Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/328

314 deplorable fanaticism carried away both him and his army. They were now fighting against a papist population, and deemed it a merit to destroy them. They confounded all Irishmen with the wild savages of Ulster, who had massacred the protestants in 1641; and Cromwell, in his letters from Drogheda, plainly expresses this idea, calling it "a righteous judgment of God upon those barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood."

From Drogheda Cromwell returned to Dublin, and then marched on Wexford, taking and burning minor places by the way. On the 1st of October he summoned Wexford to surrender, and though the governor refused, the officer who commanded the castle traitorously yielded it, and the soldiers then perceiving the enemy quit the walls of the town, scaled them with their ladders, and encountering the forces in the market place, they made a stout resistance; but Cromwell informs the parliament that they were eventually all put to the sword, "not many less than two thousand, and I believe not twenty of yours from first to last of the siege. The soldiers got a very good booty; and the inhabitants," he says, "were wither so completely killed, or had run away, that it was a fine opportunity for honest people to 'go and plant themselves there." According to various historians, no distinction was made between the soldiers and the innocent inhabitants; three hundred women, who had crowded around the great cross, and were shrieking for protection to Heaven, were put to death with the same ruthless ferocity. Some authors do not restrict the numbers of the slain like Cromwell to two, but calculate them at five thousand.

Ormond now calculated greatly on the aid of O'Neil, to create a division in the north, and divide the attention and the forces of Cromwell, for that chieftain had begun to justify the treaty made with him through Monk, by compelling Montgomery to raise the siege of Londonderry, and rescuing Coote and his small army, the only force which the parliament had in Ulster. But the cry in London against this alliance with the Irish papist, had done its work, and after the victory of Rathmines, the parliament refused to ratify the treaty made with O'Neil. Indignant at this breach of faith, he had listened to the offers of Ormond, and was on his march to join him at Kilkenny. O'Neil died at Clocknacter, in Cavan, but his son took the command. By his assistance, the operations of Cromwell's generals were greatly retarded at that place, and at Duncannon and Waterford.

On the 17th of October, Cromwell sate down before Ross, and sent in a trumpeter, calling on the commander to surrender, with this extraordinary statement, "Since my coming into Ireland, I have this witness for myself, that I have endeavoured to avoid effusion of blood; "which must have been read with wonder, after the recent news from Drogheda and Wexford. General Taafe refused. There were one thousand soldiers in the place, and Ormond, Ardes, and Castlehaven, who were on the other side of the river, sent in fifteen hundred more. Yet on the 19th the town surrendered, the soldiers being allowed to march away. O'Neil had now joined Ormond at Kilkenny with two thousand horse and foot, and Inchiquin was in Munster. Soon after Cork and Youghall opened their gates, admiral Blake co-operating by water. In the north, Su' Charles Coote, lord president of Connaught, took Coleraine by storm, and forming a junction with colonel Venables, marched on Carrickfurgus, which they soon after reduced, Cromwell marched from Ross to Watcrford, his army having taken Innerstioge, Thomastown, and Carrick. He appeared before Waterford on the 21th of November. Here, too, he received the news of the sun-ender of Kinsale and Baudon Bridge, but Waterford refused to surrender, and Cromwell was compelled to march away to Cork for winter quarters. His troops, however, took the Fort of Passage near Waterford; but they lost lieutenant-general Jones, the conqueror of Rathmines, by sickness at Dungarvon.

Cromwell did not rest long in winter quarters. By the 29th of January he was in the field again, at the head of thirty thousand men. Whilst major-general Ireton and colonel Reynolds marched by Carrick into Kilkenny, Cromwell proceeded from Youghall over the Blackwater into Tipperary, various castles being taken by the way, and quartering themselves in Fethard and Cashel. On March 28th he succeeded in taking Kilkenny, whence he proceeded to Clonmel. In this campaign the royalist generals accuse Cromwell of still perpetrating most unnecessary cruelties, though they endeavoured to set him a different example.

"I took," says lord Castlehaven, "Athy by storm, with all the garrison (seven hundred) prisoners. I made a present of them to Cromwell, desiring him by letter that he would do the same to me, if any of mine should fall into his power. But he little valued my civility, for in a few days after he besieged Gouvan, and the soldiers mutinying and giving up the place with their officers, he caused the governor Hammond and some other officers to be put to death." Cromwell avows this in one of Ids letters. "The next day the colonel, the major, and the rest of the commissioned officers were shot to death; all but one, who, being very earnest to have the castle delivered, was pardoned." And this, he admits, was because they refused to surrender at his first summons. He seemed to consider a refusal to surrender, at once and unconditionally, a deadly crime, and avenged it most bloodily. Were all war to be carried on on this principle, it would be a war, not of saints, but of devils. On the other hand, Ormond, in one of his letters, says, " Rathfarnham was taken by our troops by storm, and all that were in it made prisoners; and through five hundred soldiers entered the castle before any officer of note, yet not one creature was killed; which I tell you by the way, to observe the difference betwixt our and the rebels' making use of a victory."

The parliament, seeing the necessity of having their best general for the impending Scotch war, sent towards the end of April the President Bradshaw frigate, to bring over Cromwell from Ireland, and to leave Ireton, lord Broghill, and the other generals to finish the war by the reduction of Clonmel, Waterford, Limerick, and a few lesser places. But Cromwell would not go till he had witnessed the fall of Clonmel. There Hugh O'Neil, the son of old Owen Roe O'Neil of Ulster, defended the place gallantly with twelve hundred men. The siege lasted from the 28th of March to the 8th of May. Whitelock says, "They found in Clonmel the stoutest enemy this army had met in Ireland, and there never was seen so hot a storm, of so long a continuance, and