5 - THE BRITISH ISLES

Summary

But the confederates, affrighted with the news that the Rump was sending over an army thither, desired the Prince by letters, to send back my Lord of Ormond, engaging themselves to submit absolutely to the King's authority, and to obey my Lord of Ormond as his lieutenant. And hereupon he was sent back. This was about a year before the going over of Cromwell.

In which time, by the dissension in Ireland between the confederate party and the Nuntio's party, and discontents about command, this otherwise sufficient power effected nothing; and was at last defeated, August the 2nd, by a sally out of Dublin, which they were besieging. Within a few days after arrived Cromwell, who with extraordinary diligence and horrid executions, in less than a twelvemonth that he stayed there, subdued in the manner the whole nation; having killed or exterminated a great part of them, and leaving his son-in-law Ireton to subdue the rest. But Ireton died there (before the business was quite done) of the plague. This was one step more toward Cromwell's exaltation to the throne.

(Hobbes 1990: 162–63).

The Irish events that Thomas Hobbes here recounted in his Behemoth took place from 1648 to 1650. Hobbes himself spent most of the 1640s in French exile from the civil wars that were devastating his native England. Shortly after returning to England, he published Leviathan, with its famous declaration that without a sovereign to establish order the life of humanity is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”