In early life he was, perhaps naturally, an admirer
of the Angevin dynasty; he lived to draw the most terrible picture
extant of their lives and characters.
During his lifetime he never
ceased to inveigh against Archbishop Hubert Walter; after his death
he repented and recanted. His invective was sometimes coarse, and
his abuse was always virulent. He was not over-scrupulous in his
methods of controversy; but no one can rise from a reading of his
works without a feeling of liking for the vivacious, cultured,
impulsive, humorous, irrepressible Welshman. Certainly no Welshman
can regard the man who wrote so lovingly of his native land, and who
championed her cause so valiantly, except with real gratitude and
affection.
But though it is as a writer of books that Gerald has become famous,
he was a man of action, who would have left, had Fate been kinder,
an enduring mark on the history of his own time, and would certainly
have changed the whole current of Welsh religious life. As a
descendant of the Welsh princes, he took himself seriously as a
Welsh patriot. Destined almost from his cradle, both by the bent of
his mind and the inclination of his father, to don "the habit of
religion," he could not join Prince Rhys or Prince Llewelyn in their
struggle for the political independence of Wales. His ambition was
to become Bishop of St. David's, and then to restore the Welsh
Church to her old position of independence of the metropolitan
authority of Canterbury.
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