The Brothers of Gwynedd Read Free Page B

riding, and all the exercise and company a lively boy loves. Nor did his mother hinder, even when she knew that he was much in favour with his uncle David, who was childless by his wife Isabella. The boy was too young, said his mother, to understand, and could not be guilty of disloyalty to his house, and surely it was well to have one child covered by the protection of royal favour, a warranty against the loss of all, if the greatest must be lost. But I think, knowing or unknowing, she was using this boy to go back and forth in innocence and keep her informed of what went forward at Aber, while she waited for the prince to die. For she knew, none better, that there was a well of sympathy for Griffith's case, and that its time for gushing would not come while the lion yet lived. And she had learned how to wait with dignity, and in silence.
      Yet I am not sure, even then, how right she was to trust in the innocence of her son Llewelyn. For even without art, news can flow two ways. And at what age art and wisdom begin is a mystery, and at what age those who will some day be men achieve the courage and the clarity to judge and choose and resolve, that is a greater mystery. And this was no ordinary child, with no ordinary grandsire. And they namesakes. There is magic in names.
      Howbeit, on the tenth day of April of the year twelve hundred and forty the great Prince Llewelyn, feeling the heavy darkness draw in on him again, and this time believing it an end, had himself conveyed into the abbey of Aberconway, which he loved and had shielded so long, and there took the monastic habit, after the manner of great kings going to their judgment. And wrapped in this blessed cloth he died on the day following, and there his great body lies buried. And doubtless his greater soul has room enough now, even beyond that reach he had in this world. For he was the true friend and patron of the religious, wherever they preserved the purity and austerity of the faith, and whatsoever he did was done with grandeur and largeness of mind, and for Wales, which he loved beyond all things.

    So David ap Llewelyn was Prince of Aberffraw and Lord of Snowdon in his father's room. And in May of that same year he attended King Henry's council at Gloucester, became a knight at the king's hands, after the English fashion, put on the talaith, the gold circlet of his state, and did homage for Gwynedd, pledging himself liegeman of the king of England as overlord, saving only his sovereign right within his own principality. All which had been many times done before, and was no surrender of any part of his due, but his own side of a covenant, of which the reverse was King Henry's sworn acknowledgement of his firm status as prince of North Wales. And the other great magnates of Wales did homage in their turn on the like understanding.
      What did not appear was how wide a gulf yawned between the two conceptions of what that status meant. It was not long before all those lords marchers who had lost land to Llewelyn, however long ago, and all those border Welsh who held themselves aggrieved at surrendering to him commotes and castles forfeited for disloyalty, or taken in open battle, began to resort to law and to force, demanding from David the return of losses they would not have dared reclaim from his father. Thus the earl of Pembroke went with an army, in the teeth of the lord of that cantref, to rebuild his lost castle of Cardigan and plant a garrison there, while lawsuits came thick and fast over Mold, and Powys, and the lordship of Builth, which came legally to David as his wife's dower, but not without all possible resistance from her de Breos kin. Any and every disaffected lord, English or Welsh, who could bring a legal plea for the possession of land lost to the father, fairly or unfairly, turned now to rend the son. And King Henry, always maintaining his good faith in recognising his nephew's status, connived at all the activities of those who were