Wednesday, August 27, 2008
God’s Irish executioner and English political hero
Here’s a topic to stir the blood.. Oliver Cromwell is the subject this week of a major reappraisal by Irish historian Micheál O Siochrú and the main feature of the BBC History magazine. I can do no better than let the excellent Fintan O’Toole introduce him, quoting his Observer review:
“Even in these times, when all the talk is of putting history behind us, the easiest way to tell the difference between the Irish and the English is to utter the word “Cromwell.” Is Cromwell merely a folkloric bogeyman for the Irish?
Given the dominant mood of contemporary Irish historiography, one almost expects Micheál O Siochrú‘s forensic and fastidious account to conclude that Old Ironsides really had a heart of gold. The fascination of the book is that, even when it is put through the wringer of low-key, unemotional and carefully documented analysis, he myth turns out to be mostly true.”
For the English ( not the Scots), emotions are a bit lower, though even there in 2000, the anniversary of Cromwell’s return from Ireland, the historian and leading Cromwell authority Professor John Murrill suffered for his interest in Cromwell:
“I was myself assaulted and received death threats. The depth of
hatred that still exists in Ireland is matched only by unawareness in non-Catholic
English circles of what Cromwell did in Ireland. I am reminded of GK Chesterton’s
remark that the tragedy of the English conquest of Ireland in the 17th century is
that the Irish can never forget it and the English can never remember it.”
Might the reason for all this unpleasantness have something to do with the fact that good professor was President of the Cromwell Association, and may be supposed to have plenty of good words to say on old Ironside’s behalf? Was he therefore the right man to be reviewing Cromwell’s life and work in BBC History magazine?. On inquiry, that seems unfair to him. A summary of the prof’s views suggests a more dispassionate view than the Irish, but very far from a whitewash. This for instance on the Siege of Drogheda which ended with the massacre after surrender of 2,500 immediately and hundreds more later.
“It was in accordance with the laws of war, but it went far beyond what any General had done in England. Cromwell then perpetrated a messier massacre at Wexford. Thereafter most towns surrendered on his approach, and he scrupulously observed surrender articles and spared the lives of soldiers and civilians. It was and is a controversial conquest. But, from the English point of view, it worked’
On the same occasion, Morrill, who is Professor of British and Irish History at the University of Cambridge contributed an article entitled ‘Was Cromwell a War Criminal?’
This is a carefully balanced piece “ for” and “against” but “against” contains the conclusion:
“This was ethnic cleansing on a scale undreamt of by Slobodan Milosevic”
I’ve always thought of Cromwell as follows. In the tsunami of religious conflict compared to our own pond ripples that was the 17th century, Cromwell was the epitome of the disciplined fanatic, who became an outstanding military leader out of his status and ability to raise a regiment in Huntingdonshire. He achieved this by the then revolutionary method of showing his fellow men respect as fellow Christians, training them – and paying them. None of that feudal nonsense any more. Decidedly less favourably, as a Bible Protestant who nonetheless tolerated other Protestants in an intolerant age, he despised the Catholic Irish - and Catholic English - as being beyond the Pale ( even if they were in it if you see what I mean).
At Drogheda he employed usual siege warfare conventions. In those days,besiegers were almost as vulnerable as the besieged because of exposed supply lines and an ever-present threat of disease. So the besiegers warned those cooped up that if they didn’t surrender by XX, they’d be massacred. Which they duly were. And most of them were English. But although Cromwell must be judged mainly by the standards of his time. I’m now convinced he brought an extra edge to the business.
As O’Toole puts it: ( His conduct at Drogheda was) a refusal to distinguish between civilians and combatants and a resort to ethnic cleansing. In his first engagement, at Drogheda, he personally supervised the slaughter of about 2,500 soldiers and an indeterminate number of civilians. The arguments of apologists that this was within the laws of war at the time are contradicted by the evidence in Cromwell’s own account that he himself understood the scale of the massacre to be exceptional. It would, he admitted, have prompted ‘remorse and regret’ were it not intended to have exemplary effect as both collective punishment and a warning for the future.”
In England I see Cromwell as a sort of latter day Musharriff, executing the previous leader, always dissolving parliaments, shooting democrats ( the Levellers at Burford Church) and claiming divine inspiration for the lot. And… so totally failing to create a stable regime that they had to bring back the old one. The TV historian Tristram Hunt likens him to a puritanical ruthless Taliban leader.
Yet you can’t eliminate him from the history of the British constitution, as the unifier of the three kingdoms who still leaves trace elements behind in the DNA of the development of British democracy, even up to today.
Hunt states:
“Reverence for Cromwell was one of the few socialist traditions that survived the transition from old to new Labour. Frank Dobson, a politician whose career symbolises the difficulty of that passage, is a leading light (along with Lady Antonia Fraser) of the Cromwell Association. And Dobson shares the same machine-politics admiration for the Roundheads that Tawney expressed. “For me, it boils down to this,” he responded to a question about Cromwell’s actions at Drogheda. “He was on the right side in the civil war and, because of him, the right side won. He changed the course of English history, and changed it for the better.”
But I found quite the best romantic English revolutionary view of Cromwell in a Communist site – appropriately enough - for I was taught Cromwell by the historian they revere, the very late revisionist Christopher Hill. Cromwell swept away the feudal order, and installed the bourgeoisie in the second stage of the English Revolution. That’s why he remains something of an English hero to the English broad left.
We’re still waiting for the third stage.
P.S. Should you be concerned - yes Cromwell’s Irish record is exposed in the English national curriculum.
Brian Walker @ 08:07 PM
Are you sure you are not “Derren Brown” in disguise Brian? I just happened to pick the BBC history magazine up today because this was the front page, are you manipulating my mind?
Was Cromwell a 17th century “Derren Brown” manipulating others to do his bidding?
Posted by on Aug 27, 2008 @ 10:09 PMCromwell most definitely had the memory of the massacre of Protestant settlers in his mind when he landed in Ireland. Cromwell sought revenge for the 1641 massacre of Scottish settlers, which was orchestrated by the Priests, friars, and Jesuits.
Posted by on Aug 27, 2008 @ 10:27 PMGood old Ollie, Ireland’s first republican. John Morrill, a Professor at Cambridge, recently argued that the people who really got it in the neck from Cromwell were not Irish Catholics, but English royalists, but it appears that Ó Siochriú disagrees.
As for Tristam Hunt (the History ????), it’s interesting what he is saying about Cromwell and Labour seeing as he has been promoting the Levellers whom Cromwell destroyed as part of an attempt to promote New Labour as the standard bearers of an English radical tradition (I think it was discussed here at the time).
What sort of a tutor was Hill Brian? He seems to have been a very interesting man. Did he stay with the CP after 1956 and 1968? I can’t remember.
Posted by on Aug 27, 2008 @ 10:28 PM“Cromwell most definitely had the memory of the massacre of Protestant settlers in his mind when he landed in Ireland. Cromwell sought revenge for the 1641 massacre of Scottish settlers, which was orchestrated by the Priests, friars, and Jesuits.”
UMH, so with this ‘memory’ of the massacre do you think old Ollie was right to seek ‘revenge’.BTW, why did the ‘Priests, friars, and Jesuits’ have the settlers (aka planters) massacred?
Posted by on Aug 27, 2008 @ 11:02 PMCromwell camped less than a mile from here. A road there is named after him (Cromwellsfort Road). We’re very liberal in this country. Perhaps too much so. Bit like having a road named after Hitler in Tel Aviv…
On a similar subject we have a restaurant named after Chairman Mao in Dublin City Centre…
Posted by on Aug 27, 2008 @ 11:11 PMThe deposition of a namesake was recorded in 1652.
Posted by on Aug 27, 2008 @ 11:14 PMThose damn M’Allisters shoild have stayed in Scotland!
Interesting Nevin…loved the old fashioned wording.
Posted by on Aug 27, 2008 @ 11:22 PMI’m not sure where this notion comes from that Cromwell’s actions in Ireland are somehow overlooked by English historians, they aren’t. Even as a primary school pupil in Derry in the 1970’s I well remember the little “Ladybird” history books on British historical figures which summarised lives with a page of text facing a picture page.
Cromwell’s book had a full page on his time in Ireland “warts and all”, with a picture of him against the backdrop of a burning city and massacred civilians. In all subsequent texts I have read about him his campaign in Ireland has been fully described and commented upon.
Posted by on Aug 27, 2008 @ 11:58 PMGaribaldy, Christopher Hill lectured me, he wasn’t my tutor- I’m not sure that as Master of Balliol he tutored anybody; but it wasn’t my college. By my time in the late 60s he seemed to have narrowed his interest to topics like the millenarianists. He spoke in the usual Oxford grand accentand in a weary baritone, punctuated every so often and quite unpredictably by an alarming stutter – no, more like a prolonged snort- which subsided without acknowledgement. He was a slightly stooped figure with a shock of thick wavy hair. These were the days of the show-off international left. They had little of the cellular seriousness of the CP and had little of their predecessors’ influence. The main topic of choice was Vietnam. Christopher Hitchens, who was proudly to take a third by the way, was on the prowl. The old institutional communists like Hill were so uncool it wasn’t true. The invasion of Czecho in 1968 passed almost without an ideological murmur as it was so obviously a bad thing. Hill had left the party not long after Hungary in 1956 I believe. He and others had long been defanged; otherwise I don’t suppose he would have been elected head of house in I think 1965 - not even by superior old Balliol.
History’s fashion had switched from the sweeping macro and ideological approach to becoming like a branch of sociology with endless tables and close studies of bmds. But Hill’s books on Cromwell etc were very much read because they were readable thank God, as was the journal Past and Present he founded along with other left figures like George Rude and Eric Hobsbawm. He did seem to believe in the ideological thrust of his thesis, that there really had been an English revolution not just a civil war, which had come about because of the rise of a new sort of middle class which finally and irrevocably destroyed the remnants of feudalism and royal supremacy, true -. but also because of a ferment of ideas so outlandish to us today, but which he helped us understand. There was more to it all than the pageant of English history or the Whig interpretation of history as a slow but steady march to more representative institutions.
In Hill, the historian of great imaginative and analytical power always took precedence over the Marxist.He was I think a great and influential historian because of the boldness of his thesis; and a great figure of the university.Posted by on Aug 28, 2008 @ 12:01 AMBrian…you posting very late….your brain cells will die if you keep posting such intellectual postings at the mad hours of 2 am
Posted by on Aug 28, 2008 @ 06:18 AMHe did seem to believe in the ideological thrust of his thesis, that there really had been an English revolution not just a civil war, which had come about because of the rise of a new sort of middle class which finally and irrevocably destroyed the remnants of feudalism and royal supremacy, true -. but also because of a ferment of ideas so outlandish to us today, but which he helped us understand
That aspect of Cromwell always appealed to me and wistfully I wonder why there aren’t his likes in Britain or NI today to finally eradicate the outdated class system….
Posted by on Aug 28, 2008 @ 07:01 AMThanks for that full response Brian. Greatly appreciated. Obviously Hill was as you say an historian first and foremost, and a very brilliant one at that. I also think there is a lot in what he says about the war of the three kingdoms being essentially an English revolution at its heart.
I agree entirely with what you say about the social science approach. Last year I think it was the TLS or LRB or something did a special edition on where history might go, comparing it to one they had done 40 years before. Keith Thomas wrote about how 40 years ago he had essentially expected the computer to answer all of history’s questions. Changed times indeed.
Posted by on Aug 28, 2008 @ 08:18 AMI hate Cromwell he took away our rules of superstition and government by ducking stool to replace it with the foundations of parliamentary democracy that still plagues our once magical island.
Posted by on Aug 28, 2008 @ 08:19 AMI hate Cromwell. He took away our rules of superstition and government by ducking stool to replace it with the foundations of parliamentary democracy, which still plague our once mystical land.
Posted by on Aug 28, 2008 @ 08:22 AM“that there really had been an English revolution not just a civil war, which had come about because of the rise of a new sort of middle class which finally and irrevocably destroyed the remnants of feudalism and royal supremacy”
Somewhat of an aside, but one of the beneficiaries of that “rise of a new sort of middle class” was a certain Isaac Newton - who had some outlandish ideas of his own..
Posted by on Aug 28, 2008 @ 08:25 AMNow Now.
Israel did not send in the riot police to people giving Nazi salutes.
Posted by on Aug 28, 2008 @ 08:29 AMI hate Cromwell. He took away our rules of superstition and government by ducking stool to replace it with the foundations of parliamentary democracy, which still plague our once mystical land.
Yes, and it was really cool that Stalin starved all those Ukrainian peasants - after all, he was leading them into a land of industrial and social progress…
Posted by on Aug 28, 2008 @ 08:49 AMThe Lord Protector has become very popular all of a sudden. Just noticed another Magazine with a headline article about him. I think it was “The History Magazine.”
He must have become “fashionable,” I can just see Paris Hilton hitting the headlines in the USA MSM wearing a special designer Oliver Cromwell Tshirt. With the quote, “Cruel Neccessity” emblazoned on it. Bright Orange of course.
Posted by on Aug 28, 2008 @ 09:07 AMHaven’t we Tories always told you that *all* republicans are rotten bad eggs? Would that all their heads could end up on spikes on Ludgate Hill (after due, albeit posthumous, process, natch).
Posted by on Aug 28, 2008 @ 09:12 AM“I hate Cromwell. He took away our rules of superstition and government by ducking stool to replace it with the foundations of parliamentary democracy, which still plague our once mystical land.
Yes, and it was really cool that Stalin starved all those Ukrainian peasants - after all, he was leading them into a land of industrial and social progress… “
Can ends ever justify means?
Posted by on Aug 28, 2008 @ 10:17 AMCromwell was a Republican opposed to a royal/catholic dictatorship as he saw it so he sought vengence by the massacre of his opponents which included men women and children.
The Provos were Republicans opposed to a British imperial dictatorship as they saw it so they
sought vengence by the massacre of their opponents which included men women and children.Ah, the similarities!
Posted by on Aug 28, 2008 @ 10:48 AM“I hate Cromwell. He took away our rules of superstition and government by ducking stool to replace it with the foundations of parliamentary democracy, which still plague our once mystical land.”
Now, stand to attention for ‘God Save the Queen’!
Kinda oxymoronic!Posted by on Aug 28, 2008 @ 10:51 AMGreagoir O’ Frainclin
“UMH, so with this ‘memory’ of the massacre do you think old Ollie was right to seek ‘revenge’.”
Cromwell couldn’t stand by and watch a suppressive regime masquerading under the disguise of Christianity, which he battled against in England, make paupers and corpses out of Protestants who simply wanted a better life in a new land.
“BTW, why did the ‘Priests, friars, and Jesuits’ have the settlers (aka planters) massacred?”
because they spread a new Christianity which would eventually render all Priests and Popes powerless in their spiritual and temporal domain.
Posted by on Aug 28, 2008 @ 11:11 AMHeady days, Brian, what? From rhe dry precision of Christopher Hill in the lecture hall to the fruity pomposity of Christopher Hitchins in the union bar. From the sublime to the…oh, I don’t know…shall we just say, the less than sublime?
I can’t see much sense in those who would still become emotionally overwrought about the aftermath of the siege of Drogheda after all these years. Quite apart from interfering with a due sense of historical objectivity it has the tendency to allow people to attempt to draw pointless parallels with events of our own time. It has always occured to me that the advice of the Nazarene to “let the dead bury the dead” could be usefully to applied to political as well as religius sensibilities.
Posted by on Aug 28, 2008 @ 11:12 AM...or, even better, “religious sensibilities”.
Posted by on Aug 28, 2008 @ 11:14 AM
