A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (28 page)

Thus the antagonisms between Llywelyn and the Marchers, exacerbated by the attitude of the regents, continued to mount. The summer of 1273 saw what amounted to an arms race between the prince and Roger Mortimer, with both men rushing to build or repair castles in the vicinity of Montgomery. When the regents, writing in the king’s name, ordered the prince to cease construction of his new castle at Dolforwyn, his response was brilliantly contemptuous. ‘We received letters in your majesty’s name,’ he began, ‘but we are sure that they did not have your consent.’ Nevertheless, for all his mocking, his letter to the absent Edward contains one sentiment that was undoubtedly sincere. ‘If you were present in your kingdom,
as we hope
, such an order would not have been sent.’ Llywelyn knew that the best chance for détente between England and Wales was Edward’s swift return.
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Why, then, did he pointedly snub the king by failing to attend his coronation? The answer must be in part that Anglo-Welsh relations had deteriorated to such an extent by August 1274 that the prince would not have felt safe travelling to the ceremony. There was, however, another reason for his decision to stay away that day. Llywelyn had an additional difficulty, bigger even than his dispute with the Marchers, a problem so fundamental that it can be summed up in a single word: Wales.

Today Wales is celebrated for its untamed natural beauty. Forests, fast-flowing rivers and mountains: all are marketed to tourists in search of splendid scenery and adventure. In the Middle Ages the landscape excited much the same kind of response. Llywelyn’s great-great-grandfather, Hywel ab Owain Gwynedd, was given to writing poetry in praise of his homeland. ‘I love its beaches and its mountains,’ he declared, ‘its water meadows and its valleys,’ before going on to enumerate a few more of his favourite things: its soldiers, its horses, and, of course, ‘its lovely women’.
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No doubt his great-great-grandson enjoyed listening to such songs at his court and shared the sentiments they expressed. However, for a man who wanted to build a strong, united state, the Welsh landscape was an enormous hindrance. A more prosaic and analytical twelfth-century writer summed up the problem precisely. ‘Because of its high mountains, deep valleys and extensive forests,’ wrote Gerald of Wales, ‘not to mention its rivers and marches, Wales is not of easy access.’ Such natural obstacles frustrated travel and communication, rendering government slow and laborious. The Welsh landscape, in short, promoted division rather than unity.
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A more serious problem for the rulers of Wales, which flowed from the landscape, was the state of the Welsh economy. Mountains and forests might move men to poetry, but they are not terribly productive in financial terms. Llywelyn, in a letter written at the very end of his career, candidly admitted as much, contrasting the ‘fertile and abundant land in England’ with ‘the barren and uncultivated land due to him by hereditary right’. Of course, upland to a certain height could be used for pasturage, and this was an important mainstay of the Welsh economy, but in many other respects Wales was severely underdeveloped. There were, for instance, almost no towns worthy of note. The amount of coin in circulation was extremely limited, and what little currency there was came from England. Matters were starting to improve somewhat in Llywelyn’s day, thanks in part to the attempts that he and his immediate ancestors had made to foster and encourage trade. Change, however, was exceedingly slow in coming, and the returns were meagre in the extreme. To take one particularly telling example, it has been calculated that Llywelyn’s total customs revenue was around £17 a year – hardly a lordly sum, never mind a princely one, but above all a figure that pales into utter insignificance when compared with the annual £10,000 that Edward collected in England.
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The comparative poverty of Wales would not have been such a problem for Llywelyn had he not set such a high value on being a prince. Unfortunately, the Treaty of Montgomery had come at a hefty premium. Since the 1250s Llywelyn’s desire to have his title recognised by Henry III had led him to offer the king larger and larger sums of money. When his status was finally admitted in 1267, the price of acknowledgement was fixed at 25,000 marks (£16,667). Llywelyn agreed that, after an initial down payment of 5,000 marks, he would pay off the remainder at a rate of 3,000 marks (£2,000) a year. This was, to say the least, a plan predicated on an extremely optimistic assessment of his spending power. A generous modern estimate of his income suggests that it might have peaked in the 1260s at around £6,000 a year. At the very least, therefore, the prince had agreed to forego a third of his annual revenue, possible more, and this at a time when he was having to find extra money to defend a much-enlarged border, building and garrisoning castles like Dolforwyn.
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Llywelyn, in short, had mortgaged his principality at a rate that was impossibly high. As early as 1270 he was having difficulty keeping up with repayments, and the following year he stopped paying altogether. By the time Edward returned he was three years in arrears. Of course, the prince himself would never admit that this descent into debt was caused by his insurmountable financial difficulties. Instead, he chose to maintain that non-payment was a political decision – retaliation for the English government’s failure to address his grievances. ‘The money is ready to be paid to your attorneys,’ he wrote to the regents in February 1274, ‘provided that … you compel the earl of Gloucester, Humphrey de Bohun and the other Marchers to restore to us the lands they have unjustly occupied.’ But this was bluff and bluster. Later complaints about his oppressive rule show that Llywelyn was relying on increasingly extortionate methods to raise money; the notion that he was sitting on a big pile of treasure in 1274 is ludicrous. The reality was that by this date he had bled his principality dry and could not afford to have his grievances settled. What he needed was renegotiation with England, and this explains the provocative stance he took against its new king.
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For the same financial reasons, Edward, when he finally returned to England, was prepared to be extremely patient with Llywelyn. His crusading debts were so great that he was willing to overlook the prince’s snub if it meant getting his hands on the outstanding cash. As early as December 1272 the regents had stressed in their letters to Llywelyn that their master was in urgent need of the annual payment because he was ‘bound to diverse creditors in a great sum of money’. Edward’s own attitude is revealed in a letter he sent in the spring after his return to the sheriff of Shropshire, who was charged with bringing an end to the ongoing hostilities in the March. When the king stressed that ‘he did not want Llywelyn to have any reason for complaining about the settlement made’, and urged the sheriff to ‘act with circumspection’ to ensure that the prince was satisfied, the logic was clear enough: if Llywelyn had no reason to complain, he would have no excuse not to pay up.
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Despite the fact that the two men evidently viewed the annual render for Montgomery in very different terms, it was not impossible that a compromise solution might have been found. Edward was not averse in principle to negotiation over repayments (certain English magnates, for example, were pushed at the start of the reign to acknowledge their debts to the Crown, but also granted reasonable terms to pay them off). In the autumn of 1274, just a few months after the coronation, Edward and Llywelyn were scheduled to meet at Shrewsbury. Had they done so, perhaps a similar amicable arrangement might have been devised, and the good relations that had obtained a few years earlier might have been rekindled. In the event, however, this meeting never took place; a few days before they were due to meet Edward fell ill and was unable to attend. Then, just a few days later, Llywelyn discovered that his difficulties ran far deeper than he had ever dared to imagine.
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The prince was, in general, under no illusion about his diminishing popularity within Wales, especially in certain quarters. Earlier in 1274 he had uncovered a plot against him led by Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn, lord of Powys, a man who had long resisted the expansion of Gwynedd and resented having to kowtow to Llywelyn. Gruffudd had paid for this disloyalty – the prince had obliged him to surrender some of his lands, as well as his son, as guarantees of future good behaviour – but, all told, Llywelyn’s retribution had been mild, suggesting that he had not at the time realised the full extent of the conspiracy against him. Only in November, following a full confession from Gruffudd’s son, did he understand the true enormity of the plotters’ intentions. Their plan, it emerged, was not just independence for Powys, but death for the prince himself. And their leader was not Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn. It was Llywelyn’s own brother, Dafydd.
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Dafydd ap Gruffudd, the youngest of Llywelyn’s four brothers, has a poor reputation among modern historians of Wales, and not without reason: when it came to treachery, Dafydd had all the makings of a serial offender. Over a decade beforehand, he had abandoned Llywelyn’s war with England and defected to support Edward; earlier still, in the course of the original struggle for supremacy in Gwynedd, he had opposed Llywelyn by siding with their eldest brother, Owain. And yet, in the wake of both these unsuccessful adventures, Dafydd had not merely been forgiven, but rewarded into the bargain. In 1256 Llywelyn granted him lands in the newly conquered Four Cantrefs, and in 1267, following their second reconciliation, these lands were restored.
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Given Dafydd’s unreliable record, such lenient treatment might seem like evidence of indulgence or even naivety on the prince’s part, and there may have been an element of both in his attempts to deal with Dafydd. The basic fact was, however, that Llywelyn was struggling against the Welsh custom of partibility – that ancient obstacle to unity as impassable as the mountains and forests. Dafydd was Llywelyn’s younger brother, and in Wales even younger brothers expected a share of the ancestral estate. By granting him lands elsewhere in Wales, the prince seems to have hoped that he might persuade Dafydd to drop his demand for a portion of Gwynedd. Now, in 1274, he realised that this strategy had failed. Dafydd still regarded himself as hard done by, and could clearly count on the support of other disaffected Welshmen, like Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn, to help him prosecute his claim.

The immediate problem for Llywelyn in 1274 was not the discovery of his younger brother’s latest treachery but its wider effects. As soon as their plot had been exposed, Dafydd and Gruffudd fled across the border into England, and this led to an immediate deterioration in Anglo-Welsh relations.
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The prince demanded that the conspirators be handed over at once, claiming that their reception was contrary to the terms of the Treaty of Montgomery. In actual fact it was not: Llywelyn had promised not to receive English fugitives, but all that the English had promised in return was not to furnish his enemies with material support. In any case, the legal merits of the prince’s complaint hardly mattered. Edward must have reasoned that in Dafydd and Gruffudd he had acquired a useful bargaining chip, which might be used to counter Llywelyn’s assertion that he was deliberately withholding his treaty payments. More to the point was the fact that, as it stood in the winter of 1274–75, the king had no formal obligation to the prince whatsoever, for Llywelyn had yet to appear before Edward and perform his homage.
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It was on this issue that Llywelyn made his biggest blunder. As we have seen, he had no objection in principal to acknowledging the English Crown’s superior lordship. At the ford of Montgomery in 1267 he had been only too happy to kneel before Henry III and become his man. Homage in this context was hardly a recent innovation; Llywelyn’s predecessors, and other Welsh lords, had been doing the same for generations. As Matthew Paris had once rhetorically demanded, ‘who does not know that the prince of Wales is a petty vassal of the king of England?’
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Since Henry’s death, however, Llywelyn had begun to link the question of his vassal status, like the question of his financial contributions, to the resolution of his grievances. For this reason he had not even performed the basic first step of swearing fealty, or fidelity, to Edward in his absence. When, early in 1273, the regents had sent ambassadors to the border expressly for this purpose, the prince had failed to appear before them.

Edward, to his credit, did not attach too much importance to this initial dereliction of duty on Llywelyn’s part, just as he chose to ignore the prince’s failure to attend his coronation. His desire to see good relations restored – and payment made – meant that he was prepared to go to considerable lengths to sort the matter out. In 1274, until prevented by illness, he had been ready to travel to the border to meet Llywelyn; the following year he was ready to do so again. In the summer of 1275 the king and his court made their way north to Chester, where Llywelyn had been told to come and render his due obedience.
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The prince did not appear. As he explained in a letter, he considered that it was unsafe for him to travel into England, where his enemies were being sheltered. There was evidently some sincerity in this: Llywelyn was hovering close to the border as he wrote, seemingly in the hope that Edward would go the extra mile and come to meet him there.
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