Books: A Short History of Wales
O >>
Owen M. Edwards >> A Short History of Wales
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 | 5 |
6 |
7
CHAPTER XIX--THE CIVIL WAR
After the Tudors came the Stuarts. The Tudors did what their people
wanted; the king and the people, between them, crushed the nobles.
The Stuarts did what they thought right, and they did not try to
please the people. Under the Tudors, there was harmony between Crown
and Parliament; and Elizabeth left a prosperous people with strong
views about their rights and their religion. But James I., and
especially his son Charles I., tried to change law and religion.
From the Tudor period of unity, then, we come to the Stuart period of
strife.
From 1603 to 1642 the struggle went on in Parliament. The Welsh
Members nearly all supported the king, and the Welsh people followed
the Welsh gentry in strong loyalty. The most famous Welshman of the
period was John Williams, who became Archbishop of York and Lord
Keeper. He was a wise man; he saw that both sides were a little in
the wrong; and if any one could have kept the peace between them, he
could have done it. But the king did not quite trust him, and the
Parliament almost despised him; and this happens often to wise men
who get between two angry parties.
From 1642 to 1646, the First Civil War was waged. This was a war
between the king and the Parliament over taxation, militia, and
religion. The south-east, and London especially, were for
Parliament; the wilder parts, especially Wales, were for the king.
The only important part of Wales that declared for Parliament was the
southern part of Pembrokeshire, which had been English ever since the
reign of Henry II.
Wales was important to the king for two reasons. For one thing, it
could give him an army, and he came, time after time, to get a new
one. When he unfurled his flag and began the war at Nottingham in
1642, he came to Shrewsbury, and there five thousand Welshmen joined
him. With these and others he marched against London, fighting the
battle of Edgehill on the way. While the king made many attempts to
get London until 1644, and while the New Model army attacked him
between 1645 and 1647, the Welsh fought in nearly all his battles,
their infantry suffering heavily in the two greatest battles, Marston
Moor and Naseby. The war went on in Wales itself also--Rupert and
Gerard being the chief Royalist leaders, and Middleton and Michael
Jones being the chief Parliamentary ones. No great battles were
fought, but there were several skirmishes, and much taking and
retaking of castles and towns.
Wales was important to the king, also, because it commanded the two
ways to Ireland. The King thought, almost to the last, that an Irish
army would save him. Welsh garrisons held the two ports for Ireland,
Chester and Bristol. Bristol was stormed by a great midnight
assault, and Chester was forced to yield. In March 1647 Harlech
yielded, and the war came to an end. By that time the king was a
prisoner in the hands of the army.
The Second Civil War, in 1648 and 1649, was a struggle between the
two sections of the victorious army. The Parliament wished to
establish one religion, the army said that every man must be allowed
to worship God as he liked. One was called the Presbyterian ideal,
the other the Independent. The army was led by Cromwell, and
Parliament was overawed. Then the Presbyterian parts rose in revolt-
-Kent, Pembrokeshire, and the lowlands of Scotland. The New Model
army marched against the Welsh, in order to break the connection
between the northern and southern Presbyterians. The Welsh generals
were Laugharne, Poyer, and Powell, who had all fought for Parliament
in the first war. They were defeated at St Fagans, near Cardiff, and
then driven into Pembroke. They determined to hold out to the last
within its walls. Cromwell besieged them, and the great feature of
the war was the siege of Pembroke. Walls and castles like those of
Pembroke had become useless because of gunpowder. But Cromwell could
not at once bring his guns so far. His difficulties were increasing
daily: the Parliament was trying to come to terms with the king, all
Wales around him was disaffected, the Scotch had crossed the border
and were marching on London. After many weeks of assaults and
desperate defence, the guns came and the old walls were battered
down. Pembroke Castle, whose great round tower still stands, had
protected William Marshall against Llywelyn and had enabled an
important district to remain a "little England beyond Wales," was the
last mediaeval castle to take an important part in war. The Scotch
were soon defeated at the battle of Preston, and the king was brought
to trial and put to death, the death-warrant being signed by two
Welshmen--John Jones of Merioneth and Thomas Wogan of Cardigan. The
date of Charles' execution is January 20, 1649.
The Commonwealth was established immediately, and Wales was looked
upon with much distrust--the Presbyterian parts and the Royalist
parts--by the new Government. It was represented in the English
Parliaments, it is true, but its representatives were often English,
and practically appointed by the Government. When the country was
put under the military dictatorship of the major-generals, Harrison
was sent to rule Wales.
Honest attempts were made to give it an efficient clergy; but the
zeal of Vavasour Powel aroused much opposition. Wales either clung
tenaciously to its old religion; or, if it changed it, the changes
were extreme. Though the country generally returned to its old life
and thought at the Restoration in 1660, much of the new life of the
Commonwealth remained: congregations of Independents still met;
Quaker ideals survived all persecution; and even the mysticism of
Morgan Lloyd permeated the slowly awakening thought of the peasants
whom, in his dreams, he saw welcoming the second advent of Christ.
CHAPTER XX--THE GREAT REVOLUTION
Except to the reader who is of a legal or antiquarian turn of mind,
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the least interesting in
the history of Wales--the very centuries that are the most glorious
and the most stirring in the history of England. The older
historians stop when they come to the year 1284, and sometimes give a
hasty outline of a few rebellions up to 1535. They then give the
Welsh a glowing testimonial as a law-abiding and loyal people, and
find them too uninteresting to write any more about them.
The history of Wales does, indeed, appear to be nothing more than the
gradual disappearance of Welsh institutions. The Court of Wales was
restored with the king in 1660; but its work had been done, and it
came to an end in 1689. The Great Sessions came to an end in 1830;
and, though we now see that their disappearance was a mistake, the
bill abolishing them passed through Parliament without a division.
The last difference between England and Wales was deleted; and if
Wales has no separate existence left, why should we write or read its
history?
Because the two centuries of apparent settlement and sleep were the
period of a silent revolution, more important, if our aim is to
explain the living present rather than the dead past, than all the
exciting plots and battles of the House of Cunedda from the rise of
Maelgwn to the fall of the last Llywelyn. During these centuries,
the history of Wales ceases to be the history of princes and nobles,
it becomes the history of the people. Owen Glendower's few years of
power were a kind of prophecy; but Owen once appeared to the abbot of
Valle Crucis, so tradition says, to declare that he had come before
his time. We pass then, very gradually, from the history of a
privileged class, speaking literary Welsh, with a literature famous
for the wealth of its imagination and the artistic beauty of its
form--we pass on to the history of a peasantry, rude and ignorant at
first, retaining the servile traits of centuries of subjection, but
gradually becoming self-reliant, prosperous, and thoughtful.
The real history of a nation is shown by its literature. Its records
and its chronicles are but the notes and comments of various ages.
In the period of the princes and nobles, you can trace the rise and
decline of a great literature; watch how it gathers strength and
beauty from Cynddelw to Dafydd ap Gwilym, and how the strength begins
to fail and the beauty to wane, from Dafydd ap Gwilym to Tudur Aled.
In the period of the people, from Tudor times on, the peasants tried
at first to imitate the poetry of the past; then they began to write
and think in their own way. It is not my aim to explain the periods
of Welsh literature now; I am going to do that in another book. But,
as I have mentioned three typical poets in the period of the princes,
I will also mention three poets in the period of the people.
In 1579 Rees Prichard was born; in 1717, Williams Pant y Celyn; in
1832, Islwyn. We have, in these three, writers typical of the
seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries respectively. Rees
Prichard, still affectionately remembered in every Welsh home as the
"Old Vicar," wrote stanzas in the dialect of the Vale of Towy--rough,
full of peasant phrases and mangled English words; and he wrote them,
not in books, but on the memory of the people. In the same valley, a
century later, Williams Pant y Celyn wrote hymns, melodious and
inspiring, of great poetic beauty, though with a trace of dialect;
they were written and published, but they also haunted every ear that
heard them. Beyond the Black Mountains, in the hills of West
Monmouth, after another century, Islwyn wrote odes without a trace of
dialect; they were written and remained for some time in manuscript;
when published, they met with a welcome which shows clearly that
Islwyn is the typical poet of modern Welsh thought. If you wish to
see and realise the rise of the Welsh peasant, pass from the homely
stanzas of the good Old Vicar's Welshmen's Candle to the poetic
theology of Pant y Celyn, and from that to the poetic philosophy of
Islwyn, where concentrated intensity of thought is expressed in a
style that is, at any rate at its best, superior to the best work of
the poets of the princes.
If I were to tell you the reasons for this change, I would be
writing, in a slightly different form, what I have already written in
this book about early Welsh history. The fall of Llywelyn, the Black
Death, Owen Glendower's ideals and the Tudor legislation, all
prepared the way.
The long-bow and gunpowder, we have seen, made the peasant as
important as the noble in war. The long-bow made the coat of mail
useless, gunpowder made the castle useless--the defence of the
privileges of the Middle Ages departed.
Ideas of equality were advanced. They were looked upon at first as
truths applicable only to a perfect and impossible condition, and
their discoverers were ignored, if not hanged or burnt. But they
always became a reality, and were victorious in the end. Take the
truths discovered or championed by Welshmen. Walter Brute
rediscovered the theory of justification by faith--that all men are
equal in the sight of God, and that no lord could be responsible for
them. Bishop Pecock advocated the doctrine of toleration--that
reason, not persecution, should rule. John Penry claimed that the
people had a right to discuss publicly the questions that vitally
affected them. The history of the past shows that the apostles were
condemned, the life of the present shows that their ideas lived.
Industry and commerce became more free. In Tudor times piracy was
repressed, the march lordships were abolished, the privileges of the
towns ceased to fetter manufacture, trade with England became free.
In Stuart times roads were made, the industries depending on wool
revived, and the industries of Britain began to move westwards
towards the iron and the coal. In the Hanoverian period waste lands
were enclosed, the slate mines of the north and the coal pits of the
south were opened.
The Tudors succeeded in getting the upper classes to speak English,
and to turn their backs on Welsh life. The peasant was left supreme:
he knew not what to do at first, but light soon came.
Pass through Wales, and you will see the life of both periods--the
ruined castles and the ruined monasteries of the old; the quarries
and pits, the towns and ports, the churches and chapels, the schools
and colleges of the present.
CHAPTER XXI--HOWEL HARRIS
It is difficult to write about religion without giving offence.
Religion will come into politics, and must come into history. It has
given much, perhaps most, of its strength to modern Wales; it has
given it many, if not most, of its political difficulties.
There are periods of religious calm and periods of religious fervour
in the life of every nation. I do not know whether it is necessary,
but it is certainly the fact--the two periods condemn each other with
great energy. With regard to creed--the life of religion--you will
find that the periods of energy tend to be Calvinistic--an intense
belief that man is a mere instrument in the hands of God, working out
plans he does not understand; while in periods of rest it tends to be
Arminian--a comfortable belief that man sees his future clearly, and
that he can guide it as he likes. With regard to the Church--the
body of religion--it is fortunate, in times of calm, if it is
established, to keep the spirit of religion alive; it is fortunate,
in times of fervour, if it is free, in order that the new life may
give it a more perfect shape.
Now we must remember that there can be no calm without a little
indifference, and that there can be no enthusiasm without a little
intolerance. So men call each other fanatics and bigots and
hypocrites, because they have not taken the trouble to realise that
there is much variety in human character and in the workings of the
human mind. Perhaps it is also worth remembering that an institution
is not placed at the mercy of a reformer, but gradually changed.
The eighteenth century was a century of indifference in religion in
Wales, the nineteenth century was a century of enthusiasm. The
Church at the beginning of the eighteenth century, at any rate as far
as the higher clergy were concerned, was apathetic to religion, and
alive only to selfish interests. The Whig bishops were appointed for
political reasons; they hated the Tory principles of the Welsh
squires, and they neglected and despised the Welsh people they had
never tried to understand. In England, the Defoes and the Swifts of
literature were encouraged and utilised by the political parties; in
Wales, where clergymen were the only writers, the Whig bishops
distrusted them, and silenced them where they could, because they
wrote Welsh. The Church did not show more misapplication of revenue
than the State, perhaps; but, while the people could not leave the
State as a protest against corruption, they could leave the Church.
And, during the middle of the eighteenth century, a great national
awakening began.
The trumpet blast of the awakening was Howel Harris. He was a
Breconshire peasant, of strong passion which became sanctified by a
life-long struggle, of devouring ambition which he nearly succeeded
in taming to a life of intense service to God. Many bitter things
have been said about him, but nothing more bitter than he has said
about himself in the volumes of prayers and recriminations he wrote
to torture his own soul, and to goad himself into harder work. The
fame of his eloquence filled the land, and districts expected his
appearance anxiously, as in old times they expected Owen Glendower.
Howel Harris was, however, no political agitator. He had an
imperious will, and he wished to rule his brethren; he was aggressive
and military in spirit; God to him was the Lord of Hosts; he preached
the gospel of peace in the uniform of an officer of the militia, and
he sent many of his converts to fight abroad in the battles of the
century. He had a love of organisation; he established at Trevecca
what was partly a religious community, and partly a co-operative
manufacturing company. But, wherever he stood to proclaim the wrath
of God, no shower of stones or condemnation of minister or justice
could make those who heard him forget him, or believe that what he
said was wrong.
If I were writing for antiquarians, and not for those who read
history in order to see why things are now as they are, I would write
details--important and instructive--about the Church of the
eighteenth century, and about the congregations of Dissenters which
the seventeenth century handed over to the eighteenth to persecute
and despise. The Independents and Baptists sturdily maintained their
principles of religious liberty, but they found the century a stiff-
necked one, and their congregations were content with merely
existing. The Quakers maintained that war was wrong while Britain
passed through war fever after war fever--the Seven Years' War and
the wars against Napoleon. Howel Harris' voice might have been a
voice crying in the wilderness, if it had not been for the spiritual
life of the existing congregations, conformist and dissenting.
Modern ideas in Wales have been profoundly affected by the Quakers,
and especially in districts from which, as a sect, they have long
passed away.
The voice of Howel Harris called all these to a new life; and it is
about that new life, in the variety given it by all the different
actors in it, that I want you to think now. It made preaching
necessary, for one thing; and it was followed by a century of great
pulpit oratory. It profoundly affected literature. It gave Wales,
to begin with, a hymn literature that no country in the world has
surpassed. The contrast between the Reformation and the Revival is
very striking--one gave the people a Church government established by
law and a literature of translations, the other gave it institutions
of its own making and original living thought. The Revival gave
literature in every branch a new strength and greater wealth.
It created a demand for education. Griffith Jones of Llanddowror
established a system of circulating schools, the teachers moving from
place to place as a room was offered them--sometimes a church and
sometimes a barn. Charles of Bala established a system of Sunday
Schools, and the whole nation gradually joined it. The Press became
active, newspapers appeared. It became quite clear that a new life
throbbed in the land.
CHAPTER XXII--THE REFORM ACTS
The new life brought an inevitable demand for a share in the
government of the country, and this brought the old order and the new
face to face. The political power was entirely in the hands of the
squires, alienated from the peasants in many cases by a difference of
language, and in most cases by a difference of religion.
The Act of 1535 had, as we have seen, given Wales a representation in
Parliament. Each shire had one member only; except Monmouth, which
had two. Each shire town had one member, except that of Merioneth;
and Haverfordwest was given a member. The county franchise was the
forty shilling freehold; it therefore excluded not only those who had
no connection with the land, but the copyholder--who was really a
landowner, but whose tenure was regarded as base, on account of his
villein origin. This copyholder was undoubtedly the descendant of
the Welsh serf of mediaeval times.
The first Reform Act, that of 1832, was won for the great
manufacturing towns of England, but Wales benefited by it. It
extended the franchise to the copyholder, and to the farmer paying 50
pounds rent, in the counties; it gave the towns a uniform 10 pounds
household franchise. It also brought many of the towns into the
system of representation. It raised the number of members from
twenty-seven to thirty-two; the agricultural districts getting two,
and the mining districts two.
The slight change in representation is a recognition of the growing
industries of the country, especially in the coal and iron districts.
The coal of the great coalfield of South Wales had been worked as far
back as Norman times; but it was in the nineteenth century that the
coal and iron industries of South Wales, and the coal and slate
industries of North Wales became important. Cardiff, Swansea, and
Newport became important ports; and places that few had ever heard of
before--like Ystradyfodwg or Blaenau Ffestiniog--became the centres
of important industries. But, in 1832, Wales was still mainly
pastoral and agricultural; and the Act, though it did much for the
towns, left the representation of the counties in the hands of the
same class. Still, it was the towns that showed disappointment, as
was seen in the Chartism of the wool district of Llanidloes and of
the coal district of Newport.
The second Reform Act, of 1867, gave Merthyr Tydvil two
representatives instead of one, otherwise it left the distribution of
seats as it had been before. But the new extension of the franchise-
-to the borough householder, the borough 10 pounds lodger, and
especially the 12 pounds tenant farmer--gave new classes political
power. It was followed by a fierce struggle between the old landed
gentry and their tenants, a struggle which was moderated to a certain
extent by the Ballot Act of 1870, and by the great migration of the
country population to the slate and coal districts.
The rapid rise of the importance of the industrial districts is seen
in the third Reform Act of 1885. The country districts represented
by the small boroughs of the agricultural counties of Brecon,
Cardigan, Pembroke, and Anglesey, were wholly or partly
disfranchised. But the slate county of Carnarvonshire had an
additional member; and in the coal and iron country, Swansea and
Carmarthenshire and Monmouthshire had one additional member each, and
Glamorgan three.
The third Reform Act enfranchised the agricultural labourer and the
country artisan. In England many doubts were expressed about the
intelligence or the colour of the politics of the new voter; but, in
Wales, most would admit that he was as intelligent as any voter
enfranchised before him; all knew there could be no doubt about his
politics.
The character of the representation of Wales has entirely changed.
The squire gave place to the capitalist, and the capitalist to
popular leaders. Wales, whose people blindly followed the gentry in
the Great Civil War, is now the most democratic part of Britain.
CHAPTER XXIII--EDUCATION
The chief feature of the history of Wales during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries is the growth of a system of education.
The most democratic, the most perfect, and the most efficient method
is still that of the Sunday School. It was well established before
the death of Charles of Bala, whose name is most closely connected
with it, in 1814. It soon became, and it still remains, a school for
the whole people, from children to patriarchs. Its language is that
of its district. Its teachers are selected for efficiency--they are
easily shifted to the classes which they can teach best; and, if not
successful, they go back willingly to the "teachers' class," where
all are equal. The reputation of a good Sunday School teacher is
still the highest degree that can be won in Wales. Plentiful text
books of high merit, and an elaborate system of oral and written
examinations, mark the last stage in its development.
The Literary Meeting is a kind of secular Sunday School. The rules
of alliterative poetry and the study of Welsh literature and history,
and sometimes of more general knowledge, take the place of the study
of Jewish history, and psalm, and gospel. The Literary Meetings feed
the Eisteddvod.
The Eisteddvod passed through the same phases as the nation. It was
an aspect of the court of the prince during the Middle Ages. In
Tudor times it was used partly to please the people, but chiefly to
regulate the bards by forcing them to qualify for a degree--a sure
method of moderating their patriotism and of diminishing their
number. In modern times the Eisteddvod is a great democratic
meeting, and it is the most characteristic of all Welsh institutions.
Its chairing of the bards is an ancient ceremony; its gorsedd of
bards is probably modern. But the people themselves still remain the
judges of poetry; they care very little whether a poet has won a
chair or not, while a gorsedd degree probably does him more harm than
good.
Elementary education, in its modern sense, began with the circulating
schools of Griffith Jones of Llanddowror in 1730. They were
exceedingly successful because the instruction was given in Welsh,
and they stopped after teaching 150,000 to read not because there was
no demand for them, but on account of a dispute about their
endowments in 1779, eighteen years after Griffith Jones' death. They
were followed by voluntary schools, very often kept by illiterate
teachers.
Between 1846 and 1848 two organisations--the Welsh Education
Committee and the Cambrian Society--were formed; and they developed,
respectively, the national schools and the British schools. After
the Education Act of 1870, the schools became voluntary or Board;
education gradually became compulsory and free; and in 1902 an
attempt was made to give the whole system a unity and to connect it
with the ordinary system of local government.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 | 5 |
6 |
7