Item — HN Reader

>” the anonymous editor peppered the text with political, personal, and sexual slander aimed at tarnishing the Cromwell legacy.”

Stopped reading at this point. If the author doesn’t understand that the Cromwell legacy is already tarnished due to war crimes I doubt there’s going to be much reason to continue.

2 comments

Thats a bit of an anachronism, isnt it? The concept of war crimes was developed a few centuries later, wasnt it?

The atrocities are remembered in Ireland as atrocities all the same.

> James Joyce wrote in Ulysses, 1922, “What about sanctimonious Cromwell and his ironsides that put the women and children of Drogheda to the sword with the bible text God is love pasted round the mouth of his cannon?”

> Winston Churchill’s view in The History of the English Speaking Peoples: The Age of Revolution, 1957, is perhaps less artful, but succinct: “By an uncompleted process of terror, by an iniquitous land settlement, by the virtual proscription of the Catholic religion, by the bloody deeds already described, he cut new gulfs between the nations and the creeds…. Upon all of us there still lies ‘the curse of Cromwell.’ ”

Quotes propagated from https://simanaitissays.com/2018/11/28/oliver-cromwell-purita...

Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658)

James Joyce commentary: 1922 Winston Churchill commentary: 1957

300 years is a lot of hindsight.

Is there a specific fact, letters etc. from the time you’re arguing against? From what I recall his barbarism was seen to stand out at the time in England and Ireland. He used it as a type of shock and awe, so when arrived at the next town they’d just surrender or flee.

Just that the subject is the politics of the time (i.e. what were the people at the time arguing about - what was that "legacy" they were looking to influence), and that modern authors are looking at things from a different perspective.

At the time, it may have been that the ”Jury is still out”.

You have to remenber that things we take as granted nowdays, may have been divisive at the time.

Murdering women and children, even at that time, was considered bad. Shocking eh.

There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

You're going to have to contextualise this.

This is from "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" by Mark Twain - here he's talking about the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution

Cromwell was a monster reacting to a monstrous system. History is quick to pass judgement the former while ignoring - and in the case of England unlike France, perpetuating - the latter.

As if the british monarchy doesn't have their hands dirty with the blood of millions....

Which British monarch has their hands dirty with the blood of millions? The obvious cases where British policy led to that many deaths would be e.g. the Irish and Bengal famines (the latter during WWII). Those both took place at a time when the monarch was a constitutional figurehead.

The best case might be the slave trade. But this was at its height under the Hanoverians, by which time the Commons was already the effective supreme power. I suppose you could say that the slave trade started earlier, and that this starting event caused the later expansion. Maybe, but that's a claim about the causal chain that needs arguing for.

Sure, and this is generally regarded as a bad thing.

Cromwell gets defenders for opposing them, despite committing many of the same bad things, and in the case of Ireland, even harsher actions with longer term consequences.

Complaints about the british monarchy don't excuse Cromwell his actions.

> Complaints about the british monarchy don't excuse Cromwell his actions.

But it does mean reacting to this article purely for its ambivalence about Cromwell's actions is probably the least curious thing you can do.