Political Pamphlets and Sermons from Wales 1790-1806

Marion Löffler

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781783161027
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

Pamphleteering was a vital component of the popular political discussion opened up by the French Revolution of 1789, but while the English pamphlet wars have been exhaustively explored, Welsh pamphlet literature has been ignored. During the fifteen years following the French Revolution of 1789, over 100 Welsh pamphlets and sermons engaged in a public discourse which discussed the larger issues raised by the Revolution and the war against the French Republic.

This pioneering volume seeks to capture the excitement of the period by demonstrating how radicals and loyalists, Dissenters, Methodists and Churchmen, pacifists and warmongers engaged in a lively argument in their published works. An in-depth essay reviews and interprets texts written by artisans, Dissenting ministers, country curates and Anglican bishops, who all used religion as politics; promoted war or peace; argued over republicanism and loyalism, and utilized the law as a stage for political ideas. All texts are fully translated and thus made accessible to an English-speaking audience for the first time.

Political Pamphlets and Sermons from Wales 1790–1806: An Overview

When Mary Morgan of Ely in Cambridgeshire travelled south and west Wales in the summer and autumn of 1791 she perceived it as a delightfully foreign country where all lived in harmony without ‘that distinction of ranks, which subsists in most large towns’ of England. In Carmarthen, with about 5,500 inhabitants the second-largest town in Wales, commoners were ‘standing at shop-doors in a morning, talking politics, or hearing and communicating the news of the day’ in an entirely unthreatening manner. In its hinterland the squires maintained ‘the feudal system’ in a way which amounted to a racial and social liberation of the Welsh people:

Men of fortune have a number of tenants, whom they can always command, as they have still a kind of lordship power over the peasantry. But I believe they never exercise the least degree of tyranny. They rather consider them as under their protection, than as their vassals. It seems to be a land of perfect liberty. There are no remains of that subjection, to which their free-born necks were unwillingly bowed down, when a stately castle over-awed every village. Those castles, now in ruins, serve only to remind them of the happy change that has taken place.1

This visitor’s biscuit-tin image of perfect Burkean yet postcolonial harmony stands sharply corrected by native narratives.2 Images like the frontispiece of the radical pamphlet Cwyn yn erbyn Gorthrymder (A Complaint against Oppression; TEXT 4; Fig. 3) by Thomas Roberts (Llwynrhudol), show a different society. A fat priest on horseback accompanied by a dead pig and baskets stuffed with eggs and chickens advises the curtseying elderly female in whose direction he is swinging his whip that ‘Heaven is no place for the poor man unless he brings us tithes’. She replies that ‘Your burden is, I suppose, a good life in this world’, the boy by her side doffing his hat in reverence and fear. The milestone just passed by the priest, inscribed with the ‘X Commandments’ (‘X Gorchymyn’) warns viewers not to covet what is not theirs,3 in the background a church spire looms. The verse for this first Welsh-language political cartoon had been supplied by satirist, poet and pamphleteer John Jones (Jac Glan-y-gors; Fig. 4) for fellow London Gwyneddigion Society member Thomas Roberts (Llwynrhudol).4 The Welsh people we encounter in their writings were far from free. They buckled under the economic burdens of taxes, tithes and rents imposed by Parliament, Church and landlords and the effects of the concomitant legal, linguistic and religious colonialism. The radical Welsh pamphlets of the 1790s, alongside periodicals, poetry and the public re-enactment of an imagined ancient brotherhood of just leaders, capture the deep economic, political and religious fracture lines of Welsh society and the attempts of a few to enlighten their Welsh compatriots out of this misery.

Wales, a rural country of some 587,000 people with the beginnings of patchy industrialization,5 boasted a small but vociferous network of Dissenting intelligentsia who, first awoken into public dialogue by the American War of Independence, made their opinions heard loud and clear in the (long) decade which followed the French Revolution of 1789. Arrayed against them was an alliance of old landowners, new industrialists, lawyers, parsons and bishops who ruthlessly suppressed any protests sparked by grain shortages, land enclosures or the work of the military press gangs.6 Their hegemonic print culture of loyalist ballads, translations, pamphlets and sermons entered into an uneasy discourse with the few who dared publish their opposition to king, Church and war in order to call for a fairer society along the lines of the American experiment across the Atlantic Ocean, albeit within the framework of Great Britain. Not a single Welsh pamphlet called for political independence for Wales, though many aimed at preserving and strengthening national characteristics. The Welsh writers we meet in this volume were able to express their affinity with a national language, religion and culture for Wales, while viewing themselves as members of the Protestant ‘nation’ state of Great Britain which Linda Colley has so adroitly described as being ‘forged’ in these decades of war.7

Beginning with the historical background to and unique characteristics of Welsh pamphleteering, this essay first considers the various politicoreligious controversies conducted between Dissenters, the Established Church and Methodists, and then discusses public expressions of support for and opposition to the wars against the French Republic and the Napoleonic empire. An examination of the few strictly political pamphlets in the Welsh discussion, in particular Wales’s two republican pamphlets, follows. The overview closes with an evaluation of texts which straddled the legal sphere, be it to criticize the law, as in Wales’s only Treason Trial pamphlet, or to advertise the power of the state through legal proceedings.

Historical background: a culture in transition

Welshmen had voiced political and religious opinions publicly long before the 1790s. Men of Welsh descent had participated in, indeed, initiated some of the most important English political discourses of the eighteenth century. As early as 1771 Sir Watkin Lewes (1740–1821), treasurer of the Honourable and Loyal Society of Antient Britons and second president of the Cymmrodorion Society in London, presented Welsh addresses in support of John Wilkes following the latter’s exclusion from Parliament.8 In 1776 the Unitarian minister Richard Price who also hailed from south Wales, in supporting the American colonists’ right to self-determination with his Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, revolutionized political thinking by explaining the advantages of a government created by the people.9 In 1782 David Williams, educated at the Welsh Dissenting Academy at Carmarthen,10 also defended the Americans in his Letters on Political Liberty which advocated a whole programme of political reform.11 Lewes, Price and Williams, however, had long turned their backs on a Wales where most expressions of political will were still ‘instigated by local MPs or other landed magnates to demonstrate support for their own political attitudes’.12 In his works Price cited Ireland, Scotland, Corsica, India, Yorkshire and Middlesex, but not the Wales where he had been born and where he spent his summer holidays.13 For Williams the history of political liberty in the British isles began with the ‘Saxon constitution’, and his aim was to secure ‘an equal representation of the People of England’.14 Only two of the many pamphlets on the subject of American liberty which appeared on either shore of the Atlantic Ocean were translated ‘for the benefit of the Welsh’ (‘er budd i’r Cymry’).15 Wales was, perhaps ‘less excited by the conflict’ than other parts of the isles,16 yet the people’s voice was heard albeit in genres like the ballad and the interlude (anterliwt). Over fifty Welsh ballads on the American Revolution appeared, penned by men who acted as the spokesmen of their society.17 Even in 1784, the translation of Sir William Jones’s 1782 reform dialogue on The Principles of Government, in a Dialogue between a Scholar and a Peasant was hidden within the interlude Barn ar Egwyddorion y Llywodraeth (An Opinion on the Principles of the Government) which recounted the court case against Dean William Shipley for republishing his future brother-in-law’s pamphlet.18 By the 1790s, however, the cultural landscape of Wales was being recast. Ballad and anterliwt were fading, the former now largely an instrument of political control,19 the latter reduced to a cultural reference point in antiquarian journals and political pamphlets (pp. 120, 142). Public discussion was increasingly staged in the English provincial weeklies read in Wales, the nascent Welsh periodical press,20 and in pamphlets, sermons and text-dominated posters and broadsides. The only anterliwt which responded to the French Revolution got so thoroughly lost in this sea of modern forms and publications that it was only reconsidered in the twenty-first century.21

The Welsh ‘French Revolution debate’

Richard Price may not have written about or from the country of his birth, but his influence echoed powerfully there, for one of his last publications, the sermon A Discourse on the Love of our Country of 4 November 1789, initiated the English pamphlet wars of the 1790s that provided the political basis for and cultural background to Welsh pamphleteering.22 It elicited Edmund Burke’s counter-revolutionary manifesto Reflections on the Revolution in France of November 1790, thus giving Thomas Paine the opportunity to offer his own thoughts on government, taxes and the institution of the Crown in the two parts of Rights of Man which appeared in 1791 and 1792.23 The writings of Burke and Paine served as foundations on which various discourses on matters of reform, revolution, government, legislation, freedoms, liberties, taxes, tithes and rights were built.24 In England, this polylogue entailed the publication of at least 502 political pamphlets between 1789 and 1797, the debate reaching its peak in 1793 with 155 pamphlets, falling away to thirty pamphlets in 1796. Of them, 208 have been considered radical or reformist and 294 broadly loyalist.25 In England as in Wales contributions took the form of long literary pieces designed to develop and advertise an author’s political and philosophical persuasions, of impassioned pleas heavy with emotion and the sheer thrill of creativity, and of short didactic prose for the uneducated which at times was combined with performable dialogue or song. The majority of writers in England were male, educated and middle class or of middling sorts, among them Dissenting ministers and Anglican clergy. It is estimated that out of 464 identified pamphleteers in England, fewer than twenty were women.26 Hester Thrale Piozzi (1741–1821), by dint of descent, self-professed Welshness and residence, provided the only female voice in Wales.27 Her resoundingly loyalist Three Warnings to John Bull before He Dies, which was conceived in north Wales, was unique here in that it displayed a crookedly feminist argument by vilifying women for being ‘enlisted as seducers to bring us over to these curst opinions’ of Jacobinism, their punishment being that they would suffer the most ‘when these New Doctrines … shall confer power on corporeal advantage alone; and leave the dispensation of what then be left to dispense – in rough and brutal hands’.28

The over one hundred Welsh pamphlets and sermons published between 1790 and 1806 fit into the British framework outlined above insofar as they address similar political and religious issues from oppositional standpoints and employ comparable forms and styles. But there are differences, too, arising from Wales’s quasi-colonial status, its sustained cultural distinctiveness and its unique religious profile. Welsh pamphlets routinely addressed the linguistic and religious oppression which resulted from its increasing incorporation into the developing E...