Page 225 - Demo

Chapter Seven 225
A month after the victory of Jones at Rathmines, Oliver Cromwell, architect of victory in the English Civil War and undisputed leader of the Parliamentary Party, “Lord Lieuten- ant and General of the Parliament of England,” to give him his correct titles, or ‘God’s Ex- ecutioner,’ as he was styled by some in the vernacular, at the head of 4,000 horse and 9,000 foot, of his well-inanced and equally well armed New Model Army, landed at Ringsend, in Dublin.
Flushed with his victories in England and Scotland, and illed with ierce fanaticism and revenge, Cromwell knew exactly what he wanted to achieve in Ireland-and in his eforts he was to prove a formidable enemy. The country was to be paciied and put under the rule of the English Parliament, and as one writer said, ‘If he did not intend also to punish the Irish for the atrocities committed in Ulster by the followers of Felim O’Neill, his troops certainly did.’
It is told that Cromwell’s roundhead troops arrived in Dublin singing psalms and ac- companied by scores of zealous preachers. One of those preachers was Hugh Peters. De- scribed as being “a man of rough course nature” and “unorthodox in his teachings” Peters, a former Catholic, who now held the rank of Oicial Chaplain to Cromwell’s army, set the tone of the campaign when he invoked the troops “to kill all that were of the Irish, young and old, child and maiden.”
In the eight months he himself spent in Ireland, Cromwell almost completed the re- conquest of the country and his his passage through the land was described as being like “the swift stroke of a sword that spared not.”
Shortly after his arrival, less than three weks in fact, the great Puritan general laid siege to the strategic town of Drogheda, then garrisoned by 3,000 of Ormond’s best troops-‘the Flower of the Army’ it was said. After a desperate defence the garrison capitulated and the victorious roundheads entered the battered town-this after Cromwell ofered quarter to all who would surrender. But when the surrendered garrison had given up their arms the promised quarter was refused, and the surrendered garrison, numbering then about 2,000, were put to the sword, as were many of the townspeople and all the Catholic clergy-several accounts mention a igure of 2,000. Over one thousand of these had earlier taken refuge in St. Peter’s church, but when their whereabouts was discovered, the steeple was set on ire and those who were not burned were killed when attempting to escape; the street in front of the church was long afterwards called ‘Bloody Street.’ In another public show of brutal-