King Edward had bought over PRINCE DAVID,Llewellyn's brother,by heaping favours upon him;but he was the first to revolt,being perhaps troubled in his conscience.One stormy night,he surprised the Castle of Hawarden,in possession of which an English nobleman had been left;killed the whole garrison,and carried off the nobleman a prisoner to Snowdon.Upon this,the Welsh people rose like one man.King Edward,with his army,marching from Worcester to the Menai Strait,crossed it-near to where the wonderful tubular iron bridge now,in days so different,makes a passage for railway trains-by a bridge of boats that enabled forty men to march abreast.He subdued the Island of Anglesea,and sent his men forward to observe the enemy.The sudden appearance of the Welsh created a panic among them,and they fell back to the bridge.The tide had in the meantime risen and separated the boats;the Welsh pursuing them,they were driven into the sea,and there they sunk,in their heavy iron armour,by thousands.After this victory Llewellyn,helped by the severe winter-weather of Wales,gained another battle;but the King ordering a portion of his English army to advance through South Wales,and catch him between two foes,and Llewellyn bravely turning to meet this new enemy,he was surprised and killed-very meanly,for he was unarmed and defenceless.His head was struck off and sent to London,where it was fixed upon the Tower,encircled with a wreath,some say of ivy,some say of willow,some say of silver,to make it look like a ghastly coin in ridicule of the prediction.
David,however,still held out for six months,though eagerly sought after by the King,and hunted by his own countrymen.One of them finally betrayed him with his wife and children.He was sentenced to be hanged,drawn,and quartered;and from that time this became the established punishment of Traitors in England-a punishment wholly without excuse,as being revolting,vile,and cruel,after its object is dead;and which has no sense in it,as its only real degradation (and that nothing can blot out)is to the country that permits on any consideration such abominable barbarity.
Wales was now subdued.The Queen giving birth to a young prince in the Castle of Carnarvon,the King showed him to the Welsh people as their countryman,and called him Prince of Wales;a title that has ever since been borne by the heir-apparent to the English throne-which that little Prince soon became,by the death of his elder brother.The King did better things for the Welsh than that,by improving their laws and encouraging their trade.Disturbances still took place,chiefly occasioned by the avarice and pride of the English Lords,on whom Welsh lands and castles had been bestowed;but they were subdued,and the country never rose again.
There is a legend that to prevent the people from being incited to rebellion by the songs of their bards and harpers,Edward had them all put to death.Some of them may have fallen among other men who held out against the King;but this general slaughter is,I think,a fancy of the harpers themselves,who,I dare say,made a song about it many years afterwards,and sang it by the Welsh firesides until it came to be believed.
The foreign war of the reign of Edward the First arose in this way.
The crews of two vessels,one a Norman ship,and the other an English ship,happened to go to the same place in their boats to fill their casks with fresh water.Being rough angry fellows,they began to quarrel,and then to fight-the English with their fists;
the Normans with their knives-and,in the fight,a Norman was killed.The Norman crew,instead of revenging themselves upon those English sailors with whom they had quarrelled (who were too strong for them,I suspect),took to their ship again in a great rage,attacked the first English ship they met,laid hold of an unoffending merchant who happened to be on board,and brutally hanged him in the rigging of their own vessel with a dog at his feet.This so enraged the English sailors that there was no restraining them;and whenever,and wherever,English sailors met Norman sailors,they fell upon each other tooth and nail.The Irish and Dutch sailors took part with the English;the French and Genoese sailors helped the Normans;and thus the greater part of the mariners sailing over the sea became,in their way,as violent and raging as the sea itself when it is disturbed.
King Edward's fame had been so high abroad that he had been chosen to decide a difference between France and another foreign power,and had lived upon the Continent three years.At first,neither he nor the French King PHILIP (the good Louis had been dead some time)interfered in these quarrels;but when a fleet of eighty English ships engaged and utterly defeated a Norman fleet of two hundred,in a pitched battle fought round a ship at anchor,in which no quarter was given,the matter became too serious to be passed over.
King Edward,as Duke of Guienne,was summoned to present himself before the King of France,at Paris,and answer for the damage done by his sailor subjects.At first,he sent the Bishop of London as his representative,and then his brother EDMUND,who was married to the French Queen's mother.I am afraid Edmund was an easy man,and allowed himself to be talked over by his charming relations,the French court ladies;at all events,he was induced to give up his brother's dukedom for forty days-as a mere form,the French King said,to satisfy his honour-and he was so very much astonished,when the time was out,to find that the French King had no idea of giving it up again,that I should not wonder if it hastened his death:which soon took place.
