the author of The Trail of Martyrdom: Persecution and Resistance in Sixteenth Century England (2003) and Wounds, Flesh and Metaphor in Seventeenth-Century England (2009).
Covington applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Devil from over the Sea: Remembering and Forgetting Oliver Cromwell in Ireland, and reported the following:
Readers who turn to page 99 of The Devil from over the Sea: Remembering and Forgetting Oliver Cromwell in Ireland will glimpse one of the many ways in which Ireland’s great national villain was recalled through the centuries. Oliver Cromwell’s 1649-1658 conquest and colonization of the country left behind a legacy of violence, massive land confiscation programs, forcible population transfers, and the banishment of priests and others to indentured servitude in Barbados. Catholics would remember “Puritan Cromwell” with special bitterness, but less well-known was his reputation among members of the protestant Church of England and Ireland. As a supporter of the execution of Charles I and leader of a regime that outlawed episcopacy and the established Church of England and Ireland, it is unsurprising that Cromwell and his sectarian “rabble” would be vilified in Anglican memory as well.Learn more about The Devil from over the Sea at the Oxford University Press website.
On page 99, we witness one of these recollections in the work of Richard Mant, the great nineteenth-century Church of Ireland bishop and ecclesiastical historian. Writing his two-volume history of the Church of Ireland in 1839-40, Mant was attempting to bolster his institution during a time of internal and external challenge stemming from the 1801 union of Britain and Ireland and the threat of a muscular new Catholic nationalism. Mant’s treatment of Cromwell required him to tell the story of Church of Ireland bishops who were sent into exile and beleaguered in other ways by the Cromwellian regime; on the other hand, Mant also had to contend with uncomfortable cases where bishops had accommodated themselves to the new puritan regime. Of these men Mant said nothing, which reveals the many ways in which memorializing narratives entail a convenient forgetting as well.
Cromwell’s lasting memory among religious denominations was simply one of the many ways in which he haunted Ireland. My book sets out to recover his ghost in a variety of places: in folklore and literature, ruins and material objects, political polemics and newspapers. So powerful was his malignant charisma that memory of him even “migrated” throughout the world, as I demonstrate in another chapter that treats his afterlife among the Irish diasporic community in the United States. Cromwell was above all a kind of floating signifier, and one that could attach itself to ever-changing historical events and needs. For Gaelic poets, he represented the source of their own loss and dispossession; for Irish nationalists, he was the ogre against whom the country’s heroes were contrasted and forged; for those who lived near wrecked monasteries and churches, he was the origin point for all that was broken. Page 99 touches on Mant’s own bedevilment by Cromwell, as he harnessed memories of persecution to create the story of a church’s tribulations and its ultimate perseverance.
--Marshal Zeringue
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