Caernarvonshire

Regarded as ‘the most impassable, barren country of all Wales’, Caernarfonshire was described in the 1670s as

generally very mountainous, especially in the midst [Snowdonia]... yet is it not unfertile, feeding good herds of cattle, and hath abundance of fish and fowl, especially that part towards Ireland [the Llŷn peninsula]... It hath for its bounds on the south Merionethshire ... and the Irish seas, which is also its western and northern limits – except where it is fronted by the Isle of Anglesey – and on the east the River Conwy, which parts it from Denbighshire. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 281; J. Gwynfor Jones, Law, Order and Government in Caern. 1558-1640 (Cardiff, 1996), 24.

The county was separated from Westminster by more than simply distance and topography. On referring the county’s election disputes to a committee in the spring of 1641, the Commons added two MPs fluent in Welsh, for many of the witnesses summoned to give testimony could speak no English. Infra, ‘Caernarvon Boroughs’. In a county with a very high proportion of monoglot Welsh speakers, some local government business was conducted, by necessity, in the vernacular. J. Gwnfor Jones, ‘Aspects of local government in pre-Restoration Caern.’, Caern. Hist. Soc. Trans. xxxiii. 30.

Caernarfonshire’s economy was based largely on the rearing of sheep and cattle in the upland areas and arable farming (mainly of corn and barley) in the better drained, more fertile lowlands of the Llŷn peninsula and around Caernarfon and the Conwy valley. HP Commons 1604-29; F. Emery, ‘The farming regions of Wales’ in The Agrarian Hist. of England and Wales ed. J. Thirsk (Cambridge, 1967), iv. 131; Gwynfor Jones, Law, Order and Government, 14-15. The ‘extreme poverty’ of the county was often commented on, although such observations were regularly deployed to deter attempts by central government to raise the tax-burden. This ‘rhetoric of poverty’ notwithstanding, the county seems to have been unusually vulnerable in the face of bad harvests and down-turns in the livestock trade: ‘many die of hunger’, it was reported in 1623, ‘and the rest bear the impression of hunger in their faces’. Gwynfor Jones, Law, Order and Government, 27-9; L. Bowen, The Politics of the Principality: Wales, c.1603-42 (Cardiff, 2007), 269.

Much of Caernarfonshire’s population – which stood at about 25,000 by the 1670s – was sparsely scattered in the valleys and hilly terrain to the east, north and west of Snowdonia. Approximately ten per cent of the county’s inhabitants lived in the five towns that comprised its only other parliamentary constituency, Caernarvon Boroughs. L. Owen, ‘The population of Wales in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion (1959), 109; N. Powell, ‘Urban population in early modern Wales revisited’, WHR xxiii. 14, 37; Gwynfor Jones, Law, Order and Government, 9-10; Gwnfor Jones, ‘Aspects of local government’, 8. One of the gentlemen involved in the 1620 election for Caernarvonshire estimated that its electorate numbered in the region of 1,100, with the majority of these voters concentrated in the Conwy valley in the east of the county and in the Llŷn peninsula in the west. HP Commons 1604-29.

In political terms, Caernarfonshire had been divided since the Elizabethan period between the Llŷn gentry and the Wynns of Gwydir and their allies in the north and east of the county. This division was rooted, in part, in the ‘social distinction’ imposed by the physical barrier of Snowdonia in the county’s centre, which separated ‘the more traditional and conservative families of the remote areas of the south and west ... and the progressive and more fashionable families of the north and east’ with their relatively easy access to the Chester-Holyhead road and to the county’s two largest boroughs of Caernarfon and Conwy. Gwynfor Jones, Law, Order and Government, 14-15; Gwnfor Jones, ‘Aspects of local government’, 11. Although the leader of the Llŷn faction from the early 1620s, John Griffith I* of Cefnamwlch, had become a follower of the controversial royal favourite George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham, there is no evidence that the rivalry between the Llŷn and Gwydir interests had thereby become attuned to national political issues and divisions. Electoral contests between the factions in the 1620s remained struggles for local superiority; wider political and religious loyalties had little impact. Infra, ‘John Griffith I’; HP Commons 1604-29; Bowen, The Politics of the Principality, 30-1, 33.

In the elections to the Short Parliament, Caernarvonshire returned Thomas Glynne of Glynllifon on 25 March 1640, apparently without a contest. The returning parties on the election indenture were 15 or so named freeholders and ‘many others’, and it was these named gentlemen who signed the indenture; John Griffith I was not among them. C219/42/2/109. Glynne, who had secured the shire seat in 1624 and 1625 as an ally of Griffith, belonged to one of the county’s leading gentry families. Infra, ‘Thomas Glynne’. His younger brother, the future parliamentarian grandee John Glynne, made it a clean sweep for the family that spring by securing return for Caernarvon Boroughs – although he opted to sit for the borough of Westminster instead. Supra, ‘Caernarvon Boroughs’. This Glynne monopoly of the shire and boroughs seats was not well-taken by their erstwhile ally John Griffith, whose office as constable of Caernarfon Castle made him a formidable electoral adversary. John Glynne avoided tangling with him in the elections to the Long Parliament that autumn by looking solely to the borough of Westminster for a seat. But his brother Thomas ran headlong into the Cefnamwlch interest by standing for both Caernarvonshire and the Boroughs. The resulting electoral contests for both seats ‘remained essentially a factional dispute with no discernible ideological flavour’. Bowen, Politics of the Principality, 33.

The elections for Caernarvonshire and for the Boroughs to the Long Parliament were delayed as a result of the high sheriff’s failure to execute the writ on the ‘county day’ in October 1640. This oversight by the sheriff – James Brynkir, a kinsman of the Griffiths – was apparently by design to undermine Thomas Glynne’s candidacy for both seats. Because the November county day would fall after the Long Parliament had assembled, the writs were returned as tarde, and the Commons, on 10 November, ordered the issue of a new writ for electing a knight of the shire. CJ ii. 25b; A.H. Dodd, ‘Caern. elections to the Long Parliament’, BBCS xii. 44; J.K. Gruenfelder, ‘The Wynns of Gwydir and parliamentary elections in Wales, 1604-40’, WHR ix. 135-6. The county election was held on 2 December and saw the return of Griffith’s son John Griffith II. The indenture was similar in format and wording to that of its predecessor for the Short Parliament and was signed by at least 20 of the freeholders, including Thomas Madrin* and William Thomas. Among the leading signatories was ‘Jo: Griffith de Llŷn’ (John Griffith I). C219/43/3/179. Glynne suffered another defeat the following day (3 Dec.) in the Boroughs election, which John Griffith I successfully managed on behalf William Thomas – the son of one of his leading opponents in the 1620s. Supra, ‘Caernarvon Boroughs’.

Thomas Glynne did not take his double defeat for Caernarvonshire and the Boroughs with good grace. It was probably the Glynllifon interest and its friends at Westminster that was responsible for a Commons order of 1 January 1641, summoning Brynkir to answer for his ‘neglect and contempt to this House’ in failing to hold elections for the county and Boroughs in October and for ‘other misdemeanours’ in the December elections. CJ ii. 61b; Procs LP ii. 89. This order was challenged the next day (2 Jan.), although it appeared that there were further grounds for impugning Brynkir’s conduct, in that he had adjourned the poll from about 9am to 1pm. When it was explained that this delay had come about because Brynkir had not received the writ until 9am on election day, Sir Simonds D’Ewes moved that the detainer of the writ should be sent for – but the previous day’s order was allowed to stand. Procs. LP ii. 89. On 11 and 20 January, the Commons ordered that petitions from Glynne, Brynkir and others involved in the two Caernarvonshire elections be referred to a committee set up on 31 December to investigate allegations of electoral malpractice in Bedfordshire. CJ ii. 66a, 70b; Procs. LP ii. 73, 160-1, 668.

Chaired by Sir Henry Herbert, the committee to examine the Caernarvonshire elections convened on 8 March 1641. It began by scrutinising the Boroughs election, and it was not until a week later that the county election was considered. On 15 March, the committee heard evidence from Glynne’s witnesses.

It was proved on Mr Thomas Glynne’s part that the greater show of voices was for him; that after the cry was past, the bailiff adjourned the county court according to the usual manner from month to month, whereupon the sheriff and the under-sheriff did a little after rectify the crier and showed that the adjournment was to take the poll at a meadow just by [Caernarfon] called Maes Glas ... And Mr John Griffith the elder did desire the sheriff to adjourn it to Maes Glas in the hearing of the crier before the adjournment was made by him. After the said adjournment, many of Mr Glynne’s voices, conceiving he had [won the election], departed out of town. It was confessed that divers freeholders went out of town after the said declaration of the sheriff was past or at least absented themselves from the poll.

Opening the case for the Griffiths, their counsel claimed that Glynne’s agents had ‘got the writ for the election into their hands and kept it from the sheriff till nine of the clock the very morning the election was made ... and showed how the same election proceeded legally all along’. Procs. LP ii. 755-6. Brynkir testified that Griffith II had received ‘above 500’ votes. D’Ewes (N), 490.

Although Herbert’s committee voted on 11 March 1641 to void the return for the Boroughs election and Griffith had lost a great deal of money defending this case as well as that for the county election, it was reported in late March that both sides now regretted pursuing the dispute. Procs. LP ii. 716; Cal. Wynn Pprs. 272. John Griffith I moved successfully on 20 April that the committee reconvene the following day (21 Apr.) to consider the county election, complaining that he had ‘long kept 60 witnesses in town at great charge’. CJ ii. 123b; Procs. LP iv. 23. The Commons issued another order to this effect on 11 May, and Griffith attempted to have the committee reconvene on 13 May, but John Glynne, acting for his brother, succeeded in postponing its meeting until 15 May. CJ ii. 143b, 144b, 145b-146a; Procs. LP iv. 321, 362. It was reported in July that the committee had ‘long since’ voted in favour of overturning both the county and Boroughs elections, but that it could secure no time to make its report because of the weight of more important business in the House. Cal. Wynn Pprs. 274; Dodd, ‘Caern. elections to the Long Parliament’, 246; Dodd, ‘The Caern. election dispute of 1640-1 and its sequel’, BBCS xiv. 42-3.

However, there may also have been political reasons for the failure of Herbert’s committee to make timely report of its recommendations. In October 1641, during Parliament’s autumn recess, John Griffith I wrote to John Egerton†, 1st earl of Bridgwater – the president of the now defunct Council in the Marches – blaming Thomas Glynne for the non-appearance of the committee’s report.

My son’s adversary [i.e. Glynne] having had the luck (to say no more of him) of overthrowing the former election for his county at a committee, he hath delayed the desire of getting a report made (that so no order for a new election might be given) out of hope to make on[e] of his forward friends sheriff, he well knowing that without some such help, if he give fair play without surprisal [at a future election], he can hardly carry it in this county by voices. Dodd, ‘Caern. election dispute’, 44.

The earl apparently obliged Griffith in securing the appointment of a sheriff well-disposed to the Cefnamwlch interest, and this may have persuaded Glynne that there was no point in pursuing his claims any further. Herbert’s committee certainly never reported its votes on the county and Boroughs elections, with the result that Griffith II and Thomas retained their seats by default.

John Griffith II was expelled from the House in August 1642 for sexually assaulting Lady Elizabeth Sedley – a widow in her mid-40s. Infra, ‘John Griffith II’. John Griffith I sided with the king during the civil war, dying at Oxford in the summer of 1643. Infra, ‘John Griffith I. The House left the Caernarvonshire seat vacant while north Wales remained in royalist hands, and it was not until 8 December 1646 – a few weeks after the last royalist stronghold in the county had fallen to Parliament – that the Commons ordered the issuing of a writ for a new election to replace Griffith II. CJ v. 4b; A.H. Dodd, ‘Caern. in the civil war’, Caern. Hist. Soc. Trans. xiv. 22-4. The House had appointed Thomas Glynne ‘governor of the town and castle of Caernarfon and of the garrison there’ in June, which afforded him considerable power in the area. Infra, ‘Thomas Glynne’. Nevertheless, possibly on account of his age and health (he died later that year), he does not appear to have stood in the ‘recruiter’ election for the county on 20 January 1647 which saw the return of Richard Wynn of Glasinfryn, near Caernarfon. Wynn’s family, the Wynns of Gwydir, had made no notable impact on the county’s affairs since the 1620s, and he may have owed his return to the influence of his father-in-law, the parliamentarian general Sir Thomas Myddelton*. Another influential family friend was Archbishop John Williams, the royalist turncoat and power-broker in Caernarfonshire by 1647, who resided at Gwydir for much of the later 1640s. Infra, ‘Richard Wynn’; A.H. Dodd, ‘Caern. in the civil war’, 22, 23, 24, 25-6; ‘John Williams (1582-1650)’, Oxford DNB. The indenture was much like its two predecessors but named approximately 25 freeholders and ‘many others’ as returning parties. Again, it was signed by the named freeholders, Madrin among them. C219/43/3/181. Wynn withdrew from the House after Pride’s Purge in December 1648, leaving Caernarfonshire without formal representation in the Rump. Infra, ‘Richard Wynn’.

Assigned a second parliamentary seat under the Instrument of Government of 1653, Caernarvonshire returned John Glynne and Thomas Madrin in the elections to the first protectoral Parliament on 12 July 1654. The returning parties on the election indenture were 12 named freeholders and ‘divers other persons qualified and capable to elect Members’. It was signed by the 12 named freeholders, who included Glynne’s son-in-law and great-nephew of the late Archbishop Williams, Robert Williams* of Conwy and Penrhyn. C219/44/3/5. In addition to his considerable local influence, Glynne was fast emerging as one of the protectorate’s foremost legal officers and politicians. Infra, ‘John Glynne’. Madrin belonged to a well-established Llŷn family with links to the Griffiths of Cefnamwlch. Having sided with the king in the civil war, he had come full political circle by the early 1650s, using his position as a magistrate, militia colonel and assessment and sequestrations commissioner to establish himself as one of north Wales’s leading parliamentarians and a persecutor of the region’s royalists. Infra, ‘Thomas Madrin’.

Glynne and Madrin seemed on course to retain their seats in the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656, only for an influential group of the county’s gentlemen to decide against Madrin. They assured Glynne of their ‘voices and the interest we have in our friends, which we conceive will prove effectual’, but that ‘in the management thereof, we have gone this time without Mr Madrin, thereby to vindicate ourselves from the imputation of sloth and too much security upon such actings’. In the event that Madrin did not accept their decision, they explained, and attempted ‘to subdue all to his own will and power ... [and] will by your lordship’s means desire admission to be a representative, we presume to inform your lordship that the major part of the county hath not your confidence in him’. This letter was signed by five gentlemen, headed by Glynne’s son-in-law Robert Williams. Although Madrin enjoyed strong support in parts of the Llŷn peninsula, it was apparently not enough to persuade Glynne to stick with him. Instead, he seems to have teamed up with his son-in-law Williams, for on election day the two men were returned apparently unopposed and with the approval of Major-general James Berry* and his leading agent in the county, John Jones I*. Infra, ‘John Jones I’; NLW, Ms 9065E/2112, 2120-1, 2131; Cal. Wynn Pprs. 345, 346, 347; TSP v. 219. The election indenture has not survived. Having opted to sit instead for Flintshire, where he had acquired an estate, Glynne wrote to Caernarvonshire’s leading gentlemen, recommending as his replacement the president of the protectoral council, Henry Lawrence II, ‘a person of great parts and integrity and whose interest is able to return to the country [sic] for their love tenfold’. NWL, Ms 9065E/2126; CJ vii. 431b. Lawrence was duly returned for Caernarvonshire on 15 October 1656, even though he had already been elected for Colchester, in Essex – a seat he appears to have retained until his elevation to the Cromwellian Other House late in 1657. Infra, ‘Henry Lawrence II’. The indenture employed the same wording as that of 1654 and was signed by the 16 freeholders named as returning parties, who yet again included Madrin. C219/45, unfol.

In the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659, Caernarvonshire was reduced to its traditional one Member, and this seat became the subject of a contest between Madrin and John Glynne’s son and heir, William. In what was evidently a very disorderly election on 5 January – indeed, swords were drawn in the competition for the Boroughs seat that same day – the sheriff returned Glynne. Infra, ‘Caernarvon Boroughs’; Cal. Wynn Pprs. 351; Burton’s Diary, iv. 224. A fragment of the indenture survived into the nineteenth century but has since disappeared. OR, 511. Madrin petitioned the House against Glynne’s return, alleging that his rival had prevailed on the basis of ‘a letter from a great person [i.e. John Glynne], by combination of the malignants, and that he [William Glynne] is an infant under age’. This last claim was technically-speaking true, although Glynne was only a few weeks short of attaining his majority when he was elected. Madrin further alleged that the sheriff had denied his request for a poll. When his petition was debated in the Commons on 22 March, Sir John Carter and other Members ‘excepted against it, as being full of lies’, and, in regard that the petition lacked signatures or subscribers, the House laid it aside. Infra, ‘William Glynne’; NWL, Ms 9065E/2177, 2183-4; CJ vii. 618a; Burton’s Diary, iv. 224-5.

John Glynne was returned for Caernarvonshire to the 1660 Convention, but a pact between the Wynns of Gwydir and the Griffiths of Cefnamwlch in 1661 sidelined the Glynllifon interest as an electoral force for the remainder of the Restoration period. HP Commons 1660-90.