Carrick,
were taken after a short defence; and Clonmel at last surrendered after
a desperate attempt at storm, which cost Cromwell, it is said, two
thousand men. This was his last great fight in Ireland. He had now
crushed opposition in the whole east and south of the island; the north
had returned to the Protestant cause; Waterford fell soon after; and
except Limerick, Galway, and a few fortresses, the Parliament's forces
were masters of the island. Cromwell had been nine months in Ireland,
and at no time possessed an army of more than fifteen thousand men.
Within that time he had taken a score of strong places, and in a series
of bloody encounters had dispersed or annihilated armies of far greater
number than his own. An official summons to England had been sent in
January; and it was not till the end of May that he actually obeyed it.

As Cromwell's practice in warfare in Ireland differed somewhat from what
he observed elsewhere, and as from that day to this it has been the
subject of furious invective, a few words thereon are plainly needed.
Cromwell had gone to Ireland, at imminent risk to his cause, to recover
it to the Parliament in the shortest possible time, and with a
relatively small army. He had gone there first to punish, as was
believed, a wholesale massacre and a social revolution, to restore the
Irish soil to England, and to replace the Protestant ascendency. In the
view of the Commonwealth government, the mass was by law a crime,
Catholic priests were legally outlaws, and all who resisted the
Parliament were constructively guilty of murder and rebellion. Such were
the accepted axioms of the whole Puritan party, and of Cromwell as much
as any man.

In such a war he held that where a place was stormed after summons, all
in arms might justly be put to the sword, though no longer capable of
resistance, and though they amounted to thousands. "They," he writes,
"refusing conditions seasonably offered, were all put to the sword."
Repeatedly he shot all officers who surrendered at discretion. Officers
who had once served the Parliament he hanged. Priests, taken alive, were
hanged. "As for your clergymen, as you call them," wrote Oliver to the
governor of Kilkenny, "in case you agree for a surrender, they shall
march away safely; but if they fall otherwise into my hands, I believe
they know what to expect from me." At Gowran the castle surrendered.
"The next day the colonel, the major, and the rest of the comm