Some Day My Prince will come. An excerpt from Three Journeys by Byron Rogers Published by Gomer Press
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hat did he look like? He looked as I had hoped he might, as a warlord of the Middle Ages should look. The man was huge. Cradling a battle axe, he would not have seemed out of place in the great hall of any castle. The shock was seeing him in shorts, framed in the doorway of a bungalow in a seaside resort at the end of Wales. “How would you have reacted had I gone down on one knee?” I asked him later. “I was wondering whether you would,” said a maths master gloomily. But then Evan Vaughan Anwyl B.Sc. of Tywyn is not just a maths master. He has only to switch on Google to be reminded of this. Here, on page after page, web-site after geneaological web-site, men he has never met are excitedly discussing the fact he and his family are “a surviving fragment of mediaeval Welsh royalty.” Another web-site goes even further. “He, his son, and two cousins are the ONLY people who can prove a direct male ancestry to any reigning Welsh prince.” Or, as somebody, preferring longer words, put it, “the only known direct patrilinear descendant of Rhodri the Great.” Dear God, Rhodri the Great ruled in Wales in the 9th century. Mr Anwyl has been identified as the head of the House of Aberffraw, the last Royal Family of Wales. And then it begins, the long wistful inventory of the titles to which he might lay claim. King of Gwynedd, Prince of Aberffraw, Lord of Snowdon. But these are titles in the safe past, for inevitably the inventory ends in the real minefield of Prince of Wales, a title once held by a member of his family. On at least one site he has been identified as the Claimant to Wales. Only Mr Anwyl has never laid claim to anything. All he has ever wanted to be is a maths master in a bungalow, a private man in middle age, playing golf in his retirement. Until very recently that other identity had been unknown, for while others proudly lay claim to descent from minor princes in Wales nobody thought that anyone existed with a descent from the grandest dynasty of all. The very possibility was the stuff of daydream. Except it wasn’t to one man. The only thing is, Mr Anwyl couldn’t give a damn. What follows would make a wonderful film, as the
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stuff of daydream becomes the stuff of black comedy. For while the BBC programme Who Do You Think You Are ? introduces people to their long-dead ancestors, provoking moments of wonder and poignance, a man in Wales, who might be the subject of the most startling programme of all, wants nothing to do with any of it. Yet out of a BBC blog-site comes the call, “From my perspective I would invite Evan Vaughan Anwyl to become Prince of Wales.” No Welshman for 600 years, not since Owain Glyndwr, has claimed the title, and, unlike Mr Anwyl, even Glyndwr was not of the old dynasty. In response to that call, there was this : “Wouldn’t that be historic justice on an epic scale, restoring the family that had fought so valiantly for Welsh independence but were disinherited by the Edwardian Conquest ?” Another contributor: “ Hopefully Charles will be the last English Prince of Wales.” Amidst the excitement there is just one doubting, and very puzzled, voice. “Do you really think the Welsh will go for it ? They have only just got the Welsh Assembly, and that took some doing.” Yet in spite of a hullabaloo that has been going on for something like two years now, nobody has ever approached Mr Anywyl, let alone asked him whether he wants to become King of Gwynedd, Prince of Aberffraw, Lord of Snowdon, or Prince of Wales. “History was never a favourite subject of mine,” he said. “We’ve always been humble farmers in our family, that is, until my two sisters and I became teachers. Yes, we’ve always been proud of our family tree, but only amongst ourselves. Beyond that, no.” The family tree hangs in the passageway of his bungalow, just as photo copies of it hang in the passageways of his two sisters’ houses, and once hung in the family farm. It is an enormous framed thing, this family tree, over three foot by two foot six, with the abbreviations of most family trees, b for born, m for married, but this one also has sln for slain. There are many slns. The tree starts with the 11th century King Gruffydd ap Cynan of North Wales, and after him his son King Owain Gwynedd, whose coat of arms, the three eagles’ heads, and whose motto Eryr Eryrod Eryri, Eagle of the Eagles of Snowdonia, the family still bears.
The centuries move like windscreen wipers. The kings become princes, the princes lords, the lords constables of castles. Then the killing stops and the farming centuries begin. The constables become squires, the squires farmers, the farmers tenant farmers, and there are no more slns. “Where are you?” There were so many columns, so many names. A huge forefinger stabbed the glass. “ That’s me.” At the very bottom, Evan Vaughan Anwyl, the latest in seven Evan Anwyls, for like any Royal Family they have kept the name in generation after generation. Mr Anwyl’s son, called the Edling, the Heir, in some sites, Dafydd V in others, is a Manchester businessman. “Is Dafydd V interested in any of this?” I asked. “Even less than me. Mind you, if it had been anything to do with cricket....” Who were the Welsh? English historians in the Middle Ages thought they knew, albeit uncomfortably. “The Welsh, formerly called the Britons, were once noble, crowned over the whole realm of England. But they were expelled by the Saxons and lost both the name and the kingdom. The fertile plains went to the Saxons, but the sterile and mountainous districts to the Welsh. But from the sayings of the prophet Merlin they still
hope to recover England..” Their main hope was that one day a Messiah might come, the one they called Y Mab Darogan, the Son of Prophecy. But as time passed, and he didn’t come, the Welsh occupied their time by fighting each other in the dreary intervals between the seed-times and the harvests. And so it might have gone on, except that the English, or at least their Norman overlords, were better at fighting. A series of piece-meal invasions began which, on the eve of the late 13th century, had left just one formidable native Welsh dynasty. In control of North and Mid Wales was the House of Aberffraw under Llywelyn, the first and only Welsh Prince of Wales to be recognised by the English State. The full-scale English invasion in 1282 under Edward I destroyed him, his dynasty and what might well have become a nation state in its shaky beginnings. But it is what happened next that is so horrible. The children of that dynasty were hunted down, the little girls put into nunneries, the boys into wooden cages where they spent the rest of their lives like rabbits in a hutch. These are not details you will not have found in any school history, but the English took the threat they represented so seriously that almost a century later a man in English pay was sent into France to murder the GregynogAdvertNoLogos:Layout 1
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