Arguably, conditions in Ireland
helped spark the English Civil War as Wentworth's unpopular policy of 'thorough'
(a euphemism for landgrabs) created enemies all round, destabilised the country,
and eventually provided much of the legal evidence for his impeachment before a
Parliament who were horrified at the prospects of his raising an Irish army to
curtail their calls for reform. Via the Adventurer's Act, Irish Catholic and
Royalist land was forfeited en masse to subsidise the Parliament's war in
England against Charles.
The cause itself was an honourable one; Charles was a
despot who invoked divine right monarchy to justify arbitrary rule, granting
monopolies to court favourites and setting up Star Chamber kangaroo courts to
try political dissidents but his reign did at least hold fast to the Anglican
'compromise' which at that time represented a bridge of sorts between warring
factions of Catholic and Protestant extremists - hence the Irish Confederates
negotiations with Ormond as opposed to the Scottish Covenanters or English
Puritans both of whom would have rebuked any attempt to grant civil liberties to
Irish Catholics.
The irony is that the Levellers of the English Civil War (inevitably crushed by Cromwell) were the source of much of the republicanism which was tapped into and moulded by the American colonists via the Scottish Enlightenment, elaborated by the French revolutionaries and eventually espoused by the United Irishmen; Tone, Emmett and O' Connor. The strands of thought, in other words, which had produced the radical murmurings of the English Parliament and led directly to the mass Irish dispossession returned 150 years after the event to argue for a reversal of the conquest and the up-ending of Protestant Ascendency.
Its perfectly legitimate to draw parallels between the English Civil War and the Irish Revolution (1912-1923), as I have seen done recently, insofar as both countries were convulsed by military conflict and the ordinary people wound up paying the heaviest price. But the especial nature of the intense religious conflict which characterised this age (pre-Enlightenment amidst a thrusting Catholic Counter-Reformation which engulfed Europe in the Thirty Years War of which the War of the Three Kingdoms was arguably only a subsidiary skuffle) inclines me to draw a greater affinity between the rise of Cromwellian Puritanism and the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979.
With the crackdown on political opposition both the Shah and Charles ensured the madrassas and dissenter pulpits were the only viable focal points for rallying disaffection (many of the Levellers having imbibed their republicanism from the Anabaptists); the one disbanded political gatherings on the pretext they were fronting communist groups, the other dissolving Parliament because it refused to raise loans (i.e. taxes on the people) which divine right absolutism regarded as legally its own.
Archbishop Laud's lever to exert further control over the entire British body politic and rein in the dissenters via the extension of the episcopacy culminated in the short-lived marriage of convenience between the Scots Covenanters and the Independents both viewing Catholicism as the common foe; anathema to the culmination of their respective Calvinist and Lutheran revolutions - Anglicanism, or the Elizabethan 'compromise' being an unsatisfactory half-way house which reeked of papism for the religious radicals.
The resultant 'holy book' fundamentalism, regulation of social life and attempts to weed out corruption which both 'clerical' dictatorships inaugurated despite Cromwell's assertion that he would 'not meddle in any man's conscience' are indeed striking. The effects in Ireland were of course manifold. The Confederates, themselves tied to the dictates of Roman envoy Rinucinni who held out the promise of French and Papal backing, could not then ally themselves with the more secular English republicans who decried Parliament's attempt to prosecute the war in Ireland - the result of which (as we all know), via the Adventurer's Act, enacted the greatest revolution in land ownership the country had ever seen, decimating the native Gaelic and Anglo-Norman (Old English) Catholic aristocracy and setting up in its place an Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendency from whose late lamented claws the generations of the late 19th C. had only recently, in the agrarian domain at least, emancipated itself from - though the full political liberation yet awaited.
No denying Cromwell had a certain greatness though, no less a talent than Carlyle frazzled at the task of biography, couldn't find his angles, & dropped the project altogether but left us at least the "Letters & Writings" - an awesome task to compile as they'd been scattered to all corners.
According to Micheál Ó' Siochrú, (in God's Executioner) when Bertie Ahern met British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook (when Labour came to power in 1997) he had a portrait of Cromwell in his office. Bertie turned on his heel and walked out, saying he wouldn't return until Cook had removed the picture of "that murdering b**tard". Cook, anxious to avoid a diplomatic spat, "made the necessary arrangements".
I used to have a visceral knee-jerk response like that but having studied the English Civil War and the cause of Parliament from "the people's" perspective it is impossible not to admire at least his tenacity in opposing the absolutist monarchy of Charles I. The New Model Army for instance he re-shaped on democratic lines demoting officers of aristocratic stock in favour of 'commoners' with proven ability. He was very 'untouched' in that way and had an easy rapport with the plain soldierly.
His biggest black mark in my mind (outside of the Irish context) was his crushing of the Levellers who had just claim to be the modern world's first true democrats & republicans (Cromwell in the end sided with the gentry at the Putney debates).
All slavery is a despicable outrage.
The despotism of an absolutist monarch no less than the brutal plundering of a colonial power. Before Cromwell set sail for Ireland he crushed the Levellers in May 1649, at Burford. These were men who had fought with him for the rights of Parliament since the beginning of the Civil War. They had written in "Agreement of the Free People" that England had no claim over Ireland. In their journal, the "Moderate Intelligencer" they justified the Irish 1641 "massacres" as the acts of a conquered people to throw off their oppressors. They admired Cromwell reservedly; his qualities of military leadership eventually delivered them a Republic, not the one they sought, but the toppling of monarchy all the same; and, so they believed, the template to abolish aristocracy and inherited privilege, to redistribute land, to have a universal franchise, erasure of the Lords and a seat in Parliament for any man of modest means and a fair ability.
Cromwell was not their lodestar but he was sufficiently in touch with the ordinary plain soldier as to merit their respect. Few aristocrats of the day would blow their nose at these demands. Cromwell had them onside for the guts of five years and even after Burford; many still stayed loyal. If the joint Confederate/Royalist armies in Ireland defeated Parliament's forces where would that leave the state of "the Realm"? - the return of Stuart despotism and the crushing of Republicanism, perhaps indefinitely.
Irish Confederates at Kilkenny were doubly cleaved; rivalries between Old English aristocrats and Gaelic chiefs spawned mutual distrust and both in turn hankered for lost titles to be vouchsafed by a Stuart monarch who had denied them, all along, via refusal of the Graces, their full civil and religious liberties. Charles was not to be trusted; all parties to the cause realised that - such is despotism. Had the Irish cause not been led by dispossessed Catholic landowners and instead contained a sprinkling of the soil the alliance with the cross-channel Leveller movement would have been the only logical strategy - but the lure of arms and armies from post-Tridentine Europe along with spiritual & financial succour from Rome couldn't be abandoned. And so they fell; in a pan-European Counter-Reformation struggle that began thirty years before when Vilem Slavata & co were chucked out of a Bohemian window onto the dung heap below.
Unlike Liburne, Overton and Wallace, Cromwell's filters couldn't bypass the propaganda spewing from Milton, Temple, and the rest of the Independent & Puritan press regarding the uprising of the 'barbarous Irish' and so he "settled scores" - "the whole world knows of their barbarity", -he proclaimed, ignorant enough on his part, in Drogheda, where the bulk of the inhabitants were English and Anglo-Irish Royalists, who had clearly nothing to do with the "rebellion".
Of course the fate of those Irish placed in chains was appalling; slavery on all levels is despicable, but that was the done thing - Cavaliers in England (both Catholic and Protestant) were rounded up in chains and packed off to the "Tobacco Island" by victorious Parliament armies and their satellite profiteers. Europe was ablaze in atrocities, the world was "turned upside down", religious discord reached its zenith and the extremes of the period precipitated Enlightenment "tolerance", hatched in the brooding skull of Spinoza who cursed Cromwell for wrecking his family's Dutch trading concern.
The world hadn't even begun to see real slavery yet; the counting houses of Europe soon saw the folly of biblical disputes and soon nestled in for the great colonial rape that characterised the explosion of mercantilism in the 18th C. - in which, of course, émigré Catholic Irish aristocrats of Gaelic and Old English stock played their part - see Walsh, the great Irish slave trader who shipped the Pretender over to Scotland for the first of many Jacobite routs. The fate of the Barbados Irish 'redlegs' was appalling and many of them still live in crushing poverty to this day, oblivious even to the roots of their squalor.
Truly wretched.
To take issue with two recent publications; "To Hell or Barbados" by Sean O’Callaghan and the article, ‘The Irish Slave Trade - The Forgotten ‘White’ Slaves,’ written by John Martin from the "Center for Research and Globalization" in Montreal.
The Irish Slave Trade ? The Forgotten ?White? Slaves | Global Research
Like O' Callaghan, whose book I have and couldn't read on account of the absence of footnotes and properly documented research, there's a tendency to blow things out of proportion.
Martin writes;
"From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves"
These figures are an absurdity. Although probably a third of the population were lost during the Confederate Wars this was largely due to famine and the requisitioning of farmer's stocks by armies on all sides of the conflict, coupled with the spread of disease. Its blatantly polarising and hides the complexity of the conflict. Peter Beresford Ellis has written a much better, fully documented account of the period of the transplantation within Ireland; "To Hell or Connaught" while O' Siochrú's book, mentioned above, is a reliable guide to Cromwell's campaign. Neither of them flinch on their criticism of the horrors of colonialism but at least they do it in a manner which is fully verifiable
I seem to remember O' Callaghan fixing on a figure of 40,000 so that may be taken as the absolute highest ball-park given that his 'Introduction' emphatically states he's talking about the "ethnic cleansing" of Ireland. Few other writers deploy terms this stark. I'm not disputing this kind of thing went on (far from it) but it's not the whole story, as any perusal of primary documents will tell you. The point I think here is that O' Callaghan's methodology is so sloppy and his intent so clear (to highlight the savagery & horror) that if he thought (within reason) he could max the figures beyond this point he almost certainly would.
Q.e.d. - John Martin's article and numbers are pure delirium.
This makes me angry on several fronts because it actually diminishes the real suffering that did happen since it provides perfect target practice for those who say the Irish are continually 'whining' and coveting the MOPE award. You can't even begin to have a serious conversation until all these preliminary smoke-clouds (kicked up by all sides) are cleared away.
Such alas, is Irish history
On the flip side of the propaganda war, in England pamphlets purporting to show the massacre of Protestants in Ulster were woodcuts of massacres in the continental religious wars. They were just so graphic they were deemed appropriate to prove the government's point. This is interesting about the woodcuts, as nothing would surprise from this period. John Milton was an able propagandist, denouncing at every turn Irish barbarity; "their absurd and savage Customes" while John Temple's "Irish Rebellion" set the seal forevermore on the 100,000 massacre figure. As late as the 1860's, James Anthony Froude was citing them as fact. Mitchel responded with "Crusade of the Period", a seldom read classic rebuttal.
When the 1641 depositions were put online Paisley beamed with McAleese at the press-call like the cat who got the cream (finally for the world to see as it were!) - it remains a keystone event in Unionist mythology. But though large (academics vary between 4 and 12,000), its an index of indigenous frustration with the Plantation in Ulster particularly & moreover a spontaneous outburst which was never sanctioned by the leadership. Indeed, Phelim O' Neill & co. did their best to reign it in.
The irony is that the Levellers of the English Civil War (inevitably crushed by Cromwell) were the source of much of the republicanism which was tapped into and moulded by the American colonists via the Scottish Enlightenment, elaborated by the French revolutionaries and eventually espoused by the United Irishmen; Tone, Emmett and O' Connor. The strands of thought, in other words, which had produced the radical murmurings of the English Parliament and led directly to the mass Irish dispossession returned 150 years after the event to argue for a reversal of the conquest and the up-ending of Protestant Ascendency.
Its perfectly legitimate to draw parallels between the English Civil War and the Irish Revolution (1912-1923), as I have seen done recently, insofar as both countries were convulsed by military conflict and the ordinary people wound up paying the heaviest price. But the especial nature of the intense religious conflict which characterised this age (pre-Enlightenment amidst a thrusting Catholic Counter-Reformation which engulfed Europe in the Thirty Years War of which the War of the Three Kingdoms was arguably only a subsidiary skuffle) inclines me to draw a greater affinity between the rise of Cromwellian Puritanism and the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979.
With the crackdown on political opposition both the Shah and Charles ensured the madrassas and dissenter pulpits were the only viable focal points for rallying disaffection (many of the Levellers having imbibed their republicanism from the Anabaptists); the one disbanded political gatherings on the pretext they were fronting communist groups, the other dissolving Parliament because it refused to raise loans (i.e. taxes on the people) which divine right absolutism regarded as legally its own.
Archbishop Laud's lever to exert further control over the entire British body politic and rein in the dissenters via the extension of the episcopacy culminated in the short-lived marriage of convenience between the Scots Covenanters and the Independents both viewing Catholicism as the common foe; anathema to the culmination of their respective Calvinist and Lutheran revolutions - Anglicanism, or the Elizabethan 'compromise' being an unsatisfactory half-way house which reeked of papism for the religious radicals.
The resultant 'holy book' fundamentalism, regulation of social life and attempts to weed out corruption which both 'clerical' dictatorships inaugurated despite Cromwell's assertion that he would 'not meddle in any man's conscience' are indeed striking. The effects in Ireland were of course manifold. The Confederates, themselves tied to the dictates of Roman envoy Rinucinni who held out the promise of French and Papal backing, could not then ally themselves with the more secular English republicans who decried Parliament's attempt to prosecute the war in Ireland - the result of which (as we all know), via the Adventurer's Act, enacted the greatest revolution in land ownership the country had ever seen, decimating the native Gaelic and Anglo-Norman (Old English) Catholic aristocracy and setting up in its place an Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendency from whose late lamented claws the generations of the late 19th C. had only recently, in the agrarian domain at least, emancipated itself from - though the full political liberation yet awaited.
No denying Cromwell had a certain greatness though, no less a talent than Carlyle frazzled at the task of biography, couldn't find his angles, & dropped the project altogether but left us at least the "Letters & Writings" - an awesome task to compile as they'd been scattered to all corners.
According to Micheál Ó' Siochrú, (in God's Executioner) when Bertie Ahern met British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook (when Labour came to power in 1997) he had a portrait of Cromwell in his office. Bertie turned on his heel and walked out, saying he wouldn't return until Cook had removed the picture of "that murdering b**tard". Cook, anxious to avoid a diplomatic spat, "made the necessary arrangements".
I used to have a visceral knee-jerk response like that but having studied the English Civil War and the cause of Parliament from "the people's" perspective it is impossible not to admire at least his tenacity in opposing the absolutist monarchy of Charles I. The New Model Army for instance he re-shaped on democratic lines demoting officers of aristocratic stock in favour of 'commoners' with proven ability. He was very 'untouched' in that way and had an easy rapport with the plain soldierly.
His biggest black mark in my mind (outside of the Irish context) was his crushing of the Levellers who had just claim to be the modern world's first true democrats & republicans (Cromwell in the end sided with the gentry at the Putney debates).
All slavery is a despicable outrage.
The despotism of an absolutist monarch no less than the brutal plundering of a colonial power. Before Cromwell set sail for Ireland he crushed the Levellers in May 1649, at Burford. These were men who had fought with him for the rights of Parliament since the beginning of the Civil War. They had written in "Agreement of the Free People" that England had no claim over Ireland. In their journal, the "Moderate Intelligencer" they justified the Irish 1641 "massacres" as the acts of a conquered people to throw off their oppressors. They admired Cromwell reservedly; his qualities of military leadership eventually delivered them a Republic, not the one they sought, but the toppling of monarchy all the same; and, so they believed, the template to abolish aristocracy and inherited privilege, to redistribute land, to have a universal franchise, erasure of the Lords and a seat in Parliament for any man of modest means and a fair ability.
Cromwell was not their lodestar but he was sufficiently in touch with the ordinary plain soldier as to merit their respect. Few aristocrats of the day would blow their nose at these demands. Cromwell had them onside for the guts of five years and even after Burford; many still stayed loyal. If the joint Confederate/Royalist armies in Ireland defeated Parliament's forces where would that leave the state of "the Realm"? - the return of Stuart despotism and the crushing of Republicanism, perhaps indefinitely.
Irish Confederates at Kilkenny were doubly cleaved; rivalries between Old English aristocrats and Gaelic chiefs spawned mutual distrust and both in turn hankered for lost titles to be vouchsafed by a Stuart monarch who had denied them, all along, via refusal of the Graces, their full civil and religious liberties. Charles was not to be trusted; all parties to the cause realised that - such is despotism. Had the Irish cause not been led by dispossessed Catholic landowners and instead contained a sprinkling of the soil the alliance with the cross-channel Leveller movement would have been the only logical strategy - but the lure of arms and armies from post-Tridentine Europe along with spiritual & financial succour from Rome couldn't be abandoned. And so they fell; in a pan-European Counter-Reformation struggle that began thirty years before when Vilem Slavata & co were chucked out of a Bohemian window onto the dung heap below.
Unlike Liburne, Overton and Wallace, Cromwell's filters couldn't bypass the propaganda spewing from Milton, Temple, and the rest of the Independent & Puritan press regarding the uprising of the 'barbarous Irish' and so he "settled scores" - "the whole world knows of their barbarity", -he proclaimed, ignorant enough on his part, in Drogheda, where the bulk of the inhabitants were English and Anglo-Irish Royalists, who had clearly nothing to do with the "rebellion".
Of course the fate of those Irish placed in chains was appalling; slavery on all levels is despicable, but that was the done thing - Cavaliers in England (both Catholic and Protestant) were rounded up in chains and packed off to the "Tobacco Island" by victorious Parliament armies and their satellite profiteers. Europe was ablaze in atrocities, the world was "turned upside down", religious discord reached its zenith and the extremes of the period precipitated Enlightenment "tolerance", hatched in the brooding skull of Spinoza who cursed Cromwell for wrecking his family's Dutch trading concern.
The world hadn't even begun to see real slavery yet; the counting houses of Europe soon saw the folly of biblical disputes and soon nestled in for the great colonial rape that characterised the explosion of mercantilism in the 18th C. - in which, of course, émigré Catholic Irish aristocrats of Gaelic and Old English stock played their part - see Walsh, the great Irish slave trader who shipped the Pretender over to Scotland for the first of many Jacobite routs. The fate of the Barbados Irish 'redlegs' was appalling and many of them still live in crushing poverty to this day, oblivious even to the roots of their squalor.
Truly wretched.
To take issue with two recent publications; "To Hell or Barbados" by Sean O’Callaghan and the article, ‘The Irish Slave Trade - The Forgotten ‘White’ Slaves,’ written by John Martin from the "Center for Research and Globalization" in Montreal.
The Irish Slave Trade ? The Forgotten ?White? Slaves | Global Research
Like O' Callaghan, whose book I have and couldn't read on account of the absence of footnotes and properly documented research, there's a tendency to blow things out of proportion.
Martin writes;
"From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves"
These figures are an absurdity. Although probably a third of the population were lost during the Confederate Wars this was largely due to famine and the requisitioning of farmer's stocks by armies on all sides of the conflict, coupled with the spread of disease. Its blatantly polarising and hides the complexity of the conflict. Peter Beresford Ellis has written a much better, fully documented account of the period of the transplantation within Ireland; "To Hell or Connaught" while O' Siochrú's book, mentioned above, is a reliable guide to Cromwell's campaign. Neither of them flinch on their criticism of the horrors of colonialism but at least they do it in a manner which is fully verifiable
I seem to remember O' Callaghan fixing on a figure of 40,000 so that may be taken as the absolute highest ball-park given that his 'Introduction' emphatically states he's talking about the "ethnic cleansing" of Ireland. Few other writers deploy terms this stark. I'm not disputing this kind of thing went on (far from it) but it's not the whole story, as any perusal of primary documents will tell you. The point I think here is that O' Callaghan's methodology is so sloppy and his intent so clear (to highlight the savagery & horror) that if he thought (within reason) he could max the figures beyond this point he almost certainly would.
Q.e.d. - John Martin's article and numbers are pure delirium.
This makes me angry on several fronts because it actually diminishes the real suffering that did happen since it provides perfect target practice for those who say the Irish are continually 'whining' and coveting the MOPE award. You can't even begin to have a serious conversation until all these preliminary smoke-clouds (kicked up by all sides) are cleared away.
Such alas, is Irish history
On the flip side of the propaganda war, in England pamphlets purporting to show the massacre of Protestants in Ulster were woodcuts of massacres in the continental religious wars. They were just so graphic they were deemed appropriate to prove the government's point. This is interesting about the woodcuts, as nothing would surprise from this period. John Milton was an able propagandist, denouncing at every turn Irish barbarity; "their absurd and savage Customes" while John Temple's "Irish Rebellion" set the seal forevermore on the 100,000 massacre figure. As late as the 1860's, James Anthony Froude was citing them as fact. Mitchel responded with "Crusade of the Period", a seldom read classic rebuttal.
When the 1641 depositions were put online Paisley beamed with McAleese at the press-call like the cat who got the cream (finally for the world to see as it were!) - it remains a keystone event in Unionist mythology. But though large (academics vary between 4 and 12,000), its an index of indigenous frustration with the Plantation in Ulster particularly & moreover a spontaneous outburst which was never sanctioned by the leadership. Indeed, Phelim O' Neill & co. did their best to reign it in.
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