182 CROMWELL IN IRELAND, Harold Hunt In the fifth century, Vortigern, the king of the Britons, invited the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes to come over from northwest Germany as mercenaries and defend him against the Scots and Picts, who had come down from the north. But the mercenaries were not satisfied with just being mercenaries; they wanted the land for themselves. They wound up driving the Picts and Scots out of the land and driving the Britons into the mountains of Wales and Cornwall. They began to call themselves English (Angle-ish), and to call the native Britons foreigners. That began a conflict between the Angles and Saxons (Anglo-Saxons) against the native Celts that continues to this day.
The Anglo-Saxons were just the beginning of trouble for the Celts. Beginning in 793, the Vikings from Scandinavia began their raids, plundering and pillaging. English historians glamorize and romanticize the Vikings. It is in their interest to do so. The Vikings were the ancestors to much of England’s population, and it would embarrass them to admit they are in possession of the land, because their ancestors slaughtered and dispossessed the native population.
After they had vanquished the native Britons and taken their lands, they settled down and married local women. They became the Anglo-Normans.
Between the Anglo-Saxons from the Southeast, the Vikings (Norse-men or Normans) from the north and northeast, the native Celts were in a vice. They were pushed farther and farther into the fringes of the land.
In 1610, Kings James I drove the Irish in Northern Ireland off their lands, and he gathered up his Anglo-Saxon subjects in the Scottish Lowlands, and gave those lands to them. He was the king; he would do as he pleased. That upset the Irish. Those lands were homes and their livelihood. They had belonged to the Irish for centuries, and James had no right to simply seize their land and give it to somebody else. The Irish waited for the opportunity to make things right.
To the best of his ability, King Charles I reigned as an absolute monarch. He assumed he was not answerable to anybody for anything. That did not suit the English people, and in 1648, Parliament arrested him and put him on trial.
The best way to bring down any king and make sure he does not cause any more trouble, is to chop off his head, so that is what they did. They went through a trial, but it was very much a foregone conclusion as to what they were going to do. They beheaded the king and made Oliver Cromwell the Lord-Protector. They put him at the head of the Parliamentary army.
Not everybody was happy with that state of affairs. They did not trust Parliament; and they did not trust Cromwell—with good reason. They wanted another king; so they raised a Royalist army to face Cromwell’s Model Army. The Civil War that followed lasted for nine years.
In 1641, while the English were occupied with King Charles I, the Irish imagined it would be a good time to take their land back and they attacked. They killed the Anglo-Saxon settlers who had taken their homes.
King Charles wanted to lead an expedition to Ireland to put down the rebels, but Parliament told him that, if he left for Ireland to put down the rebels, they would consider that he had abdicated, so he stayed at home. But the Lords of the Council ordered Lord Ormonde, the lieutenant general in Ireland, to search out every place, town, and house where the rebels were to be found and to kill every Irishman able to bear arms. Bulstrode Whitelock promised a new and overwhelming plantation of English, and Ireland would become another England.
Genocide was to be the order of the day. Anglo-Saxons had been trying to accomplish that since the Angle and Saxon invasion a thousand years before. They imagined the Celts were a lower form of mankind, not worth having in their midst. It appeared that the time for the master race had come.
It is interesting that the English and the Germans hurled that same accusation against each other three hundred years later. In the first half of the twentieth century, the English insisted that the Germans were not as highly evolved as the English, and the Germans said the same thing about them. You would think somebody would have pointed out that England’s ancestors, the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes were Germans. They came to England from northwest Germany in the late fifth century. They are ethnically the same people.
The Irish, the Welsh, the Cornish, and the Scotts are largely Celtic, and the Anglo-Saxons/Anglo-Normans considered them to be a subhuman, undeserving species, which did not deserve mercy or pity. They described them as “the very offal of men, the dregs of mankind . . . . the bots that crawl on the beasts tail.” Before you can exterminate any large group of people you must first convince your own people that they are such contemptible wretches that their death is a positive good.
On Oct. 24, 1644, Parliament passed an ordinance ordering that “no quarter be given to any Irishman, or any papist born in Ireland captured on land or sea.” No Irish prisoners of war were to be spared. Oliver Cromwell explained that hanging the Irish was “ righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches.”
Cromwell sailed for Ireland on August 13, 1649. He had a total of 94 ships and 20,000 well trained soldiers. He had an abundance of military supplies, along with four huge siege guns capable of knocking down the sturdiest city walls. He also brought a huge supply of scythes to cut down any crops they found. If he could not kill all the Irish, he would see that the survivors starved.
Cromwell attacked Dorgheda on Sept. 10, 1649. The city walls were no match for Cromwell’s huge siege guns. When it was obvious the battle was lost, Cromwell promised quarter to the people if they would surrender, but as soon as they were under his control, he ordered that nobody be spared. Estimates of those killed range from 2000 to 3400. The killing went on for four days. Some of Cromwell’s soldiers begged him to show mercy. Others had to be forced to participate in the killing.
After the battle Cromwell wrote that they “were ordered by me to put them all to the sword.” Later he wrote, “It hath pleased God to bless our endeavors at Drogheda . . . . I do not think thirty of the whole number escaped with their lives. Those that did are in safe custody for Barbadoes.” Survivors were sold into slavery in Barbadoes.
One month later, Cromwell called on the city of Wexford to surrender. Negotiations went on for days, and Cromwell became impatient and began to bombard the castle with his huge siege guns. The city surrendered, but Cromwell’s troops still ran amok and slaughtered more than 3000. Cromwell’s Protestant troops singled out priests, monks, and nuns, for torture, and especially gruesome deaths. Cromwell needed the city for winter quarters, but his troops did so much damage, and with rotting corpses everywhere, that the city was uninhabitable. Cromwell abandoned the city along with one of his big siege guns. His men refused to move it. Some of them were so sickened by the indiscriminate killing they were ready to mutiny. They finally left the other three guns stuck in the mud.
Cromwell went back to England after nine months, but the massacres continued. The Puritan forces continued to hang or behead prisoners. Some were drawn and quartered. Bishop MacMahon was beheaded and his head was put on a pike over the walls of Derry.
In spite of Cromwell’s savagery, Protestant and Calvinistic writers make him a hero. “He put those Irish Catholics to the sword.” He was not able to make good Protestants out of them, but he hammered them as nobody else ever had.
In America, especially since the Revolution and the Constitution, any time we think of Calvinism we think of election and predestination; we think of particular redemption and irresistible grace. And in America, that is about all that is left of Calvinism. Protestant Calvinists still have infant baptism, but even adding that to the mix, Calvinism is still barely a shadow of what it once was.
We must never lose sight of the fact that the real power behind Calvinism has always been the power of the sword. That is the reason Calvinism has never been the force in America that it was once was in England. Not since colonial New England have Calvinists had the power to force compliance.
Cromwell, and his Model Army attacked Ireland, because they were still loyal to the monarchy, but more than that, he attacked them because they were Catholics. In most instances they were poor starving Catholics, but they were still unbelievers—they were Catholics.
John Calvin believed and taught a lot of things that were true, but it is hard to give much credence to a man who believes he has the right to have people tortured or killed, because they do not agree with him. It was no fluke that he had Michael Servetus burned alive. He hated Servetus with a passion, and he had sworn for years that if he ever came to Geneva, he would see to it he never left alive. He made good on his threat. A hundred years later, Cromwell, the warrior Calvinist did the same thing thousands of times over. Harold Hunt