Denbighshire

Early Stuart Denbighshire, rather like its western neighbour Caernarvonshire, was subject to political tensions that owed much to its topography. ‘Denbighshire’, HP Commons 1604-29. Running southwards from the Irish Sea and the county’s border with Flintshire is what was described in the 1670s as ‘a pleasant and fertile vale, reaching in length from south to north 17 miles and in breadth about five, called the Vale of Clwyd ... much inhabited by gentry’ and ‘begirt with high hills’. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 283. The vale itself and the mountainous land extending west and south west of it to the border with Caernarvonshire and Merioneth was dominated by the Salusburys of Lleweni and their allies among the ‘garrison families’ that had settled there since the conquest of Wales. To the south-east of the Vale of Clwyd, where hilly terrain gives way to a lowland region extending across the county’s border into Cheshire and Shropshire, the leading families – notably, the Myddeltons of Chirk Castle – were more often of Welsh origin and (by the early Stuart period) more susceptible to the influence of godly Protestantism. Infra, ‘Sir Thomas Myddelton’, ‘Sir John Trevor’; A.H. Dodd, ‘The civil war in east Denb.’, Trans. Denb. Hist. Soc. iii. 41-4.

Denbighshire’s economy, certainly in the upland areas, was dominated by the rearing of livestock for the English market and the manufacture of coarse cloth for sale to the Shrewsbury drapers. ‘Denbighshire’, 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. 157. The county’s population stood at about 40,000 by the 1670s, with approximately half of its inhabitants living in the lowlands of the south east. 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. 37. The size of the electorate in this period is unknown; in 1681, it was approximately 1,800. HP Commons 1660-90.

In the elections to the Short Parliament, the Denbighshire freeholders, meeting at Wrexham, returned Sir Thomas Salusbury on 25 March 1640, apparently without a contest. The returning parties on the election indenture were 20 named freeholders and ‘many others’, and it was these named gentlemen who signed the indenture. Among the signatories was the future royalist leader Richard Lloyd*. C219/42/2/111. One of Denbighshire’s wealthiest gentlemen, Salusbury was the first of his line to represent the county at Westminster since 1601, although several members of an allied family, the Thelwalls of Plas-y-Ward and Bathafarn in the Vale of Clwyd, had occupied the shire seat on four occasions since 1614. Infra, ‘Sir Thomas Salusbury’; ‘Denbighshire’, HP Commons 1604-29.

For reasons that are now unclear, Denbighshire was very late in making its return in the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640. It was not until 4 November, the day after the two Houses had convened, that the county’s freeholders, again meeting at Wrexham, returned Sir Thomas Myddelton. The indenture was signed by at least 50 of the freeholders – among them, the man Myddelton now replaced as knight of the shire, Sir Thomas Salusbury. C219/43/3/187. Myddelton, who had sat for the county in 1625, was perhaps its wealthiest and most influential gentleman; he was also Salusbury’s uncle. Infra, ‘Sir Thomas Myddelton’. Within a week of the election, Salusbury was considering petitioning the Commons against Myddelton’s return on the grounds that elections held after the opening day of Parliament without the House’s approval were invalid. Myddelton attempted to divert potential scrutiny of his election by offering £3,000 towards securing a parliamentary loan for supplying the English and Scottish armies encamped in northern England since the conclusion of second bishops’ war. A friend of Salusbury’s assured him in December that Myddelton’s election was technically invalid, and that if anyone moved the House to this effect it would issue a writ for holding a new election. However, he advised Salusbury against challenging his uncle: ‘it would breed an everlasting feud betwixt you, and perhaps the Parliament may not last long’. In the event, Myddelton retained his seat unmolested. Procs. LP i. 228, 231; Salusbury Corresp. 110, 111, 112-3, 114.

Before he died in 1643, Salusbury had the satisfaction of seeing Denbighshire rally to the king under his and Richard Lloyd’s leadership. Infra, ‘Richard Lloyd’, ‘Sir Thomas Salusbury’; Dodd, ‘Civil war in east Denb.’, 48-51. Myddelton, on the other hand, sided with Parliament in the civil war, becoming one of its most successful generals. Having resigned his command in June 1645, he largely ceased to attend the Commons after mid-1647 and withdrew from the House altogether following Pride’s Purge in December 1648, leaving Denbighshire without formal representation in the Rump. Infra, ‘Sir Thomas Myddelton’.

Like other Welsh counties, Denbighshire 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 Colonel John Carter and Simon Thelwall of Plas-y-Ward. There is no evidence of a contest; the indenture has not survived. An English parliamentarian officer and a major figure in the administration of north Wales, Colonel Carter had become involved in Welsh affairs as a subordinate of Myddelton during the civil war and had acquired an estate at Kinmel, on the Denbighshire coast, by marriage. Infra, ‘John Carter’. Thelwall had represented Denbigh Boroughs in the Long Parliament until his seclusion at Pride’s Purge, and his grandfather had sat for the shire in 1614. Infra, ‘Simon Thelwall’.

The election for Denbighshire to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656 was a rather less harmonious affair than its 1654 predecessor had apparently been. By early July, the county’s leaders had fixed upon one of north Wales’s most influential governors and politicians, Colonel John Jones I*, for the senior place. NLW, Ms 9065E/2108. Jones had acquired an estate in Wrexham and elsewhere in the county by marriage, was intimately linked with the Myddeltons, and was an admirer of Denbighshire’s most prominent godly divine Morgan Llwyd, who was minister of a gathered congregation at Wrexham. Infra, ‘John Jones I’; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 115; ‘Morgan Llwyd’, Oxford DNB. But there was no consensus as to who should be Jones’s junior partner for the county. At least three gentlemen had set their sights on this seat: Carter, Eubule Thelwall of Plas Coch, near Ruthin, and the latter’s neighbour and kinsman Simon Thelwall of Plas-y-Ward – grandfather of the 1654 shire Member, who had died in 1655. Eubule Thelwall had dropped out of the race by early July, but Simon Thelwall seemed prepared to make a fight of it with Carter. Thelwall’s nephew, the county sheriff Sir Owen Wynn, urged him to quit the field and to persuade his friends to support Carter

both for your own ease, to save the country [i.e. county] much trouble, and also to prevent all feuds and inconveniencies that may remain to posterity ... If this business should come to a contest and that you should receive the foil [i.e. suffer a defeat] ...it will as much trouble me as it can do yourself ... and to deal freely with you ... I fear the event [i.e. a contested election] very much and would not be present to see you overborne ... and I to be an actor therein against you (as judge of the business) and I no way able to help you therein. NLW, Ms 9065E/2108, 2122.

Wynn was convinced that Thelwall’s only purpose in standing was to frustrate the electoral pretensions of Eubule Thelwall – and Simon Thelwall, anxious not to offend his nephew, was content to let him think so. NLW, Ms 9065E/2108, 2109, 2118, 2119, 2122. But despite professing himself willing to stand aside for Carter, he continued to canvass support for the second place. To confuse matters, his son Edward wrote to Wynn on 21 July concerning his father’s ‘intentions, by the free consent and concurrence of his friends, to nominate one of his sons to serve for this county in the next Parliament, so [long as] it be not in opposition to any of your allies or adherents’. NLW, Ms 9065E/2115. Simon Thelwall was sincere, however, in pledging to support Jones for the senior place, acknowledging the colonel’s ‘favours and respects’ to his grandsons in Ireland ‘and his love to me and mine in ... the time of his employment here’. NLW, Ms 9065E/2118, 2122.

Overlapping and exacerbating the competition between Carter and Thelwall for the second shire seat was a disagreement among the county’s leaders as to the best location for the election. Carter was eager for Denbigh – which alternated with Wrexham as the venue for the county court – probably calculating that the presence of the town garrison under its godly governor, Colonel George Twisleton*, would deter the more royalist of Thelwall’s supporters from voting. Thelwall, on the other hand, favoured Ruthin as ‘the most indifferent [i.e. neutral place] for all the parts of the county to resort unto’; it was also very close to his seat at Plas-y-Ward. Wynn, too, preferred Ruthin, on the grounds that it was ‘near the centre of the county’, but probably in an effort to please Jones and Carter he had opted by 31 July for Denbigh. NLW, Ms 9065E/2108, 2114-16, 2118-19, 2122. A few days later, however, Jones requested that Wynn shift the venue to Wrexham. His interest was strongest in the Wrexham area, he explained, and Major-general James Berry* had advised him that it was a convenient location for the deployment of a troop of cavalry in case of disturbances on election day. NLW, Ms 9065E/2123. In the event, it appears that the election took place at Denbigh on 20 August and saw the return of Jones and Carter, apparently without a contest. Chirk Castle Accts. 1605-66 ed. W.M. Myddelton (St Albans, 1908), 61, 77. The indenture has not survived.

When Jones opted to sit for his native Merioneth, the Commons issued a writ for holding a new election for Denbighshire. CJ vii. 434a. In the resulting by-election, held on 31 December 1656, the county returned Captain Lumley Thelwall – one of the grandsons whose obligations to Jones, while in Ireland, Simon Thelwall had acknowledged. The returning parties on the election indenture were 23 or so named freeholders and ‘divers other persons qualified and capable to elect Members’. It was signed by Sir Owen Wynn and the 23 named freeholders, headed by Simon Thelwall. C219/45, unfol.

In the elections to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament of 1659, Denbighshire was reduced to its traditional one Member, and this seat was re-claimed by Carter, apparently without a contest. The indenture has not survived. The county returned Sir Thomas Myddelton to the 1660 Convention and his eldest son to the Cavalier Parliament. HP Commons 1660-90.