Katheryn of Berain

Few figures loom larger in the folklore of Denbighshire's gentry than Katheryn of Berain, born around 1534–35, daughter of Tudur ap Robert Vychan of Berain and heiress to substantial estates in Denbighshire and Anglesey. As a young woman she was a ward of Elizabeth I and reputedly a granddaughter, through an illegitimate line, of Henry VII.

Katheryn married four times. Her first husband, John Salusbury of Lleweni, died in 1556. In 1567 she married the merchant Sir Richard Clough, a wealthy Denbigh-born agent of the London financier Sir Thomas Gresham, who built the striking Flemish-style house at Bachygraig on the edge of Denbigh — reputed to be the first brick-built house in Wales. After Clough's death in 1570 she married Maurice Wynn of Gwydir, and after his death in 1580 she married for a fourth and final time, to Edward Thelwall of Plas y Ward, in 1584.

Through six children and dozens of grandchildren by these marriages, Katheryn's descendants came to include many of the most prominent gentry families in Wales, earning her the epithet 'Mam Cymru' — the Mother of Wales. Because three of her four husbands predeceased her, a persistent legend later grew up that she had poisoned them, though there is no evidence for the claim; it is more likely a reflection of how remarkable her run of advantageous marriages seemed to later generations.

Katheryn was born around 1535 into the Denbighshire gentry, a great-granddaughter of Tudur ap Robert Fychan of Berain, and her four successive marriages — to men from the Salusbury, Clough, Wynn and Thelwall families — wove her into the ancestry of an extraordinary number of Welsh gentry lines. So many prominent Welsh families could trace descent from her that she earned the enduring nickname Mam Cymru, the Mother of Wales.

Her second husband, Sir Richard Clough, was the merchant responsible for building Bachygraig, reputed to be the first brick house in Wales, reflecting his trading connections with the Low Countries. Katheryn's portrait, attributed to the Antwerp-based painter Adriaen van Cronenburgh, survives in the National Museum Cardiff, and her story remains one of the best-known in Denbighshire's Tudor-era history.