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In 2023, I was asked to give a local history talk in my London home borough of Hackney about the connections between Ireland and Stoke Newington, an area with a proud history as a place hospitable to 'dissenters'. Dissenters were members of various 'NonConformist' Protestant traditions who refused to conform to the practices of the Anglican Church of England. They included the Stoke Newington-based authors Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797).
With hindsight, I really shouldn't have been so surprised to discover that seventeenth-century Dissenting Stoke Newington was home to a key figure in the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland: Charles Fleetwood (c.1618-1692) - fervent Puritan, Lieutenant-General in the English Parliamentarian Army and, for a time, Lord Deputy of Ireland.
Featured locations:
From Fleetwood House to Fleetwood Street
For years, I had walked past the fire station on Stoke Newington Church Street, not registering the significance of Fleetwood Street beside it.
That name is the only reminder today that the site was occupied until 1872 by a mansion that came to be known as Fleetwood House. In 1664, the widower Charles Fleetwood married the widow Dame Mary Hartopp (1623-1684) and their blended family lived for several generations in what had originally been the Hartopp home. Fleetwood had survived the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 under Charles II (r. 1660-1685) because he was not involved in the execution of Charles I (r. 1625-1649) in 1649. But he was barred from ever holding public office again. In the words of the 1897 book The House of Cromwell, survival meant settling for "the social obscurity of a meek Dissenter in the suburban region of Stoke Newington" - a parish which had been 'strongly Parliamentarian during the Civil War'.
Fleetwood would undoubtedly have often heard news of the stratospheric career trajectory post-Restoration of his Royalist enemy and the subject of an earlier blog post - the Hiberno-English, James Butler the 1st Duke of Ormonde, living by contrast in the fashionable inner London suburb of St. James's in Westminster.
1652-1657: Fleetwood in Ireland
1652 had been a good year for Charles Fleetwood. Already in charge of the Parliamentarian forces in England which had triumphed in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, he was appointed Commander-in-Chief in Ireland and a commissioner for the civil government there.
He also married Bridget "Biddy" Cromwell (1624-1662), eldest daughter of Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) who was by then 'Lord Protector' of what was akin to a military dictatorship in England . How much of a direct connection there was between these two events, we can only speculate. Historian David Farr notes that a critical contemporary said Cromwell's appointment of Fleetwood:
The Fleetwoods lived in Dublin for the next three years with Charles appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1654. Bridget had already lived in Ireland as spouse of the previous Lord Deputy Henry Ireton (1611-1651), Cromwell's second-in-command during the conquest of 1649 who had died of fever while besieging Limerick in 1651.
Finding Fleetwood in the shadow of Cromwell
The more I researched Fleetwood's legacy in Ireland, the more I was struck by the fact that his was not a name I had ever associated with this most notorious period of Irish history. It seems an odd omission given that Fleetwood's primary purpose in Ireland was to consolidate Cromwell's military conquest through the 1652 Act of Settlement by:
"systematically expropriating Catholic landowners and installing English Protestants in their stead, and [inflicting] various forms of communal punishment on the Catholics of Ireland for the massacres of protestants at the outset of their uprising in 1641" [Dictionary of Irish Biography]
Knowing how much Cromwell appears in our Irish collective memory as evil incarnate, I wonder why we pay so little attention to the roles played by his two son-in-law Lord Deputies?
Henry Ireton, according to historian John Cunningham, drafted the list of 'Qualifications' which determined who in Ireland would lose their life or land or be transplanted.
You can see the full text of these Qualifications in the 'August 1652: Act for the Setling of Ireland'.
Charles Fleetwood was the political figure who made the greatest efforts to implement this punitive, but ultimately impractical, policy of wholesale land expropriation and forced resettlement of the dispossessed west of the river Shannon in Connaught. The Dictionary of Irish Biography also notes it was under Fleetwood's tenure that thousands of Irish Catholics were forcibly transported as indentured labour to the island of Barbados, a punishment notoriously but inaccurately described by some as "slavery".
Fleetwood held the position of Lord Deputy until 1657 but was recalled from Ireland in 1655. His insistence on the policy of transplanting Catholics to Connaught was increasingly at odds with Ireland's 'Old Protestant' New English who feared the loss of their Catholic tenantry and collapse of the Irish economy. Even Cromwell had reservations about this policy of transplantation.
Within five years, England's experiment with republicanism was over and the monarchy restored with Anglicanism re-established as the official Church of England. The Dissenter Fleetwood, who had persecuted Catholics and others in Ireland, was himself fined for hosting NonConformist religious assemblies at Fleetwood House. Three of his children with Bridget Cromwell are buried somewhere in St. Mary's Old Church, Stoke Newington, N16. Fleetwood's own tomb can be seen in Bunhill Fields burial ground near Old Street, EC1.
Being a local resident who celebrates Stoke Newington's radical history of 'dissent', it was disconcerting to belatedly realise that this included a historical actor like Charles Fleetwood - especially when that Cromwellian past still echoes in Ireland's present. But does it bother me that Stoke Newington has a "Fleetwood Street" today? No. I think it's simply a trace left of a mansion house which acquired the name of Fleetwood and became part of the urban landscape for three hundred years.
What do you think? You can comment below.
Blog sources & further resources
Dissenting Stoke Newington
British History Online provides an overview of the long tradition of Protestant NonConformity in Stoke Newington.
The Fleetwoods hosted a small but select congregation for the leading Puritan Dissenter, John Owen (1616-1683). Historian Crawford Gribben has described how Owen's experiences as chaplain to Cromwell's forces in Ireland in 1649 influenced his later advocacy of religious toleration. Gribben addresses the significance of the Fleetwood House congregation in this book chapter:
Crawford Gribben, 'The Experience of Dissent: John Owen and Congregational Life in Revolutionary and Restoration England', in Church Life : Congregations, and the Experience of Dissent in Seventeenth-Century England, eds. M. Davies , A. Dunan-Page, & J. Halcome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 119-135.
Charles Fleetwood
The only detailed study of Charles Fleetwood that I could find is by historian David Farr in his book Oliver Cromwell’s Kin, 1643-1726: The Private and Public Worlds of the English Revolution and Restoration (London: Routledge, 2023). This is not widely available outside of academic libraries but you can preview some chapters on the publisher's website here.
Bridget Cromwell in historical fiction
Historical fiction is a creative way of bringing marginalised people back into the narrative. This podcast features historian Miranda Malins discussing her book about Bridget Cromwell, The Rebel Daughter.
Although it doesn't feature Ireland to any great extent, I found it a very engaging read which made a complicated episode in English history easier to understand.
Cromwellian history as material culture
I first learnt about Oliver Cromwell's wedding present for Bridget and Charles Fleetwood - an ornate and surprisingly erotic piece of furniture - in the 2013 book A History of Ireland in 100 Objects. You can read Fintan O'Toole's commentary here. And if you're in Dublin, you can see the Fleetwood Cabinet in the National Gallery of Ireland.
The Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, 1649-1652
Historians still debate whether Oliver Cromwell's brutal military strategy in Ireland was exceptional or reflected the norms of the time. This review of Micheál Ó Siochrú's popular history book God’s Executioner and Ó Siochrú's response illustrates why the issue has been so contentious:
The question of when and why Cromwell became so reviled in Ireland is also debated by historians. A summary of that debate can be found in Sarah Covington's examination of 'popular' memory of the trauma of the Cromwellian conquest in Ireland's folklore:
This episode of The Irish Passport podcast provides an excellent analysis of why the myth of the Irish in Barbados being "slaves" has become so widespread in recent years.
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