A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (38 page)

They advanced in January 1283. In a co-ordinated offensive, William de Valence led 1,500 foot-soldiers north from Carmarthen and retook Aberystwyth. In the north Edward’s army, some 5,000 strong, marched south-west out of Rhuddlan and struck into the heart of Snowdonia. Their target was the Welsh castle at Dolwyddelan, birthplace of Llywelyn the Great. It fell after the shortest of sieges and was occupied by a new English garrison. By the end of the month the brief campaign was over. Edward was back at Rhuddlan, Valence was ensconced at Aberystwyth, and the back of Welsh resistance had been broken.
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For a short while Edward stayed his hand. The Welsh were now weak, crippled even, but the occupation of Snowdonia remained a daunting proposition, especially in the dead of winter. Royal resources, moreover, were not infinite: having achieved his targeted objectives, the king let go most of his infantry and mercenaries. Nevertheless, the means for achieving a decisive victory would soon be at Edward’s disposal. In January his two great assemblies had gathered in England and, in an atmosphere no doubt exhilarated by Llywelyn’s demise, agreed to a grant of taxation. On the last day of February the king sent out writs ordering its collection.
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Two weeks later the invasion of Gwynedd began. On 13 March 1283 Edward sailed across the mouth of the Conwy and established a new base camp on the river’s western shore. With Eleanor by his side, the king took up residence in the hall that had been built there by Llywelyn, while his troops occupied the grounds of the nearby Cistercian abbey where the bones of the prince’s ancestors lay buried. The following day new writs went out. The earls and barons of England were summoned once again to muster at Montgomery and Carmarthen. One week later, a further 5,000 English infantry were ordered. The occupation of Wales was finally under way.
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There was one man, above all, whom Edward wanted to catch, and Dafydd ap Gruffudd responded by running. At first he fled south, into the mountains of Meirionnydd, holing up in the isolated Castell-y-Bere at the foot of Cadair Idris. That fortress soon came under siege by English forces, and fell in the last week of April, but by then the fugitive prince had fled again. As a consequence, the English invasion of Snowdonia began to assume the character of a massive manhunt. Roger Lestrange led his men into Wales from the middle March; Valence pushed up from the south; the army of Anglesey, now under the more competent command of Otto de Grandson, crossed the pontoon bridge and penetrated the interior. Finally, in the second week of May, the king himself marched up the Conwy with 7,000 men and set up a temporary headquarters at Dolwyddelan. Bands of Englishmen swarmed through the valleys and over the mountains, finding many Welshman who were ready to make their submission. Dafydd, however, still could not be found.
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No doubt somewhat frustrated, Edward returned to his camp at Conwy in early June, and a fortnight later retired to Rhuddlan in order to celebrate his birthday. He was still there a week or so later when, like a belated birthday present, the longed-for news arrived. Dafydd had been taken, captured near Llanberis at the foot of Mount Snowdon. On 28 June the king sent out jubilant letters to his people in England, announcing that the prince, ‘last of a treacherous line’, was now in his custody, having been caught by ‘men of his own tongue’. Edward immediately returned to Snowdonia for a two-month tour, during which hostages were taken and the submissions of communities were received. It was only at the end of August, after an absence that had lasted more than a year, that the king finally returned to England.
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The conquest of Wales, so often contemplated by previous English kings but never carried through, was at last complete. It had taken a monumental effort on the part of Edward, his magnates and his people. The financial cost alone was colossal. As far as can be determined, the total budget stood somewhere in the region of £120,000 – that is, around five times the amount spent on the previous Welsh war. The king’s subjects in England had dug deep into their pockets to find him a tax of nearly £50,000; the Riccardi of Lucca, his bankers, had strained to keep the river of silver pennies flowing into the war zone in order that the troops could be paid. In terms of those troops, the cost had been higher still. Among the English nobility, the sons of William de Valence, Robert Burnell and Roger Clifford were just a few of the numerous high-status casualties; among the common foot soldiery, the numbers must have run to countless hundreds, probably thousands. As early as October 1282, before the invasion of Snowdonia had even started, the military cemetery at Rhuddlan had already run out of room for bodies. The bitter cold of a winter campaign – itself an unprecedented undertaking – must have accounted for the fact that many of those who had been marched to Wales from distant villages in England would not be returning home. Nor, of course, had the burden been borne by England alone: men and supplies had poured into Wales from Ireland, Gascony and Ponthieu at Edward’s behest.
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But nowhere, naturally, was the impact of conquest felt more forcefully than in Wales itself. ‘What is left us that we should linger?’ wondered the author of Llywelyn’s lament. ‘No place of escape from Terror’s prison/No place to live – wretched is living!’ The trauma of 1282–83 was not to be measured merely by the loss of a prince, however mighty. It was also to be reckoned in the appropriation of the halls, houses and castles that had belonged to Llywelyn’s dynasty since time out of mind; the confiscation of Welsh secular treasures and holy relics; the destruction of churches and abbeys, most notably in the case of the abbey at Conwy. It must have been felt, above all, in terms of human suffering and loss, to an extent that is now unknown but that must have exceeded the English death toll many times over.
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And yet, with the conquest now complete, the killing came to an end. Choleric English clerics at the Roman Curia, of course, full of Christian charity, might well wish the Welsh ‘extermination’, and no doubt other Englishmen, their deep-seated antipathy stoked by Edward’s propaganda, must have felt the same way. The king himself, however, subscribed to higher ideals of justice and chivalry. In victory, it behoved him to be fair, magnanimous and merciful. Thousands of Welshmen might have died, but they had died fighting. Those who had submitted or were captured might suffer imprisonment, but their lives would be spared.

Except Dafydd ap Gruffudd. His crimes, in Edward’s eyes, were too great, and his treachery too profound, to be punished or pardoned in the normal way. As the instigator and inciter of rebellion, Dafydd was deemed to deserve death, just as surely as that earlier troublemaker, Simon de Montfort, had done. But Montfort, and for that matter Llywelyn, had obliged the king by dying in battle; Dafydd had merely been wounded in the course of his capture. This may have been a cause of regret for Edward, for it meant that he had to take unprecedented action in the autumn of 1283. No one, however, would have more cause to regret his failure to die on the slopes of Snowdon than Dafydd himself.

In September the captive prince was brought under armed escort from Rhuddlan to Shrewsbury, and there, on the last day of the month, a parliament assembled to decide his fate. Edward proposed, and his magnates agreed, that the prince was guilty of treason: the crime of plotting the king’s death. Notionally, treason had existed for a long time, but never before had it been twisted to apply to rebellion, or attributed to someone of such exalted rank. The chroniclers who described what followed were aware that they had witnessed something ‘in previous times unknown’. On 2 October Dafydd was subjected to a four-fold punishment. For his treason, he was dragged through Shrewsbury ‘at the horse’s tail’ to a scaffold; there, for his homicides, he was hanged alive. Next, for having committed his crimes in Holy Week, he was disembowelled, and his entrails were burned. Lastly, for having plotted the king’s death, his body was quartered, and the parts were dispatched to the four corners of Edward’s kingdom. His head was carried off by the citizens of London, to be displayed next to that of his brother.
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After the blood-letting came the thanksgiving. From Shropshire, Edward moved south, touring the cathedrals, abbeys and priories of Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire. Having returned to Rhuddlan for Christmas, in the New Year he crossed the Pennines to repeat the exercise in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. There can be no doubt that the king considered that the offerings he made during these months and the ceremonies he attended were entirely fitting and important in the wake of his victory. Yet the suspicion remains that he was also deliberately killing time, awaiting the onset of spring for the momentous finale he had planned.
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When the spring arrived, Edward returned to Wales for a second time, and he came fully conscious of his rights and responsibilities as a conqueror. On 19 March, at Rhuddlan, a great statute was promulgated, setting out how Snowdonia and the other royal lands in Wales would be governed in the future. It was, on the whole, a wisely worded and well-balanced document, insisting, for example, that English law should apply in criminal cases, but also allowing that, for civil pleas (inheritance, debts and contracts) Welsh procedures might be maintained. Nevertheless, this synthesised system was to be administered on purely English lines. From now on, Snowdonia would be run by the full panoply of royal officials familiar in England – sheriffs, coroners, bailiffs and their deputies – all answering to a new justiciar of north-west Wales. As the king explained in the statute’s preamble, ‘Divine providence, which is unerring in its dispositions … has now, of its grace, wholly and entirely converted the land of Wales … into a dominion of our ownership.’
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From Rhuddlan Edward moved west, back into Snowdonia itself. There he was able to assess how the physical process of transformation was progressing. Just as with his earlier campaign, the king’s new conquest was being cemented with a trio of new castles. Each of them, like their precursors, was located on the coast so as to be suppliable by sea, and each of them, more so than before, was state of the art in terms of its defensive capabilities. These latest castles, too, were set to possess a glamour that their counterparts at Flint, Rhuddlan and Aberystwyth would lack by comparison. At Conwy, for instance, where Edward and Eleanor arrived on 26 March, a castle was rising every bit as fantastical as the one they were still fashioning at Leeds. Meanwhile, across the other side of the mountains, on a rock called Harlech, a similar fortress, replete with multiple towers and turrets, was also being founded.
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It was for his third new castle, however, that the king had instructed Master James of St George and his colleagues to create something truly exceptional: Caernarfon, he intended, would be the greatest of all their many projects. The prominence it was afforded was, in part, a reflection of its future role. Situated at the southern end of the Menai Strait, the settlement was conveniently located in the heart of what used to be Gwynedd; from here the other parts of the king’s new conquest could be most easily reached. It was, therefore, an appropriate place for the new justiciar of north-west Wales to have as his base.

But Caernarfon had a stronger appeal still, and that was the pull of its past. A thousand years and more beforehand, the Romans had come to this part of Wales, and the remains of their legionary fort, Segontium, still stood close by (where, less extensive, they can still be seen today). Since that time, however, its origins had become the stuff of legend. According to Welsh tradition, the fort had stood since the time of Magnus Maximus, a Roman emperor who had seen it a dream, and who had come to Wales to discover it was a reality: ‘a great castle, the fairest that mortal had ever seen.’ And this was what Edward and his architects aspired to recreate, albeit on a new site at the mouth of the River Seiont: a truly tremendous castle, bristling with towers and turrets, amply supplied with arrow-loops, and apartments appropriate for future royal visits. To their design, moreover, they also decided to add a telling detail. The Emperor Maximus, so it was said, was the father of the Emperor Constantine. Caernarfon was therefore going to be built with polygonal towers, and different coloured bands of masonry, so as to resemble the walls of Constantinople.
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When Edward arrived at Caernarfon at the start of April 1284, he was no doubt pleased to inspect the progress of the building works, but he had other, more important motives in mind. With the king, as ever, travelled the queen, who at that time was entering the ninth month of what was probably her sixteenth pregnancy. As a consequence, every effort was made to ensure that the royal couple felt as comfortable as possible in the midst of a busy construction site. Temporary timber apartments, constructed the previous year, were improved in advance of their coming by the addition of new glass windows; nearby, as at Conwy and Rhuddlan, a garden was laid out for Eleanor’s enjoyment. After keeping the court waiting for three more weeks, and missing St George’s day by just forty-eight hours, the queen gave birth on 25 April. To general rejoicing, the child was a boy, and a few days later he was baptised Edward after his father. The tradition that the king presented this new arrival to the Welsh as their future prince is a later improvement of the story, not recorded until the sixteenth century; precisely what future Edward senior foresaw for his second son at this stage we will never know. What can hardly be doubted, however, is that the child’s birth at Caernarfon was intentional. In the person of this new Edward, Wales’s distant imperial past and its future as an English dominion were deliberately linked.
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