6 - Drogheda (1649): ‘Christ begins to reign as a Man of Blood’

Summary

Introduction

It was 11 September 1649 and Nicholas Bernard, a Protestant minister and former chaplain to James Ussher, huddled with his congregation inside Drogheda. They bowed and prayed while Drogheda's walls were pummelled and breached. As the fighting neared, one ‘Bullet shot through the Doore touched my hand’, Bernard later recounted. Cromwell's invading soldiers could have massacred them, ‘but by a speciall providence of God [they were] preserved’. An old acquaintance, one ‘sent of God’, was among Cromwell's soldiers and saved the congregation from death. Subjected to Protestants’ indiscriminating vengeance, providence saved Bernard's congregation.

Although Drogheda has attracted the scholarly attention due a massacre of near-mythic infamy, no one has provided a comprehensive assessment of the military providentialism. After detailing sermons preparing the godly for conquest, I focus on the sack of Drogheda. The godly had a complex view of these enemies. The guilt of the defenders of Drogheda, be they English royalists or Irish Catholics, was compounded by the belief that they refused to bend under providential dispensations. The chapter then focuses on post- Drogheda sermons. These eschatologically infused messages argued that the godly needed to temporarily become comfortable with the prodigious bloodshed – with one sermon even praising men ‘of blood’.

The Irish Rebellion of 1641

English beliefs about the Irish were complex, just like those they held about American Indians and other enemies. There were, however, many more occasions for positive and negative interaction over an extended period, dating at least to Laudabiliter issued by Pope Adrian IV in 1155, which granted Henry II the right to invade Ireland.3 Tudor and Stuart successes and failures in Ireland provide an important backdrop to the conflicts of the 1640s and 1650s. In particular, the English Reformation foregrounded religious differences. Centuries of accumulated injustice and prejudice led to hardened beliefs about the ‘other’.

In the 1640s and 1650s, no major armed groups in Ireland kept their hands clean. According to Frank Tallett, ‘If England represented the low point on the barometer of violence, Ireland represented the highest’. Scotland ‘occupies a mid-point’. In the late 1630s and early 1640s, it looked as if the Ulster Scots might join their Scottish brethren by rebelling against Charles’ policies and administrators.