A record of St. Cybi's Church, Holyhead

by Arthur Penrhyn Stanley

That is the determined enthusiasm which all Welshmen ought to show not only in the battlefield, but against our worst foes at home—the foes of intemperance and dishonesty and hypocrisy and deceitfulness.

(3) There is one more addition which the Welsh people, the British element of our race, has made to the course of English history. There is something in the Celtic blood, something in the Cambrian stock, which, mingling with the Saxon and Norman races, has unquestionably produced a larger result, such as without it would, humanly speaking, have been difficult or impossible. That poetic refinement, that spiritual fervour, of which I have already spoken, has, for the most part, been nourished by seclusion from the active world. Yet there was one channel in which the old British character displayed itself that directly bore on practical life—namely, the quick temper, the vivacious intelligence, which impart to other useful qualities exactly the stimulus they most need. Not seldom can we trace in families the sudden turn given to a sluggish, steady, stagnant stock of purely English extraction by contact with the imaginative, lively, mercurial character of Welsh or Celtic parentage. And what is thus seen in private life may be also faintly traced in the great course of our national history.

I will not speak of individuals, though I might mention that two of the most stirring characters who ever filled the office of Dean of Westminster were Welshmen: one was Gabriel Goodman, one of the translators of the Bible, friend of Lord Burleigh; the other was John Williams, who in his earlier days was twice committed to the Tower, once by the King, and once by the Parliament, who defended the Castle of Conway against the army of the Commonwealth, and who now after his stormy life reposes in the lovely church of Llandegai, the last ecclesiastical Lord Keeper of Great Britain.

But there is a more general influence which has left its permanent mark on England. Within that old cathedral of St. David, of which I just now spoke, the most conspicuous tomb which rises in the midst of it, and which, according to the tradition of the place, saved the cathedral itself from destruction, is that of Edmund Tudor, father of Henry VII. and grandfather of Henry VIII., who, for its sake, spared the venerable church where it stands. This very church of Holyhead was in great part rebuilt in the time of Henry VII. son of that Edmund Tudor. The rose of the Tudor family is visible to this day on its walls. Owen Tudor, the ancestor of them all, was a native of this island of Anglesey. We are thus reminded of the fact, which we sometimes forget, that, after Saxon and Norman and Plantagenet had done their best and passed away, a Welsh and British dynasty at last was seated once more on the throne of Britain, and swayed the destinies of the whole empire.

When in Westminster Abbey we pass from the tombs of the earlier kings to the magnificent chapel of King Henry VII., it is a striking thought to any one, especially to any one who has a drop of the ancient Welsh blood in his veins, that he enters there on a new field of the history of England, inaugurated by a succession of princes whose boast it was to be descended, not from Edward the Confessor or William the Conqueror, but from Arthur and Llewellyn, and that about the tomb of the first Tudor sovereign, intertwined with the emblems of his English descent, is to be seen the Red Dragon of Cadwallader.

That Tudor race, in their quick understanding, in their fiery temper, the true representatives of their ancient Celtic lineage, were the instruments raised up by God’s providence at the critical season of the new birth of England in the Reformation, for guiding, stimulating, freshening the Church and the nation to the performance of new duties, the fulfilment of new hopes, the application of new truths.

The sharpness of wit and liveliness of mind which were amongst the precocious gifts of Henry and Edward and Elizabeth, were common to them with their Welsh ancestors, and contributed in no small degree to the fresh start which England then made in the movements of that moving age. These qualities, whenever found, though they are not the highest of gifts, are inestimable for enlivening, cheering, enkindling the more powerful and the more highly civilised to action and to enquiry. Cherish them, even if they sometimes outrun discretion; correct them, if so be, not by repressing them, but by striving to develop the opposite gifts which are needed to balance and to chasten them.

II. And this leads us to two general remarks in conclusion.

(1) First let us remember that these graces of the Cambrian or Celtic character, which our Heavenly Father has thus vouchsafed to us, are also by His good providence blended in the English race with exactly those qualities which furnish their counterpoise—with that self-control, that moral discipline, that solid steadiness of purpose, without which poetic sentiment, religious fervour, mental vivacity are often useless, or worse than useless.

The old hermit in his solitude, the preacher in his fervid appeal, was good; but the honest, manly Christian, doing his duty faithfully and truthfully in his own station of life, is better. The sailor who remembers on the broad sea that God’s eye is always upon him; the workman or tradesman who endeavours to render to his Maker the best of all services, the offering of honest labour, the offering of unadulterated food, the offering of an upright conscientious traffic; the railway official or partner who cheers and encourages friendless travellers by a kindly word or by a helping hand, not for reward, but for love of his fellow creatures,—these are the modes by which, far more than by sudden conversion or enthusiastic hymns, we can fulfil God’s goodwill towards us.