Owen Glyndwr and the Last Struggle for Welsh Independence / With a Brief Sketch of Welsh History

by A. G. Bradley

Henry accomplished these great reforms in the teeth of the baronial influence of the whole Marches, and if the slaughter of the Wars of the Roses had made his task somewhat easier, he should have full credit for achieving a piece of legislation whose importance as an epoch-marking event could hardly be exaggerated, not only as affecting Wales but the four powerful counties that adjoined it.

To create and organise six new counties out of chaos, to enfranchise and give representation to twelve, to permanently attach one of the three tributary kingdoms to the British Crown, is a performance that should be sufficient to lift the reign of a monarch out of the common run. Every schoolboy is familiar with the figure of Henry VIII. prancing in somewhat purposeless splendour on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. But who remembers the assimilation of Wales to England which was his doing?

Wales, though small in population, was numerically much greater in proportion to England than is now the case. To-day she is a twentieth, then perhaps she was nearly a seventh, of the whole. It was of vital importance that her people should be satisfied and well governed. The accession of the Tudors and the common sense of their second monarch achieved without difficulty what might have been a long and arduous business.

The palmy days of Elizabeth saw Wales, like England, advance by leaps and bounds. The native gentry, the tribesmen, the “Boneddigion,” always pressing on the Norman aristocracy, now came again in wholesale fashion to the front. The grim castle and the fortified manor developed into the country house. Polite learning increased and the upper classes abandoned, in a manner almost too complete, the native tongue. The higher aristocracy, taking full and free part in English life, became by degrees wholly Anglicised, and the habit, though very gradually, spread downwards throughout the whole gentry class. The Reformation had been accepted with great reluctance in Wales. The people were conservative by instinct and loyal to all such constituted authorities as they held in affection. They would take anything, however, for that very reason, from the Tudors, and swallowed, or partly swallowed, a pill that was by no means to their liking. In Elizabeth’s time the Bible and Prayer-Book were translated into Welsh, which marked another epoch in the history of Wales much greater than it at first sounds. It was not done without opposition: the desire in official circles to stamp out the native language, which became afterward so strong, had already germinated, and it was thought that retaining the Scriptures and the Service in English would encourage its acquisition among the people. The prospects, however, in the actual practice did not seem encouraging, and in the meantime the souls of the Welsh people were starving for want of nourishment. The Welsh Bible and Prayer-Book proved an infinite boon to the masses of the nation, but it did more than anything else to fix the native tongue.

Wales readily transformed its affection for the Tudors into loyalty for the Stuarts. The Church, too, was strong—the bent of the people being averse to Puritanism, and indeed nowhere in Britain did the survivals of popery linger so long as among the Welsh mountains. Even to-day, amid the uncongenial atmosphere that a century of stern Calvinism has created, some unconscious usages and expressions of the peasantry in remoter districts preserve its traces. The Civil War found Wales staunch almost to a man for the King. There were some Roundheads in the English part of Pembroke, as was natural, and a few leading families elsewhere were found upon the Parliamentary side. Such of the castles as had not too far decayed were furbished up and renewed the memories of their stormy prime under circumstances far more injurious to their masonry. Harlech, Chirk, Denbigh, Conway, and many others made notable defences. The violent loyalty of Wales brought down upon it the heavy hand of Cromwell, though himself a Welshman by descent. The landed gentry were ruined or crippled, and the prosperity of the country greatly thrown back. It is said that the native language took some hold again of the upper classes from the fact of their poverty keeping them at home, whereas they had been accustomed to flock to the English universities and the border grammar schools, such as Shrewsbury, Chester, or Ludlow. Welsh poetry and literature expended itself in abuse of that Puritanism which in a slightly different form was later on to find in Wales its chosen home. But in all this there was of course little trace of the old international struggles. The Civil War was upon altogether different lines. The attitude of Wales was, in fact, merely that of most of the west of England somewhat emphasised.

Smitten in prosperity, the Principality moved slowly along to better times in the wake of England, under the benevolent neutrality of the later Stuarts and of William and Anne. It still remained a great stronghold in outward things, at any rate, of the Church, and kept alive what Defoe, travelling there in Anne’s reign, calls “many popish customs,” such as playing foot-ball between the services on Sunday, and retiring to drink at the public house, which was sometimes, he noted, kept by the parson, while even into the eighteenth century funeral processions halted at the crossroads and prayed for the soul of the dead. The Welsh landowning families were numerous and poor, proud of their pedigrees, which unlike the Anglo-Norman had a full thousand years for genealogical facts or fancies to play over. At the beginning of the eighteenth century there were very few wealthy landowners in Wales who stood out above the general level, which was perhaps a rude and rollicking one. There was no middle class, for there were neither trade nor manufactures worth mentioning, and little shifting from one class to another. Hence the genealogy was simple, and consequently, perhaps, more accurate than in wealthier societies. The mixture of English blood over most of the country was almost nil among the lower class, and not great even among the gentry.

The peasantry still submitted themselves without question to their own social leaders, and the latter, though they had mostly abandoned their own language, still took a pride in old customs and traditions, were generous, hospitable, quarrelsome, and even more addicted to convivial pleasures than their English contemporaries of that class. Defoe was at a cocking match in Anglesey and sat down to dinner with forty squires of the island. “They talked in English,” he says, “but swore in Welsh.” That the Welsh gentleman of the present day, unlike his prototype of Scotland or Ireland, shows no trace worth mentioning of his nationality is curious when one thinks how much farther removed he usually is in blood from the Englishman than either. It should be remembered, however, that there were no seats of learning in Wales such as Ireland and Scotland possessed. The well-to-do young Welshman went naturally to England for his education, even in days when difficulties of travelling were in favour of even indifferent local institutions.

Surnames became customary in Wales about the time of the Tudor settlement; previously only a few men of literary distinction had adopted them, such as Owen Cyfylliog, Prince of Upper Powys, Dafydd Hiraethog, etc. The inconvenience of being distinguished only by the names of his more recent ancestors connected by “ab” or “ap” was found intolerable by the Welshman and his English friends as life got more complex. It is said that Henry VIII. was anxious for the Welsh landowners to assume the name of their estates in the old Anglo-Norman fashion, and it is a pity his suggestion was not followed, in part at any rate. But the current Christian name of the individual was adopted instead and saddled for ever on each man’s descendants. So a language full of euphonious place-names and sonorous sounds shows the paradox of the most inconveniently limited and perhaps the poorest family nomenclature in Europe.

In 1735, just two hundred years after its complete union with England, began the movement that was in time to change all Wales, I had almost said the very Welsh character itself. This was the Methodist revival. All Welshmen were then Church people. The landed families for the most part supplied the parishes with incumbents, grouping them no doubt as much as possible so as to create incomes sufficient for a younger son to keep a humble curate and ruffle it with his lay relatives over the bottle and in the field. The peasantry may have been cheery and happy, but they were sunk in ignorance. They seem, however, to have been good churchgoers—the old instinct of discipline perhaps surviving—but the spiritual consolation they received there was lamentably deficient, and the Hanoverian régime was making matters steadily worse. Its political bishops rarely came near their Welsh dioceses. All the higher patronage was given to English absentees, for the poor Welsh squires could be of little political service and had no equivalent wherewith to pay for a deanery or a canon’s stall. To be a Welshman, in fact, was then, and for more than a century later when the landed class had nearly ceased to enter the Church, of itself a bar to advancement. The mental alertness and religious fervour, however, of the Welsh people had only lain dormant under circumstances so discouraging, and were far from dead. They presented a rare field for the efforts of the religious reformer, though it seems more than likely that the beauty and ritual of an awakened Anglican Church would have appealed to their natures more readily even than the eloquence of the Calvinistic school that eventually led them captive. The Welsh people were imaginative, reverential, musical. Their devotion to the old faith in both its forms was sufficiently shown by the pathetic fidelity with which they clung to their mother churches till, both physically and mentally, they tumbled about their ears.

The Methodist revivalists of the eighteenth century were, as everyone knows, for the most part Churchmen. Many of them were in orders, valiant and devoted men, who not only preached in the highways and hedges, but founded schools all over Wales, whose peasantry at that time were almost without education. They suffered every kind of persecution and annoyance from the Church, while the country clergy headed mobs who treated them with physical violence. No effort was made to meet this new rival upon its own grounds,—those of ministerial energy and spiritual devotion,—but its exponents were met only with rotten eggs. The bishops were not merely absentees for the most part, but from 1700 to 1870 they were consistently Englishmen, ignorant of the Welsh tongue, and regarded in some sort as agents for the Anglicising of Wales. Men who with some exceptions were destitute of qualifications for their office found themselves in positions that would have taxed abilities of the highest order and all the energies of a modern prelate. The holders of Welsh sees laid neither such slender stocks of ability nor energy as they might possess under the slightest contribution on behalf of Welsh religion. With the funds of the Church, however, they observed no such abstention, but saddled the needy Welsh Establishment with a host of relatives and friends. As for themselves, with a few notable exceptions they cultivated a dignified leisure, sometimes at their palaces, more often in London or Bath. One prelate never saw his diocese at all, while another lived entirely in Cumberland. With the Methodist revival one could not expect them to sympathise, nor is it surprising that their good wishes were with the militant pot-house parsons who were in favour of physical force. One must remember after all, however, that this was the Hogarthian period; that in all these features of life England was at its worst; and that the faults of the time were only aggravated in Wales by its aloofness and its lingual complications. The Welsh Methodist, it is true, did not formally leave the Church till 1811, but by that time Calvinism had thoroughly taken hold of the country, and the Establishment had not only made no spiritual efforts to stem the tide, but was rapidly losing even its social influence, as the upper classes were ceasing to take service in its ranks. The Welsh parson of indifferent morals and lay habits had hitherto generally been of the landowning class. Now he was more often than not of a humbler grade without any compensating improvement in morals or professional assiduity. The immense development of dissent in Wales during the last century is a matter of common knowledge. The purifying of the Welsh Church and clergy in the latter half of it and the revival of Anglican energy within the last quarter are marked features of modern Welsh life. We have nothing to do here with the probabilities of a success so tardily courted. But it is of pertinent interest to consider the immense changes that have come over Wales since, let us say, the middle of the Georgian period; and by this I do not merely mean those caused by a material progress common to the whole of Great Britain. For there is much reason to think that the character of the Welsh peasantry has been steadily altering, particularly in the more thoroughly Welsh districts, since they fell under the influence of Calvinistic doctrines. There is much evidence that the old Welshman was a merry, light-hearted person, of free conversation and addicted to such amusements as came in his way; that he still had strong military instincts,[16] and cherished feudal attachments to the ancient families of Wales even beyond the habit of the time among the English. This latter instinct has died hard, considering the cleavage that various circumstances have created between the landed gentry and the peasantry. Indeed it is by no means yet dead.