an offer of land in Ireland would solve both the discontent in England and Scotland and rebellious nobles in Ireland.

The offer didn't work particularly well in solving the problem of opposition. James had difficulty adjusting to the more complex balance of power in his combined kingdom. There were more forces to balance. It wasn't only the extreme Protestants and the establishment. Guy Fawkes and a group of Catholic conspirators attempted to blow the king up in 1605 as he was opening the English parliament.

Later, Parliament was particularly displeased when James said that kings were justly called gods because they exercised divine power on earth. He wasn't any more diplomatic in dealing with the Scots when he reintroduced papist practices like confirmation by bishops and required Communion to be received in a kneeling position.

Despite this, England and Scotland were peaceful compared to what happened in Europe. The simmering strains between Catholics and Protestants exploded there into a thirty year war where both sides assembled support from wherever they could. The Swedes, in particular, found lowland Scotland a source of fodder for their armies.

Be that as it may, when he died in 1625, James left increasingly hostile kingdoms to an even more arrogant son, Charles I, who had himself crowned in the Scottish palace of Holyrood with elaborate episcopal vestments and trappings in a seemingly deliberate affront to the Scots and, after 1629, tried to govern by proclamation without calling parliaments.

Charles, too, was a Protestant but his love of high church ritual and a marriage to a Roman Catholic made his subjects suspect him of Catholic sympathies. One of his greatest acts of folly was his decision in 1637 to impose a revision of the English Prayer Book on the Scottish Church which saw the revision as a foreign product of superstition and popery.

Frustrated by Charles' refusal to reverse his religious policies, leading Scots noblemen and gentry were the first to make a major challenge to the monarchy when they signed a National Covenant attacking the king's bishops.

Charles was forced into war to put down the rebellion. Charles, being Charles, tried to do it alone without parliamentary money or authorization. Raising money and men directly from supporters in England, he put together almost 20,000 men by June 1639 and marched towards Scotland.

The Covenantor commander, Alexander Leslie, had far inferior forces, perhaps 4,000 to 5,000 men less, and no provisions to allow him to retreat and fight only when he had an advantage, so he arrayed himself on the heights of Duns Law on the northern bank of the Tweed and prayed that, by displaying all he had, he would dupe the king into thinking that he had more in reserve behind him.

Charles lost his nerve and opted for negotiation. All that Charles achieved was the stripping of his supporters and a humiliation which left him the object of contempt as soon as it was clear how many men that Leslie really had.

The terms of the negotiations weren't all that favourable either and, next time, when Charles needed the support of Parliament, Charles had lost face, the English were in no mood to war against fellow Protestants, even if they were only Scots, and Parliament refused to raise the money needed to pay his troops.

Goaded by his wife, Charles eventually tried to arrest some members of the House of Commons. They went into hiding and were protected by the only regular military force in England, the London trained band. Charles had to flee London. His weakness and the antagonism to his support for the excesses of the bishops in the English Church finally brought his opponents all together.

It broke into open struggle as Charles assembled about 13,500 men at Nottingham and the English parliament about 15,000 at Northampton. A regional pattern emerged. Charles had control of Wales and the west; Parliament the south-east and east, including London. The Midlands and the north were disputed territory.

Although there were veterans of the Thirty Years War on both sides, most of the officers had little experience and wasted their time on skirmishes and sieges of country houses rather than concentrating their efforts. The sides were fairly evenly matched, driving the English parliament to form an alliance with the Scots in a Solemn League and Covenant (a separate covenant from the National Covenant).

The Covenant wasn't much appreciated in the Scottish highlands where opposition to the Presbyterian lowlands was strong but the Covenant bore its fruit at the Battle of Marston Moor where the combined forces of the English and Scots parliaments shattered King Charles' power in the north of England.

At the battle, the parliamentarians outnumbered the royalists two to one in infantry but only matched them in cavalry. Both sides drew up their forces in the continental pattern, infantry in the middle and cavalry on the flanks.

The battle started on the flanks. Oliver Cromwell's cavalry attacked those of Prince Rupert but were forced back and saved only by Scottish cavalry. On the other flank, the royalists, using musketeer support, defeated some more Scottish cavalry.

The battle turned on discipline. Cromwell was able to keep his cavalry together, defeating Rupert with the help of the Scots who had rescued him and then brought his cavalry around to the other flank where the royalists hadn't regrouped after their success. Deprived of cavalry support, the royalist infantry were surrounded and cut down.

The parliamentary army then broke up as each regiment had local concerns, the Scots going north to besiege Newcastle. Highlanders under the Marquis of Montrose retaliated by raids into the lowlands. Stolid and dour as they were, the lowland Presbyterians were no super people. It took the English army, reorganized under the New Model Ordinance to reform regiments under professional officers rather than aristocrats, to defeat Montrose in 1645 and Charles was not able to recover.

Charles' final battle was at Naseby. His cavalry on one flank, under Rupert, busied itself with Parliament's baggage train. Cromwell fell on the royalists' other flank.

Charles was about to go to the flank's rescue when a peer dissuaded him, turning the king's horse around. The royalist cavalry thought that this was a signal for withdrawal, pulled away from the fight which then turned into a rout as Cromwell took advantage of the mistake. Rupert returned to the battlefield to find parliamentary infantry in complete possession.

Charles surrendered to the Scots in 1646 but they turned him over to the English. Charles quickly identified weakness in the parliamentary camp. The Presbyterians in Parliament, because of the alliance with the Presbyterian lowlands, saw themselves as dominant, started persecuting other sects even in the victorious army and tried to disband the army without coming up with its arrears in pay. The reformed army with professional officers refused.

The army, despite the misgivings of some of its more radical soldiers who wanted a democracy based on everyone having a vote, made several offers to Charles of what would have been a constitutional monarchy.

Charles, variously in the possession of Parliament and the army and even, at one time, fleeing to the Isle of Wight, refused any limitation on his powers and spent his time encouraging royalist revolts in Wales, Kent and Sussex and a Scottish invasion. The revolts were easily handled and the invading Scots and their royalist allies were cut to pieces by Cromwell at Preston in the west, the only major encounter and the royalist cause was in ruins.

By now, the army was in control, with Parliament only an appendage, and Cromwell more than merely a highly regarded cavalry commander. With his new power and outraged at the king's treachery, Cromwell and others had the king executed.

Shocked at the execution of a Scot by mere English commoners, Scots nobles arranged to proclaim Charles' son as the new king, Charles II, though they forced him to sign an agreement to become a Presbyterian, to impose Presbyterianism on the English, and to root out bishops. The way was open for a another clash.

Cromwell marched into Ireland which had its own royalist rebellion and then Scotland. We look first at the background in Ireland.

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As the civil war developed in Britain, Charles I made several attempts to obtain Irish support for his fight against the Parliamentarians. Daniel O'Carroll the great grandson of Teíge and Chief of Ely died in the service of Charles I as did many of his countrymen.

In 1649 after the English rebels had executed the King and ended the civil war with the establishment of the Commonwealth, the pacification of Ireland was given priority by the new government. In August 1649 Oliver Cromwell with twenty thousand men of the New Model Army landed in Dublin. A month later, on 11 September, he stormed Drogheda, entering Irish history with a vengeance still not forgotten. The entire garrison and all the townspeople were ruthlessly slain. From Drogheda Cromwell went on to Wexford where two weeks later he conducted another slaughter as ruthless as the first. New Ross surrendered to him without a fight and by July 1650 Commonwealth armies were in command of all Ireland except Connaught.

After returning to England in 1650 Cromwell turned his attention to Ireland's legislation. In 1653 the Westminster 'Rump Parliament' voted to unify Ireland with Britain and abolish the Irish Parliament. In a further series of acts it was decreed that Irish landowners were to be transplanted to the inhospitable terrain of Connaught and County Clare and their lands forfeited to the adventurers and demobilised soldiers of Cromwell's armies. More than eleven million acres of land were confiscated. Native Irishmen found east of the River Shannon after 1 May 1654 faced the death penalty or transportation to slavery in the West Indies. "To Hell or Connaught" became a proverbial phrase among Irishmen.

John O'Carroll (the son of Daniel) was, at the age of five, removed from his ancestral lands into Connaught "thereby to destroy the interests of the family who were in all ages known to stand for the liberties of their country." In the original Connaught certificate (IV, 60) "the lands of Beagh, etc. are granted to John Carroll, grandson and heir to Donnough O'Carroll, as a transplanted person."

As in previous plantations, it proved impossible to enforce the Cromwellian land settlement. It is thought that fewer than a quarter of the soldiers granted Irish lands actually settled in Ireland; most preferred to sell their lands instead. The new owners who did settle found that they needed a supply of cheap labour in order to farm their new fields. So in practice, despite the dangers, many native Irishmen drifted back across the Shannon. These planters became the new ruling class in Ireland and, like the Normans before them, gradually changed into Irishmen themselves. Only in the North did differences remain were the new element of strong anti-Catholic Protestantism was added.

After the monarchy was restored in Britain in 1660, Charles II refused to reinstate most of the original landowners, although diplomatically, he did not enforce the laws against Catholics. When James II succeeded his father in 1685, only 22 per cent of the land of Ireland was in the hands of Catholics. However any lingering differences between the native Irish and the various groups of Englishmen outside the Pale who had come to Ireland during the previous centuries were by now largely forgotten.

The succession of the professedly Catholic James II could have led to settled relations between England and Ireland however his insistence upon his prerogative at the expense of Parliament generated another English civil war with an even greater Irish involvement.

After the defeat of the Scots by William of Orange in 1689, James turned to the Irish for help. The Irish once again united in supporting the English king but were defeated, as all Orangemen could tell you, on the banks of the river Boyne on 12 July 1690. For over a year the Irish army continued to resist William until in September 1691 they finally surrendered and the war ended with the Treaty of Limerick.