Book Review: Belloc on Oliver Cromwell

The picture posted above "Cromwell and dead Charles I", painted by Paul Delaroche in 1831, is in some way the opposite of Hilaire Belloc's study of Cromwell, published last year in a handsome hardcover edition by Mysterium Press in their series. Unlike Belloc, who wants to eschew myth and depict reality, Delaroche based this painting on François-René de Chateaubriand's fictional account of Cromwell opening Charles I's coffin. (It doesn't seem like Charles has been decollated at all from the angle Delaroche chose! Is there some blood pooled under the king's beard or is that just a shadow? Lack of a model, I suppose.) Belloc does reference this painting at the end of Chapter 12, "Killing the King":

There is a story the witness to which may be believed or unbelieved; it is of so dramatic a sort that many doubt it; but there is nothing impossible in it. It runs thus:

In the room where the King's body was lying at evening a figure entered which the watcher recognized as Cromwell's. He who so came in lifted the veil and looked upon the face, which was quiet even after such a death, and was heard to mutter, "Cruel necessity." (p, 216)

I commented on Belloc's style in my review of Belloc's Charles I. Here are a few examples of how that style creates confidence in the reader, from the first chapter of Cromwell, "Myth and Reality":

This book is not another life of Oliver Cromwell; there are dozens too many, the earlier batch a mass of slander, the later a mass of panegyric--all of them myth. My object here is to seek reality; to discover what Cromwell was within the nature of the man's motives, the quality of his actions as witnesses to the moral truth about himself. (p. 1)

[Ignoring the two myths, one condemning, the other praising] Belloc states: ". . . it is the business of historical judgment to establish truth on this character. No other object has been pursued in these pages." (p. 7)

And addressing the reader, Belloc emphasizes that we need to know Cromwell's background, his social standing, his great wealth, his attraction to the "intense new religion" [Puritan Calvinism]:

To discover his circumstances, you must, again, envisage those things in the world around him which made him act in a manner natural to him, strange to us: for instance, the presence of what I have called "The Catholic Menace" to him in 1620-50 most vividly apparent, to us in 1930-40 incomprehensible." (p. 8)

With that kind of address to the reader, and that kind of clarity of purpose, Belloc makes a case for trusting his portrait of Cromwell. He would have to be an utter cad if he was/is lying to his reader. He also makes it clear that he is more interested in Cromwell's political actions in bringing about Charles I's death than he is in Cromwell's military and strategic prowess, which he readily acknowledges. Not that he's going to ignore it, but it's not his main interest. He acknowledges it; he offers details in chapter 10, and narrates actions in other chapters.

The Table of Contents:

1. The Myth and Reality
2. The Problem
3. The New Millionaires
4. The New Religion
5. Growth of Character
6. The Catholic Menace
7. The Soldier Out of Place
8. The Nature of the Civil War

9. Forming and Informing

10. The Typical Actions
I. Winceby
II. Marston Moor
III. The Second Battle of Newbury
IV. Naseby
11. The Siege Train and Basing House
12. The Killing of the King
13. Ireland
I. The Approach
II. Drogheda 

III. Wexford
IV. Waterford
V. Kilkenny
VI. Clonmel
14. The Scotch Campaigns
I. Preston
II. Dunbar
III. Worcester
15. Reluctant Power
16. Cromwell in the Presence of Death

The first nine chapters are Belloc's setting of the scene of Cromwell's actions before, during, and after the English Civil War and through his reign as Protector. He describes Cromwell's family background, how the Williams-Cromwell family came to wealth through their connection with Thomas Cromwell and acquisition of land through the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Chapters 4 and 6 analyze the religious/social background of Calvinism and Catholicism, framing Belloc's scrupulously fair and balanced analysis of Cromwell's character. 

It's in Chapter 13 on Cromwell's actions in the sieges of the five Irish cities that Belloc concludes that Cromwell acted cruelly, unjustly, and horribly against especially the civilian population but also the military in those cities when they had been granted quarter. He charges Cromwell with "the profound wounding, mutilation and attempted murder of a nation." (p. 217)

Regarding these sieges, Belloc notes that in "the excesses of cruelty" displayed Cromwell was able to give "free rein to his religion" in a "crusading action" against Catholicism and Catholics. Cromwell accepted and even rejoiced in his responsibility in this action because he saw it as God's will. Belloc judges, however, that he was violating agreed-upon truces, surrender, quarter, and amnesties because of his hatred for Catholics. (pp. 224-225) For example, when the people of Wexford required the continued practice of their Catholic faith and the protection of Catholic churches and monasteries as part of their surrender, these terms "moved Cromwell to violence." 

In the last two chapters, Belloc describes Cromwell's reluctant personal rule and death. Cromwell finds himself facing the same difficulties Charles I had--how to finance the government when the people were tired of years of taxation (the taxation Parliament had fought Charles I about), especially when England was fighting a trade and naval war against the Dutch. Cromwell didn't want this absolute authority but was never able to share it with a reasonable Parliament. The responsibility for the debt England was incurring was all his. It was a "grinding menace" and "the burden grew heavier with every week that passed." (p. 315)

Belloc sympathizes with Cromwell's aches and pains at the end of his life after so much wear and tear on his body in the campaigns of the Civil War. Cromwell suffered from insomnia and was exhausted. Then his "beloved daughter, Elizabeth Claypool must die" and Cromwell "would not leave her" bedside as she was suffering, only adding to his exhaustion. (p. 319) As Belloc had suffered the devastating losses of his wife Elohe in 1914 and his son Louis in 1918 when serving the Royal Flying Corps in France.

I appreciate Belloc's fairness and his standards of judging Cromwell's character, as he has done in other books about Wolsey, Cranmer, and Charles I. I look forward to the books about Charles II and James II. He is careful, discreet, and as fair as possible, acknowledging the possibility of bias.

Please note that the publisher sent me a review copy in exchange for my opinion about the book. Mysterium Press books are available for sale in the USA at Os Justi Press in their "Belloc Books" collection.

Image Credit (Public Domain): Charles I, with Cromwell standing over his dead body.

Delaroche is famous for these genre historical paintings, like this one of Lady Jane Grey or of Saint Joan of Arc questioned by the Cardinal of Winchester.

Book Review: Belloc on Charles I AND Oliver Cromwell

The publisher of Mysterium Press kindly sent me review copies of the next set of biographies/character studies by Hilaire Belloc: Charles I (published in 1933) and Cromwell (published in 1934). The books are available in the USA from Os Justi Press.

I finished reading Charles I and am still reading Cromwell. 

What Belloc does in these books--as he did in Wolsey and Cranmer--is not just, or really, biography, but character analysis--, and how, for example, Charles I's character influenced historical events. Belloc also creates word pictures of the the cultural, religious, economic, and political milieu of the era of his subject's life. And he presents his interpretation of the crucial historical events and how, again, the characteristic personalities of the actors involved influenced their actions, strategies, successes, and failures. 

And he does it all without a bibliography and just a few footnotes. So the reader has to trust Belloc, that he is honestly guiding her through these lives and these events. I reviewed the first two volumes from Mysterium Press, Wolsey and Cranmer, previously. And Mysterium is preparing Belloc's works on Charles II and James II--I really look forward to the latter.

But as to Charles I; here is the publisher's blurb:

In an increasingly divided England the wealthy eyed the Crown and plotted revolution. Monarchy went back beyond tradition and was a symbol of the nation's unity: the people were embodied in one man. England was the first to lose it.

Charles Stuart, once a sickly child, manned the tottering throne (which was weakened and despoiled by theft) with tenacity and dignity and was led, outgunned, into a war which ended with his murder. He cleaved to law and precedent and sued for peace and freedom, was tricked by lies and cunning, and then finally beheaded.

Master historian Hilaire Belloc paints a portrait of the principled and rueful monarch who suffered for the people's rights, and whose sense of honour led him and kingship to the block.

And here is a list of the chapters:

1. The Problem
2. The Circumstance
3. Stuart
4. The Formative Years
5. Buckingham
    I. The Spanish Match
    II. The Attack Begins

    III. The Blow
6. Maturity
7. Scotland
8. The Effort for Unity
    I. The Central Effort
    II. The Effort in the Church
    III. The Effort in Ireland
    IV. The Abortive Effort in Scotland
9. The Menace
10. The Crisis
11. The Great Rebellion
12. The Triumph of the Great Rebellion
13. The Hostage    
    I. The Hostage of the Scotch
    II. Hostage of the Parliament
14. The Killing of the King

I'd like to highlight the comment from the blurb "the wealthy eyed the Crown and plotted revolution"** because in the first chapter, "The Problem", Belloc outlines how the Tudor dynasty, especially the reign of Elizabeth I, set up the fall of the monarch to come in the Stuart era. Although she still was the symbol of unity in England, Burghley was the one who truly ruled the country. 

[**I do wonder what Belloc was seeing in the early 1930's that inspired him to write this:

Today all Christendom is hungry for monarchy. In the United States, partly by provision of the Constitution, more by its development in the nineteenth century, the principle of an executive in the hands of one man was preserved. But in Europe it was gradually lost, and replaced by the rule for a few; in practice, of the rich, under the guise of representatives. That experiment is breaking down before our eyes, and monarchy is returning.

(p. 1) Where was he seeing this in Europe in the 1930s? In France? Hindsight's view of any development of "an executive in the hands of one man" in Germany or Italy is chillingly negative. But what did he know or see by 1933 to inspire this sentence?]

When James VI of Scotland came south to England to rule, he tried to wrest that power and authority from the nobility to some extent, although he was influenced by his favorites. When Charles I succeeded his father (because the first heir, Henry, had died), he inherited the same problem, with Buckingham's influence so strong in his adolescence and early reign. Yet, he was determined to rule as the King of England, as more than "a symbol of the nation's unity"; he wanted (as chapter 8 demonstrates) to create and enforce that unity among the three kingdoms in England, Ireland, Scotland--and in the Church of England.

He had developed, because of childhood weakness (rickets!) and slow development of speech, into a young man who had been isolated and presented some characteristics, according to Belloc, of reaction to events in a certain pattern: "fluid against the first onset of attack; then there came a moment when the attack reached something quite different from the first fluid resistance--a stone wall. It was thus that he same to his death. Men were led on to think him pliable; when they came unexpectedly on rigidity, they were infuriated." (p. 47)

But, when he, and his counselors, during the period of his Personal Rule (1629 to 1640) while Parliament was prorogued and the Crown was not able to raise taxes to fund the administration of the kingdom, had a plan for effecting the unity, Charles I demonstrated how determined he could be. With Richard Weston the Earl of Rutland (and a Catholic), his treasurer, William Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury; William Noy, his Attorney General; and Thomas Wentworth, privy counsellor and Lord Deputy of Ireland, Charles I had a plan for creating that unity mentioned above.

As adept as Belloc is in political and economic analysis, he also excels as an interpreter of military strategy--it's important to note that his study of the French Revolution he dedicates a long chapter, with maps, to the battles of the French Revolution--and he demonstrates that aptly in this book too. [Please note that in my review of Belloc's The French Revolution, linked above, I am quite willing to disagree with Belloc when I think it's necessary. He fails entirely in that book to reckon with the anti-Catholicism of the French Revolution--while he's quite ready to acknowledge its presence in England etc. in his studies of Charles I and Cromwell!]

Throughout, Belloc's prose, with its clarity of expression, balancing brevity with comprehensiveness and detail, provides an incredible model. As a voice of authority, it's so clear that it does inspire the reader's confidence in Belloc's interpretation of character and events. 

I appreciate Mysterium Press making these books available in handsome hardback editions and recommend this addition to the series highly.

Image Credit (Public Domain): King Charles I after original by van Dyck

Image Credit (Public Domain): 1915 portrait Belloc    

This Morning: Saints Henry Morse and John Southworth

Just a reminder that I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show at about 7:50 a.m. Eastern/6:50 a.m. Central today to continue our series on the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales. Matt Swaim and I will discuss the missions and martyrdoms of Saint Henry Morse, SJ and Saint John Southworth.

Please listen live here on the Sacred Heart Radio website; the podcast will be archived here; the segment will be repeated on Friday next week during the EWTN hour of the Son Rise Morning Show (from 6:00 to 7:00 a.m. Eastern/5:00 to 6:00 a.m. Central).

The Jesuits in Britain website posted a story in 2015 about how they obtained a portrait of Saint Henry Morse:

Around this time last year our attention was brought to an auction on French Ebay of ‘Portrait d’un martyr Jésuite (fin 17ième debut 18ième)’. This turned out to be a miniature oval shaped portrait of St Henry Morse SJ painted on copper by an unknown artist, with an inscription around the edge ‘Henricus Mas Passus 22 Janvari 1645’.

Jan Graffius, Curator of Collections at Stonyhurst College explains: ["]The painting is in the tradition of small devotional images painted on copper, produced in Flanders from around 1630 to 1670. Many of them were aimed at English recusants in exile, of which there were considerable numbers in the Low Countries. We have at Stonyhurst a set of 12 images of the life of Christ, Thomas Becket and Mary. The images of Mary all depict her with swords piercing her heart. These were probably picked up in St Omers (which was still part of the Spanish Netherlands at this point) by members of the Stonyhurst Shireburn family who went to St Omers in the 1640s-1670s. They were cheap to produce, easily packed and transported because of the copper support, and I suspect there were a good many in circulation in the Low Countries. They were dangerous objects to have in England because they were clearly Catholic. The images of martyred Jesuits were doubly incriminating, and so the majority of these Images probably stayed on the Continent. Many exiled English recusants lived in France and the Low Countries in the 17th century, and the painting may have been bought by one of them, and handed on to descendants.["]

Please read the rest there.

Saint Henry Morse, pray for us!

Saint John Southworth, pray for us!

Preview: Saints Henry Morse and John Southworth

On Monday, October 19, Matt Swaim and I will continue our series of brief biographies of each of the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales on the Son Rise Morning Show. The 50th anniversary of their canonization is coming up soon, on Sunday, October 25. 

Saint Henry Morse, SJ was martyred on February 1, 1645; Saint John Southworth on June 28, 1654, both at Tyburn. These two martyrs, both of whom served the people of London during a time of plague, spoke some of the most stirring words of  all the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales before their executions. 

According to Bishop Richard Challoner's Memoirs of Missionary Priests, Saint Henry Morse proclaimed:

I am come hither to die for my religion, for that religion which is professed by the catholic Roman church, founded by Christ, established by the apostles, propagated through all ages by an hierarchy always visible to this day, grounded on the testimonies of holy scriptures; upheld by the authority of fathers and councils, out of which, in fine, there can be no hopes of salvation.

After being interrupted, he continued:

The time was . . . when I was a protestant, being then a student of the laws, in the inns of court in town: till being suspicious of the truth of my religion, I went abroad into Flanders, and upon full conviction renounced my former errors, and was reconciled to the church of Rome, the mistress of all churches. Upon my return into England, I was committed to prison for refusing the oath of pretended allegiance;  and from prison, though I was then no priest, I was sent into banishment. I went to Rome, and after I had gone through the course of my studies for seven years, I returned into England, to help the souls of my neighbours; and here, amongst other charities, I devoted myself to the service of the poor Catholics and others, in the time of the late plague, and suffered nothing to be wanting that lay in me, to their spiritual comfort.

And then another interruption--he was chastised for bragging about his "works"--and Saint Henry Morse continued:

I will glory in nothing, replied the father, but in my infirmities; but all glory I ascribe to God, who was pleased to make use of so weak an instrument in so pious a ministry and who is pleased now to favour me so far, as to allow me this day to seal the Catholic faith with my blood; a favour which I have begged of him for these thirty years: and I pray that my death may be some kind of atonement for the sins of this nation; and if I had as many lives as there are sands in the sea, I would most willingly lay them all down for this end, and in testimony of the Catholic faith, which faith is the only true, the only certain faith, the only faith confirmed by miracles still continuing; in which to this day the blind see, the dumb speak, the dead are raised to life. For thy testimonies, O Lord, are made credible exceedingly.

After that statement of faith, Father Morse denied ever knowing or ever being part of any plot against King Charles I, said his prayers and was executed at Tyburn. He was hanged to death before the rest of the barbarities of his martyrdom were performed upon his body.

Saint John Southworth, the patron saint of the Diocese of Westminster in London, also spoke clearly at Tyburn before his execution. Again, Bishop Challoner transcribes his last words, spoken as Oliver Cromwell was the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth:

Good people, I was born in Lancashire. This is the third time I have been apprehended, and now being to die, I would gladly witness and profess openly my faith, for which I suffer. And though my time be short, yet what I shall be deficient in words, I hope shall supply with my blood, which I will most willingly spend to the last drop for my faith. Neither my intent in coming into England, nor practice in England, was to act any thing against the secular government. Hither I was sent by my lawful superiors to teach Christ's faith, not to meddle with any temporal affairs. Christ sent his apostles; his apostles their successors; and their successors me. I did what I was commanded by them, who had power to command  me, being ever taught that I ought to obey them in matters ecclesiastical, and my temporal governors in business only temporal. I 'never acted nor thought any hurt against the present protector. I had only a care to do my own obligation, and discharge my own duty in saving my own and other men's souls. This, and only this, according to my poor abilities, I laboured to perform, I had commission to do it from him, to whom our Saviour, in his predecessor St. Peter, gave power to send others to propagate his faith. This is that for which I die, O holy cause! and not for any treason against the laws. My faith and obedience to my superiors is all the treason charged against me; nay I die for Christ's law, which no human law, by whomsoever made, ought to withstand or contradict. This law of Christ commanded me to obey these superiors, and this church, saying, whoever hears them hears himself. This church, these superiors of it I obeyed, and for obeying, die. I was brought up in the truly ancient Roman catholic apostolic religion, which taught me, that the sum of the only true Christian profession is to die. This lesson I have heretofore in my life-time desired to learn; this lesson I come here to put in practice by dying, being taught it by our blessed Saviour, both by precept and example. Himself said, 'he that will be my disciple, let him take up his cross and follow me.' Himself exemplary practised what he had recommended to others. To follow his holy doctrine, and imitate his holy death, I willingly suffer at present; this gallows--looking up--I look on as his cross, which I gladly take to follow my dear Saviour. My faith is my crime, the performance of my duty the occasion of my condemnation. I confess I am a great sinner; against God I have offended, but am innocent of any sin against man; I mean, the commonwealth and this present government.

Finally, after he made a plea for leniency for the Catholic laity who wanted only to practice their faith, he was told to prepare for his death. The Venetian Secretary reported on his execution: he was hanged, and was not dead when the executioner "cut out his heart and entrails and threw them into a fire kindled for the purpose, the body being quartered . . . Such is the inhuman cruelty used towards the English Catholic religious."

The Catholic Encyclopedia provides this biography of Saint Henry Morse, SJ:

Martyr; b. in 1595 in Norfolk; d. at Tyburn, 1 Feb., 1644. He was received into the church at Douai, 5 June, 1614, after various journeys was ordained at Rome, and left for the mission, 19 June, 1624. He was admitted to the Society of Jesus at Heaton; there he was arrested and imprisoned for three years in York Castle, where he made his novitiate under his fellow prisoner, Father John Robinson, S.J., and took simple vows. Afterwards he was a missionary to the English regiments in the Low Countries. Returning to England at the end of 1633 he laboured in London, and in 1636 is reported to have received about ninety Protestant families into the Church. He himself contracted the plague but recovered. Arrested 27 February, 1636, he was imprisoned in Newgate. On 22 April he was brought to the bar charged with being a priest and having withdrawn the king's subjects from their faith and allegiance. He was found guilty on the first count, not guilty on the second, and sentence was deferred. On 23 April he made his solemn profession of the three vows to Father Edward Lusher. He was released on bail for 10,000 florins, 20 June, 1637, at the insistence of Queen Henrietta Maria. In order to free his sureties he voluntarily went into exile when the royal proclamation was issued ordering all priests to leave the country before 7 April, 1641, and became chaplain to Gage's English regiment in the service of Spain. In 1643 he returned to England; arrested after about a year and a half he was imprisoned at Durham and Newcastle, and sent by sea to London. On 30 January he was again brought to the bar and condemned on his previous conviction. On the day of his execution his hurdle was drawn by four horses and the French ambassador attended with all his suite, as also did the Count of Egmont and the Portuguese Ambassador. The martyr was allowed to hang until he was dead. At the quartering the footmen of the French Ambassador and of the Count of Egmont dipped their handkerchiefs into the martyr's blood. In 1647 many persons possessed by evil spirits were relieved through the application of his relics.

The same source provides these details about Saint John Southworth:

English martyr, b. in Lancashire, 1592, martyred at Tyburn, 28 June, 1654. A member of a junior branch of the Southworths of Samlesbury Hall, Blackburn, he was ordained priest at the English College, Douai, and was sent on the mission, 13 October, 1619. He was arrested and condemned to death in Lancashire in 1627, and imprisoned first in Lancaster Castle, and afterwards in the Clink, London, whence he and fifteen other priests were, on 11 April, 1630, delivered to the French Ambassador for transportation abroad. In 1636 he had been released from the Gatehouse, Westminster, and was living at Clerkenwell, but frequently visited the plague-stricken dwellings of Westminster to convert the dying. In 1637 he seems to have taken up his abode in Westminster, where he was arrested, 28 November, and again sent to the Gatehouse. Thence he was again transferred to the Clink and in 1640 was brought before the Commissioners for Causes Ecclesiastical, who sent him back there 24 June. On 16 July he was again liberated, but by 2 December he was again in the Gatehouse. After his final apprehension he was tried at the Old Bailey, and as he insisted on pleading "guilty" to being a priest, he was reluctantly condemned by the Recorder of London, Serjeant Steel. He was allowed to make a long speech at the gallows, and his remains were permitted to pass into the possession of the Duke of Norfolk's family, who had them sent to the English College at Douai. The wonderful recovery in 1656 of Francis Howard, seventh son of Henry Frederick, Earl of Arundel, was attributed to these relics, which were secreted during the French Revolution, and the present location of which is now unknown.

His remains were found, however, after this great encyclopedic work was published, and they are venerated in Westminster Cathedral.

Saint Henry Morse, pray for us!

Saint John Southworth, pray for us!

The Gypsy Priest and the English Civil War

I just finished reading Elizabeth Goudge's The White Witch, a historical novel set during the English Civil War. The publisher, Hendrickson, comments on the author:

Elizabeth Goudge was a British novelist (1900–1984) born into the home of an Anglican priest and theologian. She wrote children’s books as well as novels—her Green Dolphin Street was made into an Academy-Award winning film. In style and themes she parallels English writers such as the creator of the Miss Read series as well mirroring the spiritual depth found in George MacDonald’s Victorian novels. She won the Carnegie Award in 1947 for The Little White Horse, which is J. K. Rowling’s favorite children’s book.

In this book she tells the story of a family in Oxfordshire and how the English Civil War affects their lives. Starting with the Haslewood family and the group of gypsies who sometimes live near Squire Robert Hasleswood's lands, Goudge gathers a cast of fictional and historical characters to deal with issues of life and death, good versus evil, and religious conflict.

Goudge's Anglican background is clear as she depicts Robert Haslewood's Puritan conversion as a disaster for the family, the community, and especially the local Church of England minister, when Robert accidentally--although in a self-righteous rage--burns the little hovel Parson Hawthyn occupies. Robert is a sad figure: each time he comes home he wants to win his children, Jenny and Will, over to him, yet each time he does something that creates more distance between them. He wants their little dog, Maria (named for Henrietta Maria, King Charles I's wife in happier days) destroyed just because she irritates him and then he violently destroys the celebration of Christmas and burns down the Parson's home because it's all too Popish for his newly inspired Puritanism.

Goudge creates triangles of relationships: Robert loved Froniga, the White Witch of the title, but married Margaret. Poor Margaret has the ultra-capable Froniga living next door and helping and healing everyone in the village. 

In addition to the admiration of Robert, Froniga has the gypsy tinker Yoben, who has a secret: Goudge drops some hints (he prays in Latin from a book; he defends the Blessed Virgin Mary; he has been "cut off from the sacraments of religion"). Through Yoben, she becomes acquainted with the Royalist spy cum itinerant portrait painter, Francis Leyland, aka John Loggin.

In addition to admiring and visiting Froniga, Yoben cares for Madona, an elderly gypsy woman who has three gypsy children to care for (Cinderella, Dinki, and Meriful).

Since there is a White Witch, there must also be a Black Witch, the evil and malevolent Mother Skipton. These two pagan spiritual influences are well-matched by Parson Hawthyn, who frees Skipton from her darkness and reminds Froniga of the source of her lightness. He offers the example of love in the service of Jesus Christ and His Church that no one else in the novel even approaches.

Beyond this Oxfordshire idyll, Goudge depicts the events of the English Civil War, including King Charles, his sons and his daughter Elizabeth, Prince Rupert, Jeremy Taylor, Oliver Cromwell, John Hampden, and others. She recounts the battle of Edgehill, the exile Royal Court at Oxford, and other battles. King Charles I, who touches Will Haslewood's scrofula and cures him, is mysterious and almost mystical; Oliver Cromwell, whose adamantine righteousness converts Robert Haslewood to extreme enthusiasm, is easily fooled: a Royalist soldier enters his headquarters and charms him out of the Royal Standard, returning it to King Charles.  

Goudge's descriptions of nature and animals are delicate and sure: she explains the human motivations of her characters very sympathetically. The plotting and the pace pick up appreciably after the first few chapters, while Goudge is introducing her characters. I'm glad that Hendrickson is publishing her works in quality paperback editions; I was insulted by the publisher's politically correct comments on Goudge's unfortunate depictions of the Romani people. I thought she depicted them as free people who loved nature. Hendrickson's suggestion that they could have censored her novel was despicable.

The English Republic and Religion

From History Today (available now online at least):

The English republic was rooted in the religious and political idealism of its visionaries, administrators and apologists. As Bernard Capp demonstrated, in England’s Culture Wars (2012), the new regime set about a comprehensive programme of moral and social reform. The Cromwellian vision for a godly nation was energetically pursued, though it achieved more in some areas than in others. New laws made adultery a capital crime. Popular pastimes, including drinking and horse racing, were carefully controlled. The legislation promoted a ‘reformation of manners’ that was reflected in a new republican aesthetic. The visual culture, as in Robert Walker’s portraits of the leaders of the new regime, and public oratory on major state occasions, such as the sermon preached by John Owen at the funeral of Henry Ireton, promoted personal religion, moral sobriety and civic responsibility as the virtues that would enable and sustain the revolutionary regime. 

But fashions in the court were changing. The move, in 1653, from Commonwealth to Protectorate alienated the most ideological republicans, who felt that the transition to a single office of leader was betraying the aspirations of ‘generation 1649’. In 1657 some of those who had supported the Protectorate blanched at the offer of the crown that was made to Cromwell in its second constitution. At the same time, the regime’s growing number of critics began to notice that the programme for a reformation of morals seemed to focus more on the disruptive habits of the lower orders than on the recreations of the new elites. While local magistrates pressed hard against popular music and dancing, the Cromwellian court was slowly returning to these traditional festivities. In November 1657, the French ambassador noted a ‘different spirit’ in Whitehall, at the wedding of Cromwell’s youngest daughters, ‘dances having been held there again during these past days, and the preachers of the older times are withdrawing from it’.

The subtitle of Capp's book is Puritan Reformation and its Enemies in the Interregnum, 1649-1660.

Read the rest of "The End of the English Republic" by Crawford Gribben, Professor of History at Queen’s University Belfast and the author of John Owen and English Puritanism: Experiences of Defeat (Oxford University Press, 2016) while you can (before it moves behind the paywall!)

The Death of His Highness, Lord Protector Cromwell

Three hundred and sixty years ago today Oliver Cromwell died. Ten years ago, Micheál Ó Siochrú wrote an appraisal of Cromwell's deeds in Ireland: God's Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland:

Cromwell spent only nine months of his eventful life in Ireland, yet he stands accused there of war crimes, religious persecution and ethnic cleansing. In a century of unrelenting, bloody warfare and religious persecution throughout Europe, Cromwell was, in many ways, a product of his times. As commander-in-chief of the army in Ireland, however, the responsibilities for the excesses of the military must be laid firmly at his door, while the harsh nature of the post-war settlement also bears his personal imprint. A warrior of Christ, somewhat like the crusaders of medieval Europe, he acted as God's executioner, convinced throughout the horrors of the legitimacy of his cause, and striving to build a better world for the chosen few.

Here's a review by Dr Jason Peacey of University College London (review no. 777) from the Reviews in History website:

The civil wars that engulfed the three kingdoms of England, Ireland and Scotland in the mid-17th century remain a battlefield, and generation after generation they retain a capacity to provoke passionate debate and heated historical controversy. Within this field, however, there is probably no single individual more likely to generate historiographical heat than Oliver Cromwell, utterly convincing analysis of whose complex personality continues to elude even the greatest of scholars. And within scholarship on Cromwell and the Cromwellian period there is no more controversial topic than his attitude towards, and activity in, Ireland. Cromwell’s name retains the capacity to inflame passions, and in at least some quarters he has become synonymous with religiously inspired brutality and atrocity, with something little short of ethnic cleansing, and with tyranny and military dictatorship. At the same time, however, he is capable of making the ‘top ten’ in a 2002 BBC poll of ‘greatest Britons’. It was perhaps inevitable, therefore, that the 350th anniversary of Cromwell’s death in 1658 would be commemorated, and that it would revive questions about his reputation. This book represents one of the most substantial and very best pieces of history to emerge from this latest example of academia’s penchant for anniversaries. Ó Siochrú has produced the finest kind of popular history; a work that is both challenging for academic specialists and capable of reaching out to a wider audience. The book is, on the whole, written in a crisp and concise fashion, and makes an important historiographical contribution without becoming bogged down in historiographical debates. It also benefits from generous production values, with a number of valuable maps, a detailed chronology (albeit only covering 1649–53), and a healthy number of glossy portraits of Ó Siochrú’s main protagonists. Perhaps inevitably, however, such an attempt to traverse the scholarly and popular markets creates certain tensions, and it might even be suggested that there are actually two different books here; one a judicious reevaluation of a crucial and contested period of history, and the other a controversial and contentious reading of some of the most bloody episodes in English and Irish history.

Read the rest there, including author's response.

Belloc on Laud and Cromwell, Anglo-Catholics and Puritans

Tomorrow on the Son Rise Morning Show Anna Mitchell and I will continue our discussion of Hilaire Belloc's Characters of the Reformation, returning to England tomorrow after visiting the Holy Roman Empire and France the past couple of episodes. Our subjects this week are William Laud and Oliver Cromwell, so we are dealing with the reign of Charles I and the English Civil War. Belloc is also back to analyzing aspects of his historical figure's personality and character. With High Church Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud, Belloc is also ready to comment on contemporary Anglo-Catholicism and its adherents:

Laud was the Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury under Charles I of England. He belonged to that generation which was born somewhat before the year 1600 and which was old by the middle of the seventeenth century — that is, by the time that each party in the great religious quarrel of the Reformation was dimly appreciating that the battle was a drawn one, and that there could not be a complete victory on either side. 

It will be remembered that the middle of the seventeenth century, and more particularly the date 1648 (The Treaties of Westphalia), marks that moment of exhaustion on the two sides. After it, what used to be united Christendom was permanently divided into the two camps of the Catholic and Protestant cultures, the boundaries of which have not appreciably changed from that day to this. Laud, as Archbishop of Canterbury, was the principal figure in English official Protestantism; that is, in the new establishment set up by William Cecil, and known as "The Church of England" in the critical period when the conflict was being decided. He was put to death by the English revolutionaries a little before the general settlement just mentioned; and he had begun his characteristic activities less than twenty years after the beginning of the century. 

His personality is most interesting. He was of the middle ranks of society, with no special advantages of birth, and gained public attention wholly through his own energy and character. That energy was intense and never failed him to the end; it was as great in his last days as in his first and it animated a very small body — for he was almost a dwarf in size. His volume of work and correspondence was enormous, his power of attention to detail was equally great, and he followed a fixed clear policy with great chances of success, which was only defeated by the rise of a general rebellion against the English Royal Government, in which his own activities and office were included.

The importance of Laud in any study of the great religious quarrel and its unsatisfactory drawn settlement in the seventeenth century is considerable, and it lies in this: he was an early example of how the great Catholic recovery which had marked the end of the sixteenth century reacted upon the Protestant world. But at the same time Laud is a still more striking example of the way in which the Reformation had made the Protestant attitude of mind inescapable for those who had broken away from Catholic unity. In other words, the interest of his career lies in this — that in spite of certain sympathies with Catholic tradition and in spite of their recovering certain sides of the general European culture, the Protestants throughout Europe and even in England (where Catholicism was still so strong), were condemned to be the victims of the original violent rebellion which had taken place in their fathers' time.

And the issue is of course, the authority of the Pope. Belloc notes that Laud and others wanted Christian unity but could not accept one authority in the Church: the Vicar of Christ (whom they thought of as "an Italian priest" at worst, the bishop of Rome at best):

Laud was the chief and leader of those who had come to deplore the losses inflicted by the Reformation and the wounds which it had inflicted upon normal human habit. He was the leader and representative of those who feared and disliked Puritanism as a moral disease. He had sympathy with the natural and excellent use of images in worship. One of the counts in the indictment against him on which he was put to death was his having put up a statue of Our Lady and the Holy Child, which one may still see standing above the main door of the University Church of Oxford (St. Mary's). He and those like him, who were now becoming numerous in the English Established Protestant Church, not only felt a sentimental attraction towards the lovely and human externals of Catholic worship, but were also inclined — one cannot use a stronger word, but at any rate inclined — to consider the fullness of Catholic doctrine in nearly all points. 

They inclined (as their descendants, the High Churchmen, do to-day) to an explanation of the mystery of the Eucharist more and more approximating to the truth. They inclined to Sacramental Penance and the Sacramental view of religion in general. They were particularly strong upon the necessity of a hierarchy and upon what they hoped was in their own case and what they admitted in the case of Catholics to be, the Apostolic Succession. They desired to regard their clergy as priests and some of them indeed would come to say even "sacrificing priests." But with all this they remained Protestant. They remained (though they would not have admitted it) thoroughly anti-Catholic, because they rejected that one part of Catholic doctrine which is its essential — the combination of unity and authority. The unity of the visible Church and its invincible authority were repugnant to their growing nationalism, and those who preserved such an attitude of mind were just as much the enemies of Catholicism as the most rabid Puritan could be, or the most complete agnostic. 

Laud himself used a phrase which has become famous in this regard: he said that he could not consider reunion "with Rome as she now is." Now that phrase was not only a rejection of unity, but by its wording it implied that there was no united visible Church of God on earth. The use of the word "Rome*' in this connection emphasized and was intended to emphasize the doctrine that "the Church of Rome hath erred" — which inevitably includes the doctrine that "all the Churches [as the phrase goes] had erred"; and that therefore there was no united visible infallible Church.

Analyzing Laud's legacy after his execution by Parliament, Belloc comments:

Laud became the target for a double attack. He had repressed Puritanism in religion, he had supported personal monarchy in politics. His person was seized by the rebels, he was imprisoned, and at last they put him to death.

Such a career and such a termination to it created what may be called "The Legacy of Laud." Politically that legacy came to nothing. The victory of the wealthier classes in England was so complete and the corresponding defeat of the monarchy so thorough that the very idea of government by a King died out in about half a century after Laud's death. One long life-time after his beheading on Tower Hill the English throne was filled by a puppet monarch who was not even allowed to attend the governing Council of the realm. And from that day onwards England has been governed by the great land-owners and by the money- dealers of the City of London. . . .

But the legacy of Laud in ecclesiastical matters had more vitality. It fell very low during the eighteenth century, but it was revived before the end of that century . . . There followed, in the same lifetime, the Tractarian Movement, and there now exists in greater force than has hitherto been known, a Laudian spirit acting in varying degrees throughout one great section of the English Protestant Establishment. The more devoted followers of that spirit go far beyond Laud himself in their imitation of Catholicism, and even in the attempt to recover the spirit of that from which they are separated; a considerable minority express themselves openly in favour of that reunion with the Catholic Church which Laud himself rejected.

Then Belloc turns to Oliver Cromwell, military leader, regicide, and Lord Protector. Like St. Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell before them, William Laud and Oliver Cromwell have something in common: they both lost their heads. The timing was just different! Cromwell's body was exhumed during the reign of Charles II and he was "executed". His head was displayed on a pole in front of Westminster Hall until 1685 (Charles II's father had been tried by Parliament in Westminster Hall.)

After reviewing the religious doctrines of Calvinism, Belloc comments on Cromwell and his Puritanism:

The way in which Cromwell was typical of the whole Calvinist business is nowhere better seen than in his attitude towards the old religion which this new religion had set out to kill — that is, his attitude towards Catholicism. Catholicism was for him the very spirit of evil, to destroy which from off the face of the earth seemed to him the highest of the duties lying to his hand insofar as he could fulfil it. He could fulfil it to a considerable degree in this one Province of Europe, the British Isles, when he had achieved despotic power. And his intense fanaticism on this point appears especially in his treatment of Ireland. For the rest and in general, Cromwell was the typical figure of what is called Puritanism. 

Puritanism is a particular form and degree of Protestantism which has specially flourished in England, Scotland and Wales, but of which there were wide areas throughout the Protestant world, notably in Scandinavia and in Holland. To be a Puritan is almost exactly the same as to be what the old world used to call a Manichaean. The Puritan and the Manichee have the same attitude towards the universe; their creeds work out to the same moral and social practice. But there is one doctrinal difference between them, for while the Manichee believes in an evil principle which works side by side with and is equal to the principle of good in the universe, the Puritan, proceeding from Calvin and therefore only admitting one will in the universe, makes both evil and good combine in the same awful God who permits, and in a sense wills, evil, and particularly the sufferings of man.

Belloc picks up his common theme, that the English Reformation had led to the creation of new wealth:

The accidents by which Oliver Cromwell became the typical figure of English Protestantism in its extreme or Puritanical form were these: 

He was a cadet of one of those millionaire families who had gained their enormous wealth out of the wreck of the monasteries during the period of the Reformation. His father, of whom he was the only surviving son, was himself the only son of the enormously wealthy Sir Henry Cromwell, and Henry was the son of Richard Cromwell, nephew of Thomas Cromwell, the man who dissolved the monasteries under Henry VIII. Richard Cromwell's real name was Richard Williams. He was nephew to Thomas because his mother had been Thomas Cromwell's sister, his mother having married a tavern-keeper in Putney, near London, whose name was Williams. Richard took on his important relative's name, but both he and those who succeeded him had to use the name Williams for legal purposes, and when his great-grandson, Oliver, lay in state, the title "Oliver Cromwell, alias Williams," was embroidered on the half- royal hangings which draped the bed. . . .

He had a genius for forming and leading cavalry. No one suspected it, least of all himself, until the opportunity came which made it manifest. Cromwell was already in his forty-third year when the War broke out. He had barely entered his forty-fifth when it was clear he would become the principal military figure. He was installed the head of the victorious army by the time that he was forty-eight, and in his fiftieth year it was he who plotted for and achieved the death of King Charles. He proceeded to the conquest of Ireland, a task which he accomplished with horrible cruelty and as a result of which he dispossessed nineteen-twentieths of the Irish nation, confiscating their land wholesale. He intended to destroy the Catholic Church altogether in that country. He thought that he had achieved that end before he died; but there he was mistaken.

Nevertheless, Cromwell's success and his Protectorate were decisive in the process of establishing Protestantism in England:

All that political experiment of an English military republic under a "Protector" was ephemeral. It was bound to break down and did so within two years of Cromwell's death. He died on the third of September, 1658, and the dead King's son, young Charles, returned and was crowned Charles II in the Spring of 1660. Nevertheless, that for which Cromwell stood had, in effect, conquered. 

Those who retained Catholic principles and inclinations in England were still very numerous; when he died they were still more than a quarter of the population. In Ireland, in spite of massacre and wholesale robbery the great Catholic mass stood firm, and there at least seven-eighths of the people retained their religion in spite of the conquest; but the Civil War had completed both in Britain and in Ireland that long process of Catholic impoverishment and Protestant enrichment which had begun with the Dissolution of the Monasteries more than a hundred years before and had been continued with the Irish confiscations under Elizabeth and completed with the enormous fines levied upon all those landowners in England who stood out boldly and openly proclaimed themselves Catholic. 

Further, the victory of those for whom Cromwell stood and of whom he was the most conspicuous leader was the virtual end of the monarchy, although kingship had come back amid universal rejoicing before young Charles had been crowned at Westminster and all the rest of it. The great landowners and the great merchants, acting through the House of Commons and the House of Lords, which they formed, took over the government in England and have retained it ever since. Further, after that episode there could be no question of the Catholic Faith returning in any strength. It might have survived in a large fraction of the people, but it could never again mould the general spirit of England. 

Oliver Cromwell, therefore, is not only the chief Puritan figure at the decisive moment, the seventeenth century, when the Protestant and Catholic separated finally and agreed to call it a drawn battle; he is also the figure who marks the turning point in the transformation of England from a Catholic to a Protestant country. The process was not completed under him. Catholicism largely survived in England till it received its death blow there in 1688. But by the time of his death the Protestant character of England as a whole was firmly fixed.

The Fortnight for Freedom: St. John Southworth

The Archdiocese of Westminster celebrates its martyr saint today, St. John Southworth, executed for the crime of being a priest in 1654. He had been arrested and protected by Queen Henrietta Maria and suffered imprisonment and exile. Returning to London, he assisted St. Henry Morse, SJ, during an attack of the plague. Finally, he was arrested and executed during Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate:

He pleaded guilty to exercising the priesthood and was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. At his execution at Tyburn, London, he suffered the full pains of his sentence and was hanged, drawn and quartered. He was allowed to speak before his sentence was carried out. Among his last words:

“My faith and obedience to my superiors is all the treason charged against me; nay, I die for Christ’s law, which no human law, by whomsoever made, ought to withstand or contradict… To follow His holy doctrine and imitate His holy death, I willingly suffer at present; this gallows I look on as His Cross, which I gladly take to follow my Dear Saviour…I plead not for myself…but for you poor persecuted Catholics whom I leave behind me.

"My faith is my crime, the performance of my duty the occasion of my condemnation. I confess I am a great sinner; against God I have offended, but am innocent of any sin against man, I mean the Commonwealth, and the present Government."

The Venetian Secretary reported on his execution: he was hung, and was not dead when the executioner "cut out his heart and entrails and threw them into a fire kindled for the purpose, the body being quartered . . . Such is the inhuman cruelty used towards the English Catholic religious."

The Spanish ambassador returned his corpse to Douai for burial. His corpse was sewn together and parboiled, to preserve it. Following the French Revolution, his body was buried in an unmarked grave for its protection. The grave was discovered in 1927 and his remains were returned to England. They are now kept in Westminster Cathedral in London. He was beatified in 1929. In 1970, he was canonized by Pope Paul VI as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. The Cathedral honors him with a guild.

St. John Southworth, pray for us!

A Sad Anniversary: The Desecration of Oliver Cromwell's Tomb

From The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) comes this review of Lord Charles Spencer's latest book:

On Jan. 26, 1661, in Westminster Abbey, the tomb of Oliver Cromwell was broken open and his corrupted corpse was removed. Four days later, it was ritually hanged and beheaded at Tyburn before thousands of jeering onlookers. Cromwell’s severed head, encased in an iron cage, was then skewered on a pike and erected before the House of Lords. There it remained for a quarter century—an emblem of the wages of treason.

Nearly three years earlier, Cromwell had been interred with stately pomp. During the English Civil War he had commanded the victorious armies of Parliament against King Charles I. He had engineered the king’s public trial for treason and then his execution in 1649, eventually ruling all of Britain as Lord Protector. But this revolution did not survive his death, and in 1660 the monarchy was restored by the king’s eldest son, Charles II. Oliver Cromwell, once lionized by John Milton himself as “our chief of men,” was now the hated ringleader of the regicides.

There has been a great deal written about Charles I; somewhat less about the men who executed him. These regicides are the subject of Charles Spencer’s “Killers of the King.” The ninth earl Spencer, brother of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, knows a thing or two about monarchy. The sympathies of his book incline against the institution. Perhaps familiarity does breed contempt.

Killers of the King: The Men Who Dared to Execute Charles I is published by Bloomsbury. It's one thing to charge the living with a crime, another thing entirely to desecrate the dead! Of course, the royalists thought of the king's body as a sacred thing that had been violated, so they responded in kind when they had the power. The reviewer, Jeffrey Collins, professor of history at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, offers some corrections and context to Lord Spencer's views:

But this narrative of suffering valor is overdrawn. Mr. Spencer portrays Charles II as a “man of vengeance,” goaded on by royalists “baying for blood.” In truth, prudence and insecurity moved the king to moderate his reprisals. As “Killers of the King” itself demonstrates, the regicides’ worst enemies were their old parliamentary allies. Those who had fought Charles I but had avoided his trial were eager to isolate the regicides and sacrifice them as “scapegoats for half the kingdom.” Many of the regicides were captured by former allies who turned in their captives to prove their own conveniently rediscovered royalism.

This cycle of betrayal was ugly but predictable. The regicides had not represented the popular will. They had purged Parliament of their enemies and summarily dissolved the House of Lords; they were the architects of a military coup. Like most revolutionaries, they postured as a vanguard and sacrificed constitutional order to their own sense of heavenly justice. Charles Spencer captures the sincerity and the conviction of the regicides, but he cannot vindicate the justice of their actions. The regicides killed the king, but they could not kill the monarchy. Our capacity, centuries later, to be fascinated by their story is a measure of their failure.

Puritans Ban Christmas; Royalists Rebel Against Rebels

In this Christmas 2011 issue of the BBC History Magazine, Mark Stoyle, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Southampton, describes how and why the Puritans banned Christmas once they had control of Parliament and how Royalists and others fought the ban:

As the year 1645 limped towards its weary close, a war-torn England shivered beneath a thick blanket of snow. A few months earlier, parliament’s New Model Army, led by Sir Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell, had routed the forces of Charles I at the battle of Naseby. Although that defeat had struck the king’s cause a mortal blow, the royalists still refused to surrender, and the bloody Civil War which had divided the country ever since 1642 continued to rage.

Under constant pressure from the armies of both sides to supply them with money, clothing and food, few Englishmen and women can have been anticipating a particularly merry Christmas. Yet, for those who lived in the extensive territories which were controlled by the king’s enemies, there was to be no Christmas this year at all – because the traditional festivities had been abolished by order of the two Houses of Parliament sitting at Westminster.

From Charles’s beleaguered wartime capital in Oxford, the royalist satirist John Taylor – by now in his mid-60s, but nevertheless one of the king’s most indefatigable literary champions – issued a cry of anguish at this assault on England’s time-honoured customs. All of the “harmless sports” with which people had long celebrated Christ’s nativity “are now extinct and put out of use… as if they had never been,” Taylor lamented in his pamphlet The Complaint of Christmas, and “thus are the merry lords of misrule suppressed by the mad lords of bad rule at Westminster”.

So why had the parliamentarians decided to wage war on Christmas – and how did those, like Taylor, who were determined to defend the traditional celebrations, fight back?

The attack on the feast of Christmas had deep roots. Long before the Civil War began, many zealous Protestants, or ‘Puritans’, had been troubled both by the boisterous nature of the festivities which took place at Christmas and by the perceived association of those festivities with the old Catholic faith. During the early 1600s, most English Puritans had been prepared to tolerate Christmas. Following the rebellion of the Presbyterian Scots against Charles I in 1637, however, all this was to change.

Read the rest here. There were even riots in protest against the Puritan ban:

Worse was to follow in 1647 – despite the fact that, on 10 June that year, parliament has passed an ordinance which declared the celebration of Christmas to be a punishable offence. On 25 December 1647, there was further trouble at Bury, while pro-Christmas riots also took place at Norwich and Ipswich. During the course of the Ipswich riot, a protestor named ‘Christmas’ was reported to have been slain – a fatality which could be regarded as richly symbolic, of course, of the way that parliament had ‘killed’ Christmas itself.

In London, a crowd of apprentices assembled at Cornhill on Christmas Day, and there “in despite of authority, they set up Holly and Ivy” on the pinnacles of the public water conduit. When the lord mayor despatched some officers “to pull down these gawds,” the apprentices resisted them, forcing the mayor to rush to the scene with a party of soldiers and to break up the demonstration by force.

The worst disturbances of all took place at Canterbury, where a crowd of protestors first smashed up the shops which had been opened on Christmas Day and then went on to seize control of the entire city. This riot helped to pave the way for a major insurrection in Kent in 1648 that itself formed part of the ‘Second Civil War’ – a scattered series of risings against the parliament and in favour of the king, which Fairfax and Cromwell only managed to suppress with great difficulty.

From Boston Witch to Catholic Saint?

This story from the Catholic News Agency recalls the depiction of the indentured servitude/slavery of Irish Catholics in British America depicted by Robert Emmett Curran in Papist Devils:

The last person hanged for witchcraft in Boston could be considered a Catholic martyr.

In the 1650s, Ann Glover and her family, along with some 50,000 other native Irish people, were enslaved by Englishman Oliver Cromwell during the occupation of Ireland and shipped to the island of Barbados, where they were sold as indentured servants.

What is known of her history is sporadic at best, though she was definitely Irish and definitely Catholic. According to an article in the Boston Globe, even Ann's real name remains a mystery, as indentured servants were often forced to take the names of their masters.

While in Barbados, Ann's husband was reportedly killed for refusing to renounce his Catholic faith. By 1680, Ann and her daughter had moved to Boston where Ann worked as a “goodwife” (a housekeeper and nanny) for the John Goodwin family.

Father Robert O'Grady, director of the Boston Catholic Directory for the Archdiocese of Boston, said that after working for the Goodwins for a few years, Ann Glover became sick, and the illness spread to four of the five Goodwin children.

“She was, unsurprisingly, not well-educated, and in working with the family, apparently she got sick at some point and the kids for whom she was primarily responsible caught whatever it was,” Fr. O'Grady told CNA.

A doctor allegedly concluded that “nothing but a hellish Witchcraft could be the origin of these maladies,” and one of the daughters confirmed the claim, saying she fell ill after an argument with Ann.

Cotton Mather advised at her trial, packed with judges from his congregation, and a contemporary noted that it was unjust and cruel:

Allegedly, Boston merchant Robert Calef, who knew Ann when she was alive, said she “was a despised, crazy, poor old woman, an Irish Catholic who was tried for afflicting the Goodwin children. Her behavior at her trial was like that of one distracted. They did her cruel. The proof against her was wholly deficient. The jury brought her guilty. She was hung. She died a Catholic."

Mather convicted Ann of being an “idolatrous Roman Catholick” and a witch, and she hung on Boston Common on November 16, 1688. Today, just a 15 minute walk away, the parish of Our Lady of Victories holds a plaque commemorating her martyrdom, which reads:

“Not far from here on 16 November 1688, Goodwife Ann Glover an elderly Irish widow, was hanged as a witch because she had refused to renounce her Catholic faith. Having been deported from her native Ireland to the Barbados with her husband, who died there because of his own loyalty to the Catholic faith, she came to Boston where she was living for at least six years before she was unjustly condemned to death. This memorial is erected to commemorate “Goody” Glover as the first Catholic martyr in Massachusetts.”

A Catholic condemned as a witch also figures in Mary Sharratt's Daughters of the Witching Hill, her historical novel about the Pendle Hill Witches. One of the women convicted and hung for witchcraft was a well known recusant, Alice Nutter.

A Short Passage to Eternity: Blessed Peter Wright, SJ

Blessed Peter Wright was a Jesuit martyr in England. Born in Slipton, Northamptonshire, England in 1603, Peter reverted to Catholicism after deserting from the English army on the Continent and was trained for the priesthood in Ghent and Rome. Entering the Jesuits in 1629, he taught at St Omers and then he ministered to English Catholics soldiers fighting for the King of Spain in Flanders/the Spanish Netherlands and accompanied Sir Henry Gage back to England. He also served as a chaplain to the Royalist army during the English Civil War at Oxford first with Sir Henry Gage and then with John Paulet, the 5th Marquess of Winchester. After the war, he was arrested at the home of the Paulet on Candlemas, February 2, 1651--thus sharing an arrest date with St. Anne Line--and imprisoned in Newgate. During his trial, the late Henry Gage's brother Thomas presented evidence that Wright was a priest and thus had violated the Elizabeth statutes against Catholic priests in England, so he was sentenced to death by hanging, drawing, and quartering. (Note that Thomas had been ordained a priest in the order of preachers, the Dominicans--and that Thomas had aided officials in the condemnation of three other priests: the Jesuit Thomas Holland in 1642, the Franciscan Francis Bell in 1643, and the Jesuit Ralph Corby in 1644--he was a busy informant.)

Blessed Peter Wright, beatified in 1929 by Pope Pius XI, spoke these words at Tyburn Tree on May 19 in 1651:

Gentlemen, this is a short passage to eternity; my time is now short, and I have not much to speak. I was brought hither charged with no other crime but being a priest. I willingly confess I am a priest; I confess I am a Catholic; I confess I am a religious man of the Society of Jesus, or as you call it, a Jesuit. 

This is the cause for which I die; for this alone was I condemned, and for propagating the Catholic faith, which is spread through the whole world, taught through all ages from Christ's time, and will be taught for all ages to come.

For this cause I most willingly sacrifice my life, and would die a thousand times for the same if it were necessary; and I look upon it my greatest happiness, that my most good God has chosen me most unworthy to this blessed lot, the lot of the saints. This is a grace which so unworthy a sinner could scarce have wished, much less hoped for. And now I beg of the goodness of my God with all the fervour I am able, and most humbly entreat Him that He would drive from you that are Protestants the darkness of error, and enlighten your minds with the rays of truth. And as for you Catholics, my fellow soldiers and comrades, as many of you as are here I earnestly beseech you to join in prayer for me and with me till my last moment; and when I shall come to Heaven I will do as much for you. God bless you all; I forgive all men. From my heart I bid you all farewell till we meet in a happy eternity.

Deborah Kerr and The English Reformation

Today is the anniversary of the birth of one of my favorite actresses, Deborah Kerr, in 1921. You might think that there is no connection between that anniversary and the subject of this blog, but you would be wrong!

First, Deborah Kerr played Catherine Parr, Henry VIII's last wife, in the 1953 movie, Young Bess, based on Margaret Irwin's novel of the same title. Parr's Protestant evangelical tendencies are depicted when Henry VIII (played by Charles Laughton, again) accuses her of authorizing an English translation of the Holy Bible without his permission.

Secondly, Kerr played an Irish girl who hates the memory of Oliver Cromwell so much that she won't spend her honeymoon in an inn named the "Cromwell Arms" in the movie titled either The Adventurous or I See a Dark Stranger.

Thirdly, Deborah Kerr played the role of Sister Clodagh in the movie based on Rumer Godden's Black Narcissus. Rumer Godden is one of the authors I mention in my litany of conversions in the last chapter of Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation. Interesting, Kathleen Byron, who plays Sister Ruth, the mad, bad nun, also appeared in Young Bess, as Anne Seymour, Edward Seymour's wife.

Finally--and this is obscure indeed--Kerr played Gulielma Maria Springett, William Penn's first wife, in Penn of Pennsylvania, a rather unsuccessful biopic of King James II's ally in the attempt to bring religious freedom to England before the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Convinced?

The Siege of Drogheda, September 11, 1649

"I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgement of God on these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands with so much innocent blood; and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which are satisfactory grounds for such actions which cannot otherwise but work remorse and regret." --Oliver Cromwell to Parliament.

Today is the 364th anniversary of the fall of Drogheda on September 11, 1649. According to this website:

In a furious passion, Cromwell ordered that no quarter was to be given. Mill Mount was protected by a bank and ditch and a timber palisade but these defences were soon broken down and the Royalists put to the sword. Aston was bludgeoned to death with his own wooden leg, which the Parliamentarian soldiers believed to be filled with gold coins. The rest of the garrison fled across the Boyne into the northern part of the town, pursued closely by Colonel Venables' troops who prevented the Royalists from raising the drawbridge behind them.

By late evening, up to 6,000 Parliamentarians were in the town overwhelming all resistance and slaughtering officers and soldiers. A cavalry screen outside the walls prevented escape to the north. Catholic priests and friars were treated as combatants and killed on sight. Many civilians died in the carnage. A group of defenders who had barricaded themselves in the steeple of St Peter's Church in the north of Drogheda were burned alive when the Parliamentarians set fire to the church. Around 2,000 people died in the storming and massacre of Drogheda; a number of prisoners who surrendered before Cromwell gave the order for no quarter were murdered in cold blood. Surviving members of the garrison captured the following day were transported to Barbados. Parliamentarian losses were around 150.

According to the conventions of 17th century warfare, a besieged city that refused a summons to surrender and was then taken by storm could expect no mercy. Cromwell regarded the massacre at Drogheda as a righteous judgment on the Catholics who had slaughtered Protestant settlers in the Irish Uprising of 1641, a view that was probably shared by most Protestants at the time. He also considered that the example of Drogheda would serve as a warning to other garrisons in Ireland to surrender rather than risk a similar fate, thus preventing bloodshed in the long run. However, the massacre of Drogheda left an indelible stain on Cromwell's reputation. It has lived on in Irish folk memory, making his name into one of the most hated in Irish history.

The BBC debated Cromwell's reputation in 1999, the 400th anniversary of his birth.

Readers of Gone With the Wind might remember that Scarlett O'Hara has a rather confused view of Drogheda and when it occurred. Rhett Butler calls her the most historically ignorant person he has ever met.

Episode Nine of the The English Reformation Today

Today on "The English Reformation Today" on Radio Maria US, I'll cover lots of history by focusing on the religious aspects of the English Civil War, the execution of King Charles I, Interregnum period (when Parliament and Oliver Cromwell ruled), and the Popish Plot during the reign of Charles II--we'll see how far I get in the hour! The plan I submitted to Radio Maria included this summary for today's episode:

Highlight the religious conflict in England leading to the English Civil War; describe the Puritan Experiment in government, including its attack on Christmas. Describe the great religious crisis of the Popish Plot during the reign of the restored Stuart monarch, Charles II--recount the injustice of the trials of the last great wave of Catholic martyrs from 1679 to 1681. Continue the story of Maryland, describing Calvert's heirs and their efforts to inculcate religious tolerance and freedom of religion in their colony--the changing fortunes of Catholics in the Maryland colony during the the Civil War and Restoration.

As I commented, the Stuart dynasty coming to England seemed more stable--unlike Elizabeth I, with no family heir (not even a cousin left, after she got rid of Mary, Queen of Scots and her Grey cousins, Nine-Day-Jane's sister Mary and Katherine)--James I of England had two sons in case the eldest died (and he did) and Charles I had more than two prepared to succeed him. But the Stuart monarchy endured two overthrows--the English Civil War toppled Charles I from the throne and his head from his neck, while the Glorious Revolution of 1688 deposed his son James II and left his son and grandsons to be Pretenders.

Why? I don't think we can ignore how religious division and dissent contributed to this dynasty's troubles, whatever the personal or regal failings of its monarchs--the Tudor model of asserting supremacy and uniformity had left the country divided: Anglican, Puritan, and Catholic. The Catholic opposition, as we know well from the past few episodes, had been driven underground, but a consistent, muted danger to the State. The Puritan opposition remained a force above ground with influence in both Church and State, and it would prove to be the real source of danger to the Stuarts--at least to Charles I and Charles II (in the latter case, when Scotland backed his succession to his father). As I explain in this article, Stuart devotion to the Protestant cause was always suspect until after the Glorious Revolution, as the first four Stuarts seem to "flirt" with Catholicism, with Catholic wives and catholic (lower case) sympathies:

From the beginning of the Stuart dynasty in England, there seemed to be uncertainty about how loyal the kings from James I to James II were to the Church of England and to Protestantism.

At the beginning of his reign, James I wanted to hold an ecumenical council with the Pope! He also negotiated a treaty with Spain for his son and heir Charles to marry the Infanta. That treaty, like the one eventually signed when Charles married Henrietta Maria of France, sister of King Louis XIII, allowed the foreign bride to remain a Catholic, to have priests at Court as her chaplains and confessors, and to have a chapel in which to worship-and even promised leniency to Catholics. On the other hand, Parliament did not think that James I did enough to support his own son-in-law, the Elector of the Palatinate in Bohemia, when he lost the Battle of the White Mountain, defeated by Catholic forces in 1620. The Catholicism of James' wife, Queen Anne, didn't help, although they became estranged soon after he succeeded to the throne of England. She did not receive Anglican communion at their coronation ceremony, however, and that was pointed.

Charles I indeed allowed his wife that freedom and members of his Court were often concerned that his uxoriousness might lead him to become Catholic. Henrietta Maria was a devout Catholic, processing to Tyburn Tree to honor the Elizabethan and Jamesian martyrs, refurbishing her chapel in the latest baroque style, and attracting converts. The presence of the Capuchin friars and the celebration of Catholic Mass shocked and disturbed Anglican courtiers. When Parliament was not in session, Charles indeed showed leniency to Catholic priests and Henrietta Maria often pled for clemency. Parliament indicted her for treason during the Civil War and she fled the country for exile in France. The religious conflict between Puritans in Parliament and Charles I's arminian High Church Anglicanism contributed to the causes of the Civil War and the execution of the the king in 1649 after he lost.

Charles II returned to England in 1660 in the security of the re-established Church of England, the Book of Common Prayer, the Authorized Version of the Bible, and the monarchy. He married a Catholic princess, however, Catherine of Braganza, and refused to divorce her even though she bore him no sons. He treated her as well as possible considering his rampant infidelity, maintaining both Protestant and Catholic mistresses-thus the occasion when Nell Gwynn called out to the crowds jostling her carriage, "Good people, I am the Protestant whore!" If Charles's cabinet had known what he had agreed on May 26 in 1670, they would have been stunned. Although they did not know about the secret contents in the Treaty of Dover (no one did until the 19th century), they knew that Charles attempted to extend freedom from the penal laws to Catholics in his Declaration of Indulgence in 1672. He had to back away from that move when Parliament rejected his proclamation, and for a time seemed to turn more toward Protestant interests on the Continent, allying with William of Orange against the French. Imagine the surprise when they discovered that he had converted on his deathbed, encouraged by his Catholic brother. . . . (You may read the rest here)

I welcome all listeners of Radio Maria US to my blog, whether you're listening on one of their radio stations or on line or through one of their apps. I invite you to call in with questions and comments toll-free at 866-333-MARY(6279). Just a reminder, too, that podcasts of previous episodes of The English Reformation Today are available on the Radio Maria US website. Next week: The Long Eighteenth Century for Catholics from the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the Jacobite Pretenders, to the first Catholic Relief Acts!