Portadown Massacre

The Portadown Massacre occurred in the Irish county of Antrim, in Ulster, in mid November 1641, during the Irish Uprising in the era of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Up to 100 mostly English Protestants were killed by a group of armed Irishmen. It was by far the worst massacre of Protestants to occur during the 1641–42 Irish Uprising. (The second worst was probably a barn-burning at Shewie, which left 22 dead).

The Massacre

In November 1641, armed parties of Ulstermen were rounding up British Protestant settlers and marching them to the coast, from which they were forced to board ships to Britain. One such a group of Protestants were imprisoned in a church in Loughall. They had been informed that they were going to be marched eastwards where they were to be expelled to England. The Irish soldiers were said by to be led by either Captain Manus O'Cane or Toole McCann- later accounts of the event differed on this point. After some time,the English civilians were taken out of the Church and marched to a bridge over the river Bann. Once on the bridge, the group was stopped. At this point the civilians, threatened by pikes and swords, were forcibly stripped of their clothes. They were then herded off the bridge into the icy cold river waters at swordpoint. Most drowned or died of exsposure, although some were said to have been shot by musket-fire as they struggled to stay afloat.

Estimates of the number of those killed varied from less than 100 to over 300. William Clark, a survivor of the massacre, said during the 1642 depositions that as many as 100 were killed at the bridge. As Clark was a witness of the massacre his figure is taken as being the most credible.

The Portadown Ghosts

The depositions record numerous reports of ghost sightings after the massacre: For example, a woman called Elizabeth Price claimed to have seen at the spot of the massacre a spirit in the shape of a woman: 'her eyes seemed to twinkle in her head and her skin as white as snow...divulged and then repeated the word "Revenge, Revenge, Revenge"'. It continued to appear for some time and only disappeared when the settler force reached the town. The message within such stories is apparent. Over two hundred years later, in 1886, the historian Robert Dunlop argued that the presence of these ghost stories in the depositions meant that they were 'worthless' as evidence. [Ulster 1641 pg 185] Modern historians generally accept that there were a number of major atrocities in Ulster in 1641, but disregard the idea of a wholesale massacre of Protestants in the province.

Aftermath

The Portadown massacre was used to support the view that the Irish Uprising was a vast conspiracy to massacre all of the Protestant inhabitants of Ireland, though large massacres such as this were in fact largely confined to Ulster. The atrocity featured prominently in Parliamentarian propaganda works in the 1640s, most famously by John Temple's "The Irish Rebellion" of 1646. The immediate goal of these propagandists was to isolate King Charles, who many prominent English Protestants such as John Pym viewed as being sympathetic to Irish Catholics. In the longer term, accounts of the massacre strengthened the resolve of many Parliamentarians to launch a reconquest of Ireland, which they did in 1649. Over the next 150 years, infamous massacres such as that at Portadown were often cited as a justification for the discriminatory Penal Laws in Ireland.

References

* MacCuarta, Brian, "Ulster 1641", Institute of Irish Studies, Queen's University of Belfast, 1993, ISBN 0853894914