Richard Williams Morgan
Morgan's outspoken criticism of English bishops in Wales who could not speak Welsh led him into conflict with the authorities of the Church of England.
In books on the history of the Welsh and the origins of Christianity in Wales, he traced the ancestry of the Welsh people back to Japheth, son of Noah, and in his St. Paul in Britain, claimed that the apostle Paul had converted the people of Britain to Christianity; and thus, the British Church was as old as the Church of Rome, and never owed allegiance to the Pope.
[7] Not surprisingly, Short took this up as a disciplinary matter, and although he finally accepted that Morgan was not the father of Elizabeth's child, the enmity between the two men was to grow worse.
[9][10] His notorious attitude towards the bishops, and the public and aggressive way he expressed his feelings, led to scandal in November 1857, when he was staying with friends in Rhosymedre, Ruabon, in north-east Wales.
[13] In April 1858 the Welsh-language (and strongly Welsh nationalist) satirical magazine Y Punch Cymraeg published a cartoon supporting Morgan's campaign against the English bishops.
[16] At this time, Morgan was also involved in the Celtic Revival movement, along with other Welsh clergymen like his cousin John Williams, the bard Ab Ithel.
[9] In 1858, he joined Ab Ithel and other like-minded clergy to organise an eisteddfod at Llangollen, Denbighshire – although some of his colleagues felt that his involvement, while he continued his campaigns against the English bishops, might jeopardise the plans for the meeting.
[17][18][9][19] The focus of the gathering was a gorsedd, a ceremonial meeting of bards, following rituals claimed to be based on ancient Celtic practice, but actually invented by Edward Williams, commonly known as Iolo Morganwg, in the late 18th century.
One Welsh newspaper editor, Isaac Foulkes, commented at the time "every oddbod in Wales took himself off there, and no doubt felt quite at home in the company".
[21] Môr Meirion himself declaimed the opening "Gorsedd Prayer" and later in an oration (as a contemporary commented) "launched his energetic but somewhat too unqualified Cymricism".
[22] After 1858 Morgan served as a curate for short periods in a number of English parishes,[23] but in the 1860s he lived most of the time in London, concentrating on pseudohistorical writing.
[24] Morgan returned to the subject of the Japhetic origin of the Welsh in 1863, in his Vindication of the Mosaic Ethnology of Europe, in which he reaffirmed the accuracy of the Biblical story of the Flood, and the historical descent of the races of mankind from the sons of Noah.
[29][30][3] At some point Ferrette met Morgan, and, suggests Anson, "found a kindred spirit in this erratic, unstable, hot-headed Welsh clergyman".
[32][33] Brandreth reports a later claim that Morgan was "obsessed with the vision of a British Church that should restore the doctrine and discipline of the days before St Augustine".
[40][41][42] In spite of his involvement with the Ancient British Church, Morgan served as curate twice more in English parishes, in Stapleton, Shropshire in 1882–83, and in Offord D'Arcy, Huntingdonshire in 1886–88; in 1888 he retired and moved to Broadstairs in Kent, but died on 22 August 1889 in Pevensey, Sussex.
An article published in the Cambrian Journal in 1863 described him as "a man of genius, ability and learning, the energetic champion of all Cymric interests, and the uncompromising scourge of all ecclesiastical abusers.
If only he would chasten his imagination, and moderate his patriotic impulses, in dealing with Welsh history, he would be also entitled to unqualified praise as one of the most eloquent and vigorous writers of the day".
According to Peter Anson, Morgan was "a tireless but uncritical research worker, ready to believe anything that took his fancy and indifferent to the lack of documentary evidence".
In 1857 Morgan published The British Kymry, or Britons of Cambria, a comprehensive history of the Welsh people from the time of the Biblical Flood to the 19th century.
[53] Morgan accepted it as a factual account, and elaborated on it, drawing on Welsh medieval texts and legends, as well as on the forgeries of Iolo Morganwg.
[23][56] The subject was also a matter of great interest to Morgan's cousin John Williams, who in 1844 published The Ecclesiastical Antiquities of the Cymry; or the Ancient British Church; its History, Doctrine, and Rites.
[59] In the 20th century Morgan's views on the relationship between the Druids and early Christianity in Britain seem to have influenced Gerald Gardner, one of the founders of modern Witchcraft or Wicca.
It was the stone plinth on which had stood the Palladium, the statue of the goddess Pallas Athene upon which, according to Greek legend, the safety of the city of Troy depended.
