Pembroke Boroughs

In the 1530s, John Leland visited Pembroke when it could glory in its fame as the birthplace of Henry VII, and he was evidently impressed by the impregnable castle and the stout town walls. Even then, however, the eastern suburb of the town was in ruins, hinting that prosperity was not easily sustained in south-west Wales. A pattern of decay and depopulation persisted well into the seventeenth century. The Itinerary in Wales of John Leland ed. L. Toulmin Smith (1906), 115-6; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Pembroke Boroughs’. By the second half of that century, the population of the borough must have been around 1,000, allowing for likely significant depletion during the civil war and especially during and after the siege of 1648. Compton Census, 462; N. Powell, ‘Urban Population in Early Modern Wales Revisited’, WHR xxiii. 34. Pembroke was governed by a charter of 1485 that provided for a council consisting of a mayor, two bailiffs and 12 councillors. Its standing as a parliamentary borough was complicated by its relationship to the out-boroughs, ancient towns that joined with Pembroke to send a single Member to the Commons, under Tudor legislation. Doubts persisted as to which of these had the right to participate and the duty to provide parliamentary wages. In 1621 the committee of privileges ruled that the contributory boroughs were Tenby, Wiston, Newport, Fishguard, Cilgerran and St Dogmaels. However, there seems no evidence that any of these places except Tenby and Wiston subsequently played any part in parliamentary elections. HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Pembroke Boroughs’. In the indentures for the two elections of 1640, Pembroke is described as the shire town, and the electors seem only to have been Pembroke men.

Hugh Owen of Orielton, only two miles from Pembroke, had in 1626 staked his claim to the patronage of this constituency and thereby established a family hold that was to last until 1868. Yet he was returned to the Short Parliament for Haverfordwest. Sir John Stepney of Prendergast had offered his services gratis to the corporation of Haverfordwest in January 1640, but nevertheless the switch took place, and Stepney sat for Pembroke. It remains unexplained, but was evidently a convenient arrangement and was probably entirely collusive. C219/42/2/6/124. Owen reclaimed Pembroke for the Long Parliament, in which Stepney duly sat for Haverfordwest. The indenture survives, albeit in barely legible condition. C219/43/6/7/208. Owen played a distinctly pliable part in the civil war. He was probably passive in his political declarations, making both king and Parliament willing to call on his allegiance. He was taken to Oxford seemingly on an initiative by Richard Vaughan†, 2nd earl of Carbery, the royalist commander in the region, and as late as March 1644 he was being courted by both sides. Parliament chose to interpret, or at least to present, his journey to the king’s quarters as a capture. In February 1644, the Commons postponed debate on his case and his right to continue to represent Pembroke, and in May 1646 it was referred to the committee on absent Members, with no result except that Owen was never disabled from sitting. CJ iii. 390a, iv. 551b. He was not in the House when it was purged by officers of the New Model army in December 1648.

Because the town lost separate representation under the Cromwellian Instrument of Government, Pembroke did not again return a Member until 1659. On that occasion, the contestants were the Owens of Orielton and the Lort family. The mayor of Pembroke, the returning officer, was John Lort of Pricaston, Castlemartin, the youngest of three brothers. Like the Owens, the political behaviour of the Lorts had been ambivalent during the first civil war. According to Mayor Lort’s detailed account of the election, he received the precept from the high sheriff and convened the bailiffs and aldermen of Pembroke on 8 January 1659. Truth Manifest; Or, a Modest Reply to a Paper lately Printed (1659, BL, 190.g.12.179). They agreed to ‘send for other burgesses that lived in that country’, the mayor advising Sir Hugh Owen and his brother Arthur Owen by letter and giving personal notice to the rest. When the Pembroke townsmen met on 10 January, the out-burgesses (including the Owens, who lived out of town) were not there, but ‘by their servants desired the meeting might be put off till the middle of the week’. The precept being read, those present resolved ‘to choose no stranger, but a burgess of their own borough’. John Lort denied that he at this point ‘ever said that he would choose his brother, if he had but six voices for him’. At the town hall on 13 January it was agreed unanimously that Sampson Lort, the mayor’s brother, should be sworn a freeman on the Saturday following, which he was. Meanwhile James Philipps* had by letter to the mayor sought to impose Colonel John Clerke II* on the constituency and on being told that they were resolved to choose one of their own burgesses replied, ‘that if they did not choose one whom he should nominate, that then he would bring down hundreds to carry it’. The three interests probably in contention at this point were those of the Owens, who for electoral purposes could claim a long-standing loyalty from elements in the town; of Clerke, representing the wishes of the Cromwellian government; and of Sampson Lort, who while willing to serve in local office under the protectorate, was sympathetic to radical Protestantism and was nowhere as close to the government as Clerke.

After giving two days’ notice, the mayor began election proceedings on 17 January. On that day James Philipps insisted on an interview with him beforehand and made no impression on the mayor despite his warning that he had mustered voters from the out-boroughs. At the town hall Sir Hugh Owen requested that James Philipps and Essex Meyrick (son of Sir John Meyrick*) should be made freemen, which being refused by the corporation members, ‘a company of strangers, and pretended burgesses of out-boroughs (having too much drink given them that morning, on the charge of the said James Philipps) fell into a great mutiny’ in which the mayor and his eldest brother Roger, ‘a sickly and infirm man’ were assaulted, and the election was postponed until Wednesday following. The forename of Essex Meyrick is a sufficient indication of his likely political adherence to the conservative, Presbyterian gentry interest, probably by this time inclining to royalism. Owen’s attempt to co-opt both Philipps and Meyrick suggests an effort to forge an electoral pact between Cromwellians and Presbyterian against the more radical Lort.

Before the mayor left the meeting on 17 January, he was threatened with replacement by the town clerk and assailed by Sir Hugh Owen who wished to deprive him of the precept in his pocket. In an afternoon session on town business, Arthur Owen ‘in a great passion suddenly offered himself to serve in Parliament for the said town’. The mayor advised him to attend the election on Wednesday, but Owen demurred:

if he were chosen on Wednesday, he should judge it no legal election, and making other excuses, before he went from the place, publicly denied to serve in Parliament for them, and declared that he gave his voice to Colonel Clerke.

The mayor denied that he ordered a ‘guard of halberds’ to exclude the out-burgesses: ‘if any did order them, it was some friend of Mr James Philipps’, whom he also accused of offering the Tenby freemen a barrel of ale among them and 6d each to support his candidate at Pembroke.

At the next meeting of the proceedings, on 19 January, the mayor claimed there was ‘no man there to stand for the election’ at the town hall, and his proposal of Sampson Lort was adopted and followed by his almost unanimous return, after Philipps had asserted himself as representing the central government; he

told the mayor he was there as a public minister of state to take notice of his doings, and threatened the mayor, that he would make him go to London, because he would not do as he would have him.

There had been no demand for a poll, however. Philipps then allegedly intimidated various freemen into signing ‘Mr Owen’s certificate’, after they had desired their names to be inserted in the indenture for Sampson Lort. The two bailiffs complained to the mayor that Philipps had threatened them with fines of £1,500. The statement of the Lort case was a reply in print to their opponents’ own The State of the Election of a Burgess to Serve in Parliament for the Shire-Town of Pembroke, which has not been traced. There is nevertheless a statement of Owen’s case attached to the indenture of return of Sampson Lort, which survives. This petition embodies a statement of Owen’s election, and was treated as a return. C219/48. This accused the mayor of high-handedly adjourning and postponing the election meeting despite entreaties to continue with it. A request by the bailiffs that they should officiate in the mayor’s place was snubbed. An assembly of burgesses chose Arthur Owen, being an alderman, as their representative, and deemed the mayor’s writ to be void. The numerous signatories attesting this were headed by Essex Meyrick and John Bateman (one of the bailiffs), and included the mayors and burgesses of Tenby and Wiston. The return of Sampson Lort was subscribed by his brother the mayor alone, though in his contract with the high sheriff he was joined by his brother Roger, three aldermen and some 35 freemen.

According to the Lorts’ pamphlet, the only source, when the indenture and petition reached the House the controversy over the election, reified in the form of the return, was ‘appointed to be heard’ on 2 April 1659. However, there is no evidence that the case was resolved or even debated. Truth Manifest. Arthur Owen sat for Pembrokeshire before and after this. Lort, at the head of what by then had been excoriated as the ‘fanatic’ party, contested Haverfordwest in 1660. In that election, Sir Hugh Owen once again took Pembroke Boroughs, and in 1661 Pembroke Boroughs returned Rowland Laugharne, who had championed the parliamentary cause in arms in south-west Wales from 1644 to 1646 before leading the royalist Welsh revolt against Parliament in May 1648.