Drogheda, Battle of

Siege of the southern garrison town of Drogheda, County Louth, by Oliver Cromwell's Parliamentary forces in September 1649, during Cromwell's Irish campaign (1649-50). When the town was taken, 4,000 Irish were massacred, including civilians, soldiers, and Catholic priests. The merciless killing contributed to Catholic Irish hatred of English rule in Ireland.

The Irish had supported Charles I's Royalists in the English Civil War (1641-49) as part of their Great Rebellion against the English government in the 1640s. Cromwell's army was taking revenge for this collusion and the Portadown Bridge massacre of Protestant planters (settlers) in 1641.

The massacre at Drogheda, 1649 Cromwell's army contained 12,000 men, while the Irish rebels in Drogheda numbered just 2,220. Cromwell surrounded the city and on 10 September 1649 ordered the commander of the Irish troops to surrender. Sir Arthur Aston, an English Catholic commanding the rebel soldiers, refused to do so, believing that the city walls and defences made Drogheda safe against Cromwell's siege.

A single wall running all the way around the town protected Drogheda. It was 6 m/20 ft high, 1.8 m/6 ft wide at the bottom and 0.6 m/2 ft high at the top. Unfortunately for the Irish this seemingly strong wall proved no match for Cromwell's cannons, and the walls soon began to crumble. Ships of the Parliamentary navy were sent to blockade the harbour, and Drogheda was soon cut off from all reinforcements and supplies. Within days the Irish were running low on food and ammunition. The situation in the town was not strong for the rebels either. Many of its inhabitants would have been happier to surrender and welcome in the English army.

Cromwell's cannon broke down the walls and his soldiers entered the town. The Irish rebels continued to fight on, but the situation was hopeless. They were heavily outnumbered and low on supplies. Cromwell ordered that Aston and all others found in possession of weapons were to be killed. Many of the English soldiers, however, took this order further than Cromwell intended and many civilians were killed in the bloodshed that followed. The English Puritan soldiers killed all Catholic priests as if they were soldiers of the Irish rebel army.

According to some accounts, by the end of the massacre at Drogheda the English Parliamentary soldiers had killed 4,000 Irish, well in excess of the 2,220 soldiers that Aston had commanded at the start of the siege. Only 30 survivors of the rebels were recognized, and these were sent to work as slaves on the sugar island of Barbados in the Caribbean.

Impact of the massacre on Irish history Cromwell justified his actions at Drogheda in a letter to William Lenthall, the speaker of the English Parliament, by stating that he had carried out ‘a righteous judgement of God upon these barbarous wretches’. He believed that the spilling of blood at Drogheda would ‘tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future’.

The events at Drogheda have acted as a source of conflict in Ireland. Nationalist Irish believe that Cromwell's actions were an unjustified slaughter of many innocent civilians and priests by an army intent on murdering Catholics. The fact that the massacre followed the events of the rebellion in 1641, such as Portadown Bridge, and the refusal of Aston to surrender has been used by Protestants to defend the actions of Cromwell.