This has always been regarded as a great reproach to Cromwell. He himself, of course, does not confess that he broke his word, or forced his officers to break theirs; but he does something very like it. He asserts plainly, in his letter to Lenthall, the Speaker, that "our men, getting up to them, were ordered by me to put them all to the sword. And indeed, being in the heat of the action, I forbade them to spare any that were in arms in the town; and I think that night they put to the sword about two thousand men." Some of them escaping to the church, he had it set fire to, and so burnt them in it; and he records the exclamations of one of them in the fire. The rest of the fugitives, as they were compelled to surrender, were either slaughtered, or, to use his own words, "their officers were knocked on the head, and every tenth man of the soldiers killed, and the rest shipped for Barbadoes." He says that one thousand people were destroyed in the church that he fired. He adds that they "put to the sword the whole of the defendants. I do not think thirty of the whole number escaped with their lives; those that did are in safe custody for Barbadoes." This is, perhaps, the most awful confession that ever was made in cool blood, for these letters were written about a week after the assault, and by a man of such a thoroughly religious mind that he attributes the whole "to the Spirit of God;" says "this hath been a marvellous great mercy;" and prays that "all honest hearts may give the glory to God alone, to Whom, indeed, the praise of this mercy belongs." Cromwell endeavoured to justify this horrible massacre by the plea "that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future." The butchery of Cromwell had not frightened men into surrendering their towns at his summons, and thereby preventing shedding of blood. In fact, great as were the merits of Cromwell, his barbarous mode of warfare in Ireland cannot be defended on any principles of reason, much less of Christianity or humanity. In England he had been noted for his merciful conduct in war, but in Ireland a deplorable fanaticism carried away both him and his army. They were now fighting against a Papist population, and deemed it a merit to destroy them. They confounded all Irishmen with the wild savages of Ulster, who had massacred the Protestants in 1641; and Cromwell, in his letters from Drogheda, plainly expresses this idea, calling the wholesale slaughter "a righteous judgment of God upon those barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood."