William Davies (priest)
William Davies (died 27 July 1593) was an outlawed Welsh Roman Catholic missionary who worked as an underground schoolmaster in the Creuddyn Peninsula of North Wales.
He is credited with involvement in the underground publication of Y Drych Cristianogawl and with composing at least one devotional work of Welsh bardic poetry during his imprisonment.
Ordained as a priest in 5 April 1585, the Douay Diaries state that on 6 June 1585, he returned to work as an outlawed missionary to the Welsh people.
[4] With the covert protection of Robert Puw of Penrhyn Hall (d. 1629), a Recusant member of the Welsh gentry from the Creuddyn Peninsula and grandfather of the Cavalier poet Gwilym Puw,[5] Davies turned the manor into a center of underground education, an illegal minor seminary, and the Welsh equivalent to Eilein Bàn in Loch Morar or Scalan in Glenlivet.
Pembroke was reportedly, "determined to stamp out Catholicism and Recusancy in Wales and had been charged by Elizabeth on 15 September 1586 to implement the laws against Catholics with rigour.
"[6] In response, Davies was one of eight men who remained in hiding in a cave at Y Gogarth Fach, or Little Orme Head, betwixt Llandudno and Penrhyn Bay, between c. August 1586 and 14 April 1587.
[7] While hiding in the cave, in high risk defiance of Elizabethan era censorship laws, Puw and Davies also secretly produced a print run, similarly to illegal Samizdat literature after the Bolshevik Revolution, of the banned Catholic book Y Drych Cristianogawl, a short essay on the love of God by exiled Welsh priest Gruffydd Robert and which is believed to be the first book of Welsh-language literature ever printed in Wales.
[10][11] On 15 March 1592, he was arrested at Holyhead along with four minor seminary students trained at Penrhyn Hall, whom Davies was smuggling via Ireland to continue their education at the English College in Valladolid.
[17] Before he climbed the ladder, Davies was asked by the deputy sheriff what he thought of the Queen and replied, "God give her a long, prosperous reign and grace to die a member of the Catholic Church."
[20] An Elizabethan English account attributed to John Bennett alleges that Davies was allowed to die on the gallows before being cut down, disembowelled, beheaded, and quartered.
[27] Following careful investigation, William Davies was beatified by Pope John Paul II as one of the Eighty-five martyrs of England and Wales on 22 November 1987.
During the 2010 papal visit to the United Kingdom, Pope Benedict XVI was presented with an exact facsimile and replica of Y Drych Cristianogawl, which had been commissioned by Joseph Kelly, Editor of The Universe Catholic weekly as a gift to the Holy See from the Welsh people.
The facsimile was produced by renowned book conservator Julian Thomas at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, using one of the only two surviving copies of the original Samizdat volume.
