Glamorgan’s topography made an impression on every visitor, its coastal plain of Y Fro (the vale of Glamorgan) in sharp contrast to the more northerly hills of Y Blaenau. The portway, the main road followed westwards from Cardiff, marked roughly the borderlands where hills and vale met, ‘the ‘border vale’ as conceptualized by modern historians. R. Merrick, Morganiae Archaiographia ed. B. Ll. James (S. Wales Rec.Soc. i), 125, 126. The peninsula of the lordship of Gower lay further west beyond Swansea, and like the vale of Glamorgan was a district of mixed farming, unlike the Glamorgan uplands, where the economy was emphatically pastoral. G. Williams, ‘The Economic Life of Glam. 1536-1642’, Glam. Co. Hist. iv. 3-9. There had been external investment in the iron industry in the county in the Tudor period, entrepreneurs attracted by the ready supply of ore, timber for fuel, and water-power for mills. Among the investors were the Sidneys of Sussex and Kent, but by 1640 the industry was already in decline. Coal, too, was a resource that was worked in a limited way, largely for local consumption. Of the Glamorgan ports, only Neath and Swansea exported coal, almost entirely to south-west England, and none went from Cardiff. J. Hatcher, Hist. British Coal Industry Vol. 1. Before 1700 (Oxford, 1993), 138-9. With an estimated population of what must have been around 35,000 in 1640, Glamorgan was second only to Carmarthenshire among the Welsh counties in terms of population size. G. Williams, ‘Glam. Society 1536-1642’, Glam. Co. Hist. iv. 75-6. A compilation of 1634 listed 738 freeholders by name, so it seems reasonable to assume an electorate in 1640 of around 800. The Names of all the Freeholders in Glam. in 1634 ed. H.H. Knight (Neath, 1849). At that time the concentration of freeholders lay in the hundreds of the vale of Glamorgan, where villages were typically nucleated, in contrast to the scattered settlements of the larger land mass but more thinly spread population of the uplands.
Parliamentary elections for the county in the period 1604-29 had, where evidence survives to allow a confident assertion, been conducted in the mid-Glamorgan town of Bridgend, but the first election in 1640, held on 16 March, took place in Cardiff. It seems highly likely that the return of Sir Edward Stradling of St Donats for the single seat had gained the prior approval of Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke. About 32 of the Glamorgan freeholders signed the indenture, headed by the leading gentry of the county such as Sir William Lewis of Gelligaer, Sir Thomas Lewis of Penmark and William Herbert of Cogan Pill, who was himself returned for Cardiff Boroughs. C219/42/2/6/116. There is no evidence of a contest, and the seat may have been of interest to Stradling because of the immunity from arrest for debt it would have afforded. He was abroad in the service of the king when the second election of 1640 took place, and on that occasion the knight of the shire was Philip Herbert, styled Lord Herbert, the eldest surviving son of the 4th earl. No indenture has survived for the election. Herbert was made lord lieutenant of Glamorgan, Breconshire and Monmouthshire in March 1642, but proved a vacillating and uncommitted figure during the civil war. He maintained a low profile in the Commons, attracted no attention from the New Model army in the purge of the Commons in December 1648, and re-appeared in the House in the wake of his father’s election for Berkshire in April 1649. There is no evidence that Herbert took any particular interest in business relating to Glamorgan during his time in the Commons.
By the terms of the Instrument of Government of 1653, Glamorgan acquired two shire seats, and another seat for the borough of Cardiff. The first election under this constitution took place on 12 July 1654. It is not clear from the damaged indenture where the election was held, but the two men returned, apparently uncontested, were Colonel Philip Jones, a reliable and trusted member of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell’s* council and a long-serving governor of Cardiff, and Edmund Thomas of Wenvoe. The signatures of some 18 individuals are visible on the indenture, and they represent a departure from the make-up of the 1640 electorate. C219/44/3. Sir Thomas Lewis of Penmark represented continuity, but many more figures from among the junior branches of the county gentry were evident, men like Edward Stradling of Roath and John Gibbs of Neath, the latter described by Jones’s enemies in 1659 as ‘a person popishly affected, an enemy to the godly party, formerly a commissioner of array and aided the king, now a justice of the peace.’ . Glam. Archives, DF/L 7. Even more striking is the presence among the voters of at least three clergymen, Henry Nicholls, Edmund Ellis and Joshua Miller, ministers of Coychurch, St Fagans and St Andrews respectively, whose profession no longer disqualified them from participating in elections to the Commons. Oxford DNB (Nicholls); T. Richards, Hist. Puritan Movement in Wales (1920), 67, 145 (Ellis, Miller). Edmund Thomas was no more than 21 years of age, and was the step-son of Michael Oldisworth*, man-of-business to the 4th earl of Pembroke. The electoral arrangement thus appeared to satisfy both the Cromwellian interest in Glamorgan and the older allegiances and loyalties of the gentry, focused on the Herbert family. Relations between Jones and Thomas were evidently cordial, and both were returned once more to the second protectorate Parliament in 1656, again without any known opposition. Thomas was evidently able despite his youthfulness, and in December 1657 was along with Jones elevated to Cromwell’s Other House.
Elections to Richard Cromwell’s* single Parliament saw a reversion to the pre-1654 electoral arrangements. Jones and Thomas were disqualified from standing by virtue of their membership of the Other House, and the sheriff resumed an earlier pattern by summoning the electors to Bridgend for the election, which took place on 29 December 1658.The indenture was signed by 43 electors, and the names were mostly of lesser gentry. The clergy seem not to have participated. C219/48. There seems only to have been a single candidate for the single seat, Evan Seys of Boverton in the vale of Glamorgan, a serjeant-at-law since 1656, who had kept out of the civil war. His family had been faithful in its loyalties to the earls of Pembroke, but he was probably returned on his own interest in Glamorgan, where he enjoyed a landed estate. By no means a client of Philip Jones, he nevertheless was regarded as dependable by the Cromwellian government. At the Restoration, the seat was taken by the head of the Mansell family of west Glamorgan. Sir Edward Mansell gave way to the heir of the 5th earl of Pembroke in 1661, but when William Lord Herbert succeeded his father as the 6th earl in December 1669, Glamorgan was the seat of the Mansells without interruption until 1712.
