Glamorgan

Until 1734 Glamorgan was controlled by an alliance of three Tory peers, the Duke of Beaufort, Lord Windsor, and Lord Mansel. The Mansels represented it uninterruptedly from 1670 to 1712, when, in the absence of a Mansel candidate the alliance secured the unopposed election of a local Tory squire, Robert Jones, and on his death of another, Sir Charles Kemys. On the death of Kemys, Bussy Mansel, the then Lord Mansel’s uncle, was defeated by a Whig candidate, William Talbot, son of the lord chancellor, whose wife had inherited an estate in the county. On Talbot’s accession to his father’s peerage Mansel was returned, holding the seat unopposed till his own accession to the peerage in 1745. At the ensuing by-election Admiral Mathews, of an old Glamorganshire family, stood on the Whig interest, narrowly defeating the candidate of the three Tory families, Sir Charles Kemys Tynte, who had inherited the estates of Sir Charles Kemys. In 1747 the seat was recovered for the Tories by Charles Edwin without opposition.