Queen Elizabeth II, Defender of the Faith

It was St. Patrick’s Day. With her jaw set, my mother dripped green food coloring into our little glasses of orange juice. We were careful not to smirk unless her back was turned, but she picked up on our irreverence anyway.

“A million people died, and the British could have stopped it,” she hissed softly.

We could care less about history, but my mother felt it in a visceral way. Her parents were born in Ireland.

My mother’s target was William, Sovereign Prince of Orange. The Brits had bullied Ireland for centuries, but in 1691, William, now Protestant King of England, Ireland and Scotland, really brought the hammer down on Irish Catholics, depriving them of their land and throwing them out of the government. From then on, the Brits hammered away at Catholics, denying them the vote, closing their schools, keeping it up for so long that they forgot that most of the problems in Ireland were of Britain’s making. Their plan had been for Catholics to quietly work the farms that had been stolen from them, producing a little food for their families and a lot of cash for their conquerors. Instead, there were unpleasant uprisings and, due in part to Ireland’s poor soil, unreliable crop yields. When the crops failed spectacularly in the mid-19^th century, the British sighed with impatience. The Irish had long ago lost the war, so they were losers, right? Irishmen were always drunk, and the women just kept having babies. Brits complained of “famine fatigue.” They were sick of rescuing the Irish from themselves, so they finally decided to just not do it.

Neither Queen Elizabeth II nor any of her predecessors has ever apologized. So far as I know, there has never been an official acknowledgement of the colossal damage the British did all over the globe. The Queen’s replacement, her son, Charles, has tried to enlighten the world about the climate crisis. Maybe he will open his mouth and speak about his country’s real history, but it’s not likely. Americans are right now at the raw and painful edge of coming to terms with their own country’s history of oppression, and so far it’s not going well.