THE WELSH: A

NATION without a STATE
By HENRY' EDWARDS!
NE of the discreditable of which became the College Recepisodes at the Countertor. On the other hand the head of Reformation vial the great instruction was a Jesuit, Fr. feud at the commonly called Aggazzari, whose assistants were English College in Rome. also Jesuits.
It is significant that there were two accounts of its foundation, the English and the Welsh accounts. The former made out that it stemmed from the English hospice founded in 727 by Ina. The Welsh said it was founded by none other than King Cadwallader and the hospice, "both large and faire standing in the way to the Pope's Pallace not far from the Castle of St. Angelo, was even said to be the palace of the last King of united Wales."
Lewis Owen's Running Register put it: "This seminarie was in times past the palace of Cadwallader who by his last will gave it to be an hospice for Welsh pilgrims and ordained that certain priestes of his country should have the rule and government of it for ever." Since the conquest of Gwynnedd, the last independent part of Wales, in 1282, it had been thrown open to both nations, but the Welsh had the government of it— or were supposed so to have it. Even as late as 1559, Sir Edward Carne, a Welshman and formerly Queen Mary's Ambassador to Rome was its Custos. Two years later the Custos was Dr. Goldwell, the exiled Bishop of St. Asaph. In the same year "Dr. Maurice Clenock" that is, Dr. Morris of Clynog (compare Pantycelyn for William Williams of Pantycelyn, or Top House for John Jones, Top House), was appointed Camerarius and 10 years later Custos.
WHEN the Pope in 1578 started the English College, it was housed in the hospice, the Custos It was an unhappy arrangement. Dissensions broke out at once. And some of the students began to rebel against the garrulous, kindly Welshman who was then Rector. His greatest fault, as his opponents, who included Dr. Allen himself, knew, was his preference for the nine Welshmen in the College. "When any Englishman cometh to the hospital, if his learning be never so good or his behaviour discreet, he shall not be entertained. But if a Welshman . . . whether he have learning or no, he is a Welshman and must be permitted." The English exiles, who claimed to have an aristocratic background, chivvied the poorer Cymry. And soon there was a scandalous broil with eminent exiles like Dr. Owen Lewis, though a friend of Dr. Allen, contesting against him.
Dr. Lewis was typical of his nation at the time in his oppositron to the Jesuits. And it was without doubt a feud that before very long turned into a proand anti-Jesuit affair. The Jesuits (with English students) against the Welsh—so it was seen. The chief of the anti-Jesuits was Hugh Griffith, afterwards Provost of Cambrai. He remained their bitter enemy to the end, a man with English students decided to walk back to England. But he shouted too soon. The Pope belatedly took action, Dr. Morris was removed and the Jesuits from that time were in control. Dr. Lewis went to stay with Cardinal Borromeo, whose friendship with the great Catholic, Griffith Roberts, is one of the cornmonplacea of Welsh Catholic history. Dr. Morris went from Rouen by ship to Spain, but was drowned on the way.
17 was Hugh Griffith's case that JEthe Jesuits had ''no skill or experience of our country's state nor of our men's nature."
And there, for once, the choleric Welshman may have been right at the time, though, no doubt, the Jesuits learned better before they died gloriously at the sack of their mission at Llanrothal in 1679. True it' was, that in the 17th century Welsh Jesuits, Robert Jones, Blessed Philip Evans, William Morgan and Blessed David Lewis, more than offset the earlier contretemps. But it would be idle to deny and profitable to examine that contretemps. If the Welsh exiles turned with deep suspicion away from the Jesuits, they found in the Order of St. Benedict the very spirit they required. Indeed, the feud had the tragic effect of ranging Benedictines against Jesuits. Blessed John Roberts, the Benedictine Welsh martyr, executed in 1610, was apparently in trouble with the Jesuits at one time. The life and work Of John Jones, Llanfrynach (Fr. Leander) and David Baker, the Benedictine mystic of Abergavenny, are well known, but seldom are their racial feelings and prejudices taken into account in connection with their labours.
Both "Leander" and John Roberts were convicted by Jesuits and both conceived an aversion to them.
it may well have been that at the time the work of such Welshmen was looked upon (possibly by themselves) as a means of checking Jesuit aims. Parsons himself accused the Welsh of entering the Benedictine order only "to vex and oppose" the Jesuits. More seriously, he contended that they were in treaty with an heretical Government and lhat one of them had defended the Elizabethan oath of allegiance. Now there, I believe, we are getting near a real divergence of view. Broadly speaking, the Welsh exiles hated the projects of the English and the Jesuits to restore the old Faith by something like force. Anti-Spanish to start with (long before the Change of Religion), the Welsh tended to support a Scottish rather than a Spanish succession.
But at bottom they did not regard the problem of the reconversion of these isles as one touching the civil government. In this the Jesuits might be regarded as a product of their age, They knew all about cu/us regis, and proposed to act accordingly. To them the start must be made from the top. Not so the Welsh.
THE story of Welsh Christianity
since the Change is largely that of a nation of unlettered peasants, unaided and sometimes attacked by an alien State, battling against "top men."
They planned, created, developed and maintained the great chapel constituency numbering today some 600,000 (excluding the seats of recent English origin) against 200,000 of the Protestant Church of Wales, disestablished since 1920, and 115,000 Catholics.* It was not the unresting energy of Cradock, the eloquence of Rowlands, the quiet piety of Wroth, the poetry of Pantycelyn the genius of Christmai Evans, the intellect of Williams o'r Wern and the organising work of the great Dr. Charles that made it. It was a work of "y werin," the people. If there be any really democratic entity in Wales, it is the chapel. But in this the chapel folk built upon their Catholic past. It is no coincidence that the "Celtic" cousins of the Welsh, Cornish, Irish and Scots, have all chosen forms of religion originally discountenanced by the English State. The Welsh Catholics believed what the Irish have proved, that the religion of the people was independent of that of the State. Indeed, it is a tribute to Dewi Sant and his fellow monastic founders of Wales that this indifference to the State survives among us. For it ought always to be remembered that Wales, a nation, has survived since its patron and his fellow monks cohered it in the sixth century in spite of its failure to possess a State instrument.
No capital, unless it be the peripatetic national eisteddfod, no throne, unless it be "the big seat," not even the language binds us together. By all the ordinary tests Wales is not a nation in the usual sense. And Welsh Nationalism to many Welshmen seems ridiculous. In this world of State-nationalism with its inter-state-nationalist intrigues and real polifik. Wales, the child of Dewi, stands forward as an example of a better way,
* These figures arc the most recent and
for the Protestants exclude the more "nominal" element. That is to say, the 600,000 chapel Welsh are those who attend chapel with some regularity. The population of Wales is two and a half
million.