Writing Wales, from the Renaissance to Romanticism

Stewart Mottram, Sarah Prescott, Sarah Prescott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134788361
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Writing Wales explores representations of Wales in English and Welsh literatures written across a broad sweep of history, from the union of Wales with England in 1536 to the beginnings of its industrialization at the turn of the nineteenth century. The collection offers a timely contribution to the current devolutionary energies that are transforming the study of British literatures today, and it builds on recent work on Wales in Renaissance, eighteenth-century, and Romantic literary studies. What is unique about Writing Wales is that it cuts across these period divisions to enable readers for the first time to chart the development of literary treatments of Wales across three of the most tumultuous centuries in the history of British state-formation. Writing Wales explores how these period divisions have helped shape scholarly treatments of Wales, and it asks if we should continue to reinforce such period divisions, or else reconfigure our approach to Wales' literary past. The essays collected here reflect the full 300-year time span of the volume and explore writers canonical and non-canonical alike: George Peele, Michael Drayton, Henry Vaughan, Katherine Philips, and John Dyer here feature alongside other lesser-known authors. The collection showcases the wide variety of literary representations of Wales, and it explores relationships between the perception of Wales in literature and the realities of its role on the British political stage.

PART I Renaissance to Seventeenth Century

1 Early Modern Welsh Nationalism and the British History

Grace Jones

DOI: 10.4324/9781315546131-1

There have been a number of studies of English representations of Wales in the early modern period. These studies establish this representation as ambivalent and contradictory. On the one side, there is the Wales existing on the peripheries of English power. This is a place of wilderness, barbarism, and corruption. ¹ As Henry VIII declared in the Acts of Union of 1536, this is a Wales whose ‘sinister … usages and customs differing from [the English]’ must be ‘utterly’ obliterated. ² On the other side, there is the Wales of ancient and heroic legend. The Welsh, or their ancestors, were the heroes of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae [History of the Kings of Britain], a twelfth-century legend depicting a glorious golden age of military victories and Arthurian knights. When the Tudor monarchs chose to represent the history of their dominion through this British History, they also endorsed a version of Wales as mediator of Britain’s ancient heroic past. ³

¹Studies that explore this version of Wales include (amongst others) Kate Chedgzoy, ‘The Civility of Early Modern Welsh Women’, in Early Modern Civil Discourses, ed. Jennifer Richards (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 162–81; and Prys Morgan, ‘Wild Wales: Civilizing the Welsh from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries’, in Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas, ed. Peter Burke, Brian Harrison, and Paul Slack (Oxford, 2000), pp. 265–83. ²Cited in Peter Roberts, ‘Tudor Wales, National Identity and the British Inheritance’, in British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, ed. Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 8–42 (p. 13). ³Philip Schwzyer, Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge, 2004).

This chapter considers these opposing perceptions of Wales in early modern culture, but I also want to go beyond this ambivalent image produced in texts by English writers. During this period the Welsh were not only the subjects of English representations; Welsh humanists were also engaged in the writing of their history and the construction of their identity. In what follows, I explore works by two Welsh authors, Humphrey Llwyd’s Commentarioli Britannicae descriptionis fragmentum (1568) and David Powel’s The Historie of Cambria, now called Wales (1584). The first work provides a chorographical description of the landscape, people, and history of England, Scotland, and Wales. My interpretation is based upon the English translation by Thomas Twyne, The Breviary of Britayne, first published in 1573. The second text I explore is itself based on an earlier work by Llwyd, the Cronica Walliae (1559), a work edited and enlarged by Powel. Both Llwyd’s original and Powel’s revision chart the later history of Wales, from the supposed end of the reign of Cadwaladr, the last British king, to the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the last native Welsh prince. Powel then extends this history to include events in the history of England’s relations with Wales up until the accession of Henry VII. My argument is that these two texts, the Commentarioli and Historie of Cambria, combine to produce a historical narrative that refuses to relinquish a separate Welsh identity in the aftermath of England’s union with Wales. The authors instead promote their indigenous language and culture, and quietly affirm their possession of the land. The two texts therefore resist the ways in which English representations of Wales were constructed in this period as part of a project to validate Tudor control of the Principality and its people. Such texts, I argue, stand as evidence of the existence of heterogeneous forms of collective identity in the period, suggesting that studies of early modern nationalism need to account for ‘Welsh’ as well as ‘English’, or indeed of ‘British’, identity. ⁴

⁴There have been a number of studies of early modern ‘nationalism’ since Richard Helgerson’s seminal Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1992). These include works that look at ‘English’ nationalism, such as Cathy Shrank’s Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530–1580 (Oxford, 2004). More recently there has been a shift to considering ‘British’ nationalism, for example Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain (Basingstoke, 2004), and Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism and Memory.

To begin with, it is important to define sixteenth-century English representations of Wales and the rationale behind them; it is only then that we can fully understand the significance of Llwyd’s and Powel’s histories. The derogatory attitude towards the Welsh in English discourse has its origins in the Middle Ages. Wales had been an internal colony of England since Edward I’s conquest and settlement in 1282–84. ⁵ This colonization was accompanied by a colonial discourse which legitimized the suppression of the Welsh as a ‘civilizing mission’. As Prys Morgan explains, the tradition of defining the Welsh as barbaric in English eyes originates at least as far back as Giraldus Cambrensis in the twelfth century. ⁶ Cambrensis wrote that the Welsh wandered wild and alone in forests, rather than living like the English in communities. Such a description portrayed the Welsh as little different to beasts. This is a familiar topos of colonial discourse, where the colonizer reduces the humanity of the colonized in order to legitimize the control, suppression, or eradication of the ‘other’.

⁵R.R. Davies, ‘Colonial Wales’, Past and Present, 65 (1974): 3–23 (p. 3). ⁶Prys Morgan, ‘Wild Wales’, p. 266. In fact, Cambrensis, also known as Gerald of Wales, is more ambivalent about Welsh culture than this reading of his descriptions allows. Nevertheless, it is easy to see how his work could be utilized for a colonial purpose.

This perception of the Welsh as uncivilized intensified in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. From Edward I’s conquest in 1282–84, up to and beyond Owain Glyn Dŵr’s rebellion in 1400, the relationship of England with Wales was explicitly a colonial one. ⁷ As Davies considers, during this period the Welsh and the English came to be segregated on racial grounds, and positions of power and influence in Wales were only available to Englishmen. ⁸ According to Davies, the conquest and settlement of Wales was ‘much more than a military victory followed by an act of territorial annexation. It was accompanied by an administrative and legal settlement which bears the authentic stamp of imperialism’. ⁹

⁷Davies, ‘Colonial Wales’, p. 3. ⁸Davies, ‘Colonial Wales’, pp. 12–13. ⁹Davies, ‘Colonial Wales’, pp. 13–14.

Early modern English writers therefore inherited a long tradition of defining the Welsh as barbaric. The Welsh in the sixteenth century were still viewed and represented through the same colonial framework as had been used throughout the later Middle Ages by writers from Cambrensis onwards. For example, English administrators in Wales such as Rowland Lee, President of the Council in the Marches of Wales in the 1530s, supplemented the idea of the Welsh as uncivilized with a representation of them as murderous thieves who could not obey civil laws. ¹⁰

¹⁰Morgan, ‘Wild Wales’, p. 266.

The Anglo-Welsh acts of union of 1536 and 1543 also bear the hallmark of colonial intent. The acts were designed to incorporate Wales more fully into England because Henry VIII wanted to eradicate the threat of discord and disorder latent in the ‘barbaric’ cultural identity of the Welsh. This was especially the case after the Reformation, as Henry VIII feared that the Welsh nobility would choose Roman Catholicism over loyalty to the crown. Through these acts the Welsh were for the first time given equal rights under English law. But the Welsh paid a heavy price for the enjoyment of these rights, for they came at the cost of an expectation that the Welsh would relinquish their separate identity and conform to English standards of ‘civilized’ behaviour. As the historian J. Gwynfor Jones argues, the aim of these acts was to negate the differences of custom and language between Wales and England so that the King’s subjects would consider themselves one people. ¹¹ Welsh customs were explicitly attacked under the acts, as English became the official language of Wales and the only language to be used in administration and the law courts. ¹²

¹¹J. Gwynfor Jones, Early Modern Wales, c. 1525–1640 (New York and London, 1994), p. 81. ¹²Jones, Early Modern Wales, p. 81.

So the union acts subjected early modern Wales to the logic of a colonial discourse that had been constructed over centuries. This discourse aimed to prove that only if the Welsh gave up their language and traditions, and accepted English language and law, could they become civilized. In other words, Welsh culture was denigrated as barbaric so that the suppression of it could be justified as being for the benefit of the people – the typical ‘civilizing mission’.

The accession of Henry Tudor to the throne in 1485, however, gave birth to a new royal ideology and a new approach to Wales. The Tudors chose to identify themselves with the genealogy of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s ancient British emperor-kings, and in so doing to legitimize their ‘imperial’ claims, not only to the crown of England, but to the Principality of Wales. Yet Geoffrey of Monmouth himself wrote of the ancient Britons as ancestors, not of the English, but of the Welsh, and this inevitably created conflict within Tudor colonial discourse. The barbarous Welsh were in this discourse also the epic knights of Britain’s glorious past.

This inconsistency was a minor inconvenience when compared to the benefits of the British History for Tudor claims to power. As Philip Schwyzer explains, Henry VII, or ‘Harri Tudur’, was connected to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s ancient British kings through his Welsh grandfather, Owain Tudor, who was believed to be a descendant of Cadwaladr, the last king of the Britons. ¹³ Therefore the Tudors could claim that their pedigree stretched back to the original British kings of Galfridian legend – proving their right to the throne. Indeed, the usefulness of this legend went further than that. Included in the British History was the prophecy of Merlin, which promised that a British king would one day return to regain control of the island. With his British pedigree and claims to kinship with Cadwaladr, the victory of Henry VII at Bosworth made it appear that Merlin’s prophecy had actually been fulfilled. ¹⁴ So the British History held a symbolic power for the Tudors; it connected them to an ancient, glorious pedigree, and it linked them to the prophetic return of a king.

¹³Philip Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism and Memory, pp. 13–14. ¹⁴T.D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (London, 1950), p.35 and Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism and Memory, p. 13.

The story was also especially useful after the Reformation. The British History told of the struggles of ancient Britons against the might of Rome, and after England’s break with the papal Church in the 1530s, the story of ancient British conflict with Rome proved a useful weapon in the Tudor propaganda war against Roman ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Renaissance to Seventeenth Century
• 1 Early Modern Welsh Nationalism and the British History
• 2 Writing on Borderlines: Anglo-Welsh Relations in Thomas Churchyard’s The Worthines of Wales
• 3 Green Tights and Swordfights: Edward I and the Making of Memories
• 4 ‘Prince of Wales by Cambria’s Full Consent’?: The Princedom of Wales and the Early Modern Stage
• 5 William Browne and the Writing of Early Stuart Wales
• Part 2 Seventeenth Century to Romanticism
• 6 Morgan Llwyd and the Foundations of the ‘Nonconformist Nation’
• 7 ‘If there be Helicon in Wales it is’: Writing Wales in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Poetry
• 8 ‘No rebellious jarring noise’: Expressions of Loyalty to the British State in Eighteenth-Century Welsh Writing
• 9 ‘Walking Conundrums’: Masquerades, Riddles, and National Identity in Late Eighteenth-Century Wales
• 10 Haunted by History: Welsh Gothic 1780–1800 183
• Bibliography
• Index