How weird was Oliver Cromwell?

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.

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.