‘I myself would for Caernarfonshire’: The Old Lady in King Henry VIII

In the opening scene of 1 Henry IV, Westmorland cautiously relays to the king certain details of Mortimer’s defeat in the Battle of Bryn Glas. In describing the far-reaching shadow cast by the rebellion of the ‘irregular and wild Glendŵr’ (1.1.40), certain horrors of this particular defeat seem too sensitive to pass on to the beleaguered Henry. While the deaths of a thousand Englishmen at the hands of the Welsh rebels are described in vivid terms, the fallen soldiers’ postmortem treatment by Welshwomen is only alluded to in an abstruse fashion. For Westmorland, the ‘shame’ in the retelling of this particular horror is an impropriety too far.