Cromwell is one of the most controversial and contradictory figures in British history.
Churchill dubbed him a Military Dictator; Milton, a Hero of Liberty; and Trotsky, a Class Revolutionary.
Known as both an indulgent reveller and an enduring puritanical icon, a king-killer and the ‘protector of the commonwealth’, opinion has never been settled.
A 2002 BBC poll in Britain placed Cromwell as one of the ten greatest Britons of all time; and yet his measures against Catholics in Ireland and Scotland have been characterised as genocidal with 600,000 deaths attributed to his name.
Tom Reilly, an Irish born author, here attempts to separate myth, propaganda and truth.
Despite enduring hatred within his native land, Reilly boldly determines himself to an objective appraisal of what evidence supports Cromwell’s bloody heritage, and what doesn’t.
Reilly states that to falsely blame Cromwell, or anyone else, for atrocities of the past releases those truly to blame from all responsibility.
Reilly therefore leads the charge in clearing a path to a new interpretation of history.
“No historian has ever made a serious challenge to my thesis... The counter-arguments of those academics who ventured into print with rebuttals, and those who continue to expound the traditional version of events, are singularly unimpressive... These historians have undoubtedly set us back years.”
This is a controversial work revealing a new perspective on Cromwell and the multitudinous deaths attributed to him from a time when documented evidence is fraught with inconsistencies.
Truth, they say, is always the first casualty of war.
‘Only recently have Irish historians like Tom Reilly had the scholarly integrity to get the story right.’ Simon Schama
‘He brings to the subject an enviable familiarity with the terrain and a shrewd way with the sources….Reilly knows how tainted are most accounts on which the history of the Cromwellian war rests.’ Toby Barnard, author of Cromwellian Ireland
Tom Reilly (born 1960) is an Irish author and former regional newspaper columnist. He is currently the manager of Ardgillan Castle. To date in total, he has published ten books. Reilly is a director of printing company, Burex Manufacturing Ltd. He has spent most of his working life in the printing and allied trades and is an avid local historian. He set up the Drogheda Heritage Centre along with his wife, Noeleen, in 1999 in St Mary's Church of Ireland, Drogheda, the site of Cromwell's entry into the town in 1649.
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