Welsh Journals

'A RANK REPUBLICAN [AND] A LEVELLER': WILLIAM JONES, LLANGADFAN IN ONE of the most colourful passages of his epic study, Citizens, the historian Simon Schama recounts the extraordinary fête de Voltaire enacted on the streets of revolutionary Paris on 11 July 1791.1 Many Jacobins believed that the celebrated philosopher, who had died in 1778, had not received national public recognition for his role in undermining the ancien regime, establishing the concept of revolution, and advancing the cause of egalitarianism and social justice. A carefully engineered public relations exercise was therefore organized: Voltaire's embalmed body was placed on a couch-bed perched on an enormous, specially designed chariot drawn by four white horses sporting the tricolour. Over a hundred thousand curious and rapt onlookers braved the pouring rain to witness the procession as it made its way slowly to Voltaire's final resting place at the Pantheon. A month earlier, William Jones of Llangadfan in Montgomeryshire, probably the most ardent admirer of Voltaire in eighteenth-century Wales, had attended a much less spectacular pageant at the newly revived Welsh eisteddfod held at Llanrwst. In suitably Voltairean language, he urged his compatriots, in an address entitled 'To All Indigenous Cambro-Britons', to summon up enough courage to abandon their oppressed native land and make for the Land of Liberty in America.2 Jones, who counted himself a citoyen du monde, had discovered his political voice in 1789 and his correspondence (in both Welsh and English) with the likes of William Owen Pughe, Walter Davies (Gwallter Mechain) and Edward Jones is littered with barbed references to tyrants, fleecers and oppressors, and celebratory praise for sans-culottes, Jacobins and followers of Tom Paine.3 Despised by his rector as 'a rank Republican [and] a Leveller',4 William Jones had emerged by the 1790s as an unusually articulate representative of sans-culotte radicalism in the heart of rural Montgomeryshire and as a spokesman for a new political nationalism in Wales. Known as 'the rural Voltaire', he apparently resembled his hero as much in physiognomy as in ideology. Each had a broad forehead, brilliantly hypnotic eyes, aquiline features, and a gaunt, angular body. They shared, too, a fondness for shabby, old-fashioned clothes, misanthropy, incivility, blasphemous curses, lewd jokes and satirical verse. Voltaire's life and works 'Simon Schama, Citizens. A Chronicle of the French Revolution (London, 1989), pp. 561-66. 2N.L.W. MS. 13221E, ff. 339-42. 'See in particular N.L.W. MS. 168C, f. 292; 1806E, f. 782; 13222C, f. 287. 'N.L.W. MS. 1806E, f. 786.