I. Introduction
As evidenced by the closing salvo to their 1854 report, the Association of Welsh Clergy in the West Riding of the County of York (hereafter “the association”) was a radical group: “Let all narrow and bigotted adherence to petty systems, be at once exploded and for ever.”Footnote 1 The “petty systems” whose influence the association wished “exploded” were founded on the Anglican Church's centuries-old tradition of assigning non-Welsh speaking bishops to Welsh sees.Footnote 2 Despite upwards of 90 percent of Wales being monoglot Welsh speaking through the eighteenth century,Footnote 3 between 1727 and 1870, no Welsh-speaking bishop was appointed to a Welsh diocese (of which there were four: Bangor, Saint Asaph, Llandaff, and Saint David's).Footnote 4 Further, throughout the early Victorian period, many Welsh-born and Welsh-speaking clergy were appointed to livings in and around the English city of York. From their vantage point in the north of England, they both criticized the linguistic policy of the Established Church in their native land and suggested how it should be reformed. The members did not seek an altogether new system, however, but instead a return to the “true,” ancient British Protestant church, which the association alleged preached in the language of the people. Preaching in foreign languages was a form of imperial conquest. According to the potent myth perpetuated since the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, such a church had been founded in pre-Saxon and Celtic Britain shortly after the death of Christ and had taken root well before Augustine, the first archbishop of Canterbury, had brought Roman Catholicism into the realm.
Despite their concerns’ magnitude, the association is virtually invisible in the scholarly record. Their output was small and brief; although the association existed from 1821 (first as a group that met annually on Saint David's Day—that is, March 1—but later as a more formal entity), they only published annual reports from 1852 through 1856, after which they are believed to have disbanded. One of the strongest Welsh voices advocating church and, hence, state reform in Victorian Britain has thus faded into obscurity. Since, as Aled Jones wrote in 2005, the period of 1847 through 1867 saw “ideas of difference defined in terms of culture and ‘race’” forming prominently across Wales,Footnote 5 a fresh study of the association and their aims provides insights into the function of culture and colonialism in Victorian Britain.Footnote 6
This essay brings to light this little known but very significant group of churchmen and, through it, addresses numerous related elements of Victorian Britain, including: the Anglican Church and its institutional structure, the church's effects on indigenous non-English-speaking populations, the forms resistance to the Anglican Church took from within and without, and the states of Anglicanism and Nonconformity in Victorian Wales. Ultimately, the association constructed an alternative Protestant history that, they believed, corrected what had become the imperial and “Catholic” Anglican Church. I focus on key terms used by the association that also serve as entry points into valances of Victorian Wales and Britain, including “Catholicism,” “nation,” “patriotism,” and “liberty,” and, additionally, the rhetoric of slavery and “helotism” that the association and other nineteenth-century Welsh Anglicans invoked to describe themselves and the Welsh-speaking population. In contrast, I consider how the association and other Welsh Anglican writers used terms such as “alienation” and themes of “tyranny” to refer to the Catholic Church, and by extension to the Anglican Church as a whole. In the only sustained analysis the association has received heretofore, Roger L. Brown describes them as a “pressure group” that sought to reform the church in Wales, which members believed had been “ruined” by misadministration and disregard of its congregants.Footnote 7 Brown has recovered the association and introduced the range of issues with which its members were concerned. What remains to be done is a close analysis of the few publications they made as a group—specifically, the reports published from 1852 through 1856 and other related contemporary Welsh religious texts—in order to understand the key terms they used and how these terms framed the association's critiques of the church and their visions of reform.
Anglicanism in Wales was under much strain in the 1850s. 1847 saw the publication of the infamous Reports of the Commissioners of Enquiry into the State of Education in Wales, commonly known as the “Blue Books,” which maligned the Welsh language and Welsh Nonconformity (which here, along with “dissent,” refers to non-Anglican Protestant denominations).Footnote 8 These reports contributed to a new high point of patriotic and nationalist identityFootnote 9 which was further bolstered by an apogee of Welsh-language literacy in Wales (the vicar of Ysgeifiog stated in 1847 that “the Welsh are becoming a nation of readers”).Footnote 10 In 1850, two thirds of Wales still spoke Welsh and much of this population had no knowledge of English,Footnote 11 meaning that Welsh was the language of much of this celebrated literacy. Perhaps the single most important event that preceded the association's reports—and one that encapsulated all of these previous points—was the release of the data from the 1851 religious census, which proved Wales had become a “nation of Nonconformists” and that the church in Wales was in crisis.Footnote 12 The association itself wrote in the 1854 report that: “The fact cannot be denied, dissentis the national religion of Wales.”Footnote 13 The association needed to very carefully forge a vision of “Justice for Wales” and “Welsh Patriotism,” these being the reports’ titles, in order to promote a Welsh patriotism that maintained allegiance to the church (their decision to publish in English confirms that Anglicans and other English speakers were their target audiences). They did this by weaving their principles into post-Reformation church histories that set Wales at the center of the ancient British church, which was conquered by the Romans (that is, Catholicism). They substantiated these histories by claiming that the church was not incorrigible: rather, it needed to reorient itself toward acting properly and not be tempted by “Catholic” practices such as preaching in an unintelligible language. Echoing rhetoric that was being adopted by nascent nationalist movements within Wales itself, the association called their compatriots to return to the supposedly “Protestant” origins of the Welsh church.
Beyond reinforcing the association's status as a “pressure group,” this essay also elucidates how they responded to current events in order to adopt for themselves terms and themes that were gaining traction elsewhere in Wales, and especially with Nonconformists. I first consider current scholarship on the Established Church in Wales over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (and the few references to the association within it), then survey post-Reformation Welsh church literature with a focus on early iterations of what developed into the association's vision of “nationalism,” and then turn to how Catholicism was constructed and understood in such Protestant histories up to the 1850s, before finally examining how the association and other Welsh authors constructed a separate Victorian nationalist rhetoric. The final point incorporates the perceived fusion of Anglicanism and Catholicism and how the association's “nationalist” struggle resisted these antagonistic forces.
II. The Association in their Time and Place
Debate surrounding the state of the Anglican Church in Wales and its contribution, if any, to Nonconformity's rise over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is as contested now as it has been in the past. Nevertheless, we possess a sufficiently clear picture of the culture of the Victorian church in Wales to understand both the Nonconformists’ and the association's responses. One example of the extremes can be seen in writings by R. Tudur Jones and Philip Jenkins. Jones draws a correlation between the English bishops and English imperialism: “The fact that the Church was linked to the state meant that it was heavily influenced by the prejudices and assumptions of English political and ecclesiastical leaders. By the nineteenth century, England's aggressive nationalism was nearing the heyday of empire.”Footnote 14 He then clarifies further that “English imperialism comprised strong religious elements.”Footnote 15 This attitude also reflects certain contemporary pronouncements from the church itself—for instance, the oft-quoted 1766 declaration from the Court of Arches, repeated in the 1854 report, that “Wales is a conquered country, it is proper to introduce the English language, and it is the duty of the bishops to promote the English, in order to introduce the language.”Footnote 16 In contrast to this alignment of the church's behavior with English imperialism, Philip Jenkins suggests that the difficulties the church encountered in Wales were such that it should be lauded for functioning there as well as it did. He writes that “distinctive cultural and linguistic problems” plagued the church in Wales even though it was “administratively identical” to how it operated in England and that “we should perhaps be less struck by the church's ultimate crisis in the nineteenth century” than by its “remarkable success in maintaining popular loyalty over the previous 250 years.”Footnote 17 The association was something of a nexus uniting these two extremes: on the one hand, it was composed of Anglican clergy, but on the other, these very clergymen were discontent with the current situation regarding non-Welsh-speaking bishops to the degree that they described it using imperialist rhetoric that anticipated R. Tudur Jones. Mark Ellis Jones writes that their vexed position is what has pushed them out of the historical record, “because such an Anglican initiative is difficult to reconcile with the Nonconformist interpretation of the past.”Footnote 18
The association's most prominent members’ lives exemplify the fraught nature of its situation and legacy. Their careers also bring into perspective a union that is quintessential to understanding the nature of their activism: in addition to being Anglican clergy, they participated in Welsh literary culture and, most prominently, in the eisteddfod, Wales's ancient bardic festival that had seen a revival over the turn of the nineteenth century.Footnote 19 Joseph Hughes (bardic name Carn Ingli, 1803–1863), for instance, regularly returned to Wales for the national eisteddfod. A respected eisteddfodic poet throughout his life, he was appointed the association's “official bard.”Footnote 20 David James (Dewi o Ddyfed, 1803–1871) was a prominent eisteddfodic presence as well, in addition to being a prolific author of religious and social tracts.Footnote 21 His brother Thomas James (Llallawg, 1817–1879) judged eisteddfodic competitions, contributed to Welsh periodicals, and was a founding member of the Cambrian Archaeological Association.Footnote 22 Lewis Jones (1793–1866), the association's president for thirty years, used his position as vicar of Almondbury to appoint Welsh clergymen to the new livings he oversaw.Footnote 23 Far from being unrelated or oppositional forces, these members’ lifeworks reveal a unity between Anglicanism and Welsh national identity as it was embodied in the eisteddfod. This bond would be the foundation of their arguments for reform. Their active engagement in and affinity for Welsh cultural institutions also adds another dimension to their status. Being from southern and western Wales (Hughes and the James brothers were originally from Pembrokeshire and Jones from Cardiganshire), receiving assignments in the area of York could not have placed them much farther from home. Their biographies bring into focus a troubling crux that is at the heart of their concerns: in England, despite being adept Welsh clergymen, they had little direct influence on the church's practices in regard to Wales; and in Wales, despite being prolific eisteddfodic and bardic authors, they alone could not stem the flow of worshippers away from the Anglican faith.
Assignment to English-speaking regions effectively forced the members of the association to use the English language exclusively at the expense of their Welsh (at least publicly) and thus contributed to their imperialist narrative. For their part, the association's members seemed to recognize and wish to capitalize on their position (“We are the only party who dare stir in the matter”).Footnote 24 Brown synthesizes their concerns (and reaches a conclusion similar to R. Tudur Jones's): “One result of this policy of appointing Englishmen to Welsh livings was that the cathedrals and major parishes had become English colonies within the Welsh Church.”Footnote 25 It was within these contexts that the association formed their concerns regarding colonialism, language, and culture (national and local). The association configured the perceived abuses of the Anglican administration using the discourse of geography and history. That is, the association approached the church's “corruption” by likening it to a foreign force invading and conquering a native population. It was here that they embedded their struggles in contemporary church histories, and specifically Welsh histories that incorporated bardic and druidic elements that grew out of the turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Welsh antiquarian movement (and were, of course, legible to contemporary eisteddfod audiences).Footnote 26 The association thus confronted what they labeled the “corruptions” of the Established Church from a uniquely-Welsh position and located Anglicanism's origins in the ancient Welsh church. As Anglicans, rather than Nonconformists, its members used their vantage point as concerned representatives to point to where the church had wandered astray from its own creeds. To correct its course, the church needed to consult Welsh Anglican histories which outlined the doctrines that the church's current practices were obscuring and even destroying.
These practices formed the bases of the association's two major contentions: First, they argued that the continued appointment of English-speaking bishops and preferential treatment for the English language constituted an attempted invasion and subjugation of Wales since the country defined its national identity largely in terms of its language. Second, and relatedly, the association asserted that the church was acting in a manner that exceeded Catholicism in its efforts to suppress and ultimately extinguish the Welsh language under the church's aegis. This did not mean that Anglican doctrine was becoming more Catholic; rather, the association had in mind early British church history in which the invading Roman forces conquered Britain, imposed foreign practices and a foreign language over the natives, and attempted to exterminate the native language and identity.
This last accusation was articulated as merely an “attempt” because, as David James (Dewi o Ddyfed) writes in his 1836 Patriarchal Religion of Britain (addressed to the “gentlemen” of the association), the ancient British church remained alive through the preservation and perseverance of the Welsh language, which the Romans were not able to eliminate entirely. In support of his contention that ancient druidism “opened a way for the introduction of the Christian religion,”Footnote 27 he explains how the association's members are among the only figures left who can claim a certain knowledge, and thus authority, of the ancient church since they alone speak the original language that it used: Association members’ “purpose [is] to keep alive the remembrance of that primitive community—the ancient order of druids, who, by their policy and zealous exertions became the chief source,” not of power, but of moral improvement and national prosperity “among the Aboriginal Britons,” whose descendants many of you really are, though few of you probably know it.”Footnote 28 The association was then the only body capable of tapping into the “true” British church's origins. Unlike the church they were serving, they sought not to use this historical authority to control the shepherds and the flocks but instead to return to how it operated before its original conquest.
III. Victorian Wales: “A nation of Nonconformists”
By the time of the association's first published report in 1852, the 1847 Blue Books and 1851 religious census had revealed, in official terms, the degree to which the church was losing the Welsh population's trust. The Blue Books, to the dismay of the Nonconformists (and of many Anglicans), forged a link between the putative immorality of the people and their adherence to the Nonconformist faith. This provoked a swift reaction which contributed to a stronger link between Nonconformity and nationalism and which defined each in terms oppositional to the Anglican Church.Footnote 29 In John Davies's words, by the mid-nineteenth century, many shared the belief that “the chapel people were the only true Welsh and that Welshness was synonymous with Nonconformity.”Footnote 30 As the religious census statistics for Wales would reveal a mere four years later, the report's caustic judgments were directed at a clear majority of Welsh worshippers. Of the worshippers accounted for on “Census Sunday,” 611,000—or roughly 80 percent—attended a Nonconformist place of worship.Footnote 31 Over half of Wales did not attend a service at all (concerning for all denominations) and Roman Catholics had increased tenfold to approximately 5,500 people between 1800 and 1851.Footnote 32 On the surface, by the year 1852, approximately one out of five worshippers attended an Anglican service in Wales, and the other four out of five, not to mention those who did not attend a place of worship at all, held a virtual monopoly on the rhetoric of nationalism and pride in Wales's history and language.
The association came to contend that the “true” Protestant Church was founded on the very nationalism—here including notions of patriotism, justice, and language—that Nonconformists were beginning to espouse, especially after the publication of the 1847 Blue Books. Indeed, Prys Morgan suggests that, before 1847, Nonconformists had generally shown little interest in things “Welsh” and were galvanized to collectively rally around nationalist principles only after the Blue Books’ publication. Since, he writes, “up to 1847 many of the chief Welsh patriots . . . had been Anglican parsons,” the Blue Books effectively catalyzed an inversion of Welsh religion and nationalism.Footnote 33 With this in mind, it was the Established Church's corrupt practices that had wrought the current crisis, specifically by alienating the Welsh congregants by continuously preaching in a foreign tongue (a form of the “alienation” they discuss throughout). Furthermore, within the Protestant Church histories the association relied upon, they could draw a correlation between historical and current infringements upon Welsh nationhood and determine that, in both cases, the origin lay in England.
IV. The “True” History of “True” Protestantism
From their conceptions, post-Reformation Protestant histories provided strong bases for tying nativity and nationalism to language and geography and for defining them in opposition to the effects of foreign, typically English, invasions of one variety or another. Since the Reformation, and before the publication of Bishop William Morgan's Welsh Bible of 1588, there had been historical scholars striving to make Welsh into a classical tongue replete with an ancient literature comparable to that of Greece and Rome.Footnote 34 Part of how they explained the language's vaunted status was through a “shared vision of a glorious past” and “the realization that the present fell far short of that glory and the determination that the glory should be restored.”Footnote 35 This glorious past was rooted in a number of foundation myths that sought to explain how the original Christian mission was introduced to Britain centuries before the advent of the Church of Rome. Most prominent among these was the story of Joseph of Arimathea's journey into Britain: “The myth of Joseph of Arimathea . . . related how [he] came to this country to preach the pure Gospel of Christ some thirty years after the Crucifixion. Rather more than a century later, the country became officially Christian through the conversion of King Lucius.”Footnote 36 This is the way that the ancient British—“i.e., Welsh”Footnote 37—Church founded its claims of being the original and primitive native church. By returning to its origins, the Welsh church would, in the association's view, renew its legitimacy among its natural constituency from which it had become alienated. (To quote R. Geraint Gruffydd: The British church “upheld the pure Faith until forced by the English to renounce it following the coming of St Augustine of Canterbury from Rome in 597.”)Footnote 38
According to the foundation myth, the corrupting influence of the Church of Rome had arrived in Britain via England. Consequently, it was imperative for the champions of the Reformation to claim that, far from being in any way Welsh, Romanism had been an English import. Foremost among figures promulgating these views was Bishop Richard Davies (1505–1581) who contended that the most prominent obstacle hindering Protestantism's spread in Wales was, to quote Glanmor Williams, an “‘English’ religion, uncongenial to Wales.”Footnote 39 Davies proclaimed, with the Protestant histories in mind, that the “Romish” religion was imposed on Wales through England and that the English had never even shared in the “true spiritual patrimony” preserved by the Welsh church until the Reformation.Footnote 40 Further, and most importantly, by the nineteenth century, only an “elect minority” still preserved in them the knowledge of the true, native church.Footnote 41 These “chosen individuals” were those within the Welsh church who were conversant with the history of the pre-Saxon Welsh church and could discern that the policies of the current establishment replicated, however unconsciously, the oppression of the Church of Rome. A return to the “glorious past,” before not only Catholicism but also the “Reformed” Church's current tendencies, could only be effected by venerating the Welsh language and nation, both of which harbored the church when the “glorious past” was the present. For the association, the chosen few (or the “elect minority”) were those clergy who could themselves speak Welsh, the language of the old church, and who were exiled far from their native flock while “alien” English clergy slowly sought to smother and extinguish the Welsh language where it was still spoken. The current establishment was, in fact, destroying the remnants of the “true” church that still existed. This historical and current threat was the basis upon which Welsh clergy took up the banners of “patriotism,” “nationalism,” and “liberty,” and it verified that they held the original claims to these concepts since it was their lineage that had struggled with them from time immemorial.
V. Nineteenth-Century Protestant Notions of CatholicismFootnote 42
By the 1850s, multiple generations of church historians had constructed and reconstructed early British church chronicles that elevated the presence of an invasive and tyrannical Catholic Church, and these bore similarities to the tendencies that the association was accusing the Established Church of having developed itself. In this period, these histories had begun to use terms such as “nation” when describing the struggles the native British church endured when confronted by this foreign church that, they claimed, forced them to adopt new modes of praise and to do so in a new tongue. Thus, in the eyes of the association, the church was beginning to take the form of the very entity that it had, with the Reformation, expelled. This entity and its expulsion possessed many qualities that, when read together, become far more profound than simply being the antithesis of Protestantism. To accuse the church of acting in a Catholic manner was to further affiliate it with tyranny against and oppression of, in these instances, Wales's culture and nation.
The divisions that the clergy made between the Reformed and the Catholic Churches generally represented the institutions’ political ideology. Since these histories claimed that the original British church was first conquered by Rome before it resurfaced in the Reformation, very few people had access to the early British church's tenets. Again, it was the Welsh language that preserved even the knowledge of the original church's values, it being the original language of Britain and the ancient British church. As Glanmor Williams states, the fact that “only an elect minority had held to the truth” represented a “stupendous challenge,” the response to which needed to be rooted in both the history and the scriptures themselves.Footnote 43 In order to convince the leaders of the Established Church that they were replicating the errors of Rome, the association needed to promulgate the true history of the native Welsh church. Thomas Burgess (1756–1837), bishop of Saint David's from 1803 until 1825, claimed that the Reformation had restored the ancient liberties which that native church had always enjoyed, a claim which the association incessantly made: “The Reformation of our Church . . . restored to us the full and unrestrained use of the Scriptures, relieved us from many unscriptural doctrines and usages, delivered us from the horrors of the Inquisition, gave us liberty of conscience and freedom of inquiry, and liberated us from the tyranny of a foreign jurisdiction.”Footnote 44 While it can be argued that the association's claims and concerns cover each of these facets (for instance, that disregarding Article 24 correlates with “unscriptural usages”),Footnote 45 what are most interesting are the claims regarding liberty, freedom, and liberation, especially from that of a “foreign jurisdiction.”
Burgess invokes “liberty of conscience” consistently when drawing distinctions between the Established Church and Rome. He repeats this in his essay A Protestant and Papist's Manual by stating: “Liberty of conscience, and the rights of conscience, are sacred things, and, in this country, are held in deserved veneration.”Footnote 46 In this instance, he goes on to write that current Roman Catholics are incapable of “entire conformity to the British Constitution” and that their “scruples of conscience” “induce them to acknowledge a foreign spiritual jurisdiction” which moves them to seek the British state to do away with its native laws.Footnote 47 Burgess associates “liberty of conscience” with the native religion and distinguishes it from Catholicism's deferral to “foreign jurisdictions.” Burgess's claims—again, disregarding those that focus on doctrinal distinctions between the two churches—thus provide a helpful and broad sense of what some ideological implications of being labeled “Catholic” or “papist” were: they suggested that one was loyal to a foreign and invasive body and that this foreign loyalty infringed on both the native state and the personal opportunities it provided. These opportunities took the form of certain liberties—brought forth through a literal “liberation” from the foreign Catholic Church—which were maintained by native laws (that is, the “constitution”) and were themselves endowed with a resistance to “tyranny.”
It is with these connections in mind that later treatises on Protestantism, and especially on the English-speaking bishops and clergy in Wales, must be considered. In his 1858 treatise On the Inexpediency, Folly and Sin of a “Barbarian Episcopate,” John Williams (1792–1858), archdeacon of Cardigan (who had written that he was “delighted with the Yorkshire Movement”),Footnote 48 stated that the current policy was redolent of Catholicism. Indeed, the Anglican Church had not only adopted Catholic practices but had exceeded them. On the resiliency of the Welsh language, he writes that “the intrusion of Englishmen bishops into Welsh sees, has completely failed if its object was to hasten the period when the Welshman was to forego his native language and literature, and become a one-tongued Saxon.”Footnote 49 He continues:
Before the Reformation was established in England, it did not much matter whether a Catholic bishop were acquainted with the vernacular language of the people . . . as the sacraments were dispensed and religious worship celebrated in an ancient and venerable tongue.
[ . . . ]
But in modern times such has been the progress of common sense, even in the most bigotted Catholic countries, that it would be very difficult to find a bishop of the Romish Church who cannot eloquently address the people of his diocese in their own vernacular tongue.Footnote 50
The English-speaking bishops, in Williams's eyes, were then worse than even contemporary Catholic priests, and their practices had separated “the masses in Wales” from “their natural leaders.” Perhaps worse, this renewed form of linguistic tyranny was reminiscent of complaints that Catholicism had reinstated an ancient form of slavery. For Williams, the Welsh “masses” had come to be alienated from the national church. This alienation made them distant from local Welsh clergy, who themselves were, in Williams's eyes, largely disregarded also by the bishops under whom they served. He claimed that “the result of this system [under English-speaking bishops] was a degraded state of the great body of the clergy in Wales, helots in their own native land, and thought unworthy of that social and political equality, without the enjoyment of which it is very difficult for the great body of mankind to preserve their own self-respect.”Footnote 51 He goes on to assert that the church's leaders “are delighted with the present state of affairs, and will never aid us in removing the abuses which cripple and degrade the establishment and her helotised ministry.”Footnote 52
In these manners, high-ranking church figures in Wales saw a resurgence of what Bishop Burgess had outlined as historical and theoretical Catholic principles, as well as their consequences. By perpetuating certain forms of “tyranny” at the expense of former “liberties,” not only had the flock been alienated but a new underclass (the “helotised ministry”) had been created, all of which was redolent of the oppression of Rome. This also set the stage for the association in the 1850s.
VI. “Patriotism”
The rousing titles of “Welsh Patriotism” in the reports of 1852 and 1853 and “Justice for Wales” for those in 1854 and 1856 were evidence that, to quote Roger Brown: The association “needed to be negative in order to be positive in their concern.”Footnote 53 This, however, somewhat masks the fact that the patriotic content of the reports on the whole eschewed negativity. The manner in which the prefaces introduce themes of “justice” and “patriotism” and then identify “foreign” England as the threat presents a much more compelling line of inquiry. For instance, the first page of the 1852 report reads: “It has been well observed, that love of country is a feeling that cannot be too highly eulogised,—a feeling deeply fixed in the bosoms of the inhabitants of every climate, and in none deeper than in the descendants of the ancient Cymry.” (“Cymry” here refers to the people of “Cymru,” the Welsh word for “Wales.”)Footnote 54 In later reports, similar introductory remarks are imbued with a reassurance that this form of patriotism remains strong in spite of the fact that those making said remarks live far from home—in this case, in Yorkshire and the north of England. Thus, the opening of the 1853 report argues: “The love of his own country is natural to every man; it is deeply impressed on his heart, whether he has been born in the most civilized, or uncivilized country: neither distance of time, nor remoteness of situation can alienate his affections from the land that gave him birth. And perhaps, no people, are more susceptible of this noble and generous feeling than the Welsh.”Footnote 55 The later reports begin much the same way. Short of invariably imbuing “patriotism” and “justice” with a negative tone, there is little trace of pessimism in the reports. It is more helpful to determine how and of what these concepts were composed.
The reports tend to define “patriotism” and “justice” indirectly by revealing certain qualities of each. Thus, the opening passage of the 1854 report states: “We envy not the feelings of the citizen of the world, who looks upon every square yard of land alike; and sees no reason why he should prefer his own country to any other. The word patriotism finds no place in his vocabulary, nor do the generous sentiments it inspires, meet with a welcome response in his cold heart.”Footnote 56 A remark from the 1852 report recounting the annual meeting made a helpful addition: “The day was spent in a rational and patriotic manner, it having been devoted to the discussion of subjects connected with the language and literature of Wales.”Footnote 57 These examples provide a few key details of how “patriotism” must be understood when coming from the association: it is localized, it becomes diluted the more one moves toward being a “citizen of the world,” and it is demonstrated through propagation of the native language and literature (effectively countering some of the baser claims of the 1847 report). Extending these points to their logical conclusions, the association was suggesting that the more one becomes a “citizen of the world,” the less he is concerned with localized and thus patriotic issues such as his native language and literature. This was the very quality the “Anglo” bishops, as they were occasionally titled, were thought to be without, as their behavior threatened a native language and also was a by-product of a homogenizing “citizen of the world” attitude at the expense of such patriotic concerns.
The 1853 report outlines what some of the consequences are when these attitudes prevail. After reminding readers that the Established Church “of this country” is a “noble institution, when her principles are fairly and honestly carried out,” it states that: “But when the patronage of the Church is bestowed to enrich friends and relations, without any regard to the good of the community, . . . when such iniquities are permitted and sanctioned by archbishops in the most hallowed ground of our venerable establishment in England, it is no wonder their example should be followed by suffragen bishops, deans, and chapters, and others throughout the country.”Footnote 58 Patriotism is thus bound with local community, and the ill effects of misconduct that compromise a native patriotism have the chance of corrupting those with whom they come into contact. The corruptive forces in this instance were very clearly designated as originating in and operating from England. It is also evident from these passages that to be patriotic does not preclude sympathy for other communities. Rather, possessing this patriotism makes one more able to ascertain the forms that threaten it in other locations. The same homogenizing forces that in this instance were confronting Wales—its language, literature, and even salvation—had historical precedent that the association could recognize and had the potential to affect other communities similarly in the future.
VII. “Alienation”
Throughout the reports, threats to patriotism and nation were grounded in discussions of “alienation,” and these discussions provide the lens through which, ultimately, the allegations that the Established Church was acting in a Catholic fashion become visible. The “alienation” emphasized throughout the reports went in both directions: the native Welsh felt alienated from the church because alien figures had infiltrated it and were operating in Wales. That they were alien because they were English, in addition to being non-Welsh speaking, further reinforced the nationalistic distinctions the association drew between Wales and England. First, unlike the direct accusations of Catholic practice, the theme of alienation transcended intangible ideologies into doctrinal practices, but only insofar as it distinguished the modern church from the ancient British church. That is, by the association's time, the post-Reformation Established Church had come to rely on forms of alienation even in how it organized itself. The 1853 report states:
The Cymro [here, the Welsh person] . . . loves to dwell on the glorious deeds of his forefathers, and embalm their memories in his heart; for “reason good has he” to be proud of the worthies of his race, and especially of that holy man, whose anniversary we this day commemorate [Saint David]. While England and other countries have adopted aliens to their soil for their patron saints, Cambria glories in a son of her own. While other nations boast of champions of war, Britons pride themselves in their champion of peace.Footnote 59
This helps triangulate how “alienation” is to be understood. The quotation distinguishes England from “Cambria” (which is to say Wales) in a multifaceted manner. The Welsh here are lauded for celebrating the native-born Saint David as opposed to a saint imposed on them who lived and practiced elsewhere.Footnote 60 It also elevates memory (with its grasp of the ancient church), and in this case, the memory is of one of the “worthies of [the Welsh] race” who embodied the championing of peace. The memory and praise of this peaceful figure remained very near-at-hand during the crisis of alien bishops who praised “aliens to their soil” while conquering soil belonging to neither them nor their saints.
This quotation further elucidates a number of points regarding the association's discussions of “patriotism” and “citizenship of the world.” The patriotic Welsh felt most endeared to their own nation and their own race's “worthies” as opposed to those who looked to other nations’ pasts to establish their own sense of self and identity (national or otherwise) and then imposed these foreign elements onto others, be they in the form of foreign saints or foreign languages. One effect of this debased patriotism was to alienate those whom it subjugated. After quoting the Court of Arches' 1766 declaration that Wales was a “conquered country” and remarking that this “sentiment . . . has been too literally carried out,” the 1854 report went on to state: “And what has been the result? Why, only the total prostration of the Welsh Church, and the alienation of the Welsh people from her communion.”Footnote 61 It is evident that, since their patriotism combined an attachment to local history, a culture of peace, and an unbroken memory of both, the association proclaimed that the Welsh people recognized when an institution that they had always been part of was becoming corrupt. They could also detect the threats and eventual effects of foreign interlopers. The 1854 report quotes a “patriotic writer” who could identify when the alienation began and what initiated it, remarking that a similar practice occurred much earlier: describing “the prevalence of this obtrusion of aliens into the Welsh episcopate in the sixteenth century,” for a period of around forty years leading up to the reign of Queen Elizabeth, “the Welsh sees were filled as they are now with English bishops, ignorant alike of the language, manners, and spiritual wants of the people.”Footnote 62 He goes on to clarify that the current crisis was foreseeable based on this very history: “The consequences then of placing the affairs of the Welsh Church under the management of aliens in blood, language, habits, and sympathies were just as might have been expected from a practice entirely devoid of piety, reason, and justice.”Footnote 63
Patriotism and alienation thus gain even more clarity. The 1854 report aligns a peace-loving patriotism with what the alienating forces do not possess and thus threaten, including a kindredness of “blood, language, habits, and sympathies.” Further, the invasive, foreign, alien forces, who are in this case English, act in a way that does not contain “piety, reason, and justice.”Footnote 64 Aside from indirectly associating “reason” and “justice” with patriotism, this quotation also introduces the possibility that alien bishops even lack piety, thus separating them not only from their flock but from the church they are supposed to be representing. The dual qualities of foreignness and irreligiosity combine to allow a platform from which to accuse the church of acting in a Catholic fashion while harkening back to the early Catholic “conquest” of Britain. Indeed, these two qualities cohere during instances when the reports directly condemn the church with these claims, such as when the 1854 report queries: “If we consider the Latin service of the Romanists so opposed to reason and religion as administered amongst people of other tongues, what can we say in defence of the practice of our own church, in this respect, in Wales?”Footnote 65 Additionally, when we recall the theme of nationalism in opposition to universal homogenization, then the following claim from the 1853 report acquires a new clarity, both in how it characterizes Catholicism and how it suggests the current Anglican bishops are participating in something worse:
We are accustomed to consider this one of the crying sins of the Romish Church, that, in its aim at uniformity, it has lost the reality of God's worship, by a Latin service, and has taken away the key of knowledge by withholding the Word of God in the vernacular tongue. But the Church of Rome has never, or rarely, in modern times, been so untrue to herself as to send into any district priests of missionaries who were strangers to the tongue of the people, among whom they were to labour.Footnote 66
The emphases in the above (reproduced from the original) suggest how imperative it is to understand the implications and resonations of each phrase. Essentially, the reports claim that a universal “uniformity”—one might assert that the “citizen of the world” sees the whole world as “uniform”—is truly unrealistic when applied to worshipping God. Indeed, it is so far in opposition to the reality of worshipping God and to piety in general that it alienates its audience and completely prevents them from acquiring the “key of knowledge” with which to access their salvation. This practice would have been crude enough in theory, but the Established Church was going beyond even this historical, theoretical Catholicism and partaking in practices that the reports claim modern Catholicism had put to rest.
VIII. “Catholicism”
Beyond having the sense that the appointment of English-speaking bishops reflected certain Catholic ideological tendencies, the association was also concerned that Roman Catholicism was in fact growing in Wales at the time, a contention confirmed by the results of the religious census of 1851. The 1854 report includes an excerpt written by the Rev. J. Roberts, “a clergyman of the Established Church, a native of Carnarvonshire, who knows the Welsh language, the Welsh habits, and the Welsh movements.” Convinced of “the progress of Popery in Wales,” he writes:
[The association] cannot help applying to [the church] the words of the prophet, “My people hath been lost sheep; their shepherds have caused them to go astray.” . . . And if the system of appointing Anglo-bishops for Wales is to continue, and the interests of religion are to be treated quite secondary to a barbarous and unscriptural prejudice against an ancient and comprehensive language . . . your committee are fully confident, that the Church will, not only not recover her position, but will become a byword and proverb throughout the Christian world.Footnote 67
Here Roberts draws a connection between the non-Protestant, or Catholic, practices of the Established Church in Wales and the growth of Catholic practitioners in Wales. The 1854 report goes on to define how this is the first resurgence of Catholicism in Wales since the publication of the Welsh New Testament and includes a quotation from Bishop Richard Davies's prefix to it, where he states that the native Welsh bishops of Queen Elizabeth's period “found a people immersed in Popery; they have left a nation of Protestants.”Footnote 68 It also makes clear that, from the time of the Reformation until the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, there were no native Welsh bishops in Wales, the Welsh sees instead being “filled as they are now with English bishops, ignorant alike of the language, manners, and spiritual wants of the people.”Footnote 69 According to the reports, the period spanning Elizabeth's reign until the beginning of Queen Anne's in 1702 witnessed the high point of Protestantism in Wales. With Queen Anne came the return of English bishops to Welsh sees, and this was seen as the immediate origin of the current crises.Footnote 70
The 1854 report also records another instance where the association alleged that the Established Church had transcended Catholicism. In an article discussing his presence at the consecration of a new church in Llanfihangel-Ysceifiog in Anglesey, Joseph Hughes (Carn Ingli) remarks that the service was performed entirely in English, even though “not twenty visitors in the whole congregation” spoke English.Footnote 71 Hughes then recalls a companion at the consecration remarking, regarding the service being in English, that “all this is very much like Popery,” to which another attendee responded, “Yes . . . it is thorough Popery.”Footnote 72 Hughes continues: “But it was beyond Popery, for Roman Catholic priests do not preach to their flocks in the Latin tongue.”Footnote 73 The same report goes on to make two more direct claims regarding the presence of “Catholicism” in the Established Church's practice of assigning English bishops to Welsh sees. The first does not record a member of the association's thoughts but instead calls attention to anxieties among the common people in Wales. With the consecration at Llanfihangel-Ysceifiog in mind, Hughes continues: “Every one, acquainted with the public mind of the Principality, must have perceived the low opinion, which the people entertain respecting this sacred rite, which is very naturally considered by them, either as a remnant of Popery, or at the best a mere matter of form.”Footnote 74 The report closes with a query, repeated here, that aims to summarize the feelings of the clergy and their distant Welsh flock: “If we consider the Latin service of the Romanists so opposed to reason and religion as administered amongst people of other tongues, what can we say in defence of the practice of our own Church, in this respect, in Wales?”Footnote 75
Collectively, these claims that the Established Church was acting in a Catholic manner reveal the meaning and intention of the accusations. First, the implications were not that the church advocated “worship of graven images” or other contemporary Catholic stereotypes. (Paul O'Leary writes that by this time anti-Catholicism “can be characterized as an attitude or a mentality as much as a doctrinal objection to a different religious persuasion.”)Footnote 76 In spite of this, the shift to “Catholic” practices was having a literal, if indirect, effect of pushing people away from the church and toward Catholicism, with the implied reason being that even the Catholic priests might preach in Welsh in Wales.Footnote 77 Second, it appeared that the church, by repeatedly assigning English bishops to the Welsh sees, was being Catholic, or “beyond,” without quite realizing it. A primary reason for this was the fact that the appointment of bishops was done from afar, and beyond being linguistically discriminatory, this was also directly threatening what the association and others believed to be the only remaining direct connection to the original British church. While British Protestant historians believed that the Reformation brought about a certain “return” to the original British church (albeit a compromised and eroding one), the association held firmly that the only direct link that still existed to the ancient British church was preserved in the Welsh language since this was the language through which the original British people would have worshipped. The responsibility fell to the association, themselves alienated from their native land, to demonstrate to the church that its actions were not in keeping with the convictions of the Protestant faith, and that these actions were pushing the flock away to both Nonconformity and to Catholicism.
IX. Conclusion
The allegations of Catholic practice made by the association, then, were more than pejoratives aimed at rousing strong emotion in the Anglican administration, and indeed, they went beyond mere historical allusions. They were actually deployed in a manner that more strongly framed how their visions of nineteenth-century Welsh “patriotism” and “nationhood” were to be understood. Within these allegations, the ancient and original Protestant Christianity that Catholicism had suppressed contained the same principles that were later channeled into the Reformation. These, in turn, were being threatened by the supposedly Reformed Church in the form of revived Catholic-like practices. For instance, David James writes about druidism's legacy:
Druidism was not forgotten. Many learned men in England and on the Continent, applied their time and talents to the study of it: but unfortunately they did not know where any fresh or undiscovered memorials of it lay. They seem to have forgotten that a people still existed in a corner of Britain, who could boast of a lineal and uninterrupted descent from those very Britons of old, among whom Druidism had originated, and reigned for ages, in its greatest splendour and purity; and who also spoke that very language in which the Druids themselves had once performed their solemn rites, and instructed the people, and taught the young.Footnote 78
What James is suggesting here is that those who could tap into Druidism's legacy had an uninterrupted memory not only of Druidism's original tenets but also of the original church's suppression by the Roman Catholic Church. With this knowledge, they were also the most equipped to decree when practices reminiscent of Catholic suppression were resurfacing, whether the practitioners realized it or not.
According to Roger L. Brown, the association seems to have slowly dissolved some time after publishing their final report in 1856, with few of their concerns having been resolutely addressed.Footnote 79 A poem recited by one Master Herbert A. James, “a young bard,” and included in the 1856 report suggests that the association and its members remained stalwart in their concerns of alienation and memory and in their vision of reform well after they discontinued their published reports. James's poem reads:
The situation remained laid out as clearly as it was before, and there remained a strong sense of the association's purpose being yet unfinished. Though the association remained alienated “in a Saxon land,” its members still invoked the legacy of ancient defenders of the Welsh language, they still identified the current church officials as being the offenders (not the church itself), and they still desired that they be granted a higher level of influence that would allow them to choose “bishops of [their] own.”
Brown writes that, by the time of their final report, the association had established itself as an effective “pressure group” but had inadvertently done itself a number of disservices throughout its published reports. These, according to Brown, included how they framed generalizations regarding the state of remote parish churches and the lack of schools throughout Wales, their failure to acknowledge certain positive traits of a number of bishops, and their “naive” belief that Wales could return to an ancient “golden age of Christianity” if it could overcome the Anglo-Welsh bishops who had ruined the church.Footnote 81 A close assessment of the association's rhetoric regarding this “golden age” yields two results, which each also speak to manifestations of conquest and resistance in the Victorian era: First, it sheds more light on just how strongly the present influenced how its members constructed their rhetoric and themes, and not merely the corruption of the present but also the concurrent development of patriotic rhetoric elsewhere (especially following the release of both the 1847 report and the 1851 religious census). Second, it reveals that the association did not create the idea of a “golden age,” but rather that this was a quintessential element of the very Protestant history that they were harking to and continuing into their own time. Embedded in each element of the present was a profound connection to the past, specifically that of the original British church. The association reminded their readers that the discourse of patriotism was not new but that a Welsh nationalist struggle had occurred long ago and had continued up until the present. Rather than simply longing for an idyllic past, the association was staking claims in a patriotic nationalist discourse that by the 1850s was rapidly being appropriated by Nonconformist and other movements, and doing so by revealing that the current situation was the result of many years of neglect. Indeed, by reflecting upon British church histories, the association revealed that the church had withstood previous attempts of conquest. The association not only sought to reclaim the ancient British church but also to realign patriotic nationalist rhetoric and its associated ambitions before it was completely monopolized by bodies that felt that the church was, among other things, a primary threat. Woven into the association's narrative of conquest, culture, and identity was the specter of the Catholic Church, which was the original historical conqueror and which the church had come to unknowingly emulate. The association fashioned a “golden age” that responded to current crises in a way that resonated with a current audience and reacquainted that audience with strands of its own history.
