seriously pressed his claims, and the legitimacy of his birth was somewhat doubtful. Cecil had long been anxious for the succession of the King of Scots, whose hereditary right and Protestantism made him the most acceptable candidate, even apart from the advantage of the union of the two kingdoms, which his succession involved. The dying queen was urged to express her will. She gave no sign when her ministers spoke of the King of Scots, but when Seymour's name was mentioned, she cried, with something of her old energy, "I will have no rascal's son in my seat, but one worthy to be a king." On 24th March 1603 her unconquerable spirit yielded itself to death. CHAPTER VIII. Wales and Ireland under the Tudors. The Tudors and The Tudor Kings were not satisfied to establish their rule merely over England. Like Edgar or Edward I., they aspired to reduce the whole of the British Islands under their sway. We have seen how the British Henry VIII.'s plan to unite England and Scot- Islands. land had been made futile by the brutality of his methods, though under Elizabeth the Reformation first really bound the two countries together, and rendered possible the union of the two realms under Henry VII.'s great-great-grandson after her death. We must now see how Henry VIII. joined Wales and other great franchises with his English kingdom, and how, after nearly a century of struggle, the last days of Elizabeth witnessed the completion of the effective English conquest of Ireland. The Principality, the March, and Cheshire before 1536. 2. Since the suppression of the revolt of Owen Glendower, Wales and the March of Wales had been the scene of no very striking events. Harsh penal laws, passed when the fear of Owen and his Welshmen was still a living force, had imposed on the Welsh all sorts of disabilities. The English towns and castles were kept apart as a garrison, and intermarriage between the two races was sternly forbidden. Yet the arm of the English King was far too weak to enforce such cruel statutes, and in reality the Welsh lived a disorderly and independent life, caring very little for any sort of law. The old distinction between the Principality and the March was still kept up. In the Principality, the eldest son of the English King ruled as Prince of Wales. Edward I., the conqueror of the Principality, had divided his land into the five shires of Anglesey, Carnarvon, Merioneth, Cardigan, and Carmarthen, and had set up a rude imitation of the English system of local institutions. Very similar was the state of things in the County Palatine of Chester, of which the county of Flint was a sort of dependency. It was, like the Principality, ruled by the King's eldest son, but under his title of Earl of Chester, and was as distinct as Wales itself from the general English system, being a little feudal state, standing by itself ever since Norman times. Exactly the same was the condition of the many petty feudal lordships that jointly formed the March of Wales, and still remained as relics of the first Norman conquest of southern and eastern Wales in the reigns of William II. and Henry I. Each lordship marcher was governed on its own system, bound to the English crown by the homage done by its lord, but having no relations with the Principality. The enormous number of petty jurisdictions made the March even more lawless than the Principality. It was easy for robbers and murderers by crossing the next boundary to withdraw themselves into a separate state, where a different justice was administered by another set of officers. As time went on, the various lordships marcher fell into the possession of the great baronial families of England, and, still later, many of them escheated to the crown, especially in 1399 when the marcher lordships of the Dukes of Lancaster, and in 1461 when the Mortimer marcher district, including all central Wales, was united to the crown by Edward IV. Thus, before the accession of the Tudors, the king or his heir were direct lords of nearly all Wales, either as Prince of Wales, Earl of Chester, or lord of the various marcher lordships. Yet no attempt was made to weld the different districts together in a single system. 3. Both Yorkists and Tudors were specially connected with Wales; the Yorkists as heirs of the Mortimers, and the The Council of Tudors, because on the male side they were Wales at Ludlow. of pure Welsh descent, the laws against the intermarriage of Welsh and English not preventing Owen Tudor, the Anglesey squire, from marrying the widow of Henry V., and their son Edmund from wedding the heiress of the Beauforts, who, after the slaughter of the Wars of the Roses, handed on to her son Henry VII. the representation of the House of Lancaster. Edward IV. started the beginnings of a better system when he sent down a council to Ludlow, the old home of the Mortimers, to act as advisers and assistants of his little son, the Prince of Wales who perished in the Tower. Henry VII. continued the Council, and by naming his heir Arthur showed that he was not unmindful of his father's ancestry. Henry VIII., when he Boundary between the exceptional The Principality... The smaller marcher lordships.. Henry VIII's; the presentaboun-xxs The palatineishires of Cheshire (including Flintshire Pembroke and Glamorgan... had no son to be Prince of Wales, made the Lady Mary Princess of Wales and kept on the Council in her name. Gradually the Council changed its character, and from being the personal council of prince or princess, it grew into a body specially entrusted with the administration both of the Principality and the March, being called the Council of Wales and sitting permanently at Ludlow, which thus became the capital of sixteenth century Wales; while the President of the Council, generally a political bishop or a great nobleman, became in practice its governor. The Council at Ludlow quite changed the character of the district under its charge, putting down with a strong hand the constant family feuds, robbery, and bloodshed that had put the whole land permanently at the mercy of a swarm of petty local tyrants, and making Wales as peaceful as any part of Henry's dominions. The Union of 4. In 1536 Henry VIII. carried a series of laws through Parliament which entirely changed the legal position of both the Principality and Marches. Hitherto they had belonged to the English kings, but had been no part of England, but rather a dependency of it. Henceforth, so far as law could make two nations one, complete equality was established between them. The petty lordships marcher were practically abolished. Henceforth the marcher had no more authority over his property than the lord of any English manor. All Wales was made "shire ground," a phrase that in Tudor times meant the bringing in of the whole English system of local government. The old shires of the Principality were reorganised, and in some cases enlarged. New shires were built up out of the lordships marcher, the greatest of which became the centres round which the new counties were grouped. The ancient palatine earldom of Pembroke and lordship of Glamorgan were made the nucleus of the modern Pembrokeshire and Glamorganshire. The new shires of Montgomery, Radnor, Brecon, and Monmouth were established. Other marcher lordships were annexed to the English counties of Shropshire, Hereford, and Gloucester, which thus first attained their modern dimensions. The thirteen counties, old and new, into which Wales and its March were now divided, each received precisely the same organisation as an English shire, with sheriffs, justices, sessions, coroners, and the rest. Moreover, they were called upon to return members to the English Parliament, one knight for every shire (two for Monmouth), and one burgess from their grouped boroughs. Cheshire was also allowed to return members for the first time. The only thing that was now peculiar to Wales was the continuance of a special judicial system with special judges for Wales and Chester, which went on till the reign of William IV. But under Charles II., Monmouthshire was included in an English circuit, and so cut off from the remaining counties. Henceforth Wales enjoyed the same law and privilege as England. The union of the two countries was complete. the Welsh 5. Henry VIII.'s reforming measures had little effect in altering public feeling in Wales. The people accepted the abolition of the Papacy and the monasteries, The Reformation but went on with their old beliefs, just as if in Wales and nothing had happened, thus almost realising National Revival the king's ideal of religion. Under Mary, under Elizabeth. the Welsh returned without difficulty to the old faith. So few were the Protestants that the whole land only supplied three martyrs to the Marian persecution, one of whom was the English bishop of St. Davids, Ferrar, while the other two were humble sufferers from the English towns of Cardiff and Haverfordwest. Under Elizabeth the real reformation in Wales began, being set on foot by a few zealous Welshmen, who had learnt Protestantism under Edward VI. or at Geneva. They saw that the new gospel could only reach the people if taught in their native Welsh ; accordingly they set to work to translate religious books into the vernacular. The two chief Welsh reformers were the laymen William Salesbury of Llanrwst and Richard Davies, also a Carnarvonshire man, who had been an exile at Geneva under Mary, and was after Elizabeth's accession made bishop, first of St. Asaph and then of St. Davids, and became chief adviser of Cecil and Parker on Welsh affairs. By their care the first Welsh New Testament and the Welsh version of the Prayer Book were published in 1567. Unluckily, the two friends now quarrelled. The result was that it was not until 1588, a few months after the defeat of the Armada, that the single-handed zeal of William Morgan, afterwards Bishop of St. Asaph, enabled a Welsh Translation of the whole Bible to be printed. It was now possible to preach with effect in Welsh; and before the end of Elizabeth's reign the Welsh were quite won over from Rome, though it was a harder matter to preach them out of those ancient customs, that to Puritans, like Davies, seemed mere relics of Popery. Puritanism, however, hardly existed in Wales, save in the English-speaking districts of the south and east, which were in closer touch with Puritan England. John Penry, the only famous Welsh Puritan of the time, [see page 82] drew a most gloomy picture of the religious condition of Wales, and urged on Parliament to take further action for spreading Protestant ideas, for, said he, unless the magistrate doth uphold Christ's honour |