‘For Wales – see England’. For much of the period since the Annexation of 1284, the constitutional history of Wales might be summed up neatly in this oft-quoted, and rather dismissive, line from the Encyclopaedia Britannica.1 Edward I’s settlement set the parameters within which Wales was to operate in terms of government, the administration of the law and the role of the Church, for 250 years; and the so-called ‘Act of Union’ (1536 and 1543) carried the process further, assimilating governmental and legal practice in Wales further to the English model. Yet, as this chapter will suggest, ‘For Wales – see England’ does not tell the full story of Wales’s constitutional history. During the nineteenth century, as a viable strain of political nationalism grew up in the principality, its proponents looked to the example of Ireland as a pattern on which to model their demands. During the twentieth, it was Scotland that provided the inspiration for politicians now anxious for a greater measure of devolution – something finally achieved in 1997. If the first five centuries after annexation saw Wales sublimated to English constitutional imperatives, the nineteenth and the twentieth saw Wales define its own nationhood by active engagement with the other smaller nations within the United Kingdom. In this chapter these three phases of Welsh constitutional development will be examined in turn, and it will be suggested that the Wales which received a degree of institutional independence in 1997 was a very British creation.

The union of England’s and Scotland’s parliaments was not just a political and economic project but also a narrative and rhetorical one. As a dissenter, tradesman, and newspaper proprietor, Defoe was uniquely positioned to write Great Britain into existence. This chapter reveals that whether he was addressing Scottish or English readers, and whether he was writing pamphlets, poetry, or articles for his Review, Defoe’s message regarding the Act of Union was remarkably consistent. Employing a rhetoric of common sense, he repeatedly argued that it was illogical to pit Scottish against English interests in the negotiation of a treaty that would transform both into Britons and render their interests identical. This argument boldly asked readers to imagine that they were already British, or to proleptically inhabit an as yet unrealized identity.

Mary Tighe’s long Spenserian allegorical romance, Psyche (1805), is one of the major poems by an Irish woman of the early nineteenth century. Shaped by the zealous Methodism of her childhood, Tighe reacted with anguish to the political violence of 1798, offering the reconciling balms of sentiment to the open wounds of sectarian conflict. In Psyche, a mother and a young woman vie for the affections of a son, displacing national struggle into a realm of emotional psychodrama. Connecting with nature, a rejected woman rediscovers the force of attachment and belonging, even as the text accommodates (via Apuleius) a good deal of sexual errancy and threats to feminine decorum. In its drama of female audacity, transgression and outcast heroism, the poem shows Miltonic ambitions, seeding a template much emulated by Tighe’s fellow poets of the nineteenth century and beyond.

Archipelagic approaches to eighteenth-century poetry have played a part in rescuing Irish women’s poetry of this period from being read through an exclusively Anglocentric lens. In its cultural encounters between native Gaelic culture and colonial settlers, eighteenth-century poetry is rarely straightforward in its identifications. Often women poets, as in the case of Dorothy Smith, would frame their work through an address to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Though Britain will often be cast as the civilising force, the woman poet takes on the role of intermediary, pleading Ireland’s cause and defending her honour on the wider stage. Another complicating factor is the precarious economic situation of the poet seeking patronage as she makes these appeals, as we see in the work of Dorothea DuBois. The poems of Henrietta Battier and Mary O’Brien offer further permutations in what is a complex cultural landscape. Condescending English attitudes to Ireland are turned back on English audiences with witty defiance, as the female voice of Anglo-Ireland comes into its own.

This chapter explores Irish bills for divorce brought to Westminster from 1701 and to the Irish parliament until the Act of Union in 1800. The moral, reputational and financial impact of divorce is considered from a gendered and class-based perspective and noteworthy cases such as that of Sir John Dillon and Lord Abercorn are examined. The profile of the first Irish divorcees in terms of gender, religion, class and grounds for divorce is determined. Moreover, themes of female agency, illegitimacy, collusion, adultery, false testimony (procured in particular from servants) as well as the association between the availability of divorce as an incentive to adultery which became a recurring theme in both clerical and lay debates are also explored in both jurisdictions. The impact of the Act of Union on the rate and profile of Irish divorces is analysed. In addition, the popular criticism and press reportage of Irish divorce allow the tropes of immorality and moral superiority to be defined and considered.

This chapter explores the rationale for and impact of Ireland’s exclusion from the 1857 Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act which moved English (and Welsh) divorce from parliament to court. The lack of engagement with this reform was apparent across the religious divides in Ireland which allows the suggestion of Catholic orthodoxy emerging as victorious against a liberal reform to be challenged. The Irish Catholic and Protestant presses opposed the bill more forcibly than any of the churches which evidences that Irish resistance to divorce was not always denominationally bound. However, akin to the Irish church response to divorce reform, the press never encouraged more popular protest. That Ireland was seen as a case apart in regard to divorce reform is highlighted by the government’s encouragement of other areas of the empire to apply the rulings of the 1857 divorce act. In consequence, by 1869 only Irish divorce bills were routinely heard in Westminster which remained averse to introducing divorce reform for Ireland. This inertia continued for decades as successive administrations proved disinclined to extend the 1857 act to Ireland and few called for its application.