I wrote a post about The Avengers on 30th December last year, Doctor….Who? Time for an update.
I’ve watched twenty four episodes but I’m still on series two, so Patrick Macnee is still partnered with Honor Blackman. They are still maverick investigators being described as amateurs but also on one occassion they are given their mission by a gent who looked to me like a senior spook, a hint of things to come.
Now it’s time to digress. In an episode called The White Dwarf, Steed gets an astronomy lesson from Cathy Gale but shows his knowledge by referring to Archbishop Ussher. I thought I’d channel-hopped to University Challenge by mistake but then thought I should read-up on Ussher.
He was an interesting cove, born James Ussher in Dublin in 1581. Ten years later Trinity College Dublin was founded and young James was admitted in 1594. He subsequently went into the Church and by 1605 was Chancellor of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. James I made him Bishop of Meath in 1621 and four years later promoted him to be Primate of all Ireland and Archbishop of Armagh.
He was an assiduous scholar and theologian. I don’t think we should get too bogged down in detail here but the reference in The Avengers was to his calculation that the Creation happened at nightfall on Sunday, 22nd October 4004 BC. He went to England in 1640, never to return to Ireland. After the Irish Uprising of 1641 in which he lost his home and his income, Parliament voted him a pension of £400 and Charles I conferred on him the property and income of the See of Carlisle. With Parliament’s permission he left London to join Charles I in Oxford in 1642 and remained loyal to the King thereafter. He almost witnessed the king’s execution at Whitehall, from the roof of the Countess of Peterborough’s London home but fainted before the axe fell.
If like me you are not familiar with the Irish Uprising in 1641 Wiki, as usual, has the low-down which I’ll not try to improve on.
The Irish Rebellion of 1641 began as an attempted coup d’état by Irish Catholic gentry, who tried to seize control of the English administration in Ireland to force concessions for the Catholics living under English rule. The coup failed and the rebellion developed into an ethnic conflict between native Irish Catholics on one side, and English and Scottish Protestant settlers on the other. This began a conflict known as the Irish Confederate Wars.
The rising was sparked by Catholic fears of an impending invasion of Ireland by anti-Catholic forces of the English Long Parliament and the Scottish Covenanters, who were defying the authority of King Charles I (king of England, Scotland, and Ireland). In turn, the rebels’ suspected association with Charles helped start the English Civil War. The English and Scottish Parliaments refused to raise an army to put down the rebellion unless it was under their command rather than the King’s.
The Irish rebellion broke out in October 1641 and was followed by several months of violent chaos before the Irish Catholic upper classes and clergy formed the Catholic Confederation in the summer of 1642. The Confederation became a de facto government of most of Ireland, free from the control of the English administration and loosely aligned with the Royalist side in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The subsequent Irish Confederate Wars continued in Ireland until the 1650s, when Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army decisively defeated the Irish Catholics and Royalists, and re-conquered the country.
After the Civil War Ussher continued his studies until his sudden death in 1656 at Lady Peterborough’s house in Reigate. He was given a State funeral by Cromwell and is buried in Westminster Abbey.