Cadwaladr ap Cadwallon (died 682) or Cadwaladr Fendigaid was a late seventh-century king of Gwynedd who reigned from the middle of the century until his death. Little is known of his reign, but he later became a mythical redeemer figure in medieval Welsh literature following his depiction in the De gestis Britonum by Geoffrey of Monmouth. In Geoffrey's narrative, Cadwaladr was the last native Briton to be King of Britain, and renounced his throne in 689 to go on a pilgrimage to Rome after an angel prophesied to him that he must do so in order for the Welsh to eventually recover their patrimony. However, Geoffrey's account of Cadwaladr's sanctity and his visit to Rome is the result of an intentional or pre-existing conflation with events in the life of King Cædwalla of Wessex.
For later Welsh writers, the myth provided hope in a period when the native order was increasingly encroached upon by and subject to English authority and customs. Because of the popularity of Geoffrey's work in England, the legend was also used by the supporters of both Edward IV and Henry Tudor during the Wars of the Roses to claim that their candidate would fulfil the prophecy by restoring the authentic lineage of Cadwaladr to the throne of England. From the sixteenth century onwards, the Welsh Dragon has sometimes been conflated with Cadwaladr and referred to as "Red Dragon of Cadwalader" because of the importance of both Cadwaladr and the dragon in the ideology of Henry Tudor's supporters which helped to justify his claim to the throne.
In medieval Wales, Cadwaladr was also venerated as a saint, particularly at his dedicated church on Anglesey. The rediscovery of a tomb thought to be his at Saint Peter's Basilica in the late 1570s further fuelled a dispute between Welsh and English factions at the English College in Rome over the competing legacies of Cadwaladr and Cædwalla.
Historical record There are no contemporary records of Cadwaladr's reign, and the later ones which survive are confused and contradictory. Peter Bartrum suggested that he may have been born about 633 AD, shortly before his father's death at the Battle of Heavenfield. The earliest Welsh genealogies contained in the ninth-century manuscript Harley 3859 record him simply as , and trace his ancestry as a member of the First Dynasty of Gwynedd back to Cunedda Wledig.
The earliest record of Cadwaladr's life is in the Historia Brittonum, written in 829 or 830 AD, but its depiction of Cadwaladr is not straightforward. In the section of the Historia Brittonum known as the "Northern History" because of its synchronisation of events with the reigns of kings of Northumbria, it is said that Cadwaladr reigned after his father Cadwallon ap Cadfan, who in 634 was slain while fighting against Oswald at Heavenfield, near Hadrian's Wall. The following section of the Historia Brittonum states that the king of Gwynedd in 655 was Cadafael ap Cynfeddw, an ally of Penda of Mercia whom he abandoned on the eve of the Battle of the Winwæd and thus earned the nickname , meaning 'Battle Dodger'. The Historia Brittonum also states that Cadwaladr died of plague in the reign of Oswiu. However, Oswiu died in 670, and an entry in the Welsh Annals records Cadwaladr's death as having occurred as a result of a plague in 682. This discrepancy arose because the author of the Historia Brittonum wrongly associated the plague in the Welsh Annals with the 664 plague in Bede's Ecclesiastical History. The author's confusion may have occurred because the Welsh Annals do not contain any absolute dates for their events but instead number its annals in groups of ten. Cadwaladr's reign is the last of a Welsh ruler in the Historia Brittonum, and this terminal position within such a widely disseminated text may have significantly influenced both his legacy and his portrayal in subsequent medieval literature. It is uncertain if Cadwaladr was succeeded by his son Idwal Iwrch. This near-total documentary silence left ample room for the elaborate literary tradition that later came to characterise Cadwaladr's memory.
Cadwaladr and Geoffrey of Monmouth A king called Cadualadrus is described as the final ruler of the Britons in Geoffrey of Monmouth's De gestis Britonum, a widely circulated fictional narrative of British history written between 1137 and 1139. Geoffrey drew on Welsh sources to fashion his narrative. However, his figure of Cadualadrus is an amalgam of the historical Cadwaladr and the Anglo-Saxon king Cædwalla, a late seventh-century ruler of the West Saxons. Cadualadrus
In De gestis Britonum, Cadualadrus is said to have been the son of Caduallo, based on Cadwallon ap Cadfan, and a half-sister of Penda by a different mother but the same father. After a plague depopulates Britain, Cadualadrus leaves it for Brittany, and discerns that it is God's will that the sovereignty of Britain be taken from the British and given over to others. This plague completely depopulated Britain south of Scotland except for Cornwall and Wales, with the Anglo-Saxons settling the empty lands in what would become England. After the plague had passed, Cadualadrus prepared a fleet to recover Britain for the native Britons, but an angel appeared to Cadualadrus and told him that God would not allow them to rule over it until "the time came which Merlin had foretold to Arthur". Cadualadrus was also ordered by the angel to visit Pope Sergius in Rome, where after doing penance, his sainthood was assured. The angel further promised that sovereignty of the island would be returned to the Britons when Cadualadrus' body was returned to Britain from Rome sometime in the future. Cadualadrus' Breton host Alanus consulted written prophecies and urged Cadualadrus to fulfil the angel's words and go to Rome, where after taking monastic vows Cadualadrus died on 20 April 689.
Geoffrey obtained the story of Cadualadrus' pilgrimage and even his date of death from Bede's account of Cædwalla of the West Saxons, who actually died on 20 April 689 whilst on pilgrimage in Rome. As the year 689 would have been within the same group of ten years as the 682 entry in the Welsh Annals, Geoffrey would have faced the same difficulty as the author of the Historia Brittonum in dating Cadwaladr's death. If the merging of the two men did not predate De gestis Britonum, then Geoffrey seems, at minimum, to have elevated Cadwaladr's holiness, though he may even have reimagined a completely secular figure. This conflation between Cadwaladr and Cædwalla has been argued to predate Geoffrey's time. Any accidental confusion between the two prior to Geoffrey is highly unlikely, as it was Cadwaladr's father Cadwallon who bore a name equivalent to Cædwalla, not Cadwaladr himself. Instead, Geoffrey appears to have purposefully conflated the two and even borrowed the wording of Bede's introduction of Cædwalla in the Ecclesiastical History to introduce Cadualadrus in his De gestis Britonum. Both introduce their subjects as "of the race of the Gewisse", in Bede an archaic term for the royal dynasty of the West Saxons, but which denoted for Geoffrey the people of Gwent in south-east Wales. Geoffrey's assigning an English mother to Cadualadrus may have sought to reconcile the fact that Cædwalla is explicitly described as an English king in Bede. Geoffrey's citation of Bede in his introduction of Cadualadrus may even imply that he thought that Bede misidentified Cædwalla, and left it to the reader to decide which account to believe.
The Vita Merlini and Armes Prydein In 1150, Geoffrey of Monmouth completed the Vita Merlini, a poem narrating how Merlin went mad after a battle and thereafter dwelt in woods, prophesying the future. Geoffrey's Merlin foretells the restoration of Britain to the native Britons, and mentions Cadwaladr by name as one of the two leaders who will enact these events:
Geoffrey was not the first to narrate such a restoration, as his narrative bears a striking similarity to that contained in Armes Prydein Vawr, a tenth-century political prophecy surviving in a fourteenth-century manuscript. Geoffrey almost certainly had read a version of Armes Prydein or a poem like it prior to his composition of Vita Merlini. In Armes Prydein, two heroes are named as Cadwaladr and Cynan, future leaders who will lead an alliance of the Britons or , Irish, Scots, and Hiberno-Scandinavians in order to drive the Anglo-Saxons out of Britain and return the island to British control. Geoffrey's preoccupation with legitimacy is parallelled in Armes Prydein, as its poet asserts that the English settlement of Britain is illegitimate because of its coming into existence through the actions of Hengist and Horsa. The poem also voices a grievance over the current desire for extortionate tribute from the Welsh by a figure known as the , meaning 'Great King', generally identified as Æthelstan or Edmund I. In the poem, the assembled armies of the are even envisioned as querying the English in the midst of battle as to their right to be in Britain at all. For the poet, the Cornish and the men of Strathclyde were distinct from the , though they would be reconciled as one people in the future. Cadwaladr is mentioned three times in the poem, while Cynan appears twice; the two are named together on three occasions. Cadwaladr and Cynan are not explicitly associated with any identifiable figures within the text of Armes Prydein, and the Vita Merlini is the earliest extant text to make a clear identification of these individuals as Cadwaladr ap Cadwallon of Gwynedd and Cynan Meiriadog, the latter regarded by Geoffrey as the founder of Brittany. Geoffrey also alluded to this prophecy in the De gestis Brittonum, but he did not there identify Cadualadrus or Conanus. Cadwaladr ap Cadwallon may already have been identified as a future deliverer of the Welsh before Geoffrey's time given his prominent concluding role in the Historia Brittonum, but it remains unclear how the Welsh themselves understood the historical importance of Cadwaladr's reign prior to Geoffrey's account.
Welsh reception of Cadualadrus
The medieval Welsh imported Geoffrey's depiction of Cadualadrus wholesale into their own representations of the monarch. The popularity of Geoffrey's work led to multiple translations of De gestis Britonum into Welsh. These are not always strict translations, as some versions elaborate on Cadwaladr's supposed Gwentian ancestry by saying his mother was of the aristocracy of Ergyng and Ewias. Geoffrey's legacy was also felt in more strictly historic writings: the Brut y Tywysogion begins in 682 AD with the death of Cadwaladr, but this is located in Rome and dated to 20 April, as in Geoffrey.
Cadwaladr features most prominently in Middle Welsh prophecy. He is a central figure in the prophecies attributed to the early Welsh poet Taliesin, occurring in four of the ten prophecies to which Taliesin's name is affixed, where he is said to be a future deliverer of the Welsh, as in Armes Prydein. Cadwaladr also appears in some of the poetry attributed to the prophet Myrddin. According to some of these poems, Cadwaladr will meet with Cynan at the unidentified Rhyd Rheon before beginning their conquest. The combined testimony of these prophecies suggests that Cadwaladr would have first conquered North Wales, while Cynan would campaign from the south, and the two combined would then together defeat the English. Cadwaladr appears to always have had a more prominent position in these prophecies than Cynan.
Veneration