This clause of the manifesto declares the King to have publicly proclaimed that Edmund Mortimer, who was taken in pitched battle, had fraudulently given himself up to Owyn. The King's own letter to the council[156] is totally irreconcileable with his making such a declaration. He announces to them the news which he had just received of Mortimer's capture, as a calamity which had made him resolve to proceed in person against the rebels. "Tidings have reached us from Wales, that the rebels have taken our very dear and much beloved Edmund Mortimer." Again, the clause avers that the King had suffered the same person, Edmund Mortimer, to be kept cruelly in prison and iron chains _up to that time_, and would not suffer him to be ransomed. In contradiction to this charge, we are assured by the early chroniclers[157] that Owyn treated Mortimer with all the humanity and respect in his power; and that because he possessed not the means of paying a ransom, he had, as early as St. Andrew's day, (30th of November 1402, less than six months after his capture, and nearly eight months before the alleged delivery of the manifesto,) been married to the daughter of Owyn with great solemnity; and, "thus (p. 163) turning wholly to the Welsh people, he pledged himself thereafter to fight for them to the utmost of his power against the English." [Footnote 156: Acts of Council, vol. i. p. 185.] [Footnote 157: Monk of Evesham and Sloane, 1776.--In the passage relating to Mortimer's marriage in Walsingham's history, the word "obiit" is evidently an interpolation by mistake. It does not occur in the corresponding passage in his Ypodig. Neust.] Another expression in this clause, incompatible with the truth, but quite consistent with the mistakes which from very early times prevailed as to the circumstances preceding the battle of Shrewsbury, charges the King with having pronounced the three Percies to be traitors, and with having secretly planned and imagined their ruin and death; and this is said to have been signed and sealed by Northumberland, then remaining in the north. Whereas the truth, established beyond controversy, though little known, is, that, up to the very day when the King announced to the council Hotspur's rebellion,--barely four days before the battle,--he had entertained no idea of their disloyalty. Even in his last preceding despatch he informed the council that he was on his way "to afford aid and comfort to his very dear and faithful cousins, the Earl of Northumberland and his son Henry, and to join them in their expedition against the Scots."[158] [Footnote 158: Acts of Council, vol. i. p. 207.]