Fashioning the Faithful: Making a Welsh Protestant Public

Any discussion of public discourse in early modern Wales needs to accommodate the fact of overwhelming Cambrophone monolingualism. Around 90 percent of the population used Welsh as their sole mode of communication in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote ⁵ Attempts to mobilize opinion in Wales, then, needed to gain traction in the Cambrophone community in order to succeed. It is telling, however, that the Welsh language had very little presence in the kinds of print and manuscript cultures that have garnered the most attention in recent studies of early modern politics. I have argued elsewhere that, in Wales, this helped to privilege the role of the bilingual elite among the clergy and gentry who were important in interpreting and disseminating such materials for the majority.Footnote ⁶ This provided a particular cast to the complexion of any putative public emerging from early modern Wales, although we should not think of the Welsh majority as closed off in some kind of linguistic ghetto from broader religious and political currents. In addition to elite linguistic brokers, interlocutors such as traders, drovers, and chapmen also offered a means for information to cross the linguistic divide. The increasing volumes of political and religious discussion found in English-language print and manuscript did not, however, transfer easily into this milieu. Although news and polemic were shared between England and Wales, we need to recognize the possibility for the formation and cultivation of Welsh-language publics that were not separate from English political and religious discourses but that were distinct in their personnel, cultural resources, and communicative practices. We might locate one such particularist Welsh public in the cause of Welsh-language Protestant reform (and its Catholic counterpublic) that flared episodically into life from the mid-sixteenth century.

The Reformation in Wales had a rocky progress, in no small measure because it took little account of the cultural landscape there and appeared to many as an unwelcome and alien (that is, English) imposition. The translation of the Scriptures and liturgy into English was of little use for most Welsh men and women because, in the words of one Elizabethan bishop, “Gods worde” remained closed up “from [the majority] in an unknown tongue.”Footnote ⁷ However, the Oxford-educated Denbighshire cleric, William Salesbury, made a concerted attempt to fashion a Welsh Protestant public and to address Catholic obduracy through print and polemic. Salesbury initially seems to have envisioned the creation of an Anglo-Welsh Protestant linguistic community, and he began providing the necessary tools for servicing this community in the 1540s and 1550s by publishing a Welsh-English dictionary and a guide for pronouncing Welsh words.Footnote ⁸ His principal goal, however, was to assimilate the Welsh within the Church of England as rapidly as possible, and he increasingly acknowledged the imperative of providing religious texts in Welsh to achieve this objective.

In a 1547 publication, Oll Synnwyr Pen Kembero Ygyd (The Whole Sum of a Welshman's Head), Salesbury invoked the idea of an engaged Welsh public that, he hoped, would press for the translation of the Bible into Welsh. In a rhetorical mode that he would employ again years later, Salesbury addressed the Welsh people directly in the (Welsh) preface to this work, arguing,

This was a call for active political engagement by Cambrophone readers and auditors: for a mobilization to lobby royal authority and to effect a change in the official policy of linguistic uniformity promulgated at the union of Wales and England in the 1530s. It appealed to and addressed the “Welsh people,” and thus conjured and aimed to mobilize a distinctive interest group within a state that was politically homogeneous but linguistically diverse. This was a matter of “national interest,” although this was a nation constructed through faith, language, and a common historical lineage rather than through political forms. Indeed, Salesbury would later refer to the project in patriotic terms as “our countrey matter.”Footnote ¹⁰ The word that Salesbury used for “language,” “iaith,” was also the most evocative sixteenth-century term for describing the Welsh “national” community. He also referred to the potent idea that the Welsh were descendants of the original Britons, thus appealing to particularist sentiment and opening a space in which a Welsh public could marshal its resources to influence the political center.

It is difficult to know exactly whom Salesbury envisaged as his audience. Foremost in his mind was probably bilingual gentry and clergy, but he conveyed the message in a demotic vernacular discourse of patriotism and historicity suggesting a wider reception was simultaneously imagined. Of course, he could not agitate openly for independent mass mobilization, but combining the language of commonwealth reform with magisterial direction and supplication struck a judicious balance early in Edward VI's reign. His Latin dedication to the bishops of Wales and of Hereford—in a work of 1551 that translated the Epistles and Gospels into Welsh—indicates that he aimed to influence and mobilize a socially variegated set of publics. Here Salesbury described his “long expectation” that

While there is little evidence for any popular agitation stemming from these efforts—indeed the tone would long remain one of despair at the slow progress of reformation in Wales—a surviving text that probably dates to early in Elizabeth's reign suggests that there was some form of wider mobilization by like-minded reformers along the lines that Salesbury discussed. This anonymous petitionary address, possibly directed to the Privy Council, called for the translation of the “Lordes Testamentes into the vulgare Walsh tong” by godly and learned divines. Such a translation, the address argued, would accomplish “the expulsment of sooch miserable darknes for the lack of the shynyng light of Christes Gospell … emong the inhabitantes of the … Principalitie.”Footnote ¹² The evidence is sparse and ambiguous, but across the mid-sixteenth century we can identify an effort to fashion and sustain, largely through print, a particularist Welsh voice for reform: a vernacular Protestant public. While this obviously had important connections to wider developments, such as the 1549 rendering of the Prayer Book in English, it was nevertheless a distinct kind of public being mobilized within the political and religious structures of the realm.

The arguments of Salesbury and the anonymous petitioner(s) ultimately swayed official opinion, and an act authorizing the translation of the Bible and Book of Common Prayer into Welsh passed in 1563. Its most significant outcome was the 1567 translation of the New Testament by Salesbury and the Bishop of St David's, Richard Davies. The volume's reach was extensive, as it was placed in every Welsh parish church. Salesbury and Davies prefaced the work with a remarkable text that, as Salesbury had in 1547, addressed the Welsh people directly as an engaged collective capable of corporate action and possessed of the capacity to effect change.Footnote ¹³ The text, “Epistol at y Cembru,” or “Letter to the Welsh People,” opened with a striking entreaty: “Awake thou now lovely Wales … do not denationalize thyself, do not be indifferent, do not look down, but gaze upwards to the place thou dost belong.”Footnote ¹⁴ Salesbury and Davies appealed to the patriotic sentiments found in Welsh-language communities, but they additionally construed this patriotism as constitutive of a confessional public. The glue that bound this prospective public together would be language and faith, but the “Epistol” also made considerable play on the historical ancestry of the Welsh, claiming that Protestantism was the rediscovery of the pure faith of the original Britons. This was a complex vision that at once embraced the reformed monarchy but that also appealed to peculiarly Welsh sentiments. For example, the “Epistol” described the Saxon Augustine as the villain who had contaminated the British with the degraded teachings of Rome. On some readings, this could be understood as anti-Englishness, but here the intention was integrative, albeit through particularist discourses. This text looked to graft a confessional dimension onto the existing linguistic and historical community of “y Cymry” (“the Welsh people”).

Although we cannot attribute the ultimate success of Protestantism in Wales solely to appeals made in print, it is nevertheless the case that Welsh-language texts and translations were crucial in shaping, supporting, and naturalizing the Protestant faith. After the initial inroads made by the 1567 New Testament, the most important of these works were William Morgan's 1588 translations of the complete Bible and Book of Common Prayer, but other key texts of basic Protestant piety bolstered the cause. Several authors echoed Salesbury and Davies's appeals for the popularizing and vernacularizing of Welsh Protestantism, with the translator Morris Kyffin indicating that he had chosen the “simplest, easiest, most vulgar words” and “uncomplicated expression,” so that his work could be accessible to those who knew only spoken Welsh.Footnote ¹⁵ Examining the efforts of sixteenth-century reformers in Wales, then, we find a concerted undertaking by a coterie of humanists to lobby for a genuinely popular public engagement with, and adoption of, an acculturated Protestantism.

It is important to note, however, that the Protestant public that emerged in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was neither static nor the simple realization of Salebury's patriotic vision. It may be more accurate to think of an increasingly confident reformed public emerging by stages from the Catholic past. The slow pace of religious reform in Wales allowed the church to assimilate long-established traditions of indigenous saints and local folkloric beliefs.Footnote ¹⁶ What emerged from this process was a version of the Church of England that had Welsh cultural sensibilities entwined in its fabric. This was an institution capable of embodying a vision of a Welsh public good that was forged out of English reformed principles but was not reducible to them. It was “British” in origin and character, and some even suggested that the English were junior partners in the conjoined confession.Footnote ¹⁷ However, this Welsh Protestant public never had any kind of institutional existence separate from that of England. This may be why even the most aggrandizing “Cambro-British” enthusiasts never articulated any imperial ambitions for their faith in the way the Covenanting Scots did in the 1630s and 1640s. While the sixteenth-century reformers glossed their texts with the patriotic language of the “nation,” this confessional identity was understood to encompass rather than challenge English Protestantism. The gradual pace of religious change in Wales, however, left spaces in public discourse that opponents looked to occupy.

Constructing a Catholic Counterpublic

One of the more intriguing elements of the campaign to produce a Welsh Protestant interest was the attempt by Catholics to create a counterpublic that was equally rooted in particularist cultural sensibilities. Welsh Catholics, of course, were excluded from the London print market, but it was they who produced the first book on Welsh soil on a clandestine press in a cave near Llandudno. They also employed presses on the Continent and drew on a rich tradition of manuscript circulation and oral culture in order to make their case for resisting the Elizabethan settlement. Aiming to address the growing penetration into Welsh-language communities of the reformers’ arguments, some native Catholics argued that they needed to draw on the power of the press to sustain an alternative public interest. The Anglesey-born Catholic exile Owen Lewis wrote in August 1579 to an influential cardinal requesting Rome's support for a planned campaign of Catholic printing in Welsh. This, Lewis argued, was necessary because English “heretical books” had recently been translated into Welsh, corrupting the people who, hitherto, had remained “healthy … because [they] did not understand the English heresies written in the English tongue.”Footnote ¹⁸ Lewis's disquiet suggests the inroads that the Salesbury-Davies translations were making and an anxiety that the reformers were winning over the Welsh through a deftly calibrated cultural appeal. Also telling is the fact that men like Lewis thought that Welsh Catholics should answer in kind, with a “remedy … to save our brothers’ souls”: the writing and distributing of Welsh “books to be sent over to these [Welsh] shires.”

Lewis's initiative was not supported by the papacy, however, and his Welsh coreligionists had to make do with more ad hoc schemes for influencing public sentiment. These included the clandestine text produced in the north Wales cave, Y Drych Cristianogawl (The Christian Mirror), printed in late 1586 or early 1587, probably by the Caernarvonshire missionary priest Robert Gwyn.Footnote ¹⁹ In a further sign that Salesbury and Davies's work was proving effective as a piece of public polemic, Gwyn's move into the world of vernacular print tried to steal his opponents’ presentational and rhetorical clothes. Y Drych appropriated Salesbury and Davies's tactic of addressing the Welsh people (“the beloved Welsh”) directly as a confessional, historical, and linguistic collective that could be persuaded through argument and evidence. Essentially, he invoked and addressed an alternative Welsh-language public. The text played heavily on the synergetic connections between Welsh concepts of British antiquity and the lineage of the true Catholic faith in Britain to refute the account narrated at length in the “Epistol.” Patriotic tropes were also on display, with Welsh being presented as the ancient language of the Catholic faithful. Moreover, the text argued that the language was being betrayed by the country's English Protestant rulers as well as their local gentry satraps who, it claimed, oppressed and neglected Welsh in favor of English. In betraying the community of language, of course, there was the clear implication that these groups were betraying the historical and religious inheritance of all Welsh people. By contrast, the author presented the Catholic faith as the natural home of Welsh. Once again echoing arguments made by Protestant reformers, he suggested his mission was to provide spiritual counsel for the generality of Wales including the illiterate and the uneducated “in the most common and vulgar language now used by the Welsh people.”Footnote ²⁰ Although the text itself was intended for literate elites, then, its message was not.

The author of Y Drych acknowledged the difficulties of getting such works published, and the output of printed Catholic literature in Welsh was miniscule. However, an established tradition of manuscript circulation and oral communication afforded a refuge for Catholic discourse within Welsh-language contexts.Footnote ²¹ Indeed, the preface of Y Drych acknowledged that it had originally been intended to circulate in manuscript only and that it had “journeyed from hand to hand through many places across Wales, receiving great esteem and welcome everywhere … some wishing to read it; others, unable to read, desiring to hear it read; a third part willing to copy it, to have many copies to go about the country.”Footnote ²² It was this popularity that convinced the author to have the first part of the larger manuscript printed, knowing that a receptive audience had already been identified and established.Footnote ²³ This kind of manuscript circulation has acquired an important presence in the scholarly literature on early modern public opinion, with illicit religious works jostling with material such as satirical rhymes and political libels in the critical public sphere theorized before the deluge of popular print in the 1640s. Given the logistical problems of printing Welsh Catholic texts, it is perhaps unsurprising that we find manuscripts assuming an important role in attempts to sustain a Catholic presence in the Welsh-language public of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

The process of receiving texts, reading them aloud, and producing scribal copies for onward distribution described by the author of Y Drych was probably common in Welsh recusant communities. For example, we know that Y Drych was one of several polemical manuscripts Richard Gwyn circulated in Wales, albeit the only one that ended up being (partly) published. Two others took the form of extended answers to John Jewel's Apologia, and it is significant that Morys Kyffin felt the need to print a Welsh Protestant translation of, and gloss on, Jewel's text in the mid-1590s, suggesting the need to challenge recusants’ vilification of the work in the vernacular sphere.Footnote ²⁴ Gwyn wrote in one of these brief treatises that he had composed it for the “unlearned” and for “every common man” who desired to follow the Catholic faith.Footnote ²⁵ While he might not have had the sense of a zealous Welsh population ripe for rebirth that permeates Salebury's writings, Gwyn clearly had an eye toward bolstering the piety and resolve of a socially diverse constituency.

Some of the attractiveness of Gwyn's work might have stemmed from its social inclusiveness, but his presentation of Protestantism is also interesting for the ways in which it sought to fashion and present his particularist Welsh public. Among other derogatory terms Gwyn used for reformers was “gwyr newydd,” or “new men.” One of the manuscripts he circulated was “Gwssanaeth y Gwyr Newydd” (“Service of the New Men”), part of wider post-Tridentine arguments against attending Protestant services that, in England, was spearheaded by Robert Parsons. Gwyn also, however, described the reformers as “gwyr newydd o loyger,” or, “the new men of England.”Footnote ²⁶ This was an intriguing strategic attempt to place Protestantism outside the cultural matrix of a genuine Welsh identity and to connect it with the old enemy beyond Offa's Dyke. Gwyn even deployed this label of national exclusion within Wales itself, on one occasion referring to “gwyr newydd o Loyg[e]r, ie, a Chymru hefyd,” “new men of England, yes, and Wales too.”Footnote ²⁷ Here, then, we encounter a form of public-making that sought to mesh confessional, linguistic, and national identities and to suggest that the true Welsh population was that which adhered to the old faith and the old language. Such tactics are reminiscent of Geoffrey Keating's Gaelic-language history of Ireland, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, which made close connections between identity, faith, and language and which positioned true Irishness against recent Protestant interlopers. Keating's “New English” are not so far from Gwyn's “Gwyr Newydd o Loyger.”Footnote ²⁸

Public Patriots? The Gentry and Welsh Royalism

Welsh Catholics were outgunned by the reformers’ command of the pulpits, presses, and coercive machinery of the state. The Welsh gentry adopted a sympathetic and gradualist approach to religious reform that was generally sensitive to local attitudes. There were few, if any, Protestant zealots among the lay elite to alienate a religiously conservative population, but their indulgence of Catholic survivalism did not extend to compromising their role as agents of the Protestant crown. Wales's incorporation into the administrative and political systems of England was crucial in co-opting gentry support for, or at least benign accommodation with, the Protestant settlement in Wales. The structures of governance inaugurated under Henry VIII provide a stark contrast to the stillborn English state in early modern Ireland, where English rule was a colonial imposition by outsiders.Footnote ²⁹ In Wales the state's agents were the local gentry who were sympathetic both to their countrymen's needs and to the monarch's authority. The praise poems of Welsh bards demonstrate how the gentry's new administrative roles became incorporated fairly quickly into the landscape of local honor politics.Footnote ³⁰ These poems also suggest how Welsh vernacular publics drew on older qualities of good lordship and protection of the Welsh language and culture but mixed these readily with the religious and political forms of the incorporated state.

The union and the Reformation were intimately connected in a state-building process that enmeshed the Welsh gentry in the fabric of the wider confessional realm. It was also crucial for the nature of early modern politics that Wales was incorporated fully into the structures of English government: unlike Scotland and Ireland, there were no autonomous institutions to provide fora for any putative Welsh public voice. As one eighteenth-century clergyman declared (originally in Welsh), after the Acts of Union, “neither have we [the Welsh] any separate interest from theirs [the English]; nor are we to reckon ourselves two distinct bodies, but as one and the same body politick with the English.”Footnote ³¹ Nonetheless, the combined influence of a culturally modulated Reformation, a sympathetically implemented union, and the conviction that the Tudors and Stuarts embodied British, and thus culturally Welsh, ruling dynasties all imparted a particular cast to the principality's politics. Wales's public culture under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts was characterized by a close relationship among language, religion, and loyalty. The kind of patriotic monarcho-centric Protestantism found in Salesbury's works became a significant resource for the formation of social and political identities in early modern Wales and hence for the kinds of publics that flourished there. It seems fair to say that, in general, the social geography of language produced a less-critical culture of public politics in Wales than that found in much of the recent literature on early modern England. That is not to say that Welsh publics could not, on occasion, be disapproving of church and state, but the resources for constructing such discourses were more limited and the diversity and critical vitality of political publics consequently more circumscribed.Footnote ³² This argument can be developed by considering public mobilizations incorporating ideas of Wales and Welshness during the political crisis of 1642.

Petitions in the name of “Wales” printed immediately before the outbreak of civil war were sympathetic to the cause of Charles I and his church rather than that of parliament. These appeals incorporated particularist cultural perspectives. One of these was a petition to the House of Commons dated 12 February 1642 in the name of “many hundred thousands … within the thirteene shires of Wales.”Footnote ³³ Such levels of support were rhetorical rather than real, but it is notable that this language articulated, invoked, and spoke on behalf of a coherent Welsh public. The petition declared that Wales had “always shown our loyalty to his Majesty [and] our awfull obedience to you [the Commons].” Although the petition paid lip service to the Commons, another passage suggested how “Wales” was becoming estranged from parliament because of satirical publications seen as connected to the parliamentary interest. The petitioners warned that this “epidemicall derision of us” was a “scorning detestation of our known fidelity” and cautioned that, if not tackled, this would “become a great discouragement to all our countrymen.” This was a Welsh political public being embodied in a publication articulating anxieties about the politicization of cultural difference at a moment of acute crisis. It was also a resolutely pro-royalist public.

Another Welsh petition submitted to the Commons on 5 March 1642 was part of the campaign supporting the beleaguered episcopate. This petition similarly embodied a corporate identity, but this time it was presented in the name of the six counties of north Wales. It claimed to have the subscription of 30,000 hands, being “the unanimous and undevided request and vote of this whole country.” Even if this was not wholly representative of local opinion, and even though the numbers are almost certainly inflated, it was nonetheless a striking attempt to claim (and perhaps to help to construct) such united Welsh opinion for the anti-Puritan cause. Unlike others supporting the episcopate, this petition was presented on behalf of several counties forming a distinct territory rather than an individual shire. This suggests an attempt to represent or mobilize a culture region as much as an administrative unit. Importantly, the petition emphasized the particularly “British” dimensions of episcopacy, claiming it to be “that forme which came into this island with the first plantation of religion heere, and God so blessed this island that religion came earlely in.” Here, then, was the Salesbury-Davies vision of a British church as a rallying point for Welsh public politics. A further British component of this Welsh political public was found on broadside copies of the petition: prominently displayed at the top were the three feathers and initials of the Prince of Wales, “C[arolus] P[rinceps],” with the legend “Ich Dien,” meaning “I serve.”Footnote ³⁴ This connection with the Prince of Wales was important in maintaining ties between Wales and the British crown under the early Stuarts.Footnote ³⁵ The role of the prince was also publicized in an account of an entertainment involving the future Charles II at Raglan in 1642, where he was informed that

The royalists also tried to turn Prince Charles's positive profile in the Welsh political consciousness into a recruitment tool. In September 1642 Welsh volunteers to the royalist army were informed that they would be appointed to a regiment guarding the prince, while in March 1643 the prince was created lieutenant-general of north Wales.Footnote ³⁷ North Wales had placed the prince's insignia prominently on its pro-episcopal petition just months before, suggesting how political appeals from the locality and the center could potentially find fruitful common ground in Welsh particularist sensibilities.

The petitions of 1642 reflect the fashioning of a Welsh royalist public rather than simply a royalist public in Wales. This was not merely importing into a Welsh context the public politics of England; rather it was an attempt to mobilize political constituencies through culturally specific references and resources. These petitions offer a guide principally to gentry perspectives; hence we should be wary of extrapolating too promiscuously from this material to evaluate popular attitudes. However, the gentry were important in publicizing the king's propaganda, and the sparse evidence we have suggests that the royalist message was translated orally into Welsh for general consumption more readily than parliamentarian material.Footnote ³⁸ Certainly the Welsh-language poems and ballads produced during the 1640s and 1650s were predominantly royalist, often aggressively so. A recurrent refrain from parliamentarian sources was that the gentry and clergy in Wales had “deceived” the people, which might reflect how the construction of a royalist public in Wales owed more to the agency of elites, or perhaps the convergence of elite and popular opinion, than elsewhere in the kingdom.Footnote ³⁹ It was also the case that Puritan and parliamentarian publics that drew a good deal of their momentum from English language manuscript and print did not translate readily into the Welsh context, a point that is developed in the following section.

The Problems of Puritan Publics in Seventeenth-Century Wales

Wales became something of a byword for royalism during the 1640s, being described as “the nursery of the king's infantry” by one correspondent in 1645.Footnote ⁴⁰ Some of royalism's success can be attributed to the ready translation of the king's message into a Welsh milieu. While there is no doubt that parliamentarian propaganda circulated in Wales, too, its impact was attenuated by the fact that the linguistic brokers among the gentry and clergy were generally hostile to its messages. In part because of these problems, the small numbers of Welsh parliamentarians argued that an effort to reform the people in the Welsh language was necessary, and piecemeal initiatives to that end were adopted at points during the 1640s. Their cause was hampered, however, in no small part because reforming texts were produced almost exclusively in English. It is telling that Puritan sympathies flicker into life during this period primarily in bilingual urban areas close to the border with England, such as Wrexham and Cardiff. Initiatives culminating in the establishing of the Commission for the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales (1650–1653) placed considerable emphasis on the need for evangelizing Wales by Welsh-speaking ministers, but this need was not met. Indeed, the commission, as conceived by its masters in the Rump Parliament, took insufficient account of the cultural realities facing the project, and this lay at the heart of many of its problems.

The commission's activities demonstrate the awareness by a group of zealous radicals of the need to convince and reform the people of Wales in their native tongue and also the difficulties in making this a reality in a world where the language of the saints was English. Commissioners were empowered to expel unworthy ministers and replace them with a new godly Welsh-preaching pastorate. They also emphasized the need for education, something intimately related to language and the majority's inability to access edifying literature (and presumably also state propaganda). Another important component in the propagation scheme was to be the provision of Welsh-language Bibles for the masses, probably because most people only had access to such texts through the interpretative authority of their ministers. The kinds of individually derived scriptural piety so central to the English Puritan experience were understood to be beyond most Welsh communities.

The comparatively small numbers of the godly in Wales mobilized impressively with petitions of thanks and support for establishing the commission, and this represents a crucial moment in the formation of what might be described as a Welsh nonconformist public.Footnote ⁴¹ Key problems for the commission, however, were that it was not an organic growth from Welsh popular culture and that, because of the relative weakness of the godly cause there, a good deal of its authority, direction, and leading personnel hailed from England. As a result, the commission had difficulty in integrating with, and helping to transform, Welsh public opinion. One of the commission's leading lights, Vavasor Powell, acknowledged these challenges, noting that despite their best efforts the propagators could not supply enough godly clergymen “especially because they wanted the Welsh tongue.”Footnote ⁴² A considerable problem facing the Commission for the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales, then, was its capacity for effective political communication: its ability to construct and invigorate a vernacular public.

Something of an exception in this regard was the north-Wales Puritan Morgan Llwyd, who appropriated and adapted traditional Welsh literary forms in pamphlets, verses, and other writings that helped to plant the seed of a different kind of particularist public in Wales. As Stephen Roberts has written, “When most of the self-styled Saints in Wales used English as their natural medium for the printed word … Llwyd's mission was to reach the Welsh people with books in the language they themselves used in everyday speech.”Footnote ⁴³ Interesting resonances between the works of Llwyd and Salesbury speak to the ways they adapted their messages to follow the lines of force within Welsh public discourse. As was the case with Salesbury, Llwyd argued for the Welsh as a particularly zealous constituency of the wider polity ripe for the gospel; indeed, both men maintained that the Welsh were among God's chosen people and that Welsh was an ancient language of faith. Moreover, Llwyd, like Salesbury, made claims for his brand of piety as deriving from the ancient British roots so beloved of the Welsh.Footnote ⁴⁴

Under the aegis of the commission and its successor republican regimes, men like Llwyd acted as a genuine bridgehead for a form of popular Welsh nonconformist culture. After the Restoration, dissent had greater success in combining with Welsh language culture on account of a concerted effort to spread its message through speech and vernacular print. This drew on the resources of sympathetic English individuals such as Thomas Gouge and Edward Stillingfleet, as well as native dissenters like Stephen Hughes and Charles Edwards. In the 1670s, these men established the Welsh Trust, whose principal aim was publishing and distributing Welsh Bibles and (uncontroversial) vernacular literature for the edification of ordinary Welsh men and women.Footnote ⁴⁵ Although outwardly an ecumenical project, the trust had important dissenting roots and represented a significant moment in bringing together nonconformity, the Welsh language, the technologies of print, and the mechanics for its widespread distribution. This helped to provide a degree of institutional scaffolding to support a Welsh nonconformist public in the later seventeenth century and beyond. Still, however, the dominant presence in Welsh public discourse was one that stressed allegiance to the Church of England.Footnote ⁴⁶ For many, it was easier and more natural to mobilize behind familiar patriotic discourses that stressed that Morgan Llwyd's piety was a foreign import by the “Ffanatics o Lunden” (“Fanatics of London”).Footnote ⁴⁷

Early Modern Wales and the Logistics of Communication

Although Wales was not insulated from wider currents of opinion, there is no evidence for the kind of dynamic and vigorous critical publics historians have located in Stuart England. The barriers and exclusions in Welsh public life thus need to be integrated into accounts of early modern British politics, and doing so provides something of a corrective to recent historiographical trends that have been relentlessly integrative, both geographically and socially. Addressing these questions in the Welsh context brings language to the fore, but I wish to conclude by considering another neglected dimension of the early modern public sphere: the logistics of communication.

Much of the literature on the early modern public sphere is London-centric and often considers the provinces as a uniform space into which news, information, and print were transmitted.Footnote ⁴⁸ However, linguistic difference and unevenness in the infrastructures of print and distribution complicates that picture. The fact that Wales possessed no press before 1718 was a significant factor structuring early modern Welsh political and religious publics. This caused considerable frustration, delay, and error in the production of Welsh-language texts by London printers who did not understand the language, whose copy had to travel long distances, and who frequently needed native speakers to supervise production. Moreover, it made printing Welsh books more expensive and less commercially viable, and it limited the degree to which a vernacular voice entered the world of political print.Footnote ⁴⁹ While the printing of Anglican Welsh translations and devotional works experienced a step-change from the later seventeenth century—often because they were subsidized by charitable benefactors—the more ephemeral forms of political print that have been so important in discussions of the early modern public sphere in England and Europe simply were not produced in Welsh.

Popular printing in Welsh only really arrived with Thomas Jones, an almanac maker who worked initially in London but moved to Shrewsbury in the 1690s.Footnote ⁵⁰ Although Jones made many topical allusions to political events in his almanacs, it is significant that his attempt to invigorate a Welsh vernacular news culture did not flourish. In the preface to one almanac, Jones wrote of his intention, beginning in December 1690, to send a serial Welsh language “collection of all the news published in England” the previous month to serve local communities. However, in the following year, he reported that this “Monthly News” (“Newyddion Misawl”) had failed due to lack of support from booksellers and readers. Jones had been told that this was because there was no need to get news from London as local news was more popular and because, in any event, people would not be able to afford the proposed digest.Footnote ⁵¹ While this response might have been partly the product of obstructionism by booksellers suspicious of Jones's commercial ambitions, it does not alter the fact that there was no discernible groundswell of support for the scheme. As a result, topical Welsh language news materials did not appear in any significant form until the late eighteenth century.Footnote ⁵² Thus, the type of “postrevolutionary” public sphere posited by Lake and Pincus was not viable in Wales: the country lacked the raw materials of a dynamic culture of political vernacular print and the associated urban centers for distributing and consuming it.

The absence of major urban centers in Wales contributed to its rudimentary communications infrastructure and shaped the country's participation in wider political publics.Footnote ⁵³ As historical geographers have noted, in early modern England, “when thinking of travel, contact and communications … it may be an oversimplification to think in terms of only one ‘periphery.’ There was a readily accessible periphery and a less-accessible one.”Footnote ⁵⁴ That Wales occupied this less-accessible periphery has a material bearing on the degree of its integration within the realm of public discourse at all social levels. If thinking about early modern publics involves examining the way “political communication was shaped by emerging markets and developing infrastructures of communication,” then we should consider the ways in which the friction of distance and the presence of underdeveloped markets changes the dynamics of “national” political discourse and interest formation.Footnote ⁵⁵

While the amount of political news, print, and correspondence circulating in Wales increased significantly across the early modern period, logistical problems helped limit the country's assimilation into the broader cultures of British politics, even at elite levels. As Michael Warner has noted, “a public can only act in the temporality of circulation that gives it existence.”Footnote ⁵⁶ In these terms, the public cultures of London and of the principality were somewhat out of sync and, while closely connected, were also discrete. Wales's eastern border was open to wider currents of information—one reason why Thomas Jones established his press at Shrewsbury—yet even here there was a sense that one occupied the margins of British public life. James Morgan lived in Kynnersley, Herefordshire, and in 1700, after thanking James Brydges for sending him news, declared that “we country folks see things at a distance and but very darkly, unless sett of[f] by such a light as you give to them.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Slightly further beyond the Anglo-Welsh border in April 1677, Mutton Davies of Flintshire thanked a family friend at the Inner Temple for sending him a recent newsletter, observing that “so much news, frugally manag'd may help me to entertain my neighbours yet a fortnight, for news like fashions may be fresh in the country though stale at London, and an Act of Parliament cry'd in every street with you, may make me pass for a man of intelligence.”Footnote ⁵⁸ While Davies may have been positioning himself rhetorically as an ignorant country gentleman compared with his sophisticated metropolitan correspondent,Footnote ⁵⁹ there is no reason to doubt the core truth behind such statements: that political news was particularly cherished in Wales and the Marches because it was less common and less frequent than in areas closer to London. There was an economic dimension to this, as correspondence and carriage were usually paid by the recipient, and charges generally increased according to distance travelled. As a result, as James Daybell has observed, communications were “more sporadic in outlying parts of the country [from London],” making it more difficult for those in places like Wales to “keep abreast of current news.”Footnote ⁶⁰ This was true in terms of conveying political print as well as personal correspondence, with Sir Thomas Myddleton paying 1s. 1d. to obtain a Protectoral declaration in Denbighshire in January 1654 but only a penny for a diurnal when in London in May 1651.Footnote ⁶¹ These additional costs in Wales must have curtailed newsgathering practices beneath the levels of the gentry.

Problems accessing news and information stemmed from distance, the geographical barriers to communication, and the underdeveloped nature of the postal system beyond the two major east-west routes in the north and south of the country. Even the lord president of Wales, the earl of Bridgwater, complained in the 1630s how “letters passe slowly & uncertainely,” partly because of the “difficulty & danger” of travelling in parts of Wales.Footnote ⁶² The bishop of St. Asaph, William Lloyd, informed William Sancroft in May 1687 that a group that he had anticipated ordaining had not arrived, adding “I know not what hindered them, for they live above 30 miles from hence in ye inner parts of ye countrey with which we have no correspondence.”Footnote ⁶³ This problem of connectivity worked both ways, and those at the political center often had only a sketchy knowledge of Welsh developments. One London commentator on the royalist rising in Wales during the spring of 1648, for example, noted that “Wales is at such a distance that intelligence from those parts is rare & very uncertaine” and “so full of uncertaintys that I know not what to determine.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Wales's poor postal network was cited as an important reason for difficulties in circulating information, even after the establishment of the Post Office. At Swansea in 1667, for example, one correspondent lamented to a government official that “these partes of Wales hath not bene soe carefully suplied [with post] … as they ought to bee which hath occasion'd not onely delayes but some miscariadg[e]s to the detriment both of publique & private concerns.”Footnote ⁶⁵ The deputy-postmaster general, Roger Whitley, a Welshman by birth, shared this worry; he wrote in January 1673 to the postmaster at Carmarthen, “noe letters (noe not from Cornwall or Scotland) are soe uncertaine and irregular as those from South Wales and I am more troubled about you than all other businesse.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Postal services were in a poor state in north Wales, too, with Whitley describing the “very greate neglects” and abuse of the “publique” by the poor performance of the posts there.Footnote ⁶⁷ The terrain often necessitated using foot posts to deliver messages, which meant slower connections and a weaker integration into wider information networks. Even in the mid-eighteenth century, correspondents in north Wales were grumbling that “the post is a great while coming [here], sometimes a fortnight.”Footnote ⁶⁸

At the very least, these comments direct us to be more cognizant of the logistics of early modern publics and the manner in which even relatively short distances could have important implications for a locality's ability to access and participate in wider mobilizations. While I am not arguing that Wales was aloof from wider political and religious developments and debates, this evidence does indicate that historians have tended to flatten out the field of reception beyond London in their discussions of the early modern public sphere, whereas the reality was more complex. We are dealing with a series of asymmetries and inequalities in the information state which have implications for the nature of Welsh public participation and levels of political knowledge. In addition to the deformations and ruptures in any theoretical English public sphere that may be wrought by language difference, then, we should also consider the ways in which speed and accessibility warped the fabric of reception and participation.

Conclusion: Politics and Particularist Publics

The comparative dearth of Welsh popular print meant that oral dissemination remained particularly important in transmitting knowledge and informing opinion. However, lacking a critical mass of independent voices, the interpretative authority of the gentry and clergy seems to have had a formative role in structuring early modern Wales's political publics. A zealous Anglican cleric of the eighteenth century, Griffith Jones, a man revered for increasing levels of Welsh literacy, in 1742 argued against campaigners who maintained that the Welsh should be made to speak English: “our language is so great a protection and defense to our common people against the growing corruption of the times in the English tongue; by which means they are less prejudiced and better disposed to receive divine instructions.”Footnote ⁶⁹ He continued, “although we have not the happiness to express our allegiance [to church and king] in the words of your language, yet we hope that in deed we shall not be found defective in it.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Jones had in mind principally the threatening blandishments of Catholicism and nonconformity, but he was describing a form of vernacular public that had its roots in the patriotic visions of William Salesbury. We should not overstate the continuities at play here. I am not suggesting that the mid-sixteenth- and mid-eighteenth-century Welsh publics were the same. However, the cultural resources from which they were formed; a patriotism embracing the Welsh language; a particularized version of Britishness; a moderate, Cambricized Protestantism; and a close identification with a Briticized monarchy all remained surprisingly consistent. These were nodal reference points in Welsh public discourse throughout this period.

As Griffith Jones indicated, effective political and religious mobilizations in early modern Wales needed to be acculturated within a Cambrophone milieu. This fact, along with the dynamics of print and communication in Wales, tended to serve the crown, gentry, and church better than alternative voices of dissent. While the publics described above were linked intimately to wider political and religious developments, the landscape of reception in Wales rendered them qualitatively different. The dynamic of religious and political communication in early modern Wales thus modifies familiar accounts of the post-Reformation and postrevolutionary publics in significant ways and introduces discontinuities into the fabric of early modern religious and political communication that have hitherto been largely unheeded.

Whereas Wales was a unique case, particularist publics were not. Considering the manner in which local cultures received the appeals made by various interest groups—and the ways they fashioned their responses (one might say created their particularist publics) partly from culturally specific resources—offers suggestive insights into the variegated politics operating within the English public sphere. The work of Tim Thornton (Cheshire), Diana Newton (the northeast), Mark Stoyle (Cornwall), and Katrina Navickas (Lancashire), suggest the directions that such work might take.Footnote ⁷¹ This more complex picture of regional politics speaks to the competing claims of a largely apolitical provincial landscape elaborated in the scholarship of early Stuart revisionism, and the near-universally politicized nation that emerges from the literature of post-revisionism. An approach incorporating particularist publics might help to reconcile these positions. The framework suggested here emphasizes processes of reception and interest formation within particular cultures, but does not reify the locality into a space opposed to the politics of the center, as was the tendency among revisionists. However, neither does such an approach subsume the localities within “national” political discourses, as is the case with much post-revisionist scholarship. Accommodating provincial political complexity in this way is reminiscent of the kind of dialogic relationship between local and national political cultures found in David Underdown's Revel, Riot and Rebellion, but in this iteration particularist publics emerge from a complex of cultural heritages, social structures, linguistic and dialectical variations, and rhetorical appeals rather than being understood as products of ecology.Footnote ⁷²

The possibilities for also applying such insights within the other kingdoms of the British archipelago are clear. Here, however, the dynamics of linguistic and cultural difference are complicated further by the existence of separate confessional establishments, different legal structures, and a variety of constitutional relationships with the wider British state. For early modern Wales, the integration with English government and politics was particularly thorough, but this did not preclude the possibility of its distinctive voice sounding in the conversations that constituted political discourse in the British archipelago.