Welsh Journals

SIR RHYS AP THOMAS AND HIS FAMILY: A STUDY IN THE WARS OF THE ROSES AND EARLY TUDOR POLITICS. By Ralph A. Griffiths. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1993. Pp. xv, 333. £ 35.00. The family of Sir Rhys ap Thomas (d. 1525) rose and fell in a curve of near-perfect symmetry. His grandfather, Gruffydd ap Nicholas, exploited the turbulence of Henry VI's reign to construct a gangsterish dominion over large areas of south-west Wales. Rhys's father, uncles and brothers were in eclipse, revolt or exile under Edward IV, but Rhys himself helped Henry Tudor to the throne and was rewarded with a more secure, though perhaps less extensive, satrapy than his grandfather's. All seemed set fair for his son, Gruffydd ap Rhys, with his service to Prince Arthur and marriage to one of Henry VII's St John cousins. But Gruffydd died young, and Rhys was succeeded by his teenage grandson, Rhys ap Gruffydd. Young Rhys seems to have been upset that he was not immediately entrusted with all the power that had been his grandfather's, fell out violently with his supplanter Lord Ferrers, dabbled in piracy and ended on the block in 1531, charged with a mysterious conspiracy to invade England in company with James V of Scots. In the arts of local politics-stategic marriages for offspring legitimate or illegitimate, the well-used office or well-judged mortgage, the recruitment of loyal followers, impressive buildings, lavish patronage of poets, and at least on occasion violent intimidation-the house seems to have been consistently gifted. But Rhys ap Gruffydd, like Gruffydd ap Nicholas whose hegemony crumbled towards the end of his career, could not match the political dexterity or military indispensability of the great Sir Rhys on the wider stage. Professor Griffiths uses an impressive range of sources to tell this striking story, from government archives to praise poems and the remarkable items of furniture surviving from Sir Rhys's household. The achievement is all the greater since most of the family's archives seem to have been destroyed by fire in 1619. However, he does a good deal more than that. Roughly half this volume consists of an edition of the Life of Sir Rhys ap Thomas penned by his descendant Henry Rice in the 1620s; lost in manuscript, but here taken from Richard Fenton's printed edition of 1796, and accompanied by the two partial transcriptions of the original known to survive elsewhere. The text is fully annotated with references to the sources of Henry Rice's historical information and his frequent classical allusions as to the individuals and events he describes. Both Rice's intellectual context and Fenton's are enlighteningly sketched. So, in more detail, is the spur to Rice's composition, the family's quest for rehabilitation, which dragged on, with only very partial success, from 1547 to the reign of Charles I. There are thus rich pickings here at a number of historical levels. Perhaps inevitably in such a broadly-conceived enterprise, there are also slips or moments when the unwary might be misled, as over the completion date of Edward Hall's chronicle (the 1540s not 1532, p. 38); Henry VIII's age at his accession (seventeen not eighteen, p. 50); the knighting of Sir Robert Salusbury (in 1523 at Roye, as Henry Rice states, not in 1513 at Therouanne, pp. 216, 249); and the identity of the 'Lord Brooke' who commanded the English forces in Brittany in 1489 (Robert, Lord Willoughby de