Cromwell would be in the Hague at a war crimes tribunal for his atocities today. That man was a ruthless brutal oppressive imperialist evil man whose name is synonomous with cruelty and suffering in my country. May he rot in hell. A Hitler of the middle ages.
Some facts:
It is clear that Cromwell saw the Irish Catholics in general as enemies. During the civil wars, the Parliamentarian side in particular nursed a hatred towards the Catholic Irish, who were long seen as "savages" and inferior by the English. A desire for revenge for the massacres of the 1641 Irish Rebellion against English rule added to the general climate of Protestant hostility. Cromwell's hostility to them was religious as well as political. He was passionately opposed to the Roman Catholic Church, which he saw as denying the primacy of the Bible in favour of papal and clerical authority, and which he blamed for tyranny and persecution of Protestants in Europe. Cromwell's association between Catholicism and persecution were deepened with the Irish Rebellion of 1641. This rebellion was marked by massacres by native Irish Catholics of English and Scottish Protestant settlers in Ireland, which were wildly exaggerated in puritan circles in Britain (from 4,000 killed to 120,000). These factors contributed to Cromwell's harshness in his military campaign in Ireland.
In a letter to the Irish Catholic Bishops at New Ross he wrote, "you are part of the Anti-Christ and before long you must have, all of you, blood to drink." Moreover, the records of many churches such as Kilkenny Cathedral accuse Cromwell's army of having defaced and desecrated the churches, another case of a desecrated church by Cromwell is widely reported in southern Galway in Killeely part of parish of Clarinbridge.
William Petty estimated in his demographic survey of Ireland in the 1650s that the war of 1641–53 had resulted in the death or exile of over 600,000 people, or around one third of Ireland's pre-war population. In the wake of the Cromwellian conquest, the public practice of Catholicism was banned and Catholic priests were executed when captured. In addition, roughly 12,000 Irish people were sold into slavery under the Commonwealth. All Catholic-owned land was confiscated in the Act for the Settlement of Ireland 1652 and given to Scottish and English settlers, the Parliament's financial creditors and Parliamentary soldiers. The remaining Catholic landowners were allocated poorer land in Connacht. Under the Commonwealth, Catholic landownership dropped from 60% of the total to just 8%.
Cromwell is still a figure of hatred in Ireland, his name being associated with massacre, religious persecution, and mass dispossession of the Catholic community there.
Last edited by CameronPoe (2007-03-15 11:05:12)