Montgomery Boroughs

At its formation under the Henrician Acts of Union, the constituency of Montgomery Boroughs had comprised the shire town and five other ‘ancient boroughs’ – Caersws, Llanfyllin, Llanidloes, Newtown and Welshpool. HP Commons 1509-58. The two most important boroughs were the former marcher towns of Montgomery and Welshpool, lying close to the county’s eastern border with Shropshire. Described in 1673 as ‘an indifferent large town-corporate’ with a well-frequented market, Montgomery had a population by 1670 of approximately 700 and was perhaps the county’s third or fourth largest urban community. Montgomeryshire’s ‘greatest and best built town-corporate’ was Welshpool, five miles to the north of Montgomery. It had about 1,000 inhabitants by 1670, ‘enjoyeth a very good trade for English commodities from Bristol [and] its market ... is very considerable for cattle, provisions and flannels’. According to the 1670 hearth tax returns, Llanidloes, near the county’s southern border with Radnorshire, was the county’s second largest borough, with a population of roughly 800 – although one contemporary thought it ‘a mean town’. The other Montgomeryshire town often regarded as second only to Welshpool in terms of size was Llanfyllin, close to the county’s northern border with Denbighshire. But though it was considered a ‘good town and hath a considerable market’, it seems to have had less than 500 inhabitants in 1670. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 289-90; I. Soulsby, The Towns of Medieval Wales (Chichester, 1983), 167-8, 170-1; HP Commons 1604-29; D. Jenkins, ‘The demography of late-Stuart Mont. c.1660-1720’, Mont. Colls. lxxviii. 100; M.L. Chapman, R. Morgan, E.R. Morris, ‘A hist. of Llanidloes’s borough charters’, Mont. Colls. lxxix. 16; N. Powell, ‘Urban population in early modern Wales revisited’, WHR xxiii. 17, 27, 36, 37. Newtown and Caersws had ‘dwindled into insignificance’ by the mid-seventeenth century and had apparently ceased participating in Boroughs elections long since. Soulsby, Towns of Medieval Wales, 93-4, 209-10; HP Commons 1558-1603; HP Commons 1604-29; HP Commons 1660-90. Indeed, the franchise seems to have narrowed in the century after the Union to exclude all but ‘the burgesses of Montgomery’ – a trend that was not reversed until the Restoration period, when Llanfyllin, Llanidloes and Welshpool and their gentry allies re-asserted their electoral rights. Parliamentary elections for the Boroughs were held at Montgomery, and the returning officers were the town’s two annually-elected bailiffs. HP Commons 1604-29; HP Commons 1660-90; J.D.K. Lloyd, ‘The borough recs. of Montgomery’, Mont. Colls. xlv. 30-1.

Parliamentary representation for the Boroughs had been dominated during the early Stuart period by the Herberts of Montgomery Castle, while their cousins, the Herberts of Powis Castle, near Welshpool, had monopolised the shire seat. As the shire town’s undisputed electoral patrons, the Montgomery Castle branch of the Herberts had every reason to encourage the exclusion of the out-boroughs – and particularly, no doubt, that of Llanfyllin and Newton, where their enemies the Vaughans of Llywdiarth and the Price family of Newton held sway. HP Commons 1604-29. In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Richard Herbert of the Montgomery Castle branch of the family was returned for the shire, leaving the Boroughs seat free for a candidate from one of the county’s lesser families. On election day, 1 April, the Boroughs returned Sir Edward Lloyd of Berth-lwyd, near Llanidloes, who was an enemy of Herbert’s competitor for the county seat, Sir John Price*. Infra, ‘Sir Edward Lloyd’. The returning parties on the election indenture were about 30 named individuals – the majority, if not all, freemen of Montgomery – and ‘many others’; the bottom part of the indenture, with the signatures on it, has been torn off. C219/42/2/120.

In the elections to the Long Parliament that autumn, Price claimed the county seat in the absence of Herbert, who had been unavoidably detained on royal service against the Scots in northern England. Ousted as knight of the shire, he had to settle for the Boroughs seat, to which he was returned on 24 October – a week after the county election. Sufra, ‘Montgomeryshire’. The returning parties on the election indenture were 30 named freemen of Montgomery and ‘many others’, and it was signed by all, or the greater part, of the named group. C219/43/3/205; Lloyd, ‘Borough recs. of Montgomery’, 30-1.

Herbert sided with the king at the outbreak of civil war and was disabled from sitting as an MP by the Commons in September 1642 – the first Welsh Member to suffer this penalty. Infra, ‘Richard Herbert’; A.H. Dodd, ‘Wales and the second bishops’ war (1640)’, BBCS xii. 95. The Boroughs seat, like that for the county, was left vacant while the royalists retained strongholds in Wales, and it was not until 11 November 1646 that the Commons ordered the issuing of a writ for a new election to replace Herbert. CJ iv. 719a. The Cornish Presbyterian MP Francis Buller I evidently tried to manage the ‘recruiter’ elections in Montgomeryshire – where he owned an estate – on behalf of Edward Vaughan* of Llwydiarth (for the county) and Vaughan’s cousin Charles Lloyd* (for the Boroughs) and, to that end, Buller’s electoral agent may have helped secure the appointment as county sheriff of Rowland Hunt, who was connected through his brother Thomas Hunt* with Sir Robert Harley* and his Presbyterian circle in and around Herefordshire. The main political link between Buller, Vaughan and the Harleys was their shared opposition to the army. Infra, ‘Francis Buller I’; ‘Thomas Hunt’; ‘Charles Lloyd’; ‘Edward Vaughan’; PROB11/184, ff. 321v-322; Buller Pprs. 98-9. But whereas Vaughan duly secured the county seat, on 6 April 1647 the Boroughs returned not Lloyd but George Devereux of Vaynor, a few miles north west of Montgomery.

The scion of a Warwickshire family, Devereux had acquired property in Montgomeryshire through marriage into the Prices of Vaynor in 1633. He was also a kinsman of the Presbyterian grandee Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, who had been appointed lord lieutenant of Montgomeryshire by Parliament in 1642. Devereux’s return was controversial inasmuch as he had recently been imprisoned and his estate at Vaynor secured by Parliament’s troops in Montgomeryshire for alleged delinquency, until the Committee for Sequestrations* at Westminster had intervened to suspend proceedings against him on the grounds that he had raised troops to assist Sir Thomas Myddelton* in securing the county for Parliament. Infra, ‘George Devereux’; NLW, Wynnstay ms 90/16/16, 19, 29, 40, 80-1, 121, 128. The election indenture was very similar in layout and wording to its two predecessors; the returning parties were 28 named freemen of Montgomery – including six of the town’s aldermen – and ‘many others’, and it was signed by the named group. C219/43/3/207.

Buller’s desire to intervene in the Montgomeryshire recruiter elections suggests that the Presbyterian grandees were keen to secure the return of their allies in the county. Nevertheless, Devereux’s interest in Montgomery and the influence of the Prices of Vaynor and their allies – who may well have included his wife’s uncle, the recruiter MP for the shire Edward Vaughan – had probably been sufficient to win him the seat without significant outside support. His alignment with the Prices and Vaughans in county politics is suggested by his prominence among the signatories to the election indentures for the shire of October 1640 and February 1647 returning Sir John Price and Edward Vaughan respectively. Supra, ‘Montgomeryshire’, Infra, ‘George Devereux’; W.V. Lloyd, ‘Sheriffs of Mont.’, Mont. Colls. xxvii. 200. Rather than representing a victory for the Westminster Presbyterians, Devereux’s return marked the eclipse of the Herbert interest in Montgomery as a result of the family’s royalist and recusant affiliations. Infra, ‘Richard Herbert’. Nevertheless, Devereux’s presence in the Commons was not welcomed by the Independent interest, for nine days after his election, on 15 April, Sir William Brereton and Sir Henry Mildmay were majority tellers in favour of his suspension from sitting until the ‘great and grievous charges’ against him had been investigated by a committee set up a few months earlier to examine similar accusations against Vaughan. The investigation into Devereux and Vaughan was transferred in July to the committee for receiving complaints against MPs – a body used by the Independents to hound their political opponents – where it seems to have languished. Devereux was not listed among those Members secluded at Pride’s Purge in December 1648 – doubtless because he had observed the order suspending him from sitting, which remained in force, leaving the Boroughs without formal representation in the Rump. Infra, ‘George Devereux’.

Disenfranchised under the Instrument of Government in 1653, Montgomery Boroughs regained its seat in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament of 1659, when it returned the projected candidate for the Boroughs in 1646-7, Charles Lloyd. A London merchant who had succeeded his brother to the family estate at Moel-y-Garth, near Welshpool, and had purchased sequestrated property in his native county, Lloyd had sat for the shire in the first and second protectoral Parliaments. He probably owed his return to a combination of his own local interest and the support of his cousins of Llwydiarth. Infra, ‘Charles Lloyd’. The indenture has not survived. After 1659, the Herberts resumed their dominance of the Boroughs seat. HP Commons, 1660-1690.