"Geography,history,ethics,divinity,canon law,biography,natural history,epistolary correspondence,and poetry employed his pen by turns,and in all these departments of literature he has left memorials of his ability."Without being Ciceronian,his Latin was far better than that of his contemporaries.He was steeped in the classics,and he had,as Professor Freeman remarks,"mastered more languages than most men of his time,and had looked at them with an approach to a scientific view which still fewer men of his time shared with him."He quotes Welsh,English,Irish,French,German,Hebrew,Latin,and Greek,and with four or five of these languages at least he had an intimate,scholarly acquaintance.His judgment of men and things may not always have been sound,but he was a shrewd observer of contemporary events."The cleverest critic of the life of his time"is the verdict of Mr.Reginald Poole.{3}He changed his opinions often:he was never ashamed of being inconsistent.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.He detested the practice of promoting Normans to Welsh sees,and of excluding Welshmen from high positions in their own country."Because I am a Welshman,am I to be debarred from all preferment in Wales?"he indignantly writes to the Pope.
Circumstances at first seemed to favour his ambition.His uncle,David Fitz-Gerald,sat in the seat of St.David's.When the young scholar returned from Paris in 1172,he found the path of promotion easy.After the manner of that age -which Gerald lived to denounce -he soon became a pluralist.He held the livings of Llanwnda,Tenby,and Angle,and afterwards the prebend of Mathry,in Pembrokeshire,and the living of Chesterton in Oxfordshire.He was also prebendary of Hereford,canon of St.David's,and in 1175,when only twenty-eight years of age,he became Archdeacon of Brecon.In the following year Bishop David died,and Gerald,together with the other archdeacons of the diocese,was nominated by the chapter for the king's choice.But the chapter had been premature,urged,no doubt,by the impetuous young Archdeacon of Brecon.They had not waited for the king's consent to the nomination.The king saw that his settled policy in Wales would be overturned if Gerald became Bishop of St.David's.Gerald's cousin,the Lord Rhys,had been appointed the king's justiciar in South Wales.The power of the Lord Marches was to be kept in check by a quasi-alliance between the Welsh prince and his over-lord.The election of Gerald to the greatest see in Wales would upset the balance of power.David Fitz-Gerald,good easy man (vir sua sorte contentus is Gerald's deion of him),the king could tolerate,but he could not contemplate without uneasiness the combination of spiritual and political power in South Wales in the hands of two able,ambitious,and energetic kinsmen,such as he knew Gerald and the Lord Rhys to be.Gerald had made no secret of his admiration for the martyred St.Thomas e Becket.He fashioned himself upon him as Becket did on Anselm.The part which Becket played in England he would like to play in Wales.But the sovereign who had destroyed Becket was not to be frightened by the canons of St.David's and the Archdeacon of Brecon.He summoned the chapter to Westminster,and compelled them in his presence to elect Peter de Leia,the Prior of Wenlock,who erected for himself an imperishable monument in the noble cathedral which looks as if it had sprung up from the rocks which guard the city of Dewi Sant from the inrush of the western sea.