Global Crisis
Page 90
The Catholic clergy of Ireland proved the most bellicose of all. Although they apparently played little part in planning the 1641 uprising, many priests immediately lent their support. Some urged the rebel troops on in battle: ‘Dear sons of St Patrick, strike hard the enemies of the holy faith,’ said one; while another, during Mass, ‘exhorted them all present to fall to this course of rebellion’, and called for extreme measures, ‘assureing them that though the English did discharge musketts, and that some of them should be kill'd yet they should not feare, for such as soe died should be saints; and they should rush on with a multitude and kill all the Protestants’. In Ulster, ‘the preestes amongst the rebells’ allegedly claimed ‘that it was noe sinn to kill all the Protestants, whoe are damned’ already; in Connacht, the prior of a monastery assured his clerical colleagues that ‘it was as lawfull for them to kill’ Protestants ‘as to kill a sheepe or a dogg’; while in Munster a Dominican friar when asked about the Catholics’ plan for his Protestant neighbours, replied ‘“Why, to kill them,” quoth he, “for they will never be ridd of them in this kingdome till they take that course”’, adding ominously ‘for we have an example in France in the like, for untill the greate massacre there they could never be free of the heretickes’ – a clear reference to the Massacre of St Bartholomew in 1572, which claimed the lives of 12,000 Protestants.33 Equally radical, in 1645 Conor O'Mahony, an Irish Jesuit teaching at the university of Évora, published a tract that congratulated his compatriots on the slaughter of 150,000 of the Protestant newcomers, urged them to make haste to kill the rest, and then replace King Charles with a native Irish monarch.34
The involvement of clerics in European revolts mattered because they constituted such a large proportion of the continent's ‘public intellectuals’: those who helped to shape popular opinion through the spoken and the written word, through the pulpit and sermon as well as the pamphlet and book. In Spain, for example, although clerics made up scarcely 5 per cent of the population, over half of the intellectual elite in the seventeenth century had taken Holy Orders. In addition, a catalogue of all Spanish works published between 1500 and 1699 included 5,385 religious texts, almost all of them written by clerics, compared with 5,450 items in all other categories combined (many of them also written by clerics).35 Elsewhere in Catholic Europe, clerics wrote two-fifths of all books published in the kingdom of Naples in the course of the seventeenth century, while over half the authors of tracts that supported the revolution of 1640 in Portugal, and one-fifth of all known authors of pamphlets published between 1610 and 1643 in France, were clerics.36
Catholic and Protestant clerics alike used the spoken as well as the written word to foment and encourage resistance. The English preacher Stephen Marshall reminded those who heard his sermon entitled Meroz cursed that ‘the Lord allows no neuters’ and rebuked those who ‘are sorry for Germany, when they think on it, and that is but seldom’, but did nothing to uphold the Protestant cause there; and he predicted that those who failed to embrace ‘the cause of God’ in England would be cursed just like Meroz in the Book of Judges, ‘because they came not to the help of the Lord … against the mighty’. In the year before the English Civil War began, Marshall delivered his sermon to some 60 different congregations, including the House of Commons, who had it printed.37 Some seventeenth-century sermons, Catholic as well as Protestant, lasted several hours, during which skilful clerics managed to excite their devout auditors to near hysteria. One Irish Jesuit in the 1640s ‘was interrupted so often by the sobs and cries of the faithful that he had to give up preaching, as his voice could not be heard’; while one of his French colleagues regularly reduced his audiences to tears, and the press of the congregation trying to touch his garments or kiss his hand sometimes knocked him over.38
The clergy of Latin Christendom enjoyed such influence largely thanks to their education and their elite background. Thus in Ireland, by 1641 every Catholic bishop, the provincials of every Order of Regulars, and hundreds of rank-and-file clergy had received a strict seminary education on the European continent. This training created not only a capacity for unified action, but also a level of learning, discipline and demeanour that empowered the clergy of Ireland both to mould and to channel popular behaviour. Although the senior Catholic clergy in France probably did not attain the same level of learning or discipline, of the 90 bishops nominated between 1640 and 1660, over three-quarters came from noble families, and some of them from the most powerful dynasties in the kingdom (Cardinal de Retz was the brother of a duke). Finally, almost half the 79 Portuguese clerics known to have preached in support of the ‘Restoration’ of 1640 came from noble families.39
Although normally of less exalted birth than their Catholic counterparts, almost all Protestant ministers boasted impressive academic credentials. An analysis of some 400 Scottish clerics in the 1640s – all of them involved in the revolt against Charles I – revealed that only one-quarter were the sons of landowners (and only 20 came from noble families), but every one of them held a university degree. Alexander Henderson epitomized Scotland's ‘clerical troublemakers’. He taught at St Andrews University immediately after graduation, and then became pastor of a small neighbouring parish until he came to Edinburgh, where he displayed formidable oratorical and organizational skills in opposing ‘Laud's Liturgy’. In 1638 he drafted the National Covenant and presided over the General Assembly that abolished episcopacy; and later he delivered sermons and published pamphlets to justify armed resistance to Charles I, negotiated directly with the king and masterminded the negotiations to oblige England and Ireland to adopt the Solemn League and Covenant (see chapter 11 above). He had become, in the unkind phrase of one of the deposed bishops, ‘the Scottish Pope’, and such was his fame that Sir Anthony van Dyck, the king's painter, did a full-length portrait of him.40
Two clerical contemporaries of Henderson, both Catholic priests, also led European revolts. In Catalonia, Pau Claris (from a family of Barcelona lawyers) studied law at the university of Lleida before becoming a canon of Urgell Cathedral. He achieved prominence in 1638, the same year as Henderson, when he emerged from the triennial lottery as the senior member of the Standing Committee of the Estates (Diputació: see chapter 9 above). From this position, he orchestrated first defiance and then armed resistance to Philip IV, until in 1641 he declared Catalonia to be an independent republic, with himself as its head. In Ireland, the constitution of the Confederation of Kilkenny in 1642 gave every Irish bishop the right to sit in the General Assembly (17 bishops did so), while the Supreme Council (the executive branch of government) always contained at least five bishops. Three years later, the papacy sent Giovanni Battista Rinuccini as nuncio to provide the Confederation with leadership and guidance. Rinuccini, from a Florentine patrician family, had gained a doctorate in civil and canon law before his appointment as archbishop of Fermo, a town in the Papal States where he resided for 20 years, writing and publishing books as well as administering his diocese, until his departure for Ireland. In 1646 he became president of the Supreme Council and thus chief executive of the Confederation.41
Contentious Clerics Elsewhere
Clerical opposition also threatened the stability of other states in the mid-seventeenth century, most notably the Ottoman empire, where a group of elite families (the mevali: see chapter 7 above) gained the right to pass on their offices and revenues to other family members. This privilege had a limited impact as long as Ottoman expansion continued to create new posts for the graduates of the medreses that trained the state's preachers, teachers and judges; but once expansion ceased, some graduates waited years for a licence either to teach or to preach, since vacancies remained few, and a disaffected clerical proletariat soon developed.
Even clerics lucky enough to get jobs could still make trouble. In the 1630s the charismatic preacher Kadizade Mehmet won widespread support, first in Istanbul and then throughout the Ottoman empire, through his call for a return to the beliefs and practices of Islam in the ti
me of the Prophet Mohammed. Kadizade focused on ‘innovations’ associated with the Sufis, members of devout religious orders, excoriating both the way they practised Islam (such as singing, chanting and dancing while reciting the name of God) as well as their social innovations (such as the Sufis’ consumption of stimulants like tobacco and coffee to maintain their stamina as they sang, chanted and danced). When some Sufi leaders fought back, the Kadizadeli (as they became known) denounced and beat up individual Sufi sheikhs, vandalized their lodges, and threatened to kill their adherents unless they changed their ways.
Paul Rycaut, an English resident in the Ottoman empire during the 1650s, regarded the proliferation of extreme Muslim groups like the Kadizadeli as ‘dangerous, and apt to make a considerable rupture in [the] long continued union [of the Ottoman state] when time changes and revolutions of state shall animate some turbulent spirits to gather soldiers and followers under these doctrines and other specious pretences’.42 Nevertheless Sultan Murad IV attended Kadizade's sermons in person during the 1630s and embraced several elements of his programme (for example, banning the consumption and possession of tobacco or coffee and dismembering or impaling smokers and coffee-drinkers). The Kadizadeli lost ground for a decade after Murad's death in 1640 because his mother, Kösem, used her considerable political authority to protect the Sufis; but after her murder in 1651, the government issued new legislation against smoking and drinking, and approved the destruction of certain Sufi lodges. The Kadizadeli vision enjoyed official support until the deposition of Mehmet IV in 1687, which ended a half-century during which their violent quarrel with the Sufis had not only ‘spread extremist notions and so provoked the people and sown dissension among the community of Mohammed’ but also severely weakened the empire.43
Clerics also played an important role in inspiring resistance in three other states. In Russia, a small group of literate clergymen and monks, protected by a few prominent lay patrons, articulated the cultural system of ‘Old Believers’ in the 1650s and 1660s, creating a movement that challenged the right of the Romanov dynasty to rule (see chapter 6 above). In Ukraine, when Bohdan Khmelnytsky led the Cossacks in revolt against their Polish overlords in 1648, the Orthodox clergy offered enthusiastic support from their pulpits. Khmelnytsky reciprocated by including many ecclesiastical grievances in the Cossacks’ demands to the crown: the admission of Orthodox prelates to the federal Diet, the appointment of Orthodox local officials, the restitution of all former Orthodox churches taken over by the Catholics, and so on (see chapter 7 above). Finally, in India, the charismatic Guru Hargobind, the sixth Sikh Master, radicalized his followers and in the 1630s led them in battle against the forces of the Mughal emperor (see chapter 13 above).
‘Dirty people of no name’
The political upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century empowered many others besides discontented members of the traditional elite. In East Asia, Nurhaci, the ‘Great Ancestor’ of the Qing dynasty, later accorded divine status, began his meteoric career as chief of a minor Manchurian clan that (by his own admission) initially possessed only 13 suits of armour between them. The Ming loyalist leader Coxinga was the illegitimate son of a Japanese samurai's daughter and a Chinese pirate. Li Zicheng, who overthrew the Ming and proclaimed himself the first emperor of the new Shun dynasty, had worked as a minor official at a provincial postal station. In Russia, both Bohdan Khmelnytsky and Stenka Razin, who led the greatest Cossack rebellions of the early modern period, came from poor families; while Patriarch Nikon, who for a time enjoyed powers equal to those of the tsar of Russia, was the son of peasant.
In Europe, too, many rebel leaders came from obscure backgrounds – a fact that profoundly irritated Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. In his penetrating History of the rebellion and civil wars in England and in other writings, Clarendon frequently condemned the king's opponents as ‘men of no name and contemned interest’, ‘inferior people who were notorious for faction and schism’, and even ‘dirty people of no name’. There was some truth in such snobbery. Even John Pym, who led the king's opponents in the House of Commons, remained so obscure in the early months of the Long Parliament that one colleague referred to him (with delicious inappropriateness) as ‘Mr. Pope’; while an official record listed Oliver Cromwell, the later Lord Protector, as ‘Mr. Cornewell’. Another MP protested about ‘the illuminated fancies of this all-knowing age’, in which
Old women without spectacles can discover popish plots; young men and apprentices assume to regulate the rebellion in Ireland; seamen and mariners reform the house of peers; poor men, porters, and labourers spy out a malignant party and discipline them; the country clouted-shoe [clog, meaning ‘bumpkin’] renew the decayed trade of the city; the cobbler patch up religion.44
The Civil War and Interregnum would catapult many more Englishmen from humble backgrounds to prominence. Edward Sexby, once apprenticed to a grocer, in 1647 argued the ‘rights of man’ with assurance and eloquence at the Putney Debates and later drew up The principles, foundation and government of a Republic for the city of Bordeaux; while the most charismatic religious leaders of the period included George Fox, a former shepherd and apprentice shoemaker; John Bunyan, a tinker; and James Nayler, a yeoman. The grandfather of Oliver Cromwell had been a brewer.45 Many leading Italian revolutionaries in 1647 came from obscure urban backgrounds: Giuseppe d'Alesi (Palermo) was a craftsman who had languished in prison until freed by rioters; Giuseppe Piantanida (Milan) was a confectioner; and Masaniello (Naples) was an illiterate fishmonger.
Political upheaval and war also empowered some European women of humble birth. In England, they not only led riots, like their continental sisters (see chapter 17 above), but also took an active role in the political process. In several parishes of southern England in 1642, when asked to express public support for Parliament by signing the Protestation ‘as well women and youth of both sexes gave their full consent, though they put not hereunto their hands because they could not write’.46 In addition, ‘several young Puritan virgins gave expression to their evangelical and millennial zeal through inspired speeches delivered in a trance-like state induced by prolonged fasting and physical weakness’, a condition that has been labelled ‘holy anorexia’. At least one of them secured a hearing from the nation's rulers: in 1648–9, the Army Council granted two audiences to allow Elizabeth Poole (despite expulsion from her church for immorality and heresy) to explain her vision of what was best for the kingdom – and when they refused to heed her prophecies, she published them in pamphlets. Mary Cary, who described herself as ‘minister or servant of the Gospel’, also published several hundred pages of prophecy between 1647 and 1653, setting out God's plan for England and the world, based on twelve years' study of Scripture which started when she was 15. ‘In a different world’, it has been observed, ‘such women might have become ministers’.47
Some Catholic women also achieved prominence during political upheaval. In Spain, in 1640 the beleaguered viceroy of Catalonia turned for advice to a holy woman who ‘enjoyed a reputation for virtue on account of her unusual life, since she was said to have eaten nothing for six days, and gone forty without defecating, which increased the esteem in which she was held and authenticated the warning that she gave the viceroy: that he would die on Corpus Christi’ (as he did). Between 1643 and 1665, Philip IV of Spain wrote letters to Sor María de Ágreda, a nun who claimed prophetic powers, at least twice a month setting out the problems he faced and soliciting her advice as well as her prayers (see chapter 9 above). This made her the most powerful woman in the Spanish Monarchy.48
Whatever their social background, many of those empowered by the chaos of the mid-seventeenth century were surprisingly young. Nathan of Gaza was 22 when he proclaimed Shabbatai to be the Messiah; and Elizabeth Poole was 26 when she shared her visions with the English Army's council of officers. Masaniello was 27 when he became ruler of Naples, as was Johnston of Wariston when he drafted the National Covenant, and Mary Cary when she published her first p
amphlet. The prince of Condé was 28 when he tried to displace Mazarin as chief minister to Louis XIV. When the English Civil War ended in 1648, the Agitators of the New Model Army and most leaders of radical religious groups like the Quakers were still under 30. Dorgon and Wu Sangui were both 32 in 1644 when they made the agreement at the Shanhai Pass that settled the fate of China for almost three centuries. The duke of Guise was one year older when he seized control of Naples. Sir Thomas Fairfax was 33 when he took command of the New Model Army in 1645, and 38 when he resigned it. Coxinga was 35 when he led his great army of Ming loyalists up the Yangzi and almost took Nanjing in 1659. Neither Shabbatai Zvi nor James Nayler had turned 40 when their followers hailed them as the Messiah. Lesser protagonists were also young, although the shortage of sources makes verification more difficult. In Naples, the ‘boys’ who obeyed Masaniello were in their teens or twenties, just like the apprentices at the forefront of most London riots in the 1640s, and the ‘young people’ who took the lead in almost one-tenth of the popular revolts in France. Christopher Hill's comment about Revolutionary England could be applied to the entire northern hemisphere in the 1640s and 1650s: it ‘was a young man's world while it lasted’ – but how long it lasted depended in large measure upon the ability of the ‘people who hope only for a change’ to mobilize others through arguments that justified their resistance.49