The Evolution of States

by J. M. Robertson

§ 6

While thus showing that in his foreign relations in general he had no higher principle than that which led him to protect the Protestant Vaudois, Cromwell himself could not or would not tolerate Catholicism in England. What was immeasurably worse, he had put thousands of Irish Catholics to the sword, and reduced tens of thousands more to the life conditions of wild animals. His policy in Ireland, if judged by the standards we apply to the rule of other men, must be pronounced one of blind brutality. He had helped to make a civil war in England because his class was at times arbitrarily taxed, and had fears that its worship would be interfered with; and in so doing he felt he had the support and sanction of Omnipotence. When it came to dealing with Irishmen who stood up for their race ideals and their religion, he acted as if for him principles of moral and religious right did not exist.[1125] His most ferocious deeds he justified by reference to the Ulster massacre of 1641, as if all Irishmen had been concerned in that, and as if the previous English massacres had not been tenfold more bloody. Under his own Government, by the calculation of Sir William Petty, out of a population of 1,466,000, 616,000 had in eleven years perished by the sword, by plague, or by famine artificially produced. Of these, 504,000 were reckoned to be of Irish and 112,000 of English descent. And it was planned to reduce the survivors to a life of utter destitution in Connaught and Clare. By the settlement of 1653, ten of the thirty-two Irish counties were allotted to the "Adventurers" who in 1641 had advanced sums of money to aid in putting down the Irish Rebellion; twelve were divided among Cromwell's soldiers; seven, with all the cities and corporations of the kingdom, were reserved for the Commonwealth; and three of the most barren counties—for the most part unreclaimed—were left for the natives. The settlement could not be carried out as planned by the Government, and as evidently desired by Fleetwood, the Lord Deputy, and many of the officers. The very greed of the soldiery defeated the project of a "universal transplantation," for they were as eager for Irish labour as for Irish land.[1126] But the confiscation of the land was carried out to the full, and multitudes were forced into Connaught. The worst tyranny of Charles is thus as dust in the balance with Cromwell's expropriation of myriads of conquered Irish. For them he had neither the show of law nor the pretence of equity. They were treated as conquered races had been treated, not by the Romans, who normally sought to absorb in their polity the peoples they overcame, but by barbarians in their mutual wars, where the loser was driven to the wilderness. Far from seeking to grapple as a statesman with the problem of Irish disaffection, he struck into it like a Berserker, on the same inspiration of animal fury as took him into the breach at Drogheda; and his or his officers' enactments, providing for the slaughter of all natives who did not carry certificates of having taken the anti-Royalist oath, are to be matched in history only with the treatment of the conquered Slavs by the Christianising Germans in the Dark Ages.

Dr. Gardiner and Mr. Harrison partly defend the massacre of Drogheda as justified by the "laws of war" of the time. It is true that for the period it was not very much out of the way. The Royalist Manley, describing it, says only (History of the Rebellions, 1691, p. 227): "I would not condemn the promiscuous slaughter of the Citizens and Souldiers, of Cruelty, because it might be intended for Example and Terror to others, if the like Barbarity had not been committed elsewhere." But Manley seems to have forgotten the friars, whose slaughter neither laws of war nor European custom exonerated. There were really no "laws of war" in the case. Dr. Gardiner (Student's History, p. 562; Commonwealth and Protectorate, small ed. i, 118) puts it that these laws "left garrisons refusing, as that of Drogheda had done, to surrender an indefensible post ... to the mercy or cruelty of the enemy." But it is unwarrantable to call Drogheda an "indefensible post." Dr. Gardiner's thesis that any captured post, however hard to take, is ipso facto proved to have been indefensible, may be dismissed as a very bad sophism. Elsewhere he himself puts it (p. 132, note) that men "defending a fortified town after the defences had been captured" were liable to be slain—a very different thing. Drogheda contained 3,000 foot, mostly English, "the flower of Ormond's army," as Dr. Gardiner avows.

Mr. Harrison (Oliver Cromwell, p. 136) perhaps errs in saying that its commander, Sir Arthur Aston, an officer of "great name and experience ... at that time made little doubt of defending it against all the power of Cromwell." Cp. Gardiner, Com. and Prot., small ed. i, 128, as to Aston's straits. It had, however, actually resisted siege by the Catholics for three years, and it was only by desperate efforts that Cromwell carried it. He went into the breach with the forlorn hope, and he gave the order for slaughter, as he himself admits, in the fury of action. The first order, be it observed, was to slay all "in arms in the town"—this at a time when men commonly carried arms in time of peace, and members wore their swords in Parliament. It simply meant a massacre of the male inhabitants. The garrison was not so slaughtered: when the surrender of the garrison came, Cromwell's blood-lust was slaked, and he spared all but every tenth man—for slavery in the Barbadoes. Nor did his men merely slay those taken in arms. He tells that "their friars were knocked on the head promiscuously"; and it is impossible wholly to refuse to believe the royalist statement of the time, that men, women, and children were indiscriminately slaughtered. Dr. Gardiner, on somewhat insufficient grounds (History of the Commonwealth, i, 135, 136, note), entirely rejects the personal testimony of the brother of Anthony à Wood (Anthony's Autobiography, ed. Oxford, 1848, pp. 51, 52) as to Cromwell's men holding up children as shields when pursuing some soldiers of the garrison who defended themselves. Dr. Gardiner is himself in error in respect of one charge of improbability which he brings against the narrative, as quoted by himself. But in any case his own narrative, as he evidently feels, shows the Cromwellian troops to have been sufficiently ferocious. Quarter was promised, and then withheld (Gardiner, i, 117, note, 118); and by Dr. Gardiner's own showing the "Parliamentary" account itself avows that the final surrender of the defenders on the "mount" was obtained by sheer treachery—a fact which Dr. Gardiner gloses even while showing it. A Puritan drunk with the lust of battle is a beast like any other. Cromwell himself had to quiet his conscience with his usual drug of religion. But if this act had been done by Cavaliers or Catholics upon a Puritan garrison and Independent priests, he and his party would have held it up to horror for ever.

The only defence he could make was that this was vengeance for the great Irish Massacre—that is to say, that he had shown he could be as bloody as the Irish, who on their part had all the English massacres of the previous generation to avenge—a circumstance carefully ignored by clerical writers who still justify Cromwell in the name of Christianity, as seeking to make future massacres impossible. All the while, there was not the slightest pretence of showing that the garrison of Drogheda had been concerned in the old massacre. Compare, on this, the emphatic verdict of Dr. Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth, i, 139. Mr. Harrison (p. 145) quotes Cromwell's challenge to opponents to show any instance of a man "not in arms" being put to death with impunity—this after he had avowed the slaughter of all priests and chaplains! His general assertion of the scrupulousness of his party was palpably false; and it is idle to say that he must have believed it true. That Ireton's Puritan troops slew numbers of disarmed and unarmed Irish with brutal cruelty and treachery against Ireton's reiterated orders, is shown by Dr. Gardiner; and he tells how Ireton hanged a girl who tried to escape from Limerick (Commonwealth, ii, 48, 53). Is it then to be supposed that Cromwell's men were more humane when he was hounding them on to massacre? As to the further slaughter of natives, there stands the assertion of Father French (Narrative of the Earl of Clarendon's Settlement and Sale of Ireland, Dublin, rep. 1846, p. 86) that under the Proclamation which commanded the soldiers to slay any men met on the highway without a certificate of having "taken the engagement" abjuring the monarchy, "silly Peasants who out of Ignorance or want of care ... left their tickets at home, were barbarously murdered." In the circumstances the statement is only too credible.

There remains to be considered the old plea that the massacre of Drogheda made an end of serious resistance, and so saved life. Thus Carlyle: "Wexford Storm followed (not by forethought, it would seem, but by chance of war) in the same fashion; and there was no other storm or slaughter needed in that country" (Cromwell, Comm. on Letter CV). This is one of Carlyle's innumerable misstatements of fact. Even on his own view, the Wexford slaughter had to follow that of Drogheda. But, as Gardiner shows, Cromwell's bloodshed at Drogheda and Wexford, "so far from sparing effusion of blood," though "successful at Ross and at a few lesser strongholds, had only served to exasperate the garrisons of Duncannon, of Kilkenny, and of Clonmel; and in his later movements Cromwell, always prepared to accept the teaching of events(!), had discovered that the way of clemency was the shortest road to conquest" (Com. and Prot. i, 157; cp. p. 137). The laudation here too is characteristic; but it disposes of Carlyle's.

Carlyle would never be at pains enough to check his presuppositions by the records. As Gardiner tells (p. 123, note), he denounces an editor for printing a postscript in which Cromwell admitted the slaughter of "many inhabitants" of Drogheda. This, said Carlyle, had no authority in contemporary copies. "It appears," writes Dr. Gardiner, "in the official contemporary copy in Letters from Ireland." What is more, the editor in question had given the reference!

There are men who to-day will still applaud Cromwell because he quenched the Irish trouble for the time in massacre and devastation; and others, blenching at the atrocity of the cure, speak of it with bated breath as doing him discredit, while they bate nothing of their censure of the arbitrariness of Charles. Others excuse all Puritan tyranny because of its "sincerity," as if that plea would not exculpate Torquemada and Alva. The plain truth is that Cromwell in no way rose above the moral standards of his generation in his dealings with those whom he was able to oppress. He found in his creed his absolution for every step to which blind instinct led him, in Ireland as in England; and it seems to be his destiny to lead his admirers into the same sophistries—pious with a difference—as served to keep him on good terms with his conscience after suppressing an English Parliament or slaughtering an Irish garrison.

Take, for instance, the fashion in which D'Aubigné shuffles over the Irish massacres, after quoting Cromwell's worst cant on the subject: "This extract will suffice. Cromwell acted in Ireland like a great statesman, and the means he employed were those best calculated promptly to restore order in that unhappy country. And yet we cannot avoid regretting that a man—a Christian man—should have been called to wage so terrible a war, and to show towards his enemies greater severity than had ever, perhaps, been exercised by the pagan leaders of antiquity. 'Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God'" (The Protector, 3rd ed. p. 159).

It is too much even to say, as a more scrupulous critic has done, that the phenomenon of the Commonwealth represented a great attempt at a higher life on the part of men nobler and wiser than their contemporaries.[1127] It was simply the self-assertion of energetic men of whom some were in some respects ahead of their time; while the others were as bad as their time, and in some respects rather behind it—men bewildered by fanaticism, and incapable of a consistent ethic, whose failure was due as distinctly to their own intellectual vices as to their environment. No serious poetry of any age is more devoid of moral principle than the verses in which Marvell and Waller exult over the wanton attack on Spain, and kindle at the prospect of a future of unscrupulous conquest. Both men were religious; both as ready to sing of "Divine Love" as of human hate; and both in their degree were good types of the supporters of Cromwell. The leaders from the very outset are visibly normal agitators, full of their own grievances, and as devoid of the spirit of fellow-feeling, of concern for all-round righteousness, as any of the men they impeached. Their movement went so far as it did because, firstly, they were vigorous men resisting a weak man, and later their own natural progress to anarchy was checked by the self-assertion of the strongest of them all. Thus their and his service to progressive political science is purely negative. They showed once for all that an ignorance guided by religious zeal and "inspiration" is more surely doomed to disaster than the ignorance of mere primary animal instinct; and that of the many forms of political optimism, that of Christian pietism is for the modern world certainly not the least pernicious. The Puritan name and ideal are in these days commonly associated with high principle and conscientiousness; and it is true that in the temper and the tactic of the early revolutionary movement, despite much dark fanaticism, there was a certain masculine simplicity and sincerity not often matched in our politics since. But as the years went on, principles gave way, dragged down by fanaticism and egoism; and the Puritan temper, lacking light, bred deadly miasmas. Milton himself sinks from the level of the Areopagitica to that of the Eikonoklastes, an ignoble performance at the behest of the Government, who just then were suppressing the freedom of the press.[1128] In strict historical truth the Puritan name and the ideal must stand for utter failure to carry on a free polity, in virtue of incapacity for rational association; for the stifling of some of the most precious forces of civilisation—the artistic; and further for the grafting on normal self-seeking of the newer and subtler sin of solemn hypocrisy.