Capture and execution of Dafydd
Thus perished the last representative of the long line of Welsh Princes that may be said to have had its rise with the sons of Cunedda eight centuries before. The last dim spark of Welsh independence flickered feebly for a few weeks, till the very recesses of Snowdonia, for almost the first time in history, gave back their echoes to the blast of English bugles, and the wild passes of Nant Francon and Llanberis felt the tramp of alien feet. Dafydd found himself alone, a hunted outlaw in the forests of the Vale of Clwyd. He was soon captured and taken to Shrewsbury, where a Parliament was then sitting. Llewelyn’s remains had been treated with doubtful logic and poor chivalry as a traitor. What treatment he would have met with at Edward’s hands as a prisoner we cannot know. But Dafydd could expect nothing but the worst and he received it. He was tried as an English baron at Shrewsbury and sentenced to be quartered, disembowelled, and beheaded. His quarters were distributed among four English cities, Winchester and York, it is said, quarrelling for the honour of his right shoulder, while his head was sent to moulder by his brother’s over the gateway of the Tower of London. A story runs that while his entrails were being burned his heart leaped from the flames and struck the executioner who was feeding them.
1282. Edward settles the new government of Wales
The Statutes of Rhuddlan
All resistance worthy of mention was now over in Wales. The six centuries or thereabouts of its history as a separate nation in whole or in part had closed. A new epoch was to open, and Edward was the man to mark the division between the past and the future in emphatic fashion. Hitherto, though statesmanlike in his views, he had been in actual deed both cruel and unjust to Wales, and allowed his agents to be still more so; but now that resistance was crushed he dropped the warrior and tyrant and showed himself the statesman that he was. Most of the Welshmen that had remained in arms received their pardons, though a few took service abroad. The King exacted no sanguinary vengeance, but followed, rather, the more merciful and practical course of providing against the chance of his Welsh subjects requiring it in future. He went to Wales with his Court and remained there for nearly three years. He made Rhuddlan his principal headquarters, rebuilding its ancient castle; and at Conway, Harlech, and Carnarvon, besides some less formidable fortresses, he left those masterpieces of defensive construction that have been the admiration of all subsequent ages. From Rhuddlan in due course he issued the famous statutes called by its name, which proclaimed at once the death-knell of Old Wales and the fact of its territorial fusion with the realm of England. The details of the settlement were laborious, and the spectacle of an English Court spending in all nearly three busy years in Wales is evidence of the thoroughness with which Edward did his work.
It is enough here to say that with the exception of modern Denbighshire, which was left in lordships, Edward carved North Wales into the present counties of Flint, Anglesey, Carnarvon, and Merioneth. Powys and South Wales being honeycombed with Anglo-Norman lordships and reconciled Welsh chieftains, he shrank probably from disentangling a confusion that brought no particular danger to himself, and from a course that would have embroiled him with the whole feudal interest of the Marches.
The still mainly Welsh districts, however, of Cardigan and Carmarthen, he had already, as we have seen, formed into counties. They were now, like those of the North, to be governed by lieutenants, sheriffs, and justices, and in all things to resemble English counties, except in the privilege of sending representatives to Parliament. Wales was kept separate from England, however, in so far as its immediate feudal lord was not the King of England, but the King’s eldest son; and the Principality of Wales at this time, it must be remembered, meant only the royal counties.
Edward’s intentions just
Edward’s laws for the conquered country were just and his intention not ungenerous. He reduced the rentals hitherto due to the Welsh Princes and listened patiently to the grievances of the people. He enacted that both in counties and lordships the old Welsh laws should be those of the Welsh so far as possible, and that justice should be administered in both languages, and he sent the Archbishop of Canterbury on a long visitation to take note of the destruction to churches perpetrated during the recent wars, and to arrange for their repair.
He was severe on the bards, it is true, but he did not slaughter them, as an old fiction asserts. Their wandering avocations were sternly repressed, and with the business that he had in hand it is not easy to see what other course he could have taken with men whose trade then chiefly consisted in recalling the wrongs of Wales and urging revenge. The whole business was concluded by a great tournament at Nevin, on the Carnarvon coast, which was attended by the flower of Welsh, English, and Gascon chivalry.
The King’s return to London
When the King returned to London after his long absence, he went with splendid ceremonial and a vast procession to the Tower and to Westminster Abbey, causing the regalia of the exterminated Welsh Princes and the skull of St. David to be borne before him. Nor must one omit mention of the immortal but grim joke which tradition says that he played upon the Welsh nobility before leaving the country. For does not every schoolboy know how, having promised them a Prince who was born in Wales and could speak no English, he sent Queen Eleanor to Carnarvon for the birth of Edward the Second?
1295
A good deal can be said of the century that was to elapse before our story opens, but not much that is of vital import. In 1295, thirteen years after the conquest, Madoc ap Meredith, a connection of Llewelyn’s, made a last attempt to rouse the Welsh. It proved abortive, but was serious enough to stop Edward from going to France, and to take him down to Conway, where it is said that on a certain occasion a high tide cut him off from his men, and nearly delivered him into the hands of the insurgents.
Wales through the fourteenth century
It would be too much to say that the next hundred years in Wales were those of peace and prosperity. But by comparison with the past they might not untruly be called so. No serious friction occurred between the two races; while the long wars with France and constant broils with Scotland engrossed the attention of the Welsh aristocracy, both Norman and native. Nor, again, was it only the nobles and gentry that found respite from their domestic quarrels in a combined activity upon the unfortunate soil of France. Welsh soldiers as well as Welsh gentlemen served by thousands in the armies of England, and few people remember that about a third of the victorious army at Cressy were Welshmen. This long companionship in arms and partnership in almost unparallelled glories must have done something to lessen the instinctive antipathy with which the two peoples had from time immemorial regarded each other. Yet how much of the ancient enmity survived, only requiring some spark to kindle it, will be evident enough as I proceed to the main part of my story, and the doings of the indomitable Welshman who is its hero.
CHAPTER II
BIRTH AND EARLY LIFE 1359-1399
“… At my birth
The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes;
The goats ran from the mountains, and the herds
Were strangely clamorous to the frighted fields.
These signs have marked me extraordinary,
And all the courses of my life do show,
I am not in the roll of common men.”
IN these famous lines the Glyndwr of Shakespeare, though not, perhaps, a very faithful portrait of the true Glyndwr, tells us of those dread portents which heralded his birth. Thus far, however, tradition rings true enough in the lines of the great poet, and is even shorn of some of the most fearsome details it has sent down to us through various channels. Shakespeare’s Glyndwr might, for instance, have told us, what all Welshmen of his day were well assured of, that on that memorable night the horses of Griffith Vychan, his father, were found standing in their stables up to their fetlocks in blood; and how he himself, while still an infant in his nurse’s arms, was accustomed to greet with demonstrations of delight the sight of a sword or spear and allow those around him no peace till the deadly weapon was placed in his baby hand.
There is great uncertainty as to the day, and some disagreement as to the exact year, wherein old earth thus shook in labour with so heroic a soul. This divergency of opinion extends over the period of ten years, from 1349 to 1359. The evidence that seems to give the latter date unquestionable preference will be alluded to shortly. In any case the point to be noted is that the hero of this story, judged by the standard of his time, was quite advanced in life when he began the long and arduous undertaking that has made his name immortal, and cherished by his countrymen as the most famous of all names in their history. For there is no shadow of a doubt that if the Welsh people were polled upon the subject, Owen Glyndwr would stand, by an overwhelming majority, at the head of the list of national heroes. Whether rightly or wrongly he holds the first place among Welsh warrior patriots in the affections of his countrymen.
It was the fortune, as I have endeavoured to make plain in the introductory chapter, of a long succession of Welsh chieftains, to find themselves at the head of a people struggling desperately against conquest and absorption. It is no wonder that with such opportunities ever present, century after century, the list of those who seized them and won distinction and some measure of success, and thereby preserved their names to posterity, is no short one. It is not to the point that the field of their exploits was a small one, and the people who cherish their memory a small people, – so much more, rather, the honour, seeing the odds against which they contended with such rare tenacity; nor, again, is it to their discredit that English historians have done as a rule scant justice to the vigour of the old Welsh warriors. “Good wine needs no bush.” The surface and the tongue of Wales to-day are sufficient evidence to the vitality of its people and their martial prowess in the days of old. Their heroes have happily too long been dust to suffer in reputation at the hands of the modern destroyer of historic ideals. But above them all, this last and most recent of patriots, Owen ap Griffith Vychan of Glyndyfrdwy, distinctly towers. Precisely why this should be is not readily explicable, and to very many educated Welshmen the fact is not acceptable. But it is unnecessary to advance here any reasons or theories for the particular preference accorded to Glyndwr. Whether worthy or not, the fame is his, and though, curiously enough, uncommemorated in marble, stone, or brass, and recorded by the poet and historian in a fragmentary and disconnected fashion, it is fame that seems to grow no dimmer with the lapse of time. Genealogy has charms for few people, and Welsh genealogy, to the Saxon who has not served some kind of apprenticeship to it, is notoriously formidable. But there will be Welsh readers of an assuredly more sympathetic turn of mind who, not having at their fingers’ ends, perhaps, the details of the national hero’s origin, will be not ungrateful for them.
Owen of Glyndyfrdwy, commonly called Owen Glyndwr, came of the princely house of Powys, and was a direct descendant in the male line of the celebrated Bleddyn ap Cynvyn, Prince of Powys, and for a short time of Gwynedd also, whose reign almost exactly covered the period of the Norman conquest of England. The second in descent from Bleddyn was the last Prince of United Powys, and this was Madoc ap Meredith, who died in 1159. Readers of the introductory chapter will remember that Powys, between the upper millstone of Norman power and the nether one of North Welsh patriotism, began to temporise and give way long before the Edwardian conquest. Its Princes would have been more than mortal if their politics had not been of an unsteady kind. They frankly accepted the Norman as “Emperor in London” somewhat early, thus accepting the inevitable, but could not resist the temptation when Welsh affairs were prospering to break away to the national side. While gaining at this cost some immunity from Norman greed and a measure of semi-independence, the Powys Princes were not wholly trusted by either party, and sometimes felt the vengeance of both. In 1159 Powysland fell in half; Powys Uchaf, or, roughly speaking, Montgomeryshire, being given to Madoc’s famous nephew, Owen Cyfeiliog, warrior, poet, founder of Strata Marcella Abbey, and author of The Hirlâs Horn; Lower Powys, or Powys Fadog, the country of the Dee and Ceiriog, fell to Madoc’s son, Griffith ap Madoc. This last was followed by another Madoc, who in 1200 founded the splendid Abbey of Valle Crucis, whose ruins, standing as they do in the loveliest nook of the Vale of Llangollen, are justly celebrated as presenting one of the most exquisite pictures of the kind in Britain. Beneath its grass-grown aisles lies the dust of the chieftain of this line of Powys. To a height of eight hundred feet above its crumbled walls and gables, still graceful in their decay, springs an isolated cone-shaped hill, on whose sharp crown stands a pile of ragged, splintered ruins placed in weird, suggestive fashion against a background of sky. This is Dinas Brân, the most proudly perched mediæval fortress in Wales, perhaps in all Britain. Here in this eagle’s nest, swung betwixt earth and heaven, lived the Princes of Powys Fadog; and no more fitting refuge could be imagined for men who, like them, had sometimes to look eastward for their foes and sometimes to the west. It was in 1270, close to the final conquest, that Madoc’s son Griffith died, after dividing his life between friendship with the English King and repentant alliances with his own race. He had married Emma, daughter of James, Lord Audley, who had done great service for Henry III. against the Welsh with a body of German cavalry. The death of this Griffith ap Madoc is the last event recorded in the Welsh Chronicle. It is supposed that the monks of Conway and Ystradfflur, who conjointly compiled it, could not bring themselves to put on record the sad events of the next twelve years, the last years of Welsh independence. Griffith’s son, another Madoc, followed, and died in seven years, leaving two young sons, and dividing his inheritance between them. The elder, Llewelyn, had Dinas Brân with Yale and Bromfield, while Griffith had Chirk and the territory attached to it. The orphan boys, their father having been tenant in capite of Edward the First, became that monarch’s wards. Edward, as was customary, handed them over to the guardianship of two of his nobles, selecting in this case the great Marcher barons, Warren and Roger Mortimer. Trusteeships were not in those days, even under favourable conditions, the thankless and unprofitable affairs they are now. Warren had Llewelyn and Dinas Brân; Roger Mortimer, Griffith and Chirk. A Welsh ward in the hands of a Norman Lord Marcher must have been a lamb among wolves indeed; and as every one, no doubt, expected, under conditions so painfully tempting, the two boys in due course disappeared and were no more seen, while two magnificent castles arose at Chirk and Holt respectively, with a view to securing to these unjust stewards their ill-gotten territory. A black tale, which posterity has accepted, crept steadily about, to the effect that a deep pool in the Dee beneath Holt Castle could tell of a midnight tragedy therein enacted. The two boys at any rate disappeared, and the Earls, according to custom, succeeded to their estates. Nor is it very likely that the King, who himself had a slice of them in that outlying fragment of Flint still conspicuous on the map of England, asked many questions.
It seems that such conscience as Earl Warren possessed was smitten with compunction as years went on, and these twinges he thought to allay by restoring a fragment of the property to the family he had so outraged. When the King was sitting at Rhuddlan in 1282 the remorseful Earl petitioned that the manors of Glyndyfrdwy on the Dee beyond Llangollen and of Cynllaeth a few miles to the south of it, should be restored to Griffith, an uncle of the two boys whose fate weighed, let us hope, upon his soul.
In this manner Griffith succeeded to these estates and was known as Y Baron Gwyn, or “the White Baron,” Lord of Glyndyfrdwy in Yale, dying about 1300. Fourth in direct descent from him and occupying the same position was Owen Glyndwr’s father, Griffith Vychan (i. e., “the little” or “the younger”), the preceding owner having been a Griffith too. To him succeeded Owen, as eldest son, holding his two manors, like his fathers before him, direct from the King. On his mother’s side Owen’s descent was quite as distinguished, – even more so if one is to believe that his mother, Elen, was a great-granddaughter of Catherine, the daughter of the last Llewelyn. Putting this aside, however, as mere tradition, it will be enough to say that Griffith Vychan’s wife came from South Wales and was a daughter of Thomas ap Llewelyn ap Rhys, a descendant of the Princes of Deheubarth, Lord of Iscoede Vchirwen in Cardigan and of Trefgarn in the parish of Brawdy, Pembrokeshire. He had two daughters, co-heiresses, the elder of whom, Elen, married Owen’s father, while the younger became the wife of Tudor ap Gronow of Penmynydd, the grandfather of the famous Owen Tudor. It will be seen, therefore, that Thomas ap Llewelyn was the ancestor both of Glyndwr and of our present King.
Owen was actually born in the South Welsh home of his mother’s family and inherited property from her which no doubt added to his wealth and consequence. Trefgarn Owen, Trefgarn West (or “castel”), still exists as a farmhouse, and the tradition that Owen was born in it is likely long to outlast the edifice itself. This event occurred probably in the year 1359, in the heyday of the successful wars in France, so that it is quite possible that Griffith Vychan may have been among the crowd of Welsh gentlemen who followed the banners of Edward the Black Prince across the Channel. This would quite account for the presence of Owen’s mother at such a time in the home of her fathers; and as we know nothing of his childhood, it is perhaps permissible to indulge in conjectures that have about them some reasonable probability.
Of Owen’s early manhood and domestic life, however, quite enough is known to dissipate the notion engendered by Shakespeare, and but faintly discouraged by English historians, that he was a wild Welsh chieftain, a sort of picturesque mountaineer. On the contrary, he was a man accustomed to courts and camps, and, judged by the standard of his time, an educated and polished gentleman. The first actual record we have of him is on September 3, 1386, when he gave evidence at Chester as a witness in the greatest and most prolonged lawsuit that had ever, in England, filled the public eye. This was the celebrated case of Scrope and Grosvenor, the point in dispute relating solely to a coat of arms. It lasted four years and nearly every prominent person in the country at one time or another gave evidence. Among these appears the name of “Oweyn Sire de Glendore de age XXVII ans et pluis,” also that of “Tudor de Glindore,” his brother, who was some three years younger than Owen, and fell ultimately in his service. Of the nature of his evidence we know nothing. The entry is only valuable as giving weight to the year 1359 as the most likely date of his birth.
In the social economy of Wales, Owen’s forbears, since they lost at the Edwardian conquest, in the manner related, the chieftainship of Powys Fadog, had been simply minor barons or private gentlemen of fair estate. They had nothing like the official position, the wealth, or the power of the Lord Marchers. Still they owed no allegiance, as did many of the lesser nobility, to any great Marcher baron, but held their estates in North Wales direct from the King himself. And we may well suppose that with the long memories of the Welsh no Marcher baron, no Mortimer, nor Gray, nor Talbot, whether in peace or war, was in their eyes so great a man as simple Owen of Glyndyfrdwy, on whose modest patrimony the vast estates of these interlopers encroached. As, in the ancient tribal laws of Wales, it took nine generations for an alien or servile family to qualify for admission to full rights, so it was equally difficult to make a medieval Welshman realise that the ejected landowners and princes of their own race were other than temporary sufferers. They could not believe that Providence intended to perpetuate so great an outrage. They recognised in their hearts no other owner but the old stock, whatever the exigencies of the times might compel them to do with their lips, and even their spears and bows, while every vagrant bard and minstrel helped to fix the sentiment more firmly in their breasts.
Owen himself, as a man of the world, had, of course, no such delusions. No one, however, when the time was ripe, knew better than he how to work upon the feelings of those who had. A family grievance of his own, as we have shown, he might justifiably have nursed, but there is no reason to suppose that he was on bad terms with the houses either of Warren or Mortimer. Indeed, he is said to have been esquire at one time to the Earl of Arundel. His local quarrels lay, as we shall see, to the north and rested wholly on personal grounds, having no relation whatever to the wrongs of his great-great-grandfather.
In the only signature extant of Owen previous to his assumption of princely honours, we find him describing himself as “Oweyn ap Griffith, Dominus de Glyn D’wfrdwy.” To dwell upon the innumerable ways in which his name and title were spelt by Norman and Celtic writers, contemporary and otherwise, in times when writers’ pens vaguely followed their ears, would be, of course, absurd. The somewhat formidable sounding name of Glyndyfrdwy simply means the Glen of the Dwfrdwy or Dyfrdwy, which in turn is the original and still the Welsh name for the river Dee. About the first syllable of this word philologists have no scope for disagreement, “Dwr” or “Dwfr” signifying water; but concerning the terminal syllable there is room for some difference of opinion. It will be sufficient for us here to say that the derivations which seem to the eye most obvious are not so much in favour as that from “Diw,” sacred or divine. This attribute at any rate has been bestowed on the chief and most beautiful of North Welsh rivers by English and Welsh poets from Spenser to Tennyson and, according to the former, “by Britons long ygone.”
In regard, however, to the pronunciation of the name of Owen’s patrimony, when I have said that the very natives of the historic hamlet slur the name into something like Glyndowdy, – a rare luxury among the Welsh, – it is not surprising that Anglo-Norman chroniclers and others have made havoc of it with their phonetic spelling. Even Welsh writers have been unsteady upon the point. And Owen of Glyndyfrdwy probably figures under more designations than any hero who ever lived: Glendour, Glindor, Glindore, Glendurdy, Glyndurdu, and Glendowerdy, are but a few selected specimens.
English historians, with characteristic contempt of Welsh detail, have selected the last and the most unlikely of them all. In his own country Owen was generally known during his later life and ever since his death as Glyndwr, the spelling to which I have adhered in these pages. It may perhaps not be out of place to note that the Welsh “w” is equivalent to a “ōō,” and by a Welsh tongue the terminal “r” is, of course, strongly marked.
Of the early youth of Glyndwr history tells us nothing, nor, again, is it known what age he had reached when his father died and the estate came into his possession. It is supposed that like so many Welshmen of his time he went to Oxford; but this, after all, must be mere surmise, though, judging by the bent of his life at that period, we seem to have good grounds for it. In such case it is likely enough that he took a leading part in the ferocious faction fights with which the jealousies of English, Welsh, and Irish students so often enlivened the cramped streets of medieval Oxford. It is quite certain, however, that Owen went to London and became a student of the Inns of Court, a course virtually confined in those times to the sons of the wealthy and well-born. There is something very natural in the desire of a large Welsh landowner of that time to familiarise himself with English law, for the two codes, Welsh and English, to say nothing of compromises between them, existed side by side over nearly all Wales, and one can well understand the importance of some knowledge of Anglo-Norman jurisprudence to a leading Welshman like Glyndwr, who must have had much to do, both directly and indirectly, with both kinds of courts. That he was no wild Welsh squire has been already shown, and it was not unnatural that a youth of handsome person, high lineage, and good estate should drift, when his law studies were completed, into the profession of arms and to the English Court. Here he soon found considerable favour and in course of time became squire of the body, or “scutiger,” not, as most Welsh authorities have persisted, and still persist, to King Richard the Second, but to his cousin of Bolingbroke, the future Henry the Fourth. This latter view is certainly supported by the only documentary evidence extant, as Mr. Wylie in his able and exhaustive history of that monarch points out. “Regi moderno ante susceptum regnum,” is the sentence in the Annales describing Glyndwr’s position in this matter, and it surely removes any doubt that Bolingbroke is the King alluded to. In such case Owen must have shared those perils and adventures by land and sea in which the restless Henry engaged. It is strange enough, too, that men linked together in a relationship so intimate should have spent the last fifteen years of their lives in a struggle so persistent and so memorable as did these two. Bolingbroke began this series of adventures soon after the loss of his wife, about the year 1390, and we may therefore, with a fair probability of truth, picture Glyndwr at that grand tournament at Calais where Henry so distinguished himself, and poor Richard by comparison showed to such small advantage. He may also have been present at the capture of Tunis, where English and French to the wonder of all men fought side by side without friction or jealousy; or again with Bolingbroke on his long journey in 1393 to Jerusalem, or rather towards it, for he never got there. There were adventures, too, which Owen may have shared, with German knights upon the Baltic, and last, though by no means least, with Sigismund, King of Hungary, at that memorable scene upon the Danube when he was forced into his ships by the victorious Turks.
Yet the tradition is so strong that Glyndwr was in the personal service of Richard during the close of that unfortunate monarch’s reign, that one hesitates to brush it aside from mere lack of written evidence. Nor indeed does the fact of his having been Henry’s esquire constitute any valid reason for doing so. It is not very likely that, when the latter in 1398 was so unjustly banished by Richard to an uneventful sojourn in France, Glyndwr, with the cares of a family and estate growing upon him, would have been eager to share his exile. On the other hand, he must have been by that time well known to Richard, and with his Pembrokeshire property and connections may well, like so many Welshmen, have been tempted later on to embark in that ill-fated Irish expedition which promised plunder and glory, but turned out to be incidentally the cause of Richard’s undoing. That this feckless monarch possessed some peculiar charm and a capacity for endearing individuals to his person seems tolerably evident, however strange. That the Welsh were devoted to him we know, so that perhaps the loyalty to Richard with which most Welsh writers credit Glyndwr arose from such personal service rendered after the departure of Bolingbroke for France. And it is quite possible that he went, as they assert, with the King on that last ill-timed campaign which cost him his crown.
Some declare that he was among the small knot of faithful followers who, when his army abandoned the slothful Richard on his return to Pembrokeshire from Ireland, rode across country with him to Conway, where Salisbury in despair had just been compelled to disband his freshly mustered Welshmen for lack of food and pay. If this is true, Glyndwr, who most certainly never lost battles from sloth or timidity when he became in one sense a king, must have witnessed with much sympathy the lamentations of the faithful Salisbury:
“O, call back yesterday, bid time return,
And thou shalt have ten thousand fighting men;
To-day, to-day, unhappy day too late,
O’erthrows thy joys, friends, fortune, and thy state.”
All this occurred in September of the year 1399. Henry, taking advantage of Richard’s absence, had landed, it will be remembered, at Ravenspur in Yorkshire some two months earlier. He found discontent with the existing state of affairs everywhere prevalent and the recognised heir to the throne but lately dead. The situation was tempting to a degree. Bolingbroke’s first intention had almost certainly aimed at nothing more than the recovery of his own immense estates of which he had been most unjustly and unscrupulously deprived by his royal cousin. But unexpected temptations confronted him. He was met on landing by the Percys and soon afterwards by other great nobles, who, from what motives it matters little, encouraged him to seize the throne. To make a short story of a famous episode in English history, Bolingbroke found himself by September, when Richard was returning with fatal tardiness from Ireland, not indeed actually crowned, but in full possession of London and other districts and virtually acknowledged as King. In the same month he was heading a triumphant march by way of Bristol at the head of a great and gathering army towards North Wales, where Richard lay, as we have seen, at Conway, helplessly wringing his hands and cursing the fate he had brought upon himself.