I. Both mention a massacre, but with this difference, that whereas the earlier seems to confine it to 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 had ordered the mass to be said there on the 9th of September were undoubtedly the civil or military authorities in the town.  Theirs was the guilt, if guilt it were, and theirs should have been the punishment.  Yet his argument supposes that the unarmed individuals whose blood was shed there on the 12th, were the very persons who had set up the mass on the 9th.