Gabi on Oliver Cromwell

Oliver Cromwell (Gabi Jauregui)

                                          (National Portrait Gallery, London)

Oliver Cromwell was born on April 25th, 1599 in the village of Huntingdon, Huntingdonshire, England (Morrill et al.). Cromwell was heavily relied upon by his family, especially after the unanticipated death of his father while he was eighteen (Morrill et al.). Due to this tragedy, Cromwell decided to take initiative regarding his familial affairs and tended to his mourning mother and sisters, sacrificing his education and career pursuits until later in his life (Morrill et al.). Cromwell was forced to cultivate a farm in St. Ives, Cambridgeshire, England to earn a living wage, however, he eventually was able to improve his standing and gain notoriety by the English Parliaments (Morrill et al.).

Cromwell was extremely outspoken against the rule of England’s King Charles I, partially because of his “treason” due to having eloped with the catholic Henrietta Maria of France (Morrill et al.). Following the Short Parliament, Cromwell’s victory leading to his key position in the Long Parliament in 1640 is the first action taken in regards to his plot to overthrow King Charles I (Morrill et al.). Subsequent to this, Cromwell also commences his active participation in the English military, where he leads troops throughout three separate civil wars against King Charles I, spanning between 1642- 1651 (Morrill et al.). Shortly thereafter, the Long Parliament was scrutinized by Cromwell, causing what was known as the “Pride’s Purge” in 1648 (Morrill et al.). This purge eradicated any members of the Parliament who were deemed unfit. The rest of the Long Parliament was known thereafter as the “Rump Parliament” (Morrill et al.)

As Cromwell continued to ascend through England’s former legislative system, he was eventually granted the opportunity to travel with his troops to Scotland and Ireland, where he would essentially conquer both countries and become the “Lord Protector” of all three nations (Morrill et al.). Cromwell allegedly committed numerous atrocities while pillaging present-day Britain, some so severe (such as the tragedies caused in Drogheda and Wexford), that he was infamously considered to be “one of the most hated in Irish history” (Plant).

Seventeenth Century author and poet John Milton, however, was an acquaintance of Cromwell and highly regarded him and his actions. Milton once composed a sonnet to Cromwell, referring to him as “our chief of men” (Milton ln. 1).  Yet, although Cromwell piqued the interest of many for a variety of reasons for decades, he eventually grew ill from malarial fever and died on September 3rd, 1658 (Plant). Approximately two and a half years following his death, Cromwell’s remains, along with the remains of two others, were exhumed by vindictive members of the former Long Parliament and publicly hanged and decapitated (Plant). Following this decapitation, Cromwell’s head was pierced through a stake and left to rot above the Westminster Hall for almost thirty years, when it eventually fell (Plant). Subsequent to this, Cromwell’s head was stolen, put on display, and eventually found again and returned to his former alma mater, the college of Sidney, Sussex, Cambridge, where it’s exact location remains a mystery (Plant).

Sources:

Milton, John. “Sonnets: 16.” Samson Agonistes: Introduction, www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/sonnets/sonnet_16/text.shtml.

Morrill, John S., and Maurice Ashley. “Oliver Cromwell.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 14 Sept. 2018, www.britannica.com/biography/Oliver-Cromwell#ref22095.

Plant, David. “Oliver Cromwell, 1599-1658.” The Navigation Act, 1651, 2001, bcw-project.org/biography/oliver-cromwell.

The World Encyclopedia. Oxford University Press, 2004.

Image Source:

https://olivercromwell.net/cromwells-head/

Sarah on the Long Parliament

The Long Parliament (Sarah Rusher)

Parliamentary propaganda, 1643

The Long Parliament was reluctantly assembled in November of 1640 by an utterly bankrupt King Charles I just weeks after the defeat of the English in the Bishops’ Wars against Scotland. King Charles I only intended for the parliament to pass financial bills that would grant him additional funds. The Long Parliament, however, did much more than that. From the outset, the king faced a body profoundly mistrustful of his intentions. The early sessions of the Long Parliament were dominated by attempts to limit the King’s autocracy. John Pym lead the opposition initially, focusing criticism upon the King’s advisors rather than the King himself. This proved to be effective. Within weeks of the Long Parliament first assembling, Archbishop Laud and the Earl of Strafford were both denounced as evil councilors, impeached, and subsequently executed. In 1641, the Long Parliament carried out a series of reforms that abolished the courts of Star Chamber, High Commission, and all other institutions and financial measures of dubious legality that had allowed King Charles to circumvent the common law and rule without calling a Parliament during his eleven-year Personal Rule (1629-1640). These were important steps towards the establishment of the constitutional monarchy and the parliamentary democracy of modern Britain. The Long Parliament received its name from the fact that, by an Act of Parliament passed in May of 1641, it could not be dissolved without its own consent, and those members did not agree to its dissolution until March of 1660—twenty years after it was first assembled. The Long Parliament sat through the First Civil War and it was both expelled and restored twice.

In October of 1641, the Irish Uprising called the issue of whether the armed forces should be controlled by the King or by Parliament to attention. John Pym and his supporters drafted the Grand Remonstrance, which listed over one-hundred and fifty perceived misdeeds of Charles’ reign, in an attempt to undermine confidence in the King and his remaining advisors. Tensions between Parliament and the King grew until January 1642, when the King made a failed attempt to arrest five members of the House of Commons whom he regarded as his primary opponents in Parliament. By March of 1642, the Long Parliament decreed that its own ordinances were valid and legally binding without any assent from the King and they passed the Militia Ordinance, which placed the command of each county’s armed forces in the hands of their supporters. The result was the outbreak of the First Civil War (1642-6), through which the Long Parliament sat. Divisions grew over this time period between the Presbyterians, who wanted a swift end to the war and were willing to negotiate with Charles I, and the Independents, who wanted a vigorous prosecution of the war so that they would be able to force their terms on a defeated King. These divisions had already been present in the Long Parliament and were a holdover from disagreements about how the Church should be organized.

Works Cited

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Long Parliament.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 25 July 2014, www.britannica.com/topic/Long-Parliament

Plant, David. “The Long Parliament.” BCWProject, bcw-project.org/church-and-state/first-civil-war/long-parliament.

“The Long Parliament.” UK Parliament, www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/evolutionofparliament/parliamentaryauthority/civilwar/overview/longparliament/.

Grace on William Laud

William Laud (Grace Kujak)

Image Source

William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, was born on October 7, 1573. Besides being the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1633-1645, one of the most important spiritual leaders in England, he was also an adviser to Charles the 1^st. He went to St. John’s College at the University of Oxford, and was both a pastor and academic. He eventually held multiple official influential roles in the church and the government as well, and was very vocal in politics – he was one of the major influences that helped caused the English Civil War. Charles the 1^st immediately liked him, when he came into power, because Laud encouraged his belief in the “divine right of kings.”

Laud hated Puritans with a passion – he personally felt that the church should keep to strict ceremony and tradition, and reinforced this belief brutally. He put stringent rules in place in the Church of England about what to wear, how to set up the church, and when to bow. When Puritan publishers printed a pamphlet against him, he had their ears cut off and then branded their foreheads in punishment. He didn’t believe that church and state should be separated, at all, and had no qualms about trying to influence the king so he could keep persecuting Puritans. The public, however, was behind the Puritans, especially given Laud’s tactics.

Laud’s big mistake was, in the end, trying to control the Scottish church as well as the English one – the Scots were not having that, and they utterly refused to listen to him, escalating tensions with England. Finally, in 1640, Parliament (which had been disbanded) met to change regulations for Laud’s church, in which they said that all his rules for church were more for ceremony’s sake than actually necessary to be “saved.” Later that year, he was accused of high treason and popery (which means, of course, acting like a pope) and locked in the Tower of London – he stayed there for four years until his trial finally began, and he was beheaded in 1645.

Sources:

Pennington, D.H. “William Laud.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 4 Jan. 2018, www.britannica.com/biography/William-Laud.

Sparkes, Abigail. “The Life and Death of William Laud.” Historic UK, Historic UK Ltd., www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/The-Life-and-Death-Of-Wiliam-Laud/.

Scott on Sir Francis Bacon

Sir Francis Bacon (Scott Klaiss)

Sir Francis Bacon was born January 22^nd, 1561 in London, England, to Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and Lady Anne Cooke. Being born of a prominent family, he studied at Trinity College in Cambridge before studying Law at Gray's Inn. After receiving his law degree, Bacon was elected to Parliament in 1584, where he would serve as a representative for various constituencies for the next 37 years. Sir Francis Bacon initially struggled as a statesman under the rule of Queen Elizabeth, due to his opposition to granting Parliamentary funds to the Queen, but gained favor under the rule of James I after her death. After being knighted by King James I in 1603, Sir Francis Bacon would rise through a series of prominent advisory positions, such as Attorney General and Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, until being appointed Lord Chancellor in 1618. During his time as Lord Chancellor, Sir Francis Bacon would be convicted of accepting bribery, resulting in him forfeiting all his offices and his position in Parliament. Retaining his personal property and titles, Sir Francis Bacon would spend the last remaining five years of his life dedicated to his scientific and philosophical works (Britannica).  

            Throughout his education and political life, Sir Francis Bacon sought to reform learning and further the discovery of scientific knowledge. He called into question, even during his time at Trinity College, the prominent methods of scientific inquiry during his time. He challenged not only the much revered classic philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, but also the humanists and other Renaissance scholars. During Bacon's time, many intellectuals still relied on Aristotle's deductive logic for scientific inquiry; this approach works from a general claim towards a specific conclusion, or in other words, that if a proposed premise is true than following true inferences can also be made. A simple example of this might be: Ben is a man, and all men are mortal; therefore, Ben is mortal. Bacon felt that this form of reasoning, especially when applied to natural phenomena, failed to acknowledge specific details of an occurrence, and was therefore faulty in its approach. Bacon argued against this method, in his Novum Organum, for a scientific method that relied on making a series of concrete observations, recording and categorizing them, and making generalizations based on these observations about a natural phenomenon. Bacon claimed this form of inductive reasoning was an essential tool for a correct interpretation of nature. This form of inductive reasoning challenged the more philosophical and metaphysical approaches made by intellectuals in Bacon's time (Klein).

            To further address human fallacies in logic and reasoning, Bacon stated that the human mind was not inherently objective in its acquisition of knowledge, and had to be trained to avoid its innate fallacies. Bacon devised the metaphorical concept of "idols" to address this. In Baconian fashion, he classified these idols into four different classes: The Idols of the Tribe, Idols of the Cave, Idols of the Market, and Idols of the Theatre. Idols of the Tribe refer to natural weaknesses and tendencies common to the human condition. Idols of the Cave are more individual fallacies that arise from cultural influences, such as personal bias or allegiance to a particular belief. Idols of the Market are shortcomings derived from language itself, such as names for things that don't exist or misleading names for things that do. Idols of the Theatre address weaknesses in popular philosophies. In short, these idols represent an effort to acknowledge the physiological causes of human error that may impede scientific pursuit of fact and knowledge (Simpson).

            Beyond Sir Francis Bacon's political career, we see a flawed yet practical visionary who was representative of his time. We observe a man who sought to question the world around him in a deeper and more concrete way and devise methods to uproot classical thought that had been upheld as superior for roughly two thousand years.

Image Taken From:

Blakemore, Erin. "Six Degrees of Francis Bacon is Your New Favorite Trivia Game." Smithonian.com, 16 Oct. 2015, www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/move-over-kevin-six-degrees-francis-bacon-here-180956977/. Accessed 17 Sept. 2018.

Sources:

Klein, Jürgen "Francis Bacon," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) www.plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/francis-bacon. Accessed 17 Sept. 2018.

Simpson, David. "Francis Bacon." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, www.iep.utm.edu/bacon/#SH2i. Accessed 17 Sept. 2018.

The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. " Francis Bacon." Encyclopedia Britannica, inc., April 02, 2018, www.britannica.com/biography/Francis-Bacon-Viscount-Saint-Alban. Accessed 17 Sept. 2018.