Wales

by William Watkin Davies

CHAPTER X
THE REFORMATION

Wales and England were now one in law; and it consequently followed that all statutes passed by Parliament were applicable to the Principality, unless expressly stated not to be so. No reservations had been made, as were afterwards made as to religion, laws, and education, in the matter of the Scottish Union. In every step, therefore, of the Reformation Settlement, Wales was obliged to share; and there can be no doubt at all that the Reformation was unpopular in Wales, and that the Anglican Church, as it emerged at the close of the reign of Elizabeth, had made for itself no place in the hearts of the people. At the same time it would be easy to exaggerate the reluctance with which Wales accepted the many religious changes of the Tudor period. The picture which some recent writers have drawn of a Wales deprived of the ancient religion to which it was devoted, and of a Church plundered while faithfully discharging its functions, is as fanciful and as devoid of truth for Wales as it would be for England. The truth is that, long before the Reformation, the Roman Church in Wales had lost all real hold upon the minds and hearts of the people. All that remained was a sentimental loyalty, and an immense amount of the grossest superstition. When the harsh and tactless agents of Thomas Cromwell visited the parishes and abbeys of Wales, defacing churches, plundering monks, and destroying miracle-working images, the prevailing feeling was not that religion was being insulted, but that superstitious beliefs, tenaciously held, were being flouted. Indeed the very fact that Wales was so ill-prepared for the Reformation is, in itself, the most convincing proof of the scandalous way in which the ancient Church had neglected its duties. So great was the intellectual and moral torpor into which the people had sunk that it took more than a century for the new doctrines to penetrate their minds. Theirs was the most abject and deplorable of all conditions of slavery, the condition in which the slave does not even desire to be free. The new Anglican Church, which was mainly the creation of Elizabethan statutes, it is true, also failed. Upon its predecessor it was an immense improvement; but it lacked the intense emotionalism which alone could stir the Welsh heart; and, moreover, it came to Wales in alien guise, speaking a foreign tongue. It was not until the Bible in Welsh had saturated into the minds of all classes, and until the intense appeal of Puritanism had been heard in the land, that Wales became, what it continued afterwards to be for two centuries and a half, a country in which religion was the primary concern of all the people.

Nor is it right to say that the dissolution of the monasteries inflicted a cruel blow upon Wales. It is perfectly true that, in the Middle Ages, the Welsh monastery had been, on the whole, favourable to the cause of national independence, in contradistinction to the bishop, who was almost invariably an English agent. But the day was long past when the monastery was the school, the hospital, the alms-house, and the common friend of the whole country-side. It is possible, though by no means certain, that the tenant of monastic land enjoyed an easier existence than his neighbour on the land of a lay lord; but that was the sole benefit which remained, a singularly poor excuse for the considerable endowments held by the monks. The truth is that the dissolution of the monasteries was a good thing in itself; the blunder and the crime consisted in the use to which the confiscated property was put. This might have gone to found schools, to endow charitable institutions, and to provide land for the landless; instead of that it was recklessly bestowed upon courtiers, upon the new families who were serving the Tudor sovereigns so well, and upon nobles whose estates were already sufficiently large. There were no really wealthy monastic foundations in Wales at all: their revenue was under £200 a year; and they were consequently dissolved with the smaller monasteries.

The agents sent to Wales by Cromwell for the purpose of putting down superstitious practices, and removing idolatrous emblems, performed their task with the minimum of tact, and sometimes with shameful rapacity and greed. One of the worst was Bishop Barlow, who was sent to the diocese of St. David's, the most hallowed ground in Wales. Himself a time-serving cleric of the type of Cranmer, he had no sympathy with persons who were unable to keep pace with his own religious instability. The religious sentiment, which had gathered for centuries about the Cathedral of St. David, meant nothing to him. He sought to transfer the see to Carmarthen. At one moment he insulted the memory of St. David, at another he denied that such a man had ever existed. He tore the roof from the beautiful Bishop's Palace, and with the proceeds provided marriage portions for his five daughters, all of whom were married to bishops. So consistent was he in his thieving, that it is with considerable suspicion that one reads his lamentations about the "barbarity," and the "idolatry," of the people for whom, he argues, it would be waste of money to repair churches.

An equally thorough, but much more honest and satisfactory, agent of the Reformation was Ellis Price, popularly known in North Wales as the "Red Doctor." He was a Welshman, and a kindly individual who seems to have entertained much good-natured contempt for all forms of religion. He destroyed superstitious relics; but did not plunder churches in order to enrich himself. We possess the reports which he sent to Cromwell; and no impartial reader can peruse them without coming to the conclusion that the Welsh people were indeed sunk in the deepest ignorance and the most abject superstition. One of the idols with which Price had to deal has earned for itself a tragic fame. This was an immense wooden image of Derfel Gadarn, clothed in complete armour, which stood in the church of Llandderfel in Merionethshire. So popular was this figure, says Price in a letter to Cromwell, that people "come daily in pilgrimage to him, some with kine, some with oxen and horses, and the rest with money, insomuch that there were five or six hundred, to a man's estimation, that offered to the said image the fifth day of this month of April. The innocent people hath been sore allured and enticed to worship, insomuch that there is a common saying amongst them that, whosoever will offer anything to the image of Derfel Gadarn, he hath power to fetch him or them that so offer, out of hell." Cromwell commanded that the image should be sent to London, and an offer of the parishioners to ransom it for forty pounds was rejected. Its arrival in the metropolis was opportune. A Welsh prophecy had declared that, one day, Derfel Gadarn would set a forest on fire. The prophecy was now to be fulfilled. The great doll was hewn in pieces, and used to burn a friar of the name of Forest, who had denied the royal supremacy!

Whatever may have been the feelings with which the Welsh people regarded the religious innovations, there can be no doubt at all that they readily acquiesced in them. In Wales there was no Pilgrimage of Grace, nor any plots against the English Government. The old religion lingered on, no doubt, in obscure corners, just as it did in the remote valleys of Cumberland; but it was abroad, and not in Wales, that the Welsh defenders of Romanism distinguished themselves. At Douai, and after its foundation in 1578 at the English College at Rome as well, scholarly and devout Welsh Catholics like Morgan Phillips, Owen Lewis, and Dr. Morris of Clynog, were busy training priests for the English mission field. So great became their influence at Rome that the peace of the College there was troubled by perennial feuds between English and Welsh. It was the great age of the Society of Jesus. Those devoted, able, daring and unscrupulous missionaries were winning fame for themselves in every corner of the world; and they were at work in England and Wales. But in the Welsh Catholics they met, from the outset, with strenuous opponents, and a long battle raged between them. Two other Welsh Catholics, belonging to a younger generation, were John Roberts of Trawsfynydd, and John Jones of Llanfynach, better known as Father Leander. These two had been contemporaries at St. John's College, Oxford, another contemporary and friend of theirs being Archbishop Laud. At that time they were Protestants, at least in name; but subsequently were converted by the Jesuits. A natural antipathy seems to have existed in the sixteenth century between all Welshmen and the Jesuits; and it was not long before Roberts and Leander went over to the Benedictines. Roberts founded a Benedictine seminary at Douai; and in 1605 the Benedictine College of St. Gregory was opened there, an institution which for many years was to wield immense influence within the Catholic Church. At the time the Benedictine Order was represented in England by only a single monk; and the reinforcement which came from the Welshmen Roberts, Leander, and David Barker of Abergavenny, was both timely and decisive. But although ardent Catholics, these Welsh exiles remained always loyal to the Tudors. With conspirators and assassins they would have no dealings. They believed in the restoration of Catholicism in England, not by murder, not by foreign invasion, but by peaceful propaganda and by that alone. They are an interesting and an amiable circle; and time has clothed them with that fascination with which it appears to be the special and inalienable privilege of leaders of lost causes to be endued.

It was not until Elizabeth had been for some years on the throne that any attempt was made to provide the Welsh people with a substitute for the religion of which they had been deprived. The legal continuity of the Church was maintained; but little else remained. Benefices were poor, and the priests few and ignorant. The people sank deeper and deeper into spiritual indifference. As late as 1585 a well-qualified observer could write that "Many places in Wales, yea, whole counties, have not a single Christian within them, but live like animals, most of them knowing nothing of righteousness, but merely keeping the name of Christ in memory." The scandalous extent to which pluralism existed, despite the Pluralities Act of Edward VI, left large numbers of parishes without any sort of spiritual ministration. Even the great Edmund Prys did not scruple to be at the same time Rector of Maentwrog, Festiniog, Llandudno, and Ludlow, as well as Archdeacon of Merioneth, and Canon and Prebendary of Bangor. He soon resigned Ludlow, but only to acquire the additional livings of Llanenddwyn and Llanddwywe, as well as a stall at St. Asaph. Fortunately for the country, a few Welshmen were conscientious and enlightened believers in the Reformed Faith; and they beheld with sorrow the plight to which Wales had been brought. They perceived that the only way in which the people could be raised and cleansed was by giving them the Bible in their own language. So far back as 1546 Sir John Price of Brecon had translated a few Biblical passages into the vernacular, and in 1551 William Salesbury translated the Gospels and the Epistles. In 1563 Parliament passed an Act commanding the Welsh Bishops, together with the Bishop of Hereford, under penalties, to have a complete edition of the Bible in Welsh ready by 1566. A Welsh version of the new Prayer Book was issued in 1567. But it was not until the appearance of Bishop Morgan's translation of the Scriptures, in 1588, that the Bible began to be a popular book in Wales, and to influence the minds of the people. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of the influence exercised by Morgan's Bible. Not only did it, in time, rouse the people from religious lethargy, but it did for the Welsh language what Luther's Bible did for Germany—it became the canon of Welsh prose, fixing for centuries its idiom, its diction, and its style. Morgan was ably assisted in the work by men like David Powel of Ruabon, Edmund Prys, and Dr. John Davies of Mallwyd. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Whitgift, was sympathetic, and Gabriel Goodman, a native of Ruthin, who was at the time Dean of Westminster, rendered financial assistance.