Cultures of Radicalism in Britain and Ireland
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Cultures of Radicalism in Britain and Ireland

John Kirk

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eBook - ePub

Cultures of Radicalism in Britain and Ireland

John Kirk

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About This Book

This collection of essays addresses the role of literature in radical politics. Topics covered include the legacy of Robert Burns, broadside literature in Munster and radical literature in Wales.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2015
ISBN
9781317320647
Topic
History
Edition
1

1 ‘ENGLAND’S MEN WENT HEAD TO HEAD
WITH THEIR OWN BRETHREN’: THE
WELSH BALLAD-SINGERS AND THE WAR OF
AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE

Ffion Mair Jones

Introduction

London, 1776. David Samwell (Dafydd Ddu Feddyg), who later came to fame as the surgeon on Captain Cooke’s last voyage, penned a poem about the tumultuous events of the day.2 By that time, the troubles brewing between Great Britain and her colonies in America since the 1760s regarding ‘taxation without representation’, as the popular slogan put it, were coming to a head. The first shots of what is now called the American War of Independence were fired in the towns of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts in May 1775; by the summer of 1776, the Americans had issued their declaration of independence, and British troops under the leadership of William Howe had reached New York, ready to begin an intense military campaign.3 Understandably, there was great interest in these events among the public in Britain, especially so in London, where strong objections were voiced against the coercive measures of Lord North’s government by a group of political radicals. They believed that: ‘As we would not suffer any man, or body of men to establish arbitrary power over us, we cannot acquiesce in any attempt to force it upon any part of our fellow-subjects.’4
This statement strongly reflects the concept of a British Constitution which was prevalent after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, responding, in many respects, to what was seen as the tyranny of Stuart rule. David Samwell’s poem addresses this question of an Englishman’s freedom within the Constitution and laws of Great Britain. He acknowledges fully that a king who misuses his position to oppress his people should be punished:
Ped fae ef yn cynnal ryw Ormes anwadal
Ni a ddylem ei ddial yn hafal i hon.
(If [the king] should undertake some kind of wanton oppression
we should wreak vengeance upon him in accordance with [the law].)
Samwell’s view was that the current government (of which the king was head) was ‘upholding the law’ and that, therefore, there was no justification in accusing either George III or his servants of any wrongdoing.5 Yet this was exactly what he saw happening in the London of 1776. His poem represents the voices of radicals railing against the government and trying to persuade and encourage others, more naive than themselves, to do likewise. Pleaders for ‘Freedom’, as they considered themselves, went ‘among the innocent, to cause trouble, boldly and in defiance of the peace’, and Samwell could only lament the fact that the ‘stupidity of the ordinary man / could benefit others of such dubious behaviour’.6 Extensive ‘speech-making’ was to be found in ‘every tavern’, and the shoemaker and other artisans were to be seen ‘contending for the stories of / lying newspapers every morning, dreadful thing’.7
Only two copies of Samwell’s poem survive. One is in the manuscript collection of Edward Jones (Bardd y Brenin), and it is easy to see that he – a man who later denounced the stonemason Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg) to the authorities as a dangerous radical – would have appreciated Samwell’s fears and anxieties about the extraordinary expansion of the public sphere in the London of the period. The other surviving version of the poem includes a note of introduction:
Y Pennillion canlynol a wnaeth Dafydd ddĂ» yn y Flwyddyn 1776 yn Llunden pan oedd fath chwerw ymddadlu yn Llundain drwy’r Deyrnas ynghylch Rhyfel America.
(The following stanzas were composed by Dafydd Ddu in London in the year 1776 when there was such bitter contention in London throughout the kingdom regarding the American war.)
It appears that Samwell changed his view of the situation after writing the original note, amending it to suggest that there was contention not only in London but throughout the entire kingdom regarding this war. We do not know whether the poem reached Wales at the time it was created, but it appears that Samwell, by the time he had completed it, was of the opinion that the war was firing people’s imaginations beyond the capital. His view would have resonated with two important twentieth-century Welsh historians. Both R. T. Jenkins and Gwyn Alf Williams argued that Wales woke up, politically, for the first time during the American Revolutionary period. These two, and others after them, acknowledge the part played by the Welsh ballad in this awakening.8 Conversely, Stephen Conway, the author of a recent volume on the effect of the American war on the constituent parts of Britain, argues that ‘Wales, though divided, was perhaps less excited by the conflict than any other country in the British Isles’.9 This chapter moves from Samwell’s London to Wales to consider the evidence for Welsh interest in the war, concentrating on the ballads which secured the attention of Jenkins and Williams, but discussing also a range of works in various other genres which developed alongside the ballads and may have influenced them.

Translated Pamphlets, 1775–6

The first ballad relating to the war was published in 1776. It is a poem complaining about a dearth of tobacco resulting from the dispute.10 At least three further ballads were sung the following year.11 The ballad-singers, however, were not the first Welsh people to take an interest in the American conflict. Welsh translators had been at work since 1775. During that year, William Pine, a bookseller in Bristol, published an anonymous Welsh translation of the Scotsman William Smith’s A Sermon On The Present Situation Of American Affairs, originally published in the same year at Philadelphia.12 Smith’s work had swiftly crossed the Atlantic to Britain and Ireland where it was reprinted (again in 1775) in London, Dublin, Belfast, Cork and Bristol. In 1776 another edition appeared in Edinburgh. This pamphlet thus quickly spread to the four nations of the British Isles, and Wales was no exception.13
William Smith, ordained as a minister of the Church of England, was a provost at Philadelphia College.14 His pamphlet, as befits a sermon, begins with a Biblical story, portraying the relationship of the Israelites and the Gileads in the Old Testament. Two and a half Israelite tribes settled on the eastern bank of the river Jordan (in a territory which became known as Gilead), opposite the other Israelite tribes, who inhabited the western bank. In order to celebrate their happiness in reaching the land of Gilead, these tribes began to raise a high altar, ‘as an everlasting symbol of the fact that they belonged to the same nation, and were entitled to the same national and religious rights as their brothers among the other tribes’.15 Unfortunately, the Israelites of the west bank misconstrued what had happened and raised ‘a cry against them without delay. The hotheads of that day did not hesitate to call them rebels against the living God 
 [and] because of this the entire audience of brother-tribes, who resided in Canaan, gathered together for war against their own flesh and blood’.16 The relevance of the story is evident to anyone by now, but to emphasize his point, Smith laments in parenthesis ‘(and, alas, my God, that the example has been followed among the brother-tribes of our Israel in the mother country)’).17 There is clear sympathy here for the colonists of America (the ‘American Gilead’), whose ‘act 
 of godliness and love’ was ‘misconstrued’ by the inhabitants of their mother country, the ‘Britannic Israel’.18
The sermon goes on to show how faithful and partisan towards Britain her American colonies are. It traces the history of the settlement, when the Americans showed real courage by pioneering in a deserted land, ‘taking no heed of the inconvenience of our situation’, and refusing to be ‘stifled by fear’.19 It shows how they responded to Britain’s plea for military aid, fighting alongside the mother-country during the Seven Years’ War, and doing so with such bravery as to win the praise of their mother-country as well as a substantial monetary prize.20 The Americans’ ‘altars’ are all testimony to their ‘unity and love’ towards Britain, according to Smith, and their refusal to repay taxes as demanded during the 1760s was not an act of disrespect towards Britain but a sign of their understanding of and adherence to the British ‘altar’, namely the Constitution established following the Glorious Revolution of 1688.21 This Constitution noted the right of Britons to freedom and representation: ‘even our refusal [to pay taxes] was ample proof of our respect towards the altar itself’.22 After describing the conflict in these terms, Smith goes on to express, with real emotion, his grief at seeing plans for war afoot between ‘brothers’.23 The threat from beyond the ‘free’ British nation state – that posed by the Catholic European states – here raises its head, Smith arguing strongly for the ‘reunion 
 of the members’ of the Empire ‘as the only safety-net for freedom and Protestantism’ in the face of ‘those kingdoms who are the enemies of freedom, truth and mercy’.24
In the final section of his sermon, delivered as an address to Congress, Smith sets out the dilemma which now faces the American people. He is not in favour of lying down and letting the privileges and ‘freedom’ so revered by open-minded Englishmen of the day be put aside. The Americans should be sure that ‘this vast land, in ages to come, will be filled and adorned with virtuous and wise people; enjoying FREEDOM and all its associated blessings’, and not ‘covered with a species of men worse than the savages of the desert, since they once “knew what pertained to their happiness and peace but had suffered them to be hidden from their view”’.25 Thinking forward to the future like this was one of the tactics of radicals such as Thomas Paine, who argued that independence was inevitable, and that the current generation should ensure it for the sake of those to follow them:
I once felt all that kind of anger, which a man ought to feel, against the mean principles that are held by the Tories. A noted one, who kept a tavern at Amboy, was standing at his door, with as pretty a child in his hand, about eight or nine years old, as most I ever saw; and after speaking his mind as freely as he thought was prudent, finished with this unfatherly expression, ‘Well, give me peace in my days.’ Not a man lives on the continent, but fully believes that separation must some time or other finally take place, and a generous parent would have said, ‘if there must be trouble, let it be in my days, that my child may have peace;’ and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty.26
Smith, however, backs away from this view, recommending that his listeners should accept ‘that the power of every state, under God, is contained in their Unity’ and that the two sides should accept the ‘faults, and even the differing beliefs’ of each other.27 Despite this loyal ending, his sermon raises questions about the relationship of both Britain and America with the Constitution – the alleged instrument of ‘Freedom’ – expressing criticism of the behaviour of the British government, but at the same time a strong resistance to war.
In 1776, an anonymous Welsh translation appeared of a pamphlet entitled The Rise, Progress, and Present State Of The Dispute Between The People of America, And the Administration, also produced anonymously, and probably composed a year earlier.28 The translator’s address to his native Welsh audience explains that ‘there is a great deal of talk about the war between this country and America, many not knowing its true cause’.29 He suggested that ‘the account would be of benefit to the Welsh in their own language’ and noted ‘that the language that I put in it will be comprehensible to everyone’.30 The printer of the work, Dafydd Jones of Trefriw, however, clearly felt that an apology was needed for the poor quality of the typesetting. He noted in stanzas at the end of the first part of the pamphlet that ‘there were not enough letters / to do this without fault’.31 This technical deficiency contributes to making this pamphlet poorer in quality and considerably less lucid than that published by William Pine in Bristol. It is much more controversial in its contents, too, and makes no attempt to adopt the allegedly unbiased attitude of Smith (who understood that he had been called to a...

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