Llywelyn ap Gruffudd

Llywelyn ap Gruffudd was born about 1220, a grandson of Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, the ruler known as Llywelyn the Great who had dominated native Wales in the early thirteenth century ^[1]. His father, Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, was the elder but illegitimate son of that great prince, and under the settlement Llywelyn ab Iorwerth arranged, the succession to Gwynedd passed instead to a younger, legitimate son, Dafydd ap Llywelyn. Gruffudd's exclusion left his own four sons, Owain, Llywelyn, Dafydd, and Rhodri, with uncertain prospects in a divided dynasty ^[2].

The family's misfortunes deepened during Llywelyn's youth. Gruffudd was held prisoner, first by his half brother Dafydd and later by King Henry III of England, and in 1244 he fell to his death while attempting to escape from the Tower of London on a rope of knotted sheets ^[1]. Anyone asking who was Llywelyn ap Gruffudd before his rise should picture a landless younger son of a dead prisoner, dependent on his uncle's favour in a principality under heavy English pressure.

Despite these handicaps, Llywelyn earned early notice. Unlike his elder brother Owain, who spent years in English custody with their father, Llywelyn remained in Wales and served his uncle Dafydd, gaining military experience during the fighting against Henry III in the mid 1240s ^[2].

Dafydd ap Llywelyn died childless in February 1246, and Gwynedd passed jointly to Owain and Llywelyn, the two eldest of Gruffudd's sons. The brothers inherited a weakened land. By the Treaty of Woodstock in 1247 they surrendered to Henry III the Perfeddwlad, the four cantrefs of Gwynedd east of the River Conwy, and held the remainder as vassals of the English crown ^[3].

Joint rule did not last. When their younger brother Dafydd came of age and pressed for a share, Llywelyn refused any further partition of an already reduced inheritance. Owain and Dafydd combined against him, and in June 1255 Llywelyn defeated them both at the battle of Bryn Derwin. He imprisoned Owain, who would remain in captivity for more than twenty years, and took sole control of western Gwynedd ^[1].

Opportunity followed quickly. In 1256 the Welsh of the Perfeddwlad, resentful of royal administration, appealed to Llywelyn, and he swept east of the Conwy, recovering the four cantrefs in a matter of weeks ^[3]. Over the next two years he pushed into Meirionnydd, Ceredigion, Powys, and the south, exploiting Henry III's financial troubles and the growing baronial opposition in England. By 1258 most of the native lords of Wales had done him homage, and in that year he began to style himself Prince of Wales, a title no ruler had used with such wide practical authority before ^[2].

The central item in any list of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd achievements is the Treaty of Montgomery, sealed on September 29, 1267. After a decade in which Llywelyn had aligned himself with Simon de Montfort and the baronial party during England's civil wars, Henry III came to terms. The treaty recognised Llywelyn as Prince of Wales, granted him the homage of almost all the native Welsh lords, and confirmed his territorial gains, in return for his own homage to the king and a payment of 25,000 marks in instalments ^[4].

No previous Welsh ruler had extracted such formal recognition from an English king. Llywelyn's principality stretched from Anglesey deep into the middle March, and his supremacy over lords who had previously answered directly to the crown gave native Wales, briefly, something close to a single political structure ^[3]. Historians treat the years around 1267 as the high point of the medieval Welsh polity, the moment when a feudal principality of Wales seemed a durable possibility ^[5].

Llywelyn also worked to make the principality an institution rather than a personal conquest. He drew revenues on a scale his predecessors had not managed, maintained a chancery, negotiated as a European prince, and defended the customary law of Wales, the law of Hywel Dda, as the proper law of his lands in disputes with royal officials ^[2].

Llywelyn married late, and his choice of bride was itself a political statement. Around 1275 he arranged to marry Eleanor de Montfort, daughter of Simon de Montfort, the dead leader of the baronial revolt, and a cousin of the new king, Edward I. Edward regarded the match as a provocation. When Eleanor sailed from France in 1275 or 1276, her ship was intercepted off the Scilly Isles and she was held at Windsor for roughly three years ^[6].

Only after Llywelyn's submission in 1277 did Edward release her. The couple were finally married at Worcester Cathedral on October 13, 1278, with the king himself present and, by several accounts, meeting part of the cost of the feast ^[6]. The marriage appears to have been a settled one, and Eleanor acted on occasion as an intermediary between her husband and the English court.

Their only child, a daughter named Gwenllian, was born in June 1282. Eleanor died giving birth to her. After the fall of Gwynedd later that year, the infant Gwenllian was taken by Edward's officers and placed in the Gilbertine priory at Sempringham in Lincolnshire, where she lived as a nun until her death in 1337, never returning to Wales ^[6].

The accession of Edward I in 1272 changed Llywelyn's position fundamentally. Llywelyn repeatedly failed to appear to perform homage to the new king, citing genuine grievances: English sheltering of his enemies, including his own brother Dafydd and Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn of Powys after a plot against his life in 1274, and encroachments on his lands ^[4]. Edward treated the refusals as rebellion. In 1276 he declared Llywelyn a rebel, and in 1277 he marched a large army along the north Wales coast while a fleet cut off the grain harvest of Anglesey.

Outmatched, Llywelyn submitted. The Treaty of Aberconwy in November 1277 stripped him of almost everything gained since the 1250s. He kept the title Prince of Wales and the heartland of Gwynedd west of the Conwy, but the four eastern cantrefs went to the crown and to Dafydd, and the homage of nearly all the other Welsh lords was transferred to Edward ^[3].

War returned in 1282, and not at Llywelyn's choosing. On the night before Palm Sunday, March 21, 1282, Dafydd attacked Hawarden Castle, and revolt spread rapidly across Wales in reaction to the conduct of royal officials ^[5]. Llywelyn, whatever his hesitations, put himself at the head of the rising. Edward answered with a war of conquest rather than correction. In the autumn, negotiations conducted through Archbishop John Pecham offered Llywelyn an English earldom in exchange for surrendering Gwynedd; he refused, replying that his council and people would not permit him to abandon a land his family had held since antiquity ^[4].

In early December Llywelyn moved south to raise support in mid Wales. On December 11, 1282, near Cilmeri close to Builth Wells, he became separated from the main body of his force and was killed by English troops in a skirmish connected with the fighting at Orewin Bridge on the River Irfon. Accounts differ on the exact circumstances, but the sources agree that his killers did not at first realise who he was ^[1]. His head was cut off, sent to Edward, and displayed on a spike at the Tower of London ^[5].

Llywelyn's death broke native Welsh resistance. Dafydd carried on the war for some months before his capture and brutal execution at Shrewsbury in 1283, and by the Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284 Edward annexed the principality to the English crown, ringing Gwynedd with the great castles of Caernarfon, Conwy, and Harlech ^[5]. In 1301 Edward conferred the title Prince of Wales on his own heir, beginning the practice that continues in the British monarchy.

In Welsh memory Llywelyn became Ein Llyw Olaf, Our Last Leader. The court poet Gruffudd ab yr Ynad Coch composed a famous elegy on his death, a lament in which the natural world itself seems to convulse at the news, and the poem remains one of the most studied works of medieval Welsh literature ^[7]. A granite memorial stands at Cilmeri near the spot where he fell, and commemorations are held there each December.

Modern scholarship, above all J. Beverley Smith's full length study, presents a ruler of real administrative and diplomatic skill whose project was undone by the resources of a far larger neighbour and by divisions within his own family ^[2]. Among the enduring Llywelyn ap Gruffudd facts is a simple one: no native ruler after him ever held the title he made real. For readers of any Llywelyn ap Gruffudd biography, his career remains the essential account of how an independent Wales was won, recognised, and lost within a single lifetime ^[3].