The Protector: The Fall and Rise Of Oliver Cromwell - A Novel- Tom Reilly-Top Hat Books (June 24 2022)

 “The whole agrarian history of Ireland is a series of confiscations of Irish land to be handed over to English settlers. These settlers, in a very few generations, under the charm of Celtic society, turned more Irish than the aborigines. Then a new confiscation and new colonisation took place, and so in infinitum.”

Frederick Engels

‘If I’m ever proven wrong, I’ll shut up and get off the stage.’

Tom Reilly

“Such issues are beyond good manners, sir. Catholicism is more than a religion. It is a political power. Therefore, I am led to believe there will be no peace in Ireland until the Catholic Church is crushed.”

Oliver Cromwell

“This ancestor of Lord Lansdowne, the founder of the noble Lansdowne family, Sir William Petty, landed in Ireland in 1652 with a total capital of all his fortune of £500. But he came over in the wake of Cromwell’s army and got himself appointed ‘Physician to the Army of Ireland’. In 1662, he was made one of a Court of Commissioners of Irish Estates and also Surveyor-General for Ireland. As the native Irish were then being hunted to death, or transported in slave-gangs to Barbadoes, the latter fact gave this worthy ancestor of a worthy lord excellent opportunities to ‘invest’ his £500 to good purpose.”

James Connolly

“What is History but a fable agreed upon?”. Napoleon I.

A new book on Oliver Cromwell is always welcome, but this one is a major disappointment. I would not go as far as to say that it wastes both the reader and author's time but it comes pretty close to that. It is not Reilly’s fault but now all new work on Cromwell will be defined by its attitude to the magnificent three volumes of  Letters, Writings, and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell.[1]His book does not fair very well.

Despite being an amateur historian, books by Tom Reilly are worth reading. He has come under significant attack for what is seen as an unhealthy fixation with Cromwell. However, not all the criticism from modern academia has been fair, and some have been borderline abusive. The book is not without some merit. It is well written and researched and, to a limited degree, re-establishes Cromwell’s authentic voice. How much of the real  Cromwell appears remains to be seen. My criticism of his robust and somewhat rose-tinted defence of everything Cromwell did fails to place Cromwell in a more objective context.

Before the invasion of Ireland, Cromwell had to do two necessary things, both crucial to a successful invasion of Ireland. First was the execution of Charles I. Although, in the short term, far from stabilising an already unstable ruling elite, the execution led sections of the bourgeoisie to pursue negotiations with the Royalists in England and Ireland. One of the reasons for the invasion was to subdue a possible Royalist/Catholic revolt and to secure Cromwell’s and a large section of the English bourgeoisie's strategic political and economic interests in that country. Second, Parliament charged Cromwell to deal with the growing radicalisation of the New Model Army. One manifestation of this radicalism was the Leveller inspired revolt over the army being shipped to Ireland to put down the revolt.

Most criticism of Reilly has centred on his passionate defence of Cromwell’s role in Ireland.[2] In his new book, Reilly continues his theme that Cromwell was not to blame for the massacres. He writes, “We should apologise to Cromwell’s family for blackening his name, for making him a monster. We are teaching our children propaganda that perpetuates anti-English prejudice.”

Suppose we take out of the equation Reilly’s hyperbole and infatuation. In that case, we are left with the fact that Oliver Cromwell was a leading member of the English bourgeoisie and, alongside others, not only made a lot of money out of the conquest of Ireland but, if it happened today, would be guilty of war crimes.

The English Bourgeoisie, from the beginning saw Ireland as a money-making adventure. As an incentive to make the conquest easier, it got Parliament to pass an  “Adventurers Act” in 1642 to invite the “Middling Sort” to invest in the army. The greater the investment, the greater the return of land. Cromwell had loaned over 2,000 pounds and had been promised land in Leinster. Christopher Hill correctly states Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland was “the first big triumph of English imperialism and the first big defeat of English democracy”.While many of the bourgeoisie stumped up money for their adventure in Ireland, Parliament felt a little more cooperation was a need and this came in the form of a series of ordinances which was a demand for money with menaces. In February 1648: it issued An Ordinance For raising of Twenty thousand pounds a Month for the Relief of Ireland.

Frederick Engels states, “ In the 17th century, the whole of Ireland, except the newly Scotchified North, was ripe for a fresh confiscation. So much so that when the British (Puritan) Parliament accorded to Charles I an army for the reduction of Ireland, it resolved that the money for this armament should be raised upon the security of 2,500,000 acres to be confiscated in Ireland. And the “adventurers” who advanced the money should also appoint the officers of that army. The land was to be divided amongst those adventurers so that 1,000 acres should be given them, if in Ulster for £200 — advanced, in Connaught for £300, in Munster for £450, in Leinster for £600. And if the people rose against this beneficent plan, they are Vendéens! If Regnard should ever sit in a National Convention, he may take a leaf out of the proceedings of the Long Parliament and combat a possible Vendée with these means.[3]

In another part of the same letter, Engels makes this point: “The 80,000 Protestants’ massacre of 1641. The Irish Catholics are here in the same position as the Commune de Paris. The Versailles massacred 30,000 Communards and called that the horrors of the Commune. The English Protestants under Cromwell massacred at least 30,000 Irish and, to cover their brutality invented the tale that this was to avenge 30,000 Protestants murdered by the Irish Catholics.”

The Irish socialist James Connolly, while not blaming the English bourgeoise for everything that occurred to the Irish people after the conquest of Ireland in the latter part of the seventeenth century, but wrote “ Just as it is true that a stream cannot rise above its source, so it is true that a national literature cannot rise above the moral level of the social conditions of the people from whom it derives its inspiration. If we would understand the national literature of a people, we must study their social and political status, keeping in mind the fact that their writers were a product thereof and that the children of their brains were conceived and brought forth in certain historical conditions. Ireland, at the same time as she lost her ancient social system, also lost her language as the vehicle of thought of those who acted as her leaders. As a result of this twofold loss, the nation suffered socially, nationally and intellectually from a prolonged arrested development. During the closing years of the seventeenth century, all the eighteenth, and the greater part of the nineteenth, the Irish people were the lowest helots in Europe, socially and politically. The Irish peasant, reduced from the position of a free clansman owning his tribeland and controlling its administration in common with his fellows, was a mere tenant-at-will subject to eviction, dishonour and outrage at the hands of an irresponsible private proprietor. Politically, he was non-existent. Legally, he held no rights; intellectually, he sank under the weight of his social abasement and surrendered to the downward drag of his poverty. He had been conquered, and he suffered all the terrible consequences of defeat at the hands of a ruling class and nation who have always acted upon the old Roman maxim of `Woe to the vanquished'.[4]

I do not hold out much hope that Reilly’s next Cromwell adventure will produce a more objective study. I will examine Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives, which emerged in 2020. Reilly can write more books and hold more conferences, but the reality is that his hero is not as innocent as he makes out. Perhaps his next book should contain a few warts.

 

 

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[1] The Letters, Writings, and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell: Volume 1: October 1626 to January 1649 (Speeches & Writings of Oliver Cromwell) Hardcover – 7 Sept. 2022by Andrew Barclay (Editor), Tim Wales (Editor), John Morrill (Editor)

[2] See Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives Hardcover – 30 Nov. 2020

by Professor Martyn Bennett (Author, Editor), Raymond Gillespie (Editor), Scott Spurlock (Editor)

[3] Engels To Jenny Longuet-Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, pp. 326-329-https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/letters/81_02_24.htm

[4] Labour in Irish History by James Connolly

A tribute to Dave Hyland- ( 1947-2013)

 

It is hard to imagine that it is ten years since the passing of Dave Hyland. I first met him in Hammersmith, London, on February 8 1986. The split inside the Workers Revolutionary Party had just taken place, and the Internationalist faction, of which I was a member, had assembled for the 8th congress only to be barred from the meeting by police called by the Slaughter\Banda faction.

I joined the WRP in 1983 after a nine-month candidate membership, which I think was a record for any revolutionary organisation. When I told my parents about the membership, I expected some hostility, but my mother said, “At least it will keep him on the streets”. This quote will be the title of my autobiography. My path towards membership in the WRP was pretty tortuous, and I will not burden readers with the details of the many organisations I joined, which, in reality, were thoroughly reactionary.

Joining the WRP was like a breath of fresh air. I felt comfortable being a member. I had prepared myself by reading and collecting classical Marxist literature. I bought so much literature from the Militant organisation that they sent two girls around to my house in an attempt to recruit me. I did not stay long in that party, which I quickly saw was a front for the Labour Party.

Inside the WRP, I read books and pamphlets about their history and that of the ICFI. A basic part of membership was, of course, newspaper selling. I never really read the WRP’s Newsline which was nothing more than a comic to me and did not advance my intellect one iota. That bothered me, but I did not understand why the paper was so low compared to the youth movement’s paper, The Young Socialist. The youth paper carried articles from the US section of the Workers League. One such article was David North’s Leon Trotsky and the development of Marxism. In my limited outstanding of Trotskyist politics, the Workers League was far superior to the WRP. It was only after the split and the publication of How the WRP Betrayed Trotskyism did I fully understood why.

As I said, my first meeting with Dave was in Hammersmith. He was handing out booklets that contained a wealth of material on the split and various topics. One of which was Security and the Fourth International. I had read the two books produced by the ICFI, so I was very familiar with a subject that fascinated me and was eager to read more. I still have the booklets I got from him. It isn't easy to sum up a man's character in such a brief meeting, but my abiding memory was of his energy. He was a fighter of very similar stature to the American Trotskyist James P Cannon. Hyland had what Trotsky called the “physical power of thought.”

As I got to know him, while it was hard to become friends in a revolutionary party, it did not stop me from having the utmost respect and admiration for him. Outside of David North, he was the most important figure in my political development. He had many important characteristics. He was well-read despite having a hard-working life and raising a family, which was probably the most important family in the political life of the British Section, if not the ICFI. He was very approachable and easy to talk to and I like to feel we had immediate political and personal rapport. One memory sticks out. It was during my victimisation in 1987. I was preparing for an important meeting and having problems writing a speech. At the time, he was National Secretary of the British section of the ICFI, yet he still found the time late into the night to coach me and make changes to the speech.

During my time in the party, I had known that Dave was not well but did not know until his death how terrible his illness was. So, unlike many who were close to him at the end, his death did come as a great shock to me, and it saddens me terribly that he had to suffer with such extremely aggressive rheumatoid arthritis for more than 20 years. But as David North wrote, “Despite the gravity of his illness, Dave had manifested powers of resistance that seemed to defy scientific explanation. His willpower, his desire to live and to participate in life as fully as possible, exerted itself as a real physical force.”

In his appreciation of Hyland, Nick Beams said, “Marxism bases itself on the objective laws of society. But it has nothing in common with any fatalism or passivity. At crucial turning points in the historical process, the decisions made by individuals and their struggles based on those decisions prove to be the decisive factor. Dave’s decision to fight for the programme of the IC was one such decision”. It was his finest hour. In my heart and mind, Comrade Dave will never be forgotten. As David North said, “ He will be remembered by his comrades and remain an inspiring example of revolutionary steadfastness and principle for generations to come.”