Page:Speeches and addresses by the late Thomas E Ellis M P.pdf/111

 the English Reformation and the plague-spot of the Church of England, did not undermine and absorb the political liberties of the nation. When a Puritan Parliament curbed a menacing despotism and priestcraft, the leaders, men like Sir John Eliot and Sir Robert Phelips, hailed from Celtic Cornwall and Devon, and though the main force of the Puritan revolution came from the most pronounced Teutonic districts of England, yet its leader, Oliver Cromwell, who led the Parliamentary forces to victory, and during his Protectorate placed Britain at the head of the nations, was the descendant of a Welsh squire of Glamorgan. The Tudors and Cromwell were rulers of men and moulders of national destinies.

So much for Welsh Celtic infusion in the nature of the makers of Britain in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century, the Irish Celt exerts his influence. The two greatest factors in the making of Britain in the eighteenth century were the opposition to the Napoleonic revolutionary wars and the rise of the British power in India. Edmund Burke, an Irishman, was the soul