Following the 1641 uprising, the Confederate wars and the Cromwellian conquest, the English Commonwealth was obliged to redeem debts owed to soldiers and adventurers with land in Ireland seized from Catholic rebels. The adventurers comprised mainly London merchants and English landowners who had put up money at the start of the war to fund the … Read more
First the big news—Oliver Cromwell has apologised to the Irish people for massacring them and sending them off to Barbados as slaves. Well, he has not spoken in person but the Arise Mission from his home town of Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, has issued an apology on his behalf and brought a letter to that effect to … Read more
Sir, —In his reassessment of the reputation of Oliver Cromwell, Micheál Ó Siochrú outlines the known historical facts relating to his campaign in Ireland (August 1649–May 1650), detailing his programme of ethnic cleansing, the massacre of military and civilian personnel at Drogheda and Wexford, the forced removal to Connacht and the transportation of slave labour … Read more
Sir, —When assessing Oliver Cromwell’s legacy in Ireland, we should notoverlook the religious congregations he supported in Dublin during theCommonwealth. The Protestant Dissenter congregations at Wood Street andNew Row were a source of republican ideas and pro-reform politics inthe city from their foundation through to the establishment of theUnited Irishmen in the late eighteenth century. … Read more
Sir, —In connection with Micheál Ó Siochrú’s September/October article ‘The curse of Cromwell’, you may be interested in a few more points about the Cromwell statue at Westminster, most of which I picked up while doing research on the Irish Independent of the 1890s (when it was the paper of the Parnellite party). The proposal … Read more