RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/09/is_it_over_yet.html

There’s a huge difference between the solemn, sorrowful citizens who lined the streets to say good-bye to Ronald Reagan, John Kennedy, and FDR and the rubberneckers hoping to catch a glimpse of celebrity politicians putting in a public appearance for the late Senator McCain’s multiple memorials. Releasing those men we loved from afar to a higher and happier place bears no resemblance to spectators taking part in one of the “scheduled events” posted strategically on the Fox News website and elsewhere.

Despite of the wall-to-wall media coverage of a seemingly unending series of funeral services (five at last count), this nation does not mourn the passing of a hero. Yes, dignitaries showed up and slid fake praise into orations meant for something other than a heartfelt memorial to the dearly departed. John McCain may have been dear to a few people, but for the rest of us (and most likely 99% of the people invited to be part of his ostentatious Display of the Dead), he remains a clear and present exemplar of a petty plutocracy and blatant self-service. One ecstatic writer called it the “biggest resistance meeting yet” as Her Father’s Daughter saddled the next generation with the bitter Sins of the Father and was celebrated for embracing what many have called a world-class grudge. Somehow, she missed the message that “John called on us to be bigger… and better than that.” Others, disgusted by the “political theatrics and cheap shots” recognized her father’s signature spitefulness — nasty to the end and beyond. Yet it was the observation of a high-school junior that explained a certain hollowness to every news anchor’s claim that a nation mourns. CJ Pearson wrote: “At most funerals I’ve attended, it’s God’s love that fills the room, not hate and animus for a person who is not even in attendance.”

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.