The conduct of war and the effects of warfare in the Irish Confederate (or Eleven Years) War of 1641-53 and the Thirty Years War in Germany in 1618-1648

The conduct of war and the effects of warfare in the Irish Confederate (or Eleven Years) War of 1641-53 and the Thirty Years War in Germany in 1618-1648

This essay will try to establish the intensity, scale and conduct of warfare in these two wars of the early modern period in Europe. It will examine the adherence to codes of conducts and institutionalized mechanisms of war in contrast to breakdown of discipline, unlicensed pillaging and atrocities. It will try to examine the socio-economic relations of warfare and assess these effects on both soldiers and civilian populations.

With regard to that, the realities of warfare first of the Irish War and then of the Thirty Years War will be discussed. Then, perceptions of the war and actual demographic consequences for the two warzones will be examined. Lastly, a conclusion will be drawn to what extent similarities and contrasts can be observed between the two conflicts.

Prior the Irish rebellion in October, king Charles I. licensed the use of martial law to deal with potential unrest across Ireland in April 1641, following his decision to disband Strafford’s enlarged Irish army. Therefore, by the time the rebellion broke out, martial law was a well-recognized, and frequently invoked, weapon of coercion, used in times of peace and war, against combatants and non-combatants alike.^[1]

Following the outbreak of the rebellion, thousands of terrified refugees fled to Dublin, Scotland, or England. Each side accused the other of starting the killings: While Catholics claimed, that the Lord Justices had given orders “to spare neither man, woman nor child“,^[2] Protestants “embellished“ the 1641 depositions, a collection of accounts of eyewitness experiences of the rebellion, originally compiled as legal evidence of loss and criminal activity and to be able to restore the lost property after the quashing of the Rebellion, to their advantage and misused them as an instigator and a justification for sectarian warfare.^[3] A blatantly sectarian proclamation, blaming the disorder on “evil affected Irish papists“ without distinction, issued by the Dublin administrators, and the brutal and indiscriminate reprisals of Sir William St Leger and Sir Charles Coote persuaded the Catholic Old English to throw in their lot with the native Irish insurgents.^[4]

An example of the brutal reprisals was the burning of Clontarf, after rebels had robbed an English boat that had ran aground off the coast of the village, killed a miller, who tried to stop them and compelled another man to convert to Catholicism in December of 1641. Coote took retribution by setting the whole village on fire, driving Catholics out of their homes. This, however, didn’t deter the rebels, fishermen, who looted what was left on the ship just a few days later.^[5]

That they were breaking the law was admitted by Protestants such as Edmund Borlasse, who conceded that they had sometimes acted“contrary to the laws of Arms and Christianity“, but he justified this as an understandable response to the savage excesses of the Catholic Irish.^[6] Commanders like St Leger were also conscious about the existing laws, but stated that in the situation of the rebellion “the Magna Charta must not be wholly insisted on“. In a declaration of January 1642, the Lord Justices did still make the distinction as they only allowed the execution of “any pillager, or any rebel or traitor“ but on the other hand their interpretation of who was guilty of inciting the rebellion was very general, as they ordered to specifically target women, who were in their view “very forward to stir up their husbands, friends and kindred“. They based these orders on the depositions of some fleeing Ulster Protestants, who reported that individual women had incited violence, but that was just the veneer of justification.^[7]

As the initial ravaging subsided, due to the deaths of Coote and St Leger and the slower flow of supplies to Ireland because of the outbreak of the English Civil War, the Irish Catholics gained some “breathing space“ and in the summer of 1642, the confederate association was set up by their elites, mainly to restore law and order.^[8]

The irreconcilable Dublin administration was replaced by more moderate figures such as Ormond in late 1642. This led to a gradually more disciplined English military conduct. On the Irish side, the impact of homecoming continental veterans was now beginning to have the same effect, as these men had experienced military discipline on the continent, especially in the latter stages of the Thirty Years War.^[9] These men now became commanders of the confederate armies, such as Owen Roe O’Neill in Ulster, who complained in 1642 that his men couldn’t be called soldiers because they “behave nothing better than animals“.^[10] He began to generate professionalism among his troops. The same development was initiated among the Ulster Scots by Robert Monro, who had fought in the Danish and Swedish armies in the Thirty Years War.^[11]

Conclusively, after the initial bloody, indiscriminate, sectarian butchery of the first months, the war in Ireland was mostly moderated by the observation of certain basic rules of engagement for the rest of the 1640s until the arrival of Oliver Cromwell and the siege of Drogheda.^[12]

However, the English didn’t accept that on the principle of reciprocity, the Irish would be “made equal in exchange with the English nation, and Protestants“. This was the position the Earl of Essex, fighting on parliament’s side, expressed in a letter in 1645 to Prince Rupert, a royalist commander, when he complained that the latter had executed the English prisoners in retaliation for the same number of Irish royalist soldiers being hanged by parliamentary troops after they had taken Shrewsbury. He had acted upon the principle of reciprocity and didn’t see the Irish as inferior to others, but as “His Majesty’s good subjects taken prisoner in the act of their duty“.^[13]

A 1644 ordinance was passed by Parliament, ordering specifically to exclude any Irish from any surrender agreements and from granting them quarter. Instead, commanders should “fortwith put every such person to death“. Thus, a notion of collective guilt was put onto the Irish by the English parliamentarians. Firstly they saw all Irish as guilty of favouring the 1641 rebellion, secondly they fomented publicly for their ends the threat of a “Catholic invasion“ into England itself as some royalist Irish troops – mostly of whom were not Catholic, but Protestant Irish – were shipped over by Ormond in 1644. These fears were instrumentalized to justify the inferior treatment of the Irish.^[14]

[...]

^[1] Cf. O’Siochru, M., Atrocity, Codes of Conduct and the Irish in the British Civil Wars 1641-1653, in: Past and Present 195 (May 2007), pp. 55-86, p. 59.

^[2] Cf. O’Siochru, Atrocity, p. 60.

^[3] Cf. Bennett, M., The Civil Wars Experienced, 1638-1661, London 2000, pp. 45-46.

^[4] Cf. O’Siochru, Atrocity, pp. 60-61.

^[5] Cf. Bennett, Civil Wars, p. 59.

^[6] Cf. O’Siochru, Atrocity, p. 60.

^[7] Cf. O’Siochru, Atrocity, pp. 60-62.

^[8] Cf. O’Siochru, Atrocity, pp. 62-63.

^[9] Cf. O’Siochru, Atrocity, p. 64.

^[10] Cf. Barry, G., A Discourse of Military Discipline Devided into Three Books, Brussels 1634, STC 1528, quoted in O’Siochru, Atrocity, p. 64.

^[11] Cf. O’Siochru, Atrocity, p. 65.

^[12] Cf. O’Siochru, Atrocity, pp. 66-67.

^[13] Cf. O’Siochru, Atrocity, p. 69.

^[14] Cf. O’Siochru, Atrocity, p. 68.