One Last Hiraeth
Only a few leaves remained on the great oak tree which the old man had instructed should mark the site of his grave. The fever had gripped him for three nights and days: but he was comforted by the presence of his daughters, and their families, standing vigil by his bedside.
They had kept him hidden these past few years: and none had betrayed this most hunted and hated of Welshmen to the English king. His fate would not be that of Owain Lawgoch, last of the ancient line of the House of Gwynedd, assassinated in France by an English spy. Nor would it be like that of Dafydd ap Gruffydd, brother of Llywelyn the Last, who had been dragged through the streets of Shrewsbury, before becoming the first notable person to suffer that most heinous and barbaric of deaths: judicial murder by hanging, drawing and quartering.
No, this Welsh rebel would die peacefully in bed. His rebellion had been the longest and most fiery of Wales’ mediaeval wars for independence, and the one that had come closest to achieving its aim: three years had passed since it had effectively burnt itself out. A new king had come to the throne of England, one who had struck a more conciliatory tone than his perpetually insecure father. Royal pardons had been offered, and had come to the attention of the weary old rebel, but he had scoffed at them. Though his dreams had been shattered, at least he would die a free man of Wales. He would not bend the knee to the new English king, even if the news accompanying the final pardon spoke of Henry V’s great victory over the French on the field of Agincourt.
He peered at the parchment lying across his lap through weary eyes, and chuckled gently. ‘My joints are far too enfeebled to permit me to bend the knee to anyone now,’ said Sychath’s greatest son.
*
Two nights later the final chill had come upon him. On the third evening of fever, he lay abed, gazing up at his three ever-faithful daughters. His sons, alas, were lost to him. His firstborn, Gruffydd, had been taken prisoner by the English, and had died from bubonic plague in the Tower of London three years before. Three of his other four sons - Madog, Thomas, and John - were also dead, or taken captive. Of his sons, only Maredudd remained at liberty, hiding somewhere in the mountain fastness of Gwynedd, reduced to the level of meagre banditry in his continuing futile resistance to the English. None of his sons had sired heirs: the old man knew that, with his passing, the male line of descent from the royal dynasties of Wales would surely fail.
His daughters, at least, were safe. Alys, Janet and Margaret had all found English husbands amongst the gentry of Herefordshire. It was here, in the home of Alys and her husband, Sir John Scudamore, Sheriff of Herefordshire, that the wily old fox had found a final bolthole. If only the young English king knew, that one of his most faithful servants in the Marches, had secretly married the daughter of a Welshman - and the most notorious Welshmen at that! Love is a mysterious thing, pondered the old man drowsily. I’m in the last place the king would think to look for me: and I am safe. If only my beloved homeland could be so!
‘Fear not, Owain,’ spoke an unfamiliar young voice from the crowd assembled around his bedside: ‘We know of the hiraeth you feel. You can rest now. Your labours have not been in vain.’
Who was that who had spoken?
The old man struggled to raise his head - surrounded as it was by comforting pillows - and, concentrating as best he could, tried to focus his uncertain gaze upon the attentive crowd. They looked different, somehow. In place of his daughters, sons-in-law and grandchildren, a strange assembly of figures were standing there. The dress of most of them was unfamiliar, outlandish even. Most - though not all of them - were smiling at him: as if encouraging him, soothing him, by their mere presence. They seemed to be standing slightly apart from one another, as if only half-aware that they were part of a greater company. Their focus was firmly fixed upon him. One of them, he realised, was richly dressed, in a manner not entirely unlike the way he himself had once dressed, at his court at Glyndyfrdwy: though not even at his coronation had he been arrayed as splendidly as this figure was. Here before him stood the imposing figure of a great - if somewhat portly - king.
‘Hail, cousin,’ cried the king, laughing heartily. ‘Rest easy, knowing that the red rose and the white will be united, and the white dragon and the red will wage war no more. The Sons of Penmynydd will sit upon the throne of England. Camelot will rise anew.’
Next to the king, another figure, younger, much slimmer, was also dressed in princely garb, though less sumptuous than that of the merry monarch. ‘Mamma thought a crash course in y Gymraeg and a term at Aberystwyth would suffice to win over the hearts and minds of the Welsh towards their newest prince,’ the young man announced dolefully. ‘But, alas, it takes more than an investiture ceremony in an English-built castle of occupation to achieve that. I may bear the title, for a while: but you were the last true Prince of Wales, old man.’ There was a look of grave respect upon his face, but also deep sadness.
‘They drowned our valley, then stole our water,’ chimed another, bitterly, ‘But we do not forget. Cofiwch Dryweryn.’
‘We laboured in the darkest pit,’ continued a fourth figure, ‘not just us, but for many generations our children.’ His face was blacked, and he was wearing strange headgear, from which a dim but discernible light was radiating out, blending with the glow of the dozen candles flickering across the old man’s bedroom. ‘The dust blackened our lungs, the rocks scarred our bodies. Four hundred of us died beneath the earth in one day at Senghenydd alone. As for Aberfan–’ the man stopped speaking for a moment and swayed silently, as if overcome with emotion, before continuing: ‘But as we toiled underground, we also built the finest communities overground. We became a land of chapel and of song…’
‘And of rugby,’ interrupted a younger man, with a mischievous demeanour. His clothes were different, again, exposing more skin than any of the others, and he was mostly arrayed in red and white. Tucked under his right arm he held a strange elongated bladder-shaped object. But this was no court jester, despite his garb. ‘They sang Bread of Heaven in the stand, and angels wept at their rapture; we played on the pitch, and devils quaked at our determination.’
‘I was determined too,’ said the eldest individual. He had a once-impressive, now thinning head of white hair. He declaimed (somewhat imperiously): ‘I was inspired by Gandhi and King. And by you, of course. I threatened to go on hunger strike if they didn’t give us the Welsh language television channel they had promised us. They gave in. I was President of Plaid for thirty-six years, but that was the crowning moment of my life. Cymru am byth.’
‘And I walked twenty-six miles barefoot over hills and valleys to buy a book,’ said a young girl softly, clad in the traditional chequered shawl that Welsh women had worn virtually unchanged for generations. ‘But not just any book. They called me: y Gymraes fechan heb yr un Beibl. The Welsh girl without a Bible. But my story led to the foundation of societies that would take the word of God throughout the whole world.’
‘And it wasn’t just the Word that went out from Wales.’ This new voice belonged to a smiling sun-drenched brown skinned woman who spoke with a peculiar accent, neither Welsh nor English. ‘The people went too. And they built Y Wladfa, on another continent, remote and cold. But it was home. Buenas noches, dulce príncipe, descansa en paz.’
The bedridden old man could stay silent no more. ‘What manner of words are these?’ Tremulous and rasping though it might be, there was unmistakable awe and wonder in his faltering voice. ‘What portends do they present before my eyes? Visions from hell?’
‘No, not hell. Nor, indeed, of heaven - despite what Gareth Edwards might say.’ There was a languid mocking tone in this new voice. It belonged to the last of this strange crowd, a dishevelled figure with a bulbous nose, and messy hair, who was standing most markedly apart from all the others. ‘He may have been the greatest player ever to don a Welsh rugby shirt: but I’m the wordsmith, the heir to Taliesin, not him.’
‘Taliesen was never described as a roistering, drinking and doomed poet,’ said the imperious elder severely.
‘True, Gwynfor,’ said the younger man. ‘But as for you, Owain: take some small comfort, if you can, from my words. Dead men naked they shall be one / With the man in the wind and the west moon / Though lovers be lost love shall not / And death shall have no dominion.’
‘Romans chapter 6, verse 9,’ said the young girl, and the old man realised that she was the one who had first spoken to him. ‘Worry not for the future of Wales, Owain. The universities, the Senedd, the dream of a people proud and free - it will all come to pass. Because you did not give up, because you remained defiant to the end, we shall not give up either. Cymru am byth.’
‘But who will become prince in my stead?’ The weary freedom fighter gasped, straining heavily with the effort of speaking. These strange interlopers - from another time or place, he could not say - they had to hear his urgent words, even if they were to be his last. ‘The royal Houses of Gwynedd, Powys, Deheubath: I am the last of their lineage. My sons have no heirs. Though we may not not yield to the Enemy, our deepest longings remain unfulfilled. After a thousand years of striving against the invader from the East, what hope remains for the land, for the people, without their prince?’
It was the white-haired elder who responded. ‘We are Meibion Glyndŵr - the Sons of Glyndŵr. All of us. We have no need for princes now. You will never be forgotten, though we know not where lies your grave. What need is there to know where they have buried your body? You cannot bury a dream. In the hearts of your people, you will always remain alive. You will always be our Prince.’
The old man closed his eyes.
‘You will always be our father,’ sobbed Alys. He opened his eyes again, but this time it seemed to him that he was standing there, with his three daughters and their families, looking down upon himself. Of the mysterious visitors, there was neither sight nor sound. He was there, alongside Alys, Janet and Margaret. He was staring down at the body of Owain Glyndŵr, last native-born Welshman to hold the title Tywysog Cymru - Prince of Wales.
*
The next morning, they laid him to rest beneath an English oak tree - the irony of it! The precise spot that he himself had chosen. No gravestone would mark the site of the burial: though six hundred years and more might pass away, and a new millennium come, still his descendants would honour their promise to provide an inviolate sanctuary for Sychath’s greatest son. They stood in silence as the priest intoned the burial rite in Latin. As he concluded the service, a chill east wind whistled through the creaking branches of the tree, and with a sigh the last remaining leaf broke free and fluttered down into the open grave.
Unmarked by the grieving family, nine further onlookers - muses and witnesses from the future for which he had laid the foundations - watched as the final deed was done. They also said nothing for an age, waiting until the mourners had dispersed. Then at the last one of them turned his gaze heavenward. Slowly, in his deep sonorous voice, he said:
‘When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone / They shall have stars at elbow and foot / And death shall have no dominion.’
***
Commentary:
Owain Glyndŵr was descended (through the male line) from the Princes of Powys, and (through the female line) from the Princes of Gwynedd and Deheubath: the three main principalities of mediaeval Wales. His rebellion (1400-1415) was the most protracted and most nearly successful of all the Welsh wars of independence waged in the Middle Ages. Although it sounds extraordinary that ‘Wales’ most wanted man’ was able to spend his final years in seclusion just across the border in England, there’s good grounds for believing the story to be true. Descendants of his daughters continue to be around today (most notably the descendants of John and Alys Scudamore).
The nine characters from Owain’s future are King Henry VIII, second king of the Tudor dynasty that was distantly related to Glyndŵr; Prince Charles of Wales (now King Charles III), seen musing on the mixed response to his investiture as Prince of Wales in 1969 at Caernarfon Castle; a witness to the drowning of Tryweryn, a Welsh village destroyed to create a reservoir in 1965 to provide water for England, acting as a spur to Welsh nationalism; a coal miner who reflects on the mining disaster in Senghenydd (1913), the greatest industrial accident in British history, and the Aberfan disaster (1966), the collapse of a colliery spoil tip in Wales on a primary school; Gareth Edwards, widely acknowledged as one of Wales’ greatest rugby players in the 20th century; Gwynfor Evans, President of the nationalist party Plaid Cymru, whose threatened hunger strike was instrumental in securing the launch of a dedicated Welsh-language television channel, S4C, in the UK in 1982; Mary Evans, a 16-year-old girl whose determined quest to obtain a Bible of her own in 1800 led a few years later to the foundation of the British and Foreign Bible society; a descendant of the Welsh colonists who settled in Patagonia from 1865 onwards; and Dylan Thomas, the most famous Welsh poet of the 20th century (here speaking lines from his poem ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’, inspired by Romans 6:9). Why nine? Because they’re Muses, of course.
Various Welsh words and phrases are peppered throughout this piece, which functions as a companion-piece to my last effort, ‘The Dragon’s Son’. The most significant of these is ‘Hiraeth’ - a Welsh word that is difficult to translate into English, the nearest approximations being ‘longing’ or ‘homesickness’. The title here - ‘One Last Hiraeth’ is also a play on the English phrase ‘One Last Hurrah’ - which this is, of course, for Owain.
Owain Glyndŵr was born at Sycharth in North Wales in 1354. His burial site (probably in 1415) remains unknown to this day. Unless - perhaps - you’re a Scudamore.