greatest Welsh defect was {144} the absence of political genius, the very thing with which England was so abundantly gifted. Institutions like Llewelyn's Council of Princes were without ancestors and without posterity; they were accidents and imitations, and not natural products of Welsh political development. Before such institutions could become stable and strong, Wales had to be brought into the closest union with England, and serve a long period of political apprenticeship. {145} CHAPTER X THE REFORMATION Wales and England were now one in law; and it consequently followed that all statutes passed by Parliament were applicable to the Principality, unless expressly stated not to be so. No reservations had been made, as were afterwards made as to religion, laws, and education, in the matter of the Scottish Union. In every step, therefore, of the Reformation Settlement, Wales was obliged to share; and there can be no doubt at all that the Reformation was unpopular in Wales, and that the Anglican Church, as it emerged at the close of the reign of Elizabeth, had made for itself no place in the hearts of the people. At the same time it would be easy to exaggerate the reluctance with which Wales accepted the many religious changes of the Tudor period. The picture which some recent writers have drawn of a Wales deprived of the ancient religion to which it was devoted, {146} and of a Church plundered while faithfully discharging its functions, is as fanciful and as devoid of truth for Wales as it would be for England. The truth is that, long before the Reformation, the Roman Church in Wales had lost all real hold upon the minds and hearts of the people. All that remained was a sentimental loyalty, and an immense amount of the grossest superstition. When the harsh and tactless agents of Thomas Cromwell visited the parishes and abbeys of Wales, defacing churches, plundering monks, and destroying miracle-working images, the prevailing feeling was not that religion was being insulted, but that superstitious beliefs, tenaciously held, were being flouted. Indeed the very fact that Wales was so ill-prepared for the Reformation is, in itself, the most convincing proof of the scandalous way in which the ancient Church had neglected its duties. So great was the intellectual and moral torpor into which the people had sunk that it took more than a century for the new doctrines to penetrate their minds. Theirs was the most abject and deplorable of all conditions of slavery, the condition in which the slave does not even desire to be free. The new Anglican Church, which was mainly the creation of {147} Elizabethan statutes, it is true, also failed. Upon its predecessor it was an immense improvement; but it lacked the intense emotionalism which alone could stir the Welsh heart; and, moreover, it came to Wales in alien guise, speaking a foreign tongue. It was not until the Bible in Welsh had saturated into the minds of all