Owen Tudor: The Life of a Medieval Stud
WARNING: VERYVERYVERYVERY LONG POST
To defend the memory of my historical bae and redress the terrible injustices done against him by historical fiction writers, I have decided to write this 100% legit Official Biography of Owen Tudor, Medieval Wales’ Sexiest Man Ever™.
Our very EXTRA tale begins on the intermittently sunny Isle of Anglesey in the small village of Penmynydd. This place had been, for many centuries, the seat of a well-respected Welsh noble family with a very colourful history. They claimed direct male-line descent from Gwenellian ferch Rhys, the daughter of Rhys ap Tewdwr, Prince of Deheubarth, and more famously from Ednyfed Fychan, Llewelyn the Great’s renowned seneschal. One story goes that Ednyfed, in true Shakespearean fashion, brought Llewelyn the decapitated heads of three invading English lords, for which Llewelyn commanded Ednyfed to change his arms to display the three heads and granted all his descendants tax breaks for the rest of forever.
The family managed to maintain their status (and EXTRA) well into the late 14th Century. In 1345, two brothers, Tudur ap Goronwy, Lord of Penmynydd, and Hywel, Archdeacon of Anglesey, even managed to escape charges for their role in the murder of Henry de Shaldeford, Edward the Black Prince’s highly unpopular representative in North Wales, whose body was found near Hywel’s house in Bangor. The infamous incident led the English burgesses of Caernarfon to complain that the brothers were so influential that “no man dare indict them”. As befitting man of such influence and EXTRA, Tudur was able to contract a marriage with Marged ferch Tomos, the maternal aunt of perhaps the most EXTRA man in Welsh history: Owain Glyndŵr, the last native Prince of Wales. Tudur and Marged went on to have five sons, the youngest of whom, Maredudd, went on to marry Marged ferch Dafydd, the daughter of the Lord of Anglesey. In around 1400, they became parents to the one, the only, the EXTRA... Owen Tudor.
Not-So-Humble Beginnings:
Despite history remembering our hero as “Owen Tudor”, Owen was originally christened ‘Owain ap Maredudd ap Tudur’, which simply meant “Owen, son of Meredith, son of Tudor”. Obviously at this point in time, Owen was not a hot babe, but only a literal babe, who was introduced into a world of EXTRA from the moment of his birth. When Glyndŵr’s 15-year war for Welsh independence erupted in 1400, Owen’s father and two surviving uncles, Rhys and Gwilym, chose to unequivocally support their cousin’s campaign. For this reason, Dan Jones speculates that Owen Tudor may have even been named after Owain Glyndŵr. The brothers did some pretty audacious things, most notably capturing the English-held Conwy Castle with only forty men, which they achieved by disguising themselves as carpenters and infiltrating the castle while the garrison was at church. Unfortunately, the Tudor brothers’ involvement in their cousin’s war eventually caught up with them. In 1406, King Henry IV outlawed all three brothers and confiscated their lands. In 1412, Rhys was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Chester, with Gwilym dying the following year. As for Maredudd, tradition has it that he murdered a man before running off to the wilds of Snowdonia to continue the rebellion, never to be seen again. Like I said, EXTRA.
Maredudd left behind his young son Owen, who, at some point during his teenage years, made his way to the court of the new king, Henry V, in London, where he began his training as a squire. Owen may or may not have been present at the famous Battle of Agincourt in 1415, but an “Owen Meredith” was certainly recorded as part of Sir Walter Hungerford’s retinue in France in 1420. Contrary to what Wikipedia says, Owen never called himself “Owen Tudor”. He was almost always referred to during this period as “Owen Meredith” which suggests that Owen himself used his Welsh patronymic. Unfortunately, Owen was subject to severe anti-Welsh penal laws passed by Henry IV during Glyndŵr’s war, which banned Welshmen from holding Crown offices, bearing arms, forming assemblies, owning property in England, testifying against Englishmen in court, and even from marrying Englishwomen. As a Welshman and the son of a rebel to boot, Owen did not have had many opportunities for advancement in England. Perhaps due to his services in France and connection to Sir Walter Hungerford, however, Owen was able to secure a position in the household of Henry V’s French widow, Catherine de Valois. The 16th Century Welsh chronicler, Elis Gruffydd, places him as Catherine’s “sewer and servant” (someone who serves dishes and tastes them), but popular tradition places him as her Master of the Wardrobe. Despite her gilded life as the Dowager Queen of England, Catherine was suffering under a statute specifically passed to prevent her from remarrying until her son, Henry VI, came of age. Since she was widowed when Henry was only nine months old, she potentially faced another fifteen years of widowhood, despite only being in her early twenties. Thanks to Owen Tudor, however, her life would soon take a turn for the EXTRA.
Owen Tudor, Ye Olde Mills & Boon Hero:
Tradition has it that Catherine first noticed Owen when he drunkenly fell into her lap during court festivities. Another more scandalous tale has Catherine being unable to forget Owen after “accidentally” spying on him swimming naked in a river on a hot summer’s day. Either way, the lonely Catherine obviously could not resist the absolute stud of a man that was Owen Tudor, and they soon became lovers. According to John Wynn of Gwydir, Catherine, being a Frenchwoman, could not sympathise with the English view of the Welsh as “a barbarous clan of savages, reckoned inferior to the lowest English yeomen.” Perhaps Owen being a disenfranchised foreigner like herself was what drew them together. Whatever the reasons for their affair, at some point in the late-1420′s, in complete defiance of both the anti-Welsh penal laws and the statute forbidding the remarriage of Dowager Queens, Catherine and Owen secretly married.
For obvious reasons, Owen and Catherine resided far away from court, first in the Bishop of London’s residence at Much Hadham Palace, where their eldest son, Edmund, was born around 1430, and later in the Bishop of Ely’s palace at Hatfield, where their second son, Jasper, was born a year later. Owen was even able to successfully petition Parliament for the rights of an Englishman in 1432, although he was still denied the right to hold a Crown office or become a burgess. This suggests that Henry VI’s Regency Council may have known of Owen’s marriage to Catherine, but were too suspicious of his intentions to be willing to grant him more rights than was necessary for him to run a marital household in England. Two years later, Catherine granted Owen an interest in her dower lands in Flintshire in North Wales, presumably so he could support himself independently. Owen must have also had some pretty legendary dick skillz because even as late as 1541, a citizen of Colchester named Richard Fox ran into trouble with Henry VIII for making lewd comments about Catherine “baying like a very drunken whore while making love to Ewyn Tedder”. Naturally, all this D led to the birth of their youngest son, Owen, which apparently caught Catherine completely by surprise. The story goes that while visiting Henry VI at Westminster Palace, Catherine went into labour prematurely, forcing her to seek sanctuary in Westminster Abbey to deliver the baby. Owen Jr. would later become a Benedictine monk at the Abbey.
Unfortunately, Catherine and Owen’s quiet life together did not last long after this. While pregnant with their last child in 1437 (supposedly a daughter named Margaret), Catherine suffered from a “grievous malady” and retired to Bermondsey Abbey, where both she and her newborn child died on 3 January 1438. It seems that Catherine did spare a thought for Owen and their young sons in her dying days, as her will, written only three days before her death, charges Henry VI with “the tender and favourable fulfilling of mine intent” regarding her secret family. It must have seemed to Catherine that they would need all the help they could get once news of her scandalous marriage reached the public. And she was correct. With Catherine’s death, Owen suddenly found himself without his royal wife and without her protection, leaving him completely vulnerable to the wrath of Henry VI’s Regency Council. The Council, led by Henry’s uncle, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, immediately took action against Owen, placing his young sons in Barking Abbey, and demanding that he appear before them to answer for the heinous crime of being a total stud and banging the king’s mother.
An EXTRA Escape:
The events that followed Catherine’s death are where we really see Owen’s EXTRA-ness in its full glory. Owen had already reached Northamptonshire on his journey back to North Wales when the Duke of Gloucester’s messenger, Miles Sculles, caught up with him. His response to the summons was to flat-out refuse to go anywhere until he received written assurance from Henry VI himself that he would be able to “freely come and freely go”. Owen then literally made Sculles go back to Westminster just to obtain this. However, as the probably very irritated Sculles was making the long journey back whence he came, Owen also secretly made his way to Westminster, immediately taking sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. According to the indictment against him, Owen refused to leave sanctuary for many days, even when the Council sent some men “out of goodly friendship and fellowship” to coax him into a nearby tavern (seriously). However, Owen soon received warning that Henry VI had been “heavily informed against him”. Convinced that he was making matters worse for himself by remaining in sanctuary, he threw himself upon the mercy of the king and his Council. Yet, our hero was no pushover. Refusing to take any of the Council’s shit, Owen:
[…] affirmed and declared his innocence and his truth, affirming that he had done nothing that should give the King occasion or matter of offence or displeasure against him.
Owen then dared all of them to “come at him, bro”:
[...] offering himself in large ways to answer as the King’s true liege man should, to all things that any man could or would surmit upon him.
Apparently, the sixteen-year-old Henry VI was so impressed by the sheer size of Owen’s balls, that he soon sent Owen back on his merry way to Wales. However, this did not at all sit well with the Council, who complained that Owen’s demand for written safe conduct from the king was “more odious” than what even a traitor would have asked. Yet, if Owen’s sought the king’s protection out of fear that the Council would stop at nothing to see him punished, he was soon proven correct. While travelling through Warwickshire, Owen was suddenly seized by Gloucester’s men and imprisoned in the notorious Newgate Prison, along with his chaplain and servant.
Perhaps realising that Henry VI might be displeased with the violation of a royal guarantee of safe conduct, the Council hastily concocted a rather vague legal justification for the arrest: since Owen had already “freely come and freely gone” from Westminister, they hadn’t reaaaally defied the king when they ordered his arrest… and golly, what a good thing they did too, because they also conveniently uncovered his “malicious purpose and imagination”! The Council went even further, suggesting that imprisoning Owen was necessary to prevent “rebellion, murmur, or inconvenience” against the king, especially given the “disposition and intentions” of the Welsh (holy xenophobia Batman)! Obviously, this was all total bullshit, and a few people felt that Owen’s treatment at the hands of Henry VI’s council was extremely unjust. Surviving Council minutes record that some members disapproved of Owen’s arrest, having been “greatly moved” by Owen’s honest (and apparently, ballsy) conduct before the king. An Anglesey bard named Robin Ddu (who may have known Owen personally) composed a poem lamenting that:
Neither a thief nor a robber, neither debtor nor traitor, he is the victim of unrighteous wrath. His only fault was to have won the affection of a princess of France.
Clearly, Owen felt the same way too. After a year of enduring imprisonment and terrible food in Newgate, Owen violently escaped during one of the routine nighttime searches with the help of his chaplain, “hurting foul” his jailor in the process. The pair were on the run for a few days, but were eventually re-apprehended. Owen was once again imprisoned, though this time in the more comfortable environment of Windsor Castle in the custody of none other than his former master, Sir Walter Hungerford. There Owen remained for another year, until he was finally pardoned and released by Henry VI in July 1439, and reunited with his sons.
The EXTRA Continues:
It was probably around this time that the sixteen-year-old Henry VI, who had long thought himself an only child, finally met his mother’s secret family. Luckily for Owen and his sons, Henry was a kind young man, and having few close relatives left, and he was keen to bring his Tudor relatives into his immediate family. A famously religious and chaste man, Henry was determined to keep Edmund and Jasper from following in their stud of a father’s footsteps. He took personal charge over his half-brothers’ upbringing and education, even going so far as to “keep careful watch through hidden windows of their chamber, lest any foolish impertinence of woman coming into the house should grow to a head” (WHAT THE FUCK HENRY). In 1453, Edmund and Jasper were finally compensated for their years of being cockblocked by their half-brother, and were raised to the earldoms of Richmond and Pembroke, becoming the first Welshmen in history to enter the English peerage.
As for Owen, he clearly made a good impression on his step-son. Henry VI grew very fond of him, often referring to him in official documents as his “very dear friend and esquire” (“nostre tres cher ame et escuyer”). Owen remained loyal to Henry VI for the rest of his life, and was duly rewarded for it with an annual pension of £100, the Crown office of Keeper of the Parks in North Wales (a position normally reserved for Englishmen), and in 1445, a place in the official escort for Henry’s new bride, the badass Margaret of Anjou. In 1449, Owen was even briefly tasked with the captaincy of Regnéville during the ongoing Hundred Years War, but was unfortunately soon forced to surrender the castle to the Admiral of Coëtivy after six days of besiegement. Being the EXTRA man he was, Owen certainly did not surrender without a fight, and French chroniclers of the period mention the “fierce battle” that was waged outside the castle walls. Obviously impressed by this display of balls and bravado, the French permitted Owen and his men to return home, where he and his son Jasper spent the next decade maintaining peace in Wales on behalf of Henry VI. After decades of loyal service to his step-son, our hero Owen Tudor was finally rewarded as he deserved, and was created a knight banneret in 1461.
The Death of a Stud:
Unfortunately, Owen would, along with his eldest son Edmund, become an early casualty in dynastic wars known as the Wars of the Roses. On the 1st of November 1456, Edmund celebrated his first wedding anniversary by dying of the plague in a Yorkist dungeon, predeceasing not only his father and brothers, but also his pregnant 13-year-old widow (ew), Margaret Beaufort. Owen himself lived to see the birth of his grandson (the future Henry VII) in 1457, and because he was a total GILF, also managed to father an illegitimate son, David Owen, two years later.
However, Owen would not live long afterwards. In the winter of 1461, he (along with Jasper and the Earl of Wiltshire) served as one of the Lancastrian commanders at the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross against the Yorkist forces of Edward, Earl of March (the future Edward IV). The battle was fought in the severe depths of winter, well outside normal campaigning season. Due to a combination of Edward’s tactical superiority and their march through Wales forcing them to take a disadvantageous position between a steep hill and a bog, the Lancastrian forces were soon routed. Jasper and the Earl of Wiltshire were able to escape to fight another day, but Owen, a fairly elderly (but no less studly) man, was taken prisoner and brought to Hereford market for execution. According to the chronicler Gregory, Owen hoped that Edward would show him mercy, “weening and trusting all the time on pardon and grace till he saw the axe and block and the collar of his red velvet doublet was ripped off”. Even in the face of execution, Owen was said to have joked:
That head shall lie on the stock that was wont to lie on Queen Catherine's lap.
He then “put his heart and mind wholly unto God, and full meekly took his death”. Thus, with the blow of an axe, the extraordinary and EXTRA life of Owen Tudor was ended. The Yorkists set his decapitated head upon the highest part of Hereford’s market cross, where a local “mad woman” reportedly “combed his hair and washed away the blood of his face”, surrounding it with more than a hundred burning candles. Perhaps, even in death, womankind felt it necessary to give the citizens of Hereford one last opportunity to be graced with the studliness of Owen’s glorious visage. Or perhaps, as Leanda de Lisle suggests, the “mad woman” was actually the mother of his illegitimate son, David, loyally following him during what would become the last few days of his life.
Owen was buried in the Greyfriars’ priory in Hereford.
An EXTRA Legacy:
Before his death, Owen had the foresight to leave the majority of his wealth and possessions to the then two year-old David, who would not have otherwise been entitled to his patrimony as an illegitimate son. Our hero was certainly no deadbeat dad. However, Owen could never have predicted the fate that befell his equally-studly son, Jasper (definitely deserving of a post of his own), whose EXTRA adventures during his 24-year exile make him one of the most exciting figures in the Wars of the Roses. Nor could Owen have ever predicted that, two decades after his death, his four-year-old grandson would eventually take the throne as Henry VII, and found the most famous and arguably most EXTRA royal dynasty in English history: the Tudors.
Despite his invaluable contributions to the English tourism industry and Cate Blanchett’s acting career, Owen Tudor has largely gone unremembered today in favour of his more popular descendants. Even his own great-grandson, Henry “Headchopper” VIII, spared no thought for his stud of a forefather, and Owen’s tomb at Hereford was destroyed by Henry’s soldiers during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Nevertheless, the romance and allure of Owen “Widow Comforter” Tudor’s life continues to inspire playwrights and novelists to this day. Fictional depictions of Owen have varied throughout the centuries, ranging from the figure of courtly romance in 16th-17th century plays, to Agnes Strickland’s “predatory soldier” who takes advantage of (even rapes?!) the vulnerable and naive Catherine, to the meek and mild fellow of modern historical fiction (except in Philippa Gregory’s books apparently, ugh). Yet, from what little we know of him, Owen was neither a rapist defiler of virtuous women (FFS), nor some wilting Welsh leek who let Catherine, the English, or anyone else walk roughshod over him.
This was a man who came to a foreign country with nothing but his devilish good looks, yet nevertheless rose up through the ranks of English society. This was a man who was discriminated against throughout his life, yet never took shit from anyone, even in the face of death. And most importantly, this was a man who, through sheer (dick) skill and perseverance, won the heart of a lonely and widowed Queen, fathered two earls, and eventually, became the grandfather of the first Tudor king of England.
So, despite boring you with perhaps the longest post in history (if you are even still reading this lol), for Owen Tudor, methinks I can do no less.
