One of the most notorious episodes in the siege of Drogheda, when more than 3,000 Irish people were killed by an English army headed by Oliver Cromwell, came when Cromwell and his troops chased a renegade band of the enemy up into the steeple of St Peter’s church. When the fleeing detachment of soldiers refused to surrender, Cromwell ordered that the steeple be burned. We know that this is true because, in addition to the corroborating evidence, Cromwell wrote a 1,500-word letter about the events back to the House of Commons on 17 September 1649, exulting that he had even heard one of the trapped men screaming: ‘God damn me, God confound me, I burn, I burn.’
That telling sadistic detail reveals much about both the writer and the addressee of the letter. Presumably Cromwell only included it because he knew that his audience in parliament would be impressed (and likely scared) by their commander-in-chief’s ability to bring his enemies to a point of such terror that they felt damned, confounded and abandoned by their God in the final moments of their lives. In letting the Commons hear the screams of his army’s victims, Cromwell was knowingly playing upon a contemporary ethnic hatred of the Irish to reveal himself as a holy warrior doing a vengeful Protestant God’s violent work, extirpating a neighbouring Roman Catholic threat.
Details that escape canonical accounts show Cromwell as being, well, deeply weird
As terrible as those screams from St Peter’s church sound, they are absent from the second instalment of Ronald Hutton’s biography of Cromwell (the first volume, covering his early life and civil war career, was published in 2021). This isn’t, it must be emphasised, because Hutton downplays the atrocities committed by Cromwellian armies during their nine-month Irish campaign. While he dismisses as a nationalist ‘partisan lie’ a once influential idea that Cromwell authorised a ‘general massacre of the population’ at Drogheda, his analysis of the techniques of brutalising violence committed by Cromwell’s forces in places such as Drogheda and Wexford is judicious, always conducted with an expert grasp of the ethics and mechanics of early modern siege warfare. Rather, Hutton omits the screams because he largely paraphrases this famous letter instead of quoting much from it, remarking only that the ‘defenders perished in the flames’. This is absolutely characteristic of the use made of Cromwell’s letters and speeches throughout his book.
It’s an odd and risky move for a Cromwell biographer to make, especially since Oxford University Press’s three-volume, 2,500-page Letters, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell appeared in 2022 under the general editorship of John Morrill. There the appeal, the craft and the deceptions of Cromwell’s rhetoric throughout his career are laid bare in meticulous detail, helping to make sense of how this pious yet ruthless soldier-politician persuaded and alienated so many of his contemporaries. We are, by contrast, distanced from the subject of this biography by Hutton’s decision to précis his words so frequently.
This is a real shame, since Hutton’s Cromwell is already enigmatic enough. In this portion of his life, we see Cromwell emerge from the Civil War to become one of the judges at Charles I’s trial, having disappeared when the final arrangements for it were being made. He is rewarded so handsomely for his work as the highly skilled commander of parliamentary forces in the early years of the fledgling Commonwealth that this hammer of the Stuart monarchy soon acquired a property portfolio resembling that of the greatest aristocrats of the realm. The book closes with Cromwell dissolving the Rump Parliament in 1653, a body he’d done much to legitimise, because it could no longer match his own reformist energy.
While the standard portrait of Cromwell as an intensely religious man even by the standards of a religious age is here – and Hutton is excellent on how liberty of conscience for Protestants rather than radical constitutional concerns is Cromwell’s lodestar – we also get details that escape canonical accounts and show Cromwell as being instead, well, deeply weird. For instance, during the pressurised period leading up to the regicide, he ended a disagreement with the parliamentarian Edmund Ludlow about the future of the monarchy by having a cushion fight with him. Similarly, when the signatures for Charles I’s death warrant were being collected, Cromwell and the staunch republican Henry Marten were seen horsing about with the ink, smearing it on each other’s faces. Such oddities seem all the more baffling because we can’t benchmark them against the very different version of his personality and inner life that Cromwell wanted to present to his contemporaries in his letters and speeches.
Even if this book sometimes feels less a biography and more like a military history expertly focalised though the figure of Oliver Cromwell, the version of its subject that it finally presents is compellingly distinctive and one for our times. This is no Cromwell as liberal or socialist superhero, as the late 19th century or 1960s might have had him, but, in his evangelism, militarism and republicanism, a forerunner for the American radical right.
Comments