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Irish Post
12-07-2025
- Sport
- Irish Post
Ireland abroad in England's inner city
THE roll call in the classroom of a morning went along these lines. Condon, Daly, Egan, Horgan, Hennessy, Mahony, O'Donnell, O'Sullivan, O'Driscoll, Sheehy, Shields. I mean it was a long time ago but that's at least some of what I remember. This wasn't Ireland though. This was the inner city of England's second biggest city. This was England in the 1970s and 1980s and this was Ireland abroad. I've tried to explain to people that growing up in England my knowledge of England wasn't by any means extensive. I didn't really know any English people growing up. Our first next door neighbours were an Asian family and everyone else I knew was Irish. Everyone who came to the house, bar those neighbours, was Irish. Every kid at school came from an Irish family. The teachers were nuns or Irish or a few English Catholics who I never understood — and to this day English Catholicism remains something of a mystery to me. When I finally went away, at the late age of twenty, to do a degree in a northern English town I really didn't know where it was and anyone I asked didn't know either. This was pre the internet, you see, and the Irish people I lived amongst only really knew an English place if they'd had to go there. Outside of the tight streets of the city I grew up in I knew nothing of England. I never went to the English countryside. I was utterly flummoxed by cricket and my father used to say of it that it seems to go on all day and nothing seems to happen. I would definitely have failed Tebbit's cricket test on every level and, indeed, in ways he wouldn't have dreamed of. I knew my own city well and identified with it and spoke like it and was passionate about my local football team but England itself was as good as a foreign country to me. That did, of course, change, I went away to study, sort of anyway, and in the next decade I studied and worked in any number of big English cities. I got to know them all very, very well, and knew them easily. Birmingham, Preston, Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool, London, how are ya? Many aspects of English life remained foreign to me but I got to know the country well and the people of different cities and married into an English family and realised that for everything that divides us there is always far more that unites us. We are very different and we are much the same too. And that's not just okay, that's a good thing. The point is that being Irish for people like me was just a matter of fact. It wasn't a wishful thing. It wasn't an aspiration. It wasn't something negligible that was suddenly useful decades later when we wanted an Irish passport in order to beat Brexit rules. It was simply a factual recounting of who we were. I'm fairly sure, for instance, that if by some chance my parents had found some corner of England where we were the only Irish family that would have been completely different. Our house would have still been Irish but we would have had no choice but to be English outside because there would be nothing but England outside. It wasn't like that though. The Irish emigrated to the big cities because they simply went where there was most work. Thousands and thousands of them. The UK economy has relied on immigration and the labour of immigrants for decade after decade. They might resent that now but that doesn't make it any less true. We built their cities. And we made them sing and dance and echo with our lives. I haven't lived in England since 1999 and each time I go back the strangest feeling I have is of how foreign it all is. Some of that is merely the passing of time. Some of it is the nature of the immigrant existence in that it contains a certain transitory element. Where I grew up has completely changed. One wave of immigrants is replaced by another. And so it goes. Still, I can't help but notice, that the country I was born in was once like a foreign country to me, became a country whose cities I knew well and closely, and is now a foreign country to me all over again. When our parents made the decision to get on that boat who'd have thought how far the ripples would travel. See More: Birmingham, Ireland, Irish
Scotsman
09-07-2025
- General
- Scotsman
Book review: Exile: The Captive Years of Mary, Queen of Scots by Rosemary Goring
An 18th century work depicting the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1587 at Fotheringhay Castle. Picture:Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Rosemary Goring's Homecoming, the story of the turbulent years when Mary, Queen of Scots lived, governed, married, was bulled and betrayed, defeated and imprisoned in Loch Leven Castle, threatened with death, and compelled to abdicate before escaping and, after her supporters were defeated in battle, fled to England, was a very good book. This sequel, Exile, telling of her years in captivity in England, is even better. Together they have claim to be not only the most complete account of Mary's life, but also the fairest and most intelligent. She has, one should add, an advantage over the host of previous biographers. She has been able to draw on the coded letters which Mary wrote from prison that a team of cryptographers has recently deciphered. More of them later. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Goring has no doubt that the flight to England was Mary's greatest blunder. She should have made for France where she had been married to her first husband, now eight years dead. But she was in fear for her life and she believed that her cousin Queen Elizabeth would restore her to the throne in Scotland. But Elizabeth was wary of her, understandably. Her Protestant regime was insecure. Many English Catholics, especially in the north, regarded Mary as their rightful queen. Meanwhile the Scots Protestant lords, though a bunch of repulsive cutthroats, were allied to England. Then there was the question of the murder of Mary's second husband Darnley. The Protestant lords, led by Mary's half-brother Murray, insisted Mary was party to that murder (they knew very well she wasn't). Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad So Elizabeth kept Mary at a distance and under house arrest, light in the early years, more stringent as time passed. Three hundred years later Queen Victoria said she couldn't forgive Elizabeth for her 'cruelty to poor Mary'. My grandmother, who first aroused my interest in history, said the same thing. But I think they were wrong. She was a threat to the Queen and the Protestant religion. Moreover, her English ministers feared and hated Mary. After the Pope excommunicated Elizabeth in 1570, this encouraged English Catholics to deny her right to the throne, and after a Catholic rising in the north was defeated (and its leaders executed), the English Parliament called for the Scottish queen to suffer the same fate. But Elizabeth refused. Mary's imprisonment would last 17 years. She was still treated as a queen. She had her own household of more than 20 and her meals were lavish. She was shuffled from castle to castle, all well guarded. Goring has explored them all or what remains of them. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Meanwhile, Mary wrote letters, some complaining of the restrictions put on her. All this is dealt with in fascinating detail. There were proposals that she might return to Scotland to share the throne with her son James VI, whom she hadn't seen since he was a baby. But they came to nothing. There was no enthusiasm in Scotland and James, who had been educated by the brilliant and repulsive George Buchanan, had been taught that she had been guilty of his father Darnley's murder. In truth there was more support for Mary in England than in Scotland and Mary's hopes, disappointed by the inaction of the Catholic powers France and Spain, turned to these enthusiastic conspirators. An inveterate letter-writer, Mary engaged with these young zealots, ignorant of the fact that Elizabeth's spymaster, Walsingham, had penetrated the network, even encouraging plotters. For years I persuaded myself that, not knowing the final form of her letters, for she wrote in French and her secretaries translated and encoded them, she might not have consented to the planned assassination of Elizabeth. But, alas, she was guilty. Her end was magnificent, though appalling. Devout in her Catholicism now, she saw herself as a martyr. Goring's treatment of her last months ending in the horror of Fotheringhay is magnificent, worthy of the queen's superb performance. I can't think it could have been written better. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Reluctantly I have to say Victoria and my grandmother were wrong. If Elizabeth has been like her appalling father Henry VIII, Mary would have gone to the block at least a dozen years earlier.
Irish Times
22-04-2025
- General
- Irish Times
Londoners and tourists mourn Pope Francis as the Catholic church enjoys new lease of life
They filled the pews of Westminster Cathedral and thronged its side chapels. They stood at the back and in the aisles. Some even knelt on the marble floors. The requiem mass for Pope Francis on Monday evening drew an enormous crowd of locals and tourists alike – the grieving, the pious and the simply curious – to the central London home of the Catholic church in England and Wales. Although it sometimes runs counter to many visitors' expectations, metropolitan London is by far the most religious city in Britain due to its status as a magnet for immigrants from the developing world, where religion is stronger than in the West. Among the English Catholics praying at the cathedral on Monday evening I heard the accents of many Hispanics, Caribbeans, Africans, Southeast Asians whom I took to be Filipinos, Europeans including Italians and French, and even a few from Ireland. READ MORE The grand, red-bricked cathedral sits in the heart of London's West End, close to busy Victoria Station. The area was relatively quiet as the mass began at 5.30pm on Easter Monday. Most parking spaces in surrounding streets were taken up by broadcasting vans with satellite dishes. The broad plaza at the front of the cathedral was stalked in advance of the service by the television reporters who were eager to capture scenes of the grief of Catholics following the death earlier that day of Francis. Yet, in truth, the atmosphere at Westminster Cathedral was stoic and restrained. This was a mass for an 88-year-old man who had seemed to be near death for months. There was no sense of shock, no ostentatious displays of emotion. Very few appeared tearful. In recent months, the area around Westminster Cathedral had begun to attract many homeless asylum seekers, most of them younger men who had camped around the plaza and up the side of the cathedral building. They were moved on by local authorities over the Easter period as the church became busy with services. Now, as people came to mourn a pope who had preached compassion towards immigrants, a few of the asylum seekers appeared to have returned on Monday evening to sit on the steps outside the cathedral. However, they hadn't re-erected any of their tents by the time I left. Just inside the door to the cathedral was a memorial shrine to Francis, a large picture of him waving which was surrounded by candles and a splash of yellow and white Easter flowers. Beneath the picture were hundreds of memorial cards for churchgoers with prayers for the pope in death. These included Psalm 120 – the song of the ascents – as well as the evening prayer of the Canticle of Simeon and a bespoke 'Prayer for Francis'. The cards were professionally printed on high quality material – produced in haste, perhaps, by the Liturgy Office of the Catholic Bishops Conference on Monday afternoon. Or maybe they prepared them in advance in the expectation of what was soon to come. Archbishop of Westminster Cardinal Vincent Nichols delivers his homily at Westminster Cathedral on Monday. Photograph: PA The Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, presided over the mass, which lasted for 90 minutes. Afterwards, tourists and locals queued to sign the four books of condolences for Francis that had been opened down the back of the cathedral. After the bishops left the scene, many other visitors also queued with little reverence to take selfies at the steps to the altar. London tourism trundles on as always. The Catholic church, meanwhile, has in recent years experienced something of an unexpected renaissance in Britain, fuelled by increasing mass attendance by Generation Z . A recent YouGov survey for the Bible Society found that British Catholic churchgoers now outnumber Anglicans two-to-one in the 18-34 year age group. Six years ago, there were 1.5 times more Anglicans than Catholics in this age bracket. While the number of people in Britain who identify as Christian overall is falling – it dropped below half to 46 per cent of the population at the 2021 census, as the number of non-religious grew – the Catholic church still claims 6.2 million members, even if less than a fifth are regular massgoers. The church says mass attendances have risen steadily in recent years, although these are still behind pre-pandemic levels. If the trends identified in the YouGov research persist, Catholics across all age groups will soon outnumber Anglican Protestants for the first time in 500 years since the Reformation started by Henry VIII. The monarchy in recent years appointed the UK's first Catholic prime minister – Boris Johnson married Carrie Symonds in Westminster Cathedral . High-profile Catholics such as Jacob Rees-Mogg are also prominent on the airwaves. Now an upsurge of youth has injected enthusiasm into the church. The pope may have died, but the Catholic church in Britain, it seems, remains still very much alive.
Ammon
08-02-2025
- General
- Ammon
Rare letter to Elizabeth I from possible love interest sold for £32,700
Ammon News - A rare signed letter to Queen Elizabeth I from her lifelong friend and possible love interest, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, has been sold for £32,700 – four times more than the estimated price. The document contains an enigmatic reference to an unspecified great matter of state, said to bear directly on the Queen's life and likely relating to England's policy towards Scotland in the aftermath of the Throckmorton plot of 1583. This was a conspiracy between English Catholics and continental powers to overthrow Elizabeth and replace her with Mary Queen of Scots. The earl also apologises in the letter for his elusiveness during his recent journey across the Midlands of England. His marriage in 1578 to Lettice, dowager countess of Essex, who Elizabeth loathed, is believed to have contributed to his absence and he was forced to keep his marriage half-hidden as a result. The statesman and Queen had known one another since childhood and although he had failed to win her hand in marriage, they remained close friends until his death. Experts at Lyon & Turnbull, the auctioneers who sold the letter on Wednesday, traced just two other autographed letters from the earl to Elizabeth. One is now at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. The other, at the National Archives in London, was written by him a few days before his death. Meanwhile, a letter written and signed by Henry VIII's elder daughter Mary I, Queen of England and Ireland, known as Bloody Mary, fetched £37,700 – more than double the asking price. Signed 'Mary the quene', it was written to William, Lord Paget, on the outbreak of Wyatt's Rebellion, on January 28, 1554. The Independent
The Independent
06-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Rare letter to Elizabeth I from possible love interest sold for £32,700
A rare signed letter to Queen Elizabeth I from her lifelong friend and possible love interest, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, has been sold for £32,700 – four times more than the estimated price. The document contains an enigmatic reference to an unspecified great matter of state, said to bear directly on the Queen's life and likely relating to England's policy towards Scotland in the aftermath of the Throckmorton plot of 1583. This was a conspiracy between English Catholics and continental powers to overthrow Elizabeth and replace her with Mary Queen of Scots. The earl also apologises in the letter for his elusiveness during his recent journey across the Midlands of England. The letter to Elizabeth from her lifelong favourite Robert Dudley provides a window on to one of history's most famous love stories Dominic Somerville-Brown, Lyon & Turnbull His marriage in 1578 to Lettice, dowager countess of Essex, who Elizabeth loathed, is believed to have contributed to his absence and he was forced to keep his marriage half-hidden as a result. The statesman and Queen had known one another since childhood and although he had failed to win her hand in marriage, they remained close friends until his death. Experts at Lyon & Turnbull, the auctioneers who sold the letter on Wednesday, traced just two other autographed letters from the earl to Elizabeth. One is now at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. The other, at the National Archives in London, was written by him a few days before his death. Meanwhile, a letter written and signed by Henry VIII's elder daughter Mary I, Queen of England and Ireland, known as Bloody Mary, fetched £37,700 – more than double the asking price. Signed 'Mary the quene', it was written to William, Lord Paget, on the outbreak of Wyatt's Rebellion, on January 28, 1554. Wyatt's Rebellion was intended by its leaders – members of parliament alarmed by Mary's imminent marriage to Prince Philip of Spain – as a series of four co-ordinated uprisings to take place in Devon, Herefordshire, Leicestershire and Kent. Mary, who was avowedly Catholic, hoped the marriage would produce a son and heir and re-establish the Catholic faith across England and Ireland. In addition, a handwritten notebook filled with remedies and recipes sold in the auction for £10,080, more than double its estimate. The snapshot into the life and times of mid-17th century England reflects a period when the country was gripped by civil war and beset by the plague. It contains 82 pages of remedies, at least 25 of them written by Dr William Fyffe, who was honorary physician to the King for the county of Lancashire. Many were for treating the plague, which was rife at the time, and for wounds caused by sword or gunshot. Dominic Somerville-Brown, specialist in rare books and manuscripts at Lyon & Turnbull, said: 'The letter to Elizabeth from her lifelong favourite Robert Dudley provides a window on to one of history's most famous love stories. 'Mary's letter is a vivid snapshot of her thinking at a pivotal moment in her rule. 'This was a stunning pair of results for two documents of first-rate importance. 'Bidders were drawn to the contrasting portraits of England's two Tudor Queens and came together to produce a succession of dramatic saleroom battles. 'There was also substantial interest and correspondingly strong prices for other historical manuscripts in the sale, including the 17th century English cookery book.'
