the men in arms against the commonwealth,
the second towards the end notices, incidentally as it were, the additional
slaughter of a thousand of the townspeople in the church of St. Peter. In
the first, Cromwell, as if he doubted how the shedding of so much blood
would be taken, appears to shift the origin of the massacre from himself to
the soldiery, who considered the refusal of quarter as a matter of course,
after the summons which had been sent into the town on the preceding day;
but in the next despatch he assumes a bolder tone, and takes upon himself
all the blame or merit of the proceeding. "Our men were ordered _by me_
to put them all to the sword."--"I forbade them to spare any that were
in arms." In the first, to reconcile the council to the slaughter, he
pronounces it a "marvellous great mercy;" for the enemy had lost by it
their best officers and prime soldiers: in the next he openly betrays his
own misgivings, acknowledging that "such actions cannot but work remorse
and regret without sufficient grounds," and alleging as sufficient grounds
in the present case--1. that it was a righteous judgment of God on
barbarous wretches who had imbued their hands in so much innocent blood;
and 2. that it would tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future.

2. Now the insinuation conveyed in the first of these reasons, that
the major part of the garrison had been engaged in the outbreak of the
rebellion and its accompanying horrors, was in all probability a falsehood;
for the major part of the garrison was not composed of native soldiers,
but of Englishmen serving under the marquess of Ormond, the king's lord
lieutenant. This is plain from the evidence of persons who cannot be
supposed ignorant of the fact; the evidence of the royalist Clarendon
(History, vol. iii. part i. p. 323), and of the republican Ludlow, who soon
afterwards was made general of the horse, and became Cromwell's deputy
in the government of the island (Ludlow, Memoirs, i. 301). But, however
groundless the insinuation might be, it served Cromwell's purpose; it would
array in his favour the fanaticism of the more godly of his party.

For the massacre of the townspeople in the church he offers a similar
apology, equally calculated to interest the feelings of the saints. "They
had had the insolence on the last Lord's day to thrust out the Protestants,
and to have the mass said there." Now this remark plainly includes a
paralogism. The persons who