Marion Löffler - Political Pamphlets and Sermons from Wales 1790-1806

WALES AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

General Editors: Mary-Ann Constantine and Dafydd Johnston

SELECTION OF PAMPHLETS

1 [Morgan John Rhys], )

2 John Jones, Glan-y-Gors, Bardd, , [1795]))

3 J. Jones, Glan y Gors, )

4 Thomas Roberts, o Lwynrhudol, , [1798]))

5 [William Richards], )

The influence of the French Revolution manifested itself in different ways in the various parts of the British isles. In England and the Lowlands of Scotland it engendered the most fundamental debate about politics since the English civil war, according to John Barrell. In Ireland it fanned the flames of a struggle for independence inspired by both the American and the French republics. Wales did not experience political mass mobilization on anything approaching the same level and no propaganda in favour of Welsh independence emerged. Yet the French Revolution nevertheless furthered Welsh-language Enlightenment efforts and brought a nascent public debate cautiously sparked by the American War of Independence to first fruition. The main expressions of this process of cultural and political revolution, as originally noted in R. T. Jenkinss classic volume, Hanes Cymru yn y Bedwaredd Ganrif ar Bymtheg, were a new Welsh periodical literature, the recasting of the medieval eisteddfod as a modern institution with a democratic governing body in the gorsedd of the bards, and the public pamphlet wars conducted by Welsh radicals and loyalists, war-mongers and pacifists, Anglicans, Dissenters and Methodists.

Many of the English and some English-language Irish and Scottish pamphlets of this profoundly influential epoch in the political history of Europe have been made accessible in the eight volumes of Political Writings of the 1790s edited by Gregory Claeys. Yet, as he notes in brackets, Welsh developments remain more obscure. His only example of a radical Welsh pamphlet, provided in a footnote, is An Address to the Jacobine and Other Patriotic Societies of the French; Urging the Establishment of a Republican Form of Government by Richard Prices nephew George Cadogan Morgan, who spent all his adult life in England, signed A Native of England, and a Citizen of the World and did not address Welshmen. This neglect is partly due to the fact that, unlike any other region of the British isles at the time, much of the Welsh printed material was in the vernacular Welsh, and is therefore inaccessible to most English-speaking researchers. This volume thus fills a sizeable gap by considering the bilingual discussion conducted in Welsh political pamphlets and sermons published between 1790, when the first Welsh texts in response to the French Revolution appeared, and 1806, the end of the Methodist controversy. Its first part discusses the varied publications as they emerged in exchanges of letters and replies or accusations and vindications in the main categories of Religion, War and Peace, King and Crown, and the Legal Sphere. The second part of the volume features texts and translations of five radical Welsh-language pamphlets all of them important contributions to the intellectual and political history of Wales contextualizing them in the Welsh revolution debate. The five texts were chosen for two reasons. Firstly, unlike many other contemporary English-language and some loyalist Welsh-language publications, they are not currently available in digital form. Their reproduction with notes in this volume will therefore make the original texts more easily available and understandable to a new generation of Welsh scholars. Secondly, since none of them has appeared in English before, translating them will make them accessible to a non-Welsh speaking audience. Bethan Jenkins, Bodleian History Faculty Library, Oxford, is mostly responsible for the translation, a feat on which she is to be congratulated.