Robert Godsill (Letters, 11 April) is right to say that the connection between England’s rulers and slavery goes back further than William III. However, in referring to the Drogheda massacre of 1649 – Oliver Cromwell’s sacking of the city during his invasion to destroy the Irish Confederation – he is wrong to say that the lord protector sent many of the survivors to Barbados as slaves.
Ireland was the grisly theatre of England’s first colony and the laboratory in which it perfected its strategies of colonial atrocities against civilian populations. The Irish were displaced from their land, suffered through English-engineered famines and massacred on a regular basis, all in the name of English imperialism. Queen Elizabeth’s lord deputy of Ireland, Arthur Chichester, declared that Irish “barbarism gives us cause to think them unworthy of other treatment than to be made perpetual slaves to Her Majesty”. Despite this, while thousands of Irish people were deported to the Caribbean, none were actually enslaved.
