Wishing to be painted warts and all, Cromwell has been portrayed in Ireland as all warts, except by descendants of those who secured a place there as a result of his actions. In this ambitious and original book, Sarah Covington takes up the surly sitter's invitation to the artist to incorporate “all these roughnesses, pimples, warts and everything” (246). In a dazzling cultural biography that traces this controversial figure's impact and afterlife, from the massacres at Drogheda and Youghal to the Northern Ireland peace process of the 1990s, Covington offers a series of portraits, richly rendered, that frame the individual whom John Milton called “our Chief of Men” from a variety of angles, each adding to a cumulative sense of the slipperiness of the subject under scrutiny. In Covington's hands, Cromwell emerges as a mercurial figure akin to Milton's Satan, by turns vilified and celebrated as an iconoclast. For some readers, this might make her of the Devil's Party; for others, it will affirm the tangled nature of traumatic history.
Covington's immersive examination of a pivotal figure in Irish history is impressive in its depth and detail. She has a connoisseur's nose for vignettes, making this Cromwellian collage a model of the range of insights that can be achieved at the intersection of cumulative and incremental research. While the braided cross-period approach may not appeal to all readers, Covington's work fits beautifully into the recent historiographical trend toward commemoration, memorialization, and memory studies more broadly. Her exhaustive exploration of public memory, or social memory of Cromwell's fraught legacy, is a vital contribution to the “folkloric turn” in the historiography of early modern Ireland that she has championed. “Unofficial histories,” made more accessible by digitization and new databases of online material, prompt new ways of thinking about the past. Covington's sympathetic attentiveness to an alternative archive, including popular depictions of historical actors and events, makes a refreshing change from the well-riffled repositories and circular or sanitized debates of official histories.
There is another point to be made here: large repositories like EEBO and ECCO encourage a nonhierarchical approach to sources, since keyword searches invariably unearth texts that would not be found in standard reading lists. Covington's teeming notes and extensive bibliography speak to her own engagement with a vast sweep of material, oral and written, over a prolonged period. The Devil from Over the Sea took ten years and it shows. This work differs dramatically from the deep dive into the Irish campaigns conducted by Micheál Ó Siochrú in God's Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (2008). Ó Siochrú's monograph brought Cromwell to book for a more mainstream readership than hitherto, but Covington's longer lens brings to the surface stories overlooked in scholarly accounts. She is a virtuoso source-miner with a horologist's eye for fine detail.
There is the odd oversight. James Joyce's allusions to Cromwell in Ulysses are noted, but not James Connolly's reference to “Cromwell's crimes” in his song “Soldiers of Ireland” (1897). We are told of Walter Scott's mother Anne's unlikely recollection of meeting someone who had witnessed Cromwell's entry into Edinburgh in 1650, nose-first, as it were (245–46). Her son's more pointed allusions to Cromwell in “Rokeby” (1813), his narrative poem of the civil war, and his novel, Woodstock, or The Cavalier; A Tale of the Year Sixteen Hundred and Fifty-one (1826), where a fiery Presbyterian preacher praises the sword “welded in Ireland against the walls of Drogheda,” are overlooked. This is in keeping with Covington's desire to include voices less listened to, and to let hearsay be heard.
Covington's conclusion suggests that “Ireland itself has changed,” and with it the imprint of Cromwell on cultural memory, but the ghosts of the past are not so readily laid to rest (345). The recent brouhaha over the so-called “backstop” during negotiations regarding the United Kingdom's departure from the European Union is proof of the persistence of plantation history. The 300-mile land border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic had been forgotten at earlier stages of the process. Ireland was the altar on which prospective social change in England was sacrificed to colonialism, laying the groundwork for a lasting imperial monarchy. Ireland is the key to the failure of progressive politics in England. The present British state, with its two European land borders, is a product of Cromwell's conquest of Ireland in 1649–53 and the capture of Jamaica in 1655, a direct attack on Spanish colonial interests. While Ireland remembers Cromwell, England forgets colonialism.
Cromwell's decade of dominance straddled the reigns of Charles I and II (the former beheaded in 1649, the latter crowned King of Scots at Scone in 1651). As Charles III takes the reins in 2023, Cromwell's portrait in the attic acquires a fresh coat of paint. In 1995, Charles, as Prince of Wales, made the first official visit to Ireland by a member of the royal family since Irish independence. In 2023, Michael Higgins became the first Irish President to attend the coronation of a British monarch. The two were co-patrons of the Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool. Meanwhile, a descendant of Sir Charles Trevelyan, another villain of Irish history, has said the family would consider a request for reparations from the Irish government. History persists. Trevelyan, notorious as the central relief administrator during the Great Hunger, is a complex character in his own right, deserving of the kind of treatment Covington accords Cromwell, and indeed in Charles Trevelyan and the Great Irish Famine (2004), Robin Haines began such a necessary process of revision. Depicting demonized persons in Irish history merits the intense level of engagement brought to bear in Covington's erudite and devilishly detailed case study.
