According to the Welsh version, Glyndwr must have been present when Percy, Earl of Northumberland, who in years to come was to be so vitally bound up with his fortunes, entered the great hall of Conway Castle, to all appearances a friendly and unarmed envoy of Henry of Bolingbroke. We all remember his soft speech and how with the utmost deference and humility he told King Richard that all his dear cousin required of him was to ride back by his side to London and there summon a Parliament, and bring to justice certain persons, who, for the past few years, had been his evil counsellors. If Glyndwr was in truth there, he must almost certainly have seen these two illustrious personages commit that astounding piece of perjury and sacrilege in Conway church, when they knelt side by side and swore before the altar and upon the sacred elements that their intentions towards each other were wholly friendly and without guile. He must then, too, have heard King Richard, when scarcely off his knees, swear that if only he could get his dear cousin of Bolingbroke into his hands he would put him to such a cruel death it should be long spoken of even in Turkey. Perhaps it was the memory of the spectacle that decided Glyndwr on certain occasions in his after life to show a curious reluctance to “put his trust in princes,” however loyal in the abstract he might be to their memory. If we follow the Welsh tradition, he saw this game of duplicity to the bitter end and made one of the small band of horsemen who crossed the estuary of the Conway in the dawn of an autumn morning with the puling king on their way to Rhuddlan Castle, whose ivy-mantled ruins still make such a charming picture amid the meadows where the Clwyd winds its tidal course towards the sea. Long before Richard got there, and while still surmounting the steep headland of Rhos above Old Colwyn, he caught sight of the troops which the crafty Northumberland had left there in concealment. It was too late to retreat. The waves roared far beneath him and rocky crags towered high above his head. He saw that he was undone and read in the situation the black treachery he would have himself dealt out with scant scruple to anyone lingering in the path of self-indulgence, which he had so long trodden.
“O that I were as great
As is my grief, or greater than my name,
Or that I could forget what I have been,
Or not remember what I must be now.”
Amid faces from which the friendly mask had already half fallen and spears that may well have had an ominous glitter in his eyes, the disheartened King passed on to Rhuddlan and from Rhuddlan to the strong castle of Flint. Here in the morning came to him his cousin of Bolingbroke, inquiring, among other things, whether he had broken his fast, for he had a long ride before him. Whereat Richard demanded what great army was that which darkened the sands of Dee below the castle walls. Henry replied curtly that they were Londoners for the most part, and that they had come to take him prisoner to the Tower, and nothing else would satisfy them. If Glyndwr were indeed present it must have been a strange enough sight for him, this meeting of his former patron and his present master, under such sinister circumstances, in the gloomy chambers of Flint Castle. If he were still here it may be safely assumed that, like the rest of Richard’s escort, he went no farther. Even if he were absent, quietly hawking and hunting at Glyndyfrdwy, there would be nothing irrelevant in calling to the reader’s recollection a famous episode, the chief actors in which had so far-reaching an influence on the Welsh hero’s life; how all semblance of respect for the King’s person was dropped; how, mounted of design upon a sorry nag, he was led with many indignities along the weary road to London and there made to read his own abdication in favour of his captor and cousin; and how he was hurried from fortress to fortress, till at Pontefract he ended his misspent life in a manner that to this day remains a mystery – all this is a matter of historic notoriety. Whether the unfortunate Richard died of grief, failing health, and lack of attention, or whether he was the victim of deliberate foul play, only concerns us here from the fact of his name occurring so frequently in our story as a rallying-cry for Henry’s enemies, and from the mystery attaching to the manner of his death being for years a genuine grievance among the rank and file of the disaffected, and a handy weapon for their more designing leaders.
How much of his life Glyndwr had so far spent in his native valleys of the Dee or Cynllaeth it is impossible to guess. Perhaps at odd times a good deal of it; seeing that he was now over forty, had found time to marry a wife, a lady of the neighbourhood, by whom he had become the father of a numerous family, and to win for himself great popularity and a name for hospitality. The famous Welsh poet, Gryffydd Llwyd, much better known by his bardic name of “Iolo Goch,” or the Red Iolo, was his constant friend and companion at this time, and became, later on, the Laureate of his Court and of his cause. In the thick volume which the extant works of Iolo fill he has left us a graphic though somewhat fantastic picture of Glyndwr’s domestic life. I have already shown how the Welsh chieftain owned the two estates of Glyndyfrdwy and Sycherth or Cynllaeth in his native district, while from his mother he inherited property in Pembroke. The two former places were near together. If the mountain fringes of Glyndyfrdwy, which ran east and west, did not actually touch the Sycherth estate, which ran north and south with the waters of the Cynllaeth brook, there could have been little but the deep Vale of the Ceiriog to divide them. There were mansions upon both estates, and, though Glyndyfrdwy was the more important property, it was in the less striking but still charming valley down which the Cynllaeth babbles to meet the Tanat beneath the woodlands of Llangedwyn, that Sycherth or Sychnant, the more imposing of Glyndwr’s two houses, was situated. This valley lies snugly tucked away behind the first ridge of hills which rises abruptly behind Oswestry and so conspicuously marks the Welsh frontier. It practically skirts the English border, and Offa’s Dyke trails its still obvious course along the lofty summit of its eastern boundary. Scarcely anywhere, indeed, does the Principality begin in a social sense with such striking abruptness. Once over the hill from Shropshire, and within a short hour’s drive from Oswestry, and you are for every practical purpose in the heart of Celtic Wales. Few travellers come this way, for it is on the road to nowhere that the outside world takes count of, and few strangers but an occasional antiquary ever see the well-defined and flat-topped tumulus on which the manor house of the most famous of all Welshmen stood. It lies in a meadow between a wooded hill and the Cynllaeth brook, not far from Llansilin, and is very conspicuous from the road leading up the valley to the little hamlet, whose churchyard holds the dust of another famous Welshman, the seventeenth-century poet, Huw Morris. The inner and the outer moat of Sycherth are still more or less perfect, and there are even yet, or were not long ago, plain traces of stonework beneath the turf. It will be well, however, to let Iolo, who was there so much and knew it so well, tell us what it looked like in his time, five hundred years ago.
There was a gate-house, he says, a strong tower, and a moat. The house contained nine halls, each furnished with a wardrobe filled with the raiment of Owen’s retainers. Near the house on a verdant bank was a wooden building supported upon posts and roofed with tiles. Here were eight apartments in which the guests slept. There was a church, too, in the form of a cross, and several chapels. The mansion was surrounded with every convenience and every essential for maintaining a profuse hospitality: a park, warren and pigeon-house, mill, orchards, and vineyard; a fish-pond well stocked with “gwyniads” from Bala Lake, a heronry, and plenty of game of all sorts. The cook, Iolo declares with much enthusiasm, was one of the very best; and the hospitality of the establishment so unstinted that the office of gate porter was a sinecure. Our bard indeed makes his poetic lips literally smack over the good things beneath which Glyndwr’s table groaned. Nor does he forget his hostess:
“The best of wives,
Happy am I in her wine and metheglyn;
Eminent woman of a knightly family,
Honourable, beneficent, noble,
Her children come forward two by two,
A beautiful nest of chieftains.”
Charming, however, as is the site of Sycherth, nestling beneath its wooded hill and looking out towards the great masses of the Berwyn Mountains, it would ill compare with that almost matchless gem of Welsh scenery, where the vales of Edeyrnion and Llangollen meet among the mantling woodlands and sounding gorges of Glyndyfrdwy. It is a curiously apt coincidence that one of the most romantic spots in Wales should have been the cradle of the man who is without doubt the most romantic personage in Welsh history. Scarcely anyone, as I have said, ever finds his way to Sycherth; but thousands of travellers every summer follow by road or rail that delightful route which, hugging the Dee from Ruabon almost to its source beyond Bala Lake, reveals new beauties at every turn. Such being the case I would venture to ask any intending traveller from Ruabon to Bala and Dolgelly to take special note of a spot just five minutes to the westward of Glyndyfrdwy station, where the wide torrent of the Dee, after clinging to the railroad for some distance, takes a sudden bend to the north. Precisely here, but perched high upon the other side of the railroad and so nearly overhanging it as not to be readily visible, is a green tumulus crowned by a group of windswept fir trees. This is locally known as “Glyndwr’s Mount,” not because, as was probably the case at Sycherth, it was erected as a foundation for the chieftain’s house, – since this one here is evidently prehistoric, – but merely from the fact that the house stood at its foot. Vague traces of the house are still visible beneath the turf of the narrow meadow that lies squeezed in between the Holyhead Road on the upper side and the river and railroad on the lower side.6 Whether Sycherth was Owen’s favourite home in peace or not, Glyndyfrdwy was most certainly his more natural headquarters in war, while in his own district. Both, however, were burnt down by Prince Henry, as we shall see later on, in one of his expeditions against the Welsh. As for the mound, it is a notable landmark, being one of a series which are sprinkled along the Dee valley in such fashion as to indicate beyond a doubt that if they were indeed the tombs of dead warriors, they were also most admirable signal-stations for living ones. But whatever the origin of this one it had at any rate no connection with times so recent as those of Glyndwr. The only surviving relic of that hero’s residence is a long, narrow oaken table of prodigious thickness, which is yet treasured in a neighbouring farmhouse. A meadow below is still called “Parliament field,” while the massive old stone homestead of Pen-y-bont, half a mile up the valley, contains a portion of the walls which formed, it is believed, Glyndwr’s stables, or, more probably, his farm buildings. But as many of these local points will come up in the course of my story, it is time to say something of the lady who, so entirely blest in her earlier years, was to spend her later ones amid such stress and storm, and to share so precarious a crown.
This lady bountiful of Sycherth and Glyndyfrdwy, so extolled by Iolo, came of a notable Flintshire house. She was the daughter of Sir David Hanmer of Hanmer, a family long settled in that detached fragment of Flint known then as Maelor Seisnig, or “English Maelor.” Sir David had been appointed by Richard the Second one of the Justices of the King’s Bench and at the same time knighted. There are Hanmers even yet in those parts; till comparatively lately there were still Hanmers of Hanmer. More enduring than a human stock, there are monuments in stone and brass that tell the story, common enough in England, of a family that for centuries were great in their own district without ever making their name a familiar one to the average British ear. The Hanmers, too, were a fair specimen of many families in the Welsh Marches who had both English and Welsh blood in their veins, and whose sympathies were divided when social animosities took a warlike turn. It was very much so indeed with the Hanmers when Glyndwr’s war by degrees forced everyone to take a side in self-defence. Of Glyndwr’s sons only two are directly mentioned, Griffith and Meredith, both of whom we shall find fighting by his side, but at such an advanced stage of the struggle that it seems probable they were but boys when hostilities broke out. We hear dimly of three more, Madoc, Thomas, and John. Of the daughters somewhat more is known; and they must for the most part have been older, since it seems that three were married before the troubles began. The eldest, Isabel, became the wife of a Welshman, Adda ab Iorwerth Ddu. The second, Elizabeth, married Sir John Scudamore of Kent Church and Holme Lacy in Herefordshire, whose descendants still retain the name and the first of these historic manors. Another, Janet, was given to John Crofts of Croft Castle in the same county, and the youngest, Margaret, called after her mother, took another Herefordshire gentleman, Roger Monnington of Monnington. The most celebrated was the fourth daughter, Jane, whom we shall find being united under romantic circumstances to her father’s illustrious captive and subsequent ally, Sir Edmund Mortimer. She it is, of course, whom Shakespeare brings upon his stage and, in her song to Hotspur and Mortimer,
“Makes Welsh as sweet as ditties highly penned,
Sung by a fair queen in a summer’s bower.”
The Commote of Glyndyfrdwy, which formed Owen’s Dee property, lay in the then newly formed county of Merioneth, though it was wedged in by the Marcher lordships of Chirk, Bromfield, and Yale on the east; while to the north, Denbighshire as yet having no existence, it touched the Norman lordships of Ruthin and Denbigh in the Vale of Clwyd. But Glyndwr held his estates direct from the King, having manor courts of his own, and resorting in more important matters to the assize towns of Dolgelly and Harlech. Corwen must have been actually on his property but, though a notable gathering-spot in war time, it had no corporate existence, and was probably even more insignificant in size than the other Merioneth towns. The Welsh did not herd together in towns or villages. Each individual or group of individuals dwelt on their small homesteads scattered about the hillsides or cut out of the forests which then covered so much of the country and had contributed so greatly to its defence.
Owen in his home life must have been something of an unique personality. He was the equal in breeding and in knowledge of the world of the great barons around him, – the Greys, Talbots, and Charltons, – and of sufficient estate to be himself a grand seigneur. Yet his hospitable house must have offered a remarkable contrast in the eyes of the natives to the grim fortresses of Chirk, or Dinas Brân, or Ruthin, whose owners’ mission in life, so far as the Welsh were concerned, was to make themselves unpleasant. Their claws, it is true, had been considerably cut down by Edward the First, but the same blood was there; and the habit of former years, which looked upon the killing of a Welshman as a meritorious action, only wanted an opportunity to reassert itself.
Owen’s rent-roll was about two hundred pounds a year, and some slight mental effort is required to realise that this was a very large one, both actually when judged by the contemporary value of money, and relatively as regards the financial standing of private landowners, particularly in Wales, where this was low. Owen was probably one of the richest native Welshmen of his day. Few if any in the north had such an opportunity of showing the contrast between the simple and profuse hospitality of a native aristocrat, and the stiff, contemptuous solemnity of the lord of a Norman fortress. It was easy enough for the descendant of Madoc ap Griffith to make himself popular upon the banks of the upper Dee, and Owen seems to have added a desire to do so to the personal magnetism that the whole story of his life shows him to have possessed in a very high degree. All the bards of his own time and that immediately following unite in this praise of his hospitality. Amid much fanciful exaggeration, such for instance as that which compares Sycherth to “Westminster Abbey and Cheapside,” there is no doubt about the esteem and admiration in which Owen was held by the Welsh and particularly by the bards who lived at free quarters in his roomy halls. But all this began before he had any idea of utilising his position and popularity in the manner that has made him immortal. There is really no authority at all for making him a follower of Richard. All Wales and Cheshire were indignant at the King’s deposition and treatment, and Glyndwr, even supposing his Irish expedition to have been mythical, may well have shared this indignation. But in such a case his antecedents were, from private attachments, wholly Lancastrian. Not only had he been Bolingbroke’s squire, but his former master, the Earl of Arundel, had been a pronounced foe of the late King. Discontent and turbulence were brooding everywhere, but we have no reason to suppose that Glyndwr at this date, the last year of the century, had any excuse whatever for entering into dynastic quarrels. On the contrary, unless the story of his recent connection with Richard be true, he had much reason to be contented with Bolingbroke’s accession. At this moment he was in all probability living quietly at Sycherth, hunting deer amid the birchen woods and bracken glades of the Berwyn and hawking in the meadows of Llansilin. Amid all the pleasures, however, which filled his rural life there rankled one deep and bitter grievance, and this concerned the upland tract of Croesau that lay upon the north-western fringe of his Glyndyfrdwy manor, over which he and his powerful neighbour, Reginald Grey, Lord of Ruthin, had been falling out this many a long day. The details of this quarrel, the primary cause of that decade of strife which desolated Wales and profoundly influenced the reign and embittered the life of Henry of Bolingbroke, must be reserved for another chapter.
CHAPTER III
GLYNDWR AND LORD GREY OF RUTHIN1400-1401
REGINALD, Lord Grey, of Ruthin, the prime cause of all the wars that devastated Wales and the English Marches throughout the first ten years of the fifteenth century, was a typical Lord Marcher, and was perhaps the worst of a fierce, unscrupulous, and pitiless class. His ancestors had been in the Vale of Clwyd for over a hundred years. At Edward’s conquest the first Earl had been planted by the King at Ruthin to overawe the Welsh of what is now northern Denbighshire and of the two recently created counties of Flint and Carnarvon which lay upon either side. There were other Lord Marchers and other English garrisons between Chester and Carnarvon, but at the time this story opens the Greys were beyond a doubt the most ardent and conspicuous props of the English Crown. The great Red Castle at Ruthin, the “Castell y Gwern Loch,” had risen in Edward’s time beside the upper waters of the Clwyd, and its ample ruins still cluster round the modern towers where the successors of the fierce Lord Marchers exercise a more peaceful sway.
Around Ruthin Castle, as at Denbigh, Conway, and Carnarvon, a group of English adventurers – soldiers, tradesmen, clerks, and gentlemen – had gathered together and built for themselves habitations, aided by favourable charters from the King, and still greater favours from their lord, who leant upon their services in times of danger. They led profitable, if sometimes anxious lives. Welsh and English alike pleaded before the lordship courts, whose records may still be read by the curious in such matters. Both Welsh and English laws, theoretically at any rate, were administered within the lordship, but as the Lord Marcher was, within his own domain, a law unto himself, the state of affairs that existed at Ruthin and similar places was complicated and is not immediately pertinent to this story. It will be quite accurate enough for present purposes to describe Grey as surrounded and supported by armed burghers and other dependents, mainly but not wholly of English blood, while the mass of the Welsh within his lordship, gentle and simple, remained obedient to his rule from fear and not from love. I need not trouble the reader with the limitations of his territory, but merely remark that it bordered upon that of Owen.
Now, upon the wild upland between the Dee valley and the watershed of the Clwyd, lay the common of Croesau, whose disputed ownership eventually set Wales and England by the ears. This strip of land had originally belonged to Owen’s estate of Glyndyfrdwy. Lord Grey, however, in Richard the Second’s time, had, in high-handed fashion, appropriated it to himself on the sole and poor excuse that it marched with his own domain. Glyndwr, being at that time probably no match for Grey at the game of physical force, possessed his fiery soul in patience, and carried the dispute in a peaceful and orderly manner to the King’s court in London. Here the justice of his claim was recognised; he won his suit and Lord Grey was compelled to withdraw his people from the disputed territory, cherishing, we may well believe, an undying grudge against the Welshman who, before the eyes of all the world and in an English court of justice, had got the better of him.
Now, however, a new King was upon the throne, and Owen apparently out of favour. The opportunity was too good an one to be missed by the grasping Norman, who, driving Owen’s people off the disputed territory, annexed it once more to his own estate. Glyndwr nevertheless, whatever the cause may have been, proved himself even under this further provocation a law-abiding person, and, refraining from all retaliation, carried his suit once more to London and laid it before the Parliament which Henry summoned in the spring of 1400, six months after he had seized the throne. But Owen, though he had been esquire to the King, was now wholly out of favour, so much so as greatly to support the tradition that he had served the unfortunate Richard in a like capacity. His suit was not even accorded the compliment of a hearing, but was dismissed with contemptuous brevity. Trevor, Bishop of St. Asaph, who was then about the King’s person and deeply in his confidence, protested in vain against the unjust and ill-advised course. As a Welshman, familiar with the condition of his own country, he solemnly warned the authorities against provoking a man who, though of only moderate estate, was so powerful and so popular among his own people.
The Bishop’s pleadings were of no avail. “What care we for the barefooted rascals?” was the scornful reply. The Welsh were in fact already in an electrical condition. In spite of their general discontent with English rule, they had been attached to Richard, and with that strength of personal loyalty which in a Celtic race so often outweighs reason, they resented with heartfelt indignation the usurpation of Bolingbroke. They were very far from sure that Richard was even dead. If he were, then Henry had killed him, which made matters worse. But if in truth he actually still lived, they were inclined to murmur as loudly and with as much show of reason at his dethronement. Richard, it will be remembered, after having been compelled publicly and formally to abdicate the throne, had been imprisoned for a time in the Tower, and then secretly conveyed from castle to castle till he reached Pontefract, where he ended his wretched life. The manner of his death remains to this day a mystery, as has been intimated already. Whether he was murdered by Henry’s orders or whether his weakened constitution succumbed to sorrow and confinement or bad treatment, no one will ever know. But his body, at any rate, was brought to London and there exposed in St. Paul’s Cathedral for the space of three days, that all the world might see that he was in truth dead. The men of Wales and the North and West of England had to take all this on hearsay, and were readily persuaded that some trickery had been played on the Londoners and that some substitute for Richard had been exposed to their credulous gaze. For years it was the policy of Henry’s enemies to circulate reports that Richard was still alive, and, as we shall see in due course, his ghost was not actually laid till the battle of Shrewsbury had been fought and won by Henry. Indeed, so late as 1406 the old Earl of Northumberland alleged, in a letter, the possibility of his being alive, while even seven years after this Sir John Oldcastle declared he would never acknowledge Parliament so long as his master, King Richard, still lived.
Glyndwr, after the insults that he had received in London, returned home, as may well be conceived, not in the best of tempers; Grey, however, was to perpetrate even a worse outrage upon him than that of which he had already been guilty and of a still more treacherous nature. It so happened that at this time the King was preparing for that expedition against the Scots which started in July, 1400. Among the nobility and gentry whom he summoned to his standard was Glyndwr, and there is no reason to assume that the Welshman would have failed to answer the call. The summons, however, was sent through Lord Grey, in his capacity of chief Marcher in North Wales; and Grey, with incredibly poor spite, kept Owen in ignorance of it till it was too late for him either to join the King’s army or to forward an explanation. Glyndwr was on this account credited at Court with being a malcontent and a rebel; and as there had been some brawling and turbulence upon the Welsh border the future chieftain’s name was included among those whom it was Grey’s duty, as it was his delight, to punish. There is no evidence that Owen had stirred. It is possible he might have made himself disagreeable to Grey upon the marches of their respective properties. It would be strange if he had not. There is no mention, however, of his name in the trifling racial disturbances that were natural to so feverish a time.
It seems pretty evident that if the malicious Lord Marcher had rested content with his plunder and let sleeping dogs lie, Owen, and consequently Wales, would never have risen. This ill-advised baron, however, was by no means content. He applied for further powers in a letter which is now extant, and got leave to proceed in force against Owen, among others, as a rebel, and to proclaim his estates, having an eye, no doubt, to their convenient propinquity in the event of confiscation.
But before Owen comes upon the scene, and during this same summer, a most characteristic and entertaining correspondence was being carried on between the irascible Lord Grey and a defiant gentleman of North Wales, Griffith ap Dafydd ap Griffith, the “strengest thief in Wales,” Grey calls him, which is to say that he accuses him of carrying off some horses from his park at Ruthin. The letters, which are in Sir Thomas Ellis’s collection, are much too long to reproduce, but they show unmistakably and not without humour, the relations which existed between Lord Grey and some of his Welsh neighbours, who, already turbulent, were later on to follow Glyndwr into the field of battle. The King, before starting for Scotland and before getting Grey’s letters, had commanded his Lord Marchers to use conciliation to all dissatisfied Welshmen and to offer free pardons to any who were openly defying his authority.
Griffith ap Dafydd, it seems, had been prominent among these restive souls, but under a promise, he declares in his letter, of being made the Master Forester and “Keyshat” of Chirkeland under the King’s charter, he had presented himself at Oswestry and claimed both the pardon and the office. In the last matter his claim was scouted, according to his own account, with scandalous breach of faith, and even his bodily safety did not seem wholly secure from the King’s friends. He narrates at some length the story of his wrongs, and tells Grey that he has heard of his intention to burn and slay in whatever country he [Griffith] is in. “Without doubt,” he continues “as many men as ye slay and as many houses as ye burn for my sake, as many will I burn and slay for your sake,” and “doute not that I will have bredde and ale of the best that is in your Lordschip.” There is something delightfully inconsequent in Griffith’s method of ending this fire-breathing epistle: “Wretten in grete haste at the Park of Brunkiffe the XIth day of June. I can no more, but God kepe your Worschipful estate in prosperity.”
Grey of Ruthin was filled with wrath at this impudence and replied to the “strengest thief in Wales” at great length, reserving his true sentiments, however, for the conclusion, where he bursts into rhyme: “But we hoope we shall do thee a pryve thyng: A roope, a ladder and a ring, heigh in a gallowes for to heng. And thus shall be your endyng. And he that made the be ther to helpyng. And we on our behalf shall be well willing for thy letter is knowlechyng.”
It is quite evident that the Greys had not lived, aliens though they were, in the land of bards for five generations for nothing. Full of wrath, and by no means free from panic, Grey writes off in all haste to the young Prince Henry, who is acting as regent during his father’s absence in the north. He encloses a duplicate of his answer to the “strengest thief in Wales” and advises the Prince of the “Misgovernance and riote which is beginning heer in the Marches of North Wales.” He begs for a fuller commission to act against the rebels, one that will enable him to pursue and take them in the “Kyng’s ground”; in the counties, that is to say, where the King’s writ runs, and not merely in the lordships which covered what are now the counties of Denbigh and Montgomery. “But worshipful and gracious Lorde, ye most comaunden the Kynge’s officers in every Cuntree to do the same.” Grey goes on to declare that there are many officers, some in the King’s shires, others in the lordships of Mortimer at Denbigh and of Arundel at Dinas Brân and in Powysland, that are “kin unto these men that be risen, and tyll ye putte these officers in better governance this Countrie of North Wales shall nevere have peese.” He enclosed also the letter of the “strengest thief,” and begs the Prince to read it and judge for himself what sort of people he has to face. He urges him to listen carefully to the full tidings that his poor messenger and esquire Richard Donne will give him, and to take counsel with the King for providing some more sufficient means of curbing the turbulent Welshmen than he now has at his disposal. “Else trewly hitt will be an unruly Cuntree within short time.”