Cardigan Boroughs

In this period there seems no certain way of identifying which of the contributory boroughs contributed to the electoral process, or to what extent. Nor is it possible to know which of the minor boroughs were still considered eligible to participate. Marian legislation had stipulated that the county court sessions should alternate between Cardigan and Aberystwyth, thus consolidating the primacy and rivalry of these two towns before 1640, but the fragmentary evidence suggests a weakening of involvement beyond Cardigan. Each of the surviving returns was subscribed by freemen of Cardigan, and the returning officer in 1646 was the mayor of that town. L. Bowen, ‘Wales at Westminster...1542-1601’, PH xxii. 111; HP Commons 1604-1629 ‘Cardigan Boroughs’. Unusually, the indentures were in English: New Radnor was the only other Welsh constituency not to make returns in Latin. In April 1640, the able lawyer John Vaughan I was able to retain his hold on the seat he had first represented in 1628. Both county and boroughs elections were held on the same day, and probably both at Cardigan. The outcomes were surely the result of a pre-election arrangement whereby Vaughan and the Price interest divided the electoral spoils. C219/42/2/5/103.

Vaughan was again returned to the Long Parliament, but the indenture was not made out until 14 December. C219/43/6/5/166. He was occupied as counsel in a case proceeding through the Lords, which probably accounts for the delayed election and the belated start to his impact on Commons business. The names of Cardigan burgess families such as that of Bradshaw are apparent on the indenture, which by recording Vaughan’s election as ‘burgess for the said town of Cardigan’ made not even a gesture towards the contributory principle. Both king and Parliament were disappointed in Vaughan’s behaviour during the civil war. In January 1645, his home at Trawsgoed was plundered by parliamentarian soldiers, and on 1 Sept. 1645 he was ‘discharged from being a Member’ for the duration of the Parliament.

The Commons authorised new writs for Cardigan Boroughs and Cardiganshire on 5 June 1646. CJ iv. 313b, 566a. Once again, the recruiter election, held in Cardigan on 24 August 1646, was a Cardigan only affair. The indenture claimed to be for that town and made no mention of other boroughs. C219/43/6/5/167. Among those signing it were James Philipps* and Abell Griffith or Griffin, a man who would become a dependable local agent of the state throughout the 1650s. E113/1 (Card.); S.K. Roberts, ‘Card. and the State, 1540-1689’, in Card. County Hist. Vol. 2 ed. G.H. Jenkins, R. Suggett, E.M. White (Cardiff, 2019), 445-6, 449, 497. The choice fell upon a Pembrokeshire soldier, described in the document as ‘Thomas Wogan esquire’, with no place of residence given. Wogan’s selection cannot be read as a victory for the political partisans of the New Model army, the Independents. Wogan had served in the army of the 3rd earl of Essex (Robert Devereux) but had not been among those selected for service in the new army under Sir Thomas Fairfax*. Rather, Wogan seems to have benefited from the drift towards Cardigan’s hegemony over the seat, with family members including Hector Wogan, his uncle, and James Philipps, his first cousin, active in the election arrangements.

By the terms of the Cromwellian Instrument of Government, Cardigan and the other boroughs lost their separate parliamentary representation. It was recovered in 1659, for elections to the Parliament of Richard Cromwell*. The Cardigan Boroughs indenture for that election has been lost. The seat was secured by Rowland Dawkins, a west Glamorgan associate of Colonel Philip Jones*, an ally of the county Member, James Philipps, whose interest at Cardigan seemed unassailable. Dawkins was also returned for Carmarthen, where the turbulent election proceedings precipitated a petition, an investigation by the privileges committee and rulings in his opponents’ favour. By contrast, all seemed agreed that Dawkins had been ‘indisputably chosen burgess for the town of Cardigan’. The State of the Case betwixt Major General Rowland Dawkins and David Morgan (1659, BL 1865.c.16.116). The Philipps family continued to control the seat down to 1689, beating off a challenge in 1661 from Sir Francis Lloyd* of Maesyfelin, Lampeter. Lloyd petitioned against James Philipps’s return on the grounds that insufficient notice of the election had been given to the contributory boroughs, evidence that they had not yet been erased from the political landscape. HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Cardigan Boroughs’.