What happened at the Siege of Drogheda?
In September 1649 Oliver Cromwell besieged the Royalist garrison of Drogheda under Sir Arthur Aston. On 11 September, after Aston refused to surrender, Cromwell's troops stormed the town and he ordered that no quarter be given. Most of the roughly 3,000 defenders were killed, with the Catholic clergy and an unknown number of townspeople.1
Few events in Irish history carry as much weight as the eight days at Drogheda in September 1649. For many in Ireland the name stands for Cromwell himself; in England he has long been remembered as a champion of Parliament, the cavalry commander of Naseby. This article follows the siege day by day from the sources, sets out what each side was trying to do, and lays out the argument that historians are still having about who died and why. It belongs to the last phase of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, after the English Civil War had ended in the execution of Charles I, and to the longer story told in our military history of Ireland.2
Why did Cromwell besiege Drogheda?
By the summer of 1649 the English Parliament had executed Charles I and declared a republic, and Ireland had become the most dangerous base for his son. Eamon Darcy of Maynooth University stresses that the coalition Cromwell faced was not a simple Irish versus English affair: it joined Irish and Old English Catholics, most of whom had taken part in the Confederate wars of the 1640s, with Irish Protestants angered by the King's execution and English Royalists who had fled across the sea. Its commander was James Butler, Marquess of Ormond, who had signed a peace with the Confederates in January 1649.3
Ormond's advance on Dublin, the last major Parliamentarian base, began late and slowly. In July Lord Inchiquin took the smaller Parliamentarian towns of Dundalk, Newry, Trim and Drogheda, but on 2 August Michael Jones sallied out of Dublin and routed Ormond's army at Rathmines. Ormond lost many of his best officers and most of his supplies. Cromwell, appointed Lord Lieutenant and general for Ireland in May, landed near Dublin on 15 August with an army that sources put at roughly 10,000 to 12,000 men and a powerful train of siege guns.4
Cromwell's first objective was Drogheda. Gardiner explains that while it held out, the town screened Ormond, who was trying to gather his scattered forces and to bring Owen Roe O'Neill's Ulster army over to his side. Cromwell later wrote that the aim was to retake the town or to tempt the enemy to fight a battle to save it.5
Who defended Drogheda, and why did they stay?
In August Ormond gave the command of Drogheda to Sir Arthur Aston, an English professional soldier widely reputed to be a Catholic, who had governed Reading and then Oxford for Charles I; Jim Burke's entry in the Dictionary of Irish Biography traces his earlier career in Russian and then Polish service, in which he fought against the Poles, the Turks and the Swedes. A fall from his horse in 1644 had cost him a leg, and his wooden replacement made him well known in the Royalist army. Burke notes that he set to work at once to strengthen the defenses.6
The garrison was a cross-section of the coalition. Gardiner, working from the muster of 30 August, counts 2,871 men: Ormond's own regiment under Sir Edmund Verney, an English and largely Protestant regiment under Colonel Byrne, two regiments under Colonels Wall and Warren that were mostly or entirely Irish Catholics, and some troops of horse. John Morrill adds that many of the officers were English and that English Catholics made up at least a third of the garrison. Drogheda itself, he points out, had never been a Confederate town.7
Ormond's plan was rational on its own terms. Darcy writes that he hoped to tie Cromwell down in a long siege. The town sat on both banks of the Boyne, joined by a single bridge, so a besieger could not close it off without dividing his army, and Ormond intended to gather a relieving force at Tecroghan in County Meath. The weakness was that the relief never came: Inchiquin and Clanricarde sent no men, O'Neill was ill and still negotiating, and Ormond had only about 1,000 horse with him.8
How did the Siege of Drogheda unfold?
After a rendezvous north of Dublin at the end of August, Cromwell's army stood before Drogheda on Monday 3 September. For a week it dug in, while the heavy guns came up by sea; Cromwell explained that this was why the batteries took time. Inside the walls Aston wrote to Ormond on 8 and 9 September that his ammunition, money and food were running low, and, in a letter Gardiner quotes, Verney urged Ormond to bring his army to Slane and threaten the besiegers' supply line.9
Cromwell placed two batteries against the south-eastern corner of the southern town, where St Mary's Church stood just inside the wall. On 10 September he summoned Aston to surrender, “to the end effusion of blood may be prevented”, and warned that if he refused he would have no cause to blame him. Aston refused, and the guns opened fire. They brought down the church steeple and a corner tower and, after two or three hundred shot, opened two breaches in the wall.10
That evening Aston sent Ormond what Gardiner calls his last written words: speedy help was much desired, and his ammunition was decaying fast. On the morning of the 11th, while the guns widened the breach, the defenders threw up three lines of earthworks behind it.11
What happened when Cromwell stormed Drogheda?
At about five in the afternoon of 11 September the regiments of Ewer, Hewson and Castle went up the slope to the breach. Cromwell's own letter dates the assault to Tuesday the 10th, but his editors and Gardiner show that his dates in that letter run a day early. Seven or eight hundred men got in, and the defenders drove them out again; Colonel Castle was shot in the head and killed. Cromwell admitted that the defenders had fought “very stiffly”. Other witnesses describe two repulses, and Burke's entry says the town fell at the third attempt.12
Cromwell then went forward in person and led the next attack. This time the attackers broke through, took the earthworks and the church, and let in their horse. Gardiner, drawing on Royalist letters, records claims that some defenders were offered quarter at this point and laid down their arms. Ormond wrote later that the word “No quarter” went round only once the town was secure; Gardiner thought this “too highly coloured” but unlikely to be without foundation.13
What happened on the Mill Mount and at St Peter's Church?
Aston and several hundred men climbed the Mill Mount, a high mound inside the south-western walls. A Parliamentarian letter printed in Perfect Diurnal says that Lieutenant-Colonel Daniel Axtell went up with a dozen men, persuaded the governor to go into the windmill on the summit, and that those inside were disarmed and then killed. Cromwell wrote that his men, reaching them, “were ordered by me to put them all to the sword”. Aston was beaten to death, by tradition with his own wooden leg, which soldiers believed was full of gold. Morrill counts about 300 men who surrendered on a promise of quarter and were then executed.14
Cromwell went further. “Being in the heat of action,” he wrote, “I forbade them to spare any that were in arms in the town.” The killing ran down the streets, across the bridge and up into the northern town. Around St Peter's Church, where Catholic clergy had celebrated Mass days before after the Protestant congregation was turned out, Cromwell reported that near a thousand were put to the sword. Some eighty to a hundred men held the steeple; when they refused to yield, he ordered it fired, and the pews were piled beneath it and burned.15
Two wall towers held out into the next day. When they gave in, the officers of one were killed, every tenth soldier was killed, and the rest were shipped to Barbados; the men in the second tower were spared and transported too. Gardiner writes that Verney and several other officers who had at first been sheltered were killed in cold blood about a day after the fighting ended. Cromwell believed all the friars in the town were killed bar two, and both of those were killed when they were found. The heads of Aston and other officers were sent to Dublin and set on poles.16
How many people died at the Siege of Drogheda?
Cromwell's own count is the starting point. He told the Speaker that about 2,000 were put to the sword on the night of the storm, and he told the President of the Council of State that he did not think thirty of the garrison escaped with their lives. He put his own losses at fewer than a hundred killed. A list of the dead circulated from his camp ended with the words “and many inhabitants”; Gardiner noted that it appears in the official contemporary printing, and Jason Peacey, reviewing the evidence, accepts that it came from Cromwell's camp, though perhaps not from Cromwell himself.17
Later estimates differ mainly over the civilians. Gardiner put the dead at well-nigh 3,000 men and thought only a few civilians died. Morrill estimates perhaps 3,000 Royalist troops, the Catholic clergy, and perhaps 500 civilians, mainly in the heat of the fighting. At a Drogheda symposium in 1999 Commandant Jim Burke of the Military History Society, named as James Burke in the same report, gave 3,552 Royalist and 64 Parliamentarian dead and concluded that a large number of non-combatants died, and the local historian Eugene Coyle, using a figure of nearly 3,500, reckoned 500 to 700 of them were civilians and clerics.18
Were civilians massacred at Drogheda? The historians' debate
The killing of the garrison is not in dispute. Whether townspeople were deliberately killed is, and Darcy calls it the subject of much historical controversy. The sharpest exchange has been between Tom Reilly, a Drogheda local historian, and Micheál Ó Siochrú of Trinity College Dublin.19
Reilly's case, set out in books from 1993 onward and summarized at the Old Drogheda Society's 1999 symposium, is that the evidence shows a deliberate killing of Royalist combatants but not a massacre of civilians, and that Cromwell followed the protocols of seventeenth-century siege warfare. In a 2021 letter to History Ireland he challenged Ó Siochrú to show where the evidence is for large numbers of unarmed townspeople killed, adding that “an armed civilian is no longer a civilian”.20
Ó Siochrú, whose book God's Executioner devotes a chapter to Drogheda and Wexford, reads the evidence the other way. In his reply to Peacey's review he argued that in the conquest the accepted military conventions “simply did not apply” to the Catholic Irish, and that the conquest deserves to be called “a war of extermination”. Peacey, more cautious about some of the sources, still wrote that “there is of course the evidence that unarmed civilians were killed in Drogheda”. Coyle's review of Reilly's 1999 book judged that it dismissed the eyewitness accounts too readily.21
The witnesses themselves pull in different directions. Thomas Wood, an officer in the storming army, later told his brother, the Oxford antiquary Anthony Wood, that at least 3,000 died, “besides some women and children”, and that soldiers used children as shields on the church stairs; Gardiner rejected the story as the tale of a soldier known for his buffoonery. Nicholas Bernard, the Protestant preacher of St Peter's, survived the sack in his house and later described a killing aimed at men in arms and Royalists. Terry Clavin, writing in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, reads Bernard's two accounts against each other and concludes it is at least arguable that the soldiers were killing some of the civilian population in the hours after the town fell, though less systematically than they killed the garrison.22
How did Cromwell justify Drogheda?
Cromwell gave his reasons in writing within a week. To the Speaker of Parliament he called the slaughter “a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood”, and said it would “tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future”, things which, he admitted, “otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret”. The day after the storm he sent a summons to Dundalk pointing to Drogheda's fate as a warning.23
The “innocent blood” was the killing of Protestant settlers in the rising of 1641, which English pamphlets had greatly exaggerated. Gardiner and Morrill both point out that almost none of Drogheda's defenders could have taken part: the town had been besieged by the Irish insurgents in 1641 and 1642, not held by them, and many of the garrison were English. Morrill suggests the “barbarous wretches” may have been, in Cromwell's mind, the English Catholics who carried on a lost war from another island.24
On the law of war, the historians draw a line. Gardiner holds that the customs of the day allowed a commander to refuse quarter to a garrison that rejected a summons and was taken by storm, but adds that killing prisoners already admitted to quarter was contrary to the military practice of the time. Morrill writes that Cromwell followed the laws of war as they had operated in Ireland over the previous century rather than as he had applied them in England, and Gardiner likewise judges that he treated the Irish worse than the English. Darcy calls the killing of men who had laid down their arms a breach of the contemporary rules of war. Before the march Cromwell had in fact issued a declaration forbidding his soldiers to harm people not in arms; Ó Siochrú treats it as prudent military practice rather than a sign of his attitude to the Irish.25
What happened after the fall of Drogheda?
Cromwell's warning worked in the short run. The garrisons of Dundalk and Trim abandoned their towns, leaving guns behind, and Darcy adds that Carlingford and Newry also surrendered without a fight. Ormond wrote to the King that the defeat had so frightened his people that he could hardly persuade them to act in their own defense. Cromwell marched south and on 11 October his troops stormed Wexford, still in negotiation, where Morrill counts more than 2,000 dead, a larger share of them civilians.26
It did not end the war. Morrill's verdict is that one would like to call Drogheda Cromwell's Hiroshima and Wexford his Nagasaki, but that the massacres brought an end only to atrocity, not to the fighting. Waterford held out, Clonmel cost him some 2,000 men by Morrill's count, and after Drogheda and Wexford he more often offered generous terms. He left Ireland on 26 May 1650; his successors took three more years to complete the conquest, which was followed by the confiscation of Catholic land and transplantation to Connacht.27
Why is Drogheda remembered the way it is?
The historian Jason McElligott (named as Jim McElligot in History Ireland's report) argued at the 1999 symposium that literate Irish Catholics showed no strong hostility to Cromwell until the mid-nineteenth century, when nationalist writers demonized him; Morrill notes a similar argument by Toby Barnard, much challenged since. McElligott also warned against minimizing the carnage. Morrill himself calls the campaign the stuff of legend, rooted in part-truths.28
For Reilly, Cromwell's bad name owes much to partisan nationalist history; for Ó Siochrú, the evidence shows that the usual conventions of war were not applied to the Catholic Irish. What both sides accept is the core of the event: a garrison of English and Irish, Catholic and Protestant soldiers refused quarter after a storm and largely killed, its clergy sought out and killed, and a town whose own losses are still argued over. Darcy ends with the Irish phrase for the whole war, “an cogadh a chriochnaigh Éire”, the war that finished Ireland.29
Where did the Siege of Drogheda take place?
Drogheda stands on both banks of the River Boyne north of Dublin, the two halves joined in 1649 by a single bridge. The southern town, where Cromwell attacked, rises steeply from the river; the breach was made near St Mary's Church, and the Mill Mount rises at the western end of the old southern wall. The northern town around St Peter's Church lies across the bridge.30
The Mill Mount is now Millmount, in the center of the town south of the river. The earlier fortifications were replaced in the early nineteenth century by a Martello tower, which was shelled in the Irish Civil War of 1922 and restored in 2000. The complex houses the Drogheda Museum, run by the Old Drogheda Society, whose 1999 symposium on Cromwell is cited above.31
_p3.072_CROMWELL_TAKING_DROGHEDA_-_1649.jpg){kind=link}