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230 Stephen Dunford: The Journey of The IrIsh
of Cromwell’s men; and eventually enabled the Mayor of Clonmel to force from Cromwell good terms, while Hugh and his men had, under cover of darkness, slipped quietly away in safety.
In late May, when news reached Ireland that Charles 11, son of the executed King, was likely to make a landing in Scotland, Cromwell set out for England to meet and deal with this new threat. On Cromwell’s departure, the command of the army devolved on his son- in-law, Henry Ireton, and after him, Cromwell’s son, Henry commanded. The war dragged on for over two more years with the Irish gradually retreating westwards. Towards the latter half of 1650, Ormond, Preston, and ‘Murrough the Burner’ all forsook Ireland, ‘the unfor- tunate country they had helped to ruin’as one wag of the day quipped.
What remained of Eoghan Ruadh’s Army of the North was still holding out in Ulster under the command of Heber MacMahon, Catholic Bishop of Clogher. But in June 1651, this army was disasterously defeated near Letterkenny, county Donegal, when the Bishop, against the pleadings of more astute military counsellors, engaged with the enemy, com- manded by Charles Coote. Eoghan Ruadh’s only son, Henry, was executed by Coote’s order in the aftermath of the battle.
With Waterford already captured, Limerick yielded to Ireton in October 1651. It is told that an out break of the plague,a pestilence to which Ireton himself succumbed, hastened the fall of the city-in May 1652, Galway too capitulated. It was not until January 1653, however, that the garrison of the Aran Islands yielded, and a month later, ‘the last spark of freedom,’ as the small garrison of Innishboffin Island was referenced, also fell. “There on the strand,” wrote an eyewitness, “when the last flicker of the fight for freedom died, Rory O’Moore, faithful to the last, was found amongst the bravest.”
In a conflict that lasted almost twelve years, 600,000 perished either by the sword, fam- ine, or plague-this out of a population of about a million and a half. The eminent nine- teenth century Irish scholar, John Patrick Prendergast, left us this picture of Ireland in the aftermath of the Cromwellian wars:
“Ireland, in the language of Scripture, lay void as wilderness. Five-sixths of her peo- ple had perished. Women and children were found daily perishing in ditches, starved. The bodies of many wandering orphans, whose fathers had been killed and whose mothers had died of famine, were preyed upon by wolves. In the years 1652 and 1653 the plague, following the desolating wars, had swept away whole counties, so
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