WOOD, Richard (c.1625-c.1658), of Rhosmor, Llangwyfan, Anglesey.

The Wood family was of gentry status when it migrated from Cheshire to Anglesey. As early as 1331, the family held tenements on the island, probably in the manor of Rhosyr.8E. G. Jones, ‘Some Notes on the Principal County Families’, Trans. Anglesey Antiq. Soc. (1940), 46. Owen Wood was sheriff of Anglesey in 1577, another of the same name held the same office in 1613-14, and a third, Richard Wood’s father, was appointed sheriff in November 1639, in time to be the returning officer for the county’s 1640 elections.9Dwnn, Vis. Wales, ii. 203-4; List of Sheriffs (List and Index ix), 236-7; Coventry Docquets, 369. This last Owen Wood was of some importance in Anglesey. His wife, Gaynor Bodvel, was the daughter of Thomas Bodvel of Bodvel and his second wife, a Glynne of Glynllifon, Caernarfonshire. Gaynor was the half-sister of Sir John Bodvel, father of John Bodvell*.10A.H. Dodd, 'The Tragedy of Col. John Bodvel', Trans. Caern. Hist. Soc. vi. 12. In 1627, Owen Wood became a trustee in the marriage settlement of the sister of the London merchant, Lewes Roberts, author of The Merchants Mappe of Commerce and other works.11Bangor Univ. Archives, DIN/201; Oxford DNB, ‘Lewes Roberts’. He was also involved in a number of legal transactions and conveyances with Dr William Griffith, chancellor of the diocese of Bangor and a master in chancery, who in 1633 benefited from the diocesan patronage of Archbishop Laud.12NLW, Carreglwyd Estate, series I/422, 1082, 1401, 1468, 1735, 2141; Bangor Univ. Archives, BMSS/17099; Wood, Fasti, i. 432. He was probably a deputy lieutenant.13Cal. Wynn Pprs. 258. His links with the diocesan hierarchy may have predisposed Owen Wood to support the royalist cause in the civil war. He was an active commissioner of array, and responded enthusiastically to the call by Thomas Bulkeley, Viscount Bulkeley, to recruit soldiers.14Bangor Univ. Archives, Baron Hill 5362, 5364. By February 1645 Wood was in command of the king’s garrison at Holyhead.15N. Tucker, N. Wales and Chester in the Civil War (2nd ed., Ashbourne, 2003), 128, 133. However, he was no diehard cavalier; In May 1643 he reported in detail to a cousin on the king’s approach to Parliament in pursuit of peace, detailing the woeful consequences to England and Ireland if a peace were not achieved.16NLW, Hafodgaregog and Trefan Estate Records, holograph letter 86.

Between February 1645 and June 1646, Owen Wood abandoned the king’s cause for that of Parliament, appearing in 7 June 1646 as a parliamentarian commissioner for the surrender of Anglesey, a transfer of allegiance made painless by the absence of any armed conflict on the island. Anglesey’s surrender was negotiated against the backdrop of the recent more tumultuous settlement of Caernarfonshire, and the gentry islanders were strongly motivated by their fear of the presence of large numbers of soldiers congregating at Holyhead prior to embarkation for Ireland.17Cal. Wynn Pprs. 292; Bangor Univ. Archives, Baron Hill 6728; Dodd, Studies in Stuart Wales (2nd ed.), 130-1. The dominant parliamentarian partisans in the region, John Jones I and Roger Pope, left Beaumaris to settle more recalcitrant Merioneth, but they were confident enough of conditions on Anglesey not to thwart the successful moving of the writ (8 Dec. 1646) for the county election to replace John Bodvell, Wood’s kinsman.18CJ v. 4b. Richard Wood, Owen Wood’s eldest son, who can have been barely of majority age, was elected on 31 December 1646. Rather unusually, the young Wood had been admitted to Lincoln’s Inn on 7 October the same year, and then to St John’s, Cambridge, just under a week later. His manucaptor or sponsor at Lincoln’s Inn was Pierce Lloyd of Lligwy, Anglesey, whose own son was bound at the inn on the same day.19LIL, Admiss. Bk. 7, f. 58v; L. Inn Admiss, i. 254. Four months earlier, Lloyd senior had been among the Anglesey gentlemen who had called upon Colonel Richard Bulkeley to surrender Beaumaris to Thomas Mytton’s* commissioners.20Cal. Wynn Pprs. 294. Wood’s election therefore came as the culmination of an autumn of admissions – to Lincoln’s Inn, Cambridge University and the House of Commons, but despite these auspicious beginnings, he made no impact on the House whatsoever. He is not known to have taken the Covenant; was named to no committees; was not even noted as absent, with or without permission, in calls of the House; and the sources for the purge by the army of the Commons on 6 December 1648 are silent about him. The suspicion must be that he never took his seat.

With his father, Richard Wood was named to the assessment commission for Anglesey from June 1647, but unlike Owen Wood, who had served as a justice of the peace before 1640, and would do so again from July 1650, Richard was never advanced to the commission of the peace.21A. and O.; Justices of the Peace ed. Phillips, 11-13. In February 1650, Owen Wood was called upon again to serve as sheriff for his county, and did so, but even this did not bestow immunity upon him from the attentions of the Committee for Compounding. The committee identified him as liable to a fine arising from the revolt of Anglesey in 1648, even though he strenuously denied involvement. In July 1653 he petitioned the compounding commissioners for relief.22CCC 3130. Richard, meanwhile, appears to have played no part at all in public affairs for a long period after February 1648, which suggests that suspicions attached to the family’s political loyalties, Owen Wood’s shrieval service notwithstanding. In October 1655 he married the daughter of Viscount Bulkeley, the most socially prominent figure in Anglesey. The marriage not only confirmed the upward social trajectory of the Woods, but also the suspicions around the politics of the family.

Owen Wood was dead by 20 November 1655, when his will was proved. The will had been drawn up in March 1651, and included a lengthy preamble with more than usually vivid pious Protestant expressions, including the testator’s fears and hopes for his own soul, ‘stained with many foul, abominable and ugly sins from my youth’.23PROB11/251, f. 291. No assumption about Owen Wood’s puritanical leanings can safely be sustained, however, since he protected at Rhosmor his son-in-law, the ejected Episcopalian cleric, William Langford, who had been vicar of Welshpool, Montgomeryshire. Langford would record in his will how Rhosmor provided a haven against the persecutions of the fiery radical minister, Vavasor Powell.24PROB11/328, f. 112 (will of William Langford). The religious affiliations of Richard Wood are equally opaque, though unlike Vavasor Powell he conformed to the protectorate. In fact he returned to public life under the regime of Oliver Cromwell*. He was sheriff of Anglesey in the year of emergency, 1655-6, and in June 1657 was named once more to the assessment commission. However, his career was to be brief. He drew up his will in December 1656, and he had died, childless, by 18 February 1658, when it was proved. His executor was his brother and heir Thomas Wood (d.1670), last of the male line at Rhosmor.