A Book of North Wales. Baring-Gould Sabine

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      Wales is supposed to have provided a grandmother to queens Mary and Anne, a pot-girl, who married the brewer whose tubs she scoured, so soon as his wife died. But the story is as apocryphal as that of the smuggling into the palace of James II. of a surreptitious Prince of Wales in a warming-pan.

      The Protestant party got up this latter scandalous fable, and Mary of Modena and the Roman Catholic faction retaliated with the tale of the Welsh pot-girl.

      The story was this. It was confidently asserted that the wife of the celebrated Lord Clarendon was a bare-footed Welsh lass who had gone to London for service and found employment as a “tub-woman” to a brewer and publican there, who subsequently married her, and on his death bequeathed to her a large fortune. As the succession was disputed by his relations, she sought the professional assistance of the lawyer Edward Hyde, who introduced her to his family, and his son Edward married her. She became the mother of Anne, whom James Duke of York married. Her granddaughters Mary and Anne wore the crown.

      But the story is contradicted by facts. Edward Hyde, who became Earl of Clarendon and High Chancellor of England, married Anne, daughter of Sir George Ayliffe, knight. Six months afterwards she died of small-pox, and childless. Then he married Frances, daughter of Sir Thomas Aylesbury, knight, and by her became the father of Mary and Anne.

      Burke, in his Romance of the Aristocracy, tells the story somewhat differently. He makes the pot-girl marry Sir Thomas Aylesbury, by whom she had a daughter Frances, who married Edward Hyde.

      But this story also breaks down. For it is certain that the wife of Sir Thomas Aylesbury was the daughter of Francis Denman, rector of West Retford, and widow of William Darell.

      As far as can be ascertained there is not even a substratum of truth in the story.

      Carnarvon lies at a little distance from the old Roman town of Segontium, or Caersaint, as the British called it. The river that flows into the sea beneath the castle walls is the Seiont, or Saint. It was here that resided Elen the Road-maker, daughter of Eudaf, chieftain of Erging and Ewyas, who married the usurper Maximus, called by the Welsh Maxen Wledig. This Roman general was raised to the purple by the legions in Britain in 383. He was by birth a Spaniard, and had acquired a reputation under the elder Theodosius in a campaign against the Picts and Scots in 368.

      According to Welsh tradition he was a humane ruler, who showed favour to the native British. Unfortunately for himself and for Britain, Maximus did not content himself with recognition as king in Britain, but aspired to be emperor in Rome. He assembled a large army of native levies, prepared a fleet, crossed the Channel. His wife’s brother or cousin, Cynan Meiriadog, a ruler whose home was near S. Asaph, threw in his lot with him, and led to his assistance the flower of the youth of Britain.

      Maximus established himself at Trèves, and his wife, who was a pious woman, gave up the imperial palace there to be made into a church. At Trèves she has been confounded with Helena, mother of Constantine, who never was there at all. This misconception has been made to serve as a basis for the myth of the “Holy Coat,” the seamless robe of Christ, which she is supposed to have brought from Jerusalem and to have given to the church of Trèves, where it is preserved as an inestimable relic and exposed at long intervals. Maximus was finally defeated and killed at Aquileia in 388. His followers dispersed, and Cynan Meiriadog and his young bucks never saw again their native land. “Britain,” says Gildas, “was thus robbed of her armed soldiery, of her military supplies, of her rulers, of her vigorous youth who had followed the footsteps of the above-mentioned military tyrant, and who never returned.”

      What became of Elen after the death of Maximus can only be inferred. Probably she escaped from Trèves and came back to her native Wales. She has been credited by the Welsh with the great paved roads that traverse the Principality in all directions, and they bear her name as Sarnau Helen.

      The noble castle of Carnarvon was begun by Edward I., and is picturesque, but not equal to Conway. In it Edward “of Carnarvon,” who succeeded to the throne, was born. He was invested with the Principality of Wales after the extinction of the race of Cunedda in blood.

      Visitors are shown a room in the Eagle Tower as that in which Edward first saw the light; but this tower was not erected till later, though the castle itself was begun in 1284. It was not completed till 1322. There had, however, been a fortress here before, erected by Hugh the Wolf, or the Fat, Earl of Chester. This Hugh and his namesake, the Earl of Shrewsbury, were unsparing in their cruelties to the Welsh. If Hugh of Chester was a wolf in his ferocity, he was a fox in guile. He inveigled the king of Gwynedd into a conference, then treacherously imprisoned him, and the king languished in a dungeon for twelve years, to 1098. Hugh was sister’s son to William the Conqueror, who delivered over Wales to him to rifle at an annual rental of £40.

      Gruffydd, king of Gwynedd, escaped in 1098, and at once threw himself into Anglesey. The two Hughs marched against him from Carnarvon as their base, and entered Mona. What had happened before, and was to happen again and yet again, occurred now. At the supreme moment Gruffydd flew to Ireland, and Anglesey was at the mercy of the two Hughs. They set to work to destroy the crops, burn the houses, and slaughter the inhabitants in cold blood, after all resistance had come to an end. When weary of killing, they tore out the tongues, scooped out the eyes, and hacked off the feet and hands of the peasantry, out of mere lust of torture.

      It so chanced that at this juncture a Viking fleet appeared off the coast, under Magnus Barefeet of Norway, and Hugh the Fat of Chester and Hugh the Proud of Shrewsbury advanced to the coast to oppose the landing of the Northmen. On board the king’s ship was Magnus of Orkney, a pious, feeble youth. The Norse king bade him arm for the fight.

      “No,” replied the young man, “I will not hurt those who have not hurt me.”

      “Then go down, coward, into the hold,” said Magnus Barefeet wrathfully. The young prig took his psalter and obeyed. And as the battle raged above him, his voice could be heard above the din of arms repeating the psalms.

      The two earls were on the coast near Beaumaris, where it shelves into the sea, riding up and down urging on their men.

      “Then,” says the Icelandic Saga writer, “King Magnus shot with his bow, but Hugh was clad in armour, and nothing was bare about him save one eye. King Magnus let fly an arrow at him, as did also a Halogolander at his side. They both shot at once, one arrow struck the nose-screen of the helm and glanced aside, but the other entered the earl’s eye and penetrated his head, and that was afterwards recognised as the king’s arrow.”

      When the shaft struck him, Earl Hugh leaped into the air. “Ah, ha!” shouted King Magnus, “let him skip.”

      The Hugh who fell was Hugh of Shrewsbury.

      The Norsemen came ashore, but finding Anglesey already ravaged, re-entered their boats and spread sail.

      The Magnus who would not fight, but sat in the hold singing psalms, is he to whom the cathedral of Kirkwall, in Orkney, is dedicated.

      From Bangor, Plas Newydd, the seat of the Marquess of Anglesey, may be visited. The grounds are fine, and there is good timber in the park, but the house is naught. More interesting is Plas Côch, a fine example of an Elizabethan house, built by Hugh Hughes, Attorney-General in the sixteenth century.

      In the grounds of Plas Newydd are two cromlechs, or rather what the French would call allées couvertes. They are prehistoric tribal mausoleums, and are perhaps the finest in the Principality. The cap stone of one is 14 feet long by 13 feet broad, and from 3 to 4 feet thick. There are vast numbers of cromlechs in Anglesey, but year by year sees the number decrease. By the Highway Act of William IV. (1835) the road surveyor may enter on any waste or common and dig and search for stone and remove the same. He СКАЧАТЬ