The arrival of Oliver Cromwell, the New Model Army & Bubonic plague

The war of 1641-53 in Ireland produced the greatest population loss in Irish history with the possible exception of the Great Famine of the 1840s.

The 17th century was perhaps the bloodiest in Ireland's history. Two periods of war (1641–53 and 1689–91) caused huge loss of life. The ultimate dispossession of most of the Irish Catholic landowning class was engineered, and recusants were subordinated under the Penal Laws.

During the 17th century, Ireland was convulsed by eleven years of warfare, beginning with the Rebellion of 1641, when Irish Catholics rebelled against the domination of English and Protestant settlers.

The Irish Confederate Wars, also called the Eleven Years' War, took place in Ireland between 1641 and 1653. It was the Irish theatre of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms – a series of civil wars in the kingdoms of Ireland, England and Scotland.

The war in Ireland began with the rebellion of 1641 by Irish Catholics, who tried to seize control of the English administration in Ireland to force concessions for Catholics. This developed into an ethnic conflict between Gaelic Irish and old English Catholics on one side, and English and Scottish Protestant colonists on the other. Catholic leaders formed the Irish Catholic Confederation in 1642, which controlled most of Ireland and was loosely aligned with the Royalists.

The Catholic gentry briefly ruled the country as Confederate Ireland (1642–1649) against the background of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms until Oliver Cromwell reconquered Ireland in 1649–1653 on behalf of the English Commonwealth. The Confederates and Royalists fought against the English Parliamentarians and Scottish Covenanters. 

The war was both a religious and an ethnic conflict – fought over who would govern Ireland, whether it would be governed from England, which ethnic and religious group would own most of the land, and which religion would predominate in the country. It was the most destructive conflict in Irish history. 

In 1649, a Parliamentarian army led by Oliver Cromwell invaded Ireland and by 1653 had conquered the island. Cromwell's conquest was the most brutal phase of the war, arriving in Dublin with his New Model Army on behalf of England's Rump Parliament in August 1649. 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. As retribution for the rebellion of 1641, the better-quality remaining lands owned by Irish Catholics were confiscated and given to British settlers. Several hundred remaining native landowners were transplanted to Connacht. Cromwell passed a series of Penal Laws against Roman Catholics, who formed the vast majority of the population.

The Parliamentarian reconquest of Ireland was brutal, and Cromwell is still a hated figure in Ireland. The extent to which Cromwell, who was in direct command for the first year of the campaign, was responsible for the atrocities is debated to this day.

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, probably brought to Ireland by the New Model Army. The Parliamentarians also transported about 50,000 people as indentured labourers to work, in servitude in enforced migration, mainly to the Caribbean.

For Bandon: The 17th Century "City of Refuge", the Rebellion of 1641, followed by the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland would be a period of significant trauma:

Rebellion of 1641 & Cromwellian conquest of Ireland
In October 1641 the native Irish rose in rebellion in counties Derry and Tyrone. The rising spread rapidly throughout Ireland and made its first appearance in West Cork in Glandore. Panicked settlers throughout the region fled to Bandon for protection as it was the only walled town west of Cork. Before the rebellion was one year old, it was reported that one thousand of them lay buried within the churchyard walls as a result of hunger and disease. By 1642 all of the West Cork chieftains were outlawed and the same year civil war broke out in England. What followed in Ireland was a period of widespread sectarian violence and killing of civilians on both sides. Throughout the country only the areas where English settlers were concentrated such as in Cork city, Youghal, Kinsale and Bandon remained in the hands of protestant settlers.

The warfare and bloodshed of the 1640s ended in a terrible manner in 1649 with the arrival of Cromwell. While Cork city was the first town in Munster to declare for Cromwell it was the townspeople of Bandon, however, that acted first to deliver up Bandon town by forcibly taking the garrison for the Parliament and Cromwell. The invasion and victory of the English parliament under Oliver Cromwell had a catastrophic impact on Ireland. It resulted in the death of a least 400,000 people out of a population of around 1.5million inhabitants.

After the war vast tracts of land were confiscated and the second plantation of Munster began. Not only did Cromwell confiscate lands and force tens of thousands into exile but he also sent many thousands into slavery to work the tobacco plantations of the West Indies, Virginia and other colonies. Many of these poor souls left in slave ships from Kinsale. Into this waste land, new colonists flocked to Ireland numbering, it is suggested, more than 200,000.

This was: ‘The war that finished Ireland’ 

This is the heading for the concluding section of the article for The Irish Story by John Dorney, already been quoted above: War and Famine in Ireland.

If the template for ruthless and systematic destruction of crops, animals and food supplies as a military tactic in Ireland was laid in the late 16th century, it reached its apogee in the middle of the next century, in a brutal war that raged from 1641 until 1653. This war, started by the rebellion of Irish Catholic gentry in October 1641, pitted Catholic against Protestant but also split the Protestant English and Scottish along the lines of Civil War raging in those countries between King and Parliament.

It is unnecessary in this article to detail the development of this conflict except to say that for most of the 1640s, the centre of Ireland was largely held by an Irish Catholic movement centred on Kilkenny, with quarrelling Protestant enclaves at Cork, Dublin, and in two separate pockets of Ulster, one around Carrickfergus, the other around Derry.

"Companyes of the Rebells meeting with the English flyinge for their lives falling downe before them cryinge for mercy thrust theire into their childrens bellyes & threw them into the water." Depiction of supposed Irish atrocities during the Rebellion of 1641 by Wenceslaus Hollar.

All sides, in trying to maintain their territory and to expand it, used scorched earth warfare. By 1642, the no-mans-land of central Ulster had been so ravaged by both Irish and Scottish forces that Eoghan Rua O’Neill, the Irish general, famously remarked it, “not only looks like a desert, but like hell, if there could be a hell upon earth”.

Refugees from Ulster, estimated at 30-50,000, fled the “starving wilderness”, to all corners of the country. One Irish language account tells of their arrival in West Cork and Kerry, where they were initially greeted warmly, “famine hit the North and scattered them in our midst here in Munster. Men and women came, they were true Irish people” (Eireannaigh chearta a b’ea iad). But eventually, when they began to compete with the locals for scarce food, they were violently driven out. Elsewhere it was the locals who fled, for instance in Ballybritain, Offaly, half the local population fled before the armed refugees who were accompanied by elements of the Ulster Army.

The anecdote is interesting in that it shows how bonds of ethnic or religious solidarity can at first aid the relief of famine victims, but as the situation continues to deteriorate, may be discarded in favour of more pressing needs of local and family survival. 

It should not be thought that this “subsistence warfare” was something only practiced by English and Scottish forces against the Irish. In fact, the Catholic Confederate forces wreaked exactly the same destruction on enemy-held territory, north of Dublin in November of 1647. Eoghan Rua O’Neill’s Ulster Army burned and spoiled all the arable land they could find in hope of starving out the English Parliamentarian force based in the city.  One Dublin resident reported  that O’Neill was, “destroying the goodliest haggards of corn that was ever seen in these parts. The last night the country towards Drogheda seemed as one fire, there were about 200 fires counted by some who were on St Audeon’s steeple [in Dublin city]. He spareth none of what religion soever, all are alike to him”.

However, until 1649, such destruction was localised to the “frontiers” between the rival armies. This all changed with the invasion of Oliver Cromwell and the English Parliament’s New Model Army in 1649 – the first force in Ireland with enough logistical and financial support to truly conquer the country and to eliminate all armed resistance from both Irish Catholics and Royalists.

However, the Cromwellians’ success in smashing enemy field armies and taking fortified towns meant that by 1650 they were occupying most of the country but were faced in their rear with widespread and stubborn guerrilla resistance from Catholic bands known as “tories”. The Parliamentarian tactics for subduing this threat, instituted by Henry Ireton and Edmund Ludlow, were to remove all civilians from tory-infested areas to fortified villages and those who remained at large would be, “taken slain and destroyed as enemies and their cattle and goods shall be taken or spoiled as the goods of enemies”.

One such punitive raider in Wexford reported, “In searching the woods and bogs we have found great store of corn, which we burnt, also all the houses and cabins we could find, in all of which we found plenty of corn: we continued burning and destroying for four days”.

It was the same tactics as those of the 16th century  but conducted over a much wider area – through counties Wicklow and Wexford, the north and south midlands and south-west Munster.Ulster however, which suffered so much in 1641-42, was largely spared.

An Irish poet wrote of the period, “this was the war that finished Ireland and sent thousands begging…plague and famine stalked together”.

Again, there are no specific figures for how many died in Ireland between 1641 and 1653. The closest we have is the estimate of William Petty, who in his survey of 1672 put the death toll at 618,000, 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.

This figure is probably too high, as tens of thousands of the vanished people had either fled to continental Europe or been transported to the West Indies, but the accounts of other writers leave us in no doubt that this was a catastrophe of startling proportions. In 1653, Colonel Richard Lawrence reported, “the plague and famine had swept away whole counties so that a man may ride 20 or 30 miles and not see a living creature, either man, beast or bird”.

If we take the lowest projected figure of around 200,000 deaths, this still represents over 10% of the estimate population of Ireland at the time. This would put the human disaster of the 1640s and 50s at the very least on a par with the Great Famine of the 1840s. This catastrophe goes far to explain the enduring popular memory of Cromwell himself as a demon figure in Irish history.

Famine represents only part of the story here however. First of all, there were a considerable number of deaths due to direct violence, either combat or massacre, both of soldiers and civilians. Also, a great many of those who died in the turmoil of 1640s and 50s did so as a result of an outbreak of bubonic plague, brought accidentally from England with the New Model Army, who also died from it in droves. Unlike, “famine fever” or typhus, plague is not commonly associated with famine and will kill the well nourished as well as the starving – although the latter of course will die in disproportionate numbers.

Additionally, while the destruction of the war was certainly the key element in provoking famine, there were also severe food shortages, bordering on famine throughout Europe in 1648-51.

The social and political impact of these events on Irish society were huge, but economically and demographically, the recovery was, again, surprisingly rapid. By 1700 the population was again estimated to be about 2 million.

Unlike the plantations of the early 1600s, those after 1650 saw little new settlement of English or Scots in Ireland. Rather the ownership of land was transferred from the old Catholic landed class to Parliamentarian veterans and other Protestants trusted by the Cromwellian regime. Those Irish peasants who survived the disasters of the mid seventeenth century may actually have seen their lot improve. Much as after the Black Death of 14th century in England, the massive population loss in 1660s Ireland meant labour shortage, rising wages and lower rents.

Even the Jacobite-Williamite war of 1689-91 caused no recurrence of massive famine and population loss. By that time armies were bigger – 20-30,000 as opposed to less than 10,000 in the 1640s – but they were also better supplied and less destructive of the civilian economy. The Jacobite war was also much shorter than the wars of mid-century, meaning that less prolonged disruption of harvests and seizure of livestock could take place.

However a famine in Scotland, caused by crop failure in 1696-98, had a major impact in Ireland, causing Scottish Presbyterians to become an absolute majority in Ulster– where about 50,000 settled to escape hunger in their own country, joining the existing 100,000 strong Scottish community there.

The era of war-inflicted famine in Ireland was over by 1700. A combination of deliberate, ruthless, use of starvation to stamp out resistance and the depredations of poorly fed troops had caused the premature deaths of hundreds of thousands of the labouring poor over the previous hundred and fifty years. Ireland was not unique in this experience however. In the Thirty Years War of 1618-48, the population of Germany is estimated to have fallen from 16 to ten million – due to much the same combination of atrocity and pillaging as caused such devastation in Ireland.

But even in a much less violent two following centuries, from 1700-1900, the spectre of mass starvation would continue to hover over the Irish poor.

Cromwell in Ireland - a black legend?

The storming of Drogheda by Oliver Cromwell

It is a fact that the internet is a place where other facts are often shaped into what might be called a Black Legend. Black legends pre-date the internet by hundreds of years, and are discussed in the LODE Re:LODE article Black Legends? Join the Culture Wars!, in the section of the Re:LODE Methods & Purposes in the collection of articles To every story there belongs another . . . The Black Legends aricle is headed with the question Who owns history? The Nativists?, and any attempt to answer such a question inevitably results in having to join the so-called Culture wars!

Who was it that said: "The Irish never forget while the English can never remember"?

This war, especially the Cromwellian conquest, were long remembered in Irish culture, a culture that spoke to itself, and remembered, through poetry and an essentially oral culture. Gaelic Poetry of the post-war era laments lack of unity among Irish Catholics in the Confederation and their constant infighting, which was blamed for their failure to resist Cromwell. Other common themes include the mourning of the old Irish Catholic landed classes, which were destroyed in the wars, and the cruelty of the Parliamentarian forces. 

Here is an account of the Massacre at Drogheda, that accords with the popular received version of a singular atrocity, taken from An Illustrated History of Ireland by Margaret Anne Cusack.

Ormonde had garrisoned Drogheda with 3,000 of his choicest troops. they were partly English, and were commanded by a brave loyalist, Sir Arthur Asto. this was really the most important town in Ireland; and Cromwell, whose skill asa military general cannot be disputed, at once determined to lay siege to it. He encamped before the devoted city on 2nd of September, and in a few days had his siege guns posted on the hill shown in the accompanying illustration, and still known as Cromwell's Fort. Two breaches were made on the 10th, and he sent in his storming parties about five o' clock in the evening. earthworks had been thrown up inside, and the garrison resisted with undiminished bravery. the besieged at last wavered; quarter was promised to them, and they yielded; but the promise came from men who knew neither how to keep faith or to show mercy. The brave Governor, Sir Arthur Aston, retired with his staff to an old mill on an eminence, but they were disarmed and slain in cold blood. The officers and soldiers were first exterminated, and then men, women and children were put to the sword. the butchery occupied five entire days: Cromwell himself described the scene, and glories in his cruelty. Another eyewitness, an officer in his army, has described it also, but with some faint touch of remorse.

A number of townspeople fled for safety to St. Peter's Church, on the north side of the city, but every one of them was murdered, all defenceless and unarmed as they were; others took refuge in the church steeple, but it was of wood, and Cromwell himself gave orders that it should be set on fire, and those who attempted to escape the flames were piked. the principal ladies of the city had sheltered themselves in the crypts. it might have been supposed that this precaution should be unnecessary, or at least, that the English officers would respect their sex; but, alas for common humanity! it was not so. When the slaughter had been accomplished above, it was continued below.

Neither youth nor beauty was spared. Thomas Wood, who was one of these officers, and brother to Anthony Wood, the Oxford historian, says he found in these vaults "the flower and choicest of the women and ladies belonging to the town; amongst whom, a most handsome virgin, arrayed in costly and gorgeous apparel, kneeled down to him with tears and prayer to save her life." Touched by her beauty and her entreaties, he attempted to save her, and took her out of the church; but even his protection could not save her. A soldier thrust his sword into her body; and the officer, recovering from his momentary fit of compassion, "flung her down over the rocks," according to his own account, but first took care to possess himself of her money and jewels. This officer also mentions that the soldiers were in the habit of taking up a child, and using it as a buckler, when they wished to ascend the lofts and galleries of the church, to save themselves from being shot or brained. It is an evidence that they knew their victims to be less cruel than themselves, or the expedient would not have been found to answer.

Cromwell wrote an account of this massacre to the "Council of State." His letters, as his admiring editor observes, "tell their own tale;" and unquestionably that tale plainly intimates that whether the republican General were hypocrite or fanatic - and it is probable he was a compound of both - he certainly , on his own showing, was little less than a demon of cruelty. Cromwell writes thus: "It hath pleased God to bless our endeavours at Drogheda. After battery we stormed it. The enemy were about 3,000 strong in the town. They made a stout resistance. I believe we put to the sword the whole number of defendants. i do not think thirty of the whole number escaped with their lives. Those that did are in safe custody for the Barbadoes. This hath been a marvellous great mercy." In another letter he says that this "great thing" was done "by the Spirit of God."

Given the significance of this episode in the conduct of a brutal war historians have revisited and revised this historical narrative. The Wikipedia article on the Siege of Drogheda says for instance, in a section headed Debates over Cromwell's actions:

Cromwell justified his actions at Drogheda in a letter to the Speaker of the House of Commons, as follows:

I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgement of God on these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands with so much innocent blood; and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which are satisfactory grounds for such actions which cannot otherwise but work remorse and regret.

Historians have interpreted the first part of this passage, "the righteous judgement of God", in two ways. Firstly, as a justification for the massacre of the Drogheda garrison in reprisal for the Irish massacre of English and Scottish Protestants in 1641. In this interpretation the "barbarous wretches" referred to would mean Irish Catholics.

However, as Cromwell was aware, Drogheda had not fallen to the Irish rebels in 1641, or to the Irish Confederate forces in the years that followed. The garrison was in fact English as well as Irish and comprised Catholics and Protestants of both nationalities. The first Irish Catholic troops to be admitted to Drogheda arrived in 1649, as part of the alliance between the Irish Confederates and English Royalists. Historian John Morrill has argued that in fact it was English Royalist officers who were singled out for the most ruthless treatment—being denied quarter, executed after being taken prisoner and whose heads were publicly displayed on pikes. From this viewpoint, he argued that by "barbarous wretches" Cromwell meant the Royalists, who in Cromwell's view had refused to accept "the judgement of God" in deciding the civil war in England and were needlessly prolonging the civil wars.

The second part of Cromwell's statement, that the massacre would "tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future", is accepted to mean that such harshness, including such tactics as clubbing to death and the public displaying of heads, would discourage future resistance and prevent further loss of life. Another of Cromwell's officers wrote, "such extraordinary severity was designed to discourage others from making opposition". Indeed, the neighbouring garrisons of Trim and Dundalk surrendered or fled when they heard the news of what had happened at Drogheda.

Several recent analyses by historians, particularly by Tom Reilly, have claimed that Cromwell’s orders were not exceptionally cruel by the standards of the day, which were that a fortified town that refused an offer of surrender, and was subsequently taken by assault, was not entitled to quarter. However, other historians have argued that, while, "Arthur Aston had refused a summons to surrender, thereby technically forfeiting the lives of the garrison in the event of a successful assault ... the sheer scale of the killing [at Drogheda] was simply unprecedented".

According to John Morrill, the massacre at Drogheda, "was without straightforward parallel in 17th century British or Irish history". The only comparable case in Cromwell's career was that at Basing House, where 100 soldiers out of 400 were killed after a successful assault. "So the Drogheda massacre does stand out for its mercilessness, for its combination of ruthlessness and calculation, for its combination of hot- and cold-bloodiness".

Tom Reilly, who is mentioned in the Wikipedia article, argues that Oliver Cromwell did not, as folk memory has it, slaughter the inhabitants of Drogheda in 1649, and that Cromwell was framed by Sir George Wharton and John Crouch who: "were royalist propagandists who spewed out their radical anti-government newsbooks Mercurius Elencticus and The Man in the Moon respectively on a weekly basis. Both Wharton and Crouch have been described by many early modern print experts as the purveyors of little news but lots of outlandish absurdity."

In an opinion piece for The Irish Story 'Cromwell was Framed' published in 2014, Tom Reilly sets out his argument, and addresses the question of the credibility of the eyewitness accounts, especially that of Anthony á Wood, who is quoted as being a key eyewitness to the "Massacre at Drogheda" in An Illustrated History of Ireland by Margaret Anne Cusack, and quoted above:

When discussing the horrific events at Drogheda in 1649, one of the ‘go to’ sources for many is the (second hand) account of the parliamentarian soldier Thomas á Wood, who fought at Drogheda and therefore could be (and often has been) described as an eyewitness.

Wood reputedly tells us that children were used ‘as a buckler of defence’ by the attackers and he describes the gruesome killing of a young local girl, whom he tried to save but one of his crazed colleagues stabbed her through ‘her belly or fundament whereupon Mr Wood seeing her gasping, took away her money, jewels &c., and flung her down over the works.’

Although some have determined that Wood’s tract is melodramatic hyperbole it has generally been used in a primary source context coming directly from an eyewitness. This is a mistake. Now for the first time the stories of Thomas á Wood, which were transcribed decades later by his brother Anthony, (rendering it non-eyewitness testimony) in the context of fireside stories with which he regaled his ‘brethren’ can be revealed as unequivocally untrustworthy. The source is normally cited loosely as The Life of Anthony á Wood from the year 1632 to 1672 written by himself.

New evidence now clearly shows that this book was first compiled (not published) in 1711 by a Doctor Thomas Tanner, 16 years after Anthony á Wood died and 62 years after Drogheda. Most significantly however, is the fact that it might easily have been influenced by the hands of others and it did not see the light of day until 1772, when a Thomas Hearne edited and published it – that’s 123 years after the events!

Anthony á Wood, a staunch royalist, who was always suspected of being a Catholic had his life’s historical works published after his death in various publications, and all with different editors (including the Rev Sir J Peshall 1773, John Gutch 1786, Phillip Bliss 1813, Andrew Clark 1889), some of which included the story of his life, which in turn contains the account of his brother Thomas at Drogheda. Wood’s biography was not in fact published by himself in the literal sense, but was transcribed by editor Hearne in 1772 from pocket diaries, documents and manuscripts that Wood left to Dr. Tanner, among others, on his deathbed.

This is not exactly what you would call an authentic primary source directly from an eyewitness. Diminishing the credibility of the source even further is the fact that Colonel Henry Ingoldsby, Thomas á Wood’s commanding officer described Thomas as having ‘an art of merriment called buffooning.’ Just the type of soldier, as Samuel Rawson Gardiner has suggested, who might make up sensational stories to impress a fireside audience.

It is important to analyse Anthony á Wood’s commentary because his is the only account that gives details of civilian deaths at Drogheda, using his brother’s lurid stories, if they even were his brother’s own lurid stories.

Tom Reilly continues his argument, an argument that sets out the historical background to what has become a black legend, and that subsequently has proved highly functional in various propagandistic settings:

The most pragmatic way to approach the question of the origin of the deliberate civilian atrocity allegations is to separate the wheat from the chaff and identify the primary sources themselves, those that date from the year 1649 and were written in the weeks and months following the sackings of Drogheda and Wexford. These 1649 sources are well-known and mostly comprise the newsbooks of the day, the letters of those in command of the royalist army (Lord Ormond and Lord Inchiquin) and one or two private letters.

It may therefore occasion surprise for one to learn that in the eleven intervening years between the stormings of both Drogheda and Wexford and the Restoration there are just TWO contemporary accounts that allege Cromwell slaughtered the lawyers, merchants, servants, farmers, doctors, carpenters, washerwomen, widows, teenagers and children of Drogheda and Wexford.

That being the case, it is not such a wild leap of faith to identify these two individuals as the ones who instigated the civilian massacre stories – or alternatively to identify them as the ones who framed Oliver Cromwell. Sir George Wharton and John Crouch

Any analysis of any of their publications will reveal their penchant for lies, slander, slurs, calumny and character assassination, including crass sexual innuendo directed at Cromwell himself and his high profile parliamentary bosses. Indeed, in his edition of 7 November 1649 John Crouch decides to spread a rumour that Cromwell’s penis was shot off at Drogheda and goes into some explicit and gaudy details as to how this might affect Mrs Cromwell.

For eleven long years no other document, that we know, of accuses Cromwell of civilian atrocities. There the matter should really have ended. Indeed, it is worth speculating that if the House of Cromwell, in the guise of his son Richard in the first instance, the second Lord Protector, had survived into the 1660s and beyond it is likely that both Crouch’s and Wharton’s outrageous publications would have been long cast to the mists of time.

Instead, of course, the Restoration happened when Charles II restored his royal seat on the throne and it wasn’t long before his father’s killers became the victims of vengeful royalist wrath. Not long after the bodies of Cromwell, his parliamentarian compatriot John Bradshaw and son-in-law Henry Ireton were exhumed and defiled as the chief protagonists of the failed republic, people couldn’t get to the printing presses quickly enough to destroy their reputations.

In his Conclusion Reilly summarises as follows:

The evidence now being revealed by this writer simply hones in on whether or not Cromwell was responsible for deliberately killing large numbers of innocent, unarmed civilians in Ireland in the year 1649. Some may have died in the cross-fire, as the result of collateral damage, others definitely drowned by accident.

Cromwell’s legacy is complicated by the subsequent war and plantation that devastated Ireland but the question remains, was he guilty of massacres during his campaign of 1649-50 in Ireland or not?

The subsequent dreadful Cromwellian Plantation that devastated Catholic Ireland is another matter altogether and should not cloud one’s judgement when discussing these alleged war crimes. Were large numbers of innocent civilians deliberately massacred? Did Cromwell do it, or did he not? Should we still be teaching children that Cromwell indiscriminately slaughtered entire town populations? As President of the Cromwell Association, Prof John Morrill has recently announced, ‘Paradoxically, by blaming Cromwell for the much more lasting horrors of the Commonwealth period in Ireland, we let those really responsible off the hook.’

Access to long withheld witness statements  

In 2010 The Guardian ran this story: 

Witness statements from Irish rebellion and massacres of 1641 go online

'Ultimate' cold case analysis may heal ancient quarrels and offer genealogy and linguistics treasure trove

The 31 handwritten volumes of embittered 17th-century testimony have been alternately hailed as the world's first war crimes investigation or damned as a prototype dodgy dossier packed with black political propaganda.

Witness statements taken after the Irish rebellion and massacres of 1641 – that provided Oliver Cromwell with justification for his infamous slaughter of the defeated garrisons at Drogheda and Wexford – are being put online and will for the first time be cross-checked, where possible, for accuracy and exaggeration.

In what has been dubbed as the ultimate in cold case reviews, historians, linguists, software specialists and the public are being invited to trawl through newly transcribed versions of the original documents held in Trinity College, Dublin.

So, Owen Bowcott writes on Sun 7 Mar 2010. He continues:

The 350-year-old writing is barely legible, the spelling across 19,000 pages of text erratic. The events they chronicle, however, poisoned Anglo-Irish relations for centuries, focusing attention on atrocities inflicted predominantly by dispossessed Irish Catholic rebels on Anglo-Scottish, Protestant settlers. The barbarities are still emblazoned on Orange Order banners and loyalist murals in Northern Ireland.

As late as the 1930s the Irish government intervened to prevent publication of historical research about the accounts of arson, communal murders, mass drownings, lynchings and robberies because it was deemed to contain such incendiary allegations.

Academics from Trinity College, Aberdeen and Cambridge Universities are now co-operating on a series of research projects that could not only help bring resolution to ancient quarrels but will open up a treasure house of genealogical, linguistic and census information.

Professor Jane Ohlmeyer, one of the principal investigators at Trinity, believes that new language analysis methods will allow the documents to be explored "in a way we couldn't have done 10 or 15 years ago during the Troubles".

The rebellion, which broke out in October 1641, was a significant moment in the formation of identity in Ireland, she told the Guardian. Estimates of the numbers killed vary from 4,000 to up to 200,000. It began in Ulster but spread across the country.

The depositions were ordered by government commissioners, many of the Church of Ireland clergymen, who recorded the victims' testimonies.

"They did it in the hope of obtaining evidence against the rebels and also as a crude form of insurance claim against lost property," Ohlmeyer said. Cromwell's commissioners were still taking evidence in the 1650s and the records form an extraordinarily detailed portrait of contemporary life, occupations and possessions in every Irish county.

The volumes were eventually donated to Trinity College in 1741, where they languished, rarely seen.

"In the 1930s a group of Irish scholars tried to publish them," Ohlmeyer said. "But the Irish government blocked them because it was too contentious.

"There are about 4,000 claims altogether. Nine times out of 10 they are not far off the mark because we have other sources we can check from the period. Now we can systematically analyse how accurate they were.

"There were clearly some atrocities such as the drowning of Protestants at Portadown where around 100 people lost their lives. That year was on record as one of the coldest winters and people died of starvation and cold.

"I was most moved by the account of one man who escaped to Dublin where he heard that his wife and children had been killed. He was reported to have died of grief. There's a lot of evidence from women, especially widows.

"The bloodletting was on both sides but Oliver Cromwell used this as justification for his [massacres at] Drogheda and Wexford. There were also a series of war crimes tribunals held by Cromwell in the 1650s."

The multi-disciplinary project has been funded by both Irish and British research councils. Students of the Holocaust and more recent genocides – such as Rwanda and the Balkans – as well as groups supporting peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland have been among early users of the resources. It is hoped to have all the documents available online by the end of this year.

Another lead researcher, Barbara Fennell, a senior lecturer in language and linguistics at the University of Aberdeen, said: "These depositions tell us a lot about what English was like at the time.

"We hope to be able to synthesise some of the voices and make recordings of what they would have sounded like. They will be real echoes of the past.

"We know that different commissioners had different manners of speaking and writing. The language analysis software should be able to match up styles of speaking and writing ... so it may give us insights into any bias of evidence being introduced by a third party's influence. The historians say that Cromwell exaggerated the accounts to justify his actions. Is there any evidence of that as it was being written down?

"These collections are unique in early modern times. It is like doing a cold case review in the sense that we are using modern technological advances to provide insights into old evidence."

One of the 1641 depositions

Phillip Taylor late of the Portadowne in the County of Armagh husbandman ag sworne saith That about the xvj xxiiijth of October Last he this deponent was taken prisoner at Portadowne aforesaid by Toole mc Cann of now of Portadowne gent a notorious rebell and comander of a great number of rebells together with those Rebells his souldiers to the number of 100 persons or thereaboutes Att which tyme the Rebells first tooke the Castle and victualled the same, Then they assaulted and pillaged the towne & burned all the howses on the further side of the water And then the said Rebells drowned a great number of English protestants of men women and children in this deponents sight, some with their hands tyed on their backs And saith that the number of them that were soe then drowned amounted as this deponent was credibly tould and beleveth, to the number of 196 persons: And the same Rebells then alsoe threatened to shoote to death one Mr Tiffin a zealous protestant minister there & discharged a peece at him accordingly but as it pleasid god they mist him and at length he escaped from them: And further saith that the said Rebells kept this deponent in prison at portadowne aforesaid for the space of seven weekes and sett a horse Lock vpon his legg: but at length he gott a passe from the said Toole mc Cann & soe gotte away from them But whilest he stayd there many poore protestants were by the Rebells murthered in seuerall placs in about Loughgall aforesaid And they alsoe in that tyme stript of his clothes one Mr Jones a minister at Segoe nere Portadowne aforesaid: whoe afterwards escaped from them to the towne of Lisnegarvy: And the deponent hath credibly heard that one Mr ffullerton a minister & another in his company were alsoe murthered by the Rebells before the drowning of the protestants aforesaid And that the rebels signum dicti Phillippi Taylor [mark]