iniquity, terror and survival: welsh gothic, 1789-1804

Iniquity, Terror and Survival: Welsh Gothic, 1789-18041

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E L I Z A B E T H E DWA R D S

Abstract: Literary critics have recently begun to draw attention to ‘national Gothic’,outlining the importance of themes of conflict and defeated and victorious histories in thisform of the Gothic. The contested and unsettled history of Wales provides the perfectconditions for a national Gothic, yet little work has yet been done towards the notion of aspecifically Welsh Gothic in the period following the French revolution. This articleexplores four variations on the theme of writing Gothic in revolution-era Wales: a touristGothic, a Jacobin Gothic, a loyalist Gothic and a post-colonial Gothic. It shows how writersof this period used the conflicts and iniquities of the Welsh past equally to illustrateWales’s incorporation within a larger united Britain and to figure its otherness, its familiardifference, relative to its historical enemy – England.

Keywords: Wales, French Revolution, tourism, Jacobinism, loyalism, post-colonialism

I. Welsh Gothic?

It is a lasting irony of Welsh literary history that the best-known eighteenth-centuryversion of Wales came not from a Welsh pen but from an English one. For fifty years andmore the pale spectres of the massacred Welsh bards of Thomas Gray’s ode ‘The Bard’(1757) haunted later writers of Wales.2 When, for instance, the young Leigh Hunt met thewriter and lexicographer William Owen (later Owen-Pughe) and the Anglesey poetRichard Llwyd in London in the early 1800s, Gray’s bard seemed to join them:

... [Owen] had a Welsh harp in his room, and I had the satisfaction of hearing him play uponit. He was not very like Gray’s bard: and instead of Conway’s flood, and precipice, and an armycoming to cut our throats, we had tea and bread and butter, and a snug parlour with ourbooks in it. Notwithstanding my love of Gray, and a considerable wish to see a proper ill-usedbard, I thought this a better thing, though I hardly knew whether my friends did. I am notsure, with all their good-nature, whether they could not have preferred a good antiquariandeath, with the opportunity of calling King Edward a rascal, and playing their harps at him,to all the Saxon conveniences of modern times.3

Hunt’s playful unease about his Welsh companions is salutary: Owen and Llwyd appearwell mannered and sociable, and yet in his romanticised and ambivalent view they areclearly not to be trusted. But the uncertain terms of Hunt’s response to these Welsh bardsmay be at least partly explained by the fact that he was an admirer of Richard Llwyd’spoetry.4 Llwyd’s poems often turn on the traumas of Welsh history, revisiting andrecontextualising the struggles and displacements of the Welsh past rather than makingany attempt to resolve them. From Hunt’s perspective, Richard Llwyd and William Owenseem more closely connected to Welsh history than metropolitan (and Saxon) modernity:quaint, antique and yet faintly threatening in their other-worldliness. Wales is a liminalspace throughout this encounter, ‘an uncanny space [...] strangely familiar and familiarlystrange’.5

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 35 No. 1 (2012)

© 2011 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4

2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Gray’s ‘The Bard’ is no less haunted and uneasy, even though the events it depicts neverhappened.6 Picturing the slaughtered Welsh bards, ‘Smeared with gore, and ghastly pale’,the poem continues with the last remaining bard’s ghostly imaginings; his compatriotbards undead,

On yonder cliffs, a griesly band,I see them sit, they linger yet,Avengers of their native land:With me in dreadful harmony they join,And weave with bloody hands the tissue of thy line.7

In ways that Gray could not have foreseen, this fantasy of Wales as vindictive andunsettled takes on new meanings in Richard Llwyd’s poems on the disturbances of Welshhistory. These works are often translations (real or pretended) of ancient Welsh texts, inwhich the past becomes the setting for present conflicts. Sarah Prescott’s recent study ofThomas Gray and his Welsh contemporary Evan Evans has shown how eighteenth-century Welsh poetry was a place in which ideas of Welshness and Britishness could bedefined, imposed and resisted – in which national identities could be lost and won. InPrescott’s account Welsh writers actively oppose Anglo-British incorporation byemphasising the cultural, literary and national differences between Welsh and Englishwriters in this period.8 Through figures such as Evans and then Llwyd, Gray’s vengefulbard is written and rewritten across the landscape of eighteenth-century anglophoneWelsh writing.

Turning to the later part of the eighteenth century, this essay takes up the notion ofWelsh Gothic as a means of tracking the development of the Gray–Evans debate into the1790s and beyond. It suggests that the Gothic provided Welsh writers and visitors toWales with a means of expressing various forms of horror, uncertainty and confusion inan age in which the final outcome of events following the French Revolution lookedexceptionally unclear. At the same time, the Gothic also became a means of articulatinga long-held sense of ambivalence about the relations between Wales and England, whichoften becomes visible in this period through explorations of Wales’s history of conquestand colonial suffering. The appearance of this Gothic in this way at just this point is,however, not at all coincidental, since the sense of instability and uncertainty widely feltin Britain as a result of the revolution may have prompted writers in Wales to draw onthe medieval – an equally disturbed period of history – as a parallel or touchstone for themodern.

Studies of the Gothic have taken a profoundly historical turn in the past decade or so.9

In Robert Mighall’s words, the Gothic is a mode that ‘testifies to a concern with thehistorical past, and adopts a number of rhetorical and textual strategies to locate the pastand represent its perceived iniquities, terrors, and survivals’.10 Mighall’s sense of the Gothicas a means of locating past-ness and navigating its emotional geography provides a focalpoint for this essay. And the time seems right for a Welsh Gothic since critics have recentlybegun to draw attention to the national dimensions of the Gothic.11 Murray Pittock, forexample, has noted the ‘inflection of national Gothic towards issues of conflict betweenpeoples, or between defeated and victorious histories’.12 Wales seems to provide the perfectconditions for a national Gothic in this context of contested histories, yet little work hasbeen done so far towards the notion of a specifically Welsh Gothic in the late eighteenthand early nineteenth centuries.13 My main concern in this paper, Welsh poetry or poetryon Welsh themes, has never before been included in any account of the Gothic of thisperiod.

120 ELIZABETH EDWARDS

© 2011 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

However, the concept of the Gothic takes on a remarkably varied range of meanings inthe period after 1789, and Welsh Gothic is no less difficult to define. This paper exploresfour variations on the theme of writing Gothic in revolution-era Wales: a tourist Gothic, aJacobin Gothic, a loyalist Gothic and, lastly, a post-colonial Gothic. The boundariesbetween these sub-categories are not, of course, fixed – there are hybrid versions,continuities and overlaps between them – but they represent a range of ways into alittle-researched subject. Each of these starting-points for Welsh Gothic raises issues oflocal, national and international proportions. Taken together, they begin to show thedepth and diversity of material that lies within the concept of a Welsh Gothic.

II. Tourist Welsh Gothic

When continental travel became impossible during the French wars, more tourists cameto Wales than ever before, seeking out what they saw as sublime and picturesque scenesfrom Swansea to Snowdonia.14 Welsh landscapes particularly inspired the young J. M. W.Turner, who made several sketching tours of Wales in the 1790s. Peter Lord has suggestedthat Turner ‘clearly intended to exhibit a Last Bard picture’,15 and while he never produceda final piece on this theme, watercolours from his Snowdonia tour in 1799 hint at how thework could have looked. Caernarvon Castle (1799-1800) shows a bard singing in a pastorallandscape, with the castle – an emblem of oppression – glowing in the middle distance.16

An unfinished companion picture, Looking down a Deep Valley towards Snowdon, with anArmy on the March (1799-1800; Fig. 1), depicts the army of Edward I winding its waythrough a scene borrowed from ‘The Bard’. Savagely indistinct, barely legible in parts, thispainting suggests considerable uncertainty on Turner’s part about how to depict theconquest of Wales.

Some tourists imagined themselves travelling through the landscapes of Gothic fictionwhile in Wales. Touring north Wales in 1799, the painter Robert Ker Porter describedHarlech Castle as ‘an ancient and splendid Radcliffian erection’.17 Other travellersencountered the hard realities of the lives of the Welsh poor. When the diarist Ann Listervisited Neath Abbey in 1793, she noted that the Abbey was ‘now uninhabited except byColliers, who have built some huts adjoining to part of the mouldering walls, which do notdiminish its picturesque effect’.18 Following in Lister’s footsteps in 1796, the Comte dePenhouët, an emigrant Breton aristocrat, also found these families living in the ruins ofthe Abbey:

the cells of [the Abbey] serve as a retreat to an innumerable gang of mendicants, whosefigures are hideous beyond all that can be imagined [...] As soon as I entered into one of thevaulted outer parts, several women came out of holes that communicated with it; theysurrounded me, and the farther I advanced, the more the troop augmented: they carriedalmost all of them infants upon their backs, and the tone of voice in which they begged of uscould be compared only to that of those women who headed the rebels at Paris.19

It may be exceptional that Penhouët documented the dreadful living conditions of workersat the mines and copper refineries near Neath Abbey,20 but his depictions of these workersin text and image are intensely conflicted ones. Penhouët’s sketch of a ragged mother andchild at Neath Abbey appears grotesque: the mother’s destitution and misery, and hermisshapen or exaggerated proportions, equally inspire pity and fear (Fig. 2). She embodiesa sense of horror all the more powerfully because she is explicitly linked with Parisianrevolutionaries in the accompanying text. Events in France seem to infect Penhouët’s

Iniquity, Terror and Survival: Welsh Gothic, 1789-1804 121


ability to see Welsh peoples and landscapes to the point that Wales seems to become anightmare of France, closing in around him, as he visits Neath.

Welsh scenes sometimes became backdrops to the wider events unfolding in Britain andbeyond in the 1790s. The ruins of Denbigh Castle, built during the conquest of Wales byEdward I in the thirteenth century, inspired Joseph Hucks in this way as he walkedthrough north Wales with Coleridge in the summer of 1794. Past and present seem tooverlap in Hucks’s poem on Denbigh Castle, which records his sense of encountering themateriality of Welsh history, its solidity, above all its presence. Meeting the ruins atDenbigh, record of past conflicts, prompts Hucks to reflect on the current situationin Britain, at war with France and suffering serious domestic political divisions.21 ‘On theRuins of Denbigh Castle’, a poem equally haunted and brought to life by history, is framedwith a Gothic sensibility:

Now sad and slow, borne far on dusky wing,Sails the still Eve – Night from her ebon throneSlow rising, scatters wide her mystic spellsO’er the tir’d world; and from yon murky cloudGleams the pale moon, diffusing holy lightThro’ many a midnight Isle and silent scene.22

Noticing some faded writing etched into part of the building – ‘In deep but time-worncharacters, I trace/ The stern feudality of antient years’ – Hucks begins to rework

1. J. M. W. Turner, Looking down a Deep Valley towards Snowdon, with an Army on theMarch, 1799-1800. © Tate Gallery, London



Wales’s violent history of despotism and conflict as a point of comparison for the post-revolutionary 1790s. Appropriating Welsh history in order to illustrate contemporarytroubles may seem (like ‘The Bard’) to rub away Welsh difference, and to replacehistoricalWelsh grievances with present English radical ones. But Hucks does notventriloquise or try to speak for Wales in this poem, which never loses sight of Welshdifference. His sense of bewilderment and disillusionment at the turn of events in Britainin 1794, which implicitly features throughout the poem, preserves a respectful andsympathetic distance between tourist and landscape, paradoxically strengthening thelink between ruined castle and current affairs. In Hucks’s eyes the stoic and defiantruined castle seems to have a special affinity with beleaguered radicals in this year: the

2. Armand-Louis-Bon Maudet de Penhouët, ‘Inhabitant of Ruins near Neath’, LettersDescribing a Tour through Part of South Wales. By A

Pedestrian Traveller. With Views, Designed and Etched by the Author(London: T. Baylis, 1797), p.39



resolute and heroic Welsh forces of a past age who are ostensibly the subject of Hucks’sreflections in the following quotation equally bring to mind the defendants in thetreason trials, a band of men metaphorically under siege for their political beliefs:

Ye patriot few; who arm’d with fortitude,E’er while have fought for freedom! whom the forceOf England’s proud usurpers, nor their threatsCould ever bend from virtue’s stern resolve! (p.103)

Penhouët’s experiences aside, Wales often represents a retreat or refuge in this period. AtDenbigh, Hucks turns away from the troubles and disputes of Cambridge or London in1794:

Far hence thou busy world! nor here intrudeThy sounds of uproar, arguing much of care,Of impotent alarms and deep dismay,Of hateful contests, hopes, and sickly fears. (p.103)

Here the phrase ‘impotent alarms’ particularly speaks to the contemporary context, sincealarmism is, in 1794, shorthand for fears that a revolution may take place in Britain.23

However, Hucks’s sense of the impotence of the alarms of this year indicates his belief thatrevolution is out of the question, as well as his suspicions that the defendants in thetreason trials face spurious or exaggerated charges. Although the weathered ruin ofDenbigh seems, for Hucks, connected to reformers besieged by reactionaries, the personalheroism of these individuals does not diminish or displace the material heroism of the oldcastle. As Welsh history provides the occasion for a study of present alarms and conflicts,so the iniquities, terrors and above all the survivals of the Welsh past nurture hopes thatthe political and ideological storms of 1794 will subside, leaving nothing more than a newmark on the history of oppositional politics.

III. Welsh Jacobin Gothic

The year 1794 marks the emergence of a new variety of Gothic – the Jacobin Gothic.William Godwin’s novel Things As They Are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams, writtenthis year, can been seen as the first Jacobin Gothic text, written ‘under terror’ as Godwinputs it in his preface to the novel. Caleb Williams takes the Gothic into new political andintellectual territories in its sense of the Gothic as a form defined by secrets, surveillanceand intimidation, invading the most ordinary of existences.24 Godwin’s novel critiquesBurkean Gothic ideology at a moment intensified by the treason trials and by theincreasingly despotic appearance of the actions of the British government.25

According to Damian Walford Davies, however, Godwin’s Caleb may also have Welshorigins in the poet and stonemason Edward Williams (better known by his bardic pen-name, Iolo Morganwg),26 who moved in various radical circles in London, includingGodwin’s, in 1794.27 Iolo was a self-appointed ‘Bard of Liberty’, a fierce critic ofmonarchical ambition, corrupt politicians and clerics, oppression of all kinds and,especially, war. His poems of the early to mid-1790s are full of monsters and fiends (oftenwith obvious real-life referents) or chaotic visions of destruction and confusion, oftenlinked with scenes of war, that are hallmarked by evil and terror. Iolo was well known toa number of Welsh and English radicals in London – among them David Williams, George



Dyer, Robert Southey, John Thelwall and Joseph Priestley – and he was also drawn into theinfectious culture of suspicion that drove so many radicals in this period to feel (likeGodwin’s fictional Caleb Williams) hunted by spies and haunted by paranoia.28 Iolo waspresent at the celebrations of the acquittal of Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke and JohnThelwall on 4 February 1795 at the Crown and Anchor, where he sang a song he had beencommissioned to write for the occasion, ‘Trial by Jury, The Grand Palladium of BritishLiberty’. By the end of 1795, however, Iolo had left the repressive, coercive climate ofLondon to return home to Wales – a place that also, and not coincidentally in the light ofDavies’s reading of the novel, provides Caleb with a temporary refuge.

Back in Wales, however, Iolo continued writing about contemporary affairs, thoughhe did so indirectly most often in this period, in terms of his theories of Welsh bardism.These theories were founded on democratic ideals – liberty, equality, justice and pacifismall feature strongly in bardism – and they offered Iolo ‘a vehicle for his Jacobinsympathies’.29 Iolo long held on to his radical sympathies of the early 1790s, even whenother former radicals (among them Southey and Coleridge) had begun to desert anddisown their earlier feelings about revolution and reform. Driven from London in 1795

either by real intimidation or by his fears of possible intimidation, Iolo’s political outlooktook on the figurative and visionary qualities of bardo-druidism in the later 1790s. Inthe following section we see the Gothic, often violent imagination that animates Iolo’sperspective on past and current events at its most intense, in a manuscript dating from1802 that can be seen as a late cry of defiance against the events and mixed emotions of1794.

In the early summer of 1802 Iolo set out to walk from London to north Wales, pencillingan account of his journey along the way. One of his first entries in his notebook (writteneither 30 May or 1 June) describes the scene he imagines on leaving the city, titled ‘Idea ofa grand illumination for the 1st of June 1802’:

Let about 2 or 300 good ropes be suspended from the tops of St. Pauls to the ground, each tohave nooses at every foot distance, and in every noose a neck of one of the rascals that richlydeserve it. A lamp tied to every hand and every foot, every rope thus thickly furnished like atrace of onions, and each of these rascals in the well-merited agonies of death having theirconvulsed limbs in motion, would exhibit a very grand illimination [sic] of moving lights, thatwould be seen, as if quite alive, at twenty miles distance at least. And if Kings, nobles, parsons,&c &c, would on such an occasion become lights to enlighten the world, they would answerthe purpose for which they were originally instituted.30

Although this passage was probably written on the move, it is anything but artless. Denseand highly crafted, Iolo’s St Paul’s scene shows a meticulous and magnetic eye for detail,from the glancing biblical reference to the slippery, punning ‘illimination’, which plays onthe idea that this is a vision of execution: illumination-as-elimination. Perhaps the mostsurprising feature of this execution fantasy is the unexpected and absurdly homelyillustration of the string (or ‘trace’) of onions. Appearing about midway through thepassage, the onions testify to the passage’s fluid and disturbed sense of perspective, and itssense of the monstrous and dehumanised.

The onion image perfectly captures the strains that run through this piece – it evensmells faintly unsettling. Other features of the passage develop its ambivalence. Take thephrase ‘a trace of onions’. These are obviously not real figures, only ones laid over theLondon skyline as if projected there; traces or ghostly outlines emanating from a darkimagination. ‘Trace’ is a dialect word for a string or plait of onions, but it also suggestsother contemporary meanings – vestiges, remains, marks or impressions (including, in the



Lockean sense, those left on the brain) – that commonly referred to results or after-effects.‘Trace’ identifies changes to the real or perceived while it simultaneously suggests whatthe OED defines as ‘the presence or existence of something, or of a former event orcondition’.31

Iolo’s particularity about the date – 1 June 1802 – also suggests the presence of formerevents and their after-effects. The notion of ‘a grand illumination for the 1st of June’ bringsto mind 1794, and the first major naval battle of the Revolutionary war. The British victoryover the French fleet in this engagement, led by Admiral Howe, quickly came to be knownas the ‘Glorious First of June’, and Howe’s victory stayed in the public mind throughoutthe 1790s as part of the wartime propaganda of British military power. Iolo was not theonly artist remembering the Glorious First of June in 1802. Francesco Bartelozzi produceda large mezzotint on the subject in this year, Commemoration of the Victory of June 1st 1794,which included medallion portraits of Lord Howe and over thirty other admirals andofficers. Somewhere around this point, too, the sculptor John Flaxman was beginningwork on the Howe monument that was (it had already been decided) to be placed in StPaul’s.32 St Paul’s was a relatively empty space in this period, a ‘potential national shrine’where national character could be displayed in a more controlled way than in the crowdedand chaotic space of Westminster Abbey.33 The poet laureate, Henry Pye, who had recentlypublished the deeply loyalist poem Naucratia, or Naval Dominion (1798), was thought theideal candidate to compose the text of Flaxman’s monument,34 but in contrast with anestablishment figure such as Pye, Iolo’s imagined illumination suggests his distance andalienation from commemorations of Howe. Instead Iolo shows us his opposition to the warand its heroes, and, perhaps, offers his own impossible counter-memorial for Howe.

Iolo’s method of remembering bears little relation to Bartelozzi’s or Flaxman’s. Hismemories of 1794 are opaque and layered; onion-like, to think of the 1802 journal. JohnBarrell has recently suggested that a new, multidisciplinary approach to the 1790s is theonly way of showing the very great extent ‘to which the whole life of a nation wasbelieved to have been penetrated by political suspicions and restructured by politicalconflict’.35 In lifting away some of the layers of this vision from 1802 it is possible to seeIolo’s macabre view of London, overlaid and embedded with the memory of earlierevents, as a response to a world that had been restructured by the events of the 1790s.Eight years earlier, Joseph Hucks described the ways in which experiencing themateriality of Welsh history at Denbigh Castle shaped his understanding of present,London-centred conflicts. By 1802 the memories of an angry Welsh bard adrift inLondon haunt and fracture later moments. As he imagines the death of ‘Kings, nobles,parsons &c &c’ – and does so mainly through events and symbols normally associatedwith popular loyalist sentiment – Iolo stands against a hegemonic tide of public, civicpatriotism, whether in the form of illuminations or of official tributes to figures likeHowe. Iolo became (he claimed) a suspected person on account of his connections withradicals in 1793-4,36 yet we have seen how Welsh bards in London are always alreadyobjects of suspicion in the period. Iolo’s journal entry would have been an edgy, riskypiece for any writer of this period. But it was an even more fraught venture for a Welshbard compromised not just by his political views but also by a sense of culturalambivalence or alienation that goes well beyond the immediate context of 1794 or 1802.

IV. Loyalist Welsh Gothic

While tourists visited Wales in increasing numbers in the 1790s, it was also possible to seesomething of Wales without leaving London at all in this decade. In the summer of 1798



James Boaden’s play Cambro-Britons, a historical drama set in thirteenth-century Wales,enjoyed a successful run at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. The play is set in Snowdonia,where the Welsh prince, Llewellyn, is resisting Edward I’s attempts to conquer Wales.Racing through a number of intrigues – among them imprisonment, attempted seduction,filial betrayal and the interventions of a ghost – the play concludes with an unlikely twistwhen Edward abandons his invasion and makes peace with the Welsh: ‘All thoughts ofconquest, prince, I here disclaim [...] Be my friend, my nearest, best ally.’37

Boaden had scored previous successes with Fountainville Forest (1794) and The ItalianMonk (1797), dramatisations respectively of Ann Radcliffe’s novels The Romance of theForest (1791) and The Italian (1797).38 All three plays showcase Boaden’s talent forGothic thrills, but Cambro-Britons in particular also brings out his loyalist sympathies.The preface to the published play emphasises the patriotic motives behind Cambro-Britons, a work that is intended to ‘inspir[e] [...] ardour against an invading enemy’(p.iii). Boaden explains his departure from real historical events in this context:

If I have not conducted Llewellyn to his miserable end, I shall have the thanks of every man,who, as a patriot, wishes that he may always triumph, who seeks to sustain the independenceof his country. I do not falsify his history; I only select the events of it. (p.v; original emphasis)

Cambro-Britons represents a fantasy of Welsh history, a fantasy of national unity thatbetter fits the context of 1798 and the current, fraught state of the war between Britainand France. But the play does not completely resolve the problem of perverting the courseof Welsh history, and one symptom of its failure to do so appears in Act III, which includesa tableau of Gray’s ‘The Bard’. Marching through a mountain pass, the English armymeets a crowd of haggard bards, who rage at Edward for his treatment of the Welsh:

Would I could add the eagle’s piercing scream,And all the savage sounds that awe the desert,To thunder on thee – tyrant, persecutor! –Cool, unrelenting, bloody ravager! –Behold the last remains of that high raceThy policy has butcher’d! Fondly deeming,That with the bard, who gave the brave to fame,Freedom itself and courage would expire! (p.77)

As in Gray’s poem, the bards then fling themselves into the torrent below, shrieking cursesthat are meant to fall on Edward ‘like mist,/ And deadly vapours’ (p.78). Here, couchedwithin a play calculated to rouse British loyalism, is Gray’s version of Welsh history – ahistory that is otherwise far too traumatic and divisive to find any place in a play writtento inspire British unity against the invasion crisis of 1797-8. Boaden seems to offer analternative narrative trajectory for Cambro-Britons in this portion of the play: a sort ofsuppressed other that is actually closer to ‘real’ Welsh history in the sense that it depicts abrutally imperial Edward I, rather than the conciliatory king of the end of the play. InCambro-Britons, Boaden seems (in a similar way to Turner in the late 1790s) divided orundecided in his portrayal of the Welsh past.

Wales had, of course, recently been the site of the only French landing on British soilduring the French wars: the Fishguard invasion of February 1797. A sense of the dangersof Wales’s long, vulnerable coastline – worryingly close to the much more volatile Ireland,as Fishguard showed – may also have played into ambivalent views of Wales as not justhistorically but presently problematic for British unity and liberty. By the invasion crisis of



1803-4, Welsh writers were calling attention to their loyalism in spite of (or perhapsbecause of) the threat posed by Wales’s undefended shores. Poems by Richard Llwyd39 andRobert Holland Price40 played on the terrifying prospect of a French invasion, composingpoems on the necessity of loyal unity during this national crisis. Llwyd’s poem ‘An Addressof the Bard of Snowdon, to his Countrymen’, dated June 1803, outlines a notion of bardicloyalism created from a particular vision of the Welsh past and from an awareness of thehorrors – and the consolations – of history. In this poem, and in Holland Price’s The Horrorsof Invasion (1804), a poem addressed to the Chirk Volunteers, the past is put to serve presentloyalist ends, rather as a distorted Welsh history aims to invigorate loyalist Britishpatriotism in Cambro-Britons in 1798. But these poems do not wilfully misrepresent Welshhistory; instead, they try to define a modern Welsh identity against, and through, themartial heroism of the past. Being loyalist becomes inseparable from being Welsh in thesepoems – and being Welsh, these poems claim, means being uniquely qualified as loyalist,heroic and patriotic within a larger, unified British nation. In this way, defending Britishliberty becomes a logical development of historical struggles for Welsh independence andfreedom. As the term ‘bardic loyalism’ implies, this is a very literary process: it happens inpoems, which refer to other, older poems as historical as well as artistic authorities andantecedents.

The temperature of Holland Price’s response to the invasion scare may be gauged fromthe published preface to Horrors. ‘[T]hough France, and such another neighbour leagued,should pour their myriads on our shores,’ he writes,

while unanimity prevails, what have we to fear. What a proud day for Britain; to see a wholenation, rising as one man, and rallying round the throne of a beloved Monarch! the Father ofhis People! When we behold such as scene as this, how well may we repeat, in the language ofour immortal Bard:

Come the three corners of the world in arms;And we shall shock them, – Nought shall make us rue,If Britain to itself do rest but true.41

This epigraph comes from the closing lines of Shakespeare’s King John, a play better knownin the early nineteenth century than it is today, and whose theme is Anglo-French conflict.Holland Price is probably echoing The Anti-Gallican, whose editor or compiler used thesame quotation when dedicating the volume to the ‘The Volunteers of the UnitedKingdom’.42 Holland Price’s version, however, substitutes ‘Britain’ for the original‘England’ in the final line quoted above, which fits even more neatly within calls for aunited national response to the threat of invasion.

The resumption of the war with France in May 1803 inspired a flood of loyalistpropaganda, from newspaper poetry to James Gillray’s cartoons featuring John Bullmocking Napoleon. But in contrast with Gillray’s chauvinistic satires, Holland Pricesketches a form of loyalism that is defined by its associations with a heroic, militarisedWelsh past: a dignified defiance rather than a bullish one. The appeal of The Horrors ofInvasion mainly lies in Price’s claims for Welshness within a united Britain. Price arguesthat the Welsh have historically been exemplary defenders of liberty, emphasising theirtenacity and courage when ‘forced into a long and unequal contest in defence of theirnative rights’. He urges modern readers to do likewise:

May the Britons of these days emulate the magnanimity of their renowned ancestors, maythey put on a resolution to conquer or to die in the defence of their beloved country! and



either by their courageous efforts preserve its glorious constitution free and inviolate from thethreatened contamination of the Corsican, or seek an honourable grave in its ruins. (p.9)

Throughout the poem the antiquity and intensity of Welsh patriotism makes the Welshpeople more capable of defending the nation than any other constituent part of the unitedBritain imagined in the poem’s doctored King John epigraph. Welsh poets have always alsobeen warriors, Price notes. The poem begins with an apostrophe to the sixth-century poetAneirin – a man who ‘fought personally against the invaders of those days’ as well as agreat bard. Although no soldier himself, Holland Price is perhaps trying to write himselfinto this tradition as a loyalist bard for Britain’s Napoleonic war, singing the terror of theprospect of invasion:

For Bonaparté threats to cross the waves,And turn our free born Britons into slaves!Nay dooms to slaughter those that dare opposeThe hellish fury of these barb’rous foes (p.10)

V. Post-Colonial Welsh Gothic

Holland Price clearly positions himself within a united British nation and tasks himselfwith its defence in The Horrors of Invasion. So too did Richard Llwyd, whose ‘Address of theBard of Snowdon’ placed ‘genuine Freedom’s holy flame’ in Wales and urged the ‘Sons ofSnowdon’ to defend ‘Country, Parents [and] Children’.43 Uniquely among Llwyd’s poems,this work also appeared in the fourth number of The Anti-Gallican in 1803, where it wouldhave reached a different audience from his 1804 collection.44 It seems that the significanceof the invasion scare moved Llwyd to comment directly on current events in his ‘Address’in a way that was unusual for him. Beyond this poem a deep-set ambivalence about therelations between Wales and England, perhaps best understood in post-colonial terms,features much more strongly in his poetry. Most important in Llwyd’s poetry is Welshlandscape – the place of Wales, both in the sense of its physical form and its status – and,especially, Welsh history.

Llwyd’s writing offers the period’s most powerful exploration of the complex violenceand displacements of Welsh history, which figure so prominently in his medievaltranslations and original poetry. It is well known by now that in post-colonial Gothic texts‘[t]he cultures and histories of colonized nations are shadowed by the fantasized possibilityof alternative histories, the sense of what might have been if the violence of coloniza-tion had not come to eradicate or pervert the traces of “independent development”.’45 Yetwhat does it mean to write of the conquest of Wales and its unhappy legacies in English?In the ‘case of a stateless nation’, M. Wynn Thomas has argued, separate identity is‘substantially maintained by its writers’.46 Anglophone Welsh writing, however,constantly presents the problem of how to define and understand its Welshness. HowWelsh is a text written in English? What should its Welshness look and sound like?

In his sense of anger and grief over the Welsh past Llwyd makes a series of statementsthat look, as Jane Aaron has pointed out, like a ‘contemporary, twenty-first-century,argument for the concept of Welsh colonisation’.47 Most important is Beaumaris Bay(1800), a topographical poem about Anglesey that takes anglophone Welsh poetry of thisperiod into new territory. Like a near-contemporary work such as Charlotte Smith’sBeachy Head (1807), Beaumaris Bay falls somewhere between prospect poem and Romanticmonologue, linking and merging physical and literary landscapes with imagined and



emotional ones. Llwyd sets great store by memory in Beaumaris Bay: collective andcultural, as much as personal and individual, memory definitively shapes the poem:

Here [Beaumaris Castle] earth is loaded with a mass of wall,The proud insulting badge of Cambria’s fall,By haughty Edward rais’d; and every stoneRecords a sigh, a murder, or a groan.The Muse of Britain, suff’ring at its birth,Exulting sees it crumbling to the earth.Ah! what avails it that the lordly towerAttracts the thoughtless stare and vacant hour!If ev’ry Bard with indignation burns,When to the tragic tale the eye returns;If for his haunted race, to distant times,There’s still reserv’d a vengeance for his crimes.48

This powerful, sometimes unexpectedly delicate, poem offers a very different perspectiveon the decaying stones of Edwardian castles from Joseph Hucks’s poem on Denbigh Castle.Both poets play on the notion that the castle is monumental, a physical emblem of pastnational and political events. Yet for Llwyd there is a strong sense that the story told by thecastle is only a partial and fragmentary one, hiding a history of deracination andapartheid.49 Edward I’s conquest of Wales resulted, Llwyd reminds his readers in afootnote to this passage, in the native Welsh being banished from Beaumaris:

So effectually did English policy operate to the exclusion of the natives from these strongholds, and the towns which gradually grew near them, that in a rental of the boroughproperty, taken so lately as 1608, I find but seven British names. (p.14n)

‘The history of these fortresses is’, Llwyd concludes, ‘a continued series of oppression andirritation’ (p.14n). Beaumaris Bay – the place, the poem – stands for historical injuries thathave, by the late eighteenth century, still not quite healed. Llwyd’s backward gaze towardsmedieval Wales in his poetry is often unsettling, but, unlike Thomas Gray, he voices earliertexts and histories from within Welsh culture, with a powerful sense of entitlement and asearing awareness of the wrongs of Welsh history.

Yet even Llwyd could not entirely escape Gray, who appears on a number of occasionsin Beaumaris Bay, echoing the ‘tragic tale’ of the poem from the footnotes.50 For all Gray’spower to haunt later writers, however, Llwyd does a good job of writing over ‘The Bard’ inBeaumaris Bay – so much so that later visitors to Snowdonia and Anglesey see thelandscape not so much through Gray’s poem as through Llwyd’s. They quote BeaumarisBay as they travel, as though the best view of the place, the right view, is Llwyd’s. Makinga tour of Wales in 1805, William Fordyce Mavor dryly commented on reaching Conwythat Gray had obviously never seen the place when he wrote ‘The Bard’: ‘for the banks ofthe Conway here are remarkably tame in general.’51 ‘Wood, water, rocks, meadows, andfertile fields’, Mavor continues, ‘all serve to diversify the scene; nor is it possible to view thisscene of bardic imprecation, without calling to mind the following animated lines’:

Lo! Conway still, in plaintive strain, renews,The woeful day that hapless Cambria rues;When o’er the frowning brow that crowns the flood,The hoary bard, with looks of horror stood –Struck, deeply, struck the sorrows of his lyre,



And ills unborn pourtray’d with prophet’s fire –Fix’d on the flowing stream the frantic stare,And gave his tortur’d bosom to despair;Then rush’d from life’s accumulated woes,And in the pitying waters found repose.52

Mavor’s quotation comes from the closing pages of Beaumaris Bay, and although thispassage obviously draws on ‘The Bard’, it is important that Mavor turned to Llwyd’sversion rather than Gray’s. Beaumaris Bay does not completely exorcise the presence of‘The Bard’, but it does provide a counter-view of Welsh scenes, past and present, throughwhich Llwyd breaks new paths into the landscape and history of Wales for picturesquetourists and antiquarian readers alike.

Nations are perhaps always spectral, in the sense that they are made up of imaginedcommunities: a ghost story as well as a socio-political fact.53 In the imaginations both oftourists and natives Wales becomes a place of threats and curses (‘bardic imprecation’, asMavor put it), in which a history of iniquity is always implicit – the elephant in thebook-lined room where Llwyd, Owen and Leigh Hunt met for tea. There are no ghosts, nomachinery of stage or plot that manufactures hauntings in Richard Llwyd’s poetry, onlyreminders of the half-buried wrongs of British history viewed from a Welsh perspective. Itmay seem as though there are almost as many versions of Welsh Gothic as there areGothicised accounts of Wales or Welshness in the period, but common themes do emerge.These accounts highlight the familiar difference of the Welsh people: bards who areobjects of suspicion, whether they are suicidal or sociable, or a native underclass thattourists may find picturesque, disgusting and terrifying in equal measures. They recordthe unbearable sublimity of Welsh landscapes – Snowdonia hazily occupied by an Englisharmy for Turner, or viewed through ‘a sort of supernatural film’ by Ker Porter54 – and theeloquent stones of Wales’s many castles. And then there is the figure of the Welsh princeforced to choose between being a loyal friend of the crown and the destruction of hisperson and his nation. The message from Welsh history is victory or death (a sentimentvoiced by Wordsworth in a very different context in 1803, in a poem such as ‘To the Menof Kent’), but the message cuts both ways, raising a united British response to the Frenchthreat and recalling past hostilities between Wales and England. In Welsh Gothic themeeting point between these nations is perhaps not so much a borderline as a fault line,characterised by the traumas of defeat, defiance, colonisation and resentment. This faultline runs fluidly through perceptions of Wales in the period, in which the historicalmemories sensed, sustained or uncovered by writers and painters ensure the survival ofthe Welsh as Richard Llwyd’s ‘haunted race’.

NOTESI am grateful to Mary-Ann Constantine, Murray Pittock and (especially) Marion Löffler for helpful discussionsof Wales and the Gothic, and for perceptive comments on an earlier version of this article.

1. I have adapted the phrase ‘iniquity, terror and survival’ from Robert Mighall, A Geography of VictorianGothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p.xiv.

2. Sarah Prescott discusses Welsh responses to Gray in Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales: Bards andBritons (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008), p.56-83.

3. James Henry Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries, 2 vols, 2nd edn (London: HenryColburn, 1828), vol. II.197. See also Nicholas Roe, Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt (London: Pimlico,2005), p.59-60.

4. The admiration was mutual: Llwyd refers to Hunt as ‘my accomplished friend’ in a footnote to ‘RichardLlwyd, the Bard of Snowden, to his Countrymen’, The Anti-Gallican, or, Standard of British Loyalty, Religion andLiberty (London: Vernor and Hood, 1804), p.139.



5. Justin D. Edwards, Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectacle of a National Literature (Edmonton: University ofAlberta Press, 2005), p.xv.

6. Prescott, Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales, p.63.7. Thomas Gray, ‘The Bard’, in Roger Lonsdale (ed.), The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver

Goldsmith (London: Longmans, 1969), p.189.8. Prescott, Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales, p.xiv.9. Key studies in addition to Mighall’s include E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and James Watt, Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre andCultural Conflict, 1764-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

10. Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction, p.xiv (my emphasis).11. There is a growing body of work on Scottish and particularly Irish Gothic. See, for instance: Luke

Gibbons, Gaelic Gothic (Galway: Arlen House, 2004); Jarlath Killeen, Gothic Ireland: Horror and the Irish AnglicanImagination in the Long Eighteenth-Century (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005); and Murray Pittock, Scottish andIrish Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p.211-34.

12. Pittock, Scottish and Irish Romanticism, p.216.13. Andrew Davies has compiled a bibliography of Gothic Welsh fiction of this period, ‘“The Gothic Novel

in Wales” Revisited: A Preliminary Survey of the Wales-Related Romantic Fiction at Cardiff University’,Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text 2 (June 1998). Individual novels by Welsh writers or set in Waleshave been briefly discussed within wider accounts of the Gothic that do not aim to investigate Wales orWelshness; see, for example, Watt, Contesting the Gothic, p.45-6, on William Godwin’s Imogen (1784). JaneAaron’s forthcoming essay ‘Haunted by History: Welsh Gothic 1780-1801’, in Stewart Mottram and SarahPrescott (eds), Writing Wales from the Reformation to Romanticism, is a notable exception. I am grateful to JaneAaron for allowing me to read this essay prior to publication.

14. See Hywel M. Davies, ‘Wales in English Travel Writing, 1791-8: The Welsh Critique of Theophilus Jones’,Welsh History Review 23:3 (June 2007), p.65-93, for an overview of travel in Wales in this period.

15. Peter Lord, The Visual Culture of Wales: Imaging the Nation (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), p.158.16. This painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1800 alongside unattributed lines (possibly by

Turner) on the sorrows of the Welsh bard over an unnamed tyrant who has ‘drench’d with blood the land’.Anne Lyles, Young Turner: Early Work to 1800 (London: Tate Gallery, 1989), p.38.

17. National Library of Wales (hereafter NLW) MS 12651 B, fol.39 (original emphasis).18. NLW MS 20.073 A, fol.16.19. Armand-Louis-Bon Maudet de Penhouët, Letters Describing a Tour through Part of South Wales. By a

Pedestrian Traveller. With Views, Designed and Etched by the Author (London: T. Baylis, 1797), p.38.20. Peter Lord, Industrial Society (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998), p.130.21. See John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death; Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793-1796 (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2000), for a detailed account of the political and legal scene in Britain in 1794.22. Joseph Hucks, ‘On the Ruins of Denbigh Castle’, Poems (Cambridge: B. Flower, 1798), p.102. Subsequent

references to the poem are to this edition, cited by page number within the text.23. Denbigh Castle also appears as a Gothic ruin in Hucks’s A Pedestrian Tour through North Wales (1795),

where his use of the phrase ‘The post is going out’ (p.46) further links his description of the castle to thecontemporary context. Hucks is mimicking Sir James Murray’s much-satirised dispatches from northernFrance and the Netherlands in 1793: see John Barrell and Jon Mee (eds), Trials for Treason and Sedition, 8 vols(London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006-7), vol. II.278 and II.442, and vol. VIII.383, for Murray’s dispatches. I amgrateful to John Barrell for this point.

24. See Antje Blank, ‘Things As They Were: The Gothic of Real Life in Charlotte Smith’s The Emigrants andThe Banished Man’, Women’s Writing 16:1 (May 2009), p.78-93, for an account of everyday Gothic in 1793-4.

25. Robert Miles, ‘The 1790s: The Effulgence of Gothic’, in Jerrold Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion toGothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p.50.

26. Edward Williams, ‘Iolo Morganwg’ (1747-1826), was a self-educated labouring-class poet fromGlamorgan who wrote verse in both Welsh and English. A stonemason by trade, he was also variously amanuscript collector, an agricultural surveyor and a brilliant forger of Welsh medieval poetry. Widely known asradical in his political beliefs, he became a founding figure of Welsh Unitarianism in the later 1790s, a period inwhich he also began to develop his theories of Welsh bardism in full, some of which were posthumouslypublished in 1829 as Cyfrinach Beirdd Ynys Prydain (‘The Secret of the Bards of the Island of Britain’). Seehttp://iolomorganwg.wales.ac.uk/ for more on Iolo’s life and work.

27. See Damian Walford Davies, Presences that Disturb: Models of Romantic Identity in the Literature and Cultureof the 1790s (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002), p.176, for the suggestion that Iolo may be a model forCaleb Williams. For more on relations between Iolo and Godwin in 1794, see Damian Walford Davies, ‘ “AtDefiance”: Iolo, Godwin, Coleridge, Wordsworth’, in Geraint H. Jenkins (ed.), A Rattleskull Genius: The ManyFaces of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005), p.147-72.

28. See John Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2005), for an explanation of the culture of surveillance and suspicion that characterised the 1790s.

29. Davies, Presences that Disturb, p.135. See also Cathryn Charnell-White, Bardic Circles: National, Regionaland Personal Identity in the Bardic Vision of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), p.19-23.

30. NLW MS 13174A, fol.1.



31. ‘trace, n.1’, The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); OED Online, 26

April 2010 <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50255568>.32. Henry Dundas had presented proposals for a Howe monument to the House of Commons in October

1799: see the Morning Chronicle and True Briton (4 October 1799). On 23 January 1802 the Morning Chroniclereported that space had been reserved within St Paul’s for Flaxman’s monument.

33. Lynda Pratt, ‘Naval Contemplation: Poetry, Patriotism and the Navy, 1797-99’, Journalfor Maritime Research (December 2000), discusses naval victories, St Paul’s and the Naval Thanksgiving ofDecember 1797. See Nicola J. Watson, The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic & Victorian Britain(Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p.23-32, for Westminster Abbey in this period.

34. Oracle and Daily Advertiser (17 October 1799).35. Barrell, Spirit of Despotism, p.15.36. Davies, Presences that Disturb, p.145-52.37. James Boaden, Cambro-Britons: An Historical Play, in Three Acts (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1798),

p.90. Subsequent references to the play are to this edition, cited by page number within the text.38. Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p.76, 131.39. Richard Llwyd, ‘Bard of Snowdon’ (1752-1835), was a labouring-class Welsh-speaking poet from

Anglesey. Details of his early life remain sparse, though we know that he spent nine months at the BeaumarisFree School before entering domestic service. Llwyd began to publish his poetry from the 1780s onwards in theChester Chronicle, where he seems to have become a kind of poet-in-residence. His well-received long poemBeaumaris Bay, published in 1800, made his name as a provincial writer. After living in Beaumaris for manyyears, he moved in 1807 to Chester, where he pursued his interests in Welsh antiquarianism and heraldry intothe later part of his life.

40. Very little is known of Robert Holland Price (1780-1808), though his celebration of the Chirk Volunteers(and detailed knowledge of individuals within the corps) and the Ladies of Llangollen in The Horrors of Invasionstrongly suggests that he was local to the Chirk–Llangollen area. Meic Stephens suggests in The New Companionto the Literature of Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998) that he was a gentleman. Horrors is his onlyknown work.

41. Robert Holland Price, The Horrors of Invasion: A Poem, 2nd edn (Wrexham: J. Painter, 1804) p.3.Subsequent references to the poem are to this edition, cited by page number within the text. No first edition ofthis work is currently known to exist.

42. The Anti-Gallican, p.3.43. Richard Llwyd, ‘Address of the Bard of Snowdon’, Poems, Tales, Odes, Sonnets, Translations from the British

(Chester: J. Fletcher, 1804), p.191-2.44. The Anti-Gallican, p.139-41. The poem could also have found a (for Llwyd) local readership via its

publication in The Chester Chronicle (5 August 1803).45. David Punter and Glennis Byron (eds), The Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p.54.46. M. Wynn Thomas, ‘Introduction’, in M. Wynn Thomas (ed.), Welsh Writing in English (Cardiff: University

of Wales Press, 2003), p.3. See also Jane Aaron, ‘Bardic Anti-Colonialism’, in Jane Aaron and Chris Williams(eds), Postcolonial Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005), p.137-58.

47. Aaron, ‘Haunted by History’.48. Richard Llwyd, Beaumaris Bay: A Poem (Chester: J. Fletcher, 1800), p.13-14. Subsequent references to the

poem are to this edition, cited by page number within the text.49. R. R. Davies, The Age of Conquest: Wales, 1063-1415 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p.385, describes the

‘spirit of apartheid’ that characterised English boroughs in north Wales in the medieval period. Richard WynJones discusses the ‘ethnic cleansing’ that took place during these resettlements in ‘The Colonial Legacy inWelsh Politics’, in Postcolonial Wales, p.25.

50. See, for instance, Beaumaris Bay, p.15n, for the ‘Smear’d with gore, and ghastly pale’ passage of ‘TheBard’.

51. William Fordyce Mavor, A Tour in Wales, and through several Countries of England ... in the Summer of 1805(London: Richard Phillips, 1806), p.119. I am grateful to John Barrell for this reference.

52. Mavor, A Tour in Wales. Mavor is quoting Beaumaris Bay, p.46-7.53. Edwards, Gothic Canada, p.xix.54. NLW MS 12651 B, fol.63.

elizabeth edwards is a Research Fellow at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and CelticStudies, Aberystwyth, where she works on the AHRC-funded project Wales and the French Revolution. She iscurrently editing a selection of Welsh poetry in English from the period 1789-1806, forthcoming from theUniversity of Wales Press, and has recently written articles on war poetry in revolution-era Wales and (withMary-Ann Constantine) on Iolo Morganwg and radical song. Her research interests also include travel writingand eighteenth-century women’s writing.



iniquity, terror and survival: welsh gothic, 1789-1804

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