Oliver Cromwell: father of Irish republicanism?

Published in Confederate War and Cromwell

Oliver Cromwell’s government sponsored two congregations of Protestant Dissenters in Dublin between 1649 and 1660. One of them met at Wood Street and the other at ‘Saint Nicholas-within-the-walls’, close to Christ Church Cathedral. Both of these communities flourished from the mid-seventeenth century until well into the nineteenth. For more than 140 years the ministers at these meeting-houses advocated notions of civil and religious liberty. The radical religion and politics that they developed contributed to the foundation of the Society of United Irishmen in 1791, to the rebellion of 1798 and to its after-shock, Emmet’s rebellion of 1803.

The Wood Street congregation (which later relocated to Strand Street) was founded by Puritans who came to Dublin to escape persecution during the reign of Elizabeth I. Revd John Owen (1616–88), one of the most eminent Puritan theologians of his era, came to Ireland with Oliver Cromwell as his chaplain and preached at Wood Street in 1650. He had previously preached at Westminster Abbey the day after the execution of Charles I, when he praised the regicides as ‘the Lord’s workmen’. Another link to the Cromwell family who often preached in Wood Street was Revd Stephen Charnock, personal chaplain to Oliver Cromwell’s son Henry when he was military commander in Ireland in 1653.