There is much care and valour in this Welshman.”
Shakespeare’s Henry V, Act I, Sc. iv.
David Lloyd George had gone to Parliament as a Welsh Nationalist; and, as the months passed, it became clear that the task of moulding and defending the new national cause in Wales would absorb his main energies.
It was not a popular task at Westminster, where it cut right across the party divisions. It was not even yet wholly an easy task in Wales, where the old spirit of feudalism had many strongholds and was still “an unconscionable time in dying.”
Throughout the following years (1892-7) David Lloyd George had to fight a double battle—at Westminster and in Wales. At Westminster he took the lead of a small group of Welsh members—often only four—who greatly dared to put the cause of Wales before the cause of party—never an easy task in a House where the party system is the very oxygen of the political atmosphere. On all great public questions that arose in those years—tithes, free schooling, local option, clergy discipline—he steadily and daringly pursued the national course and built up a national policy.
The influence that kept him straight on this course came ever from his own native soil. For he was in daily touch with that faithful little family group—those four loyal souls—his uncle, his brother, his sister, and his mother—who kept for him, while he battled in London, the fires burning on the home hearth, helped his wife by looking after the children in moments of stress, and steadily aided him with counsel and inspiration. David wrote to that little family party a daily record of his doings; and day by day Uncle Lloyd wrote to his “Di” long letters, partly in Welsh, partly in English, advising him on every question that arose, always taking the bold side, always bringing his nephew back to the goals of his pilgrimage—faith and fatherland. “Land of our Fathers” was the key-phrase in Uncle Lloyd’s politics; and, amid the stress and distraction of Westminster, his boy was never allowed, for a single day, to miss hearing that clear call from the Eagle mountains.
Here was the source of his strength in the struggles that now lay before him, calling for the utmost exercise of will and decision. For, if the Welsh cause was to be kept to the front, it was necessary to fight continually against the submerging influence of the party machines.
The most remarkable among these contests of the early nineties was undoubtedly that memorable fight undertaken by Mr. Lloyd George and a small band of Welsh fellow-members against Mr. Gladstone in the zenith of his power and frame over the Clergy Discipline Bill.
The Bill seemed a very innocent and reasonable measure. It aimed at strengthening the control of the Anglican Bishops—always weak enough—over their clergy. To Englishmen reasonable enough; but not so to Welshmen, to whom the very word “Bishop” was almost as hateful a sound as to the Presbyterian Scotch. Not until the Bishops released their hold on Wales would they consent to give them a stronger hold over their own clergy.
Now the Bill happened to be a very special favourite of Mr. Gladstone, who still loved his Church with a mighty love, and Mr. Gladstone was at that moment a very formidable opponent. It is difficult now to realise the power of his authority at that moment. The Liberals who had remained faithful to him regarded him with a loyalty that amounted to a passion. To dispute his word would seem to them the nearest secular approach to heresy or sacrilege. It was that spirit that Mr. Lloyd George dared to defy.