Cylchgronau Cymru

Chwiliwch trwy dros 450 o deitlau a 1.2 miliwn o dudalennau

Williams Wynn, the acknowledged leader of Welsh Jacobitism. His record is instructive as a cautionary tale. He may have had the audacity to burn in public a picture of George I and have been ready to declare his readiness to assist in a Jacobite rising, provided it was supported by a French invasion, but he was not ready to give any undertaking in writing; he pleaded poverty when asked for money, and he did nothing in 1745 (H.P., II, 543-45). It is a familiar story. Apart from the rebellions the historian is plunged into a morass of half-truths, exaggerations, con- tradictions and absurdities, and if Robert Walpole is to be believed, he must inhabit an almost Orwellian world of double-think, impenetrable deception and confusion, because the real Jacobite 'conceals his true sentiments and roars out for revolution principles.'30 All this makes it difficult to accept or take seriously the thesis that the Tory was, and remained for most of the reigns of George I and George II, essentially Jacobite. The new evidence from the Stuart archives and the archives of the French Foreign Ministry is no more convincing than the old, for it is the usual, polluted contemporary estimates by Jacobite sympathizers of potential Jacobite support. And it is not even all new; some of it, and more of the same kind, has long been in print in L. Eardley Simpson, Derby and the Forty Five (1933), Appendices A, B, C, pp. 235-63, to which no reference is made. Still, even in dissent there can be gratitude for what has been provided about parliamentary Jacobitism. No-one can tell with certainty its precise numerical strength, but there can be little doubt that severe damage was done to its parliamentary strength after 1722 by retirement, death and defection. Two Jacobite lists of 'what nobility and gentry may [my italics] be inclinable to join them', drawn up at the time of the Atterbury crisis (H.P., I, 64-65, 109-13), name eighty-three Jacobite members of the 1715-22 House of Commons and twenty-one more who entered sub- sequently. Checking against the biographies, it emerges that of these only nineteen were left in 1746: twenty-two retired from parliament in 1722; another thirty-two had either retired or died by 1727; death and defection had removed another twenty-six by 1745. It is curious evidence with which to support an argument that the Tory party was essentially and incorrigibly Jacobite. Even where the History of Parliament fails to convince, therefore, it may still provide illumination, though not at a mere flick of the switch, and not always where the editor expected it to fall. Historians will doubtless find much to criticize in these volumes, but they will be grateful to those who have carried to a conclusion a massive, scholarly endeavour which provides them with an indispensable work of reference. G. C. GIBBS. Birkbeck College, London. H.P., I, 69.