Oliver Cromwell’s Conquests of Ireland are one of the darkest chapters in Irish history. The massacres were numerous, and decimated a large part of the Irish population, plunging them into poverty and misery. This is the story of the troubled times when Cromwell, a British Protestant, crushed the Kingdom of Ireland and Scotland under his boot…
The Cromwell Conquests began in 1649, when Oliver Cromwell, a British Protestant soldier, set foot in Ireland. At the time, Ireland was torn apart by the Irish Confederate Wars (1641-1653), a civil war stemming from a higher conflict known as the “War of the 3 Kingdoms”, in which the Kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland wished to emancipate themselves from the Kingdom of England and its monarch Charles I, thus gaining their independence and the right to choose their own religion, not the one ordained by the king…
The war had made King Charles I unpopular, and Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), a member of the British House of Commons, decided to become the king’s direct opponent. He formed a cavalry regime made up of Protestant Puritans, nicknamed the “Iron Ribs”, and then managed to lead the king to failure, purging Parliament and bringing Charles I before an extraordinary commission that voted for the monarch’s execution in January 1649.
Cromwell became a symbol, and decided to settle the other side of the conflict in Ireland and Scotland…
Cromwell landed in Dublin in August 1649, leading an army of 12,000 men. He then began a series of battles and sieges pitting them against the Irish Catholics.
He first seized the town of Drogheda, murdering the entire population of the town (over 3,000 people). This was followed by the massacre in the town of Wexford, where civilians and soldiers were coldly slaughtered by British Protestants.
Cromwell’s battles and confrontations lasted over 3 years, reducing the Irish population from 1,466,000 to 616,000. Women and children were massacred and deported to Virginia and the West Indies, while many civilian and military men were murdered or fled to France and Spain. Cromwell’s main battles in Ireland are known to have been savagely murderous. Among the bloodiest of these are the following:
Cromwell then left Ireland for Scotland, and succeeded in suppressing the Presbyterian revolts, uniting Scotland with England by force and being appointed “Lord Protector of the Republic of England, Scotland and Ireland” in 1653. He left behind a bloodless Ireland, where Catholics were subjected to strong political and religious oppression through discriminatory penal laws. British Protestant settlers flocked to the area, asserting their supremacy over the Irish…
The wealth gap widens relentlessly, plunging the Irish into poverty and famine…
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