Dr David W Jones graduated in law, from the then University College Cardiff, in 1978. He has worked in managerial roles in both the private and voluntary sectors. He served as chief executive of a Bristol-based charity for the last 13 years of his career, and he also advised on issues surrounding the governance and management of charities. His PhD, awarded by Swansea University in 2019, was entitled, ‘The campaign for the disestablishment of the Welsh Anglican Church: a study in political intrigue and popular frustration’. He continues to write articles related to Welsh political and church history.
In June 1920, prime minister David Lloyd George was to describe Welsh disestablishment as both ‘one of the dramatic episodes of history’, and ‘a controversy which has embittered Welsh life for generations and absorbed some of the best energies of mind and soul for 50 years’. This may be read as political hyperbole today, as the impact of the campaign to seek the disestablishment of the Anglican church in Wales is rarely mentioned. On those rare occasions when it is, the significance is frequently misunderstood or dismissed as a fusty remnant of an arcane religious dispute between church and chapel, seemingly irrelevant in an increasingly secular world. In this blog post, I will draw from my research to introduce the significance, context, and development of Welsh disestablishment and demonstrate its significance.
Dismissal Fails to Comprehend the Significance of This Event:
The significance of disestablishment in Wales as a key political issue which generated widespread popular support was regularly expressed through the electoral process over decades. It was to the ‘Wales of the ‘eighties and ‘nineties what Home Rule was to Ireland’. It represented ‘the Welsh Nationalist movement in religious dress’.[1] The movement for Welsh disestablishment maintained a truly radical objective, as it was a direct assault upon one of the acknowledged pillars of the English state, the established state church. The campaign for disestablishment was to last for at least half a century. The longevity of the struggle has inordinate significance, and its repeated failure to reach the statute book, despite public support, is evidence of the impotent nature of democracy in Wales. The prospect of disestablishment continues to regularly haunt the Church of England, and a study of the position in Wales is apposite.
Historical Background and Context:
Before disestablishment, the Anglican Church in Wales consisted of four dioceses which fell within the Convocation of Canterbury. The authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury in Wales can be traced to the thirteenth century as a consequence of the conquest of Wales. The Church of England’s role as the established church in Wales resulted from the union between England and Wales in the 1530s. This position was not challenged until the mid-eighteenth century, with the growth of nonconformity.
The beginning of the campaign.
The position in Wales was made abundantly clear by a religious census in 1851 which revealed that, of those who attended religious services, 78% were dissenters and 21% were Anglicans. The first occasion when the call for Welsh disestablishment was heard in parliament was in 1870. Such demands were to become a regular event, with an increasing level of support, but disestablishment would not take effect until 1920.
Welsh language
The Church of England’s relationship with the language which was spoken by the vast majority of Welsh people was subject to criticism. This has often been exemplified by the fact that between 1727 and 1870 no Welsh speaker was appointed to an episcopal see in Wales. The position from 1870 until the present time has not been encouraging.
What Was Disestablishment?
The four Welsh dioceses were an integral part of the Church of England, but those who sought disestablishment wanted to detach them from state control. This was an inordinately complicated legal, ecclesiastical, and political act. The vehemence of those politicians who sought to defeat disestablishment was ‘precisely because it was one bulwark defending the rest of the power edifice’. The basis for the pursuit of disestablishment was that the Anglican church had practically no hold upon the Welsh speaking population of Wales, as ‘the Church is largely dependent upon English settlers and Anglicised Welshmen for its numerical strength’.[2] It was a clash between those well-established, influential bodies that represented the defence of the establishment status quo and a neophyte movement that was obliged to trust its radical aspirations to a Westminster-based political Liberal party. That party recognised disestablishment as a potential vote-winner in Welsh constituencies, but it would often fail to reciprocate Welsh support with any demonstration of the sustained commitment which was required to undermine such an entrenched position.
Legislation
The legislation which finally brought the prospect of Welsh disestablishment onto the statute books was enacted on 18 September 1914, but its operation was suspended due to the outbreak of the Great War. After much uncertainty amidst Unionist (Conservative) hopes for its eventual repeal, it took effect on 31 March 1920. It was to leave both sides with cause for dissatisfaction, suspicion, misunderstanding, and lasting resentment. The Welsh Church Bill had been introduced into the House of Commons in April 1912, so its extraordinary parliamentary odyssey had begun eight years earlier. It represented the fourth occasion in twenty years when draft legislation on Welsh disestablishment had been pursued.[3]
Was This Only a Welsh Issue?
Whereas disestablishment was perceived by many as a stalking-horse for wider nationalistic aspirations, due to the length of the campaign, it would transmogrify into being the ‘alpha and omega’ of Welsh ambitions. It can be argued that the ‘political capital’ expended to achieve a form of disestablishment bankrupted any possibility of achieving home rule or at least a situation where Wales was better placed to weather the trauma of the Great War. Such a bleak hypothesis should be viewed as tragic, as the resultant form of disestablishment that emerged in 1920 was an attenuated form of what had been anticipated. Not only did the decades long struggle for disestablishment denude all other national endeavours, but it exhausted political and popular will. The 1914 Welsh Church Act was a ghost of what had been understood in the 1890s. Under the guise of the Great War, behind-the-scenes political shenanigans were to lead to amendments to the 1914 legislation and re-endowment (re-funding) of the disestablished Welsh Anglican church. There remained the uncomfortable fundamental issue of how a half century of campaigning demonstrated that Welsh democracy had been unable to influence matters.
An English Issue
The campaign for Welsh disestablishment did create a particularly unwelcome glimpse into an uncertain future for the Church of England. In 1913, when there were last ditch attempts to defer, or at least modify, Welsh disestablishment, the Church of England’s Representative Church Council passed a resolution requesting the Archbishops of Canterbury and York to establish a committee to report on the relationship between Church and State.[4]
[1] Owen Owen, Welsh Disestablishment. Some Phases of the Numerical Argument (Wrexham, 1895), p.46.
[2] W. Hughes Jones, Wales Drops the Pilots (London: Foyle’s Welsh Co., 1937), p.59.
[3] H. H. Asquith, as home secretary, was to introduce a Welsh Disestablishment Bill in May 1894 and in February 1895 and then again, as prime minister, in April 1909.
[4]The Archbishops’ Committee on Church & State, London, 1917, p.2.
Ecclesiastical History Society 