Royal Wales. Deborah Fisher
as a sign of Llywelyn’s high-mindedness, in that he chose not to punish the daughter for the sins of the father, but no one bothered to record Isabella’s feelings on the matter.
Llywelyn’s action in selecting Dafydd as his heir, rather than his older, illegitimate son Gruffydd, reveals his willingness to compromise with the English. He saw that the future of Wales might depend on the country becoming more like its threatening neighbour, rather than continuing to resist the inevitable. He was not so wedded to Welsh law that he would champion the rights of his eldest son when he could use his younger son’s Norman blood as a means of preserving Welsh independence. Llywelyn’s strategy for assuring the succession proved not to be as watertight as he had hoped. Shortly after his death, Henry III recognized Dafydd, the legitimate son of Llywelyn and Joan, as ‘prince of Wales’. He received the new prince’s homage at Gloucester, and even set a coronet on his head. By the following year, however, relations had deteriorated and Henry invaded Gwynedd. Dafydd spent the rest of his short reign staving off the inevitable.
Dafydd died prematurely, six years after his father, leaving no heir. It was another Llywelyn, the son of Dafydd’s illegitimate elder brother, Gruffydd, who eventually came to the fore in Gwynedd, dominating his own three brothers in the process. Picking up where his grandfather had left off, Llywelyn ap Gruffydd (c.1230–82) set out to become undisputed ruler of Wales, and was recognized as such in the Treaty of Montgomery, signed in 1267. With Henry III, now an immature adult, still on the English throne, Llywelyn’s position was a strong one, threatened mainly by the petty jealousies of lesser Welsh princes. He had reached this position largely thanks to a timely alliance with Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, the powerful French-born baron who was determined to make the king more answerable to his subjects.
Simon’s campaign for a parliament was deemed necessary because there were no real restrictions on the activities of the English kings. Their own Marcher lords were as vulnerable to their mood swings as the Welsh were. Even William Marshal had suffered from King John’s tyranny, having his Welsh castles taken away from him in a fit of pique and then returned in a moment of greater sanity. In 1210, angry with his former favourite William de Braose (grandfather of the man who would cuckold Llywelyn Fawr), and even more angry when he discovered that the latter had run away to France to elude his displeasure, John took William’s wife and his eldest son prisoner instead. Maud de Braose was a feisty woman, who had defended her husband’s possession of Painscastle against Welsh attack during the 1190s. She had as good as called John a murderer after the mysterious death of his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, in 1203. Now John took his vengeance on her and her son. They died in captivity, perhaps at Windsor or at Corfe Castle in Dorset, starved to death on the king’s orders. William de Braose senior, who had planned to be buried at Brecon, died in exile. The de Braoses, Norman to the core, nevertheless left their hearts in the Welsh border country.
Alliances between Welsh chieftains and Marcher lords were not uncommon, and, where they occurred, could produce a lethal cocktail of home-grown loyalties and imported military power that threatened the English throne. It was an alliance between Robert Fitzhamon (d.1107) and a local prince that had first given the Normans their power base in Glamorgan, and Henry I had imprisoned Iorwerth ap Bleddyn (1053–1111) for his alliance with the earl of Shrewsbury, Robert of Bellême, when the latter supported Robert Curthose, Henry’s brother and rival for the throne.
Henry III’s eldest son, the future King Edward I, disapproved of his father’s vacillating rule, and was determined to show himself a strong ruler when the time came. It was Edward who put an end to Simon de Montfort’s dominance, defeating the rebel barons at the Battle of Evesham in 1265 and banishing the entire de Montfort family from England. In doing so he was sending into exile his own aunt and his first cousins (Simon’s widow being the sister of King Henry III). Simon was one of those progressive English barons who had allied themselves with the Welsh rather than make enemies of them. His pact with Llywelyn ap Gruffydd was cemented by Llywelyn’s promise to marry Simon’s daughter Eleanor, and this did not endear the Welsh leader to Prince Edward. Seven years after Evesham, Edward came to the throne. Having eliminated the internal opposition, he felt safe within the boundaries of England, and cast his eyes further afield.
By 1282, Edward I wanted Wales very badly. His reasons cannot have had a great deal to do with the natural resources of the principality. Geographically, Wales was a troublesome region, with its tendency to mountainous terrain, poor soil and generally wet weather. What it did have, in abundance, was a set of minor rulers who made Edward’s hold on England less secure than it might otherwise have been. As long as they stayed on their side of the border and did not resist too strongly when his own barons infiltrated Welsh territory, he had been prepared to tolerate them. He had enough on his plate, with crusades and rebellious Scots leaders, to have no strong motive for an invasion of weak little Wales. Besides, it was only a matter of time before the barons did the job for him. The king did, however, feel obliged to make his dominance felt when he came up against a Welsh leader who was unwilling to lie down and be walked over.
It was the petty quarrel between Edward I and Llywelyn ap Gruffydd that escalated into internecine war, putting an end to Wales’s 900-year-old tradition of independence from England. Edward was simply tired of waiting. The policy of delegating the conquest to the king’s barons carried with it the danger of insubordination. Marcher lords must be made to share their profits with the monarch who had treated them so generously; they must not be allowed to become petty kings themselves. One of the great Marcher titles, the earldom of Chester, comprising Cheshire and Flintshire, its last incumbent having died in 1237, passed briefly into the hands of Simon de Montfort before his disgrace. Edward I himself, while heir to the throne, had briefly been known as ‘Lord’ of Chester, and he bestowed the earldom on his eldest son, with the result that princes of Wales from 1301 onwards have also been earls of Chester. The title makes a connection between the old and new regimes.
Llywelyn’s marriage to Eleanor de Montfort was guaranteed to provoke the king of England. Edward had exiled his cousin along with the rest of her family, but the ostensible reason for his displeasure was that Llywelyn had not asked his permission to go ahead with the marriage. Moreover, the Welsh prince had tried to avoid giving Edward any say in the matter by having his bride brought to him by sea. The king, having got wind of the wedding plans, arranged for the ship to be taken by ‘pirates’, and Eleanor languished for more than two years under house arrest at Windsor until Llywelyn had made suitable concessions. The king then made a show of celebrating the marriage in fine style at Worcester Cathedral. At the very last moment, he extracted further concessions from the Welsh. He was determined to show Llywelyn who really ruled the country.
The death of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, ‘Llywelyn the Last’ as he is called in English and, more tellingly, ‘Ein Llyw Olaf’ (‘our last leader’) in Welsh, is a defining moment in the history of Wales. It is in this event that lovers of Welsh independence see their nation subjugated by a foreign oppressor. In particular, the ignominy of Llywelyn’s death (killed in an ambush and decapitated by a knight who had no idea of his royal status) seems to sum up the destruction of Welsh identity. King Edward, who accepted Llywelyn’s head as a gift and paraded it around the streets of London, is regarded as no better than a murderer whose tyranny continued unchecked following the demise of the only leader with both the competence and the courage to stand against him.
Edward did not see himself as a tyrant but as a realist and a modernizer. He seems to have believed he was doing Wales a favour by subjugating it and annexing it to England. That he took his revenge on the Welsh and their leaders is not in dispute. The brutality with which he executed Llywelyn’s younger brother Dafydd, the callousness with which he condemned Dafydd’s small sons to life imprisonment (from which they never emerged), the sheer coldness of his decision to send the daughters of Dafydd and Llywelyn into convents for the rest of their lives, all testify to his determination to put down any opposition that might arise.
Yet his pronouncements are also evidence of a man who wanted to appear generous in victory and who placed some value on the new lands now made available to him. Edward claimed that his intention was not to punish the children of his enemies, merely to put an end to division and rule in peace. ‘Having the Lord before our eyes, pitying also her sex and her age, that the innocent may not seem to atone for the iniquity