3 - ‘Bard of Liberty’: Iolo Morganwg, Wales and Radical Song

Summary

On 4 February 1795 the Welsh stonemason Edward Williams, better known as Iolo Morganwg (‘Iolo from Glamorgan’), celebrated the acquittals of Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke and John Thelwall at the Crown and Anchor Tavern with a song. Trial by Jury, subsequently printed as a broadside, comprises four heady stanzas of ‘Triumph's exulting excess’: mountains of innocence standing firm against the raging storms, spies and informers helplessly gnashing their fangs. In the final stanza, as homage is paid to the defendants’ lawyers, the glorious institution of Trial by Jury is claimed for Britain.

Boast, BRITAIN, thy JURIES! thy glory! thy plan!

They treat the stern Tyrant with scorn!

O! bid them descend, the best Guardians of Man,

To millions of ages unborn,

Far and wide as the light, of true FREEDOM the soul

Be thy BLEST INSTITUTION proclaim'd;

With ERSKINE, with GIBBS, on Eternity's roll

In the language of Glory be nam'd.

This is not untypical. On the printed page, all brash capital letters, italics and exclamations, Iolo does tend to assert more than he persuades. But a good voice can work magic, even on bombast, and this is, or rather was, a performance. In front of an audience of some 900 people, Iolo Morganwg became at this point most fully, and most publicly, the character for which he was best known in radical and literary circles in 1790s London, ‘Bard Williams’, or, as he put it himself in the rather wittier ‘Newgate Stanzas’, the ‘Bard of Liberty’:

Of late, as at the close of day

To Newgate cells I bent my way

Where Truth is held in thrall.

I, 'twas to scorn a Tyrant's claim,

Wrote Bard of Liberty my name

And terror seized them all.