Kieran Healy

Apt Quotations

The Sixth International is an interesting blog I’ve recently discovered, via comments left here by one of its authors. Its tagline reads:

‘”I beseech ye in the bowels of Christ, think that ye may be mistaken.” I should like to have that written over the portals of every church, every school, and every court house, and may I say, of every legislative body….’—Learned Hand

The Sixth Internationalists (and many of my readers) probably know this already, but the ‘bowels of Christ’ quote within the quote comes from Oliver Cromwell. Hand puts it to work as a call to humility in those who would impose their faith or laws on others. I believe Cromwell made the plea in a letter to Scottish church leaders. He wrote it a year or two after overseeing the massacre of Catholics in Ireland, most notably at the siege of Drogheda, where about 3,000 residents were murdered after having surrendered. At the time he commented “This is a righteous judgement of God on these barbarous wretches … it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which are satisfactory grounds to such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret.” Tolerance of ideological dissent in the United Kingdom always implicitly or explicitly excluded Catholics because they were thought to be loyal first to the Pope and thus a threat to state sovereignty.

Drogheda also involved the wholesale slaughter of women and children, which Cromwell justified by saying “Nits breed lice.”

Or maybe he didn’t say that.

The huge tragedy of Anglo-Irish relations is that causes of mutual grievances can be found as far back as diligent historians can dig. About a decade back, an academic wrote in one of the UK Sunday broadsheets to say that among the few surviving scraps of writing from the 6th century attributable to St Patrick was a complaint about slaving expeditions into Ireland from Britain, presumably from Wales. To really understand where we are, we need to know how we got here.

Before we definitively pigeon-hole Cromwell as an incorrigible xenophobic and religious bigot, recall that in 1650 he reversed the decision of 1290 by Edward I to expel all jews from England and instead encouraged inward migration for settlement. In due course, one outcome was that Disraeli, an ethnic jew but by religion a baptised Christian, became leader of the Conservative Party and then prime minister in 1868 and 1874-80. His grand father was an immigrant.

What does tend to get overlooked in discussions of Anglo-Irish relations is the deep and continuing popular aversion in England to catholicism, amounting almost to paranoia for a period, but which has valid historic roots. In the reign of Mary Tudor, England’s monarch 1553-58, at least 287 protestants, according to surviving historic documents, were burned to death for heresy at various locations around England to restore catholicism by state terror. At a time when the total population was about 5 million and the venues for burning suitably dispersed and public the messsage was clear. A later plaque on the wall of Balliol College, Oxford, commemorates the death by burning nearby of Bishops Cranmer and Ridley, authors of the mandatory Book of Common Prayer, and also Bishop Latimer. In her life-time, Mary Tudor became known by the soubriquet: Bloody Mary.

The Spanish Armada, which attempted an invasion of England in 1588, was equipped with a Papal commission to restore catholicism. We still commemorate every year on 5 November, with bonfires and firework displays, the abortive attempt by a small group of catholic conspirators in 1605 to blow up England’s Parliament at the state opening. Ten of thousands of Huguenots refugees settled in England from the late 16th century through into the 17th century to escape persecution in France – http://www.geocities.com/hugenoteblad/hist-hug.htm – which doubtless reinforced popular apprehensions as to a likely fate of protestants in England were catholics able to regain a secure foothold in government of the realm.

It is impossible to understand the motivating themes in England’s civil war in the 1640s; the credence given to Titus Oates’ tales of a Popish plot 1678-81; the flight of James II in 1688 and the invitation extended thereafter by Parliament to the Dutch Prince William of Orange to reign jointly with his wife Mary, daughter of James II; the Gordon Riots in London of 1780, which amounted to an anti-catholic pogrom; or the background to William Pitt’s resignation as prime minister in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars in 1801, without taking account of the extent of populist anti-catholic sentiment. Pitt resigned because he was prevented from carrying his intended legislation for catholic emanciptaion through Parliament. It took the combined political muscle of the Dublin-born Duke of Wellington, in the Lords during one of his brief stints as prime minister, and Peel in the Commons as home secretary, to force through legislation for catholic emancipation in 1829.

The protracted course of this conflict over religious sentiments and its enduring consequences perhaps contains a lesson for our times.

One, the United Kingdom didn’t exist in Cromwell’s time.

Two, one of the things the roundheads were fighting against were the Catholic tendencies of the monarchy.

Three, within a hundred years you would have two insurrections led by Catholic pretenders in 1715 and 1745.

Four, the record of Catholic states was obviously so much better. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes anyone? I wonder where all those Huguenot refugees in England came from.

Five, the Spanish Inquisition anyone?

Enough of the belligerency and conflict stuff? The Edge of England’s Sword blog has signposted official endeavours to rewrite European history in school textbooks so presentation to impressionable school pupils better accords with the prevailing preferred vision of steady organic progress towards European integration in harmony. A delicious guide to this revisionism is at: http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal_archives/2003_04_01_archive.asp#200155664 together with helpful offerings on suitable treatment for difficult passages. The proposed new treatment of the Spanish Armada is especially recommended.

To turn to the 20th Century, I honestly don’t remember hearing an anti-Catholic statement during my 15 years in England, unless you count jokes about the Pope. You’ll hear FAR more anti-Catholic rhetoric in the US - indeed, infinitely more, if I didn’t hear any in England, except when Ian Paisley was onscreen. The English are basically completely indifferent to religion, and Anglicanism furthers that. Remember, the Anglican Church was working on strengthening ties to Rome when the American (yes) Episcopalians sabotaged that by unilaterally enthroning the church’s first woman bishop. This might well be different if I’d grown up in Wales or Scotland, they’re Protestant, as the Anglicans say.
I’d guess about 5% of the British public know that Guy Fawkes has anything to do with Catholicism.
Cromwell did terrible things. He’s also not very popular in England.

Of course, when I studied British history in England, we learned practically nothing about Ireland. Not Cromwell, not 1846, not 1916 (1920?). Mind you, we seem to have jumped from 1750 to the Second World War.
I wonder how much Irish history makes it into English state school teaching today.

>The English are basically completely indifferent to religion

Exactly. Both by the reported impressions of foreign observers and the percentages of the population attending places of worship, the English are in strong contention for the least religious people in Europe with only the Netherlanders as close rivals. Sectarian politics has mercifully disappeared almost everywhere although vestiges are recognised as surviving in two conurbations. With only rare exceptions I have not been aware of the religious faiths of even close work colleagues and I’ve lived and worked in several different regions.

On gaps in the awareness of history by the English, we have this entirely apt observation IMO from the inaugural lecture of Professor Geoffrey Elton in 1968:

“Now one of the most curious things about the English, I think . .is that they suppose themselves to be conscious of history and to be enveloped in History. They are not. They are both indifferent and ignorant as far as history is concerned. If you want a really historically conscious country you have to go either to Central Europe, where they have too much history . . or to the United States, where they have so little of it.” [quoted by Norman Davies: The Isles (1999), p.524]

The corollary, of course, is that for many the roots of national festivities, like fireworks on 5 November, are thoroughly obscure, as is much of Britain’s constitution, which is scattered through umpteen Acts of Parliament, precedents and conventions. My distinct impression is that most English people regard the source of “the troubles” in Northern Ireland as an arcane mystery. A connection with the past has surfaced in some recent public debate relating to the legal impediments preventing the Prince of Wales from marrying or becoming a catholic. However, my understanding is that the legal complexities are so daunting that remedying the evident anomaly is unlikely any time soon.

Another corollary is that by the regular official Eurobarometer polls, the British regularly emerge as the least enthusiastic members of the European Union and the most sceptical of the benefits of membership.

The Sixth Internationalists are well aware of the quotation’s provenance. We rather like the irony. (Irony is our faible, and we’ve been spanked for it before.)

Whataboutery is a game beloved of all, and there’s no better playing field than Irish history. Cromwell’s men got all enthusiastic at Drogheda; a few years earlier the victims had been the perpetrators, as catholic ‘native’ Irishmen massacred protestant ‘settlers’ (not forgetting, and whatabouterists never do, women and children). The game is still going on, though there’s some reason to hope it is now in injury time and will soon reach its long overdue end. (Nil-nil and a waste of time for all concerned, will be my post-match analysis.)

It was a Ladybird biography for children that summed Cromwell up best, I think. ‘He had the name of a hard man,’ (and I am quoting from memory here so I probably don’t have it quite right), ‘but he was never unnecessarily cruel, except to the Irish.’

But for all the irony of Cromwell’s saying this, there’s something to what he said.

Let’s adjust perspectives. Ireland hardly has some sort of near monopoly in European history of atrocity and bigotry as the persecution of the Huguenots and anti-semitism show. Estimates of the scale democide in the Soviet Union, excluding war dead, are about three times those in the Third Reich. If anything, Ireland’s history rather looks like accounts of rough play at kindergarten by comparison. Consider too that Galileo was subject to an extended period of house arrest for publishing an account of his astronomical observations supporting the heresy that the earth went round the sun.