Op/Ed: Might A Love Of Horse Racing Have Changed History?

[Wandering Eyes]

You have to hand it to Oliver Cromwell. He has been Ireland’s most hated Englishman since 1649. That is a staggering 19,240 weeks at number one. Bryan Adams, with Everything I Do, spent 16 weeks at number one, although it felt considerably longer. Tiger Woods managed 683 weeks and Roger Federer a paltry 302.

The only time Cromwell might have been in danger of losing the number one spot was in 1981 at the time of the hunger strikes during ‘The Troubles’, (our euphemism for a dirty savage sectarian conflict that killed more than 3,500 people over 30 years) and Maggie Thatcher was in power.

This year’s burning of Notre Dame was a reminder. If you are at the sales in Newmarket and bored, go to visit Ely Cathedral. It is a wonder. Having its origins in the seventh century, it is 20 minutes from Newmarket and is home to some of the finest stained-glass windows in England.

The tour of the Cathedral Tower is not for the wearers of extra large. The stairways and doorways are tiny. For any of you with doubts about suitability, watch a You Tube clip of In Bruges as depressed hitman Colin Farrell explains to a trio of large Americans as to why their going up the tower there would be unwise.

Oliver Cromwell was born in Huntingdon, which has a racecourse, but moved in 1636 to Ely, which does not. He inherited a nice house beside Ely Cathedral. His home is at the gates of the Cathedral and is open to the public. Had he ever climbed the Cathedral Tower, which one must presume that he did, he would have been able to see Newmarket Heath.

The head of the history department when I was in Trinity College Dublin was a genial Englishman called Lyons. His life’s mission was to prove that Benjamin Franklin, who visited Ireland in 1771 and sat in the Irish Parliament building (now the Bank of Ireland) to witness a debate, had crossed College Green and entered Trinity College through the front gates. Now, you know he must have done so, but to my knowledge Mr. Lyons never found the written evidence necessary. Such is the frustration of being bound by the burden of proof.

Back to Mr. Cromwell in his eyrie. It obviously never occurred to him that an enjoyable day out would be to ride over to Newmarket and indulge in a little light carousing whilst trying to win a few florins seeing who could get their horse to the top of Warren Hill the quickest. As he had nine children, it must be assumed that he was busy at night.

These were God-fearing times. Odd expression, given the savagery of the era. Charles I believed in the Divine Right of Kings. Cromwell didn’t.

Cromwell was the local MP in Ely and also a self-righteous Protestant. He had a road to Damascus moment at the age of 27 which resulted in his dual role of Justice of the Peace and Puritan in rounding up the local drunks late at night and forcing them to sing hymns. This is not what has made him so hated in Ireland, although it certainly wouldn’t have enamoured him much to the locals here, more for the playlist than the singing.

No. What Cromwell did was to come to Ireland in 1649 with his fearsome, battle-hardened New Model Army which had won the English Civil War and sack primarily Drogheda and Wexford, massacring a goodly number of the local residents in the process. Subsequently he reinforced the apartheid-like Penal Laws that were designed to keep Catholic Ireland in servitude.

Cromwell was a brilliant soldier. Once he decided the Irish Catholic Confederation and its Royalist allies needed dealing with, the result was never in doubt. As with most men of religious conviction, he also knew he had God onside.

Had Cromwell ordered the massacre in Wexford–and he almost certainly did not–it would have been and still is a common military tactic. Throughout the history of warfare, you laid down a marker, thus letting others down the line know what was in store if they resisted. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were of no military significance, but certainly in the Western world no one questions the American strategic decision to kill 250,000 civilians to end the Second World War.

The heavily fortified town of Fethard gave up without a fight after witnessing what had happened in Drogheda and Wexford. Not much surrendering goes on down there these days.

There is some debate as to what happened in both Drogheda and Wexford. Drogheda was under the control of an alliance of Irish Catholics and English Royalists. Catholic Royalists versus Protestant Republicans, think on that. They were given the option of surrendering but chose to fight, lost and got massacred. Standard stuff, although there is plenty of written evidence that Cromwell had not wanted for it to happen. In Wexford it is most likely that soldiers of the New Model Army (not chosen for their impeccable table manners) high on bloodlust got loose and ran amok. They would have been anti-Irish anyway. Most of them hadn’t wanted to come to Ireland after years of fighting in England and only came for the spoils. As these things go, the English Civil War had been a rather civilised affair with few atrocities. One that did occur was the massacre of 100 women camp followers after the decisive battle of the war at Naseby in 1645. The Parliamentarians had thought the women were speaking Irish. In fact, they were probably Welsh. The vagaries of war.

There were rumours (certainly true) of the killing of Protestant fishermen off the Cornish coast by pirates operating from Wexford. In our technological age we have Holocaust deniers, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, A Flat Earth society with its own website, Creationists, Scientologists and any other religion you care to mention. You can imagine what an ignorant peasant soldier might have been persuaded to believe in the mid-17th century.

The piracy theory is likely to have been an easy sell. In 1631, Barbary Pirates from Algiers had kidnapped the entire English Protestant settlement of Baltimore in West Cork having been led there by a Catholic from Waterford. (Read The Stolen Village by Des Ekin). The 200-plus unfortunates ended up in the slave markets of Algiers. At most, three returned home. Funnily enough, Charles I was extremely upset that Algerian Pirates under Dutch command would dare attack his kingdom in such manner.

Like all close neighbours the relationship between Ireland and England has always been a tad troublesome. Even in that most ecumenical of worlds, the horse fair, the physical evidence is there. Any visitor to Tattersalls for the October Book 1 sale will see an unconscious (or is it?) separation. The titled English farms of New England, Watership Down and Highclere are camped in the valley that is the Highflyer Yard. The Irish farmers of Camas Park, Glenvale, Tally-Ho and Yeomanstown occupy the high ground. A situation Cromwell would never have allowed. Sensibly, Tattersalls has put the neutral Swede of Lanwades in between.

Seven months before his arrival in Ireland, Cromwell had caused King Charles I to have his head chopped off, thus delaying the start of horse racing by about a decade. We attribute the patronage of Charles II as being the beginning of the sport as we know it. Between 1649 and 1660, Charles had been forced to live in exile, in Holland and impecunious circumstances, thus preventing him from having a racing stable.

Both his father and grandfather had Royal stables in Newmarket, but it was Charles II’s arrival in the town in 1666 and his subsequent frequent visits that made it the home of horse racing.

Although Charles is remembered most for wine, women and song, he was also a 17th century monarch. As such, he took exception to his father being executed. Read The King’s Revenge. After the Restoration in 1660, Charles ordered the hunting down of the surviving 37 of the original 59 signatories to his father’s death warrant and murdered the lucky ones. If captured alive they were hung, drawn and quartered. Not pleasant. Two were even trapped living in a cave in New England.

He also dug up Cromwell, who had died in 1658, and had his head stuck on a pole outside Westminster Hall for 15 years. A gentle reminder to any wannabe king-killers out there.

Currently it takes a five-year residency (up from three) for any large South Sea Islander who is not good enough to be picked by New Zealand to qualify to play rugby for Ireland. Three hundred and seventy years after the events, the descendants of Cromwellian soldiers and planters are still in the process of integration.

As was the norm, Cromwell paid his soldiers in confiscated land and thus began Ireland’s loathing of the man. Of course nowadays you would be as likely to find an Irish family living south of the Giant’s Causeway without Cromwellian blood somewhere in the pedigree as you would be to find a Thoroughbred free of Eclipse.

Dad was from Wexford. He was proud of his roots and was a supporter of the ‘Yellowbellies’. There is a Cooper’s Wall at one end of the parish in Wexford Town. More importantly there still stands Ye Olde Cooper’s Inn about five miles out of town on the way to Rosslare. The family were Wexford solicitors with a penchant for National Hunt and Point-to-Point racing. The royal blue colours were first seen on the racecourse in the 1830s, we believe. The coffers would have been fuller, but life poorer, had they stuck to the day job. But just when did we arrive? 1649, anyone?

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