GLENDOWER, or GLENDWR, OWEN, a Welsh chief, who was one of the most active and formidable enemies of Henry IV. of England. He was descended from Llewelyn, the last prince of Wales, and followed the fortunes of Richard II. to the close, when, in 1399, Henry of Bolingbroke usurped, the crown and assumed the title of king Henry IV. Taking advantage of Glendower's known attachment to the dethroned monarch, lord Grey of Ruthyn seized part of his land. Glendower's suit for its restitution was dismissed by parliament, and then lord Grey seized the rest of his land. Revenge and despair, conspiring with a martial disposition, and the encouraging prophecies of the Welsh bards, drove him to take up arms, and provided him with followers. In 1400 he commenced operations by seizing the estates of lord Grey. The king ordered his sub jugation, and granted his estates to his brother, the earl of Somerset. Glendower's forces were inferior in number to those of his adversaries. Ile was sometimes victor ious, chiefly through surprises, ambushes, and the like, but sometimes defeated, and forced to retire to the hills,_ where his positions and rude fortifications could not be approached. In 1402, he drew lord Grey into an ambush, and took him prisoner. This nobleman was ransomed on paying 10,000 marks, and the king, out of jealousy of the earl of March (a boy of ten, the true heir to the crown), or some similar cause, allowed him to pay his own ransom. Immediately on his release, lord Grey married a daughter of Glendower; and it would appear that sir Edmund Mortimer, the uncle of the earl of March, married another, having been captured also a little later by Glendower, in a battle in which 1100 of 3Iortimer's followers were left dead upon the field. Treason seems to have been falsely imputed to Mortimer as the cause of his defeat; but Henry 'V.'s suspicions and Glendower's kindness soon made the treason sufficiently real, for
Mortimer induced his sister's husband, earl Percy (Hotspur), to conspire with hint and Glendower (now proclaimed prince of Wales) against the government. Percy led with him into the same enterprise the Scotch earl Douglas, whom he had just taken prisoner at Romildon hill. This coalition against royalty ended in the battle of Shrewsbury, in July, 1403, in which the fall of Hotspur and the late arrival of Glendower gave the vic tory to the king and his forces. In June of the following year, Glendower entered into a treaty with Charles VI. of France against the English. Little came of it, for the next year, Glendower sustained severe reverses, and was driven to wander among the caves of the mountains with a handful of adherents. Another two or three years sa* his for tunes somewhat in the ascendant, and they fluctuated in the ordinary levels of the petty warfare of a bold, barbarous chief, with mountains to escape to against the advance of superior civilized numbers, which he.could no more resist on the plains than they could destroy him among the mountains. He died a natural death in the house of one of his daughters, on Sept. 20, 1415, aged about 65, having spent the last fifteen years of his life in constant turmoil and warfare. His successes show that he had about the highest talents of his class, and he had their faults also. The popular idea of him is to be found in Shakspeare's King Henry IV. From the first, he has been a kind of mythical hero, and the lapse of centuries does not clear up the exact facts of his history. His rebellions were the expiring fires of the independence of Wales, which the English kings had been treading out for nearly a century and a half.