Once upon a time there was a man named Richard who had so many hyphens he didn’t know what to do. And so Lord Richard Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville petitioned the King for a dukedom and got one: the dukedom of Buckingham and Chandos. This unusual double dukedom, created in 1822, combined the Buckingham title from his father’s family, the Grenvilles (who also picked up the Temple and Nugent surnames), and an earlier Chandos title from his wife’s family, the Brydges-Chandos family. But this wasn’t the first time Buckingham was combined with another title to form a dukedom: Buckingham and Normanby had been created in 1703 for the Sheffield family, but was extinct by 1735. In contrast to the Sheffields, solid Tories, the family cluster of Grenville, Temple and Pitt dominated the Whig party for much of the eighteenth century from their grand county house at Stowe in Buckinghamshire. But much of their fame and fortune came from an older family: the Brydges of Chandos.

In the thirteenth century, there was a man living in the borders between England and Wales, Sir Simon de Brugge. Later genealogists put forward suggestions that he was a descendant of warriors who had come with William the Conqueror, perhaps the Montgomerie family, relatives of Duke William from Normandy, who had been given the earldom of Shrewsbury to protect western England against Welsh incursions. They proposed Sir Simon’s ancestors took their name from a fortified bridge built by the Montgomeries to defend a bend in the river Severn in Shropshire. The town that grew up around this bridge, Bridgenorth, was later spelled Brigge, Brug or Bruges. Within a few generations, the Brugge family had settled at Solers, now Bridge Sollers in Herefordshire, on the river Wye.

In the late fourteenth century there were two brothers: Thomas Bruges, who owned Haresfield and Matson, estates in the neighbouring county of Gloucestershire (both now suburbs of the city of Gloucester), and John, who retained Solers, and became Sheriff of both Herefordshire and Gloucestershire. John’s line ultimately settled in Dymock, in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, and included Sir John Brydges who moved to London to become a draper, and served as Lord Mayor of London in 1520. His daughter Winifred did very well on the marriage market and wed first Sir Richard Sackville, then John Paulet, 2^nd Marquis of Winchester (the son of Elizabeth I’s Lord High Treasurer). The elder brother, Thomas, married an heiress to more Gloucestershire estates, Alice Berkeley, daughter of Sir Thomas Berkeley of Cubberley, and Margaret Chandos, heiress of the barony of Chandos.

Roger de Chaundos, of Fownhope and Snodhill Castle in Herefordshire, was Sheriff of Herefordshire on and off between 1311 and 1333, and Sheriff of Glamorgan, across the border in South Wales. In 1337, he was summoned to Parliament as 1^st Baron Chaundos. The name likely derived from Candos near a bend in the Seine in central Normandy. Roger’s son Thomas, 2^nd Baron de Chaundos, was also Sheriff of Herefordshire off and one between 1359 and 1374. About this same time, one of the most famous knights in England was Sir John Chandos—probably a relative from a different branch based in Derby—who was a close friend to Edward the Black Prince and named by him to the post of Constable of Aquitaine. Another Sir John, the 3^rd Baron, died in 1428, leaving his sister (or perhaps his daughter) Margaret as his heir. It was her grand-daughter Alice who brought the Chandos estates to the Brydges family.

Cubberley or Coberley had been owned by the Berkeleys since the eleventh century, but had not built a manor house here until the early thirteenth century. Nestled in a Cotswold valley a few miles east of Gloucester, Coberley Hall became the seat of the Brydges family for the next century, until they moved to Sudeley Castle in the sixteenth century. Sold to John Dutton, later Lord Sherborne, in 1606, it passed through many hands before it was demolished in 1790.

The barony of Chandos was not a place, but just a title attached to the name, like many of the early English baronies. Lands in Herefordshire passed to the Brydges, but the most important castle, Snodhill, passed to other relatives, then to the Beauchamp family and on to the English Crown. An important frontier castle between England and Wales, it was held by various families for the Crown over the centuries until ‘slighted’ on order of the Parliamentarians during the English Civil War. The ruins decayed until only recently when a new Preservation Trust was set up to rescue it and carry out fascinating archaeological work, as can be seen in this lovely video: https://snodhillcastle.org/

Thomas and Alice’s son, Sir Giles Bruges of Cubberley, was, according to some sources de jure 4^th Baron Chandos (terminating the abeyance in 1458). He became Sheriff of Gloucestershire and died in 1467. He married well to secure his family’s position in the county, Katherine Clifford, of Frampton-on-Severn, whose first husband had been Anselme Guise of Elmore, on a rise south of Gloucester. In an interesting aside about the Guise family of Gloucestershire: they were no relation to the powerful Guise dynasty in France, but took their name from an ancestor Guy owning something (Originally ‘Guy’s Aspley’ in Bedfordshire), and indeed is pronounced locally as Guy’s.

After a few generations, the barony of Chandos was finally recognised, but as a new creation. Sir John Brugge or Brydges also married well, in 1512, to Elizabeth Grey, daughter of the 9^th Baron Grey de Wilton and Florence Hastings, a cousin of Henry VIII’s bosom friend Lord Hastings. Brugge was himself in favour at the young court of Henry VIII, one of the King’s soldiering buddies. When he was older, Sir John served the Crown as his ancestors did as a sheriff (of Wiltshire, 1537; while his brother Thomas, became sheriff of Gloucestershire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire). Having been the Constable of Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire since the 1530s, he was granted it outright by Queen Mary in 1554, and created Baron Chandos of Sudeley, in thanks for his role in suppressing the rebellion of Thomas Wyatt in February of that year. He was appointed Lieutenant of the Tower of London, with his first task being to oversee the execution of his wife’s cousin, Lady Jane Grey, as depicted in the famous painting by Paul Delaroche from 1833. He also watched over the Queen’s half-sister Elizabeth during her incarceration in the Tower that Spring, then oversaw the execution of Wyatt himself in May. Lord Chandos died in 1557, so he escaped any repercussions for his actions when Elizabeth took the throne in 1558.

Sudeley Castle is also in Gloucestershire, a few miles north of the Brydges estates at Coberley, near the ancient Cotswold town of Winchcombe. It is best known today as the home of Queen Katherine Parr as a widow and her chief lodger, Princess Elizabeth. Winchcombe had been an ancient capital of Mercian kings, and a royal estate nearby was held by Norman kings from the eleventh century. A local family, de Sudeley (from sudeleagh, ‘south meadow’), barons Sudeley from 1299, died out in the 1440s and the estate passed by marriage to Ralph Boteler, Lord High Treasurer, who built a grand new mansion. As a Lancastrian, his estates were seized by the Yorkist king Edward IV in 1469, and in the next reign, Richard III made this a favourite residence, built a large banqueting hall, which still remains in ruined form. In his will, Henry VIII gave the castle to Thomas Seymour, who was created Baron Seymour of Sudeley in 1547, and married the widowed Queen Katherine. But their marital bliss was short lived: she died in September 1548 and was buried at Sudeley; he fell from favour and was executed in March 1549. Her brother the Marquess of Northampton inherited, but he too fell from favour and the castle and its gardens was seized by Queen Mary in 1553 and given to Baron Chandos, as above. His son Edmund remodelled it significantly in the 1560s-70s, in part to make it suitable to host Elizabeth I on her royal progresses through the West Country (she stayed here several times, including a three-day festival in 1592, which bankrupted the Brydges-Chandos family!). Seriously damaged during the English Civil War, the 6^th Baron Chandos was unable to make repairs due to significant debts, and in 1655 it passed out of his family by means of his wife’s heirs by her second marriage, the Pitts. They rented it out to various tenants, but over the next century the building seriously decayed. In 1837, the Dent brothers, glove merchants from Worcester, purchased Sudeley Castle and began to retore it. Their descendants, the Dent-Brocklehursts, still own it, and have opened it up for tourism since the 1970s. Today it is also known as a site for super glamorous celebrity weddings.

Edmund, 2^nd Baron Chandos (d. 1573), continued the line in Gloucestershire, while his brother Charles founded a second line in neighbouring Herefordshire by acquiring Wilton Castle from his cousin the 13^th Baron Grey (to enable the latter to pay a ransom in 1558). The senior line continued on, as virtual ‘kings of the Cotswolds’ (a nickname given to Grey, 5^th Baron Chandos, in the 1610s). His second son, William, the 7^th Baron, died in 1676. They had all married well, with successive baronesses being daughters of the Earl of Lincoln, the Earl of Derby and the Earl of Manchester.

In 1676, the barony of Chandos passed to the junior line of Wilton (created baronets in 1627). Sir James Brydges, 3^rd Baronet, was now 8^th Baron Chandos of Sudeley. He was appointed Sheriff of Herefordshire the next year. He married Elizabeth Barnard of London, daughter of Sir Henry Barnard, a very wealthy merchant with the Levant Company who controlled appointments as ambassador to Constantinople—indeed, Barnard sent his new son-in-law Chandos to the Ottoman court as the English ambassador from 1680. Though he did not die until 1714, his son James’s career soon eclipsed his own.

James Jr had also married a Londoner, Mary Lake, daughter of Sir Thomas Lake, of Cannons, Middlesex. She died in 1712 just before the culmination of her husband’s great rise to a dukedom, but her inheritance brought great riches, including Cannons. James had started his political career as MP from Hereford in 1697, and became involved in the East India Company and the financial administration of the office of the Lord High Admiral. From here he was appointed in 1705 Paymaster-General of the Allied Forces, a post that is always seen as a major stepping stone to great wealth (see Henry Fox later in the century). Managing public funds needed to support the huge war effort in the War of the Spanish Succession, he amassed a huge sum for himself, one of largest and swiftest fortunes of the age. In October 1714, three days after succeeding his father as 9^th Baron Chandos, the new king George I made him Earl of Carnarvon and Viscount Wilton in his coronation honours. He was a talented political networker, and after courting Whig ministers, was further elevated in the peerage in 1719 as Duke of Chandos and Marquess of Carnarvon.

In 1710, Brydges purchased his wife’s uncle’s estate at Cannons in Middlesex just outside London, in the village of Edgware (just off the ancient Watling Street, but now giving its name to Edgware Road). The name Cannons refers to the canons of St Bartholomew’s Priory who owned the land in the Middle Ages. After the Priory had been dissolved in the Reformation, a large house was built here in the early seventeenth century by Mary’s great-grandfather Thomas Lake, Secretary of State for James I, who granted him the manor of Little Stanmore in 1604. Brydges started a new house in 1713, a model of innovative Palladianism in England, which cost over £200,000 (about 40 million today) before it was finished in 1720. It was a marvel, but, as we will see below, unsustainable, and so after a twelve-day demolition sale in 1747, it was mostly pulled down. Elements were saved: the portico columns are now part of the National Gallery in London; the ceiling of the chapel is now in a church in Worcestershire; and so on. A new villa was built on the site in 1760 by William Hallett, a renowned cabinet maker; today it houses the North London Collegiate School, while Canons Park is owned by the local council (and gives its name, with this spelling, to a tube stop). Nearby, the Duke built a family mausoleum in St Lawrence Church.

The Duke of Chandos became one of the great patrons of the Georgian Age: at Cannons, he exhibited Italian art and maintained his own orchestra and choir—led by the leading composer of the age, Handel. The German-born composer arranged eleven psalm settings into what is known as the ‘Chandos Anthems’ in 1717-18 for the ducal chapel; and in 1718 premiered his pastoral masque Acis and Galatea, outside on the terraces overlooking the garden, with its water features that included an impressive jet d’eau. This would later be reworked and expanded into an opera, Handel’s most popular secular work. This musical legacy later inspired the formation of a record label Chandos Music in 1963 (later Chandos Records from 1979).

The Duke’s extravagance was mocked by some in high society as tasteless and definitely smelling of the nouveau riche. But his fortune continued to grow: he built a grand townhouse on St James Square; he invested in the development of the district north of Mayfair called Marylebone; he speculated in stocks. But here is where it all went wrong: in the bursting of the ‘South Sea Bubble’, October 1720, Chandos lost nearly £700,000 (£200 million today). Forced to sell his London townhouse, his debts continued to grow, to nearly £85,000 by his death in 1744.

The Duke and his first wife had several sons who died young, followed by John (known as the ‘Marquess of Carnarvon’ after 1719), who married well, Lady Catherine Tollemache, daughter of the Earl of Dysart, but died in 1727, leaving two daughters. The next son, Henry, tried to rebuild the family’s position by obtaining a good position at court, as Master of the Horse to the Prince of Wales in 1729, and by marriage to Mary Bruce, granddaughter of the 2^nd Earl of Ailesbury. Her father, later the 3^rd Earl, died in 1747 with no male heirs, meaning most of his titles passed to distant male cousins, but not his barony of Kinloss (based in Morayshire, created in 1602 for Edward Bruce, Master of the Rolls), which was reckoned able to pass through a female line. But Carnarvon lost the position in the Prince’s household by 1735, his wife died in 1738, and he sullied his social standing by a second marriage to a domestic, Anne Jefferies (née Wells) in 1744. It was said he ‘bought’ his new wife from an innkeeper while visiting Newmarket—wife-selling was in fact a way of getting a divorce in the eighteenth century, and the Duke claimed he saw her being mistreated so rescued her. But the damage was done and once he became 2^nd Duke of Chandos, he dismantled Cannons in 1747 and auctioned off its contents to attempt to cover his father’s debts.

A second Chandos House was built in London at this time, on Queen Anne St in Marylebone, by the famous architect Robert Adam, his first London townhouse. Construction began in 1769. Its chief resident was for many years the 3^rd Duke’s widow, confined here in her madness until 1813, after which it was sold. It housed the Austrian Embassy until 1866, then had various owners under 1959 when it was sold to a business. It is remarkably intact.

The 2^nd Duke of Chandos did not get to live in his new London house, and died in 1771. He was succeeded by his son, another James. As Marquess of Carnarvon, James had acquired another good post at court, Gentleman of the Bedchamber of the Prince of Wales, 1760-64, and was later named a member of the Privy Council in 1775 and appointed Lord Steward of the Household, 1783, a post he held until his death in 1789. This was an important post to have at the time of crisis during the first attack of George III’s mental illness in the summer of 1788. The 3^rd Duke of Chandos’ marriages were not of the rank normally associated with the great ducal families of the age, though both were strategic additions to prop up his family’s flagging fortune: his first wife (from 1753) Margaret Nicol (Nicholl), was an heiress, of Minchenden Hall in Middlesex; while the second (from 1777) was Anna Eliza Hope Elletson (née Gamon), heiress of her first husband’s sugar plantation in Jamaica.

Minchenden (today usually spelled Minchington) was a brick house built in the 1660s by Sir Thomas Wolstenholme in Southgate, which is ironically in North London (it was the ‘south gate’ of the Enfield Chase, an open area long owned by the Duchy of Lancaster, over which young James Brydges had been appointed Ranger). Purchased by John Nichol in 1738 it passed to his daughter Margaret and thus to the Brydges family. As family debts continued to mount in the nineteenth century, the house was sold to a neighbouring landowner who demolished the house and absorbed the estate into his own.

The Hope Plantation in Jamaica had been established by Maor Richard Hope in 1655, not too far from Kingston, and by the eighteenth century was worked by hundreds of slaves. Anna Eliza had been born in Hertfordshire but moved to Jamaica where her first husband, Roger Hope Elletson, served as Lieutenant-Governor, 1767-68. Since 1873, the Hope Estate has been transformed into the Hope Royal Botanical Gardens.

With restored wealth, the 3^rd Duke added to the family’s reputation as art collectors, notably through his acquisition (via his first marriage) of a portrait thought most to resemble William Shakespeare, now known as the ‘Chandos Portrait’. This was sold by his heirs in 1848 to the Earl of Ellesmere who donated it to the newly founded National Portrait Gallery as the first work of art in its collection.

In 1789, the 3^rd Duke died rather suddenly died due to an accident fall, it was said caused by his wife. She was declared a lunatic in 1791, and was confined to Chandos House and became a ward of court. Several lawsuits sprung up regarding the management of her various estates, including lands in Ireland and the plantation in Jamaica.

What was left of the Chandos fortune passed to their only child, Anna Elizabeth, who was only ten years old. This inheritance included claims to the Scottish barony of Kinloss, which the 3^rd Duke had never claimed, though eligible as heir of his grandfather the Earl of Ailesbury in 1747. It was proposed to marry the heiress as early as 1785 to Richard Temple-Nugent-Grenville, Earl Temple, which was done in 1796. She and her husband thus forged the great quintuple-barrelled surname by royal licence in 1799.

Grenville & Temple

By strict patrilineal reckoning, Richard’s surname was Grenville. This family’s roots stretch back into the eleventh century in Buckinghamshire—the first real connection with this county we encounter in this post. Earlier versions of the name are given as Greenvile or Greenville. They were lords of Wotton Underwood, a village northwest of Aylesbury, from about the fourteenth century. It is interesting to note that Buckinghamshire would proliferate with prime ministers’ country houses over the centuries: besides Wotton, there was Stowe House to the north (see below), and Hughenden (Disraeli’s house) to the south, as indeed is Chequers. In fact, former prime minister Tony Blair purchased the refurbished stable block at Wotton Underwood itself in 2008.

There was a manor house at Wotton from the twelfth century. The Grenvilles built a new house on higher ground in 1704, before moving to Stowe in 1749. A younger brother stayed on at Wotton, as did a sister, Hester, who was married to William Pitt the Elder, who redesigned its landscaping. After a bad fire in 1820, it was rebuilt with lower proportions, and after the family died out in 1889, it was rented out, then sold in 1929. The run-down building was slated for demolition in 1957, but was saved and renovated. It is still in private hands and open infrequently. Its coach house was renamed the South Pavilion and was owned by Sir John Gielgud, then Tony Blair.

For centuries the Grenvilles of Wotton cultivated ties with local gentry families of Buckinghamshire but did not rise to great prominence. Then in 1710, Richard Grenville, MP for Buckingham, married Hester Temple, sister and ultimately co-heiress of Sir Richard Temple of Stowe, the future Viscount Cobham, one of the leading lights of Whig politics in the 1720s-30s.

The Temple family were a more recent addition to Buckinghamshire society, making their money in wool, and based at Stowe House only from the late sixteenth century. The family rose in the world a bit when John Temple of Stowe’s daughter Elizabeth married William Fiennes, Viscount Saye & Sele (from just over the border in Oxfordshire) in 1600, and a few years later, his son Thomas, MP for Andover in Hampshire, purchased the ‘rotten borough’ of Buckingham (its two MPs far over-represented a small electorate), became a baronet (1611), and was appointed in succession Sheriff of Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Warwickshire.

His son Peter was also Sheriff of Buckinghamshire, while a nephew, Thomas, became Governor-Proprietor of Acadia-Nova Scotia in 1657, and received one of those rare baronetcies in the Peerage of Nova Scotia in 1662. Thomas was joint proprietor with William Crowne (both appointed by Lord Protector Cromwell), and they travelled there to develop it, also living in Boston for a time, but were forced by a treaty signed by England 1667 to recognise that Acadia belonged to France.

In the latter half of the seventeenth century, the Temple family became embedded in the ‘Country Party’, the remnants of the Parliamentarians of the Civil War which eventually formed the Whig Party in the 1670s. One of the main aims of the Whigs in this time was to prevent the succession of the Catholic and absolutist Duke of York, a mission led in part in Parliament by Sir Richard Temple, 3^rd Baronet. His son Richard, 4^th Baronet, was a soldier and politician: he rose through the military ranks in the 1680s-90s and in 1710 was promoted to lieutenant-general. He also occupied one of those seats guaranteed for the family as MP for Buckingham, from 1697 to 1714. That latter year, a new king, George I elevated him to the peerage as Baron Cobham, in the County of Kent, and sent him to Vienna as his ambassador. I’m not sure why this title was selected, as Cobham Hall in Kent seems un-related, as does Cobham Park in Surrey. In 1715, Lord Cobham married Anne Halsey, heiress of Edmund, owner of Anchor Brewery in Southwark, whose wealth enabled him to redevelop his family’s old seat at Stowe. Her father benefitted too, obtaining one of the Temple safe seats as MP for Buckingham in 1717.

Stowe House is in the far northern end of Buckinghamshire. Originally a manor owned by Osney Abbey (in Oxford), when it was secularised in 1539 it was given to the Giffords, then leased to the Temples in 1571 and then sold to them outright in 1589. The house was rebuilt in the 1680s by the 3^rd baronet, then additions were added in the 1720s by Viscount Cobham (with renowned architects John Vanbrugh and William Kent). The real showpiece we see today, the very wide steps leading up to the neo-classical south front, was added in the 1770s by the 2^nd Earl Temple (designed by Robert Adam). Later additions included a massive library built in its own wing, and a fashionable ‘Egyptian Hall’. It was lavishly decorated with artworks purchased in Italy on the Grand Tour, and notably, much of the Orléans Collection sold in 1798. Most of this was sold off during the family’s bankruptcy travails in 1848-49—notably the Stowe Collection of Manuscripts now housed at the British Library, including about two-thousand Irish, Anglo-Saxon and medieval documents. The rest of the collections were sold in 1921, though some things were later bought back, notably family portraits that still adorn the house. After the Grenville-Temple family died out in 1889, Stowe House was rented out (including to the Count of Paris, exiled claimant to the French throne, who died here in 1894). The Morgan-Grenvilles sold it in 1922 to Stowe School, who still occupy the house, while the gardens, since 1989, have been held by the National Trust. Stowe’s gardens are still considered amongst the finest in Britain, but its real fame came as its role as the political hub for much of mid-century politics, as we will see.

Speaking of politics, Lord Cobham returned to politics in 1716, and was named a Privy Councillor and Constable of Windsor Castle. In 1718, he was honoured further with the elevation of his title to Viscount Cobham. In the two decades that followed he developed into a senior statesman for the Whig party, the mentor to his nephews George Grenville and William Pitt, both future prime ministers. His faction became known as the Cobhamites, or ‘Cobham’s Cubs’, and they usually met at Stowe House—an alternate capital in opposition to London, and in particular a focal point of opposition to the government of Prime Minister Walpole. George Lyttleton was another of the Cubs, and was also a nephew, the son of Cobham’s sister Christian (and his family ultimately would be the heirs to the Cobham title). Other posts and ranks given to Viscount Cobham in this period include Governor of Jersey (1723) and Lord-Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire (1728); and in military grades, General (1735), and finally Field Marshal (1742).

When Viscount Cobham died in 1749, his viscountcy, and Stowe House, passed to his sister Hester, who was created Countess Cobham in her own right in 1749, with her son Richard Grenville-Temple as her heir. The Temple baronetcy, however, passed by right to a cousin, William Temple, but became dormant a generation later with the death of the 7^th baronet in 1786. The next generation of Grenville-Temples was extraordinary, with four brothers and a brother-in-law at the pinnacle of Whig politics for much of the middle of the eighteenth century—often leading the government not from London, but from Stowe House.

The eldest, Richard Grenville-Temple, succeeded his mother in 1752 as 2^nd Earl Temple and 3^rd Viscount Cobham. A close political associate of his brother George and William Pitt, they pushed their way into power in the 1740s in the government of Henry Pelham. In 1754 Pitt solidified the alliance by marrying their sister Hester. In 1756, Richard became First Lord of the Admiralty while George was Treasurer of the Navy. Then in 1757, Pitt formed a government as virtual prime minister (nominally under Pelham’s brother, the Duke of Newcastle), and Richard was promoted to Lord Privy Seal. That was as high as the Earl rose in politics, and he died in 1779, leaving his titles to his nephew George Grenville junior.

Meanwhile, George Grenville senior succeeded Pitt as Leader of the Commons in 1761, then formed a government as Prime Minister (formally Chancellor of the Exchequer) in 1763. His ministry oversaw the aftermath of the Seven Years War and the first stirrings of colonial unrest in America. After only two years he was forced out by the King who disliked him for replacing his favourite, Lord Bute. He died in 1770. Grenville was succeeded as Prime Minister in 1766 by his brother-in-law William Pitt (this time officially), again for only two years. Pitt was created Earl of Chatham that same year (Lady Hester had already been created Baroness Chatham in her own right in 1761), and was father to two sons: John, 2^nd Earl of Chatham, and William Pitt the Younger, who would himself be Prime Minister for over two decades, from 1783 to 1806, transforming the Grenvillite party into the Pittite party.

The younger Grenville brothers were James, a Lord of the Treasury and Cofferer of the Household during the ministries of both Grenville and Pitt; and Henry, who actually held high office before anyone in the family, as Governor of Barbados in 1746, and later as Ambassador to Constantinople in 1761.

The next generation was nearly a repeat of the same, with three brothers all prominent in different spheres of influence. Here the most eminent was the youngest, William Wyndham Grenville, who succeeded Pitt the Younger as Prime Minister in February 1806, and oversaw the abolition of slavery in March 1807, but was forced out that same month for trying to pass a bill on Catholic Emancipation. He took his middle name from his mother’s father, Sir William Wyndham, a prominent politician (though a Tory) in the reign of Queen Anne (and husband to the great Seymour heiress). Here yet another brother-in-law, Charles Wyndham, 2^nd Earl of Egremont, was part of the political machine of the Temple-Grenvilles in the 1760s. Before this Grenville became prime minister, he had been created Baron Grenville of Wotton in 1790 to move him from being Speaker of the House of Commons to Leader of the House of Lords. His wife Anne Pitt was a cousin of Pitt the Younger. His older brother Thomas, held the family seat as MP for Buckingham and was First Lord of the Admiralty, 1806-07.

Finally, the eldest brother, George, 3^rd Earl Temple from 1779, was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland August 1782 to May 1783, and 1787 to 1789. In between these stints in Ireland he was appointed a Secretary of State when Pitt the Younger formed his first ministry in December 1783, but resigned only three days later—the shortest cabinet tenure until the 2020s. He was raised in rank to Marquess of Buckingham in 1784 and sent back to Ireland where he became increasingly unpopular for his extravagant lifestyle. While he was in Ireland, he succeeded his father-in-law as 2^nd Earl Nugent. So one more name was added to the family list.

Nugent:

George Grenville’s wife was Lady Mary Nugent. The Nugent family came from County Westmeath, right in the centre of Ireland. Sir Gilbert de Nugent, said to be originally from Nogent-le-Rotrou in western France, came to Ireland with one of the conquering Norman lords, Hugh de Lacy, in 1171. When de Lacy was granted the lands of the former Kingdom of Meath, Nugent was given the local lordship of Delvin, where he built a new castle.

Delvin Castle, also called Nugent Castle, is today a ruin on the edge of town. Another castle nearby, Clonyn, was the seat of the senior branch of the family: initially built by the 1^st Earl of Westmeath in 1639—he famously burned it down himself in 1649 rather than forced to offer hospitality to the men of Cromwell’s army—restored by his grandson in the 1680s, then replaced altogether in Victorian neogothic style in the 1860s and sold in the 1920s (and still privately owned).

A peerage title, Baron Delvin, was granted to William FitzRichard Nugent in 1389, and more officially in 1451. The family produced several rebels during the Tudor era and remained Catholic even after reconciliation with the Crown and the creation of the title Earl of Westmeath for Richard Nugent, 7^th Baron Delvin, in 1621. The second son of the 1^st Earl went abroad, as many Irish Catholic nobles did, and founded a line of Austrian Nugents: Jakob Robert, Count Nugent von Westmeath was a Field Marshal-Lieutenant, while Count Michael Anton was an Austrian artillery commander and Governor of Prague (d. c1790). A soldier in the next generation was much more famous, and even made a prince (so doubly qualified for inclusion in this blog post): Laval, Count Nugent von Westmeath, was born at Ballinacor House in County Westmeath in 1777. He had a long military career in Austrian service, from the Napoleonic Wars to the revolutions of 1848. In 1809, he was appointed Chief of the General Staff of Archduke Johann, commander of Austrian forces in the war against France, and today is recognised (by some) as a hero in Croatia for liberating their Adriatic coast from French troops. In 1813, he led troops into Italy, liberating Modena and restoring its Este duke, and was named a Lieutenant-Field Marshal in April 1815. Now commander of one of the armies sent to chase the ex-king of Naples, Joachim Murat, out of Italy, he liberated Rome, then defeated Murat in May. For his efforts, Count Nugent was rewarded with the title ‘Roman Prince’ by Pope Pius VII in 1816, and a Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece in Austria. Continuing down the Peninsula, he helped restore King Ferdinand IV to his throne in Naples, and so moved into that monarch’s service in 1817, married an Italian noblewoman (a Riario-Sforza), then returned to Austria in 1820. He returned to the Croatian coast as military commander in 1829, having already acquired several castles and lordships there including the imposing and very ancient Trsat Castle, overlooking Rijeka—once a stronghold of the Frankopan princes—which he restored and opened as a museum; and Bosilijevo, another Frankopan castle further inland (on the borders with Slovenia), which he acquired from the Auersperg family [LINK] and made his chief residence. Bosilijevo Castle was sold by the family in 1897, but Trsat was maintained until confiscated during World War II.

Having continued to rise in the military hierarchy, as Master of Ordnance in 1838 and General-in-Chief in Moravia in 1839, Nugent von Westmeath was sent to North Italy to suppress the revolts of 1848, then pulled to Hungary to do the same there in 1849. Again, his successes earned him a promotion, to full Field Marshal. A few years before his death in 1862, he was honoured again for his adherence to the Catholic cause with the titular title ‘Prior of Ireland’, a no longer extant position within the Order of Malta. He was succeeded as ‘2^nd Prince Nugent’ by his son Albert (d. 1896), then his grandson Laval (d. 1940).

Back in Ireland, the main Nugent line continued in the person of George, 8^th Earl of Westmeath, who was raised in rank to Marquess of Westmeath in 1822. When he died in 1871, the title passed to a cousin and reverted to an earldom, which continues to the present.

But Mary Nugent was from a cadet branch of the family, Nugent of Carlanstown, formed in the sixteenth century by the second son of the 3^rd Baron Delvin. Carlanstown is also in County Westmeath and was the site of a medieval castle, mostly (but not entirely) replaced by a grand house in 1830.

Robert Nugent of Carlanstown became a tutor in the household of Peter Plunkett, 4^th Earl of Fingall, and married his daughter Lady Emilia in 1730. She died in childbirth the next year, but Robert continued to advance his career through an astute second marriage in 1736 to a rich and well-connected widow, Anna Craggs, whose second husband, English MP John Knight, had left her Gosfield Hall.

Gosfield, near the town of Braintree in Essex, had been built by John Wentworth in 1545. Expanded in the 1690s, it was then acquired by Knight in 1715. Nugent later expanded it to house his daughter and son-in-law, the Marquess of Buckingham. Louis XVIII lived here in 1807-09 until moving to the better-known Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire. Gosfield Hall was later owned by the Courtauld Institute, and today it is run as a wedding venue.

Anna Craggs’ father, James Craggs, was a financier and Whig politician. He was appointed Postmaster General in 1715 and clothier to the army, from which he profited a great deal, in the same manner as the Duke of Chandos above. He made an enormous fortune in the South Sea Bubble and was implicated in its collapse in 1720. His son James was named Secretary of War in 1717. Both father and son died within a month of each other in 1721, leaving Anna a great heiress.

Robert Nugent of Carlanstown, who took the name Craggs-Nugent on his second marriage, converted to Protestantism, and saw his political fortunes rise. MP for Cornwall and then Bristol from 1741 to 1788, from 1782 was called ‘Father of the House’ as the longest-serving MP. In 1747, he was appointed Comptroller of the Household of the Prince of Wales (and ingratiated himself by lending a lot of money), then in successive Whig regimes he was a Lord of the Treasury (1754), a member of the Privy Council (1759) and First Lord of Trade (1766). He was also appointed Vice-Treasurer of Ireland in 1759, a post he held (with a short break) until 1782, and was rewarded for his party loyalty with the titles Viscount Clare and Baron Nugent of Carlanstown, 1767; then Earl Nugent, 1776 (all in the Peerage of Ireland). His third wife (from 1757), Elizabeth Drax, widow of the 4^th Earl of Berkeley, helped solidify his connections with the royal family through her long service as Lady of the Bedchamber to Augusta, Princess of Wales (the mother of George III)—for nearly thirty years.

But despite his three marriages, the 1^st Earl Nugent left no male heirs: his son Edmund from his first marriage died young in 1771, while his third wife left him two daughters, Mary and Louisa. The earldom of 1776 was thus created with a special remainder to allow it to pass to Mary and her heirs.

Edmund Nugent did have two sons, Sir George and Sir Charles, but these were illegitimate. The latter was an admiral, with service in America and the Caribbean from the 1770s to the 1810s. He retired as Admiral of the Fleet, 1833, the most senior officer in the Royal Navy. Sir George Nugent made his career on land: he served in the American Revolution and the Revolutionary Wars and was a major-general by 1796, then was named Commander of the Northern District of Ireland in 1798 (during the great rebellion there that year). From 1801 to 1806 he was Governor of Jamaica, and when he returned to serve as Commander of the Western District of England, he was also made a baronet, of Waddesdon in Berkshire—a place made more famous for its fantastic neo-gothic palace built by the Rothschilds in 1874. In 1811 Sir George Nugent was sent abroad again as Commander-in-Chief in India. Much later in life was raised to Field Marshal (1846). His line of baronets continues to the present; a second son of one of these was created Baron Nugent of Watterling, Norfolk, in 1960. He had been the equerry of the Duke of York since 1927 and continued in this role when the Duke became George VI, and even after for his daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, until 1960, when his post was converted to Lord-in-Waiting. He died in 1973 and his barony died with him.

When the 1^st Earl Nugent died in 1788, his daughter Mary, Marchioness of Buckingham, Countess Temple, and Viscountess Chatham, became 2^nd Countess Nugent, bringing this Irish title seemingly appropriately to her husband, George Temple-Grenville, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Together they adopted the surname Nugent-Temple-Grenville. Mary had an inheritance worth £14,000 a year and nearly 9,000 Irish acres. To secure this inheritance, Mary was created Baroness Nugent of Carlanstown in her own right in 1800, with special remainder to her second son, George. She died in 1812, followed by her husband in 1813.

And so we come to their son, Richard Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville, 2^nd Marquess of Buckingham, 4^th Earl Temple and 3^rd Earl Nugent. He had married Lady Anne Brydges, daughter of the 3^rd Duke of Chandos, in 1796, and so formed the entire five-barrelled surname. I suppose it seemed outrageous for such a splendidly titled—and well-connected politically—person to not have a dukedom, so in 1822, King George IV re-created the Duchy of Chandos, but threw in Buckingham as well. It is said that the 1^st Duke of Buckingham Chandos earned this promotion from the King by becoming a Tory in order to support the administration of George IV’s favoured Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, and especially by having so many rotten boroughs in his pocket (these were all quashed by the Reform Acts of 1832). This dukedom was the last of the double dukedoms, an oddity that had appeared in the eighteenth century (with the exception of two more royal dukedoms in the nineteenth century: Connaught & Strathearn and Clarence & Avondale). His new subsidiary titles were Marquess of Chandos and Earl Temple of Stowe. In 1830, the Duke was named Lord Steward for the coronation of William IV. The 1^st Duchess died in 1836 followed by the 1^st Duke in 1839.

The Victorian era thus opened with Richard, 2^nd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, as one of its leading figures, still based at the old Whig political headquarters, Stowe House. In the government formed by Robert Peel in September 1841, he was named Lord Privy Seal, but he only served for five months. The Chandos family curse seems to have been passed to him from his mother, and, with around 1.5 million pounds of debt, in 1847 he declared himself bankrupt, selling Buckingham House on Pall Mall, Avington Park (the new Chandos seat), and much of the contents of Stowe House, including 21,000 bottles of wine. He also sold over 36,000 acres of land in Ireland and southwest England, leaving just the core of 10,000 in Buckinghamshire.

Avington Park is a country house in the Itchen valley, just outside Winchester in Hampshire. It was built as an Elizabethan ‘half-H’ style manor house, expanded in the seventeenth century by a Brydges cadet branch, and in 1751 passed to the 2^nd Duke of Chandos. In the 1847 sale, it was acquired by the Shelley family (the same as the poet), and it is still in private hands.

The London residence of the family had been Buckingham House—not the one that became Buckingham Palace, but one almost as grand on Pall Mall. It had been built for the 1^st Marquess of Buckingham in 1790 by Sir John Soame. Sold in 1847, then demolished in 1908, an even grander building on the site now hosts the Royal Automobile Club.

At this low point in Buckingham & Chandos fortunes, yet another Temple prime minister enters this story: Henry John Temple, 3^rd Viscount Palmerston, was the first prime minister from the Liberal Party, 1855-58 and 1859-65. He too had strong Irish roots: his family’s viscounty had been created in 1723 in the Irish peerage (for Palmerston in County Dublin) along with a barony, Temple of Mount Temple, County Sligo. But it appears these Temples were not related to the Temples in this blog post: Lord Palmerston’s ancestors had been lawyers and politicians in Ireland since the early seventeenth century—though they did originally hail from Leicestershire, which is not that far from Buckinghamshire, so perhaps somewhere in the past they were related to the Temples of Stowe? What’s more, the political tendrils of the Temple-Grenville-Pitt dynasty don’t entirely end there either, as William Gladstone, prime minister in the 1860s-90s, was married to a granddaughter of Catherine Grenville, sister of the 1^st Marquess of Buckingham.

There was a bit of a resurge in the next generation. In 1861, the 2^nd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos was succeeded by his son Richard, whose second name Plantagenet seems to augment even further the outrageous ostentatiousness of his quintuple-barrelled surname. This pomposity is especially notable in the absolutely huge and overwhelmingly complicated ‘Grenville Armorial’, commissioned by his grandfather for the ceiling of the library in Stowe House in 1806. Designed to shock and impress, at 1.4 meters, with 719 individual ‘quarterings’ (some certainly exaggerated) it tells the story of the combination of families of Grenville, Temple, Nugent, Brydges and Chandos.

As Marquess of Chandos, Richard had been appointed Keeper of the Privy Seal of the Prince of Wales (1852), and now as 3^rd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, he resumed his family’s premier place in politics, as Lord President of the Council, 1866-67, then as Secretary of State for the Colonies, 1867-68. He paid off most of his father’s debts, successfully reclaimed the title Baron Kinloss in 1868 (dormant since 1747), and in 1875 crowned his career as Governor of Madras, 1875-1880. When he died in 1889, however, the magnificent collection of surnames and titles (and of course landed estates) was dispersed to various heirs. Despite his two marriages, to Caroline Harvey and Alice Graham (widow of the Earl of Egerton), he had no sons, only three daughters.

The dukedom and the marquessates became extinct, as did the earldom of Nugent. The viscountcy of Cobham passed to a cousin, Lord Lyttelton, while Stowe House and the Scottish barony of Kinloss went to the Duke’s eldest daughter Lady Mary, married since 1884 to Major Luis Morgan—they assumed the name Morgan-Grenville. The earldom of Temple of Stowe had been created with a special remainder to the 3^rd Duke’s sister, Anne, who in 1846 married William Gore-Langton, a kinsman of the Gore baronets, the earls of Arran and the barons Harlech. Their son William Temple-Gore-Langton became 4^th Earl Temple of Stowe in 1889, and his heirs still hold the title. The Temple title and the Temple seat at Stowe were now separated, and though Lady Kinloss tried to keep up the maintenance of Stowe House, she was forced to sell it in 1921. She had boosted her family’s connection to the past by giving her younger sons various ancestral names to form Temple-Morgan-Grenville and Nugent-Morgan-Grenville, but when she died in 1944, her eldest son having died shortly before her, she was succeeded by his daughter, Mary, who added her husband’s surname to her own. True to her family’s political heritage, Mary Freeman-Grenville, 12th Lady Kinloss, was active in the House of Lords until her hereditary status was removed in 1999. She was succeeded in 2012 by her daughter Teresa Freeman-Grenville.

There is currently no dukedom of Buckingham or Chandos.

(images Wikimedia Commons)

In 2024, Emily Sheffield published an editorial in I (now The I Paper) commenting on what it was like to be former Tory Prime Minister David Cameron’s sister-in-law. She received a lot of flak on social media from people who claimed she would be nowhere if not for her sister Samantha and her famous husband. Few seemed to be aware that the Sheffield family was far more aristocratic than the Camerons, with roots stretching back to the Tudor era and beyond. At one point they even inhabited the house now occupied by Britain’s royal family. Though they had risen slowly through the peerage hierarchy, they finally achieved the highest honour, a dukedom, in 1703—and it was an unusual one, in that it combined two place names, Buckingham and Normanby. Their lands, including Normanby, were firmly in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, but not Buckinghamshire, but the name could perhaps reflect the influential Yorkshire political network of the dukes of Buckingham of the previous century, extinct since 1687. And the ‘Yorkshire clique’ did generally adhere to Tory politics, as would the Sheffields of Normanby. This is in sharp contrast with the family of the next dukes of Buckingham (and Chandos), who were leaders of the Whig party for much of the eighteenth century. Though the dukes of Buckingham & Normanby may not be well remembered today (if at all), their imprint on the city of London was long lasting: Buckingham House is better known today as Buckingham Palace.

The Sheffields were a solid gentry family in North Lincolnshire as early as the thirteenth century, with no connection, as far as I can tell, with the manor of Sheffield on the far side of Yorkshire (later the great industrial city of Sheffield, which took its name from the river Sheaf). Their seat was at Butterwick on the west bank of the river Trent (with East Butterwick opposite side) in a low-lying area near the confluence of the Trent with the Ouse known as the Isle of Axholme. There was a tower house here in which the Sheffield family lived in the sixteenth century, surrounded by a deer park, which has some remains today. By the 1620s, the tower was sometimes called Mulgrave Castle, but this is more properly the name of their castle in North Yorkshire (see below). Forty years later, the family moved to Normanby, across the river and a few miles to the north, and the old tower at Butterwick fell to ruin.

Sir Robert Sheffield, son of an MP, became a lawyer and held several prominent positions within the City of London, notably that of Recorder, a senior judge, before becoming Speaker of the Commons in 1512. His son began marrying into the higher nobility, with two wives, a Stanley (of Derby) and a Zouche, but died relatively young, leaving his son Edmund as a ward of George Boleyn (Queen Anne’s brother), and after his fall, John De Vere, Earl of Oxford, whose daughter Anne he married in 1538. Through his Stanley mother he was a cousin of Henry VIII who in his will authorised the creation of the barony of Sheffield of Butterwick, which was actioned only a month after the King’s death in 1547. But the 1^st Lord Sheffield died just two years later trying to put down an uprising near Norwich, part of Kett’s Rebellion, in August 1549.

John, 2^nd Baron Sheffield, also died relatively young, in 1568. Leaving little to his widow except this splendid Tudor portrait.

The 2nd Lady Sheffield, born Douglas Howard, remained at court and was one of the powerful personalities that flourished at the Elizabethan court. Douglas, daughter of William, Lord Howard of Effingham, had been named for her godmother, Lady Margaret Douglas. About the time of her husband’s death, Lady Sheffield started an affair with Robert Dudley, the favourite of Queen Elizabeth—a dangerous idea. A son was born in 1574, called Robert Dudley, who later followed his mother’s lead in claiming that she and his father had indeed married in 1573 (in a controversial court case of 1604/05). The marriage was never recognised by Robert Dudley (senior), and soon after he married Lettice Knollys in 1578, Lady Sheffield married Sir Edward Stafford. In later life both Staffords played an important role representing English interests in France where Sir Edward was Ambassador.

The 3^rd Baron Sheffield, Edmund, was raised at the Elizabethan court, and served in the English support for Dutch independence in 1585 and in the Navy against the Spanish Armada in 1588. In the next reign, he rose in favour of King James, first as Lord Lieutenant of Yorkshire and President of the Council of the North, 1603, then Vice-Admiral of Yorkshire, 1604. In 1625, King Charles granted him Mulgrave Castle, then in 1626 elevated him in the peerage to Earl of Mulgrave.

Mulgrave is just north of Whitby, on the coast of North Yorkshire. A Viking fortress had been built here as far back as the sixth century, replaced by an imposing Norman castle in the twelfth century, as the caput (or main seat) of a feudal barony. It passed through various Norman families, Fossard, de Turnham, de Mauley, and by 1400 to Bigot, and in the sixteenth century to the Radcliffes. Dismantled by order of Parliament in 1647, a new Mulgrave Castle was rebuilt a short distance to the north by Catherine, Duchess of Buckingham and Normanby. This passed to the Phipps family in 1718, who significantly remodelled it in the 1780s, and they still own it today.

The 1^st Earl of Mulgrave’s son John died young in 1614, so he was eventually succeeded by his grandson, Edmund, in 1646. In 1631, young Edmund made an interesting choice in marrying Elizabeth Cranfield, daughter of the disgraced former Lord High Treasurer, the Earl of Middlesex. Back in 1621, Middlesex had tried to gain royal favour by marrying as his second wife Anne Brett, a cousin of the King’s favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham—but he also tried to promote Anne’s brother Arthur Brett as a rival royal favourite in 1622, which led to his downfall. Buckingham himself died in 1628; and although he left a son, the 2^nd Duke of Buckingham, when he died in 1687, that title became available. Could this be the link between the Sheffield family and the title Buckingham that we shall see in the next generation? After these tumultuous years at the court of James I, Edmund became a Parliamentarian, yet he was still permitted by King Charles to succeed his father as Lord-Lieutenant of Yorkshire as late as 1646, the year he also became 2^nd Earl of Mulgrave. During the Commonwealth period Mulgrave sat as a member of the Council of State, but died in 1658, before the Restoration, when many members of the aristocracy redeemed themselves at the court of Charles II. So it was the widowed Countess of Mulgrave who was instrumental in raising her young son John to be more loyal.

And loyal he was. And was well rewarded…with a double dukedom. The young 3^rd Earl of Mulgrave first succeeded his father as Vice-Admiral of Yorkshire, though he was only 12. As an adult, he joined the emerging Tory faction at court, a political group that evolved in the 1670s around the old Royalist interests (and the Yorkshire gentry faction), and was rewarded with the position of Lord-Lieutenant of the East Riding of Yorkshire in 1679. He was a longtime courtier as Gentleman of the Chamber for both Charles II and James II. He was particularly favoured in the reign of James II, who named him to his Privy Council in 1685, and Lord Chamberlain of England. Mulgrave supported James in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, so lost these posts in the new regime of William & Mary, but was later reconciled with William III who rewarded his loyalty (again) by raising him in the peerage to Marquis of Normanby in 1694.

Normanby Hall is near Scunthorpe in North Lincolnshire. A seventeenth-century house was redesigned in late Georgian style by the Sheffield family in the 1820s, and remained their primary seat until it was given to the North Lincolnshire Council in 1963 (and the Sheffield family moved to Sutton Park, see below). The house was opened for tourism and the grounds turned into a country park.

In 1702, King William died and was succeeded by Queen Anne. The Marquis of Normanby by this point was one of her favourites, and she appointed him Lord Privy Seal in 1702 and Lord-Lieutenant of the North Riding of Yorkshire (switching Ridings). The next year, she created him Duke of Buckingham and Normanby. Cockayne’s Complete Peerage speculates that the ‘and Normanby’ was added in case the Villers heirs managed to reclaim the Buckingham title (which they didn’t). A few years later, the Whigs lost power and the Queen’s favoured party, the Tories, formed a government, so the new Duke was created Lord Steward of the Household, 1710, and Lord President of the Council, 1711. These posts ended with the arrival of George I in 1714, and the Duke retired, and died in 1721.

In 1703, the new Duke of Buckingham and Normanby built a house near court in London, on land he had acquired a few years before. He named it Buckingham House. This land, in the fields north of Westminster Abbey had originally been part of the Manor of Ebury, watered by the river Tyburn. It was an ancient estate, owned by Anglo-Saxon kings, then given by William the Conqueror to the Abbey. Henry VIII secularised the lands in 1536 and leased it out; James I then sold the freehold, which eventually passed to the Earl of Middlesex—the same as above—who sold it to Hugh Audley, one of England’s richest men. He left it to his great-niece Mary Davies, whose story is known as the founder of the great London wealth of the Grosvenor dukes of Westminster. The first great house on the site was built in 1624 by William Blake, purchased in 1633 by George Goring, Earl of Norwich. This ‘Goring House’ was extended over the next decades and soon included a ‘Great Garden’. In the 1670s it was owned by Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington, a chief minister of Charles II. It burned down in 1674, so a new ‘Arlington House’ was built in 1675. John Sheffield bought the freehold then built a new ‘Buckingham House’ in 1703, with a central block and two service wings. His heirs sold both the freehold and the house back to the Crown in 1761—it was later known as ‘the Queen’s House’ and by the 1790s, Buckingham Palace. A new building replaced the Sheffield house in the 1820s, then Queen Victoria added a new wing in the 1850s—what is now considered the ‘front’ of the house, with its famous balcony (though this was significantly redesigned in 1913).

In 1706, the Duke of Buckingham and Normanby married for the third time—the two first wives having died childless—to Catherine Darnley, the divorced Countess of Anglesey. This was an interesting choice, as she was a natural daughter of James II and his mistress Catherine Sedley. The new Duchess was thus a half-sister of the Old Pretender, James Edward Stuart, and was reputedly one of the most proud women at court (some called her ‘Princess Buckingham’), openly pro-Jacobite. Politically she was a Tory and a strong rival to the Whig Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough. Much younger than her husband, the Duchess of Buckingham and Normanby lived for many years as a widow and died in 1743, outliving the dukedom itself: outliving two infant sons (called by the courtesy title ‘Marquess of Normanby’), and the nineteen-year-old 2^nd Duke.

Edmund, 2^nd Duke of Buckingham & Normanby, served in Germany with his uncle, the Duke of Berwick (also an illegitimate child of James II), in the War of the Polish Succession (1733-35, and died of consumption on a visit to Rome in 1735.

Upon the 2nd Duke’s death most of the Sheffield estates passed to a half-brother (below); but Mulgrave Castle was awarded to the Phipps family, heirs of his mother’s first marriage to the Earl of Anglesey, and some of the Sheffield titles were later re-created for them: Baron Mulgrave, 1765, Earl of Mulgrave and Viscount Normanby, 1812 (for Henry Phipps, Foreign Secretary, 1805, and First Lord of the Admiralty, 1807); and finally Marquis of Normanby, 1838 (for Constantine Phipps, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and Home Secretary). This line continues today. There was also a new barony (and for a short time, an earldom) of Sheffield, for the unrelated Holroyd family in 1781, now held by a branch of the Stanley family.

The illegitimate son of the 1^st Duke, Sir Charles Sheffield, born about the time of his father’s third marriage, was created Baronet Sheffield, of Normanby, in 1755. He inherited Buckingham House but soon sold it to George III. The Sheffield baronets retreated back to Lincolnshire for the next century. In 1963, they sold the too large Normanby House and purchased Sutton Park, north of York towards the Howardian Hills. The Georgian manor house built by the Harland family in the 1750s replaced an earlier Jacobean manor. The Sheffields moved their huge art collection here from Normanby (and included works that had once been in Buckingham House in London). It remains private, with occasional open days. The 8^th and current Sheffield baronet, Sir Reginald, is the father of Samantha, Lady Cameron, and the journalist Emily Sheffield.

(Images Wikimedia Commons)

Since 1301, the heir to the English throne has borne the title Prince of Wales, but this title had been forged by several previous generations of native Welsh princes, notably of the House of Aberffraw: the princes of Gwynedd. From their base on the Isle of Môn, better known in English as Anglesey, they dominated the northwest corner of Wales for centuries, and stretched their influence along the north coast towards Chester and down the west coast into Ceredigion. At times their authority extended deep into the interior to include the principality of Powys, assuming the title ‘Prince of all the Welsh’ or even ‘King of the Britons’.

There are few physical remains of this dynasty, either in written records, visual representations of its princes, or its chief residences. The chronicles that are used by historians of Wales are often incomplete or contradictory. For a dynastic historian like me, their history is a good lesson in how family did not always mean harmony, and fraternal bloodshed and betrayal in this dynasty was rampant. Yet there are also stories of bravery and skill here, preserving Welsh culture in the face of generation after generation of invasions by Danes and Saxons, and later by Normans, to whom they ultimately fell. The House of Gwynedd is usually divided into two dynasties: the first, the House of Cunedda, established in the 450s (or the Maelgyning, named for Maelgwn in the sixth century), and the House of Aberffraw, who took over in the 840s and ruled until 1283.

Cunedda is one of the earliest figures to feature in Welsh history though provable details are scarce. He was said to be a warrior chieftain from northern Britannia, living in the area called Manaw Gododdin, today roughly the area known as the Lothians in Scotland. Invited by the people of northern Wales to help them either defend against raids by marauders from the Isle of Man, or to drive out Irish people who had settled the northwest coasts. Irish influence in this period was heavy, and it is thought the name of the Llŷn Peninsula, just south of Anglesey, might mean ‘people from Leinster’. Some stories say Cunedda was the grandson of a Roman officer stationed in Britain, while others say he was a descendant of Beli Mawr, an ancient British king from before the Roman conquest, and from other British kings who had ruled the ‘Old North’ (Hen Ogledd) in the Roman era, including Coel Hen (‘Cole the Old’), who reigned in the fourth century (and who has become confused over time with the nursery rhyme figure of Old King Cole). Both of these origin narratives could be true, and it seems that he and his sons did retain Roman customs and the Christian faith. His epithet, ‘Wledig’, is possibly a translation of a Roman title (an official of a region, like a ‘count’ in the original sense of that word), but may be more simply a British word for ruler or lord. Cunedda and his successors used the title rhi, ‘chief’ or ‘small king’, or the grander title of brenhin, ‘king’. To keep with the theme of dukes and princes in this website, I’ll pass over much of the earlier period of independent kings in Gwynedd, and focus more on the later period, after about 1060, when its rulers adopted the lesser title of tywysog or prince.

The state established by Cunedda in about 450 stretched from the Llŷn Peninsula and Ynys Môn in the west to the area around Conwy on the north coast and over the Clwyd mountains to the river Dee in the east. His kingdom eventually took the name Gwynedd, possibly from the Old Irish weidh-n (forest people, wild people) or weina (chase, pursue). In Latin, it was rendered Vened or Venedotia. Môn was probably from the same root as manaw (‘mountain island’) as used for Mannin, aka the Isle of Man. In contrast, Anglesey derives from the much later Viking name ‘Ongli’s Island’, which could be named for a chief called Ongli or for ongull (‘hook’), related to our word ‘angle’…so not Angle as in those people who came to Britain with the Saxons.

Cunedda died about 460 and divided his realm amongst his sons and grandsons, who gave their names to the historic principalities of northwest Wales: Ceredig ruled Ceredigion (Cardigan) and Meirion ruled Meirionydd (Merioneth). The eldest son Einion Yrth (‘the Impetuous’) retained Gwynedd and defeated the remaining Irish on Môn and consolidated his family’s rule there. He was followed in about 500 by his son, Cadwallon Lawhir (‘the Long-Haired’), who established his family’s superiority over the other Cambrian or Welsh states. Cadwallon’s nephew, Cynlas Goch (‘the Red’, also called Cuneglasus), established a separate line who ruled in the eastern parts of Gwynedd known as Rhos, which continued until about 800. Another interesting, but probably mythical, member of the dynasty at this early stage, was Saint Non or Nonita, who was a daughter or daughter-in-law of King Ceredig, a nun raped by another Welsh prince resulting in the birth of Saint David, the patron saint of Wales. Saints Einion and Seiriol are also attached in some medieval genealogies to the line of Rhos. The Ceredigion branch of the dynasty carried on as rulers of a separate kingdom until it was absorbed by Gwynedd towards the end of the ninth century.

There are few sites with visible remains to visit from these early kings of Gwynedd, Rhos and Ceredigion. The court of Cadwallon Lawhir may have been a site today called Caswallon’s Llys (llys being the Welsh word for ‘court’, essentially an undefended great hall palace rather than a fortified castle) on the northeast corner of Ynys Môn atop a hill, Mynydd Eilian (‘mount of Saint Eilian’)—today only visible due to geophysical surveys undertaken in 2009. It is also thought he had a stronghold further to the east on the north coast near the mouth of the Conwy river: Bodysgallen (Bod Caswallon), though there is no real evidence connecting him to this site. The current Bodysgallen House is a manor built in the seventeenth century by the Wynns and held by the Mostyns from the later eighteenth century.

Just next door is the ruined hill fort of Deganwy, built by King Maelgwyn in the sixth century on a volcanic plug overlooking Conwy Bay (and today offering great views to the later Norman Conwy Castle). The Earl of Chester later built a Norman castle here in the 1070s, but little is known about it, in part because Prince Llywelyn Fawr rebuilt and expanded it in the thirteenth century, and this castle in turn was destroyed in 1241 by Dafydd II to prevent it from falling into English hands. Henry III of England nevertheless captured the site, rebuilt a castle, then saw it destroyed again in 1263 by Llywelyn II. Conwy Castle was then built on the other side of the estuary in the 1280s by Edward I, and Deganwy lost any strategic value. Very little remains today.

Also nearby, on the other side of the peninsula (and thus overlooking the Colwyn Bay) was the llys of the Rhos branch of the family, Dinerth, on a hill called Bryn Euryn—again, only known today following an excavation of 1997. At the foot of this hill was a more recent building, Llys Euryn, held by a local lieutenant for the princes of Gwynedd in the thirteenth century who became the ancestor of the Tudors.

Some of the kings in this early period stand out. Maelgwyn Hir (‘the Tall’), was known as a great warrior, but not necessarily in a good way: Gildas, one of the only contemporary sources, describes him as a ‘vicious sinner’. He and Cuneglasus are listed as amongst the worst kings of the Britons. Yet Maelgwn is also known as a founder of many churches and abbeys, perhaps even the episcopal see for Gwynedd, Bangor, in about 530—at first as a monastery for Saint Deiniol and only later (perhaps the eighth century?) as a bishopric.

By mid-century, the principality was weakened by conflict with another British state, the Kingdom of Strathclyde, which perhaps led to Gwynedd’s early defeat by the new invaders, the Saxons, at the Battle of Chester, 613. In a resurgence, Cadwallon II raised a large army and took over much of the north of Britain, sacking York in 633, but died in battle a year later. He and his son, Cadwaladr, are considered the last two ‘high kings’ of Britain (‘Rex Brettonum’). The latter was very religious (known as Fendigaid, ‘Blessed’) and strengthened the church; he built a church on the southwest coast of Môn (near the later royal site of Aberffraw), now called Saint Cadwaladr (in the village of Llangadwaladr), where his grandfather Cadfan’s tomb can still be viewed (from about 625). The Blessed Cadwaladr was a folk saint (not formally recognised by Rome), but a powerful one with a messianic aura—the last British king to drive out the Saxons (under the banner of his iconic red dragon), and destined to return someday to do the same once more (Y Mab Darogan, ‘the child of destiny’). According to Geoffrey of Monmouth (always very free with his imagination in his chronicles), towards the end of his life Cadwaladr renounced the throne and went on pilgrimage to Rome where he died in 682. The Tudor Dynasty revived his messianic cult and claimed descent from him to help legitimise their claims to the English throne.

The royal genealogy in the next generations gets a little fuzzy: Idwal, Rhodri, Cynan, Hywel and Caradog all involved themselves in wars versus their Saxon neighbours to the east, but also against other Welsh princes to the south and the inevitable fraternal or avuncular struggles that continued to weaken the dynasty. Several kings are said to have died due to the ‘treachery’ of their brothers. The capital shifted to Caernarfon, an old Roman fortification, Segontium, on the river Seiont. The newer Welsh name derived from y gaer yn Arfon, ‘the fort in the land across from Môn’. A new castle was built after the Norman conquest by the Earl of Chester in the 1080s—and also one at the other end of the Menai Strait called Aberlleiniog, on Anglesey near Beaumaris. Caernarvon was re-captured by the prince of Gwynedd in 1115, but was taken again by the English in 1283, when Edward I rebuilt it once more into the magnificent castle we see today, one of the great models of medieval castle building, and part of the ring of castles in North Wales, including Conwy and Harlech. Here Edward’s son was crowned Prince of Wales in 1301.

But that’s getting ahead of ourselves by quite a bit. The last of the House of Cunedda, King Hywel, died in 825, leaving a daughter (or perhaps a niece), Ethyll (or Esyllt). Some historians consider she may have been invented by later medieval genealogists to legitimise the takeover of Gwynedd by the House of Aberffraw.

Merfyn Frych (‘the Freckled’) (also known as ‘the Opressor’), was said to have married Ethyll. Or she was his mother, married to Gwriad who was said to be descended from the ancient kings of Britain (and from them back to Adam) or to the kings of the Isle of Man (there is often confusion in these sources between Man and Môn). Historians gave his dynasty the name Aberffraw after his principal seat on Môn.

Aberffraw became the new seat of the principality when Merfyn’s son Rhodri moved the llys here from Caernarfon in about 870. A new fortress-residence replaced an older palace that had been built at the mouth of the Ffraw river by Cadwallon Lawhir in the fifth century. It remained the capital until the thirteenth century—later rulers used the title ‘Prince of Aberffraw’. Much was dismantled in the 1320s to provide stone used to rebuild Caernarfon Castle, and the rest was destroyed soon after. There was never again a castle here, and the land was eventually owned by the Meurig (Meyrick) family of Bodorgan Hall, and later the Owens of Penrhos—then various families until it was part of the estate of the Marquis of Anglesey (in the Paget family) and then Viscount Bulkeley (of Beaumaris).

Another llys, east of Aberffraw and closer to the Menai Straits, has been identified at Rhosyr. Little is known about it, but it was in use in the mid-thirteenth century and has only recently been purchased and excavated by Cadw, the historic preservation organisation for Wales.

Rhodri Mawr (‘the Great’) was given this nickname as he inherited both Gwynedd from his father in 843, and Powys from his mother in 855, and eventually Ceredigion by marriage to its heiress in 872. So by the 870s, he was effectively prince of all of northern and central Wales. He was killed in 878 in battle against the Mercians, however, and his sons divided up his realm once more: Anarawd the eldest got Gwynedd, Merfyn got Powys, and Cadell got Ceredigion then added the Kingdom of Deheubarth (South Wales) by the end of the century—his descendants were called the Cadellings or the House of Dinefwr, named for their principal seat in Carmarthen (Anglicised as Dynevor). They ruled South Wales, contesting supremacy over Wales with the House of Aberffraw (and particularly passing Powys in the centre back and forth), until they were conquered by the English in 1197. They will receive a separate blog post

The House of Aberffraw usually claimed primacy over the other Welsh princes. But not always: Idwal of Gwynedd took on the Saxons under Edmund I, but was killed in 942, so his cousin Hywel Dda (‘the Black’), King of Deheubarth, took over in Gwynedd and Powys—once more unifying all of Wales, and famously codified Welsh law (Cyfraith Hywel), and agreeing to a firm border with King Athelstan of Wessex in 930. The laws may actually date from a later period, but Tudor legal experts liked to cite them again to stress Henry VII’s descent from Rhodri Mawr and Hywel Dda.

Idwal’s sons were restored to their place in Gwynedd in 950, and the next reigns are absolutely bloody. Nearly all of the kings blinded or murdered or exiled their brothers or nephews. They also sometimes paid tribute to the Saxon kings and sometimes were deposed by them. King Iago was defeated in 1039 by Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, who came from a different Welsh line altogether (founded by Seisyll, of unknown origins, who married a princess of the House of Aberffraw) His son Cynan lived in exile in Ireland forged an alliance through marriage with the daughter of Olav, King of Dublin, But his return to Wales in 1050 with a fleet of Irish ships failed and he returned to exile. The reign of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn had weakened by his getting involved in the politics and dynastic struggles of his Saxon neighbours, and he was defeated by Harold Godwinson in 1063. As is well known, Godwinson was then himself defeated by William, Duke of Normandy, in 1066 and a new era began for Wales as well.

Another dynasty arose in the north, with Bleddyn ap Cynfyn of Powys taking the throne of Gwynedd, with the backing of Edward the Confessor, in 1063, then passing this on to his nephew Cynwrig, who was driven out in 1079 when the House of Aberffraw re-established itself in Cynan’s son Gruffydd. By this point, the title used was prince not king, as Anglo-Norman overlordship was usually acknowledged. Indeed, North Wales was mostly occupied by the Normans in the 1080s-90s, with troops advancing from their base in Chester. Gruffydd was captured in 1081 and spent several years in Chester Castle. In 1092, the Normans attempted to install one of their own as Bishop of Bangor, but he was driven out. Gruffydd escaped and fled back to Ireland once more in 1096 but soon returned with Irish and Danish troops and secured his rule over Môn. In 1101 he negotiated terms with King Henry I of England, who recognised his rule here, plus Llŷn and the north coast as far as the mouth of the river Conwy. Further east, the King created a new buffer zone, the Welsh Marches, firmly under Norman control. Gwynedd enjoyed relative peace and a period of rebuilding in the astonishingly long reign (well, for medieval Welsh history!) of Prince Gruffydd ap Cynyn, who patronised the arts (according to legend one of the earliest official also sponsored an Eisteddfod, the festival and competition of poetry and music), and rebuilt royal residences and churches in stone, notably Bangor Cathedral, 1120-39, where eventually he would be buried. In 1116, Henry invaded again, with support from Alexander I of Scotland, and forced Gruffydd to do formal homage and pay a heavy fine. Peace was maintained as the Prince attained old age, and his rule was extended somewhat further to the south, into Meirionnydd, 1136, due to a dynastic dispute there. That same year, he joined with the princes of Powys and Deheubarth to defeat the Normans at Cardigan Castle.

When Prince Gruffydd died in 1137, his sons Owain and Cadwaladr took over the rule of Gwynedd and much of northern Wales jointly. An older son, Cadwallon, had been killed fighting a few years before, and his son Cunedda’s claims were stifled by his uncles who had his eyes pulled out (and he was otherwise ‘emasculated’). Of the remaining co-princes, Cadwaladr made a name for himself early, by travelling to England and supporting Lady Matilda in her fight to gain the throne, and helped her capture her rival Stephen of Blois in 1141. Two years later, he murdered an ally of the House of Aberffraw, the King of Deheubarth, so was exiled by his brother Owain to Ireland—he returned to the Menai Strait with a Norse fleet and civil war seemed imminent, but the threat to Wales from the Norman marcher lords brought them back together. Tensions re-emerged between the brothers several times until 1153 when Cadwaladr fled to England, where he had kin as the brother-in-law of Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Hereford, and joined forces with King Henry II (Matilda’s son).

Meanwhile, Prince Owain had tested the peace with Henry II by expanding his domains eastward along the north coast of Wales, to Rhuddlan and the Clwyd valley (what is now Denbighshire). So in 1157, Henry II arrived with an army, joined by the Earl of Hereford and Prince Cadwaladr, but was pushed back. Nevertheless, Owain agreed to renew homage, restore lands to his brother, and Rhuddlan to the Earl of Chester. Peace held for about five years, until Owain invaded England through Shropshire (this time with his brother at his side). Again there was a hasty English retreat, and Henry II for a time abandoned his plans to definitely conquer Wales.

Yet by the 1150s Owain was using the title tywysog (prince), not brenhin or rex, since he recognised de jure the sovereignty of the King of England—though he was de facto independent. His supremacy amongst the Welsh princes was asserted as the senior descendant of Rhodri the Great. Owain ap Gruffydd was considered one of the greatest rulers of medieval Wales, but when he died in 1170, the Welsh principalities were again torn apart by another civil war and another English invasion.

After three years, most of the realm was taken by force by Prince Dafydd I, who brutalised and imprisoned his brothers Maelgwn and Rhodri, as well as illegitimate half-brothers Hywel and Cynan. Also named as a sibling is Prince Madoc who was said to have sailed west to escape the dynastic chaos and ended up discovering North America. This is a character I knew very well in my childhood, as a protagonist in one of my favourite novels, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, by Madeleine L’Engle, along with his supposed descendants who bore the names Maddox and Mad Dog. There was indeed a long-enduring legend amongst the English colonists of the seventeenth and eighteenth century that there were Welsh-speaking natives living in the interior of the Carolinas, and was linked to a Cherokee legend of the ‘moon-eyed people’ who were fair haired and pale-skinned, but contemporary sources list no Madoc amongst the sons of Owain ap Gruffydd.

Dafydd’s rule was supported by Henry II of England, and in 1174 he married the King’s half-sister Emma of Anjou. In the early 1190s, his brother Rhodri escaped from prison, and with the aid of his nephews Gruffydd and Maredudd, the sons of Cynan of Merioneth, and Llywelyn, the son of his eldest brother Iorwerth Drwyndwn (‘broken nose’), he defeated Dafydd at the Battle of the Conwy Estuary and drove him out of Gwynedd and into exile in England (where Henry II had given him and his wife some estates in Shropshire).

Llywelyn became Prince of Gwynedd, while his cousins retained Merioneth as his vassals. He had been raised in exile in Powys (his mother’s homeland), and shortly after 1200 he had annexed much of that principality as well as Ceredigion to the south. He too allied with the English royal family through marriage to Joan, daughter of King John in 1205, who soon gave him an heir, Dafydd. But there was also an elder son, Gruffydd, born from an earlier marriage with a daughter of Ragnald, King of Man, that was much contested and then annulled since he had consummated the relationship before she was thirteen.

The name Llywelyn is still today synonymous with independent Wales and distinct in its Welshness—and its difficulty to pronounce for many given its initial double ll (a ‘voiceless alveolar lateral fricative’, as I’m sure we all know). Unlike David, Owen or Griffith, it did not have an easy Latin or English version for medieval chroniclers or early modern historians (though some used ‘Lewis’). The name is said to have evolved from Lugubelinos, a compound of two British deities Lugus and Belenus (the gods of harvest and healing).

Llywelyn Fawr (‘the Great’) had a long and stable reign. His early alliance with King John was tested when the latter invaded in 1211, despite attempts by Joan to intervene. But the Welsh princes came together and by 1216 the English were driven out, and Llywelyn recognised as paramount amongst the princes. Two years later, John was dead, and Llywelyn made a new treaty with his son Henry III by which he was formally recognised as ‘Prince of Wales’. The next decade of peace allowed him to develop his court at Aberffraw as a ruling prince, using his wife’s knowledge of court etiquette and culture. He also tried to establish a more stable form of government, by hosting other Welsh princes in a regional council, usually at an abbey such as Strata Florida (inland from Aberystwyth). The Prince used this period to build or refortify many castles all around Gwynedd. It’s worth pausing to look at some of these castles, built in a new style for Wales, inspired by Norman designs.

Castell y Bere was first. Built on the top of a ridge deep in the mountains, it was intended to control the population of Merioneth and secure Gwynedd’s southern borders. Edward I expanded it in the 1290s, then it was retaken by the Welsh in 1294, burned and mostly abandoned—a ruin by the sixteenth century. Today the site is managed by Cadw.

Criccieth was built later, in the 1230s on a headland overlooking Tremadog Bay (the northern part of Cardigan Bay). It was built to be the administrative centre of this region (known as Eifionydd), and to displace a nearby Norman castle, Dolbenmaen. Captured by Edward I in 1283, Criccieth Castle was improved by the English, and often used as a prison. It was a ruin by the 1450s, and eventually sold by the Crown to the 2^nd Baron Harlech (of the Ormsby-Gore family), and since the 1930s has also been managed by Cadw.

Moving inland into Snowdonia, Dolbadarn Castle was built at the base of Llanberis Pass, which allowed travellers or troops to cross from the west coast to the Conwy valley which then linked up to roads along the north coast. The large round tower allowed the Prince to wield authority as lord of the mountains, not just the islands and coasts of northwest Wales. It was one of the strongest castles of the Welsh princes, and would be Daffyd II’s last holdout in the final days of Welsh independence in 1283. After that, it lost importance and fell apart. A ruin by the eighteenth century, Dolbadarn became a popular subject for Romantic painters like Turner. It was owned by the Duff baronets until it too was gifted to Cadw in 1941.

On the far side of the Llanberis Pass was Dolwyddelan Castle, which Prince Llywelyn built to replace an older castle nearby, Tomen, which had been built by his father and was probably his birthplace. Dolwyddelan sits on a ridge commanding the upper reaches of the river Lledr which flows into the river Conwy, and guards the main east-west route through the interior. Like the others, it was taken by Edward I in 1283, and eventually granted by the Crown to the Wynn family of baronets (whose base was the neighbouring Gwydir estate). From the Wynns, it passed to their descendants the lords Willoughby de Eresby, and from them into the custody of Cadw in 1930.

By 1235, Gwynedd was at peace, with a ring of advanced castles from Cardigan Bay to the Conwy estuary, and a sophisticated court at Aberffraw. Prince Llywelyn promoted his younger (unquestionably legitimate) son Dafydd as his heir, ‘Prince of Aberffraw and Lord of Snowdonia’—and obtained the formal nod of approval from King Henry III, to whose court he travelled with his mother (Henry’s half-sister) to do formal homage.

Yet the best laid plans rarely hold, and after Llywelyn the Great died in 1240, King Henry invaded and forced Dafydd II to give up claims to all lands outside Gwynedd, and for good measure captured his half-brother Gruffydd, taking him to the Tower of London, where he died in 1244 trying to escape. Dafydd did have some successes repelling English forces, then died suddenly in 1245, and was buried at the Abbey of Aberconwy, founded by his father (who is also buried there), now in the heart of the town of Conwy.

Dafydd II’s death once again re-opened the succession question—always a thorny point in a land that had not yet embraced primogeniture. His half-brother Gruffydd’s older son Owain Goch had also been a prisoner in London with his father while the younger, Llywelyn, had remained in Wales as an ally of his uncle. Now Henry III negotiated a shared rule between Owain and Llywelyn, and fraternal peace lasted until 1253. Another younger brother, Dafydd, reignited the conflict, and he and Owain took on Llywelyn in 1255 and lost. Owain was imprisoned for about twenty years (probably in Dolbadarn Castle), while Dafydd remained on the loose, and led another rebellion against Llywelyn II in 1263, after which he was exiled to England (only to return for another try in 1274).

Prince Llywelyn II ‘the Last’ reunited all the Welsh principalities in the 1260s-70s. His seat was Garth Celyn, in the village of Abergwyngregyn (or just Aber). The small village on the north coast, midway between Conwy and Bangor, has two sites that are claimed as Gwynedd’s last princely capital. A manor house, Pen y Bryn, up on a hill, with structures that date back to the seventeenth century at least (and hints of earlier stonework), and a mound down in the valley closer to the church. There are calls for the Welsh government to purchase the site of Garth Celyn (‘Holly Enclosure’), but which one?

In 1275, Llwelyn married Eleanor, the daughter of Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester—a significant alliance given de Montfort’s role as leader of the baronial opposition to the Crown in England in the 1260s. Further to this, Eleanor’s mother was Eleanor of England, Henry III’s sister and aunt to the new king from 1272, Edward I. Thanks to these familial links, after Edward invaded North Wales in 1277, a new settlement was reached, the Treaty of Aberconwy, named for the monastery noted above, by which Llywelyn secured Gwynedd and the title Prince of Wales for himself, while his brothers were also given lands to rule: Owain in Llŷn and Dafydd in the interior valleys east of the Conwy river (while England secured the north coast and the Dee estuary). Dafydd was also married to a significant English noblewoman, the daughter of the Earl of Derby. The most significant clause of the Treaty was that when Llywelyn died, his principality would be ceded to the English crown.

Though he had been a key ally of the English, Dafydd rejected this idea and fanned other Welsh princes to join him in attacking English outposts in Spring 1282. Llywelyn did not want war but felt obliged to support his brother and defend Welsh independence—and was killed in an ambush near Builth Wells in Powys in December; his head was taken to London. Llywelyn’s wife Eleanor also died in 1282, so their only child, an infant daughter Gwenllian, was left as an orphan. The last of her house, she was captured by the English and spent her life in Sempringham Priory in Lincolnshire. Always treated with courtesy as a princess of Wales, she died in 1337.

Dafydd III continued the fight for several months. In the winter of 1282-83, he was increasingly encircled in Snowdonia, and held on to the fortress of Castell y Bere until April 1283. Captured in June, he was taken to Rhuddlan Castle (by this point English military headquarters in North Wales), then to Shrewsbury and executed. His head was also sent to London. The remaining males of the family were captured and sent to Bristol Castle. The daughters, like Gwenllian, were sent to convents in England for the rest of their lives. Dafydd’s eldest son Llywelyn died a prisoner in 1287 (about twenty years old), while his younger brother Owain, the titular ‘Prince of Gwynedd’, continued to live in Bristol Castle until his death in 1325.

By the Statute of Rhuddlan, 1284, Gwynedd was annexed by the Kingdom of England and was reorganised into six shires (Anglesey, Carnarvon, Merioneth and Flint, alongside two in the south, Cardigan and Carmarthen). The rest of Wales would become the ‘Principality of Wales’, governed locally by English marcher lords, and overall by the King’s heir based (at least nominally) in Ludlow—ironically located not in Wales but Shropshire—with the future Edward II first being crowned as Prince of Wales at Caernarfon in 1301. This remained the situation until all of Wales was fully incorporated into England by Henry VIII in 1536.

There were later Welsh revolts: 1294 by Prince Madoc of Merioneth; 1372 by Owain Lawgoch; then 1400 by the famous Owain Glynŵr (a member of the House of Powys). Of these, Owain Lawgoch (‘red-handed’) is relevant here, as a descendant of Llywelyn the Great via his illegitimate son Gruffydd. He was born at Tatsfield Manor in Surrey, educated in the art of war in the French army in the 1350s-60s, and during a pause in the fighting of the Hundred Years War, planned armed expeditions to Wales to reclaim his ancestral throne, with the backing of the French king (1372-74). Referring to himself in French as Evain de Gales,he issued manifestos, but never got far with his invasions and was assassinated by an English agent at Mortagne in Poitou in 1378. He is reckoned to be the last of the House of Aberffraw.

There are lines of Welsh nobles who trace their lineage back to these princes, notably the line of Wynn of Gwydir. Their family genealogies linked them to one of the uncles of Llywelyn the Great, Rhodri, Lord of Anglesey (d. 1195); they owned an estate, Gwydir, in the high uplands of the river Conwy in Snowdonia, from the mid-fourteenth century to the eighteenth. The Wynns were one of the most significant families of north Wales during the Tudor and Stuart periods, and their manor house, built around 1500, still stands. The most prominent was Sir John Wynn, Sheriff of Carnarvonshire and Merionethshire between 1587 and 1603, and a member of the Council of the Marches of Wales—created Baronet Wynn of Gwydir by King James I in 1611. The last baronet died in 1719, and the heiress took the estate to the family of the Duke of Ancaster and his heirs in the family Willoughby de Eresby.

The principality of Gwnyedd vanished, but the name was resurrected as a modern county in 1974. In 1996 it was reduced, so that today it includes Merioneth and Carmarthen, but not Anglesey. All three do retain the name Gwynedd however as a ‘preserved county’ for ceremonial purposes. The most famous castles in Wales are the ‘big four’ (Caernarvon, Beaumaris, Harlech and Conwy), but these were built by Edward I and are part of the later history of the region. For now the northwest corner of Wales remains part of the United Kingdom—though a genuine point of interest as one of the best places to hear Welsh spoken in everyday life—but who knows, perhaps someday the Blessed Cadwaladr will return to drive the Saxons away from these shores.

(images Wikimedia Commons)