The 1641 Rising and Cromwell's conquest
A Catholic rising in Ulster begins a decade of war that ends with Oliver Cromwell's brutal reconquest and the transfer of most Catholic-owned land to Protestants.
- God's Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland — Micheál Ó Siochrú, Faber and Faber (2008)
- Modern Ireland 1600–1972 — R. F. Foster, Allen Lane (1988)
- Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 — Nicholas Canny, Oxford University Press (2001)
In October 1641 Catholic Irish in Ulster rose against the settlers. Thousands of Protestants were killed or died as refugees, and English pamphlets inflated the numbers into the hundreds of thousands, which fed lasting fear and anger in Britain.
- Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 — Nicholas Canny, Oxford University Press (2001)
- Modern Ireland 1600–1972 — R. F. Foster, Allen Lane (1988)
- Ireland: A History — Thomas Bartlett, Cambridge University Press (2010)
- Modern Ireland 1600–1972 — R. F. Foster, Allen Lane (1988)
In August 1649, after the execution of Charles I, Oliver Cromwell landed at Dublin with a parliamentary army. At Drogheda in September and Wexford in October his troops killed the garrisons and many civilians and priests. Cromwell called Drogheda “a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches”.
- God's Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland — Micheál Ó Siochrú, Faber and Faber (2008)
- Modern Ireland 1600–1972 — R. F. Foster, Allen Lane (1988)
- God's Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland — Micheál Ó Siochrú, Faber and Faber (2008)
- Ireland: A History — Thomas Bartlett, Cambridge University Press (2010)
The Cromwellian settlement then confiscated land on a vast scale. Many Catholic landowners were ordered west across the Shannon to Connacht, a choice remembered as “to Hell or to Connacht”. Catholics had held well over half of Irish land in 1641; after the Restoration settlement they held only about a fifth.
- Modern Ireland 1600–1972 — R. F. Foster, Allen Lane (1988)
- Ireland: A History — Thomas Bartlett, Cambridge University Press (2010)
- The Oxford Companion to Irish History — S. J. Connolly (ed.), Oxford University Press (2002)
Cromwell's massacres at Drogheda and Wexford and the confiscations that followed were a near-genocidal assault that turned the Catholic Irish into a dispossessed people.
- God's Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland — Micheál Ó Siochrú, Faber and Faber (2008)
- Ireland: A History — Thomas Bartlett, Cambridge University Press (2010)
The 1641 rising, with its killings of settlers at places like Portadown, showed the danger Protestants faced, and remained a powerful memory for centuries.
- Modern Ireland 1600–1972 — R. F. Foster, Allen Lane (1988)
- Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 — Nicholas Canny, Oxford University Press (2001)
Historians now put the settlers killed in 1641 in the low thousands, far below contemporary propaganda claims, while debating how far Cromwell's atrocities exceeded the norms of the day; Micheál Ó Siochrú argues they were exceptional in their ruthlessness.
- God's Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland — Micheál Ó Siochrú, Faber and Faber (2008)
- Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 — Nicholas Canny, Oxford University Press (2001)
- Modern Ireland 1600–1972 — R. F. Foster, Allen Lane (1988)
Why it matters today
Cromwell is perhaps the most hated figure in Irish popular memory, and "the curse of Cromwell on you" survived as an insult. Meanwhile the 1641 massacres of Protestant settlers became a foundation story of Ulster Protestant fear. Both sides remember different victims of the same decade.