Why Wales Never Was by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, General
ISBN: 9781786830142
Google: tb2rDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Published: 2017-06-01T22:15:50+00:00

For Hobsbawm, this condemns the national movements of non-historic nations as luddites.41 The argument could be turned on its head however to condemn the link between assimilatory and progressive politics. To collaborate with liberals and socialists from the dominant ethnic majority was a high-risk strategy that few took. The lesson was not learnt in Wales.

Welsh resistance

Despite this, Wales offered a form of resistance, even if it was to prove ultimately to be a mirage. Welshmen like Michael D. Jones and Emrys ap Iwan offered a cutting and critical analysis of the failings of liberalism. For Emrys ap Iwan, writes Dafydd Glyn Jones, ‘loving general [community] rights … was a greater virtue – we could almost say a more sacred virtue – than loving personal rights, although they were rights’.42 Emrys promoted the ‘general’ rights of the Welsh in order to offset the claim that English was the ‘universal language’ of Britain. In the work of Emrys ap Iwan and Michael D. Jones, the perverse liberalism which undermined the existence of Welsh-speaking Wales is deconstructed.

The period’s most interesting figure was Michael D. Jones. His significance is that he objected, often and at some volume, to British liberal discourse in Wales. Despite this he regarded himself as a political liberal, at least at the beginning of his career. He resisted the influence of the Anglican Church and opposed the tithe, the Church tax that even non-Anglicans had to pay. He had supported the Liberal candidate in Meirionnydd in the general election of 1859 with much enthusiasm, and the Tory took revenge by evicting his mother from her smallholding.43 An original man, his Nonconformist leadership role (he was principal of the Independent College at Bala and had some clout within the Nonconformist establishment) was combined with an uncommon awareness of the colonial nature of the relationship between England and Wales.

Despite holding communitarian viewpoints, Michael D. Jones remained loyal to the sort of radical politics that could have driven him in the direction of laissez-faire liberalism. Perhaps his cultural background explains how he avoided the trap.44 In the 1820s, his father had been a member of a local Cambrian society, and the son became acquainted with the sort of Herderian ideas that were circulated in these organisations. When he became a national figure, he would profess his connections with the Llanover Circle. His sons were trained on the triple harp by Llanover’s harpist, Thomas Gruffydd, and in 1877 he presented a fox skin from the Welsh colony in Patagonia to Lady Llanover herself. Adorning himself in a Volkish garb of home-spun cloth, wool clothes and knee-breeches, Michael D. Jones dressed like an idealised man of y werin, the people. The Herderian politics of language had become an anachronism in Welsh culture by the 1850s and the 1860s. But it left its mark on this Welsh ‘liberal’ whose theology was evangelical, his politics radical and his journalism militantly anti-colonial.

The Welsh colony in Patagonia, established in 1865 and a development for which Michael D. Jones was largely responsible, has ensured that his name remains well known in Wales up to the present day.

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