Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England

by C. H. Firth

Like Strafford, Cromwell believed that the impartial administration of justice would make the Irish people good subjects and attach them to English rule.

“We have a great opportunity,” he wrote, “to set up a way of doing justice amongst these poor people, which, for the uprightness and cheapness of it may exceedingly gain upon them, who have been accustomed to as much injustice, tyranny, and oppression from their landlords, the great men, and those that should have done them right, as I believe any people in that which we call Christendom.... If justice were freely and impartially administered here, the foregoing darkness and corruption would make it look so much the more glorious and beautiful, and draw more hearts after it.”

In the newly conquered country the obstacles which made the reform of the Law so difficult in England, could more easily be overcome. “Ireland,” Cromwell said, “was as a clean paper, and capable of being governed by such laws as should be found most agreeable to justice; which may be so impartially administered as to be a good precedent even to England itself.”

Some improvement in these respects there certainly was. The Irish judges appointed by Cromwell were capable and honest, and one of the chief-justices, John Cooke, was a zealous law-reformer. But no improvement in the administration of the laws could reconcile Irishmen to English rule while the laws themselves were so little “agreeable to justice.” Justice combined with forfeiture and proscription, and without equal laws, was a legal fiction which had no healing virtue.

Equally futile was the attempted conversion of the Irish. The struggle against England had made Irish nationality and Catholicism identical terms, and a faith associated with spoliation and foreign conquest could make no progress in the hearts of the conquered. The only permanent result of Cromwell’s zeal was an increase in the number of Protestant Nonconformists in Ireland. Some nominal converts from Catholicism were made. A few landowners professed themselves Protestants in order to obtain a temporary respite from transplantation, and a good many Irish women who had married English soldiers passed as Protestants in order to elude the laws against the intermarriage of soldiers and papists. But converts of this kind usually relapsed, and the mixture of the two races, which the government could not prevent, profited Catholicism, not Protestantism. The failure of the policy of conversion entailed the partial failure of the policy of colonisation as well. The families of the greater landowners established by the confiscations remained English and Protestant. The families of the smaller landowners—of the ex-soldiers who became yeomen and small farmers—tended to become Catholic in creed and Irish in feeling. “How many there are,” lamented a pamphleteer in 1697, “of the children of Oliver’s soldiers in Ireland who cannot speak one word of English. This comes of marrying Irish women instead of English.”

In the main, Cromwell’s Irish policy followed the lines which Tudor and Stuart statesmen had laid down. In one respect, however, he was more original and more enlightened than either his predecessors or his successors. Strafford’s economic policy had aimed at making the Irish rich, but also at keeping Ireland economically subject to England and preventing Irish manufactures or products from competing with those of England. No such jealousy of Irish trade warped Cromwell’s policy. Its fundamental principle was that the English colony were to be regarded simply as Englishmen living in Ireland, and entitled to the same rights as Englishmen living in England. “I would not,” said a speaker in the Parliament of 1657, “have our own people oppressed because they live in Ireland.” Accordingly, in the levy of any general tax on the three countries, care was taken that their respective shares should be equitably assessed. The same customs and excise were paid in Ireland as in England, and Ireland enjoyed equal rights with regard to foreign and colonial trade. However, as the native Irish and the Catholics were excluded from the corporate towns which were the seats of commerce and manufactures, the benefit of this trade was almost exclusively reaped by the English colony. Cromwell’s object was to secure the prosperity of what he called “the interest of England newly begun to be planted in Ireland.” If it were overtaxed, or in any other way overburdened, “the English planters must quit the country,” and then, as he warned his second Parliament, “that which hath been the success of so much blood and treasure, to get that country into your hands, what can become of it, but that the English must needs run away for pure beggary, and the Irish must possess the country again?”

With free trade, Cromwell also gave the English colonists in Ireland representation in the Parliament of the Three Nations. The Long Parliament had projected the legislative union of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and had fixed the number of their representatives, but it was left to Cromwell to call the first united Parliament. The “Instrument of Government” allotted Ireland thirty members, leaving the Protector to fix the particular constituencies by which these members were to be returned, and thirty representatives of Ireland sat accordingly in the Parliaments of 1654, 1656, and 1659. As Catholics and persons who had taken part in the rebellion were excluded from voting, the members for Ireland consisted entirely of officers and officials representing the English colony. “I am not here,” said one of them in 1659, “to speak for Ireland, but for the English in Ireland.”

Outside the ranks of the new colonists, the union of the English and Irish Parliaments found few cordial supporters. The older English colony preferred a separate Parliament for Ireland. It would be impossible, argued one of their spokesmen in 1659, for the Irish to get their grievances redressed, if they had to come over to England and apply to the English Parliament for the purpose. “I pray that they may have some to hear their grievances in their own nation, seeing they cannot have them heard here.” In 1659, the republican opposition in Richard Cromwell’s Parliament, moved largely by the fact that the Irish members were staunch Cromwellians, urged their exclusion from the House. Ireland, Vane argued, was only a province, and had no right to a voice in the government of the mother country. “They are still in the state of a province, and you make them a power not only to make laws for themselves, but for this nation; nay, to have a casting vote for aught I know in all your laws.” The attempted exclusion of the members from Ireland failed in 1659, but at the Restoration, the legislative union with Ireland was the first thing to go. No law was required to repeal it, for it had never received the King’s assent, and no voice was raised in its defence. English conservatism and Irish provincialism were too strong, and Cromwell’s imperial scheme went to the limbo reserved for policies too wise for their generation.

The natural consequence of the termination of the legislative union was the loss of the commercial equality which had accompanied it. The English colonists were no longer treated as Englishmen domiciled in Ireland, but as strangers and rivals. The Navigation Act of Charles II. excluded them from American and colonial trade, while two other acts followed, prohibiting the export of Irish cattle and provisions to England. Finally, in the reign of William III. the Irish woollen manufacture was destroyed, and the ruin of Irish commerce and agriculture was completed.

It was only Cromwell’s policy towards the English colony in Ireland which was reversed; his policy towards the native Irish was still pursued. So far as his policy coincided with the traditional policy of England towards Ireland it was maintained; so far as it was wiser and more original it was abandoned. Carlyle draws a picture of Ireland as it might have been if the “ever blessed restoration” had not “torn up” Cromwell’s system “by the roots.” “Ireland under this arrangement,” he holds, “would probably have grown up into a sober, diligent, drab-coloured population, developing itself most probably into some sort of Calvinistic Protestantism.” It is a baseless dream. Even in Cromwell’s lifetime it was evident that his scheme for the conversion of the Irish was doomed to failure. After his death the proscription of Catholicism and the hopeless attempt to force Protestantism on a reluctant people were still continued, nor were they abandoned till 1829. The new proprietors whom Cromwell had established still kept their hold, and only a very small proportion of the confiscated estates—nominally one third, in reality much less—returned to their old possessors at the Restoration. So the Cromwellian land settlement survived its author, to be his most permanent monument, and to be also, as Mr. Lecky writes, “the foundation of that deep and lasting division between the proprietary and the tenants which is the chief cause of the political and social evils of Ireland.”