Cromwell in Ireland
but I hear nothing, nor have done, of Colonel Trevor. My ammunition decays apace, and I cannot help it."
The guns were the heaviest artillery of the time, and after some two or three hundred shots Cromwell says in his despatch, "they beat down the corner tower, and opened two reasonable breaches in the east and south wall." Against these openings the storming parties went. On the 9th Aston says the powder was "far spent," yet twice were the stormers beaten back. Probably the last cartridge had been fired, when a third attempt, led by Cromwell up to, but not into, the breach, was successful. Before darkness had set in the southern portion of the town was in possession of the assailants. Then began a scene which is almost without parallel in the annals of war.
It has been the effort of the writers of the last fifty years to minimise the massacre wrought by Cromwell's army, by Cromwell's orders, in this hapless town of Drogheda; but the old evidence of unmitigated atrocity is too strong for the new sepulchre-painters, and Drogheda stands, and will stand, through time as one of the bloodiest landmarks on the long road of human guilt.
Let us hear what these old chroniclers wrote of Drogheda.
37
