Owen Glyndwr and the Last Struggle for Welsh Independence

An impression not altogether easy to account for, that the fall of this great castle would prove the final blow to Owen’s resistance, got abroad, and there was a great rush of knights and nobles to take part in the ceremony. A picked force of 2400 archers and men-at-arms was told off for the service, and an entry in the Issue Rolls notes the sum of £6825 as being set aside for their pay over the period of six months beginning in June. This was a strong nucleus for an expedition that could be supplemented by the levies of the border counties and the spare strength of the local Marcher barons. Aberystwith Castle occupies a site of much distinction, placed upon a bold promontory projecting into the sea. Its ruins still survive as one of the innumerable witnesses to Cromwell’s superfluous vandalism, and afford a favourite lounge to summer visitors at the popular Welsh watering-place. But the first castle built on Norman lines was erected in the twelfth century by Gilbert de Strongbow, the earliest Norman adventurer in this district. A centre for generations of Norman-Welsh strife, dismantled and restored again and again by contentious chieftains, it was finally rebuilt by Edward I.; and what Cromwell and time’s destroying hand have left of it dates chiefly from that luminous epoch in Welsh history. Not many of those, perhaps, who loiter amidst its lifeless fragments are aware that in the season of 1407 it was the object of quite a fashionable crusade on the part of the chivalry of England, well supplied with every requisite of siege warfare that the primitive science of the period could provide.

Harlech was at this time the headquarters of Glyndwr’s family, including Edmund Mortimer, but to localise Glyndwr himself becomes now more difficult than ever. Since Carmarthen and most of South Wales had forsaken their allegiance, his energies must have been still more severely taxed in keeping up the spirit and directing the movements of his widely scattered bands. We heard of him lately raiding through Pembroke and threatening the Flemish settlements. Merioneth and Carnarvon in the North were still faithful, and we can well believe that the great castles of Aberystwith and Harlech, lying midway between the remnant of his southern followers and those of the North, were in some sort the keys to the situation. Aberystwith, in which Glyndwr had placed a strong garrison under a trusty captain, seemed so, at any rate, to the English. Great guns were sent all the way from Yorkshire to Bristol, to be forwarded thence by sea to the coast of Cardigan, while ample stores of bows and arrows, bowstrings, arblasts, stone-shot, sulphur, and saltpetre were ordered to be held in readiness at Hereford. Woods upon the banks of the Severn were to be cut down and the forest of Dean to be picked over for trees, out of which was to be contrived the siege machinery for the subjugation of hapless Aberystwith. A troop of carpenters were to sail from Bristol for the devoted spot and erect scaffolds and wooden towers upon a scale such as had not been before witnessed at any of the innumerable sieges of this Welsh war. Proclamations calling out the great nobility of western England and the Marches to meet the King and Prince at Hereford were sent out. Owen, as well as Aberystwith and Harlech, was to be crushed, and the King himself, with the flower of his chivalry, was to be there to witness the closing scene. How far off even yet was the final extinction of Owen, no one then could have well imagined.

But a temporary check came to these great preparations. The King, as he had shrunk from crossing the Channel, now shrank from crossing the Welsh border. A pestilence, somewhat more severe than those which were almost chronic in the country in those days, swept over the island and was more virulent in the West than elsewhere. It may have been this that for a time suspended operations. Strange to say, too, the Richard myth was not quite extinct, for during this summer bills were found posted up about London proclaiming that he was “yet alive and in health, and would come again shortly with great magnificence and power to recover his kingdom.” But neither pestilence nor the vagaries of the King nor false rumours of the dead Richard were allowed to permanently unsettle the Aberystwith enterprise. Fighting in Wales had by no means been a popular or fashionable pastime, when there was no territory to be won or to be defended. It was poor sport for the heavy-armed sons of Mars of that period, all athirst for glory, this tilting over rough ground at active spearmen who melted away before their cumbrous onslaught only to return and deal out death and wounds at some unexpected moment or in some awkward spot. But now whole clouds of gay cavaliers, besides men scarred and weather-beaten with Welsh warfare, gathered to the crusade against Aberystwith. French wars just now were at a discount, not because the spirit was unwilling, but because the exchequer was weak, so, the supply of fighting knights and squires being for the moment greater than the demand, Prince Henry reaped the benefit of the situation in his march through South Wales.

But the bluest blood and the most brilliant equipment were futile in attack against castles that nature and Edward the First had combined to make invulnerable. The guns and scaffolds and wooden towers were all there but they were powerless against Aberystwith and the brave Welshmen who, under Owen’s lieutenant, Rhys ap Griffith ap Llewelyn, defended it. The King’s particular cannon, weighing four and one half tons, was there, which, with another called the Messenger, shook the rock-bound coasts, striking terror, we may well fancy, into the peasants of that remote country and proving more destructive to those behind it than those before, for we are told that it burst during the siege, a common thing with cannons of that day, dealing death to all around. Once an hour, it is usually estimated, was the greatest rapidity with which these cumbrous pieces could be fired with safety, and we may well believe that the moment of explosion must have been a much more anxious one, seeing how often they burst, to their friends beside them than to their foes hidden behind the massive walls of a Norman castle. The Duke of York was there, and the Earl of Warwick, who, two years previously, had defeated Glyndwr in a pitched battle and was eager, no doubt, to meet him again. Sir John Grendor, too, was present, no courtier, but a hero of the Welsh wars, and Sir John Oldcastle, a typical border soldier, who became Lord Cobham and was ultimately hunted down as a Lollard at Welshpool and burned by Henry V.; while Lord Berkeley commanded the fleet and managed the siege train. It was not known at Aberystwith, either by the Welsh or the besiegers, where Owen was. He could not readily trust himself in castles, besieged both by land and sea, and run the risk of being caught like a fox in a trap. He bided his time, on this occasion, as will be seen, and arrived precisely at the right moment. Prince Henry found the castle impregnable to assault, and there was nothing for it but to sit down and reduce it by starvation. The only hope of the garrison lay in Owen’s relieving them, and with such an army before them the possibility of this seemed more than doubtful. Provisions soon began to fail, and in the middle of September Rhys ap Griffith made overtures and invited seventeen of the English leaders within the castle to arrange a compromise. One of these was Richard Courtney of the Powderham family, a scholar of Exeter College, Oxford, and Chancellor of the University. Mass was said by this accomplished person to the assembled Welsh and English leaders, after which they received the sacrament and then proceeded to draw up an agreement which seems a strange one. By it the Welsh undertook to deliver up the castle on November 1st if Glyndwr had not in the meantime appeared and driven off the besiegers. Till that date an armistice was to continue. Those of the garrison who would not accept these terms were to be turned out to take their chance; the rest were to receive a full pardon at the capitulation. The abbot of Ystradfflur, who, though a Cistercian, had taken Owen’s side, and three Welsh gentlemen, were given up as hostages.

The Prince and his nobles were doubtless glad enough to get away from so monotonous a task in so remote a spot, though their return to England was hardly a glorious one. No one seems to have expected Owen, and only five hundred soldiers were left in camp at the abbey of Ystradfflur, some fifteen miles off, to insure the proper fulfilment of the agreement when November should come round. Parliament was to meet and did meet at Gloucester in October, and the King himself, so much importance did he attach to Aberystwith, still talked of returning with his son to receive its surrender at the appointed time. But neither the royal progress nor the surrender became matters of fact, for during October Owen slipped unexpectedly into the castle with a fresh force, repudiated, as indeed he had a right to repudiate, the agreement, and branded as traitors to his cause those who had made it, which was hard. The five hundred royal soldiers at Ystradfflur had shrunk in numbers and relaxed in discipline, and had at any rate no mind to encounter Owen, who remained in possession of the west coast and its castles throughout a winter which so far as any further news of him is concerned was an uneventful one. In the meantime the Parliament which sat at Gloucester for six weeks in the autumn was greatly exercised about Welsh affairs. Wales had returned no revenue since Glyndwr first raised his standard, and the sums of money that had been spent in vain endeavours to crush his power had been immense. The feeling was now stronger than ever that taxation for this purpose, one that brought no returns either in glory or plunder, had reached its limit, and that it was high time the nobles whose interests lay in Wales should take upon themselves for the future the heavy burden of Welsh affairs.

One incident occurred at this Parliament which had some significance and was not without humour. The Prince of Wales was publicly thanked for his services before Aberystwith almost upon the very day when, unknown, of course, to him and to those at distant Gloucester, Owen had slipped into the castle about which so much stir was being made, upset the whole arrangement, and turned the costly campaign into an ignominious failure. It is significant, too, that the Prince, after acknowledging the praises of his father and the Parliament, kneeled before the former and “spake some generous words” concerning the Duke of York, whose advice and assistance “had rescued the whole expedition from peril and desolation.” This looks as if Owen’s people had not allowed the return journey of the Prince and his friends and his even still large force to be the promenade that was expected. It may well indeed have been the ubiquitous Glyndwr himself from whom the sagacity of the Duke delivered them in the wilds of Radnor or Carmarthen. Though Aberystwith and Harlech were safe for this winter, the Prince, with a deliberation perhaps emphasised by chagrin at his failure, made arrangements for a second attempt to be undertaken in the following summer.

The winter of 1407-1408 was the most terrible within living memory. It is small wonder that no echo of siege or battle or feat of arms breaks the silence of the snow-clad and war-torn country. Birds and animals perished by thousands, for a sheet of frozen snow lay upon the land from before Christmas till near the end of March. Yet outside Wales even so cruel a winter could not still all action. For Glyndwr’s old ally, Northumberland, selected this, of all times and seasons, for that last reckless bid for power which has been before alluded to, and with Bardolph and Bifort, Owen’s Bishop of Bangor, went out across the bitter cold of the Yorkshire moors, the first two of them, at any rate, to death and ruin. Bifort, however, seems to have got away and carried the nominal honours of his bishopric for many years.

The opening of summer in 1408 found Owen still active and dangerous. No longer so as of old to the peace of England and to Henry’s throne, – that crisis had passed away, – but he was still an unsurmountable obstacle to the good government of Wales. We know this rather from the anxiety to subdue him manifested this year by the King’s council to the exclusion of all other business, than from any detailed knowledge of his actions. Of these one can guess the general tenor, and the necessary sameness of a guerilla warfare somewhat mitigates the disappointment natural at the lack of actual detail. One gathers from the brief but, from one point of view, significant entries in the public records how entirely demoralised most of the country still remained. Here is an order to prevent supplies being sent to the rebels; there a caution to keep the bonfires in Cheshire or Shropshire ready for the match; there again are notes of persons becoming surety for the good behaviour of repentant Welshmen, or Lord Marchers trying to come again to terms with their rebellious Cymric tenants. Panic-stricken letters, however, came no more from beleaguered castles, nor do the people of Northampton any longer quake in their beds at the name of Glyndwr, though the border counties, and with good cause, feel as yet by no means wholly comfortable.

“In 1408,” says the Iolo manuscript, “the men of Glamorgan were excited to commotion by the extra oppression of the King’s men; many of the chieftains who had obtained royal favour burnt their stacks and barns lest Owen’s men should take them. But these chieftains fled to the extremity of England and Wales, where they were defended in the castles and camps of the King’s forces and supported by the rewards of treason and stratagem. Owen could not recover his lands and authority because of the treachery prevalent in Anglesey and Arvon, which the men of Glamorgan called the treason of the men of Arvon.”

All this is sadly involved, but one treasures anything that has a genuine ring about it in connection with this shadowy year. Arvon, it may be remarked, is the “cantref” facing the submissive Anglesey, and no doubt the royal castle of Carnarvon was able by this time to exercise an intimidating influence on that portion of the country.

Prince Henry’s commission as Lieutenant of both North and South Wales was again renewed; and, gathering his forces at Hereford in June, he again moved on towards the stubborn castle of Aberystwith, making Carmarthen, the old capital of South Wales, his base of operations. Aberystwith this time held out till winter, when it at last fell, the garrison meeting with no harsher treatment than that of ejection without arms or food. Harlech, which Gilbert and John Talbot had by the throat, with a thousand well-armed men and a big siege train, resisted even longer. The Welsh this time were able to utilise the sea, which in those days beat against the foot of the high rock upon which the castle stands, a rock now removed from the shore by half a mile or more of sandy common. Glyndwr, too, was now able to move freely from one beleaguered fortress to another. Both of them held out with singular valour and tenacity, attacking the provision boats which came from Bristol for the besieging armies, and disputing every point that offered an opportunity with sleepless vigilance and tireless energy. Edmund Mortimer died either during the siege or immediately after the surrender, of starvation some writers say, though privation would perhaps be a more appropriate and likely term. Mortimer’s wife and three girls, with a son Lionel, together with that “eminent woman of a knightly family,” Glyndwr’s own consort, fell into the King’s hands with the capture of Harlech, and seem to have been taken to London in a body.

There is something pathetic about this wholesale termination of Owen’s domestic life, in what for that period would be called his old age. One longs, too, to know something about it. How Margaret Hanmer deported herself under the reflected glories of her lord. Whether indeed she saw much of him, and if so, where; whether she was a stout-hearted patriot and bore the trials and the uncertainties of her dangerous pre-eminence with proud fortitude, or whether she wept over the placid memories of Sycherth and Glyndyfrdwy, and deplored the fortune that had made her a hero’s wife and a wanderer. She had three married daughters to give her shelter in Herefordshire. Let us hope that she found her way to one of them, as her husband did years later when the storms of his life were over. As for the Mortimers, that branch of the family was entirely wiped out. The children died, and the gentle Katherine, who had married so near the throne of England, soon followed them and lies somewhere beneath the roar of London traffic in a city churchyard. One account places the capture and removal to London of Glyndwr’s family at a later period, but as the interest in this is chiefly a matter of sentiment, the precise date is of no special moment.

The lines were now rapidly tightening round Owen. The English government, by this time fairly free from foreign complications, showed a vigilance in Wales which it would have been well for it to have shown in former years, when the danger was much greater. Owen, on his part, relapsed gradually into a mere guerilla leader, though the hardy bands that still rallied round him and scorned to ask for pardon were still so numerous and formidable that it was with difficulty the King could prevent some of the Marcher barons even now from purchasing security against his attacks. Talbot with bodies of royal troops still remained as a garrison in Wales. It is curiously significant, too, and not readily explicable, that in this year 1409 the town of Shrewsbury closed her gates against an English army marching into Wales and refused them provisions. It looks as if even the honest Salopians, tired of keeping guard against the ubiquitous Glyndwr, had thus late, and for the second time in the war, made some sort of terms with him. We find also Charleton, Lord of Powys, about this time granting pardons to those of his tenants who had been “out with Glyndwr,” while he was rewarding his more faithful lieges in the borough of Welshpool by an extension of their corporation limits to an area of twenty thousand acres, an unique distinction which that interesting border town enjoys to this day.

Meanwhile it must not be supposed that the royal party treated all Welsh captives with the leniency we have seen at Aberystwith, Harlech, and elsewhere. Rhys Ddu, a noted captain of Glyndwr’s, and Philip Scudamore, a scion of that famous Herefordshire family into which the Welsh leader’s daughter had married, were taken prisoners while raiding in Shropshire and sent to London and placed in the Tower, where several Welsh nobles had been this long time languishing. Rhys was taken to the Surrey side of the river by the Earl of Arundel, tried, and handed over to the sheriff, who had him dragged upon a hurdle to Tyburn and there executed. His quarters, like those of many Welsh patriots before him, were sent to hang over the gates of four English cities, and his head was affixed to London Bridge. Ten Welsh gentlemen were under lock and key at Windsor Castle. They were now handed over to the Marshal and kept in the Tower till heavy ransoms were forthcoming. But Henry’s treatment of his Welsh enemies was upon the whole the reverse of vengeful, and he was wise in his generation. His wholesale pardons to men wearied with years of war in a cause now so utterly hopeless were infinitely more efficacious against that implacable foe who would not himself dream of asking terms. Owen, too, on his part had many prisoners, hidden away in mountain fastnesses, chief of whom was the hapless David Gam, whom my readers will almost have forgotten. Nine of these, we are told by one writer, his followers hung, greatly to their leader’s chagrin, since he wanted them for hostages or for exchange.

The Avignon Pope had done Owen little good. A certain religious flavour was introduced into the martial songs of the bards, and Owen’s native claims to the leadership of Wales were now supplemented by papal and ecclesiastical blessings from this new and very modern fount of inspiration. But everything ecclesiastical at Bangor was in ashes, the torch, it will be remembered, having been applied by Glyndwr himself. The royal bishop, Young, had years before fled to England and was now enjoying the peaceful retirement of Rochester. Owen’s bishop, Bifort, as we have seen, was a wandering soldier. The more vigorous Trevor, who came back to Owen in 1404, was at this time in France, making a last effort, it is supposed, to interest the French King in Glyndwr’s waning cause. But death overtook him while still in Paris, and he lies buried in the chapel of the infirmary of the Abbey de St. Victor beneath the following epitaph:

“Hic jacet Reverendus in Christo Pater Johannes Episcopus asaphensis in Wallia qui obiit A.D. 1410 die secundo mensis aprilis cujus anima feliciter requiescat in pace. Amen.”

CHAPTER XI

LAST YEARS OF OWEN’S LIFE 1410-1416

OF the last six years of Owen’s life, those from 1410 to 1416, there is little to be said. His cause was hopelessly lost and he had quite ceased to be dangerous. Wales was reconquered and lay sick, bleeding, and wasted beneath the calm of returning peace. Thousands, it is to be feared, cursed Glyndwr as they looked upon the havoc which the last decade had wrought. The unsuccessful rebel or patriot, call him what you will, has far more friends among those yet unborn than among his own contemporaries, above all in the actual hour of his failure. Of this failure, too, the Welsh were reminded daily, not only by their wasted country and ruined homesteads but by fierce laws enacted against their race and a renewal on both sides of that hatred which the previous hundred years of peace had greatly softened.

Men born of Welsh parents on both sides were now forbidden to purchase land near any of the Marcher towns. They were not permitted to be citizens of any borough, nor yet to hold any office, nor carry armour nor any weapon. No Welshman could bind his child to a trade, nor bring him up to letters, while English men who married Welsh women were disfranchised of their liberties. In all suits between Englishmen and Welshmen the judge and jury were to be of the former race, while all “Cymmorthau,” or gatherings for mutual assistance in harvest or domestic operations, were strictly forbidden.

These laws were kept on the statute books till the real union of Wales and England in Henry the Eighth’s time, but gradually became a dead letter as the memory of the first ten bloody years of the century grew fainter. Glyndwr, however, believed in the justice of his cause, and if he expressed remorse for the methods which he had used to uphold it, we hear nothing of such apologies. That he showed the courage of his convictions in heroic fashion no one can gainsay. That men could be found to stand even yet in such numbers by his side is the most eloquent tribute that could be paid to his personal magnetism. He had lost all his castles, unless indeed, as seems likely, those grim towers of Dolbadarn and Dolwyddelan in the Snowdon mountains were left to him. He became henceforward a mere outlaw, confined entirely to the mountains of Carnarvon and Merioneth, between those fierce and rapid raids which we dimly hear of him still making upon the Northern Marches. His old companions, Rhys and William ap Tudor, who had been with him from the beginning, were in the King’s hands, and were about this time executed at Chester with the usual barbarities of the period. The elder was the grandfather of Owen Tudor, and consequently the ancestor of our present King. David Gam was still a prisoner in Owen’s hands till 1412, when the King entered into negotiations for his release through the agency of Llewelyn ap Howel, Sir John Tiptoft, and William Boteler. What terms were made we know not; an exchange was in all likelihood effected, seeing how many of Owen’s friends were in captivity. David’s liberation, however, was by some means successfully accomplished, and he lived to fight and fall by the King’s side at Agincourt, being knighted, some say, as he lay dying upon that memorable field.

When, in 1413, Prince Henry came to the throne, he issued a pardon to all Welsh rebels indiscriminately, not excepting Glyndwr. But, obstinate to the last, the old hero held to his mountains, refusing to ask or to receive a favour, striking with his now feeble arm, whenever chance offered, the English power or those who supported it. When Henry IV. succumbed to those fleshly ills which constant trouble had brought upon his once powerful frame, Glyndwr was still in the field and royal troops still stationed in the Welsh mountains to check his raids. Tradition has it that he was at last left absolutely alone, when he is supposed to have wandered about the country in disguise and in a fashion so mysterious that a wealth of legend has gathered around these wanderings.