To study the actual work undertaken and achieved by Cromwell and his government is the object of this chapter.
From this study we shall find that whatever was Cromwell's first intention, and whether he did or did not offer the Irish the famous choice above mentioned, the weight of his hand fell in reality not on the mass of the people, but on the upper ranks of society and especially on the landed proprietors.
On February 14th, 1653, the lonely island of Inishboffin, off the coast of Galway, the last spot within the British seas over which the royal flag of England still floated, surrendered to the soldiers of the Parliament.[1] After eleven years of destructive warfare there was again peace in Ireland. Rather might one say that a stillness as of death reigned over the island. Over 600,000 people, men, women and children had, according to Sir W. Petty, perished during those years.[2] The survivors—still, according to Petty, about 850,000—were reduced to the utmost extreme of misery. Ireton on his march to besiege Limerick passed through tracts where for thirty miles together there was neither a house nor a living soul
- ↑ Cromwell had left Ireland on the 29th of May, 1650.
- ↑ It is probable that this estimate is far below the truth. In the early stages of the war the garrisons of Dublin and Drogheda carried on a veritable war of extermination against the natives. "The inhabitants being all destroyed by the English garrisons for fifteen miles round and the dogs only surviving, they fed on their masters' dead bodies, and had become so dangerous for passengers that the soldiers were careful to kill them also." (Prendergast, following Barnard). And the Census of 1659 attributed to Sir W. Petty gives the whole population as only about half a million. His published statistics and calculations cannot altogether be trusted.
