Welsh pedigree of queen Victoria—A poet’s flattery—Castles of Monmouthshire—Geoffrey of Monmouth—Henry of Monmouth—The Kymin—Subsidiary tour—Sir David Gam—White Castle—Scenfrith—The Castle spectres—Grosmont—Lanthony Abbey.
“Monmouthshire,” as has been well observed, “though now an English county, may be justly considered the connecting link between England and Wales, as it unites the scenery, manners, and language of both.” In ancient times, it was a debatable land of another kind, when Romans, Saxons, and Normans, strove by turns against the aboriginal Britons. During the Roman invasion it was a part of the territory of the Silures, who inhabited the eastern division of South Wales, and were one of the three great Welsh tribes; but in the conflict of the Saxons, Gwent (its British name) played the most distinguished part of all, under its sovereign Utha Pendragon and the renowned king Arthur. To Gwent, moreover, if chronicles say true, we are indebted for our present sovereign lady, who is descended collaterally from its princes. Merrich, the son of Ithel, king or prince of Gwent, died without issue male, leaving one daughter, Morvyth, who espoused Gwno, great grandson to Rees ap Theodore, prince of South Wales, and lineal ancestor of Sir Owen Tudor, grandfather of Henry VII. “So that it appears,” say the Secret Memoirs of Monmouthshire, “that the kings of Scotland and England are originally descended from Morvyth, this Gwentonian prince’s daughter, and heir to Meyrick, last king of Gwent, who, according to several authentic British pedigrees, was lineally descended from Cadwalladar, the last king of Britain, and as our historians do testify, did prognosticate, fifteen hundred years past, that the heirs descended of his loins should be restored again to the kingdom of Britain, which was partly accomplished in king Henry VII., and more by the accession of James I. to the British throne, but wholly fulfilled in the happy union of all Britain by the glorious queen Anne; whom God long preserved of his great goodness, and the succession of the Protestant line.”
We know not what value may be attached to this illustrious ancestry by Queen Victoria; but her predecessor, Queen Elizabeth, was fond of tracing her descent from the ancient kings of her country—a predilection which the courtly Spenser does not omit to flatter in his Faerie Queene.
“Thy name, O soveraine Queene, thy realme and race,
From this renowned prince derived arre,
Who mightily upheld that royal mace
Which thou now bear’st, to thee descended farre
From mighty kings and couquerors in warre,
Thy fathers and thy grandfathers of old,
Whose noble deeds above the northern starre,
Immortall fame for ever hath enrold;
As in that old man’s booke they were in order told.”
The old man have referred to is Geoffrey of Monmouth, of whom more anon.
It is to the Norman invasion that Monmouthshire owes its castles; for the great barons were not employed by the state, as had been the case with the Saxons, to conquer the territory, but were invited to enter upon adventures at their own cost, and for their own gain. The lands they subdued became their own; they were created lords-barons over them; and castles speedily bristled up all over the territory to maintain the authority so acquired. Pennant states the number for Wales at a hundred and forty-three, of which Monmouthshire, as the frontier region between the belligerents, had of course the greatest proportion, amounting, it is said, to at least twenty-five. In these baronial lands, the writs of ordinary justices of the royal courts were not current. The barons marchers, as they were called, had recourse to their feudal lord the king in person; and the same abuses and confusion were the result which we have noticed in Herefordshire, till Henry VIII. abolished this anomalous government, divided Wales into twelve shires, and withdrew Monmouthshire into the list of the English counties. It is interesting to trace the chain of fortresses thus destined to become, still earlier than in the natural course of time, a series of ruins. They extend, in this county, along the banks of the Monnow, the Wye, and the Severn, and from Grosmont, diagonally, to the banks of the Rumney; while castellated mansions, such as Raglan, which we shall notice presently (at first only a rude fortress), arose in all quarters to keep the natives in due respect.
King Arthur, mentioned above as prince of Gwent, did not reign at Monmouth, but at Caerleon; although he is closely associated with the former place, inasmuch as the gothic room in the priory which we have pointed out, on the authority of tradition, as the study of Geoffrey of Monmouth, was in all probability the birthplace of his most heroic achievements. Geoffrey, in fact, for it is needless to attempt to conceal the fact from our readers, was an historical romancer rather than an historian. The groundwork of his celebrated performance was Brut y Breninodd, or the Chronicle of the Kings of Britain, written by Tyssilio, or St. Telian, bishop of St. Asaph, in the seventh century; but Geoffrey owns himself, that he made various additions to his original, particularly of Merlin’s prophecies. After all, however, if we may venture to express our private opinion on so recondite a subject, it seems to us that a monkish history, of the seventh century, must have been reasonably fertile in itself in wonderful incidents and legendary tales, and that in all probability Geoffrey of Monmouth deserves less credit as a romancer than he has received from one party, as well as less credit as an historian than he has received from the other.
However this may be, the work has served as a valuable storehouse for our poets and romancers. It has even supplied the story of King Lear to Shakspeare, who deepened the pathos by making Cordelia die before her father; whereas, in the original story, Lear is restored to his kingdom, and Cordelia to life. Milton drew from it his fiction of Sabrina in the Mask of Comus; and in early life he had formed the design of writing an epic poem on the subject taken up from Geoffrey by Spenser, in the second book of the Faerie Queene—
“A chronicle of Briton kings,
From Brute to Arthur’s reign.”
Dryden, also, intended to produce an epic poem on the subject of king Arthur, but he contented himself with an opera, in which he has sublimely described the British worthy