Owen Glendower

Extract

Owen Glyn DWR has been neglected to a remarkable extent by English historians. The reason is perhaps not far to seek. He belonged to the great army of unsuccessful men; and history has never been kind to failures. He survived in the memory of Englishmen as a character in a Shakesperian play. In so far as he entered at all into serious history, they were content to put him down as an irascible but unpractical Celt, a picturesque bandit, the main object of whose existence was to kill Saxons.

His fate at the hands of his countrymen was little better. Paradoxically enough the battle of Bosworth, which enabled a Welsh king to ride into London at the head of a largely Welsh army, did Wales little but harm. The gentry came to court and became Anglicised : the Reformation which destroyed the monasteries—the cultural centres of the country—completed the process. The patriots were usually papists, and either fled abroad or perished on the gallows. The Act of 1535 avowedly aimed at the extirpation of the Welsh language : and the unpleasant figure of the anglicised Welshman began to appear. In 1567 Dr. Griffith Roberts, the Chaplain of St. Charles Borromeo, and a prominent exile, satirized the type in the preface to his Grammar : ‘their Welsh is Englishfied, and their English, God knows, is too Welshy.’ Morus Kyffin, a fervent defender of the Reformation, wrote in 1595 of a ‘clerical person’ who ‘said that it was not right to allow any Welsh books to be printed.