The Fall of Harlech: The Rebel Tudor Earl and the Yorkist Masterlock

In August 1468, the longest siege in British history came to an end. Here's how it happened.

On 14 August 1468, the Lancastrian-held Harlech Castle formally surrendered to the Yorkists, bringing an end to the longest siege in British history.

Outside north-west Wales, the name Harlech is perhaps most associated today with Michael Caine’s Zulu, the 1964 epic which included a climactic scene where British soldiers defiantly broke out into a rendition of the Welsh military march, ‘Men of Harlech’.

"Your foes on every side assailing,

Forward press with heart unfailing,

'Till invaders learn with quailing,

Cambria ne'er can yield!"

What of the actual Harlech? The old heart of this ancient coastal settlement occupies a commanding position upon an imposing cliff, bounded on one side by the soaring peaks of the mysterious Snowdonia and on the other by the greyish expanse of Cardigan Bay.

The castle owes its existence to the tumultuous final decade of the thirteenth century, when the independent Welsh kingdom of Gwynedd was overrun by the English armies of King Edward I. This conqueror embarked on a remarkable castle-building programme across his newly won principality, erecting strategic fortresses like Caernarfon, Conwy, Beaumaris, and Harlech. Like the others, Harlech was intended to be a formidable if sophisticated symbol of English royal power, a heavily defensive concentric structure designed to intimidate the local populace into submission. When the Welsh revolted against English rule in the early 1400s, Harlech briefly became the main seat of the Welshman who regarded himself the rightful Prince of Wales, Owain Glyn Dwr.

When the Wars of the Roses broke out in England, two families swapped pre-eminence in Wales – the Lancastrian-aligned Tudors and the Yorkist-aligned Herberts. The feud was bloody and complex, not least confused after 1461 when the Tudor heir, Henry Tudor, was given to the Herberts to be raised.

Since the comprehensive Yorkist victory over the Lancastrians in 1461, which resulted in the Lancastrian king Henry VI being turfed off the throne and replaced with the Yorkist Edward IV, the garrison in Harlech Castle had doggedly resisted all overtures to submit, holding out in the name of their lord, Jasper Tudor.

A man of great resilience and patience, Jasper had not been disheartened by the events of the previous few years, and was able to count on the support of a core group of Welsh followers to retain a foothold in Wales, men like Phillip Mansel of Gower, Hopkin ap Rhys of Llangyfelach, and Lewis ap Rhydderch of Strata Florida.

During this period, Jasper moved ‘from country to country, not always at his heart’s ease, nor in security of life’, and directed such insurgency from afar. Careful measures were taken to ensure he remained outside the grasp of the Yorkists. According to the poet Tudur Penllyn, Jasper typically sailed into Barmouth, ten miles south of Harlech, and passed on intelligence and orders to the garrison before retreating to the sea from whence he had quietly arrived.

To curtail Jasper’s sedition, on 26 October 1464 a commission was handed to William Herbert, his brother Richard, and brother-in-law Walter Devereux granting them powers to pardon any Harlech rebel below the rank of baron, though it did not encourage any defections. The parliament that sat that year further demanded the garrison surrender, charging Dafydd ap Ieuan ap Eynon and Rheinallt ap Griffith ap Bleddyn with harbouring known Lancastrian malcontents and ‘with great might’ seeking to destroy the ‘most royal person’ of Edward IV. The king even ordered the mayor of Chester to have a proclamation read in his city three days in a row that threatened the garrison with death unless they submitted before 21 January 1465. Again, such threats had no impact.

By the summer of 1468, the remote Harlech was still holding out for Lancaster, more than seven years since Edward IV had wrested the crown away from Henry VI. No other fortress in England or Wales still had a Lancastrian element dwelling inside. On 1 June, Louis XI of France signed an order authorising his treasurer of war Antoine Rougier to provide Jasper a modest sum of money, around fifty men, and three ships to sail to Wales. Jasper assembled his small force and headed out from Honfleur and through the English Channel, sailing around the southwest coast of Pembrokeshire and into the Irish Sea. On 24 June, he landed at his usual spot near Barmouth though this time the extent of his ambitions would not be restricted to merely touching base with the Harlech garrison.

Though he only had limited supplies, and certainly not enough to sustain any prolonged military campaign, Jasper sought to use the opportunity afforded him to launch a direct assault on Yorkist authority in north Wales. Once his men were refreshed after their voyage, Jasper roused the garrison at Harlech before they collectively headed north-east, a punishing upland trek through the heart of Snowdonia until they reached the gentler plains of the Conwy Valley. During this march through the principality counties of Merionethshire and Caernarfonshire, areas strongly Lancastrian in sentiment, many flocked to Jasper’s standard, his highly-regarded Tudor lineage a potent recruiting tool in a region his ancestors had once held sway.

By 24 June, Jasper had reached his destination, the wealthy Yorkist lordship of Denbigh, where his men wasted little time in setting the town ablaze. The houses were plundered, the taverns burned, and the citizens generally terrorised by hundreds of soldiers, many of them strange French mercenaries who showed little restraint. Though the castle itself was able to fend off the assault, Jasper held sessions in the town in the name of Henry VI, a bold move that mocked the authority of the Yorkist king, Edward IV. So great was the raid that just one week later it was remarked upon by the Milanese ambassador at the French court, though estimates that Jasper had put 4,000 Englishmen to death were wildly misplaced.

The assault on Denbigh, a lordship that formed an integral component of his Yorkist inheritance, hardened Edward’s resolve to crush all lingering Lancastrian resistance in north Wales. Jasper Tudor had played his final hand when it came to fomenting anti-Yorkist sedition through Harlech. On 3 July 1468, the king handed a fresh commission to William Herbert to array the counties of Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, and Shropshire, his mission to raise an army with the sole purpose of capturing the Lancastrian coastal stronghold. According to the estimates of contemporary poets and chroniclers, he was able to gather a force numbering between 7-10,000 soldiers. One detachment was entrusted to the command of his brother Richard Herbert, who captured and put to death twenty of Jasper’s men in the Conwy Valley.

Lord Herbert, meanwhile, advanced on Harlech from the south with the main Yorkist host, following the winding route of Sarn Helen, the ancient Roman road. The pincer movement worked; on 14 August, the Harlech garrison surrendered, bringing to a close seven stout years of Lancastrian defiance on the Welsh coast. Fifty members of the garrison were sent to the Tower of London, where two were promptly beheaded by earl Rivers, the constable of England. The castle’s leader, Dafydd ap Ieuan, however, the man responsible for rejecting all previous calls to surrender, evaded severe punishment, and would even regain the favour of the Yorkist king later in his reign. Other followers of Jasper, underlings like his kinsman Roger Puleston who had for so long risked their lives keeping his cause afloat, now grudgingly accepted pardons.

Frustratingly for the Yorkist crown, Jasper was nowhere to be seen in the weeks and months after the fall of Harlech. A later sixteenth-century Welsh tradition recalled that he had managed to evade capture by donning the disguise of a peasant, hauling a bale of straw on his back as he navigated through hostile country around Denbigh to the Flintshire coast. Whatever the means of his escape out of Wales, by October 1469 at the earliest Jasper was back at the French court of Louis XI. In a tacit acknowledgement that his campaigns in Wales had likely reached their end, he formally entered the service of his French cousin, for which he was compensated a generous pension of £100 tournois a month.

William Herbert’s prize for bringing all of Wales to heel for the Yorkist king was significant, and politically loaded. On 8 September 1468, the ‘king’s kinsman’ was raised to the earldom of Pembroke, the same title that had been stripped from Jasper seven years earlier. He also acquired Chepstow Castle from the duke of Norfolk and was made master forester of Snowdon, constable and captain of Conwy, and chamberlain of North Wales. Already chamberlain of South Wales, Herbert’s pre-eminence over the Welsh was indisputable, by far the most powerful full-blooded Welshman since the Edwardian conquest nearly two hundred years earlier. He naturally did not escape the attention of the bards, with Lewys Glyn Cothi noticeably regarding Herbert as ‘King Edward’s master-lock’. The Wars, however, were not over.

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