Feb 5, 2011 AD
"The Tudors"
and
The Cromwell Dynasty
[SOURCE]:
Showtime
The Tudors
In the Showtime series "The Tudors", King Henry VIII is presented with the teachings of Lutherism for the first time, which preaches that he and he alone is the supreme leader of England, ruling by divine right, answerable to no man, to which he enthusiastically responds, "That's for me!!"
And which helps explains why "vainglorious" King Henry VIII and some of the German princes wanted so much to help establish the Protestant Religion in their dominions.
In previous eras, Europe existed with a de-facto Checks and Balances system.
The people "gave unto Caesar what was Caesar's and gave unto God what was God's."
The Christian King was a Christian Caesar and the Christian Pope was God's representative on Earth.
The Christian Kings of Europe also cemented ties with other Christian Kings of Europe by intermarriage.
All these formalities kept wars in Europe fairly civil and Christian, and kept Kings as moral as one could expect from a monarchial dictatorship.
The Protestant Revolution however, in three stages, tore asunder this carefully laid system of checks and balances.
Stage 1
Destroy the Christian Pope
Thomas Cromwell was a first-stage Protestant leader of the Anglican variety.
The not-so-radical focus of the Church of England style Cromwell was in gently leading Christians away from the authority of the Pope, if he could and if not, then in persecuting any devout Catholics who would not submit to King Henry VIII's decree that all his subjects were to pray to him as the Supreme religious authority in England.
With counsel from Protestant men like Thomas Cromwell, King Henry VIII broke his Kingly intermarriage to his Spanish wife, Catherine, and married essentailly a common English woman, Anne Boleyn, which he knew would break the authority of the Pope in England so long as he could intimidate his subjects into staying loyal to him.
Cronwell led the looting of Catholic properties, such as Catholic Churches, Catholic hospitals that healed the sick, Catholic schools that gave children a sound moral education, Catholic monastaries that fed and clothed the poor, while insuring that much of the loot was given to himself.
The Jews of the day were said to be well pleased.
Stage 2
Destroy the Christian King
Oliver Cromwell was a second-stage Protestant leader of the Puritan variety.
The much-more-radical focus of Puritan Cromwell was in leading Christians away from the authority of the Christian King and then ethnically cleansing Catholics for good.
Under the orders of Oliver Cromwell, the authority of the King would now be broken with the regicide of King Charles II.
Subsequent to killing the King and crowning himself Lord Protector, Cromwell would lead a military expedition into Catholic Ireland to demolish their land holdings and impoverish the people. The population of Ireland was reduced by a third in these persecutions with the best lands given to Protestants, pushing Catholics into regions of poorer soil -- a persecution some have characterized as ethnic cleansing.
The Jews of the day were said to be well pleased.
Stage 3
Allow the Jews to return and to dominate the country
Oliver Cromwell, over the objections of the merchants who would be put out of business, invited Jews to re-enter England for the first time in 350 years. This was further cemeted by the invasion of England in the so-called "Glorious Revolution" led by William and Mary from Holland -- a Protestant couple also under the influence of the Jews of Amsterdam, who now moved their operations to England's London.
England would no longer be self-ruled.
The Jews of the day were said to be very well pleased.
The Wikipedia Version of English History
Thomas Cromwell
Used the power of the government
to destroy the religion
[Thomas Cromwell, advisor to King Henry VIII] was one of the strongest advocates of the English Reformation, and the English Church's break with the papacy in Rome.
Cromwell was the most prominent of those who suggested to Henry VIII that the king make himself head of the English Church, and shepherded the Act of Supremacy of 1534 through Parliament.
In 1535, Henry VIII delegated powers he had gained under the Supremacy Act to Cromwell, appointing him to the newly created office of "Vicegerent in Spirituals." In this role, Cromwell presided over the dissolution of the monasteries, which began with his visitation of the monasteries and abbeys, announced in 1535 and begun in the winter of 1536. His vicegerency evolved into another new position, vicar general, which gave him the power as supreme judge in ecclesiastical cases.
{Cromwell] made use of the printing press, a relatively new technology, to spread propaganda for the [Protestant] Reformation.
Thomas Cromwell acquired considerable wealth by taking over [Roman Catholic] monastery property during the Reformation. [After ironically, having condemned the charitable Cardinal Wolsey of doing the same.]
His final downfall, however, was caused by the haste with which he encouraged the king to marry Anne of Cleves, a princess from the United Duchies of Jülich-Cleves-Berg. This was a marriage that Cromwell hoped would put the English Reformation back on track after the recent setback with the Six Articles. Cromwell was accused of treason, arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London. Following his fall from favour with the King, Cromwell was subjected to an Act of Attainder on 29 June 1540, and all his honours forfeited.
After the execution, Cromwell's head was boiled and set upon a spike on London Bridge, facing away from the City of London.
Interlude
Queen Mary after King Henry VIII
After the accession of Queen Mary I to the English throne in 1553, and Mary’s subsequent decree of Catholicism, Protestants faced a choice: exile, reconciliation/conversion, or punishment
However bloody the end, the trials of Protestant “heretics” were judicial affairs, adhering to a strict legal protocol. During the session which restored the realm to “papal obedience” parliament reinstated the heresy laws. From 20 January 1555 Marian England could legally punish those judged guilty of heresy against the Catholic faith.[6] Thus it became a matter of establishing the guilt or innocence of an accused heretic in open court – a process which the Catholic authorities employed to reclaim “straying sheep” and to set a precedent for “authentic Catholic teaching.”
If found guilty, the accused were first excommunicated, then handed over to the secular authorities for execution.
As head of state, she had some 284 Protestants executed.
[Displaying Protestant irony in their support for the burning of heritics,] before Mary's ascent to the throne, John Foxe, one of the few clerics of his day who was against the burning of even obstinate heretics, had approached John Rogers to intervene on behalf of Joan Butcher, an Anabaptist who was sentenced with burning. Rogers, a Protestant preacher and royal chaplain, refused to help, as he supported the burning of heretics. Rogers claimed that the method of execution was “sufficiently mild” for a crime as grave as heresy.
Later, after Mary I came to power and converted England to Catholicism, John Rogers spoke quite vehemently against the new order and was [the first one] burned as a heretic.
Oliver Cromwell
Lord Protector -- of the Protestants
Used the power of the religion,
to destroy the government
[Oliver Cromwell's] father was a younger son of a family founded by Thomas Cromwell (c. 1485-1540), a minister of Henry VIII, which had acquired considerable wealth by taking over [Roman Catholic] monastery property during the [Protestant] Reformation.
Cromwell's hostility to the Irish was religious as well as political. He was passionately opposed to the Roman Catholic Church, which he saw as denying the primacy of the Bible in favour of papal and clerical authority, and which he blamed for suspected tyranny and persecution of Protestants in Europe. Cromwell's association of Catholicism with persecution was deepened with the Irish Rebellion of 1641. This rebellion, although intended to be bloodless, was marked by massacres of English and Scottish Protestant settlers by Irish and Old English, and Highland Scot Catholics in Ireland. These settlers had settled on land seized from former, native Catholic owners to make way for the non-native Protestants. These factors contributed to the brutality of the Cromwell military campaign in Ireland.
At the Siege of Drogheda in September 1649, Cromwell's troops massacred nearly 3,500 people after the town's capture—comprising around 2,700 Royalist soldiers and all the men in the town carrying arms, including some civilians, prisoners, and Roman Catholic priests.
At the Siege of Wexford in October, another massacre took place under confused circumstances. While Cromwell was apparently trying to negotiate surrender terms, some of his soldiers broke into the town, massacred 2,000 Irish troops and up to 1,500 civilians, and burned much of the town. No disciplinary actions were taken against his forces subsequent to this second massacre.
In the wake of the Commonwealth's conquest, the public practice of Catholicism was banned and Catholic priests were murdered when captured.
Cromwell's sweeping campaign in Ireland began in August 1649. He left in May 1650, but the campaign continued until 1653. Its effects devastated Ireland's Catholic population, roughly one-third of whom were killed or exiled by the war. Famine and plague were the biggest killers, produced in large part from the scorched earth tactics used by Parliamentary forces. Some Irish prisoners of war were sold as indentured labourers in the West Indies. The Catholic landowning class was dispossessed en masse. Thousands of New Model Army soldiers and the Parliament's creditors were settled on confiscated Irish lands. Those Catholic landowners deemed innocent of rebellion against the Parliament but who had not shown "constant good affection" still had their land confiscated and were forced to re-locate to Connacht, where the soil was poorer.
In September 1649, he justified his sack of Drogheda as revenge for the massacres of Protestant settlers in Ulster in 1641, calling the massacre "the righteous judgement of God on these barbarous wretches, who have imbued their hands with so much innocent blood." However, Drogheda had never been held by the rebels in 1641—many of its garrison were in fact English royalists. On the other hand, the worst atrocities committed in Ireland, such as mass evictions, killings and deportation of over 50,000 men, women and children as slaves to Bermuda and Barbados, were carried out under the command of other generals after Cromwell had left for England.
Although Cromwell's time spent on campaign in Ireland was limited, and although he did not take on executive powers until 1653, he is often the central focus of wider debates about whether, as historians such as Mark Levene and John Morrill suggest, the Commonwealth conducted a deliberate programme of ethnic cleansing in Ireland.
Cromwell is still a figure of hatred in Ireland, his name being associated with massacre, religious persecution, and mass dispossession of the Catholic community there.
Cromwell was sworn in as Lord Protector [for life] on 16 December 1653, with a ceremony in which he wore plain black clothing, rather than any monarchical regalia. However, from this point on Cromwell signed his name 'Oliver P', standing for Oliver Protector—in a similar style to that used by English monarchs—and it soon became the norm for others to address him as "Your highness".
[And the Puritans, after tens of thousands of innocent deaths on their hands, had the audacity to proudly state that the 284 Protestants Queen Mary offered to forgive, but burned when they decided to become martyrs, entitled her to be called Bloody Mary!]
Oliver Cromwell
Lord Protector -- of the Jews
Used the power and might of Jewish deceptions,
to help divide and conquer both Protestant and Catholic
In 1290, King Edward I of England issued an edict expelling all Jews from England. Three hundred and fifty years later, the situation was reconsidered.
As Lord Protector (of the Protestants), Cromwell was aware of the contribution the Jewish community made to the economic success of Holland, now England's leading commercial rival. It was this—allied to Cromwell's tolerance of the right to private worship of those who fell outside evangelical Puritanism—that led to his encouraging Jews to return to England in 1657, over 350 years after their banishment by Edward I, in the hope that they would help speed up the recovery of the country after the disruption of the Civil Wars
Public opinion in England had been prepared by the Puritan movement for a sympathetic treatment of any proposal by the Judaizing sects among the extremists of the Parliamentary party for the readmission of the Jews into England.
Rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel, who in 1650 published his Hope of Israel, in which he advocated the return as a preliminary to the appearance of the Messiah. The Messiah could not appear till Jews existed in all the lands of the earth. According to Antonio de Montesinos, the Ten Tribes had been discovered in the North-American Indians, and England was the only country from which Jews were excluded. If England admitted them, the Messianic age might be expected.
Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel met Oliver Cromwell in 1655 in order to discuss the admission of Jews into England.
Early in the following year, the question came to a practical issue through the declaration of war against Spain, which resulted in the arrest of Antonio Rodrigues Robles, and forced the Maranos of London to avow their Judaism as a means of avoiding arrest as Spaniards and the confiscation of their goods. As a final result, Cromwell appears to have given informal permission to the Jews to reside and trade in England on condition that they did not obtrude their worship on public notice and that they refrained from making proselytes.
[The Maranos (secret Jews) of Spain first arrived in England after the 1492 AD expulsion decree of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Just in time to witness the only daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, devout and chaste, be disgraced by a divorce from the King of England and just in time to witness the start of the Protestant Reformation, after only 1,500 years of quiet Catholic devotion in Europe. To an expert in these matters, this was all just a mere coincidence; but to the ignorant casual observer one has to wonder.]
Outwardly they passed as Spaniards and Catholics; but they held prayer-meetings at Cree Church Lane, and became known to the government as Jews by faith. Toward the middle of the 17th century a considerable number of Marrano merchants settled in London and formed there a secret congregation. They formed an important link in the network of trade spread especially throughout the Spanish and Portuguese world by the Marranos or secret Jews.
This method of finding a solution to the Jewish question in England had the advantage of not raising anti-Semitic feeling too strongly; and it likewise enabled Charles II, on his return, to avoid taking any action on the petition of the merchants of London asking him to revoke Cromwell's concession. He had been assisted by several Jews of royalist sympathies, such as Mendes da Costa and Augustine Coronel-Chacon, during his exile.
[Charles II was bought and sold as well.]
After the Royalists returned to power, they had his corpse dug up, hung in chains, and beheaded.
[Seems that neither Cromwell men were beloved by the people]
William and Mary
"The Glorious Revolution"
Glorious because the Jews
were never so welcomed
[William of Orange's] tenure of the throne, however, brought about a closer connection between the London and the Amsterdam communities, and thus aided in the transfer of the centre of European finance from the Dutch to the English capital. Early in the eighteenth century the Jewish community of London comprised representatives of the chief Jewish financiers of northern Europe, including the Mendez da Costas, Abudientes, Salvadors, Lopezes, Fonsecas, and Seixas.
-- Wikipedia -- "Thomas Cromwell", "Oliver Cromwell", "Resettlement of Jews in England", "Interregnum", "Marian Persecutions", and "History of the Marranos in England"
Article located at:
http://www.thechristiansolution.com/doc2011/395_TheTudors.html
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