Iolo Morganwg by William Owen Pughe
One of the main attractions at this week’s National Eisteddfod in the Vale of Glamorgan will be the Gorsedd of the Bards of the Isle of Britain. The institution was invented two hundred and twenty years ago by one of the Vale’s most significant figures: the Flemingston stonemason, opium addict, literary forger and self-proclaimed Druid, Edward Williams, better known as Iolo Morganwg (1747-1826).
Iolo’s first Gorsedd ceremonies were held, not in Glamorgan, but on Primrose Hill in London, during the summer and autumn of 1792. A few months earlier, setting aside his trade and leaving his wife and children unsupported, Iolo had walked from Glamorgan to London with the aim of becoming a professional writer. Despite his energetic public persona, his letters to his wife Peggy (NLW MS 21285E) show that for most of 1792, he was on the brink of physical and mental collapse, and that he even contemplated suicide. They reveal that he was gnawed at by guilt over his failure to provide for his family, and that he was consuming large quantities of opium to treat an asthmatic complaint made worse by the smoky London air. In consequence, he was tormented by nightmares and spent his nights wandering the streets and the neighbouring fields.
In July 1792 he moved to Holborn, one of the poorest areas of London, and found lodgings ‘within a door or two’ of where – some twenty years earlier – the young Bristol poet Thomas Chatterton had died from an overdose of arsenic and opium. During the years following his death, Chatterton had been exposed as a forger of medieval English poems and, at the same time, acclaimed as a poet of genius. He was in many respects Iolo’s English counterpart, and although they had never met, Iolo felt a particular affinity with Chatterton. Crushed by despair at his own failure to earn a living as a writer, Iolo began to believe that London was destroying him, just as it had destroyed Chatterton before him. ‘I shall curse London with my latest breath’, he wrote to Peggy in October 1792.
NLW MS 21285E
In contrast to Chatterton, however, Iolo survived London. He eventually returned to the tranquillity of Glamorgan, where he spent the remainder of his long and productive life. His forgeries went undetected until nearly a century after his death.
Geraint Phillips