He captured Drogheda in September 1649. His troops massacred nearly
3,500 people, including 2,700 Royalist soldiers, all the men in the town
with weapons and probably also some civilians, prisoners and priests.
At the siege of Wexford in October 1649, 2,000
Irish soldiers and perhaps 1,500 civilians were killed.
Slaughtering civilians as well as soldiers.
Transporting many Irish Catholics as slaves to
the West Indies.
Giving Catholics' land to Protestant settlers and exiling
the Irish to poor land in Connacht in the west of Ireland.
There is little evidence that he ever sent slaves to the West Indies.
Cromwell ordered his men not to kill civilians and hanged those who did.
Cromwell refused to show mercy to the people of
Drogheda, as the laws of war allowed at the time, because
they had refused to surrender. He wrote later that he gave
the order only to stop bloodshed in the long run.
Cromwell left Ireland two years before the Act for the
Settlement of Ireland (1652) which confiscated Catholics' lands.