Central to the Whig interpretation of English history with which generations of English – and indeed American – schoolchildren have been imbued is the idea that England is, and in some sense always was, an essentially Protestant nation.  For over 400 years Catholicism has been portrayed as a foreign, alien imposition which the English people gladly threw off, thereby forsaking the dark clouds of the Middle Ages for the blue skies of happy Modernity.

In a recent article in the UK’s Telegraph, author and historian Dominic Selwood lays bare the utter falsehood of all this: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/dominicselwood/100272287/how-a-protestant-spin-machine-hid-the-truth-about-the-english-reformation/

He reveals that England was, instead, an essentially Catholic country. As he puts it “medieval religion in this country was, for a thousand years, as English as tea, warm beer, Maypole dancing, and cricket.” Merrie England was merrie in so far as it was Catholic, and Catholicism itself, far from being some foreign imposition, was at the heart of traditional England. The Faith, writes Selwood, “had developed a particularly English flavour, with a focus on the involvement of ordinary people in parish churches, village greens, plays, and pageants – much of which seemed to involve a good deal of community parties, dancing, and drinking.”

Protestantism in England did not arise spontaneously from below. It was imposed, for cynical and self-interested motives from above, and imposed brutally and ruthlessly upon a resentful but powerless English people (not the last such unwanted ideological imposition to serve the self-interest of the powerful they were to suffer in like manner…)

The crushing of Catholic England was a step in the replacement of Faith, Hope and Charity as the underlying values of Western societies by Cynicism, Selfishness and Greed which led to today’s vacuous anti-cultural consumerism and the exaltation of the god of GDP before which today’s politicians and – aptly named – “opinion formers” fawn and bow.

As Dr Selwood reveals, one consequence of the so-called “Reformation” was that “parishes were also deprived of around 40 to 50 saints’ “holy days” (holidays) a year, when no servile work was allowed from noon the previous day. This was a dramatic change to the rhythms of life the country had known for centuries. The reformers were keenly aware this would boost economic activity, and welcomed the increase in output it would bring”.

Selwood’s article paints a very clear picture of the sort of people who tore the heart out of their own nation and people, becoming very rich in the process. Henry the King, who for motives that can charitably be seen as ruthless raisons d’etat (the quest for a male heir) or, less charitably, as the service of his own lusts, betrayed the Faith he had once ably and eloquently defended and which, as Dr Selwood reveals, he never personally ceased to believe, hearing Mass regularly to his dying day.

Thomas Cromwell, the King’s brutal fixer and henchman, was captured for posterity in the portrait by Holbein, in which the great artist has clearly and brilliantly captured his subject’s soul. He looks like Avarice personified, a cold-eyed ruthless servant of himself.

Other ignoble nobles of Cromwell’s ilk cast aside their faith and scruples in the cause of personal enrichment. Like jackals they followed the King and Cromwell to plunder their own people and strip away the caring shelter for the poor that the Church had provided for centuries, leaving the poor and the powerless naked beneath the Lidless Eye of Greed. The villagers, the happy hobbits of Merrie England, were driven from their common lands, which were “enclosed” by law to serve the rich, and herded into stinking tenements to break their bodies and impoverish their souls in the aptly named “dark Satanic mills”.

Mines and factories sprung up as the growing greed machine of commerce befouled the lands of Britain, ere its tendrils spread forth under the banner of Empire to grasp the world.  Worst of all, as Dr Selwood demonstrates, the slaves thus delivered up helpless to be exploited and enslaved by the Sauronic engine of what has now become global capitalism were taught to rejoice in their chains and see the destruction of all they once were and believed as an “enlightened” liberation. As Dr Selwood observes, this “enlightenment” was erected on the wholesale destruction of the cultural treasures of Merrie England and a Nazi-style burning of books : “The result was the wholesale destruction of a millennium of irreplaceable English craftsmanship in windows, statues, frescoes, and paintings. The Tate recently estimated that over 90 per cent of all English art was trashed in the period, and scarcely a handful of books survived the burning of the great monastic and university libraries. Oxford’s vast Bodleian, for instance, was left without a single book.”

The death, indeed the deliberate murder, of Merrie England, which Dr Selwood describes, and the lies by which the perpetrators justified their crime, was the sprouting of the evil seed of a soulless engine of ruthless selfishness which was ultimately to cast aside the Protestantism under whose cover it had grown to proclaim openly that “Greed is Good”, and that serving short-term self-interest is the ultimate end of human aspirations.