A FEW years ago, I stood in a court in London, charged under the Organisation of Serious Crime Act. Me? With a master’s in peace studies? You’ve got to be joking, I thought of saying to the magistrate. But thought it better not to.
What I’d done was stand in Parliament Fields, across the road from the Houses of Parliament, holding a sign listing the number of Iraqi people who had died in Falluja after their homes had been bombed by British and American forces. But you can’t do that sort of thing nowadays. You’re not allowed. During Tony Blair’s watch, something like 800 bylaws were introduced which resulted in many’s the ordinary punter being brought to court.
As it happened, the kindly magistrate spoke the magic words: “You are free to go.” And so I did. It had all been a terrible mistake. Dates had been mixed up, years confused, clerical errors made.
“But were you ever in Parliament Fields?” asked the Crown Prosecution lawyer afterwards and for a moment, I felt sorry for him. He was, after all, only doing his job.
“Yes, many times,” I told him. “I used to take my children to see the statue of Cromwell.”
This Thursday, September 3rd, in case you didn’t know, is Cromwell Day when a group of people will gather at his statue outside the Houses of Parliament to commemorate the man who once struck terror among the crowned heads of Europe.
Cromwell and I go back. Living in a small village in England not far from Oxford, once – and undoubtedly still, a royalist stronghold, my socialist husband and I fell in with a bad crowd from the Roundheads Association where talk was all about democracy, the Putney debates and Col Rainsborough’s famous speech about the common man: “. . . for really I think that the poorest he that be in England hath a life to live as the greatest he”. No mention of women, of course.
Soon we were dressing up as 17th-century parliamentarians, taking our children on skirmishes which eventually upgraded to full-grown, authentically re-enacted English civil war battles. Action, plunder, cannonfire, having the Lord Protector himself to dinner – how more exciting can a family weekend get? And for the grown-ups, politics was never far away for, in those dark Thatcher years, battlelines were clearly drawn: Labour party members in the Roundheads, Tories in the king’s army.
Why, my neighbour’s son, a scion of the John Buchan family, rode into battle on his own horse, though to give him his due I think he probably voted liberal.
The royalists, as might be expected, were not averse to a few dirty tricks, which is how my daughter, 10 at the time, was hit on the arm by a deadly tennis ball fired from a cannon on the other side. She had the bruise to show for it and got a mention in despatches, so that was alright.
The real heroes, of course, were the Levellers – those soldiers who took Cromwell to task for not being democratic enough and criticised him for being prepared to talk to the king instead of getting on with the business of beheading him. So radical were the Levellers that they held their own army officers should be elected, for heaven’s sake. A group of them refused to go to Ireland – not because they were on the side of the Irish but because Cromwell hadn’t paid them for three months.
For their outspokenness, three of them were lined up and shot in the churchyard at Burford, a cutesy village a few miles from Oxford.
Now, every May, another group of people meets at Burford to celebrate the Levellers with the guest speaker that old campaigning warrior, Tony Benn.
CROMWELL DIED in 1658 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. But so hated was he by the royalists that when their time came again, they had his body dug up and desecrated. Quite right too, many will say. For was he not guilty of the vicious murder of 2,000 people in Drogheda?
Historians are divided, not on the facts but on the reasons for what he did at Drogheda. By acting in this terrible way, some say, he aimed to bring the war in Ireland to a swift conclusion. He was not after the Irish, others say, but had his sights set on the royalists who, together with their supporters, controlled some 80 per cent of Ireland at that time. Put crudely, the Irish got caught in the crossfire.
And there are the usual conundrums associated with civil war. “How can you be on the side of Cromwell,” I was often asked. But how could a self-respecting republican align themselves with the royalists and their appalling track record of inequality, oppression and abuse of power? Plus, it was the Roundheads who introduced the idea of democracy to the English parliament, which is why Cromwell’s statue stands outside it to this day.
Here in Ireland, history doesn’t allow us to acknowledge Cromwell’s republican ideals or his unwavering devotion to his God. Why? Because of Drogheda, a place many English people will never have heard of. “ The trouble,” GK Chesterton said, “is that the English never remember and the Irish never forget.”