The last Prince of Wales

When Wales first entered this tree it came by one road, the old kings of Deheubarth behind the princess Nest. The August waves have now filled in the rest of the country, and Wales stands in the family record with four royal houses: Dinefwr in the south, Aberffraw in Gwynedd, Rhuddlan, and Mathrafal of Powys. One crown, as this site counts such things, but a whole nation's worth of houses.

The names are the grandest in Welsh history. Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, the only king who ever ruled the whole of Wales, every acre of it, for eight years before 1063. Owain Gwynedd, the first to call himself Prince of Wales. Llywelyn the Great, who mastered native Wales for forty years and married Joan, King John's daughter, which quietly adds yet another road back into the Plantagenets. All of them now stand documented in the direct line.

And then the name that needs no introduction in Wales and gets one anyway everywhere else. Owain Glyndŵr, the last Welshman to hold the title Prince of Wales, raised the great revolt of 1400, summoned a Welsh parliament, outfought and out-vanished four royal invasions, and was never captured and never betrayed, a fate so rare among failed rebels that it reads like a blessing. The road here runs through his daughter Alys, who married a border knight in secret while her father was still a hunted man with a price on his head. Her marriage survived; through it, so does his line; and through her, the last Prince of Wales is an ancestor of this family, eighteen generations up.

The pleasing symmetry is that the tree now holds both ends of that war. Alys's father raised the revolt; the future Henry V, who burned Glyndŵr's court at Sycharth in 1403, was the son of a king this family also descends from by other roads. As with Runnymede, the blood takes both sides of the argument. It usually does, if you climb far enough.

The Welsh ladders are drawn in full in The Royal Houses.