From Drogheda, the Lord-General turned south to Wexford.  Here an equally energetic defence was followed by an equally successful assault, and this also by a similar drama of slaughter.  “There was lost of the enemy,” he himself writes, “not many less than two thousand; and, I believe, not twenty of yours from first to last.”  The soldiers, he goes on to say, “got a very good booty in this place.”  Of “the former inhabitants ... most of them are run away, and many of them killed in this service.  It were to be wished that some honest people would come and plant here[12].”

[12] “Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches”—­Carlyle.

The grim candour of these despatches needs no comment.  We see the whole situation with that vividness which only a relation at first hand ever gives.  The effect of these two examples was instantaneous.  Most of the other towns surrendered upon the first summons.  The Irish army fell back in all directions.  An attempt was made to save Kilkenny, but after a week’s defence it was surrendered.  The same thing happened at Clonmel, and within a few months of his arrival nearly every strong place, except Waterford and Limerick, were in the Lord-General’s hands.

That Cromwell, from his own point of view, was justified in these proceedings, and that he held himself—­even when slaughtering English Royalists in revenge for the acts of Irish rebels—­a divinely-appointed agent sent to execute justice upon the ungodly, there can be little doubt.  As regards ordinary justice his conduct was exemplary.  Unlike most of the armies that had from time to time ravaged Ireland, he allowed no disorder.  His soldiers were forbidden by proclamation to plunder, and were hanged, “in ropes of authentic hemp,” as Carlyle remarks, when they did so.  The merciless slaughter of two entire garrisons is a hideous deed, and a deed, too, which appeals with peculiar force to the popular imagination.  As compared to many acts perpetrated from time to time in Ireland, it seems, if one examines it coolly, to fade into comparative whiteness, and may certainly be paralleled elsewhere.  A far deeper and more ineffaceable stain rests—­as will be seen in another chapter—­upon Cromwell’s rule in Ireland; one, moreover, not so readily justified by custom or any grim necessities of warfare.

The final steps by which the struggle was crushed out were comparatively tedious.  Cromwell’s men were attacked by that “country sickness” which seems at that time to have been inseparable from Irish campaigns.  Writing from Ross in November, he says, “I scarce know one officer amongst us who has not been sick.”  His own presence, too, was urgently required in England, so that he was forced before long to set sail, leaving the completion of the campaign in the hands of others.