In the battle of Blackheath (17 June 1497) he had command of fifteen hundred horse, took Lord Audley prisoner, and was created knight-banneret on the field; he was one of the company who later in the year pursued Perkin Warbeck to Beaulieu Abbey (Bacon). On 22 April 1505 he was elected a knight of the Garter. He fought in the French expedition of 1513, and received soon after the office of seneschal and chancellor of the lordships of Haverfordwest and Rhos. He died in the spring of 1525 (Anstis, Register of the Garter, 1724, ii. 292), and was buried at Carmarthen in the Greyfriars' Church, whence his body was afterwards removed to St. Peter's. The tomb was restored in 1865.
Rhys married, first, Eva (called by Dwnn Mabli), daughter of Henri ap Gwilym of Cwrt Henri, by whom he had one son, Gruffydd; and, secondly, Janet (d. 1535), daughter of Thomas Mathews of Radyr, Glamorganshire, and widow of Thomas Stradling. A list of his natural children is given in the ‘Cambrian Register’ (i. 144). One of Lewis Glyn Cothi's poems (ed. 1837, i. 163–6) is in his honour. It is clear he played an important part in the revolution which placed Henry VII on the throne; and Fuller remarks that ‘well might he give him a Garter by whose effectual help he had recovered a crown’ (Worthies, 1662).
[A full biography, written about 1635 by a descendant, was printed in vol. i. of the Cambrian Register (pp. 49–144). It depends too much on tradition to be altogether trustworthy, yet contains much important information. Other sources are the chronicles of Polydore Virgil, Hall, Grafton, Holinshed, and Speed; Bacon's Hist. of Henry VII; Dwnn's Heraldic Visitations, i. 210; Anstis's Register of the Garter; Gairdner's Richard III.]
RHYS, IOAN DAFYDD, or John David (1534–1609), Welsh grammarian, was born in 1534 at Llan Faethlu, Anglesey. His father, Dafydd Rhys, was, according to the traditional story (which is imperfectly corroborated), a son of Rhys Llwyd Brydydd of Glamorganshire, and came to the north as gardener to Sir William Gruffydd of Penrhyn, who married Jane Stradling of St. Donat's in that county. Dafydd married, it is said, one of the bride's attendants; on the death of both in a few years their son John was brought up at St. Donat's, and educated with the Stradlings. It is certain he was in December 1555 a student of Christ Church, Oxford, but left the university without graduating, and proceeded to Siena (Tuscany), where he took the degree of doctor of medicine. Appointed public moderator of the school of Pistoia, he published at Venice an Italian work on the Latin language, and at Padua a Latin treatise, ‘De Italicæ linguæ pronunciatione.’ After a long residence abroad he returned to England and practised as a physician, settling at Blaen Cwm Llwch, at the foot of the Brecknock Beacons. He had been urged, some years before making his home in Brecknockshire, by Sir Edward Stradling [q. v.] to publish a Welsh grammar, and in 1592 his ‘Cambrobrytannicæ Cymræcæve linguæ institutiones et rudimenta’ appeared in London. The Latin text (a large part of which has reference to Welsh prosody) is preceded by a dedication to Sir Edward, who bore the expense of publication, by Latin complimentary verses by Camden and John Stradling, a Latin address to the reader by Humphrey Prichard of Bangor, and Rhys's own Welsh preface. Wood asserts that Rhys died a papist, but Prichard calls him ‘sinceræ religionis propagandæ avidissimus,’ though the purpose attributed to him of issuing his grammar in order to aid the readers of the Welsh bible of 1588 seems to have been an afterthought of his friends. He introduced into his grammar a new orthography, which was followed by Myddelton (1593 and 1603) and Henry Perry (1595), but never won general acceptance. A manuscript translation by him of Aristotle's ‘Metaphysics’ into Welsh is said to have once existed in the library of Jesus College, Oxford. Rhys died in 1609, leaving a son Walter, who was vicar of Brecon from 1576 to 1621 (Jones, History of Breconshire, ii. 51).
[Wood's Athenæ Oxon.; tract by E. Gamage in notes to Taliesin Williams's Doom of Colyn Dolphyn, 1837; Rowlands's Llyfryddiaeth y Cymry, pp. 57–68; Foster's Alumni Oxon. 1500–1714.]
RHYS, MORGAN (1710?–1779), Welsh hymn-writer, was born about 1710 in the neighbourhood of Llandovery. At first one of Griffith Jones of Llan Ddowror's travelling schoolmasters, he afterwards kept school on his own account at Capel Isaac, near Llandeilo, living in a cottage on Cwm Gwenywdy farm, in the parish of Llan Fynydd. He early joined the Calvinistic methodists, and was a member and preacher of the Cilycwm Society. He died in August 1779, and was buried at Llan Fynydd.
He first appeared as a hymn-writer in 1760, when twenty-two hymns from his pen were published at Carmarthen. In 1764 a second edition of this collection appeared, under the title ‘Golwg o ben Nebo’ (‘A Prospect from the Summit of Nebo’); in 1773 a third followed, and in 1775 a fourth, all at Carmarthen. Further editions were
