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press made much of the fact that the 120 women captured had been carrying knives more than half a yard long, with a hook at the end, ‘made not only to stab, but to tear the flesh from the very bones’. One newsbook recommended that they ‘be put to the sword, or tied back to back and cast into the sea’.34 This played on more general fears about the Irish: ‘Do you imagine… the Irish rebels will be [any] more merciful to you, your wives and children than they were to the Protestants in Ireland?’35 Attitudes like these informed a hostility to the Irish troops that was barely restrained. In mid-December, following the capture of a minor royalist garrison at Beoley House in Worcestershire, all troops thought to be Irish had been put to the sword. One hundred and fifty troops intercepted en route from Ireland the following April by Vice-Admiral Richard Swanley were taken to Pembroke in triumph before, on St George’s Day, being tied back to back and thrown into the sea. One newsbook reported with glee how they had been ‘caused to use their natural art, and try whether they could tread the seas as lightly as their Irish bogs’.36

These atrocities invited responses, of course, and threatened that the war would lose all restraint. At Bolton in May 1644 parliamentary forces defending the town, having repulsed an attack, took a prisoner and ‘hung him up as an Irish papist’ in full view of his comrades. When the town fell many were slain out of hand in reprisal. At Lyme, Dorset, in June a royalist siege was abandoned. In the deserted royalist camp parliamentarian seamen found ‘an old Irish woman’, looking for her friends, who she had thought were still there. The seamen dragged her back to Lyme, ‘drove her through the streets to the seaside, slashed and hewed her with their swords’ before casting her corpse into the sea. Following the capture in Dorset of Irish troops, apparently native Irish who could not speak English, Essex had written to approve their execution: ‘if the Irish he [the local commander] has taken prove to be absolute Irish, he may cause them to be executed: for he would not have quarter allowed to those’.37

By the autumn of 1644 this was near to official policy. On 24 October the English parliament passed an ordinance that no quarter should be offered to Irishmen or papists born in Ireland taken in arms against Parliament. They were to be exempt from all surrender agreements and, following any surrender, parliamentary officers were ordered ‘forthwith to put every such person to death’. Officers failing to do so ‘shall be reputed a favourer of that bloody rebellion of Ireland’ and subject to such punishment as the Houses thought fit.38 A similar order followed in Scotland, on 23 December 1645, that Irish prisoners should be executed without trial.39 But the fear of reprisal seems to have restrained this escalation. Days after the execution of the Irish prisoners in Dorset twelve parliamentarian prisoners, civilians, were hanged ‘upon the same tree’ by Sir Francis Doddington. Following the passage of the ordinance of 1644 thirteen Irish prisoners had been hanged after Shrewsbury fell to the parliamentarians. Prince Rupert immediately hanged thirteen Protestant English in retaliation, explaining that ‘soldiers of [his] were barbarously murdered in cold blood, after quarter given to them’.‘[L]et the authors of that massacre know, their own men must pay the price of such acts of inhumanity, and… be used as they used their brethren… in the same manner’.40

Hostility to the Irish threatened to change the terms of engagement, reflecting the power of the fear rather than actual size, composition and importance of the Irish armies. There were other groups who attracted similar, though by no means identical, hostility. The Cornish were talked about as if they were not English by their opponents, and hostile stereotypes of the Welsh were common in cheap print – as buffoons or near pagans. So relentless was this campaign that it informed attempts to propagate the gospel in Wales during the 1650s. Parallels were frequently drawn between