Once upon a time, there was a young Welshman called Llywelyn. His father was a prince, but the prince was unwell and died when his two sons were still young. Their mother remarried and took the boys to live at her new husband’s manor in Shropshire. Although Llywelyn’s step-father was a good man and kind to him, Llywelyn never forgot who his true father was and that he was a prince of Gwynedd. However, his uncles had stolen his inheritance and split it between them. So, aged just fourteen, he set off to north Wales to seek his fortune. By the time he was nineteen, he had been recognised as the rightful heir to his uncle, Gruffydd, and he was close to defeating his other uncle, Rhodri. While he was in Gwynedd, he met a beautiful young woman called Tangwstyl Goch with flaming red hair. They fell in love and he took her to live with him in his palace of Aber on the Menai strait, and there she bore him a son, Gruffydd, but she died in childbirth, leaving Llywelyn grieving. Needing to give his child a mother, he married Joan, the daughter of King John. And they lived happily ever after.
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| Statue of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth at Conway |
That’s the official story, anyway. The truth is a little different.
And it's the story as much of three men as it is a Welsh prince and an English princess.
Sometimes, History goes wrong. Sometimes, matters that one would think couldn’t ever be forgotten are and, sometimes, in their place, a fiction is inserted to make sense of something that has long passed out of memory. That is what has happened here.
If you haven’t read the excellent novel by Sharon Penman about Llywelyn Fawr—Llywelyn the Great—Here Be Dragons, you should. There are many other excellent novels and non-fiction about Llywelyn which say the same thing; grab one of those. It’ll make what I’m about to say more powerful and, maybe, more shocking.
I think we all fell in love with Llywelyn as painted by Ms Penman, but I am going to shatter some illusions now—all these books that talk about Tangwstyl are wrong.
It’s actually quite hard to conclude other than Ms Penman did, and countless other writers and historians beguiled by Llywelyn, if you have a cursory look around the internet, and God, forbid, Wikipedia, to come to any other conclusion that Llywelyn had a mistress called Tangwstyl who was Gruffydd’s mother. She’s everywhere.
The problem is, Tangswtyl Goch was a bloke. The only contemporary or near contemporary—if you think 130 years is near contemporary—mention of anyone called Tangwstyl in relation to Llywelyn, was a man. He’s described in a survey of Denbighshire from 1336; a parcel of land called Llannefydd was mortgaged to Llywelyn by ‘his friend called Tangwsyl Goch’ ‘amice sue nomine Tanguestel Goch’, amice being a male form of the Latin for ‘friend’. The Tangwstyl myth first appears somewhere between the 1560s and the 1840s, and JE Lloyd isn’t clear when either, in his 1910 book History of Wales.
This leaves a gap. If there was no romantic mistress Tangwstyl Goch, then we have a child without a mother—Gruffydd, the moody, perpetually angry son of Llywelyn.
So, how do we tell what’s going on, and how do we know which version is real? That’s a question I have asked myself, but the clues were there to be found, just, it seems, no one wanted to look, until recently when a historian called Paul Martin Remfry did just that.
There’s a reference in JE Lloyd’s History to a letter of Innocent III discussing a marriage between Llywelyn and a sister of Ranulf of Chester. If Lloyd was aware of that, he should have been aware of the rest of the contents of that letter. That’s where the detail on the mother of Gruffydd is found.
The Innocent III letter is one of three concerning the same group of people, namely, a prince of north Wales, a girl and her father. The most relevant and informative is the third of the three. It is dated 16th February 1205 at St Peters, aka the Vatican. The others are from 1199 and 1203. In this 1205 letter, we learn about the daughter, Rhunallt, of King Reginald of the Isles, i.e. the Isle of Man, and it explains she had been first betrothed to Llywelyn in around 1192 or before, when she was about ten. Nothing much had happened, she remained on the Isle of Man, he remained in Gwynedd. Then, he decided, instead, to pursue a sister of the earl of Chester. This sister is unnamed, and the letter says they were married. While Llywelyn was otherwise occupied with his Chester bride, his uncle, Rhodri, decided he also wanted to marry Rhunallt, and accomplished this in June 1192, without Llywelyn’s knowledge. Rhodri died in 1194, leaving Rhunallt widowed, aged around twelve. Llywelyn was, by this time, single again, and he again approached King Reginald for Rhunallt’s hand in marriage, notwithstanding she had been his aunt. She was around thirteen. By 1199, Llywelyn was worried the marriage wasn’t legitimate because of her previous involvement with Rhodri and the issue of age in 1192, and he approached the pope to get a pronouncement that it was legitimate. It was granted, though the pope was not entirely convinced she was either over-age when Llywelyn and Rhodri both tried to contract marriage with her (nine was the lowest the pope would allow without special dispensation) and he was also unsure that Rhodri had not shared her bed and had thus consummated the marriage and, by so doing, made her as close as blood to Llywelyn and thus not a legitimate bride. In this letter, the pope states Llywelyn believed the clerics who had previously said the marriage was sound didn’t know ecclesiastical law, and got it wrong. So, satisfied the marriage was illegitimate for all these reasons, he dissolved it.
Several matters are brought up by this dissolution. First and foremost, Llywelyn’s son Gruffydd went overnight from being his father’s heir to being nothing. His anger and animosity towards his half-brother Davydd, son of Llywelyn’s second (third?!) wife Johanna, makes perfect sense whereas it had seemed just rather petulant as a son of a mistress. Llywelyn shattered the accepted Welsh norm that sons inherited regardless of the status of the relationship between the parents, as long as the father recognised the son and the son was fit to inherit (note Adda, Llewelyn’s younger brother who was deemed otherwise and remained far from politics, and happily so). Llywelyn’s position was tricky. Under Welsh law, he had to split Gwynedd into two on the birth of Davydd because Gruffydd had absolutely been acknowledged. But he understood the catastrophic consequences of splitting Gwynedd into two with the English king now focussed almost entirely inwards and without the distraction that the continental empire had offered his predecessor, Richard. Llywelyn couldn’t maintain Gruffydd as his heir as the eldest son and slight the grandson of King John. So, the only way to make Davydd his heir was to disinherit Gruffydd by switching to the Anglo-Norman tradition of the succession of the eldest legitimate son regardless of fitness to inherit.
In 1226, Llywelyn, with Henry III, his brother by marriage, sought papal dispensation to legitimise Johanna, making Davydd’s position stronger. Anger that Llywelyn didn’t do that same for his own son, seemed like sour grapes from Gruffydd, if he were merely the son of a mistress, but in context of his mother being his father’s twice-papal-approved wife, his animosity towards Llywelyn and Davydd is wholly understandable and expected.
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| Johanna, Lady of Wales |
On a brief note, the name of King John’s illegitimate daughter – she’s always referred to in the history books as Joan, but the Latin in the documents that refer to her use Iohanna which is much closer in spelling to the medieval spelling for John – Jehan. There was a spelling Jehanne but the Latin is quite specific.
[It sits alongside Lowelino, Henr and David – I’m rather enjoying the scribe’s struggle with the Welsh name of Llywelyn.]
Secondly, what happened between 1199 and 1205 for Llywelyn to change his mind so dramatically? 1203 begins with Llywelyn being so certain he wanted his marriage legitimised, he asked the pope again, after the favourable response of 1199, and was again granted his wish, with the pope saying that he doubted it was legitimate, but he allowed it as it settled a previous dispute between Gwynedd and the Isle of Man. Remember, he’s asking for the marriage to continue. The papal response is date 19th April 1203, and a letter to Innocent was sent at the very, very least, a month before that, likely many more. It took one month to get to Rome, at least, and we have no idea how long the pope deliberated or how long it took for him to question those clerics mentioned, ones based in England and Wales. It may have been as long as six months before.
The letter sent by Llywelyn takes a month to reach Rome. The pope sent several to England—another month, probably two assuming he didn’t react straight away (the marital concerns of one prince of a small territory on a small island in the north of Europe wasn’t going to be very high on his agenda); replies have to be sent, probably fairly quickly because it is the pope asking, so we’re up to four months realistically. Another to think and write a response—the pope is a busy man—a final month to reach Wales. So, Llywelyn was acting to shore up his marriage around October 1202.
It is unlikely Llywelyn and John had discussed the potential of an English princess for Llywelyn before he sent to Innocent in the second half of 1202, the question he is asking doesn’t reflect that—he isn’t trying to extract himself from the marriage but to put it further beyond doubt. It is possible, by spring 1203, he had reported back to John that, despite the papal approval, there were cracks in his marriage that could break it open, leaving him free to marry Johanna. Llywelyn got his response probably around mid-May, and John’s actions in Ellesmere are dated in the letters patent as 27th May 1203, time enough for an urgent communication between Llywelyn and John, even allowing for John to be in Rouen, around eight day’s rapid ride away.
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| King John |
By early 1205, Llywelyn had set in motion the dissolution of his marriage to Rhunallt. Allowing for time for letters to be sent to and from Rome, he must have begun his deliberations and then acted on them in the second half of 1204, 1204 being the year King John lost Normandy, and turned his attentions to his actual kingdom, now the family ducal lands were gone. He returned to England at the end of 1203 and didn’t leave again until June 1206. A combination of discussions between Llywelyn and John and John’s presence in England seems to have sparked off the annulment.
Llywelyn’s marriage was annulled in the document dated 16th February 1205. Llywelyn would have found out around a month later, let’s say end of March to allow for slower travel due to winter weather over the Alps, lengthening the journey time from a month to around six weeks. He married Johanna in mid-April 1205. It appears to be rather rushed; unseemly haste, maybe. Plans had to have been settled before February 1205—there wasn’t time after—and it’s likely it was done by the autumn of 1204. Llywelyn had to have been pretty certain the marriage was doomed, once he himself cast doubt on it in a letter to the pope, and there had to be a compelling reason to throw away a nine-year marriage and the healthy son and heir resulting from it. He had to be well aware of the perils of begetting an heir, being so close to Ranulf of Chester who had no issue whatsoever from two marriages with women proven to have borne children. Llywelyn can’t have written to the pope to obtain the annulment without already being assured of the hand of Johanna.
All of this rather tarnishes his romantic image. Not only was he apparently trying to transact a marriage with an under-age girl, he broke it off when someone else came along, only to go back to her when that ended. He then cast her off for a second time when yet another, better, prospect was handed to him, and that marriage appears to have been agreed while he was very much still married to Rhunallt.
That is one view, and it may be that Llywelyn was the architect of his own fate. But it is possible he was less so. How much choice did Llywelyn have in the matters of his marriages? Surrounded by people with interests in whom he married, was Johanna foisted on him? We can never know, but it is possible.
Rhunallt gave birth to Gruffydd in 1198, which ties in with Llywelyn trying to shore up the marriage a few months later, possibly under pressure from clerics who were questioning its legality and, therefore, that of his heir. It is possible he truly didn’t want to lose Rhunallt. He returned to her once they were both free again in 1194. It could be seen he went to great lengths to try to save his relationship twice, in 1199 and 1203. The age difference was only nine years, and attitudes to younger girls were not the same as they are now—note that no one questioned the right of Rhodri to consummate his marriage with the young Rhunallt, only the fact of it.
Maybe, the marriage to the sister of Ranulf of Chester had been orchestrated by Ranulf, a large, powerful neighbour, applying pressure, linking the two territories together and hadn’t been Llywelyn’s particular choice. Ranulf was heirless after a ten-year marriage; maybe he had designs on Llywelyn, who he reputedly liked. We can know Llywelyn had cared for the marriage to Rhunallt, if not necessarily Rhunallt herself, from the 1199 papal intervention, and the discussion with the pope of 1203 must be seen to be him underlining the right of the marriage to shut up his detractors. The presence of John in England through 1204 may have pressured Llywelyn. He only ever came as close to Wales as Bridgenorth, Shropshire, but he was in almost constant motion and could pop up almost anywhere.
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| Ranulf de Blondeville, earl of Chester |
What is striking is that two of the men closest to Llywelyn—politically, and socially—had both perfected the art of disposing of an unwanted wife. In 1199, both John and Ranulf had their own ten-year marriages annulled: John’s marriage to Isabella of Gloucester was annulled, leaving him free to marry the twelve-year-old Isbella of Angoulême a year later; Ranulf’s marriage to Constance of Brittany, widow of Geoffrey of Brittany and sister-in-law to John, was annulled by Constance, leaving Ranulf free in October 1200 to marry Clementia, widow of Alain de Vitre, Siegneur de Dinan, and former mistress of King John. These two influential men knew it was not just possible to extricate one’s self from a marriage, they also knew exactly how to do so. That these two men did influence him can be seen in his marrying the daughter of one and being such a close friend of the other—the Chronicle of the Abbey of St Werburg in Chester records that Llywelyn came to Chester in 1220 to see Ranulf the day he returned from crusade. Ranulf’s heir, his sister’s son, John the Scot, son of the earl of Huntingdon, married one of Llywelyn’s daughters. And, of course, the marriage between Llywelyn and Ranulf’s sister in 1192.
There is another twist which, again, may point to pressure brought to bear on Llywelyn – Ranulf of Chester’s new wife of 1200, Clementia, just happened to be Johanna’s mother.
Factor in that Ranulf refused to sign Magna Carta in 1215, we can see this is a little triumvirate, spoiled only by John’s aggression towards Llywelyn from 1210 onwards. It is worth noting that Llywelyn did add his name to Magna Carta.
So, we can find the romantic prince in the story told by Innocent III; it all depends on what you believe the motives of those involved were. Llywelyn was either a cad or a man caught in a net cast by a bored and bruised king who enjoyed meddling with the pope and a close neighbour he couldn’t refuse. I personally believe he was strong enough to have dictated his own destiny, and as much as I would like him to be the hero, he was a successful man of his times, and marriage in the noble classes was rarely contracted for romantic reasons. There appears to have been no wholesale censure of him for his actions, suggesting it was nothing unusual nor particularly frowned upon. I do think he may have been influenced by those around him to accept that marriages were not necessarily for life; the presence of King John and Ranulf of Chester can’t be coincidence and the marriage to Johanna made perfect sense.
There is an interesting side point here about King John and his second marriage. We are led to believe the nobles of England and France were up in arms about his taking to wife a twelve-year-old girl. That sentiment is absent in the letters of Innocent concerning Llywelyn, Rhodri and Rhunallt. So, just maybe, it was a case of finding anything that could be used to criticise John, rather than a genuine sense of horror or disgust at his actions concerning Isabella.
There’s one more surprise in store for lovers of the romantic Llywelyn ap Iorwerth – he wasn’t called ‘Great’. There is a single reference from the time of Edward I of a Llywelyn Fawr, in relation to a charter that was being re-confirmed after a fire destroyed the originals. It confirmed a grant to Beddgelert priory of certain lands. However, those lands didn’t belong to Llywelyn ap Iorwerth to grant to anyone, but to a different Llywelyn, one referred to as ‘Magni’ meaning, in his case ‘senior’ as he had a younger brother bizarrely also called Llywelyn. Llywelyn ap Iorwerth was only ever called that, or Llywelyn of Gwynedd, Llywelyn of north Wales, by everyone, including the bards who were the treasurers of the stories which were passed down to those who finally wrote them down in the sixteenth century. I suppose, that we accept the moniker, proves we believe he was a great man to have stood up to King John and maintained an independent Gwynedd until his death on 11th April 1240.
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My grateful thanks go to Peter Martin Remfry who
presented much of this research. To the authors of the ‘Itinerary of King John’
project; to those who taught me Welsh history at Aberystwyth university –
Professor R. R. Davies and Dr John Beverely Smith. And to Sharon Penman, who
sent me there in the first place.
