Cylchgronau Cymru

THE WELSH JACOBITES By DONALD NICHOLAS, M.A., F.S.A. (Scot.). AN enormous amount has been written on the subject of the Jacobites in Scotland and England, but very little on the Jacobites in Wales. This is because of the extreme scarcity of manuscript evidence in the Principality, and not because the Welsh Jacobites were any less enthusiastic in their unofficial loyalty to the exiled Stuarts than their compatriots in England. It will be seen later that their loyalty never became official, but always remained in the realm of make-believe and of toasting "The King over the Water" in exquisitely turned wine glasses, or of taking snuff from boxes which contained concealed portraits of the de jure Prince of Wales. As "Owen Rhoscomyf n wrote many years ago:- "The chief reason for the scantiness of records of Welsh Jacobitism lies in the fact that, as it never had the opportunity of taking the field, so it was never broken in battle. Therefore, when after the retreat from Derby and the failure in Scotland, Sir Watkin (Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, Bt., M.P. for Denbighshire) joined the Duke (of Beaufort) at Badminton to remain there so long as a 'guest,' the Government thought it best to let sleeping dogs lie, and not add troubles in Wales to troubles in Scotland. Sir Watkin could have raised a thousand men at little more than an hour's notice among his more immediate people, without calling on any of the members of the Cycle. (See later.) This 'wisdom' of the Government gave time for the destruction of all incriminatory documents among the Jacobites themselves and in the lack of trials for treason we have a lack also of those legal indictments and documents from which so much of the history of English and Scots Jacobitism is drawn."2 But despite this tremendous lack of documentary evidence, there is on the other hand a good deal of circumstantial evidence in existence, which shows how many of the oldest Welsh families supported the Stuarts in theory if not in practice, in very much the same fashion as the support of the English Jacobites portrayed itself. Sir Richard Williams-Bulkeley, Bt., of Plas Meigan, Anglesey, found some years ago in a locked drawer, a series of eleven letters from one who signed himself "A.B." in London, to one "John Richards of Beaumorice." "A.B." is thought to be the Hon. Henry Bertie, M.P. for Beaumaris, and "John Richards" his brother-in-law, Richard, the 4th Viscount Bulkeley. Although on the surface entirely innocent, these letters show, if only by the fact that James Francis Stuart (James III) is usually referred to as 1 A Victorian historical novelist, who wrote "The White Rose of Arno," a tale of the Welsh Jacobite, David Morgan, founded on fact. 2 The Royalist, vol. viii, p. 29.