"To hell or Connaught", Cromwell in Manchester and Ireland.

 

Massacre at Drogheda

Oliver Cromwell's statue in Manchester city centre was removed in 1968 ostensibly because of road development. Some believe that it was removed because it was vandalised and there were demands for it to be removed. The Irish community also found it offensive. I believe it was taken to Wythenshawe Park, where it now resides.  Out of sight out of mind.

They've kept Cromwell's statue outside the House of Commons. Not long ago there was an exhibition about Cromwell in London which was entitled "warts and all." I believe there was no mention of Cromwell's campaign in Ireland. Some years ago, I was watching Michael Portillo's railway journeys in Ireland. He stopped off at Drogheda, but he never mentioned the massacre that took place there in 1641. After the garrison at Drogheda refused to surrender, they were given no quarter and Cromwell ordered that people be put to the sword. It's said that the governor of Drogheda, Sir Arthur Aston, an English royalist, was beaten to death with his own wooden leg. Many fled into St Peter's Church to avoid being killed, scurrying up the church steeple. Cromwell ordered that the church to be set on fire. Cromwell wrote that he thought a hundred people died in that church. He admitted that many civilians including women and clergymen had been killed, either shot at in error, or out of cruelty. In a letter to speaker Lenthall, Cromwell wrote:

"I forbade them to spare any that were in arms in the town...I think that night they put to the sword about 2,000 men." He told Lenthall that what had happened "was the righteous judgement of God upon those barbarous wretches and that it would prevent the effusion of blood for the future." Colonel John Hewson, a parliamentary officer, claimed that there must have been 3,000 bodies lying in the streets of Drogheda, of whom, he thought, 150 were his comrades.

Cromwell's behaviour in Ireland has never been forgotten or forgiven. The deaths and loses in Ireland following the invasion of 1649, were catastrophic. Many more died in those wars than had died in the English civil wars of the 1640s - if not from fighting, then from subsequent plague and starvation. The Irish Catholics were given the choice of either being killed or deported to Connaught, when Cromwell sought to seize Irish lands for English and Protestant settlers. Many died in the brutal migration. "To hell or Connaught", is attributed to Cromwell.