The Army of Flanders was a Spanish Habsburg army based in the Netherlands during the 16th to 18th centuries. It was notable for being the longest standing army of the period, being in continuous service from 1567 until its disestablishment in 1706. In addition to taking part in the numerous battles of the Dutch Revolt (1567–1609) and the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), it also employed many developing military concepts more reminiscent of later military units, enjoying permanent, standing regiments (tercios), barracks, military hospitals and rest homes long before they were adopted in most of Europe.

AD 1652: The Caribbean Sea

The military transports sailed steadily eastward. On board the creaking vessels a motley crew of Cromwells Republican soldiers, sailors from Bristol and Liverpool, adventurers, English, Irish and Scots prisoners to serve as troops or to be sold as servants and African slaves

This expedition objective given by the Lord Protector himself Have just failed to take the rich island of Hispaniola Both these commanders had served in the Irish warsand there commander is afraid of what his master will do to punish him

so they have hatched a plan hearing that the island of xaymaca is weakly defended, the problem is that this island has not been developed by the Spanish and was poor. It was not highly prized.

   Ireland

Ireland, after twelve years of continual war, is under military law. Large extents of the country are effectively free fire zones and a guerrilla campaign of harrassment of Government troops has devastated the country. There is hardly a building standing, all churches are in ruins

unlike previous wars this has also affected the catholics of the towns a people known as Old English

Galway is the last city to fall, and its fall is desperate, with the entire city being cleared. Catholics were forbidden to live in the towns on pain of death.

The country was ruined. The people were destitute

The law of vagrancy allows those who cannot prove their means to be transported and sold.

In England this generally targets the poor, but in Ireland this has the opposite effect, as the native aristocracy and Old English are dispossessed they find themselves vulnerable to being “Barbadoed”. Particularly targeted are those who offer the most resistance the traditional landholders leaders of their people the proffessional classes poets

   Africa

The history of the Atlantic is the history of the frontier, most familiar to us as the Wild West of American folklore.

The west African states were beyond Rome to the South of the Sahara.

The western frontier from the English perspective began in Ireland this was their first contact with “savages” with an alien culture and where they first developed ideas of colonial attitudes

This frontier had existed in northern Europe since the days of Imperial Rome. Ireland and Scotland that had not seen the legions bring “civilisation” had retained a distinctive non-urban culture. But more importantly they had a distinctive Christian tradition, one that Rome painted as pagan.

  focus on the Gaelic culture of northwest Europe and the African culture of West Africa. Both of which became blended in the so called creole culture of the Caribbean.

In later years, the instincts of Rome toward centralisation of power and uniformity of ritual led it to attempt to exert control beyond the Empires traditional boundaries one of its concerns from an early period was the perceived heterodox nature of Irish Christianity. A fear of what was in effect a rival tradition and more worryingly,one that was of higher antiquity than Roman Catholicism.

All Catholic land was forfeit to the Commonwealth.

% of the land was transferred to new owners, displacing almost the entire old aristocracy all now faced a choice, become tenants of an entirely new and foreign landlord class, leave the country or continue to resist in whatever way possible.

The Act of Settlement of 1652 all had to move by the winter

Connacht was to be made a reservation for the native nobility

with a four mile exclusion zone on the coast and along the Shannon. to prevent interaction with foreigners

Cromwells soldiery fought each other to divide the spoils of war

In Sligo for example

, Carbury and Tireragh were to be distributed amongst the soldiers

in Mayo, Tirawley was confiscated from the Barretts,

During this time many thousands were transported to the West Indies Barbadoe'd many more were executed without trial as martial law was imposed across the country.

How many white servants (bonded and free) reached Barbados in the seventeenth century and what proportion of these were Irish, it is impossible too say. Over fifty percent seems a dibtinct possibility.

In 1667 Governor Willoughby was worried because he believed that more than half of the four-thousand-strong Barbadian militia was Irish (Ibid: 508-9).

 Jamaica

In 1731 Governor Robert Hunter declared that the ‘servants and lower rank of people in Jamaica chiefly consisted of Irish Papists’ who had been ‘pouring in upon us in such sholes as they have done of late years’ (Beckles 1990:520).

This remark was made at the end of a decade in which 72,689 enslaved Africans had been ferried in, while the “white” population supposedly stood at just above 7000 (Richardson 1998, 2: 459).

Some ten percent of the property owners in Jamaica in 1670 were Irish. In 1685 when James II ascended the throne, he found the support of this group useful in promoting his policy of strengthening Catholicism and royal power by encouraging the exercise of freedom of religion within his dominions.

In the early 1670s a visitor came upon a settlement of one to two hundred Irish on Guadeloupe living ‘much as they do at home in little huts, planting potatoes and tobacco, and as much indigo as will buy them canvas and brandy and never advance so far as sugar planting’(Cullen 1994:127.

Eventually, the English government in desperation began to pay Irish soldiers to leave and thousands did, joining the armies of Spain and France.

  First we have “La llegada de irlandeses a la frontera caribeña hispana” by Igor Pérez Tostado, in which the author opens up an area which has remained somewhat unknown, namely Irish emigration to the Caribbean in the seventeenth century. Rather than pushing on to far-off Lima or Mexico, the author shows that the Irish concentrated on the island of Hispaniola, whether they had arrived via Spain or directly from Ireland. An Irish community existed on the island from as early as the 1630s, while several fruitless projects were undertaken for large-scale colonisation by Irish people. Often the Irish compared their situation to that of the enslaved Africans, both peoples stripped of their patrimony and forcibly exiled from their native land, though the author nowhere suggests that the plight of the Irish truly approached that of the slaves. Indeed, in what might evince a wry smile from many Irish readers, Pérez Tostado mentions that the authorities on the island complained that other nationalities were masquerading as Irish in order to enjoy the benefits reserved for that nation.

A decade later a census of the island proved this description correct, showing some sixty-nine percent of the white male population and some seventy percent of the white females to be Irish.

On Nevis and Antigua, the Irish totalled around a quarter of the white population; on Saint Christopher they hovered around ten percent. Nini rogers

From the seventeenth century onwards, the Munster ports achieved international importance as the final point for taking on water and victuals before the Atlantic crossing. Since the West Indian islands furnished little in the way of material for naval repairs, eighteenth-century Cork was organised to produce sailcloth and rigging as well as provision for British, French, Dutch, Danes and Bremeners setting out on the Atlantic crossing.