Life of Reilly

What drives a man to local history?

On the morning of 20 May 2000, perhaps a dozen men and women holding printed placards walked into St Mary’s churchyard in the Irish town of Drogheda. They had come to protest an exhibition taking place at the deconsecrated church, which featured a provocative historical relic: the death mask of the English soldier-statesman, Oliver Cromwell.

In Ireland, the name Oliver Cromwell is remembered with unanimous horror. Under Cromwellian rule, the Irish population shrunk by a third, decimated by famine, plague and colonial policy. At the end of the Civil War, Cromwell had personally led a brutal Irish campaign designed to subdue the restive Catholic population. At Drogheda, his army massacred the entire defending garrison, burning Catholic priests alive inside a church and butchering huge numbers of civilians.

In 2000, the old tormentor was back. CROMWELL DRANK DROGHEDA BLOOD, read one placard. SATAN AND CROMWELL: LADS TOGETHER, said another. One protestor began smearing the churchyard walls with symbolic ketchup. Leading the protests was Drogheda’s deputy mayor, Frank Godfrey, sporting a broad-brimmed black hat and antique sword. He was seeking to parley with the man that everyone knew was responsible: local historian, Tom Reilly.

A year before the exhibition, Reilly attracted national attention by publishing a book which argued that Cromwell’s forces did not, in fact, massacre civilians at Drogheda or at Wexford, where another massacre is attested. Reilly argued that Cromwell’s campaign, while brutal, had not even breached the laws of war as they were understood in the seventeenth century. The book was called Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy.

In the same year, Reilly had sunk a large amount of his own money into setting up a local heritage centre in St Mary’s, a recently deconsecrated Protestant church. As a member of the Friends of Oliver Cromwell society – its only ever Irish member – he was able to secure the loan of the death mask that provoked such outrage.

‘It is a bit like bringing the death mask of Hitler to a town where he killed the Jewish population,’ the deputy mayor had told the local press who covered the protest.

Yet Tom Reilly was undeterred.

In 2002, he provoked an eerie simulacrum of the first debacle by exhibiting Cromwell’s sword in the same centre. Godfrey put on his black hat and was soon being quoted in local newspapers compared it to exhibiting Hitler’s pistol in Jerusalem. This time, he challenged Reilly to a duel with whatever weapon he chose.

Perhaps because the duel never materialised, Reilly went on with his crusade to rehabilitate Cromwell’s name. He has been waging his lonely war for over a quarter of century, never shrinking from his original contention and never moving from his beloved hometown of Drogheda. At the end of last year, I travelled there to meet Reilly and try to understand: why?

Tom Reilly – the author of Cromwell at Drogheda, Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy, Cromwell was Framed, Making a Massacre, Tracing Drogheda’s Medieval Walls, The Medieval Walls of Drogheda and Drogheda FC: The Story so Far – was quick to tell me that he showed no early yen for the disciple of history. He failed his school leaver’s exam in the subject and went straight into work in the printing industry. Soon he was married with children. A keen footballer, he injured another player in his late twenties, accidentally leaving his opponent laid up for six months. Looking on, Reilly thought to himself: I need a more sensible hobby.

In his memoir, Reilly records bafflement about what happened next. ‘Not long after I had kissed goodbye to my twenties, for some strange reason I found myself being drawn towards local history. Don’t ask. I got nothing. No idea why’. He writes about his newfound passion as though it were a dormant medical condition. ‘I’m not exactly sure what part of the brain contains the local history cells, but whatever it is they began to animate me.’

Reilly began looking around town to see what he could see of Drogheda’s past. One day, he drew an old administrative record out of the town archives and had something akin to a religious experience. ‘The book itself was absolutely mesmerising to me,’ he wrote in his memoir. ‘It was like nothing I had ever felt before. Somehow, it was like all of the intervening centuries had not happened.’ Inside, he found records of a meeting that took place in Drogheda not long after Cromwell sacked the town. He was shocked to see that no explicit mention was made of a massacre having taken place, and that people appeared to still be living in the town.

Picking up steam, he travelled to Cromwell’s hometown of Huntingdon. What he found at Cromwell’s childhood home, as well as a second local Cromwell museum, amazed him. It was as if the English somehow didn’t know about what Cromwell had done in Ireland. ‘In both of these visitor attractions, there wasn’t a mention of his wholesale massacres in Ireland. These people were glorifying him as some kind of historical enigma.’ To this day, Reilly thinks of the town as something like a spiritual second home. His book An Honourable Enemy begins with a set of directions from Huntingdon to Drogheda.

This historical awakening coincided with a slow rejection of the Catholic Church. Reilly told me he finally accepted that there was no God after the death of his father, when one day he thought to himself: he’s nowhere. As he lost his faith, he began to gain a deeply felt connection to the historical past.

At the same time, he was gaining a sense of deep connection to the historical past. Reilly spoke to me about the sense of communion that he felt in Cromwell’s house. ‘I go as often as I can,’ he said. ‘It’s just raw history. To stand looking at the window that he looked out of. It just does something to me. I stand there in his house and contemplate. I contemplate his presence.’

Travelling in England, Reilly discovered books about Cromwell he’d never seen in Ireland. In one essay, the Roundhead general was described as ‘an honourable enemy’. He began to think about writing a book along those lines. Soon, he was writing in earnest. When the book was finished, he pitched it to 70 publishers without a bite. Then a man from a company called Brandon Books called and said they would like to buy the book – could Reilly send over the version with references?

References?

Nervously, Reilly explained to the man that there were no references. He hadn’t known you had to do them. Begging for time, he went back, traced the source of each quote, and recorded all the necessary detail. Then he published and waited. The reviews were unkind. ‘None of this is convincing,’ said The Irish Times. The Sunday Tribune was equally unconvinced. A few minor notices gave some latitude to the book as a novel intervention.

Then the next weekend, Reilly got a rave review in the Sunday Times. After that, the knives were out.

‘Now sorry John, but Tom Reilly is old news and very boring news I’m afraid, from my perspective. I can only say the same thing over and over again so many times before I get a bit tired of it. We don’t have to keep saying this over and over, frankly, it’s flogging a dead horse. There is nobody in the historical academic world who gives any credence to this whatsoever. I have no comment to make on this either way, John. I do not want to be quoted on this. I do not want to have anything to do with this whatsoever. I am removing myself from this. I have no comment to make, I have nothing to say, I do not wish my name to be used in any way in anything relating to this,’ said one academic whose name I shall here withhold.

Generally speaking, Irish historians are not very fond of Tom Reilly. ‘It would be easy to ridicule Reilly’s dreadful prose; his enthusiastic description of the McDonald’s outlet in modern Drogheda will, unfortunately, remain with me for a very long time,’ wrote the historian Jason McElligott in a review of An Honourable Enemy, calling it ‘a painfully bad book.’ McElligott later published at length on Reilly’s work, apologising that he was using ‘a sledgehammer to crack a nut.’ The historian John Morrill said simply: ‘Reilly fails the test of source criticism at almost every turn.’

The central claim of Reilly’s career is that Cromwell did not massacre civilians at Drogheda. This is a hard claim to defend. Cromwell’s own report to Parliament states that about 3,000 soldiers ‘and many inhabitants’ were killed. A few days after the siege, the diarist John Evelyn wrote that he had received news of Drogheda having been taken, ‘and all being put to the sword’. The antiquarian Anthony Wood writes about his elder brother who had fought at Drogheda telling his family about it. ‘He told them that 3,000 at least, beside some women and children’ were killed, ‘and afterwards all the town put to the sword.’

That Cromwell himself seems to admit that ‘many inhabitants’ were killed does pose a problem to the sympathetic biographer. In An Honourable Enemy, Reilly repeats a claim first made by Thomas Carlyle that the words were added to the published letter in the 18th century. (The original letter has not survived.) Unfortunately, this is not true. In Cromwell Was Framed, Reilly agreed that it was untrue, but continued to cast doubt on the statement. ‘The fact is we absolutely and categorically do NOT know that these are the words of Oliver Cromwell himself. That’s how we can get around those words,’ he writes.

When I met Reilly at the end of last year, he was particularly keen to stress two things. He said that it was commonly understood within 17th-century warfare that if a town stood siege rather than surrendering, defensive troops could not expect quarter in the event of a breach. Second, that historians have not distinguished sufficiently between civilians in arms and civilians proper. ‘I keep saying people,’ he would interrupt himself to lament, whenever the distinction began to slip.

At 63, Tom Reilly is an anxious, slightly hunted presence, one whose obsessive running regime has kept him young for his years. Spry and gaunt with a stubbly roughness around the edges, he reminded me of a rubbed-out-and-redrawn Quentin Blake illustration. He does not accept royalties for his books, he says, because his cause is too important. He has been mocked, scorned and remorselessly trolled for his views. There remains a small amount of strong, local animosity. Several years ago Reilly received handwritten death threats through his front door. When I asked him about it in person at the tail-end of last year, he was bluff and edgy. ‘I don’t think they ever will,’ he said. ‘In fact, you can put that on my gravestone: He didn’t think they ever would.’

With time, Reilly’s demeanour seems to have travelled along a familiar parabola. He has become more rebarbative, more self-certain and more self-consciously solitary in his crusade. In 2011 he self-published Cromwell Was Framed, taking aim at the ‘vested historical interests’ he felt had quashed discussion of his thesis. ‘I am duty bound by history, to play my part in an attempt to overturn one of the greatest historical miscarriages of justice ever,’ he explained. More recently, Reilly wrote a memoir, Making A Massacre, about his experience of fighting academic consensus to try and clear Cromwell’s name. ‘Cromwell was no genocidal maniac. This is my gift to the world. Now fecking get over it,’ he wrote. In a deliberate dig at the distinctly gaelicised name of one of his academic detractors, Reilly put out the book under the pen name ‘Tomás Ó Raghallaigh.’

Reilly is exceptionally welcoming to anyone who comes asking questions about history – especially if they happen to work in media. I was not the first journalist to have come seeking the company of this local historian who seemed to mix madness and self-knowledge in the precise, gin and tonic like proportions that make people useful to journalists.

‘Thought I recognised that voice,’ a passing pedestrian called out at one point.

‘It’s only me.’

‘Only you giving the old tour.’

‘Feck off.’

‘Feck off yourself’.

Reilly turned to me. ‘That’s my brother’, he explained.

We came to a halt at the top of the bank. Behind us a church steeple was outlined in black against a night sky marbled with dark lilac clouds. Ahead, a steep bank led down to where a stream had once run into the River Boyne. ‘There’s so much atmosphere up here,’ said Reilly. From the other side of the valley, the living room lights of a few houses were winking. Reilly turned outwards to face the phantom siege guns of his historical hero. ‘They thundered down there’, he said, tracing the passage of Cromwell’s army down one side of the valley. ‘And then they thundered up here.’ He pointed to the hill leading up to the church. I understood that he was tasting the historical pith of where we were standing with an intensity that he struggled to communicate. ‘Every year on September 11,’ he said, ‘I come up here and think: it was here. On this day.’ (In 1649, he would have continued.)

It was obvious we had come somewhere that leylines crossed. Consider: we were pressed against the old town walls of Drogheda, about which Reilly has written two books. Ahead was a hill still known as Cromwell’s mound, where the siege, about which Reilly has written three books, began. Below us was the dale that had served as a teenage knocking shop for the young folk of Drogheda in Reilly’s day. Reilly’s house was less than a hundred metres away as the crow flies. We were maybe 20 yards away from where Cromwell breached the walls of the town: we could see the steeple of the churchyard where Reilly’s short-lived heritage centre was set-up, protested and eventually abandoned.

After the heritage centre shut, the collection was swept up into a rival museum nearby that also dealt with local history. In the basement of that museum, Reilly told me that thinking about it gave him a great sense of failure. He had been warned against it, he said, but wouldn’t listen.

‘I don’t like to be told’, he said. By way of demonstration, he told me a story about a time he’d been asked to leave the class by a teacher and simply refused to go, no matter how many times he was asked. ‘I did it to the point I lost the class,’ he said. ‘Eventually I looked around and nobody was laughing.’

I liked Drogheda. I liked its riverfront mall and its white wishbone bridge over the black Boyne. I liked the mixture of amusement and disbelief with which my enquiries about the reputation of Oliver Cromwell were met. I liked that sense, familiar from other small towns I’d reported from, of having blundered into a slightly volatile place governed by delicacies I didn’t fully understand, and which I was professionally obliged to transgress.

On my night in Drogheda I went round the pubs, asking about Oliver Cromwell and Reilly. You can imagine the response. One man was willing to specify that he thought Reilly was a ‘bollocks and a gobshite, but a good skin’. Most people I spoke to affected not to know who Reilly was, or declined to comment on him. At one pub, I asked a group of men at the bar what they thought about Oliver Cromwell. The question was passed down to the oldest man in the group, who cried ‘they’re sending journalists at me now!’ Everyone burst out laughing, and when it became clear they weren’t going to stop, I got up and left. Only the next day did I realise I had been literally laughed out of a pub.

I liked Drogheda. Reilly loves it. I think that’s the key to all this. It’s possible to think of Reilly as someone who got co-opted, or simply opted in, to another nation’s grand narrative. Or as an amateur who can’t decide whether he wants to be a noble crusader out for the truth, or an ornery gadfly summoned up to sting the academics on their own territory. What I would suggest, having met Tom Reilly, is that you can’t understand him until you realise that the 300 yards stretching from Cromwell’s mound to Millmount isn’t academic territory at all. It’s Reilly’s.

‘It’s right here,’ said Reilly. ‘The history is right here.’ I was standing in his back garden, looking at a hole in the ground. Inside, wooden pallets were laid crossways to support the banks of loose earth. Inside, also, was Reilly, scraping with a plank at a carpet of fallen leaves. ‘I love the connection that I make with history. I dig into it. It’s illegal, but fuck it, it’s my garden.’

In the hole, Reilly showed me the remnants of a path that once ran through there. There was no record of it on any maps. Inside his house, Reilly showed me tiles with a design he said was ecclesiastical. Then he showed me the map from the early modern period which showed how the plot on which his house now stood once adjoined the plot on which the church was built. He wasn’t just an expert on the siege, he was its neighbour. The most important thing to have ever happened to Drogheda – and you could go right up to it. You could almost touch it.

Talking to Reilly, I often thought that a proper historian starts with an interest in narratives and reasons and works back towards the evidence as they progress through the education system. A local historian starts with an object or a place – something which inspires a devotional intimacy – and works upwards towards the narratives swirling vaguely above. A local historian – or one kind of local historian – is almost like a poet, trying to find the words and images that fit something they already know.

In Reilly’s living room, I met his wife Noeleen, a soft-spoken presence who seemed tolerantly baffled by her husband’s passion. ‘I don’t know what triggered the need to write a book,’ she said.

‘No, no,’ he murmured.

‘I don’t know why you got stuck on that.’

‘It came out of nowhere,’ agreed Tom.

‘A book, we supported it – 30 years later he’s rolling out the same story.’

At a certain point, Reilly mentioned that he was working on a vague, new project involving satellites that he hoped would make him a millionaire within the year.

‘I mention the satellite thing because it’s such a contrast.’

Noeleen smiled beatifically. ‘We stumbled upon it’.

‘In a year I won’t care’, said Reilly.

‘He will always care,’ said Noeleen.

‘I will, it’s true.’

Before I left town, Reilly showed me a box of old finds. An ecclesiastical tile. A weight of some kind. A roof tile. This would all have been from the buildings that were once where Reilly’s house is now. The only remnants of the historical dwelling are the chips and pieces he has collected. He passed over the lid of a box for me to hold. Then he passed over a shard of bone.

He said that someone nearby had been building an extension, and they’d found remnants of a skeleton. Everyone there had taken a piece. The bone was light and smooth and you could tell from holding it what sort of noise it would make if you dropped it on marble. I held it in the palm of my hand, light as a chip of pumice or driftwood. He passed me over a musketball.

One side was completely round, and the other completely flattened, like a sculpture of an igloo. Reilly explained that lead is soft enough that when it strikes something hard, like stone, it goes anvil flat. He had found this piece with some others in the dale. Here were the others. They were grey, with a black metallic shine. I reached in to pick one out. Reilly said they dated from the time of Cromwell. They seemed to have all been fired into the same patch of land. But only one of them had hit something hard. Perhaps it had hit bone.

There might have been, I was saying to Reilly, some sort of pursuit. Or an execution had taken place, said Reilly. Yes, I agreed. That could explain why there were so many bullets in one place. One man would have been standing over another. There would have been mud, wet grass and musket smoke. For a moment of extraordinary intensity, I could see it.

Whether Reilly was talking about what might have happened, or I was just picturing it, is something my notes do not record, but in either instance I left town knowing it was past time for me to put down Reilly’s skull and hold my own.