men." side, its inner intrenchments, and St. Mary's Church. The principal part of the garrison had retreated into the Millmount, but being hotly followed, Cromwell's whole army, horse and foot, now swarming into the town, the fort was taken-or rather there is reason to believe, surrendered on promise of quarter-but Cromwell says: "being in the heat of 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 2,000 Hemmed in this narrow space, surrounded by the ever-swelling numbers of the enemy, as Cromwell's whole army of 10,000 men gradually girt them round with sword and fire, the place was soon filled with one writhing, bleeding, gasping mound of dying men. Sir Arthur Aston fell sword in hand among the first; and a Cromwellian Captain, who was present, says his body was actually "hacked and chopped to pieces." English cavalier, Irish chief, fought and fell side by side. Many a mother, and wife, and wife that was to be, in Upper and in Lower Ossory, on either bank of the Shannon, and in the shadowy Wicklow valleys, shuddered in her sleep that night with a tender terrible instinct, as soul after soul from that heap of hapless soldiers, through the thick cloud of powder smoke, and the rank steam of blood, soared sudden towards the stars. During the night, such of the garrison as had escaped from the Millmount, and the great mass of the inhabitants of the town, took refuge either in St. Peter's Church, or in the tower of St. Sunday's Gate and that of the West Gate. Cromwell ordered the steeple of the church, which was of wood, to be fired next morning, and thought it an edifying incident to tell Speaker Lenthall, in his next despatch, that one of those therein burned to death, was heard to say in the midst of the flames: 'God damn me! God confound me! I burn, I burn!"" Then, the townspeople and soldiers within the church still stoutly resisting, his soldiers scaled its galleries and lofts. In all human history, there is hardly so horrible an incident as that which happened in this attack. A troop of infants was collected through the town, and each Puritan soldier advanced to the assault, holding a little innocent in one hand as a buckler, in the other his sword or pike, on which the morning's sun was baking the evidence of the night's work in a crust of blood. They penetrated the church. The children were tossed over the wall. In aisle, and vault, a long day of hideous massacre followed. There was no mercy for man or woman, or child. One Parliamentary captain attempted to save a young girl of evident rank, whose tears and prayers had moved his heart to pity; but a private soldier, who saw his design, at once ran his sword through her body.* It is a tradition of the country that when another of his officers appealed to Cromwell against * Thomas à Wood, brother of Anthony à Wood, the great Oxonian scholar, was a captain in Ingoldsby's Regiment, serving in Ireland at the time of Cromwell's landing. He was present at the taking of Drogheda, and his brother's narrative of his own life (prefixed to the Athena Oxonienses) contains the account he gave his family of what he witnessed. This account is referred to by several recent writers, who hardly appear to have read it. It is, perhaps, the most exact and complete piece of evidence extant as to what actually happened at Drogheda, and as it is not very long, may, with advantage, be quoted here. Anthony à Wood writes: "About a year before that time, viz., in 1650, he returned for a time to Oxon to take up his arrears at Christ Church, and to settle his other affairs; at which time, being often with his mother and brethren, he would tell them of the most terrible assaulting of and storming of Tredagh, wherein he himself had been engaged. He told them that 3,000 at least, besides some women and children, were, after the assailants had taken part, and afterwards all the town, put to the sworde, on the 11th and 12th of September, 1649; at which time, Sir Arthur Aston, the governor, had his braines beaten out, and his body, hacked and chopped to pieces. He told them that when they were to make the way up to the lofts and galleries of the church, and up to the tower where the enemy had fled, each of the assailants would take up a child and use it as a buckler of defence, when they ascended the steps, to keep themselves from being shot or brained. After they had killed all in the church, and up the towers, they went into the vaults underneath, where all the flower and choicest of the women and ladies had hid themselves. One of these, a most handsome virgin, arrayed in costly and gorgeous apparel, kneeled down to Thomas Wood, with tears and prayers, to save her life; and being strucken with a profound pity, he took her under his arm, went with her out of the church, with intention to put her over the works to shift for herself; but a soldier, perceiving his intentions, he ran his sword" [into her body. The exact words of Wood cannot be reprinted here.] "Whereupon Mr. Wood, seeing her gasping, took away her money, jewels, etc., and flung her down over the works." This Mr. Carlyle calls "An old soldier's account of the storm sufficiently emphatic." It is to be hoped that Mr. Carlyle did not really read the document which he so describes. Much as he groans and grumbles over the labour that the study of original authorities costs him, the careful student will frequently find, especially in Irish affairs, that it is well to verify his references and quotations. This letter, then, it is perhaps reasonable and charitable to presume that he did not read, nor even Hugh Peters' letter to the Parliament above alluded to; for in his comment on Cromwell's declaration, in reply to the Clonmacnoise manifesto, he proceeds to argue, from the silence of the bishops on the subject, that there were no massacres of women or civilians at Wexford and Drogheda. He says: ་ "What, perhaps, will most strike the careless modern reader in the Clonmacnoise manifesto, with its inferences' of general extermination, is 'that show of moderate usage at present,' and the total absence of those 'many inhabitants' butchered at Drogheda lately-total absence of those, and also of the two hundred women in the market-place of Wexford '-who in modern times have even grown two hundred beautiful women' (all young and in their Sunday clothes for the occasion), and figure still in the Irish imagination in a very horrid manner. They are known to Abbé Mageoghegan, these interesting martyrs; more or less to Philopater Irenæus, to my Lord Clarendon, the wanton slaughter of children, he only answered: "Nits will be lice." Was it not written in Joshua, forsooth, that at Jericho, that godly captain had utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old; and was not this Tredah even their seven-days-circled Jericho, whose walls had, as it were, fallen down at the sound of their horns? Let the Canaanite therein then be slain, root and branch, yea, flower and leaf. And we slew and slew and slew-slew them with unpitying sword: Fled the coward-fought the brave,-wailed the mother-wept the child, The two towers remained. They contained six or seven score soldiers, and they held out until they were starved into surrendering. "When they submitted, their officers were knocked on the head, every tenth man of the soldiers killed, the rest shipped for the Barbadoes,"* and sold into slavery. More than a hundred years afterwards an Irish mariner sailing in the Caribbean Seas was surprised to hear the soft guttural vocables of the Gælic tongue, and the airy cadences of the Irish music from the lips of a race as brown as the turf of the Bog of Allen, One officer only escaped of all the garrison. Cromwell himself passes over in silence the atrocities perpetrated in the taking of the town, and which did not cease for days afterwards. But Hugh Peters, who wrote the first account of their victory to the Parliament, after stating the exact number of the garrison slain, 3,350 men, adds concisely :-"None spared." Ormond, whose language always bore an exact measure to his meaning and whose information here was direct and complete, wrote to the king:-"On this occasion Cromwell exceeded himself and anything I ever heard of in breach of faith and bloody inhumanity. The cruelties exercised in Dro Jacobite Carte, and other parties, divided by wide spaces and long centuries from them; but not to this occult hierarchy sitting deliberately close at hand, and doing their best in the massacre way." This, in so far as it means anything, means that women were not murdered at Drogheda and Wexford, because the bishops at Clonmacnoise omit to say so. What, then, becomes of Thomas (or, as Mr. Carlyle familiarly calls him, Toma liberty, by the way, which his brother did not permit himself)-à-Wood's "sufficiently emphatic" testimony. Mr. Carlyle's peculiar phraseology, having a purely arbitrary signification, affords abundant opportunity for equivocation; but he is generally taken, when he uses such words as "sufficiently emphatic," to mean direct, veracious, straightforward. Perhaps, however, he really never read "Tom "-à-Wood's story. * Cromwell's Despatch to Speaker Lenthall. * gheda for four days after the town was taken would make as many several pictures of inhumanity as are to be found in the Book of Martyrs, or in the relation of Amboyna." The priests of the town, Cromwell himself writes, "were all knocked on the head promiscuously, but two; the one of which was Father Peter Taafe, brother to the Lord Taafe, whom the soldiers took the next day and made an end of." The other was taken in the Round Tower, and shot with the officers. A manuscript history of the Society of Jesus in Ireland, says :-" One of our Society was tied to a stake and hewn to pieces. Six of our Fathers were then there; now there is none." Two brothers Bathe-one a Jesuit, one a Secular Priest-were tied up together, and shot in the marketplace. Father Robert Netterville, old and bed-ridden, was dragged out of his cell, kicked and beaten to the breaking of his bones, and left to die in the street. For four days the streets of Drogheda witnessed every form of martyrdom even to the massacre of the Innocents, and every sort of sacrilege and sin except one. They were in this merciful to women, that they merely murdered them. Even still the town bears evidence of that terrible storm of war which raged within its walls two hundred years ago. Old people call one of its streets the Bloody Street, and tell the tradition of six generations, how the carnage overflowed its gutters and caked on its flags. The very shop-signs speak of a population brayed together in the mortar of some universal crushing calamity. The noblest names of Normandy and of the England of the Plantagenets and Tudors-the lordly Latimer, the de Guernons and de Verdons, famous in every field of chivalry from the Pale to Palestine, Montagues and Bellews, and Dowdalls, are to be found interspersed with the best of the Celtic patronymics, O'Neils and O'Donnells, MacCarthys and MacSwineys-with names like Plunkett and Dromgoole, that belonged to the Danes of Dublin-with names which tell of a Huguenot settlement-with the plain Saxon names which came in with Cromwell's first Corporation, and have remained ever since-all alike engaged in the humble, homely trade of an Irish provincial town; and whether their forefathers arrived with the clan Milesius or the clan Oliver, now become, through the gentle ministry of time, "kindly Irish of the Irish one and all. Cromwell's campaign was more than half won by its first fearful victory. "It had the effect he proposed," says Carte. + Quoted in Dr. Moran's Persecutions of the Irish Catholics. "It spread abroad the terror of his name; it cut off the best body of the Irish troops, and disheartened the rest to such a degree that it was a greater loss in itself, and much more fatal in its consequences than the route at Rathmines." And so the curse of Cromwell had begun to spread like a pall over Ireland. But we must defer the narrative of the rest of the war, and of the settlement which followed to a future article. We need not so long delay, however, our grateful acknowledgment of the labour and zeal with which, in the work named at the head of this paper, Mr. Prendergast has investigated the history of the atrocious Act of Parliament by which three of the four provinces of Ireland were confiscated for the benefit of the Puritan adventurers and soldiers. It is the merest justice to say that hardly any more valuable original contribution has been made to the history of that "tragedy of a country' in the present century. ART. VI. THE PAPAL ALLOCUTION ON FREE MASONRY. 1. Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism. A translation from the French of the Abbé Barruch. London: 1797. 2. Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the Secret Meetings of Freemasons, Illuminate, and Reading Societies. Collected from good authorities by JOHN ROBISON, A.M. Third edition. London: 1798. 3. Der Freimaurer-Orden in seiner wahren Bedeutung. E. E. ECKERT. Dresden 1852. 4. Kann ein gläubiger Christ Freimaurer sein? Antwort an den Herrn Dr. Rudolph Seyder, von WILHELM EMMANUEL, FREIHERRN VON KETTELER, Bischof von Mainz. Fünfte Auflage. Mainz, Franz Kirchheim 1865. THE HE Papal Allocution, delivered on the 25th of September, brings a heavy indictment against the Masonic and other secret societies. It accuses that wicked association, commonly called Masonic, of a conspiracy against the Church of God, and of civil society. To the remissness of Catholic sovereigns, in not having rooted out this abandoned and dangerous sect, though admonished by his predecessors to do so, Pius IX. attributes the numerous seditions and revolts in the past and present generations, the great incendiary wars which have desolated Europe, and the bitter evils which have afflicted and still afflict the Church. |