New Radnor Boroughs

At its formation under the Henrician Acts of Union, the constituency of New Radnor Boroughs had comprised shire town itself and perhaps as many as seven out-boroughs – a number that by the Restoration period had apparently contracted to the four of Cefnllys, Knighton, Knucklas and Rhayader. ‘New Radnor Boroughs’, HP Commons 1509-58, HP Commons 1604-29, HP Commons 1660-90. All but two of the eight towns that may initially have made up the constituency – that is, Cefnllys and Rhayader – lay close to Radnorshire’s eastern borders with Herefordshire and Shropshire. The county’s largest town by the Stuart period was Presteigne, with a population of approximately 600, followed by Knighton, to the north, which had about 500 inhabitants. New Radnor, a little to the west, had withered since medieval times and probably had 400 inhabitants at most, although it remained Radnorshire’s most developed municipality, being governed by a corporation consisting of 25 capital burgesses, headed by two aldermen and an annually-elected bailiff. Moreover, the borough’s jurisdiction extended across a number of adjacent parishes, covering roughly a fifth of the county’s area. Of the smaller contributory boroughs, only Rhayader was a market town, while Cefnllys, Knucklas, Norton and Painscastle were little more than villages. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 277; S. Lewis, A Topographical Dictionary of Wales (1834), ii. ‘Radnor (new)’; K. Parker, Radnorshire from Civil War to Restoration (Logaston, 2000), 3-4; HP Commons 1509-58; HP Commons 1604-29; I. Soulsby, The Towns of Medieval Wales (Chichester, 1983), 206-8, 212-13, 219-20, 224-6; N. Powell, ‘Urban population in early modern Wales revisited’, WHR xxiii. 36, 37.

Parliamentary elections for the Boroughs were held at New Radnor, and the electorate was dominated by the town’s capital burgesses, who were drawn primarily from the gentry residing in the Knighton-New Radnor-Presteigne area, although a few were seated further afield. Howell Powell, for example, who had become a burgess by 1659, came from Cwmdauddwr, near Rhayader in the west of the county. The returning officer was the bailiff of New Radnor. C219/43/3/215; C219/48, unfol.; ‘New Radnor Boroughs’, HP Commons 1509-58, HP Commons 1604-29; Parker, Radnorshire, 189.

Parliamentary representation for the Boroughs had been monopolised during the 1620s by Charles Price* of Pilleth, near Knighton. In the elections to the Short Parliament in 1640, Price was returned for the county on 10 March and his brother-in-law Richard Jones for the Boroughs on 2 April. Seated at Trewern, about two miles south west of New Radnor, Jones’s family had been prominent in the town’s affairs since Elizabethan times. Infra, ‘Richard Jones’. He probably owed his return to a combination of his own and Price’s considerable interest in New Radnor. The election indenture stated that Jones had been returned only after ‘due summons and proclamation’ had been ‘given to all bailiffs of every borough within the said county’ and with the consent of ‘the most number of the ... burgesses’ of New Radnor ‘and the rest of the boroughs’. Nevertheless, the ten or so named returning parties were the two aldermen and other burgesses of New Radnor, and the indenture’s only signatory was the town’s bailiff. C219/42/2/126.

In the elections for the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640, the Boroughs returned the minor courtier Philip Warwick of Chislehurst, Kent. The indenture has not survived. Returned also for the Kentish borough of New Romney on the interest of the king’s bedchamber man and lord warden of the Cinque Ports, James Stuart, 4th duke of Lennox, Warwick opted to sit for New Radnor Boroughs. Infra, ‘Philip Warwick’. How he had managed to prevail at New Radnor, where he enjoyed no proprietorial interest or known family connections, is not clear. Perhaps the likeliest explanation is that he was recommended by Charles Price, who had strong connections with Warwick’s kinsman George Goring* and with the earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†) – one of the crown’s electoral managers in 1640. Infra, ‘Charles Price’, ‘Philip Warwick’; Parker, Radnorshire, 29, 39-40.

Warwick voted against Strafford’s attainder in 1641 and sided with the king during the civil war, for which he was disabled from sitting as an MP by the Commons early in 1644. Infra, ‘Philip Warwick’. The House issued a writ on 21 January 1646 for holding a new election to replace Warwick, but for some reason it was not executed, and therefore another such writ was issued on 19 March 1647. CJ iv. 412b; v. 118b. An indenture was made out on 26 April, the contracting parties being the sheriff of Radnorshire and ‘the major part of the burgesses of New Radnor assembled at New Radnor’, returning Robert Harley ‘with a full and unanimous consent’. Brampton Bryan mss, 27/18. Harley was of Brampton Bryan and Walford, Herefordshire, a son of the Westminster Presbyterian grandee Sir Robert Harley. Infra, ‘Robert Harley’. However, this indenture was never sent to Westminster, and remained among the Harley family papers. Another attempt at an election, this time successful, was made on 13 May. The returning parties on this indenture – which was similar in wording and layout to its Short Parliament predecessor – were 13 named burgesses of New Radnor, ‘being the more and greater number of the said burgesses of the said borough, and the rest of the boroughs of the said county’. These same 13 burgesses, and one other gentleman, were the indenture’s only signatories – a group that included Richard Jones (or possibly his son and namesake), his grandson Griffith Jones† and the controversial figure of the chairman of the county’s sub-committee for accounts, Rowland Meyrick of Gladestry, near New Radnor, who had represented the Boroughs in 1614. Meyrick’s allies in the county were largely established county gentlemen, many of whom had royalist sympathies. C219/43/3/215; Parker, Radnorshire, 124-5; ‘Rowland Meyrick’, HP Commons 1604-29.

The different wording of the April and May indentures may indicate some resistance by the out-boroughs to being excluded, or may suggest second thoughts on the part of the Harleys, who may have recognized the value of demonstrating a broader base of support. Certainly Harley owed his election to his father’s influence. The Presbyterians’ opponents in the army alleged that Harley’s return, like that of Arthur Annesley for the county in April, had been secured by Sir Robert Harley, Sir William Lewis* and their allies on the committee of south Wales (in which Radnorshire was included) by making deals with locally influential delinquents. The Harleys certainly dominated the Radnorshire parliamentary committee, as they did that of Herefordshire. Clarke Pprs. ii. 157-8; Parker, Radnorshire, 119-20, 125-8; D. Underdown, ‘Party management in the recruiter elections’, EHR lxxxiii. 258-9. But probably more important in securing Robert Harley’s return were his family’s landed interest and godly connections in western Herefordshire and eastern Radnorshire. Sir Robert Harley owned property at Stanage, near Knighton, and the family seat at Brampton Bryan, a few miles east of Stanage, was within easy riding distance of Knighton, Knucklas, Presteigne, New Radnor and Norton. Sir Robert had certainly required no undue political influence to obtain the Boroughs seat in the elections to the 1604 Parliament. Infra, ‘Sir Robert Harley’; CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 398; Parker, Radnorshire, 20-1, 31, 72, 128.

Harley was secluded at Pride’s Purge in December 1648, leaving the Boroughs without formal representation in the Rump. In 1652, the Radnorshire county committee complained to the Committee for Compounding* that

there is a thing called the corporation of Radnor, a grievance and burden to all the godly and well-affected in these parts, compacted of corrupt and dangerous members, most of them against Parliament and refusing conformity to the present government ... If they are suffered to act as a corporation we can have no heart to act whilst thus affronted. CCC 578.

Disenfranchised under the Instrument of Government in 1653, New Radnor Boroughs regained its seat in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament of 1659, when it returned the godly Herefordshire lawyer Robert Weaver. A firm supporter of the protectoral regime and a son-in-law of the Cromwellian grandee Edward Whalley*, Weaver belonged to a Herefordshire gentry family that was seated at Yatton, about five miles east of Presteigne. Given his radical affiliations, his return for a constituency dominated by opponents of the ‘godly and well-affected’ is not easy to explain. Yet he had strong local connections, particularly through his mother, who was a sister of Thomas Lewis – the county sheriff and an influential figure in its affairs. Infra, ‘Robert Weaver’; Parker, Radnorshire, 215. The election indenture, which was dated 8 January, employed the same wording as its 1647 predecessor; the returning parties were 21 named burgesses of New Radnor, ‘being the more and greater number of the said burgesses of the said borough, and the rest of the boroughs of the said county’. C219/48.

At some point soon after the Boroughs election in 1659, Robert Harley appears to have petitioned the committee of privileges against Weaver’s return, alleging that Weaver had seized upon a seemingly amicable exchange between them at Edward Whalley’s house in London to have him imprisoned in the Tower on suspicion of sowing sedition. Add. 70007, ff. 106-8; Parker, Radnorshire, 215. Harley claimed that Weaver had used his place as a Westminster magistrate and his intimacy with Whalley and his brother-in-law William Goffe* to have him

carried away with great violence and threats, from amongst a people for whom I had served in the Long Parliament, viz. the corporation of New Radnor, and who intended to send me for them to his [Richard Cromwell’s] Parliament. Since [then] it hath appeared why Mr Weaver did do this, for by his threatening letters and messages which he obtained from divers great lords and major-generals he hath procured himself to be sent from Radnor to this Parliament ...[Yet] notwithstanding the letters and messages he had got, the people would not have chosen him had I been in a condition of serving ... as doth appear that notwithstanding my violent and disgraceful carrying away and the many threats used to the people, and not one of my relations being present [on election day] ...yet Weaver did obtain his election but by two voices as I am credibly informed. Add. 70007, ff. 107r-v.

Harley’s brother Edward*, who had been an alderman of New Radnor since the late 1640s, had certainly not signed the election indenture. Infra, ‘Edward Harley’. On the other hand, the fact that 21 of Edward’s colleagues on the corporation had signed it, and that this was substantially the same group of burgesses who had returned Robert in 1647, is difficult to reconcile with the claim that Weaver had prevailed by only two voices. In a meeting of the committee of privileges on 26 February 1659, Whalley’s son Captain John Whalley, the MP for Nottingham, moved ‘that the business of Radnor might have a certainty assigned as to the disability of the election, which was ordered accordingly’. Burton’s Diary, iii. 502. In the absence of any evidence that the committee voted on this dispute or reported it to the House, it can be assumed that Weaver retained his seat.

The Boroughs returned Robert Harley to the 1660 Convention and his brother Edward to the Cavalier Parliament, and the Harleys would retain their grip on the constituency until 1714. HP Commons 1660-90, ‘New Radnor Boroughs’; HP Commons 1690-1715, ‘New Radnor Boroughs’; Parker, Radnorshire, 224-9, 237.