To face oppression; and, where Freedom finds
Her aid invok’d, there will the Briton die!
At this time (1283) Edward held his court at Rhuddlan, and to appease the conquered people hit upon the politic, though dangerous, expedient of promising them for their prince a native of the Principality, who never spoke a word of English, and whose life and conversation no man could impugn. By this bold manœuvre he succeeded in obtaining their submission, and he fulfilled his promise to the very letter; for he removed his Queen Eleanor to Carnarvon, which was then so far completed as to allow of her reception, and there, on the 24th of April, 1284, she gave birth to a son—Edward of Carnarvon, the victim of Berkeley Castle, and the subject of Marlowe’s tragedy—who was created Prince of Wales—a title the heirs to the crown have ever since retained.
The sanguinary extirpation of Cambrian independence, while ultimately a blessing to the native race, was also a good thing for those who dwelt within the borderland of Cheshire, inasmuch as it spared their country from a continuance of the bloodshed and devastation it had been subjected to during the centuries of struggle between the Saxon and the Celt. The land had rest, and for a hundred years or more from that time Beeston is found to occupy but a comparatively small space in the chronicles of the kingdom.
The power wielded by the first Edward fell from the feeble grasp of his son and successor. In the fifth year of that unfortunate monarch’s reign we find the custody of the castle being transferred from John de Serleby to John de Modburly, who appears to have been acting as the deputy of Sir Robert de Holland, the head of the great feudal house of that name in Lancashire, who, in the same year, by the king’s favour, had been appointed his Chief Justice of Chester and custodian of his castles of Chester, Rhuddlan, and Flint, and three years later Holland was re-appointed to the same office. This Sir Robert, who had married a great-granddaughter of that paragon of beauty, if not of chastity, Rosamond Clifford—the “Fair Rosamond” of mediæval romance—founded the Benedictine Priory at Up-Holland, in his own county; he was held in great esteem by Thomas of Woodstock, Earl of Lancaster, the king’s cousin, who made him his secretary, and he was in that earl’s retinue on the occasion of the rising of the barons to remove the De Spencers from the royal councils, for which act his estates were forfeited after the defeat at Boroughbridge in 1222, when the Earl, himself, was made prisoner and conveyed to Pontefract, where, to satisfy the vindictive favourites of the king, he was beheaded.
During the protracted reign of Edward III. and the long French wars, in which the Cheshire men, under the immediate eyes of the king and his son, the Black Prince, won so much renown, several castellans were appointed in succession, though it does not appear that the castle was at any time the scene of active military operations. On the death of Edward, his grandson, Richard, the eldest son of the Black Prince, who was then only eleven years of age, succeeded to the throne, to find, as many others have done, what it is to be—
Left by his sire, too young such loss to know,
Lord of himself, that heritage of woe.
A “heritage of woe” truly, for his reign, from the beginning to its close, was one of continuous anarchy and disturbance. On the 23rd November, 1385, we find him appointing John Cartileche janitor of his castle of Beeston for life, in the room of Sir Alan Cheanie, who had then only lately died. The appointment was made under the king’s seal, and about the same time Richard himself paid a visit to the chief city of his palatinate—the object, no doubt, being to ingratiate himself with his Cheshire friends, and, that being so, it is probable Beeston was on the same occasion graced with his presence. Loyalty to the crown was a strong characteristic of the Cheshire men, a feeling that was no doubt strengthened by the many marks of royal favour their county had received from its earls, in whom they recognised their titular sovereigns; hence the intimate relations which existed between the king and the palatinate. When the Duke of Gloucester assembled a body of men in order that he might retain control of the youthful sovereign, Richard hastened to Chester and called out his loyal Cheshire guard; and when, in 1397, by what in modern times would be called a coup d’état, he determined on overthrowing the regency and recovering the power which Gloucester and his cabal of nobles had deprived him of, and in furtherance of that object had summoned a Parliament to meet him at Westminster in September, he, to guard against any possible resistance on the part of the disaffected nobles, surrounded the house with a guard of two thousand of his Cheshire archers, each wearing as a badge the white hart lodged, the cognisance of his mother, the “Fair Maid of Kent,” which Richard had then adopted.
The power thus regained was wielded neither wisely nor well. On the death of John o’ Gaunt, in 1399, Richard, to replenish his exhausted exchequer, seized his possessions into his own hands, leaving to the banished son of “time-honoured Lancaster,” the youthful Bolingbroke, nothing but the empty title. This arbitrary abuse of power naturally inflamed the resentment of Bolingbroke, who resolved upon accomplishing the king’s dethronement, and it was not long before the opportunity offered for putting his scheme into execution. While the unsuspecting Richard was leading the Cheshire bowmen among the bogs and thickets of Ireland, in order to quell the insurrection and punish the murderers of Mortimer, Bolingbroke, taking advantage of his absence, embarked with a small retinue and landed “upon the naked shore of Ravenspurg,” a place on the Humber, where, at a later date, Edward IV. landed on a similar errand, with an excuse plausible as that of the duke whose exploit he imitated. He quickly mustered a force of 60,000 men; towns and castles surrendered to him; and before Richard could return the invader had virtually made himself master of the kingdom. When he did arrive, there being no army to receive him, seven loyal Cheshire men, John Legh of Booths, Thomas Cholmondely, Ralph Davenport, Adam Bostock, John Done of Utkinton, Thomas Holford, and Thomas Beeston, each with seventy retainers, became his body guard, wearing his cognisance of the white hart upon their shoulders, and keeping watch over him day and night with their battle-axes.