Empire: World History - 233. Blood and Betrayal: Oliver Cromwell's Irish Invasion (Ep 1)

Episode Date: February 27, 2025

His statue may stand proudly outside the Houses of Parliament in London, but in Ireland, Oliver Cromwell is remembered as “the Devil from over the Sea” for the bloodshed he unleashed there from 1649 to 1653.  Rising to prominence as a Parliamentarian during the English Civil Wars, Oliver Cromwell sought revenge against the Catholics who had killed Protestant colonists in Ireland during the rebellion of 1641.  Soon after overseeing the execution of King Charles I, Cromwell feared that Ireland would be used as a backdoor to England by Royalists, and he took violent measures to stop that from happening. The sieges at Drogheda and Wexford saw some of the worst massacres to occur in Irish history. What happened to ordinary people during the misery of the 1650s? And what legacy did the Cromwellian Conquest leave in Ireland? Listen as Anita and William are joined once again by Professor Jane Ohlmeyer, author of Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism and the Early Modern World, to discuss how Irish Catholics were displaced and dispossessed as a result of the Cromwellian Conquest.   _____________ Empire Club: Become a member of the Empire Club to receive early access to miniseries, ad-free listening, early access to live show tickets, bonus episodes, book discounts, and a weekly newsletter! Head to empirepoduk.com to sign up. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk  Blue Sky: @empirepoduk  X: @empirepoduk goalhanger.com Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Anouska Lewis Senior Producer: Callum Hill Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mparpoduk.com. And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durimple. Looking very smug today, possibly because my entire computer system melted down in the most catastrophic and stressful. What do you mean you said nothing? I could hear you chortling away in the background. And you rang me to rub my nose in it. I just thought you might need some tech assistance. I was always willing to help.

Can I just say, you know you're in the end of days when Willie Dalrym brings you up to give you tech support? You know, basically, our time here is almost over, people. This is one of the many horsemen of the apocalypse. Anyway, we're here now. And listening to all this prattle, the most patient woman. on God's Green Earth, it is Professor Jane Olmeyer, author of Making Empire, Ireland, imperialism and the early modern world. We heard from her in Jerpur, and you might remember we talked about plantations, not plants, people, corporate imperialism in Ireland, using the city of Derry, stroke, London Derry, stroke, stroke city in Northern Ireland as a prism through which to understand how colonial practices and policies played out and how they were a laboratory for what

many people would use as a template for colonisation. And what I think is really interesting is how little of this is known in Britain. The Irish know this history very, very well. I went through 10 years of education in the British curriculum, and I never came across any of the stuff. Well, Jane, welcome, welcome, welcome. And you are going to hold our hands and take us through one of the most contentious periods of Irish history, and that is Cromwellian conquest, Oliver Cromwell,

who many people will see if they ever go to Westminster, his statue stands proudly outside the Houses of Parliament. Famously, a man who wanted to be displayed warts and all in his portrait. He was having his portrait done and thought it was too pretty and he said, you put it in. I want people to see me as I am. So let's start with the mid-17th century and let's have a portrait of the man himself. Tell me who he was, what's his origin story and what was he like? Hi, Anita. Hi, William. Great to be back. Remember, William? The English never remember and the Irish never forget. It's one of those wonderful stories. Anyway, Anita Cromwell. So in England, of course, as you said, he's revered. It's this great parliamentary hero. And in Ireland, he's excoriated as God's execution. And in Scotland. And Scotland, too. And the devil beyond the sea. I mean, he's the most vilified man possible. But Cromwell's a fascinating character. And obviously he was a military genius.

He was born in 1599 just outside Cambridge and really lived much of his early life as an ordinary country gentleman and he's in his 40s when he becomes an MP. I hadn't realised again quite how posh he was. I'd presume that he was sort of urban middle class and he wasn't. He was landed gentry. He was landed gentry but he's in his 40s before he sort of finds God and becomes a politician

and goes on to be probably the most celebrated or one of the most celebrated military figures in British history. What I find so interesting about him is, are his religious beliefs. He believes he has a direct line to God. He actually reads as almost sort of messianic, if you read his letters and his speeches. He is the hand of God and the kind of the reaper of wrath for God and very much appoints himself to that role.

It doesn't read well to a modern eye. It definitely doesn't. But of course he comes to Ireland and commits some of the world. of the worst atrocities in Irish history at Drahada and Wexford, and we'll come back to those. But he is vilified in Ireland as God's executioner as this satanic figure, this devil beyond the sea. And in the Irish folklore archive, it records social memory. And all of these sort of testimonies were taken in the 1930s. And Cromwell is mentioned, he's only second to Daniel O'Connell in terms of how he's remembered in social memory.

And to this day, there's a generation who will hiss when they hear Cromwell's name. I mean, he really is vilified, especially amongst Irish Catholics, for what he did in Ireland. But of course, he was just one of many Englishmen who did, you know, dreadful things in Ireland. And just to give us a context of the world that he was born in, we're talking about the accession of Charles I. What does Britain look like? What does England more particularly look like? and how does it fit in the context of Europe? Well, he's born in 1599, so at the end of Elizabeth's reign,

and he comes to maturity during the reign of King James I's 6th and 1st, and then later Charles I first his son. I think England at this point is a bit of a non-entity on the world stage. It's a country that really is beginning to, if you want, establish itself. It's a period of westward expansionism. But Ireland is where a lot of its attention is focused and that pacification and conquest of Ireland has happened under Elizabeth. And now Ireland becomes, if you want part of this westward enterprise, as England not just moves into the Atlantic world,

but of course with the East India Company into Asia and the other corporate bodies into Asia as well. I've just been watching Wolf Hall on the telly. And he is related to Thomas Cromwell, isn't he? Through his mother, isn't that right? Yeah, there's some distant relationship. Yes. No, you're absolutely right. Yes, his great, great grandmother, if you want to put a pin in it, was the sister of Thomas Cromwell of Wolf Hall fame. So, you know, he's got this sort of direct lineage to history. Also, can I just tell you, I mean, Huntington, where he was born and the formative part of the world for him. It's a really beautiful, even now, you know, full of fields. It was John Major's old constituency. And they're very, very proud of this sort of Cromwellian roots that they had. And just very recently, they had an exhibition about Cromwell's head.

And his body was briefly at the end of my road in London. Yes, that's right. Yes, that's right. Right. So, look, Ireland we haven't spoken about. So we've got an idea of what England looked like. But what about Ireland? How is Ireland faring as young Oliver Cromwell is growing up?

Well, in Ireland during this period, it's been militarily conquered. And it's all about how Ireland is now made English. So there are attempts to make the majority a Catholic population Protestant, but also then to civilise Ireland. When I say civilise, I have an inverted quotes because that really means how can Ireland be anglicised? How can the English language be introduced, the English legal system,

how Ireland can be commercialised. And we talked about that when we talked about dairy. But English is the language of the courts, of commerce, and it becomes increasingly the lingua franca. And it's very much associated with the Irish being civilised, again, in inverted commas. But during this period, There are a number of minor rebellions, but one reason why Ireland has been pacified because of

the destruction on the foot, not just of the nine years war, but then the flight of the earls. And what you find is that there's the exercise of martial law during this period. And so imperialism is all about the exercise of power and violence and a bed of pikes underpins English rule in Ireland, including the first half of the 17th century. And we should remind people, if you haven't heard the previous episodes with Jane do go back. I mean, solid, solid gold stuff in there. But the flight of the Earls is basically the entire opposition that could have stood up to the English and to colonialism,

takes off and heads for the continent. And so Ireland is sort of bereft of leadership at that time of any kind of meaningful resistance. Absolutely, Anita. And not only that, because you see if you want the leadership fly to the continent, obviously they're hoping to come back, but that then paves the way for the plantation of Ulster. And the consequences of that will be,

talking about today. We said he sort of came from quite a gentrified background. He also gets power at a reasonably early age because you see Oliver Cromwell become an MP for Huntington, his hometown, at the age of 29. Is there any evidence early on in his parliamentary career or in his speeches that he has a bigotry towards Catholics or indeed an antipathy towards Ireland? The simple answer is no. He is anti-Catholic, but he actually also then is somebody who believes in what we would call religious. It's toleration. In other words, toleration of other Protestant sects, basically. He himself is what we call today a Puritan. In other words, a hard-line Protestant, more like maybe Presbyterians, they believe you want to get away with the trappings associated with

Catholicism. In Ireland, the majority of population is Catholic, 80% at least. So if he's not set in stone at the beginning of his career, it is probably the Irish rebellion of 1641 that wakes something up in him. So first of all, I mean, just tell us what happens in 1641 and why it's important. So basically, in October 1641, a major rebellion breaks out in Ireland, whereby the Irish Catholic insurgents sees major strategic places around the island. They fail to take Dublin. Because a drunk reveals the plot, as the Owen O'Connellie gets drunk and tells everybody what's about to happen. Sadly, yes, the stereotype comes in there. However, very quickly, the Irish insurgents are able to control huge swathes of the country.

Now, that military force that's shown is accompanied by extreme violence. So we see the wholesale massacre of Protestant colonists. And this then triggers equally vicious attacks by government forces against the Catholics. we would call it today ethnic cleansing, verging on genocide, the sort of violence that is unleashed, obviously triggered by the Catholic rebellion, but met with force far greater. Do we have any idea of numbers? I mean, you know, when you're talking about sort of ethnic cleansing and genocide, those are hefty terms. What are the numbers involved? Let's be very clear. That word ethnic cleansing and genocide are never used in the context of the 17th century. What we're seeing, their later terms, what we're seeing are thousands and thousands of people losing their lives. We don't have precise figures.

And people have tried over the years, and all it does is if you want fuel propaganda mills. But we should recognise that despite the fact that these atrocities are played up by the English and become the excuse for counter atrocities, that they do exist. I mean, I've got estimates in front of me here that in some areas, from 17 to 43% of Protestant settlers are killed, maybe 4,000 people. Does that sound right to you? That does. It's funny, I'm involved in a big project at the moment where we're actually trying to give

some estimates of people who lost their lives. We don't actually know, but we've got an amazing archive called the 1641 depositions, which are like eyewitness testimonies of what happened in 1641. Now, there are documents of conquest in that they're collected to justify the subsequent expropriation of Irish land, but they nonetheless give us these incredible insights into what life was like in colonial Ireland, because people list all of their losses, and having listed their losses, they go on then to say what their own experiences of the war were

and what then allegedly happened. So we've got eyewitness testimony, then we've got hearsay testimony, and we're able to now systematically go through all of these depositions, and there's about 8,000 of them, an estimate, we hope with some degree of accuracy, the numbers of deaths,

But just for your information, going back to Willie's figure, people have suggested that over the course of the 1640s, about a third of the population of Ireland died either in the original massacres or in the subsequent war. Many of them would have been on the foot of the actual military incursions, but many thousands died because of the famine, the plague that followed the armies and these slash and burn techniques that were used. You also have attacks on the Irish in England, don't you? There are counter atrocities of Irish emigrants living in London and around the country. Yeah, well, what happens is, of course, the English propagandists use the outbreak of war in Ireland to feed this anti-Catholic, anti-pulpery, is how you'll see it in the records, hysteria. And that is used very effectively by the parliamentarians. And this is what Cromwell would have been seeing.

in whipping up this hysteria against Irish Catholics. So then we're seeing sectarian attacks in Wales and England, particularly on the foot of other military incursions, Naisby or some of the big battles. Right. And also, I mean, this coalesces when the parliamentarians are grabbing all these headlines and using them and you've got this frenzy of anti-Catholicism, attention turns to Charles I,

because there is a perception, certainly among many English parliamentarians, that he has too many Catholic sympathies. I mean, first of all, why do they say that about Charles? And is it true? He's a committed Anglican. However, his wife, Henrietta Maria, is a French princess and she, over time, would have allied very closely with the Irish Confederates, as the Irish insurgents are later known. So Charles himself, though, is a committed Anglican. I think it's unfair to describe him as a Catholic, but he has many friends as well. And he's not sympathetic to the Irish cause to begin with, but over time he turns to Ireland for support, and that, of course,

then fuels the anti-Catholic hysteria around him. And just to get the dates established, 1641 is the Irish rebellion, 1642, the English Civil War begins. And it's really at the end of the Civil War that Cromwell turns his attention to revenge on the Irish. And the reason he does that, William, is because Ireland is always a strategic threat to England. It's the back door to England. And he knows that Charles will look to Ireland, and particularly the viceroy or the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Duke of Ormond, one of the great butlers who is in charge of the royalist cause there. Butler being the family name rather than he wasn't carrying wine around restaurants. No, I guess once upon a time he might have in terms of the royal

court, but no, he's an Anglo-Norman settler who's been there for centuries. James Butler, Duke of Ormond, he really runs the show in Ireland for much of the 17th century. And Cromwell realizes that he has to take out that royalist army if he's ever going to secure the peace in England. Well, so this is the leap. You know, parliamentarians are often men who have very long lunches, no, soft bodies. But the image that we have of Cromwell is a man who don's armour sits on a horse and leads the charge.

So at what point does he turn from parliamentarian to soldier? Remember in the 1630s, there are no parliaments? And that's one of the big gripes against the king, is that he, doesn't call Parliament. So I don't think Cromwell's a particularly effective politician. However, he's a very effective military commander. And this really happens after 1642. And entirely self-taught, he hasn't got a military training. No, no, no. And again, it's just quite extraordinary. But it's really Cromwell who sets up the first, if you want professional army in England. It's called the new model army. And this new model army, say by 1646, has become an formidable force. And they're

very much professionally trained, but they're also infused with this sense of being godly troops, especially any of the troops around Cromwell. He uses Protestantism to fire them up. And so it's an army, a very formidable army that he brings to Ireland. And it's a veteran army. These guys now have been seasoned in English warfare, and he deploys them along with a large war chest to Ireland in 1649. So again, just for clarity, 1641, the rebellion, 1642, the Civil War breaks out. January 1649, Charles I, gets executed. And it's at that point that Cromwell gathers the army and takes them across the Cito Island. So tell us what happens. They land where? So it's in August 1649, a Cromwell's army. And we're talking about 55,000 men, and a vast war chest,

land very close to Dublin. So they immediately secure Dublin. And then they want to take out the cream of Orman's army, the Duke of Orman's army, which is stationed at a place called Drogheda, which is north of Dublin on the edge of the pale, this area that would have been traditionally controlled by the English. So he immediately marches north and Drogheda is besieged. It's besieged between the third and the 11th of September 1649. When it refuses to surrender, the troops obviously just charge the city and we see a bloodlething just that has never been seen before in Ireland, something like 3,000 royalist troops are killed in hot and cold blood, all of the Catholic clergy and any Catholic religious are murdered, along with an unknown number of civilians, probably around 500. And much of this is done in cold

blood. In other words, it's a premeditated massacre that's occurring here. I'd love to read his speech, which gives a measure of his sort of slightly messianic quality. This is him in Dublin just before he goes to Drogheda, and he talks about his purpose as the great work against the barbarous and bloodthirsty Irish and all their adherents and confederates for the propagating of the gospel of Christ, the establishment of truth and peace, and the restoring that bleeding nation to its former tranquility and happiness. He's very much seeing himself as God's own sword, doesn't he? But, you know, it also reminds me of Delhi and what happens in Delhi as well, you know,

this kind of bloodletting. And there's an account. 1857, you're talking, yeah. Yeah, 1857 a lot later. But, you know, you've got sort of an account by a man called Morrill who describes Cromwell riding in on his horse and in his armour and seeing piles of bodies of his men. and the blood is up. And he says, and this is a direct quote, it was the site of fallen comrades that was the occasion of Cromwell issuing the order for no quarter. In Cromwell's words,

in the heat of action, I forbade them, meaning his soldiers, to spare any that were in arms in the town. And that night they put to the sword about 2,000 men. That does not include the women and children who also get caught up in this bloodlet. Here's another quote again, showing his sort of extraordinary sense of it being the sword of God. He wrote to a friend that truly our work is neither from our brains nor from our courage and strength. But we follow the Lord who goeth before and gather what he scattereth, that so all may appear to be from him. So when he's doing this a fusion of blood, he's seeing it as God's work. Yeah, they did, and including Cromwell himself, and it's really interesting to see how he justifies what he's.

He's done at Droghade. He says it's a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches who've imbrewed their hands in so much innocent blood. So it's a direct reference back to 1641. Again, God is telling him to do it and it's in punishment. We're punishing them for the rebellion of 1641. But Cromwell then goes on to justify the massacres on the grounds that it would terrorise other royalists and Irish Confederates into surrender. So I think there's also, he wants to make an example if you want of strada. But it's not Christian behaviour. Shall we put it that way?

We've talked about the massacres of Leonis. That's one interpretation, but it's very much seen by him to be Christian behaviour. However, there are acts of enormous betrayal, which nobody can justify as Christian behaviour. For example, you know, there is a man, a governor who is promised that he will live and leave with 200 men if they surrender. And so they do. And so what happens instead is that they are disarmed, they're taken to a windmill, and they're killed about an hour after they surrender.

The said governor himself, they take his wooden leg and beat him to death with it because they believe it's filled with gold. Now, that is both venal, that is deceptive. I mean, nobody can argue. But do people know that that kind of thing is happening at the time? Or is there something that we discover later? Well, people in Ireland know. And obviously, that's very much part of popular memory.

And the other thing to remember is of those who die lose their lives in Drodha, the vast majority of them are actually Protestants. In other words, it's not actually Catholics that he's killing. It's the cream of Ormond's army. And that includes Irish Protestants who have been serving the royalist cause, Charles I first. He feels no sense of conscience at all at the murder of these captives.

He says, I believe we put to the sword the whole number of the defendants. I do not think 30 of the whole number escaped with their lives. Those that did are in safe custody. for the Barbados. In other words, they're going to be shipped off to become plantation slaves in the West Indies. And, you know, before we go to Barbados, it might be worth noting he does what he does in Drodda, and then he does the same again in Wexford. So it's not a one-off on the contrary. He goes to Wexford,

and another 2,000 people are killed again, many civilians, and it's just an absolute massacre. And the reason he goes to Wexford is because Wexford is where the Navy is stationed. So, I mean, let's talk a little bit more about the expulsions and what happens to those who are then shipped off out of Ireland, never to see their home again. What happens is after these big military victories at Drodda at Wexford, Cromwell then goes on basically to clear the other Irish towns. It does take a long time. He leaves Ireland and leaves his son-in-law, Henry Arriton, to finish the business. But what he also institutes is the transportation of thousands of Ireland. Irish, mostly Catholics, to Barbados, and then after 1655 to Jamaica. But this is effectively

a death sentence for the thousands. Initially, it's men and then with time, it's women and children as young as five who are also shipped to the Caribbean to work on the sugar plantations there. Remember at this point, Britain has a number of colonies there. Well, with a third of the Irish population now, I think, killed, shipped off or suffering in some terrible way. What is to become of Ireland? Join us after the break. Welcome back. Jane, we were just looking at the claps of the Royalist Army, the incredible death toll and the mass emigration, forced emigration,

that takes place after this. Just give us an idea, what sort of estimates would you give to the death over the whole period of the 1640s who is suffering? which bit of the population is being wiped out by these wars? Deaths numbers are always guesstimates, William, but we reckon about 300,000 people. And it's obviously men, women and children because they're not just dying as a result of the insurrection or military action.

Thousands of people are dying from famine, from plague. There's a particularly brutal bout of plague in 1650, which is, of course, then spread by these armies. And as always, it's the most vulnerable that bear the brunt of war. I'm doing a big project on women, and we can see women literally carrying the war on their backs. So the Irish population is now much diminished, and the Catholic population is reduced to its knees by the Cromwellian conquest, which actually is only completed in 1652. And again, I just wonder what the English made of all of this, because certainly when news of, again, 1857 and the massacres that took place after the mutiny come back, there is a mixed reaction. There are some people saying, this is going too far. This is just awful. Some

people saying, bravo, well done. You need to teach them a lesson. I have seen etchings from this time. So pictures were coming back of the kind of desperation of absolutely emaciated ribs sticking out children and their desperate hollow-eyed mothers. They knew. They knew what was happening. Anita, you might be talking about some of the famine etchings, but there are woodcuts that are done in an amazing pamphlet called The Tears of Ireland from 1642. which basically show some of the atrocities committed allegedly by Catholics against Protestants. Exactly. Yeah.

So these are propaganda images. So that's all they got. Okay. We know from there are so many descriptions, and this is where the 1641 deposition archive is just incredibly important, is that both sides suffer dreadfully and especially non-competence, the women, the children. So those later images are appropriate here because the level. of suffering would have just been absolutely ghastly. Right, okay.

Just to take forward Anita's analogy with what was happening in 1857. 1857, you have got a Times war correspondent in Delhi, and reports are going back to London of what's happening, and people are fulminating Dickens famously says, delete Delhi. But do you have any sense that people in England are aware of the suffering in Ireland at this time, or is it just the atrocities done to the Protestants, which are publicised? I think there is an awareness, but I think there's a sense that, well, they're Catholics. And again, let's go back to Edmund Spencer, this othering we've seen of Irish Catholics. Actually, this is a good thing because what it does is create more opportunity for English adventurers to seize Irish lands and to civilise, again, in inverted commas, the barbarous, wild Irish, who are basically second-class citizens, they're subhuman.

So in a way, Cromwell has done England, a big, favor here. It is again extraordinary that I mean, I've studied Spencer in literature classes at no point did we learn that Spencer was this sort of adventurer trying to drive Catholics out of their homes and create a Protestant Eden in their absence. Well, what Cromwell has done is what Spencer dreamed about. So I think that's how it would have been received by, if you want, Protestant England. Now, there's a very different reception in Catholic Europe. There, there would have been much greater sympathy for what has happened to Ireland. And during this period, actually Catholic Europe was interfering very directly in the Irish Theatre of War. And first Spain and later France

wanted to become protectors of Ireland. But again, they're doing it for, you know, geopolitical reasons as well as a bond of Catholicism. And, you know, as if they needed more propaganda. In 1651, it gets put about that English supply convoys are not safe because they're being attacked by whatever is left of Irish resistance. And the reply, the response is harsh. I mean, the message goes out, if you travel more than two miles outside of military base, you are not safe from, you know, these people who want to slit your throats and take what's on your wagons. Is this when the destruction of food happens in response? Is that what happens? And tell us a bit about that. What you have is, as part of the Cromwellian conquest, you get slash and burn

campaigns. This is vintage tactics in an Irish context that you deny your enemy food and you get the Cromwellians. They're in these locked up in sort of strategic castles and garrisons and they want to starve the local population in as much as they can. That combined with the plague is devastating. I think again, it's very hard to just capture the level of misery that we would have had in Ireland in the early 1650s. And where we see this reflected very powerfully is in the Gaelic or Bardic poetry of this period, which depicts Ireland as completely and utterly destroyed. Hibernia has been laid waste by these boorish upstarts, i.e. the Cromwellians. Do we have any epics dedicated to this period? Are the Gaelic epic poems about all this stuff?

Oh, of course there are, William. What they capture, though, is just the destruction of, if you want, the Gaelic, Irish-speaking, culture, way of life. And obviously, you know, the people themselves, especially the elite and the political leadership that has been annihilated. Because in addition to those who are shipped to Barbados, to Jamaica, we also have tens of thousands being shipped into the army's of the continental powers, especially Spain and France. And remember, it's in England's interest to rid Ireland of its swordsmen, because effectively it's a death sentence as well. And so it's the beginning of those wild geese that we associate with the later period.

And in this later period, I mean the emptying out, as you say, you know, you can do it through scorching the earth, you can do it through sending people away or putting them to the sword. There are actual edicts that are put in place, like places like, County Wicklow, which many of us will know, they say, look, these are free fire zones. So free fire zones are placed in our quote, where anyone, anyone found in the free fire zone can be taken slain, destroyed as enemies, their cattle and goods shall be taken or spoiled as the goods of enemies. So this is a completely, let's empty this out. Anyone who's found here is a combatant.

That's it. Military rule on steroids is what it is. It really is. A bed of pikes. Jane, you also get the 1642 Adventurers Act reallocating land from the defeated Catholics to incoming settlers. This is hugely important, William. Remember, land equals political power. And because of the Irish Rebellion of 1641, we see the mass expropriation of thousands of Irish people who were allegedly involved in the 1641 rebellion and their lands then being reallocated to English adventurers. hence the Adventurers Act, i.e., these are people who've invested in helping suppress the insurrection, but also soldiers, these soldiers that serve in Ireland need to be paid.

35,000 of them get given land. Get given land because it's a cheap way of paying them. Now, this is massive because over the course of the 1650s alone, something like 2.5 million Irish acres are redistributed from Catholic hands into Protestant hands. And when you combine that with the Irish land that has been confiscated as part of the plantations, over the course of the entire 17th century, the total figure is about 8 million and 2.5 million just from the 1650s. That 8 million acres represents a third of the landmass of Ireland. A third? A third of the landmass of Ireland. I mean, it's huge. And also it's

the best quality land. Because what happens is that we get, and many Irish, Catholics who have been dispossessed of their lands. And then they are forcibly transplanted to the west of Ireland, west of the Shannon, which obviously has the best views, but the worst land. And that's this phrase to hell or to Connacht. Hell being Barbados and Connacht, of course, being the west of Ireland. So, I mean, it's devastating. Jane, there is a figure here I'd love to run past you. It says that before the uprising, 1641, around 59. percent of Irish land was in Catholic hands, and at the end of this whole horror, less than 22 percent. In other words, it's gone from 60 percent to 20 percent. That's roughly right. We

think the current figure, again, I've got colleagues who are working on this, is probably about 52 percent of the land in 1641 was held by Catholics, and that's reduced to 22 percent after Cromwell gets his hand on this. So it's a very, very significant. And as I say, It's not just about the quantity, it's the quality of the land as well. So give us an example of someone who is disinherited at this time. What's the sort of story that we have in the records? The Cornwallians were great record keepers. So we actually have very detailed accounts of the thousands of people who were transplanted.

They're called the Transplanters Certificates. And it will describe, you know, Bridget Murphy, age 22. She was married to, I don't know, a column. They had three children. They owned two cows. And they were transplanted from their homes, say, in Wicklow, to somewhere in County Galway, which is in the West. So all of this is documented.

And it's a huge archive, again, that I'm working on in the context of a major European Research Council grant on the lived experiences of women. So hopefully this is an area that will really be able to bring to people's attention like never before because it's these ordinary people that are no longer landowners, they become landholders. And the disruption is phenomenal. And just to give a picture of this figure, let's say that this woman with two cows is sent from the east coast off to the distant west. Is she given a sort of map reference of where her new land will be?

Is she given a bus to get in? No, she just walks and hopes for the best when she gets there. She has to walk, yeah. It's completely unregulated in that sense. People will have been making their own way. And a lot of people, I mean, the roads in Ireland are dreadful in this period. So actually getting from east to west is extremely difficult, especially in the winter months. So these were long, arduous journeys. And many people didn't even make the journey. They would have died en route. And when they arrive on the way, are they being met by officials who are saying you've got to a croft over there, or are they just sort of turning up and trying to find a bit of bog that there was cultivating? Yeah, sadly, it's not organised at all. You're just given a patch of land and expected to make do. So all of this has great resonance with what's going on in Gaza today,

this transplantation of people, their property from their homes to somewhere, that they have no associations, no links whatsoever. There are so many other, though, very interesting parallels. I think the ethnocentricity that we're seeing displayed, but also these examples of extreme violence. So I feel that if you want to see Gaza today and want to understand that, part of that is actually looking at what's going on in Ireland in the 16th and especially the 17th century. So, I mean, would that explain partly why Ireland and, you know, particularly President Michael D. Higgins, they've been so outspoken about what's going on in Gaza. In fact, you know, they stand quite apart from a lot of countries by going as far as they do to criticise what's going on in Gaza.

I think it does, Anita. I think you have to remember that of all the countries in Western Europe, Ireland is the only one who has experienced this intense colonisation. And dispossession. Absolutely. And it's profoundly shaped who we are. And of course, we're seeing this coming out in modern day politics. Well, I mean, it's a fascinating place to pause. Join us next. time when we're going to be talking about something that actually appears in your iPhone calendar. Just go on, have a look right now. The Battle of the Boyne, it comes up.

But we're going to talk about the Battle of the Boyne. This is all the run-up to what becomes a really important chapter. And probably the most crucial battle in Irish history, would you agree, Jane? Yeah, it doesn't deserve to be. It should be Ochram, but we'll talk about that. Okay. Great. Well, look, to find out more, join us again.

And if you can't wait, of course, you know what. You can get this early if you're a member of the EmpirePod. Empirepoduk.com is where you'll find us. Empirpoduk.com. You get early access to all of these mini-series. You get access to tickets to our live shows, which are coming up later this year. So until the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye from me, William Duremple.