In this regional history of Northeast Wales, Sarah Ward Clavier examines the culture and identity of the gentry during traumatic times. She argues that the gentry's loyalism, royalism, and Anglicanism informed and defended their beliefs and actions from the Long Parliament to the Glorious Revolution.

In part 1, Clavier demonstrates the gentry's deeply rooted and continually replenished social and political conservatism, surveying the importance they placed on Welsh historical culture, history-writing, and their obsession with lineage and pedigree. They defined their status, not by wealth like their English cousins, but rather in terms of superior pedigree. They also sought to maintain their clout as well as their fictive community of shared beliefs through patronizing, collecting, and promoting “Welsh mythological, genealogical, and national history” (28). Their obsession with pedigree, family genealogy, and heraldry was often mocked by the English. Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, among others, satirized the Welsh as ignorant and bombastic, given to protracted speeches about their supposedly heroic heritage. But as Clavier deftly shows, this obsession with lineage, along with bardic poetry and British history writ large, created a “fictive sense of unity, continuity and stability” (61). The gentry also memorialized their heritage, pride of place, and loyalty to the monarchy through visual culture, be it architectural features such as porches and fireplaces; material objects such as silver tableware, chests, and plates; or public spaces like funerary monuments and parish churches. These displays not only reinforced their local kin-based authority as the region's natural leaders and office holders, but it also perpetuated a “conservative narrative of continuity” from time out of mind. Their status, their loyalty, was “past-present-perpetual” (73). This historical culture, Clavier asserts, was particularly important during times of crisis, reinforcing the gentry's local power and acting as a sort of “ideological shield from the attacks of Parliament, military defeat and the Interregnum” (64).

The Northeast gentry families were also devoted to the episcopal Church, as Clavier demonstrates in Part 2. Like so many myths perpetuated by the Victorians about British religiosity in former times, Wales was often portrayed as a hotbed of nonconformity. But neither Puritan culture nor the more radical Protestantisms that followed (both seen as foreign imports) mustered enthusiasm in the Northeast during the seventeenth century. The gentry envisioned the Anglican Church, on the other hand, as the direct descendant of the ancient Celtic Church, uncorrupted by Rome. This rhetorical trope of a pure British church had been useful to sixteenth-century polemicists’ justifying the Reformation and remained important to the Welsh gentry. This was their Church, rooted in their history and language, stocked with their clergy, and they stood by it during the war and Interregnum, ensuring that the Prayer Book services were maintained, and sheltering ejected clergy. They had looked on the iconoclasm of the Puritans with horror and eagerly persecuted dissenters following the Restoration. They had a far more tolerant view of their Catholic neighbors, with whom they socialized and intermarried. Catholicism was, after all, something they understood; it represented a conservative continuity. Conversely, Protestant dissent had proved itself disruptive and destabilizing. Thus, during the worst moments of anti-Catholic hysteria in England, such as the Popish Plot, the Welsh gentry did not panic or lead antipapist crusades. In fact, they tended to safeguard Catholic kin, friends, and neighbors.

In Part 3, Clavier addresses the Welsh gentry's loyalism and attachment to the Stuart monarchy. Their loyalty to the church and crown, and to a stable, patriarchal, and well-ordered society—one that the church and crown helped to fortify—was bound up with their collective identity. Their loyalty and royalism were also ostentatiously commemorated in material objects such as snuffboxes, lockets, rings, metals, and portraits. They had served and sacrificed for Charles I and they honored the cult of Charles the Martyr following his execution. Their loyalty to the Stuarts, as well as their innate distrust of novelty and disorder, which they acquainted with Whigs and dissenters, was put to the test under James II. They were happy to harass Protestants outside the Church and distrusted toleration. Their reaction to the Three Questions survey of 1686 (asking all lord lieutenants whether they would support the removal of the penal laws and the tests that excluded Catholics and Protestant Dissenters from public office) was negative or ambivalent and resulted in the removal of many of these families from their traditional positions of power. In this instance, they had chosen the Church and stability over the monarch. Nonetheless, they showed little enthusiasm for the Dutch invasion in 1688 and were none too pleased by the passage of the Act of Toleration in 1689. Their sympathies lay with the nonjurors and Jacobites. Just as they had displayed emblems of their devotion to Charles the Martyr, they once again began to collect and preserve pro-Stuart and Jacobite artifacts.

This book is a rich, complex study that deserves attention. The discussion of Welsh historical culture and Thomas Mostyn's collections and correspondence, are especially fascinating. Clavier's use of visual and material culture, her mastery of English and Welsh historiography, and her sensitivity to the limitations of her sources are to be commended. There are very few women in this study, nor any discussion of the social fabric of these families. Some readers might find parts of this study repetitive, but others will welcome Clavier's introductions to each section and conclusions to each chapter. Above all, this is a solid contribution to the study of seventeenth-century history. It reminds us that, pedantic and hot-tempered though he may be, Fluellen, the Welsh captain in Shakespeare's Henry V, is also brave and supremely loyal to his King, warranting Henry V's lines, “Though it appear a little out of fashion, / There is much care and valour in this Welshman.”