ing it as long as any place held out, which encouraged others to yield. But when they had done all in their power, and feared no hurt that could be done them, then the word 'no quarter' went round, and the soldiers were, many of them, forced against their wills to kill their prisoners."
This has always been regarded as a great reproach to Cromwell. He himself, of course, does not confess that he broke his word, or forced his officers to break theirs; but he does something very like it. He tells us plainly, in his letter to Lenthall, the speaker, that " our men, getting up to them, were ordered by me to put them all to the sword. And indeed, being in the heat of the action, I forbade them to spare any that were in arms in the town; and I think that night they put to the sword about two thousand men."
That some of them escaping to the church, he had it set fire to, and so burnt them in it; and he records the exclamations of one of them in the fire. The rest of the fugitives, as they were compelled to surrender, were either slaughtered, or, to use his own words, "their officers were knocked on the head, and every tenth man of the soldiers killed, and the rest shipped for Barbadoes."
Great Seal of the Commonwealth
He says that one thousand people were destroyed in the church that he fired. He adds that they "put to the sword the whole of the defendants. I do not think thirty of the whole number escaped with their lives; those that did are in safe custody for Barbadoes."
This is, perhaps, the most awful confession that ever was made by a man in cool blood, for these letters were written about a week after the assault, and by a man undoubtedly of a thoroughly religious mind. Nay, so much so, that he attributes the whole "to the spirit of God;" says "This hath been a marvellous great mercy;" and prays that "all honest hearts may give the glory to God alone, to whom, indeed, the praise of this mercy belongs." And this he says at a time when he had given no mercy to three thousand men! Nay, it is assorted by trustworthy historians, that for five days Drogheda was given up to the wild fary of the soldiers, who considered that they were doing God service in exterminating papists, and that neither sex nor age was spared. That the thousand people in the church were almost wholly innocent inhabitants who had fled there for refuge; indeed, Cromwell himself says they were the people, not soldiers, and that "all their friars were knocked on the head promiscuously except two, and these two, one the brother of lord Taafe, were by the soldiers put to death."
Cromwell endeavoured to justify this horrible massacre by this plea, "that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future;" and Thomas Carlyle, in his "Letters and Speeches of Cromwell," has been at much pains, in a medley of very strange language, to excise his hero on that ground. But the business of the historian is not to erect men into demigods, but to represent them as they are, with all their power and weakness, their virtues and defects; and we are bound to say no amount of reasoning, much less of grotesque and rampant imagery, can ever wipe the blood of Cromwell's bloody campaign in Ireland out of memory. Even had it been warrantable to do evil that good might come of it, it is unfortunately not true that Cromwell's massacre here prevented the future effusion of blood. We shall find him immediately repeating the monstrous cruelty at Wexford, and his conduct producing its certain effect, that, of making his opponents defend their towns and garrisons with a desperation which not only greatly increased the bloodshed, but the difficulty and length of the campaign. Whitelock, the parliamentary historian, relating the siege of Clonmel, on the 9th of the following May, eight months afterwards, says "that they found in Clonmel the stoutest enemy this army had ever met in Ireland, and that there was never seen so hot a storm of so long a continuance, and so gallantly defended, wither in England or Ireland."
Thus the butchery of Cromwell had not frightened men into surrendering their towns at his summons, and thereby preventing effusion of blood. In fact, great as were the merits of Cromwell, his barbarous mode of warfare in Ireland cannot be defended on any principles of reason, much less of Christianity or humanity. In England he had been noted for his merciful conduct in war, but in Ireland a
