The new Wales was to he safeguarded by four alliances--with the
English barons, with the Pope, with Scotland, and with France. He
failed to save the Percies from their defeat at Shrewsbury in 1403;
but he based all his plans on an alliance with the Mortimers, the
enemies of Lancaster and the Percies. The head of the Mortimer
family had died in Ireland in 1398, and had left four young children.
They were the real heirs to the crown, and Owen meant to win their
throne for them. Their uncle, Edmund Mortimer, married Glendower's
daughter. But the young Earl of March, the elder of the Mortimer
boys, had no ambition, and a plot to bring him and his brother to
Owen failed.
The Papacy had always proved to be a broken reed for Welsh princes;
but Owen's alliance with Peter de Luna, the anti-Pope Benedict XIII.,
gave a certain amount of prestige to his title. The alliance with
Scotland, based on common kinship, could bring him no help at that
time: because it was torn between two factions during the reign of
the weak Robert III.; and the next king, the poet James I., was
captured at sea and put into an English prison.
The French alliance was much more promising; it would give what Owen
wanted most--siege engines, a fleet, and an army of trained soldiers.
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