ABSTRACT
From the seventeenth century until the time of Victoria, the established Anglican Church was central to political culture in Wales. The seventeenth-century church in Wales should therefore be seen as a bastion of Welsh culture. There was no serious conflict between the maintenance of national culture and the assertion of British unity and harmony. Though the political successes were thwarted by the change of dynasty in 1714, the High Church tradition would survive to become the main political orthodoxy of eighteenth-century Wales Old 'moderate' and even puritan gentry families increasingly drifted into high-flying opinions; while Whig squires appointed moderate clergy of Hanoverian sympathies, the ecclesiastical 'middle ground' was far to the right of what had seemed conceivable a generation earlier. It can also be argued that a clear tradition links the evangelical revival in Wales with earlier High Church ideas, while calvinistic methodism did not formally break with the established church until the early nineteenth century.
