OWEN GLYNDWR
In the long roll of Welsh history which we have been unfolding there
are many illustrious names--Cunedda Wledig, Howel Dda, Owen Gwynedd,
the Lord Rees, Llewelyn Fawr, and Llewelyn the last Prince of Wales:
but of all the men of the Middle Ages no one has so touched the heart
and fired the imagination of Wales as Owen Glyndwr. For all Welsh
people he stands alone and supreme, the ideal Welshman of all time.
Both the beginning and the end of his life are shrouded in obscurity.
It was only for some half-dozen years that he occupied a foremost
place in the politics of his day. He left behind him no solid gain
of any kind, but at best a vague tradition and an unrealised dream.
Yet in spite of all that his hold upon his countrymen has never
relaxed; and when the bonds in which the national spirit had been
confined for more than three hundred years were beginning to break
{110} in the first half of the nineteenth century, it was his name
that was invoked, and his dreams that were recalled. Gardiner once
said that the two typical Englishmen of all time were Shakespeare and
Oliver Cromwell; the one in the realm of thought, the other in the
realm of action. Wales owes no such divided allegiance: the Welsh
spirit at its best is typified in one man--Owen Glyndwr. Owen was a
direct descendant of the princely house of Powys, a line of princes
which had played a none too illustrious part in the struggle for
independence. The family was a wealthy one, and Owen spent his early
years in passing from one of his father's country houses to the
other. The real home of the family was the exquisitely beautiful
Glyndyfrdwy, a narrow valley through which the limpid waters of the
Dee flow between thickly wooded banks, above which rise the
heather-clad slopes of the Berwyns. Close at hand are Valle Crucis
and Dinas Bran; and not far off is the entrance to the fertile and
lovely Vale of Clwyd. Even the year of Owen's birth is uncertain.
Tradition varies; but the best evidence at our disposal points to
1359 as the date. Wealthy and well-connected young men in those days
used frequently to study law for some years {111} at the Inns of
Court, a training which was regarded as more aristocratic than
residence at the University of Oxford. Owen seems to have gone up to
London, and to have spent some time in listening to cases argued in
Westminster Hall, then the home of the Common Law Courts.
Shakespeare is probably right when he makes Owen lay claim to the
possession of the best culture of the day--
"I can speak English, lord, as well as you;
For I was trained up in the English court;
Where, being but young, I framed to the harp
Many an English ditty lovely well,
And gave the tongue a helpful ornament."
The pursuit of Law is not commonly associated by us with either
poetry or romance; nevertheless it is in the Courts that Owen seems
to have met his future wife, the daughter of Sir David Hanmer, one of
the Justices of the King's Bench. The wedding probably took place in
1380, when Owen was only twenty-one years old. The period of legal
training was followed by a course of training in the use of arms. In
1385 Owen followed Richard II to Scotland, where he won much credit
by his prowess in the field. But it is {112} a mistake to imagine
that he was ever a blind partisan of Richard. Later, when it became
opportune to profess belief in the existence of Richard in order to
imperil the throne of his successor, Owen was perfectly willing to do
so; but in these early years, long before it had ever occurred to him
that he might lead a Welsh revolt against England, he was a follower
of Henry Bolingbroke, and, if tradition speaks correctly, one of his
esquires. According to another account he also was, at one period,
esquire to his neighbour the Earl of Arundel, lord of Oswestry,
Chirk, and Cynllaith. How many years were spent in this sort of
novitiate we have no means of ascertaining; all we know for certain
is that, before 1400, Owen was living the customary life of a Welsh
country gentleman, at his two houses of Glyndyfrdwy and Sycherth.
Wales at that time was seething with discontent; a discontent which
was partly political, and partly social. The country was warmly
attached to King Richard, and looked upon Henry IV as a usurper and
an assassin. It was also being borne in upon the people that England
was now determined to extirpate the Welsh language, and to destroy
finally every trace of Welsh nationality. The fourteenth {113}
century had witnessed in many of the countries of Western Europe a
rapid development of the national spirit, and both England and Wales
were among those which had participated in it. In addition to
political grievances, there were also social grievances, felt more
especially in the South. But even when we have taken all these
things into full account, the universality, the spontaneity, and the
warmth of the rebellion of 1401 remain something of a mystery. One
thing is certain, and that is that Wales was solidly behind Owen; and
that it was the North and the middle parts of the country, regions in
which political preponderated over social grievances, which led the
revolt.
The great rebellion began with a personal quarrel between Owen and
his arrogant neighbour Lord Grey of Ruthin. In 1400 the king had
summoned Owen to assist him in his Scottish expedition. The summons
had been entrusted to Lord Grey to deliver; but he, wishing to sow
discord between Henry and Owen, neglected to transmit it. The king
was angry with Owen, and with greater justice Owen was angry with
Grey. Owen's wrath took the eloquent form of a merciless raid upon
his enemy's estates, in the course of {114} which certain members of
his household were slain. Grey, determined to retaliate, gathered
together his forces and marched against Glyndyfrdwy. But the whole
country was now up in arms; and supported by a strong body of
followers, Owen was able to burn the town of Ruthin to the ground.
Owen then openly declared himself the deliverer of Wales from the
English yoke; and so serious a view did the king take of the
situation that, without delay, he marched into Carnarvonshire. He
was greatly incensed; and his anger was proved by the burning,
without any provocation, of the house of the Franciscans at Llan
Vaes. Owen, not strong enough as yet to meet the king in battle,
retired into the mountain recesses, and Henry had to content himself
with declaring all his lands forfeited. Meanwhile the flame of
rebellion spread; and Owen was joined not only by people from every
part of Wales, but by young Welshmen from Oxford, from London, and
from beyond the seas. He had now planted his standard of the red
dragon on the slopes of Plinlimmon; and there, safe from the clutches
of all invading armies, he proceeded with the task of organization,
making frequent dashes into the neighbouring counties, and capturing
towns, castles, {115} and abbeys. The capture of the strong castle
of Conway by nephews of Owen in the spring of 1401 brought Henry
again to Wales, this time accompanied by Earl Percy. Conway was
quickly recaptured. Percy, after marching through Carnarvonshire,
reached the foot of Cader Idris, where he won a victory.
Nevertheless the crushing of the rebellion, and the capture of Owen,
seemed to be as remote as ever. In the autumn of the same year the
energetic and persistent king came again, marched through
Merionethshire, harried Cardiganshire, and stabled his horses near
the high altar of the abbey of Strata Florida. Owen meanwhile hung
on the skirts of his army, capturing stragglers, and cutting off
supplies; and again the baffled monarch was compelled to return to
his own country.
Up to the close of 1401 Owen had been nothing more than a guerrilla
leader who, had he been captured, might with perfect justice have
been put to death as a rebel. And had that fate befallen him then,
his career would have but little interest save for the curious and
the professional student. It was the next two years that proved that
Owen was a statesman of the first rank, as well as an able military
leader. He began at once to look {116} out for suitable alliances,
and in making them he met with marked success. His early enemy, Lord
Grey, fell a prisoner into his hands, and was converted into an ally
by marriage with one of Owen's daughters. At the same time
successful negotiations were entered into with the native chieftains
of Ireland, the French king, the king of Scotland, and the
discontented Percies. At the battle of Bryn Glas Edmund Mortimer was
captured. He, likewise, was married to one of the Welsh leader's
daughters, and encouraged to desert Henry, and to claim the throne of
England for his own nephew the Earl of March. For the third time
Henry marched into Wales, this time with an immense army. But the
elusive and ubiquitous Glyndwr could nowhere be brought to bay; and
wind, rain, and floods played havoc with the English hosts. Henry
had now quarrelled openly with the Percies. Owen, Mortimer, and
Percy Hotspur met on the shore of remote and desolate Aberdaron; and
there they agreed upon a plan for the tripartite division of England
and Wales.
Owen was then at the height of his power, but in the very hour of
triumph he on two occasions only barely escaped death at the hand of
an assassin. On the first occasion he {117} was walking with his
cousin Howel Sele in his park at Nannau near Dolgelly. Suddenly a
doe appeared, and Owen called upon Howel to shoot. But the faithless
Howel turned his bow against Owen; and the arrow glanced off from the
coat of mail which he invariably wore beneath his ordinary dress.
From that hour no man ever saw Howel Sele; but years afterwards a
human skeleton was discovered in a hollow tree close to the spot
where the encounter must have taken place. The second attempt was
made by Davydd Gam. He had come to Machynlleth to attend the
Parliament which Owen had summoned there. Fortunately for him, as
well as for his intended victim, the plot was discovered, and Davydd
lived to meet a more honourable death on the field of Agincourt.
The alliance concluded at Aberdaron was destined to be short-lived;
for the Percies were crushed by Henry at the battle of Shrewsbury.
Owen has been repeatedly blamed for wasting time in ravaging South
Wales instead of keeping tryst with his allies, and joining them
before the king's forces had come upon the scene. The censure is
probably undeserved. It was vital to the success of their plans that
South Wales should be left {118} behind them incapable of further
resistance; and, furthermore, it is likely that the Percies had, at
the last moment, altered their plans and marched on Shrewsbury,
instead of meeting Owen in the vicinity of Ludlow. But we cannot so
readily exonerate Owen from blame for neglecting to fall upon the
king's army, tired and disorganized as it must have been after the
battle. Not to do so was the greatest blunder of his whole career.
Prince Henry, afterwards to become so famous as the victor of
Agincourt and the conqueror of France, had now been appointed
Lieutenant of Wales, and the war was carried on with increased vigour
and ruthlessness. Henry ravaged North Wales, and burned to the
ground Owen's home of Sycherth. Nevertheless the power of Owen
steadily increased. In 1404 he summoned Parliaments to Dolgelly and
Machynlleth. These Parliaments were not a revival of Llewelyn's
Council of Princes, but deliberate imitations of the English
Parliament. He was now styling himself "Owen by the grace of God
Prince of Wales"; and he was treated by foreign potentates as
sovereign of an independent country. He had his own Great Seal, his
Privy Seal, his chancery, and his courts of law. He concluded an
{119} alliance with France in January 1405, and some time later a
force of fifteen hundred Frenchmen landed at Milford, and captured
Carmarthen. They remained in Wales until early in the following
year; but the assistance which they rendered to the national cause
appears to have been negligible. But the friendship between Owen and
Charles of France continued; and in 1406, in a letter addressed from
Pennal, we find Owen telling the French king what his aims were,
_i.e._, to create a Wales territorially free, to create an
independent Welsh Church, and to create two Universities, one for
North, and one for South Wales.
Owen had also succeeded in winning the support of the Pope, or rather
of one of the Popes; for those were the days of the Great Schism, and
there were rival claimants for the throne of St. Peter. Owen decided
to withdraw the spiritual allegiance of Wales from the Roman Pope,
Gregory XII, and to transfer it to Peter de Luna, then dwelling in
Avignon, and calling himself Pope Benedict XIII. In return, of
course, Owen expected the Pope to acknowledge the independence of
Wales. John Trevor, bishop of St. Asaph, had already gone over to
the nationalist side; and Owen, {120} with the Pope's consent,
nominated Llewelyn Bifort to the see of Bangor. Apparently this
prelate was never recognised by the English Church; but he was
present some years later at the Council of Constance, signing himself
as "Ludovicus Bangorensis." In the North Wales dioceses, at least,
the national party was supreme between 1404 and 1408, and in a lesser
degree in those of the South as well.
The project of founding two national Universities, it seems, never
found any sort of realization in Owen's day, nor indeed for close
upon five centuries afterwards. But the plan in itself is sufficient
to rebut the ridiculous calumny that Owen was an uncivilized
barbarian. It is a pity that the age which saw the founding of
Universities at St. Andrews, Prague, Vienna, Louvain, Cracow,
Cologne, Padua, Heidelberg, Leipzig, Erfurt, Pesth, Würtzburg, and
Rostock, should not have witnessed the founding of one in Wales as
well. What a difference the existence of such an institution would
have made in the national character, and in the whole outlook of the
people, we can only regretfully conjecture. For centuries young
Welshmen flocked eagerly to Oxford, to Cambridge, and to some of the
{121} famous European seats of learning; but the culture of Wales ran
in other channels, undisciplined and amateurish, and, despite its
wonderful charm and fascination, lacking in classic restraint and
breadth of outlook.
Owen's success reached its culmination in 1405. From that time on
his star was steadily on the wane, although for years he kept up a
brave, and sometimes successful, resistance. A plan to secure the
person of the young Earl of March, and to proclaim him King of
England, miscarried. Slowly but surely the pressure of Henry's
armies, and those of the Lords Marchers, was beginning to tell. Most
of the grievances of the peasants had wisely been redressed, and they
longed for the time when they could till their fields in peace,
unmolested by the armies of either friend or foe. Owen's high ideals
were beyond the comprehension of the selfish and illiterate labouring
classes upon whom he had depended for his strength; and they now
deserted in hundreds from his camp. The general _débâcle_ was
assisted by the young Henry's policy of studied clemency. He was no
foreigner, but a rival Prince of Wales; and he strove to prove that
he cared just as much as did Owen for the welfare of his Welsh
subjects. The abbot of Valle {122} Crucis was perfectly right when
he told Owen that he had risen a century too soon.
In the closing years of his life Owen was no better than a fugitive.
Indeed, so completely had all traces of rebellion disappeared, that
no particular effort was made to effect his capture. Where he lived,
and how he lived, was unknown to his contemporaries as it is to us.
Sometimes he would appear, clad as a common labourer; then vanish
again, and not be seen for months. In its poverty and its loneliness
it is a pathetic close to so splendid and so romantic a career. The
young Henry had succeeded his father as King of England in 1413, and
in 1415 he offered a free pardon to Owen. The pardon was, however,
refused. That is the last fact which we know about the fallen
leader. When he died, or where he is buried, we do not know; but a
tradition, to which perhaps some credence may be given, tells us that
at the end he came home to his beloved Glyndyfrdwy, and that his
bones lie close by at Corwen. All his friends had long since been
dispersed; some were dead, some languished in English prisons, others
were living abroad in exile. Of the State which Owen had attempted
to construct not a vestige remained, and the ideals which he had
{123} cherished remained for centuries forgotten. But in tradition
his name always loomed large on both sides of the border. How
powerfully he had impressed the people of England is proved by the
place which is accorded to him by Shakespeare. The Glendower of the
great dramatist is a compound of cunning and simplicity, of
amiability and uncouthness; but his considered verdict is that--
"In faith he is a worthy gentleman,
Exceeding well read, and profited
In strange concealments; valiant as a lion,
And wondrous affable, and as bountiful
As mines of India."
Not a mean tribute from the victor to the vanquished rebel!
{124}