for five days after the town was taken would make as many several pictures of inhumanity as are to be found in the "Book of Martyrs," or in the relation of Amboyna.'1 This description comes from an enemy, and, though it has never been refuted, it may perhaps be exaggerated. In the letters of Cromwell we have a curious picture of the semi-religious spirit which was manifested or at least professed by the victors. It is noticed as a special instance of Divine Providence that the Catholics having on the previous Sunday celebrated Mass in the great church of St. Peter, in this very place near 1,000 of them were put to the sword, fleeing thither for safety,' and he adds that all their friars were knocked on the head promiscuously but two,' who were taken prisoners and killed. 'And now,' he continues, 'give me leave to say how it comes to pass that this work is wrought. It was set upon some of our hearts that a great thing should be done, not by power or might, but by the Spirit of God. And is it not so clearly? That which caused your men to storm so courageously, it was the Spirit of God, which gave your men courage and took it away again, and therefore it is good that God alone have all the glory.' 'I wish that all honest hearts may give the glory of this to God alone, to whom indeed the praise of this mercy belongs.' 2 Among the English soldiers who were present at this siege was the brother of Anthony Wood, the well-known historian of Oxford, and the vivid and most authentic glimpse of this episode of Puritan warfare which that accurate and painstaking writer has given us in his autobiography, furnishes the best commentary on the language of Cromwell. He relates how his brother would tell them of the most terrible assaulting and storming of Tredagh, where he himself had been engaged. He told them that 3,000 at least, besides some women and chil

1 Carte, ii. 84.

2 Carlyle's Cromwell.

dren, were, after the assailants had taken part and afterwards all the town, put to the sword on September 11 and 12, 1649, at which time Sir Arthur Aston, the governor, had his brains beat out and his body hacked to pieces. He told them that when they were to make their way up to the lofts and galleries of 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 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 arraid in costly and gorgeous apparel, kneeled down to Thomas Wood with tears and prayers to save her life, and being stricken with a profound pitie, he 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 through her . . whereupon Mr. Wood, seeing her gasping, took away her money, jewels, &c., and flung her down over the works.'1

It is possible, as its latest eulogist has argued, that this massacre may have had some effect in accelerating a

submission which in the exhausted state of Ireland could in no case have been long delayed, but it left behind it one of those memories that are the most fatal obstacles to the reconciliation of nations and of creeds. The name of Cromwell even now acts as a spell upon the Irish mind, and has a powerful and living influence in sustaining the hatred both of England and Protestantism. The massacre of Drogheda acquired a deeper horror and a special significance from the saintly professions and the religious phraseology of its perpetrators, and the town

1

Life of Anthony Wood prefixed to the 'Athenæ Oxonienses.'

where it took place is to the present day distinguished in Ireland for the vehemence of its Catholicism.

The war ended at last in 1652. According to the calculation of Sir W. Petty, out of a population of 1,466,000, 616,000 had in eleven years perished by the sword, by plague, or by famine artificially produced. 504,000, according to this estimate, were Irish, 112,000 of English extraction. A third part of the population had been thus blotted out, and Petty tells us that according to some calculations the number of the victims. was much greater. Human food had been so successfully destroyed that Ireland, which had been one of the great pasture countries of Europe, was obliged to import cattle from Wales for consumption in Dublin. The stock, which at the beginning of the war was valued at four millions, had sunk to an eighth of that value, while the price of corn had risen from 12s. to 50s. a bushel. Famine and the sword had so done their work that in some districts the traveller rode twenty or thirty miles without seeing one trace of human life, and fierce wolves—rendered doubly savage by feeding on human flesh—multiplied with startling rapidity through the deserted land, and might be seen prowling in numbers within a few miles of Dublin. Liberty was given to able-bodied men to abandon the country and enlist in foreign service, and from 30,000 to 40,000 availed themselves of the permission. Slave-dealers were let loose upon the land, and many hundreds of boys and of marriageable girls, guilty of no offence whatever, were torn away from their country, shipped to Barbadoes, and sold as slaves to the planters. Merchants from Bristol entered keenly into the traffic. The victims appear to have been for the most part the children or the young widows of those who were killed or starved, but the dealers began at length to decoy even Englishmen to their ships, and the abuses became such that the Puritan Government, which had for

some time cordially supported the system, made vain efforts to stop it. How many of the unhappy captives became the prey of the sharks, how many became the victims of the planters' lusts, it is impossible to say. The worship which was that of almost the whole native population was absolutely suppressed. Priests continued, it is true, with an admirable courage, to move disguised among the mud cottages of the poor and to hold up the crucifix before their dying eyes, but a large reward was offered for their apprehension, and those who were taken were usually transported to Barbadoes or confined in one of the Arran Isles. Above all, the great end at which the English adventurers had been steadily aiming since the reign of Elizabeth, was accomplished. All or almost all the land of the Irish in the three largest and richest provinces was confiscated, and divided among those adventurers who had lent money to the Parliament, and among the Puritan soldiers, whose pay was greatly in arrear. The Irish who were considered least guilty were assigned land in Connaught, and that province, which rock and morass have doomed to a perpetual poverty, and which was at this time almost desolated by famine and by massacre, was assigned as the home of the Irish race. The confiscations were arranged under different categories; but they were of such a nature that scarcely any Catholic or even old Protestant landlord could escape. All persons who had taken part in the rebellion before November 10, 1642, all who had before that date assisted the rebels with food or in any other way, and also about one hundred specified persons, including Ormond, Bishop Bramhall, and a great part of the aristocracy of Ireland, were condemned to death and to the absolute forfeiture of their estates. All other landowners who had at any period borne arms against the Parliament, either for the rebels or for the King, were to be deprived of their estates, but were promised land of a third of the value in

Connaught. If, however, they had held a higher rank than major, they were to be banished from Ireland. Papists who during the whole of the long war had never borne arms against the Parliament, but who had not manifested a 6 constant good affection' towards it, were to be deprived of their estates, but were to receive twothirds of the value in Connaught. Under this head were included all who lived quietly in their houses in quarters occupied by the rebels or by the King's troops, who had paid taxes to the rebels or to the King after his rupture with the Parliament, who had abstained from actively supporting the cause of the Parliament. Such a confiscation was practically universal. The ploughmen and labourers who were necessary for the cultivation of the soil were suffered to remain, but all the old proprietors, all the best and greatest names in Ireland were compelled to abandon their old possessions, to seek a home in Connaught, or in some happier land beyond the sea. A very large proportion of them had committed no crime whatever, and it is probable that not a sword would have been drawn in Ireland in rebellion if those who ruled it had suffered the natives to enjoy their lands and their religion in peace.1

The Cromwellian Settlement is the foundation of that deep and lasting division between the proprietary and the tenants which is the chief cause of the political and social evils of Ireland. At the Restoration, it is true, the hearts of the Irish beat fast and high. Many had never rebelled against the sovereign; and of those who had taken arms, when the English Parliament announced its intention of extirpating Catholicism, by far the greater

1 Scobell's Acts of the Long Parliament (1652). See, too, the admirable work of Mr. Prendergast, The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland—a book which

ought to be carefully studied by everyone who desires to understand the course of later Irish history.