The Brothers of Gwynedd

by Edith Pargeter

  "You could," said David, "if you would. Where else can they look for help? Where else can we, all of us, look for leadership, if not to you? I tell you, there is not a chieftain in the whole of Wales outside your realm who is not groaning and raging under his wrongs, and burning to rise and avenge them. They come to me now with their complaints, as I am coming to you. Day after day new outrages, new exactions, new offences against the law and custom and order of our lives. And the treaty promised us we should enjoy our own manner of life unmolested! Now it has gone beyond oppression. Men of mine, men I valued, have been done to death, who by Welsh law would have been alive this day."

  That story he told, and after it, his tongue loosed and his thoughts racing, many another such story from many another cantref. "I have been busy these last weeks," said David passionately, "putting together the grievances of all my own tenants and chiefs, yes, and all the men of Rhos and Tegaingl, too, who have no Welsh lord to whom they can go for help. And I've ridden the length and breadth of Wales and talked with the princes of Maelor and Cardigan, and our nephews in Iscennen. Do you want to hear what your sometime vassals cry against England?"

  "Go on," said Llewelyn. "I am listening."

  David drew breath and began. It was a long recital, man by man, lawsuit by lawsuit, distraint by distraint, delay upon delay, offence piled on offence against the laws and customs of Wales that had been guaranteed to us by treaty, and were safe now only within Llewelyn's domain. Old allies of his brother now spoke through David's mouth, their young nephews cried out in David's voice, while that voice grew steadily larger and calmer and more princely in authority. And Llewelyn watched and listened with a still face and patient eves as David spoke for the nation of Wales, he who had been a dangerous obstacle to achieving that nationhood. For it was a national cause he argued, and he knew it, and knew the irony of his pleading, before the brother whose life-work he had helped to frustrate. His face burned to the brow, as if he heard within his own mind all those words Llewelyn forbore from uttering. But he would not turn back.

  "And your wrongs," he said at the end, and his voice shook for a moment. "Those, too, I know. Do you need to be reminded?"

  "No," said Llewelyn, "I need no reminders."

  "It is not only Arwystli. It is not only these robberies in Chester, nor the crude devices to delay justice, nor the border raids that are still countenanced, when you have paid the money due from you promptly every year, to the last mark. No, it is the manner and insolence of Edward's usage in all things. He has his officers order your men to appear before them wherever they choose, instead of meeting on the borders as was always done aforetime. He makes use of the most detestable of his Welsh renegades to visit your court and conduct his minor matters of business with you. Oh, saving the arch-renegade of all," said David, turning crimson but with unflinching eyes, "David ap Griffith—who is no longer available.…"

  "Hush!" said Llewelyn, stung and reproachful. "This I will not hear!"

  "No, I pray you pardon me, I had no right. Such things I should say only to myself, never to you who never have said them to me, and never will say them. But I do not forget, and I can feel the keenest pain when such a man as Rhys ap Griffith is sent into your court at Aberffraw with the king's authority, and feels free to insult you in your own house -"

  "He paid for it," said Llewelyn equably. For that bout of insolence had cost Rhys a hundred pounds sterling to quit him of the prince's prison.

  "He paid," said David. "Edward has yet to pay. What manner of man would be so blockish and unfeeling as to send him to you? This is how he approaches us all. He tramples on every soreness and every bruise." He drew breath, wearied and drained, and flung himself down in his chair. "Well, I have done, I have told you."

  "And what," said Llewelyn, "do you want from me?"

  "You are the prince of Wales. Where else should we go with our wrongs? Knowing that you also have yours? I want you to tell us, all of us, what we are to do, and what you mean to do."

  "I mean," said Llewelyn, "to go on pressing every issue with the king, resisting every encroachment at law as best I can, and bearing what I have no choice but to bear. There are realities by which you are bound, as well as I. There is not one of us but must sleep in the bed he made. I am the prince of what is left of Wales. I was the prince of a greater Wales, but when the testing came I had not done my work well enough. I failed Wales, and Wales failed me. These men who come to you now with their complaints, and bid you carry them to me for remedy, how many of them fell away from me then, to keep their own little plots of land safe? How many were willing to sue for Edward's peace rather than lose their small inheritance to preserve Wales? How many betrayed Wales? Now, because they do not like the rule they were glad to accept then, they send you to urge on me an action that could only be a second and final ruin. What they want now is what they wanted then, to preserve their own small rights. David, never think this is a sudden, miraculous, united Wales you are offering me, the nation I wanted then and long for yet. These are still only a thousand little divided souls clinging desperately to their own privileges and their own lands, and seeing nothing beyond. As they turned from me to Edward, when he seemed best to promise them security, so now they will turn from Edward to me, now they are looking for another saviour. Oh, I do not hold them so much to blame. They are not yet ready to be a nation. But they are the reality with which we have to reckon. There is no salvation there. Not yet!"

  "Nor ever," said David, stiffening again in desperation, "unless we deserve and fight for it."

  "Not yet, believe me, however well we deserve, however valiantly we fight. We have seen what Edward can do, even if he beggars himself in doing it. The same he could do again, and more. Never think Edward does not learn from experience. If Welshmen took arms now, Wales would be lost for ever. He would not halt for awe of a winter campaign, next time, nor waste six months on calling out his feudal muster. He would hire and buy, and bring ships and men from France, and take in archers and lancers at his wages. Welsh archers among them," said Llewelyn, with sharp and sorrowful bitterness, and smiled ruefully at his brother, but David was mute. "What I want for Wales," said the prince, "goes far beyond anything that could be gained now. That was my failure, that I tried to go too fast. The time for my vision is not now—not yet."

  He waited, and David had nothing to say, but sat steadily gazing at his brother, and his face as withdrawn and resigned as his brother's.

  "But you are right," said Llewelyn, answering what had not been said, "that is not my reason for enduring still, and urging endurance upon you. All I have said is true, but as at this moment it is of small consequence. For the truth is, David, that this Wales that I long to see will never be won by my hand, unless time and God loose my hand. I am bound in honour and fealty to Edward, and to the terms of the treaty I made with him."

  "Which he has broken," blazed David, "by small means, like a mouse gnawing, a hundred times over, and laughs at you for keeping it."

  "No," said Llewelyn immovably, "for however I may overrate Edward, Edward knows and does not underrate me. If in the end I must despise him, as I pray God I never need, he will never be able to despise me. No, Edward may take every advantage, wring out every delay, he may well desire to laugh as he does it, smoothly parrying every letter I write to him, but he will not be able to enjoy his gains. He may discard his honour, if he so pleases. He will not be able to sever me from mine."

  "In the name of God!" said David, pale with passion but very still. "Knowing Edward as you now know him, this giant of meanness, this great prince utterly without greatness, this monster who knows only one loyalty, to Edward, and acknowledges only one treason, against Edward—dear God. have I not reason to know it, who took my treason into his arms twice, and found a welcome for it there?—knowing all this, you hold fast to your oath and seal for his sake?"

  "No," said Llewelyn gently and patiently. "No way for his sake. All for mine."

  I went out with David w
hen he left his brother that night, so softly, with such a chastened face and quiet voice, after such submissive avowals of his own dues owed to Edward, and such resigned acceptance at last of the rightness of Llewelyn's stand. I followed at his shoulder by night along the corridors of Aber, and waited for him to speak. And he had nothing to say. He was out of words, having spent so many. Also he was very weary, much of his own strength also spent in the struggle he had lost. Since he did not at once go in towards his own apartment, but turned along the stone passage and went out into the darkness of the inner ward, I went with him, and he did not send me away, but slowed to bring me abreast of him, and laid his arm about my shoulders as we came out under the stars. A night of clear frost it was, we could see the glitter of rime along the crest of the wall, and hear the steely ring of the watchman's heels on the guardwalk above the postern gate. The sound drew David's gaze, and in the faint starlight I saw his face again sharp with remembrance.

  "I see he keeps it guarded now, as well as barred," he said, deliberately probing

  his old wounds and mine. "God put a moat about it, that night. As well to be sure. There will never again be anything to fear from me, but who knows, there may be other Davids at large." He turned his head suddenly, and stared into my face. "You are still unsure of me, Samson, own it! You may, without penalty. I have not been notable for constancy. If you think I may still play him false or work to his harm, say it openly."

  Truth to tell, many a time I had asked myself that same question, and found no certain answer. Yet when it was he who asked, I found myself clear in mind, with no need to hesitate.

  "No," I said, "I do not believe you will ever forsake him again. For better or worse, you said, he had won you. I never knew you to mean anything as solemnly as you meant that. But time and chance and a single moment of anger or folly may still work to his harm, even against your will."

  "And you do not trust my temper or my wisdom," said David, without resentment. "I think you trouble needlessly, seeing I am no vassal of his now, and nothing I do reflects on him—even though you may know, as I know, that at heart I am more his vassal now than ever in life I was before. My formal fealty is to Edward, and with Edward I have to deal, whether I keep it or break it. But if you need reassurance, I swear to you, Samson, I will not take one step before me, write one word, or so much as open my mouth, without weighing the consequences to Llewelyn and to Wales. Tongue and temper I'll watch, if you'll credit me I can, and for his sake above all. There, are you content?"

  No question but he was in grave earnest, and I could not doubt him. On that note we parted and went to our beds. And from that night he made no more mention of the discontent that boiled through Wales, but came out of his abstraction and was very good company, merry without fever, even-tempered, resolute and amenable, as though he had put off a shadow. And when they left us to return to Denbigh, he kissed his brother and made his goodbyes with a bright, quiet, cloudless face, and a particular and solemn affection.

  Cristin, carrying Elizabeth's youngest girl, warmly wrapped in woollen shawls, gave me her hand through the curtains of the litter, and drew eased and thankful breath as she watched him mount.

  "He speaks now of taking up his men's case at law, since they were seized in land which is Welsh, even if it is not part of the principality of Wales. Not that a blood-price will bring them back, but at least it will provide for their families, and go some little way to vindicate and avenge them. And who knows, perhaps help to protect others who may get embroiled in the same way at Chester market. He may even consider appearing the next time he's called to the shire-court, if only to claim Welsh law and fling out again, as he did once before. By Welsh law he is not yet in default. And yet," she said, drawing her slender black brows together in frowning wonder, "does this sound like David to you?"

  "He has promised," I said, "to do nothing without considering its prudence, for the prince's sake."

  "As a judge of what's prudent," said Cristin, reluctantly smiling, "David is likely to prove the most perilous justice on any bench. Yet it's something if he'll make

  the attempt."

  He was away out of the gates then, Elizabeth riding with him for the first few miles, and after them went the litter with its nest of furs, and the little rosy girl half-asleep in Cristin's lap. I watched until a hand waved from between the curtains at the gate, and then they were out of sight, and we were left to turn our attention once again to the long struggle, courtly in more senses than one, that showed now so urgent a face.

  I think I had not fully realised how urgent, until I was at Llanfaes on Llewelyn's business, towards the end of January of that year twelve hundred and eighty-two, and Brother William de Merton spoke to me of his great disquiet at the way the prince was being treated, and told me, in confidence, that he had ventured to write directly to the king a strong protest and a stronger warning, urging the damage that must be done to relations between Wales and England if the injustices continued. For the prince, he said, had faithfully kept his side of the treaty, and had great occasion for complaint at the delays and obstacles impeding his lawsuit over Arwystli, since these clearly constituted a breach of the terms of the peace, just as the distraints made on behalf of Robert of Leicester infringed the prince's sovereignty in his own lands, the merchant never having brought suit in Wales, as he should have done. As Archbishop Peckham had brought his weight to the king's support, so Brother William came sturdily to the defence of Llewelyn's right, and that unasked, out of his concern for the peace, in part, but most of all for justice.

  Llewelyn and Eleanor were at Nevin, in Lleyn, at that time, and thence the prince also sent a long, considered letter to Edward, protesting at the Chester distraint, and requesting the release of the detained goods. Then he came to the matter of Arwystli, strongly contesting the latest device for delay, and demanding a just remedy.

  "For your Grace may be assured," said Llewelyn in conclusion, "that in this matter we are far more concerned at the humiliation to ourselves than about any profit that can possibly accrue to us from the impleaded land."

  For all its force it was not a letter composed in anger or despair, but in stern dignity, and for all its admission that he recognised and resented the humiliation put upon him, it was a proud and princely letter, a reproof from one monarch who kept treaty strictly, to another who misused it. We did not then know it, but it was the last letter the prince of Wales ever wrote to the king of England. He thought of it then rather as a new beginning, setting out the ground on which he was prepared to fight with fresh heart for his son's inheritance, but certainly not to imperil it.

  By the same courier Eleanor also wrote to her cousin. It was the second day of February, and she was in the fifth month of her pregnancy. But she still had time and thought for those unfortunates of her former household who remained prisoners after so long. One John Becard, as she had recently heard, had been pardoned and released at the entreaty of one of the king's magnates, and though she was glad he should have his freedom, it hurt her that her own frequent pleas for him should have been passed over, and his liberty restored only at someone else's instance. And so she told the king roundly. It was to me she dictated that letter, and though I do not recollect it word for word, after all this time, I have the gist of it by heart for ever.

  Somewhat thus it went:

  "I should be glad to have some word from your Grace, and beg you to send me news of how you do. I have been surprised and grieved that your Grace allows my husband, the prince, to be annoyed by this merchant who still persecutes him, for as the prince is ready to show justice to every comer, according to the laws and customs of his land, I find it strange that credence should be given to such a complainant, before ever he has brought suit in the prince's own court, where this case by right belongs. I beg your Grace to give us a just remedy in this affair. I have also heard that certain of my men, captured with me, have been restored to your peace through the pleas of others, when I myself have often petitioned y
our Grace on their account, and have not been heard. I had not thought I was so estranged from you that you would turn a deaf ear to my prayers, and rather restore these men to your peace for the sake of others. Howbeit, by this writing I once again pray your Grace to receive to your peace Hugh de Pomfret, Hugh Cook, and Philip Taylor, for since these are poor men, and English, it will be easier for them to make a living here in England than elsewhere, and it would be cruel to send them into exile from their own land.

  "Dated at Nevin, on the feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin."

  "Now take heart," said Eleanor, when these letters had been despatched, "for if Edward opens his prison at my urging, we may receive it as an omen of good. His grip is tight indeed, but one by one we have won my men out of his hold, and if he lets these go, then I'll press again for Amaury. They have suffered long enough, all of them, for the crime of escorting me to my marriage."

  It was in this spirit that they waited, so immovable in their resolve to hold station, and neither give way a step nor encroach a step, that I had to recall the grave and ominous face of Brother William de Merton before I could truly assess that point to which we were come. And within two weeks, as though heaven itself could not deny Eleanor her will, we received word that the three men she had prayed for had been granted their pardon and set free, at the instance of the princess of Wales.