A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (37 page)

It was at this critical juncture that the archbishop of Canterbury arrived with the notion of ending the war by peaceful negotiation. Given the royal rebuffs he had already received since taking office three years earlier, John Pecham can hardly have expected that his latest idea would elicit the king’s unqualified enthusiasm. Apart from anything else, winter was now setting in; even a short delay at this stage could prove costly, if not calamitous, to English military plans. And yet, at the same time, Edward could not reasonably refuse a request by his most senior churchman to send an emissary into Gwynedd with the hope of inducing a Welsh surrender. Pecham, after all, was not proposing to act as an impartial arbiter: the letters he sent to Llywelyn were on a par with his earlier condemnation of Welsh law. The prince and his countrymen were reproached for their crime of rebellion, and exhorted to make an immediate and unconditional submission.
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Within a few days, however, the archbishop had received a response that gave him pause. In a lengthy written statement Llywelyn and his councillors set out a justification for their actions (this is the principal record of Welsh grievances discussed earlier in this chapter). They also enumerated what they claimed were the crimes of the English in recent weeks: the burning of churches, the killing of monks and nuns, the indiscriminate slaughter ‘of women and infants at the breast and in the womb’. It was enough to persuade Pecham, when he came before the king in the closing days of October, to suggest that such complaints merited investigation and correction.
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Edward would not stand for this. As far as he was concerned, the Welsh had always had the opportunity to present him with any complaints they might have had; he was not about to start a dialogue at this late stage with men who had attacked his castles and killed his other subjects. From what we can tell – for we have only the archbishop’s account – these exchanges with the king must have been very difficult indeed. Edward told Pecham that he would not issue safe-conducts for the Welsh to come and go from his court. In that case, Pecham informed Edward, he would go to see Llywelyn himself. The king made it clear that he did not approve. The archbishop went anyway.
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More days were therefore lost as Pecham, in defiance of Edward’s wishes, travelled into Snowdonia to hold talks with the Welsh leader. When he returned, in early November, it was with the unhappy knowledge that both parties were wedded to irreconcilable positions: Edward’s insistence on unconditional submission was matched by Llywelyn’s refusal to surrender except on guaranteed terms. In desperation, the archbishop, this time with Edward’s consent, tried to devise a formula that could satisfy both sides. Certain English magnates promised that, if the prince submitted, they would lobby the king on his behalf. In secret, a document was sent to Llywelyn, offering him an earldom in England if he would give up the fight for Wales.
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Before the prince could respond to this offer, however, its credibility was hopelessly compromised by events elsewhere. During his negotiations with Pecham, it appears that Llywelyn had based himself at his hall of Garth Celyn, which lay on the coast, not far from Bangor. This meant that, thanks to the recently completed bridge of boats, he was also not far from the English base on Anglesey, and the temptation was evidently too great for the army there to resist. On 6 November Luke de Tany and his forces poured across the bridge, almost certainly with the intention of catching the prince and his council unawares and bringing the war to a swift conclusion. They rode out, in the words of one chronicler, ‘to acquire glory and reputation’.

What they found was death. That day saw the greatest English disaster in Wales, not just of this campaign, but in the course of Edward’s life to date. Reports of precisely what happened, as ever, differ in their detail. From the best of them it would seem that the cavalry had crossed the bridge and moved some distance along the coast when, suddenly, the Welsh swept down from the mountains and attacked. Outnumbered and outflanked, the horsemen turned to flee but, the tide having changed in the meantime, they found that they could not get back to the bridge. ‘Panic-stricken at the sight of their numbers,’ wrote one English chronicler, ‘our men preferred to face the water than the enemy. They plunged into the sea, burdened as they were with their armour, and were drowned all in a moment.’

At least sixteen English knights were lost, including Luke de Tany himself, and Roger Clifford, namesake son of the king’s captive friend. Also among the dead were two young relatives of the chancellor Robert Burnell, possibly his nephews, perhaps his bastard sons. Notable survivors included the redoubtable Otto de Grandson, and the household knight William Latimer, whose horse swam him through the waves to safety.
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We do not know on whose authority the decision to launch the attack was taken. Some chroniclers are adamant that the initiative lay with the commanders on Anglesey, and others imply that Edward himself had not approved the action. We might reflect, however, that it would have taken a bold commander to have acted in this way without seeking the highest approval, and also note further that it would have been entirely in keeping with the king’s earlier daring stratagems – his raid on Kenilworth, his escape from Hereford – to have given such a scheme the go-ahead.

What is certain is that, in the wake of the thwarted assault, all talk of submission and secret deals was ended. Five days after their victory on the shores of Snowdonia, Llywelyn and his councillors sent their final reply. Nominally addressed to Archbishop Pecham, but surely written above all for the ears of Edward I, it rang with defiance. The king, they declared, had no legitimate claim to the Four Cantrefs or to Anglesey, for he had only ever held them by force, and using officers who had exercised ‘the cruellest tyranny’. These lands, they averred, belonged ‘purely to the prince, and the princes and their predecessors from the time of Camber, son of Brutus’ – the founding father of the British people was invoked in the document no fewer than three times. As for the secret offer of an earldom in England, Llywelyn publicly rejected it as a worthless promise made by men out to disinherit him. And even if the prince had been minded to accept, his council would have prevented him. ‘The people of Snowdonia,’ the letter concluded, ‘do not wish to do homage to a stranger, of whose language, manners and laws they are entirely ignorant.’
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So this was it: not a struggle between an offended overlord and his rebellious vassals, as had earlier been pretended. This was a war between peoples; a veritable clash of civilisations. As soon as he heard the news from Anglesey, Edward returned from Denbigh to Rhuddlan to consult with his magnates and plan his next move. By any assessment their situation was no longer strong. The recent disaster apart, numbers of horse and infantry were falling, the obligation to serve having long since expired. But when Llywelyn’s letter arrived, there was no question about what would have to be done. On 24 November writs were dispatched to every county in England.

The king, they announced, proposed ‘to put an end finally to the matter that he had now begun of suppressing the malice of the Welsh’. This, it was explained, was an historic struggle that it fell to their generation to end. It would entail labours and expenses beyond what was customary; the burden might therefore seem hard. But it was better that they bear it now than be tormented by the Welsh in the future. In separate letters to the clergy of England, Edward added that he wished to finish the business in Wales for ‘the praise and honour of God, the increase and renown of him and his realm, and the perpetual peace of his realm and people’.
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No doubt these writs reflected a genuine resolve on the part of the king and his magnates, ensconced at Rhuddlan in the deepening winter of 1282. Scores of other orders were sent out simultaneously, requiring new levies of infantry to be raised and new contingents of crossbowmen to be recruited. Nevertheless, the rallying cry to England was propaganda with a specific purpose. What Edward needed above all else was cash. Already this second Welsh war had gone on far too long; it would not be possible to pay for it using the kind of expedients that had eventually paid for its predecessor, nor, for that matter, with the emergency loans that the king’s ministers had managed to extract from various English towns and cities during the course of the summer. For the fight to be continued on the scale that was necessary, there was only one possible solution, and that was a grant of general taxation. This was the burden Edward needed his people to bear, and the reason behind his extraordinary writs. In January, he intended, two great assemblies would gather, one in Northampton, the other in York. Each would be larger than any parliament ever summoned: not only four knights from every county and two men from every town, but also every landowner with an income of more than £20 a year. All would come at the king’s command to help him in this hour of great national need.
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Llywelyn and his allies could not afford to wait for this to happen. At present they were encircled, but, with the respite granted by their recent victory, they might open up new fronts. Already in the second half of November there were fresh risings in south and west Wales, perhaps fomented by the presence of the prince himself in those areas. It was in the middle March, however, that Llywelyn was hoping for the greatest gains. There, on 26 November, Roger Mortimer, not only the king’s commander in the region but also the most powerful lord in his own right, had died of natural causes. (‘His long and praiseworthy services,’ wrote Edward to Mortimer’s namesake son, ‘recur frequently and spontaneously to our memory.’) The old warrior’s passing had led to immediate fears of an English collapse in central Wales: within weeks the sheriff of Shropshire was reporting that Mortimer’s ‘fickle and haughty’ tenants were ‘on the point of leaving the king’s peace’. In Edward’s second set-back that autumn, Llywelyn saw his best opportunity. Leaving Dafydd in charge of Snowdonia, the prince took his army and struck out in the direction of Builth.
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He arrived there on 11 December to find the might of the entire middle March ranged ready to meet him. Coincidence or conspiracy? There is circumstantial evidence to suggest that the Welsh leader had been lured into a trap devised by Mortimer’s sons and perhaps by some of his own men too. Whatever the truth, it is clear enough what happened next. On the high ground to the west of Builth, at a place called Cilmeri, a substantial battle took place between the English and Welsh forces, and in the course of the fighting the prince of Wales fell. Most accounts agree that he somehow became separated from his men, and was killed unrecognised by his English assailant. It was only when the battle was over, and the bodies were examined, that his corpse was identified.

‘Know, Sire,’ wrote Roger Lestrange, captain of the English forces, to his royal master, ‘that Llywelyn ap Gruffudd is dead, his army broken, and the flower of his men killed.’ Accompanying the letter as proof was the prince’s severed head. Edward had it sent on to Anglesey to cheer his other troops, and from there dispatched to London, where its arrival was greeted with a fanfare of trumpets and horns. Carried through the city’s streets on the end of a lance, it was finally placed on an iron spike above the Tower of London and crowned with a mockery of ivy. The prophecy that a Welshmen would one day wear a crown in London was in this grisly way seen to have been fulfilled.
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While the English rejoiced, Wales despaired. ‘See you not that the world is ending?’ asked one Welsh poet. ‘Ah, God, that the sea would cover the land!’ For his countrymen, Llywelyn’s death was an unmitigated disaster. Their leader for more than thirty years, he had once given them a greater unity than they had ever known before. It is doubtful whether, had he lived longer, they would have recovered it. Without him, however, the hope of doing so evaporated entirely. Dafydd ap Gruffudd now took up the princely title and entered into the inheritance that he had coveted for a lifetime. But Dafydd was not a man to fill his brother’s shoes. Just a few weeks earlier he had been pleased to send his own letter of defiance to Archbishop Pecham, proudly proclaiming that the Welsh were fighting a just war, and hopeful of God’s help. Now he was ready to plead for peace, and (according to one English chronicler) sent the captive Roger Clifford to beg Edward for terms.
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It was a request that, unsurprisingly, the king was not minded to consider. Already by the time of Llywelyn’s death, ships were arriving at Rhuddlan from Gascony, bringing 200 new horse, 1,300 foot soldiers and 70,000 crossbow bolts. Other ships from Ireland brought the food to feed the troops – cows, pigs, sheep, oats, wine, cheese and beer. Meanwhile, the knights of south-western England were dutifully reassembling at Carmarthen. By January new drafts of infantry were massing in both north and south.
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Nor was it just a case of material preparation. The death of the Welsh leader had infused the English with an even greater sense of destiny and the righteousness of their cause. ‘Glory be to God in the highest, peace on earth to men of good will, a triumph to the English, victory to King Edward, honour to the Church, rejoicing to the Christian faith, confusion to jealous men, dismay to envious ones, and to the Welsh everlasting extermination.’ So wrote an English clerk in Rome in January when he heard the news of Llywelyn’s death. Edward, the same writer added, was the king ‘whose footsteps the heavenly king directs … long may he live and reign and conquer and rule’; in tackling the Welsh, he and his soldiers were ‘powerfully removing the reproach of their people, that domestic enemy … the disturber of English peace’. There can be little doubt that Edward himself shared this sense of missionary purpose. His war with Wales had taken on the aspect of a secular crusade. His infantry were issued with armbands bearing the cross of St George. His armies, when they advanced, marched behind St George’s banner.
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