[Illustration:  Massacre at Drogheda]

[Illustration:  CROMWELL’S FORT, DROGHEDA].

A number of the townspeople fled for safety to St. Peter’s Church, on the north side of the city, but every one of them was murdered, all defenceless and unarmed as they were; others took refuge in the church steeple, but it was of wood, and Cromwell himself gave orders that it should be set on fire, and those who attempted to escape the flames were piked.  The principal ladies of the city had sheltered themselves in the crypts.  It might have been supposed that this precaution should be unnecessary, or, at least, that English officers would respect their sex; but, alas for common humanity! it was not so.  When the slaughter had been accomplished above, it was continued below.  Neither youth nor beauty was spared.  Thomas Wood, who was one of these officers, and brother to Anthony Wood, the Oxford historian, says he found in these vaults “the flower and choicest of the women and ladies belonging to the town; amongst whom, a most handsome virgin, arrayed in costly and gorgeous apparel, kneeled down to him with tears and prayer to save her life.”  Touched by her beauty and her entreaties he attempted to save her, and took her out of the church; but even his protection could not save her.  A soldier thrust his sword into her body; and the officer, recovering from his momentary fit of compassion, “flung her down over the rocks,” according to his own account, but first took care to possess himself of her money and jewels.  This officer also mentions that the soldiers were in the habit of taking up a child, and using it as a buckler, when they wished to ascend the lofts and galleries of the church, to save themselves from being shot or brained.  It is an evidence that they knew their victims to be less cruel than themselves, or the expedient would not have been found to answer.

Cromwell wrote an account of this massacre to the “Council of State.”  His letters, as his admiring editor observes, “tell their own tale;"[486] and unquestionably that tale plainly intimates that whether the Republican General were hypocrite or fanatic—­and it is probable he was a compound of both—­he certainly, on his own showing, was little less than a demon of cruelty.  Cromwell writes thus:  “It hath pleased God to bless our endeavours at Drogheda.  After battery we stormed it.  The enemy were about 3,000 strong in the town.  They made a stout resistance.  I believe we put to the sword the whole number of defendants.  I do not think thirty of the whole number escaped with their lives.  Those that did are in safe custody for the Barbadoes.  This hath been a marvellous great mercy.”  In another letter he says that this “great thing” was done “by the Spirit of God.”