26 JUNE 1915, Page 38

FIFTEENTH-CENTURY WALES.*

THE importance of the part played by Wales and the Welsh in the Wars of the Roses receives in this book, for the first time, a full and careful historical investigation. Mr. Evans adds to our knowledge, not only of the Civil Wars, but also of the foreign wars of the fifteenth century, for he devotee a chapter to the Welsh warriors who fought for Henry V. and Henry VI. in France, and throws fresh light upon the dis- tinguished career of Matthew Gough, a soldier whose name occurs frequently in contemporary reeords, but is not to be found in the Dictionary of National Biography. His exploits show the conmge and daring, If not the high mind and the knightly spirit, of his great nineteenth-century Irish namesake, whose family, renowned in the annals of the were of this and the last three generations, was originally of Welsh descent.

Mr. Evans begins his proper subject with a narrative which historians usually reserve for the concluding stages of their account of the Wars of the Roses. "Kate of France," the bride who was won by the conquests of Henry V., was left a widow at the age of twenty-one, and, some four or five years later, she was secretly married to Owen Tudor, a Welsh gentleman. They lived together for some years and had three sons and a daughter. Then the Government stepped in and separated them, sending Owen Tudor to Newgate, and the Queen-Dowager to Bermondsey Abbey, where she died at the age of thirty-five. Her eldest Tudor son, Edmund, was created Earl of Richmond by his half-brother, Henry VI.; he died young, and his wife, the Lady Margaret Beaufort, the future benefactress of Oxford and Cambridge, was a widow and a mother at the age of fourteen. Edmund's brother, Jasper, also received a peerage from Henry VI., and became Earl of Pembroke.

When the Civil War began the Yorkist Party were strong in Wales, and Queen Margaret, the warlike wife of Henry VI., looked to Richmond and Pembroke to rally the Lancastrians of the Principality and the March; but Richmond died almost at once. Two months later his wife gave birth to the future Henry VII. The responsibility thus devolved upon Pembroke, whose services to his cause have been almost entirely ignored by historians. "It is the penalty he has had to pay for having chosen Wales as his sphere of action," says Mr. Evans. The penalty is not entirely due to our ignorant* of Welsh history ; it is also attributable to the fact that

• Wales and its Wars of Ow Rom. By Rowell T. Evan% MA. Cambridge, at the 'University Press. POs. net.1

Pembroke's best work was not done on great battlefields, and soldiers who do not command armies in the field are apt to be forgotten, in Wales or elsewhere. Mr.Evans proceeds to show Pembroke's "extraordinary skill and tenacity in reorganizing his forces after defeat" and his "keen zest for the shifts of statecraft." He bad a more substantial reward than post.- burnous fame, for "he alone of the leaders on either side lived through the struggle and witnessed its close" in the victory of his cause.

To Pembroke's skilful management of Lancastrian interests in Wales and the Welsh March Mr. Evans attributes the loss of power by the Duke of York in 1459, as illustrated by the treachery and the rout of his forces at Lndford Bridge, close to his own citadel at Ludlow. A year later the victory of York at Northampton changed the situation, and the Lan- castrian cause in Wales received a grave blow in the defection of Sir William Herbert, whose wavering loyalty, as Mr. Evans proves, it had been Pembroke's aim to secure. The Lancastrians recovered their military prestige at Wakefield, where the Duke of York was captured and put to death, and at the second battle of St. Albans ; but King Henry's refusal to permit the sack of London by his wife's wild northern 'levies deprived them of the political results of their victories, and the decisive action was fought on the borders of Wales. At ldortimer's Cross the forces of Edward IV. "were drawn mainly from what are now the shires of Glamorgan, Breck- , nook, Monmouth, Radnor, and Montgomery, and the border county of Hereford," and Pembroke's motley army included a Welsh contingent from Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire. The Yorkists won a complete victory. Pembroke escaped from the field, but his father, Owen Tndor, was captured and beheaded at Hereford. It was from Mortimer's Cross that Edward marched to London to accept the offer of the crown, and in the overwhelming victory of Towton the victorious Welsh Yorkists helped to confirm the decision of the Welsh armies at Mortiniees Cross. Pembroke had been definitely defeated, and his rival, Herbert, was raised to the peerage.

One of the first tasks of the Government of Edward IV. was the reduction of Wales to the Yorkist obedience. Pembroke's name was excluded from offers of amnesty, and he had to flee to the mountains of Snowdon, and then, after another defeat, to Ireland. This skirmish, fought at Tuthill, just outside the walls of Carnarvon, has, says Mr. Evans, "escaped the notice of every historian of the Wars of the Roses." There is a parallel in Montrose's last fight at Carbisdale, which was rediscovered by Mr. Gardiner. Marie& stood out for the Lancastrians for seven years, during which Jasper Tudor was indefatigable in stirring up trouble for the Government; but the interest of the story is now, for a time, diverted to Herbert, who in 1468 received the forfeited title of Pembroke. Herbert, whom Mr. Evans regards as "the forerunner of Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell," had the ear of Edward IV., and when Warwick raised his rebellion Herbert led a Welsh contingent against him. He was defeated at Edgecote, near Banbury, and was executed at Northampton. The other Pembroke, Jasper Tudor, reappears on the scene, in alliance with Warwick. During the brief restoration of Henry VI. he again employed his talents in Wales, and he was on his way to join Queen Margaret when she was defeated at Tewkesbury. He fled to Brittany, taking with him his nephew, the Earl of Richmond, then fourteen years of age. Fourteen years later Henry and Jasper Tudor sailed together from the mouth of the Seine to Milford Haven, and again Wales and Welshmen played a considerable part in English history, for the invaders met with no opposition in Wales, and there were Welshmen in the army which won the battle of Bosworth. Jasper Tudor did not hold a chief command, but his long and affectionate service to hie nephew was rewarded by the dukedom of Bedford.

Mr. Evane's book is a contribution both to the history of Wales and to the history of England. We have laid stress on its importance for the general history of the country, although most of its new detail belongs properly to the much. needed investigation of Welsh recorde. The survey of the Wars of the Roses, as we have summarized it, is necessarily one-sided, and the book must, of course, be read in conjunc- tion with other sources. Here and there Mr. Evans seems to us rather to exaggerate the significance of his special aspect of fifteenth-century history, but he undoubtedly modifies the received narrative. It is a work of genuine scholarship and sound method.

An incidental remark of Mr. Evans's is work quoting. It has been frequently pointed out that the phrase "The Wars of the Roses" is not of strictly contemporary date. "During the civil war there was but one rose, the white rose of York, There was no Lancastrian rose; the red rose of the House of Tudor first appeared on Bosworth Field." Mr. Evans doe. not question the accuracy of this modern view as far as England is concerned, but he points out that it is not true of Wales, where, in the reign of Edward IV., poets foretold the rule of the red rose.