Part 2 (1/2)

David of Snowdon held out in the wilds of the mountains for a few months, and at last was arrested and sentenced to a traitor's death.

With Llewellyn's death Wales became and has remained ever since, part of the kingdom of England. English laws were established, and the barbarous Welsh laws abolished. The country was divided into s.h.i.+res and hundreds on the English model. Strong castles were built at Conway and Caernarvon; and at the latter in 1284, Queen Eleanor gave birth to ”the Prince of Wales, who could not speak a word of English,” as his father said when he presented the future Edward the Second to the Welsh chieftains. A tradition has existed that Edward completed the pacification of Wales by a ma.s.sacre of the Bards. In spite of that very familiar quotation from Gray's Ode,

Ruin seize thee, ruthless king!

one is thankful to know that modern historians have proved this terrible accusation to be a mere fable; besides it is a fact that from the time of Edward to that of Elizabeth, the productions of the bards were so numerous as to fill more than sixty volumes in quarto.

Meantime the Abbey had been yearly growing in beauty. Edward the First added to his father's building. On his return from the crusades he brought from France the slabs of porphyry, the precious marbles, which still help to make his father's tomb one of the most gorgeous monuments in the Abbey. He filled the Confessor's Chapel with trophies of his wars--the dagger with which he was wounded at Acre--the Black Rood of St. Margaret and the Stone of Fate from Scotland. But these were all given in later years. What we have to do with were certain trophies of the Conquest of Wales.

While the king was still engaged in quieting down his new princ.i.p.ality, his eldest son Prince Alfonzo, named after his grandfather Alfonzo of Castile, came journeying back to London. He brought with him Llewellyn's golden crown, said by tradition to have belonged to King Arthur, also jewels and ornaments, and possibly the precious Crocis Gneyth (or Cross of St. Neot) which certainly was brought to the Abbey from Wales during Edward the First's reign.

The little lad who was twelve years old, came with these treasures to Westminster; and he offered up Llewellyn's crown and the jewels in the Confessor's Chapel, where ”they were all applied to adorn the tomb of the blessed King Edward.”[18] We can fancy the boy, dressed after the fas.h.i.+on of those days in chain armour from head to foot with a long flowing cloak, accompanied by a great train of knights and n.o.bles, wending his way up the solemn Abbey with his offerings, and gravely hanging up the crown in the Sanctuary of the English Kings.

There is indeed something to touch one's imagination in this act--the hand of the innocent boy putting the finis.h.i.+ng stroke to the great struggle between the British and Anglo-Saxon races. Henceforth they were to be one. The proudest t.i.tle of the heir to the English throne was to be ”Prince of Wales.” The Plantagenets were to reign over Arthur's mysterious realm, till two hundred years later Arthur and Llewellyn's descendants, the Tudors, should sit on the throne of England.

But Alfonzo's short life was nearly at an end. Matthew of Westminster goes on to say: ”This Alfonzo died this year, being about twelve years of age--dying on the nineteenth of August, on the day of St. Magnus the king, and his body was honorably buried in the Church of Westminster, near the tomb of St. Edward, where it is placed between his brothers and sisters, who were buried before him in the same place.”

The exact spot where Alfonzo lies is uncertain. Bur Mr. Burges, writing in Sir Gilbert Scott's _Gleanings from Westminster Abbey_, makes a happy suggestion, which I like to think is a correct one. When all England was mourning for Henry the Fifth, a chantry where daily ma.s.ses were said for the repose of his soul, was built over his tomb at the extreme east end of the Confessor's Chapel. The heavy stone step on which his tomb rests was laid upon, and nearly covered, a flat monumental slab in the mosaic pavement. The part of the slab which projects beyond the step is worn down by hard usage into a mere ma.s.s of gray stone. But Sir Gilbert Scott thought that if a bit of the superinc.u.mbent stone was raised, some portion of the more ancient monument might exist beneath. He therefore cut a square block out of the step, and underneath it, sure enough, found the remains of a fine Purbeck slab. It was inlaid with a bra.s.s cross, bra.s.s letters ran around the edge, and what heralds call ”the field” was filled with gla.s.s mosaic. Four letters of the inscription remain on each side--most likely part of the words ”_pries pur l'ame_.”[19] This monument is generally said to commemorate the infant son of William de Valence. Mr. Burges however suggests that it is just as likely to be the tomb of Alfonzo; and as it would exactly correspond with the position in which Matthew of Westminster says he was buried, I think we may safely conclude that the young prince lies there.

Near by in the Chapel of St. John the Baptist there is a very beautiful monument to a little nephew and niece of Prince Alfonzo--Hugh and Mary de Bohun. They were children of his sister Elizabeth and of the powerful and resolute Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, who more than once opposed Edward the First in measures which he thought hurtful to the kingdom.

”This gentleman and his sister,” as one of the Abbey historians calls the children, died about 1300; and their tomb stood at first in the Confessor's Chapel. It was removed from thence by Richard the Second to make room for his own monument, and placed in the Chapel of St. John the Baptist, where it is half buried in the wall.

Young Alfonzo, the bearer of the trophies of the conquest, sleeps peacefully enough here at our feet, while we tell his part in the growth of England. But what memorial remains in the nineteenth century of the last hero of the Britons--the ”Eagle of men”--the ”Devastator of England.” The Golden Crown that Alfonzo hung up disappeared from the Abbey at the Reformation, when sacrilegious robbers broke in and carried off the silver head from Henry the Fifth's monument, and many another treasure. At Builth a modern house is built over the ”Lord of Snowdon's”

grave. While at the ”Llewellyn Arms,” a little inn close to the spot where he fell, some local artist has made a rough copy of the well-known picture of Napoleon crossing the Alps do duty on the signboard as a portrait of Llewellyn ap Gruffyd.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] Edward the First, Hammer of the Scots, is here. Keep the Pact.

[16] ”Green's Short History of the English People,” p. 155.

[17] Green, p. 162.

[18] ”Matthew of Westminster.”

[19] Gleanings. p. 138.

CHAPTER III.

JOHN OF ELTHAM.

Just within the gate of St. Edmund's Chapel lies the figure of a young knight in full armor. His hands, in their jointed gloves, are folded in prayer. His head, with the front of his helmet open to show the face, is gracefully turned to one side. His feet are crossed against a lion--a creature full of life, who looks round watching his young lord's placid face.

Who is this fair young knight, deemed worthy of a place in what Dean Stanley loved to call ”the half-royal chapel, full of kings' wives and brothers”?

He is Prince John of Eltham, son of Edward the Second, created Earl of Cornwall by his brother, Edward the Third, who lies in state on the other side of the ambulatory.

Prince John was born on Ascension Day, 1315, at Eltham in Kent, ”where our English kings had sometime a seat.” The second son of Edward the Second and his wicked wife Isabella of France, the poor baby came into the world in sorely troubled times. The year before his birth his weak and worthless father had been hopelessly defeated by the Scots under Robert Bruce at Bannockburn. And during the young prince's short life England was a prey to war without, intrigue and revolution within. The whole of Edward the Second's reign is a confused record of public and private strife. A horrible succession of famines laid waste the land. A fresh campaign against Scotland ended in a humiliating truce for thirteen years. The Queen, Prince John's mother, on pretence of concluding a treaty between her husband and her brother, King Charles the Fourth, carried off Prince Edward, a child twelve years of age, to France. There she was joined by her vile favorite Mortimer; and neither threats nor entreaties could persuade her to return until she landed at Orwell in 1326 with a great following of exiled n.o.bles, and proclaimed her son Edward ”guardian of the realm.” Deserted by all, her wretched husband was at last captured in Wales and carried to Kenilworth, where he was deposed by the Queen and Parliament in 1327. He died a few months later, murdered by Mortimer's orders at Berkeley Castle.