Welsh Journals

may be persuaded to translate into English his assessment of Powell's work in Wales during the Interregnum. Lastly, Mr. B. G. Owens turns to west Wales and to the church founded there in 1668, an indirect descendant of the Ilston church, which eventually came to be known as the church of Rhydwilym. He discusses the primary and secondary materials which survive for the early history of this exclusive Particular Baptist church up to the passing of the Toleration Act of 1689. These three essays fully substantiate the claims of the editor and open new work on seventeenth-century Welsh Baptist history to a wider readership. They may do even more, and stimulate others to publish further scholarly essays in this and allied fields. CLAIRE CROSS York THE ENGLISH MINISTERS AND Jacobitism BETWEEN THE REBELLIONS OF 1715 AND 1745. By Paul S. Fritz. University of Toronto Press, 1975. Pp. 180. £ 8.60. Perhaps surprisingly, there is much that remains unclear about the character and significance of Jacobitism. Scholars have tended to skirt a subject which attracts enormous but sometimes undiscriminating attention. In this book Paul Fritz does a lot to redress the balance, with a detailed and measured account of the Hanoverian establishment's treatment of the Jacobite problem, particularly in the early 1720s. The principal result is to confirm Gary Bennett's assessment of the importance of the Atterbury plot for the construction of Walpole's regime. Mr. Fritz, too, sees Walpole as a brilliant and ruthless scaremonger, who actually made the Jacobite menace work to the profit of the Protestant Succession and his own political career, by persecuting it with a tenacity which Stanhope and Sunderland, perhaps faced by more real dangers than Walpole, had never displayed. If any further confirmation of Walpole's personal and political obsession with the threat of a Stuart Restoration were needed, it is provided here, with useful supporting evidence in the form of an analysis of the extraordinary international intelligence system which he built up in the 1720s. The faults of the book perhaps spring naturally from the nature of the subject. Jacobitism is an almost impossibly difficult phenomenon to analyze. As Walpole himself observed, in a remark quoted in this book, 'discontent and disaffection are like wit and madness: they are separated by thin partitions'. Gauging the precise opinions of those on whom the success of the Stuarts ultimately depended-the country gentlemen of England and Wales rather than the highland clans of Scotland-is a nice problem, not rendered easier by the equivocations and vacillations of those involved. Relatively unhelpful too are the main sources which, like the Stuart papers themselves, are suffused by the inherent optimism of conspirators, and tell much of plots, intrigues and projects, but little of the actual prospects of success. The minor gentry of the counties, whose conviction of the divine right of the Stuarts was frequently assumed,