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 accustomed to kneel at the foot of that cross in prayer, now, with life itself at stake, they would instinctively press towards it to escape from the swords of the enemy.  But, as far an regards the atrocity of the thing, it makes little difference on what particular spot they were murdered.  You cannot relieve the memory of Cromwell from the odium of such murder, but by proving, what it is impossible to prove, that at Wexford the women and children were specially excepted out of the general massacre.