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

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.