Radnorshire was one of the smallest and most barren counties in seventeenth-century Wales. K. Parker, Radnorshire from Civil War to Restoration (Logaston, 2000), 1-2; R. Suggett, Houses and Hist. in the March of Wales: Radnorshire 1400-1800 (Aberystwyth, 2005), 3, 6-7, 9. It was described in the 1670s as ‘for soil, very hungry and ungrateful to the husbandman ... being so mountainous and rocky, especially in the west and north parts, which are fit only to feed cattle. And were it not for the many rivers which so plentifully water it ... it would be more sterile’. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 277. As with the three Welsh counties that bordered it to the north, west and south (Montgomeryshire, Cardiganshire and Breconshire), its economy was dominated by the rearing of livestock – in Radnorshire’s case, for the English market. Only in the lowlands bordering Shropshire and Herefordshire, where most of the county’s largest towns – among them, New Radnor, Presteigne and Knighton – and villages were clustered was there much in the way of arable farming and then largely of the subsistence variety. Parker, Radnorshire, 4-7, 13; HP Commons 1604-29; Suggett, Radnorshire, 3-10. Radnorshire’s population by the 1670s was approximately 16,000 and was concentrated in the eastern lowlands. Parker, Radnorshire, 2-3; L. Owen, ‘The population of Wales in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion (1959), 112; N. Powell, ‘Urban population in early modern Wales revisited’, WHR xxiii. 36. The size of the electorate in the mid-seventeenth century is unknown; in the 1621 election it had numbered about 1,000. Shire elections were customarily held at New Radnor and Presteigne alternately. C219/42/2/125; C219/48, unfol.; HP Commons 1604-29.
Radnorshire’s parliamentary representation during the early Stuart period had been all but monopolised by the Price family of Mynachdy and Pilleth (adjacent villages lying a few miles south-west of Knighton), and that trend would continue into the 1640s. Parker, Radnorshire, 27; HP Commons 1604-29. In the elections to the Short Parliament, the freeholders assembled at New Radnor on 10 March 1640 and returned Charles Price of Pilleth, apparently without a contest. C219/42/2/125. Price’s elder brother James had served as knight of the shire in 1624, 1625 and 1626, while he himself had sat for New Radnor Boroughs in every Parliament of the 1620s. Infra, ‘Charles Price’; ‘New Radnor Boroughs’, ‘James Price II’, HP Commons 1604-29. The contracting parties on the election indenture were the county sheriff and nine named freeholders and ‘other persons’, and these ten gentlemen were the only signatories. C219/42/2/125. In the elections to the Long Parliament that autumn, the county returned Price again. The indenture has not survived.
Price sided with the king at the outbreak of civil war and was disabled from sitting as an MP early in October 1642. Dubbed by the parliamentarians ‘the great prince of Radnorshire’, he was killed in action when the New Model stormed Bristol in September 1645. Infra, ‘Charles Price’; Parker, Radnorshire, 70. The Radnorshire seat was left vacant while the royalists retained a foothold in Wales, and it was not until 19 March 1647 that the Commons ordered the issuing of a writ for a new election to replace Price. CJ v. 118b. In the resulting ‘recruiter’ election, held on 27 April 1647, the county returned Arthur Annesley of Mountnorris, county Armagh, Ireland. Although Annesley had family connections with south Wales, his election had allegedly been engineered by the Presbyterian grandees Sir Robert Harley* and Sir William Lewis* ‘to make such creatures of their own Members’. This perceived electoral design was also held responsible for the return of Harley’s son for New Radnor Boroughs and Annesley’s brother-in-law, John Lloyd, for Carmarthenshire. Infra, ‘Arthur Annesley’; Clarke Pprs. ii. 157; D. Underdown, ‘Party management in the recruiter elections’, EHR lxxxiii. 258-9. Yet for all that Annesley was a carpetbagger and had probably been absent on election day, the indenture returning him was signed by a far larger number of the freeholders (at least 30) than had featured on its predecessor for the Short Parliament. Infra, ‘Arthur Annesley’; C219/43/3/213. Annesley was among those MPs secluded at Pride’s Purge in December 1648, leaving Radnorshire without formal representation in the Rump. Infra, ‘Arthur Annesley’. The county was informally represented in the Nominated Parliament by John Williams of Bron-y-Garn Llwyd (about ten miles west of Knighton), who was one of Vavasor Powell’s closest and most devoted allies. Infra, ‘John Williams’.
Radnorshire, like other Welsh counties, was assigned a second parliamentary seat under the Instrument of Government of 1653, and in the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654 it returned the newcomer George Gwynne of Llanelwedd (near the county’s western border with Breconshire) and Henry Williams of Lower Caebalfa, about ten miles south of New Radnor. There is no evidence of a contest. The scion of a Carmarthenshire family, Gwynne had acquired a substantial estate in Radnorshire by marriage in the late 1640s and had become a militia commissioner and magistrate for his adoptive county. Infra, George Gwynne’; Parker, Radnorshire, 191. Williams, while retaining a strong family connection with neighbouring Breconshire, had figured prominently in Radnorshire’s affairs since the civil war and was the county’s most experienced administrator by the mid-1650s. Infra, ‘Henry Williams’; Parker, Radnorshire, 191. Gwynne and Williams were returned again, apparently unopposed, in the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656. Both men were young and unremarkable collaborators with the Cromwellian regime, both came from families with royalist pasts, and both would prove politically supple enough to weather the Restoration. Infra, ‘George Gwynne’, ‘Henry Williams’. Neither the 1654 nor the 1656 election indentures have survived.
Radnorshire was reduced to its traditional one Member in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament of 1659, when the freeholders assembled at Presteigne on 4 January to return Henry Williams. The returning parties on the election indenture were ten named freeholders – headed by George Gwynne – and ‘divers other persons qualified and capable to elect Members’, and these same ten gentleman, and the county sheriff, were the only signatories. C219/48. Gwynne reclaimed the county seat in the elections to the 1660 Convention, but he was replaced in 1661 by one of north Wales’s most zealous civil-war royalists, the chief justice of the Brecon circuit Sir Richard Lloyd. ‘Radnorshire’, ‘Sir Richard Lloyd (Floyd) I’, HP Commons 1660-90.
