LAST YEARS OF OWEN'S LIFE
1410-1416
Of the last six years of Owen's life, those from 1410 to 1416, there
is little to be said. His cause was hopelessly lost and he had quite
ceased to be dangerous. Wales was reconquered and lay sick, bleeding,
and wasted beneath the calm of returning peace. Thousands, it is to be
feared, cursed Glyndwr as they looked upon the havoc which the last
decade had wrought. The unsuccessful rebel or patriot, call him what
you will, has far more friends among those yet unborn than among his
own contemporaries, above all in the actual hour of his failure. Of
this failure, too, the Welsh were reminded daily, not only by their
wasted country and ruined homesteads but by fierce laws enacted
against their race and a renewal on both sides of that hatred which
the previous hundred years of peace had greatly softened.
[Illustration: MONNINGTON COURT AND CHURCH.
Copyright
W. H. Bustin.]
Men born of Welsh parents on both sides were now forbidden to purchase
land near any of the Marcher towns. They were not permitted to be
citizens of any borough, nor yet to hold any office, nor carry armour
nor any weapon. No Welshman could bind his child to a trade, nor bring
him up to letters, while English men who married Welsh women were
disfranchised of their liberties. In all suits between Englishmen and
Welshmen the judge and jury were to be of the former race, while all
"Cymmorthau," or gatherings for mutual assistance in harvest or
domestic operations, were strictly forbidden.
These laws were kept on the statute books till the real union of Wales
and England in Henry the Eighth's time, but gradually became a dead
letter as the memory of the first ten bloody years of the century grew
fainter. Glyndwr, however, believed in the justice of his cause, and
if he expressed remorse for the methods which he had used to uphold
it, we hear nothing of such apologies. That he showed the courage of
his convictions in heroic fashion no one can gainsay. That men could
be found to stand even yet in such numbers by his side is the most
eloquent tribute that could be paid to his personal magnetism. He had
lost all his castles, unless indeed, as seems likely, those grim
towers of Dolbadarn and Dolwyddelan in the Snowdon mountains were left
to him. He became henceforward a mere outlaw, confined entirely to the
mountains of Carnarvon and Merioneth, between those fierce and rapid
raids which we dimly hear of him still making upon the Northern
Marches. His old companions, Rhys and William ap Tudor, who had been
with him from the beginning, were in the King's hands, and were about
this time executed at Chester with the usual barbarities of the
period. The elder was the grandfather of Owen Tudor, and consequently
the ancestor of our present King. David Gam was still a prisoner in
Owen's hands till 1412, when the King entered into negotiations for
his release through the agency of Llewelyn ap Howel, Sir John Tiptoft,
and William Boteler. What terms were made we know not; an exchange was
in all likelihood effected, seeing how many of Owen's friends were in
captivity. David's liberation, however, was by some means successfully
accomplished, and he lived to fight and fall by the King's side at
Agincourt, being knighted, some say, as he lay dying upon that
memorable field.
When, in 1413, Prince Henry came to the throne, he issued a pardon to
all Welsh rebels indiscriminately, not excepting Glyndwr. But,
obstinate to the last, the old hero held to his mountains, refusing to
ask or to receive a favour, striking with his now feeble arm, whenever
chance offered, the English power or those who supported it. When
Henry IV. succumbed to those fleshly ills which constant trouble had
brought upon his once powerful frame, Glyndwr was still in the field
and royal troops still stationed in the Welsh mountains to check his
raids. Tradition has it that he was at last left absolutely alone,
when he is supposed to have wandered about the country in disguise and
in a fashion so mysterious that a wealth of legend has gathered around
these wanderings.
"In 1415," says one old chronicler, "Owen disappeared so that
neither sight nor tidings of him could be obtained in the
country. It was rumoured that he escaped in the guise of a
reaper bearing a sickle, according to the tidings of the last
who saw and knew him, after which little or no information
transpired respecting him nor of the place or name of his
concealment. The prevalent opinion was that he died in a wood
in Glamorgan; but occult chroniclers assert that he and his
men still live and are asleep on their arms in a cave called
Ogof Dinas in the Vale of Gwent, where they will continue
until England is self-abased, when they will sally forth, and,
recognising their country's privileges, will fight for the
Welsh, who shall be dispossessed of them no more until the Day
of Judgment, when the earth shall be consumed with fire and so
reconstructed that neither oppression nor devastation shall
take place any more, and blessed will he be who will see that
time."
Carte says that Owen wandered down to Herefordshire in the disguise of
a shepherd and found refuge in his daughter's house at Monnington.
It is quite certain that in 1415, Henry V., full of his French schemes
and ambitions, and with no longer any cause to trouble himself about
Wales, sent a special message of pardon to Glyndwr. Perhaps the young
King felt a touch of generous admiration for the brave old warrior who
had been the means of teaching him so much of the art of war and the
management of men, and who, though alone and friendless, was too proud
to ask a favour or to bend his knee. Sir Gilbert Talbot of Grafton, in
Worcestershire, was the man picked out by Henry to accomplish this
gracious act. Nothing, however, came of it immediately. Perhaps the
great campaign of Poitiers interfered with a matter so comparatively
trifling. But on the King's return he renewed it in February, 1416,
commissioning this time not only Talbot but Glyndwr's own son,
Meredith, as envoys. Whether or no it would have even now and by such
a channel been acceptable is of no consequence, as the old hero was
either dead or in concealment. Common sense inclines to the most
logical and most generally accepted of the traditions which surround
his last years, namely, the one which pictures him resting quietly
after his stormy life at the home of one or other of his married
daughters in Herefordshire. Monnington and Kentchurch both claim the
honour of having thus sheltered him. Probably they both did, seeing
how near they lie together, though the people of the former place
stoutly maintain that it is in their churchyard his actual dust
reposes.
At Kentchurch Court, where his daughter Alice Scudamore lived with her
husband, and which still belongs to the family, a tower of the
building is even yet cherished as the lodging of the fallen chieftain
during part at any rate of these last years of obscurity. The romantic
beauty of the spot, the survival of the mansion and of the stock that
own it, would make us wish to give Kentchurch everything it claims,
and more, in connection with Glyndwr's last days. Above the Court,
which stands in a hollow embowered in woods, a park or chase climbs
for many hundred feet up the steep sides of Garaway Hill, which in its
unconventional wildness and entire freedom from any modernising touch
is singularly in keeping with the ancient memories of the place. The
deer brush beneath oaks and yews of such prodigious age and size that
some of them must almost certainly have been of good size when Thomas
Scudamore brought Alice, the daughter of Owen of Glyndyfrdwy, home as
a bride; while just across the narrow valley, through which the waters
of the Monnow rush swift and bright between their ruddy banks, the
village and ruined castle of Grosmont stand conspicuous upon their
lofty ridge. It must in fairness to the claims of Monnington be
remembered that Grosmont was not precisely the object upon which
Glyndwr, if he were still susceptible to such emotions, would have
wished his fading eyesight to dwell long, since of all the spots in
Wales (and it is just in Wales, the Monnow being the boundary)
Grosmont had been the one most pregnant, perhaps, with evil to his
cause. For it was the defeat of Glyndwr's forces there that may be
said to have broken the back of his rebellion. And as we stand upon
the bridge over the Monnow midway between England and Wales, the still
stately ruins of the Norman castle that must often have echoed to
Prince Henry's cheery voice crown the hill beyond us; while behind it
the quaint village that rose upon the ashes of the town Glyndwr burnt,
with all its civic dignities, looks down upon us, the very essence of
rural peace.
Glyndwr's estates had long ago been forfeited to the Crown and granted
to John, Earl of Somerset. Soon after his death Glyndyfrdwy was sold
to the Salusburys of Bachymbyd and of Rûg near Corwen, one of the
very few alien families that in a peaceful manner had become
landowners in North Wales before the Edwardian conquest. It is only
recently indeed that there has ceased to be a Salusbury of Rûg. Owen's
descendants, through his daughters, at any rate, are numerous. A few
years after his death, Parliament, softening towards his memory,
passed a special law for the benefit of his heirs, allowing them to
retain or recover a portion of the proscribed estates. In consequence
of this, Alice Scudamore made an effort to recover Glyndyfrdwy and
Sycherth from the Earl of Somerset apparently without success, so far
as the former went, in view of the early ownership of the Salusburys.
Of Griffith, the son who was so long a prisoner in the Tower in
company with the young King of Scotland, we hear nothing more. But of
Meredith this entry occurs in the Rolls of Henry V., 1421: "Pardon of
Meredith son of Owynus de Glendordy according to the sacred precept
that the son shall not bear the iniquities of the father." To another
daughter of Glyndwr, probably an illegitimate one, Gwenllian, wife of
Phillip ap Rhys of Cenarth, the famous bard, Lewis Glyncothi, wrote
various poems, in one of which he says: "Your father was a potent
prince, all Wales was in his council."
No intelligent person of our day could regret the failure of Glyndwr's
heroic effort. That Welshmen of the times we have been treating of
should have longed to shake off the yoke of the Anglo-Norman was but
human, for he was not only a bad master, but a foreigner and wholly
antipathetic to the Celtic nature. At the same time, the geographical
absurdity, if the word may be permitted, of complete independence was
frankly recognised by almost every Welsh patriot from earliest times.
The notion of a suzerain or chief king in London, as I have remarked
elsewhere, was quite in harmony with the most passionate of Welsh
demands. Glyndwr perhaps had other views; but then the kingdom that he
would fain have ruled, if the Tripartite Convention is to be relied
on, stretched far beyond the narrow bounds of Wales proper and quite
matched in strength either of the other two divisions which, under
this fantastic scheme, Mortimer and Percy were respectively to govern.
What was undoubtedly galling to the Welsh was the spectacle of a
province to the north of the island, consisting, so far as the bulk of
its power and civilisation was concerned, of these same hated
Anglo-Normans, not only claiming and maintaining an entire
independence on no basis that a Celt could recognise, but trafficking
continuously with foreign enemies in a fashion that showed them to be
destitute of any feeling for the soil of Britain beyond that part
which they themselves had seized. To the long-memoried Welshman it
seemed hard, and no doubt illogical, that these interlopers, one
practically in blood and speech and feeling with their own oppressors,
should thus be permitted to set up a rival independence within the
borders of the island, while they on their part were forced to fuse
themselves with a people who could not even understand their tongue
and with whom they had scarcely a sentiment in common. It is difficult
not to sympathise with the mediæval Welshman in this attitude or to
refrain from wondering at the strange turn of fortune that allowed the
turbulent ambition of some Norman barons to draw an artificial line
and create a northern province, which their descendants, if they
showed much vigour in its defence, showed very little aptitude for
governing with reasonable equity.
[Illustration: PORCH OF MONNINGTON CHURCH AND GLYNDWR'S REPUTED GRAVE.
Copyright
Mrs. Leather.]
Glyndwr, it is true, had thrown off the old British tradition and had
called in foreigners from across the sea, as Vortigern to his cost had
done nearly a thousand years before. He had also adopted a French
Pope. Neither had done him much good, and Welshmen were soon as ready
as ever to fight their late brief allies for the honour of the island
of Britain. But Glyndwr from an early period in his insurrection had
kept the one aim, that of the independence of his country, dream
though it might be, consistently in view. No means were to be
neglected, even to the ruining of its fields and the destruction of
its buildings, to obtain this end. How thoroughly he carried out his
views has been sufficiently emphasised; so thoroughly, indeed, as to
cause many good Welshmen to refrain from wholly sharing in the
veneration shown for his memory by the bulk of his countrymen. There
can be but one opinion, however, as to the marvellous courage with
which he clung to the tree of liberty that he had planted and watered
with such torrents of human blood, till in literal truth he found
himself the last leaf upon its shrunken limbs, and that a withered
one. In the heyday of his glory his household bard and laureate
wrote much extravagant verse in his honour, as was only natural and in
keeping with the fancy of the period and of his class. But the Red
Iolo himself, in all likelihood, little realised the prophetic ring in
the lines he addressed to his master on the closing of his earthly
course, though we, at least, have ample evidence of their prescience:
"And when thy evening sun is set,
May grateful Cambria ne'er forget
Its morning rays, but on thy tomb
May never-fading laurels bloom."
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