Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy (Paperback)

The previous reviewer is right that Reilly does not satisfactorily explain away Cromwell's own reference to civilian casualties at Drogheda but the fact that civilians may have died in the heat of action (today we would call it collateral damage) does not make a massacre. Reilly does, in my opinion, convincingly demolish the reliability the testimony of Woods, the only eyewitness to describe deliberate atrocities committed against civilians during the battle, by showing that he had good reasons to wish to present Cromwell in a bad light. If Wood's evidence is discounted then there is no real evidence of a massacre of civilians: all other sources, including those that the earlier reviewer mentions, are second hand and, like Woods, have an interest in presenting Cromwell in a bad light. The consequences for Ireland of the Cromwellian conquest were quite bad enough without making the man into something he was not. I would hope that Reilly's book might help encourage a less self-serving approach to Irish history if it was more widely read.

It would be easy to ridicule Reilly's dreadful prose; his enthusiastic description of the McDonald's outlet in modern Drogheda will, unfortunately, remain with me for a very long time. Yet, the main weaknesses of this book are not stylistic, but historical. To be blunt, Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy owes more to Reilly's often expressed desire to "rehabilitate the memory of Cromwell in Ireland" than it does to any generally accepted rules of historical practice.

The author exhibits a profound unfamiliarity with the history of the English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century. In his mind, Cromwell was a democrat, the leader of an oppressed nation which rose up against monarchical tyranny, thereby securing freedom and liberty. This was certainly the view of a number of historians writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it is an untenable position for anyone familiar with an undergraduate textbook written in the last fifty years. In actual fact, Cromwell was no more a democrat than Charles was a tyrant, and the English Revolution was not an expression of the popular will, but the product of a civil war fought between two small groups which were unrepresentative of the wishes of the population as a whole.

Furthermore, Reilly has chosen to write about perhaps the most controversial period of Irish history without consulting a single book or pamphlet dating from the time of the sack of Drogheda. Instead, he bases his thesis on extracts of contemporary sources reproduced, with varying degrees of accuracy, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As such, he makes a number of serious blunders, the most important of which concerns Cromwell's letter to the House of Commons after the battle at Drogheda. The original letter does not survive but the official printed version confirms that "many inhabitants" were among those killed by Cromwell's forces at Drogheda. If this pamphlet is authentic, Reilly's thesis is in ruins. He, therefore, latches onto a nineteenth-century, pro-Cromwellian book which claimed that these words do not appear in the original pamphlet. When it was subsequently pointed out to Reilly that they do indeed appear in the pamphlet in question, he was forced to fall back on another argument from a nineteenth-century defender of Cromwell; the incriminating words must have been added without Cromwell's knowledge, possibly by the printer of the pamphlet. Yet, Reilly provides no evidence for this assertion and does not explain why the printer might have done this or how he avoided punishment for accusing Cromwell of killing civilians.

Even among the limited range of nineteenth and twentieth-century books which he consulted, Reilly found a number of contemporary references to the slaughter of civilians at Drogheda. As such, he is forced to adopt a number of disturbing sleights of hand. He dismisses all accounts of the massacre which were not written by eyewitnesses. At first glance this is entirely reasonable, but when one considers the nature of the sacking of a town it seems churlish to discount all testimony written by individuals who spoke to eyewitnesses or survivors. For example, Reilly dismisses Anthony Wood's testimony that his brother Thomas, who served in the Cromwellian forces at Drogheda, had spoken on numerous occasions of his part in the killing of women and children in the town. Reilly denigrates Anthony Wood as a gossip, buffoon, and drunk, and suggests that we would be unwise to put much faith in him. Yet, if Anthony Wood is unreliable why does Reilly accept his description of the royalist governor of Drogheda, Sir Arthur Aston, as a reprehensible tyrant? The only logical answer is that Wood's description of Aston's character helps Reilly to explain away the fact that Cromwell's men beat his brains out with his own wooden leg after he had surrendered.

In other words, anything which tends to lessen the enormity of Cromwell's actions at Drogheda is accepted uncritically, while any evidence which implicates him in the murder of civilians must pass the highest possible standards of proof. Reilly explains away eyewitness accounts of civilian deaths by magnifying slight inconsistencies between them and by attacking the character and motivations of the witnesses themselves. Once again, Cromwell is innocent until proven guilty while his opponents are guilty until proven innocent. Finally, having, to his satisfaction at least, demolished the evidence against Cromwell, Reilly asserts that there is no contemporary evidence for the massacre of civilians at Drogheda. At times one cannot but feel something approaching admiration for Reilly's ability to deal from the bottom of the deck, but one cannot get away from the fact that he has done too little research to support his extravagant claims. He is completely unaware of John Evelyn's diary entry for 15 September 1649 which tells how he received "news of Drogheda being taken by the Rebells and all put to the sword." Neither is he familiar with a report in a newspaper named Mercurius Elencticus, dated 15 October 1649, which tells how the Cromwellians at Drogheda "possessed themselves of the Towne, and used all crueltie imaginable upon the besieged, as well inhabitants as others, sparing neither women nor children." Had Reilly been aware of these sources he would, undoubtedly, have found some grounds to dismiss them, but when they are read in conjunction with the numerous other accounts of civilians deaths at Drogheda there can be no doubt about what happened in that town in September 1649. This is a painfully bad book, and it is tempting to suggest that its main use will be to teach students how not to conduct research, assess evidence or write prose.

Jason Mc Elligott St John's College Cambridge