Welsh Journals

Richard Williams makes no attempt to conceal his political affiliation in the Parody, and his lack of sympathy with the King is clearly revealed, especially in the last line- 'Then live King G The Fourth we mean. Yet it is difficult to exclude the possibility that the final stimulus for the parody was at a more domestic ecclesiastical level. It is probable that Bishop Shipley himself was too remote to exert any direct baneful influence on Richard Williams, but the presence of his son, the Dean, may well have been a constant authoritarian shadow on the Rector's path of progress. The Dean and the Rector were of much the same age-the former being born in 1745 and the latter in 1747, and both were of clerical stock. The records reveal the voracious and apparently insatiable appetite of the Dean for lucrative appointments, and indicate clearly his phenomenal success in amassing valuable preferments. He rose from lowly deacon in 1770 to the high office of Chancellor, and later Dean of St. Asaph in 1774. To watch this rate of elevation must have been a galling experience for other clergymen, and especially so for Richard Williams, who, in spite of his taste for satire and flippancy, was a poet and scholar of some merit. Perhaps the Parody was the measure of his disenchantment. Archbishop A. G. Edwards in Memories described the Dean's career as an example of 'Episcopal Nepotism', and it is not surprising that the personal qualities of the recipient of these paternal favours failed to endear him to Thomas Pennant. One suspects that they proved equally repellent to Richard Williams, who was on very friendly terms with Pennant and his family. The significance of the asterisk attached to the word 'blameless' in the St. Asaph Loyal Address, and the mordacious footnote reference to 'the most happy mistake of the printer' which substituted 'shameless' for 'blameless', would have been readily understood by contemporary readers of the Address. The meaning may not seem clear to present day readers until another remarkable episode in the history of the Diocese is recalled. In August 1784 at the Assizes at Shrewsbury 'in the cause of the King on the prosecution of William Jones, Attorney at Law, an action was brought against the Rev. William Davies Shipley, Dean of St. Asaph, for a Libel before the Hon. Francis Buller, Esq. one of the Judges of His Majesty's Court of King's Bench'. Such was the interest engendered that a verbatim report 'taken in shorthand by William Blanchard' was subsequently published in full later that year. The legal proceedings were taken as the result of the publication of a pamphlet entitled, The Principles of Government, in a Dialogue between a Gentleman and a Farmer. The plan to have the pamphlet translated into Welsh was not put into effect.