inately slaughtered, and
there is evidence of an eye-witness to that effect; but this is not
believed to have been done by the order, or even with the knowledge, of
the general. The Royalist accounts insist that quarter was promised at
first; and that the butchery of men in cold blood was carried on for
days. Here again the act must have been exceptional and without
authority.

To Cromwell himself this fearful slaughter was a signal triumph of the
truth. "It hath pleased God to bless our endeavors." "This hath been a
marvellous great mercy." "I am persuaded that this is a righteous
judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their
hands in so much innocent blood; and that it will tend to prevent the
effusion of blood for the future. Which are the satisfactory grounds to
such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret." "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." In the same sense it was
received by Parliament and council of state, by some of the noblest
spirits of their age.

Ludlow says simply that this "extraordinary severity was used to
discourage others from making opposition." It had always been the policy
of Cromwell in battle to inflict a crushing defeat; at Marston, at
Naseby, and at Preston he had "taken execution of the enemy" for hours
and over miles of country. At Basing and elsewhere, after a summons and
a storm, he had slaughtered hundreds without mercy. And such was the law
of war in that age, practised on both sides without hesitation. But the
item of numbers and of time tells very heavily here. The killing of
hundreds in hot blood differs from the massacre of thousands during
days.

There was no such act in the whole civil war as the massacre--prolonged
for days--of three thousand men enclosed in walls entirely at the mercy
of their captors, to say nothing of the promiscuous slaughter of
priests, if not of women and unarmed men.

In England such a deed could not have been done; and not in Ireland, but
that they were Catholics fighting in defence of their faith. The fact
that the garrison were Catholics, fighting on Irish soil, placed them,
to the Puritan Englishman, out of the pale. No admiration for Cromwell,
for his genius, courage, and earnestness--no sympathy with the cause
that he upheld in England--can blind us to the truth, that the lurid
light of this great crime burns still af