ETA: The final, edited version of this article has now been published with Literature & History under an Open Access license and can be accessed here: https://doi.org/10.1177/03061973241295331.
This is the pre-print version of my article accepted by the Literarture & History journal. I am depositing this version here on my blog in line with their Green Open Access policy. In due course, I will provide a link here to the final, published version.
You can also download this pre-print version here: https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:63597/
Abstract
This article investigates three Victorian historical novels in Welsh and English about the Fishguard Invasion by the French in 1797. The article discusses the metaphorical function of landscape and geography in their relation to national identity and historical events against the late-Victorian backdrop of the fear of invasion of the British mainland.
Introduction
On 22 February 1797, the Légion Noire, a small French army of no more than 1,400 soldiers, landed at Carreg Wastad Point near Fishguard, Pembrokeshire, under the leadership of the Irish-American Colonel William Tate (c1744-18??).[1] He could not have chosen a more shrewd place from which to goad a dissatisfied peasantry to rise against the monarchy. The isolated location and rocky coastline of the Pencaer Peninsula gave ideal cover for landing his troops, while the farming country around would provide the necessary supplies to sustain the men and women under his command. Unknown to Tate and his co-conspirators, Wales’s woe-begotten infrastructure and the poor military defence of the coastline also worked in their favour as any serious military backup was several days away. However, the Welsh country population was not as easily stirred into rebellion as had been hoped by the military and political strategists back in France.[2] By the second day of the invasion, morale among the officers collapsed when they saw ships drawing up anchor and marooning the troops on hostile territory while the rank and file raided their way through the peninsula. Eventually, Tate dispatched an envoy of his officers to nearby Fishguard to seek terms of surrender, which was effected on Goodwick Sands on the morning of the third day. Aside from a few skirmishes between invaders and peasantry, no genuine combat took place between the Légion Noire and the local militia, the volunteer infantry at Fishguard under the leadership of the inexperienced Thomas Knox, but the events became commonly known in English as the Battle of Fishguard, while in Welsh they are named Glaniad y Ffrancod. [3]
Over the following century, increasingly fanciful memories and folk renderings superseded reliable information.[4] Leading up to the centenary, several historical novels in Welsh and English about the event appeared in close succession, as single-volume publications or in serialised format in weekly newspapers and magazines. This article focuses on three retellings of the events, not with the intention to separate fact from histrionic fancy, but rather with an eye on the symbolic functions of an embattled historic landscape for a Victorian readership in Wales. Historical landscape in this context means that historical fiction takes a two-fold view as it entangles past and present geographies and histories, questioning their very nature and construction. John Kirk argues that ‘geographical space is socially constituted within a matrix of power relations which are economic, political and cultural, while place is something recouped from this through processes of living: feelings of belonging and modes of identification’.[5] In the specific case of the three novels under discussion here, historical landscapes probe the historical location and emergence of Welsh and British selfhood when a people suddenly find themselves under attack from outside. In her discussion of ‘Bardic nationalism’ Katie Trumpener argues that Scottish and Irish writers of the Romantic period established their own Celtic identities through the means of (quasy-historical) fiction. This took place against the backdrop of a newly unified Britain, which now included Ireland, and its changing international standing during the Napoleonic Wars and thereafter.[6] Noting for the trajectory of the historical novel in the nineteenth century from Scott onwards, Richard Maxwell finds that ‘[f]ar from discouraging the wide imitation of the genre, this association [with Scotland] suggested that other countries (especially small, ill-defined, colonized, or radically unstable ones) could also use the historical novel as a means of national self-inquiry and self-definition’.[7] Wales was not colonised in the same sense that Britain (with Welsh participation) colonised North America and the global south, but it can be argued that in terms of historical fiction this small nation utilised the Scottish template created in the first half of the century, whilst raising its own, unique questions regarding Wales’s identity in a British context. Published between 1892 and 1897, the historical novels under observation demonstrate how writerly intervention in national historiography recognises the specificity of Welsh places in the nation’s past as well as the authors’ and their readerships’ present within the wider spatial paradigm of the British state. Specifically, the Fishguard Invasion novels are set during an age of revolutions in which Britain, after losing its North American colonies, consolidated its borders against its chief European rival, France, whilst laying the foundations for a second empire.[8]
Seen within the context of their dates of publication during the 1890s, the theme of invasion unfolds against British fears of political, armed and economic overreach on a worldwide level. It is in this economic, political and cultural setting that the invasion novel had taken hold as a popular literary genre among the late-Victorian readership. Commonly accepted as the first of its kind, George Tomkyns Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer (1871) was written in response to the Franco-Prussian War which effectively catapulted a newly unified German state onto the international stage of imperialist rivalries and the race for exploiting the material and human resources of the global south.[9] The majority of early invasion novels centred around likely and credible invasion scenarios in the present or near future, before eventually crossing over into other genres such as gothic and science fiction, or historical fiction by the fin de siècle. While these genres easily lent themselves to metaphysical explorations of imperialism and various forms of subjection, they also upheld old prejudices and subconscious fears prevalent at the time. Most prominently, these concerns centre around the degradation of the white Briton by an inferior race, species or life-form as presented in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) or H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898). Whereas earlier invasion fiction followed a more classical mode of invasion with the approach of hostile forces from across the sea (Chesney), the later, more fantastical off-shoots suggested that the enemy could strike unseen from within (Stoker) or above (Wells). As regards invasion fiction in general, it was feared that with military resources and defence stretched thin, the mother country Britain would be left defenceless against invading forces, often believed to hail from Germany, Russia or France, which would then threaten the British population with the indignity of colonisation and imperial rule. The novels charting the Battle of Fishguard subsequently represent a marriage of two exceedingly popular literary genres as they constitute historical invasion fiction.
That said, it could equally be argued that early-nineteenth-century British historical fiction set in the eighteenth century was deeply invested in invasion narratives and embattled historical landscapes. Written at a time of heightened French invasion fear, Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) charts the rise and fall of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745-46, rendered as an invasion of English territory from an allegiance between hostile Celts and French exiles. Similarly, William Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. (1852) narrates several real invasions and invented invasion plots. In the case of Thackeray, the real invasions are led by British forces abroad in Ireland in the Battle of the Boyne and in Spain during the War of Spanish Succession, whereas the fictional invasion plot centres around an abortive attempt at overthrowing Queen Anne and restoring her Catholic brother, James Francis Edward Stuart, to the throne. These earlier historical fictions are deeply invested in world building as they invariably cover larger territories, longer time frames and include a greater ensemble of characters. Even with a comparatively smaller set of characters, the overall principle also holds true for Elizabeth Gaskell’s quasy-historical novel Sylvia’s Lovers (1862). Charting the life story of the eponymous heroine and her two rival suitors, this story is largely set in a fictional coastal town in north-East England against the historical frame of British military involvement on the European mainland during the Napoleonic Wars. Ultimately, however, these earlier, more prototypical historical novels and the fin-de-siecle Fishguard Invasion novels are united by their point of view of the core territory of Britain from the geographical fringe, whilst differing in the importance set by the invasion plot for the overall narrative. In other words, while Britain may be governed centrally, ultimately it is defended at its outer territorial extremes.
Joining factual historical research, as reflected in her introduction, with Walter Scott’s formula of the accidental, ‘more or less mediocre, average English gentleman’ as protagonist, Margaret Ellen James gives a fairly faithful retelling of the events in The Fishguard Invasion by the French in 1797 (1892), but presents them in the form of a prolonged comedy of errors, blunders and accidents.[10] While James crafts her narrative around a Waverley-like narrator, Dan Rhys constructs a decidedly more gothic tale of Welsh pirates and smugglers in his novel ‘Peryglon Pencaer, neu Ffwdan y Ffrancod yn Abergwaun’ (1894; transl. ‘The Dangers of Pencaer, or The Trouble of the French at Fishguard’) serialised in Papur Pawb.[11] Similarly, Gwyn Meredith’s serialised novel ‘Gwenny Vaughan, Or The Fishguard Invasion’ (1896-97) in the Cardiff Times takes greater artistic license in developing the invasion story around Irish privateers, whilst exploring themes of coloniality.[12] Despite their different formats, languages and circumstances of publication, the three novels fictionalise the historical past to fit their contemporary ideological outlook. Moreover, the coastal Pembrokeshire landscape in these invasion fictions acts as a symbolic as well as a manifest frontier.
In his survey of the emergence and development of the historical novel, Jerome de Groot argues that the genre
might be seen as a tool for national self-definition, and to work globally as a form and locally in terms of the effect of its content. In modern critical and sociological terms, this has been defined as ‘glocalisation’, describing the interaction of the local with the international.[13]
Recognising this international dimension within the specifically local unfolding of the Battle of Fishguard, the three historical invasion novels under observation utilise Pembrokeshire as a geographical place as well as symbolically charged space in which to explore questions of Welsh and British nationhood. In this sense, the setting invites a two-fold reading, one in which geography is mapped though literary means, and one in which the location acts an extended metaphor, a conceit, thus externalising social and political conflicts.[14] While mindful of the former, this article chiefly focuses on the latter. What is more, by examining the porous and brittle borders of the national territory, they open a literary conversation around the themes of coloniality and sovereignty against a late-Victorian backdrop of cultural and political revivals in Wales. According to Kathryn Sutherland, ‘historical fiction became a vital way of understanding how history works and of connecting past to present’.[15] As an example of fin-de-siecle historical fiction from Wales, the three novels discussed below provide suitable examples of contrasting literary historiographies of the same past event to communicate and comment on current affairs and their specific relevance to a Welsh readership. In other words, the Fishguard Invasion novels utilise the past to legitimise the present. Even though political radicalism and demands for Home Rule under the Cymru Fydd movement peaked during the 1890s, ultimately, the broader consensus firmly located Wales in the Union as well as a benefactor of and contributor to the empire.
Margaret Ellen James: The Fishguard Invasion by the French in 1797 (1892)
Published in 1892, Margaret Ellen James’s novel The Fishguard Invasion by the French in 1797 appears to be the first novel-length fictionalisation of the historical events.[16] According to the by-line on the title page, the publication purports to be an eyewitness account with ‘some passages taken from the diary of the late Reverend Daniel Rowlands, sometime vicar of Llanfihangelpenybont’ who, at the time of the events, was 15 years of age.[17] James largely relies on then known historical documentation of the French Invasion and retraces the events from the first person perspective of a fictional boy who encounters many local, historically verified characters over the course of three days. Rather than following the sober tone of previously published eyewitness accounts and historiographies, James presents a serious story comically told. It would go too far for the confines of this article to provide a detailed discussion of James’s creation of young Daniel Rowlands. Suffice it to say, he fits George Lukács’s description of the typical Scott hero like a glove as he, too, ‘posseses a certain, though never outstanding, decree of practical intelligence, a certain moral fortitude and decency which even rises to a capacity of self-sacrifice, but which never grows into a sweeping human passion, is never the enraptured devotion to a great cause’.[18] In addition to following the invasion from the landing of the French troops, through their ransacking of the Pencaer farmsteads to their surrender on Goodwick Sands, the novel also covers part of the aftermath. The postscript relocates events to Pembroke, where it describes the jail break of some of the French convicts with the support of two local girls.
On the one hand, James took astonishingly little poetic license in stringing together scattered historical anecdotes from diverse published and orally transmitted accounts into a single, coherent story. On the other hand, The Fishguard Invasion is ostensibly narrated as a comedy owing to the youthful inexperience of the teenaged narrator and his repeated incomprehension regarding his neighbours’ (re-)actions towards the invading force as well as towards each other. This entanglement of detailed research with light humour proves a shrewd strategy as James is therefore able to signal an awareness for the criticism previously levelled against the genre, as ‘authors of historical fiction were under a special obligation to their readers to insure the accuracy of the historical portions of their works’.[19] In her study of Gothic historical fiction by female authors, Diana Wallace argues that this particular sub-genre ‘can be seen as a kind of metahistory, a way of theorising or producing a philosophy of history’.[20] While tonally James’s comedic treatment of the Fishguard Invasion represents the diametric opposite of the Gothic mode, according to Hayden White’s recognition of comedy as one of four possible modes of historiography, Wallace’s argument remains applicable for this example of historical invasion fiction.[21] In terms of content, Sarah L. Johnson notes in the first of her two seminal guides to historical fiction that authors frequently take recourse to several strategies in order to signal historical accuracy, such as bibliographies, foot- and endnotes, postscripts, family trees, glossaries, images and maps.[22] In this regard, James’s journalistic and detailed preface to the novel together with her own quasi-documentary illustrations throughout function as additional vindication of what she feared may otherwise be judged a ‘very improbable and imaginative fiction’. [23] As a counter measure, she therefore presents her collected ‘authorities for the facts mentioned in the story’ in the shape of a detailed survey and bibliography of historical eyewitness accounts and antiquarian scholarship.[24] Finally, James historicises the late-Victorian ideological undercurrent of her novel with carefully selected statements by original participants. According to these selectively curated voices, such as the letter by Lord Milford, Richard Phillips (1744-1823) written only two days after the French surrender, Wales represents more than just a constituent part of modern Britain:
The great spirit and loyalty that the gentlemen and peasantry has shown on this occasion exceeds description. Many thousands of the latter assembled, armed with pikes and scythes, and attacked the enemy previous to the arrival of troops that were sent against them.[25]
The quoted letter signals that while the culture on the ground remains robustly Welsh, the peasantry’s loyalty identified by Lord Milford is first and foremost directed towards the Union. Placed within the context of a preface to a Victorian historical novel, however, this represents a collision between different conceptualisations of Britishness across time and space. With the hindsight of the historical novelist, James establishes Brytaniaeth (ancient Britishness) and Prydeindod ( after Bethan M. Jenkins ‘an identity that had been lost to the English who were using the concept of “Britishness” to synthesise multiple ethnicities into one essentially Anglocentric nation’) as the two sides of a modern Welsh coin.[26] The historical sources that James presents in her introduction together with the comportment of the characters in the novel subsequently cast the Welsh as key defenders of the geographical margins of Britain without whom the modern British state, if not the empire, would fall apart. In past decades, several investigations of Wales’s coloniality in the wider British context have engaged with the country’s two-fold role as recipient and perpetrator of colonialism. This includes discussions of immigration and minoritisation within Wales, some more successfully and convincingly than others.[27] James’s historic actors together with her symbolic use of the Pembrokeshire landscape subsequently speak to these discussions as she challenges late nineteenth-century discourses in which Wales was seen as contributory to Britain at best or at worst, according to supporters of Welsh Home Rule at the time, a peripheral province subservient to English interests.[28] James plays with these perceptions as her Pembrokeshire represents a home to the supposedly colonised ancient Britons as well as the much later Flemish settlers.
Although placed towards the end of the novel, which subsequently colours the preceding action accordingly, James’s perhaps most poignant reference to the Welsh as original Britons echoes a much older successful invasion. Ancient conquest not only functions as leveller between the nations of modern Britain, but has also leaves its traces on the land. Metaphorically the spectacle of the landscape thus reawakens dormant knowledge of an old wrong as Daniel indulges in a daydream during the surrender of the French troops:
What a place this [natural amphitheatre] would have been for one of the old Roman shows; for a moment I seemed to see the gladiators struggling for life and death […]. I woke up suddenly with a start to find I had been dozing on the hillside, where the people were sitting quietly enough, Britons not Romans, perhaps some of them descendants of these very gladiators who had been ‘Butchered to make a Roman holiday’. (James 170)
Pondering the emergence of an Anglo-Saxon tradition in the historical novel, Billie Melman observes that ‘[b]ecause of its remoteness, the pre-Norman era could be reconstructed as an inclusive fiction’ outside Victorian political discourse.[29] In Daniel’s daydream, the natural landscape accordingly appears to have absorbed the spirit of the ancient Roman conqueror, but this time it works against the invading force as it is the indigenous natives who gain the victory. James uses the narrator’s daydream to reclaim the land for the historical characters as well as that of her readers nearly a century later. Despite four centuries under Roman rule, James suggests that the Welsh re-emerged on the other side of this first conquest in the common era as a distinct people and have remained so ever since.
Not only does Pembrokeshire symbolise ancient land for equally ancient Britons, but the landscape also evidences subsequent arrivals, thus simultaneously accommodating Britaniaeth and Prydeindod. In particular, the so-called ‘Landsker Line’ plays an integral role in James’s symbolic geography. This intangible border delineates the majority distributions of the Welsh-speaking communities to the north and the English-speaking communities to the south of the county. Superficially, it could be argued that like a miniature internal Offa’s Dyke, the Landsker Line separates the Pembrokeshire communities into colonisers and colonised:
‘Little England beyond Wales,’ the people who live there being in fact Flemings, not Cymri, and the language they speak, being a Saxon dialect, […] Welsh is utterly unknown ‘down below’.[30]
In historical terms, the Flemings had moved into and settled in the southern part of Pembrokeshire around the time of the Norman conquest, effectively pushing out the Welsh language and culture, hence the colloquial name for this English-speaking corner of Wales.[31] In his History of Little England Beyond Wales (1888), the Pembrokeshire historian Edward Laws (1837-1913) speaks to local attitudes of the day as he charts the history of the Flemings, tracing two main waves of immigration, political alliances and their trajectory to the present. Throughout, Laws establishes the Flemings as strangers, interlopers and traitors who remain forever apart from the Welsh population and show more affinity, in character and origin, with the equally untrustworthy Anglo-Saxon and Viking races.[32] In contrast to Law’s racialised discourse, James’s novel presents the Flemings and their unique dialect as one of many, albeit quirky, facets of Pembrokeshire life, which is also ‘worth studying, not from its beauty, but from its quaintness and originality’, instead of disavowing ‘down below’ as un-Welsh, leave along un-British.[33] Here, in this remote corner of Wales, people habitually cross an invisible cultural border in both directions, establishing new familial ties across the linguistic communities, as seen in the narrator Daniel himself with his Flemish mother and Welsh father.[34] By presenting Daniel’s first-person narrative of the events as an authentic local voice, James frames Pembrokeshire as a bicultural location. Consequently, rather than forming a point of separation, the Landsker binds the two culturally distinct halves of Pembrokeshire just as eighteenth-century Britain merged the Welsh, Scottish and English into a symbolic multi-national family.[35]
With the emergence of invasion fiction in late-Victorian Britain, novelists channelled broadly existing fears of invasion by imperialist rivals such as Germany or Russia into their works. Commonly, these fictional invasions landed on the English coast (Battle of Dorking; Dracula), followed by a quick conquest of London as the heart of Britain (Dracula; The War of the Worlds). In contrast, James uses the invasion genre to historicise as well as decentre modern Prydeindod to the rural coastal edge in Wales, suggesting that it represents a force that begins rather than ends at the coastal frontier. While this force originates in the past (Brytaniaeth) with the gradual consolidation of the four nations into one state, for the Victorian reader towards the end of the century, it represents the driving force behind the establishment of an empire connected by the seas. The idea of a shared modern, global Prydeindod across internal divides is intrinsically tied to Francophobia as one of the key ideologies behind the emergence of the state during the eighteenth century.[36] Surveying historical sources around the Battle of Fishguard, Roland Quinault observes, ‘The Welsh have often, understandably, been preoccupied with English invasions of Wales; but when they were confronted by a French invasion of their country, they acted, with the English, as British patriots’.[37] This very sentiment also surfaces in the invasion novels in which the Welsh interpret the French attack as an attack on their Britishness in both the past and modern senses. Daniel presents the story in English, but effectively he has translated the lived Welsh culture on the ground around him from his ‘own tongue’ and he frequently reminds his audience that ‘of course we spoke in Welsh’.[38] This is done for the benefit of an Anglophone readership who would otherwise not be able to enjoy the Welsh peasantry’s patriotic, and by extension anti-French, defence of the British realm:
[A]t a little distance further along the cliff I espied the owner of Trelethin […] standing very firm on his legs against a background of bright sea […] while with both his raised-up hands he clutched a long spy glass […]. Following the direction of his spy-glass, I perceived a yet more astounding sight […]. Three ships of war were passing slowly along our coast not far from land […].
‘They’ve English colours, sir,’ I said to Mr. Williams.
‘Foreigners are deceitful,’ says he.[39]
Observing the arrival of the French and conversing with each other in Welsh, it is not so much Daniel’s and Mr Williams’s Brytaniaeth that is roused, but a shared sense of Prydeindod, as Williams’s tone suggests a patriotic identification with the ‘English colours’. In labelling the French as foreigners, there is an unspoken agreement between the boy and the farmer that England and Wales are not strangers to one another, but form mutual, constituent parts of Britain.
Dan Rhys: ‘Peryglon Pencaer, neu Ffwdan y Ffrancod yn Abergwaun’ (1894)
A few years after James’s comparatively faithful adaptation of the Battle of Fishguard for historical fiction, Dan Rhys (1851-1914) published ‘Peryglon Pencaer, neu Ffwdan y Ffrancod yn Abergwaun’ in 17 parts in Papur Pawb. Published between 1893 and 1917, this Welsh language newspaper from Caernarfon enjoyed a Wales-wide circulation.[40] News reports were only of minor importance for Papur Pawb, as it focused on humorous content and offered a strong literary section. The paper advertised ‘Peryglon Pencaer’ as ‘[n]ofel gyffrous ac ardderchog’ (‘an exciting and illustrious novel’) during its serial run and following completion listed the title among other ‘[rh]amantau cyflawn’ (‘completed romances’), thus indicating that the story was first and foremost intended as entertainment rather than historical truth.[41] While Rhys’s name did not appear alongside the weekly instalments, a separate profile on his life and professional accomplishments as newspaper journalist and secretary of the National Eisteddfod also identified him as the author. What is more, according to this editorial, Rhys also inherited a direct personal family connection with the French invasion:
[U]n o’r ystraeon cyntaf a glywodd gwrthddrych ein hysgrif [sef Rhys], pan yn blentyn, ydoedd ei nain yn adrodd gyda chryn ddoniolwch hanes glaniad y Ffrancod yn Abergwaun—sef “Peryglon Pencaer,” sydd yn ymddangos ar hyn o bryd yn “Papur Pawb”—a’i phrofiad hi ei hunan fel aelod “Catrawd y shawls cochion.”[42]
(One of the first stories that the object of our essay [i.e. Rhys] heard as a child was his grandmother’s humorous account of the French Invasion at Fishguard—namely ‘Peryglon Pencaer,’ which appears currently in ‘Papur Pawb’—and her own experience as a member of the ‘Red Shawls Regiment’.)
Possibly inspired by the quality of Rhys’s grandmother’s spirited tales of her youth, the story takes generous artistic license with the events around the French invasion of Fishguard. Rather than attempting to retrace the steps of the invading forces, the novel contains a jumble of smugglers who also engage in wrecking and piracy, melodramatic kidnappings and marriage plots. In addition to the outrageous plot, the narrator frequently ponders the state of the British nation and Wales’s role in it, in the past and present, through a creative reinterpretation of post-revolutionary France as ‘ein brodyr Celtaidd ni, or ochr arall i Gulfor Ffrainc’ (transl. ‘our Celtic brother on the other side of the Channel’).[43]
In contrast to James’s fictionalisation of the north Pembrokeshire coastline as protective land that shelters its dwellers from outside attacks, Rhys produces the opposite impression in ‘Peryglon Pengaer’. Instead of providing for and nurturing its inhabitants, this is a treacherous coastline where
bron yr oll o arfordir daneddog, creigiog, a pheryglus Penfro, yn llawn o draethellau peryglus i forwyr, o greigiau a man ynysoedd sydd wedi eu melldithio filoedd o weithiau gan forwyr, ac o ogofeydd mawrion a throellog, fu’n anwyl gan smyglars a morladron yn yr hen amser gynt.[44]
(‘almost all of the jagged, rocky and dangerous Pembrokeshire coast is full of perilous sandbanks for sailors, of rocks and skerries which mariners have cursed thousands of times, and of large and winding caves that were dear to smugglers and pirates in the olden times.’)
Throughout ‘Peryglon Pencaer’, the land appears to work against the protagonist, Capten Huws, as he is shipwrecked just off Strumble Head in a storm and subsequently cast ashore with another crew mate who is promptly murdered by the pirate smugglers who had lured them into the treacherous waters.[45] After Huws is taken prisoner and brought to their central hideout, a seemingly fortified farm building on the Pencaer Peninsula, he undertakes several breakout attempts before eventually discovering his presumed-dead fiancée and her maidservant also in their clutches.[46]
In a survey of Victorian Gothic tales set around the Cornish coast, Shelley Trower observes that Cornwall is frequently represented as a pre-modern location which feels decidedly ‘un-English or foreign’.[47] The same holds true for the symbolic function of the Pembrokeshire coastline in ‘Peryglon Pencaer’. In her groundbreaking study Welsh Gothic, Jane Aaron argues the perilous real-life smuggling activities evidenced along almost the entirety of the Welsh coast also occasioned their association with Gothic imagery in folk traditions and works of fiction.[48] The pervasiveness of the wreckers in ‘Peryglon Pencaer’ represents a throwback to an age when this peripheral region lay beyond the long arm of centralised British law. Already the Welsh setting of the story signals its ‘un-Englishness’, but with the marked difference that the wreckers are also perceived as a foreign disturbance from within the Welsh community:
Fleming oedd Niclas, a Flemings oedd y rhan fwyaf o’i griw, neu felly y clywais, er nad oes neb wyr yn iawn beth oeddynt, oblegid ni ddaeth neb erioed o’u crafangau yn fyw i allu dyweyd yr hanes.[49]
(‘Niclas was a Fleming, and Flemings were the majority of his crew, although nobody really knows what they are because nobody ever escaped from their claws to relate their origin.’)
The underlying implications regarding Celticity and ancient Brytaniaeth are therefore multi-layered. In her discussion of Daphne Du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn (1936), Wallace argues that ‘the novel suggests, the wreckers are a thing of the barbaric past’.[50] Similarly, in ‘Peryglon Pencaer’, the Flemings represent barbaric, historical interlopers whose presence had been encouraged following the Anglo-Norman conquest and who keep a stranglehold on the local indigenous population even centuries after their initial settlement. Similar to the sinister dangers of the Cornish coast observed by Trower, this Pembrokeshire coast is an unforgiving and treacherous terrain so long as the foreign Flemings and their corrupting influence remain in place. In this sense, Prydeindod as a supposed unifier becomes a hollow substitute for Brytaniaeth as it signifies the conquest of a land by a people who have no claim to it.
Uniquely among the three novels discussed here, and possibly owing to its Welsh-language background, the French invaders in ‘Peryglon Pencaer’ restore the locals to freedom – not as intended from a geographically distant government, but instead from the immediately present smuggler bandits. The priorities of the locals originate in a sense of immediate Welsh control of the land rather than a faraway, abstract British governance. However, the invaders’ attempt at stirring the Welsh population to rebellion fails because ultimately ‘y mae’r Cymry yn sicr o gymeryd plaid y Saeson yn erbyn y Ffrancod’ (‘the Welsh are certain to join the English against the French’) not out of loyalty, but due to a deep-seated suspicion of the invaders, even though they may be fellow-Celts.[51] Based on this awareness of a shared ancestry between the invaders and the invaded, the narrator stresses that the Welsh retained their ethnic traits, whereas it is no longer possible to say who or what the ‘Saeson’ are following several invasions by Danes, Swedes and Normans.[52] Here Rhys follows a pattern in Scott’s historical fiction which Lukács styles ‘the “middle way”’ of English history, in which ‘the most violent vicissitudes of class struggle have always finally calmed down into a glorious “middle way”’, forging a nation that rises above the violence and bloodshed by uniting the best elements of the opposing factions into something new for the greater good.[53] This suggests that Rhys clearly distinguishes between the still Celtic Welsh, the true, ancient Britons, from the serially invaded, conquered and racially-mixed English. Similar to James’s novel, ‘Peryglon Pencaer’ therefore lays claim to Brytaniaeth, through a racialised discourse. The fundamental difference between the two, however, lies in their respective evaluation not just of the English, who through the centuries have mellowed into a benign neighbour, but, above all, of the Pembrokeshire Flemings. Whereas James blurs family lines from ‘above’ and ‘below’ the Landsker line, the Welsh-language novel excludes the southern population from belonging to Wales, whilst identifying the English as a hybrid people. Based on this internal logic of Wales’s original claim to the land, the Welsh are loyal to the Crown not out of political or hereditary conviction, but due to a sense of stewardship of the land they live on. In other words, Prydeindod as a concept of common stewardship over the Isles is founded on each nation’s retained right over their ancestral land which, in Wales, is expressed as Brytaniaeth. For that reason, the Flemings as a late-arrived group of settlers represent a perpetual strange people on strange land.
While ‘Peryglon Pencaer’ equates the ancient Britons with the modern Welsh, the novel is much more ambivalent when it comes to recent political allegiances. Following the French Revolution, Wales was open to ideas of ‘cultural and political revolution’ without ‘experience[ing] mass mobilisation’ as occurred in Ireland, Scotland or England.[54] The novel reflects this ambivalence in the narrator’s commentary, which is largely based to historical hindsight rather than agreement with the original revolutionary principles:
Ac y mae hanes Ffrainc am y can’ mlynedd sydd bron wedi pasio er glaniad y Ffrancod yn Abergwaun yn profi tuIwnt i amheuaeth, debygem, ein bod ni yn well allan fel hyd yn nod y lleiaf a gwanaf o’r ‘partneriaid’ Prydeinig […] nag a fuasem fel ‘partner’ i’n cyd-Geltiaid o Ffrainc.[55]
(‘Nearly one hundred years of France’s history since the French invasion of Fishguard have proven beyond doubt that we are probably better off even as the smallest and weakest of the British ‘partners’ […] than we would have been as ‘partner’ to our fellow-Celts of France.’)
While acknowledging that late-Victorian Wales is politically and economically perceived as the weakest of the British nations, the narrator remains deeply suspicious of social improvement through invasion or insurrection. This again tallies with the above idea that Rhys shares Scott’s ‘middle way’ ideology as Welsh progress is presented as a constant process of negotiation between the involved parties where all participants are expected to find a compromise. In this sense, the commentary provides a reality check for the revolutionaries’ anachronistic and fictional arguments in favour of rebellion as laid out by Colonel Tate:
[O]s na ddaw’r Cymry, yr Ysgotiaid, a’r Gwyddelod allan yI awr i gynnorthwyo FIrainc i osod ei throed ar warau y Saeson ffroenuchel, […] y byddwollie ichlli eich iaith, eich, teimladau cenedlgarol, a’ch hunaniaeth fel pobl a’r wahan i’r Saeson, […] ac na chlywir byth mwyach son am Gymro, Cymru, na Chymraeg.[56]
(‘If the Welsh, Scots and Irish will not turn out in support of France to stomp out the wrongs of the haughty English […] you will lose your language, your national feeling and your identity as a people separate from the English, […] and never will there be heard any talk of the Welshman, Wales nor the Welsh language.’)
Colonel Tate’s triple warning against the loss of the people, country and language, if English domination continued unchecked, reflects the same arguments in support of Welsh Home Rule as raised by movements such as Cymru Fydd with their slogan ‘Fy iaith, fy ngwlad, fy nghenedl!’(‘My language, my country, my people!’) a century later.[57] However, Tate’s unhistorical appeal to pan-Celtic sentiment, not just between the Welsh and the French, but also the Irish and Scottish falls on the deaf ears of the protagonists. This mirrors Cymru Fydd’s own fractured relationship with Scotland and Ireland in relation to Welsh territory. Whereas the former is treated with suspicion for ‘Scotch capitalist’ involvement in the development and exploitation of the Welsh coalfields, Ireland enjoys the unfair advantage of ‘a broad channel to divide [them] from the inroads of a stronger nation’.[58]
Finally, ‘Peryglon Pencaer’ not only acts as a reflection on historical invasions and Wales’s role between two larger imperial forces, but also references contemporary events unfolding on Madagascar over the summer and autumn of 1896 when the novel was serialised in Papur Pawb. It is perhaps in this instance where the story most overtly overlaps with invasion fiction. In 1883, France had invaded the Merina Kingdom on Madagascar with the ambition of establishing a French colony. While the 1886 Franco-Hova Treaty recognised the kingdom’s continued independence, France controlled the country’s foreign policy, thus essentially establishing a protectorate. During the summer of 1894, France accused Britain of meddling in their imperial affairs by aiding the Hova with secret deliveries of weapons in order to rebel against French rule.[59] The discovery of the weapon deliveries caused a major diplomatic incident which threatened to pull Britain and France into war against another. As the writing and publication of ‘Peryglon Pencaer’ coincided with the diplomatic crisis, the narrator imagines the possibility of having played an involuntary, if significant role similar to that of Harriet Beecher-Stowe several decades before:
Onid dylanwad ‘Caban F’ewyrth Twm’ gynt a brysurodd y rhyfel echrydus rhwng y Gogleddwyr a’r Deheuwyr yn yr Unol Daleithau? Wel, ie, ac y mae meddwl pa mor agos fu ‘Peryglon Pencaer’ i ddwyn oamgylch wrthdarawiad rhwng dwy o genedloedd cryfaf y bydysawd yr wythnosau diweddaf hyn yn peri i’r awdwr ddechreu teimlo yn eiddileddus o’i alluoedd a’i bwysigrwydd, ac wrth gofio ffeithiau fel hyn y mae yn gallu sylweddoli pa mor fawr yw dylanwad nofelydd.[60]
(‘Did not the influence of the earlier Uncle Tom’s Cabin expedite the terrible war between the Northerners and Southerners of the United States? Yes, indeed, and to think how close ‘Peryglon Pencaer’ has come to causing a conflict between the two strongest nations of Christendom in the most recent weeks makes the author suspicious of his abilities and influence, and upon remembering facts such as these, one is able to realise a novelist’s great influence.’)
It is at this juncture in ‘Peryglon Pencaer’, where history and present meet along the contested fringe territory of the Pembrokeshire coastline of the past and the Merina kingdom of 1894 that Wales’s cultural otherness within an Anglocentric Britain overlaps most overtly with imperial otherness of colonial spaces overseas. This reflects the similar metaphorical function of the Cornish coast as ‘semi-domestic kind of imperial destination’ in works of Victorian Gothic fiction where, according to Trower, ‘invasion […] serves effectively to replace Cornwall with Africa’.[61] This is not to say that Wales or the Welsh coast represent a colonised space in the same way that Britain and France raced each other in colonising the global south as seen here in the specific case of Madagascar. Rather, in reflecting how imperial rivalry between European powers promotes armed conflict and the suffering of innocent bystanders, Rhys’s ‘Peryglon Pencaer’ understands itself as part of a writerly tradition, including Beecher-Stowe’s explicitly named Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which literature speaks on behalf of suppressed or otherwise side-lined communities.
Gwyn Meredith: ‘Gwenny Vaughan, or The Fishguard Invasion’ (1896-97)
The third and final of the historical invasion novels under consideration is Gwyn Meredith’s ‘Gwenny Vaughan, or The Fishguard Invasion’ serialised in the Cardiff Times between 19 December 1896 and 17 April 1897, thus coinciding with the centenary. The first two instalments include a historicised map of the terrain between Fishguard and the Pencaer Peninsula, thus signalling geographical and, therefore, historical accuracy of the story, as noted by Johnson.[62] However, Meredith takes significant artistic license in his characters and their respective involvement before, during and after the invasion. ’Gwenny Vaughan’ tells the story of the French Invasion from the perspective of the local population, the militia men, and a handful of Irish smugglers who have helped the invaders achieve their successful landing. Following Lukács’s observations regarding the utilisation of the historical event, ‘Gwenny Vaughan’ arguably stands in the tradition of Scott’s historical fiction in the sense that the story is more invested in recreating the feeling of the period rather than strive for a detailed recreation of events, the so-called ‘bird’s-eye view of the philosophy of history’, and that characters are already fully formed at the outset.[63] ‘Gwenny Vaughan’ keeps its historical actors and events largely in the background or literally views them from a distance, as is the case when a Fishguard contingent goes spying on the French encampment, and does not dare approach the enemy, but instead stays hidden among the heather.[64] The invasion as well as the titular heroine are little more than MacGuffins. The invasion narrative comes to a premature end by the tenth out of eighteen instalments as it functions as a means in Denny’s revenge rather than an event in and of itself.[65] Similarly, Gwenny is objectified either as a prize to be won in matrimony or as a tool to effect revenge.
In significant contrast to James’s fictional protagonist Daniel in The Fishguard Invasion, who narrates his own story and is involved in all major developments throughout, Meredith’s titular heroine, Gwenny Vaughan, only features in relation to the male characters around her, and there is virtually no insight into her perspective of the events in which she is involved. She is engaged to Harry Lloyd, a young officer from Fishguard, whose personal enemy, the pirate and smuggler Captain Walter Denny, plans to kidnap, marry and kill her to exact revenge for the death of his father. Although the novel carries her name, Gwenny has little agency or presence throughout. She either acts on orders given to her, or remains in the background until the action circles back to her as part of the revenge plot in the second half of the novel. In fact, it is the sighting of the French ships that prompts her initial departure from the action, albeit by a brave footrace, as Harry Lloyd sends her running nearly 5 miles across open country from Garn Fawr, down to Goodwick Sands and up again to Fishguard to raise the alarm:
On she sped, with almost the fleetness of an antelope. The meridian of Treviseg [sic] is speedily left behind and Taibach is passed in an incredibly short space of time. Then bending slightly down the slope she flies past the dip in the ridge called the Lady’s Gate, from the old tradition that the ghost of a lady in white, of whom Pencaer legends speak, haunts the spot. On and on […] the young girl swiftly flew above Trehowel and then Brestgarn is gained, when leaving Llanunda [sic] to the left she sped around the tall Carn Unda [sic] in the neighbourhood of Penyrhiew [sic].[66]
As a creature of the land, Gwenny has little difficulty traversing the difficult terrain at great speed, more animal than human, thus signalling great intimacy with the location which allows her to act on instinct and so win time. In contrast to Daniel in The Fishuard Invasion, who compares himself to the indigenous and very common hare, the narrator likens Gwenny to an exotic antelope.[67] Gwenny’s metaphorical transformation into a prestigious game animal that is to equal measures exotic and sexualised signals her exceptional social status, whilst marking her as a single man’s prized possession.[68]
Gwenny’s footrace against the clock is reminiscent of Daniel’s breakneck progress across country in The Fishguard Invasion. Just as James fictionalised the Pencaer Peninsula as a place where people live in a symbiotic relationship with the land, Meredith creates a living and lived-in landscape, imbued with centuries’ old traditions, folk stories and knowledge about the lay of the land. In fact, the narration personifies the land to such a degree that it effectively displaces the heroine from her own story:
Penainglas [sic], the south-western horn of the bay, pushed itself boldly forward into the dark blue waters. Westward, at the extreme point of Pencaer, was the grey, frowning, and tempest-washed Strumble Head, against which the sea in its wrath broke over with dash and thundering roar, only to retreat in clouds of foam, apparently baffled and worsted in the conflict; yet ever renewing its attacks on the mighty headland that has withstood its buffettings for ages.[69]
Similar to The Fishguard Invasion, the coastline in ‘Gwenny Vaughan’ serves as a frontier between the dwellers on land and anyone approaching via the sea, with the cliffs forming a natural protective, albeit porous fortress. This barrier, however, only serves its function so long as nobody uses their deep knowledge of the terrain to betray its weaknesses to an invading enemy. As is to be expected, this is exactly what happens as Captain Denny uses the knowledge he has gained of secret coves from working with the local smugglers when he signals the invaders from Pencaer and so allows them to launch their campaign.
While the betrayal plot line looks like symbolic terrain already covered by James and to an extent ‘Peryglon Pencaer’, Meredith weaves a thread of devious quasi-colonials around the invasion narrative and, thus, extends its horizons from a short-lived local to a multi-generational global affair. In ‘Gwenny Vaughan’ it is the duplicitous Captain Denny who successfully guides the French to their landing spot at Carreg Wastad. He is the offspring of a fictional Irish pirate who, in the novel, was the captain of the real Black Prince, the last pirate ship to attack Fishguard:
It was widely suspected that the Black Prince had crossed the Atlantic […]. The West India islands and the Spanish Main, off the Mexican Coast, were the common hunting grounds of the Black Prince.[70]
During the American War of Independence, the historical Black Prince had been commissioned by Benjamin Franklin to sail out of France and capture as many British prisoners as possible so that he could exchange them for imprisoned American soldiers.[71] In linking the main 1797 invasion narrative with the verified earlier attack on Fishguard in 1779, the novel equates coloniality with duplicity, danger, immorality and threats against the hierarchical order between Britannia, including Wales, and its colonial possessions overseas. In terms of racialised prejudice against colonial spaces, the novel treads common ground with Victorian fiction across all genres. However, as observed above, Wales’s peripheral location on the British mainland creates fuzzy borders. In her study of Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of the Seven Stars (1903), Trower observes that ‘Cornwall’s peripheral position as neither quite inside nor outside the imperial mainland of England allows apparently poisonous atmospheres from other, far flung regions overseas to invade’.[72] ‘Gwenny Vaughan’ arguably utilises the Pembrokeshire coastline to the same extent and imbues it with a symbolic liminal function similar to Stoker’s Cornwall. Consequently, the Atlantic acts as one continuous, shared space with Pencaer and the Caribbean as its respective poles. Rather than separating homeland and colony, this vast body of water thus enables ‘the return movement, of foreign bodies and objects, often experienced as an invasion’.[73] Such an inversion of the Atlantic from border to global highway, therefore, poses a threat and destabilises imperial thinking in which colonial space is held only at arm’s length.
‘Gwenny Vaughan’ ultimately complicates the imperial perspective, as Captain Denny is of Irish extraction and so stands in marked contrast to Welsh pirates such as the Pembrokeshire native Bartholomew Roberts (1682-1722) who, despite his infamy, is to this day venerated as a type of folk hero.[74] By foregrounding Denny’s innate or hereditary villainy rather than celebrating him as a swashbuckling buccaneer or an anti-hero in the style of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Long John Silver of histrionic Treasure Island (1883) fame, the novel turns his homeland Ireland into a quasi-colonial space burdened with the same negative connotations as the British colonies in the global south. This is no coincidence as the events in ‘Gwenny Vaughan’ unfold so shortly before the French landing in Ireland in June 1797, the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and Ireland’s subsequent formal integration into the United Kingdom in 1801. Ultimately, however, order and imperial thinking are restored as ‘Gwenny Vaughan’ disposes not just of the French invaders, but also of the equally unwelcome Captain Denny, who fails to exact his revenge. Unable to lure his enemy, Harry Lloyd, to his death, Denny’s last attempt at escape ultimately falters and ‘[w]ith a wild whoop, in which there was concentrated as much of baffled rage and of despair as of braggart defiance, the pirate captain turned his face towards the abyss and leaped outward and downward—into Eternity’.[75] Half a century earlier, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) had another colonial, the Creole Bertha Rochester, leap to her death with a yell, thus associating coloniality with raw emotion, immorality and the loss of rational thought, none of which could be tolerated on British land. It is with the Irishman’s leap from the cliffs that Wales consolidates its Prydeindod against a pan-Celtic sense of solidarity with the nation on the other side of the Irish Sea.
Conclusion
Since the popularisation of the historical novel and invasion fiction in the nineteenth century, fictional treatments of the Battle of Fishguard have experienced several transformations. More recent titles include the Young Adult novel The Black Legion (2008) by William Vaughan, Trick of Fate: Connel O’Keeffe & The Pen Caer Legacy by Patricia Watkins, and Jemima Nicholas – Heroine of the Fishguard Invasion by Siân Lewis both published in 2012.[76] Whereas Trick of Fate follows a young Irish actor who gets mistaken for an Irish Republican in the invasion of Fishguard and eventually ends up involved in the subsequent French invasion of Ireland, the heavily illustrated novella Jemima Nicholas makes the historical events palatable for young readers as it follows the formidable cobbler in her pursuit of the invaders. Even more recently, on the occasion of the 225thanniversary of the invasion in 2022, the community-led Theatr Gwaun in Fishguard double-billed two short plays, ‘The Last Invasion’ by Matthew Sturgis and ‘Conquest of the World’ by Rob Taylor, thus keeping the local story-telling tradition of its own history very much alive.[77] These are just some of the latest examples showing the adaptability of historical events to contemporary interests and tastes.
In the context of the late nineteenth century, Britain had continuously and successfully expanded its global empire against fierce indigenous resistance and despite aggressive competition from rivals such as France, Russia or, in the latter years, a freshly unified Germany. The combined forces of rebellion and rivalry gave rise to a phase of invasion scares in the domestic and overseas territories. As a result, British writers transformed contemporary global politics and worries into invasion fiction set either in the immediate present or near future, whilst also re-evaluating the past through the lens of the historical novel. Broadly exploring the emergence and development of modern Britain from the eighteenth century onwards, late-Victorian historical novels about the Battle of Fishguard celebrate a fairly insignificant and patchily documented historical event. It is perhaps the latter factor that contributed to the greatly varied literary treatment of the subject. In an interview with John Barnie dating from 1987, Raymond Williams observed about the motivation behind his own epic historical novel, People of the Black Mountains (1987):
People have asked me a lot, which is it, a history or a novel? Well, it is unambiguously a novel, but using history. For there is a sense, I would say, in which history which is both recorded and unrecorded can only find its way through personal substance if it then becomes a novel, a story.[78]
In this respect, the historical novel from and about Wales before and since Williams finds creative ways for reinterpreting the past, but also restore voice and agency to overlooked or marginalised lives. Whereas Margaret E. James uses adolescent country boys and peasants to ponder Wales’s place in the British union, Daniel Rhys explores the anachronistic ethics and morality on which the French based their arguments for invading their largest imperial rival, whilst Gwyn Meredith grapples with the threat posed by unruly colonials on the British mainland. In the disguise of an established literary genre such as the historical novel, these works of fiction afforded their authors the possibility of exploring difficult themes of their own times, most pressingly the state of Welsh and British nationality, by removing the discussion to a heroized and mythologised past. Whilst concluding that Wales as a border territory was under threat from malign outside forces, none of them identified the aggressor as English, thus ultimately confirming the ‘middle-way’ and status quo of Wales’s place in the Union.
[1] R. Quinault, ‘The French Invasion of Pembrokeshire in 1797: A Bicentennial Assessment’, Welsh History Review= Cylchgrawn Hanes Cymru 19:4 (1999), 618-642, p. 624. The dates of birth and death of William Tate are disputed. While several sources claim c.1728 as his birth year, among them John D. Ahlstrom, E. H. Stuart Jones, and the US National Archives, whereas Richard Rose cites co-temporary French sources that date Tate’s birth to around 1744: J. D. Ahlstrom, ‘Captain and Chef de Brigade William Tate: South Carolina Adventurer’, The South Carolina Historical Magazine 88:4 (Oct. 1987), 183-191, p. 183; E. H. Stuart Jones, The Last Invasion of Britain, (Cardiff, 1950), p. 250; ‘To George Washington from William Tate, 3 August 1789,’ Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-03-02-0218, [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, vol. 3, 15 June 1789–5 September 1789, ed. Dorothy Twohig. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989, 374–377.]; R. Rose, ‘The French at Fishguard: Fact, Fiction and Folklore’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, New Series, 9 (2003), 74-105, p. 77.
[2] Among this group of strategists who hoped to goad discontented British peasantry and labouring orders into overthrowing the monarchy were the exiled Irish revolutionary Wolfe Tone and Lazare Hoche, ‘a prominent General in the French Republican Army and one-time rival of Napoleon Bonaparte’: J. D. Ahlstrom, ‘Captain and Chef de Brigade William Tate’, p. 187-8.
[3] John Campbell, ‘From Lord Cawdor to the Duke of Portland’, 149-150, p.150, in D. Salmon, ‘The French Invasion of Pembrokeshire in 1797: Official Documents, Contemporary Letters, and Early Narratives’, West Wales Historical Records: The Annual Magazine of the Historical Society of West Wales 14 (1929), 129-207; Quinault, ‘The French Invasion of Pembrokeshire in 1797’, pp. 625, Ahlstrom, ‘Captain and Chef de Brigade William Tate’, p. 190.
[4] Rose, ‘The French at Fishguard’, pp. 83-88; War-Office, List of the Officers of the Several Regiments and Corps of Fencible Cavalry and Infantry: of the Officers of the Militia; of the Corps and Troops of the Gentlemen and Yeomenry; and of the Corps and Companies of Volunteer Infantry, 5th edition (1797), p.240.
[5] J. Kirk, ‘Figuring the Landscape: Writing the Topographies of Community and Place’, Literature & History, 3rd series 15.1, 1-17, p. 6.
[6] K. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, 1997), p.xi-xiii.
[7] R. Maxwell, ‘The Historical Novel’, The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 3: The Nineteenth-Century Novel 1820-1880. (Oxford: Oxford UP 2012), eds. Jenny Bourne Taylor, John Kucich, Patrick Parrinder, pp. 59-75, p. 60.
[8] See L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New Haven and London, 1992/2009).
[9] M. Hughes and H. Wood, ‘Crimson Nightmares: Tales of Invasion and Fears of Revolution in Early Twentieth-Century Britain’, Contemporary British History 28:3 (2014), 294-317, p. 297. DOI: 10.1080/13619462.2014.941817
[10] G. Lukács, The Historical Novel (Boston, 1983), p. 32; M. E. James, The Fishguard Invasion by the French in 1797 (London, 1892).
[11] [D. Rhys], ‘Peryglon Pencaer, neu Ffwdan y Ffrancod yn Abergwaun’, Papur Pawb, 14 July – 3 November 1894. All translations by the author, unless stated otherwise.
[12] M. Gwyn. ‘Gwenny Vaughan, Or The Fishguard Invasion’, Cardiff Times, 19 December 1896 – 17 April 1897.
[13] J. de Groot, The Historical Novel (Florence: Taylor & Francis Group, 2009), p. 94.
[14] Compare: R. Singer, ‘Bicultural Geographies: Narrating Anglo-Welsh Identities in the Novels of Allen Raine’, International Journal of Welsh Writing in English 3:1 (October 2015), 102-122, p. 102.
[15] K. Sutherland, ‘“Where History says little, Fiction may say much” (Anna Barbauld): the historical novel in women’s hands in the mid-twentieth century’ in Georgette Heyer, History and Historical Fiction, (London: UCL Press, 2021), ed. Samantha J. Rayner, Kim Wilkins, 17-35, p. 19.
[16] Margaret Ellen James’s historical novel is predated by a short story published in the popular miscellany The Red Dragon in 1885: A Native, ‘How the French Fared at Fishguard’, The Red Dragon: The National Magazine of Wales 7:3 (1885), 235-245.
[17] James, The Fishguard Invasion by the French in 1797, pp. 1, 44.
[18] G. Lukács, The Historical Novel, p. 33.
[19] J. C. Simmons, ‘The Novelist as Historian: An Unexplored Tract of Victorian Historiography’, Victorian Studies 14:3 (March 1971), 293-305, p. 295; cf. B. Melman, ‘Claiming the Nation’s Past: The Invention of an Anglo-Saxon Tradition’, Journal of Contemporary History 26:3/4 (September 1991), 575-595, pp. 576-7.
[20] D. Wallace, Female Gothic Histories : Gender, History and the Gothic (Cardiff, 2013), p. 1.
[21] H. White, ‘The Historical Text as Literary Artefact’, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978), p. 84
[22] S. L. Johnson, Historical Fiction: A Guide to the Genre. Genreflecting Advisory Series. Diana T. Herald, ed. (Westport, Connecticut and London, 2005), pp. 9-10.
[23] James, The Fishguard Invasion by the French in 1797, p. 9.
[24] James, The Fishguard Invasion by the French in 1797, p. 9.
[25] qtd. in James, The Fishguard Invasion by the French in 1797, p. 16.
[26] B. Jenkins, Between Wales and England: Anglophone Welsh Writing of the Eighteenth Century, (Cardiff, 2017), p. 19.
[27] M. Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536-1966. Vol. 197. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1977); C. Williams, Sugar and Slate (Aberystwyth, 2002); J. Aaron and Ch.Williams, Postcolonial Wales (Cardiff, 2005); C. Williams, N. Evans and P. O’Leary, eds. A Tolerant Nation?: Exploring Ethnic Diversity in Wales (Cardiff, 2015); S. Brooks, Why Wales Never Was: The Failure of Welsh Nationalism (Cardiff, 2017); A. Price, Wales –The First and Final Colony (Tal-y-bont, 2018); S. Brooks, Hanes Cymry – Lleiafrifoedd Ethnig yn y Gwareiddiad Cymraeg (Cardiff, 2020).
[28] G. A. Williams, When Was Wales? (London, 1991), pp. 141-2; J. Davies, A History of Wales (London, 1990/2007), pp. 451-3.
[29] Melman, ‘Claiming the Nation’s Past’, p. 578.
[30] James, The Fishguard Invasion by the French in 1797, p. 204.
[31] J. Davies, A History of Wales, p. 111.
[32] E. Laws, The History of Little England Beyond Wales, and the Non-Kymric Colony Settled in Pembrokeshire (London, 1888), pp. 99, 114, 120, 413.
[33] James, The Fishguard Invasion by the French in 1797, p. 204.
[34] James, The Fishguard Invasion by the French in 1797, p. 205.
[35] James added a sequel to the invasion plot which covers the breakout of several French captive soldiers from prison in Pembroke mainly assisted by the narrator’s two female cousins on his Flemish mother’s side of the family. However, while Daniel calls the sisters’ conduct ‘unpatriotic’ (p. 234), at no point does he link it with their Flemish background.
[36] cf. Colley, Britons, 1992; cf. Melman, ‘Claiming the Nation’s Past’, p. 583.
[37] Quinault, ‘The French Invasion of Pembrokeshire in 1797’, p. 641.
[38] James, The Fishguard Invasion by the French in 1797, pp. 46, 79.
[39] James, The Fishguard Invasion by the French in 1797, pp. 47-49.
[40] ‘Papur Pawb’, Welsh Newspapers Online, National Library of Wales. n.d. https://newspapers.library.wales/browse/3585945
[41] ‘Peryglon Pencaer’, Carnarvon and Denbigh Herald, and North and South Wales Independent, 12 October 1894, p. 7; ‘Ail gyfrol “Papur Pawb”’, Carnarvon and Denbigh Herald, and North and South Wales Independent, 9 August 1895, p. 2.
[42] ‘Mae son amdanynt’, Papur Pawb, 22 September 1894, pp.4-5, p.4.
[43] [Rhys], ‘Peryglon Pencaer’, Papur Pawb, 14 July 1894, pp. 9-11, p. 9.
[44] [Rhys], ‘Peryglon Pencaer’, 14 July 1894, p. 9.
[45] [Rhys], ‘Peryglon Pencaer’, 14 July 1894, p. 10.
[46] [Rhys], ‘Peryglon Pencaer’, Papur Pawb, 18 August 1894, pp. 9-11.
[47] S. Trower. ‘On the Cliff Edge of England: Tourism and Imperial Gothic in Cornwall’, Victorian Literature and Culture 40:1 (2021), 199-214, p. 208.
[48] J. Aaron, Welsh Gothic (Cardiff, 2013) p. 14.
[49] [Rhys], ‘Peryglon Pencaer’, 14 July 1894, p. 9.
[50] Wallace, Female Gothic Histories, p. 141.
[51] [Rhys], ‘Peryglon Pencaer’, Papur Pawb, 28 July 1894, pp. 9-11, p. 9.
[52] [Rhys], ‘Peryglon Pencaer’, Papur Pawb, 22 September 1894, pp. 9-10, p. 9.
[53] G. Lukács, The Historical Novel, p. 32.
[54] M. Löffler, Political Pamphlets and Sermons from Wales 1790-1806 (Cardiff, 2014), xi-viv, p. xi.
[55] [Rhys], ‘Peryglon Pencaer’, 22 September 1894, p. 9.
[56] [Rhys], ‘Peryglon Pencaer’, Papur Pawb, 29 September 1894, 9-10, p. 9.
[57] A Celt, Cymru fydd Gymru rydd, or The National Movement in Wales (Carnarvon, 1895), p. 18.
[58] A Celt, Cymru fydd Gymru rydd, pp. 5, 17.
[59] H. Deschamps, ‘Madagascar and France’ transl. Y. Brett, in The Cambridge History of Africa Volume 6 from 1870 to 1905 (Cambridge, 1985/2001), ed. R. Oliver and G. N. Sanderson, 521-38, pp. 524-5, 529.
[60] [Rhys], ‘Peryglon Pencaer’, Papur Pawb, 27 October 1894, 9-10, p. 9.
[61] Trower, ‘On the Cliff Edge of England’, p. 210.
[62] G. Meredith, ‘Gwenny Vaughan, Or The Fishguard Invasion’, Cardiff Times, 19 February 1897, 2, p. 2; 26 December, 3, p. 3; S. L. Johnson, p. 10
[63] G. Lukács, The Historical Novel, pp. 32, 38.
[64] G. Meredith, ‘Gwenny Vaughan, Or The Fishguard Invasion’, Cardiff Times, 2 January1897, 3, p. 3.
[65] Either by editorial design or coincidence, the instalment chronicling the surrender of the French was published on 13 February 1897, just a few days short of the centenary. G. Meredith, ‘Gwenny Vaughan, Or The Fishguard Invasion’, Cardiff Times, 13 February 1897, 3, p. 3.
[66] G. Meredith, ‘Gwenny Vaughan, Or The Fishguard Invasion’, Cardiff Times, 26 December 1896, 3, p. 3.
[67] James, The Fishguard Invasion by the French in 1797, p. 68.
[68] T. Wyatt, ‘1’ in Selected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt (New York: Routledge, 2003), ed. H. Scott, 21, p. 21.
[69] G. Meredith, ‘Gwenny Vaughan, Or The Fishguard Invasion’, Cardiff Times, 19 December 1896, 2, p. 2.
[70] G. Meredith, ‘Gwenny Vaughan, Or The Fishguard Invasion’, Cardiff Times, 16 January 1897, 3, p. 3.
[71] E. J. Dolin, Franklin’s Privateers‘, Sea History 180 (Autumn 2022), 18-21, p. 19.
[72] Trower, ‘On the Cliff Edge of England’, p. 200.
[73] Trower, ‘On the Cliff Edge of England’, p. 200.
[74] C. Johnson, The history and lives of all the most notorious pirates, and their crews, from Capt. Avery, who first settled at Madagascar, to Capt. John Gow, and James Williams, his Lieutenant, Etc. who were hang’d at Execution Dock, June 11, 1725, for Piracy and Murther, and afterwards hang’d in Chains between Blackwall and Deptford: giving a more full and true Account than any yet Published, of all their Murthers, Piracies, Maroonings, Places of Refuge, and Ways of Living. Adorn’d with Twenty Beautiful Cuts, being the Representation of each Pirate: To which is prefix’d, An Abstract of the Laws against Piracy. (1725: London) p. 92.
[75] G. Meredith, ‘Gwenny Vaughan, Or The Fishguard Invasion’, Cardiff Times, 10 Apr 1897, 3, p. 3.
[76] W. Vaughan, The Black Legion (Tal-y-bont, 2008); P. Watkins, Trick of Fate: Connel O’Keeffe & The Pen Caer Legacy (Fishguard, 2012); S. Lewis, Jemima Nicholas – Heroine of the Fishguard Invasion (Llanrwst, 2012).
[77] ‘The Last Invasion and Conquest’, Theatr Gwaun, Fishguard, April 2022. https://theatrgwaun.com/production/the-last-invasion-and-conquest/
[78] R. Williams, ‘People of the Black Mountains’ in Who Speaks for Wales? National, Culture, Identity (Cardiff, 2003), ed. Daniel Williams, 165-74, p. 174.
