Langley

Cromwell’s siege of Clonmel in May 1650 lingers on in Tipperary folk memory, not least because it was where Cromwell met his only real repulse in Ireland, and where Irish resistance finally collapsed. Looming large in the folklore is one Henry Charles Langley, a lieutenant in one of Cromwell’s cavalry regiments, Colonel Sankey’s Regiment of Horse.  He is on record as being one of the first to volunteer to storm the breach made in a wall of the town, after an earlier assault on the breach had left about a thousand Cromwellian infantry trapped inside and slaughtered.[1]  When the infantry refused to advance a second time the General appealed to his cavalry.  Folklore embellishes the moment, telling that Cromwell called out that whoever would be first through the breach would get his pick of Tipperary land, and that it was Langley who was that first brave man.

[1] P. O’Connell and W. C. Darmody, eds., 1650-1950 Siege of Clonmel Commemoration Tercentenary Souvenir Record, 1950, pp. 16-33;  Rev. D. Murphy, Cromwell in Ireland, pp. 334-337

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