A century ago, P. W. Joyce, writing on the conquest and settlement of Ireland in the 1650s, claimed that ‘the dreadful Cromwellian episode must be taken as proceeding not from the English government or English people, but from the will of one man’.Footnote 1 In Ireland, this unsophisticated understanding of events has proven resilient. However, among professional historians, there has occurred a considerable shift in perceptions of the ‘Cromwellian’ conquest and settlement, and of Oliver Cromwell's role in both of these complex processes. The first detailed study of the conquest, Father Denis Murphy's Cromwell in Ireland, published in 1883, focused for the most part on Cromwell's campaign between August 1649 and May 1650.Footnote 2 In contrast, two recent monographs have offered detailed accounts of the entire war up to its conclusion in 1653.Footnote 3 These latter works have both somewhat clarified the role played by Cromwell and enabled some understanding of the parts played by other significant figures such as Henry Ireton. This repositioning of Cromwell as just one among many key actors in a wider drama has led John Morrill to suggest a new title for the episode: ‘the English conquest’.Footnote 4 However, such efforts at rebranding are unlikely to succeed in the face of a perhaps market-driven concern to package both English victory and Irish defeat as a bloody chapter of Cromwellian biography.
In the historiography of the settlement, a similar widening of the focus, and consequent repositioning of Cromwell, can be detected. In 1865, John Prendergast defined ‘Cromwellian settlement’ as ‘the dealings of the Commonwealth of England with the lands and habitations of the people of Ireland’.Footnote 5 His work, which explored the transplantation of Catholics to Connacht and the plantation of English adventurers and soldiers in the other three provinces, served to enhance Cromwell's status as a hate figure in Ireland. Over a century later, in the 1970s, the scholarly definition of settlement was expanded by Toby Barnard beyond its earlier agrarian meaning to encompass policies such as law reform and the advancement of learning.Footnote 6 Barnard placed increased emphasis on the policies of Charles Fleetwood and Henry Cromwell in Ireland between 1652 and 1659. As a result, Joyce's omnipotent Oliver all but disappeared. For example, in Barnard's article on ‘Planters and policies in Cromwellian Ireland’, Henry Cromwell received ninety-two mentions, Oliver Cromwell just thirteen.Footnote 7 David Stevenson's essay on ‘Cromwell, Scotland and Ireland’ and the Irish fruits of the recent revival in ‘protectoral studies’ are of the same Barnardian flavour.Footnote 8
Fortunately, the puzzle of Cromwell's peculiarly low profile in the past half-century of scholarship on Ireland in the 1650s has already been solved by English historians. Martyn Bennett has noted how, after 1653, ‘the personal Cromwell all but disappears’, while Peter Gaunt has explained that as the flow of personal letters dries up, ‘he becomes largely absorbed into the formal and anonymous mechanisms of central government’.Footnote 9 Because the assumption-driven work of earlier Irish nationalist and reductionist writers had assigned to Cromwell a dominant role in enforcing ‘Cromwellian’ confiscation and transplantation, the eventual impact of this archival actuality on the historiography of 1650s Ireland was all the more pronounced. Nonetheless, the personalized terminology has persisted and, despite Morrill's corrective reference to the ‘miscalled Cromwellian Settlement’, it will most likely continue to do so.Footnote 10
However, the historiographical problem that exists is more than one of mere faulty labels. Since the 1970s, old certainties regarding Ireland in the 1650s have been destabilized by Cromwell's retreat from view, but little effort has been made to re-establish upon firmer foundations an understanding of the relationship that did, in fact, exist between Cromwell and the ‘Cromwellian’ land settlement. To address this problem, it is necessary to recover, in an Irish context, something more of the ‘personal Cromwell’. Although this sometimes elusive figure was very much present at Drogheda, the issue of Cromwell's wider attitude towards Ireland and its people is too important simply to be extrapolated from his words or deeds during his brief Irish campaign. This point is reinforced by the findings of Patrick Little's recent essay, ‘Cromwell and Ireland before 1649’.Footnote 11 For the period 1652–8, there are several interrelated questions concerning Cromwell and Ireland which need to be addressed. It is essential to establish the extent to which he was responsible for the design of the land policies of confiscation, plantation, and transplantation to which he has lent his name, and also to assess his role in the implementation of those policies. The surviving evidence can also tell us much about Cromwell's attitude towards Irish people in the 1650s, and thereby greatly enhance our understanding of the overall relationship between Cromwell and Ireland. Moreover, it is appropriate to focus on land and people because the long-standing popular perception that exists of Cromwell's policies in these areas has helped to ensure that a figure adjudged among the greatest of Englishmen is also the bogeyman-in-chief of Irish history.
I
In order to determine Cromwell's role in the planning of the Irish land settlement, it is necessary to ascertain the extent of his involvement in formulating the relevant legislation. The land settlement was based upon three acts of the English parliament. The first of these, the Adventurers' Act of 1642, offered for sale Irish land forfeited as a result of the 1641 rebellion. We can take it that Cromwell sympathized with this scheme, since he subscribed a substantial amount of money.Footnote 12 The second piece of legislation, the Act for the Settling of Ireland of 1652, outlined the range of penalties that were to be imposed on the parliament's enemies there. In 1899, Samuel Gardiner noted that there was ‘no evidence whatsoever to connect it with Cromwell’, and his finding has been affirmed by later historians.Footnote 13 On the other hand, Gardiner argued that Cromwell had played a significant role in shaping the third relevant act, the Act of Satisfaction of September 1653, which set out the final blueprint for plantation and transplantation.Footnote 14 Again, this view has been reiterated by subsequent historians.Footnote 15 Gardiner's influential finding relied, however, upon coincidences of timing, rather than on any convincing evidence. The main outlines of the act were approved by the council of state in June 1653 when, according to Gardiner, ‘Cromwell held a virtual dictatorship.’Footnote 16 Nevertheless, there is sufficient evidence to demonstrate that the key features of the land settlement had already been agreed upon before the expulsion of the parliament in April 1653.Footnote 17 Therefore, apart from his role on some parliamentary committees and his status as one of over 1,500 adventurers, there exists no meaningful evidence which links Cromwell to any single aspect of what Prendergast referred to as ‘Cromwell's acts’, the three key legislative enactments that together provided for the Irish land settlement of the 1650s.Footnote 18
Contrary to the conclusions reached by previous historians, the design of the Irish land settlement, as it was pieced together between 1642 and 1653, did not bear the distinct imprint of Oliver Cromwell. In fact, the chief responsibility, insofar as it can be attributed to a single individual, lies with Cromwell's stern son-in-law Henry Ireton. It was he, early in 1651, who drafted the list of ‘qualifications’ which was eventually approved by parliament as the Act for the Settling of Ireland. Under this ‘Iretonian’ settlement, many Irish landowners, both Protestant and Catholic, were to lose life and land, and others were to forfeit at least part of their estates. In his ‘qualifications’, Ireton also made provision for the relocation of people within Ireland. Ireton's death from plague at Limerick in 1651, before parliament had approved his scheme of ‘justice and mercy’, has, however, helped to obscure the concrete link between Ireton and the character of the post-war settlement.Footnote 19
II
Having investigated Cromwell's role in designing the policies of confiscation and transplantation, it remains to ascertain the extent to which he actually influenced their operation between 1653 and his death in 1658. The task of oversight was initially entrusted to the commissioners of parliament in Ireland, including Charles Fleetwood, Ireton's successor both as head of the Irish government and as husband to Bridget Cromwell. From his arrival in Ireland in the autumn of 1652, Fleetwood proved determined to enforce the parliament's punitive Irish land legislation. However, he soon met with opposition from many existing landowners, both Protestant and Catholic, who believed that the terms of various articles of surrender negotiated during the conquest entitled them to retain all or part of their estates. In addition, during the conquest some individuals had obtained personal promises regarding their lands. In common with other English newcomers to positions of power in Ireland, Fleetwood was generally hostile towards the country's inhabitants.Footnote 20 Furthermore, the Irish government was adamant that the harsh terms of the Act for the Settling of Ireland ought to take precedence over concessions made in surrender negotiations.Footnote 21 Their obstinate stance was reinforced by the contents of a proviso which had been appended to the Act for the Settling of Ireland in 1652. This clause acknowledged the validity of the various concessions made to individuals who had surrendered upon articles, but it also empowered the Irish government ‘to transplant such persons from their respective places of their usual habitation … as shall be judged most consistent with publique safety’.Footnote 22 However, in some cases this provision for transplantation could be interpreted as inconsistent with the terms of surrender agreed with Irish landowners in relation to the retention of their existing estates. This circumstance helped to ensure that groups and individuals threatened with confiscation and transplantation would look to London, and to Cromwell, for relief. An analysis of Cromwell's responses to appeals from Irish proprietors can shed new light on his relationship with the people of Ireland and on the precise role which he played in implementing the land settlement.
Cromwell was all too familiar from his English experience of the tensions (and even contradictions) that could exist between terms conceded at the moment of surrender by army officers and policies proposed thereafter by parliament. In the early 1650s, he and other officers had grown exasperated as the parliament approved the sale of certain English estates, ignoring earlier guarantees given to their royalist owners by the parliamentary army.Footnote 23 This controversial action threatened to unravel ‘the web of honour’ which had usually governed the behaviour of armies in England during the civil wars. This ‘web’ encompassed Protestant and Catholic, royalist and parliamentarian, and within it were interwoven vital matters of promise-keeping, trust, personal integrity, and the good reputation of an army.Footnote 24 The most concise statement made during the conquest of Ireland on this issue came from Ireton as he chided a besieged Catholic opponent for his attachment to ‘the Shadows and Plumes of Honour’: ‘with us’, Ireton explained, ‘the Truth and Substance of Honour is Honesty’.Footnote 25 Back in England, late in 1652, the parliament bowed to army pressure and renewed a lapsed commission which had previously adjudicated on claims arising from articles of surrender.Footnote 26 This established a precedent for Irish landowners to take their cases to the committee for articles in London. However, the Irish government proved determined to resist the orders of what it saw as an ill-informed and interfering committee. In response, Irish landowners, determined to overcome the intransigence of the administration in Dublin, began their attempts to enlist additional support from a figure of growing authority: Oliver Cromwell.
Cromwell's first major attempt to influence the execution of the land settlement occurred in reaction to the Irish government's decision in May 1653 to transplant over 250 presbyterian Ulster Scots proprietors to the south of the country.Footnote 27 The Irish government believed that this initiative was made possible by the terms of the legislative proviso described above. However, the Ulster Scots, headed by their former commanding officer Hugh Montgomery, Viscount Ardes, and James Hamilton, earl of Clanbrassil, immediately opposed the transplantation scheme by pleading the protection of articles of surrender dating to April 1650.Footnote 28 In that month, three delegates, including Dean Michael Boyle, whose brother Colonel Richard Boyle was reportedly slain in cold blood days after the fall of Drogheda, had been sent to consult with Cromwell on behalf of the remaining Protestant royalist forces. Negotiations soon followed. In return for the payment of composition fines similar to those levied on English royalists, Cromwell undertook that the surrendering Irish Protestants would be permitted ‘to enjoy their lives, liberties and estates (both real and personal), with the same immunity, protection, and right, as any other people under the authority, not obnoxious for any delinquency at all’.Footnote 29 Shortly afterwards, Ardes and some comrades had presented themselves at Clonmel, where Cromwell further promised ‘all the favour he could in safety do them’.Footnote 30
Nonetheless, Ardes, having temporarily relocated to the continent, was at the behest of the Irish government exempted from pardon by name in the Act for the Settling of Ireland.Footnote 31 This penalty was not enforced; instead, early in 1653 Ardes travelled to London where, having obtained a letter of recommendation from Cromwell, he secured from the committee for articles an order for possession of his estate.Footnote 32 However, upon his arrival in Dublin in May, Ardes learned of the Irish government's intention that he should ‘forfeit two thirds of his estate and be transplanted as to the other third’.Footnote 33 Greatly shocked, he returned to London, this time accompanied by his neighbour Clanbrassil.Footnote 34 The objective of their journey was to defeat the Irish government's plans by enlisting further support from Cromwell and the committee for articles.
Cromwell rapidly complied with their wishes. In July, and later again in December, he wrote letters to Fleetwood in which he referred to the proposed transplantation of Clanbrassil and demanded ‘a stop thereof’.Footnote 35 In August, fresh orders from the committee for articles in favour of Ardes and Clanbrassil reinforced Cromwell's demands; as transplantation would be ‘in diminution of [their] said articles’, it could not proceed.Footnote 36 Furthermore, because many of those targeted for transplantation had submitted along with Ardes and Clanbrassil in 1650, they could expect equal protection under the same articles. Thus, Cromwell's interventions helped to guarantee that the rulings of the committee for articles concerning the Ulster Scots would at last be taken seriously in Dublin, and that the proposed transplantation scheme would have to be abandoned.
This episode represented only the beginning of Cromwell's efforts to moderate the impact of the land settlement on Ireland's existing landowners. His ability to do so was somewhat enhanced by his elevation to the office of lord protector in December 1653. Significantly, the Instrument of Government empowered Cromwell and his council ‘to make laws and ordinances for the peace and welfare of these nations where it shall be necessary’ until the meeting of the next parliament, scheduled for 3 September 1654.Footnote 37 Irish landowners were accordingly presented with a nine-month window of opportunity in which to obtain legislative backing from a sympathetic Cromwell for the promises contained in their articles. These included the Munster Protestants who had surrendered to Cromwell late in 1649. At that time, in response to a request from Protestant officers in Cork and Youghal, he had promised ‘full indemnity for all things past’.Footnote 38 In June 1654, Cromwell permitted the Munster Protestants' agent Vincent Gookin to draft an ‘Act of Oblivion’ designed to confirm the guarantee he had given in 1649. This was approved by Cromwell and his council on 1 August.Footnote 39 A month later, a further ordinance was passed which permitted the remainder of the Irish Protestants, including the Ulster Scots, to compound for their estates, as promised by Cromwell in April 1650.Footnote 40 These developments meant that by September 1654 much of the uncertainty surrounding continued Irish Protestant proprietorship had been resolved. The planned ‘Iretonian’ schemes of confiscation and transplantation had been subverted by a far more lenient ‘Cromwellian’ arrangement.
III
The removal of Protestant land from the store available for redistribution meant that the success of the land settlement now depended entirely upon the maximum confiscation of Catholic property. The Catholics stood accused of committing widespread massacres in 1641, and they were held responsible for the long and costly war that had ensued. Therefore it seemed unlikely that very many landowners would be able to circumvent the policies of confiscation and transplantation to Connacht approved by parliament in 1652 and 1653. However, the channels successfully exploited by Protestants, namely, recourse to Cromwell and the committee for articles, were also open to some Catholic proprietors. Cromwell's hatred for Catholicism is infamous, and it received fullest expression in a declaration which he had issued in Ireland early in 1650.Footnote 41 Nevertheless, it should not be presumed that his violent hostility towards Irish Catholics in time of war continued into the period of settlement. Instead, Cromwell's treatment of Irish Catholics post-conquest and his influence on the enforcement of transplantation to Connacht must be reconstructed from the available evidence.
The most robust Catholic defence against the transplantation to Connacht was mounted by the Old English officers of the Leinster army. This grouping included numerous substantial landowners who had been prominent in Irish war and politics in the 1640s. Their hopes of avoiding transplantation rested upon an undertaking given by the English officers to whom they had surrendered in May 1652:
faithfully and really to mediate with the parliament to our utmost endeavours … that they may enjoy such moderate part [of their] estates as may make their lives comfortable who live amongst us, or for the comfortable maintenance of the families of such of them as shall go beyond the seas.Footnote 42
The landowners concerned reasonably expected that this concession would enable them to retain at least part of their ancestral estates. A few years later, they would insist that ‘a transplantation at that time [was] no more thought of … than theire removall into America’.Footnote 43 In contrast, the Irish government believed that the controversial proviso of the Act for the Settling of Ireland upon which they had based their plan to remove the Ulster Scots also empowered them to transplant the Leinster officers. Furthermore, the instructions for transplantation issued by the council of state in July 1653 had explicitly stated that Catholics entitled to land under articles should be satisfied with Connacht acres.Footnote 44 Faced with this unpalatable prospect, the Leinster officers, led by their former commanding officer, Richard Nugent, earl of Westmeath, decided to take their case to the committee for articles in March 1654.
Significantly, the Leinster officers' attempts to persuade the committee for articles that transplantation would be ‘repugnant to the words of the said articles, and contrary to law’ produced the desired results. It ruled that they should enjoy their estates ‘until a future parliament in England’ gave its verdict on the case.Footnote 45 Parliament was due to meet in September 1654. However, in the case of the Ulster Scots, the temporary legislative powers enjoyed by Cromwell under the Instrument of Government had allowed him to take over the role of parliament. Inevitably therefore, the Leinster officers hoped to imitate their Protestant counterparts by persuading Cromwell to pass an ordinance securing them in their estates. They were further encouraged by his initial response. On 29 March 1654, he wrote to the Irish government on behalf of Westmeath, an officer who had lost a substantial part of his regiment at Drogheda in 1649. Having reminded Fleetwood and his fellow commissioners ‘how much the faith of the army and our own honour and justice is concerned in the just performance of articles’, Cromwell ordered them to obey the committee's ruling in Westmeath's case.Footnote 46 The Leinster officers had argued that justice was on their side, and Cromwell concurred. In his treatment of Irish Catholics, he evidently intended to apply the same principles of fairness which characterized his behaviour towards English royalists and Irish Protestants. The significance of this development was not lost on the Irish administration.
The response from Dublin was swift. A lengthy letter of protest sent to Cromwell in mid-April was followed by the dispatch of two well-briefed agents to London. The Irish commissioners not unreasonably depicted the success of the entire land settlement as depending on the case of the Leinster officers, among them Sir Richard Barnewall, ‘one of the most eminent delinquents in Ireland’. They argued that exempting them from transplantation, even temporarily, would set a precedent for ‘all the Rebells of Ireland’ to retain their estates, at least until a new parliament got around to considering the issue. The commissioners also went on the offensive against the committee for articles, insisting that a similar committee should be established in Dublin where ‘the truth’ could be arrived at ‘with lesse trouble and charge … than can be expected in England’. In other words, the Irish government wanted disputes relating to articles referred to a pliable body which would not dispute its version of ‘the truth’. In the meantime, the commissioners boldly confessed that they intended to defy Cromwell's order, unless it should be confirmed by yet another letter.Footnote 47 However, they were determined to ensure that such a missive would never be written.
The Irish government realized that, to ensure this outcome, it would have to find a way to block Irish Catholic access to Cromwell. Worryingly for the Dublin administration, the Leinster officers had maintained a presence in London where they were attempting to win further concessions. A petition which they presented in May 1654 harked back, with contemporary resonance perhaps, to the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland, and stressed how they
and their progenitors have since there arrival there affected and continued the Civility, breeding, landguage, lawes, and manners of the English … who now to be proscribed to a wilderness devoid of all accomodation is to diswont them from there accustomed Civilitie and betray the same to barberties, Custome being a second nature.Footnote 48
To prevent the possibility that Cromwell might be won over by such appeals, Fleetwood commenced a smear campaign against the Irish Catholics then in London. In a letter sent to John Thurloe on 2 June, he warned that ‘these people are an abominable false, cunning, and perfidious people; and the best of them to be pitied, but not to be trusted’. Moreover, Fleetwood also sought to exploit the atmosphere of paranoia prevailing in London in the aftermath of the discovery of John Gerard's plot to assassinate Cromwell. Accordingly, he warned Thurloe that:
We have ground to believe, that the Irish have some desperate thing in design to execute speedily, and to believe, that the late bloody intentions to my lord's own person was part of this design … I therefore beg, you will suffer no Irishman, under what pretence soever, to come near my lord's person … and that you would remove the Irish from about London.Footnote 49
The Leinster officer Sir Richard Barnewall, and ‘one Segrave, a notable Jesuited papist’, received special mention.Footnote 50 However, as Barnewall's hopes of avoiding transplantation rested on securing concessions from Cromwell, it is somewhat unlikely that he, or indeed any other Irish Catholic, was planning to murder the lord protector at this time.
Nonetheless, Fleetwood's intervention had the calculated effect of contributing to a backlash against Irish Catholics in London. Among those forced to flee from London was Father Peter Talbot, younger brother of the prominent Leinster officer Sir Robert Talbot, and elder brother of Richard, a survivor of Drogheda. In early July, from his safe haven in Antwerp, Talbot reported that his brother Sir Robert and other Catholics in London had recently received a promise that the transplantation would not go ahead, ‘and in fact it was suspended for six weeks’. However, the Leinster officers' success had been short-lived and Cromwell was apparently ‘now busy imprisoning the Papists and the priests. Of the latter, four have been arrested, and a vast number of the former, twenty of whom were Irish, all of them being quite guiltless of any conspiracy.’Footnote 51 Another Irish observer, the Munster Protestant John Percival, claimed that 2,000 people had been arrested and that ‘many Irish likewise are seized, amongst which McCarty Reagh, Fagan of Feltrim, Lord Barnewall and his son and many others’.Footnote 52 Among the plotters mentioned in witness statements were two Irishmen, ‘one Mr. Plunkett’ and a Colonel Connor.Footnote 53 It is likely that at least some of the Leinster officers were also arrested.Footnote 54 It appeared therefore that the Irish government had succeeded in its efforts to drive a wedge between Cromwell and the Irish Catholics.
IV
The events of June 1654 would seem to have dashed whatever hopes the Leinster officers entertained of securing an ordinance from Cromwell before September. Nonetheless, several other Catholics then in London did win real concessions from Cromwell. From early 1653, Oliver Fitzwilliam's efforts to recover his estate under the articles of Dublin by having Protestant trustees claim the land on behalf of his wife had been a cause of concern to the Irish government. Fitzwilliam, a Co. Dublin landowner, had fought at Naseby and had served as a lieutenant-general in the army of the Catholic confederation in the 1640s.Footnote 55 Significantly, he was able to draw upon the support of influential English in-laws, the Holles family. The outrage felt in Dublin at Fitzwilliam's rather transparent efforts to construct a tidy legal shelter for his property was further exacerbated in February 1654 when Cromwell ordered that the trustees should be put in possession.Footnote 56 The Irish government, emboldened by the findings of a judicial review which it had instituted to examine the case, refused to back down.Footnote 57 In August 1654, however, Cromwell, ignoring the sustained protests from Dublin, approved an ordinance granting the estate to Lady Eleanor Fitzwilliam.Footnote 58 For Edmund Ludlow, one of the Irish commissioners, Cromwell's generous treatment of Oliver Fitzwilliam, ‘a civil person, tho a papist’, symbolized his desertion of ‘the good old cause’.Footnote 59
Shortly before surrendering his legislative power to a new parliament on 3 September, Cromwell approved yet another ordinance in favour of an Irish Catholic landowner, John Grace of Courtstown, Co. Kilkenny. In the 1640s, Grace had been a member of the general assembly of the Catholic confederation,Footnote 60 but he and his tenants were received into protection by Cromwell himself after the fall of Kilkenny in March 1650.Footnote 61 Thereafter, Grace proved useful to Ireton, and in January 1651 he was dispatched to carry a message to an assembly of Catholic leaders in the west. For this and other services, Grace received written assurance from Ireton ‘that he should be admitted to a composition for his estates, at an easy rate, and that he would recommend him to parliament in that particular’.Footnote 62 A few years later, Grace was among the Catholics who journeyed to London determined to win exemption from transplantation. Eventually, on 30 August 1654, Cromwell approved an ordinance permitting Grace to compound for his estate.Footnote 63 When Grace returned to Ireland in 1655, he carried with him a letter from Cromwell which recited ‘the merits and equity of the case’ and urged ‘a speedy and favourable dispatch’ of his business. In December 1655, another letter from London enabled Grace to recover his lands from the army, while in October 1656 Cromwell intervened yet again to reduce Grace's composition fine and to extend the term allowed for payment.Footnote 64 Unlike Fitzwilliam, Grace could not draw on the support of influential English relatives. Instead, his success in securing an ordinance can be attributed to Cromwell's sympathetic determination to fulfil a promise made by his deceased son-in-law, regardless of the fact that it was made to an Irish Catholic.
V
One further development in August 1654, the re-establishment of the traditional form of government by lord deputy and council in Ireland also had potential implications for Cromwell's dealings with Catholic landowners. The lord protector's commission which established the new Irish government, headed by Fleetwood, invested it with discretionary powers on the issue of transplantation.Footnote 65 This decision suggested that Cromwell was at last prepared to defer to Dublin regarding the enforcement of transplantation. Although the original deadline for the removal of Catholics had been set at 1 May 1654, the uncertainty surrounding Cromwell's intentions helped to ensure that the scheme had made only negligible progress by the autumn. On 30 November, however, the Irish government moved to re-state its commitment to transplantation through a new proclamation, and, on the same day, it ordered the Leinster officers to appoint legal counsel so that the long-running saga relating to their articles could be brought to a final resolution in Dublin.Footnote 66 At the same time, Fleetwood still found it necessary to keep one eye on London, where the continued presence of Irish Catholics remained a source of worry to him. After all, those who had failed to win concessions from Cromwell before 3 September 1654 might now appeal to parliament instead.
At the opening of parliament, Cromwell had urged MPs to devote some attention to the settlement of Ireland.Footnote 67 However, that assembly proved generally un-cooperative and it was dissolved by the lord protector at the earliest opportunity in January 1655. At first, this development appeared to be a major setback for the Irish Catholics; a letter written from Dublin early in February reported that ‘the Irish are much troubled to hear of the dissolution of the late parliament, in whom they had great hopes, but blessed be God their hopes are prevented’.Footnote 68 However, the renewed uncertainty which the dissolution introduced to the political landscape in London ultimately raised the expectations of Irish Catholics, and the fears of the Irish government, that Cromwell might now resume the legislative powers he had exercised between December 1653 and September 1654 and be persuaded to alter transplantation policy. Fleetwood became even more concerned when he learned of the publication in London early in January 1655 of a pamphlet written by Vincent Gookin in which he attacked the Irish government and the policy of transplantation.Footnote 69 Although the publication was anonymous, Fleetwood was fairly certain of the author's identity.Footnote 70 From his perspective therefore, it now seemed as if the Irish Catholics and Protestants in London were making common cause against his administration, and that they were striving to win Cromwell over to their point of view.
Fleetwood reacted to this perceived threat, both to his government and to the land settlement, by renewing his efforts to undermine the position of Irish Catholics in London, and by seeking to malign Gookin. On 7 February 1655, he wrote to Thurloe suggesting that Irish Catholics both at home and in London were strongly linked to the recently discovered royalist conspiracy of the English grouping known as the Action Party. He identified six Irish Catholic agents in London, including Sir Robert Talbot and John Grace, and he warned Thurloe that ‘it were well an eye were had on those persons … who are men of parts and interest’. They had allegedly requested £500 from Catholics in Ireland to support their agency, and had signified that this sum would enable them to ‘gett of[f] transplantation’.Footnote 71 The writer of another letter sent from Dublin attempted to implicate Gookin in these Catholic machinations by suggesting that part of the requested monies were needed to pay him for his services in writing a pamphlet against transplantation. Fleetwood himself denounced the latter publication as ‘a very strange and scandalous book’, and he was probably involved in commissioning Colonel Richard Lawrence to pen a response to Gookin's charges.Footnote 72
While Fleetwood was evidently alarmed at the prospective outcome of further exchanges between Cromwell and Irish landowners, by the end of February he was convinced that the main danger to the transplantation had passed. Writing again to Thurloe, he welcomed the news that, in accordance with the limitations set down by the Instrument of Government, ‘his highness hath declined the legislative power’. This meant that it would not be possible for Cromwell to change or overturn the laws relating to transplantation, because, Fleetwood explained, any such alterations ‘must be the exercise of the legislative power’.Footnote 73 The latter was to remain in abeyance until the next meeting of parliament in September 1656. Therefore, Fleetwood concluded triumphantly, ‘those things which we heare are attempted to be done in England concerninge Ireland, will be prevented through the want of that power’.Footnote 74 Once again, his fear that Cromwell might further impede the transplantation had been assuaged.
Accordingly, early in March 1655, Fleetwood was able to inform Thurloe that ‘we have now begun the business of our partial transplantation’.Footnote 75 In Dublin a few weeks later, the last futile pleas of the Leinster officers against transplantation were rejected.Footnote 76 However, perhaps conscious of Cromwell's interest in their case, in June 1655 Fleetwood travelled west to Athlone, where the commissioners for overseeing the transplantation were based, and from there he reported back to Thurloe that the earl of Westmeath and the other Leinster officers were satisfied with the measures he had taken to assist their re-settlement in Connacht. This outcome at last confirmed that one of the major obstacles to the success of the land settlement, the uncertainty created by Cromwell's evident sympathy for the Leinster officers, had been surmounted by Fleetwood's dogged persistence.
VI
Although by mid-1655 it had become clear that the transplantation would go ahead, Cromwell nonetheless continued to intervene frequently on behalf of Catholics. These interventions were sometimes related to articles of surrender, as in August 1655, when Cromwell, in response to a petition from the townspeople of Fethard, ordered that the generous terms which he had granted to that town in 1650 should be fully observed.Footnote 77 This helped to ensure that its Catholic inhabitants would avoid transplantation. On other occasions, he was moved by pleas from individual Catholics concerning their reduced circumstances, their poor health, or their inoffensive behaviour during the war, and he duly assisted them in their efforts to escape transplantation.Footnote 78 Unfortunately for the Catholics concerned, Cromwell's intercession was sometimes not enough to ensure that they would be spared. For example, many historians have noted that a plea from Cromwell did not save Edmund Spenser's grandson William Spenser from transplantation.Footnote 79 However, when proprietors who had captured Cromwell's attention relocated to Connacht subsequently, they usually fared better than other Catholics in securing the full quantity of lands due to them. The fact that Spenser was assigned more than 1,000 acres and a strong castle at Ballinasloe, and that the lessee of the state forced to surrender the property to him was Cromwell's nephew, Major John Desborough, has rarely been noticed.Footnote 80
In his efforts to assist Spenser and many other landowners faced with transplantation, Cromwell was in part motivated by his belief that the laws governing the scheme were rather too harsh. Apart from those who based their claims for exemption on promises received during the conquest, Catholic landowners wishing to avoid transplantation were by law required to demonstrate conclusive evidence of ‘constant good affection’ to the ‘English interest’.Footnote 81 Very few Catholics who had resided in Ireland in the 1640s could fulfil these criteria. However, it is clear from his letters that Cromwell believed this rule to be draconian. On one occasion, he declared his conviction that the punishment of persons who had for the most part behaved themselves well was ‘not the intention of the law which enjoins the transplantation’.Footnote 82 Cromwell's letters on behalf of Catholics also show that, however necessary transplantation was deemed to be, he was sometimes deeply troubled by the effects of what he viewed as a cruel policy. For example, referring to the prospective transplantation of Patrick Courcy, Baron Kingsale, he protested that ‘it would be a most unmerciful and ungodly thing to put him to such an extremity’.Footnote 83 In these pity-filled words, and in his other letters concerning the treatment of Irish Catholic landowners, we can detect the sympathetic voice of the ‘personal Cromwell’.
VII
Overall, the available evidence clearly shows that Cromwell was not responsible for the original design of the land settlement, and that his primary contribution to its execution consisted of a sustained and sometimes successful endeavour to lessen its impact on Ireland's existing landowners, both Protestant and Catholic. Although he was not opposed in principle to plantation or transplantation, it appears that he would have preferred to restrict the operation of the latter scheme to a category of people described by him as ‘the worse of Irish’.Footnote 84 His behaviour is all the more remarkable in light of the persistent resistance from Dublin to any concessions. From 1653, the Irish government recognized that Cromwell posed a major threat to the entire land settlement, and Fleetwood in particular expended considerable energy in an attempt to curtail his father-in-law's involvement in its implementation. Nonetheless, Cromwell secured Irish Protestants in their estates and worked with some success to aid Catholic landowners. Moreover, his attitude and his actions fuelled Catholic hopes that the land settlement might be greatly altered, and the uncertainty which surrounded Cromwell's intentions helped temporarily to paralyse the enforcement of transplantation to Connacht.
The true nature of Cromwell's role in the land settlement and his generous treatment of those affected by it have until now been concealed due to a number of factors, not least among them the Protestant–Catholic divide in the historiography of Ireland. During the 1650s, the foundations of Protestant ascendancy were laid upon the ruin of Catholic Ireland. Although these processes were concurrent, generally historians have studied and given their sympathies to either one or the other. Prior to the late twentieth century, the approaches adopted by respective historians were closely linked to their political and confessional affiliations. More recently, despite the greatly reduced influence of denominational factors, the traditional historiographical split has nonetheless been sustained. Because Cromwellian rule produced sharply contrasting outcomes for Ireland's Protestant and Catholic communities, it has perhaps seemed reasonable to continue to treat of their experiences separately. However, this practice has hindered a proper appreciation both of the totality of Cromwell's relationship with Irish landowners and of his attitude towards the land settlement.
On the Protestant side, that community, after 1660, was stricken with amnesia concerning the extent of its debt to the ‘usurper’ Cromwell. This circumstance coloured the account provided by the contemporary Ulster Scots chronicler Patrick Adair, in which the abandonment of the presbyterian transplantation was attributed to political turmoil caused by ‘Cromwell's driving on his design for his own advancement to the supreme Government’.Footnote 85 In the nineteenth century, this interpretation was recycled by some Irish Protestant historians, and the episode was ignored by nationalists concerned only with identifying Catholic losses of life and land. The latter writers also portrayed the conquest as a vicious Cromwellian assault on Catholic Ireland.Footnote 86 In this context, the fact that most of royalist Protestant Ireland had been conquered by Cromwell in 1649–50, and had then been exempted by him from the proposed land settlement in 1653–4, went unnoticed. This lack of comprehension regarding Cromwell's role was compounded by Robert Dunlop in 1913 when he concluded that the Ulster Scots transplantation had been abandoned because of ‘the disturbed state of the country’.Footnote 87
It was not until the 1970s that the fortunes of Irish Protestants in the 1650s received sustained attention. At that point, Barnard and Karl Bottigheimer each independently identified the arrival of Henry Cromwell in Ireland in 1655, and his subsequent attempts to widen the regime's support base, as the crucial developments which ‘revived and restored to power the “ancient protestants” who might otherwise have disappeared beneath the tide of the soldiery’.Footnote 88 However, neither historian realized that the foundations of this recovery lay in the key promises made by Oliver Cromwell as early as 1649–50. Thus, Henry Cromwell's support for the ordinance of 1654 in favour of the Munster Protestants was seen as the vital ingredient in their success, while no convincing explanation was offered for the abandonment of the Ulster Scots transplantation. Barnard could only speculate that the opposition of Ulster English landowners to the removal of their Scots neighbours had inspired a change of policy, while David Stevenson unhelpfully concluded that, after the announcement of the scheme, ‘nothing happened’.Footnote 89 On the contrary, a great deal happened, and Cromwell was centrally involved at every stage. His support for Protestant efforts to assert the primacy of articles of surrender over parliamentary legislation can be viewed as a protracted attempt to preserve his highly prized personal and soldierly honour through the fulfilment of guarantees given by him in the course of conquest. For Ireland's Protestants therefore, Cromwell's vindication of his honour was the crucial factor in enabling them to appropriate the spoils heaped up by the victory of his sword.
On the Catholic side, their desperate and largely unsuccessful pleas for restoration to their estates after 1660 inevitably highlighted the hardships they had experienced under Cromwellian rule.Footnote 90 In the short term, any acknowledgement that the plight of Catholic landowners had been viewed sympathetically by Cromwell would have been unwise; it was better to have him represented as the exemplar of English oppression in Ireland, a ruthless conqueror devoid of any redeeming features. Against this background, in recent decades some historians have struggled to explain exactly what it was that Irish Catholics could have hoped to achieve by journeying to London in the 1650s. Most influential has been Robert Simington's presumption that the Leinster officers were bargaining first of all for their lives, and secondly to maximize the quantity of land which they would receive in Connacht. The traditional Irish nationalist representation of Cromwell, propagated by Simington himself in the Catholic nationalist journalism of his youth, perhaps made it difficult for him to comprehend the fact that the Leinster officers and others actually hoped to avoid transplantation altogether by appealing to the lord protector.Footnote 91
VIII
On the whole, the available evidence details an enhanced image of Cromwell altogether more thorough than the blood-spattered portrait which adorns the rogues' gallery of Irish history. Moreover, this image can be readily identified as ‘the personal Cromwell’ sometime absent from historical writing on the settlement of Ireland in the 1650s. As has been shown, its recovery has considerable implications for our understanding both of Cromwell's role in the land settlement and of his attitude towards Irish Protestants and Catholics. Nonetheless, the stain of Drogheda remains; if anything, Cromwell's honourable and lenient treatment of Irish landowners places that episode ever more starkly in relief. Many of Cromwell's recent biographers have sought to explain his actions at Drogheda by reference to the laws of war, noting that a garrison which refused to surrender thereby forfeited its right to quarter.Footnote 92 The same laws of war also required that articles of surrender be properly observed and that promises made be honestly kept. Although Cromwell adhered to these conventions at Clonmel and elsewhere, in accounts of the conquest such instances of honourable behaviour will always be necessarily overshadowed by the events which occurred at Drogheda and Wexford. However, the conquest was only one part of the wider relationship between Cromwell and Ireland. The reconstruction of his role in the implementation of the land settlement reveals a great deal more evidence concerning Cromwell's humane and generous behaviour in an Irish context. In his extensive dealings with Irish landowners, he displayed a genuine compassion for cases of hardship and a strong aversion to perceived unfairness and injustice. Moreover, it is clear that the Catholics and Protestants who made approaches to Cromwell fully expected to be treated equitably and honourably by him, and nothing that had occurred during the conquest of Ireland was sufficient to dampen their expectations.
