The Greatest April Fool in History
It’s rarely wise to use superlatives: call a ship unsinkable or a castle impregnable, history has a way of making a fool of you. But Wales’ Conwy Castle truly was impregnable according to the technology existing at the time.
Imposed upon the largest rock in the district, it was intended to be impressive: pennants streaming from the tops of its whitewashed towers, against the backdrop of the Snowdonia mountains, its invincibility was evident to the most naive of peasants. Storming the rock’s vertical cliffs to assault the castle’s thirty-foot high walls was impossible. Siege engines could not get the elevation necessary to smash boulders into its walls. Tunnels could not be hacked through the solid rock upon which the ramparts were founded. Its private, fortified dock rendered starving the garrison into surrender out of the question. It could hold out for years against the most powerful of enemies.
It fell in the time it took to attend an Easter mass.
In 1401, the Welsh were rebelling again. England’s inexorable conquest had been conducted at crippling cost and agonising pace over the previous centuries, but in bankrupting his government with a mammoth programme of castle building, Edward I had more-or-less put a lid on it a century earlier. Now the Welsh seethed under repressive and discriminatory laws, while the English barons who administered them were largely a law unto themselves.
When one of them annexed the lands of one minor Welsh nobleman, Owain Glyndwr, the country exploded. Welsh soldiers deserted; Welsh students at Oxford abandoned their studies; Welsh labourers their fields and tools. All swarmed to Glyndwr’s banner to proclaim him Tywysog Cymru, the Prince of Wales.
Among them, the Tudor brothers, Rhys and Gwilim, Welsh nobility of Anglesey, pillaged the English colonists of north-west of Wales back into their castles. King Henry IV rapidly assembled a punitive expedition to fall on the Welsh like a hammer; but was in practice an absurdity achieving nothing beyond the king’s humiliation, and lending credibility to Glyndwr. Thereafter, in an effort at diplomacy and conciliation, the king offered a full pardon to all except the leaders; the Tudors were leaders.
“A flash in the pan” is an expression that wouldn’t be coined until the invention of the musket, but, the English settlements in north Wales largely ransacked out of existence, the rebellion went quiet over the winter. We don’t know how the Tudors came to befriend the carpenter of Conwy Castle; but with ultimate victory far from guaranteed and facing the prospect of eventual execution once the English had reasserted control, the Tudors hatched a plan to ensure the pardon was extended to them also.
You may be tempted to imagine that a century of quiet (rather than peace) had engendered complacency among the English colonists. April 1st 1401 was Good Friday. Although no Englishman was safe more than a bow shot from the castle’s walls, no substantial body of Welsh rebels existed in the district, so the garrison had gone to mass in the walled town below the castle rock, the castle itself defended by two gatekeepers. The carpenter approached with a couple of apprentices. A regular contractor, it was no surprise that he was asking to be admitted to complete one more task. The surprise was when the carpenters whipped out weapons and stabbed the gatekeepers. When the garrison emerged from the parish church, their castle was bolted and barred against them, and full of Welshmen dancing on the ramparts, hooting insults and baring their bottoms at them.
April Fool.
As a thunderbolt of propaganda, the capture was spectacular. News would inject new vigour into the stagnant insurgency, which would wreak havoc for another six years and make a legend of Owain Glyndwr — “this great magician, damn’d Glendower,” William Shakespeare wrote of him. But the English sense of security had also allowed the garrison to neglect the castle’s reserves. The armoury was less well stocked than it should have been. Worse, the Tudors had made no arrangements to ship supplies to the castle’s walled dock, assuming the cellars would be packed with victuals to sustain a whole garrison for months on end. Much was rotten.
Gwilim Tudor may not have been especially troubled at first. When the legendary knight, Henry Hotspur, took charge of the siege, he did so with overwhelming force. It was probably the first time canon had been used in Wales. Little more than elongated bells, they could be fired no more than once an hour. They caused no significant damage to the castle, and their principle effect was probably psychological, being the loudest noise any of the Welsh defenders had ever heard. Whether they inspired greater terror among the besiegers is questionable. At least one of them exploded, hurling a great cloud of metal shards in all directions, killing everybody in its vicinity.
But Hotspur conducted the siege primarily to pressurise the defenders. Quietly, he recognised that the castle could not be subdued and opened negotiations. The Tudors’ main demand was a simple one: free pardon for everybody involved. Given the ease with which other pardons had been issued, Hotspur readily agreed. Gwilim agreed to let the English have their castle back, and within three weeks, the treaty was off to London for the king’s assent; a formality, everybody was certain.
Henry IV was livid. The Welsh had made him look a chump three times already: first, in having permitted such a serious uprising within his dominion; second, in presiding over a punitive expedition that had been driven “weather beaten and bootless back,” in Shakespeare’s words; again, by the risible capture of one of his mightiest castles, one that contained royal apartments, no less, and had hosted at least two kings. Somebody had to die!
If this was a fly in Hotspur’s ointment, it was a catastrophe for Gwilim. With so much of the castle’s stores inedible, a long siege was impossible. Spring dragged into summer as the garrison became desperate for food, the siege flattening the civilian town. The one thing Gwilim had in his favour was the embarrassment of the English, who wanted to have done with it.
We don’t know how they were selected, but, the castle’s rat population being depleted by the hungry defenders, eight of the garrison were set upon as they slept during the night of the 23rd June, beaten into submission, bound, and the following morning, booted out of the gate. The besiegers hanged them. The king’s face saved, Gwilim and the rest of his comrades fled to the mountains.
As the rebellion gathered pace, the Tudor brothers voluntarily continued their activities for Glyndwr, invalidating the conditions of their pardon. Rhys and Gwilim were eventually both captured and executed. The youngest brother, Meredudd (whose involvement in the rebellion was probably minimal), moved to London where he had a son, Owen. Owen Tudor married Henry V’s widow, Catherine de Valois. They had a son, Edmund. Edmund Tudor’s son was Henry Tudor. Henry Tudor killed Richard III at the battle of Bosworth and was crowned Henry VII. Henry VII’s son was Henry VIII. Henry VIII’s daughter was Elizabeth I. Together, they arguably had a greater influence on the development of the modern British nation than any other two monarchs. The direct descendant of the Tudors is Queen Elizabeth II.
The Tudors had struck their blow. The rebellion had already erupted back into flame. Glyndwr had raised his standard in the west, and triumphed against superior forces in a pitched battle outside Aberystwyth. Throughout the west and south, English settlers were being driven from their colonies back into England, the countryside reduced to cinders and the king’s authority reduced to little more than a few forlorn castles. The kings of Scotland and France would both become involved, supporting Glyndwr. Hotspur himself would defect to Glyndwr. He was killed at the battle of Shrewsbury, where the king’s son, the future Henry V, was also nearly killed by an arrow that flew into his right cheek, pinioned through his mouth and out below his jaw. Had he not survived, the history of England would have been entirely different. As it was, he became the only British monarch to have a portrait painted in left profile, hiding the horrible scarring on the right side of his face. But probably none of it would have happened had Gwilim Tudor not captured Conwy Castle on April Fool’s Day, 1401.
