The Catholic Resistance in Wales: 1568–1678

Extract

In 1575 a Welsh priest in Rome wrote down a plan which he had cherished in his long years of exile, since the time when the death of Mary Tudor had extinguished his hopes of becoming Bishop of Bangor. He imagined the galleys of the Papal fleet coming to anchor at Menai, and disembarking an army led by Catholic exiles. The mountain passes from Harlech to Conway were to be blocked by Welsh Catholic sympathizers, and when sufficient English Catholics had made their way into this bridgehead, he proposed a breakout into the Midlands to rescue Mary Queen of Scots and place her on the English throne.

Dr Morys of Clynnog, the author of this scheme, made Wales his landing place for three reasons: her potentialities for resistance, her separate language and history, and her fidelity to the Catholic faith. All these points are made, from the opposite side, by Morys Clynnog’s supplanter in the Bishopric of Bangor, the Protestant Nicholas Robinson. ‘I have found’, he wrote in 1567, ‘since I came to this country images and altars standing in churches undefaced, lewd and indecent vigils and watches observed, much pilgrimage-going, many candles set up to the honour of saints, some relics yet carried about, and all the country full of beads and knots.’ Fr Robert Persons, s.j., likewise turned his attention to Wales at the start of his famous missionary journey with Blessed Edmund Campion in 1580 as a region where priests would be welcome and would do great work for the Catholic cause.

Our enquiry leads us to consider the way in which the Catholic Church adapted her mission to the Welsh nation in the unprecedented circumstances of the Elizabethan persecution. First we must study the part played by the seminary priests from Douai in North Wales. At the very beginnings of the Douai seminary we find associated with Cardinal Allen a Welsh priest from Anglesey, Dr Owen Lewis, like Morys Clynnog, an Oxford graduate and an exile.