A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (36 page)

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It was the night of 21 March 1282, and Roger Clifford, one of Edward’s oldest friends, was asleep in Hawarden Castle. Some five miles to the west of Chester, Hawarden had come to the Crown as a result of the recent war, and its castle was seemingly new. Most likely the building works there had begun soon after Clifford’s appointment as keeper of the lordship just over a year earlier. That being the case, they can scarcely have been finished on the night in question – it happened to be the eve of Palm Sunday – when Dafydd ap Gruffudd and a band of armed Welshmen descended, burned the castle, killed several members of Clifford’s household, and carted the constable himself off into captivity.
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A widespread revolt against English rule was under way. The following day Flint and Rhuddlan were subjected to identical assaults; two days later Aberystwyth was taken by trickery. In each case the castles were attacked: Aberystwyth was destroyed, and Rhuddlan too may well have fallen. But, in each case, the castles formed only part of the target. The rebels’ fury was directed equally at the attendant towns, those enclaves of English privilege, where the Welsh were obliged to trade but could not live, and where the legal discrimination between the two peoples was a fact of everyday existence. Property was looted, houses were burned, and those settlers who could not flee were killed.
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The scope and success of the revolt shows that it was popular; its timing reveals that it was planned. As Dafydd and his followers launched his attacks in the north, Rhys Wyndod and his allies mounted copycat assaults in the south, recovering the castles at Llandovery and Carreg Cennen. Meanwhile, other Welsh lords led the attacks on Oswestry, an English town on the eastern border, subjecting it to the same fate as the other new boroughs. Clearly these leaders had leagued together in the weeks and months beforehand and agreed on the date that their pent-up anger would be released.
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It seems equally clear that Llywelyn was not among their number. The prince, when later given the chance to account for his actions, claimed to have had no prior knowledge of the rebellion, and indeed there is no good evidence of his involvement. The sudden outbreak therefore placed him in a terrible dilemma: whether to support Dafydd’s intemperate action or to assist Edward I in suppressing it. If patriotic sensibility urged him to back his brother, his sense as a politician restrained him, for the timing was wrong, and the chances of success impossibly slim. For a while, at least, Llywelyn must have debated, with his councillors, and with himself. It has been suggested, temptingly, that he may have waited until as late as June before making his decision.

In 1282 Llywelyn’s own time was running out. He was approaching, if he had not already attained, his sixtieth year. But in the spring of that year, his young wife, Eleanor, was pregnant. If their child was male, then it might be worth playing the long game: putting down his perfidi ous brother to protect the patrimony for his son, and thereby preserving an independent Gwynedd, and a principality that might one day recover its greatness.

On 19 June this hope for the future evaporated. Eleanor died in childbirth. The child, which survived, was a girl, christened Gwenllian. It was, perhaps, a broken and desperate prince who finally joined his brother and his people that summer, to face the king of England’s immeasurable wrath.
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It was 25 March, three days after the first attacks, that Edward heard the news. More than anything else, it was the treachery that seems to have astonished him. Dafydd, the king was later minded to recall, ‘had been received as an exile, nourished as an orphan, endowed with lands and placed among the great ones of the palace’. That such generosity should be repaid by rebellion almost beggared belief. When, later that same day, writs began to emanate from the royal chancery, they naturally dwelt on the killing, burning and kidnapping. But when Edward said the Welsh were ‘unmindful of their own salvation’, he meant they had sworn sacred oaths to obey him, and these oaths had now been broken.
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And how the writs flew. Edward, as we have noted, was effectively on holiday at the time of the revolt, caught off-guard and with few of his great men about him. But as soon as the news broke messengers sped out in all directions. Within ten days the council was in session. On 6 April the other magnates were called to muster in mid-May, at Worcester, as before. On 7 April the knights of the household began to draw pay, and a contingent galloped north to see to the relief of Rhuddlan. Orders started to pour out for supplies. Food was demanded from Essex, Surrey, Kent and Hampshire. Workmen – 345 carpenters and more than 1,000 diggers – were summoned from no fewer than twenty-eight counties. The men of the Cinque Ports were warned to prepare their ships, the Riccardi to be ready with their money. Naturally this activity was not confined to England. Crossbowmen were ordered from Gascony, horses were purchased from France, and other supplies were requested from Ponthieu, Ireland and even from Scotland.
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It was only in May, when the king arrived at Worcester, that his tremendous momentum suffered a setback. Edward’s call to arms had been highly unusual. He had not, as was conventional, asked men to serve him out of obligation, nor had his summons been universal. Instead, some half a dozen earls and 150 other named individuals had been ‘affectionately requested’ to serve in return for pay. It was, it seems, the king’s intention to avoid the limitations of the customary forty days’ service, and instead to put the relationship between him and his cavalry forces on a more businesslike basis.

Some of the earls, at least, must have agreed to this idea, for they were with the king in early April when the orders had gone out. It was probably the unconsulted majority, beyond the council, who objected to a scheme that would have effectively made them the king’s mercenaries. Moreover, the suggestion that they should forget their ancient obligations and embark on a novel arrangement must have seemed more than a little rich, coming as it did from a king who, from the moment of his accession, had insisted on the most traditional interpretation of his own rights. No official protest is recorded, but the idea of paid service was quietly dropped. Three days into the muster, new writs were issued of the conventional kind: the magnates were summoned to reassemble at Rhuddlan at the start of August. None of the earls, in the event, accepted pay. It is not impossible that two of them, the earl of Hereford and the earl of Gloucester, had some hand in leading the opposition to the king. Hereford held the hereditary honour of ‘constable of England’, with responsibility for compiling the lists of men who served in a campaign, as well as for their discipline. As early as 6 April he had insisted on receiving the traditional perquisites that went with his office. Meanwhile, Gloucester (that is, our old friend Gilbert de Clare) was clearly put out at the suggestion that he should serve in an army under the command of the new justiciar of south Wales, Robert Tiptoft. On 10 April, the earl had evidently insisted that the honour of leading the southern forces should be his.
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As this mention of a southern army suggests, Edward’s strategy in 1282 was much the same as it had been five years earlier. Having left Gloucester in charge of the south (albeit with Tiptoft as his deputy), the king proceeded north towards Chester, from where, as before, he would lead the main force into north Wales. En route he stopped in Shrewsbury, and parted company with Roger Mortimer. The old warrior who had said farewell to arms three years earlier was once again called upon to do what he did best, and hold the line in the middle March.
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Nevertheless, although the strategy was the same in broad terms, there were important differences this time around. In 1277 Llywelyn had been quite isolated; Edward’s main opponent that year had been the Welsh terrain. On this occasion, by contrast, the opposition was far more general, the fighting fiercer and more widespread. Before he could advance along the coast road to Rhuddlan, the king had first to tackle the resistance in the interior of the Four Cantrefs, led by Dafydd ap Gruffudd. The rebel leader and his Welsh allies had made their chief stronghold at Denbigh, and also held a number of other castles in the same region.
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The initial stage of this operation was carried out in early June, soon after Edward had arrived at Chester. While the king remained in the city supervising the assembly of men and materials for his push along coast, it fell to Reginald de Grey – justiciar of Chester, antagoniser of Dafydd and, since March, captain of the king’s northern forces – to lead the first inland assault. With some 7,000 foot soldiers already at his disposal, many of them archers, Grey made swift progress. In the middle of June he recovered the castle at Hope (Caergwrle), which Dafydd destroyed in his retreat, and where over 1,000 English workmen immediately began the business of reconstruction. By the end of the month the king’s forces had retaken another castle at Ewloe, and also Hawarden, the point from which the whole conflagration had been started.
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But by this time they had heard the bad news: Gloucester and his army had already been defeated. The haughty earl, having insisted on leading the king’s southern forces, had succeeded in advancing all of four miles before being overtaken by disaster. On 11 June some 1,600 English foot and at least a hundred horse had set out under his command from their base at Dinefwr to retake nearby Carreg Cennen. Five days later, their objective achieved, they were retracing their steps when the Welsh attacked. Gloucester himself escaped, but others were not so lucky. Among the knightly casualties was William, son of William de Valence, a cousin of the king. Many of the foot soldiers must also have perished; English military activity in south Wales came to an abrupt and inglorious halt.
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Gloucester’s incompetence obliged Edward to alter his plans. The king had hoped to bring the full weight of his cavalry forces to bear against Snowdonia; now he had to divert some of these troops into the southern theatre. On 2 July the knights of the south-western counties of England were advised that their new muster point was Carmarthen; those of the west Midlands were told to go to Montgomery. Four days later, Gloucester, who by this time had appeared before the king to explain himself, was deprived of his command. In his place was appointed William de Valence, who may have been grateful for the opportunity to avenge the death of his son.
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That same day Edward moved out of Chester and advanced towards Rhuddlan. His new castle there, far from complete at the time of his last visit, had been swiftly recovered by the knights of the household in April. Nevertheless, the Welsh had apparently done substantial damage with their siege engines before they departed: repairs were put in place immediately after the king’s arrival. Now was the time for Rhuddlan, as the foremost base of English operations, to prove it was worth its expensive price tag. At once the newly canalised River Clwyd was seen to have been a sound investment, when the forty-strong fleet of the Cinque Ports sailed up to the walls of the castle.
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From Rhuddlan, Edward intended to achieve two separate but simultaneous objectives: the capture of Denbigh and the occupation of Anglesey. Both waited on the build-up of troops and supplies, but early August saw the arrival of the cavalry for their postponed muster, and by the middle of the month there were 6,000 infantry in pay.
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The Anglesey divisions were the first to leave. Under the captaincy of Luke de Tany, erstwhile seneschal of Gascony, at least 200 horse and 2,000 foot occupied the island and, as before, secured its harvest. This was not, however, simply to be a repeat performance of the exercise of five years earlier. That August, while Tany and his troops fought to secure a beachhead, the men of the Cinque Ports began to ship great quantities of timber, nails, rope and iron from Chester to Rhuddlan, and from Rhuddlan to Anglesey. This was the makings of the most ambitious part of the campaign plan: a bridge of boats that would link the island to the mainland, allowing Tany’s army to penetrate Snowdonia from the rear. In early September hundreds of carpenters were engaged in its construction.
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By that time the king’s army had also moved out. To them fell the more tedious task of securing every strongpoint and valley in the Four Cantrefs. Edward marched first to Ruthin, a castle further up the Clwyd that had fallen to Reginald de Grey before the end of August. Later he pushed west to Llangernyw, just a few miles from the upper reaches of the Conwy. Progress was painfully slow, no doubt out of caution. This was a war being fought on ground where mounted cavalry were of limited, not to say negligible use, but where guerrilla tactics could easily hand victory to the Welsh. Throughout September the king’s forces were divided into three smaller armies, each one inching their way forward, anxious not to repeat the earl of Gloucester’s error.
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As the autumn began to set in, their task approached completion. In early October Edward was back at Rhuddlan, where he began to hand out portions of conquered territory to his friends as reward for their services. By this time, too, the south was secure. William de Valence had led a successful month-long mission from Carmarthen to Cardigan by way of Aberystwyth. It remained only to take out Dafydd’s main base at Denbigh, and this was done three weeks into the month. On 22 October the king arrived there in person, but Dafydd was nowhere to be seen. The rebels had retreated into Snowdonia, and the mountains that had always been their surest refuge. This time, however, Edward was quite determined: there would be no escape. His armies remained intact and, moreover, his bridge of boats was ready.
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