Carmarthenshire

By the seventeenth century, Carmarthenshire had through the incorporation of outlying lordships become the largest of the Welsh counties. In 1646 the gentry described the ‘mere commodities’ of their county as ‘butter, cheese, hay, oats etc.’, but insisted that ‘the subsistence of our county consists in stock of cattle not in corn or other commodities’.1 C108/189, petition of Carm. gentry to Commons, 1646. This was at the close of the civil war, but in more settled times the regional economy was more diverse, resting upon not only cattle farming, dairy production and cloth manufacture, but also on an expanding coal industry in the Llanelli district of east Carmarthenshire. Although firm statistics are not available, the county’s coal production must have contributed very significantly towards what has been estimated to have been a fifteen-fold increase in coal shipments from west Wales between 1600 and 1675.2 HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Carmarthenshire’; J. Hatcher, Hist. British Coal Industry Vol. 1. Before 1700 (Oxford, 1993), 140. If the 1676 Compton ‘census’ is a guide, the county was home to a population of between 18,000 and 20,000 people.3 Compton Census, 465-8. Perhaps as a legacy of the incremental formation of the county during the first half of the sixteenth century, no single location had been settled upon for the shire elections to Parliament, and from 1640 the sheriffs continued the earlier peripatetic pattern. The election for the Long Parliament was held at Rhiw’radar, in the parish of Llangathen, some five miles west of Llandeilo. Although the location of the 1646 ‘recruiter’ election is not known for certain, the description of an open field on a hill and a nearby church suggests that it was again at Rhiw’radar, but in 1656 the venue was the ‘shire hall’ in Carmarthen. The election held in January 1659 took place at Llandeilo.4 C219/43/6/5/170; C108/188, pt. ii, misc., relation of the Carm. election; C219/48.

In nine out of 15 elections from 1572, the Vaughans of Golden Grove took the single seat. The election held on 26 March, the indenture for which is now missing, saw the return of Henry Vaughan of Derwydd, younger brother of John Vaughan†, who in 1628 had been created earl of Carbery [I].5 OR. The second earl of Carbery, Henry Vaughan’s nephew, was among the 40 or so electors who returned Vaughan again to the second Parliament of 1640, at an election held at Rhiw’radar on 5 November, two days after the Parliament had assembled at Westminster.6 C219/43/6/5/170. He proved an early leaver as well as a late arrival, being among the first to take up arms for the king, and after sitting in the Oxford Parliament was disabled from sitting further at Westminster on 5 February 1644. Carbery was a more pliant figure. Although he was given senior military command by the king – captain-general of all Wales in 1643, lieutenant-general of south-west Wales from later that year – and elevated to the English peerage as Baron Vaughan of Emlyn, he relinquished his responsibilities in the spring of 1644 after suffering defeats at the hands of Parliament’s commander in south Wales, Rowland Laugharne†. Carbery’s uncle soldiered on, but at Laugharne’s instigation, Carbery himself was allowed to shrug off his active royalism. By November 1645, Laugharne was urging Speaker William Lenthall to set aside Carbery’s past, in the interests of political stability in south-west Wales, where the people were ‘unsatisfied and unsettled’ by his eclipse. Parliamentary committees evidently concurred, although the seeds were sown for future resentment. ‘No general of the king escaped sequestration or composition but his lordship’, a royalist later annotated one of Laugharne’s intercessionary letters.7 C108/188, pt. ii, ‘misc.’, letters of Rowland Laugharne.

Carbery’s speedy rehabilitation was the price Parliament evidently considered worth paying for peace in west Wales, and the writ was moved on 10 February 1646 for both the Carmarthenshire and Carmarthen by-elections.8 CJ iv. 435a. A further two months elapsed before the election was held for the shire. It took place in an ‘open field upon the hill’ which rather suggests Rhiw’r adar was the venue, not Carmarthen. It was a location that favoured the interest of the Vaughans, as Golden Grove was only two miles away. It seems to have been the first contested county election of the century. The sheriff, Charles Gwyn of Gwempa, near Llangyndeyrn, was not from that district of the county, and had been appointed by the Commons four months earlier.9 CJ iv. 366a; J. Buckley, Genealogies of the Carm. Sheriffs (Carmarthen, 1910), 106. Gwyn seems to have tried his best to act impartially. After reading the writ at a house, probably an inn, some of the crowd cried up John Lloyd of Fforest and others for one Rice. The most likely candidate is Edward Rice of Newton, near Dinefwr castle and a short distance from Rhiw’radar.10 West Wales Recs. i. 65; Hist. Carm. ed. Lloyd, 475. After the reading of the writ and the crying up of the competitors, the sheriff moved to the nearby open field with the consent of two of Rice’s gentry supporters. The parties then congregated in two separate groups, the sheriff then declaring for Lloyd on viewing the size of the respective crowds after both Lloyd and Rice had asked for his judgment. Rice then asked for a poll, which was taken by hundred, beginning with Derllys hundred, the most ‘remote’ from the election venue, and then the hundred of Cathinog, the most local. Rice’s party objected to the delay in polling the voters of Elfed hundred, whom they thought should have been called first. With the aid of a roll of eligible voters, the sheriff continued the poll until dusk, and resumed the following day in the house where he had read the writ and in the nearby churchyard and church porch. After apparently inviting any undeclared electors to come forward, he declared Lloyd elected.11 C108/188, pt. ii, misc., relation of the Carm. election.

Lloyd’s election was probably secured with the support of those Carmarthenshire gentry keen to reach a rapprochement with Parliament and to ensure that native gentry continued to oversee ‘civil government and affairs’.12 C108/146, original petition of Carm. gentry and others to Commons. He was also firmly associated with the Presbyterian interest at Westminster. His new wife was the widowed sister of Arthur Annesley*, who would himself be elected for Radnorshire in 1647 with the help of Sir Robert Harley* and Sir William Lewis*. Much of Lloyd’s military career had been spent in the regiment of Sir John Meyrick*, a client of the earl of Essex and an undoubted Presbyterian in his factional allegiance. Edward Rice did not sign the Carmarthenshire petition of loyalty to Parliament, and probably represented that part of the Carbery interest unreconciled to Westminster. Sage Vaughan, wife of Henry Vaughan*, a die-hard royalist soldier, was the widow of a Rice of Newton. Edward Rice ‘esquire’ was liable for the royalist taxes in 1643-4, and had been knighted by March 1661, only a few years before he died in 1664.13 C108/189; NLW, SD/1664/84, bond of Walter Rice, 1664; Justices of the Peace ed. Phillips, 172. One of his supporters was Robert Birtt or Brett, prosecuted for royalism by the county committee.14 CCC 3155. Lloyd and Rice were to a considerable extent proxies for the Annesleys and the Vaughans respectively, and their rivalry was not new. The families had competed for the Carmarthen seat in 1625, and by 1651 a full-blown feud was simmering between Annesley’s father, Viscount Valentia (Francis Annesley†) and ‘Coward Carbery’, as Valentia called him, over ‘wastes, depopulation and damages’ inflicted upon the Annesley family’s estates during the civil war.15 C108/188, pt. i, Correspondence II; C108/255, ‘Correspondence’.

Lloyd was secluded along with Annesley and Meyrick, his associates, at Colonel Thomas Pride’s* purge of the House in December 1648. Under the terms of the Instrument of Government, the county acquired another seat, and the election to the first protectorate Parliament was held in the summer of 1654. The original writ to the Carmarthenshire sheriff in 1654 would be brought into the House in March 1659 as a specimen when the summoning of Scottish Members was in debate.16 CJ vii. 615b. There was probably no contest in 1654, since both members returned were committed supporters of the government of Oliver Cromwell*. John Claypoole had since 1646 been Cromwell’s son-in-law, and Rowland Dawkins, who took the second seat, was governor of Carmarthen and a close and trusted associate of Colonel Philip Jones*. Jones must undoubtedly played some part in ensuring the outcome of the election, but the subordination of the Carbery interest to that of Cromwell was at least equally significant. In a regional backlash against Carbery immediately after the restoration of the monarchy, it was alleged that the earl was ‘very great’ with Jones and Dawkins, and that Cromwell had sent red deer to stock the park at Golden Grove as a gift. Petitioners explicitly attacked Carbery for ‘solely prostrating his interest’ to the Cromwellians in parliamentary elections.17 C108/189, petition against the earl of Carbery. Claypoole and Dawkins were returned again in 1656, at an election held on 20 August at the ‘shire hall of Carmarthen’.18 Trans. Carm. Antiquarian Soc. x. (pt. 27), 63-4. Only six voting freeholders were named on the indenture, followed by a formulaic reference to other persons qualified and capable’. However, Claypoole was also elected for Northamptonshire, and chose to sit for his native county. At the subsequent by-election, again held at Carmarthen shire hall, the indenture once more subscribed by six electors, Robert Atkyns, was returned in his place.19 C219/45. Atkyns had no local interest of his own, but was undoubtedly returned because he was the son of a common pleas judge who could generally be relied upon by the government.

When writs were issued for elections to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament, the pre-1654 franchise and electoral arrangements had been restored. The county election for the single Member was held at Llandeilo on 6 January 1659.20 C219/48. Twelve electors signed the indenture, which returned Thomas Hughes, a Monmouthshire Welsh judge and client of Philip Jones. The election was apparently uncontested, but it came three days after a contested and disorderly contest in Carmarthen for the borough seat. The contest seems to have been an alliance of the Golden Grove and the Cromwellian interest, the latter represented by Dawkins, against the claims of an arriviste lawyer, David Morgan, whose offence against the evidently partial sheriff may have been no more than his daring to challenge better-entrenched local interests. In elections for the Convention of 1660, John Lloyd was successful, as the royalist Vaughans were ineligible, but thereafter the Golden Grove interest re-established itself and retained a grip on the county seat until 1689.