VAUGHAN, Evan Lloyd (c.1709-91), of Corsygedol, Merion.

When at the general election of 1768 William Vaughan declined re-election for Merioneth, Evan Lloyd Vaughan was unwilling to stand and J. Pugh Pryse was returned. Also on Pryse’s death in January 1774, Vaughan was at first reluctant to stand; he was returned unopposed, but at the general election had to fight a contested election, which merely proved the strength of the Vaughan interest. All his subsequent elections were uncontested.

Vaughan voted regularly against the North Administration till its fall. He supported Rockingham’s second Administration, and after his death seems to have inclined to Fox. But on 18 Feb. 1783 Vaughan voted for Shelburne’s peace preliminaries, and was absent from the divisions on Fox’s East India bill (‘he has not attended Parliament this winter’, wrote a neighbour of his on 5 May 1784NLW, diary of Eliz. Baker of Dolgelley, Peniarth mss 416, A, viii 32.). Robinson, in his survey of December 1783, wrote about Vaughan: ‘very doubtful how he may act and therefore classed contra’. In fact, Vaughan was thoroughly independent: he voted for Pitt’s parliamentary reform proposals, 18 Apr. 1785, and against his Irish propositions, 13 May 1785; and was absent from the divisions on the Regency, 1788-9. ‘There is no man of property in that county save old Vaughan’, Lord Buckingham wrote to W. W. Grenville in 1789, ‘who always votes against you.’HMC Fortescue, i. 487. Before 1790 there is no record of his having spoken in the House. Oldfield described him in 1816 as ‘one of the last independent members of the old constitutional school’.Rep. Hist. vi. 80.

He died 4 Dec. 1791.