He jerked his head toward the east. “What in the hell do you think your precious Irish are, in this day and age? Huh? You think Ireland in 1633 is the land of poetry? James Connolly giving socialist speeches before he leads the Easter Uprising?”
Darryl said nothing. Tom’s chuckle was dry as a bone. “Fat chance. We’re a long ways off from William Butler Yeats and James Joyce, Darryl. Much less James Connolly and his Irish Socialist Republicans. Today—right now—the Irish are every bit as much ‘wild savages’—your words, not mine—as any American Indian.”
Mercilessly: “It’s an island full of superstitious illiterates—sorry, Darryl, but they are ‘priest-ridden’—whose main export is probably mercenary soldiers. Who have a particularly bad reputation, by the way, for savagery. Ruled over—wherever the English haven’t grabbed the land—by the sorriest pack of mangy clan chiefs you’ll ever find. Frankly, comparing them to the Iroquois is an insult to the Iroquois. The Iroquois managed to pull together a real confederacy. More than your precious Irish have done! Every one of those so-called ‘kings’—and you’ve got hundreds of them—isn’t anything more than a sheep-stealing bandit with delusions of grandeur. The reason the English rolled right over them for centuries is because they could always find one Irish so-called ‘king’ eager and willing to sell out any other at the drop of a hat.”
He stopped, challenging Darryl to contradict him.
But Darryl didn’t even try. His romanticism about Ireland was deep, but . . .
That, too, after all, was part of the nationalist tradition he’d been brought up in. “Such a parcel of rogues in a nation,” he half-muttered, half-sang.
Tom smiled. “That’s actually from a Scot tune, but it’s appropriate enough. The Scots in this day and age aren’t much better than the Irish. Which, of course, is why the English have usually been able to run them ragged too.”
Darryl sighed, and wiped his face.
“For Pete’s sake,” said Tom, “you don’t have to look as if I’m asking for your family heirlooms. I’m not asking you to give it all up, Darryl. There’s no need to. It’s not as if I’m any fan of England’s policies in Ireland over the centuries. And if we were in the days of the Men of ’98, we’d be playing in a whole different ball game. But we’re not. Wolfe Tone won’t even be born for another century. At least. So . . . are you willing to listen, for a change? To me, at least, if not Melissa?”
“Yeah. Shoot.”
Tom paused, marshaling his thoughts. “What Cromwell did in Ireland, for those nine months, was crush a rebellion allied to King Charles that threatened the revolution he was leading. He carried out the campaign the way the man did everything. I told you once before, he was one of the greatest generals of his day. And he didn’t have any time to waste, because he needed to get back to England as soon as possible. So, he went through Ireland like a thunderbolt. Mostly, it was a string of sieges. None of the Irish rebels—who were mostly English Catholic settlers, by the way, not Irishmen the way you mean the term—wanted to face him in the field. Don’t blame ’em. Nobody did, after Marston Moor and Naseby, except maybe Prince Rupert.
“Speaking of whom . . .” Tom’s eyes moved back to the Thames and grew a bit unfocused. “Hm. I wonder what’ll wind up happening to him, now? Hell of a guy, Prince Rupert. He’s King Charles’ nephew, by the way. Thirteen or fourteen years old, right at the moment, if I remember right.”
” ‘Bout Cromwell,” gruffed Darryl.
“Yeah. Well, anyway, it was all over within nine months. There was another bad massacre at Wexford in October. About two thousand people died. Some of them were civilians, including women and children fleeing the town, who drowned when the boats they were in capsized. But it doesn’t seem that Cromwell himself ordered that massacre, the way he did at Drogheda. From what the historians can figure out, his troops ran into resistance inside the town after the garrison was supposed to have given up, and ran wild. On the other hand, there’s also no evidence that Cromwell tried to stop it, or gave much of a damn afterward. He was a hard man, no doubt about it, even if he wasn’t deliberately cruel. And he had good reason to be, frankly, because if the royalists had won they would have been a lot more savage than he was. Don’t ever believe any of this crap about the sweet English aristocracy, Darryl. Take a look at what the English did to the Scot Highlanders after Culloden, you don’t believe me.”