LECTURE ON OLIVER CROMWELL.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume V, Issue 244, 4 January 1878, Page 15

LECTURE ON OLIVER CROMWELL.

The good folks of Kumara have been on the tip-toe of expectation during the last week in consequence of Mr. J. J. Crofts. having announced his intention of delivering a lecture on Oliver CrornwelT and the Puritans, in reply to one which had been delivered in this town on the same subject by the Rev. C. Clarke. Although Mr. Crofts' ability as a speaker had been already known in the "West Coast, and, through your columns, to the whole of New Zealand by his vigorous opposition to the " Secular Education Bill " of the late Ministry, and in his eloquent speeches in defence of Catholic Education, still it was expected by the partisans of the' view which Mr. Clarke took of the Lord Protector, that he would not be able to succeed in his attempt to reply, with successful effect, to the. eloquent and reverend lecturer. Those that thought so were grievously disappointed at hearing Mr. Crofts in the Theatre Royal on Saturday evening last. p^. His lecture may be characterised without exaggeration as being brilliant, logical, eloquent, and consistent with historical truth. He did not confine himself to Irish Catholic historians, and quoted largely from Macaulay, Hallatn, Clarendon, aud others. He started from the ' plantation," or rather, as the lecturer appropriately designated it, the "confiscation of Ulster "by James I. He glanced rapidly over the quarrels between Charles I. and his Parliament. He painted m nervous English the baseness, ingratitude, and treachery of I Charles and his minister, Strafford. The rising of 1641, the causes which led to it, the various battles fought, the disposi- • tion of the forces under the various generals on both sides, and the number of slain and wounded were aptly and minutely described. The "cessation" and its effects on the Confederate cause were touchingly pourtrayed. His description of the Battle of Benburb, Owen Roe O'Neil's generalship, the impetuous charge of the Irish troops, and the complete rout of Monroe's forces, with the latter's ignoble flight without hat, cloak, or sword, to Carrickfergus, where he shut himself up in the fortress, was received with loud and prolonged applause. The diabolical cruelties of Coote, Inchiquin, Rauelagh, and the other Puritan generals were feelingly depicted. But the butcheries of Cromwell in Drogheda and Wexford sent a thrill of horror through the audience. ° He clearly proved that the Rev. Mr. Clarke was guilty of supprexsio veri, and of offering a direct insult to the Irish Catholic nation by completely ignoring its existence during a most important era of English history, when the changes wrought in England reacted with such terrible and disastrous effects on the religion and people of Ireland. • r It would be impossible in the limited space of a single letter to do anything like justice to the lecture. He concluded with a brilliant peroration on the intellectual physical, and moral character of the Irish race, which completely displaced the implied calumny contained in the io-norin" of or any allusion to Ireland, by the Rev. C. Clarke in his lecture on Oliver Cromwell. It is to be hoped that Mr. Crofts will cause his lecture to be published in pamphlet form. If he does, I trust a copy of it will be found m the house. of every Irishman in the colonies. Mr. Crofts certainly deserves the thanks of all Irishmen for his able and successful refutation of Mr. Clarke's fulsome panegyric on the greatest monster that Ireland in her long list of cruel persecutors" suffered and* bled under. Dec. 18, 1877. P. Du«ttK, 8.0.8. F.