Early Modern European Nations and Empire

North American Journal of Welsh Studies, Vol. 2, 1 (Winter 2002)
North American Journal of Welsh Studies Vol. 2, 1 (Winter 2002) © North American Association for
the Study of Welsh Culture and History 2001. All Rights Reserved.
The Plight of Pygmy Nations;
Wales in Early Modern Europe
Philip Jenkins, Pennsylvania State University
Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University.
His books include The Making of a Ruling Class: The Glamorgan Gentry 1640-1790 (Cambridge 1983)
and A History of Wales 1530-1990 (Longman's 1992).
“The Welsh were never subject to any but God and the King, and that none
showed their allegiance more than the Welsh.”- Sir William Williams.
Once upon a time, historical writing on early modern Wales reflected a kind of imperial
optimism, and the story told was one of benevolent absorption into a greater British entity.
In reaction, a grimmer narrative portrayed the 250 years after the Act of Union as a time of
betrayal, when the elites were seduced into imperial loyalties, while the older culture was
scorned and trampled, to be saved only by the fierce loyalty of the common people. Clearly,
Wales occupied a special place in early modern Britain, in that it avoided the religious,
political and ethnic catastrophe which befell its Celtic neighbor Ireland, yet failed to emulate
Scotland by preserving any kind of legal or political identity, however vestigial. Though it
never faced the near genocidal conditions of Ireland, yet it conspicuously failed to be a
nation in its own right. In a Greater British perspective, therefore, we see Wales more in
terms of what it failed to become rather than what it actually was. I want to suggest though
that if we consider the situation of Wales against a wider European canvas, then the Welsh
experience emerges as a remarkable success story, as something rich and strange. In no
other comparable nation or sub-nation was official policy anything like as favorable to the
minority culture as in Wales, nor were local elites so enthusiastically integrated into the
national whole while keeping so large a sense of national identity and cultural pride. In
Wales, too, the official state religion served to bolster rather than suppress local identity.
There were many reasons for this distinctness, but above all, I want to stress the thoroughly
successful use of royal institutions and ideology to provide a political focus for Welsh elites.
I. Incorporating Wales
Being a Welsh historian can pose the danger of parochialism - you may know the
cutting remark about the poet who was “world famous, in Wales.” On the positive side, to
understand Welsh history is to be sensitized to some currently pressing historical and
cultural issues, about the relationship between ethnicity and nationhood, between language,
class and religion. These problems are as unresolved in the contemporary Balkans as they
are, perhaps, in Quebec or California. A Welsh standpoint also makes one suspicious about
the way in which the major nations of Europe construct their fundamental historical
narratives. These are usually teleological tales in which such irrelevancies as Wales,
Languedoc, Bavaria, and Catalonia ultimately attain their proper position as units within
Jenkins, Plight of Pygmy Nations
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“true” or “real” national units, acquiring thereby the appropriate language and class
structure.
Wales offers a splendid case-study of exactly how one of these smaller units was
incorporated within a larger British whole, and it was a remarkably strange process, which in
a European framework, emerges as far odder than Welsh historians often suggest. Wales
was radically different from England, above all in language, far more so than say Languedoc
from France, and these differences absolutely did not diminish following the political union
of the sixteenth century. And yet there was no nationalist reaction, which might strike us as
bizarre from our post-Enlightenment perspective: we know intuitively that a Volk with its
Sprach should have national consciousness, and a tendency to seek national selfdetermination.
In the seventeenth century however, this equation was far from obvious.
Though ethnic identity was defined in terms of language, political self-consciousness could
easily be satisfied through the structures of dynastic kingship, and a concurrent ideological
system expounded with triumphant success through the pageantry, propaganda and
mythology of the Renaissance monarchy. Wales in fact became the first region of the British
Isles to develop an ideology of “British” unity based on loyalty to the monarchy and the
Protestant cause. It was the “Ancient Britons” who thus pioneered “Britishness,” and the
Stuarts exploited this synthesis brilliantly for their own ends.
To illustrate this theme, I’d like to use a specific incident which occurred in October
1642 at the Marquess of Worcester's castle at Raglan, in Monmouthshire, when the twelve
year old Charles, Prince of Wales, arrived to muster support and money for the king's cause
from his principality. Now, Raglan at this point was a remarkable place, where the Marquis
was probably the richest man in Britain. His son and heir was experimenting with steam
engines and hydraulics, which he used to power amazing special effects in the gardens, and
also in spectacular pageants. His wonders included “a garden ornament which opened its
mouth and replied to questions in several languages” - I am sure that Welsh was one of
them! He also used his special effects deliberately to terrify local Puritans: when they came
to search the castle for arms in 1641, he arranged for spectacular rumbling and echoing
effects, while servants ran around yelling “Look to yourselves my masters, for the lions are
got loose. ” The Parliamentarians never stopped running, and did not turn their heads until
the castle was out of sight.
I have no exact idea what he laid on for his royal visitors some months later, but I
assume it was stunning. Surrounded by Worcester's tapestries "full of lively figures and
ancient British stories," the courtiers were presented with the traditional Welsh drink
metheglin. Bardic poetry and Welsh prophecy undoubtedly formed part of the entertainment,
as both were especially cultivated in the Somerset family. It would be noted after the castle's
fall in 1646 to Parliamentary forces that "Never was there an old house so pulled down by
prophecies, ushered into its ruin by predictions, and so laid hold upon by signs and tokens."
In this ultra-patriotic atmosphere, Charles heard "loving and loyal" speeches, asserting that
the Britons were "the true remaining and only one people of this land." They would
therefore do their patriotic duty to help "upon any lawful design to the maintenance of
justice, piety and religion, and defend their persons from all malignants and enemies."
North American Journal of Welsh Studies, Vol. 2, 1 (Winter 2002)
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Now, I’d suggest that what is happening here is rather remarkable. The ideology
being invoked looks as if it should be nationalist, and that to us suggests separatism, but the
conclusion is resolutely unionist. In this thought-world, the more fiercely one asserts local
values, local culture and local particularism, the more one is declaring loyalty for Crown and
nation. Moreover, I wonder where else in Europe at this time one could so proudly assert
the value of a local and, to be frank, a fringe language, as a symbol of national unity?
Perhaps no political system has ever been as successful as Renaissance monarchy in
overcoming the difficulties of persuading a diverse group of races and nations to live
together in one state. Absolute kings tended also to be cosmopolitan kings. Now, that
praise of monarchy will sound like a very bad joke from the perspective of Ireland, where
the same period that witnessed the happy merger of Wales also saw some of the bloodiest
civil warfare anywhere in Europe, especially in the 1590s, and where ethnic tensions were
notorious. The key variable, however, was religious. In the sixteenth or seventeenth
centuries, multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic states were perfectly viable and even flourishing
entities, except and unless political mistakes allowed an equation to be drawn between
ethnicity, language, and dissident religion, at which point God and King were at odds, and
catastrophe was likely. Ireland was the best-known example of this, but Europe in these
years offers some examples of both the benevolent Welsh pattern, and far more of the
venomous Irish model.
We might discuss this in terms of what was a familiar cliche in Victorian England,
namely the idealized harmony of “cottage, throne and altar.” However saccharine it sounds,
it could work in the sense that when throne and altar clearly represented the interests and the
cultural aspirations of the common people, the “cottage,” the resulting alliance was very
difficult to overcome, and highly resilient against any upstart elite. In early modern Wales,
the three, miraculously, held together. In Ireland, and in much of Europe, they did not.