Cylchgronau Cymru

bishop, the brewer and the squire, and emerged as the champion of Wales and the Messiah of the under-privileged. It is a Caer- narvonshire version of the Horatio Alger story of the log-cabin to president' kind, popular in the United States at the same period. A later biographer, Beriah Gwynfe Evans (1848-1927), formerly editor of the Genedl Gymreig but then a free-lance journalist, was somewhat more measured in a new biography published in early 1916. After all, Evans had had somewhat strained relations with Lloyd George since the failure of the Cymru Fydd League (of which Evans was secretary) in 1896.6 Also Evans was uncertain of the probable direction of Lloyd George's post-war career. Evans was writing during the political struggles brewing over military conscription, and he noted the growing estrangement from most of his Liberal colleagues that this crisis brought about for Lloyd George.7 Even so, Evans called his informative biography The Life Romance of Lloyd George, and looked forward to his subject's presiding over a vast new post-war imperial confederation.8 (Evans himself was always something of an imperialist). English writers on Lloyd George during this same period the barrister, Herbert du Parcq in 1912; the journalists, Harold Spender in 1920 and E. T. Raymond in 1922 were also highly sympathetic.9 Spender, an ally of long standing, wrote of the Prime Minister's vision of a State deliberately consenting to sink faction in the cause of a larger purpose',10 although the details of this vision remained under- standably vague. The second phase in Lloyd George historiography was heralded by the fall from power in October 1922. The tone was set by Stanley Baldwin at the famous meeting of the Unionist M.P.'s at the Carlton Club on 19 October. Here he described Lloyd George as a dynamic force' and a dynamic force', Baldwin charac- teristically added, is a very terrible thing V1 The major assaults on the fallen Welsh Prime Minister, however, came now from 6 cf. Beriah Evans to Lloyd George, 25 May 1905 (Beaverbrook Library, Lloyd George Papers, A/ 1/5/2). Beriah Gwynfe Evans, The Life Romance of Lloyd George (Everyman, London, n.d. (1916), p. 221. 8 ibid., pp. 234ff. There is a shrewd portrait of Evans in E. Morgan Humphreys, Gwfr Enwog Gynt: Yr Ail Gyfres (Gwasg Aberystwyth, 1953), pp. 120-31. 9 Herbert du Parcq, Life of David Lloyd George, 4 vols. (Caxton, London, 1912); Harold Spender, The Prime Minister (Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1920); E. T. Raymond, Mr. Lloyd George (Collins, London, 1922). 10 Harold Spender, op. cit., pp. 337-8. 11 G. M. Young, Stanley Baldwin (Hart Davis, London, 1952), 41-2.