The steeple burnt.

and hopeless as their position was they refused the offer. After a fruitless attempt to blow up the tower with gunpowder, Cromwell gave orders to drag the seats in the church beneath it and to set them on fire. As the flames gained the structure above, the unhappy victims attempted to escape to the roof. Some fifty of them were there killed by the soldiers, whilst the remaining thirty perished in the burning steeple. The authors of this cruel deed comforted themselves by recording the imprecations of the tortured wretches, as if no fate. could be too horrible for men who died with profane oaths upon their lips.1

Sept. 12. Two towers

captured.

On the following morning it having been discovered that a few survivors who had taken refuge in two towers in the wall refused to yield, Cromwell set a guard to watch them till hunger drove them down. From one of the towers shots were fired, and some of the watch were killed and wounded. When the inevitable surrender came, Cromwell, instead of directing a promiscuous slaughter, ordered that the officers should be 'knocked on the head, and every tenth man of the soldiers shipped for the Barbados,' whilst the whole garrison of the other tower was spared, though they too were sent to Barbados.2

1 In Perfect Occurrences (E, 533, 15) we are told that they refusing to come down, the steeple was fired, and then fifty of them got out at the top of the church, but the enraged soldiers put them all to the sword, and thirty of them were burnt in the fire, some of them cursing and crying out "God damn them!" and cursed their souls as they were burning.' I have added some particulars from a tract by Dr. Bernard lent me by Mr. Firth. Its title-page is lost, so that I am unable to quote it more precisely. 2 Cromwell to Lenthall, Sept. 17, Carlyle, Letter cv. It will be seen that I have made no use of the story told by Thomas Wood, a soldier in Cromwell's army, to his mother and his brother the antiquary, Anthony Wood, in 1650, and related by the latter in his own life, prefixed to Ath. Oxonienses. "He told them," writes the latter, "that 3,000 at least, besides women and children, were, after the assailants had taken part and afterwards all the town, put to the sword on Sept. II and 12, 1649; that when they were to make their way up the lofts and galleries in the church and up to the tower where the enemy had fled, each of the assailants would take up a child and use [it] as a buckler of defence when

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CONTINUED SAVAGERY

121

With these exceptions Cromwell showed no pity. What was worse, even the few who by the connivance of the soldiers had escaped death on the Mill Mount were sought out and killed in cold blood. Amongst these was Verney, . Verney and the noble son of a noble father, who was enticed even

Death of

Boyle, from the presence of Cromwell by a certain Roper, who then ran him through with a tuck.' Lieutenant-Colonel

they ascended the steps, to keep themselves from being shot or brained. After they had killed all in the church, they went into the vaults underneath, where all the flower and choicest of the women and ladies had hid themselves. One of these, a most handsome virgin, arrayed in costly and gorgeous apparel, kneeled down to Thomas Wood with tears and prayers to save her life; and, being strucken with a profound pity, took her under his arm, went with her out of the church with intentions to put her over the works to shift for herself; but a soldier, perceiving his intentions, he ran his sword up her belly, whereupon Mr. Wood, seeing her gasping, took away her money, jewels, &c., and flung her down over the works, &c."

Anthony further tells us that his brother had served as a Royalist, and, having engaged in the Cavalier plot in 1648, had fled to Ireland, where, to escape the gallows, he became an officer in the regiment of Colonel Henry Ingoldsby. Ingoldsby said of him that he was 'a good soldier, stout and venturous, and, having an art of merriment called buffooning, his company was desired and loved by the officers of his regiment.' Just the sort of man, in short, to invent a story to shock his mother and his steady, antiquarian brother.

66

This suspicion is confirmed by Dr. Bernard, to whose tract I have referred in the last note. He was the preacher at St. Peter's, and lived hard by. He narrates at some length the dangers which he had himself escaped, and then proceeds to tell what happened in the church. "Not long afterwards," he says, came Colonel Hewson, and told the Doctor he had orders to blow up the steeple (which stood between the choir and the body of the church), where about threescore men were run up for refuge, but the three barrels of powder which he had caused to be put under it for that end, blew up only the body of the church, and the next night "—this should have been 'the same night '-" Hewson caused the seats of the church to be broken up, and made a great pile of them under the steeple, which, firing it, took the lofts wherein five great bells hung, and from thence it flamed up to the top, and so at once men and bells and roof came all down together, the most hideous sight and terrible that ever he was witness of at once." Not only does Bernard say nothing of Wood's

Boyle was summoned from dinner by a soldier, and shot as soon as he had left the room. Though we have no particulars of the deaths of Colonel Warren and Captain Finglas, it

and of Warren

can hardly be doubted that they shared the fate of and Finglas. Verney and Boyle.2

It was not only upon the soldiers of the garrison that destruction fell. Every friar in the town was knocked on the head, and a few civilians perished, either being mistaken for soldiers or through the mere frenzy of the conquerors.3

horrors, but he implicitly denies their existence when he writes that 'when that town was stormed and all that bare arms in it put to the sword.' Bernard was a strong Royalist, having taken a prominent part in proclaiming Charles II. at Drogheda. He had been threatened with death by Cromwell and had no reason to spare him, especially as his tract was published after the Restoration.

In examining the story itself we come upon inherent improbabilities. It makes children to be found in the church, where they are said to have been caught up by the soldiers, and the women in the vaults beneath. Surely the children would have been with their mothers, either below, or, far more probably, in their own houses. Moreover, when handsome virgins want to hide themselves on such an occasion, they are not accustomed to array themselves in jewels and gorgeous apparel. After this it is hardly worth while to ask what Wood meant by saying he dropped the girl's corpse over the works. The works were high walls-at least twenty feet high. Did he really take the trouble to climb up for the purpose? 1 Lady Verney's Verney Family, ii. 344.

2 Many men and some officers have made their escapes out of Drogheda. All conclude that no man [had] quarter with Cromwell's leave; that yet many were privately saved by officers and soldiers; that the Governor was killed in the Mill Mount after quarter given by the officer that came first there; that some of the towers were defended until yesterday, quarter being denied them; and that yesterday morning the towers wherein they were were blown up; that Verney, Finglas, Warren, and some other officers were alive in the hands of some of Cromwell's officers twenty-four hours after the business was done, but whether their lives were obtained at Cromwell's hands, or that they are yet living, they cannot tell." Inchiquin to Ormond, Sept. 15, Gilbert's Cont. Hist. of Aff. in Irel. vol. ii. Pref. xxviii.

3

Carlyle was exceedingly indignant with the editor of the Old Parliamentary History for printing a postscript to one of Cromwell's letters, in which a list of the slain soldiers is given with the addition and many

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CROMWELL'S DEFENCE

123

When all was over Cromwell appears to have felt the necessity of justifying himself. On the 12th he despatched Venables with a compact force to recover Dundalk, and gave him a letter to the Royalist governor of himself. that town. "I offered mercy," he wrote, "to the

Sept. 12. Cromwell

excuses

inhabitants,' which he says has no authority in contemporary copies. It, however, appears in the official contemporary copy in Letters from Ireland, E, 575, 7. Dr. Bernard's experience, as told in the pamphlet referred to in the note to p. 120, throws some light on the question. After telling how the mayor and other principal Protestants took refuge in his house, and how it was the first to be attacked after the town was fully taken, he proceeds as follows: "There came five or six who were sent from a principal officer-the Doctor's former acquaintance - under a pretence of a guard for his house, but had a command from him, as soon as they were entered, to kill him, which an ear-witness hath since assured him of. The Doctor denying to open the door to them, one of them discharged a musket bullet at him; it passed through the door, and only fired the skin of one of his fingers, leaving a spot upon it, which burned four or five days after, and did him no more hurt.

"Then a cornet of a troop of horse came to his relief, and pretending he had order from the General to take care of that house, the soldiers withdrew, and so at a back door he brought in his quartermaster, whom he left to secure him. About a quarter of an hour after another troop of horse came to the window, and demanded the opening of the door. The quartermaster and himself, with an old servant, left him . . . stood close together, and told them it was the minister's house, and all therein were Protestants. As soon as they heard the Doctor named and his voice, one of them discharged his pistol at him, wherein being a brace of bullets, with the one the quartermaster was shot quite through the body, and died in the place, and the other shot his servant through the throat, but recovered; the Doctor only was untouched." Ultimately the soldiers hetook themselves to plunder the house till the arrival of Ewer, who turned them

out.

This was written after the Restoration, but in a sermon preached in Feb. 1649, appended to the third edition of The Penitent Death of a Woful Sinner, p. 310 (1121, b. 19), Bernard speaks of the storming of the town "when not only your goods—according to the custom of war-were made a spoil of, but your lives were in the like danger, and were in an equal hazard, but by a special providence of God was preserved." This is hardly language which would have been used if more than a very few of the inhabitants had been killed, and it is therefore possible that 'the many

garrison of Drogheda 1 in sending the Governor a summons before I attempted the taking of it, which being refused brought this evil upon them. If you being warned thereby, shall surrender your garrison to the use of the Parliament of England you may thereby prevent effusion of blood. If upon refusing this offer, that which you like not befalls you, you will know whom to blame." 2

Cromwell

further excuses himself.

Cromwell was probably the only man in the victorious army who imagined that what had taken place needed any excuse at all.3 The persistency with which he defended his conduct is sufficient evidence that his conscience was not altogether at ease. "Truly," he wrote to Sept. 16. Bradshaw on the 16th, "I believe this bitterness will save much effusion of blood through the goodness of God. I wish that all honest hearts may give the glory of this to God alone, to whom indeed the praise of this mercy belongs." On the following day, writing more fully to Lenthall, he Sept. 17. brought forward yet another argument. "I am persuaded," he wrote, "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." 4

inhabitants' was an exaggeration. That any civilians were killed in Ireland without an attempt to punish their murderers, was afterwards explicitly denied by Cromwell. "Give us," he wrote, "an instance of one man since my coming into Ireland, not in arms, massacred, destroyed, or banished, concerning the massacre or destruction of whom justice hath not been done, or attempted to be done." Declaration printed by Carlyle after Letter cxviii.

1 Tredah' in the original.

2 Cromwell to the chief officer at Dundalk, Sept. 12, Carlyle, Letter ciii.

3 When Monk's storm of Dundee in 1651 was followed by a massacre, he said nothing in his own justification.

* Cromwell to Bradshaw, Sept. 16; Cromwell to Lenthall, Sept. 17; Carlyle, Letters civ. cv. It is necessary to keep in mind the prevalence