Last week, Paul Johnston, the British ambassador to Ireland, helping launch a five-volume compendium of Oliver Cromwell’s writings and speeches, proved himself a credit to the diplomatic community. Mr Johnston noted that the late lord protector’s actions in Ireland “marked him out as a uniquely despised figure”.
Ronan McGreevy, writing in this newspaper, tells us the ambassador went on to observe that even Winston Churchill felt Cromwell had “become a potent obstacle to the harmony of the English-speaking people”.
Churchill is viewed differently on either side of the Irish Sea. Memories of his support for the Black and Tans – among other imperialist interventions – intrude upon recognition of his wartime resilience. But there remains no figure quite so divisive in these terms as Oliver Cromwell. At the same event, Fintan O’Toole characterised perceptions of the man as “one of the great divisions between the two islands”.
We can’t get away from him. As the Oxford University Press volumes were being launched, the Guardian was reporting on the “Irish amateur historian on [a] lonely mission to save ‘bogeyman’ Cromwell from genocide charges”. Tom Reilly from Drogheda had, apparently, “been mocked, vilified, challenged to a duel and threatened with death” for his efforts. A new book by Sarah Covington, titled The Devil from over the Sea: Remembering and Forgetting Oliver Cromwell in Ireland, ponders attitudes to the man associated with slaughter in Wexford and Mr Reilly’s home town.
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He has always been there. A glance at depictions of Cromwell in British popular culture would, however, give you little sense of why he is so reviled in Ireland. The key text here is Ken Hughes’s Cromwell, a not-much-loved 1970 biopic starring, of all people, proud Limerickman Richard Harris.
An on-set interview with the actor gives surprising insights on the actor’s thinking. “The interesting thing about Cromwell is how little English know of the trauma to the Irish,” he begins in expected form. But Harris then goes on to offer a defence of Dr Covington’s Devil from over the Sea. “It’s been my ambition to play him since 1959,” he says. “I’ve discovered that the legend of Cromwell was built out of royalist propaganda. And now the people are beginning to uncover the truth of the man, the greatness of the man, which is interesting.”
He notes disapprovingly that Prince Charles (as he then still was) had been brought up to believe Charles I was a “marvellous man” and Cromwell was a “hypocritical monster”. Harris is happy to relate that, after studying the period, the future Charles III “reversed that opinion”.
The most successful (if oblique) tranche of British anti-Cromwell popular culture came from a proud member of Liverpool’s Irish community
The debate here is entirely about Cromwell’s role in regicide and the establishment of a republic. The British ambassador noted that his compatriots learn almost no Irish history and that the Irish know “far too much British history”. The problem is not that the British public approve of Cromwell’s actions in Ireland. The problem is they know nothing at all about them.
An extraordinary aside in a 1963 Ladybird book about the man has been generating aghast reactions on social media for some years. “Cromwell was also a good man,” the children’s text argues. “He was deeply religious, and neither greedy nor – except in Ireland – cruel.” One could reasonably read from this that he kicked the odd Irish dog or failed to tip an Irish serving wench. Three words stand in for everything that secures Cromwell his place in the Irish encyclopedia of invading psychotics.
Through countless British films and TV series, the focus has been almost exclusively on Cromwell’s military struggles in England and his role in briefly elbowing aside the monarchy. Never mind the “warts and all”, the sleek Tim Roth and the chiselled Dominic West were on hand to play him in respectively the film To Kill a King and the TV series The Devil’s Whore.
Anthony Keigher’s hilarious musical Oliver Cromwell Is Really Very Sorry employed post-hi-NRG camp to make a vain buffoon of the late puritan
Pushback against unqualified celebration comes more vigorously from the Irish than from atavistic UK royalists. The Irish National Party worked hard to delay the erection of a statue outside the House of Commons, but it eventually arrived in 1899.
The most successful (if oblique) tranche of British anti-Cromwell popular culture came from a proud member of Liverpool’s Irish community. More than a few fans of Elvis Costello’s Oliver’s Army were aware that title referred to Cromwell, but not many made the connection between the occupying army of the 17th century and the troops then on the streets of Belfast.
The honourable member for Huntingdon is still generating creative demolitions in Ireland. A malign variation appears in Cartoon Saloon’s Wolfwalkers. Anthony Keigher’s hilarious musical Oliver Cromwell Is Really Very Sorry, among the best shows at the recent Dublin Fringe Festival, employed post-hi-NRG camp to make a vain buffoon of the late puritan. “His name brings so much anger and venom,” Keigher told DublinLive. “Once I had ‘Cromwell’ in the title it became very easy to sell it to people.”
English readers may require footnotes to Keigher’s interview.
