To Hell or Connaught
The English civil war which established Oliver Cromwell in power as England’ dictator (or protector as he liked to call it) was actually just one of series of conflicts that made up the wars of the three kingdoms, involving England ireland and Scotland. Following the successful Irish rebellion of 1641 which restored ruling power to an Irish catholic confederation, the country became entwined in the ongoing wars between the English parliament, the king, and the scottish. After a decade of fighting, Cromwell took his new model army to Ireland in 1649 and set about his own personal conquest of Ireland in which a devastating victory over the catholics and royalists, soon degenerated into a program of ethnic cleansing. By 1653, 600,000 had perished in the war, and the land from three of its four provinces was prepared for further plantation amongst cromwell’s soldiers. They already knew that the parliamentary purse was empty and had been promised land in lieu of wages. The 850,000 catholics that survived the war were forced to vacate this land for this purpose. In 1653, catholic nobility and clergy that had not fled the country were to killed on sight. Slave traders from bristol were given license to choose men, women and children for transhipment as slaves to the west indies. The licenses raised money for cromwell’s bankrupt government, and the demobbed model army soldiers who became the new landlords were allowed to recover some lost earnings by selling prisoners as well as being authorised to sell their families into slavery.
There was a limit to how many men, women and children could be shipped across the Atlantic, and the remaining population was to be either eradicated or driven west to Connaught. The date was given as the 1st of May 1654, that any catholic found east of the Shannon river was to either be executed or enslaved.
The roads into Connaught ‘were lined with the families of stricken people, hunted from the places they knew, and going where they knew not whither.’
Connaught would be their refuge, but it would offer cold comfort and only the prospect of starvation in this wild land that had never really been agriculturally settled.
The near million refugees who traipsed westward, had nothing, no wealth, shelter, food or income. The Bristol traders set up offices in their makeshift camps along the main routes, and offered money and food in return for contracts of indentured bondage. Signing up for a few years of slavery would allow your family to reach Sligo or galway or one of Connaught’s other main towns with enough money to buy food and shelter and survive the next winter. None of these refugees knew what lay in store them when they reached these western counties, and hence an expression became popular, which summed up their fate; ‘To Hell or Connaught’.
