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.
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