Cromwell in Ireland
the slaughter of ecclesiastics, and the merciless treatment of prisoners done in the castles or houses which lay in the path of the invaders. These find frequent mention in the despatches to the Parliament and in the correspondence of the time; but they are alluded to as things of such general and unquestioned occurrence as not to need explanation or excuse.
The war in Ireland went on for three years after Cromwell's departure. It reduced the country to a desert. Then came what was called the settlement. The land was divided among the army; the old proprietors were driven out of their homes, and forced across the Shannon, the terrible alternative of Hell or Connaught being, in the language of the time, given to them. Thousands of women and children were sold into the worst form of tropic slavery ever known. "An universal confiscation," says Isaac D'Israeli, "is a bloodless massacre." But there was plenty of blood upon it, too.
All this went on from 1653 to the death of Oliver Cromwell in 1658. You may search the entire modern history of man on earth and find nothing more terrible, nothing more savage, nothing more relentlessly cruel, than the record of these nine years—from 1649 to 1658—in Ireland.
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