most wonderful of all the recorded utterances of puritan theology. "And now give me leave to say how it comes to pass that this work is wrought. It was set upon some of our hearts, that a great thing should be done, not by power or might, but by the spirit of God. And is it not so, clearly? That which caused your men to storm so courageously, it was the spirit of God, who gave your men courage and took it away again; and gave the enemy courage, and took it away again; and gave your men courage again, and therewith this happy success. And therefore it is good that God alone have all the glory." That Cromwell's ruthless severity may have been justified by the strict letter of the military law of the time, is just possible. It may be true, as is contended, that this slaughter was no worse than some of the worst acts of those commanders in the Thirty Years' War whose names have ever since stood out in crimson letters on the page of European history as bywords of cruelty and savagery. That, after all, is but dubious extenuation. Though he may have had a technical right to give no quarter where a storm had followed the refusal to surrender, in England this right was only used by him once in the whole course of the war, and in his own defence of the massacre it was not upon military right that he chose to stand. The language used by Ludlow about it shows that even in the opinion of that time what was done needed explanation. "The slaughter was continued all that day and the next," he says, "which extraordinary severity, I presume, was used to discourage others from making opposition." This, as we have seen, was one of the two explanations given by Oliver himself. The general question, how far in such a case the end warrants the means, is a question of military and Christian ethics which it is not for us to discuss here; but we may remind the reader that not a few of the most barbarous CHAP. II WEXFORD AND CLONMEL 265 enormities in human annals have been excused on the same ground, that in the long run the gibbet, stake, torch, sword, and bullet are the truest mercy, sometimes to men's life here, sometimes to their souls hereafter. No less equivocal was Cromwell's second plea. The massacre, he says, was a righteous vengeance upon the wretches who had imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood in Ulster eight years before. Yet he must have known that of the 3000 men who were butchered at Drogheda, of the friars who were knocked on the head promiscuously, and of the officers who were killed in cold blood, not a single victim was likely to have had part or lot in the Ulster atrocities of 1641. More than one contemporary authority (including Ludlow and Clarendon) says the garrison was mostly English, and undoubtedly a certain contingent was English and protestant. The better opinion on the whole now seems to be that most of the slain men were Irish and catholic, but that they came from Kilkenny and other parts of the country far outside of Ulster, and so were "in the highest degree unlikely to have had any hand in the Ulster massacre" of 1641. Again, that the butchery at Drogheda did actually prevent in any marked degree further effusion of blood, is not at all clear. Cromwell remained in Ireland nine months longer, and the war was not extinguished for two years after his departure. The nine months of his sojourn in the country were a time of unrelaxing effort on one side, and obstinate resistance on the other. From Drogheda he marched south to Wexford. The garrison made a good stand for several days, but at last were compelled to parley. A traitor during the parley yielded up the castle, and the Irish on the walls withdrew into the town. "Which our men perceiving, ran violently upon the town with their ladder and stormed it. And when they were come into the market-place, the enemy making a stiff resistance, our forces broke them; and then put all to the sword that came in their way. I believe in all there was lost of the enemy not many less than 2000, and I believe not 20 of ours from first to last of the siege." The town was sacked, and priests and friars were again knocked on the head, some of them in a protestant chapel which they had been audacious enough to turn into a Mass-house. For all this Cromwell was not directly responsible as he had been at Drogheda. "Indeed it hath, not without cause, been set upon our hearts, that we, intending better to this place than so great a ruin, hoping the town might be of more use to you and your army, yet God would not have it so; but by an unexpected providence in his righteous justice, brought a just judgment upon them; causing them to become a prey to the soldier, who in their piracies had made preys of so many families, and now with their bloods to answer the cruelties which they had exercised upon the lives of divers poor protestants." A heavy hand was laid upon southern Ireland all through Cromwell's stay. Gowran was a strong castle, in command of Colonel Hamond, a Kentishman, a principal actor in the Kentish insurrection of 1648. He returned a resolute refusal to Cromwell's invitation to surrender (March 1650). The batteries were opened, and after a short parley a treaty was made, the soldiers to have quarter, the officers to be treated as the victors might think fit. The next day the officers were shot, and a popish priest was hanged. In passing, we may ask in face of this hanging of chaplains and promiscuous knocking of friars on the head, what is the significance of Cromwell's challenge to produce an instance of one man since my coming to Ireland, not in arms, massacred, destroyed, or banished, concerning the massacre or destruction of whom justice hath not been done or endeavoured to be done." 1 66 1 Gardiner, i. 145. Firth's Cromwell, 260. CHAP. II WEXFORD AND CLONMEL 267 The effect of the massacre of Drogheda was certainly transient. As we have seen, it did not frighten the commandant at Wexford, and the resistance that Cromwell encountered during the winter at Ross, Duncannon, Waterford, Kilkenny, and Clonmel was just such as might have been looked for if the garrison at Drogheda had been treated like a defeated garrison at Bristol, Bridgewater, or Reading. At Clonmel, which came last, the resistance was most obdurate of all. The bloody lesson of Drogheda and Wexford had not been learned. "They found in Clonmel, the stoutest enemy this army had ever met in Ireland; and there never was seen so hot a storm, of so long continuance, and so gallantly defended either in England or Ireland." This was the work of Hugh O'Neill, the nephew of Owen Roe. Cromwell lost over two thousand men. The garrison, running short of ammunition, escaped in the night, and the subsequent surrender of the town (May 10, 1650) was no more than a husk without a kernel. The campaign made heavy demands upon the vigour of the parliamentary force. A considerable part of the army was described as fitter for an hospital than the field. Not one officer in forty escaped the dysentery which they called the disease of the country. Cromwell himself suffered a long attack of sickness. These distresses and difficulties much perplexed him. "In the midst of our good successes, he says, "wherein the kindness and mercy of God hath appeared, the Lord in wisdom and for gracious ends best known to himself, hath interlaced some things which may give us cause of serious consideration what his mind therein may be. . . . You see how God mingles out the cup unto Indeed we are at this time a crazy company; -yet we live in his sight, and shall work the time that is appointed us, and shall rest after that in peace." us. 66 His general policy is set out by Cromwell in a document of cardinal importance, and it sheds too much light upon his Irish policy to be passed over. The catholic prelates met at Clonmacnoise, and issued a manifesto that only lives in history for the sake of Cromwell's declaration in reply to it (Jan. 1650). This has been called by our great transcendental eulogist one of the most remarkable state papers ever published in Ireland since Strongbow or even since St. Patrick. Perhaps it is, for it combines in a unique degree profound ignorance of the Irish past with a profound miscalculation of the Irish future. “I will give you some wormwood to bite upon," says Oliver, and so he does. Yet it is easy now to see that the prelates were in fact from the Irish point of view hitting the nail upon the head, while Oliver goes to work with a want of insight and knowledge that puts his Irish statesmanship far below Strafford's. The prelates warned their flocks that union in their own ranks was the only thing that could frustrate the parliamentary design to extirpate their religion, to massacre or banish the catholic inhabitants, and to plant the land with English colonies. This is exactly what Clement Walker, the puritan historian of independency, tells us. "The independents in the parliament," he says, "insisted openly to have the papists of Ireland rooted out and their lands sold to adventurers." Meanwhile, Oliver flies at them with extraordinary fire and energy of language, blazing with the polemic of the time. After a profuse bestowal of truculent compliments, deeply tinged with what in our days is known as the Orange hue, he comes to the practical matter in hand, but not until he has drawn one of the most daring of all the imaginary pictures that English statesmen have ever drawn, not, be it observed, of discontented colonists, but of catholic and native Ireland. "Remember, ye hypocrites, Ireland was once united |