Part 9

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 mediæval 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.

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.

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.

XXII THE REFORM ACTS