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Then too, there were so many dreams, half-waking, and not only of Olivia Chichele, naive and frank in divers rural circumstances, but rather of Olivia, Lady Drogheda, that perfect piece of artifice; of how exquisite she was! how swift and volatile in every movement! how airily indomitable, and how mendacious to the tips of her polished finger-nails! and how she always seemed to flit about this world as joyously, alertly, and as colorfully as some ornate and tiny bird of the tropics!
Hugh Peters, the chaplain of Fairfax, wrote after this barbarous execution: "We are masters of Tredagh; no enemy was spared; I just come from the church where I had gone to thank the Lord." The same fate awaited Wexford, and, later on, Drogheda. Cromwell, when narrating those bloody massacres, concluded by saying, "People blame me, but it was the will of God."
From Athlone he directed his march towards Drogheda, where he arrived with "20 cohorts," about the same time that the Lord Deputy Butler came up with "30 cohorts." Bruce, unprepared to meet so vast a force taken together some 25,000 or 30,000 men retreated slowly towards his point of debarkation.
On the tenth of September the royal standard of James was unfurled on the tower of Drogheda; and beneath it were soon collected twenty thousand fighting men, the infantry generally bad, the cavalry generally good, but both infantry and cavalry full of zeal for their country and their religion, The troops were attended as usual by a great multitude of camp followers, armed with scythes, half pikes, and skeans.
The co-heirs of Lord Ranelagh ordered £110 to be distributed in Roscommon; Lady Betty Brownlow, then abroad, sent home £440 for her tenants in the North; Chief Justice Singleton gave twenty tons of meal to be sold in Drogheda at one shilling and a penny a stone; the Rt. Hon. Wm.
By this ford, William ordered his centre to advance under the elder Schomberg, as the hour of noon approached, while he himself moved with the left across the river, nearer to Drogheda. Lauzan, with Sarsfield's horse, dreading to be outflanked, had galloped to guard the bridge of Slane, five miles higher up the stream, where alone a flank movement was possible.
An amiable woman with a large fortune might indeed have been an ample compensation for the loss. But Lady Drogheda was ill-tempered, imperious, and extravagantly jealous. She had herself been a maid of honour at Whitehall. She well knew in what estimation conjugal fidelity was held among the fine gentlemen there, and watched her town husband as assiduously as Mr.
"We mean well anyway," grunted the Parson. "Yes," said the other slowly. "You did her to death: but you did it for the best. That's England to the core!" The man's white bitterness struck like a sword. It was something new; it was something terrible. "Drogheda in the name of God!" "What's done can't be undone," growled the Parson, all the Englishman coming out in him. "I believe we're trying now."
It is quite clear that Cromwell at Drogheda was obeying conscience, was doing that which he conscientiously believed to be the Will of God; and there is no reason to doubt that a man like Torquemada was also carrying out what he conscientiously believed to be the Divine Will in the war which he waged against heresy through the Inquisition.
Ussher wrote to complain of the "unreverend manner" in which the proclamation was made in Drogheda. "It was done in scornful and contemptuous sort, a drunken soldier being first set up to read it, and then a drunken sergeant of the town, making the same to seem like a May-game."
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