The Battle of Britain: History and Reformation in Early Modern Wales

Abstract

The Welsh of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were proverbially proud of their history. They saw themselves as the descendants of the Ancient Britons who had dominion over these islands long before the arrival of the Romans. This Welsh heritage itself had a long lineage by the time the Tudors came to the throne, appearing in one form in the Armes Prydain (‘The Prophecy of Britain’) in the early tenth century. It was most successfully synthesized by one of their own, Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose Historia Regum Britanniae (c.1136) encapsulated both the majesty of the Welsh people’s distant past and foretold their restitution to former glories by the mab darogan (‘son of prophecy’) who would deliver them from Saxon bondage and restore their authority over Britain. The Welsh became the staunchest and most vociferous supporters of the whole corpus of the Galfridian tradition (i.e., the cluster of historical ideas and texts that supported Geoffrey’s narrative) after it came under attack by humanist scholars such as Polydore Vergil and Hector Boece in the early sixteenth century.¹ They were obsessed with a particular vision of the past, and this was to prove an important vehicle for conveying the Protestant Reformation to them. The story of the Reformation in Wales is bound up with issues of state building and the country’s incorporation within the English polity, but it is also a narrative of cultural accommodation on the part both of the Welsh and the Crown. This accommodation took the form of translation of the Scriptures and Prayer Book into Welsh, but this vernacularization was inflected with another element designed to inculturate the Reformation in Wales — the identification of Protestantism with the Welsh past.