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 The True Story Owan Glyndower By Wirt Sikes

The irregular and wild Welshman who figures as a character in Shakespeare's play of "King Henry IV", under the name of Owen Glendower is known to most Americans, and I may say most Englishmen too, only to the extent afforded by that stage-character. This notwithstanding the fact that Englishmen live next door to Wales, while great numbers of Americans are either of Welsh birth or Welsh descent. The English historians do not give him much room in their tale. Those people whose knowledge of him is not taken from Shakespeare generally have an ill-formed notion that he was a sort of brigand, a half-savage, half-starved, half-naked Welshman, with long hair and the rude manner of a backwoodsman - a mediaeval Buffalo Bill crossed on a Carolina freebooter - who burned, slew, and took anything he could lay his hands on, aided by a buccaneering rabble of jail-birds like unto himself. Those who are better informed may look with incredulity on this statement; but I do not make it idly, and I affirm that it is not exaggerated. I have talked of this Welsh hero with numbers of Americans and Englishmen, and I have invariably found that their ideas concerning him (if any) belonged to one of three classes:

1. He was a dreamer, a boaster, a believer in sorcery and enchantment, and a professed worker in the supernatural. This is the idea of him derivable from Shakespeare.

2. He was a robber who dwelt in mountain-caves, and earned his daily-bread by plunder. This idea is that most prevalent where ignorance is densest.

3. He was a rebel who made a great deal of trouble for the English king Henry IV, and was well punished in the end by a miserable old age of poverty, suffering, privation, and loneliness. This is an ultra-partisan English idea, not very common in these days.¹

¹ It was prevalent in Elizabeth's days. In the last part of the "Mirror for Magistrates", imprinted in London by Thomas Marshe, A.D. 1574, there is a doleful poem in the form of a soliloquy by Glendower, the tenor of which is quite sufficiently illustrated by the title: "How Owen Glendower seduced by false prophecyes toke upon him to be Prince of Wales & was by Henry Prince of England chased to the mountaynes where he miserablye died for lacke of foode. Anno D 1401."

No person who has not studied Welsh history from the Welsh standpoint is likely to have a just idea of this man. I purpose to tell his story as it should be told as the story of a hero, a man of rare learning in his time, of polished intellect, the friend of Dante, the patron of refinement and culture, a man of vast wealth, of royal blood (if there is such a thing), and the representative of a resistance to tyranny hardly less admirable than that of our Revolutionary forefathers.

Great Britain has no people more loyal to the queen at this day than the inhabitants of the western counties, which combined are called Wales. Yet for unnumbered centuries these were a distinct people, whom Romans, Saxons, and Normans, alike failed to subdue; and, until Henry VII came, a Welshman usually hated an Englishman worse than he did a Frenchman. That old spirit is pretty near dead now, and it would trouble you to tell at first sight the difference between a Welshman of the better class and an Englishman of the same class. There are several marked differences, but they are not on the surface. Both men are strong in the opinion, however, that Victoria is the noblest of womankind, and both claim her as their own. The Welsh call your attention to the fact that the queen is a Tudor as well as a Stuart, which is quite true; and that the Tudors were Welshmen, which is also undeniable. The Tudors were Welsh princes in Wales ages before Henry VII's grandfather married Queen Catherine and introduced the race into England. There was a Tudor king in Morganwg in the sixth century who was the terror of the pagan Saxons who came in after King Arthur fell. Henry VII marched through Wales to his throne over the dead body of Richard III, who was slain by a Welshman, Sir Rhys ap Thomas, so Welsh chroniclers claim. Since then Wales and England have gradually become one, although the Welsh retain their language - the only language on earth, they proudly say, which has endured through forty centuries with a literature all its own - and they disagree with the English on innumerable points relating to the history of the past. Books and newspapers are still printed in Welsh; and, in relating the story of Owen Glendower from the Welsh standpoint, I shall not worry the reader unnecessarily with boxing the chronological compass, but accept the dates which Welsh writers have for generations agreed upon.

Owen Glendower was born in 1349, the son of parents who traced lineage straight to the loins of Welsh royalty. His father was from those lords of Powys who were conspicuous in Norman times, his mother from Llewellyn the Great, last native prince of Wales. According to the traditions of that superstitious age, the night this child was born his father's horses were found standing in blood up to their bellies. How the blood got there, there is no effort to explain; nor what was done about it, if anything. The circumstance is related as prefiguring the sanguinary career of the infant, and not as a matter to be dealt with in a practical manner. There were other extraordinary phenomena of a like description, according to the old wives; a storm, with terrific thunder and lightning, and frightful bellowings of cattle. Shakespeare took up these tales, and made Glendower boast of them to Hotspur in the play. And it is this which has postured Glendower for all time as a superstitious braggart, while Hotspur, on the other hand, appears as a cynical doubter worthy of these days of Huxley and Darwin. Probably Shakespeare never did anything more unfair. It is to be presumed that Glendower was quite as cultivated, enlightened, educated, unregistered, as any other warrior of his period. There is nothing in history to show that he was governed by superstition one whit beyond the habit of his time, or that Percy was governed by it one whit less. "At my nativity," says the bombastic Glendower that Shakespeare drew -

"The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes,
Of burning cressets; and at my birth
The frame and huge foundations of the earth
Shaked like a coward."

To which Hotspur responds that so it would if his mother's cat had but kittened Glendower grows hot on the subject:

"Give me leave
To tell you once again,"

he says, and repeats his rodomontade word for word, adding that -

"The goats ran from the mountains, and the herds
Were strangely clamorous to the frighted fields."

To this, and to all he says, the Huxleyan Hotspur replies with shrugs and saucy repartee. At the end of one of his widest speeches, the Englishman irreverently sneers -

"I think there's no man speaks better Welsh;"

and Mortimer feels called upon to warn Hotspur that if he does not hold his peace he will make Glendower mad.

"I can call spirits from the vasty deep," this absurd ass of a Glendower goes solidly on. "So can I," puts in Hotspur; "but but will they come when you call them? "

"Why, I can teach thee, cousin, to command the devil."

"And I," retorts Hotspur, "can teach thee to shame the devil - by telling truth. Tell truth, and shame the devil."

If the real Glendower had not laid the insolent Hotspur flat, at such words as these, there is no truth in history. But Shakespeare lets the Englishman flout and jeer his fierce companion - his elder, too, it is worth remembering - again and again in this wise. The Welshman goes on bragging and crowing:

"Three times hath Henry Bolingbroke made head
Against my power: thrice from the banks of Wye
And sandy-bottomed Severn have I sent him
Bootless home and weather-beaten back."

"Home without boots?" sneers Hotspur; "and in foul weather, too? How the devil does he 'scape the ague?"

Presently they get to quarreling outright - not like warriors, but like schoolboys: "You shall." "I shan't." "You won't." "No, nor you neither." "Who'll hinder me, I'd like to know?" But here is the passage:

"Glend. I will not have it altered.
"Hot. Will not you?
"Glend. No, nor you shall not.
"Hot. Who shall me nay?
"Glend. Why, that will I.
"Hot. Let me not understand you then; Speak in Welsh."

And after Glendower goes out, Hotspur falls to abusing him behind his back "like a pickpocket:"

"He angers me
With telling me of the mouldwarp and the ant,
Of the dreamer Merlin, and his prophecies;
And of a dragon and finless fish,
A clip-winged griffin, and a moulten raven,
A couching lion, and a ramping cat,
And such a deal of skimble-skamble stuff
As puts me from my faith. I tell you what, -
He held me, last night, at least nine hours,
In reckoning up the several devil's names
That were his lackeys.

"Oh, he's as tedious
As is a tired horse, a railing wife;
Worse than a smoky house: I had rather live
With cheese and garlic in a windmill, far,
Than feed on cates, and have him talk to me."

I wonder the Welsh scholars have never rebelled at this brummagen Glendower of Shakespeare's - drawn, not in ignorance, but with intention, I think, to make his audience laugh at the Welshman. I am trembling all this time, I frankly confess, at the bare idea that I am criticising the divine William; but my audacity is not greater, I stoutly maintain, than that of Hotspur. Glendower was not the man to be Hotspur's or any man's butt and jeer, and Shakespeare knew it. Although he lets the Welshman talk like a braggart and a fool, he puts in Mortimer's mouth such fair and true words as show how well the poet knew Glendower's real character:

"Mort. In faith, he is a worthy gentleman;
Exceedingly well read, and profited
In strange concealments; valiant as a lion,
And wondrous affable; and as bountiful
As mines of India . . .

"I warrant you that man is not alive
Might so have tempted him as you have done,
Without the taste of danger."

The place of Owen's birth is not exactly known; three counties contend for the honor. He took his name from his estate of Glyndyvrdwy, after a Welsh fashion which still prevails. His name in Welsh was Owain ap Gruffydd ap Vychan, which is simply Owen son of Griffith son of Vaughan. To this day Welsh people often distinguish among their innumerable Owens, Griffiths, Davids, Howells, Williams, by adding to their names the names of their abodes even though the abode be nothing more than a stone cottage on a moor. Every Welsh cottage, in town or country, has a name of its own; nay every field, every ditch has. The estates of Owen Glendower's parents may not have been extensive, but they were evidently not mean, for the boy was given a good education, and was sent up to London to read law. He studied in one of the Inns of Court, and was admitted to the bar, but there is no evidence that he practised. He married a daughter of one of the justices of the king's bench, and might have been a judge, perhaps, if he had kept to the law. But the fashion of the time, and his tastes, led him to put aside the coif for the helmet, and turn courtier in the train of the Earl of Arundel. For his valor, or his genial parts, he became a favorite with Richard II, and was made that unhappy monarch's shield-bearer. He was with Richard in many battles, in France, in Ireland, and in the Wars of the Roses. The king knighted him, and he was called Sir Owen de Glendore.

In 1399 Richard II was deposed, Henry Bolingbroke usurped the English throne, and Owen Glendower went into retirement in Wales. He now became noted for a magnificent and lavish hospitality. His place, called Sycharth, was in the vale of the Dee, where he had some forty miles square of Vendotia's most picturesque and fertile soil. Here he literally kept open house, there being neither locks nor bolts on his doors; everybody was free to go and come; there was not even a gatekeeper. The residence was a palace and castle in one, with a tower-guarded gateway, and battlemented walls surrounded by a moat. Within were nine halls of entertainment, each supplied with a wardrobe of garments for the use of the retainers, and these wardrobes were as free as the larder to the guest - he could clothe himself as well as feed and rest; he could stay a month if he liked, or he could go on his way the next morning, with nothing to pay but thanks. There was a church on the place, together with several small chapels. Close by were a park stocked with deer, a rabbit-warren, a pond alive with fish, a heronry, a vineyard, an orchard, and a mill. Wine, ale, and mead flowed like water at the generous board; and the life of the cook, by the law of hospitality, was estimated at the worth of a hundred and twenty common men. Glendower was especially fond of gathering the bards about him in those days, and gave himself up with great gusto to the cultivation of his native minstrelsy. He was now aged about fifty, and there was a king on the throne from whom he had no favors to hope; he was abundantly blessed with the world's goods' and no doubt began to feel that, after all, there was no place like home. There was always guests enough to make merry, and to listen to the minstrel's lays; his wife, companion of his long career, was still dearer than life to him, and about his hearth-stones were gathered five graceful daughters and several sons - a "beautiful nest of chieftains", as one of the bards sang. This bard, Iolo Goch, was a special favorite with Glendower, and has left on record a number of poems which tell the story of those peaceful and happy days. Here is a specimen of his verse, relating to the Lady Margaret Glendower:

"His wife the best of wives!
Happy am I in her wine and mead.
Eminent dame of knightly lineage,
Honorable, beneficent, noble!
Her children came in pairs,
A beautiful nest of chieftains."

I give the Welsh version:

"A gwraig areu o'r gwragedd!
Gwyn fy rayd o'i gwin a'i medd.
Merch eglur, llin marchawglyw,
Urddol, hael, o reiol ryw,
A'i blant a ddeuant bob yn ddau,
Nythod teg o bennaethau!"

There is nothing to show that Owen had any purpose of leading other than this somewhat sylvan life henceforth, in his grove-embowered castle-home, surrounded by his bards, his guests, and his girls and boys. But among his neighbors was one Lord Grey de Ruthin, with whom Owen had an old dispute about a tract of land which lay between the two men's domains. Both laid claim to this land, and under the late king it had been lawfully ceded to Owen. But now, Grey being a favorite at court, and Owen none, Grey seized the land again. All authorities agree that Owen set about the recovery of this property peaceably. He brought suit in due legal form, and even went so far as to petition the English Parliament for redress. The Bishop of St. Asaph took occasion to advise the Parliament to use temperate measures in dealing with Owen, but the haughty Englishmen scornfully declared they had no fear of Owen and his barelegged scrubs. The suit was contemptuously dismissed.

This Lord Grey seems to have been a good set rogue, and bent on making all the mischief possible. Soon after Owen got the above-mentioned snub from Henry's Parliament, the king, in preparing an expedition into Scotland, sent writs summoning his various feudal barons and tenants to accompany him with their vassals. The writ addressed to Owen Glendower was intrusted to Lord Grey for delivery. The rascal maliciously kept it back till too late for Owen to obey the royal mandate. The Welsh chroniclers have no scruples in asserting that the king and Lord Grey de Ruthin managed this trap in collusion. Anyhow the king forthwith had Owen proclaimed a traitor, and aided and abetted Lord Grey in invading Owen's possessions, with full leave to appropriate all he could seize of them. At this Owen turned in fury on his ruthless persecutor. He made war on Lord Grey, retook the disputed land, and a good bit of his enemy's domains besides. The king sent Lord Talbot to assist Grey in punishing the wild Welshman; and they nearly took him in his bed one night. Their forces had surrounded his house, but he escaped in the darkness and got off into the hills. Next day Owen Glendower sent to all his retainers the signal of war - a full-strung bow. The die was cast; the insurrection had begun. Lord Grey had builded worse than he had dreamed of in his liveliest moments, and Henry IV had stirred up a hornet's nest which was destined to sting him throughout the remnant of his days. On the 20th of September, 1400, Owen Glendower flung the red dragon of Wales to the breeze, marched on Ruthin, where a fair was being held, burned the town, and carried off most of the people who were not killed to his mountain-fastnesses. Then Glendower proclaimed himself the true Prince of Wales, the heir of its ancient sovereigns, and offered battle to whosoever would dispute his right.

The son of the sovereign of England was the recognized Price of Wales then, as Victoria's eldest son is now. But the feeling among the Welsh people then was very different from the feeling among that people now. King Henry IV was a usurper, in the first place; Mortimer was the rightful heir to the English throne. The Welsh people bore the king no love in any case. Glendower was descended from ancestors who had ruled Wales for centuries. His name was associated with the days of Welsh independence, and the spirit of the people was one which looked eagerly towards the hope of renewing that independence. The English laws pressed heavily and unfairly on the Welsh. Under their ancient rulers this people had enjoyed an amount of freedom and justice now denied them. They rallied round their ancestral banner of Wales, the red dragon, and in a wonderfully brief space of time Glendower had an army. The people not only avowed their belief in the justice of his cause, but they stood ready to fight for him.

Now the English Parliament fell into the stupidity and folly of supposing that it could quell the spirit of this fierce race by a course of oppression, the most severe that ever disgraced a civilized government. It enacted laws for Wales which would have ruined the reputation of a Hottentot administration. To epitomize rapidly and incompletely; all Welshmen were incapacitated from holding office; in a suit between an Englishman and a Welshman, the former could only be convicted on terms which made conviction practically impossible; the Welsh language was proscribed; all Englishmen who had married Welshwomen were disenfranchised; any further such marriages were punishable by forfeiture of goods; Welsh meetings were forbidden to be held save in the presence of English officers; to import writing-materials into Wales was made a capital offence; Welsh parents were prohibited sending their children to any school or apprenticing them to any trade. Upon this, amnesty was offered to all Welshmen who would lay down their arms and eat dirt by a certain day - all, that is to say, except Owen Glendower and his cousins, Rhys and William Tudor. If the Welsh had had the souls of mice, they might perhaps have availed themselves of this offer. They had the souls of free men, and they scorned it. The whole land was on fire with patriotism. The students in the universities, the artisans, the very laborers, threw down their books and their tools, and rallied round their old flag. The Welsh scholars at Oxford and Cambridge left their studies and departed into Wales. Welshmen who had settled in various parts of England also secured arms and escaped to their own land. The bards multiplied their gorseddau, and struck their harps with bolder hands, singing the glories of battle instead of the amorous ditties of peace. They revived the ancient Druidic practices of inscribing their songs on revolving bars of wood (peithynen) in the primitive, vertical characters; and every tree became a book, a letter, a warning, a summons, or a spirit-stirring call. "Never was the Cymric language so studied and improved," says the Glamorgan manuscript, "as when in Glendower's time every oak was, in truth, a tree of knowledge and a college of teachers."

The English king granted all Glendower's estates to the Earl of Somerset, his (the king's) own brother, and gathering his army about him, marched into Wales to fight the Welshman whom he subsequently dubbed (in Shakespeare) -

" . . . . the great magician, damned Glendower."

It was a large army, comprising the feudal levies of ten counties. It marched quite through Wales, with the king at its head, to the sea-shore on the west; and then it marched back home again. This appears to have been the amount of the venture, briefly stated. After the time-honored fashion of the Welsh chieftains - a fashion by which they had so long thwarted the Norman conquerors in their efforts to subjugate them - Glendower manoeuvered his forces in forest-depths, in swampy retreats, and on mountain-crags, where it was folly to assail them. King Henry went back to England in a towering rage.

Owen, having established himself on the lofty mountain of Plynlimmon as a base of operations, sallied out from there and laid waste the surrounding country. It is at this period that we find the valiant Hotspur (Sir Harry Percy) opposed to the insurgents. Hotspur was judiciary of the district; there are letters in existence form Hotspur which show that he was actively engaged against Glendower thus early, or fully two years before the Shakespearean time of making them acquainted. This fact is further encouragement to me in presuming to arraign the immortal bard as a deceiver, and as having set up a false figure of Glendower for Hotspur to jeer at and for English audiences to laugh at. There was no man alive who better than Hotspur knew the fierce nature of Owen Glendower, or more respected it and him. It is these letters of Hotspur, these almost alone, which have told us the story of what was going on in Wales at this time. Glendower is ravaging Montgomeryshire and burning and pillaging its towns; he is destroying the strong castle of Radnor and many other fortresses and cities; he is sacking and laying low Cwmhir Abbey. His exploits are brilliant, terrifying, and invariably successful. He drives Hotspur out of the district, and occupies with his adherents the castles of Conway and Caernarvon. The Flemings in Pembrokeshire (an Anglo-Belgian colony living in the midst of Wales) form an army and march to aid Hotspur, vowing they will drive Owen Glendower from his eyrie. They are fiercer and fuller of hate for the Welsh, are these Flemings, than the English themselves. They surround the Welsh chieftain on Plynlimmon fifteen hundred strong; Glendower has one hundred and fifty men. Trapped, encompassed by overwhelming numbers, Glendower prepares to sell his life at dear cost. He addresses his men in the voice of stern resolve - tells them that they have no choice but to die by famine, or to die by Flemish axes in this endeavor to cut their way through a superior force. They cut their way through, accordingly - ten men against every man of them! They were one hundred and fifty; they left two hundred Flemings dead on the field ; and the rest of the fifteen hundred went back to Pembrokeshire, thankful to get home alive. Glendower remembered them, two years later, when he traveled that way.

The news of this brilliant exploit, and of others in which Glendower seemed to be endowed with superhuman valor and power, ran over the land like wildfire. Glendower's popularity grew as the flames grow before the wind. The superstitious Welshmen - all peoples were superstitious in those days - saw in him the chieftain who was to realize the prophecy of Merlin, that the sovereignty of Britain, after having been in the possession of the Saxons and the Normans, should ultimately return to the ancient Britons. It is not improbable that Glendower himself placed some degree of faith in this prophecy, but there is no reason to believe that he shared in the vulgar rubbish of the uneducated about the mysterious significance of incidents and appearances due to natural causes - the voices of the thunder and the wind, the fright of beasts, the birth of a monstrosity, or the rising of a flood. I have met Welshmen of education even in this day who speak most respectfully of Merlin and his sayings, but who are full of contempt for the table-tipping, slate-writing witchmongery of our own enlightened time. There is no proof anywhere in history that Glendower was a man of vulgarly superstitious mind, that he ever once uttered himself in the ridiculous, bombastic phraseology that Shakespeare puts in his mouth.²

² Shakespeare may possibly have taken his cue in this matter from the "Mirror for Magistrates," already alluded to, in which there are many verses like these.

"and for to set us hereon more agog
a prophet came (a vengeance take them all)
affirming Henry to be Gogmagog
whom Merlin doth Mouldwarp ever call
accurst of God that must be brought in thrall
by a Wolfe a Dragon & a Lion strong
which should devide his kingdom them among"

On the contrary, there are letters of Owen's extant which show him to have been a practical, sensible, shrewd, and wise man, animated by love of his country and his God as well as by personal ambition - a man who would serve his God, his country, and his own interests, by a better witchcraft than conjuring, to wit, the magic of the battle-axe and the wonder-working of an active intellect. A letter to his "very dear and entirely beloved Henry Don," written in Latin, is preserved, of which the following is an accurate translation:

"We inform you that we hope, by God's help and yours, to be enabled to free the Welsh race from the bondage of our English enemies, who have now for a long time past oppressed us and our ancestors, And you may, from your own observation, perceive that their time is ending. and that victory inclines to us, according to God's appointment from the beginning, so that no one can doubt that a good end will arrive, unless by indifference and discord it be lost; and that the whole Welsh nation is in uncertainty and fear concerning the subjection under which we have heard our forenamed enemies can place us. Accordingly we charge and require and entreat you, with such preparation as you have made, to come to us with all boldness as speedily as you can, to the place where you will hear that we are consuming our enemies by oppressing and attacking them; and this, by Divine assistance, will be shortly. And this you must not neglect, as you would have freedom and honor for the time to come. And wonder not that you received no warning of the first rising; for we were forced to rise without warning, because of the too great fear and danger.

"Farewell - may God keep you from harm !
By OWAIN AB GRUFFYDD,
"Lord of Glyndyvrdwy."

This is not skimble-skamble stuff - this is not the language of a man who would take the lie from Sir Hotspur, or prate about finless fishes, ramping cats, mouldwarps and ants, in connection with Merlin's prophecies of nine centuries before.

Whatever the causes, however - and they were several - there was a mighty thronging to Glendower's standard. He led his army into South Wales, entered Glamorganshire, and almost made a holocaust of the castles of that rich county. Cardiff surrendered and was spared; but he laid low Penllyn, Landoc, Hemingston, Dunraven, Talyvan, Llanblethian, Llanylan, Malefant, Penmarc, all strong and noble castles, many of which are ivy-covered ruins to this day, never having been rebuilt. He was repeatedly encountered by Anglo-Norman forces as he roved about, but victory perched always on his standard. Once he went before his army reconnoitering along the sea-shore, accompanied by one friend disguised as a servant, and came to St. Athans (just before Cardiff), where there was a castle - a ruin now - in which one Sir Lawrence Berkerolles dwelt. Of him Owen asked a night's entertainment, speaking the French language, in which he was proficient. It was granted, and Sir Lawrence, delighted with his guest, pressed him to stay several days.

"I expect to see Owen Glendower this way soon," said Sir Lawrence, by way of inducement; "the English troops are scouring the country for him, and I myself have sworn to give a large reward for his head."

Owen suggested that it would he advisable to secure him soon," for I hear that he is likely to be crowned ere long if not taken, " said he.

On leaving the castle the Welshman left a note behind, which had the extraordinary effect on Sir Lawrence (if the Lleision manuscripts may he believed) of striking him dumb, so that he never spoke again.

"Owen of the Dee Waters," said the note, "as a sincere friend, having neither hatred, treachery, nor deception, in his heart, gives his hand to Sir Lawrence Berkerolles, and thanks him for the hospitality he and his friend have experienced at his castle; and desires to assure, him that it will never enter his mind to avenge the intentions of his host, Sir Lawrence, toward him; nor shall it, so far as he has the power of prevention, enter the minds of any of his subjects or followers.

King Henry in person led another army, double the size of the first, into Wales that summer, in a fever of rage and alarm at the Welsh prince's proceedings. The same success which signalized his first expedition crowned his second: he marched back home again without ever having seen his subtle foe, but with his army exhausted by famine and disease; for it was a part of the Welshman's art of war to drain the country and strip it of the means of subsisting the king's men before retiring to the mountains.

In 1402 the appearance of a comet was accepted as a favorable augury by the superstitious among Owen's followers; and the bards seized skillfully on the circumstance to presage tremendous victories for their hero. Nor did the events of the year belie the promises made on behalf of this celestial ally. Victories crowded upon Glendower. That Lord Grey de Ruthin who was the immediate cause of the first uprising had for a whole year been making powerful preparations for attacking and overwhelming Glendower. The Welshman lured him to battle by a pretended show of weakness, met him halfway, struck the first blow, routed his forces, took him prisoner, and locked him up in a strong box he had on Snowdon Mountain. Glendower's mode of dealing with his old enemy was long-headed to the last degree. He gave way in no rages; he coolly employed his advantage to profit his cause. Knowing Lord Grey to be a special favorite of the king, he demanded ten thousand golden marks (about thirty-five thousand dollars) ransom for him - an enormous sum in those days - and got it, too.³ But, before letting his prisoner go, Owen neutralized his hostility by becoming his father-in-law. Whether Lord Grey fell in love with Owen's daughter Jane while in prison, or whether he merely yielded to the arguments of her father on the subject it is certain he married her as soon as he was released from durance vile. We hear no more of him after that. He had got enough, probably, to last him the rest of his days.

³ We can judge of the importance of this sum only when we estimate its purchasing power, and that may be guessed at when we read that one penny was the normal price of three pounds of beef in the London markets at an even later period; that a chicken cost one penny; that the best pig in market could be bought for fourpence; and that threepence a day was a laborers regular wages.

A treacherous attack on Owen's life, early in this year, was made harmless in a manner which the superstitious considered a miraculous evidence of his being watched over by protecting spirit, but which the reader will credit to the wise forethought of a shrewd and cautious man. The would-be assassin was Owen's cousin, Howell Sele, Lord of Nannau. The cousins were walking in Howell's park, whither Owen had been called on some errand; and Howell, bending his bow at a deer in the distance, suddenly turned it on his great kinsman's breast, and shot the strong arrow straight to its deadly aim. But Owen, having long suspected his cousin, had come to the meeting with a suit of chain-armor under his clothes. Howell was instantly seized and thrown alive into the trunk of a hollow tree, where he was left to perish. Some of the writers contend that he was killed first, but I see nothing incompatible with Glendower's character in the harsher account, he was a stern man, and his times were cruel to the death. Besides, treachery was ever the one unpardonable crime among those Welshmen of old. It was long a mystery what had become of Howell the Traitor's bones. (He was called Howell the Traitor to separate him distinctly from the long and glorious line of Howells in Welsh history, among whom was Howell the Good, as bright a figure in British annals, as Arthur the Brave.) So well did Glendower's men keep their secret that not until forty years had passed was his skeleton found in the tree where it had been thrust. The tree was an ancient oak, and it stood four hundred years after that, an object of veneration and dread among the peasants, who called it the Hobgoblin's Hollow Tree⁴ It fell in a storm on the night of July 13, 1813, and was believed (by men educated in these matters) to have been wellnigh a thousand years old.

⁴ Scott alludes to this tree in "Marmion:"

To Cambria look - the peasant see
Bethink him of Glendowerdy
And shun the 'Spirits Blasted Tree.`"

Once more King Henry marched into Wales, mad for revenge on this diabolical Welshman, who was now again ravaging the country right and left, burning towns, castles, and even religious edifices, when inhabitants, lords or ecclesiastics, disputed his sway. On Cardiff and its neighborhood Owen now especially wreaked his fury, vowing that it was a nest of traitors. He burned its castle (which was afterward rebuilt), demolished its monasteries and convents, and threw down the episcopal palace at Llandaff. The gateway alone now remains of this palace, a ruin of ponderous proportions, with walls many feet thick, and so solid that there are gardens atop. I marvel, as I look on the remains of these walls which Glendower threw down, what engines he used to accomplish a work so herculean. He was before gunpowder in Wales. In the midst of this career of destruction he got news of what King Henry was about, and hastened back to his mountains in North Wales. This time the king came with an enormous army, though what might he deemed the importance of size in an army which could never catch the foe it is not easy to perceive. But though Henry met no fighting-men of Owen's, he met - what he and all the superstitious of his day believed to be - the magic workings of "that devil Glendower" upon the elements. "Through his art-magicke," says an old English chronicler, "Glyndore did cause such foul weather of winds, tempests, rain, snow, and haile, to be raysed for the annoiance of the kinge's armie, that the like had in no age been heard of." It is perfectly certain that never was a poor, unhappy monarch so drowned out; never were wretched, bedraggled soldiers so wet through, soaked, pelted, and sent home with agues in their bones fit to last them into their graves. The more recent English writers who have touched on this doleful expedition of Henry's have generally taken a facetious view of it, since to treat it seriously, as the old writers did, as a visitation of the devil under Glendower's special instructions, would ill comport with the doubting spirit of our time. Falstaff hardly over-colored the picture that had been drawn before him by men of smaller humor. "He of Wales," says Falstaff, "that gave Amaimon⁵ the bastinado, and made Lucifer cuckold, and swore the devil his true liegeman on the cross of a Welsh hook." In the present irreverent century there has even been made a most comical English ballad at the expense of the king, which tells how -

"King Henry's hot thirst for destruction and slaughter
Was quenched by untimely supplies or cold water
And his gallants so gay, and his barons so bold,
They couldn't catch Glendwr, they only caught cold.
The soldiers, with rain-water up to their knees,
Were very uneasy while 'standing at ease,'
And the trumpets grew hoarse and would not sound their notes,
And the fifes seemed all suffering from very sore throats.
The cavalry's brilliant equipments were spoiled,
And the horses all smoked just as if they'd been boiled;
And the Scotch with the captain thereof.
Were extremely annoyed with a very bad cough;
And nothing was seen 'mid the yeomanry bands
But blowing of noses and wringing of hands,
And nothing was heard of the Shropshire militia
Night or day but - attisha! attisha! ATTISHA!"

⁵ Amaimon was one of the four sulphurous kings who ruled all the demons of earth.

There is every reason to believe that had Glendower been taken at this time he would not have been allowed to die the death of a patriot soldier on the scaffold, but would have been burned for a magician, as Joan of Are was a few years later by the Duke of Bedford.

Shakespeare's play begins at this point in Glendower's career - i.e., soon after Henry's return from this third disastrous venture among the wild Welshmen, who starved him, drowned him, harassed him, but would not fight him. How Henry wronged his nobles and quarreled with Hotspur is set forth in the play. The contemporary historical record relates the quarrel with Hotspur in effect thus: Edmund Mortimer, being now a prisoner of Owen Glendower, his brother-in--law Harry Hotspur besought the king to permit him to he ransomed from the royal exchequer. "Never with the royal money will I strengthen my personal enemies," said the king. Harry Percy said . "Is a man to hazard his life for you and your realm, and will you not move a foot to help him?" "Thou art a traitor!" cried the king, in high anger. "What! help mine own and my kingdom's enemy?" To which Hotspur answered: "I am no traitor, but a true subject, and as such I speak." The enraged monarch drew his dagger. "Not here, but elsewhere," said. Hotspur, and withdrew.

This incident gave Glendower powerful allies. The play relates the story of their proceedings with a general fair agreement with historical fact, but (as I have tried to show) with particular and studied misrepresentation of the character of Glendower. The allies agreed to divide the land between the three parties, Glendower, of course, taking Wales; and he, being already in possession of his dominions, convened a national assembly to sanction his assumption of royal authority, and was solemnly crowned at Machynlleth. Among the Cymric nobles who came to the coronation was one Sir David Gam, Lord of Brecon, an Anglicized Welshman, who would hardly have ventured there openly, so well was he known as Owen's enemy, but who came in disguise. He was accompanied by eight retainers, and his purpose was to assassinate Glendower then and there. The keen eye of Owen spied him out; he was a giant, it seems, and moreover he was squint-eyed - two somewhat formidable barriers to an entirely successful disguise. Owen shut him up in prison immediately, where he remained, for ten years.

With the battle of Shrewsbury Owen Glendower had nothing to do. He was leagues away from the scene when it occurred, knew nothing about it until some days after it was over, and of course joined in no councils leading to it. He had an army of twelve thousand men, and was down on the southern sea-coast ravaging Glamorgan, Carmarthen, Cardigan, and Pembrokeshire, while Percy was marshaling his forces in the north. Eventually they were to join armies and fight to dethrone Henry IV. Of this scheme the king was supposed to be ignorant, but he had been informed, and he set out to intercept Percy and prevent his joining Glendower. Percy might have avoided the conflict, nevertheless, if he had chosen; but he was ruled by that fiery spirit which gave him the sobriquet of Hotspur; and Shrewsbury battle was fought. This rashness changed the channel of history's current with a great sweep. For Glendower, on his part, was never so strong, never so feared. His coming into Pembrokeshire threw the Flemings into a frightful panic - those same Flemings who had been so eager to get at Glendower on Plynlimmon, audaciously fancying that fifteen hundred men could whip one hundred and fifty. The terrible Welshman now marked his path through them with bonfires and blood. The Constables of most of the royal castles tremblingly surrendered them without even showing fight; and those who did not welcome him with open arms he punished - as if they had resisted him with battle.

Until recently the received account in history has been to the effect that Glendower was near Shrewsbury field on the day of that battle, and was prevented from joining in the fight by a flood which crossed his path. They have even shown, for some centuries past, a tree in which Glendower was said to have perched himself and watched the battle across the flood. All this is now proved to be fiction. There is a letter from the Archdeacon of Hereford to King Henry, begging the king to come into Wales and crush Glendower, and it is dated Sunday, July 8th. It is written in French, but at the end bursts frantically into an English postscript, thus:

"P. S. - And for God's love, my liege lord, think on yourself and your estate; or by my troth all is lost else, but an ye come yourself all other will follow after. On Friday last Caermarthen town was taken and burnt, and the castle yielden by Ro. Wydmor; and the Castle Emlyn is yielden; and slain of the town of Caermarthen more than fifty persons."

Sunday falls on the 8th of July only in the year 1403 of that decade, and thus the letter becomes testimony from the English side corroborative of those Welsh writers who show that Owen Glendower was otherwise occupied about that time, and was not concerning himself with the battle of Shrewsbury.

In the next year an alliance offensive and defensive was formed between Owen and Charles V1. of France. But there was no attempt on the part of the English to make war on Glendower. He was left in undisputed possession of the whole of Wales, and amused himself part of the time in entertaining the bards after his old fashion, part of the time in attacking such castles in his domain as were not to his liking. The Italian poet Dante formed one of Glendower's guests at Sycharth this year. There is Cymric mention of a translation of Petrarch's poems, the work of Owen Glendower, which still further presses on our attention the fact that he was a man of rare attainments learned in at least five languages - English, Welsh, French, Italian, and Latin.⁶ For his other favorite diversion. Glendower seems to have been almost as thoroughgoing an old castle-hater as Cromwell himself. He had every castle in Wales in his hands at one time or another during his career, and he never garrisoned one of them, but sent them tumbling. All over Wales today you find the ivy-hung ruins of Saxon and Norman fortresses, and if you inquire who shattered these venerable walls, you will find it was either Owen Glendower or Oliver Cromwell. There are scores of these ruins scattered throughout Wales, and nothing on the Rhine is more picturesque. As places of residence, Glendower sometimes found the Norman castles useful, but as military strongholds he scorned them. "Put you your trust in castles?" he contemptuously asked of the frightened friars who had hid their library in Cardiff Castle; "your churches would be safer."

⁶ To give further emphasis to this fact, I quote here from Froude: "As late as the reign of Edward VI. (1547 to 1553) there were peers of Parliament unable to read."

The year 1405 was a momentous one for Glendower. At its opening he was apparently at the zenith of his power. He took two of the most powerful castles in Wales, or in the world, Aberystwith and Harlech, which had long defied him. One of these, Harlech, was considered an impregnable fortress, from its strength and from its position, perched on a rocky summit at a dizzy height, over-looking a magnificent sweep of land and sea. The ruins still stand, picturesque and striking in the extreme, where, for a thousand years before Glendower, walls of strength had frowned defiance to every foe.⁷ Glendower had even the boldness, so confident of his strength had he grown, to plan the rescue from Windsor Castle of the young Mortimers.

⁷ Harlech was anciently a fortress of the Britons in King Arthur's century, and was called Twr Bronwen (Bronwen's Tower).

King Henry kept these boys imprisoned at Windsor, knowing too well the use that could be made of the elder boy's right to the throne of England. Glendower's scheme was to give these boys an asylum at Sycharth till the elder should come of age. Meantime Owen was to be regent and protector of the kingdom. This bold and ambitious enterprise nearly succeeded. The Lady Constance de Spenser, keeper of Caerphilly Castle, had actually got off with the boys on her way to Glendower, when she was overtaken by the king and brought back. This was the first of a series of failures and disasters which, in connection with the preceding and succeeding events, marked the year as one of vicissitudes the most romantic and extraordinary. The king's son, Harry of Monmouth (afterward Henry V.), went forth with a grand army against Glendower. The boy had profited by the lessons his father had learned about the way to fight Welshmen, and the Welshmen, on their part, had grown less shrewd and cautious than before. At Grosmont the boy (he was but seventeen) encountered Glendower and slew a thousand Welsh. Four days later, at Usk, fifteen hundred Welsh were slain; Owen's son Griffith was taken prisoner; his brother Tudor was killed; he himself was forced to fly. The reverses had a deplorable effect on Owen's cause, and, being followed up by the English with skill and energy, the effect was disastrous in the extreme. The English forces poured into the principality like a flood. It. was skillfully rumored, too, that Owen was dead - that he had fallen at Usk - the basis for this roorbach being that Tudor, the slain brother, closely resembled Owen in personal appearance; they were distinguishable, in case of death, by means of a wart which Owen had over one eye. And Owen had disappeared. For a time he was reduced to the most painful. extremities - forced to hide like Alfred in rocky caves in secret regions known only to a faithful few who cautiously supplied him with food. That from such a condition of despair as this Glendower should rise to power again within, a few weeks seems hardly credible; but this is not one of the facts in his career which have been disputed. A French army of twelve thousand landed at Tenby on the south coast; and Glendower came out of hiding and marched to meet the Frenchmen, with an army of ten thousand men at his back! The allies marched through Wales into England, where they burned and ravaged the city of Worcester; and were met by Glendower's old enemy, King Henry IV. And there the two armies stood glaring on each other for eight days, when one or the other retreated. Here come in the French chroniclers to still further muddle the story, and to this day there is no certainty who first showed the white feather. One thing is clear enough: all parties went home. No serious fighting had been done. Glendower returned into Wales, the French returned to France, the king returned to London.

For years after this the peace remained comparatively unbroken. Owen reigned in Wales after a fashion; but the young prince, who later became Henry V., was busy with the labor of undermining Glendower's popularity and substituting his own. He was himself a Welshman by birth, it should be remembered (he was born at Monmouth), and he made friends with the people by coming among them, establishing his headquarters in Wales, and encouraging the belief that, on becoming king, he would not despise and oppress Welshmen. Glendower stoutly held to the title of sovereignty; he lived in regal state, with vassals and retainers in great numbers, and he had among his nobles some of the proudest in the land. But year by year his power was slipping from him, and he grew less anxious to punish and subdue every manifestation of disloyalty. He came at last to the maintenance of the defensive only, retired among his mountain bulwarks, shorn of his old strength, deserted by the mass of his followers, but in spirit still unconquered. The monkish historians pretend that he was reduced to the last stages of penury, want, and privation, but, unfortunately for this story (besides Welsh testimony), there is documentary evidence to the contrary. No one can imagine that Henry V. (who mounted the throne in 1413) would have made overtures of reconciliation to Glendower if he had become so contemptible a foe. But this Henry V did - offering the most liberal terms, protection in the property and safety in the life, not only of himself, but of all his adherents - to the doughty Welshman who had made his father's life a burden to him. While the negotiations were pending Owen died peacefully in his bed, at the house of one of his daughters, with his grand-children about him. Thus tranquilly ended the life whose earlier years had been so turbulent, but which had, nevertheless, extended almost to the Biblical limit of threescore and ten.⁸

⁸ He died September 20, 1415, aged sixty-six. Henry IV. died in a fit, in 1413, aged forty-seven.

Any estimate of this man which is not animated by sincere respect is a false one. Owen Glendower was a doughty knight in the field, an accomplished gentleman in the hall, a shrewd and successful general - a character to excite the enthusiasm of the poet and the admiration of the historian. Born in an obscurity so deep that neither his birthplace nor his birthday has ever been conclusively fixed upon, he rose to eminence through his own gifts, to wealth through his own endeavors, to the position of a conqueror and a sovereign through the action of wrong and oppression on a nature which would not brook them, but felt the blood of a kingly race stirred to fury by them, after it had slept in the veins of quieter men during ten generations. For fifteen years he held his ground against all the resources of the English throne, and against powerful enmities, jealousies and rivalries, within his own domain. He fought a usurper and an oppressor, and such a fight is never waged without some good result. The condition of Wales was better after his struggle than it was before, and the amount of good he accomplished is not to be lightly weighed. We can judge of the profound impression he made upon his time by this fact: Fifteen years after Glendower's death the English House of Commons, in a request for the enforcement of the forfeiture of his lands, stated that, had he succeeded, the English tongue must inevitably have perished off the face of the earth.

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