On October 10, back in 1580, a force of Papal soldiers landed at Smerwick in Ireland to foment rebellion against the English. Which is, again, just about exactly the sort of thing I think the Papacy should not do.

For one thing, it didn’t work. It was part of a tangled set of uprisings against English rule in Ireland called the Desmond Rebellions. The papal force was quickly trapped, forced to surrender, and massacred by English soldiers including Sir Walter Raleigh.

The massacre brings to mind the important qualification that English rule in Ireland was remarkably malevolent given their general record elsewhere. I cannot say that I blame the Irish for rising up since they were being denied the rights guaranteed by Magna Carta. (Or for thinking Ard na Caithne was a nicer name for the place than Smerwick, if it comes to that.) And I do not condemn the rebels, or their helpers, for not weighing the odds too carefully before doing what they thought was right.

I also concede that the Tudor break with Rome was an ugly business motivated by lust and dynastic greed rather than genuine religious fervor. I also grant that genuine religious fervor if misplaced can be very nasty indeed. But I can see why some Catholics would very much regret what had happened and want to fix it.

None of these considerations excuse the Papacy sending an army to mix together English colonial policy and religious quarrels. Indeed, it’s remarkable how much good came out of the bad beginning of the Anglican Church, including the longstanding Anglosphere identification of free-will Protestantism with liberty against tyrannical Catholicism.

I know and respect Catholics who insist the association is accidental and incomplete (including that the England that produced Magna Carta was Catholic, as was the Wessex of Alfred the Great). But it is a fact that from the Spanish Armada down to the French Revolution, the great threat to liberty was absolute monarchs professing Catholicism and in unwholesomely close league with a Church that was far too entwined in secular matters to attend to its spiritual duties properly. Need I mention Armand Jean du Plessis, the infamous Cardinal Richelieu, Chief Minister to Louis XIII, geopolitical schemer and man of dubious fidelity to Catholic theology?

Furthermore, and worse, if the Papacy wanted Catholicism to receive a respectful hearing in England, including at least tolerance of its practices, it would be hard to think of a worse policy than continually fomenting sedition and even sometimes lending troops to it.

As a footnote, Raleigh was later tried on largely political grounds, mostly unfairly, and imprisoned for many years before being executed. But one of the charges brought against him was his involvement in the 1580 massacre and his defence, that he was just following orders, was rejected.

“For I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.” Thomas Jefferson in a letter to John Adams, 28 October 1813

October 9 is a good day if you’re Rhode Island. For on this date in 1635 Roger Williams was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

OK, so that too could stand a little clarification, especially as most readers probably aren’t Rhode Island. See, Williams was a Puritan preacher who left England early in the runup to the English Civil War, in late 1629, having been ordained in the Anglican Church but rejecting Archbishop Laud’s High Church views and ultimately the Church itself.

So he went to Massachusetts and was welcomed although he quickly raised eyebrows by insisting the local Boston church was not properly “separated” from the corrupt Church of England. He was more welcome in Salem and then Plymouth but Boston pursued him with a baleful eye.

It got more baleful as Williams increasingly insisted that the state should not enforce religious doctrine. Conscience, he said, was between man and God not man and Caesar. This shocked the Puritans, but in many ways they were hoist on their own petard since they had rejected the established church and with it the authority of the state to set religions doctrine only to have these views thrown back at them by this smart-aleck (who incidentally was apprenticed under the great jurist Sir Edward Coke and at some point tutored poet John Milton in Dutch in return for a refresher course in Hebrew which is not something most people can say).

Also, Williams became friendly with some of the aboriginal inhabitants and began to develop seriously unconventional views on the practice of showing up, saying oh look, there’s nobody here, ignoring the Indians going um yeah actually we’re here, this is our home, and just stuffing it into the king’s sack. So basically the Puritans were constantly getting on their high horse about everything and everybody and then he got on his even higher one about them with good cause.

In such a situation there’s clearly only one thing to do. And it’s not admit you were wrong. It’s haul the guy into court, try him for sedition and heresy, convict him and on Oct. 9 1635 order him to git out of Dodge. Actually they said look, you’re sick, winter’s coming on, take a break, shut up and clear out in the spring. But as you probably realize, Williams wasn’t a shutupy kind of guy, so they decided to chuck him out into the snow and discovered he’d already gone there himself.

After wintering with some Wampanaogs, Williams in the spring took the radical steps of buying land from Wampanaog Sachem Massasoit, creating his own colony of Providence, and establishing a government that actually rendered unto Caesar the things that were Caesar’s, and a church that was happy to have it do so.

Eventually the threat from Massachusetts became so severe that Williams went back to England and got himself a charter for what would eventually become Rhode Island or, more formally, “the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations” (yes, that is still its name). And he continued to make trouble, opposing slavery and reasoning his way around to adult baptism and free will (also anathema to the Puritans, though why they thought you should do anything I have never understood) and founded the First Baptist Church in America.

He was a troublesome man. I imagine he was by turns charming and infuriating. But he did show the way that ideas have a way of taking on a life of their own, and especially in America being taken to their logical conclusion no matter how uneasy it may make people.

Rhode Island is not a major state and never has been. And yet in many ways Roger Williams’ stamp on America was larger and more permanent than the people who indignantly threw him out back on that chilly Oct. 9.

“When children ask inconvenient questions it is the custom to say to them, ‘When you are older you will understand,’ a reply, generally speaking, justifying parricide. But the answer is not merely irritating; it is generally, I am sorry to say, a lie. The questions asked by children, as a rule, are questions that do not depend upon any matter of age: they are simple and unanswerable questions. When we grow up we rise superior to them, not by answering them, but merely by giving up. Logically, the parents ought only to say, ‘When you are older, you will not want to understand’ though it may certainly be said that if the first version of the reply would justify parricide on the part of the child the second version might justify suicide on his part.”

G.K. Chesterton, “The Abyss”

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So this is the anniversary of the “Great Stand on the Ugra River”. Or at least part of it. Never heard of it? See, it’s a tributary of the Oka which in turn leads to the Volga. Oh. You meant the stand. Well, apparently it was pretty much the end of the Tatar Yoke over Russia, in 1480.

Now I’ve written elsewhere in this series about the lamentable political history of Russia including the sad way the newly independent Tsars seem to have learned all the wrong lessons from the period of Mongol dominance. And it’s all true. But it doesn’t diminish the value of this incident beginning on October 8, 1480 when the army of Akhmat, Khan of the Great Horde, tried to force the Ugra and were stopped by the forces of Grand Prince Ivan III of Muscovy including by their possession of firearms that the Horde lacked.

I said Oct. 8 was part of the stand. And it was, because the action went on for four days. Then the armies sat glaring at one another while Ivan tried successfully to reconcile with his own brothers whose troops then showed up swelling the Russian ranks and the Khan waited unsuccessfully for his ally the King of Poland whose troops then didn’t show up not swelling the Mongol ranks.

The latter withdrew and a few months later Akhmat was killed in battle with other Hordies. And the Mongols never really came back.

I wish Russian history since had turned out better, that Muscovy had somehow got back onto the open, European path Kievan Rus’ had been on until the Mongol Empire showed up with fire and sword and Möngke Khan. But sometimes sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof or in this case the heroism of the Russian soldiers and the steady hand of Ivan III.

At any rate, if you’d been there that day you’d have been cheering for them. And they did win. So that’s got to count for something.

“Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.”

George Bernard Shaw The Doctor’s Dilemma

On this date in 1879, Otto von Bismarck got too clever by half. Or maybe he had that problem all along. But on October 7 of 1879, his plan to keep Germany from being isolated by isolating France and Russia began to mature with the signing of the “Twofold Covenant” between Germany and Austria-Hungary.

Now you might think the alliance between these two central European states was natural, precisely because they were central European states, whatever else you might think of it. For instance that the Central Powers were the aggressors in World War I, or that land powers tend to lose to sea powers in big geopolitical showdowns, or that attacking the Anglosphere is a bad idea no matter how carefully you prepare, or that Austria-Hungary was a useless ally for anyone to have. (Incidentally Hitler shared this last view, calling Austria-Hungary “this mummy of a state” in Mein Kampf, and while he was indescribably evil he was regrettably prone to strategic insights including about the defects of Germany’s first attempt to conquer the world, which is why he got as far as he did and did as much harm as he did before finally being stopped. Mind you, he chose to be allied with Mussolini’s Italy so maybe he wasn’t that smart.)

In any case, there was real genius in Bismarck’s successful alliance with a nation his own Prussia had fairly recently humbled, in 1866, in one of the wars in rapid succession that created a mostly united Germany. Minus some of the German-speaking bits Hitler went about accumulating on his way to aggression, genocide and ultimate defeat. Moreover Germany's unification and neighbour-attacking was generally driven or at least justified by nationalism, which the Austro-Hungarian rulers rightly saw as a deadly threat to a state whose very name indicated the presence of several important and very self-conscious minorities and which, indeed, was the figurative trigger behind the literal trigger whose pulling killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and in turn set off the cascading series of threats among members of the rigid yet rickety European alliance system that plunged the world into World War I.

That alliance system was, in turn, Bismarck’s great achievement or at any rate his doing. True, he was gone by the time the great crisis of 1914 came, and those who controlled Germany were lesser lights than his. But his light shone in the wrong direction and put them where they found themselves tempted to strike fast and hard to solve dilemmas Bismarck’s alliance system had made worse not better.

It was Bismarck’s obsession with keeping Germany from being isolated that created a menacing sense of isolation among almost everyone else, even his supposed ally Italy and certainly France on the west side and Russia on the east side of his central European bloc. Indeed, the “Twofold Covenant” of 1879 specifically provided that Germany and Austria-Hungary would support one another if either got into a war with Russia, while they would maintain benevolent neutrality if either got into a war with somebody else or should I say quelqu’un d’autre.

Bismarck then proceeded to sign treaties with just about everybody else including Russia. But everybody thought he was up to something and that something would involve German troops crossing their border, which is why France and Russia gradually created an alliance that was formalized in 1894. And why Britain and France created one in 1904, and added Russia in 1907.

Now the wise course for Germany would have been to give up the notion of attacking everybody until it achieved “Deutschland über alles” whose original lyrics speak of Germany stretching from the Memel river (in Belarus) to the Meuse (in France) and from the Adige (Etsch) in Italy which created understandable anxiety or perhaps more exactly angst in the nations suddenly and musically informed of the need to start either German lessons or military training. Unfortunately Bismarck was clever rather than wise.

Too clever by half. With appalling consequences.