A Great and Terrible King Read online

  The prince was, in general, under no illusion about his diminishing popularity within Wales, especially in certain quarters. Earlier in 1274 he had uncovered a plot against him led by Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn, lord of Powys, a man who had long resisted the expansion of Gwynedd and resented having to kowtow to Llywelyn. Gruffudd had paid for this disloyalty — the prince had obliged him to surrender some of his lands, as well as his son, as guarantees of future good behaviour - but, all told, Llywelyn's retribution had been mild, suggesting that he had not at the time realised the full extent of the conspiracy against him. Only in November, following a full confession from Gruffudd’s son, did he understand the true enormity of the plotters' intentions. Their plan, it emerged, was not just independence for Powys, but death for the prince himself. And their leader was not Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn. It was Llywelyn's own brother, Dafydd.

  Dafydd ap Gruffudd, the youngest of Llywelyn's four brothers, has a poor reputation among modern historians of Wales, and not without reason: when it came to treachery, Dafydd had all the makings of a serial offender. Over a decade beforehand, he had abandoned Llywelyn's war with England and defected to support Edward; earlier still, in the course of the original struggle for supremacy in Gwynedd, he had opposed Llywelyn by siding with their eldest brother, Owain. And yet, in the wake of both these unsuccessful adventures, Dafydd had not merely been forgiven, but rewarded into the bargain. In 1256 Llywelyn granted him lands in the newly conquered Four Cantrefs, and in 1267, following their second reconciliation, these lands were restored. Given Dafydd's unreliable record, such lenient treatment might seem like evidence of indulgence or even naivety on the prince's part, and there may have been an element of both in his attempts to deal with Dafydd. The basic fact was, however, that Llywelyn was struggling against the Welsh custom of partibility — that ancient obstacle to unity as impassable as the mountains and forests. Dafydd was Llywelyn's younger brother, and in Wales even younger brothers expected a share of the ancestral estate. By granting him lands elsewhere in Wales, the prince seems to have hoped that he might persuade Dafydd to drop his demand for a portion of Gwynedd. Now, in 1274, he realised that this strategy had failed. Dafydd still regarded himself as hard done by, and could clearly count on the support of other disaffected Welshmen, like Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn, to help him prosecute his claim.

  The immediate problem for Llywelyn in 1274 was not the discovery of his younger brother's latest treachery but its wider effects. As soon as their plot had been exposed, Dafydd and Gruffudd fled across the border into England, and this led to an immediate deterioration in Anglo-Welsh relations. The prince demanded that the conspirators be handed over at once, claiming that their reception was contrary to the terms of the Treaty of Montgomery. In actual fact it was not: Llywelyn had promised not to receive English fugitives, but all that the English had promised in return was not to furnish his enemies with material support. In any case, the legal merits of the prince's complaint hardly mattered. Edward must have reasoned that in Dafydd and Gruffudd he had acquired a useful bargaining chip, which might be used to counter Llywelyn's assertion that he was deliberately withholding his treaty payments. More to the point was the fact that, as it stood in the winter of 1274-75, the king had no formal obligation to the prince whatsoever, for Llywelyn had yet to appear before Edward and perform his homage.

  It was on this issue that Llywelyn made his biggest blunder. As we have seen, he had no objection in principal to acknowledging the English Crown's superior lordship. At the ford of Montgomery in 1267 he had been only too happy to kneel before Henry III and become his man. Homage in this context was hardly a recent innovation; Llywelyn's predecessors, and other Welsh lords, had been doing the same for generations. As Matthew Paris had once rhetorically demanded, 'who does not know that the prince of Wales is a petty vassal of the king of England?'

  Since Henry's death, however, Llywelyn had begun to link the question of his vassal status, like the question of his financial contributions, to the resolution of his grievances. For this reason he had not even performed the basic first step of swearing fealty, or fidelity, to Edward in his absence. When, early in 1273, the regents had sent ambassadors to the border expressly for this purpose, the prince had failed to appear before them.

  Edward, to his credit, did not attach too much importance to this initial dereliction of duty on Llywelyn's part, just as he chose to ignore the prince's failure to attend his coronation. His desire to see good relations restored - and payment made - meant that he was prepared to go to considerable lengths to sort the matter out. In 1274, until prevented by illness, he had been ready to travel to the border to meet Llywelyn; the following year he was ready to do so again. In the summer of 1275 the king and his court made their way north to Chester, where Llywelyn had been told to come and render his due obedience.

  The prince did not appear. As he explained in a letter, he considered that it was unsafe for him to travel into England, where his enemies were being sheltered.There was evidently some sincerity in this: Llywelyn was hovering close to the border as he wrote, seemingly in the hope that Edward would go the extra mile and come to meet him there.

  As far as the king was concerned, however, he had gone quite far enough. The suggestion that his court was an unsafe place was insulting, for it implied that his word was not to be trusted. Much more offensive was the challenge to his authority. Llywelyn's homage was not a conditional thing about which they might debate indefinitely; it was a non-negotiable necessity, already long overdue. Yet it looks very much as if the prince now began to suggest precisely the opposite, giving out that his homage would be forthcoming only once Edward had remedied all his grievances in the March.

  Such insubordination was not to be tolerated. Edward was not about to make his father's mistake of allowing the authority of the Crown to be disrespected in this way. After waiting in vain at Chester for more than a week, the king finally gave up and began his journey south — 'in a rage', as one Welsh chronicler noted. He felt he had gone out of his way to oblige Llywelyn, and that for his efforts he had been gratuitously insulted, even to the point of humiliation. 'In order to receive his homage and fealty,' he later wrote to the pope, 'we so demeaned our royal dignity as to travel to the confines of his land.'

  Chester clearly marks a turning point in relations between Edward and Llywelyn. From that point on it is difficult to see how their personal relationship could have been repaired. Before he left the city in September, the king bluntly instructed the prince to present himself at Westminster the following month. Llywelyn, of course, did not appear — his dignity too was now at stake.28

  And yet, despite his well-attested rage, Edward took no retributive action. The Treaty of Montgomery had taken a long time to negotiate, and Llywelyn still owed a great deal of money for it. Pride prevented the king from making any more friendly overtures to the prince, but in late November he was still writing to his officials in the March, urging them to see that there was no fighting in the region, and stating categorically that he wanted the peace 'to be well maintained'. It took a final, astoundingly provocative act on Llywelyn's part to make him change his mind.

  At some stage in 1275 - the precise date is sadly unknown - the prince of Wales decided to get married. From an abstract, dynastic point of view, this might have been regarded as a sensible decision. Llywelyn, although now in his early fifties, was still a bachelor, and had no sons, legitimate or otherwise, to succeed him. His heir was the treacherous Dafydd, and it may have been his younger brother's defection that belatedly spurred the prince in the direction of matrimony.

  From the point of view of Anglo-Welsh relations, however, Llywelyn's marriage was the last nail in his coffin, for his intended bride was Eleanor de Montfort, daughter of the late Earl Simon. This match may have been contemplated a decade earlier, when Montfort was in power and in alliance with the prince; its resurrection in 1275 was certainly guaranteed to stir up trouble. At best a tit-for-tat response to Edward's sheltering of
the Welsh fugitives, it may have been much more - an attempt to stoke the ashes of the recent English civil war, in the hope of sparking the conflict back into life. When, at the very end of 1275, Eleanor set out in secret from her home in France, the ship that carried her across the Channel had the arms and banner of the Montforts hidden beneath its boards. They were found there by the king's agents, who captured the vessel and its passenger on the high seas.

  The scale of Edward's anger on discovering Llywelyn's intentions is not hard to imagine. The Montforts may seem like a spent force in retrospect, but in the 1270s this was not nearly so apparent; at that time memories of the divisive war were still vivid, and its re-ignition was precisely what the authorities in England feared. More importantly, the mere mention of the name of Montfort must have touched the rawest of nerves as far as the king himself was concerned. Apart from his own humiliating experiences at the hands of Earl Simon, Edward also had to consider the unforgivable murder of his cousin, Henry of Almain,by Montfort's sons. His reaction to the foiled marriage speaks for itself. Eleanor de Montfort was kept in close captivity at Windsor for the next three years; her clerical brother and escort, Amaury, was cast into prison at Corfe, where he waited twice as long for the royal wrath to cool. Most significant, however, was the king's retaliation against the disappointed bridegroom. All efforts to preserve the peace with Llywelyn were now abandoned. From the start of 1276 the Marchers were encouraged to renew their attacks, and Welsh fugitives were finally granted material aid. A cold war between England and Wales was begun.

  A full-blown war was on the agenda. Edward also marked the new year by sending a final summons to Llywelyn to come to Westminster in April and perform his homage. If the prince did not appear, he was warned, the king would consider the matter in parliament - the clear implication being that parliament would provide a verdict that would legitimise military action. Llywelyn, of course, did not come. He had made his decision to defy Edward at Chester the previous summer based on the erroneous assumption that the king was already bent on war. When Edward's ultimatum arrived it merely confirmed in the prince's mind what he had suspected all along.

  Llywelyn, for his part, professed not to want war. On the very day that Edward had left Chester in anger, the prince had written to the pope, asking him to intervene lest new discord should arise between England and Wales, 'which God forbid'. In a similar spirit, he approached the archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Kilwardby, in the weeks between receiving the king's final summons and its April deadline. Their correspondence during the summer shows Llywelyn struggling to maintain the peace in spite of the attacks being launched into Wales by the Marcher lords. 'We have strictly ordered all our vassals and other men to commit no trespasses in the lands of the king or in any part of the March,' he told the archbishop in June, and other evidence proves that this was indeed the case. Such efforts indicate that the prince's wish for peace was far from insincere.

  And yet, at the same time, Llywelyn was determined to take a stand. While his letters to the archbishop stressed his restraint, those he sent to the king simply complained of his sufferings at the hands of the Marchers and demanded justice.34 For all the prince's earnest declarations in favour of peace, one cannot dispel the feeling that a strong part of him relished the prospect of a straight fight. In contrast to his fruidess diplomatic efforts in recent years, Llywelyn's earlier military career had been one of unbroken success. His brothers, his rivals, the English — all had been roundly defeated as a result of his celebrated prowess. The royal host that had marched into Wales some two decades earlier had failed to dislodge him. The man who now threatened him had done so many times in the past, and on each occasion he had failed. His earlier victories gave the prince his confidence. If he did not want a war, it is equally plain that he did not fear it either.

  And so war was declared. In spite of the prince's non-appearance at Easter, Edward stayed his hand in the course of the summer of 1276, perhaps at the bidding of the archbishop, who clearly still believed at that stage that a peaceful outcome was possible. By the autumn, however, the king could wait no more. On 12 November, as that autumn's parliament drew to a close, Edward consulted with the great men of his realm, and the decision was taken. The prince of Wales was pronounced 'a rebel and a disturber of the peace'. The king and his men would go against him.

  Even then war was not utterly inevitable. There could be no invasion of Wales during the winter: Edward's verdict indicated that his army would not assemble until midsummer the following year. It is not impossible that this long delay was deliberately contrived, a final concession to an archbishop still endeavouring to find a peaceful solution. Either way, by passing sentence so late in the season, the king effectively gave the condemned man one last chance to escape his punishment.

  The prince, certainly, was not slow in coming forward with last-minute proposals for peace. In some respects these were outrageously generous. At the start of 1277 he offered to pay 11,000 marks (£7,333) for Edward's grace — this to be in addition to the money he still owed for the Treaty of Montgomery. But Llywelyn's letters of supplication still came laced with demands: he wanted the treaty confirmed; he wanted its terms upheld; he wanted his wife released. It all amounted to the same thing: the prince wanted to submit on his own terms, and this the king would never accept. As the hour of reckoning approached, the unmistakable spirit of defiance remained. Early in the new year the archbishop of Canterbury finally abandoned his efforts after his envoys were turned away from Llywelyn's court; on 10 February, as a result, the prince was excommunicated. Only in his last letter to Edward, dated 21 February, did Llywelyn come close to adopting the unconditional tone that the king required.

  'We swear before God,' he wrote, 'that we love and esteem your illustrious person more truly, more faithfully and more intimately than those who incite your spirit to indignation against us.'

  'We will be of greater value to you,' he concluded, 'than those who, by your war, now attempt to gain their own profit and advantage rather than your honour.'

  But by then it was too late. War was already upon him.

  Even as Llywelyn was drafting his last proposals for peace, his adversary was advancing towards him with hostile intent. Edward may not have intended to lead an army in person until the summer, but he had plenty of other resources that he could marshal in the meantime. In January he moved west to Worcester in order to supervise their deployment.

  Chief among these resources was his own household. Since he had become king, Edward's domestic establishment had grown to somewhere in the region of 600 people. The increase in size was a precondition of his new role. Medieval monarchs were no different from modern heads of state in needing extensive entourages to magnify their importance. As a consequence, the household was dressed to impress: one of the ways we are able to gauge its size is through surviving records that reveal the twice-annual distribution of robes to its (mostly male) members. Wherever Edward went, this splendid retinue went too, trotting after him on horseback and trundling along in carts. And in their wake followed others - merchants, players, beggars, prostitutes - all drawn by the household's unrivalled ability to disgorge money. As it made its ceaseless way around the country, it resembled nothing so much as a small army on the move.

  The resemblance was far from coincidental. While many household men — cooks, carters, clerks, grooms, doctors, tailors, huntsmen — had non-military roles, those individuals who really stood out, arrayed in the finest clothes and seated on the noblest horses, were the household knights, and their primary purpose was violence. A personal bodyguard for the king in times of peace, they were also effectively a standing army, an elite unit that formed the core of any force when the king went to war. The same was true of their lesser counterparts, the esquires and sergeants of the household, whose day-to-day tasks might be more menial, but whose fundamental function was also to fight. Together, both groups proved that the household, for all its elaborate routines and courtly veneer, was a dir
ect descendant of the warrior band of an earlier era. Numbers tended to fluctuate, but on average the king employed around fifty knights and around two to three times as many esquires and sergeants. This meant that in general a quarter to a third of the royal household were experienced military men who could be deployed at short notice. In the immediate circumstances of January 1277, it meant that Edward was able to detach from his side some forty knights and seventy esquires to begin operations on the ground for the coming war in Wales.

  The size of Edward's household, and the proportion of warriors within it, were neither new nor unusual: Henry III had at times maintained an entourage of similar size and composition. Fighting may have been the ultimate raison d'etre of a household knight, but they were versatile creatures, well suited to other functions - a special intervention in some distant part of the realm, a delicate diplomatic mission overseas. All Icings had use of such men. If, however, there was a difference between the households of Henry III and his son, it surely lay in their sense of purpose and in the reputation they had already earned. Edward's knights shared a strong esprit de corps, forged from their common experience in arms. Many of them had served Edward since his youth. They had fought together in tournaments, campaigned together in war, travelled together to the Holy Land and back. Strong bonds of love and loyalty bound them to each other and to the man they now served as their king.

  What was true of the household was equally true of Edward's newly appointed captains of war. A cursory glance at their names reveals that the king's other great resource was his long-established friendship with a wide circle of formidable warriors. Roger Mortimer, assigned to command the royal forces in the middle March, was a choice so obvious as to require no further explanation. Based at Montgomery, his role was essentially to continue his existing private war with Llywelyn, albeit in Edward's name and with the Crown's financial backing. Supporting him in the same region were other men with equally distinguished records of service. Roger Clifford, for example, was both Mortimer's neighbour and one of the king's oldest associates - his entree had been occasioned by Llywelyn's first war over two decades before, and he had celebrated his fiftieth birthday with Edward on crusade. Otto de Grandson and John deVescy, also appointed to the middle March, were likewise veteran crusaders, as was Payn de Chaworth, the young man whom Edward had assigned to command his forces in the south, and who had been harassing Llywelyn from his castle at Kidwelly since the spring of the previous year. William de Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, was only marginally less qualified for his role as commander of the northern forces. A man much the same age as Edward, Beauchamp had evidently commended himself through his support for the royalists during the civil war, and by his recent services in negotiating with Llywelyn on the king's behalf. In fact, of all the men placed in positions of trust in Wales, only Henry de Lacy, the twenty-seven-year-old earl of Lincoln, appears to have lacked any prior experience. The fact that he had grown up in the household of Edward's mother no doubt explains the earl's closeness to the king, and hence his appointment as one of Mortimer's lieutenants.