In 1847, at the height of the Famine, the evicting landlord, Major Denis Mahon of Strokestown House was murdered. In the subsequent fanfare of publicity, the most sensational (and false) claim was that the local parish priest had preached the previous Sunday that "Major Mahon is worse than Cromwell and yet he lives". Two centuries after his brief nine months in Ireland, Cromwell's name was so talismanic that its very invocation could plausibly be cited as sufficient cause for a bloody murder. The young James Joyce, exploring "the long memory of the Irish", wrote: "he does not forget the sack of Drogheda and Wexford: How could he forget? Can the back of the slave forget the rod?"
For others, Cromwell was a hero. Contemplating the ruins of Drogheda with Jonathan Swift in 1728, Thomas Sheridan claims that he "often heard the memory of Cromwell celebrated like that of a saint". In 1798, Lord Aldborough decorated his gaudy new house in Dublin with statues and paintings: alongside Achilles, Alexander and Caesar, he displayed King William and Cromwell.
The very name "Cromwell" had become shorthand for a complex set of attitudes, all resting not so much on the man himself, but on his being symbolic of the defining moment in Irish history. The new landed gentry of Ireland was primarily established on the back of Cromwell's conquest; so was the crushing defeat of Catholic Ireland. For winners and losers alike, his name evoked that moment when "Cromwell came over and like a lightning passed through the land" (Bishop Nicholas French). Nothing was to be the same afterwards. No wonder that Cromwell became a bete noir in Catholic circles.
If one looks (as this book does not) at contemporary Irish-language poetry, one can see the indelible mark that "clan Cromwell" left. It was Cromwell "do chriocnaigh Eire" ("finished off Ireland"). His memory was most execrated among the humiliated old Catholic gentry, replaced by what they saw as "scum na sagsan" ("English scum"), whose republican politics and plebian origins as poor bakers, shoemakers and tailors offended the aristocratic and royalist sensibilities of the Catholic Pale gentry. They saw themselves as a gentry of the blood rather than of the sword.
For the Catholics, Cromwell stood for their definitive dismissal from public life in Ireland. They were now "like worms - trod upon by a mean and regicide colony" of "little phanatick scabs". After Cromwell, Catholics saw themselves as living in conditions "worse than the Christians under the Turks or the Israelites in the bondage of Egypt". A whole community had become recessive "as if they were in a remote exile of bondage".
Because Cromwell left such a bitterly divisive political legacy, he also left an equally divided historiography. This climaxed in the late nineteenth century when the revamped and triumphalist Catholic Church occupied centre stage in Irish life. One of its manifestations was a thorough revision of Irish history to emphasise the indestructible age-old bond between Catholicism and the Irish nation. In this narrative, Cromwell was a vital character.
Inevitably, a major book on Cromwell appeared in 1883-written by the Jesuit Denis Murphy - and it created a politically correct Catholic version of Cromwell. In many ways, Tom Reilly's book is an attempt to peel off this distorting layer to reveal the real Cromwell underneath. It also claims to be the untold story of Cromwell in Ireland, vindicating his alleged massacres in Drogheda and Wexford, and claiming that this "apolitical exercise in exculpation" shows "Cromwell's compassionate policy towards Irish civilians".
None of this is convincing. The book's real (and easy) target is Murphy and the popular memory of Cromwell; if the author had chosen to write about the construction of that memory, he would have been on safer ground. The Cromwellian period has been the subject of massive - and masterly - research in recent years.
This fresh approach - sometimes grandiosely called the "new British history" - successfully reinserts Ireland back into the mainstream history of these islands. Little or any of that complex and challenging new work - by John Morrill, John Kenyon, Conrad Russell, Scott Wheeler, John Adamson, Jane Ohlmeyer, Micheal O Siochru, Padraig Lenihan, Toby Barnard, Nicholas Canny, Breandan O Buachalla, for example - is ever cited, let alone absorbed here. The best part of this book - too often shallow, excitable, tendentious, partisan and impatient in the face of evidence - is the appendix where one can read Oliver Cromwell's own vigorous prose.
Cromwell knew exactly what he was doing in Ireland. Drogheda was "a righteous judgement of God upon these barbarous wretches who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood". Wexford was "the righteous hand of God upon such towne and people" whose earlier piracy was now being punished, making them "vomit up again their stolen riches". As for the Irish Catholic Church, they might "bridle, saddle and ride" their own people "at your pleasure" but for Cromwell, "they are a part of Anti-Christ", "whose kingdom the scripture so expressly speaks should be laid in blood".
As God's Englishman, Cromwell claimed "I meddle not with any man's conscience" but immediately adds; "if by liberty of conscience, you mean a liberty to exercise the mass, I judge it best to use plain dealing . . . that will not be allowed of." His Irish campaign he saw as repaying catholic barbarities in 1641: "We are come to ask account of the innocent blood that hath been shed". If Irish Catholics continued to resist, their fate would be "misery and desolation, blood and ruin' which Cromwell would inflict with a clear conscience - he "would rejoice to exercise utmost severity against them".
It is this religious motivation which explains why Cromwell - restrained in England - was so bloody in Ireland. The crucial part of his Irish campaign happened before he landed in Dublin - the crushing defeat by Michael Jones of Ormonde's royalist forces at Rathmines. His subsequent success was due not so much to his military prowess as to superior logistics, notably the supply of war materials by sea. There is an interesting book to be written about Cromwell in Ireland; this is not it.
Professor Kevin Whelan is Michael Smurfit Director of the Keough-Notre Dame Centre in Dublin.