At this time (1283) Edward held his court at Rhuddlan, and to appease the conquered people hit upon the politic, though dangerous, expedient of promising them for their prince a native of the Principality, who never spoke a word of English, and whose life and conversation no man could impugn. By this bold manœuvre he succeeded in obtaining their submission, and he fulfilled his promise to the very letter; for he removed his Queen Eleanor to Carnarvon, which was then so far completed as to allow of her reception, and there, on the 24th of April, 1284, she gave birth to a son—Edward of Carnarvon, the victim of Berkeley Castle, and the subject of Marlowe’s tragedy—who was created Prince of Wales—a title the heirs to the crown have ever since retained. The sanguinary extirpation of Cambrian independence, while ultimately a blessing to the native race, was also a good thing for those who dwelt within the borderland of Cheshire, inasmuch as it spared their country from a continuance of the bloodshed and devastation it had been subjected to during the centuries of struggle between the Saxon and the Celt. The land had rest, and for a hundred years or more from that time Beeston is found to occupy but a comparatively small space in the chronicles of the kingdom. The power wielded by the first Edward fell from the feeble grasp of his son and successor. In the fifth year of that unfortunate monarch’s reign we find the custody of the castle being transferred from John de Serleby to John de Modburly, who appears to have been acting as the deputy of Sir Robert de Holland, the head of the great feudal house of that name in Lancashire, who, in the same year, by the king’s favour, had been appointed his Chief Justice of Chester and custodian of his castles of Chester, Rhuddlan, and Flint, and three years later Holland was re-appointed to the same office. This Sir Robert, who had married a great-granddaughter of that paragon of beauty, if not of chastity, Rosamond Clifford—the “Fair Rosamond” of mediæval romance—founded the Benedictine Priory at Up-Holland, in his own county; he was held in great esteem by Thomas of Woodstock, Earl of Lancaster, the king’s cousin, who made him his secretary, and he was in that earl’s retinue on the occasion of the rising of the barons to remove the De Spencers from the royal councils, for which act his estates were forfeited after the defeat at Boroughbridge in 1222, when the Earl, himself, was made prisoner and conveyed to Pontefract, where, to satisfy the vindictive favourites of the king, he was beheaded.