If it is difficult to account for the affection of Wales for the Stuarts, it is easy to explain its dislike of Parliament. As we have had occasion already to observe, Parliament was not an indigenous growth in Wales, but a foreign importation. It was never evolved out of the political consciousness of the people. Moreover, all that the Welsh people knew {173} about it up to that time was that it was the foreign body which passed laws making such drastic alterations in the customs of their country, forbidding them to speak Welsh, forbidding them to go to Mass, and most unfairly and inexplicably ordering that the whole of the father's estate was to go to the eldest son. Puritanism was hateful to the people, as being even more remote than Anglicanism from the old religious ceremonial for which they still had a warm corner in their hearts. Wales was, in those days, a merry country, full of mirth and joviality. Games and good cheer were loved by all. There was much superstition, much dissoluteness, much profanity, but this only made the people the more resentful of the chilling and sobering touch of Puritanism. The old Wales of the Middle Ages was still alive, and the fountains of imagination, art, and romance had not yet been frozen. There was no Welsh printing-press in existence; and even if there had been, the people were, on the whole, far too ignorant to understand a noble appeal to their latent love of liberty contained in such a work as Milton's _Areopagitica_. Of the great principles for which both parties in the war were fighting--respect for law and {174} supremacy of Parliament, on the side of the Roundheads; control of the Executive by the King, and supremacy of the Episcopal Church, on the side of the Royalists--they knew nothing. Such ideas were too complex for them. What they could understand was the ancient loyalty of subject to Prince; and in following Charles they acted ingenuously, and according to their lights. Parliament, they instinctively felt, was not fighting the battle of the poor man, nor of the squire; and Wales was inhabited almost exclusively by these two classes. In so far as it was fighting for a class at all, it was fighting for the trader; and trade was, as yet, of little account in the life of Wales. It was thus in the "Celtic Fringe," in Wales, in Scotland, in Cumberland, and in Cornwall, that Charles found the fullest measure of support; and it is interesting to remember that, when war broke out between King and States-General in France a hundred and fifty years later, it was among the Celts of Brittany that Louis XVI found his most steadfast support.