10
The apotheosis of Owain Glyndwr
Over the course of the fourteenth century, the population of the British Isles fell for the only time in its history, possibly by as much as a third. The causes were famine, the Black Death and the enormous cost of England’s Hundred Years War with France. The result was a relative calm in relations between England and subordinate Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Only as the century drew to a close did Henry Bolingbroke’s revolution of 1399 and his toppling of Richard II (r.1377–99) as Henry IV (r.1399–1413) offer a familiar invitation to border instability.
In 1400 a London-educated Welsh lawyer disputed a legal judgment with a local baron concerning land in Powys. The lawyer’s name was Owain Glyndwr (c.1359–c.1415), who, incidentally, claimed descent from the kings of Gwynedd. He raised the flag of revolt against the crown in collusion with two currently rebelling foes of Henry IV, the Percys and the Mortimers. Glyndwr grandly proposed that on Henry’s defeat he would be content to rule Wales, while they could divide England between them.
The Percy/Mortimer conspiracy failed, leaving Glyndwr uncomfortably on his own. He initially achieved some success, uniting Wales to the same extent as had Llywelyn a century before him. He captured Harlech castle in 1404 and summoned Welsh parliaments there and at Machynlleth. He wrote to the king of Scotland reminding him of their common antecedents – as Bruce had written to O’Neill – hoping to stir a joint uprising against England. A Scottish bard’s reply was that ‘Britons shall flourish in alliance with the Alban people/ The whole island will bear its ancient name …/ The Britons with the Scots rule their fatherland./ They will rule in harmony and quiet prosperity/ Their enemies expelled.’ Poets make fine warmongers.
As before, this was a faint hope. The nearest Glyndwr came to obtaining outside help was by invoking Scotland’s old alliance with France. He detached St David’s cathedral from the authority of Canterbury and proposed two Welsh universities. But Glyndwr’s strategy was unclear. He could do little beyond attack any Welsh property that sided with Henry and win skirmishes with the aid of a small French force that landed at Milford Haven. When the French troops eventually saw Henry’s full army outside Worcester they fled home. After 1405 the Welsh cause was hopeless.
Henry IV’s son, the future Henry V, was commander of the English response. He turned from battles to blockades and Welsh bases began to surrender, Anglesey falling in 1406 and Harlech in 1409. Glyndwr’s last plea to France, in the Pennal Letter of 1406, so named after the village in which it was written, even offered to bring the Welsh church under the Avignon papacy in return for help. It went unanswered and the Welsh took to the hills and guerrilla war. By 1412 Glyndwr had disappeared into Celtic legend, becoming the most desperate and appealing of Welsh heroes. Shakespeare described him in Henry IV, Part 1 as ‘a worthy gentleman, exceedingly well-read … Valiant as a lion and wondrous affable’. But his boast that he could ‘call spirits from the vasty deep’ was met with Hotspur’s dismissive reply, ‘Ay, but will they come when you do call?’ They did not.
The Glyndwr revolt was a disaster for Wales. In 1402 it saw a reversion to Edwardian repression and penal laws. The Welsh could not bear arms in public, hold public office, serve on juries or marry an English person. If they did so marry, the progeny could not be regarded as English; nor could any Englishman be convicted on the word of a Welshman. Welsh bardic ceremonies and assemblies – even Welsh poetry – were again banned. A Welsh economy, struggling to recover from the recession of the fourteenth century, collapsed. Harvests were destroyed, towns wrecked and markets suspended. Divisions between rebel and loyalist factions became deep and lasting.
Glyndwr’s rebellion, like Llywelyn’s, was essentially one of personal pride fuelled by national identity. Henry V (r.1413–22) did posthumously pardon Glyndwr but the penal laws were not repealed. A country with a long history of being on good terms with England came to identify as a nation of ‘others’, specifically not English. Nothing was more likely to drive a wedge between Wales and the English.
A Highland tragedy
As Wales was paying England’s price for Glyndwr’s rebellion, Scotland was seeking a different route to peaceful coexistence. The death in 1371 of David II, the last of the Bruces, left the country under the Stewarts in the mildest of homage to the English crown. When the third Stewart, the twelve-year-old James I (r.1406–37), finally took the Scottish throne in 1424 it was after eighteen years as a hostage in the royal court in London, much as David had been. He was determined to modernise his new domain. But he began with a brutally medieval gesture. He executed his former regent, Duke Murdoch of the Stewart dynasty, as well as Murdoch’s two sons and any potential rival on whom he could lay his hands.
James’s next priority was to bring unity to a country long divided between the Lowlands and a northern hinterland in which clan rivalries and local wars were still embedded. Here the MacDonalds, the Macleods and the Mackenzies, the ‘Spartans of the north’, ruled the deep lochs and islands of the west Highlands. The Mackays and the Gordons controlled much of the north-east. A chronicler wrote, ‘There was no law in Scotland but the great man oppressed the poor man, and the whole country was a den of thieves … justice was sent into banishment.’
Such anarchy was not confined to the Highlands. The border country, the territory of the Armstrongs and Douglases, had long been a no-man’s-land of scrub and moor. This was inhabited by bandit families known as ‘reivers … broken men, clanless loons’. As a defence against smuggling they were informally licensed by both English and Scottish authorities in the sixteenth century ‘to rob, burn, spoil, slay, murder and destroy all and every person and persons, their bodies, property, goods and livestock … without any redress to be made for the same’. All building was banned over a stretch of fifty square miles of the Solway Firth known as the Debatable Land.
In his history of Scotland Fitzroy Maclean argued that the Highland clans were in no sense part of any Scottish nation. They saw ‘kings or parliaments or officers of state from the south … only as potential allies or enemies in their own personal struggles for power’. These struggles regularly turned to civil war. In 1411 at Harlaw, 10,000 Highlanders took to the battlefield as MacDonalds fought Mackays allied to Stewarts. This was followed by a failed attempt to sack Aberdeen. Later, in 1480, at the Battle of Bloody Bay off Mull, Angus Og set Macleans against each other as well as against MacDonalds and Macleods. The orgy of killing ended only when a harpist laid down his instrument and slit Og’s throat. Conflicts even went international. In 1388 the Douglases fought the English Percys across the border at the Battle of Otterburn (or Chevy Chase), leaving 1,800 English dead.
Whatever James had learned in London, it was not diplomacy. He summoned the feuding Highland chiefs to a parliament, arrested forty of them and either executed them or stripped them of office. In retaliation, the survivors marched on Inverness and burned it to the ground. In 1437 James suffered a taste of his own medicine. Three clansmen whom he had offended decided to hack him to pieces in front of his wife. She had them tortured to death. The next king, James II (r.1437–60), was barely an improvement. Learning of a Douglas vendetta against him, he invited the chief of Clan Douglas to meet him under safe conduct and personally stabbed him to death at the dinner table. It was known understandably as the Black Dinner.
Scotland’s relations with England remained poor, but they were those of a nuisance neighbour. It failed to pay ransom for aristocratic Scottish hostages, who now crowded London in a novel form of English taxation. Scotland’s continued siding with France in the Hundred Years War infuriated the English court, with Scots appearing alongside the French on battlefields against the English. Henry V remarked on his deathbed that the Scots were ‘a cursed nation. Wherever I go I find them in my beard.’
A Tudor consolation for Wales
In 1453 the Hundred Years War with France ended in England’s defeat at the Battle of Castillon, a defeat ignored in most English histories against the earlier victory at Agincourt. No sooner was the war resolved than England embarked on its most divisive civil conflict since the days of King John. This was a succession struggle between Lancastrian and Yorkist descendants of Edward III caused by the crowning of Henry VI. From this War of the Roses the Scots and Irish mostly held aloof. The Welsh did not. They divided, with the Marcher lords predominantly Yorkists while Lancastrians rallied in the south-west under Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, uncle and guardian of his five-year-old nephew, Henry.
The Tudor child had been born to Edmund Tudor by Margaret Beaufort when she was just thirteen. This gave him a tenuous claim to the throne through Margaret’s forebear, John of Gaunt. In 1471, as rival claimants to the throne fell in a ceaseless round of battles, Henry came into ever greater prominence and danger, and Jasper took him for refuge to Brittany. He was a quarter Welsh, and it is intriguing to wonder in what language his retinue conversed.
By the 1480s the Wars of the Roses culminated in Richard III of York (r.1483–5) taking the throne. Sensing their moment, Jasper Tudor and the now twenty-eight-year-old Henry in 1485 returned from exile, landing at Milford Haven in south Wales. With an army part French and part Welsh, they marched across Wales towards the Midlands. Richard’s Welsh governor, Rhys ap Thomas (1449–1525), had promised that any invader would have ‘to march over my belly’. He honoured the promise by carefully lying under a bridge as Henry’s army passed above. Henry rode into battle at Bosworth Field under the red dragon of Cadwaladr of Gwynedd and it was Rhys who reputedly killed the un-horsed Richard.
Richard’s defeat by Henry Tudor at Bosworth ended the long Plantagenet repression of the Welsh. As Henry VII (r.1485–1509), he his supporters, granted Jasper Tudor, Rhys ap Thomas and other Welsh grandees leading roles in Wales’s government. Discriminatory laws went into abeyance and a middle-class of Welsh gentry and officials – the so-called uchelwyr – replaced most of the Marcher lords. Welshmen now crowded the streets of Windsor and Westminster, eager for preferment. One was Dafydd Seisyllt, founder of the Cecil dynasty as Lord Salisbury. The humiliations of Llywelyn and Glyndwr could be laid to rest. A part-Welshman was on the English throne.
A comic opera: Simnel and Warbeck
Henry VII’s monarchy was not uncontested. Two imposter claimants soon arose and found ready sympathisers among any dissidents eager to capitalise on a still divided England. In 1487 an Irish uprising in favour of the ten-year-old Lambert Simnel was sponsored by the Anglo-Norman grandee Gerald FitzGerald, Earl of Kildare. The child was purported by his backers to be one of the princes imprisoned in the Tower of London by Richard III. Kildare crowned Simnel as king and financed an army to invade England. This army marched to link up with the ever-rebellious Percys and reached Nottingham before being halted by Henry. A measure of Henry’s diplomacy was that he formally pardoned Kildare and employed Simnel as a kitchen boy.
Less sympathy was shown three years later in 1491 following a more determined bid by another pretender, Perkin Warbeck (c.1474–99). A Fleming, he also claimed to be one of Richard III’s murdered princes. Again he won support, initially in Ireland, and then in Scotland from James IV (r.1488–1513), and from Henry’s foes on the continent in Spain and elsewhere. Though James was to prove among Scotland’s ablest monarchs, he followed in the reckless steps of his predecessors and tried, unsuccessfully, to invade England in 1496. He turned back after four miles on news of an English army sent to oppose him. James lost confidence in Warbeck, who moved on to try pastures new.
Warbeck completed what might be termed a truly remarkable Celtic circuit. In 1497 he took a Breton ship in search of support among another people dissatisfied with the English – the Cornish. They had recently staged a bizarre uprising against a tax imposed by Henry to raise money for his recent army against Scotland. The Cornish had traditionally donated tin taxes to the Crown through their Stanneries parliament and been excused other imposts. They objected strongly to this one and staged a rare Cornish revolt.
Two thousand angry Cornish miners banded into an army and in 1497 marched across southern England to Blackheath, outside London. There the spirit failed them and they were overwhelmed by the London militia. Their leader, Michael an Gof (‘the smith’), known also as Michael Joseph, was hanged, drawn and quartered. None the less, back in Cornwall the survivors greeted Warbeck as their rightful king, crowning him as Richard IV on Bodmin Moor. He was possibly the only king of England to be crowned in a Celtic tongue. He was later arrested and eventually executed.
Scotland escaped lightly from the Warbeck episode. It had in James IV a Stewart capable of achieving a degree of stability. In 1503 he married Henry VII’s daughter Margaret Tudor, sealing a so-called Treaty of Perpetual Peace with her father. It was intended to be ‘good, real, sincere, true, entire and firm … to endure forever’. James was desperate to end Highland feuding. He was the last Scottish king to learn Gaelic and the first to visit the western islands. He secured a sort of calm by rewarding the Gordons and the Campbells at the expense of the Macleods. He built castles, appointed sheriffs and brought a degree of authority to parts of the Highlands and Islands.
The Irish were treated with no such leniency. Already under the lash of the 1366 Statutes of Kilkenny, in 1494 Ireland was further punished for supporting Warbeck by the appointment as Henry’s deputy of Sir Edward Poynings, armed with what became Poynings’ Law. This certified that ‘no parliament be holden in this land [Ireland] until its proposed legislation had been approved both by Ireland’s lord deputy and privy council and by England’s monarch’. Ireland was to be utterly subservient to England and to disagree was treason. The repressive tenor of Poynings’ Law was to last into the twentieth century.
The Simnel and Warbeck uprisings were mere pinpricks on the English state, yet they illustrated how tenuous was consent to the former Plantagenet empire in Scotland, Ireland and even Cornwall. They showed how instinctively rebellion sought common cause among most of the Celtic-speaking peoples, but how futile was any likelihood that they would then unite. The only message given was one of ongoing instability in their relationship with the English authorities in London, and of ongoing intolerance in London’s response.