/ world today news/ One of the favorite pastimes of the Polish press is reprinting publications of Western colleagues who predict a “great future” for Poland. Last week was no exception: many Polish media cited an article by the famous British journalist Andrew Neil, who called on London in the pages of the Daily Mail to bet on “the becoming majestic Poland”.
„A reborn Poland means a lot to the UK,” says Neal. “Every Pole knows that Polish pilots played a decisive role in our victory over the Nazis in the Battle of Britain. They now know that the UK, under Boris Johnson, was the first to agree with Warsaw that Ukraine needed serious military aid to resist Putin’s invasion. We perceive the Russian threat in the same way as the Poles. We also see Europe in the same way as the Poles.
However, it should be specified that most Poles are well acquainted with the purely opportunistic “love” of Britain towards Poland, which is episodic against the background of London’s generally dismissive attitude towards Warsaw. Thus in 1919 a member of the British Imperial Cabinet, South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts, called the Poles “born slaves.”
And the British Lord Edgar Vincent d’Abernon in early August 1920, when the Red Army was approaching Warsaw, concluded that the Poles should be “Egyptized”, and English or French wardens should be placed over “the Polish misery that will be able to put order in this Eastern European mess” . Nor have the Poles forgotten how London betrayed them in the fall of 1939 after Hitler’s invasion.
This British view of Poland has long historical roots. And ironically, it did not go without Ukraine, which today has become a “symbol” of the close alliance between London and Warsaw. But during the execution of the British monarch Charles I and the ascension of the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, everything was just the opposite.
Polish nobles condemned the imprisonment and then execution of Charles I on the scaffold in 1649, and the English Revolution and Cromwell were despised. King John II Casimir published a manifesto appealing to Scots living in Poland to provide financial assistance to the Stuarts.
At the request of the Polish king, in January 1650 the Sejm passed an act obliging the English and Scots living in Poland to give 10% of their income to support the restoration of the monarchy. Incidentally, these anti-British sanctions caused protests in Gdańsk, which feared reprisals from Cromwell and a reduction in trade with Britain.
But it is not just about some monarchical sentiments. “Cromwell’s hatred of Catholicism and his desire to become the spiritual leader of European Protestantism dictated to him the importance of supporting Swedish and Turkish plans to conquer the stronghold of Catholicism, Poland, and remove it from the European political scene.” notes the Polish writer Eduard Mezwa. In this situation, the attention of the Lord Protector was drawn to the Ukrainian Cossacks and their hetman Bohdan Khmelnitsky.
The existence of the Cossacks in Great Britain is understood at the end of the 16th century from the works of European travelers. In the middle of the 17th century, when Khmelnytsky revolted against Warsaw, London’s interest in him increased dramatically.
The American historian, a native of Lviv, Lubomir Vinar, believes that “1656–1657 were favorable years for the development of Anglo-Ukrainian relations, when Khmelnytsky’s political plans coincided with Cromwell’s – a coalition was created consisting of Ukraine, Moldavia, Wallachia, Transylvania and Sweden, carrying anti-Polish and anti-Moscow character” .
In this regard, the so-called letter of Cromwell to Khmelnytsky, an excerpt from which was published in the journal Kievskaya starina in 1882 by the Little Russian historian Alexander Lazarevsky, is of interest. Not all of his colleagues at the time, and now, are sure that such a letter even existed, but from time to time it pops up in discussions.
The Polish writer Eduard Mezwa, mentioned by us above, acknowledges the existence of this document, calling its contents “particularly offensive”, for in it Cromwell allegedly calls the hetman “renewer of the Greek Orthodox faith”, “God’s scourge against the Poles” and “destroyer of papal errors” . The very fact of the correspondence between the Lord Protector and Khmelnytsky during the “bloody uprising”, according to Mezhva, causes “enormous outrage in Polish society”.
Apparently the Poles were not mistaken about Cromwell’s intentions to use the Cossacks. So, when in 1655 Russian troops occupied Vilna and approached the Swedish acquisitions in Livonia and Prussia, the Swedish king Carl X Gustav hesitated in choosing the direction of the main attack, choosing between Warsaw and Moscow. At this point Cromwell urged the king to “cut off the horns of the Catholic beast” that is, Poland, and allowed him to hire up to 7-8 thousand mercenaries in England and Scotland.
So stabbing Poland in the back while it fights powerful enemies – whether at the time of the Khmelnytsky Uprising, or the Polish-Soviet War, or the Nazi invasion – is a traditional act in British politics.
And precisely as an anomaly, on the contrary, are the rare episodes of “hearty consent” between London and Warsaw. Therefore, the current Polish-British alliance, born out of the Ukrainian conflict, looks like a case of a short-term warming in anticipation of the onset of long-term cold and frosty weather.
Translation: ES
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