ABERYSTWITH. OWEN'S POWER DECLINES
1407-1408
Little is known of Owen's movements during the first half of the year
1407. Entries here and there upon the Rolls indicate that no
improvement so far as the general peace of Wales was concerned had
taken place, whatever there may have been in Henry's prospects of
ultimately recovering his authority there, prospects which now wore a
much brighter look. For though Glyndwr and his captains were still
active in the field, there nevertheless runs through all the scant
scraps of news we now get of him an unmistakable note of depression on
the part of his friends, with proportionate confidence on that of his
enemies. Prince Henry was still Lieutenant of the Marches of South
Wales, in addition to his hereditary jurisdiction, such as it now was,
over the royal counties. A great effort was in contemplation, in view
of Owen's failing strength, to put a complete end to the war. Pardons
were freely offered to his supporters, and even urged, upon the most
lenient terms, and the Marcher Barons, who were inclined at times,
when not personally in danger, to forget the conditions on which they
held their lands, were sternly forbidden to leave their castles.
Things had not been going well in France; Calais had been hard pressed
and the great English possessions in the South had been lamentably
reduced in extent. Edward the Third is computed to have reigned over
six million subjects to the north of the Pyrenees, a population much
greater than that of England and Wales combined. Henry had but a
fraction left of this kingdom, and that fraction most unsteady in its
devotion. He had been several times on the very point of making a
personal attempt to repair his failing fortunes beyond the Channel.
But his health was beginning even thus early to fail, and his nerves
were completely unstrung. He had made up his mind, however, to lead
one more expedition against Owen, now that the chances seemed so much
more favourable than on former occasions. From even this, however, it
will be seen that he ultimately flinched, and it was perhaps well that
he did so. His son and the captains round him understood Welsh warfare
much better than Henry. The rush of great armies through Wales had
failed hopelessly as a means of coercing it, and would fail again. The
steady pressure of armed bands upon Owen's front and flanks, and
liberal terms to all who deserted him, were the only methods of
wearing out the resources of this stubborn patriot, and they were
already succeeding. That he was himself pressing hard upon
Pembrokeshire, however, just at this time is evident from the orders
which were issued for forwarding arms and provisions for the defence
of the royal castles in that county, the recipient being Sir Francis
À'Court, the King's constable there. Aberystwith castle, however, was
to be the chief point of the Prince's attack this autumn, and his
father, as I have said, was expected to take part in an expedition
that came to be associated with much éclat.
An impression not altogether easy to account for, that the fall of
this great castle would prove the final blow to Owen's resistance, got
abroad, and there was a great rush of knights and nobles to take part
in the ceremony. A picked force of 2400 archers and men-at-arms was
told off for the service, and an entry in the Issue Rolls notes the
sum of £6825 as being set aside for their pay over the period of six
months beginning in June. This was a strong nucleus for an expedition
that could be supplemented by the levies of the border counties and
the spare strength of the local Marcher barons. Aberystwith Castle
occupies a site of much distinction, placed upon a bold promontory
projecting into the sea. Its ruins still survive as one of the
innumerable witnesses to Cromwell's superfluous vandalism, and afford
a favourite lounge to summer visitors at the popular Welsh
watering-place. But the first castle built on Norman lines was erected
in the twelfth century by Gilbert de Strongbow, the earliest Norman
adventurer in this district. A centre for generations of Norman-Welsh
strife, dismantled and restored again and again by contentious
chieftains, it was finally rebuilt by Edward I.; and what Cromwell
and time's destroying hand have left of it dates chiefly from that
luminous epoch in Welsh history. Not many of those, perhaps, who
loiter amidst its lifeless fragments are aware that in the season of
1407 it was the object of quite a fashionable crusade on the part of
the chivalry of England, well supplied with every requisite of siege
warfare that the primitive science of the period could provide.
Harlech was at this time the headquarters of Glyndwr's family,
including Edmund Mortimer, but to localise Glyndwr himself becomes now
more difficult than ever. Since Carmarthen and most of South Wales had
forsaken their allegiance, his energies must have been still more
severely taxed in keeping up the spirit and directing the movements of
his widely scattered bands. We heard of him lately raiding through
Pembroke and threatening the Flemish settlements. Merioneth and
Carnarvon in the North were still faithful, and we can well believe
that the great castles of Aberystwith and Harlech, lying midway
between the remnant of his southern followers and those of the North,
were in some sort the keys to the situation. Aberystwith, in which
Glyndwr had placed a strong garrison under a trusty captain, seemed
so, at any rate, to the English. Great guns were sent all the way from
Yorkshire to Bristol, to be forwarded thence by sea to the coast of
Cardigan, while ample stores of bows and arrows, bowstrings, arblasts,
stone-shot, sulphur, and saltpetre were ordered to be held in
readiness at Hereford. Woods upon the banks of the Severn were to be
cut down and the forest of Dean to be picked over for trees, out of
which was to be contrived the siege machinery for the subjugation of
hapless Aberystwith. A troop of carpenters were to sail from Bristol
for the devoted spot and erect scaffolds and wooden towers upon a
scale such as had not been before witnessed at any of the innumerable
sieges of this Welsh war. Proclamations calling out the great nobility
of western England and the Marches to meet the King and Prince at
Hereford were sent out. Owen, as well as Aberystwith and Harlech, was
to be crushed, and the King himself, with the flower of his chivalry,
was to be there to witness the closing scene. How far off even yet was
the final extinction of Owen, no one then could have well imagined.
But a temporary check came to these great preparations. The King, as
he had shrunk from crossing the Channel, now shrank from crossing the
Welsh border. A pestilence, somewhat more severe than those which were
almost chronic in the country in those days, swept over the island and
was more virulent in the West than elsewhere. It may have been this
that for a time suspended operations. Strange to say, too, the Richard
myth was not quite extinct, for during this summer bills were found
posted up about London proclaiming that he was "yet alive and in
health, and would come again shortly with great magnificence and power
to recover his kingdom." But neither pestilence nor the vagaries of
the King nor false rumours of the dead Richard were allowed to
permanently unsettle the Aberystwith enterprise. Fighting in Wales had
by no means been a popular or fashionable pastime, when there was no
territory to be won or to be defended. It was poor sport for the
heavy-armed sons of Mars of that period, all athirst for glory, this
tilting over rough ground at active spearmen who melted away before
their cumbrous onslaught only to return and deal out death and wounds
at some unexpected moment or in some awkward spot. But now whole
clouds of gay cavaliers, besides men scarred and weather-beaten with
Welsh warfare, gathered to the crusade against Aberystwith. French
wars just now were at a discount, not because the spirit was
unwilling, but because the exchequer was weak, so, the supply of
fighting knights and squires being for the moment greater than the
demand, Prince Henry reaped the benefit of the situation in his march
through South Wales.
But the bluest blood and the most brilliant equipment were futile in
attack against castles that nature and Edward the First had combined
to make invulnerable. The guns and scaffolds and wooden towers were
all there but they were powerless against Aberystwith and the brave
Welshmen who, under Owen's lieutenant, Rhys ap Griffith ap Llewelyn,
defended it. The King's particular cannon, weighing four and one half
tons, was there, which, with another called the Messenger, shook the
rock-bound coasts, striking terror, we may well fancy, into the
peasants of that remote country and proving more destructive to those
behind it than those before, for we are told that it burst during the
siege, a common thing with cannons of that day, dealing death to all
around. Once an hour, it is usually estimated, was the greatest
rapidity with which these cumbrous pieces could be fired with safety,
and we may well believe that the moment of explosion must have been a
much more anxious one, seeing how often they burst, to their friends
beside them than to their foes hidden behind the massive walls of a
Norman castle. The Duke of York was there, and the Earl of Warwick,
who, two years previously, had defeated Glyndwr in a pitched battle
and was eager, no doubt, to meet him again. Sir John Grendor, too, was
present, no courtier, but a hero of the Welsh wars, and Sir John
Oldcastle, a typical border soldier, who became Lord Cobham and was
ultimately hunted down as a Lollard at Welshpool and burned by Henry
V.; while Lord Berkeley commanded the fleet and managed the siege
train. It was not known at Aberystwith, either by the Welsh or the
besiegers, where Owen was. He could not readily trust himself in
castles, besieged both by land and sea, and run the risk of being
caught like a fox in a trap. He bided his time, on this occasion, as
will be seen, and arrived precisely at the right moment. Prince Henry
found the castle impregnable to assault, and there was nothing for it
but to sit down and reduce it by starvation. The only hope of the
garrison lay in Owen's relieving them, and with such an army before
them the possibility of this seemed more than doubtful. Provisions
soon began to fail, and in the middle of September Rhys ap Griffith
made overtures and invited seventeen of the English leaders within the
castle to arrange a compromise. One of these was Richard Courtney
of the Powderham family, a scholar of Exeter College, Oxford, and
Chancellor of the University. Mass was said by this accomplished
person to the assembled Welsh and English leaders, after which they
received the sacrament and then proceeded to draw up an agreement
which seems a strange one. By it the Welsh undertook to deliver up the
castle on November 1st if Glyndwr had not in the meantime appeared and
driven off the besiegers. Till that date an armistice was to continue.
Those of the garrison who would not accept these terms were to be
turned out to take their chance; the rest were to receive a full
pardon at the capitulation. The abbot of Ystradfflur, who, though a
Cistercian, had taken Owen's side, and three Welsh gentlemen, were
given up as hostages.
[Illustration: ABERYSTWITH CASTLE.
Copyright
F. Frith & Co.]
The Prince and his nobles were doubtless glad enough to get away from
so monotonous a task in so remote a spot, though their return to
England was hardly a glorious one. No one seems to have expected Owen,
and only five hundred soldiers were left in camp at the abbey of
Ystradfflur, some fifteen miles off, to insure the proper fulfilment
of the agreement when November should come round. Parliament was to
meet and did meet at Gloucester in October, and the King himself, so
much importance did he attach to Aberystwith, still talked of
returning with his son to receive its surrender at the appointed time.
But neither the royal progress nor the surrender became matters of
fact, for during October Owen slipped unexpectedly into the castle
with a fresh force, repudiated, as indeed he had a right to
repudiate, the agreement, and branded as traitors to his cause those
who had made it, which was hard. The five hundred royal soldiers at
Ystradfflur had shrunk in numbers and relaxed in discipline, and had
at any rate no mind to encounter Owen, who remained in possession of
the west coast and its castles throughout a winter which so far as any
further news of him is concerned was an uneventful one. In the
meantime the Parliament which sat at Gloucester for six weeks in the
autumn was greatly exercised about Welsh affairs. Wales had returned
no revenue since Glyndwr first raised his standard, and the sums of
money that had been spent in vain endeavours to crush his power had
been immense. The feeling was now stronger than ever that taxation for
this purpose, one that brought no returns either in glory or plunder,
had reached its limit, and that it was high time the nobles whose
interests lay in Wales should take upon themselves for the future the
heavy burden of Welsh affairs.
One incident occurred at this Parliament which had some significance
and was not without humour. The Prince of Wales was publicly thanked
for his services before Aberystwith almost upon the very day when,
unknown, of course, to him and to those at distant Gloucester, Owen
had slipped into the castle about which so much stir was being made,
upset the whole arrangement, and turned the costly campaign into an
ignominious failure. It is significant, too, that the Prince, after
acknowledging the praises of his father and the Parliament, kneeled
before the former and "spake some generous words" concerning the Duke
of York, whose advice and assistance "had rescued the whole expedition
from peril and desolation." This looks as if Owen's people had not
allowed the return journey of the Prince and his friends and his even
still large force to be the promenade that was expected. It may well
indeed have been the ubiquitous Glyndwr himself from whom the sagacity
of the Duke delivered them in the wilds of Radnor or Carmarthen.
Though Aberystwith and Harlech were safe for this winter, the Prince,
with a deliberation perhaps emphasised by chagrin at his failure, made
arrangements for a second attempt to be undertaken in the following
summer.
The winter of 1407-1408 was the most terrible within living memory. It
is small wonder that no echo of siege or battle or feat of arms breaks
the silence of the snow-clad and war-torn country. Birds and animals
perished by thousands, for a sheet of frozen snow lay upon the land
from before Christmas till near the end of March. Yet outside Wales
even so cruel a winter could not still all action. For Glyndwr's old
ally, Northumberland, selected this, of all times and seasons, for
that last reckless bid for power which has been before alluded to, and
with Bardolph and Bifort, Owen's Bishop of Bangor, went out across the
bitter cold of the Yorkshire moors, the first two of them, at any
rate, to death and ruin. Bifort, however, seems to have got away and
carried the nominal honours of his bishopric for many years.
The opening of summer in 1408 found Owen still active and dangerous.
No longer so as of old to the peace of England and to Henry's
throne,--that crisis had passed away,--but he was still an
unsurmountable obstacle to the good government of Wales. We know this
rather from the anxiety to subdue him manifested this year by the
King's council to the exclusion of all other business, than from any
detailed knowledge of his actions. Of these one can guess the general
tenor, and the necessary sameness of a guerilla warfare somewhat
mitigates the disappointment natural at the lack of actual detail. One
gathers from the brief but, from one point of view, significant
entries in the public records how entirely demoralised most of the
country still remained. Here is an order to prevent supplies being
sent to the rebels; there a caution to keep the bonfires in Cheshire
or Shropshire ready for the match; there again are notes of persons
becoming surety for the good behaviour of repentant Welshmen, or Lord
Marchers trying to come again to terms with their rebellious Cymric
tenants. Panic-stricken letters, however, came no more from
beleaguered castles, nor do the people of Northampton any longer quake
in their beds at the name of Glyndwr, though the border counties, and
with good cause, feel as yet by no means wholly comfortable.
"In 1408," says the Iolo manuscript, "the men of Glamorgan
were excited to commotion by the extra oppression of the
King's men; many of the chieftains who had obtained royal
favour burnt their stacks and barns lest Owen's men should
take them. But these chieftains fled to the extremity of
England and Wales, where they were defended in the castles
and camps of the King's forces and supported by the rewards of
treason and stratagem. Owen could not recover his lands and
authority because of the treachery prevalent in Anglesey and
Arvon, which the men of Glamorgan called the treason of the
men of Arvon."
All this is sadly involved, but one treasures anything that has a
genuine ring about it in connection with this shadowy year. Arvon, it
may be remarked, is the "cantref" facing the submissive Anglesey, and
no doubt the royal castle of Carnarvon was able by this time to
exercise an intimidating influence on that portion of the country.
Prince Henry's commission as Lieutenant of both North and South Wales
was again renewed; and, gathering his forces at Hereford in June, he
again moved on towards the stubborn castle of Aberystwith, making
Carmarthen, the old capital of South Wales, his base of operations.
Aberystwith this time held out till winter, when it at last fell, the
garrison meeting with no harsher treatment than that of ejection
without arms or food. Harlech, which Gilbert and John Talbot had by
the throat, with a thousand well-armed men and a big siege train,
resisted even longer. The Welsh this time were able to utilise the
sea, which in those days beat against the foot of the high rock upon
which the castle stands, a rock now removed from the shore by half a
mile or more of sandy common. Glyndwr, too, was now able to move
freely from one beleaguered fortress to another. Both of them held out
with singular valour and tenacity, attacking the provision boats
which came from Bristol for the besieging armies, and disputing every
point that offered an opportunity with sleepless vigilance and
tireless energy. Edmund Mortimer died either during the siege or
immediately after the surrender, of starvation some writers say,
though privation would perhaps be a more appropriate and likely term.
Mortimer's wife and three girls, with a son Lionel, together with that
"eminent woman of a knightly family," Glyndwr's own consort, fell into
the King's hands with the capture of Harlech, and seem to have been
taken to London in a body.
There is something pathetic about this wholesale termination of Owen's
domestic life, in what for that period would be called his old age.
One longs, too, to know something about it. How Margaret Hanmer
deported herself under the reflected glories of her lord. Whether
indeed she saw much of him, and if so, where; whether she was a
stout-hearted patriot and bore the trials and the uncertainties of her
dangerous pre-eminence with proud fortitude, or whether she wept over
the placid memories of Sycherth and Glyndyfrdwy, and deplored the
fortune that had made her a hero's wife and a wanderer. She had three
married daughters to give her shelter in Herefordshire. Let us hope
that she found her way to one of them, as her husband did years later
when the storms of his life were over. As for the Mortimers, that
branch of the family was entirely wiped out. The children died, and
the gentle Katherine, who had married so near the throne of England,
soon followed them and lies somewhere beneath the roar of London
traffic in a city churchyard. One account places the capture and
removal to London of Glyndwr's family at a later period, but as the
interest in this is chiefly a matter of sentiment, the precise date is
of no special moment.
The lines were now rapidly tightening round Owen. The English
government, by this time fairly free from foreign complications,
showed a vigilance in Wales which it would have been well for it to
have shown in former years, when the danger was much greater. Owen, on
his part, relapsed gradually into a mere guerilla leader, though the
hardy bands that still rallied round him and scorned to ask for pardon
were still so numerous and formidable that it was with difficulty the
King could prevent some of the Marcher barons even now from purchasing
security against his attacks. Talbot with bodies of royal troops still
remained as a garrison in Wales. It is curiously significant, too, and
not readily explicable, that in this year 1409 the town of Shrewsbury
closed her gates against an English army marching into Wales and
refused them provisions. It looks as if even the honest Salopians,
tired of keeping guard against the ubiquitous Glyndwr, had thus late,
and for the second time in the war, made some sort of terms with him.
We find also Charleton, Lord of Powys, about this time granting
pardons to those of his tenants who had been "out with Glyndwr," while
he was rewarding his more faithful lieges in the borough of Welshpool
by an extension of their corporation limits to an area of twenty
thousand acres, an unique distinction which that interesting border
town enjoys to this day.
Meanwhile it must not be supposed that the royal party treated all
Welsh captives with the leniency we have seen at Aberystwith, Harlech,
and elsewhere. Rhys Ddu, a noted captain of Glyndwr's, and Philip
Scudamore, a scion of that famous Herefordshire family into which the
Welsh leader's daughter had married, were taken prisoners while
raiding in Shropshire and sent to London and placed in the Tower,
where several Welsh nobles had been this long time languishing. Rhys
was taken to the Surrey side of the river by the Earl of Arundel,
tried, and handed over to the sheriff, who had him dragged upon a
hurdle to Tyburn and there executed. His quarters, like those of many
Welsh patriots before him, were sent to hang over the gates of four
English cities, and his head was affixed to London Bridge. Ten Welsh
gentlemen were under lock and key at Windsor Castle. They were now
handed over to the Marshal and kept in the Tower till heavy ransoms
were forthcoming. But Henry's treatment of his Welsh enemies was upon
the whole the reverse of vengeful, and he was wise in his generation.
His wholesale pardons to men wearied with years of war in a cause now
so utterly hopeless were infinitely more efficacious against that
implacable foe who would not himself dream of asking terms. Owen, too,
on his part had many prisoners, hidden away in mountain fastnesses,
chief of whom was the hapless David Gam, whom my readers will almost
have forgotten. Nine of these, we are told by one writer, his
followers hung, greatly to their leader's chagrin, since he wanted
them for hostages or for exchange.
The Avignon Pope had done Owen little good. A certain religious
flavour was introduced into the martial songs of the bards, and Owen's
native claims to the leadership of Wales were now supplemented by
papal and ecclesiastical blessings from this new and very modern fount
of inspiration. But everything ecclesiastical at Bangor was in ashes,
the torch, it will be remembered, having been applied by Glyndwr
himself. The royal bishop, Young, had years before fled to England and
was now enjoying the peaceful retirement of Rochester. Owen's bishop,
Bifort, as we have seen, was a wandering soldier. The more vigorous
Trevor, who came back to Owen in 1404, was at this time in France,
making a last effort, it is supposed, to interest the French King in
Glyndwr's waning cause. But death overtook him while still in Paris,
and he lies buried in the chapel of the infirmary of the Abbey de St.
Victor beneath the following epitaph:
"Hic jacet Reverendus in Christo Pater Johannes Episcopus
asaphensis in Wallia qui obiit A.D. 1410 die secundo mensis
aprilis cujus anima feliciter requiescat in pace. Amen."
[Decoration]
[Decoration]