George Browne Quotes
A bird may be taught to speak with as much sense as many of the clergy do in this country. These, though not scholars, yet are crafty to cozen the poor common people and to dissuade them from following his highness orders. The country folk here much hate your lordship, and despitefully call you, in their Irish tongue, the Blacksmith's Son. As a friend, I desire your lordship to look well to your noble person.
Browne, an Englishman by birth, was the instrument of the Protestant Reformation in Ireland.
George Browne, ?-1556, Archbishop of Dublin, Letter to Lord Cromwell, Dublin, April, 1538
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
He was particularly referring to the reigns of Queen Elizabeth I and James I.
He also had harsh words for the American Fenians which he published and these attacks were answered with his murder in Montreal in 1868. The Fenians assumed that since he had been an Irish radical patriot he would support their cause. However their indiscriminate violence and terror against anything British including Canada turned McGee’s pen against them. The American Fenians actually tried to mount an invasion of Canada in 1868 and a pitched battle ensued. They dealt with McGee in their classic manner.
Some of the founding fathers were deeply religious men while others were not so. Some varied in their believes at different times of their lives, and a number were not very favorable towards orthodox religion. At the time, Roman Catholic and Protestant churches were persecuting other religions throughout Europe and people were still being killed for their heretical beliefs. Most important to some of them, kings and other monarchs whom they abhorred, all at the time claimed the Divine Right of Kings and the established churches were the most important support for monarchs. At the time most organized religions were opposed to freedom of conscience and certainly opponents of separation of church and state. American churches tended to take on American values but were never given the chance to dominate the American government they way many had in Europe and the rest of the world.
Although the Irish members of Parliament were never sufficient to control Parliament on an “Irish question” pitting Irish against English, they were at times in sufficient numbers to hold the balance of power between English factions, thus “controlling England.”
1st Earl of Beaconsfield
Anna Maria Fielding married Samuel Carter Hall but published her many works as S. C. Hall.
The League refers to The Tenant League which united Irish factions that had been disparate before.
a lower class Catholic area of Ireland
Al-Maarri’s quotations are not only meaningful in their own right, but they illustrate the openness and free thinking that was allowed in the early days of Islam before about 1100. If anyone wrote such things today in most Islamic countries he would at least be jailed if not executed for blasphemy.
When the priest died, 3 handwritten manuscripts were found written and signed by him in which he attacked religion in general and the church and the Bible in particular. His Testament was read by Voltaire and Denis Diderot among others and he was very influential in their development as opponents of organized religion. This quotation has been one of the bases of secular humanism which would then develop after he had died.
George Browne D.D. (died 1556) was an English Augustinian who was appointed by Henry VIII of England to the vacant Episcopal see of Dublin. He became the king's main instrument in his desire to establish the state church in the Kingdom of Ireland.
