The garrison of Drogheda employed themselves busily in strengthening the town to the utmost, in readiness for the siege that Cromwell would, they doubted not, lay to it. In September Cromwell moved against the place. He was prepared to carry out the campaign in a very different spirit to that with which he had warred in England. For years Ireland had been desolated by the hordes of half-savage men, who had for that time been burning, plundering, and murdering on the pretext of fighting for or against the king. Cromwell was determined to strike so terrible a blow as would frighten Ireland into quietude. He knew that mildness would be thrown away upon this people, and he defended his course, which excited a thrill of horror in England, upon the grounds that it was the most merciful in the end. Certainly, nowhere else had Cromwell shown himself a cruel man. In England the executions in cold blood had not amounted to a dozen in all. The common men on both sides were, when taken prisoners, always allowed to depart to their homes, and even the officers were not treated with harshness. It may be assumed that his blood was fired by the tales of massacre and bloodshed which reached him when he landed. The times were stern, and the policy of conciliating rebels and murderers by weak concessions was not even dreamed of. Still, no excuses or pleas of public policy can palliate Cromwell's conduct at Drogheda and Wexford. He was a student and expounder of the Bible, but it was in the old Testament rather than the new that precedents for the massacre at Drogheda must be sought for. No doubt it had the effect at the time which Cromwell looked for, but it left an impression upon the Irish mind which the lapse of over two centuries has not obliterated. The wholesale massacres and murders perpetrated by Irishmen on Irishmen have long since been forgotten, but the terrible vengeance taken by Cromwell and his saints upon the hapless towns of Drogheda and Wexford will never be forgotten by the Irish, among whom the "curse of Cromwell" is still the deadliest malediction one man can hurl at another. Cromwell's defenders who say that he warred mildly and mercifully in England, according to English ideas, and that he fought the Irish only as they fought each other, must be hard driven when they set up such a defense. The fact that Murrogh O'Brien, at the capture of Cashel, murdered the garrison who had laid down their arms, and three thousand of the defenseless citizens, including twenty priests who had fled to the cathedral for refuge, affords no excuse whatever for the perpetration of equal atrocities by Cromwell, and no impartial historian can deny that these massacres are a foul and hideous blot in the history of a great and, for the most part, a kind and merciful man.