Merioneth

Adopting the style of the Old Testament jeremiad, John Jones I* asked a correspondent rhetorically ‘where is there more sin to encounter with, where more ignorance, where more hatred to the people of God, where the word saint more scorned, than in Merionethshire?’. ‘Inedited Letters’ ed. Mayer, 185. The correct answer was of course nowhere, in his eyes, but most of his contemporaries would have been struck more by the county’s remoteness than by its spiritual desolation. Denied, under Tudor dispensations, the usual Welsh arrangement of a borough parliamentary seat, Merioneth was a century later marked by the dubious distinction of being the Welsh county subject to the lowest tax burden, on account of its small size and its poverty relative to other Welsh shires. A. and O. Modern attempts to estimate the size of the county’s population in the seventeenth century, in concluding it to have been somewhat under 19,000, suggest that of the Welsh counties only Anglesey and Radnor were each home to smaller numbers of people than Merioneth. L. Owen, ‘The Population of Wales’, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion (1959), 113. When John Leland wrote an account of his travels through Wales in the 1530s, Bala was ‘a little poor market’, Harlech ‘a market town’ and Dolgellau ‘the best village’ in its commote. By 1640 only Dolgellau could meaningfully be considered an urban centre, and in the 1620s Bala had been written off as a ‘very filthy, dirty town’. The Itinerary in Wales of John Leland ed. L. Toulmin Smith (1906), 76-8; Arch. Cambr. i. 256; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Merioneth’. Harlech, despite the decline of its market, retained its mighty fortress, kept in repair not least to house the county court and provide the venue for shire elections. Arch. Cambr. i. 255-7. All Merioneth elections in this period, except for that of 1654, were held at Harlech.

No one family had a predominant interest in this period. Richard Vaughan of Corsygedol, chosen in 1628, died young in 1636. His predecessor Edward Vaughan of Llwydiarth lived in and had more property in Montgomeryshire than in Merioneth, no bar in 1626, but a pretext for excluding him in 1660. There is no suggestion of a contest for the seat in the election of around March 1640. Not only had Henry Wynn had recently been made solicitor-general to Queen Henrietta Maria at the time of the election, but he had already represented Merioneth in two Parliaments of the 1620s, having married a Merioneth heiress, daughter of the county Member for 1614, Ellis Lloyd of Rhiwgoch. Wynn was appointed to the committee of privileges, and made two recorded speeches, but seems not to have stood again in the election that was held on 27 October 1640. This may simply have been because of pressure of business: he was a lawyer with a number of offices and collectorships to his name. The indenture returning his successor in the seat, William Price, bore the signatures of 15 electors. C219/43/6/6. Price was no firebrand in the Commons. He managed to avoid being named to any committees in the early phase of the Long Parliament, and he made no recorded speeches. However, he was active in the cause of the king during the civil war, and his attendance at the Oxford Parliament provoked a Westminster order disabling him from sitting further in the Commons (5 Feb. 1644). The writ for his successor was not moved in the House until 8 December 1646, the same day as those for Anglesey and Caernarvonshire. CJ v. 5a.

There was an interval of over four months between the moving of the writ and the by-election for Merioneth. The delay is entirely attributable to the difficulty of reducing north Wales to the obedience of Parliament. Colonel John Jones I* and Colonel Roger Pope were active in this process, as subordinates of Sir Thomas Myddelton*. Jones signed the surrender articles of the royalist garrisons of Beaumaris and Caernarfon in June 1646, while Pope was on hand to accept the surrender of Holt castle on 13 January 1647. Harlech held out, however, and it was not until 15 March 1647 that the royalist garrison capitulated. It was prudent to delay the election until after the fall of Harlech, but the timing seems also to have owed something to the appointment of Thomas Mytton* as major-general for north Wales (8 Apr. 1647). Pope was Mytton’s son-in-law, and his candidacy for the Merioneth seat was advanced with the full approval of the major-general. The indenture for his election, signed on 27 April 1647, was in Latin and signed by about 25 electors, with Thomas Mytton’s name prominent among them. The indenture retained by the sheriff, Lewis Owen*, survives among Owen’s family papers. C219/43/6/7; NLW, Peniarth Estate, CA60. Pope died in August 1647, having made no impact at all on the House. Subsequently, Mytton himself considered standing for the seat. As early as 1644, he had aspired to a place in Parliament, but had no patron or electoral interest. By 1647, he was being encouraged by supporters in Shropshire, including Humphrey Edwardes*, to put himself forward, and when his son-in-law Pope died, he must have seen himself as a natural successor to the seat. ‘Thomas Mytton’, infra. The writ was moved on 26 August, but again there was a delay in holding the election, and by mid-September it was clear that there would be a contest between Mytton and John Jones I for the place. On 25 September, Howell Vaughan of Glan-y-llyn wrote to his cousin Robert Wynne of Sylfaen that:

Colonel Mytton and Colonel Jones stand to serve in Parliament for this county. Colonel Mytton desires the favour of this county, and particularly yours and your father's. I was desired to acquaint your father forthwith. I believe Colonel Jones will apply himself to the country. I desire, therefore, we may go hand in hand, and unanimously pitch upon the same to avoid division and discontents. Arch. Cambr. 4th ser. xxiv, 319.

The clear implication of Vaughan’s comments is that while Mytton was working to secure the support of the gentry, Jones made a broader appeal to the smaller freeholder class from which he himself sprang. A voluble opponent of Jones was Archbishop John Williams, who considered Jones to be ‘the most universally hated in these parts as now lives here’. Cal. Wynn Pprs. 302-3. By the time Williams expressed himself in these terms, however, Jones had been elected. A native of the Harlech district, Ardudwy, he was evidently able to muster a stronger local interest than Mytton for the election, held at Harlech. The indenture returned to Westminster is lost, but the sheriff’s indenture, again by Lewis Owen, survives among his papers, and records that Jones was elected on 12 October. Only one of Jones’s known electors had subscribed the indenture for Pope earlier in the year, and Jones’s most eminent support was Owen Salisbury of Rûg, who by June 1647 had adhered to Parliament. NLW, Peniarth Estate, CA61; A. and O. On 22 October, Jones was reported in north Wales to be on his way to Westminster. Flints. RO, D/G/3275/95.

As a Member firmly in the Independent camp, who would go on to sit as a commissioner during the trial of the king and sign his death warrant, Jones was in no danger of losing his seat during the upheavals of 1648-9. As a conscientious servant of the republican government, he was slow to welcome the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell*, and was probably contemplating retirement in 1654 rather than seeking to stand in the election that year. The 1654 Merioneth election was the battleground for conflict that focused on Montgomeryshire. John Vaughan II, of Cefnbodig, Llanycil, a Merioneth address, was according to his competitor, Rice Vaughan, merely a stand-in for his more powerful relation, Edward Vaughan, who had sat for Merioneth in 1626, but whose chief endeavour was to recover Llwydiarth, Montgomeryshire, his patrimonial estate. Edward Vaughan had been secluded in the purge of December 1648 after having sat for Montgomeryshire since February 1647. In 1670, John Vaughan II would embody in his will a reminder of his assistance to Edward Vaughan in his long campaign to gain possession of Llwydiarth. Edward eventually entered Llwydiarth in 1650, so by the time of the 1654 election John Vaughan II and Edward Vaughan had almost certainly established a relationship as client and patron. ‘Edward Vaughan’, ‘John Vaughan’, infra.

Rice Vaughan, the other contender for the Merioneth seat in 1647, had from soon after its inception in 1643 served as registrar to the Committee for Sequestrations. Vaughan was a younger son of Gelligoch, Machynlleth, Montgomeryshire, but his was a branch of the Vaughan family of Corsygedol, a mansion in Dyffryn Ardudwy, Merioneth. Rice Vaughan was a Gray’s Inn lawyer, and one who had owed his advancement to the pious religious Presbyterian, Francis Rous*. Vaughan had been called to the bar in 1648. ‘Committee for Sequestrations’, supra; ‘Rice Vaughan (d. c. 1672)’, Oxford DNB. Under the Rump Parliament he had been a commissioner for the propagation of the gospel in Wales (22 Feb. 1650), and became registrar to the barons of the exchequer when sequestrations business migrated there after 1648. In June 1653 he was appointed prothonotary for Montgomeryshire and Denbighshire, amid controversy. A. and O.; CSP Dom. 1653-4, p. 94. From September 1653 he was agent in Merioneth for the absentee owner of the manor of Trawsfynydd, who had bought the estate from the ‘treason trustees’ based at Drury House, London. Peniarth DA284, 285. In the early 1650s he became a polemical author, arguing that no committees of Parliament should determine cases in secret session, and that great offices of state should be held only for short periods. R. Vaughan, Certain Proposals (1652), 3-4, 6-7 (E.683.14). He also wrote a robust defence of common law against the attack on it by the Independent and republican preacher, Hugh Peters. A Plea for the Common-Laws of England (1651, E.1379.4).

According to Rice Vaughan, the election in 1654 was held over three days, from 12 July, and was controlled by Edward Vaughan of Llwydiarth through his agent, Maurice Lewis, the sheriff. SP18/74, f. 93. On 14 August 1654 Rice Vaughan petitioned the protector’s council against John Vaughan's II return. He alleged that the sheriff had chosen Bala, remote from Harlech, the usual venue, as the place to hold the poll, at the instigation of the malignant Edward Vaughan of Llwydiarth. The election, for which he and his friends had arrived punctually at 8 a.m., was delayed a day by sheriff Morris Lewis while Edward Vaughan mustered armed intimidators. Rice Vaughan further claimed that John Vaughan II had beforehand offered to promote Rice's unopposed return provided he did not, as a sequestrator, prosecute Edward Vaughan for arrears of nearly £9,000 due from the Llwydiarth estate in respect of the delinquency of its former owner, Edward Vaughan's nephew, Herbert Vaughan. Rice Vaughan refused this bargain. At the election itself he was abused and affronted, including by Merioneth magistrates, as ‘a liar, a rogue, a sectary and a man against their church’, though in the absence of the indenture it is difficult to identify the composition of any factions in the contest. Two clerks wrote in books the names of the electors, with their consent, ‘to prevent partiality of the sheriff’, but Lewis denied Rice Vaughan and some scrutineers appointed by Rice Vaughan’s supporters any sight of the writings. SP18/74, f. 93. Rice Vaughan argued that according to the Instrument of Government, such a case, where a candidate, John Vaughan II, had been a royalist commissioner of array and was thus disqualified from standing for election, called not a for a fresh election but a declaration that he as a qualified candidate should be declared victor. SP18/74, f. 94. Witnesses were summoned from Merioneth, but Rice Vaughan did not succeed in displacing John Vaughan II. CSP Dom. 1654, p. 300. After 1660 it emerged in exchequer proceedings that one of Edward Vaughan’s stratagems in the election had been to seal bills for more than £200 with at least 14 of his tenants, so that on paper they could meet the £200 property qualification for electors, specified in the Instrument of Government. E134/17Chas2/Mich11. On 30 September 1654, Simon Thelwall*, a member of the privileges committee, reported to the leading supporters of John Vaughan that the matter had been resolved by the Merioneth gentry themselves. Rice Vaughan had dropped his claim to the seat, ‘preferring the reconcilement of friends before the satisfaction of any earnest desire he had to the employment designed for him, or the clearing some scruples remaining with him’. NLW, Brogyntyn II.44, f. 20; NLW, ms 9628, transcribed in J.E. Parry, ‘Llythyrau Robert Vaughan, Hengwrt (1592-1667)’ (Univ. of Wales MA, 1960), 460-1.

In 1656, John Jones I, by this time the husband of the widowed sister of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell*, involved himself again in the electoral politics of north Wales, and was returned for the two Welsh counties in which he maintained an interest, Merioneth and Denbighshire. He was also a candidate in Dublin, to the disapproval of Henry Cromwell*. He chose to sit for Merioneth, his native county, and is not known to have faced any contest there when he was elected. The indenture has not survived. By the time elections were held for the short-lived Parliament of Richard Cromwell*, Jones had been elevated to the Other House, and so had been obliged to relinquish his electoral interest in Merioneth. The election was held on 11 January 1659 at Harlech, and the only known candidate was Lewis Owen of Peniarth, who when sheriff had in 1647 returned Roger Pope and John Jones I successively for the seat. Howell Vaughan of Glan-y-llyn, a favoured cousin of Edward Vaughan, was among the gentry who approved of Owen’s candidature in a formal letter of approval:

We your friends and kinsmen whose names are subscribed here upon mature and serious consideration resolved that you are a fit person to serve at the next Parliament for this county and our desire is that you will be pleased to undergo the employment. C219/48; NLW, Brogyntyn II/44, f. 21.

Howell Vaughan and Edmund Meyricke of Ucheldre, who in 1660 was himself elected to the Convention for Merioneth, were among the 20 or so electors whose names appeared on the indenture, suggesting that Owen was viewed as a candidate with a broad appeal to the gentry. An agreement among them in 1660 that only an inhabitant would find favour as county Member was foreshadowed in earlier attempts to pre-empt contests. It became customary to select Members at preliminary meetings, the gentry finding that practice by experience to be ‘the only way to preserve peace and amity amongst themselves’. NLW, Wynn of Gwydir pprs. William Salusbury to Richard Wynn, letter 2245.