Posted on 12/31/2010 10:16:57 PM PST by Alex Murphy
In many ways, though, what drove Cromwell was his burning religious passion.
Around 1630, when his financial woes were at their worst, he went through a dramatic religious conversion, becoming convinced that God had marked him out for eternal salvation.
‘Oh, have I lived in and loved darkness and hated the light,’ he wrote a few years later. ‘I was a chief, the chief of sinners . . . I hated godliness; yet God had mercy upon me. O the riches of His mercy!’
But Cromwell was not merely exceptionally religious. He belonged to a particular religious group — the Puritans — who believed that the frivolous Charles I, with his stubborn faith in the Divine Right of Kings and his fondness for elaborate Catholic-style church ceremonies, was betraying the Protestant Reformation.
A century earlier, Henry VIII’s tumultuous break with Roman Catholicism had given rise to a new sense of English identity, rooted in Protestant independence, localism and individualism, and fiercely antagonistic to Continental European influence. But to England’s Protestant middle classes, the return of Papal rule remained a genuine and terrifying threat.
Given his wild mood swings between jubilation and gloom, some biographers have suggested that he suffered from manic depression. That might explain why he laughed ‘as if he had been drunk’ after the Battle of Dunbar. To men like Cromwell, the sinister armies of international Catholicism were always poised to strike across the Channel and extinguish English Protestantism for ever.
And to those who remembered the Spanish Armada and the Gunpowder Plot, and who were horrified by news of the Thirty Years War, the gigantic conflict that tore much of central Europe apart as Spain, France, Sweden and Holland battled for supremacy at the cost of some ten million lives, their fears seemed all too realistic.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
It’s no surprise that 1.6% were Catholics. Actually it’s amazing there were that many.
I went to the link posted by sparky1776 and had a real education:
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1964/1/1964_1_26.shtml
I had no idea that England was tracking down people here in the colonies. I now have a new appreciation for the concept of religious freedom after going to that link.
Every once in a while I learn something here that is exceptional. Thanks Sparky.
Oops. From the first federal census of 1790, Catholics comprised only about 6/10ths of a percent (0.6%) of the population of the thirteen original colonies (about 25,000 out of 3,939,000).
Churchill is the greatest Englishman, hands down.
Besides Churchill, I would rank Newton, William Pitt the Elder, Henry II, Edward I, Nelson, Wellington, Thomas More and Shakespeare ahead of Cromwell.
How can they tell how many Catholics there were from the census? It didn’t ask about religion. The 1790 census is incompletely preserved (some states’ returns are missing, probably as a result of the burning of Washington in 1814), and before 1850 only heads of households were listed.
Boy are you two correct about this.
The number, 25,000 (Catholics), is from John Carroll (bishop), 1785.
First federal census:
http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1790.html
...or a little more or less from any one of many returns from a search.
Bishop Carroll's figure is from 5 years earlier and is presumably just a guess (although he would be better placed to make a guess than anyone else).
Cromwell ping.
Cromwell's model of forceful dispossession of land and killing of the holy men, "perfected" in Ireland, became the model for the westward movement of the murderous English.
You need look no further than the looting, burning, murder and kidnap accomplished by John Endicott (an affiliate of Williams, both of whom were students of Coke) on Block Island at the beginning of the Pequot War, a task that would later win Endicott the Massachusetts Bay Colony Governorship. Thus, it seems no coincidence that upon his later return to England in 1643, during the English Civil War, that Roger Williams secured a charter, calling his settlement "Providence Plantation." cf "Plantation" in Ireland.
Likewise, the sistered notion that only some were permittted the rights of "Englishmen" took firm and evil root in 1643 when the United Colonies accepted slavery (Setting the stage much later for the mass enslavement of Africans). Clearly, the views of Williams did not prevail at this time, in that Pequots and others had been captured and sold into slavery to the West Indies for more than a decade, a practice that no doubt that led to the bording of John Oldham's ship in Block Island and the killing of him and his crew. With the Pequots out of the way, the drive to the west begins.
One may only ask who were the savages.
Thanks for the ping. This is an excellent article. As it points out, Cromwell was a great man, and he is justly called the founder of the British Empire. I believe he was (and is) unjustly hated.
You got me there. How one forgets history.
I have a French name, an Irishman through descent tho.
No love for the blue painted chalk eating peoples.
Maryland, if I recall correctly, was founded by Lord Baltimore as a colony for Roman Catholics.
Cromwell’s Irish campaign was terrible. But it was no worse than what Hapsburg armies did to Protestant towns and cities in Germany.
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