How many catholics did cromwell kill

Ireland and Scotland In Cromwell was put in charge of the armies sent to defeat Ireland and Scotland. Cromwell in Ireland There had been problems in Ireland since the Catholic Irish had rebelled and massacred Protestant settlers in Cromwell spent just nine months in Ireland: He captured the town of Drogheda in Ireland in September His troops massacred nearly 3, people, including 2, royalist soldiers, all the men in the town with weapons and probably also some civilians, prisoners and priests.

At the siege of Wexford in October , 2, Irish soldiers and perhaps 1, civilians were killed. Many historians accuse Cromwell of: slaughtering civilians as well as soldiers transporting many Irish Catholics to the West Indies to be enslaved giving Catholics' land to Protestant settlers and exiling the Irish to poor land in Connacht in the west of Ireland Other historians point out that: Cromwell ordered his men not to kill civilians and hanged those who did.

Cromwell refused to show mercy to the people of Drogheda, as the laws of war allowed at the time, because they had refused to surrender. A number of Irish troops who surrendered were executed, and Catholic priests and friars were bludgeoned to death on sight. Invited to surrender on the promise of having their lives spared, these men were nonetheless put to the sword that evening. Aston was bludgeoned to death with his own wooden leg, which Parliamentarian soldiers believed to contain gold coins.

Having initially refused to surrender, when they finally capitulated the officers from one tower were executed and the rest of the men deported to Barbados. Under the conventions of 17th century warfare, any city stormed after refusing an earlier summons to surrender was offered no quarter. Any slaughter being intended to serve as an warning to other garrisons to surrender and so save future bloodshed. However, in Irish folk memory these massacres are considered unjustified and deeply cruel, and Cromwell remains one of the most hated figures in Irish history.

The east coast town of Wexford, some 75 miles south of Dublin, was the site of another infamous massacre, in which many soldiers and civilians died and large areas of the town burned. With the area north-west of Dublin under Parliamentarian control, and troops under Colonel Venables advancing to Ulster, Cromwell marched south from Dublin in order to sieze the major seaports of Leinster and Munster. Caught unawares, the garrison fled, allowing the Parliamentarian support fleet safe passage into Wexford Bay, whereupon the heavy siege artillery was unloaded south of the town.

Colonel Synnott played for time, hoping for support to arrive. However, upon meeting to finalise the surrender, Synnott proposed changes and negotiations broke down.

But has his name been unfairly maligned? Could it be argued he was actually justified maybe, perhaps in some of his most infamous actions? The standard 'Bad Cromwell' summary of his exploits in Ireland goes something like this. After having killed Charles I back in England, Oliver Cromwell turned his greedy gaze to Ireland, which teemed with the Catholics he despised, and which he wanted to bring to heel.

And so he set off with his army, cutting a bloody swathe through the country, ruthlessly slaughtering soldiers and innocent civilians alike. Take the bloody siege of Drogheda, for example. After a stand-off with the commander in charge of enemy forces there, Cromwell ordered the town to be stormed. Thousands were killed in the attack, including an unknown number of civilians. In one particularly gruesome moment, soldiers seeking refuge in a church steeple were burnt alive when the building was set alight.

Cromwell recounted how he literally heard someone scream 'God damn me, God confound me: I burn, I burn. And worse was to come during his attack on the town of Wexford. Here, while Cromwell himself was genuinely trying to negotiate the peaceful surrender of the troops stationed in the town, his own men abruptly launched an attack out of nowhere, in circumstances that have never been fully explained. What followed was basically a massacre of the townsfolk as well as the enemy soldiers, with Cromwell doing nothing to restrain them.

Cromwell, a staunch Puritan, regarded Ireland as a dangerous and morally reprehensible bastion of Catholicism. Question is, can his conduct in Ireland be in any way justified? Ireland was, in many ways, a legitimate strategic target. On top of that, the Irish were in cahoots with royalist forces who still posed a real threat to the new republic Cromwell had helped create after the execution of Charles I.