Has history got it wrong about Oliver Cromwell’s persecution of Catholics? | History books | The Guardian

22 comments
  1. > The findings suggest he wanted Jews to be allowed to practise openly in England and Irish Catholics to have the right to worship freely, as long as it was in private.

    Stopped reading after this sentence – being restricted to worshipping in private is not religious freedom.

  2. I’m not going to read this but the Adventurers Act which confiscated catholic lands in Ireland was payment in advance for a Commonwealth army that went unto fight in the English civil war. The invasion of Ireland was as much soldiers redeeming payment contracts as it was securing against Royalist insurgencies.

    After the Restoration confiscated estates were returned to many in England but none in Ireland, Oliver’s army in Ireland were strategically too important to displease.

    Ironically a lot of Commonwealth soldiers who’d be paid with irish land actually sold up their stakes within years to other Adventurers, thus creating consolidated estates from which we’d get the vast walled enclosures of the ascendency.

    Edit to add I can see why many people in England look to Cromwell as a republican hero, so I won’t be surprised if the whole English civil war era enjoys a historical revival once Charles III takes over.

  3. > Betteridge’s law of headlines is an adage that states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”

  4. It doesn’t matter what people said Cromwell wanted to do, it matters what he did. And he and the following British governments destroyed so much of Ireland. English people just can’t let go of the hero worship of him. He got rid of the king and made himself king in all but name, he appoints his son as successor but after his son fucked up, the British brought back in a king but did they relax the penal laws?

    I like to think I feel no hatred towards him but every time he gets brought up I get really annoyed, I want to be able to get to place where he is just a historical figure, who we learn about and not forget what he did.

  5. “Cromwell was also a good man. He was deeply religious, and neither greedy nor – except in Ireland – cruel. He was a good father to his children and the friend of all honest men.”

  6. This is very much sillyness. It doesn’t really matter what happened inside Cromwell’s brain. By most account he was a sycophant with very little actual ethical quality. And that’s being polite.

    I guess The Guardian just has articles like this for reasons of generating traffic.

  7. The fact that “to hell or to Connacht!” Is a quote, is realistically all that’s needed to dispel this failure of an article.

  8. Ah sure Cromwell was a grand lad after all. He was just over here having the craic.

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    It’s hilarious that the Guardian carried this. The very same newspaper that goes out of it’s way to decry the colonialist mindset of a past Britain.

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    I guess it’s ok if you’re Irish though.

  9. No matter is motivations he was still a prick. Actions speak far louder than words, and his actions painted Ireland in blood

  10. more revisionist horseshit. Next the tans will be saying Irish people painted blight on their spuds despite their best efforts to prevent it.

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