Ordinance of no quarter to the Irish
The ordinance of no quarter to the Irish was a decree of the English Long Parliament passed on 24 October 1644 in response to the Irish Catholic Confederation threat to send troops from Ireland to support King Charles I during the English Civil War. The decree ordered Parliamentary officers to give no quarter to Irish soldiers fighting in England and Wales, and Irish Confederate sailors at sea who surrendered. Context The Kilkenny Confederacy sent 2,000 troops in three regiments under the command of Alasdair MacColla to support Montrose's Royalist army in Scotland who were fighting against the Covenanters in 1644. During the years 1643 and 1644 they also promised to send 10,000 troops to England and Wales. The troops were never sent, because the negotiations with Charles I broke down over the public practice of Catholicism and the independence of the Irish Parliament. A ceasefire deal between the Irish Confederates and English Royalists did result in the return of some 5,000 Royalist troops from Ireland in 1643–44. The confusion of these regiments with the Irish Catholics, associated in Parliamentarian minds with the massacres of the Irish Rebellion of 1641, did much to frighten English Protestant opinion. English Parliamentarians had often taunted Prince Rupert that he was a German mercenary, and while they could just about tolerate foreign Protestants and English Roman Catholics fighting as Royalists, they considered support by foreign Roman Catholics a much greater threat. Even before the Ordinance was passed Irish prisoners were in danger of being summarily executed. For example, in July 1644 Colonel William Sydenham defeated a Royalist plundering party from the garrison of Wareham at Dorchester, and hanged six or eight of his prisoners as being "mere Irish rebels". This gave rise to reprisals on the part of the Royalists. Ordinance The English Parliament's response to the Kilkenny Confederacy's proposed expeditionary force to England was to pass the Ordinance of no quarter to the Irish: This Ordinance was effective only in England and Wales and did not apply to Scotland or Ireland (as they were not part of the same realm, they were countries beyond English parliamentary jurisdiction). Application The relative absence of Irish Catholic soldiers in England meant that the Ordinance was rarely acted upon. However, after the cessation of arms between the Confederates and the Royalists in 1643, this allowed Ormonde to send 8,000 troops from Dublin and Munster and aid the King. Although most were in fact Englishmen, a small contingent consisted of Irish Royalists. In the instances where these Irish were captured, execution swiftly followed. After the Parliamentarians' capture of Shrewsbury, a number of Irish soldiers were hanged in accordance with the law. In response, Prince Rupert executed an equal number of Parliamentarian troops, much to the English Parliament's disgust. Similarly, after the fall of Conwy Castle, seventy-five Irish prisoners were executed. One example of the severity of this law was the massacre of some Welsh civilian camp followers (who were mistaken for Irish) by Parliamentarian soldiers after the Battle of