Friday 20 May 2011

The Green Queen?

Everyone was surprised when the Queen spoke partly in Irish, but no one ought to have been. Whereas early Nationalist leaders were often highly scornful of the Irish language as a bar to progress, no small contribution to saving it was made by eccentric Anglo-Irish grandees and enthusiastic Protestant clergymen, staunchly Unionist in most cases. Douglas Hyde, the son of a County Sligo rector and born in an Ascendancy "Big House", became the first President of the Republic while remaining an observant Protestant, a dedicated Irish-speaker and educator in that medium, and an adherent to a political position fundamentally Unionist rather than Nationalist (which was probably why Fine Gael, pushed into declaring a republic by a coalition partner, gave him the job).

Sinn Féin may be creating a network of publicly-funded Irish-medium schools in order to banish the Catholic Church from the education, first of the Green side in the Six Counties, and then of almost everyone in the Twenty-Six. But at least as sterling, in its way, is the work for the language being done by the The Reverend Dr Eric Culbertson, country parson in County Tyrone, Honorary Clerical Vicar Choral of Armagh Cathedral (not the Catholic one), Deputy Grand Chaplain of the Orange Order, member of the Council of the Evangelical Protestant Society, and outspoken critic of the Good Friday and Saint Andrews Agreements. He stands in a long, long line.

In fact, the possibility, if still the outside one, of the Republic's third Protestant President may yet do what everything else has failed to do and partition the Church of Ireland. Dr Culbertson and the rest of its largely Conservative Evangelical two thirds that are in Northern Ireland might finally decide that a separate Province of the Anglican Communion was appropriate rather than continued integration with the far more liberal third that is in the Republic, if the most prominent Anglican layman on the island - the President of the Republic, no less - were to be the homosexual activist, David Norris. By all accounts, that Senator's spoken Irish is beautiful.

3 comments:

  1. Most people who know a little about the subject know that O'Connell and so on were hostile to Irish, but hardly anybody knows about the role of people who were Protestant, Unionist or both in saving it. Thank you so much for drawing attention that important aspect of Irish history. Now that we are allowed to pay tribute to the Irishmen who died in the First World War, the whole of our history is at last open to serious investigation within the general public consciousness. What a week this has been.

    ReplyDelete
  2. As you will know, beyond the Pale Ireland was not really a Catholic country until well into the 19th century and there was more resistance to the Reformation from urbanites of Anglo-Norman descent than in the Gaelic countryside, where people were often very receptive to Protestant preaching. The scholarship of Duffy and Scarisbrick, anticipated by Chesterton, has raised awareness of how nearly popular sentiment kept England Catholic. In the same way, popular sentiment nearly turned Ireland Protestant.

    Proper, hardcore Protestant. Even before Ireland's "Second Reformation" in the nineteenth century, Archbishop Ussher's Articles of 1615 were far more Calvinistic and far less rigid about episcopacy than anything in the Church of England, with English Puritan and Scots Presbyterian clergy easily incorporated into the early C of I. Even those who were so radical that they had been driven out of England or Scotland. That continued until the reign of Charles I and everything that went with it. Only today, the Queen visited "the rebel county" of Cork, historically a stronghold both of Republicanism and of popular Protestantism.

    Of course I know that you know all this. You have a hugely important role in popularising it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The history of the wider Anglican Communion even in these Islands, never mind anywhere else, is almost completely ignored by the English. They probably suspect that they would get quite a shock. If they do, then they are right.

    It is a strange feature of the Church of England that neither of its Archbishops is currently an Englishman, nor even, I believe it is correct to say, a native speaker of English, although all Welsh-speakers in Wales rather than in Patagonia might as well be. Both Dr Williams and Dr Sentamu are really figures of the Anglican Communion rather than of the Church of England. And the Anglican Communion was overwhelmingly created by people who did not like the Church of England.

    The Church of Ireland has provided two Presidents of the Irish Republic, including the ardently Irish-speaking first, both in the days when that Republic’s Constitution still laid claim to “the whole island of Ireland”. James Ussher wrote to his Canterbury counterpart as “Brother Primate” and even “Brother Patriarch”; their equality was undoubted on either side. (Ussher’s calculations of the date of creation are by far the least interesting thing about him, and a full biography was quite recently published by Professor Alan Ford of Nottingham, who previously had the questionable pleasure of lecturing me at Durham on the Reformation.)

    The Governing Body of the Church in Wales includes Dafydd Elis-Thomas, “the Meirionnydd Marxist”, but then so does the House of Lords these days; a lot of Welsh Radicalism is staunchly “Chapel” rather than “Church”, but that is certainly not universally the case, as the example of R S Thomas also illustrated.

    The Episcopal Church in the United States is a product of the American Revolution, deriving its name and orders from the Episcopal Church in Scotland, which then had a recent history of armed insurrection against the Hanoverian monarchy, and which remains heavily concentrated in the area where the SNP is also strongest.

    Most of the rest were either hardline Anglo-Catholics or hardline Evangelicals, and had deliberately gone to the ends of the earth, by no means only within the British Empire, in order to escape from the Church of England and start again from scratch, keeping in touch for purposes of spiritual and material support only with parishes whose clergy were, and are, seldom or never made bishops in England.

    And so on, and on, and on.

    It is no wonder that there is such bafflement at the smug English oligarchic suggestion that Anglican identity consists in unity with whoever some Muslim or atheist Prime Minister of the United Kingdom chooses to give a seat in the British Parliament. It is not so much that most Anglicans have, say, moved away from that sort of thinking. It is that they had never, ever heard of it in the first place.

    ReplyDelete