My great grandfather on my father’s side was named Absalom Bartlett Hyde. He was born in 1853. He named one of his sons, Oliver Cromwell Hyde.

The real, original Oliver Cromwell was the leader of the Puritans, or so-called Roundheads, in England who led a group of British Parliamentarians who signed the warrant for the execution by beheading of King Charles I in 1649. This was, of course, an absolutely sensational event.

Absalom Bartlett fathered his youngest son, James Bartlett, with a lady named Margaret Gabourel, who was not the mother of his other children.

James Bartlett Hyde’s eldest son, Charles Bartlett, was my father, and Charles was christened as a Roman Catholic, the family story being that my grandfather, James Bartlett, wanted a special friend to be his first child’s godfather, and that special friend was a firm Roman Catholic. Hence, Charles had to be christened Catholic.    

The remainder of James Bartlett Hyde’s children with his wife, Eunice Locke Hyde, were all Anglican, to the best of my knowledge. Two of them, Grace and Chrystel, were converted to the Baha’i faith when they were adults by an American lady named Shirley Warde, a Broadway actress who had migrated to British Honduras in the 1950’s.

The point of the previous paragraphs is that since Absalom Hyde obviously held the original Oliver Cromwell, the so-called Lord Protector of England, in high esteem, I believe he would not have wanted his grandson, Charles Bartlett, to be christened a Roman Catholic, Oliver Cromwell having been the leader of some very anti-Catholic people.

A few days ago, a friend loaned me a historical novel by one Robert Harris entitled Act of Oblivion. I have only read a few chapters so far, but, because my class at St. John’s College did British and European history between 1959 and 1963, the material I have read so far in the novel has stimulated me greatly. 

Fifty-nine Puritan/Roundhead Parliamentarians signed the execution warrant for Charles I, and the technical name for them is “regicides.” The Harris novel focuses on the 1660 flight (by sea) of two of the regicides from England to Massachusetts in northeastern America. The so-called Royalists had returned to power in England by military force, installed Charles I’s son, Charles II, on the throne, and had begun hunting down the regicides.

The United Kingdom (or Great Britain) is comprised of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. But most of us just refer to the kingdom as England. The matter has always been a little confusing for me.

In any case, the core issue of the violence in the British Isles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had to do with religion, which is to say, the different forms of worship of God. Those who remained Roman Catholic in Britain after the Reformation began in 1517 were also referred to, in a derogatory fashion, as “papists,” while the anti-Catholics, to repeat, were called “Puritans,” and were referred to as “Roundheads” when they went to war against Charles I under Cromwell’s leadership.

The English King, Henry VIII, had been married to a Spanish Catholic princess by the name of Catherine of Aragon. Henry wanted a son, a male heir, which Catherine was not able to produce, so he wanted to divorce her and marry one Anne Boleyn. The Pope of Rome, however, refused to permit the divorce. Henry broke away from the Roman Catholic Church and declared himself the head of the Church of England (Anglican) around 1534.

You must understand that before the German monk, Martin Luther, began the rebellion against the Pope and his Roman Catholic Church in 1517, all of Europe was Catholic. And for centuries there had been various marriages in Europe wherein Catholic royalty from different European countries were marrying among themselves. Religiously speaking, Europe had been monolithic before 1517. The royal families had been intertwined by marriage.

It was as a result of pre-1517 European history that the King of Scotland, James I, who had ruled Scotland for 36 years, became also King of England in 1603, following the death of Elizabeth I, Henry VIII’s daughter with Anne Boleyn. James I’s claim to the throne of England derived from the fact that his mother, Margaret, had been the daughter of Henry VII. So, Henry VIII and Margaret Tudor were brother and sister, and Elizabeth I and James I were first cousins.

By the time the Spanish soldier, Ignatius of Loyola, founded the militant Catholic Jesuits in 1540, the disagreements between Catholics and Protestants in England and Scotland were violent and bloody.

The Queen of Scotland from 1542 to 1567, Mary Queen of Scots, was the granddaughter of the aforementioned Margaret Tudor. (Mary was also, briefly, the Queen of France by marriage.) She was considered a serious threat by the Protestants in both Scotland and England, because she was a Roman Catholic. English Protestants feared that if anything happened to the Protestant Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603), Mary would ascend the English throne. The reality turned out to be that Mary fled from Scotland Protestants to take refuge with her second cousin, Elizabeth, but after she was imprisoned for 19 years, Elizabeth allowed her to be beheaded.

So then, to end on what may appear to be an unrelated note, Guatemala’s arrogant claim to our country derives from the fact that the Guatemalans are claiming rights which were supposedly held by Spain, Guatemala’s colonial masters until 1821. Spain (along with Portugal) acquired rights over this half of the planet (the “New World”) from the Pope of Rome, when the Pope signed the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. This was how big the Pope was, how big Catholicism was, until religious hell began to break loose in 1517.

And, as an incidental postscript, this is how the “civilized” Europeans used to execute people as recently as three and four centuries ago: They were hanged until the point of unconsciousness, cut down, revived, castrated, disembowelled—the entrails dragged out and burned in front of the living victim—then beheaded and the body cut into four quarters for public display.