The Brothers of Gwynedd (180 page)

  "Wherefore we beg your fatherly holiness, as you are bound to pursue that renewed peace, honourable and secure, for which you have exerted such heroic labours already, to devise some expedient bearing a just relation to those articles we have submitted to you in writing.

  "It would surely be more honourable, and more consonant with reason, if we should hold from the king those lands in which we have right, rather than to disinherit us, and hand over our lands and our people to strangers.

  "Dated at Garthcefn, on the feast of Saint Martin."

  So read my lord's last letter to Archbishop Peckham.

Archbishop Peckham's last letter to my lord was delivered some days later, combining in one long, voluble diatribe his rage and rejection against all the careful legal points we had urged. Now he had nothing to offer us but damnation, and the prospect of war to the death, and the distant spectacle of his own wounded vanity at having his efforts undervalued, so that all the first part of his letter was an almost incoherent outpouring in his own praise, how he had laboured for us, taken compassion on us when none other would, ventured his very life among great perils to rescue his strayed sheep, been the advocate of our necessity—though in the first place he had invited himself into that role—dealt with the majesty and magnates of England, made his frail body a bridge by which we might again cross into grace, all to have the fruit of his labours scorned. It had not fully appeared until then how he rated us as some manner of breed a little below humanity, so that he could not well understand our resentment of subjection, which seemed to him our fitting state, a kindness for which we ought to be grateful.

  All the legal points we had made he dismissed as "pernicious subterfuges," and went on to produce some surprising law of his own. We should not, he said, vaunt ourselves upon being descended from Brutus, fools that we were and worse than fools, since Brutus was one of those Trojans who were dispersed and scattered because they defended the adulterous Paris, and such a descent as we claimed no doubt accounted for our notorious looseness in morals, and the small regard we paid to legitimate marriage, in that we did not bar children born out of wedlock from having a respected place in our kinships, and even inheriting property. He went further, and accused us of encouraging incest, but in the flood of words he could probably barely stop himself by then. And had not the Trojans, our ancestors, he said, invaded these islands and driven out the Scythian giants who then inhabited them?

  "Why, therefore, we ask, are the Angles and Saxons of this generation doing you any injury, if in the process of time they are now disturbing your enjoyment of usurped dominions? It is written: Ye who despoil others, shall not you be despoiled? Fools that you are, it is not wise to glory in origins stemming from adultery, idolatry and the plunder of usurpation!"

  Then he went on to dismiss our indubitable claim that in the treaty made by the papal legate Ottobuono all these Welsh territories had been confirmed to Llewelyn, with King Henry's consent. A frivolous allegation, said Peckham, for certainly Ottobuono had had no intention of thereby weakening the king's law, civil or canon, so as to render it invalid, and for the crime of lese-majeste of which we stood accused, all hereditary rights are forfeit and perish, so that even in Snowdonia, Llewelyn's by rightful inheritance, the prince was now stripped of all power, and we with him, having no rights at all still existent except the right to beg the king's clemency. And to this astonishing proposition he appended his legal references in full, verse and line, of
English law!
English law, to which Snowdon never had been subject, and was not subject now! English law, which with its encroaching claims where it had no right had begun this whole contention!

  As to our statement that we could not rely on the king's word, since he had not kept it in the past, Peckham demanded, who says so? Only from us, the Welsh, did this charge stem, and that meant we were presuming to be judges in our own cause.
And he was not?
As for the legal code of Howel Dda, the only authority Howel had had for it had been delegated to him by the devil.

  The whole would be wearisome, though I have not forgotten any of it. But thus the gentle prelate, with many threats of excommunication, damnation, and extirpation by total war, ended his favours to us:

  "While other men are freely adorned with the gifts of God, in your remote fastnesses these are cast utterly to waste, inasmuch as you give no aid to the Church in contending against its enemies, and confer upon your clergy no wise learning, except in the meanest degree, and the majority of your people wallow in idleness and lechery, so that the world hardly knows that such a people exists, but for the few of you who are seen begging their bread in France."

  And with that he consigned us to our fate and turned his back upon Wales.

  This letter Llewelyn read with a face of indifferent distaste, and by the end of it his already dead regard for this narrow and unperceptive priest was also buried deep, to be thought of no more. He himself read it to his assembled council, and dusted his hands and left it lying when he had done.

  "I had expected to be cursed," he said, "but not in the language of the city kennels. Well, that is over. Back to the cleaner business of war!"

We held urgent council that same day how to proceed, for the next two or three weeks might be invaluable to us if well used. We knew already that great numbers of carpenters had again been shipped in haste to Anglesey, where the earl of Hereford was now in command, so plainly an attempt was to be made to repair the bridge of boats, but even that enterprise would take some time, and the great loss of men and armour and horses in the strait would not be easily replaced. The king remained at Rhuddlan, and had even withdrawn his advanced outposts, so that now none of his garrisons, apart from that in Anglesey, was further west than the Clwyd valley.

  "By the number of foot soldiers he's dismissed," Tudor said, "he could be abandoning the fight for this season, but I doubt it. I think he's waiting for his Gascons, and meantime saving money and stores. Feeding such an army as his is no light matter, even with our corn harvest, and when he's ready, and some prospect of the Anglesey division being ready to move with him, he can easily send out fresh writs, and pay whatever numbers he can raise, if he thinks the period of service need not be long."

  Llewelyn heard them all out, and pondered the courses open to him. "What we must not do," he said, "is to be shut up here with no way of linking hands with those allies we have to the south, and no channel by which we can move to help them, or they to help us. David, can you hold everything here for a while, if I go south?"

  David grimaced, calculating the possible term of his security. "I shall be safe enough for a while, and have nothing to do but keep watch. As long as four weeks, surely, perhaps longer. He cannot make good his losses earlier than that."

  The young Llewelyn said, earnestly watching his uncle's face: "Are you coming to us? My brothers have gone to ground there. If you come, we might do much."

  "I am going into the waist of Wales," said the prince, "but you shall come with me, and go home to help your brothers. I shall be holding hands one way with you, and the other here with David, and keeping the ways open. I am going into Maelienydd and Builth, to see what recruiting Edward has done for me there in Mortimer country."

  "Good!" said David, "it's a right choice. Of all things we need a highway north and south. Go with God, and leave the north to me for four weeks, and if the need arises, I'll send to you."

  So we made ready to march within two days, and the winds that had torn apart Edward's bridge sank submissively into stillness now that Edward was embattled in Rhuddlan with his rage and his hatred and his temporary helplessness. Halfway through November the sun came through, as it does freakishly, gilding all the mountain tops and filling all the valleys with fine blue mist, like a meadow full of harebells. And in this hush we massed and marched.

  The parting of those two brothers was as spare and brief that day as their dangers were great, their resolution unbending, and their need extreme. While we were gathering in the bailey they spoke but few words to each other, and those to the point, of arms and supplies, and how the forces each had could best be used. There were clouds massing again to the north, though the rest of the sky was fair, and David said that in two or three days there would be a change, and we might look for snow. And all the while they eyed each other steadily and hard, with great eyes, but never spoke one word from beneath the guarded surface of their minds. But when the prince went to mount, David himself stooped to hold the stirrup for him, and when he was in the saddle, kissed the hand that held the bridle, and Llewelyn leaned down and kissed him brotherly on the cheek. And then we rode, and did not look back.

  We made south for Bala, crossing the upper Dee, to keep the great bleak ridge of the Berwyns between us and the forces from Oswestry. Not until we were well south of the river, and I was riding in my own place close at his left side, did Llewelyn say suddenly, as an honourable man grieving over his debts unpaid: "I have missed telling him so many things! But doubtless he knows." And no more did he say then of David, but I knew his mind was on the old days before ever discontent and treason came between them, when this youngest was by far the best loved of his brothers, who had after cost him the most loss, danger and grief, and in the end drew close again and made reparation for all, in this final union that not even the fear of death could dissolve. So his evil genius ended loved as he began, and those two were one as never before had they been one.

We kept long, hard marches, and broke into the lands of Griffith ap Gwenwynwyn along with the first snow, about the nineteenth day of November. There we came apparently unheralded, for we were able to help ourselves to the contents of several of Griffith's scattered barns and farms, and drive off a good many head of his cattle, to our great satisfaction, for by then we had cut our rations to the point where most of us were hungry.

  Llewelyn had a little castle at Aberedw, south of Builth, that he had used formerly as a hunting lodge, and though it was on the eastern side of Wye, it was still secure, and as an intelligence base for an army, to be used and quitted as best served, it was excellent. There the prince took up his headquarters for a time, while we probed the state of feeling in the country round, and found friends enough, though they went in fear of the king's men, and reported Builth castle as impregnable, a judgment we accepted. When we came there, young Edmund Mortimer had still not received seisin of his father's lands, though it was granted at last about the twenty-fourth of November, and both the young men were said to be much affronted by the delay, and not at all unsympathetic to the Welsh among their tenants, even though they knew these men willed victory to the prince. In some degree, to be a marcher baron was to understand the passion of sovereign lordship in others, and respect it, as kings were unable to do, who lived by overlordship, and desired to suppress that identity with land that such as Mortimer truly felt, and reduce them to mere custodians for the crown.

  Roger Lestrange had taken over the command at Montgomery after Mortimer died, and John Giffard had succeeded him in charge of the garrison of Builth, that same Giffard who had so long maintained lawsuit over Llandovery in right of his wife, Dame Maud Clifford. As soon as we were sure that both these crown officers knew we were in their territory, we used Aberedw but sparingly, as a base for receiving news and messages, and moved the army westward into Mynydd Eppynt and the hills beyond, and held aloof from the river valleys except when we had good information as to where the English forces were. It was the one thing we could do far better than they could, against such overwhelming odds, this living wild in the onset of winter, and moving on foot at the speed of horses, and double their agility.