fifty-two men drawn from among the king’s enemies. The
execution was a military and not a national act, and at the last
scene on the scaffold the triumphant shouts of the soldiery could
not overwhelm the groans and sobs raised by the populace.
Whatever crimes might be charged against Charles, his past
conduct might appear to be condoned by the act of negotiating
with him. On the other hand, the execution seemed to Cromwell
the only alternative to anarchy, or to a return to despotism and
the abandonment of all they had fought for. Cromwell had
exhausted every expedient for arriving at an arrangement with
the king by which the royal authority might be preserved, and
the repeated perfidy and inexhaustible shiftiness of Charles had
proved the hopelessness of such attempts. The results produced
by the king’s execution were far-reaching and permanent. It
is true that Puritan austerity and the lack of any strong central
authority after Oliver’s death produced a reaction which
temporarily restored Charles’s dynasty to the throne; but it is
not less true that the execution of the king, at a later time when
all over Europe absolute monarchies “by divine right” were
being established on the ruins of the ancient popular constitutions,
was an object lesson to all the world; and it produced a
profound effect, not only in establishing constitutional monarchy
in Great Britain after James II., with the dread of his father’s
fate before him, had abdicated by flight, but in giving the
impulse to that revolt against the idea of “the divinity that doth
hedge a king” which culminated in the Revolution of 1789, and
of which the mighty effects are still evident in Europe and
beyond.
The king and the monarchy being now destroyed in England,
Cromwell had next to turn his attention to the suppression of
royalism in Ireland and in Scotland. In Ireland
Ormonde had succeeded in uniting the English and the
Cromwell
in
Ireland.Irish in a league against the supporters of the parliament,
and only a few scattered forts held out for the
Commonwealth, while the young king was every day expected
to land and complete the conquest of the island. Accordingly
in March 1649 Cromwell was appointed lord-lieutenant and commander-in-chief
for its reduction. But before starting he was
called upon to suppress disorder at home. He treated the
Levellers with some severity and showed his instinctive dislike
to revolutionary proposals. “Did not that levelling principle,”
he said, “tend to the reducing of all to an equality? What was
the purport of it but to make the tenant as liberal a fortune as
the landlord, which I think if obtained would not have lasted
long.” Equally characteristic was his treatment of the mutinous
army, in which he suppressed a rebellion in May. He landed at
Dublin on the 13th of August. Before his arrival the Dublin
garrison had defeated Ormonde with a loss of 5000 men, and
Cromwell’s work was limited to the capture of detached fortresses.
On the 10th of September he stormed Drogheda, and by his order
the whole of its 2800 defenders were put to the sword without
quarter. Cromwell, who was as a rule especially scrupulous
in protecting non-combatants from violence, justified his severity
in this case by the cruelties perpetrated by the Irish in the
rebellion of 1641, and as being necessary on military and political
grounds in that it “would tend to prevent the effusion of blood
for the future, which were the satisfactory grounds of such actions
which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret.” After
the fall of Drogheda Cromwell sent a few troops to relieve
Londonderry, and marched himself to Wexford, which he took
on the 11th of October, and where similar scenes of cruelty were
repeated; every captured priest, to use Cromwell’s own words,
being immediately “knocked on the head,” though the story of
the three hundred women slaughtered in the market-place has
no foundation.
The surrender of Trim, Dundalk and Ross followed, but at Waterford Cromwell met with a stubborn resistance and the advent of winter obliged him to raise the siege. Next year Cromwell penetrated into Munster. Cashel, Cahir and several castles fell in February, and Kilkenny in March; Clonmel repulsing the assault with great loss, but surrendering on the 10th of May 1650. Cromwell himself sailed a fortnight later, leaving the reduction of the island, which was completed in 1652, to his generals. The re-settlement of the conquered and devastated country was now organized on the Tudor and Straffordian basis of colonization from England, conversion to Protestantism, and establishment of law and order. Cromwell thoroughly approved of the enormous scheme of confiscation and colonization, causing great privations and sufferings, which was carried out. The Roman Catholic landowners lost their estates, all or part according to their degree of guilt, and these were distributed among Cromwell’s soldiers and the creditors of the government; Cromwell also invited new settlers from home and from New England, two-thirds of the whole land of Ireland being thus transferred to new proprietors. The suppression of Roman Catholicism was zealously pursued by Cromwell; the priests were hunted down and imprisoned or exiled to Spain or Barbados, the mass was everywhere forbidden, and the only liberty allowed was that of conscience, the Romanist not being obliged to attend Protestant services.
These methods, together with education, “assiduous preaching ... humanity, good life, equal and honest dealing with men of different opinion,” Cromwell thought, would convert the whole island to Protestantism. The law was ably and justly administered, and Irish trade was admitted to the same privileges as English, enjoying the same rights in foreign and colonial trade; and no attempt was made to subordinate the interests of the former to the latter, which was the policy adopted both before and after Cromwell’s time, while the union of Irish and English interests was further recognized by the Irish representation at Westminster in the parliaments of 1654, 1656 and 1659. These advantages, however, scarcely benefited at all the Irish Roman Catholics, who were excluded from political life and from the corporate towns; and Cromwell’s union meant little more than the union of the English colony in Ireland with England. A just administration, too, did not compensate for unjust laws or produce contentment; the policy of conversion and colonization was unsuccessful, the descendants of many of Cromwell’s soldiers becoming merged in the Roman Catholic Irish, and the union with England, political and commercial, being extinguished at the Restoration. Cromwell’s land settlement—modified by the restoration under Charles II. of about one-third of the estates to the royalists—survived, and added to the difficulties with which the English government was afterwards confronted in Ireland.
Meanwhile Cromwell had hurried home to deal with the
royalists in Scotland. He urged Fairfax to attack the Scots at once in their own country and to forestall their invasion; but Fairfax refused and resigned, and The
battles of
Dunbar
and
Worcester.Cromwell was appointed by parliament, on the 26th of June 1650, commander-in-chief of all the forces of the Commonwealth. He entered Scotland in July, and after a campaign in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh which proved unsuccessful in drawing out the Scots from their fortresses, he retreated to Dunbar to await reinforcements from Berwick. The Scots under Leslie followed him, occupied Doon Hill commanding the town, and seized the passes between Dunbar and Berwick which Cromwell had omitted to secure. Cromwell was outmanœuvred and in a perilous situation, completely cut off from England and from his supplies except from the sea. But Leslie descended the hill to complete his triumph, and Cromwell immediately observed the disadvantages of his antagonist’s new position, cramped by the hill behind and separated from his left wing. A stubborn struggle on the next day, the 3rd of September, gave Cromwell a decisive victory. Advancing, he occupied Edinburgh and Leith. At first it seemed likely that his victories and subsequent remonstrances would effect a peace with the Scots; but by 1651 Charles II. had succeeded in forming a new union of royalists and presbyterians, and another campaign became inevitable. Some delay was caused in beginning operations by Cromwell’s dangerous illness, during which his life was despaired of; but in June he was confronting Leslie entrenched in the hills near Stirling, impregnable to attack and refusing an engagement. Cromwell determined to turn his antagonist’s
