Monmouthshire

The population of Monmouthshire around 1640 is at least as difficult to compute as that of adjacent English and Welsh shires. The absence of evidence that can lend itself to any kind of statistical scrutiny is striking, but a highly tentative estimate would be that the county might have totalled upwards of 27,000 people.1 B. Jones, C. Thomas, M. Gray, ‘Population’, Gwent Co. Hist. iii. 198-200. Any assessment of how far the industrial development of Monmouthshire had engaged and shifted the distribution of the populace is equally problematic, but it seems that the working of iron was more extensive in this county than in Glamorgan, its neighbour, and the production of brass wire in works in the Wye valley at Tintern and Whitebrook attracted sustained inward investment from the dominant aristocratic landowners, the Somersets of Raglan and the Herbert earls of Pembroke. From the early years of the century, the Society of Mineral and Battery Works extended its wire-making enterprise, and from 1611 William Herbert, 3rd earl of Pembroke, presided over a permissive grant from the crown for iron-working in the nearby Forest of Dean of Gloucestershire, known as the King’s Ironworks, which helped attract further interest from outsiders in Monmouthshire’s industrial potential in mid-century. Among the mid-seventeenth century entrepreneurs was Thomas Foley* of Worcestershire.2 J. Evans, ‘Early Industrial Development’, Gwent Co. Hist. iii. 352-63. The coal industry was small-scale and virtually confined to the local market.3 Evans, ‘Early Industrial Development’, 365. However, in no account of Monmouthshire in this period should the development of the extractive industries be allowed to mask the dominance of the agrarian economy and its subservience to the needs and demands of nearby Bristol.4 S.K. Roberts, ‘Local, Regional and National Politics to 1642’, Gwent Co. Hist. iii. 51-3. There was a fertile coastal plain, analogous to the vale of Glamorgan further west, and wooded hills above productive grassland in the east of the county. In this period began a conflict between the Raglan Somersets, removed from the castle to Badminton in Gloucestershire after 1660, and the freeholders over rights and resources in Wentwood Forest above Newport, chronicled by Nathan Rogers*.5 N. Rogers, Memoirs of Monmouth-shire (1708). The far north and north west of Monmouthshire was less fertile, more barren upland moor and heath.

The oddity of Monmouthshire as a political entity continued in this period. Tudor legislation granted the county two parliamentary seats, in line with the dispensation for English shires, and it was visited by the assize judges on the Oxford circuit, remaining outside the jurisdiction of the Welsh courts of great sessions. It also stipulated that Monmouth should be the county town and that the sheriff’s court should be held alternately at Monmouth and Newport.6 W.R.B. Robinson, M. Gray, ‘Making of Mon.’, Gwent Co. Hist. iii. 1-6. However, the county was Welsh in character and probably preponderantly in language also, and contemporaries considered it to be part of Wales despite the fiat of the state that it should be otherwise. The elections of the earlier part of the century had seen the interest of the Somersets of Raglan, as represented by Edward Somerset, 4th earl of Worcester, weaken and give way to those owing allegiance to the absentee Herbert earls of Pembroke, who held the lordships of Usk, Caerleon and Trelleck and thus the dominant interest in the towns of Newport and Caerleon. The election for what would be called the Short Parliament took place on 2 April 1640. The indenture returned to Parliament has not survived, but the copy that remained in the county has, among the papers of the Morgans of Tredegar.7 NLW, Tredegar Park 59/9. The names of 15 Monmouthshire gentry appeared on the indenture, among them six from the various branches of the Morgan family, and the first name was that of William Herbert, probably William Herbert II*, younger son of Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke. The first seat was taken by Thomas Morgan of Machen, eldest son of Sir William Morgan of Tredegar, the patriarch of the Morgans, who had represented the county in the Parliaments of 1624 and 1625. The second seat was bestowed on Walter Rumsey, a lawyer and a judge on the Brecon circuit, who held an estate at Llanover. While the Morgans were wealthy, numerous and influential enough to maintain a measure of independence from either of the aristocratic houses, both Morgan and Rumsey were aligned more closely to the Herbert interest than that of the Somersets, and William Herbert’s presence doubtless indicates the hegemony of that family over the elections of 1640.

In the second election of the year, held at Newport on 15 October, Thomas Morgan did not appear, and the seat was taken by William Herbert II, who was also returned for the boroughs of Downton and New Woodstock, in all three cases on the interest of his father. He chose to sit as knight of the shire, although he was under age at the time of his election. According to the antiquary, Anthony Wood, it was Rumsey’s own choice not to stand again in this election, and Herbert’s partner in the second seat was Sir Charles Williams, a veteran of the 1621 Parliament and a loyal client of the earls of Pembroke.8 C219/43/4/3/46; Ath. Ox. iii. 509. In the first 18 months of the Parliament, the principal parliamentary business concerning the county was the response to the rebellion in Ireland, news of which had intensified fears of Catholicism. On 29 March 1642, Oliver Cromwell* brought into the House a certificate from Richard Symonds and three other puritan ministers of Monmouthshire testifying to the strength of Catholicism around the county town of Monmouth and renewing a demand accepted by the Commons on 7 February that the county powder magazine be moved from Monmouth to the safety of the earl of Pembroke’s town of Newport.9 PJ ii. 103-4. The atmosphere of crisis in the county was captured in a petition from the gentry and freeholders brought to the Commons on 17 May 1642, which called once more for the removal of the magazine and identified the county as peculiarly vulnerable

We in Wales and in Monmouthshire above the rest, cannot but be most sensible and suspicious of our own imminent destruction, as being compassed about with papists, more in number and stronger in power, arms, horse and ammunition than any other country (as we conceive) in the kingdom besides, who though they have always been many and strong, yet they stirred little til these late unhappy opportunities.10 A True Copie of the Petition (1642, 669.f.6.20).

In the midst of this turmoil, Sir Charles Williams died, and on 19 March 1642 the writ was moved for the by-election. It was sealed two days later.11 CJ ii. 489a; C219/43/4/3/47. This time there was evidently a contest between Henry Herbert of Coldbrook and Sir Nicholas Kemeys†. A brief note of the election was recorded by a local diarist, Walter Powell, under the date 30 March, but the indenture was sealed the following day.12 Diary of Walter Powell ed. J.A. Bradney (1907), 26; C219/43/4/3/48. The victorious Herbert was another client of the earl of Pembroke, and proved to be the most committed of the family to the cause of Parliament in the civil war that would begin only months later. Kemeys, by contrast, would become a staunch royalist, and had doubtless challenged Herbert as a representative of the elements of Monmouthshire society loyal to the king and to the earl of Worcester. He had been knighted by the king in May 1641, and became his governor of Cardiff before being removed by General Charles Gerard for questioning the district’s capacity to satisfy the financial burden the royalists laid on it. He was killed on 25 May 1648 while defending Chepstow castle for the king during the revolt against Parliament of the second civil war.13 HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Nicholas Kemeys (Kemys)’.

Although William Herbert II was active in the drive against recusants in the county, and in the campaign to secure the powder magazine, he soon moved into the king’s camp during the civil war, and attended the Oxford Parliament, thus crossing a line in the eyes of the Commons, which in most cases led to disablement from sitting further at Westminster. In Herbert’s case he was duly disabled on 5 February 1644.14 CJ iii. 389b. Not until 11 September 1646 were conditions suitable for the Commons to order a new election to fill Herbert’s place, and the necessary writ was not issued until 11 November.15 CJ iv. 667b; C231/6, p. 69. The date of the election is uncertain, but it was probably uncontested; no indenture survives. The last of the earl of Pembroke’s sons to enter the House, John Herbert, joined his elder brothers, Philip Herbert and James Herbert, in the Commons. He had taken his place by 30 December 1646, when he took the Covenant. His slender contribution to the work of the Commons was in support of the Presbyterians, and he did not sit after the army’s purge of December 1648. By contrast, his kinsman, Henry Herbert, remained moderately active in the Rump Parliament and secured election to the council of state in November 1651, although he quickly became one of the least energetic councillors.

After the expulsion of the Rump by Oliver Cromwell in April 1653, a provisional council of state was established to provide continuity in governance, and among its regular attenders from mid-May was Colonel Philip Jones. Jones had sat for Breconshire as one of the few Members recruited during the Rump Parliament, and held a number of legal and governmental offices in south Wales, while continuing as governor of both Cardiff and Swansea. His specific role in relation to Cromwell was that he was steward of the estates bestowed on the lieutenant-general out of the confiscations from the 2nd marquess of Worcester, Edward Somerset: first in Swansea and Gower, and subsequently in Monmouthshire.16 A.G. Veysey, ‘Colonel Philip Jones’, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion (1966), 320. By 1653 Jones had become one of Cromwell’s most trusted advisers. When nominations were made for the new representative assembly in 1653, all of Wales was as an entity allocated six Members, with no reference to individual counties, but in a nod to the historic distinction made between Wales and Monmouthshire, the county was given a single Member to itself, and the place was given to Jones.17 A Catalogue (1654, 669. f.19.3).

When the Nominated Assembly voluntarily surrendered its authority to Cromwell in December 1653, the Instrument of Government provided for Monmouthshire to have three county seats, continuing to treat it as an English county. Monmouth and the other towns in the shire remained without separate representation. The election for the first Parliament held under these arrangements took place on 12 July 1654, and there is no evidence of a contest. The three seats were reliably in the control of the Cromwellian interest. The lord protector’s eldest son, Richard Cromwell*, took the first seat, Philip Jones, who had remained a member of the protector’s council after 1653, the second, and the third seat went to Henry Herbert, who had apparently transferred his allegiance without effort from commonwealth to protectorate.18 C219/44, pt. 2. However, Cromwell and Jones had also been returned elsewhere; the former chose to sit for Hampshire, where he enjoyed an estate of his own through marriage, and the latter opted to sit for his native county of Glamorgan. At the resulting by-election, held on 9 November, one seat was taken by Thomas Morgan of Machen, who had last sat in April 1640. Although Morgan was by this time the head of the Tredegar and Machen houses of the family, his father having died in 1652, he remained politically passive, a quality which may have recommended him to the Cromwellians, who maintained their grip on the county. Morgan’s fellow substitute was Thomas Hughes of Moyne’s Court, who had been a somewhat ineffectual governor of Chepstow. Hughes was a client of both Henry Herbert and Philip Jones, but his name does not appear once in the Journal of the House, so obscure a figure was he at Westminster.19 C219/44, pt. 2.

During the emergency of 1655-6 and the regime of the major-generals that was devised in response, the supervision of Monmouthshire, along with the rest of south Wales, fell to Major-general James Berry. In February he wrote to Secretary John Thurloe* to advise that the government should tread lightly in the region, so as not to alienate further ‘these unconstant people, who have played with both hands’. Berry confessed himself ‘much troubled with these market towns everywhere, vices abounding and magistrates fast asleep’.20 TSP iv. 545-6. In the election to the second protectorate Parliament, held at some point around September 1656, Berry headed the list of those returned, ahead of his subordinate, the local soldier, John Nicholas, and Edward Herbert of Magor, who by January 1652 was keeping Monmouthshire manorial courts for Cromwell. Again, all three were devoted to the Cromwellian interest, and when Berry chose to sit for Worcestershire, where he had also been elected, his place went in the consequent by-election (26 Nov. 1656) to yet another servant of Cromwell’s, Nathaniel Waterhouse, who was steward of all of the lord protector’s estates.21 Narrative of the Late Parliament (1658), 17 (E.935.5). Sixteen electors signed the indenture, among them Walter Bethell, a former major in the regiment of Colonel Thomas Horton; and Francis Blethin, formerly a New Model major alongside Wroth Rogers*, and in 1655 a Monmouthshire militia captain.22 C219/45 pt. 2; M. Wanklyn, Reconstructing the New Model Army (Solihull, 2015-16), i. 90-1, 105.

The 1659 election for the only Parliament of Richard Cromwell* was conducted on the pre-1653 franchises, and so Monmouthshire returned two Members. The first place went to the latest generation of the Morgans of Tredegar. The under-age William Morgan II stood in for his father, Thomas Morgan, in the same way that the latter had appeared as an under-age surrogate for his own father in April 1640. This third generation Morgan was as hard to read politically as his father and grandfather had been during the previous 20 years, although William Morgan II soon evidently inclined towards a restoration of the Stuarts. However, the military interest was represented by John Nicholas, who served the restored Rump faithfully after the fall of the house of Cromwell. In 1660, the long-suppressed Somerset interest re-asserted itself, with William Morgan II falling into place behind Henry Somerset*, styled Lord Herbert of Raglan even when the castle was a ruin and the family commencing a new life and a fresh political era from Badminton in Gloucestershire. After 1660 the main theme of parliamentary politics in this county was the uneasy relationship between the Somersets and the county gentry.