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
