MURPHY, Rev. Denis. Cromwell in Ireland. A History of Cromwell’s Irish Campaign. With folding map, plans and illustrations.

Dublin: M.H. Gill, 1883. First edition. Large octavo. pp. xxviii, 478. Olive green cloth, title in gilt on spine. Bookplate of Robinson of Rokeby on front pastedown. A fine copy.

One of the most substantial nineteenth-century Irish studies of Oliver Cromwell’s campaign in Ireland, written by the Jesuit historian Rev. Denis Murphy, whose meticulous use of contemporary sources helped establish his reputation as one of the foremost Irish historical scholars of his generation. Published at a time when Cromwell’s legacy remained fiercely contested, Murphy sought to examine the campaign through a close reading of official correspondence, military records, memoirs, and contemporary accounts. Few figures in British and Irish history have provoked such sharply divided opinions as Oliver Cromwell. To some he was a military genius, statesman, and defender of parliamentary government; to others, particularly in Ireland, he became the embodiment of conquest, dispossession, and religious persecution. Murphy’s work is notable for its detailed treatment of the military operations at Drogheda, Wexford, Clonmel, Kilkenny, and elsewhere, while also addressing the wider political and social consequences of the Cromwellian settlement.
The volume contains a folding map, battle plans, and illustrations, together with an extensive appendix of documentary material. Among the more curious inclusions is a satirical verse, preserved among the papers of the Most Rev. Dr. Coppinger, cataloguing the descendants of the Cromwellian and Williamite settlements through a roll-call of surnames:
“The Fairs, the Blacks, the Blonds, the Brights,
The Greens, the Browns, the Greys, the Whites;
The Parrots, Eagles, Cocks and Hens,
The Snipes, Swallows, Pies, Robins, Wrens ...”
The provenance is noteworthy. From the library of the Robinson family of Rokeby, whose roots lay in both Yorkshire and Ireland and who produced a succession of distinguished ecclesiastical, political, and cultural figures during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their ownership adds a further dimension to a work concerned with one of the most consequential periods in Anglo-Irish history.
An important and enduring contribution to the historiography of Cromwellian Ireland, presenting the subject, as the title of this entry suggests, warts and all. Scarce in such fine original condition.

[CAT 164]