Certain Queries Propounded to the Consideration of such as were Intended for the Service of Ireland
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Certain Queries Propounded to the Consideration of such as were Intended for the Service of Ireland
Edited and introduced by Norah Carlin [Aporia Press 1992] Certain Queries Propounded to the Consideration of such as were Intended for the Service of Ireland was a short pamphlet or broadside which was apparently printed illegally in late April or early May, 1649, and distributed among soldiers of the Commonwealth's army on the eve of Oliver Cromwell's reconquest of Ireland. The text had been refused a licence by one of the Commonwealth government's censors, Theodore Jennings, and greatly alarmed the leadersof the army and Commonwealth, who regarded it as a real threat to their plans to conquer Ireland. It seems to have been quickly and thoroughly suppressed, for no independent copy of it survives. Yet the content of this tract was radical and threatening enough for the Cromwellian party to make considerable efforts to counter its subversive ideas about the natural right of the Irish people to resist conquest by the English. The editor of one of the pro-Comwellian newspapers, John Dillingham, devoted leading articles in his Moderate Intelligencer for six weeks to refuting these ideas, and on 9 May the Council of State, the Commonwealth's executive body, commissioned several people to write in defence of its position against "obstructers" of the Irish expedition who were raising "causeless Cavills and Queries". […] The ideas in Certain Queries were very widely associated at the time with the radical group known to history as the Levellers. This well-organised group of writers and activists had ideas on freedom and popular sovereignty which challenged the radical but authoritarian "Godly Rule" of the Cromwellians and had a lasting significance in the development of political thought in England and America. Despite many arguments among historians about their actual impact on the situation in 1647-1649, there is no doubt that they actively sought to mobilise and lead a radical opposition to the Commonwealth in 1649. From the publication of England's New Chains Discovered by John Lilburne in February, 1649, the Levellers denounced the Commonwealth as an authoritarian millitary government which had taken over without the people's consent, called upon soldiers and others to resist it, and demanded a new constitution which would guarantee representative government and individual liberty. They saw the army as crucial to the achievement of this further revolution, and called upon the soldiers to re-establish the representative General Council of the Army which had existed from June to November, 1647. The Levellers' enemies not only blamed them for the unrest in the army in the spring of 1649, but accused them of holding pro-Irish views which were by implication treasonous and a challenge to the Protestant view of Ireland held by most of the radicals as well as by the Commonwealth government. The group as a whole was accused of arguing "that it is an unlawful War, a cruel and bloody work to go to destroy the Irish Natives for their Consciences," and William Walwyn in particular was alleged to have said, "that the cause of the Irish Natives in seeking their just freedoms, immunities and liberties, was the very same with our cause here, in indeavouring our own rescue and freedom from the power of oppressors." The official government account of the army mutinies in May alleged that the Levellers "have endeavoured what they can, to render the service of Ireland either as unlawful (wherein they comply with Popish demands) or exceeding difficult" […] |
