Siege of Drogheda
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Drogheda, a town in eastern Ireland, was besieged twice in the 1640s, during the Irish Confederate Wars, the Irish theatre of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The first siege occurred during the Irish Rebellion of 1641, when Phelim O?Neill and the insurgents failed to take the town. The second and more famous siege happened in 1649, during the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, when the New Model Army under Oliver Cromwell took the town by storm and massacred its garrison.
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The first siege 1641-1642
After their victory over government troops at battle of Julianstown, an Irish rebel force under Phelim O?Neill laid siege to Drogheda in December 1641. The rebels, who were mostly from Ulster and about 6000 strong, did not have siege artillery (or indeed any artillery) to breach the walls of Drogheda and so blockaded the town, hoping to starve it into surrender. Drogheda was garrisoned by about 2000 English soldiers under Colonel Tichborne.
The rebels tried three assaults on the town. On the first occasion they simply tried to rush the walls. In their second attempt, a small party of 500 men broke into the town at night through dilapidated sections of the walls, with the aim of opening the gates for a storming party of 700 men outside. However, the initial incursion was repulsed in confused fighting and in the morning, the garrison opened the gates to rebels outside, only to take them prisoner once they entered the town. The rebels tried for a final time in March 1642, when a relief of the town was imminent, attacking the walls with scaling ladders, but were again repulsed. Shortly afterwards, English reinforcements arrived from Dublin, under Colonel Moore. They broke the rebel siege and also drove them out of Dundalk and back into Ulster.
Cromwell?s siege 1649
Oliver Cromwell landed in Ireland in August 1649, to re-conquer the country on behalf of the English Parliament. Drogheda was by this time garrisoned by an English Royalist regiment under Arthur Aston about 3000 strong and also some Irish Confederate troops. Cromwell had around 18,000 men and eleven heavy, 48 pounder ,siege artillery pieces.
Cromwell became known in the English Civil War as an excellent soldier, particularly as a commander of cavalry, but he had little expertise in siege warfare. Rather than go through the lengthy process of blockading a fortified place into surrender, he preferred the more risky but quicker option of assault. He positioned his forces on the south side of the river Boyne, in order to concentrate them for the assault and because he was not worried about whether supplies would enter the town from the north. His cannon battered two large breaches in the town?s medieval walls from long range and on the September 11th 1649, Cromwell ordered the assault.
Infamously, Cromwell, in his own words, "forbade them [his soldiers] to spare any that were in arms in the town". The garrisoned was massacred, some of them after they surrendered, as were any Catholic clergy found within the town. Arthur Aston was beaten to death with his own wooden leg, which the New Model Army soldiers thought had gold hidden in it. Richard Talbot was one of the few members of the garrison to survive the sack. Only 150 Parliamentarians were killed in the attack. This massacre became infamous in Ireland almost instantly and remains so today. However, some more recent analyses have argued that Cromwell?s orders were not exceptionally cruel by the standards of the day, which were that a fortified town taken by assault was not entitled to quarter.
Sources
- Padraig Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at War, Cork 2001
- Jane Ohlmeyer, John Keegan (ed?s), The Civil Wars, Oxford 1998.
See also
References
- Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Siege_of_Drogheda" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Drogheda, used under the GNU Free Documentation License
