Queen." How far Elizabethan policy reconciled Wales to the Anglican church in the national form that such men as Bishop Morgan or Bishop Parry gave it, is a subject that is difficult to discuss in the pages of a non party periodical. This, however, I think, may be admitted. While Roman Catholicism remained a certain force in the country, and even gained a few aristocratic converts by its Jesuit missionaries, the majority of the gentry conformed and the peasantry followed their example. Catholic ideas, however, survived the legal changes; Puritanism, in spite of Penry and Vicar Pritchard, took slight hold of the country; and the Catholic Anglicanism that finds expression in the poems of George Herbert, himself a Welsh speaking Welshman,-formed the religion of educated Welshmen. They were Laudian, as Huw Morus's poems show, in their reverence for the fasts and feasts of their church, in their respect for the old Vicar whom the sacrilegious troopers ousted from his pulpit, in their affection for the jovial gaiety of the merry world which the cruel wave of Puritanism overwhelmed, and in their religious veneration for the exiled Shepherd of the people. They lacked, however, the stern bitterness of the English royalists. One of the earliest champions of religious toleration in the Restoration Parliament was the exile cavalier lawyer,-afterwards Chief Justice,-Vaughan. Nevertheless they loathed the "red foxes" of Puritanism and the Puritan Revolution; and, apart from politics, they had fair reason for their loathing. The oppression of the English evangelicalism, which warred on everything Welsh, struck a blow at Welsh national development from which it has not yet recovered. Many, perhaps the majority, of the old Welsh families were ruined by the terrible confiscations of the Parliamentary Commissioners, and sank into the ranks of the farmers and peasantry; education declined, and there came no more Herberts of Cherbury from the aristocracy of Wales; and the land lost its educated clergy, for under the Commonwealth Welshmen went not to Oxford. Wales naturally welcomed the Restoration, which brought with it the old worship, the old Court, and once more tolerated the Eis teddfod. Although in the days of the later Stuarts, there were one or two scandalous church appointments, and although education no longer flourished as in the days before the troubles, yet in the main the Elizabethan tradition was preserved, and Welshmen were ruled in church and state by those who did their best to understand them and their needs. them and their needs. So long as the Stuarts stood by the church, the national sentiment of Welsh politicians stood by them, and Huw Morus exults with savage glee at the death of the Whig martyr Algernon Sidney. But 1688 introduced a keen division into Welsh politics. From the first a certain party held to James II, and one of the companions of the monarch's flight was the Lord of Powis whom England made an outlaw, and St. Germain's a duke. But Lord Powis held the Roman faith; and the generality of the Welsh gentry, like their poet Huw Morus, seemed prepared to accept the revolutionary settlement as the best alternative in an evil choice, provided always the church was safe. For even in those days Welshmen hated Irishmen with a deadly hatred; and, if they were Catholics at heart, they would have no Pope. For the subsequent hostility of Wales, the revolutionary government has only itself to thank. The author of the massacre of Glencoe was, unfortunately, the last man to appreciate nationalism. In the opinion of Lord Bute,* the abolition of the Court of the Marches which followed the revolution was a legislative attempt to obliterate any legal recognition of Welsh nationalism. The design to Anglicise Wales through the church is attributed by so high an authority as Judge Johnes to the same monarch. We know also that only the indignant protests of Welsh nationalists, chief of whom was the bold Briton, Price, who sat for Pembrokeshire, prevented the alienation of the crown lands of Denbighshire to a foreign favourite, whom he desired to set up, Welshmen said, as a Dutch Prince of Wales. Still when William died, and a high church Stuart again sat on the throne in the person of good Queen Anne, Welsh loyalty flowed in its ancient channel. Welsh squires voted Speech at the Rhyl Eisteddfod, 1892, for Harley and St. John, and Welsh mobs. huzzaed for High Church and Doctor Sacheverell; and Huw Morus passed away before the glory had all departed from the bard, or the crown from the Stuarts, or the national character from the ancient church of the Cymry. a But with the accession of the House of Hanover begins a black chapter in the history of Wales. The new rulers commenced to treat Wales both as conquered,"-I quote the words of one of their own lawyers, and a disaffected country. Their first acts, the appointment of the Socinian Hoadley,-who never set foot in his diocese, and the demolition of Ludlow Castle, were a declaration of war on Welsh national sentiment. For such acts marked the final abnegation of the Elizabethan policy, and the reversion to the Anglicising traditions of Henry IV. and Thomas Cromwell. For a generation Welshmen were utterly alien to the government of England, and a generation of Welsh noblemen and gentlemen never graced the court of the electors, whose Whig royal chaplains drew the incomes of sees and livings they never saw. It is oppression that drives wise men mad, and far more so hunting squires. The Welsh squires of the eighteenth century could show among their ranks no more such polished and educated cavaliers and cavaliers and scholars as the Vaughans and Herberts of the century before; but hard, narrow, and fierce as they were, they had at least a better understanding of, and a truer affection for their countrymen than the Russells, Cavendishes, or Walpoles, who misgoverned them from London. The men who fought, and not altogether unsuccessfully, in the English law courts, to save the altars of the parish churches in Wales from the mockery of a clergy ignorant of the language of the peasantry who worshipped there before them, the men whose foundation of the Cymmrodorion Society proves that they had still a love for the language and traditions of their race, the men who fought successfully to save Wales from the clutches of Dutch soldiers of fortune, deserve, with all their faults and errors, the respect of their patriotic descendants. truer Of the feeling entertained towards them. by the Welsh the new Court soon received an inkling. One of the heartiest of the old Welsh squires was Sir Charles Kemys, of Cefn Mabli. He is said to have taught the Elector George, when on the Continent, to smoke pipes and drink beer. When the Elector came over in pudding time, and the moderate men and the trimmers "looked big" at St. James', the Elector missed his stout Welsh friend. King George sent and bade him come and smoke a pipe, but the Welshman remained obdurate and absent. He would smoke with George, Elector of Hanover, not with George, King of England. Whatever benefit King George's good humour on this occasion may have won him among the Welsh people was speedily removed by his brutal treatment of the unhappy daughter of the house of Powis, who went to St. James' to beg her husband's life. I am not now concerned with the details of the '15, and must therefore postpone to a future occasion the story of Lady Winifred Herbert, afterwards Countess of Nithsdale, who, with the aid of her family retainers, Mistress Evans and Mistress Morgan, saved her husband from death, and afterwards went forth from her native land to live and die with him in exile. It may be that, for the edification of the Jacobite miners of Rhos, or perchance to effect the conversion of the stout old Jacobite farmer of Pen Graig Fargoed, in Gelligaer, Glamorganshire, who, for the following verses, let off a bard the payment of a borrowed guinea,— "Tri pheth 'rwy yn ei archi,— · Jacobite history, determined, at the advice of his council, to repeat the tactics of Henry VII., and to land with the Duke of Ormond at Milford Haven, and to march with the Welshmen who had so loyally fought for his grandfather, it might be, to a second Bosworth field. Strangely enough, the cavalier signalled out for the honour of preparing this enterprise came of a stock that, in the former generation, had not been over famous for its loyalty to the Stuart cause. But times were changed, and it was to Mr. Lewis Price, of Gogerddan, that Earl Mar wrote from Innsbruck on the 7th April, 1717,— "By permission of the King, who arrived incognito on the 3rd, I am ordered to acquaint you and other loyal men that the last push for a restoration in old England is to commence at or about 30th October next. The advice is to be conveyed by a bark bound to England, who is to resign his charge to a conscientious persecuted clergyman, who is to dispense his Majesty's pleasure to all honest bonny lads in the Principality of Wales. The expedition is to be regulated by our march from Milford to the West, under command of Lord Ormond, at the same juncture as I have to be at the like station in North Britain as in last year." This proposed invasion of Wales must have formed a forgotten link in the chain of elaborate conspiracies in which Alberoni, the great Italian minister of Spain, and the adventurous Charles the the Twelfth of Sweden, the Coeur de Lion of modern days, sought to reverse the Treaty of Utrecht, to crush Orleans in France, and to ruin the House of Brunswick and its Imperial ally. Unfortunately for the Stuarts, the arrest of the Swedish minister, and the seizure of his papers, had probably given Stanhope and his colleagues a view of their adversaries' hand, and prompt measures probably nipped the 1717 growth in the bud. In any event, the death of the great soldier of the north, and the fall of the great priest intriguer of Madrid, removed all such dreams from practical politics. Still, however, the evils that had marked the accession of the Hanoverian dynasty in Wales grew heavier as the years went on, and Jacobitism smouldered on alike in hall and parsonage and cottage, waiting This letter exists in manuscript in the Peniarth collection. The above is an analysis in the appendix to the third report of the History MSS. Commission. for the opportunity to burst into flame. In various clubs the gentry secretly met and drank the health of the king over the water. One of those centres of disaffection existed in the Cycle Club at Wrexham. The club, in 1829, when it still existed,* was merely a social meeting of country gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of Wrexham. I have been informed, however, that the custom of drinking to the king over the water was kept up to the last. In 1723 it was a powerful political organisation, and for that reason its rules and list of members,-which also, by the way, throw a curious light on the customs of the aristocracy of primitive Wales,— form an interesting study, names "We, whose names are under-written, do promise at the time and place to our respectively affixed, to observe the rules following, viz., I. Every member of this society shall, for default of his appearance, submit to be censured, and shall thereupon be censured by the judgment of the society. II. Every member that cannot come shall be obliged to send notice of his non-appearance by 12 of the clock at noon, together with his reasons in writing, otherwise his plea shall not excuse him, if within the compass of 15 miles from the place of meeting. III. Each member obliges himself to have dinner upon the table by 12 o'clock at noon from Michaelmas to Lady Day, and from Lady Day to Michaelmas at 1 of the clock. IV. The respective masters of the places of meeting oblige themselves to take down in writing each default, and to deliver in the same at the general meeting. v. Every member shall keep a copy of these articles by him, to prevent plea of mistake. VI. It is agreed that a general meeting shall be held by all the subscribers at the house of Daniel Porter, jun., holden in Wrexham on the 1st day of May, 1727, by 11 of the clock, there to dine, and to determine upon all points relating to and according to the sense and meaning of these articles. WM. HANMER, April 24th, 1724. It will be observed that these rules disclose nothing of the political character of the club. It is stated that the more recent lists of the society are drawn out in the form of a round robin, the object being to prevent any one of its members from being indicted as the head of a treasonable assembly. The story runs that, when the tables were cleared, and the bottles of claret and the jorums of ale and the silver punch bowl stood on the table, and the guests called for a song, the accompaniment was played on the Welsh harp* by the greyhaired harper of the mansion. At the head of the Welsh squires stood he whom contemporaries called the knight of Wales, the first of the house of Williams who bore the name of Wynn, which he took from his mother, who was of the house of the Wynns of Gwydir,-and ruled at Wynnstay. Traditionally he was bound to the Stuart cause, for his family owed their position in no small measure to the second Charles. And this Sir Watkin had a further tie to the White Rose, for his first bride, Anne Vaughan of Llwydiarth, came of the stock of the old cavalier bard of Caer Gai. This Sir Watkin was, moreover, the ablest of all his house. Darkened and sad as is the tale of his declining years, which has stamped him through his persecution of Peter Williams and the early Methodists as the Claverhouse of Wales without the glory of Killiecrankie, he was known once as the most eloquent and able champion of the Tory party in the House of Commons in the dark days of the Whig domination that lasted until Chatham arose. The bards, who still kept alive the flame of the old loyalty of the Civil Wars, and There are two English Jacobite songs said to have been sung at the Cycle Club given in the Cambrian Quarterly Magazine, Vol II., pp. 658, 9. In the long attack on the great enemy of the Stuarts and Wales, Sir Robert Walpole, Sir Watkin played a prominent part; and after the resignation of the prime engineer of eighteenth century corruption, no man more eloquently and savagely pressed for an impeachment than the lord of Wynnstay. The fall of Walpole raised to the highest pitch the what discredited the old Pretender, but hopes of the Jacobites. The '15 had somePrince Charles Edward, who was growing into manhood, seemed to Sir Watkin of for whom to live and die. Many had fondfact, as to the Waverley of fiction, a prince ly believed that the Hanoverian dynasty could not survive Walpole's fall. When it became clear that the Brunswicks re mained in their seats, and the interests of the nation were more and more sacrificed to the beggarly electorate, plots and conIn 1744, spiracies again became rife. Prince Charles received an invitation from Sir Watkin and other leading Jacobites to reclaim the throne, but making support conditional on the assistance of a French army. At the same time Sir Watkin was busy working with success outside Wales Corporation to the Stuart interest. When to win prominent members of the London that the knight of Wales' keen interest in the year 1745 commenced, it was noticed. the Parliamentary struggle had ceased. The outsiders were puzzled, and the Government was alarmed. But Wales in the rebellion of 1745 I must leave to another chapter. J. ARTHUR PRICE. "God keep our famous knight He'll crop the wings of the Roundheads." WORDSWORTH AND WALES. T is a curious point, and one which I do not remember to have seen noticed by commentators upon Wordsworth's poetry, that, in spite of the poet's well known love for mountains, and his enthusiastic poems in honour of Cumberland, Scotland, Switzerland, and Italy, the beautiful scenery of Wales has been passed over by him almost without mention. On two several occasions at least, we know that Wales was visited by him. He came once in 1791, when at the close of his college career he paid a visit to his friend Jones, and the two made a pedestrian tour in North Wales, - the very condition, one would think, to favour the inspiration of the poetic muse. He came again in 1824, of which visit only two or three poems, and these of no very high order, remain as the memorials. Whether the beauty of Welsh scenery did not impress him after his native county and his foreign travels, or whether the visits befell unhappily at times when inspiration was lacking, it is impossible to say. But of the few poems which deal at all with Wales, only a few lines are given to description of the country, and these are by no means in tones of enthusiastic admiration; not such as flowed from him by the banks of the Wye above Tintern Abbey, or on the cliffs of Winander, or in the Simplon Pass. He seems to look upon the inhabitants of Wales as a race "whose glory is departed." Thus in the "Sonnet on Old Bangor," he says, "Mark! how all things swerve From their known course, or vanish like a dream. Another language spreads from coast to coast; Only perchance some melancholy stream, And some indignant hills old names preserve When laws and creeds and people all are lost." The incident alluded to in the first part of the sonnet,-the mourning over the "unarmed host" and the destruction of "aboriginal and Roman love," is the destruction by Ethelfrith of the monastry of Bangor with all its records,-some of them the most precious monuments of the ancient Britons. The "unarmed host" was the body of monks seen by Ethelfrith in prayer for the victory of the soldiers on their side. "If they are praying against us, they are fighting against us," he exclaimed, and ordered them to be first attacked. They were massacred, and their fate striking terror into Brocmail, he fled from the field, leaving the army to defeat and the town to destruction. The feeling of veneration for its past and of luxurious regret over the work of time seem to be the most prominent features in Wordsworth's attitude towards Wales. The sonnet composed "among the ruins of a castle in North Wales" deserves quotation.— 'Through shattered galleries, 'mid roofless halls, On the religious side of his nature too, Wordsworth seems to find some point of contact. The venerable aspect of the Druids appeals to him, though the romantic feeling that might be expected to hover round them when seen through the dim vista of ages, is overpowered in his mind by the sense of pity for the errors of their creed. In one sonnet he describes with considerable dignity, the effect being largely due to the ponderous words employed,the scene of consulting the omens, "Screams round the arch-druid's brow the seamew -white As Menai's foam; and towards the mystic ring Where augurs stand, the future questioning, Slowly the cormorant aims her heavy flight, Portending ruin to each baleful rite, That, in the lapse of ages hath crept o'er Diluvian truths, and patriarchal love.” In another sonnet, in the same tone |