The campaign for the disestablishment of the Welsh Anglican Church: a study in political intrigue and popular frustration

Abstract

Osborne Morgan added that it was a 'cardinal axiom' of the Liberal Party that 'such questions ought to be mainly determined by the views and wishes of the people immediately affected by them, as reflected in the votes of their constitutional representatives' and: 'To ignore this axiom is, indeed, to run counter to the first principle of modern Liberalism'. 5 David Lloyd George applauded the Nonconformist minister, and leading disestablisher, Reverend Evan Jones, when he wrote that: 'You have fought a brilliant and tenacious fight for religious equality in Wales for half a century', although he could not resist reference to his own prolonged efforts: 'I have done my best in the same direction on the platform, in the House of Commons, and inside the Government, in all for over a quarter of a century': 'Mr. Lloyd George and the Welsh Church Act', The North Wales Chronicle and Advertiser, 26 March 1915, p.5. Despite this seemingly unobtainable objective, the public support for disestablishment demonstrated a remarkable stamina, irrespective of the litany of delaying tactics and unfulfilled promises which formed a recurring feature of the political response. Writing in 1912, David Caird, the Secretary of the Liberation Society, highlighted the fact that the campaign for disestablishment was a 'national demand', as explicitly demonstrated by its parliamentary history: 'A practical consideration of the demand for Disestablishment in Wales must begin with recognition of the fact that it has been made by the Welsh people through their representatives in Parliament for more than thirty years. The national character of the demand throughout that comparatively long period has been as remarkable as its persistence'. 12 Another ineluctable question is whether the relatively benign, 'soft' disestablishment 13 that was to emerge in 1920, with the Church in Wales still viewed as 'having many of the characteristics of establishment', merited the bitter, protracted, monumental struggle that was to characterise the disestablishment campaign. 14 The result should also be considered against the impact upon Wales's political and spiritual life and whether the expenditure of such extensive political capital caused other Welsh causes to be starved of attention. It has been suggested that: 'Religion also laid the foundation of the political campaign that formed the expression of Welsh national feeling in the second half of the century'. 15 But whereas it may have 'laid the foundation', the fact that disestablishment was perpetually the cynosure ensured that there was a dearth of the requisite political time and coordination required to build upon any manifestations of that national feeling. The centenary of the creation of the Church in Wales or, more accurately the termination of the 'establishment of the Church of England in Wales and Monmouthshire' 16 , on 31 March 2020, 12 David Caird, Church and State in Wales. A Plain Statement of the Case for Disestablishment (London, 1912), p.11. 13 The writer has adopted terminology utilised by t...