Brass money and wooden shoes

 

Brass money and wooden shoes

A good friend of mine took a trip to Donegal a week or so back and found the place retained that windswept beauty which makes it a popular destination for tourists as well as those with family connections there. The trip home on the ferry wasn’t quite as relaxing though as many of the passengers were orange folk making their way to Scotland for the annual parade in Glasgow. We’re often told that the order is a fraternal organisation which celebrates the religious and civil freedoms brought about by the Williamite victories in a war 336 years ago. With a total lack of self-awareness, they treated their fellow passengers to such folk classics as ‘no Pope of Rome’ and the ‘Famine song.’ It seems those religious freedoms and liberties don’t extend to their Catholic neighbours.

As with many facets of history, the mythology created by the propagandists of the day are believed more readily by some than the hard historical facts of what actually occurred. When William of Orange, a very capable battlefield general, took to the field in that far off war, he was facing his father-in-law James II, having married James’ daughter, Mary in 1677. James was allied to the French King Louis XV, known as the ‘Sun King’ and the man who built the magnificent palace at Versailles. Louis was an absolutist monarch who was trying to control the power of the Catholic church in France and expand French influence in Europe. This led to a power struggle in Europe which became known as the ‘Nine years war.’  Pope Innocent XI sought an alliance with, among others, William of Orange, in order to hinder Louis’ ambitions. Indeed, the pope came from a banking family which actually helped fund William’s war with James II. So it was that when news of William’s victory at the Boyne reached Rome, Pope Innocent ordered a mass of thanksgiving. It was more important to him that the French King’s ambitions be curbed that James should win back his throne.

When James’ army was decisively defeated at the battle of Aughrim in 1691; a bloodbath that left 7000 dead, his cause in Ireland was lost. He fled to the continent leaving the Irish who supported him to their fate. This earned him the nickname among the Irish of ‘Séamus an cac.’ (James the shit.) Once William’s position of King of England, Scotland and Ireland had been secured, his supporters controlled the narrative and the tales of his glorious victory were spun. He never did ride into battle on a white horse- that made any commander a conspicuous target for the enemy. He was a brave and able commander, far more so than James but the white horse legend was a theatrical device to portray him as a Christian saviour. In a recent TV programme presented by Lucy Worsley, she said, ‘A white horse heralded the arrival of a divine conqueror or even Christ himself.’

You may recall a few years ago that some young folk in Bristol toppled the statue of a slave trader named Edward Colston and pushed it into the river. During Colston's involvement with the Royal African Company from 1680 to 1692, it is estimated that the company transported over 84,000 African men, women and children to the West Indies and the Americas, of whom as many as 19,000 may have died on the journey. Colston was a fabulously wealthy man who gifted King William £1000 worth of shares in the Royal Africa Company. (about £200,000 today) It should be said that monarchs from Elizabeth I to George IV were involved in this sordid trade. Modern research suggests that by 1807 the British crown was the biggest buyer of enslaved people on Earth. As the company prospered, the king received a healthy income from this iniquitous trade.  Of course, we tend to judge people from the past through modern eyes but it is still disconcerting that the King of England was making money from the slave trade. When the trade was finally outlawed in the British empire in the 1830s, the government paid out £20 million in compensation (about £17 billion today) not to the freed slaves, but to the ‘owners’ who lost their ‘property.’  This was 40% of the UK budget in 1837.

This article isn’t a clumsy attempt to discredit William but merely to show that myth and history merge into each other until some can’t discern the difference. There is an Orange toast which goes; ‘to the glorious, pious and immortal memory of the great and good King William, who saved us from popery, slavery, knavery, brass money and wooden shoes.’ In reality he didn’t save hundreds of thousands of Africans from slavery but they’d rather forget that part. So too his alliance with Pope Innocent, but then mythology has always been more important than reality to some. William is the good guy riding on the white horse coming to save us, isn’t he?  

Like him or not he exerts great influence on British and Irish history, his colour is even on the flag of the Irish nation and his image adorns the walls of more than a few homes in north-east Ireland. I wonder what he’d make of it all today? He might echo the words of Voltaire who said, ‘History is nothing more than a pack of tricks we play on the dead.’