The Dangerous Book of Heroes (11 page)

Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

With the New Model Army, Cromwell was dispatched by Parliament to Ireland to crush Royalist support. In doing so, he earned a reputation for ruthlessness that survives him today. For forty weeks, between August 1649 and May 1650, Ireland ran with blood. The slaughter at Drogheda is the most infamous, when Cromwell's army killed around three thousand Royalist troops, then rampaged through the town, butchering clergy, women, and children. Those who surrendered were executed. Cromwell followed Drogheda with an attack on Wexford, where another two thousand were killed. In less than a year, he assaulted twenty-five fortified towns and killed or routed Royalist garrisons. He saw Ireland as the central stronghold of Royalist Catholicism, and his aim was the utter destruction of all forces loyal to Charles II. He used his army as an instrument of terror, so that Catholics would never again dare to rise against his Puritan new order. In his religious fanaticism, Cromwell allowed no mercy, and his name is forever blackened by that year.

He returned to England in 1650 to lead the army against Royalists in Scotland. It would prove a harder task than the fighting in Ireland. He could not bring the Scots to battle at first. Disease and desertion reduced his fighting strength to eleven thousand, while the Scots had twenty-two thousand. It should have been the end for Cromwell, and before the battle, he bit his own lips until they bled, almost insane with fervor. Near Dunbar, he broke the Scottish right wing, then crumpled the lines into the center and finally the left wing. Cromwell said of the battle: “By the Lord of Hosts, they were made as stubble to our swords.”

It was an astonishing victory against such odds, and Cromwell laughed when it was over, convinced that God had shown his hand to support him.

Throughout 1651, Cromwell's army feinted with still-rebellious Scottish lords, tempting them to come south against London. They took the bait and Cromwell crushed a second army led by Charles II at Worcester, finally ending the battles of the civil war. Charles es
caped from the battlefield and, over six weeks, made his way to France. Famously, he had to spend one night in an oak tree in Shropshire to avoid detection. Ever since, there have been both pubs and ships named the Royal Oak. Charles was aided by Catholics and would eventually become one himself on his deathbed. Meanwhile, Cromwell returned in triumph to London and was received as the savior of a nation.

His first task was to get rid of the “Rump Parliament” that had held power without elections for more than a decade. They delayed, as men in power often will, and Cromwell lost patience and declared Parliament dissolved. He had the army, and his word carried weight. He refused to become king, but the country needed a ruler and flailed without one. Cromwell allowed the term “Lord Protector” and assumed the role as head of state in a new Parliament in 1653. His health was poor and it is doubtful that he wanted the role, but he saw it as vital to establish England as a stable republic and to tide her over the storms that had raged since the death of Charles I. Cromwell had taken part in most of them, after all.

He lived less than five years after taking up this last great office. During that time he hammered out a constitution, rejecting the crown and title of king more than once. He did not have dictatorial powers and in fact was often overborne by the councillors and parliaments. He saw himself as a warden of the peace. His health worsened daily, and he was never sure he had done enough to prevent England from descending into anarchy on his death. In 1656 he wrote that he wanted to see an end to the persecution of Catholics and hoped that England would be populated by “Godly men.” He also sought greater equity for the poor in the law. In some ways he was successful, as only six thousand men were needed to keep the peace in England, while forty thousand had to remain in Scotland and Ireland.

Cromwell died of pneumonia in 1658. His body was buried and his effigy carried through almost empty streets to Westminster Abbey. His son Richard tried to rule after him but lacked the strength and authority of his father. Instead, Parliament asked Charles II to
return to the throne in 1661. From then on, the seat of power was with Parliament, not the monarch. The man who had done more than any other to bring about such a change became the focus for poisonous hatred.

Just a few weeks after Charles II became king, Cromwell's body was exhumed. The green and moldering corpse was given a trial, hanged as a traitor, decapitated, quartered, and buried in secret locations around England. It may have looked as if the monarchy was back in all its power, but a bloody lesson had been learned and the people had been heard. Never again would a king or queen rule in tyranny, unfettered by the will of the country.

In the centuries after his death, Cromwell has had his supporters and detractors by the thousand. For a long time he was a heroic figure in England. He was certainly a man of enormous personal strength, who managed to overturn an entire society and leave it forever changed. He was unflinchingly brave in battle and an inspiring leader to his men. He remains difficult to like, but he was revered by many. Yet any tale of his life must reflect the words he famously uttered to his portrait painter and be “warts and all.”

Recommended

God's Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution
by Christopher Hill

Oliver Cromwell
by John Morrill

Cromwell
by Barry Coward

Film:
Cromwell,
directed by Ken Hughes

H
elen Keller was born in 1880 in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Her father was a captain in the Confederate army during the Civil War, and her grandmother was second cousin to General Robert E. Lee.

When the war ended, the Keller family moved to Tennessee, where her father became a newspaper editor. Baby Helen was bright and alert, learning her first words and delighting her parents. At the age of nineteen months she was struck by an illness described by her doctors as “a congestion of the stomach and brain.” It could have been scarlet fever or a strain of meningitis.

The disease left her both blind and deaf. In just a short time, all light, color, and sound had been stolen away from her. At first it seemed as if there was no way she could ever learn to speak. A deaf person learns sign language by sight. A blind one learns by hearing. Denied both those senses, Helen was unable to communicate at all. Instead, she would seek out flowers in the garden, feeling her way in darkness and silence to enjoy the scent of blossoms in summer.

Copyright © 2009 by Matt Haley

As Helen grew, she began to make signs to her mother. They developed a simple language together, beginning when Helen understood by touch that a shaking head meant no and a nodding one meant yes. When she wanted ice cream, she would mime opening the freezer and shivering.

At the age of five, she was able to help her mother around the house, folding clothes and recognizing her own by touch alone. She spent a great deal of time with Martha Washington, the daughter of her mother's cook. Between them, Helen made more signs, such as placing her hands on the ground when she wanted to look for bird eggs in the long grass outside.

She already knew that the adults in the house had another world. She would sometimes reach out and feel that their lips were moving. Yet when she moved her own, no one understood. In frustration, she would throw wild tantrums, kicking and screaming without words. She felt no guilt or regret afterward, though she hurt those around her and broke toys in her rage.

There was no question then as to whether she would ever be able to leave that home for the wider and more dangerous world. On one occasion she set her clothes alight trying to dry a wet apron on a fire. Her nurse smothered the flames, but for a little girl who could neither see nor hear, the world would always be perilous.

Helen Keller was not the first to be both deaf and blind, nor even the first to overcome such a start in life. In Charles Dickens's
American Notes,
her mother read of Laura Bridgman, both blind and deaf, who had nevertheless been educated by a Dr. Gridley Howe. Howe was long dead, but it raised a hope in her mother's heart that something could be done with her bright and endlessly frustrated daughter.

When Helen was six, her parents took her to an eye specialist in Baltimore, believing that something could be done for her. The specialist saw no hope for her eyes, but for her deafness, he recommended Dr. Alexander Graham Bell in Washington, D.C. Bell's mother and wife were deaf, and he was famous chiefly for his work with deaf people. That he was the first to take out a U.S. patent on a telephone sprang from his research into hearing.

Helen was induced to sit on Bell's knee, and to her pleasure, he understood her rudimentary signs. Through Bell's recommendation, the Keller family was able to find a teacher for their daughter, a young woman who would change her life forever: Miss Anne Mansfield Sullivan.

In March 1887, Anne Sullivan arrived to live with the family in Tennessee, just before Helen turned seven. She gave Helen a doll that had been dressed by Laura Bridgman herself. As Helen played with it, Anne spelled the letters
d-o-l-l
onto the palm of Helen's open hand.

It was not long before Helen could proudly copy the action onto her mother's hand, though she did not know what letters were. In the same way, she learned simple words for things she encountered and even a few verbs, but there was still a huge gulf in her understanding. Anne Sullivan was endlessly patient and showed her that
d-o-l-l
could be used for other toys, as well as the first. Things had names!

After one frustrating morning, when she could not be made to understand the difference between
mug
and
water,
Helen smashed the doll on the floor. She felt no regret or sorrow. Without the accompanying concepts, she may not even have been capable of such emotions. Patiently, her new teacher took her outside. Sullivan knew she needed some way to make the words less abstract, to make them real for a little girl who had no frame of reference, no key to the lock of the world.

Copyright © 2009 by Matt Haley

Sullivan walked with Helen to the pump outside and placed Helen's hand under the cold water as it gushed out. At the same time, she spelled
w-a-t-e-r
on Helen's palm.

It was an awakening. In moments, Helen understood and there was a true chink of light in her darkness. It was not long before she patted Sullivan's arm and was rewarded with the word
T-e-a-c-h-e-r
spelled into her hand. After that, the little girl went very still. Nervously, her hand crept up to her own head and she tapped herself. Slowly, Sullivan spelled out
H-e-l-e-n
.

When they returned to the house, Helen touched the pieces of the broken doll and was suddenly crying. She said later that it was the first time she had ever experienced repentance and sorrow.

That same day, inspired by her sudden link to the world, she learned
mother, father, sister, teacher,
and many other words and concepts. Anne Sullivan had broken through.

That summer of 1887, Helen spent every day with her teacher, learning new words. Each one would bring sudden understanding, and Helen delighted in her widening perception.

On one occasion, Helen and Sullivan climbed a tree, then her teacher left her to fetch a picnic from the house. While Helen was alone there, more alone than many of us can imagine, a summer storm came. The wind howled around the branches where Helen clung, terrified. Sullivan came running back to get her down, but Helen had survived the tempest and the tree had not fallen. Later, she grew to love the flowering mimosa trees and climbed to the very tops of them, sitting in the swaying branches for hours at a time with the wind on her face.

Concepts other children took for granted had to be learned slowly. At first Helen wondered if love was the sweetness of flowers or the warmth of the sun. Yet she made progress and her teacher became devoted to her. As the years passed, Helen and Sullivan could hold more and more complex conversations, spelling words into each other's palms in perfect silence. Even so, there were mountains still to climb.

To teach Helen to read, Sullivan gave her pieces of card with the
letters raised so she could trace them out with her fingers. It was not long before Helen could pin
girl
to herself and hide in the wardrobe, leaving the words
is, in,
and
wardrobe
on the shelf where Sullivan could find them. All learning was a game between teacher and student, and Helen took enormous pleasure in every new thing. She learned simple sums by counting beads; she even learned geography, as Sullivan taught her to make landscapes from clay, so that the course of rivers could be traced with her hands.

Endlessly inventive, Sullivan also made a model of the earth from circles of twine and a stick, to teach Helen about the poles and zones of the planet. They grew flowers on a windowsill, raised tadpoles, and examined shells and fossils until Helen dreamed of strange creatures from the dawn of time. One of her tadpoles leaped out of the jar and Helen rescued it, pleased that it had the courage to see more of the world around it, just as she had.

By 1888, the darkness of Helen Keller's childhood had been eased enough for her to travel to Boston and the Perkins School for the Blind, where Laura Bridgman had been taught. Anne Sullivan herself had been a pupil there, when a childhood illness damaged her sight. Though Anne had recovered almost completely, she had learned manual signing from Laura Bridgman, then the first deaf-blind American to be educated.

For the first time, Helen met other blind children and was thrilled to discover that they too had been taught the manual alphabet. Her horizons opened further with visits to the sea, to Bunker Hill, and to Plymouth, where the Pilgrims had landed. Later in life she would call Boston “the City of Kind Hearts.”

She was breathing in education in great gulps by then, and at home she rode a pony she called Black Beauty, having read the book in Braille lettering. It is difficult to comprehend the courage it took for a deaf and blind girl to ride, swim in the sea, and even go tobogganing on a snowy Boston day, yet she did those things. Anne Sullivan was with her at all times, talking and teaching her constantly. Even so, they were nearly caught by a train as they crossed a trestle and had to climb down to the cross braces of the bridge as it puffed by.

When she was ten, Helen went to see another teacher who would make a crucial change in her life. Miss Sarah Fuller let Helen touch her mouth as she spoke slowly and clearly. It was incredibly hard for Helen to produce sounds from the memory of her fingers, but she never gave up. She would tell herself over and over, “I am not dumb now,” and she promised herself that her little sister would one day understand her. With her first spoken sentence, “It is warm,” she had opened another door in her life. From then on she worked night and day to improve the sounds she could make, constantly corrected by Miss Fuller and aided by Anne Sullivan.

After an intensive period of study, Helen traveled home with Sullivan by train. Her entire family came to meet her at the station. They waited in fearful anticipation for her to speak, and when she greeted them aloud, her mother wept in joy and her sister, Mildred, kissed her hand.

The following year was a difficult one for Helen. She wrote her first story, “The Frost King,” and sent it to Mr. Anagnos of the Perkins School for the Blind. He was impressed enough to publish it in the school's report, and then it came out that Helen had somehow repeated most of a story she had heard, called “The Frost Fairies.”

It was no small matter. She had no memory of the original story, but the similarities were too obvious to ignore. Mr. Anagnos felt he had been deceived and shamed, and at the school, Helen was summoned before a formal gathering to be questioned. Sullivan was not allowed to remain at her side, and Helen, a girl of twelve, suffered terribly. Marked by her grief, she never wrote fiction again, for fear that her mind would betray her into reproducing something she had once read or heard. In all her later writing, even letters to her mother, she was tortured by the idea that a sentence might not be her own and read each one over and over again to be sure.

Her next attempt at writing came the following year—a brief account of her life for a periodical, written on a Braille typewriter. Around that time she also traveled to Niagara Falls and the World's Fair, where she was allowed to touch the exhibits and sculptures. Alexander Graham Bell accompanied her and took pleasure in explaining
the sights and inventions—from his own telephone to Egyptian mummies. Helen's mind was flowering with Braille French and Latin as well as Greek, Roman, and American histories. In addition, she practiced and polished her speech constantly, hoping always to one day be understood even by strangers. Progress was very slow. How could she be corrected when the sound she made was not quite right? It was a hard, frustrating process, but she worked at it night and day.

Her world was a small one, because only those who knew the manual alphabet or the techniques of getting a blind girl to read their lips by touch could speak to her. Even so, she went on to a school for the deaf in New York, where, among other things, she studied Latin, algebra, Greek, and geography for two years. She became almost fluent in German at that time and could read Braille in four languages.

In 1896 she entered the Cambridge School for Young Ladies—the only deaf and blind pupil there. Sullivan was allowed to go with her and interpret when she could not read the teachers' lips by touch. She could not make notes in class so had to retain all that she needed and then copy it out each evening on a typewriter.