Product Description

This re-examination of the Cromwellian invasion of Ireland argues that the viewpoint of Cromwell as a genocidal maniac and religious fanatic lacks solid evidence. Placing his conquest within the rules of war at the time, it concludes he was the first successful military conqueror of Ireland.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #806109 in Books
• Published on: 2000-11-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From the Author
This book is ahead of its time
As author of this book, I feel that many historians in Ireland are not ready yet for 'an honourable' Cromwell - nor indeed are the people of Ireland. I thought that I would change the history books and public opinion about this much maligned historical figure by publishing the truth about Cromwell's Irish campaign. The reaction - among the under forties on the whole - was good, but among historians and the over forties it was bad. They can't seem to accept that an amateur could discover such a fundamental flaw in Irish history ie that neither Cromwell or his men ever engaged in the killing of any unarmed civilians throughout his entire nine month campaign. The facts are there for all to see. But God bless Ireland the past is still the present here and we MUST have our English hate figures - despite the truth. How sad is that?

Tom Reilly Author - Cromwell An Honourable Enemy

Customer Reviews

Flawed but challenging
While I sympathise with the earlier reviewer's comments on the unpolished character of Reilly's written style and the often clumsy structure of his arguments this is a challenging book, worthy of the attention of anyone who brings an open mind to the study of Irish history. Those who simply want to have their prejudices confirmed will doubtless hate the book: how dare anyone - especially an Irishman from Drogheda - challenge Irish nationalism's most cherished myth!

The previous reviewer is right that Reilly does not satisfactorily explain away Cromwell's own reference to civilian casualties at Drogheda but the fact that civilians may have died in the heat of action (today we would call it collateral damage) does not make a massacre. Reilly does, in my opinion, convincingly demolish the reliability the testimony of Woods, the only eyewitness to describe deliberate atrocities committed against civilians during the battle, by showing that he had good reasons to wish to present Cromwell in a bad light. If Wood's evidence is discounted then there is no real evidence of a massacre of civilians: all other sources, including those that the earlier reviewer mentions, are second hand and, like Woods, have an interest in presenting Cromwell in a bad light. The consequences for Ireland of the Cromwellian conquest were quite bad enough without making the man into something he was not. I would hope that Reilly's book might help encourage a less self-serving approach to Irish history if it was more widely read.

A good revisionist history - and about time too
As someone of proud Irish parentage from the Drogheda area, but born and raised in England, I really hope that this book will make a step towards ridding Irish history of some crude nationalistic elements and remnants of plain propaganda. As a result maybe one day I can have a discussion about Ireland and England that doesn't end up in vitriol. Having had first-hand experience of some startlingly personal and acerbic reactions over the years it has long been a personal aim of mine to discover if it was ever justified.

This is where I have found enormous value in a book written by an undaunted author such as Reilly. He has effectively had to go against the official history and the educational establishment in Ireland that essentially maintains the view that Cromwell was a murderous contemptible bastard. A man who willingly ordered the butchering of thousands of innocent men, women and children in the towns of Drogheda and Wexford in his campaign to subjugate the rebellious Irish.

Context is laid out, Cromwell was eliminating the last vestiges of Royalist power in Ireland, which threatened the Commonwealth. Royalist military garrisons in Ireland were put to the sword as was Cromwells right and an accepted custom at the time. It is not a dismissal of the consequences of Cromwells actions in Ireland, namely that of the freedom to practice the Catholic faith and the dispossessing of Catholic land. What the author does do however is effectively dismiss the claim that Cromwell actually went out and intentionally killed the civilian population of Ireland at both Drogheda and Wexford. He has essentially done what no other writer has done on the topic properly examined the veracity of the sources and shown that on the whole they are either unreliable due to not being eyewitness accounts, not contemporaneous, biased by religious hatred or just an attempt to blacken the name of a regicide following the Restoration. He also ahows that the numbers do not add up as to the claim that entire town populations were killed. In fact, Reilly actually shows that Cromwell took care to protect the Irish population throughout his campaign. Despite his intolerant antipathy towards the Catholic Church as well as an uncomfortable (to modern eyes at least) justification of the massacres as divine retribution for the 1641 massacres of Protestants in Ireland he did not go out to teach Ireland a lesson.

This is not to say that Cromwell's invasion was not yet another subjugation of the Irish - to any patriot a foreigner who occupies his land and imposes his will, religion and colonisers upon you will always be a figure of hatred. And Reilly shows that Cromwell did not always have it his own way in Ireland and suffered one the worst military defeats of his career at Clonmel. I feel this book has effectively shown that the sinister reputation of Cromwell - that he was another English devil terrorising Ireland is plainly undeserved and not backed up with concrete evidence. How much of this will be swallowed by Irishmen who have long been brought up on these so-called evil deeds? On the basis of a scathing review of this book written by a Jason McElligott and other reviews here on Amazon - not much. It cannot be allowed that Cromwell's actions are mitigated or the historical record reviewed!

Credit to Reilly though, he thanks McElligott in his foreword for alerting him to to the necessity of providing proof of his findings and that surely is the chief strength of this book.

Inventing a New Oliver Cromwell
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 academic 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 a painfully bad book, and it is tempting to suggest that its main use will be to teach students how not to conduct research, assess evidence or write prose.

Jason Mc Elligott St John's College Cambridge