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 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. Some were said to have been shot by musket-fire as they struggled to stay afloat but most either drowned or died of exposure.

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.

Aftermath

The Portadown massacre 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 English Protestants 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.

References

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