Owen Glyndwr and the Last Struggle for Welsh Independence

“In 1415,” says one old chronicler, “Owen disappeared so that neither sight nor tidings of him could be obtained in the country. It was rumoured that he escaped in the guise of a reaper bearing a sickle, according to the tidings of the last who saw and knew him, after which little or no information transpired respecting him nor of the place or name of his concealment. The prevalent opinion was that he died in a wood in Glamorgan; but occult chroniclers assert that he and his men still live and are asleep on their arms in a cave called Ogof Dinas in the Vale of Gwent, where they will continue until England is self-abased, when they will sally forth, and, recognising their country’s privileges, will fight for the Welsh, who shall be dispossessed of them no more until the Day of Judgment, when the earth shall be consumed with fire and so reconstructed that neither oppression nor devastation shall take place any more, and blessed will he be who will see that time.”

Carte says that Owen wandered down to Herefordshire in the disguise of a shepherd and found refuge in his daughter’s house at Monnington.

It is quite certain that in 1415, Henry V., full of his French schemes and ambitions, and with no longer any cause to trouble himself about Wales, sent a special message of pardon to Glyndwr. Perhaps the young King felt a touch of generous admiration for the brave old warrior who had been the means of teaching him so much of the art of war and the management of men, and who, though alone and friendless, was too proud to ask a favour or to bend his knee. Sir Gilbert Talbot of Grafton, in Worcestershire, was the man picked out by Henry to accomplish this gracious act. Nothing, however, came of it immediately. Perhaps the great campaign of Poitiers interfered with a matter so comparatively trifling. But on the King’s return he renewed it in February, 1416, commissioning this time not only Talbot but Glyndwr’s own son, Meredith, as envoys. Whether or no it would have even now and by such a channel been acceptable is of no consequence, as the old hero was either dead or in concealment. Common sense inclines to the most logical and most generally accepted of the traditions which surround his last years, namely, the one which pictures him resting quietly after his stormy life at the home of one or other of his married daughters in Herefordshire. Monnington and Kentchurch both claim the honour of having thus sheltered him. Probably they both did, seeing how near they lie together, though the people of the former place stoutly maintain that it is in their churchyard his actual dust reposes.

At Kentchurch Court, where his daughter Alice Scudamore lived with her husband, and which still belongs to the family, a tower of the building is even yet cherished as the lodging of the fallen chieftain during part at any rate of these last years of obscurity. The romantic beauty of the spot, the survival of the mansion and of the stock that own it, would make us wish to give Kentchurch everything it claims, and more, in connection with Glyndwr’s last days. Above the Court, which stands in a hollow embowered in woods, a park or chase climbs for many hundred feet up the steep sides of Garaway Hill, which in its unconventional wildness and entire freedom from any modernising touch is singularly in keeping with the ancient memories of the place. The deer brush beneath oaks and yews of such prodigious age and size that some of them must almost certainly have been of good size when Thomas Scudamore brought Alice, the daughter of Owen of Glyndyfrdwy, home as a bride; while just across the narrow valley, through which the waters of the Monnow rush swift and bright between their ruddy banks, the village and ruined castle of Grosmont stand conspicuous upon their lofty ridge. It must in fairness to the claims of Monnington be remembered that Grosmont was not precisely the object upon which Glyndwr, if he were still susceptible to such emotions, would have wished his fading eyesight to dwell long, since of all the spots in Wales (and it is just in Wales, the Monnow being the boundary) Grosmont had been the one most pregnant, perhaps, with evil to his cause. For it was the defeat of Glyndwr’s forces there that may be said to have broken the back of his rebellion. And as we stand upon the bridge over the Monnow midway between England and Wales, the still stately ruins of the Norman castle that must often have echoed to Prince Henry’s cheery voice crown the hill beyond us; while behind it the quaint village that rose upon the ashes of the town Glyndwr burnt, with all its civic dignities, looks down upon us, the very essence of rural peace.

Glyndwr’s estates had long ago been forfeited to the Crown and granted to John, Earl of Somerset. Soon after his death Glyndyfrdwy was sold to the Salusburys of Bachymbyd and of Rûg near Corwen, one of the very few alien families that in a peaceful manner had become landowners in North Wales before the Edwardian conquest. It is only recently indeed that there has ceased to be a Salusbury of Rûg. Owen’s descendants, through his daughters, at any rate, are numerous. A few years after his death, Parliament, softening towards his memory, passed a special law for the benefit of his heirs, allowing them to retain or recover a portion of the proscribed estates. In consequence of this, Alice Scudamore made an effort to recover Glyndyfrdwy and Sycherth from the Earl of Somerset apparently without success, so far as the former went, in view of the early ownership of the Salusburys.

Of Griffith, the son who was so long a prisoner in the Tower in company with the young King of Scotland, we hear nothing more. But of Meredith this entry occurs in the Rolls of Henry V., 1421: “Pardon of Meredith son of Owynus de Glendordy according to the sacred precept that the son shall not bear the iniquities of the father.” To another daughter of Glyndwr, probably an illegitimate one, Gwenllian, wife of Phillip ap Rhys of Cenarth, the famous bard, Lewis Glyncothi, wrote various poems, in one of which he says: “Your father was a potent prince, all Wales was in his council.”

No intelligent person of our day could regret the failure of Glyndwr’s heroic effort. That Welshmen of the times we have been treating of should have longed to shake off the yoke of the Anglo-Norman was but human, for he was not only a bad master, but a foreigner and wholly antipathetic to the Celtic nature. At the same time, the geographical absurdity, if the word may be permitted, of complete independence was frankly recognised by almost every Welsh patriot from earliest times. The notion of a suzerain or chief king in London, as I have remarked elsewhere, was quite in harmony with the most passionate of Welsh demands. Glyndwr perhaps had other views; but then the kingdom that he would fain have ruled, if the Tripartite Convention is to be relied on, stretched far beyond the narrow bounds of Wales proper and quite matched in strength either of the other two divisions which, under this fantastic scheme, Mortimer and Percy were respectively to govern. What was undoubtedly galling to the Welsh was the spectacle of a province to the north of the island, consisting, so far as the bulk of its power and civilisation was concerned, of these same hated Anglo-Normans, not only claiming and maintaining an entire independence on no basis that a Celt could recognise, but trafficking continuously with foreign enemies in a fashion that showed them to be destitute of any feeling for the soil of Britain beyond that part which they themselves had seized. To the long-memoried Welshman it seemed hard, and no doubt illogical, that these interlopers, one practically in blood and speech and feeling with their own oppressors, should thus be permitted to set up a rival independence within the borders of the island, while they on their part were forced to fuse themselves with a people who could not even understand their tongue and with whom they had scarcely a sentiment in common. It is difficult not to sympathise with the mediæval Welshman in this attitude or to refrain from wondering at the strange turn of fortune that allowed the turbulent ambition of some Norman barons to draw an artificial line and create a northern province, which their descendants, if they showed much vigour in its defence, showed very little aptitude for governing with reasonable equity.

Glyndwr, it is true, had thrown off the old British tradition and had called in foreigners from across the sea, as Vortigern to his cost had done nearly a thousand years before. He had also adopted a French Pope. Neither had done him much good, and Welshmen were soon as ready as ever to fight their late brief allies for the honour of the island of Britain. But Glyndwr from an early period in his insurrection had kept the one aim, that of the independence of his country, dream though it might be, consistently in view. No means were to be neglected, even to the ruining of its fields and the destruction of its buildings, to obtain this end. How thoroughly he carried out his views has been sufficiently emphasised; so thoroughly, indeed, as to cause many good Welshmen to refrain from wholly sharing in the veneration shown for his memory by the bulk of his countrymen. There can be but one opinion, however, as to the marvellous courage with which he clung to the tree of liberty that he had planted and watered with such torrents of human blood, till in literal truth he found himself the last leaf upon its shrunken limbs, and that a withered one. In the heyday of his glory his household bard and laureate wrote much extravagant verse in his honour, as was only natural and in keeping with the fancy of the period and of his class. But the Red Iolo himself, in all likelihood, little realised the prophetic ring in the lines he addressed to his master on the closing of his earthly course, though we, at least, have ample evidence of their prescience:

“And when thy evening sun is set,May grateful Cambria ne’er forgetIts morning rays, but on thy tombMay never-fading laurels bloom.”

CHAPTER XII

CONCLUSION

AS I have led up to the advent of Glyndwr with a rough outline of Welsh history prior to his day, I will now cast a brief glance at the period which followed. English people have a tendency to underestimate, or rather to take into small consideration, the wide gulf which, not only in former days, but to some extent even yet, divides the two countries. They are apt to think that after the abortive rising of Glyndwr, provided even this stands out clearly in their minds, everything went smoothly and Wales became merely a geographical expression with an eccentric passion for maintaining its own language. As, in the introduction to this book, I had to solicit the patience of the general reader and crave the forbearance of the expert for an effort to cover centuries in a few pages, so I must again put in a plea for another venture of the same kind – briefer, but none the less difficult.

The ruin left by Glyndwr’s war was awful. It was not only the loss of property, the destruction of buildings, the sterilisation of lands, but the quarrels and the blood-feuds which the soreness of these years of strife handed down for generations to the descendants of those who had taken opposing sides. And then before prosperity had fairly lifted its head, before bloody quarrels and memories had been forgotten, the devastating Wars of the Roses were upon the country, and it was plunged once more into a chaos not much less distracting than that in which the preceding generation had weltered.

Though, by a curious turn of events, she ultimately gave to England a Lancastrian king, Wales most naturally favoured the House of York. Edmund Mortimer, uncle to the young Earl of March, had shared the triumphs and the perils of Glyndwr’s rising. The blood of Llewelyn ap Iorwerth flowed in the veins of the Mortimers, and their great estates lay chiefly in Wales and on the border. The old antagonism to Bolingbroke’s usurpation, and the sympathy with Richard and his designated heir that half a century before accompanied it, were still remembered. The Yorkists, however, had no monopoly of Wales, – Welsh knights had fought victoriously in France under Henry V., and Marcher barons of Lancastrian sympathies could command a considerable following of Welshmen. The old confusion of lordship government still retained half Wales as a collection of small palatinates. Once more the castles that Glyndwr had left standing echoed to the bustle of preparation and the stir of arms, and felt the blows of an artillery that they could no longer face with quite the composure with which they had faced the guns of Henry the Fourth. It was not so much the actual damage that was done, for this war was not so comprehensive, but rather the passions and faction it aroused among the Welsh gentry of both races, though this new faction no longer ran strictly upon racial lines. Nor, again, was it the amount of blood that was shed, for this compared to Glyndwr’s war was inconsiderable, but the legacy, rather, of lawlessness that it left behind. Sir John Wynne of Gwydir, in the invaluable chronicle which he wrote at his home in the Vale of Conway during the reign of Elizabeth, draws a graphic picture of North Wales as Henry the Seventh found it. Sir John’s immediate forbears had taken a brisk hand in the doings of those distracted times, and there were still men living when he wrote who had seen the close of the chaos with their own eyes, and whose minds were stored with the evidence of their fathers and grandfathers. Harlech in these wars stood once more a noted siege. It was held for the Lancastrians by a valiant Welshman against the Herberts, who made a somewhat celebrated march through the mountains to besiege it. The stout defence it offered inspired the music and the words of the Welsh national march, “Men of Harlech,” – as spirited an air of its kind, perhaps, as has ever been written. The Vale of Clwyd, the garden of North Wales, was burnt, says Sir John, “to cold coals.” Landowners who had mortgaged their estates, he goes on to tell us, scarcely thought them worth redeeming, while the deer grazed in the very streets of Llanrwst. For two or three generations the country was infested by bands of robbers who found refuge in the mountains of Merioneth or the wild uplands of the Berwyn Range, and fought for the privilege of systematically plundering and levying blackmail on the Vale of Conway and the richer meadows of Edeyrnion. Sir John’s grandfather found it necessary to go to church attended by a bodyguard of twenty men armed to the teeth. “The red-haired banditti of Mawddy” kept the country between the Dovey and Mawddach estuaries and inland nearly to Shropshire in a state of chronic terror. The Carnarvon squires cherished blood-feuds that almost resembled a vendetta, laid siege to one another’s houses, and engaged in mimic battles of a truly bloodthirsty description. The first Wynne of Gwydir left West Carnarvonshire and preferred to live among the brigands of the Vale of Conway rather than among his own relatives, since he would “either have to kill or be killed by them.” To try and combat these organised bands of robbers, Edward IV. instituted, in 1478, the Court of the President and Council of the Marches of Wales, with summary jurisdiction over all breakers of the peace – provided always that they could catch them! The legal machinery of the lordships was wholly ineffectual, for though each petty monarch had the power of life and death, the harbouring of thieves and outlaws became a matter purely of personal rivalry and jealousy.

But this epoch of Welsh history ended with the advent of the Tudors, which is in truth an even more notable landmark than the so-called conquest of Edward I. Wales since that time had been governed as a conquered country, or a Crown province – she had been annexed but not united, nor had she been represented in Parliament, while outside the Edwardian counties justice was administered, or more often not administered, by two or three score of petty potentates. One must not, however, make too much of what we now call union and patriotism. Cheshire had been till quite recently an independent earldom, with similar relations to the Crown as the lordship, say, of Ruthin or of Hay. As regards national feeling, it is very doubtful if the sentiments that had animated the heptarchy had been eradicated from that turbulent palatinate who boasted the best archers in England and were extremely jealous of their licentious independence.

But it was a pure accident that in the end really reconciled the Welsh to a close union with the hated Saxon. Steeped as they were in sentiment, and credulous to a degree of mysticism and prophecy, and filled with national pride, the rise of the grandson of Owen Tudor of Penmynydd to the throne of Britain was for the Cymry full of significance. The fact, too, that Henry was not merely a Welshman but that he landed in Wales and was accompanied thence by a large force of his fellow-countrymen to the victorious field of Bosworth was a further source of pride and consolation to this long-harassed people. It would be hard indeed to exaggerate the effect upon Wales and its future relationship with England, when a curious chain of events elevated this once obscure princeling to the throne of England. It was strange, too, that it should be a Lancastrian after all whose accession caused such joy and triumph throughout a province which had shed its blood so largely upon the opposing side. The bards were of course in ecstasies; the prophecy that a British prince should once again reign in London – which had faded away into a feeble echo, without heart or meaning, since the downfall of Glyndwr – now astonished with its sudden fulfilment the expounders of Merlin and the Brut as completely as it did the audience to whom they had so long foretold this unlikely consummation. Not for a moment, however, we may well believe, was such a surprise admitted nor the difference in the manner of its fulfilment. But who indeed would carp at that when the result was so wholly admirable? It is not our business to trace the tortuous ways by which fate removed the more natural heirs to the throne and seated upon it for the great good of England as well as of Wales the grandson of an Anglesey squire of ancient race and trifling estate.

That the first Tudor disappointed his fellow-countrymen in some of their just expectations, and behaved in fact somewhat meanly to them, is of no great consequence since his burly son made such ample amends for the shortcomings of his father. The matrimonial barbarities of Henry the Eighth and his drastic measures in matters ecclesiastical have made him so marked a personage that men forget and indeed are not very clearly made to understand what he did for Wales, and consequently for England too.

By an Act of Parliament in 1535 the whole of the Lordship Marcher system was swept away, and the modern counties of Denbigh, Montgomery, Monmouth, Glamorgan, Brecon, and Radnor were formed out of the fragments. It is only possible to generalise within such compass as this. The precise details belong rather to antiquarian lore and would be out of place here. It will be sufficient to say that the Welsh people of all degrees, after waiting with laudable patience for their first King to do something practical on their behalf, petitioned Henry the Eighth to abolish the disorders under which half their country groaned and to grant that representation in Parliament as yet enjoyed by no part of the Principality, and without which true equality could not exist. The King appointed a commission to carry out their wishes. The sources from which the new counties took their names, though following no rule, are obvious enough. Glamorgan, the old Morganwg, had been practically a County Palatine since Fitzhamon and his twelve knights seized it in Henry the First’s time, that is to say, the inferior lordships were held in fealty, not each to the King as elsewhere, but to the heirs of Fitzhamon, who for many generations were the Clares, Earls of Gloucester, having their capital at Cardiff, where higher justice was administered. Pembroke was something of the same sort, though the Flemish element made it differ socially from Glamorgan. Nor must it be forgotten that that promontory of Gower in the latter palatinate was a Flemish lordship. But Pembroke was the actual property of the Crown and its earls or lords were practically constables. The rest of the Marches (for this term signified all Wales outside the Edwardian counties) had no such definitions. That they followed no common rule was obvious enough. Brecon took its name from the old lordship of Brecheiniog that Bernard de Newmarch had founded in Henry the First’s time. The old Melynydd, more or less, became Radnor, after its chief fortress and lordship. Montgomery derived its shire name from the high-perched castle above the Severn, Monmouth from the town at the Monnow’s mouth. Large fragments of the Marches, too, were tacked on to the counties of Hereford and Shropshire, the Welsh border as we know it to-day being in many places considerably westward of the old line. All the old lordship divisions with the privileges and responsibilities of their owners were abolished, and the castles, which had only existed for coercive and defensive purposes, began gradually from this time to subside into those hoary ruins which from a hundred hilltops give the beautiful landscape of South Wales a distinction that is probably unmatched in this particular in northern Europe. County government was uniformly introduced all over Wales and the harsh laws of Glyndwr’s day, for some time a dead letter, were erased from the statutes. Parliamentary representation was allotted, though only one knight instead of two sat for a shire and one burgess only for all the boroughs of a shire; and the two countries became one in heart as well as in fact. Till 1535 the eldest son of English Kings, as Prince of Wales, had been all that the name implies. Henceforth it became a courtesy title; and one may perhaps be allowed a regret, having regard to the temperament of a Celtic race in this particular, that our English monarchs have allowed it to remain so wholly divorced from all Welsh connection. The last actual Prince of Wales was Henry the Eighth’s elder brother Arthur, who died at the then official residence of Ludlow Castle a few weeks after his marriage with Catherine of Aragon.

This reminds me too that one peculiarity remained to distinguish the administration of Wales from that of England, namely that famous and long-lived institution, the “Court of the Marches.” This has already been mentioned as introduced by Edward the Fourth, who was friendly to Wales, for the suppression of outlaws and brigands. It was confirmed and its powers enlarged by Henry the Eighth’s Act, and with headquarters at Ludlow, though sitting sometimes at Shrewsbury and Chester, it was the appeal for all important Welsh litigation. Nor was it in any sense regarded as a survival of arbitrary treatment. On the contrary, it was a convenience to Welshmen, who could take cases there that people in North Yorkshire, for instance, would have to carry all the way to Westminster. For a long time, curiously enough, its jurisdiction extended into the counties of Worcester, Gloucester, Hereford, and Salop. It consisted of a president and council with a permanent staff of subordinate officials. The presidency was an office of great honour, held usually by a bishop or baron of weight in the country, associated with the two justices of Wales and that of Chester. The arrangement seems to have caused general satisfaction till the reign of William the Third, when the growth of industry and population made it advisable to divide Wales into circuits.

The petitions addressed from the Welsh people to Henry praying for complete fusion with England are instructive reading. Marcher rule at the worst had been infamously cruel, at the best inconvenient and inequitable. It was a disgrace to the civilisation of the fifteenth century, which is saying a great deal. To bring criminals to justice was almost impossible when they had only to cross into the next lordship, whose ruler, being unfriendly perhaps to his neighbour, made it a point of honour to harbour those who defied him. The still martial spirit of the Welsh found vent when wars had ceased in petty quarrels, and with such a turbulent past it did them credit that they recognised how sorely even-handed justice was wanted among them.

Lordship Marchers themselves were too often represented by deputies, and something like the abuses that were familiar in Ireland in more recent times owing to middlemen added to the confusion. According to local custom the humbler people of one lordship might not move eight paces from the road as they passed through a neighbouring territory. The penalty for transgression was all the money they had about them and the joint of one finger. If cattle strayed across the lordship boundary they could be kept and branded by the neighbouring lord or his representatives.