Carmarthen was thought to be the largest town in Wales in the early seventeenth century, with a population thought to have been more than 2,000 by 1676. Compton Census, 465; Hist. Carm. ed. Lloyd, ii. 13. It served as a regional capital for south-west Wales, if not south Wales as a whole. This primacy reflected the strong agrarian economy of the town’s hinterland, based on dairying and the rearing of cattle, the essence of rural Carmarthenshire’s husbandry for centuries later. The navigable Tywi, though beset with natural difficulties to mariners, continued to provide the route by which exports and imports could be shipped. In 1604, the Henrician pattern of Welsh parliamentary representation was changed in this county by the granting of a new charter to Carmarthen, which conferred county status on the town and replaced its bailiffs with two sheriffs. This in effect elevated Carmarthen to the same standing vis-à-vis Parliament as that enjoyed by Haverfordwest. It meant that the much smaller out-boroughs (Laugharne, Newton, St Clears, Cydweli, Llandovery, Llandeilo, Llanelli, Dryslwyn, Newcastle Emlyn) were disenfranchised. Hist. Carm. ed. Lloyd, ii. 8. The two sheriffs of Carmarthen acted as the returning officers at parliamentary elections, contracting with the mayor and burgesses. Elections were held in what was called the guildhall in 1640, 1646 and 1659, and in 1656 the shire hall, though they were presumably the same building. C219/43/6/5/174, 176; C219/45; C219/48.
In five Parliaments from 1621 the borough returned Henry Vaughan* of Derwydd, younger brother of John Vaughan†, 1st earl of Carbery [I]. Only in May 1625 was there a challenge, from Francis Annesley†, but even this may have been collusive, as Vaughan signed Annesley’s indenture. HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Carmarthen Boroughs’. In April 1640 Henry Vaughan took the county seat, vacating the borough for Francis Lloyd, the husband of his niece, daughter of the earl of Carbery. The mayor, recorder and 11 others put their names and signatures to the indenture, which appears to have been the work of the aldermen and senior burgesses. C219/42/2/6/106. A larger number (the mayor and 23 burgesses) lent their names to the second election of 1640 (19 Oct.) which took place over two weeks before the shire election, and again saw Lloyd returned apparently without challenge. C219/43/6/5/174. During the civil war, Richard Vaughan†, 2nd earl of Carbery, made Carmarthen his base. R. Hutton, The Royalist War Effort 1642-1646 (1982), 69, 70, 73. Francis Lloyd joined Henry Vaughan, his wife’s uncle, in active military service for the king during the civil war, and on 5 February 1644 was disabled from sitting further at Westminster. Soon afterwards, in April, Carmarthen fell, briefly, to parliamentary forces under Rowland Laugharne†, the event marked by the consequent retirement from military command of the 2nd earl of Carbery. In April the town was won back for the king by Charles Gerard, whose uncompromising conduct led to his departure in July 1645. On 12 October 1645, Carmarthen surrendered to Laugharne. Hist. Carm. ed. Lloyd, ii. 25-6; Hutton, Royalist War Effort, 74-5, 140, 188; Major Generall Laughorn’s Letter (1645), sig. A2(i) (E.307.15). The royalist gentry of the county showed no appetite for any further revival of the king’s cause, and helped by Laugharne’s evident wish to rehabilitate Carbery, a rapprochement between the Carmarthenshire gentlemen and Parliament was effected. The Carmarthenshire men were keen to stress early in 1646 that they had not, unlike their Glamorgan counterparts, flirted with royalist insurgency. C108/189, pt. 2. The writ for a by-election at Carmarthen was moved in the House on 10 February 1646, the same day as the writ for the county. CJ iv. 435a.
The by-election was held on 27 April, and the indenture was signed by the sheriffs, the mayor, 14 aldermen and 26 other burgesses. There is no evidence of a contest, and William Davies (‘Davids’) was returned. C219/43/6/5/176. He was probably a professional soldier, recently retired through serious injury, and almost certainly owed his place to Rowland Laugharne, who had successfully negotiated a regional settlement with Carbery. Laugharne in turn was a representative of the interest of the 3rd earl of Essex in parliamentary politics. Once at Westminster, his allegiances were entirely with the Presbyterian faction, so unsurprisingly he was a victim of the purge of December 1648. The borough then remained unrepresented as an electoral entity, as there was no ‘recruiter’ election to the Rump Parliament, and Carmarthen was disenfranchised under the Instrument of Government. In 1659, when the pre-1653 electoral arrangements were resumed, Carmarthen saw its only contested election in this period. Rowland Dawkins had succeeded Laugharne as governor of the town after Laugharne’s apostacy from Parliament during the second civil war in 1648 and had been admitted to the common council of the town in 1649. Cal. Recs. Haverfordwest, 82-3; Carm. RO, Mus. 155, f. 75. He had been Member for the county in 1654 and 1656. His opponent was David Morgan of Abergwili and Westminster, but also a member of the Carmarthen common council. Morgan’s strategy was to challenge the council of which he was a member on behalf of the commonalty of the borough. The government’s preferred candidate was Thomas Hughes*, a client of Philip Jones and the Cromwellian interest in Monmouthshire, who was proposed vigorously to the townsmen by one of the sheriffs, John Vaughan, over the course of several days. Hughes was emphatically rejected by the electors at a first poll, by voices. After Hughes was declared to have been eliminated,
Then the said sheriff (having consulted with Sir Henry Vaughan* a person excepted from pardon by the Parliament) and divers others sitting with him upon the bench (who were uncapable of giving any vote at the said election) determined to propose Major-general Dawkins in opposition to Morgan, notwithstanding that the said sheriff (the week before, when he mediated for Hughes) did produce letters from London, under the hand of the said Dawkins, importing that he would not be burgess for the town, but knight of the shire.
According to the same partisan account, the burgesses gave Morgan the preference ‘with a loud cry’, whereupon the sheriff ‘in a threatening manner’ insisted on a poll, ‘and in 37 finds 23 for Morgan and 14 for Dawkins; and the rest of the said burgesses (consisting of about 90) standing in a body for the said Morgan; and of the 14 for Dawkins, divers were persons uncapable to vote’. The sheriff then adjourned until the afternoon ‘saying to his friends, that by that time all these fellows would be gone, and that some other friends would appear’, also telling a friend of Morgan's ‘that if Mr Morgan had sent to him he would have been for the said Morgan’. He had allegedly embarrassed voters by asking them ‘instead of the question, whether they were for Dawkins or Morgan ... whether they thought Major-general Dawkins a fit person to serve for their town in Parliament’. During the adjournment Morgan’s supporters, led by the mayor and aldermen, drew up an ‘instrument’ returning him, subscribed by them and with the mayoral seal affixed. Subsequently they ‘sealed an indenture to the same effect, which they delivered to the sheriff, but was not by him annexed to, or returned with the writ’. That afternoon the sheriff reproved the burgesses supporting Morgan for staying put, and assaulted the mayoral party, threatening them with detention in the castle ‘in the hands of divers soldiers under the command of the said Dawkins’. He was backed up by ‘strangers ... with swords, pistols, and other weapons to further the election of Dawkins’ allegedly ‘called by private directions received from some lords of the privy council’, and commanded by Dawkins’s brother Jenkin. Some of Morgan’s adherents were kept prisoners in the castle ‘for many hours’ by them, and Jenkin Dawkins ‘did (in the open hall) beat divers of the said burgesses for voting for the said Morgan’. Dawkins’s sponsors also threatened
that the town should be undone for voting against Dawkins, that neither assizes nor sessions should be there kept, that a quo warranto should be brought against the town, that the mayor should be put out of his office, that troops of horse should be brought to quarter upon the town, and the townsmen sent to Jamaica.
Morgan's supporters claimed that the
sheriffs, divers justices of the peace of the out-county, and others who joined with (and assisted) them in this violence offered to the said mayor and burgesses, were delinquents in arms, and commissioners of array and such as have given no testimony of affection to the Parliament, and present government.
Having thus terrorized the electors, Dawkins’s party then proceeded to ‘a pretended election of the said Dawkins, and signed an indenture to that purpose’. Further tales of dubious practice emerged:
A sequestered minister was promised to be restored to his living, if he would take off his father and brother from voting for Morgan. A gentleman nearly related to the sheriff did (the night before the election) tell one of the burgesses of the said town, that the town indeed might vote, and again and again choose the said Morgan, but that another should be returned by the sheriff.
Several of Dawkins’s professed supporters, including the other sheriff Griffith David, ‘confessed that they did it for fear’, one alderman alleging that they should otherwise ‘have been made traitors or rebels; and that if Morgan intended to be a Parliament man, his election should have begun at London, and not at Carmarthen’. The implication of the townsmen’s resistance was that from the start (when Hughes was to have been ‘imposed’ on them) ‘the private ends of great men’ were involved, ‘and no notice given the country’: a marginal gloss in a contemporary hand interpolates, after ‘great men’, ‘by a letter from the Lord Philip Jones’. The State of the Case betwixt Major General Rowland Dawkins and David Morgan Esq. (1659, BL, 1865.c.16.116). Dawkins was a close ally of Philip Jones*, like Carmarthen's new recorder Edmund Jones*, while Morgan was an arriviste who had acquired a landed estate by keeping a close eye on the market in confiscated property. However, the fury of the sheriff, undoubtedly a kinsman of Carbery, and the government party had undoubtedly been provoked by what they saw as a challenge to the Golden Grove interest, which had reached an accommodation with the Cromwellians just as it had done in 1645-6 with the Essexians.
Dawkins having subsequently been ‘indisputably chosen burgess for the town of Cardigan’, Morgan's partisans pressed the House to reverse the return in his favour, and on 22 March 1659 the House's election committee complied, on the grounds that Morgan had obtained 108 votes, and Dawkins ‘not above 20’, though Morgan’s friends had at first claimed 115 to 15. The indenture returning Dawkins was therefore removed, and the town sheriffs, who had sought to exonerate themselves by a petition which had reached the committee by 10 March, were sent for to answer at the bar of the House for their ‘great misdemeanour and offence’. When they appeared on 26 March John Vaughan claimed they had 20 witnesses ‘to have made good their return’, but were betrayed by their solicitor, in that he procured them a lawyer who repudiated their return of Dawkins; they were therefore willing to return Morgan, and begged to be discharged, which they both were. State of the Case; CJ vii. 617a, b, 620b, 621a. David Morgan went on to become sheriff that year, and sought to substitute several nominees of his own for seven delinquent councillors, headed by two of the Vaughans, and including the recorder Edmund Jones, and the town clerk. Morgan was brought to heel and expelled from the common council after Restoration (22 Mar. 1661), when the Vaughans of Golden Grove resumed their sway untrammelled by the need to court regional allies. Carm. RO, MUS 155, f. 82.
