Cromwell Atlas
Huntingdon 1599Lord Protector of England, Scotland & IrelandWhitehall 1658

Oliver Cromwell

A Huntingdonshire farmer who became Parliament's best general, signed the king's death warrant, conquered Ireland and ruled all three kingdoms as Lord Protector. Follow him across the map, see where he changed the course of history and how it echoes other moments, and weigh up what historians make of him now.

First battle
Aged 43
King's death warrant
3rd of 59 names
Time in Ireland
About 9 months
Irish land in Catholic hands
60% → under 10%
Prelude

How it came to this

Three kingdoms, three different churches and one king. The pressures that exploded in the 1640s had been building for a century.

  1. 1536 to 1603Conquest and Reformation

    The Tudors reconquer Ireland, but the Reformation leaves Ireland mostly Catholic while England and Scotland become Protestant.

  2. 1603Three kingdoms, one king

    James VI of Scotland inherits England and Ireland. Three kingdoms with different churches now share a Stuart king.

  3. 1609The Plantation of Ulster

    Land taken from Gaelic lords who fled in 1607 is settled with English and Scottish Protestants, planting a grievance that erupts in 1641.

  4. 1625Charles I

    The new king marries a French Catholic princess, Henrietta Maria. Puritans fear popery at the heart of the court.

  5. 1629 to 1640Rule without Parliament

    Charles governs alone, raising money without Parliament and backing church changes that Puritans see as Catholic in all but name.

  6. 1637 to 1640The Scots revolt

    A new prayer book sparks rebellion in Scotland. To pay for war Charles must recall Parliament, and the crisis that makes Cromwell begins.

The atlas

Step through his life, drag along the timeline, or tap a pin or any event. Use the filters to pull out what happened in Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales or abroad. Diamonds mark the turning points explained below. The page address follows the event you pick, so a shared link opens on it.

England Ireland Scotland Wales Abroad Battle Siege or surrender Landing or sailing Still to come Campaign route Recent moves Shannon: transplantation line

Every event

    Where he changed the course of history

    Eight moments where Cromwell's own decisions moved events onto a new track, with the effects that still show today. Each one links back to the map.

    Parallels in history

    Cromwell's story rhymes with others, before and after him. Pick a comparison to see what was alike and what was not.

    Epilogue

    What came after

    The republic died within two years of Cromwell, but the land settlement and the union he forced outlived him by centuries.

    1. 1660 to 1662The king returns

      Monarchy, Lords and bishops are restored. Some Catholic landowners recover estates, but most Cromwellian grants in Ireland stand.

    2. 1688 to 1691A second revolution

      James II is replaced by William and Mary. William's victory at the Boyne in 1690 and the fall of Limerick bring a new round of Irish confiscations.

    3. 1695 to 1728The Penal Laws

      Catholics are barred from buying land, holding office, voting and much else. By the 1770s they own around 5% of Irish land.

    4. 1707 and 1801Union again

      Scotland, then Ireland, joins England in one parliament, as Cromwell's Commonwealth had briefly done in the 1650s.

    5. 1829 to 1909Emancipation and land

      Catholic Emancipation, then a series of Land Acts, let Irish tenant farmers buy back the land, undoing much of the Cromwellian settlement.

    6. 1922Independence

      The Irish Free State is founded, while Northern Ireland stays in the United Kingdom. Cromwell remains a byword in Irish memory.

    Two islands, two memories

    In Britain he is argued over. In Ireland he is remembered for one thing above all. The figures below show why the difference runs so deep.

    In Britain

    • 1845Thomas Carlyle's edition of his letters turns him from usurper into Victorian hero, taken up by Nonconformists and Liberals.
    • 1899His bronze statue by Hamo Thornycroft goes up outside the Houses of Parliament, where it still stands.
    • 2002Voted 10th in the BBC's 100 Greatest Britons, ahead of every monarch except Elizabeth I.
    • 2004A group of MPs, including Tony Banks, tables a motion to have the statue melted down. It goes nowhere.
    • TodayClaimed at different times by radicals, Liberals and parliamentarians, and still pictured as the Puritan who cancelled Christmas. The Cromwell Museum in his old Huntingdon school and his house at Ely keep his story local.

    In Ireland

    • 1650s‘Mallacht Chromail ort’, the curse of Cromwell on you, enters the language as one of the worst things you can wish on someone.
    • 1650s‘To Hell or to Connacht’ becomes the folk summary of the transplantation, though there is no record of him saying it.
    • 1895Irish nationalist MPs, joined by Conservatives, defeat public funding for the Westminster statue. Willie Redmond calls him ‘a canting, hypocritical murderer’.
    • 2000Drogheda historian Tom Reilly displays Cromwell's death mask in the town and is challenged to a duel by the deputy mayor.
    • TodayDrogheda and Wexford are taught as massacres, and his name stands for conquest and dispossession across the island.

    Share of Irish land owned by Catholics

    Approximate figures. The 1650s drop followed the Act of Settlement (1652) and transplantation to Connacht (1653 to 1654). The partial recovery came under Charles II; the later falls followed the Williamite war and the penal laws.

    The human cost, 1649 to 1653

    Modern estimates of how much of Ireland's population died during the conquest, from fighting, famine and plague together, vary widely.

    15%50% 0%half100%
    • Parliament had promised its investors 2.5 million acres of Irish land back in 1642. The conquest was partly a way to pay that debt.
    • Thousands of prisoners, vagrants and poor people were shipped to Barbados and other colonies as bonded labour. Numbers are disputed.
    • Catholic landowners east of the Shannon were ordered west into Connacht and Clare, onto poorer land.
    The Down Survey

    Mapping a conquest

    Between 1654 and 1656 about a thousand of Cromwell's soldiers walked Ireland with measuring chains, so that conquered land could be handed out to pay the army and Parliament's investors. Drag the slider to see how the land changed hands, county by county, then tap a county for its story.

    Catholic share of Ireland's land
    1641
    About half to over 60%
    1670s
    About a fifth

    Estimates for 1641 vary with what is counted. The Down Survey project's own mapping puts Catholic and Protestant holdings level at about 42% each of all land, with 12% outside the survey; older studies of profitable land give about 60%.

    How the survey worked

    • Fast. William Petty, an army doctor, signed the contract on 24 December 1654 and promised the job in thirteen months. The survey was accepted in May 1656.
    • Soldiers, not surveyors. About a thousand men, mostly unemployed soldiers, measured with chains using simple instruments Petty designed. Draughtsmen in Dublin plotted their figures onto gridded paper.
    • Profitable or not. Each parcel was marked as arable, meadow, pasture, wood, bog or mountain. Grants were reckoned in profitable acres, so bog and mountain often came along uncounted.
    • Close, not exact. Checked against modern measurement, its acreages run on average just over 11.5% short.
    • Huge. Petty counted 2,278 parishes. About 1,400 parish maps were drawn, each with a written terrier listing owners, religion and land use.

    Measure like Petty

    The survey used the Irish plantation perch of 21 feet, not the English perch of 16.5 feet. With 160 square perches to the acre either way, an Irish acre is about 1.62 English acres.

    Statute acres
    Hectares

    Parish maps were drawn at 40 Irish perches to the inch: 840 feet to an inch, or about 1:10,080, close to a modern large-scale plan.

    The maps' afterlife

    • 1656The survey is accepted and used to hand out land to soldiers and investors.
    • 1707Petty's barony maps, sent by sea to London, are captured by French privateers. They are still in Paris, at the Bibliothèque nationale.
    • 1711Fire at the Surveyor General's office in Dublin destroys many original parish maps.
    • 1786Daniel O'Brien copies the surviving maps. His copies disappear until 1965.
    • 1908The Ordnance Survey publishes a facsimile of the Paris barony maps.
    • 1922The last original maps are destroyed in Dublin during the fighting of 1922.
    • 2013Trinity College Dublin reunites the surviving copies online, linked to a database of landowners in 1641 and 1670.

    How to read the map: each county is coloured by its main role at each stage, drawn from the Act of Satisfaction (1653) and standard accounts of the plantations. Ownership within every county was mixed, and modern county boundaries are used. For parish-level ownership in 1641 and 1670, explore Trinity College Dublin's Down Survey of Ireland.

    Source check

    Drogheda: weigh the evidence

    The argument over 11 September 1649 comes down to one question: were townspeople killed, and did Cromwell mean them to be? Here is what each source says. Untick the ones you do not trust and see where your evidence points. Tap a source to read it.

    Every source that addresses it agrees the garrison was refused quarter once the walls were stormed, and that priests and friars were killed. The real argument is about civilians.

    How should he be viewed today?

    Historians have argued about Cromwell for 350 years, and Christopher Hill warned that each generation tends to make the Cromwell it needs. Here are the main voices, placed from most sympathetic to most critical. Place yourself on the scale at the end.

      Your verdict

      HeroVillain

      Where most historians now agree

      • He was an outstanding cavalry commander and organiser, with no military experience before the age of 43.
      • His faith was sincere. He read each victory as a sign of God's favour, and that certainty fed his ruthlessness.
      • Killing whole garrisons at Drogheda and Wexford was severe even by the harsh rules of the time, and civilians and priests died too.
      • The land confiscations, mostly carried out after he left Ireland but under his government, did more lasting damage than the sieges.
      • He protected a wider range of Protestant believers than almost any ruler of his age, while banning public Catholic worship.

      Still argued over

      • How many civilians died at Drogheda and Wexford, and whether he meant them to.
      • Whether his violence in Ireland was driven mainly by hatred of Catholics and the Irish, by revenge for 1641, or by the need to defeat royalists fast.
      • Whether words like genocide or ethnic cleansing fit the conquest and the land settlement.
      • Whether he was a sincere servant of his conscience, as Morrill argues, or a devious and ambitious politician, as Hutton argues.
      • Whether he defended Parliament or wrecked it, since he purged or dismissed one parliament after another.

      Myth or fact?

      Eight things people say about Cromwell. Make your call on each, then see the answer.