Читать книгу Royal Wales - Deborah Fisher - Страница 12
ОглавлениеThe Normans invaded England in 1066, but did not attempt to take Wales at that point. They preferred a piecemeal approach, and within ten years, William the Conqueror had created three new earldoms along the Welsh ‘march’, the border land that kept the Welsh and English apart. Hitherto it had been difficult to tell where England ended and Wales began. The border populations spoke both languages, and England up to now had been, like Wales, less of a nation than a collection of petty kingdoms. The new earls of Hereford, Chester, Shrewsbury and, later, Gloucester, were loyal to the new ruling dynasty of England, and recognized it as their duty to subdue Wales on behalf of the Norman kings.
Some of the Norman lords began stealthily, lulling the Welsh into a false sense of security through marriage alliances. Others immediately embarked on an expansionist strategy, building castles and raiding Welsh territory. It was not until 1081 that King William himself first entered Wales. William claimed to be on a pilgrimage to St David’s, but he had other motives. Along with the government of England, he had taken on its church, and to emphasize his control of the kingdom’s spiritual life, he had installed his mentor, Lanfranc, former abbot of Caen, as archbishop of Canterbury. While at St David’s, the king took the opportunity to ensure that its bishop knew his place and recognized the authority of Canterbury. (There would not be an archbishop of Wales until 1920, the year in which the Church of England in Wales was finally disestablished, disendowed and replaced with its independent Welsh counterpart.)
Needless to say, William was as interested in the secular life of his kingdom as in the spiritual. His journey into Wales was an opportunity to make a show of power and to put fear into the hearts of the local population. Rhys ap Tewdwr, ruler of Deheubarth, was prepared to pay William £40 a year protection money in order to keep his own little kingdom. (Significantly, this was the same amount paid to the king by the Norman lord Robert of Rhuddlan to retain his territories in north Wales.) More important than the financial incentive, in symbolic terms, was the ‘homage’ William obtained from the Welsh ruler. The Norman tradition was a ceremony in which the vassal would kneel bareheaded before his lord and pledge his loyalty. As a result, not only did the vassal owe service to his new overlord, but in return he could expect the support of that lord in times of trouble.
The Marcher lords who were too timorous to venture into Wales sometimes delegated their responsibilities to their own vassals, lesser lords such as Eustace de Cruer, who is credited with the building of the first castle at Mold. Eustace was granted the lordship of Mold by King William II, son of the Conqueror, but the territory was by no means firmly in Norman hands. Some fifty years later, when the original castle had been upgraded by Robert de Montalt, Owain Gwynedd seized it, and in 1149, at Consyllt, he gave the Norman earl of Chester, Ranulf de Gernon, a bloody nose when the latter tried to take back ‘his’ territory. At some stage, the English got their castle back, but kept it only until 1198, when Owain’s grandson Llywelyn Fawr retrieved it and held it. Mold Castle remained a bone of contention in 1245, when Llywelyn’s son, Dafydd (d.1246), was ordered to give it up to the Norman ‘seneschal’ of Chester. Dafydd refused and the dispute continued. In 1263 that hardy prince of Powys, Gruffydd ap Gwenwynwyn (d.1286), destroyed the castle, symbolic as it was of English dominance. By 1302 it had been rebuilt by the English and was the recognized property of the new ‘prince of Wales’, the future Edward II. In 1322 it was again being besieged by a Welsh rebel, this time Sir Gruffydd Llwyd, the very man who is reputed to have brought Edward I the news of his son’s birth at Caernarfon Castle. Five years later it passed into the hands of Queen Isabella, regent of England and the mother of King Edward III.
The history of Mold Castle typifies the struggle for supremacy in the Welsh Marches, particularly in the north, where the landscape was more hostile to English armies. In 1114, Henry I invaded Gwynedd and Powys, but he did not stay there. He was more successful in the south, where he made other conquests, apparently including Princess Nest (d.c.1136), the daughter of that same Rhys ap Tewdwr who had been prepared to pay homage to Henry’s father. As a result, Nest is said to have given birth to a son, Henry Fitzroy (1103–58). Both King Henry and Princess Nest developed far-from-spotless reputations in the bedroom department, and it seems safe to assume that she was a willing partner in the liaison (if it really happened).
It was not only in the Marches that the struggle between the Normans and the natives went on. As the king of England effectively controlled the activities of the church, his influence continued to be felt as far west as Pembrokeshire. Henry I issued a ‘charter of privileges’ to St David’s, conferring the status of a town on the tiny settlement which just happened to have a very important cathedral. He may have believed it would have a civilizing effect. The town became a centre of pilgrimage, and the residents could not pick and choose who should be allowed access to the shrine of St David. Two visits here were the equivalent of one to Rome, and naturally the English were among the most frequent visitors.
Henry’s policy towards Wales, copied by the more effective English kings and a strategy that eventually worked well for Edward I, was ‘divide and rule’. When he saw an opportunity to interfere between two Welsh princes who were at one another’s throats, Henry would take it. Yet his incursions into Wales were designed to inspire awe and fear in the natives, rather than to take administrative control. He had no use for Wales as another region to govern; he merely wished to ensure its continued subservience.
In 1138, Henry’s successor Stephen created the earldom of Pembroke for his retainer Gilbert de Clare, making it clear that he regarded Welsh estates as being in the gift of the king of England, regardless of what the locals might have to say about the matter. Stephen, however, was already engulfed in civil war, as Henry’s legitimate daughter, Matilda, tried to regain the kingdom her father had willed to her. The king had no time to spare for the conquest of Wales, and this was one of the keys to Owain Gwynedd’s ability to rule north Wales, virtually unchallenged, for so long, and to expand southwards into Ceredigion, taking control of it back from the Normans. Owain was the most notable of several native rulers who took advantage of ‘the Anarchy’ to strengthen their own positions.
During this twelve-year period of ‘anarchy’, no one was quite sure who ruled England. This is not to say that the Welsh took no part in the conflict. One knight who had a major role in the civil war was Robert of Gloucester (d.1147), also called Robert of Caen, whom some have identified as the child of Henry I by Nest though it is generally believed that his mother was Sybilla Corbet. As lord of Glamorgan, Robert of Gloucester had his power base in south Wales, and it was to him that the care of the deposed duke of Normandy, Robert Curthose (elder brother of Henry I), had fallen; Curthose was a prisoner in Cardiff Castle from 1126 until his death in 1134. At Cardiff Robert of Gloucester went so far as to mint coins in the name of his half-sister Matilda, whose claim to the throne he loyally supported. Robert had achieved peace in his part of the Marches by making treaties with local Welsh rulers, and was well regarded, for a Norman. He had many Welshmen in his service, as did the earl of Chester, Ranulf, when they jointly defeated King Stephen at Lincoln in 1141.
Henry II, grandson of Henry I, repeated the attempt at Welsh dominance in 1157, to be met with resistance by Owain Gwynedd, that most able of Welsh leaders. The two reached an uneasy settlement by which Henry gained Rhuddlan and some other territories and undertook not to trouble Owain again. The peace did not last, and Owain took back what he had lost in the course of the next decade. In 1165, at the Battle of Crogen near Chirk, Welsh chroniclers proudly report that Henry, accompanied by ‘a host beyond number of the picked warriors of England and Normandy and Flanders and Gascony and Anjou and all the North and Scotland’, was defeated by an alliance of princes that included both Owain Gwynedd and Owain Cyfeiliog. Henry’s last attempt at invasion was defeated by the Welsh weather.
In 1174, however, Owain’s son, Dafydd, married Henry’s half-sister, Emma of Anjou, in an attempt to bring the royal houses closer together and prevent further bloodshed. Emma was illegitimate, the daughter of Geoffrey of Anjou by a mistress. For the Welsh, illegitimacy held no stigma. As far as the royal court of Gwynedd was concerned, Emma was a princess. Henry’s son, King John, would later repeat the experiment, marrying his own illegitimate daughter to Dafydd’s nephew.
Whatever the relationship between Henry II and Wales, he needed to travel through the country in order to reach Ireland, another independent land on which the Norman kings had designs. Henry embarked at the port now known as Milford Haven in 1172. An advance army had already prepared the ground, including many Welshmen; they were led by Richard de Clare, nominal earl of Pembroke, known to history as ‘Strongbow’.
It was in 1188, during the latter part of Henry II’s reign, that Gerald of Wales (alternatively called ‘Giraldus Cambrensis’ in Latin and ‘Gerallt Cymro’ in Welsh) made his famous journey through the land. He travelled in the entourage of the archbishop of Canterbury, Baldwin of Exeter, on a campaign to recruit men for the Third Crusade. Gerald was a clergyman, of mixed Norman and Welsh blood. His grandmother was the notorious Nest, princess of Deheubarth and former mistress of King Henry I. Nest was sometimes known as ‘the Helen of Wales’ because of her ability to stir men to violence. The de Clares had obtained some of their west Wales lands from Henry I, when that king dispossessed his former allies, Cadwgan ap Bleddyn (1051–1111) and his son Owain, as a result of Owain’s action in running off with Nest, thus shaming her Norman husband. Owain ap Cadwgan continued in the king’s service, but this did not prevent Gerald of Windsor from pursuing him to his death in 1116. Angharad, Gerald’s daughter by Nest, was the mother of Gerald of Wales.
Although he could claim royal blood on his Welsh side, Gerald was unsuccessful in his attempts to achieve the status of bishop. His rejection seems to have been based on his very Welshness, leading to his being considered potentially unreliable as an enforcer of the archbishop of Canterbury’s edicts. Gerald was, however, close to the young king, serving Henry II as chaplain; and he was the ideal choice as a companion and interpreter for Baldwin. He had indeed already accompanied Henry’s son, Prince John, to Ireland in 1185.
The new archbishop of York, enthroned in 1189, was Geoffrey, an illegitimate son of the king. Gerald quickly became one of Geoffrey’s staunchest supporters. When the archbishop’s half-brother took the throne as King Richard I, both Geoffrey and Gerald fell out of favour. Gerald became more outspoken in his criticisms of secular authority, and his former relationship with Prince John did not enable him to obtain high office in the church even when John became king in 1199.
Although individual Englishmen were free to come and go within Wales, the country was considered dangerous in parts. Hills, forests and rivers were all hazards, and the language barrier did not help. In his Descriptio Cambriae, written in 1194, Gerald recommends to his monarch that the final conquest of Wales (which Henry II had recognized as being still a long way off) should be attempted only with men who knew the terrain. Only the Marches could provide such men, he warns, and even they would have difficulty with the guerrilla tactics employed by the Welsh. It would be better for the king of England to bide his time and rely on the continual internal divisions of the Welsh princes to weaken the opposition.
The stand-off continued into the reign of King John, who formed an alliance with Owain Gwynedd’s grandson, Llywelyn Fawr (‘the Great’). As in the previous generation, the alliance was cemented through marriage to an illegitimate princess, this time Joan, called Siwan by the Welsh. Joan’s career as princess of Gwynedd is well known. Despite the period she spent under house-arrest after being caught with a lover, William de Braose, there is written evidence that she did, in the course of her life, succeed in helping to keep the peace between her husband and her father, and later between Llywelyn and her half-brother, King Henry III. Most importantly, she left a legitimate son who could succeed Llywelyn as prince.
The man to whom the earldom of Pembroke had passed, after the death of the great Marcher lord Richard de Clare, was William Marshal, de Braose’s father-in-law. Marshal was a renowned soldier, called by some ‘the greatest knight that ever lived’. Through his 1189 marriage to Isabel, the daughter of ‘Strongbow’, William Marshal came into possession of vast estates scattered through Ireland (where County Clare is named after his wife’s family), England (where the village of Clare in Suffolk was named after their place of origin) and south Wales. Marshal played a leading role in the defeat of Rhys ap Gruffydd in 1192, and ten years later was made custodian of Cardigan castle by King John. He went on to appropriate the lordship of Emlyn from Maelgwn ap Rhys (c.1170–1230). In 1212, at the age of nearly 70, Marshal was still a leading figure in the campaign against the Welsh, this time joining the king to fight against the up-and-coming Welsh leader, Llywelyn Fawr. That he bore no personal hostility towards the Welsh is evinced by his voluntary return of two castles to Llywelyn as soon as peace terms were agreed.
Llywelyn wisely did not rely on his wife’s family ties with the English monarchy. In 1212 (after his father-in-law, the king of England, had been excommunicated by the pope), Llywelyn wrote to the king of France, Philippe II, referring to an embassy he had received from that king. Llywelyn’s letter promises that he and his heirs will ally themselves with Philippe and his heirs, having their friends and enemies in common. In return, he expects Philippe to recognize him as ruler of Wales. Although he refers to the other princes of Wales, it is very clear that Llywelyn considers himself their unchallenged leader, and regards their status as subservient to his own. He has a very clear sense of his own royalty.
By the time Llywelyn’s career reached its apogee in the 1220s, William Marshal was dead. His son and namesake continued in loyalty to the English crown, and retook the castles of Cardigan and Carmarthen which his father had given up to Llywelyn. In this struggle against the prince of Gwynedd, Marshal junior allied himself with lesser Welsh princes, such as Cynan ap Hywel ap Rhys, who did not wish to be dominated by Gwynedd. (Cynan’s reward was the lordship of Emlyn.) This reveals a more complex situation than we have been tempted to recognize by the age-old tales of English oppression. The reality was that the Welsh were answerable to no one ruler, and resistance to English domination (whether by individuals or by groups) had as much to do with that unwillingness to be controlled as it did to a hatred of the English.
Llywelyn, having outlived the second William Marshal, allied himself with the latter’s son, Richard, when the new earl fell out with King John’s successor, Henry III, during the 1230s. Between them, Richard Marshal and Llywelyn Fawr soon controlled the southern Welsh border. The areas not yet under the control of the Marcher lords were known, in Latin, as ‘Pura Wallia’, and Llywelyn controlled most of these, and indeed most of north Wales. The Peace of Middle, negotiated in 1234, ensured that Llywelyn retained firm control of his principality until the end of his life.
Llywelyn was in no awe of his brother-in-law the king, whom he had known from a small child. When, in 1230, Llywelyn’s wife and Henry’s half-sister Joan was discovered in a liaison with William de Braose, lord of Abergavenny, whom Llywelyn had entertained in good faith, de Braose was immediately executed by the cuckolded husband. After a brief banishment from court, Joan was forgiven and welcomed back into the marital home. Llywelyn genuinely loved her, but one might question whether he would have been so lenient had he not had to take into account the risk of offending the king of England. Not only did he allow Joan to resume her place at his side, but he allowed his son, Dafydd, to go ahead with the marriage that had already been arranged, to none other than de Braose’s daughter, Isabella. Political alliances would seem to have taken precedence over personal feelings in this case. Many prefer to see this as a sign of Llywelyn’s high-mindedness, in that he chose not to punish the daughter for the sins of the father, but no one bothered to record Isabella’s feelings on the matter.
Llywelyn’s action in selecting Dafydd as his heir, rather than his older, illegitimate son Gruffydd, reveals his willingness to compromise with the English. He saw that the future of Wales might depend on the country becoming more like its threatening neighbour, rather than continuing to resist the inevitable. He was not so wedded to Welsh law that he would champion the rights of his eldest son when he could use his younger son’s Norman blood as a means of preserving Welsh independence. Llywelyn’s strategy for assuring the succession proved not to be as watertight as he had hoped. Shortly after his death, Henry III recognized Dafydd, the legitimate son of Llywelyn and Joan, as ‘prince of Wales’. He received the new prince’s homage at Gloucester, and even set a coronet on his head. By the following year, however, relations had deteriorated and Henry invaded Gwynedd. Dafydd spent the rest of his short reign staving off the inevitable.
Dafydd died prematurely, six years after his father, leaving no heir. It was another Llywelyn, the son of Dafydd’s illegitimate elder brother, Gruffydd, who eventually came to the fore in Gwynedd, dominating his own three brothers in the process. Picking up where his grandfather had left off, Llywelyn ap Gruffydd (c.1230–82) set out to become undisputed ruler of Wales, and was recognized as such in the Treaty of Montgomery, signed in 1267. With Henry III, now an immature adult, still on the English throne, Llywelyn’s position was a strong one, threatened mainly by the petty jealousies of lesser Welsh princes. He had reached this position largely thanks to a timely alliance with Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, the powerful French-born baron who was determined to make the king more answerable to his subjects.
Simon’s campaign for a parliament was deemed necessary because there were no real restrictions on the activities of the English kings. Their own Marcher lords were as vulnerable to their mood swings as the Welsh were. Even William Marshal had suffered from King John’s tyranny, having his Welsh castles taken away from him in a fit of pique and then returned in a moment of greater sanity. In 1210, angry with his former favourite William de Braose (grandfather of the man who would cuckold Llywelyn Fawr), and even more angry when he discovered that the latter had run away to France to elude his displeasure, John took William’s wife and his eldest son prisoner instead. Maud de Braose was a feisty woman, who had defended her husband’s possession of Painscastle against Welsh attack during the 1190s. She had as good as called John a murderer after the mysterious death of his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, in 1203. Now John took his vengeance on her and her son. They died in captivity, perhaps at Windsor or at Corfe Castle in Dorset, starved to death on the king’s orders. William de Braose senior, who had planned to be buried at Brecon, died in exile. The de Braoses, Norman to the core, nevertheless left their hearts in the Welsh border country.
Alliances between Welsh chieftains and Marcher lords were not uncommon, and, where they occurred, could produce a lethal cocktail of home-grown loyalties and imported military power that threatened the English throne. It was an alliance between Robert Fitzhamon (d.1107) and a local prince that had first given the Normans their power base in Glamorgan, and Henry I had imprisoned Iorwerth ap Bleddyn (1053–1111) for his alliance with the earl of Shrewsbury, Robert of Bellême, when the latter supported Robert Curthose, Henry’s brother and rival for the throne.
Henry III’s eldest son, the future King Edward I, disapproved of his father’s vacillating rule, and was determined to show himself a strong ruler when the time came. It was Edward who put an end to Simon de Montfort’s dominance, defeating the rebel barons at the Battle of Evesham in 1265 and banishing the entire de Montfort family from England. In doing so he was sending into exile his own aunt and his first cousins (Simon’s widow being the sister of King Henry III). Simon was one of those progressive English barons who had allied themselves with the Welsh rather than make enemies of them. His pact with Llywelyn ap Gruffydd was cemented by Llywelyn’s promise to marry Simon’s daughter Eleanor, and this did not endear the Welsh leader to Prince Edward. Seven years after Evesham, Edward came to the throne. Having eliminated the internal opposition, he felt safe within the boundaries of England, and cast his eyes further afield.
By 1282, Edward I wanted Wales very badly. His reasons cannot have had a great deal to do with the natural resources of the principality. Geographically, Wales was a troublesome region, with its tendency to mountainous terrain, poor soil and generally wet weather. What it did have, in abundance, was a set of minor rulers who made Edward’s hold on England less secure than it might otherwise have been. As long as they stayed on their side of the border and did not resist too strongly when his own barons infiltrated Welsh territory, he had been prepared to tolerate them. He had enough on his plate, with crusades and rebellious Scots leaders, to have no strong motive for an invasion of weak little Wales. Besides, it was only a matter of time before the barons did the job for him. The king did, however, feel obliged to make his dominance felt when he came up against a Welsh leader who was unwilling to lie down and be walked over.
It was the petty quarrel between Edward I and Llywelyn ap Gruffydd that escalated into internecine war, putting an end to Wales’s 900-year-old tradition of independence from England. Edward was simply tired of waiting. The policy of delegating the conquest to the king’s barons carried with it the danger of insubordination. Marcher lords must be made to share their profits with the monarch who had treated them so generously; they must not be allowed to become petty kings themselves. One of the great Marcher titles, the earldom of Chester, comprising Cheshire and Flintshire, its last incumbent having died in 1237, passed briefly into the hands of Simon de Montfort before his disgrace. Edward I himself, while heir to the throne, had briefly been known as ‘Lord’ of Chester, and he bestowed the earldom on his eldest son, with the result that princes of Wales from 1301 onwards have also been earls of Chester. The title makes a connection between the old and new regimes.
Llywelyn’s marriage to Eleanor de Montfort was guaranteed to provoke the king of England. Edward had exiled his cousin along with the rest of her family, but the ostensible reason for his displeasure was that Llywelyn had not asked his permission to go ahead with the marriage. Moreover, the Welsh prince had tried to avoid giving Edward any say in the matter by having his bride brought to him by sea. The king, having got wind of the wedding plans, arranged for the ship to be taken by ‘pirates’, and Eleanor languished for more than two years under house arrest at Windsor until Llywelyn had made suitable concessions. The king then made a show of celebrating the marriage in fine style at Worcester Cathedral. At the very last moment, he extracted further concessions from the Welsh. He was determined to show Llywelyn who really ruled the country.
The death of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, ‘Llywelyn the Last’ as he is called in English and, more tellingly, ‘Ein Llyw Olaf’ (‘our last leader’) in Welsh, is a defining moment in the history of Wales. It is in this event that lovers of Welsh independence see their nation subjugated by a foreign oppressor. In particular, the ignominy of Llywelyn’s death (killed in an ambush and decapitated by a knight who had no idea of his royal status) seems to sum up the destruction of Welsh identity. King Edward, who accepted Llywelyn’s head as a gift and paraded it around the streets of London, is regarded as no better than a murderer whose tyranny continued unchecked following the demise of the only leader with both the competence and the courage to stand against him.
Edward did not see himself as a tyrant but as a realist and a modernizer. He seems to have believed he was doing Wales a favour by subjugating it and annexing it to England. That he took his revenge on the Welsh and their leaders is not in dispute. The brutality with which he executed Llywelyn’s younger brother Dafydd, the callousness with which he condemned Dafydd’s small sons to life imprisonment (from which they never emerged), the sheer coldness of his decision to send the daughters of Dafydd and Llywelyn into convents for the rest of their lives, all testify to his determination to put down any opposition that might arise.
Yet his pronouncements are also evidence of a man who wanted to appear generous in victory and who placed some value on the new lands now made available to him. Edward claimed that his intention was not to punish the children of his enemies, merely to put an end to division and rule in peace. ‘Having the Lord before our eyes, pitying also her sex and her age, that the innocent may not seem to atone for the iniquity and ill-doing of the wicked’, he wrote, by way of excuse, to the abbot of Sempringham in 1283, shortly before dispatching the baby Gwenllian to spend the rest of her life with the Gilbertine order in far-off Lincolnshire.
