whether his men had taken the bridge, and he said, 'Yes.' 'Then,' said the Prince, 'I pass not, if all the power of England were upon the other side.' But suddenly, behold the horsemen about the grove; and as he would have escaped to his men, they pursued him so hard that one Adam Francton ran him through with a staff (?), being unarmed, and knew him not. And his men being but a few, stood and fought boldly, looking for their Prince, till the Englishmen, by force of archers, mixed with the horsemen, won the hill, and put them to flight. And as they returned, Francton went to despoil him whom he had slain; and when he saw his face he knew him very well, and stroke off his head, and sent it to the King at the Abbey of Conway, who received it with great joy, and caused it to be set upon one of the highest turrets of the Tower of London. This was the end of Llewellyn, betrayed by the men of Buehlt, who was the last Prince of Briton's blood who bore dominion and rule in Wales."

At

Carte, in his General History of England, speaks only of the hand being cut off, and he adds that the corpse of the Prince lay for some time unburied. The friends of Llewellyn naturally desired to deposit the remains of their unhappy master in consecrated ground. But how could such burial be granted to a rebel who, dying unrepentant, lay there unsanctified by absolution? length one with pious fraud and convenient memory-or it would have served him sooner-affected to remember, what indeed was not unnatural, that the Prince, ere he yielded his last breath, had asked for a priest. This circumstance was reported to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the charitable prelate accepting the request of

Llewellyn as a sign of his repentance, accorded the prayed-for absolution; and with maimed body, but not with maimed rites, the last of the British princes of the blood of Cadwallader the Blessed was appropriately interred.

The prophecy is still repeated, if not believed, that the Ancient Britons will not recover their freedom till they have brought back the bones of the old King from Italy. But this is a prophecy which is not likely to disturb the peace of the wearer of the crown of England, nor of the young heir thereto who bears the old title of Llewellyn-Prince of Wales. It would be as difficult to discover the bones of Cadwallader, as it would be to select a number of pure-blooded Britons sufficient to carry anything that remains of that monarch of blessed but sorrowful memory.

BORN 1284. DIED (KING) 1327.

THE tide of the Welsh war rapidly ebbed after the death of Llewellyn, but a huge wave would occasionally rush and shatter itself into spray against the bulwarks reared by Edward I. expressly to check and break such assailants. Before the storm had quite lulled, the King manifested his sense of security by leaving his daughters, Eleanor and Joanna, to keep their little court in some Welsh castle alone, under ordinary guard, but with such good look-out as to insure the uninterrupted conveyance of supplies.

very

Pennant calls Caernarvon Castle the magnificent badge of his countrymen's subjection. This palace-fortress, the shell of which reflects honour on the names of its various architects, was commenced, by order of the King, in 1282, and was completed in about forty years. As portions were finished, they were inhabited; and, in 1284, a legend says that Edward's consort was brought there for the purpose of working out a political end which the astute King had in view.

Hitherto he had been unlucky in his sons. He had had three, but two were dead; and the infant Alphonso, surviving in the early part of 1284, was in such poor health that he too passed away before the year itself had died out. On the other hand, the Princess Royal,

Eleanor, was at this time a handsome and healthy girl, reckoning in age just a score of years. Even in the lifetime of her sickly brothers she had been designated by Edward as his successor. But the sceptre was not destined, in this instance, to go to the distaff.

The Welshmen are reported to have longed for a native prince as vicegerent of their royal conqueror. The Queen of England was, in good old English phrase, in the family-way; and when she gave birth to a prince in such room as could be prepared for such an event in Caernarvon town, if not in Caernarvon Castle,* men speedily learned why the place was selected for such an achievement. When the messenger arrived at Rhudlan Castle, where Edward was residing, on political business, and announced to him that his Queen had given birth to a boy at Caernarvon on the preceding day, the 25th of April, 1284, Edward, in his joy, made a knight of the messenger, stuffed his pouches with gold pieces, and gave him house and lands to enable him to support his new dignity becomingly. Subsequently, after reaching Caernarvon, on which city he conferred the first English charter of rights and privileges granted in Wales, he assembled there certain leaders of the Welsh people who had clamoured for a native prince. If the legend be true, they were not very acute Welshmen to be caught in the trap laid for them by the King, who, after receiving from them the expression of their willingness to submit to a prince born within the country, of blameless life and free from prejudices, proceeded to the Queen's chamber, and, taking the infant prince in his

The "Eagle Tower," said to be the birthplace of the Prince, was not yet in existence.

arms, brought him to the Welsh chieftains, claiming their allegiance to him according to promise.

A local tradition, picked up by Prince Pückler Muskau, states that when Edward, with the infant in his arms, approached the Welshmen, "he presented to them his new-born son, exclaiming, in broken Welsh, 'Eich Dyn' that is, 'This is your man!"" The verbal translation is simply "Your man!" and the expression would have been exceedingly appropriate, considering the occasion. The German traveller believes that these words were subsequently corrupted into Ich Dien, which is more questionable, and will have to be inquired into in a subsequent chapter.

The christening of the young Prince Edward was of the very gayest. He was held at the font by Anian, Bishop of Banger. Never had officiating prelate a more royal and liberal fee for performing such an office. The King, so to speak, heaped upon him manors and regalities, in various parts of Anglesea and Caernarvon, adding thereto the ferries of Borthnan and Cadnant, over the Menai, which contributed no little increase of revenue to the bishop. Such a christening fee (which is duly recorded in a manuscript presented to the British Museum, in 1844, by the governors of the Welsh School) had never before been presented to a prelate admitting a young prince into the Church of Christ, but the liberal example set by the jubilant and grateful Edward has never since been followed.

Speedily after this remarkable christening, the Prince was removed from Caernarvon to Conway, thence to Chester, and subsequently to London,-all by easy stages of some threescore miles in a fortnight. Of his