Montgomeryshire

The recusancy of the Herberts of Powis led to the primacy of their cousins of Chirbury in Montgomeryshire throughout this period. The chief independent interest was exercised by the Vaughans of Llwydiarth. Shortly before the 1660 election, Edward Vaughan was arrested as a Royalist, and both interests may have agreed to select his nephew John Purcell, of a minor gentry family that had avoided recent political commitment. Lord Herbert supported Purcell again in 1661, but he had to transfer to the borough seat, and Vaughan was returned, despite his record as a Parliamentarian in the Civil War. On Vaughan’s death a few months later, Herbert procured the election of his kinsman, Andrew Newport of Deythur, one of the most active royalist conspirators during the Interregnum. Herbert wrote: ‘For this time, as for the future, he hopes he has laid grounds of amity, that the gentry will stick to one another and be able to choose the knight’. As a courtier, Newport lost his seat in 1679, when Edward Vaughan III re-established the Llwydiarth interest, though according to the indentures he was returned in February only by ‘the greater part of the whole county’. A strong Tory and Anglican he represented the shire continuously until 1719. In September 1688 the gentry nominated William Pugh of Mathavarn who had taken a stiffer line than Vaughan on the repeal of the Penal Laws. But Vaughan was returned as usual to the Convention.2PRO 30/53/7, f. 77; Herbert Corresp. (Univ. of Wales, Bd. of Celtic Studies, Hist. and Law ser. xxi), 168, 345-6.