Quote du Jour | Iconoclasm
The Isis destroyers of the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud would have loved William “Basher” Dowsing. From the winter of 1643 through to the following summer, authorised by an ordinance of England’s Long Parliament to remove “all monuments of superstition and idolatry”, Dowsing, a Puritan officer who was provost-marshal of the armies of the Eastern Association during the first civil war, made it his personal mission to obliterate as much as he possibly could of sacred art in the churches and colleges of East Anglia.