CHAPTER VIII
WELSH REVERSES
1405
GLYNDWR was now, by the lowest estimate, in his forty-sixth year. For that period, when manhood began early, and old age, if it came at all, came quickly, he certainly carried his years with remarkable lightness. Who can say, however, with what feelings he surveyed his handiwork? From end to end, with almost the sole exception of Anglesey and Carnarvonshire and western Pembroke, Wales lay desolate and bleeding. Owen’s hands were red, not only with the blood of Saxons, but with that of old friends and even kinsmen. Red ravage had marked his steps, and there were few parts of the country that he had not at some time or other crossed and recrossed in his desolating marches. Carnarvonshire and western Merioneth and the Plinlimmon Mountains were full of booty, stock, and valuables brought from Norman-Welsh lordships and from beyond the English border. The admirers of Glyndwr would fain believe, and there is something to be said for the theory, that passion and revenge had no part in the havoc which the Welsh hero spread throughout his native land, but that it was due to a deliberate scheme of campaign by which the country was to be made not only too hot, but too bare, to hold the Saxon.
It would be waste of words to speculate on motives that can never be divulged and schemes that have left no witnesses. We have at any rate to face tradition, which counts for much. And this places Glyndwr in the eyes of most Welshmen, with all his ravagings and burnings, on a pedestal above the greatest and most patriotic of their older Princes—above Llewelyn ap Iorwerth, above the last Llewelyn, the son of Gryffydd, above Owen Gwynedd. The cool-headed student may be much less enthusiastic. But he will also call to mind the ethics of war in those days, and then perhaps remember that even in modern conflicts, whose memories stand out with conspicuous glory, there has been no very great improvement on the methods of Glyndwr. The Carolinian who preferred King George to Washington and Congress—and King George after all was at least no usurper—suffered neither more nor less than the Welshmen of Glamorgan or Carmarthen or Merioneth who from prudence or inclination preferred Bolingbroke to Glyndwr. Wars of this type have ever been ferocious. The Anglo-Americans of the eighteenth century were a civilised and peaceful people; Glyndwr lived at a time when war was a trade, ravage its handmaid, and human life of but small account.
It is quite possible to overestimate the effect upon a country in those days of even the most merciless treatment. The torch was not the instrument of irreparable loss that it would have been if applied with equal freedom only a hundred and fifty years later. Outside the feudal castles and the great ecclesiastical foundations, there were few permanent structures of much value either in England or Wales. It was late in the century with which we are dealing before the manor-house and grange of the yeoman or country gentleman became buildings of the style with which careless fancy is apt to associate their names. It is salutary sometimes to leave the ordinary paths of history and refresh one’s mind with the domestic realities of olden days as they are shown to us by writers who have given their attention to such humble but helpful details. The ordinary English manor-house of Glyndwr’s time was a plain wooden building,[13] with an escape-hole in the thatched roof for the smoke, a floor covered with rushes, and filthy from lack of change, with bare boards laid on rude supports doing duty as tables. A little tapestry sometimes relieved the crudeness of the bare interior where such a crowd of human beings often gathered together. Here and there an important person built for himself a compromise between a manor and a castle, Glyndwr himself being an instance to the point. The average manor-houses of Wales, the abodes of the native gentry, were certainly no more, probably less, luxurious, and not often—though some were even then—built of stone. As for the peasantry, their dwellings in either the England or Wales of that time were mere huts of mud, wood, or wattle, and were often, no doubt, not worth the trouble of destroying.
[13] Mr. Denton, in his England of the Fifteenth Century, allows no more than four, and usually only three rooms, to an average manor-house: one for eating in, with a second, and perhaps a third, for sleeping; a fire in the centre of the first. [Back]
The Welsh of those days, unlike the English, did not group themselves in villages. Each man not an actual servant, whether he were gentleman or small yeoman, lived apart upon his property or holding. If we eliminate the present towns, the country must have been in most parts almost as thickly populated as it is now. A valuable survival, known as the Record of Carnarvon, a sort of local doomsday book, dating from the thirteenth century, may be seen to-day, and it gives very detailed information as to the persons, manors, and freeholds of that country, and some idea of how well peopled for the times was even the wildest part of wild Wales. Prince Henry, it will be remembered, speaks of the Vale of Edeyrnion as a fine and populous country. Giraldus Cambrensis, in his graphic account of his tour with Archbishop Baldwin in the twelfth century, gives the same impression. Still the destruction of such buildings as the mass of its people lived in, even if they were destroyed, was of no vital consequence. The loss of a year’s crop was not irreparable, particularly in a country where sheep and cattle, which could often be driven away, were the chief assets of rural life. Glyndwr, to be sure, did what few other makers of war, even in Wales, had done, for he destroyed some of the chief ecclesiastical buildings. He burnt, moreover, several of the small towns and dismantled many castles. “Deflower’d by Glindor” is a remark frequently in the mouth of old Leland as he went on his immortal survey not much more than a hundred years later.
The term “rebel,” as applied to Glyndwr and those Welshmen who followed him, is more convenient than logical. However bad a king Richard may have been, the Welsh had never wavered in their allegiance to him. However excellent a monarch Henry might have made if he had been given the chance, he was at least an usurper, and a breaker of his word. London and parts of England had welcomed him to the throne. The Percys and innumerable other Englishmen who then and at various other times conspired against him were rebels beyond a doubt. But the Welsh had never even been consulted in the coup d’état by which he seized the crown. They had never recognised him as king nor sworn allegiance. To them he was simply an usurper and the almost certain assassin of their late King. If Richard were alive, then Henry could not be their lawful sovereign. If, on the other hand, he had been done to death, which either directly or indirectly he surely had been, then the boy Earl of March, as all the world knew, should be on the throne. Henry of Monmouth, too, being the son of an usurper, could not possibly be Prince of Wales. The place was vacant, and the opportunity for electing one of their own race and blood was too good to be missed. Whatever historians may choose to call Glyndwr, he was logically no rebel in a period when allegiance was almost wholly a personal matter. His enemies, whom he hunted out of Wales or pent up in their castles, were, on the other hand, from his point of view, rebels and traitors in recognising the authority and protection of an usurper. The Welsh people owed no allegiance to the English, but to the King of England and Wales, to whom for the protection of the isle of Britain, as the old tradition still ran, they paid a sum of £60,000 a year. In their eyes, as in those of many persons in England and of most in Europe, Henry was Henry of Lancaster, not King of England. The Welsh tribute, it is hardly necessary to say, had dwindled, since the rising of Glyndwr, to insignificant proportions, while the war expenses it entailed, together with this loss of income, was one of the chief causes of that impecuniosity which prevented Henry from ever really showing of what stuff as a ruler he was made.
The chief incident of the early part of the year 1405 was a nearly successful plot to carry off from the King’s keeping the young Earl of March, the rightful heir to the crown, and his brother. Being nephews of Sir Edmund Mortimer, the attempt to bring them to Glyndwr’s headquarters in Wales and to the protection of their uncle was a natural one. The King, who was spending Christmas at Eltham, had left the boys behind him at Windsor, under the charge of Hugh de Waterton, Constable of the Castle. Their domestic guardian was the widow of the Lord Despencer and sister of the Duke of York, who at this time, it will be remembered, was in joint charge with Prince Henry of Welsh affairs. The Despencers had been Norman-Welsh barons for some generations, their interests at this time lying for the most part in what is now Monmouthshire, and though ostensibly hostile, they had old ties of blood and propinquity with the house of Mortimer. This Christmas witnessed one of the many plots against the King’s life, but with these we have nothing to do, except in so far that the moment was regarded as being a favourable one for making an effort to get hold of the two royal boys. How unstable were Henry’s friends for the most part may be gathered from the fact that the Duke of York, his trusted representative in Wales, was himself privy to the scheme.
To Lady Despencer was entrusted the chief part in this dangerous work. As sister to the Duke of York, she was in the King’s eyes above all suspicion. When the latter had left Windsor for Eltham she caused a locksmith secretly to make false keys, and by means of these, with the connivance of some servants, she contrived to get her two wards safely out of the castle precincts, taking with her at the same time her own son. Horses and attendants were ready in waiting, and the whole party pushed for the West with all the expedition of which they were capable. They had passed through Berkshire before the King heard the news of their escape. When it reached him, however, no time was lost. Sending out swift messengers upon the track of the fugitives he himself at once hastened to Windsor. The pursuers were just in time and overtook the illustrious fugitives in Gloucestershire within a day’s ride of the security which Mortimer and Glyndwr’s people were waiting to afford them in Wales. A lively brush, not without slaughter on both sides, signalised the meeting, but the lady and the boys were captured and conveyed back to London. Lady Despencer then revealed the plot to murder the King, denouncing her brother, the Duke of York, as a leading conspirator. This was not a sisterly action, and the Duke loudly denied all knowledge of such dastardly intentions. At this the lady, whose private reputation was not all that it should have been, waxed indignant and clamorously demanded a champion to maintain her declaration with lance and sword. Whereupon a gentleman named William Maidstone flung down his glove to the Duke in the very presence of the King. The challenge was accepted, but, the Duke being apparently of corpulent build and the challenger both at a physical advantage and of no distinction, the romantic combat never took place. Perhaps the King wished to get the Duke into his hands without loss of time, for he seized him and sent him to the Tower instead of into the lists. He was soon, however, as an illustration of how forgiving Henry could at times be, pardoned and reinstated to the full in all his honours. His sister, however, whose tenants were nearly all supporters of Glyndwr, was stripped of her property. But they, too, were eventually restored, and their feudal superior, who made no little stir in her time, lies buried amid the ruins of the old abbey at Reading. The unfortunate locksmith who had made the keys had both his hands chopped off.