Not my Prince: the politics of remembering and forgetting

1282. 

I’ve grown up knowing the importance of those four digits, bound together by bloodshed. I saw the number plastered on Welsh t-shirts, posters. It was once the password for the family iPad, so it must have been important. 

Before I knew what the number stood for, I could feel its gravity. As I grew taller, the number sequence grew longer. It turned into a date:

11.12.1282

In school, I learnt that Llywelyn ein Llyw Olaf, one of the last native independent princes of Wales died on 11 December 1282. He’s referred to in English as ‘Llywelyn the Last’. But, in Welsh, it’s more than that. It’s closer to ‘Llywelyn, our Last Leader’.

The history goes something like this: King Edward I led an army of 15,000 men to conquer Wales following several unsuccessful attempts to maintain a hold on the Welsh. Llywelyn led the resistance but was soon killed by English soldiers. His head was placed on a spike and for 15 years, it lay in the Tower of London, crowned with a wreath of laurel leaves. Mocking the fact that Wales would never have a true, Welsh-born independent prince again.

For many people in Wales, 1282 is our 1066, the date when we were conquered. 700 years ago, it is yet to be forgotten.  

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Following the Queen’s death and my apparent lack of mourning, an English friend of mine enquired: “Why do the Welsh hate the royal family so much?”. 

I had to pause for moment.

In my Welsh bubble back at home, it seemed that being Welsh and resenting the royal family went hand in hand: we’d never watch the Queen’s speech at Christmas and we’d never sing God Save the Queen. I have no idea how it starts, let alone the words. I have no intention of ever learning it either.

Even when the Queen died, I came across more posts of protest and animosity on my Instagram feed than I did sympathy and grief. Only after moving out of Wales, I came to realise that resenting the monarchy was a view that belonged to a minority. Admittedly, even in Wales, my feelings were ones of a minority.

My resentment of the monarchy is two-fold. Yes, it’s ideological, rooted in the concept of the monarchy itself, but it’s also based in my Welsh identity.

R.S Thomas, author to one of my favourite lines of Welsh poetry, wrote that: “To live in Wales is to be conscious at dusk of the spilled blood that went into the making of the wild sky”. 

It’s exactly how I feel. For me and many others in Wales, acknowledging the spilled blood of the past forms the basis of our identity in the present. In fact, R.S Thomas himself mockingly wrote that there is no present in Wales, “only the past, brittle with relics”. Gerallt Lloyd Owen, a notable Welsh poet, wrote “Fy Ngwlad” (“My Country”) in 1969, the year of the investiture of Prince Charles. The opening lines, “Wylit, wylit Lywelyn; Wylit waed pe gwelit hyn” are directed towards Llywelyn and translate to:

“You would cry blood if you saw this…

Our hearts in the hands of a foreigner,

Our crown in the hands of a conqueror…”

In another poem of his, he writes of Cilmeri, the place where Llywelyn was killed. He writes “Fyth ni anghofiwn hyn” - “Never shall we forget”.  

Memory is not confined to those who experience it first-hand. We choose to remember, and we decide to forget. Memory can be sustained through time, passed on across centuries and inherited through generations. These poems are all examples of mnemonic devices to remember the past, sustaining the grief and rage from 1282.

700 years later, this history has yet to be swept under the carpet. Llywelyn ein Llyw Olaf might have died in 1282, but the collective memory of 1282, and everything it symbolises, lives on. This is what the Crown fundamentally failed to consider, as they announced Prince William as the new Prince of Wales this month. 

In case you, like the monarchy, weren’t aware, Wales is a devolved country, that has its own democratically elected national Parliament, the Senedd, and has done since 1999. Remarkably, Mark Drakeford, our First Minister, wasn’t notified or consulted of the decision to reinstate a Prince of Wales. He, like the rest of us, found out by listening to the King’s Speech on the news. In fact, no one from Wales was consulted about the decision. 

Since the news, over 37,000 have signed a petition calling for the monarchy to “end the Prince of Wales title out of respect for Wales”. You see, the title itself has been used as an insult since the word go. Edward I gave the title to his son, the heir, who would become Edward II. The title had already been used by Llywelyn, so Edward ‘stole’ it and gave it to his son. The title, since its birth, has been designed to undermine Wales’s status as a nation and a country.

Yet, it doesn’t have to be this way. The Prince of Wales is a ceremonial position. It has no constitutional role in Wales. The title doesn’t have to exist, and it hasn’t always been a foregone conclusion. Between the accession of Edward Tudor in 1547 and the investiture of Henry Stuart in 1610, the title was not used. The reinstatement of Prince of Wales isn’t inevitable, it’s a choice, and a politically motivated one too. 

To top it off, the new King decided to plan his first visit to Wales in Cardiff, on the 16th of September - coincidently, the day of remembrance for Owain Glyndwr, the last native-born Welshman to claim the title, the Prince of Wales. Intentional or not, they couldn’t be more disrespectful, even if they tried. 

What makes this worse, is that Charles isn’t ignorant. In fact, he knows all too well the significance of Llywelyn ein Llyw Olaf and Owain Glyndwr. In 1969, Charles spent 10 weeks at Aberystwyth University learning about Welsh history, language and culture before his investiture, before serving as Prince of Wales for over 60 years.

Conveniently, his memory seems to have failed him. The same can’t be said for the Welsh.

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In 1282, Edward I was sending a clear message to the Welsh leaders he had freshly conquered. Fast forward to 2022, the message has remained the same. 

One day, Prince William might be your King, but he’ll never be my prince. 

All images belong to the author, Gwenno Robinson, unless otherwise stated.