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Between 1639 and 1653, the whole of the British Isles was engulfed by civil war. Despite popular opinion, however, it was not pitched battles that dominated the fighting, but sieges. Not for nothing did one veteran of the conflict comment: ‘We make war more like foxes than lions, and you will have twenty sieges for one battle.’ In Ireland, the fighting was at its most brutal, and the conflict is often referred to as the Irish Wars of Religion. Sieges equally dominated the fighting here: Oliver Cromwell is credited with capturing 25 fortified towns between August 1649 and May 1650, but didn’t fight a single battle. Despite this dominance, it is only relatively recently that historians have started to pay proper attention to sieges and fortifications, and there has not been a dedicated study of sieges in Ireland until now, with the welcome arrival of Pádraig Lenihan’s Siege in Ireland.
The author’s approach has not been to provide a chronological history of fortress warfare, but instead to take the reader through the tactics and methods used during the conduct of sieges. He begins by looking at the sneak attack, highlighting both the abortive attack on Dublin Castle in October 1641 and Cromwell’s capture of Wexford in 1649. If this failed, then blockade was next, and this is the subject of the second chapter. This brought with it demoralisation, hunger, and sickness, which leads nicely on to the third chapter, where the besieged are exposed to fear of famine, bombardment, plague, or the sack. The tactics and weaponry of the siege are explored in Chapter 4, and here the author reveals that Irish armies were skilful in constructing siege works and embedding artillery. Besiegers sometimes employed other methods as well: for example, during the 1642 siege of Limerick, attackers attempted to under-mine the walls of King John’s Castle, and to counter this, the defenders dug a mine of their own. Contemporary thinking was that, to take a well-defended fortress, the besieger would need to outnumber the besieged by a ratio of 7:1. As one of the book’s 14 tables demonstrates, this was never achieved in Ireland.
A ‘storm’ – or assault – might follow the artillery bombardment: a preferred tactic for Cromwell who did not have the patience for long, drawn-out sieges. This is illustrated by means of several case studies, including that of Clonmel (1650). But the storm was hazardous, something demonstrated in Chapter 5. A successful storm would often be followed by hours (sometimes even days) of sack and slaughter, and here the author provides a thoughtful study of the storm of Drogheda, the most notorious, at least in popular culture, of all of Cromwell’s sieges. Lenihan draws interesting parallels with Cromwell’s sack of Basing House, in Hampshire, in 1645 and General George Monck’s storming of Dundee in 1651, concluding that rather than ‘fruitlessly search for rules, and “right” and “wrong”, it is better to think of mild or harsh customs and usages’. In England, storms were ‘restrained affairs’, compared to Scotland, ‘where the storm was more brutal’, and Ireland, where warfare was ‘the most brutal of all’.
Comprehensively researched, Siege in Ireland explores the whole spectrum of fortress warfare, looking at the tactics and methods of besiegers and defenders alike, as well as at logistics and recruitment, and the overall strategies of the protagonists. It was a form of warfare that impacted soldiers and civilians alike: the latter were more likely to encounter it as participants and as victims than any other kind of military action. This long-overdue study is supplemented by nearly 40 illustrations, and here is my only criticism: the maps of various sieges are in black and white, and shading is used to represent higher ground, which sometimes makes the map difficult to read. But this is a minor quibble in what otherwise is an excellent book.
REVIEW BY DAVID FLINTHAM
Siege in Ireland 1641-53
Pádraig Lenihan
Four Courts Press, hbk, 286pp (€45)
ISBN 978-1801511728
