Cromwell arrived at Clonmel on April 27, a month after Kilkenny. There is no evidence that he summoned the city to surrender. Supplies were running low when he arrived and, as in other places, there was treason to aid Cromwell’s effort. A Major Fennell accepted 500 pounds sterling from Cromwell and opened the gates to 500 Parliamentarians. But Black Hugh had some of his uncle’s savvy. He discovered the plot and arrested Fennell, who confessed on promise of a pardon. The 500 Parliamentarians were slaughtered by the Ulstermen.

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This was not the beginning Cromwell desired. On April 30, he brought up the guns and began the bombardment. On May 9, the Parliamentarians poured through a breach–and right into a trap. O’Neill had made breastworks, with a masked battery, 80 yards from the breach. The Irish fired chain shot from their cannons, and the troops maintained a continuous fire from the breastworks. Stone and timber also were hurled at the attackers. More Parliamentarians came in, only to be killed. Finally, the Parliamentarians withdrew with a loss of 2,500 men. Cromwell lost more at Clonmel than he had in all the other battles in Ireland put together. Some speculate that Cromwell would have lost even more men if the promised reinforcements had arrived.

In the end, the Parliamentarians took Clonmel not by force of arms but the lack of supplies and the ineptitude of Ormonde. The fact that Hugh O’Neill and his men managed to sneak out of town during the night before Clonmel fell also doesn’t say much for Cromwell’s vigilance.

Less than a month later Cromwell returned to England, which was facing a threat of invasion from Scotland, which had declared for the exiled Stuart King Charles II. He left Ireton in command. The war in Ireland continued on Ormonde’s forlorn hope that Charles II would come in from Scotland, but, for the most part, the Irish effort had degenerated into bands of guerrillas known as Tories. Two months after Clonmel, Bishop Hebere Mac Mahon led an Ulsterman army against Sir Charles Coote against the advice of Henry O’Neill, Owen Roe’s son. The bishop was captured, hanged and quartered on the order of Coote and Ireton. The bishop had appealed to Owen Roe O’Neill to spare Coote at the siege of Derry several years earlier.

Ireton captured Waterford on June 21 and tried but failed to take Limerick. Coote narrowly defeated the remnants of Owen Roe O’Neill’s army at Scariffhollis. At the end of 1650, Ormonde left Ireland and was replaced by the Earl of Clanridarde, who was just as despised as Ormonde and could not unite the factions. Ireton again tried to take Limerick in June 1651, and after a siege of five months, the city, under the command of Black Hugh O’Neill, yielded. Ireton died of the plague in November, but Edmund Ludlow and Charles Fleetwood completed the subjugation. Both of them later became lord lieutenants of Ireland. Galway, the last city to resist, surrendered in May 1652. The war that had begun in 1641 was over, and more than 616,000 people died in the 12 years of the war.

Many today trace the current problems in Northern Ireland back to Cromwell. The British troops in Northern Ireland are referred to as Cromwell’s Boys, and there is hardly a ruined building in Ireland whose destruction is not blamed on Cromwell.

This article was written by Basil P. Briguglio, Jr. and originally published in the October 1999 issue of Military History.

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