The Irish Fiasco: Stolen Silver in Seventeenth Century Ireland

By Geoff Quaife

Cromwell, one of Parliament's leading generals sends a cavalry officer, Luke Tremayne, to Ireland to investigate the murder of a fellow officer and to find missing silver that Spain had sent to assist the Royalist and Irish rebel cause. His mission is complicated by the actions of these opponents. A coterie of influential women, t

• Language: English
• Publisher: Book Savvy International
• Release date: Jul 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781958876985

Geoff Quaife

Born in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Graduated from the University of Melbourne with MA B.Ed. Trained as a teacher and after working in rural and city high schools and a Teacher's College he took up a position as lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of New England, Armidale NSW.

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PROLOGUE

County Cavan Ireland 1641

Simon cobb froze. the body of his friend John Otway lay scattered before him. A decapitated head, dismembered limbs, and a disembowelled torso were only surpassed in horror by the remains of John’s father, nailed to a hastily erected cross. The smell of blood and smoke eventually thawed Simon’s brain, enabling him to grasp the enormity of the crime surrounding him. Animals and humans draped the landscape in various degrees of mutilation. The manor house and its outbuildings continued to burn fiercely. Simon was too late.

After sending the female members of his family to the household of Bishop Bedell, who had been granted protection by the rebel leaders, Thomas Cobb, sent Simon to invite their neighbours, the Otways and Rutledges, to move to the relative safety of the fortified Cobb Hall. The success of rebel troops under O’Neill had provoked spontaneous peasant uprisings throughout the country. Uncontrolled gangs of marauding Irish moved through the countryside, wrecking vengeance on their supplanting English landlords.

Simon’s father, Sir William Cobb, in addition to his estates in England owned considerable property in County Cavan that he had divided between three tenants. His brother, Thomas, farmed half of the area based on Cobb Hall, while the remainder was leased to English farmers Richard Otway and Henry Rutledge. Simon and his brother David had arrived in Ireland five years earlier to learn the techniques of estate management. Sir William also hoped the frontier experience would tame David’s rebellious nature. He was Simon’s identical twin but born a few minutes later—a sequence that was to affect the direction of both their lives.

Simon’s horror turned to fear as he heard horsemen galloping up the path towards him. He panicked—and uttered a final prayer. The rebels were returning to complete the slaughter. He was no match for blood crazed animals. He would cut his own throat. He raised his dagger to just below his chin. He was about to inflict the fatal blow when he heard his name, and he immediately relaxed. It was Henry Rutledge, who had seen the smoke and flames of the Otway house from his own residence. Assessing the situation, and uncertain where the murdering horde might strike next; Rutledge readily accepted Thomas’s invitation. Somewhat unnerved, the English rode as fast as they could to Cobb Hall.

The Hall was built on the edge of a saucer shaped landscape. At the back of the house lay a steep precipice; impossible to scale, that fell away into the valley of the river Toy. In front of the house lay an extensive bog, which the removal of tons of turf had converted into a deep lake. It was crossed by a narrow under water path that few could identify, and which could be defended by a handful of men. Thomas Cobb was nevertheless realistic about the situation. O’Neill had routed the English and Scots armies, and effectively blockaded the isolated English garrisons. Most of the English had retreated into the Pale, the area radiating north and west from Dublin, where they were amazed to find the Irish gentry and most of the Irish aristocracy supported the rebellion. Cobb would get no assistance from the Dublin garrison for months. The sympathies of rebel troops, pouring into Cavan from Fermanagh and Monaghan, lay with the avenging Irish peasants, not the hated English landlords. The rebel leaders struggled unsuccessfully to control the frenzy of the Irish. Cobb had to sit tight until help came.

The sound of gunfire, and general clamour around the manor’s periphery, interrupted the evening meal of the besieged English. Before family and friends could leave the dining hall to investigate, Cobb’s steward entered it and announced, ‘Gentlemen, we have driven off a group of rebels who were chasing a fugitive along the submerged causeway. The fugitive was shot. Mr Cobb it’s your daughter, Mistress Margaret.’

The body of a young woman was brought into the house, and laid upon a trestle table. As all the women had left, Simon and David, as callow youths, were expected to minister to the inert body of their cousin. She was covered in bruises with numerous cuts and abrasions, and her clothes were coated in blood and mud, but her injuries appeared minor. A musket shot had hit her in the shoulder, and apart from superficial wounds, where it had entered and presumably exited the body; there was no major external injury. She was alive, but in their ignorance the young men could not tell whether she had fainted with the trauma of the chase and the minor shooting, or had more serious internal injuries.

Simon sat by Margaret through the night, while her father Thomas withdrew to his study and prayed. Next morning Margaret was sitting up, consuming a very large breakfast, and anxious to recount her experiences. ‘When we left for Bishop Bedell’s our escort demanded a fast pace, concerned that we might be attacked. My sisters, Ann and Mary, refused to push their favourite horses hard enough, and fell behind the main group. Mother sent me back to hurry them up. As mother and her escort disappeared around a distant bend in the road, we stragglers were set upon by men, who emerged from the ditches on the edge of the way. They killed our men and mutilated the corpses.’

‘We were taken to a cluster of peasant hovels, and forced to lie on a dirt floor—with no blankets, fire, nor food. We could hear the screams of our serving girls as they were raped and tortured. Horrible! Our captors argued in their barbaric tongue about our fate. A tall redheaded man, with a short equally red beard, entered our hut, and spoke to us in English. He would protect us as we were worth a ransom if kept alive unsullied. He said he was Captain Dermot Brady, an officer in O’Neill’s army sent to moderate the brutality of the locals.’

‘Next morning Brady left the camp with all the able bodied men. I poked my head outside, and was hit by a large rock thrown by a young boy. Women armed with cudgels, and children equipped with slings and stones, were our warders. Every attempt to leave the hut was greeted by an avalanche of stones. Apart from a bowl of water left inside the door, we received no food. Ann came up with an idea. The walls of the hovel were made of soft turf. Using the sharper rocks that had been thrown at us, we dug a hole in the wall opposite the door—a wall which backed onto a stretch of bog.’ ‘That evening the men returned, and Brady argued heatedly with the peasant leader who was a six foot, dark skinned, scar faced ruffian who spoke only Gaelic, but whose intention was clear. We should be raped, and then killed. Brady stationed himself before the communal fire, but with an uninterrupted view of our open door. Using the noise of the rebel jollifications, we widened the hole just large enough for me, the smallest of the sisters, to squeeze through. I then wriggled and squirmed my way through the bog, in places just saving myself from drowning in the deeper holes that were scattered throughout the wet terrain. Eventually, I found the road, and made my way here. Just before I reached our pathway, the men who were blockading this house saw me. I managed to get ahead of them as they were uncertain of the path through our bog, and just when I could see Cobb Hall, I felt a searing pain in my shoulder. Next thing I remember is waking up feeling very hungry, with cousin Simon at my side.’

Mary and Ann had to be rescued. Thomas questioned his daughter for more details, and then called his nephews into his study. ‘I cannot spare any men to rescue your cousins. All are needed here. The rebels are massing on the other side of the bog, at best to prevent us leaving, at worst to assault this house. No one can leave through the bog.’

‘Then how can we rescue Mary and Anne if we can’t leave the estate?’ asked Simon.

Thomas responded in a whisper, ‘There is a way. When your father built this house he constructed a secret tunnel, or rather staircase, down the inside of the precipice, which comes out on the edge of the River Toy. No one in Ireland knows it exists. Elderly artisans from his English estates built it. This secret is vital to the security of the house; therefore I cannot reveal it to anyone but close family. Consequently your cousins’ rescue has to be left to the two of you, using the concealed staircase.’

David gloomily asked, ‘How can two take on the rebel hordes?’

‘The men are here investing this house. From what Margaret says, women and children will be your only opponents.’

‘Don’t worry Uncle, we will bring Mary and Ann back to you,’ replied the more optimistic Simon.

The brothers descended the steep staircase barely lit by their flickering taper, which they carefully concealed for their return journey. They emerged from what to the outside appeared to be a small cave entrance, which was already overgrown with brambles, into the dull daylight of a wet and cold November day. David’s gloom continued. ‘God’s truth brother, how do you expect to rescue the girls? You don’t even have a plan!’

Simon was slow to answer. ‘Let’s find the hovels, and see what we are up against.’

The brothers climbed out of the river valley, and crossed the woods that lay along the ridge, without fear of discovery. It would be more difficult to reach the hovels undetected, as the landscape now became a mixture of flat agricultural fields, a multitude of streams, and bog lands in various levels of inundation. The only cover were rows of low stonewalls, few of which were in an appropriate position to help the Cobb twins, although the ditches and streams were of some assistance. Luck was on their side. As they waited on the edge of the wood, trying to assess a course of action across the more open landscape, a fog swirled in, reducing visibility to a few yards.

The young men walked quickly but quietly along the track, until they could vaguely distinguish a group of huts, and the shimmering blur of a large fire. Soon the noise of children playing, and the voices of the womenfolk, confirmed they had reached their target. Simon signalled David to continue beyond the cluster of buildings, and approach the last hut from the bog side. Now crawling, they frequently went under the water, or got temporarily stuck in the soft surface. Within yards of the hole through which Margaret had escaped, they were surprised to find it remained unfilled, but a young baby faced woman, carrying a large cudgel sat in front of it. She was shouting loudly in Gaelic. Simon thought she had seen them, but David whispered to his brother, ‘She’s complaining about the cold, and why she has to stay so far from the fire.’ Simon nodded, astonished at his brother’s understanding of her language.

Simon crawled as close to the fire as he could. Several women, an old man and numerous children sat around it. He had a simple plan. He would suddenly utter a fearsome cry, push through to the fire and taking up burning embers in each hand, deposit them on the roofs of the nearest huts, and with a remaining ember he would double back, and throw it on the hut containing his cousins. All this would happen so quickly that the rebel children and women folk would have no time to react, other than to prevent their huts from burning to the ground. As the Irish woman deserted the English prisoners to combat the fire, the Cobb brothers would enlarge Margaret’s escape hole, and drag their cousins out.

Simon’s plan should have failed. The rebel families were only momentarily disconcerted by a screaming mad man, dancing around their camp fire throwing smouldering pieces of peat onto the turf roofs of their huts, which were in no danger of bursting into flame or burning rapidly to the ground. These were not the dried thatch roofs of his English childhood. Roof and walls were constructed from the turf that lay below the surface of the bogs—damp and slow burning. The slow burning peat that Luke threw onto the turf structures was therefore of no immediate concern to the group. Consequently the Irish woman who had stood guard, returned immediately to the hut in time to grab Ann, just as David had pulled her free. The guard called loudly for assistance as a tug of war ensued over Ann’s body, and Simon coming to David’s aid, slit the young Irish woman’s throat. As her blood spurted out all over Ann, she fainted. David was silently furious with his brother. He would not forget that unnecessary act. Mary followed Ann through the hole and David led her away. Simon picked Ann up, and followed his brother into the fog, as the Irish women gathered around their slain sister.

Some distance from the hovels, Simon lay Ann down on the soft turf, and waited for her to regain consciousness. He assumed David and Mary were well ahead of them. As he waited he became aware of a figure wandering aimlessly in the gloom, weeping as it went. Simon went for his knife again, and jumped upon the shadowy figure. Moments before he plunged the dagger home, he recognised it was Mary, ‘God’s Blood! Mary, I nearly killed you. Where’s David?’

‘I don’t know, he pulled me out of the hut, and told me to move as far away from it as I could. He went back to help you and Annie.’

Simon was in a quandary. Could he leave the two sisters alone in the hostile environment and go back to look for his brother? The weather that had been so kind to his enterprise now turned against him. The fog was beginning to lift, and given his experience it would be gone within twenty minutes. He decided to get the girls home. Two hours later, Ann and Mary were re-united with their father and sister. The household’s rejoicing was muted by the loss of David, whom Simon hoped would return at any time. Three days later the rebels launched a full-scale attack on Cobb Hall.

The defenders held off a direct attack along the path, and the individual attackers who with the use of wooden planks tried to cross the treacherous bog itself. Simon was on the frontline using sword and musket, when all of a sudden he heard shots coming from the vicinity of the house itself. He saw his uncle and girl cousins dragged to the front of the house, and decapitated by a tall scar faced male. Dozens of rebels were streaming out of the house, which they had set alight. Hopelessly outnumbered and surrounded, Simon picked up two discarded planks and set out as fast as he could to escape across the bog. His mind was tormented with one thought—what terrible tortures had forced his twin brother to reveal the secret staircase, through which the rebels had entered house, and murdered his family.

1

Late April 1648

Army Headquarters, Windsor Castle

Captain luke tremayne commanded a special unit of Parliamentary horse, that on the surface provided an extra-numerary troop to protect the person of Oliver Cromwell, effective leader of the Parliamentary army—an army frustrated with the failure of their master, the Parliament, to negotiate effectively with the imprisoned King. In reality, Tremayne and his men were special agents, who undertook clandestine, often illegal operations for Lieutenant General Cromwell. They were spies, investigators and enforcers. Luke was not surprised, given the looming crisis, to be summoned by Cromwell, and wondered to which trouble spot his group would be sent. He entered what had previously been one of the Royal antechambers to find the general in full military attire, and the chamber ready to be evacuated.

‘Tremayne, glad to catch you before I leave. For the last six months the Scots, who have betrayed the Parliament, and have rallied to the King, have been preparing to invade England. Royalist riots have now broken out throughout the country. Parliament does nothing. Consequently the Council of Officers, after two days of prayers, has decided that the army must take the initiative. General Fairfax will stay here and deal with expected insurrections in London and the southeast, Major General Lambert is marching north to abort the Scottish invasion, and I’m about to leave for the West.’

‘Do we join you?’ Luke asked in eager anticipation. ‘No. You leave for Ireland at once.’

Luke could not conceal his disappointment, if not anger, and peevishly responded, ‘After two years of useless talk, when time for action comes, you deprive me of a chance to enjoy the thrill of the battle. Why bloody Ireland?’ Cromwell explained, ‘Since the Rebellion in 1641 most of Ireland has been in the hands of the rebels, the Confederates, with their own parliament and government, although they pretend allegiance to the English King. There are a few outposts held for the King by loyal Englishmen, and even less by us and our then Scottish allies in the north. Scotland’s betrayal of our cause will have serious effects in the north of Ireland, and the renewed efforts of some Confederate rebels to ally with the Royalists at this critical time, could be disastrous for us. Parliament refuses to fund any operations to regain the initiative, until the problems here are solved. By then it could be too late.’

The general continued, ‘Your mission is quite specific. Colonel Angus McGregor who commanded our most westerly garrison, Castle James in northern Tipperary was found murdered outside the gates of Dublin Castle, with remnants of a treasure trove that if complete could keep an army in the field for years. Why does a loyal commander desert his post, and is then found dead on the other side of Ireland? Where did the money came from in the first place, how did Mc Gregor get it, who stole it from him, and most important of all, where is it now?’

‘Is this a clandestine mission for myself, or a military enterprise involving the whole troop?’

‘Ireland is completely lawless. Take your whole troop, and add to it in Ireland. You need to defend yourself, and effect your will by force. You will have authority from Lord General Fairfax, and the senior member of Parliament’s Committee of Safety, Lord Hinche, to override existing jurisdictions, if necessary. To be honest most of those you meet will ignore such authority. As you do not know Ireland, I have consulted my friend Sir William Cobb, whose son has spent most of his life there, and lost family and friends during the Rebellion of 1641. Lieutenant Simon Cobb will be your deputy.’

Luke winced at having a new officer thrust upon him, but recognized his complete ignorance of Irish terrain, language and political complexities.

His prejudices surfaced immediately as his first thought of Ireland was the English maxim that if you put an Irishman on a spit, you would always find another Irishman to turn it. On that basis Luke believed that parliament had a simple strategy to keep Irish Catholic rebels, Royalists—both Irish and English, and Ulster Presbyterian Scots at each other’s throats. This would make the army’s task easier, once the reconquest of Ireland was given priority.

Luke took his leave of Cromwell, and as he left the chamber he smelt the undeniable odour of a burning fuse. He turned, raced back into the chamber, and threw himself full length at the General. Both thudded to the ground, as a loud explosion demolished most of the room. A royal table, under which their skidding bodies stopped, proved an effective defence against the flying shrapnel and falling masonry.

Neither man spoke for some time. Luke finally broke the silence. ‘Sir, after this you must rescind our orders regarding Ireland. Your personal bodyguard must be strengthened. We will stay with you to deflect any further attacks.’

‘There’s an assumption! Was I the target of this attack? The Irish situation affects a lot of interests. You may have been the bomber’s intended victim. Take care. Leave for Bristol tomorrow, for the earliest embarkation to Ireland. Our intelligence is not secure, and your mission may already be widely known. There are few you can trust.’

‘As they say, I’ll trust only myself, myself shall be my only friend.’

The Puritan general could not resist a moment of sermonizing, ‘And then you will fail my son—but one man with God will succeed.’

Next day Luke and a troop of twenty men set out for Bristol, a journey of some four days. In addition to his core unit, Luke had added eight men under Cornet Harwood, a very religious young man who had impressed Cromwell with his desire to serve in Ireland. At noon, after cantering at a steady pace through the warm spring sunshine, Luke ordered his men to water their horses at a stream whose meandering sandy banks were adjacent to the road. As he lay propped against a tree, idly watching his men, he became aware of an anomaly. ‘Sergeant Ford where are troopers Black, Nixon, Peters and Barlow?’

‘Still be on the road?’ queried the Sergeant.

‘Hardly a useful answer,’ spluttered Luke. He checked with the troopers that had been last to arrive. They claimed that the missing troopers fell out of sight after the others passed through a dense coppice some distance back. These troopers assumed the men must have dismounted to relieve themselves. Luke was uneasy. ‘Sergeant, take six men and retrace our path to this coppice.’

Andrew Ford, Luke’s experienced sergeant over many years of active service during the Civil War, returned an hour later, perplexed. ‘There is no sign of the men, nor a struggle. We searched the coppice, and found nothing. The men probably deserted. Ireland is not a popular assignment.’ Luke was uneasy. Was Cromwell right, and the bomb at Windsor an attempt to stop Luke’s mission? The removal of four troopers could be part of the same plot.

As the setting sun shone irritatingly into the eyes of the tired troop, Luke was happy to see the swinging black and white sign of The Badger, an impressive looking inn, where he decided to spend the night. Luke approached the landlord who was unhappy about the influx of heavily armed troopers. The army did not always pay for its accommodation; and providing bed and meals for sixteen troopers could be a financial disaster. Luke pacified the landlord a little by handing over a number of gold coins. He still objected. The inn lacked the accommodation for sixteen men, and his stables certainly could not house all the horses. But as he had fought for Parliament, and had been at Marston Moor, he would help the troopers by suggesting half of them proceed a mile through the village, and stay at The Red Lion. Luke was amused. Ever since the war ended in 1646, everywhere he went, the local innkeepers had all fought for Parliament. No wonder the King lost. Nobody fought for him.

But Luke would not divide his troop. ‘No, landlord, we all stay here. Put four to a chamber, and tether the horses outside. If you need more rooms throw out any existing guests, or I will demand free board.’ The troopers were quite content with the sleeping arrangements, which were better than six men crammed into a small tent, or lying out of doors with a thin blanket for protection. They were not happy about their horses, and forced the landlord to find room for half of the animals in the stable stalls, and the other half were tethered on a rail along the internal wall of the same building.

The meal was a hash of boiled mutton