“Here in Britain”: William Fleetwood, His Welsh Translators, and Anglo–Welsh Networks before 1717

Abstract

This essay explores the circumstances, content, and locus of the first two privately financed political translations into Welsh. Published in 1716 and 1717, both rendered a 1716 anti-Jacobite thanksgiving sermon preached by William Fleetwood, bishop of Ely, into Welsh. An interlude will engage with a cross-genre English verse translation, also done in 1716. Whereas Fleetwood’s text, the 1716 Welsh translation of it, and the cross-genre translation pursued a radical Whig agenda, the 1717 translation of Fleetwood into Welsh took care to remove the most radical content of his sermon. All four texts, however, focused on advertising a Protestant nation centered on a national church and the House of Hanover. The present analysis contributes to explaining how Wales’s separate cultural identity was confirmed while being bound politically into a Hanoverian nation demarcated by the Anglican Church. It explores the uncharted Welsh-language dimension of early eighteenth-century British pamphleteering, non-elite Anglo–Welsh cross-border communication networks, and the role that cultural entrepreneurs and provincial publishing centers like Shrewsbury played in not only disseminating metropolitan ideas but also enabling wider participation in the political discourse.