Welsh Journals

safety. The question of national sentiment is complicated by such external considerations, though the attitude of many Welsh partisans should be explicable from the data in the personal poems, but the influence of the bruts and their conception of nationalism was real and vital and must be adjusted with the disintegrating factors of clan alliances and groupings. The last stage of the Wars of the Roses in Wales witnessed the concentration of Welsh support around Henry Tudor. Two political events may have assisted this.' The first was the death, after the battle of Tewkes- bury, of the young Edward, son of Henry VI, and the last representative of the royal line of Lancaster. The Lancastrian claims devolved, as a result, upon Henry of Richmond, who, through his mother the Lady Margaret Beaufort, descended from John of Gaunt,2 and so was entitled to the support of the Welsh adherents of the Red Rose. The second event was the murder of the young princes in the Tower and the assumption of the crown by Richard, Duke of Gloucester. This may well have completed the alienation of the Welsh Yorkists. Many of their leaders had already perished; William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, and his brother, Sir Richard Herbert, had been executed after the battle of Banbury, Gruffydd ap Nicolas had been slain at Mortimer's Cross. Their feelings now were outraged by a crime which extinguished the line of Edward IV. It is I have somewhat modified my views on the relative importance of these two events in the light of much helpful criticism from my Chairman, Mr. W. Llewelyn Williams, K.C., M.P. 2 The Beaufort line descended from John Beaufort, the natural son of John of Gaunt by Catherine Swynford. It had been legiti- matized in 1397 [see Rot. Par., iii, 343], though the later Act of legitimization in 8 Henry IV added the phrase" exceptadiguitate regali