Frederick Engels
‘If I’m ever proven
wrong, I’ll shut up and get off the stage.’
Tom Reilly
“Such issues are beyond
good manners, sir. Catholicism is more than a religion. It is a political
power. Therefore, I am led to believe there will be no peace in Ireland until
the Catholic Church is crushed.”
Oliver Cromwell
“This ancestor of Lord
Lansdowne, the founder of the noble Lansdowne family, Sir William Petty, landed
in Ireland in 1652 with a total capital of all his fortune of £500. But he came
over in the wake of Cromwell’s army and got himself appointed ‘Physician to the
Army of Ireland’. In 1662, he was made one of a Court of Commissioners of Irish
Estates and also Surveyor-General for Ireland. As the native Irish were then
being hunted to death, or transported in slave-gangs to Barbadoes, the latter
fact gave this worthy ancestor of a worthy lord excellent opportunities to
‘invest’ his £500 to good purpose.”
James Connolly
“What is History but a
fable agreed upon?”. Napoleon I.
A new book on Oliver
Cromwell is always welcome, but this one is a major disappointment. I would not
go as far as to say that it wastes both the reader and author's time but it
comes pretty close to that. It is not Reilly’s fault but now all new work on
Cromwell will be defined by its attitude to the magnificent three volumes of Letters, Writings, and Speeches of Oliver
Cromwell.[1]His
book does not fair very well.
Despite being an amateur
historian, books by Tom Reilly are worth reading. He has come under significant
attack for what is seen as an unhealthy fixation with Cromwell. However, not
all the criticism from modern academia has been fair, and some have been
borderline abusive. The book is not without some merit. It is well written and
researched and, to a limited degree, re-establishes Cromwell’s authentic voice.
How much of the real Cromwell appears
remains to be seen. My criticism of his robust and somewhat rose-tinted defence
of everything Cromwell did fails to place Cromwell in a more objective context.
Before the invasion of
Ireland, Cromwell had to do two necessary things, both crucial to a successful invasion
of Ireland. First was the execution of Charles I. Although, in the short term,
far from stabilising an already unstable ruling elite, the execution led
sections of the bourgeoisie to pursue negotiations with the Royalists in
England and Ireland. One of the reasons for the invasion was to subdue a
possible Royalist/Catholic revolt and to secure Cromwell’s and a large section
of the English bourgeoisie's strategic political and economic interests in that
country. Second, Parliament charged Cromwell to deal with the growing
radicalisation of the New Model Army. One manifestation of this radicalism was
the Leveller inspired revolt over the army being shipped to Ireland to put down
the revolt.
Most criticism of Reilly
has centred on his passionate defence of Cromwell’s role in Ireland.[2] In
his new book, Reilly continues his theme that Cromwell was not to blame for the
massacres. He writes, “We should apologise to Cromwell’s family for blackening
his name, for making him a monster. We are teaching our children propaganda
that perpetuates anti-English prejudice.”
Suppose we take out of
the equation Reilly’s hyperbole and infatuation. In that case, we are left with
the fact that Oliver Cromwell was a leading member of the English bourgeoisie
and, alongside others, not only made a lot of money out of the conquest of
Ireland but, if it happened today, would be guilty of war crimes.
The English Bourgeoisie,
from the beginning saw Ireland as a money-making adventure. As an incentive to
make the conquest easier, it got Parliament to pass an “Adventurers Act” in 1642 to invite the
“Middling Sort” to invest in the army. The greater the investment, the greater
the return of land. Cromwell had loaned over 2,000 pounds and had been promised
land in Leinster. Christopher Hill correctly states Cromwell’s conquest of
Ireland was “the first big triumph of English imperialism and the first big
defeat of English democracy”.While many of the bourgeoisie stumped up money for
their adventure in Ireland, Parliament felt a little more cooperation was a
need and this came in the form of a series of ordinances which was a demand for
money with menaces. In February 1648: it issued An Ordinance For raising of
Twenty thousand pounds a Month for the Relief of Ireland.
Frederick Engels states,
“ In the 17th century, the whole of Ireland, except the newly Scotchified
North, was ripe for a fresh confiscation. So much so that when the British
(Puritan) Parliament accorded to Charles I an army for the reduction of
Ireland, it resolved that the money for this armament should be raised upon
the security of 2,500,000 acres to be confiscated in Ireland. And the
“adventurers” who advanced the money should also appoint the officers of that
army. The land was to be divided amongst those adventurers so that 1,000 acres
should be given them, if in Ulster for £200 — advanced, in Connaught for £300,
in Munster for £450, in Leinster for £600. And if the people rose against this
beneficent plan, they are Vendéens! If Regnard should ever sit in a National
Convention, he may take a leaf out of the proceedings of the Long Parliament
and combat a possible Vendée with these means.[3]
In another part of the
same letter, Engels makes this point: “The 80,000 Protestants’ massacre of
1641. The Irish Catholics are here in the same position as the Commune de
Paris. The Versailles massacred 30,000 Communards and called that the horrors
of the Commune. The English Protestants under Cromwell massacred at least
30,000 Irish and, to cover their brutality invented the tale that this was to
avenge 30,000 Protestants murdered by the Irish Catholics.”
The Irish socialist
James Connolly, while not blaming the English bourgeoise for everything that occurred
to the Irish people after the conquest of Ireland in the latter part of the
seventeenth century, but wrote “ Just as it is true that a stream cannot rise
above its source, so it is true that a national literature cannot rise above
the moral level of the social conditions of the people from whom it derives its
inspiration. If we would understand the national literature of a people, we
must study their social and political status, keeping in mind the fact that
their writers were a product thereof and that the children of their brains were
conceived and brought forth in certain historical conditions. Ireland, at the
same time as she lost her ancient social system, also lost her language as the
vehicle of thought of those who acted as her leaders. As a result of this
twofold loss, the nation suffered socially, nationally and intellectually from
a prolonged arrested development. During the closing years of the seventeenth
century, all the eighteenth, and the greater part of the nineteenth, the Irish
people were the lowest helots in Europe, socially and politically. The Irish
peasant, reduced from the position of a free clansman owning his tribeland and
controlling its administration in common with his fellows, was a mere
tenant-at-will subject to eviction, dishonour and outrage at the hands of an
irresponsible private proprietor. Politically, he was non-existent. Legally, he
held no rights; intellectually, he sank under the weight of his social
abasement and surrendered to the downward drag of his poverty. He had been
conquered, and he suffered all the terrible consequences of defeat at the hands
of a ruling class and nation who have always acted upon the old Roman maxim of
`Woe to the vanquished'.[4]
I do not hold out much
hope that Reilly’s next Cromwell adventure will produce a more objective study.
I will examine Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives, which emerged in 2020. Reilly
can write more books and hold more conferences, but the reality is that his
hero is not as innocent as he makes out. Perhaps his next book should contain a
few warts.
[1] The Letters,
Writings, and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell: Volume 1: October 1626 to January
1649 (Speeches & Writings of Oliver Cromwell) Hardcover – 7 Sept. 2022by
Andrew Barclay (Editor), Tim Wales (Editor), John Morrill (Editor)
[2] See Cromwell and
Ireland: New Perspectives Hardcover – 30 Nov. 2020
by
Professor Martyn Bennett (Author, Editor), Raymond Gillespie (Editor), Scott
Spurlock (Editor)
[3] Engels To Jenny
Longuet-Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow
1971, pp. 326-329-https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/letters/81_02_24.htm
[4] Labour in Irish
History by James Connolly
