Why did Queen Elizabeth I not trust wales?

Answer 1

She DID, and was in fact a quarter Welsh herself, being of the Tudor Dynasty. Her childhood nurse, and later advisor, was a Welsh woman called Blanche Parry, and Welsh scientist Dr.John Dee was her main astrologer.

Elizabeth had no problem with Wales at all, and was a fluent Welsh speaker- it was her father, King Henry VIII, who was fearful that Wales might launch another Welsh rebellion. This was for two reasons, partly because Wales was still then mostly a Catholic country and many senior Welsh clerics condemned the break from Rome that the establishment of the Church of England led to, and also because many Welsh nobility, aristocracy and even commoners felt that the Tudors had 'sold out' to England too much and were no longer representing Welsh interests. He was thus fearful of another Owain Glyndwr-style uprising, which by the 16th Century would have been much more dangerous to England due to advances in military technology, so he signed the Act of Union in 1536 which effectively abolished Wales as a seperate nation and made it a part of England.

If Elizabeth had any reservations about Welsh loyalty, it would have been due to it's predominant Catholicism at a time when she was fighting to retain England as an Anglican nation in the face of massive military threat from Catholic Spain. England was surrounded by Catholic adversaries at a time in it's life when it did not yet command superior naval or military power, it's only ally being Holland. She may thus have been wary that reversing the Act of Union and disestablishing Wales might have led to it becoming an 'enemy within', effectively a European Elizabethan equivalent of modern-day Cuba that could have been used as a base for invasion by superior powers.