Swansea

Swansea only became a parliamentary borough in its own right for Richard Cromwell’s Parliament. Previously it had been a contributory borough to the Cardiff constituency. It subsequently resumed this role until 1832, when it was again permitted to return its own Member under the Reform Act. The privilege of returning an MP was an addition by virtue of a grant of 1658 to a new charter bestowed on the town in 1656. Before that, however, Swansea had been a long-established borough, with 12 aldermen drawn from the ranks of burgesses; two ‘common attorneys’ or chamberlains who maintained the town’s accounts, and a ‘portreeve’ or mayor. The Acct. Bk. for the Borough of Swansea, Wales 1640-1660 ed. M. Price (Lampeter, 1990), 15. The basis of the town’s wealth was maritime trade, in which the embryonic coal industry was important: Swansea merchants were hostile to government impositions on coal in the 1630s. W.S.K. Thomas, Hist. Swansea from the Accession of the Tudors to the Restoration Settlement’, Univ. of Wales PhD thesis, 1958), 250. After an initial show of support for the king at the start of the first civil war, partly attributable to the overlordship of the town by the royalist and Catholic Henry Somerset, 5th earl of Worcester, the town was garrisoned for Parliament at the end of 1645, the command of it being bestowed by Parliament on Philip Jones*. Jones was born in Llangyfelach, a parish near Swansea, and may have been the son of a Swansea burgess; he was admitted burgess himself in 1646, and he played an important part in matters of town governance from then until 1660. Acct. Bk. of Swansea, 141. Jones quickly took command of the Cardiff garrison also, and meetings of the Glamorgan committee were held in Swansea in May 1647. Add. 46931A, f. 243. Earlier that year, Jones bought an imposing property on Swansea High Street, which began a decade of intensive property accumulation on his part in south Wales, with a number of further acquisitions in Swansea itself. A.G. Veysey, ‘Col. Philip Jones, 1618-74’, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion(1966), 317; Glam. Archives, D/DF 1504, 2597; D/DF E/56. He was a tenant of land owned by Swansea corporation. Acct. Bk. of Swansea, 6, 47. Swansea was a centre for meetings of commissioners for propagating the gospel in Wales and later for those investigating their stewardship. Articles of Impeachment of Transcendent Crimes (1659), 9 (E.983.31).

The lordship of Swansea passed by confiscation from the Somerset family to Oliver Cromwell, a parcel of his many rewards by the Commons. Jones’s tenure of high office began as soon as Cromwell expelled the Rump Parliament. In November 1655, when the business of renewing the charter began to appear fleetingly in the accounts book of Swansea corporation, Jones was a member of the lord protector’s council and a commissioner for the admiralty and navy. He was the same year responsible for the return to Wales of the town’s Congregationalist minister, Marmaduke Matthews, from a long absence in New England. Jones was later lauded by Matthews as demonstrating an ‘early tractableness to Christ’s truths’, and for protecting the minister since his return: it was doubtless Jones that was responsible for the augmentation of the Swansea living, again late in 1655, into which Matthews settled. M. Matthews, Messiah Magnified (1659), epistle ded.; T. Richards, Religious Developments in Wales (1654-1662) (1923), 93. Despite Jones’s hegemony over the politics and the state-supported ministry in Swansea, the town harboured diverse religious elements, including Baptists who after 1653 held meetings there; fractious Quakers from 1655 and references in 1660 to a ‘holy well’ imply the survival of pre-reformation popular religious practices, which may or may not have been tolerated by the authorities. The Ilston Bk. ed. B.G. Owens (Aberystwyth, 1996) 5-10, 24, 29-30; J. Besse, Sufferings of the Quakers (2 vols 1753), i. 735-7; A Record of Some Persecutions (1659), 27; Acct. Bk. of Swansea, 285.

It was two aldermen, John Bowen and William Bayly, who were responsible for the £40 expenditure laid out in renewing the charter, perhaps in a visit to London, and the bells of the town were rung when Jones arrived in Swansea at some point during the same civic year. Acct. Bk. of Swansea, 225, 229, 237. The new charter itself, granted on 26 February 1656, was brought to Cardiff, from whence the townsmen collected it. Acct. Bk. of Swansea, 239. The grant was to the ‘ancient port town and populous’ which ‘time out of mind hath been a town corporate’. Grant Francis, Swansea Charters, 32. It named a corporation of mayor (replacing the portreeve), high steward, recorder, 12 aldermen and 12 capital burgesses. Philip Jones was named as high steward. The aldermen included (in first place) Rowland Dawkins*, and John Price* headed the list of capital burgesses in which Evan Lewis* came second. Grant Francis, Swansea Charters, 31-3. These three were all clients of Jones. The grant of representation in Parliament came later, on 3 May 1658, by which time Philip Jones had acquired the title in the Other House of Lord Jones and had taken the position of comptroller of the lord protector’s household. The grant specified that

the mayor, aldermen and common council ... or the greater part of them ... upon the writ ... of us and our successors ... may ... elect and nominate one able and discreet person of the said town and borough ... at the costs and charges of the said town and borough and of the commonalty thereof. Grant Francis, Swansea Charters, 49.

The privilege should probably be seen more as reflecting Jones’s steady progress to the very heart of the Cromwellian establishment than as contributing to any particular political stratagem. At the time of the granting of the privilege, the second protectorate Parliament had been dissolved without agreement on the number and distribution of seats that would apply in future elections. Under the Instrument of Government of 1653, Cardiff and Haverfordwest had been the only Welsh boroughs enfranchised, while under the traditional arrangements adopted late in 1658, the county and Cardiff Boroughs were revived as the two constituencies in Glamorgan. The addition of Swansea seems not to relate to either a body of opinion in favour of retaining the Instrument or to one for reversion to the ancient constitution, but provides simply a further demonstration of Philip Jones’s political reach and grasp.

The election to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament took place in Swansea on 4 January 1659. The town possessed at least three civic halls of one kind or another, but the business of the parliamentary election was doubtless transacted in the ‘Guildhall’ or ‘town hall’, as it appears interchangeably in the town’s accounts. It was a hall with at least one upper floor and a white-painted chamber. Acct. Bk. of Swansea, 253, 275, 276; Grant Francis, Swansea Charters, 33. Unlike the occasion in 1655-6 when the corporation funded a meeting of burgesses about the charter, or the ringing of bells at the accession of Richard Cromwell, the election of 1659 went unrecorded in the borough accounts, which rather suggests that the aldermen and common council agreed on the election without any contest or even advertisement to a wider electorate or burgesses or inhabitants. Acct. Bk. of Swansea, 238, 266. The contracting parties in the return were the high sheriff with nine aldermen, eight common councilmen ‘and others of the common council and burgesses of the said town and borough’. C219/48. In William Foxwist, the aldermen and burgesses selected an established judge on the Welsh circuit in which Swansea lay, and an individual with previous parliamentary experience which it could confidently be predicted would be deployed in support of the government.

On 1 March, in the debate on the election returns, Matthew Alured* attempted to raise the case of Swansea during the discussion of a constituency (Yarmouth, Isle of Wight) where the sheriff's return had not been produced, although the Member had taken his seat. Alured was doubtless intent on making trouble for Philip Jones, but he failed to catch the mood of the House and his motion on the subject was waived. This was at a moment when Philip Jones was under onslaught from his enemies, one of whom published impeachment articles accusing the Swansea borough recorder, John Gibbs, of being a papist and former commissioner of array. Burton’s Diary, iii. 562; Articles of Impeachment of Transcendent Crimes, 15. With Jones driven to ground by his enemies after the fall of the protectorate, it was inevitable that Swansea would soon forfeit its Cromwellian charter. Foxwist neatly evaded any awkwardness by entering the House in February 1660 as a secluded Member for a former constituency, Caernarfon Boroughs. There seems to have been no attempt by Swansea corporation to return a burgess to the Convention of April 1660, and the return of the king was marked in the town as elsewhere by bells and bonfires. Acct. Bk. of Swansea, 290.