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  86 6 Londonderry There are two things you can get from aiding the civil power, and two things only—brickbats and blame.1 The story goes that the Irish Taoiseach, or Prime Minister, Bertie Ahern, on a visit to the office of the British foreign secretary in 1997, was unhappy to see a portrait of the “murdering bastard” Oliver Cromwell , the seventeenth-century perpetrator of a brutal slaughter in Ireland. Apparently, Foreign Secretary Robin Cook had it taken down.2 Ahern’s preoccupation with the portrait shows that the fallout from atrocities in Ireland has a long half-life. We should not be surprised, then, to learn that the management of the blame for the British Army’s 1972 shootings of civilians in Londonderry has taken almost four decades. Cromwell is remembered in Ireland for the events of September 11, 1649. His forces took the fortified city of Drogheda, north of Dublin. The Royalist commander, actually an Englishman, Sir Arthur Aston, would not surrender. Cromwell’s artillery made a breach in the fortifications, and, after a failed attempt, he led his men through. In the fighting that followed, he gave no quarter. Between two and four thousand people were killed. Cromwell reported his victory in a letter to the Speaker of the Parliament of England, William Lenthal. He describes the assault against both “horse and foot, and we only foot” that drove the defenders back. Cromwell’s men “getting up to them, were ordered by me to put them all to the sword. And indeed, being in the heat of action, I forbade them to spare any that were in arms in the town, and, I think, that night they put to the sword about 2,000 men.”3 Some who surrendered the following day were spared but sent to Barbados. In the letter, Cromwell mentions the “heat of action” as an excuse, but he knows it is inadequate; later in the letter, he offers justifications for his Londonderry  87 order, which otherwise is a matter of “remorse and regret.” The justifications are reprisal for earlier massacres of Protestants and the benefit of a fearsome reputation “to prevent the effusion of blood for the future.” Neither is convincing. Of the earlier massacres, “there can have been few—if any—at Drogheda who had taken part in them; certainly not the officers, certainly not the English soldiers.”4 If terror were an acceptable strategic efficiency, Cromwell would have used it elsewhere. Beyond his excuse and justifications, he submits an unvarnished account of what transpired and admits he ordered the slaughter. He had an alternative. Cromwell might have chosen the option of vain command in the manner of Shakespeare’s Henry V before the walls of Harfleur. He resisted the temptation to let blame fall. Neither did he evade responsibility for his deeds in England. He signed the death warrant for King Charles I. The king’s execution cost Cromwell political support; Cromwell’s biographer, Antonia Fraser, says that accounts from that time suggest that there was little public support for the action and that Cromwell was well aware of that.5 Counterfactually, a more Machiavellian and blame-sensitive leader would have had Charles I meet with an accident or succumb to illness. Plots existed to poison the king. Alternatively, the king could have been killed while attempting to escape. Cromwell rejected such tactics. In fact, he took measures to protect the king.6 Despite the political costs of the public execution, Cromwell took responsibility for it. After the event, the poet John Milton tried to restore public support by writing an extended justification for the tragic choice Cromwell had made.7 The year of the execution, 1649, was a bad year for Cromwell, as well as for his opponents. But he did not evade his responsibility, in January, for the execution of the king or, in September of that year, for the slaughter in Ireland. Oliver Cromwell was a responsibility-taking murdering bastard. In the seventeenth century, Catholic Ireland was a security concern for English governments in their struggle with the major Catholic European powers, France and Spain. Alliance between the Irish and these powers posed a danger, and, apart from the land itself, this security threat explains England’s continuing interest in establishing a sizable and dominant Protestant community in Ireland. Demands for “home rule” and independence grew in Ireland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth...

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