RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/7228/full

Thomas Cromwell ruined the Church in England and reinvented it as the Church of England. He thereby imposed his adopted Protestant faith on his countrymen, while destroying the Catholic faith of their fathers — and, incidentally, of his master Henry VIII. The King rejoiced until his dying day in the Papal title of defensor fideii, Defender of the Faith, and executed “Sacramentarians” (those who denied the Real Presence in the Eucharist) as heretics. Ironically, his minister Cromwell was one of them.

His Protestantism seems to have been of a more radical kind than that espoused by his ally and fellow architect of Anglicanism, Archbishop Cranmer. Whereas Cranmer equivocated, Cromwell deliberately demolished as much as possible of a millennium of Catholic Christianity in a decade of hyperactivity. He thereby enhanced the power and prestige of “this realm of England”, enabling Henry to crush popular uprisings, even the 40,000-strong Pilgrimage of Grace.

Such frightening efficiency has earned Thomas Cromwell many admirers in recent times, beginning half a century ago with the late Sir Geoffrey Elton, and culminating in the bestselling novels of Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, which were adapted for television with Mark Rylance as Cromwell. Now the distinguished Oxford historian Diarmaid MacCulloch has become his latest champion, with Thomas Cromwell: A Life (Allen Lane, £30), which Mantel describes as “the biography we have been awaiting for 400 years”.

MacCulloch’s scholarship is impressive and he succeeds triumphantly in overcoming the main obstacle that has always inhibited Cromwell’s biographers: the destruction of all copies of the minister’s letters by his faithful amanuenses, once his loss of the King’s favour became clear. This resulted in the survival of only one side of his correspondence, what MacCulloch calls Cromwell’s “in tray”. The absence of a large corpus of his writing explains why he has seemed a shadowy figure. Yet that very impersonality has been a gift to Hilary Mantel and Mark Rylance, who are able to impose their own interpretations.

http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/7227/full

As the title of her biography, still unsurpassed after four decades, Antonia Fraser chose the opening of Milton’s great panegyric of 1652: “Cromwell our chief of men”. The words of this sonnet resonate down the centuries because, with the exception of Winston Churchill, no man in English history has stood so far above his contemporaries as the Lord Protector.

He was, nevertheless, England’s only dictator. In classical political theory, a dictator was a leader appointed in time of war or other crisis for a limited period, the most famous example being Julius Caesar. Like Caesar, Cromwell was offered the crown; unlike Caesar, he was firm in his refusal. It speaks volumes for the loyalty he inspired, too, that he avoided the Roman’s fate — though after the Restoration his corpse was exhumed and hung on a gibbet, as part of Charles II’s posthumous revenge on the regicides. It says something, moreover, for the underlying awe in which Cromwell was still held, as well as for the English sense of fair play, that no such vindictiveness was shown towards Richard Cromwell, the Protector’s son, who briefly and unwillingly inherited his father’s office before being deposed by the army in favour of the Stuarts.

It would be an understatement to say that Oliver Cromwell has always divided opinion. In Ireland, the massacres at Drogheda and Wexford became a bloodstained folk memory that no historical contextualisation can cleanse. While Cromwell’s treatment of those he defeated was usually magnanimous by the standards of the time, he showed no mercy to the Irish rebels, especially the clergy. His attitude to Catholics in England, on the other hand, was exceptionally tolerant: he favoured freedom of conscience, at least in private, and the recusant community flourished under his protection. He even tried to persuade Rome to desist from placing Catholics under an obligation to rebel, in return for toleration; he was rebuffed.

But the proof of Oliver’s open mind — and in many ways the most enlightened achievement of his whole career — was his decision to reintroduce the Jews to England. Ever since Edward I’s shameful expulsion of 1290, England had been a no-go area for Jews, apart from a handful of individuals who worshipped in secret. By the mid-17th century the emerging Dutch republic, by contrast, was home to large and flourishing communities of Sephardic Jews, mostly Marranos who had sought refuge there from Spain and Portugal.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12732/progressives-reality

Many of these children in adult bodies were told, and actually believed, that better health care for everyone, including an unlimited number of illegal immigrants, would be attainable at a low cost, if only the government were to run it.

Many children in adult bodies also seem not to know that Socialism failed in the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Albania, Bulgaria, China, North Korea, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and Cuba, and is now failing in Venezuela. The irrational wish is evidently stronger than rational arithmetic.

These victims of arrested emotional development seem to confuse good motives with good results. They want better health care for a greater number of people at a lesser cost; so they fantasize that they can achieve it without denying care to those who are too old, too sick or too expensive to receive it. They kind-heartedly want a “more equal distribution of wealth”; so they fantasize that they can maneuver it without penalizing and discouraging the productive members of society, while rewarding and encouraging the unproductive ones.

“Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child,” Cicero astutely observed. For many self-described progressives today, however, this seems not to be a drawback. On the contrary, like adolescents — insisting that they are grown-ups when their parents get in the way of their fun, but then running home for all their basic needs and creature comforts — such people seem to give no thought to the past and equally little to the future.

Many people like this are said to suffer from a “Peter Pan Syndrome”: the inability or unwillingness to grow up. In thought, they seem to lean to the political left. They want the government to take on the role of parent, even if that involves maxing out the country’s “credit cards,” so that even for a short time, they can live beyond what they earn.