ABSTRACT
A few months after the less than enthusiastic response to the Thanksgiving for Burford, there was a fast for the success of the army in the forthcoming campaign in Ireland. John Clopton noted in his diary:
In March Cromwell had set out his principles to the Council of State and later to the General Council: it was the Irish who inspired the greatest fear in him. Their Catholicism singled them out. Cromwell like the rest of his country – men and women – had been bombarded with propaganda depicting the Irish Rebellion as a mono-causal war aimed at the extirpation of Protestants and Protestantism. This publicity campaign originated in the large scale enquiry into the rebellion begun on 22 October 1641. The enquiry sought interrelated information: the names of rebels and the acts that they had committed; the losses that the Protestants had incurred; and a narrative of the rebellion. The method of enquiry involved assembling a collection of depositions taken from fl eeing refugees at Dublin and elsewhere. The names of the rebels were important as the depositions were intended to provide the main
evidence for prosecutions once the rebellion had been defeated. Such evidence would also provide grounds for the confi scations of property that would fund the repayment of the investors (adventurers) who gave money to parliament to counter the rebellion. Parts of this information made its way into the public sphere, via parliament. A report on the rebellion was presented to the House of Commons by Dr Henry Jones, Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College, Dublin on 16 March 1642. This eighty-two page report was accompanied by a transcript of eighty-fi ve edited depositions, selected to provoke anger and a desire for retribution in the readers and listeners. Parliament was impressed by the content and ordered the report and the depositions to be published.2 In 1646 as fi ghting drew to a close in England and Wales’s war, more of the content of depositions made its way into the public sphere. Sir John Temple produced The Irish Rebellion, which would act as a justifi cation for and a spur to parliament’s attempt to launch a new campaign to re-conquer Ireland after the fi rst civil war in England and Wales had ended. Due to the anger these intentions caused in the New Model Army and their contribution to the political impasse that led to the army occupying London and driving its chief opponents from parliament, these plans had not been developed far.
