The Brothers of Gwynedd

by Edith Pargeter

  Enlightened and astonished, I said that she was like to prove the best lawyer we had among us, and that it should be done—out of pure goodwill!

  "In the meantime," she said ruefully, "We have not even a date for the commencement, and be sure he will give his men as long as possible before they must report their findings. Let's use the time to enlist Archbishop Peckham's good offices. We'll both urge his help for Amaury, and if Llewelyn is too proud to plead his own cause, well I am too proud not to."

  So quietly we made ready those pertinent matters that could with best effect be forced upon the commission's notice, and waited for the archbishop to come. It was the second week in June when he rode into Carnarvon, sparsely attended, and for such a prelate with very moderate ceremony, so that at first we thought him personally modest and austere, while in fact he was neither, except in his appetites. Pride he had, and proper respect he would exact to the last grain, but it was not expressed in haughtiness on his part, or demanded as servility from others.

  Friendly and inquisitive I had thought him, and so he was, and well-intentioned towards everyone, but for all that his kindly, sharp eyes could be steely and censorious if any resisted or differed from him, and his smiling, benevolent mouth was tight and obstinate in repose. The most diverse opinions were held of him. Some said he was a true saint, doing his best to follow his Saviour's commandments and tireless in his efforts for those who appealed to him in distress. Others that he would give and serve lavishly such as flattered and grovelled to him, and as readily out with bell, book and candle against all who dared to contradict him. Some revered him as a strong and able administrator and defender of clerical rights, others called him a meddlesome busybody who could not keep his fingers out of anybody's business. Some averred his compassion and sympathy were wide enough to encompass all who came, others said he was prone to favourites, and so narrow that his maledictions were more frequent than his blessings. Some thought he had a gift of delicate understanding which the ungodly could not appreciate, others said wrathfully that the man trampled in heavy-footed where angels themselves would have walked softly. And it can be said of Archbishop Peckham that almost everything ever said of him was true.

  He was of limitless energy, quick and agile in movement, and blew through the corridors of Carnarvon like a brisk wind. In the saddle he looked like a sack of Aberconway wool, but he rode fast and daringly for all that, enjoyed hunting, when he had leisure for it, and here he was removed from his pastoral cares for a while, and Llewelyn saw to it that he had good sport. At the high table in hall he was inclined to turn the talk into one long, benevolent homily, but benevolent it was, and we took it as it was meant. Indeed he made a very good impression, and if his well-meant interference in all manner of things not directly his province was sometimes maladroit, yet everyone accepted it with good humour for its evident kindliness. I have heard that others found him harder to bear, and he was always shocked and hurt at the resentment he could arouse at his worst, hurt as children are hurt when they have made an innocent advance and been rebuffed. We took care not to ruffle him, and not all because we had hopes of his aid. Both prince and princess liked him well.

  In his handling of Bishop Einion he must have been more adroit than usual, and doubtless it was flattering to have the archbishop of Canterbury busily trotting back and forth with soothing words. Also I think Einion in his heart wanted to be reconciled, and was glad to have the excuse of his clear pastoral duty to heed his primate's counsel. For though it took several visits to bring him to terms, he did gradually yield to persuasion, and agreed to compromise on some of the thorny issues that most vexed him, where the rights of church and crown clashed. Llewelyn in turn took conciliatory steps to meet him, and the archbishop, delighted with his success, brought them to sit down together in peace before he left us, and gave his blessing to the accommodation he had helped them to reach.

  He was much interested, while he stayed with us, in Llewelyn's hounds, a strain which the prince himself bred and trained, and as Llewelyn then had a litter of three couple almost ready for the chase, he promised to send them as a gift to the archbishop as soon as their training should be complete. And in the most friendly fashion the primate parted from us, and was escorted by most of the court for the first few miles of his journey home.

  "He has promised to continue his efforts for Amaury," said Eleanor, after he was gone, "and I am sure he will not fail of his promise, for he says the case is to come up in the October parliament. I shall write to Edward and add my own plea. And he seems truly to have some feeling for Llewelyn's cause, and some understanding of his complaints. My complaints," she said, and smiled, "for the prince made none to his guest, but I was not so delicate. The archbishop says he will speak up for us with Edward, and I believe him."

  So, too, did I believe him. For with all the things that were said and were all of them true concerning Archbishop Peckham, one thing I never heard any man say of him. Obstinate, bigoted, crass, often misguided he might be, but he did not lie, and he was never false.

  Llewelyn had not, until then, made any reply to Edward's declaration in parliament. Now he did so, with biting gentleness setting down his pleasure that king and council in assembly had emphasised their wish to keep the treaty of Aberconway in every particular, and to do him right. Then drily he had me list all the particulars in which they did him wrong.

  "Surely three years," he wrote, "should be long enough to settle one simple article, which the very wording of the treaty shows can and should be settled without delay or difficulty, given the will. Unless, by any chance, I have enemies whose interest and design it is to prevent such a consummation?"

  The affair of Robert of Leicester he also appended, for though the king had assured Brother William de Merton that he would order the justiciar of Chester to cease all distraints on Robert's behalf against the prince's goods, nevertheless a further seizure had been made. At which the prince professed a surprise he hardly felt, though he avowed his inability to believe that the current distraint was made with the king's knowledge, and prayed him to reinforce his order to let be.

  "I grow as fluent a liar as Edward," he said, grimacing at the end of this letter. "We are so far apart," he said, suddenly grieving, "and I have a principality to guard and cherish as well as he, and how can I go hunting after him where he goes, to pluck him by the arm and make him face me man to man? When I was in his company, for all his hardness I understood him, and for all his might, I was his peer and we spoke as peers. Now at this distance I have lost him, and I feel that loss."

  The letters flew back and forth that summer, for Llewelyn had many things to complain of, and Edward seemed to feel some guilty need to justify himself. But the first letter that came, soon after the foregoing was despatched to London, was from Archbishop Peckham, sending hearty thanks for his hounds, and for his entertainment in Wales, and that was cheering and helped to balance Edward's long and verbose epistle from Langley, which arrived a week later, again earnestly avowing his good intent to keep the terms of the treaty, but insisting that those terms were not completely clear, and that he must preserve his royal prerogative and do, in this matter, whatever had been customary in similar case in the days of his predecessors. Together with much piety concerning his duty to consult the prelates and magnates of his realm, a course to which Llewelyn should not take exception, since no one could suppose such grave and wise men would give their lord bad advice.

  "since he will have given them the advice first," said Llewelyn, between amusement and despair, "from his point of view that may very well be true."

  In other matters the king was more accommodating, and said that he had ordered the justiciar of Chester to restore the goods recently seized, and to instruct Robert of Leicester to take his case, if he wished to pursue it, to the prince's court, where it belonged, and not to trouble the royal courts again unless he alleged he was denied justice at the prince's.

  "I am heartily tired of law," said Llewelyn in
a great sigh. "I was not cut out for a litigant."

  And still the king had not so much as appointed the members of his commission. Llewelyn could not even hasten to discharge the labours that disgusted him, and be rid of them. Still he must wait, and even the stoutest heart can be eaten hollow by too much waiting.

  In middle August came another letter from the archbishop, long and circumstantial. The prince opened it with curiosity, for he had expected none just then, but read it with disbelief and consternation. Then he called in Master William to view its terms with him, for every sentence rang like an echo of Edward's utterance in parliament. But here that pious apologia was underlined and reinforced by even stronger reservations. In one respect only it showed finer than its example, it spoke in far plainer terms.

  Almost word for word the archbishop repeated that the phrase in the treaty to which we attached so much importance, "according to the laws and customs of those parts where the lands lie," could not be understood otherwise than as meaning the laws and customs by which kings of England had been used to rule those parts in the past, and determine causes arising there. Its sanction could apply only to such laws and customs as were just and reasonable, since the king by his coronation oath was bound to banish from his realm all that were unjust and unreasonable. And here the archbishop went even further than Edward had gone, for he launched out into a long denunciation of certain of our Welsh laws as being against right and against religion. Cases of homicide, which we distinguished from murder, were dealt with in Wales by enforced arbitration to bring the parties to peace, and make reparation for the wrong done, instead of proceeding to summary judgment. God knows we thought this better and more Christian than ploughing ahead to still more killing, but plainly Peckham felt otherwise. However, his main theme was that the king's coronation oath was inviolable, and no subsequent oath such as the sealing of a treaty could make it void. And he made a great virtue of having interceded for us as he had promised, and procured for him the concession—compromise, I believe, was the word used—that such Welsh laws as were just and reasonable should be maintained, to which plea the king had graciously assented. Thus the archbishop laboured to obtain justice for us!

  "This," said Llewelyn, stunned, "this we must look upon as a concession? Do words no longer mean anything but what Edward decrees they shall mean? And am I to believe that this man shut his eyes and ears while he was here with us, and understood nothing? Or has Edward so worked on him since, that he is no more than an echo of his master? No, for he goes beyond Edward! He is prompting Edward to tighten the noose! If it rests with him the laws of Howel the Good will be wiped out wherever the royal writ runs. Thank God it does not yet run in Gwynedd!"

  Both Master William and Tudor spoke out in even stronger terms about this juggling with words, which was as little convincing when it came from Peckham by letter as when Edward pronounced it solemnly in parliament. Either the words "according to the laws and customs of those parts where the lands lie" meant what they said, or no words could be held, with any certainty, to mean anything at all, for all were subject to manipulation at the king's will. Nor did the portion of law to which they applied come within any possible body of jurisprudence offensive to even the most censorious mind. Peckham might object to certain points in our criminal procedure as much as he would, but this was a straightforward matter of rival claims to land, and of the formula by which those claims should be judged. At best the archbishop's partisan declaration was irrelevant. At worst it must be dishonest.

  "No!" said Eleanor. "I cannot think he ever set out to deceive. Even if he did not truly abhor falsity, as I believe he does, he is too sure of his own rightness, too confident all men must agree with him, to be able to dissemble. Too vain, if you will! No, he meant what he said here among us, he has tried to speak up for our case, and believes he has done us service. And he means what he has written now. He has gone back full of zeal to study this law of Wales, and found too many points where it offends his religious rigour."

  "Helped, no doubt, by Edward and all his men of law," said Llewelyn grimly. "I remember very well the terms in which the king spoke at his Easter parliament, as Brother William reported them. You hear the echoes here! Word for word the same, until he goes beyond even Edward."

  "Yes," she said, "I don't deny it. But nowhere has he said that the Welsh way offends where land is disputed. No, truly I believe this is an honest man. He may set his face against Welsh law on certain points, but he will not stand by and see you wronged and deprived where he finds no fault with Welsh law. Even if we must feel that we have an enemy in him, I believe it will be an honourable enemy."

  "I should find it easier to think so," said the prince, "if he had not taken up so wholeheartedly the most specious plea of all—that these few words to which Edward voluntarily set his seal may not mean what they plainly say, because Edward's coronation oath may not be compatible with them. Had he quite forgotten the words of his coronation oath when he set his seal to the treaty? Should it not have been clear to him then whether there might ever be conflict? Whether he ought not to put in some saving clause to cover his duty to his realm? Can you believe that Edward ever worded anything without weighing every letter before he passed and sealed it?"

  "I did not say," she said ruefully, "that Edward need always be an honourable enemy. I spoke only of the archbishop."

  "I am not sure, love," said Llewelyn, reluctantly laughing, "that you are paying Archbishop Peckham much of a compliment. If he is no rogue, then he has swallowed the king's twisted arguments whole, and taken them for honest, and I doubt that makes him a fool. I am not sure which I would rather deal with. Certainly if this is an earnest of his friendship, as he preens himself, it might be better to have him for an enemy."

  "All we can do," she said stoutly, "is to go on putting him to the test. Judge him by his fruits!"

  "So we will," said Llewelyn, and smiled at her. "So we must."

  And at that it stayed, though even she was more saddened than ever she owned. But she would not either lose faith and let hope go by default, nor condemn a man before his deceit was proved beyond doubt.

  It was not until the fourth day of December of that year, when we were once again preparing for the Christmas feast, that Edward at last appointed his three commissioners, the bishop of St. David's, who was keeper of the king's wardrobe, Reginald de Grey, and Walter de Hopton, safe king's men every one, though that was not to say they might not also be just men, however little likely to command much trust within Wales. Their business was to enquire and report, so said the commission itself, by what laws and customs the king's forebears had been wont to rule and judge a prince of Wales or a Welsh baron of Wales in any disputes arising. For this task they were allowed half a year, for their report was not required to be delivered until the fourth day of May of the year following. The places where they were to enquire were appointed in advance, and by whom but Edward? And even had their fourteen questions been drawn up by an unbiased arbitrator—which I doubt—the juries before which they would be used, the witnesses to be called, depended absolutely on the will of the commissioners.

  David did not bring his household to spend Christmas with us that year, for once again Elizabeth was within a month of her time. He came instead for a brief visit in the new year, alone and in no festive mood, for his own affairs proceeded no more favourably than his brother's. He came to me in my copying-room, the evening before he left again for home, and leaned at my shoulder over the parchment I was working on, as many years ago he had leaned, with his blue-black head against my cheek.

  "We all of us posture and dance to Edward's tune like slaves," he said morosely. "Wales is become a prison, where lords and commons alike struggle to maintain their rights against a load of chains. Venables still pursues his case against me for Hope, and in spite of all Edward's pieties, in spite of all the declarations that Hope is Welsh, he's still allowed to pursue it in the Chester shire-court. Llewelyn is still denied Welsh justice over Ar
wystli, on one pretext after another. In the west de Knoville refuses to meet on the border for mutual reparations, as was always done, but summons Llewelyn's bailiffs to him wherever he chooses, out of their own land."

  "Howbeit," I said, "they do not go!"

  "Not yet, but how long before Edward's nagging wears my brother down? He cannot bear this constant haggling and meanness, it is not in his nature. Either he will break, and give in, send his men like servants wherever the king's seneschal calls them—oh, not out of fear or weakness, unless disgust is weakness!—or else he must burst out in revolt, and drive the royal bailiffs out of Wales."

  "He will do neither the one nor the other," I said. "He has only one course open to him, and that is to outlast the king at every turn, in patience, in stubbornness, to hold fast what he has, and go on contending to his life's end for what more he ought to have, and for every point of his right and prerogative. But not in arms."

  "You think not?" said David, and eyed me consideringly along his shoulder. "Not if all the chiefs of Wales outside his own principality, all those who suffer now worse than he does, our nephews in the south, the princes of Maelor and Cardigan—not if all these banded together to complain to him of their wrongs, and begged him to deliver them again, as he did once before? Would he not move even then?"