British Peers

"...we are now in a position which we have not been within the memory of living men. (“Shame.”) Now, what does this imply? Everything depends upon the Navy. (Hear, hear.) We exist as an Empire only on sufferance unless our Navy be supreme (hear, hear), and I for one, ladies and gentlemen, am not content to exist on sufferance. (Cheers.)"

"...the great Unionist party shall still control, whether in power or whether in opposition, the destinies of this great Empire."

"It is unfortunate, considering that enthusiasm moves the world, that so few enthusiasts can be trusted to speak the truth."

"If Germany is going again to be a great armed camp, filled with a population about twice as great as that of any State in Europe; and if she is going again to pursue a policy of world domination, it will no doubt tax all the statesmanship of the rest of the world to prevent a repetition of the calamities from which we have been suffering. But the only radical cure for this is a change in the international system of the world—a change which French statesmen are doing nothing to promote, and the very possibility of which many of them regard with ill-concealed derision. They may be right; but if they are, it is quite certain that no manipulation of the Rhine frontier is going to make France anything more than a second-rate Power, trembling at the nod of its great neighbours in the East, and depending from day to day on the changes and chances of a shifting diplomacy and uncertain alliances."

"I shall offer uncompromising resistance to any measure which may throw obstacles in the way of the teaching of religion in elementary schools. I will not consent in the name of religious freedom, to banish religion from education; or, in the name of religious equality, to plunder the Church."

"To secure order, freedom, and safety, for the minority as well as for the majority of the Irish people, and to do so as far as possible, by the administration of equal laws, should be the first object of any Ministry responsible for the government of that country. But I shall resist to the uttermost any attempt to loosen the connection, which has subsisted so long between Ireland and Great Britain, under whatever disguises that attempt may be made."

"There are those who talk as if Irishmen were justified in disobeying the law because the law comes to them in a foreign garb. I see no reason why any local colour should be given to the Ten Commandments."

"I hold that fiscal reform is, and must remain, the first constructive work of the Unionist party; That the objects of such reform are to secure more equal terms of competition for British trade and closer commercial union with the Colonies. ... the establishment of a moderate general tariff on manufactured goods, not imposed for the purpose of raising prices or giving artificial protection against legitimate competition, and the imposition of a small duty on foreign corn are not in principle objectionable, and should be adopted if shown to be necessary for the attainment of the ends in view or for the purposes of revenue."

"The League of Nations has had many critics, but I am not aware that, among the multitude of criticisms that have been offered, any suggestion makes its appearance for finding a substitute for that organization which we desire to see entrusted, I admit, with the great task of preserving the peace of the world. Those who criticize the League of Nations have no substitute for the League of Nations. They are prepared, it seems, for the civilized world to go on in the future, as it has gone on in the past, oscillating between those scenes of violence and sanguinary disturbance and the intervals in which great and ambitious nations pile up their armaments for a new effort. To me such an ideal appears to be absolutely intolerable, and I am not prepared, seriously, to discuss with any man what the future of the international relations should be unless he is prepared either to accept in some form or another the League of Nations, or to tell me what substitute he proposes for it."

"Nationality was valuable, in so far as it was a centripetal principle, in so far as it produced closer cooperation between members of the human race. It had the other side, and it must not be put on an absurd pedestal. It was not to any politician's or statesman's credit that he worked on the emotions of nationality to produce division; the proper use of the feeling of nationality was to produce union."

"He did not believe that any such transaction could be quoted from the annals of our political or Parliamentary history. It stood alone—he did not wish to use strong language, but he was going to say—it stood alone in its infamy."

"Dear Carson, I never heard a more powerful speech nor a more searching crossXam. I congratulate you on having escaped most of the filth. Yrs ever, R. Henn Collins."

"What a fool I was. I was only a puppet, and so was Ulster, and so was Ireland, in the political game that was to get the Conservative Party into power."

"Although a Unionist, he never was un-Irish."

"Talk of a League of Nations! Let us at all events begin with a League of British Nations."

"I wonder how many Members of this House and of His Majesty's Government are really following out the conspiracy to drive the British out of India and out of Egypt? It is all one conspiracy, it is all engineered in the same way, it all has the same object—to destroy our sea power and drive us out of Asia."

"We in Ulster will tolerate no Sinn Féin. But we tell you this—that if, having offered you our help, you are yourselves unable to protect us from the machinations of Sinn Féin, and you won't take our help; well then, we tell you that we will take the matter into our own hands. We will reorganise."

"Talk to me of treaties! Talk to me of the League of Nations! Every Great Power in Europe was pledged by treaty to preserve Belgium. That was a League of Nations, but it failed."

"I asked [David Lloyd George] if he believed in Carson. “Yes”, he said. “He is a great man: he has courage, he has determination; he has judgment”. I questioned whether he had judgment. “Oh, yes”, was [Lloyd George's] reply. “He was extraordinarily clever over the Ulster business: his calculations were almost unerring”."

"This Home Rule conspiracy is the most nefarious conspiracy that has ever been put before the electors of this country."

"We have given of our best to build up the Empire. We recall the names of Wellington, of Roberts, of White of Ladysmith, and we think of Coghill of Isandula, around whose body when it was found dead the flag of the British race, the old Union Jack, was found. All these were men of loyalist Ireland and mainly of Ulster. And now, forsooth, this great England, the great country that boasts of liberty, of adherence to principle, and of never deserting its friends, is to sacrifice the loyalists to the necessity of maintaining this heaven-sent Government in power."

"There is no one in the world who would be more pleased to see an absolute unity in Ireland than I would, and it could be purchased tomorrow, at what does not seem to me a very big price. If the South and West of Ireland came forward tomorrow to Ulster and said – "Look here, we have to run our old island, and we have to run her together, and we will give up all this everlasting teaching of hatred of England, and we will shake hands with you, and you and we together, within the Empire, doing our best for ourselves and the United Kingdom, and for all His Majesty's Dominion will join together", I will undertake that we would accept the handshake."

"I am here tonight under the most tragic circumstances, with the possibilities of grave and difficult operations in Belfast and in Ulster within almost a few days...I am here to tell you solemnly and honestly that we intend to see this matter through. The cost may be great, the sufferings may be terrible."

"I trust he will conduct his cross-examination with all the added bitterness of an old friend."

"Nothing Ireland—north, south, east, and west—has suffered so much in its history as the broken pledges of British statesmen."

"We do not want sentence of death with a stay of execution for six years."

"England's difficulty is not Ulster's opportunity. However we are treated, and however others act, let us act rightly. We do not seek to purchase terms by selling our patriotism."

"You will be a Parliament for the whole community. We used to say that we could not trust an Irish Parliament in Dublin to do justice to the Protestant minority. Let us take care that that reproach can no longer be made against your Parliament, and from the outset let them see that the Catholic minority have nothing to fear from a Protestant majority. ... Let us take care that we win all that is best amongst those who have been opposed to us in this community. ... And so I say: from the start be tolerant to all religions, and, while maintaining to the last your own traditions and your own citizenship, take care that similar rights are preserved for those who differ from us."

"But I say to my Ulster friends, and I say it with all sincerity and solemnity: "Do not be led into any such false line. Stick to your old ideals of closer and closer connection with this country. The Coalition Government, after all, is not the British nation, and the British nation will certainly see you righted. Your interests lie with Great Britain. You have helped her, and you have helped her Empire, and her Empire belongs just as much to you as it does to England. Stick to it, and trust the British people.""

"And shall I name one who hath been in our age, and wish him now to live to cure so great a canker? Would God England had a Cromwell: I will say no more."

"[I have had many a talk with Cromwell] of god, of nature & of other polytyke & wordly thyngys [from which he has] geddryd more frute of truth then I have downe of any other man lyvyng syth I cam here to my cuntrey."

"It is not unreasonable to argue that if Henry had been willing to carry out Cromwell's advice about using and husbanding his resources, and if he had not destroyed Cromwell in act of supreme folly, then by the time of Henry's death the English monarchy might have been strong enough to withstand the threats to its supremacy which the future was to bring. If Cromwell had succeeded in making Henry all-powerful, then the future history of England could have approached more closely to that of France under the Bourbons, and the English parliament suffered the same fate as the Estates General."

"A good household manager, but not fit to meddle in the affairs of kings."

"Far from being the ruthless Machiavellian of legend, Cromwell was a man possessed of a high concept of the 'state' and national sovereignty, and a deep concern for Parliament and the law; an administrative genius; one who may have lacked profound religious sense (though instinctively favourable to some kind of Erasmian Protestantism), but something of an idealist nonetheless. That the 1530s were a decisive decade in English history was due largely to his energy and vision. He was immediately responsible for the vast legislative programme of the later sessions of the Reformation Parliament – a programme not rivalled in volume and moment until the nineteenth or even twentieth centuries. He oversaw the breach with Rome and the establishment of the Royal Supremacy. He effected a new political integration of the kingdom and imposed upon it a new political discipline by making war on local franchises and the entrenched bastard feudalism of the northern and western marches, handling the final incorporation of Wales into English political life and giving Ireland a foretaste of determined English overlordship. He directed the immense operation of the dissolution of the monasteries.... Indeed, he left a deep mark on much of the machinery of central and local government. Finally, he was the first royal servant fully to perceive the power of that young giant, the printing-press."

"The Reformation, then, was not the inevitable development of the text-books. Whether it would have come anyway it is idle to speculate; but it came in the 1530's simply because Henry's desire for his divorce was baulked by an international situation which made co-operation with the papacy impossible, and it came as it did because Thomas Cromwell produced a plan which achieved Henry's ends by destroying the papal power and jurisdiction in England and by creating in England an independent sovereign state. This policy was not present from the start; it had to overcome much caution and conservatism as well as fear of the consequences before its bold simplicity was permitted to develop. The Henrician Reformation reflects the ideas—one may say, the political philosophy—of Thomas Cromwell."

"The Act in Restraint of Appeals to Rome was a government measure, affected slightly by opposition from the church and not at all by parliament. A proposal to authorize the archbishops by act of parliament to dissolve the king's marriage was soon replaced by a comprehensive attack on papal jurisdiction in England. In Cromwell's hands, the preamble turned into an unhesitating statement of the theory which underlay the whole practice of Henry VIII and his government: the theory of the imperial crown of England sovereign within its own realm over both laity and church."

"I think now that in England under the Tudors (1955), attempting to restore him to view and show him in a truer light, I made some rather extravagant claims for him, though I stand by the essence of my opinions there. I still think that Cromwell was the most remarkable English statesman of the sixteenth century and one of the most remarkable in the country's history. I still think that he instigated and in part accomplished a major and enduring transformation in virtually every aspect of the nation's public life. And I still think that he was largely responsible for the fact that the medieval heritage of common law and representative institutions remained at the heart of England's modern government, until very recent times."

"I am A Subiect and boorn to obbey lawse, and, knowing that the tryall of all lawse only consystethe in honest and probable wytnes."

"I haue medelyd in So many matyers vnder your Highnes that I am not able to answer them all...but harde it ys for me or any other medlyng as I haue done to lyue vnder your grace and your lawse but we must daylye offende and wher I haue offendyd, I most humblye aske mercye and pardon at your gracyous will and plesure."

"I am come hether to dye, and not to purge my self, as maie happen, some thynke that I will, for if I should so do, I wer a very wretche and miser: I am by the Lawe condempned to die, and thanke my lorde God that hath appoynted me this deathe, for myne offence: For sithence the tyme that I haue had yeres of discrecion, I haue liued a synner, and offended my Lorde God, for the whiche I aske hym hartely forgeuenes. And it is not vnknowne to many of you, that I haue been a great traueler in this worlde, and beyng but of a base degree, was called to high estate, and sithens the tyme I came therunto, I haue offended my prince, for the whiche I aske hym hartely forgeuenes, and beseche you all to praie to God with me, that he will forgeue me. O father forgeue me. O sonne forgeue me, O holy Ghost forgeue me: O thre persons in one God forgeue me. And now I praie you that be here, to beare me record, I die in the Catholicke faithe, not doubtyng in any article of my faith, no nor doubtyng in any Sacrament of the Churche. Many hath sclaundered me, and reported that I haue been a bearer, of suche as hath mainteigned euill opinions, whiche is vntrue, but I confesse that like as God by his holy spirite, doth instruct vs in the truthe, so the deuill is redy to seduce vs, and I haue been seduced: but beare me witnes that I dye in the Catholicke faithe of the holy Churche. And I hartely desire you to praie for the Kynges grace, that he maie long liue with you, in healthe and prosperitie. And after him that his sonne prince Edward, that goodly ympe, maie long reigne ouer you. And once again I desire you to pray for me, that so long as life remaigneth in this fleshe, I wauer nothyng in my faithe."

"The ix. day of Iuly, Thomas lorde Cromewel, late made erle of Essex...beyng in the counsaill chaber, was sodainly apprehended, and committed to the tower of London, the whiche many lamented, but mo reioysed, and specially suche, as either had been religious men, or fauored religious persones, for thei banqueted, and triumphed together that night, many wisshyng that that daie had been seuen yere before, and some fearyng least he should escape, although he were imprisoned, could not be mery. Other who knewe nothyng but truth by hym, bothe lamented hym, and hartely praied for hym: But this is true that of certain of the Clergie he was detestably hated, & specially of suche as had borne swynge, and by his meanes was put from it, for in dede he was a man, that in all his doynges, semed not to fauor any kynde of Popery, nor could not abide the snoffyng pride of some prelates, whiche vndoubtedly whatsoeuer els was the cause of his death, did shorten his life, and procured the ende that he was brought vnto."

"I do not cease to gyue thankes, that it hathe pleased hys goodnes to vse me, as an instrument and to worke somwhat by me, so I truste, I am as ready to serue hym in my calling to my litel power, as ye ar preste, to wryght worse of me then ye owght to thinke. My prayer is, that God gyue me no longer lyfe, then I shall be gladde to vse myn office in edificatione, and not in destructione."

"[Y]e shall herwith receive the kinges hieghness letteres addressed vnto you to put you in remembraunce of his hieghness travaelles and your dieuty touchinge ordre to be taken for preachinge to thintente the people maie be taught the truthe, and yet not charged at the begynnynge with ouer manney Nouelties, the publication whereof onles the same be tempered and quallified with moche wisdome doo rather brede contention Deuision and contrarietey in opinion in the vnlerned multitude, then either edifie, or remove from them and oute of their hartes suche abuse as by the corrupt and ynsauery teaching of the bishoppe of Rome, and his disciples haue crept in the same."

"I thinke that like as the Kinges Maieste cannot better or more hieghly advaunce thonour of god ne more prudently prouide for his owne suretie and the tranquilitie of his Realme domynyons and subgietes thenne in the discrete and charitable punishment of suche as doo by any meane Labour and purpose to sowe sedicion, diuision & contention, in opinion amonges his people contrary to the trouthe of goddes worde and his graces most christien ordenaunces... And therefore myne opinion is that you shal by all meanes diuise howe with charyte and myld handeling of thinges to quenche this slaunderous Bent as moche as you maye ever exhorting men discretely and without Rigour or extreame dealing to knowe and serue god truely and their prince and Souereign Lorde with all humilite and obedyence."

"For if credence shuld be gyven to euery suche lewd person as wold affirme himself to haue reuelations from god what redyer wey were there to subuert al common we[l]thes and good orders in the worlde... As for the late lord of Cauntreburys seying vnto you that she had many greate visions, it ought to move you never a deale to gyve credence vnto her or her reuelations."

"My lord, you had showed yourself of much more patience—I will not say of much more prudency—if ye had contented yourself with their lawful appeal and my lawful injunctions and rather have sought fully to instruct me in the matter than thus to desire to conquer me by shrewd words, to vanquish me by sharp threaps [assertions] of Scripture which, as I know to be true, so I trust to God—as great clerk as ye be—ye allege them out of their place."

"Suerly my lord I suppose this had been no greate cause more to reiect the one than thother for ye know by histories of the bible that god may by his reuelation dispense with his own Law, as with the Israelites spoyling the egiptians and with Jacob to hue iiij wifes, and suche other."

"The yvel (as you write therein truely) will labour to peruert the good, And even soo those that be well disposed wyll both lament the foly of the yvel and doo what they canne to make them better. He that eyther feareth not god ne esteameth the kinges Maiesties Iniunctyons preceptes, ordenaunces, and commandementes, is no mete herbe to growe in his Maiesties most catholique and Vertuous garden."

"I amongist other haue Indured a parlyament which contenwid by the space of xvij hole wekes wher we communyd of warre pease Stryffe contencyon debatte murmure grudge Riches pouerte penurye trowth falshode Justyce equyte discayte opprescyon Magnanymyte actyuyte force attempraunce Treason murder Felonye, consyli... and also how a commune welth myght be ediffyed and a[lso] contenewid within our Realme. Howbeyt in conclusyon we haue d[one] as our predecessors haue been wont to doo that ys to say, as well as we myght and lefte wher we begann."

"Tyndall (who assuredlie sheweth himself in myn opynyon rather to be replete with venymous envye rancour and malice then with any good lerning vertue knowlage or discression)."