The UK riots and an evil day 500 years ago in London

By Howard Chua-Eoan

I set myself on a path toward UK citizenship this year — and so the anti-immigrant riots engulfing Britain and Northern Ireland have left me shaken.

The vitriol and violence focused on the foreign-born may have been sparked by misinformation, but that doesn’t disguise the fact that the tinder was waiting to be lit in a Britain that many natives and newcomers find hard to recognise reactionary and polarised, instead of civil and embracing.

My colleague Adrian Wooldridge has examined the situation, concluding that Prime Minister Keir Starmer faces tough decisions with his political honeymoon having lasted less than a month.

Thuggery cannot be tolerated, but many Britons are bewildered as ever larger waves of immigration transform their cities and towns. The confusion was not helped by five prime ministers vowing and failing to regulate the flow over the past 14 years.

I come to this from a harsher side of immigration control. My family had hoped to move to the US from the Philippines in the early 1970s, but American bureaucrats threw up roadblocks that resulted in a seven-year delay to our application. My parents — the children of immigrants themselves — persevered because of the promise of a better life on the other side of the process.

My 40-year career in journalism, mostly in New York City but more recently here in London, is a testament to their patience. Once we arrived in New York City, we were welcomed — as I have been here in London for the past six years.

Other migrants have had more harrowing voyages and much less hospitable receptions. With the world as it is, patience often isn’t a virtue in the face of adversity and danger.

Scripture provides consolation. Muslims will find comfort in the Quran: “Was not the earth of God spacious enough for you to flee for refuge?” Even as we waited years to change countries, my Presbyterian mother repeated the lines from Genesis that emboldened her decision: “Go out from your land, your relatives, and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”

And Exodus has this to say: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens: you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

My habit is to reach for more secular lessons, often from history. Alas, in England, there were apparent parallels to the havoc we have today, but it’s more messy than inspirational. In 1517, London was wracked by what some historians now call “Evil May Day.”

Perhaps as many as 2,000 English people, mostly men, were riled up by an itinerant preacher in St. Paul’s churchyard who, at the direction of a local merchant, blasted the dire presence of the “strangers” among them — foreigners who were influential in politics, or prosperous merchants or laborers who were taking their jobs.

Thomas More, who became Henry VIII’s famous and tragic philosopher-bureaucrat, tried to talk them out of their rebellion, but failed.

Many migrants were beaten up and their property destroyed, but it was the rioters who got the worst of it in the end. More than 5,000 soldiers were called in to keep the peace; and King Henry — then 25 years old — executed more than a dozen of the main instigators.

It was a tyrannical response: The death penalty was usually reserved for treason, not carousing and loutish behavior, as threatening as it may be. Henry’s queen — at that point, the Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon, thus poignantly an immigrant herself — interceded with him to spare most of the hundreds of others who’d been accused.

Sixteen years later, everything and everyone would take further tumbles with the Brexit of its time: The ever-more tyrannical Henry divorced Catherine, beginning a centuries-long rupture with the Pope in Rome that lingers to this day. More would lose his head for trying to defend her rights and the prerogatives of the Catholic Church (which made him a saint).

So do these messy ironies of history trump faith and hope? No. A sentiment abides from that half-millennium old rebellion, embodied in a speech by William Shakespeare inserted into a play about More, written decades after the events of Evil May Day.

As the playwright imagined it, the future saint tries to calm the mob that was out for the blood of “wretched strangers, their babies at their backs and their poor luggage, plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation.”

He pleads with them to imagine themselves in the place of their targets. What if the king should banish them for the crimes they wished to commit? he asked.

“What country, by the nature of your error, should give you harbor?… Why you needs be strangers: would you be pleased to find a nation of such barbarous temper, that, breaking out in hideous violence, would not afford you an abode on earth, whet their detested knives against your throats, spurn you like dogs... [as if] God owed not nor made not you?”

Shakespeare’s defense of immigrants is as spirited as can be found anywhere in literature, even in the admittedly beleaguered, liberal 21st Century.

Just as important, this eloquent plea is straight from the literary heart of Englishness itself, from an artist whose words still echo hundreds of years after they were written.

Through More, Shakespeare made “the strangers’ case” as he thundered against the “mountainish inhumanity” of those native-born all too willing to kill foreigners as if slaughter was a divine right.

His words are proof of the better angels of our Anglican nature. They can still be listened to; the softly abiding British decency can yet be evoked. That’s enough for me to persevere. But we’ve got our work cut out for us.