nor and the mayor
perished with the rest.

3. But how could these bloody proceedings be reconciled with the terms of
capitulation which had been already granted? If we may believe Cromwell's
official account, a matchless specimen of craft and mystification, _he_ was
not to blame that they had been broken. He was perfectly innocent of all
that had happened. Could he not then have ordered his men to keep within
the castle, or have recalled them when they forced an entrance into the
town? Undoubtedly he might; but the pious man was unwilling to put himself
in opposition to God. "His study had been to preserve the place from
plunder, that it might be of more use to the commonwealth and the army."
But he saw "that God would not have have it so." The events which so
quickly followed each other, were to him a proof that God in his righteous
judgment had doomed the town and its defendants to destruction; on which
account he "thought it not good, nor just, to restrain off the soldiers
from their right of pillage, nor from doing of execution on the
enemy."--Letter of 16th of October. He concludes his despatch to the
government with these words:--"Thus it has pleased God to give into your
hands this other mercy, for which, as for all, we pray God may have all the
glory. Indeed, your instruments are poor and weak. and can do nothing but
through believing, and that is the gift of God also."--Cary's Memorials,
ii. 180. Did then the fanatic believe that perfidy and cruelty were gifts
of God? for at Wexford he could not plead, as at Drogheda, that his summons
had been contemptuously rejected. It had been accepted, and he had himself
dictated the terms of capitulation. Was he not obliged to carry them into
execution, even if, as was pretended in defiance of all probability, his
men had taken possession of the castle, and forced an entrance into the
town without his knowledge or connivance? Would any honest man have
released himself from such obligation under the flimsy pretext that it
would be acting against the will of God to recall the soldiers and prevent
them from doing execution on the enemy?

4. Cromwell's ministers of the divine will performed their part at Wexford,
as they had done at Drogheda, doing execution, not on the armed combatants
only, but on the women and children also. Of these helpless victims many
had congregated round the great cross. It was a natural consequence in such
an emergency. Hitherto they had been accusto