From Drogheda Cromwell returned to Dublin, and then marched on Wexford, taking and burning minor places by the way. On the 1st of October he summoned Wexford to surrender, and though the governor refused, the officer who commanded the castle traitorously yielded it. The soldiers then perceiving the enemy quit the walls of the town, scaled them with their ladders, and encountering the forces in the market-place, they made a stout resistance; but Cromwell informs the Parliament that they were eventually all put to the sword, "not many less than two thousand, and I believe not twenty of yours from first to last of the siege. The soldiers got a very good booty; and the inhabitants," he says, "were either so completely killed, or had run away, that it was a fine opportunity for honest people to go and plant themselves there." According to various historians, no distinction was made between the soldiers and the innocent inhabitants; three hundred women, who had crowded around the great cross, and were shrieking for protection to Heaven, were put to death with the same ruthless ferocity. Some authors do not restrict the numbers of the slain like Cromwell to two thousand, but reckon them at five thousand. Ormond now calculated greatly on the aid of O'Neil to create a diversion in the north, and divide the attention and the forces of Cromwell, for that chieftain had begun to justify the treaty made with him through Monk, by compelling Montgomery to raise the siege of Londonderry, and rescuing Coote and his small army, the only force which the Parliament had in Ulster. But the cry in London against this alliance with the Irish Papist had done its work, and, after the victory of Rathmines, the Parliament refused to ratify the treaty made with O'Neil. Indignant at this breach of faith, he had listened to the offers of Ormond, and was on his march to join him at Kilkenny. O'Neil died at Clonacter, in Cavan, but his son took the command. By his assistance, the operations of Cromwell's generals were greatly retarded at that place, and at Duncannon and Waterford.