TS: Oliver Cromwell vs Abraham Lincoln

This made me laugh. (But he wasn't beheaded; he just died mysteriously in his cell - probably deliberately starved to death or poisoned, so still brutal).

This microcosm of a thread suggests how controversial a figure OC is, while there seems to be more consensus on AL. Most people seem to recognise that OC was a nasty git, while debating the extent of this nastiness.

the OC did try and set sonny boy up to succeed him

IIRC, his son ruled for about a year before parliament begged Charlie II to return from exile to become King.

(Finally, praise to SP for discovering the joy of the full line WITHOUT A LINE BREAK.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Cromwell

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln

A best a pragmatist who held briatin together through the second civil war and beyond and probably did as much as anyone to lead Britain away from the wars of the late reformation and the European succession wars that followed and so indirectly laid a foundation stone for the stability that allowed Britain to grab more of the world than anyone else.

AL seems alright really.

Indeed - the Stuarts might have tried to return to absolute monarchy, but that lasted less than 30 years before we had another revolution and the Bill Of Rights was passed.

Many of the professional soldiers on both sides of the conflict were veterans of european wars and of the civil war in england and whilst the massacres of drogheda and wexford were worse than anything perpetrated in England. I'm sure some of the soldiers there had witnessed atrocities by catholic troops as least as bad and probably taken part in similar atrocities before.

You can't simply lay the blame at the feet of cromwell, although he should take his share and I am no fan of his.

(speaking of which who was it was going to recommend me a good book on the reformation? anyone?)

The Major Generals' Banned Christmas (of which Cromwell was one). It was reinstated before the protectorate was over IIRC

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0140285342/ref=wl_it_dp/202-3526781-5273426?ie=UTF8&coliid=I2EF90314TJMVH&colid=T5LTN4HKAXW6

I haven't gotten round to reading it yet.

Have you read Q?

Also ask Simon Schama while you're about it!

The fun-hater characterisation and banning of Christmas is what everyone always seems to remember! Could it be that we generally dislike people who don't enjoy a bit of lust, gluttony and merriness?

Cromwell was also incredibly divisive - i.e. separating the population into the godly and the ungodly; those who deserved to be saved and those who deserved to be damned. This happened without him, but he was the figurehead for the movement.

I think the bloody massacres tend to stick in a few minds.

The American Civil War is round 5 or 6 of the English civil war anyway.

Ireland despite, I fall on the side of Cromwell; mostly cos I read too much Christopher Hill at a tender&impressionable age. He was offered the crown of england and refused it! He insisted on his portraits being 'warts and all'! He was possibly a Seeker! ...I can't remember what the protectorate was like colonially, though, (something involving Jamaica?) maybe I should reread god's englishman today.

I find the whole 'he banned christmas! mean fun-hater' thing a real misdirection.

The emphasis on different aspects of the Puritan Revolution depends on where you live. Many histories tend to be England-centred so accentuate the effects on English politics and society; increasingly, historians like Morill have rectified that in recent times by examining Scotland and Ireland. In a typical university history course though, you can bet the Christmas factor will always get mentioned.

I am not from other parts of Europe, I am Irish and a history graduate. The context of these massacres in a European setting while appreciated doesn't really influence how I feel about OC I'm afraid.

This is all I am saying in this thread, I'll leave you all to it.

Huh? IIrc, OC presided over the first of four Anglo-Dutch wars, the end result of which was the conquest of Dutch imperial posessions, the re-establishment of William of Orange as Stadtholder (in most provinces) in '72 and his ascension to the thrones of Britain after the Glorious Revolution as one of the heroes of European protestantism, something neither Charles II nor James II could claim and Britain went on under Anne to be fully involved in the War of the Spanish Succession to counter the Bourbon attempt to 'get rid of the Pyrenees' and establish a Catholic Franco-Spanish superpower. As the general who finally determined the legitimacy and dominance of a low church version of protestantism in England, he can hardly be said to have done as much as anybody to keep Britain out of late 17th century European conflicts.

he broke absolute monarchy in the UK

I'd rather honor someone like Fairfax or Pym than a man who started fighting the unfettered power of the executive and finished by claiming it for himself. He was no Cincinnatus.

I still think that is absolutism had been maintained, or at least parliamentary authority curtailed by a loss in the first or second civil wars England would have been much more deeply embroiled in European wars of the late 17th century.

Yes, very great. If anything I'd say it might stand as the definitive take on the subject (in the English language) for this generation at least. The next will find its own.

I think the thread, short as it is on discussions of whether Abraham Lincoln is a complete cunt, offers a clear answer to the question :)

Will I be the first to point these out as Anglo-Irish?

"To hell or to Connacht" said Cromwell (allegedly, well it was certainly the policy) and drove people off their land by act of Parliament resuliting in the Cromwellian Plantation. My family name is a Norman one from the south-east and our family ended up in Mayo, thanks we're pretty sure to this bout of ethnic cleansing. I turned out alright though! In any case plenty of people were shoved on to poor land with farm sizes around 80 acres, causing poverty to be endemic for centuries to come (up until the Land Commision's efforts started to have an effect in the late C19th) Also see the Irish he shipped of to the west-indies where they worked in sugar plantations. And this is nothing but punishment for Irish Royalism (Imagine, Irish Royalism, they should have been thankful considering what came later) and hatred of Irish Catholics in general.

Was it Cromwell that crushed the Diggers and the Levellers movements?
And he didn't refuse the Crown outright, he sat on his arse and thought for a full month if I remember correctly.

But blah blah blah, Abe's better, partly because he was played by Henry Honda and that's what's important!

Royalism deserves to be punished

xpost

http://www.newgenevacenter.org/portrait/cromwell.jpg

http://images.encarta.msn.com/xrefmedia/sharemed/targets/images/pho/t029/T029278A.jsm

C'mon, he allowed Catholic-sympathizing, Scottish-blooded monarchs the vote.

Indulge a moment of grumpiness and let me point out that fanatically religious egalitarians like these do not deserve their iconic status. Can you imagine more dull company?

i must take issue with the charge that abe was ugly. next to every other president - discounting the ones we only have paintings of - in history, he was a dreamboat. espec with the beard.

(aside from woodrow wilson and ronald reagan, have we ever had a conventionally good-looking commander in chief?)

(read: not so much with the conquering (French) land, more with the manipulating everybody to gang up on whoever looks preeminent at the moment.)

Give me the Sultan of Brunei and a fat pay check and I'll learnt to waltz for him.

Netherlands, Spain, Denmark, Sweden and Norway seem to get along fine.

hey ... you makin' some kinda hereditary succession joke?

-- Squirrel_Police (goblinatri...), February 26th, 2000.

Nice time warp we've stepped through.

hey ... you makin' some kinda hereditary succession joke?

No, that was completely unintentional! Have
you not encountered any of
SP's posts before?

http://www.trilogy3.com/images/bios/lloyd.jpg

From what I remember, the Army - and particularly, General Monck - were more significant in forcing the Restoration; and immediately before, in the early months of 1660, many people expected Monck to seize government himself. This is based purely on hazy memories of the first few months of Pepys' Diary, though.

Or Vietnam furing Charlemagne's reign?

Or Thre mile island during the reign of Jimmy Carter the Peace Loving?

OR WHAT?

Fuck, I need to got pack some more.

Discarding the examples of regicide from William Rufus to Edward II to Henry VI and Edward V as having been enginereed by relatives or powerful nobles, Richard II was essentially deposed due to deep unpopularity, but the agents of his loss of power were the nobility which rallied behind Bolingbroke. He was brought before Parliament, however, and made to renounce his throne.

Hereditary rulers are totally illegitimate

Unless they're popular. Given that many societies have organized their 'executive' as essentially a war leader and high judge, the question remains: how does one choose this dux bellorum? Cromwell, like so many dictators after him, was also in many was no different than many early European kings. He felt that the Lord Protector should choose his own successor, regardless of popular sentiment and unrestrained by popular mandate, and it just so happened that his choice was his son. Historically, amongst the germanic peoples that overran Europe at the twighlight of Roman hegemony, their king was chosen, often by the arguably 'democratic' acclamation of the freeborn men of the tribe and usually from a vigorous line who often claimed (yet another version of the 'mandate of heaven' or 'the dvine right of kings') descent from a popular deity. If you look at the pre-Christian claims of descent for most of the royal families of the heptarchy, for example, it would seem that Odin, especially, had spread his seed out widely. only a cynic like Voltaire would point out that "the first king was (merely) a lucky soldier."

Given that the process of finding a king to 'acclaim' from amongst the favored family (a process replayed in practically every Mafia movie of our time) often involved cunning uncles outmanoeuvering their green nephews despite the king having formally chosen them as a successor, the process of primogeniture became increasingly de rigueur as a means of making the succession surer and more straightforward, and the number of royal sons that were crowned during the reign of their fathers is a telling indication of the worry many kings felt about stability.

That stability should be available to a Castro, a Cromwell, a Hitler, a de Rosas should seem self-evident; instead of relying on the accident of biology, they could nominate their successor. However without the validation of tradition, especially in its more superstitious forms such as heridity and divine mandate, the lucky star such dictators tend to enjoy is not passed on and such institutions as they manage to create, are as Montesquieu noted in De l'esprit des lois governed by fear more than honor and tend to require a good bloodletting before everyone is sufficiently scared to submit to the new boss. The Roman Imperial legacy of acclamation of a military victor followed by heriditary succession and punctuated occasionally by coups is a sort of 'third way' between these two and it has existed amongst their successor as well, most notably in the deposition of the Merovingians and the establishment of the Carolingian line in France.

The Japanese were, up to yesterday, mulling over extending access to the Imperial throne to women, so questions of tradition in inheritance amongst different peoples evolve according to the circumstances that they face.

However we choose our highest executives, either by blood, or by submission to conquest by a 'genius', or by election, the long history of human blunders as much as the record of certain people presently in power might lead a reasonable person to conclude that the potential for major fuck-ups is always present.

Napoleon!

?

no shit

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

Still, the latter was cruel to the Irish, but everyone should remember that everyone hated the Irish as they were backwards primitives anyway. Even though he crushed the Scots, it is great to think of a time when they were actually a real military threat.

Cromwell sucks, but most people do. The end result of his actions was for the better. And yes, Tim Roth rocks.

I've noticed some revisionist Irish books recently which discuss Cromwell's campaign in Ireland in terms other than equating it with some Waffen SS sweep through Ukraine. I think they say that the storming of Drogheda (where the defending garrison was massacred) would not have been considered out of order by anyone at the time - the city's wall was breached, the garrison were offered a chance to surrender, they declined to take it. Storming cities in that setup typically saw attacking forces take enormous casualties (see Cromwell's later loss of around a thousand guys in an unsuccessful attempt to storm Clonmel); the accepted rule was that if defenders brought it to this by not surrendering after the walls were breached (if given the chance) then their lives were forfeit.

I don't know what the revisionists say about Wexford, where Cromwell's army massacred the entire population of the town.

One thing that should be said about Cromwell in Ireland is that he insisted that his blokes buy things off the locals rather than just taking them, and unlike the armies in Ireland of the Royalists, Covenanters, and Confederates, his guys did not go round raping and pillaging on a casual basis, so one must thank him for some things. However, there is still this real sense of him as a crazed nutter with a lust for blood... one of his letters back home after the siege of Drogheda recounts how the garrison fled into a church, which was then set alight by Cromwell's troops, "And from within they cried 'I burn, I burn'. Scary man.

Hi, Aleister Crowley.

Hi, Aleister Crowley.

Or someone else...

HONEST ABE, BITCHES

Not true

to be honest, the way you learn about Cromwell in school in Ireland is so obviously demonising of him that I bet his army marched around Ireland handing out sweets to little children and playing with little bunny rabbits.

So the savagery of Cromwell's army in Ireland is deniable. I have read recent scholarship about how his army was less savage towards Irish people than the army of the Irish catholic Confederates (more inclined to buy things from locals, less inclined to rape and pillage).

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/12/all-ladies-like-whiskers.html

Reminder that the Los Angeles federal courthouse has a statue of Abraham Lincoln where he's a shirtless young stud suggestively tugging at his waistband like a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model: pic.twitter.com/32bjqEERYi

— Zack Stentz (@MuseZack) February 20, 2019

Really nice rev by Keith Thomas on an odd book on Cromwell, which has many descriptions of the English land (and sky) scape.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/06/23/the-making-of-oliver-cromwell-hutton-thomas/

Highly ironic to revive this on Juneteenth in order to give a shout out to Cromwell.