Brecon

Seventeenth-century Brecon was one of the largest Welsh towns, an administrative and judicial centre with an important, twice weekly, livestock market. While the cattle trade was probably the most valuable, the textile and leather trades were essential to the economic health of the town, which supported six guilds. Though it sustained close communications and trade links with Hereford, Brecon’s economy was robust enough to encourage a growth of population through the early modern period, so that by 1670 it had reached a figure of over 2,000. The Taylors Cussion ed. E.M. Pritchard (1906), f. 78; N. Powell, ‘Do Numbers Count? Towns in early modern Wales’, Urban Hist. xxxii. 48, 50, 52, 54, 55, 57, 60. By a charter of 1556, Brecon was entitled to a mayor (called bailiff), two aldermen and a common council of 15 capital burgesses. In 1640, the borough had eleven wards, with two constables in each. CPR 1555-7, pp. 76-81; SP16/453, f. 111. It was the seat of the great sessions courts held for the south-east Wales counties of Breconshire, Glamorgan and Radnorshire. Despite a token reference in the election return of 1597 to the assent of other boroughs in the county, Brecon appears subsequently to have regarded itself as a borough constituency without contributories. Sir Henry Williams (grandfather of Henry Williams*), elected in 1604, was the last Breconshire gentleman to be returned for the borough down to 1629, and by the 1620s it was the interest of the regional legal establishment that captured the seat for Sir Walter Pye and his son and namesake, Sir Walter Pye*. The younger Pye was installed in the Brecon seat when his father took the more prestigious position of knight of the shire for his native county in the Parliament of 1628. In the spring of 1640, his father five years dead, Pye himself sat for Herefordshire. Brecon was thus open to a different electoral interest, and the seat was claimed by Herbert Prise of the Priory, a younger son of a Brecon town gentry family. Prise had been a professional soldier in the English army, and from 1634 sewer to the queen. In September 1639, the king proposed him for the hugely lucrative post of customs collector in the port of London, but the grant was never sealed.

A fortnight after the dissolution of the Short Parliament, in May 1640 William Watkyns, the bailiff of Brecon, asserted that he was ‘the king’s lieutenant within the said town of Brecon’, and with some of the burgesses repudiated the authority of the deputy lieutenants of the county to recruit men there for the king’s army in the north. SP16/453, f. 111. The deputy lieutenants, led by Henry Williams†, reported this challenge by the bailiff and burgesses to the privy council. Watkyns was summoned to Whitehall, and in his defence he produced the town charter in support of his claim to a measure of jurisdiction independent of that of the deputy lieutenants. The council dismissed his claim but agreed not to punish him for his defiance. SP16/453, f. 111; PC2/52, p. 577. The episode doubtless to some degree coloured the course of the second election of 1640. On this occasion, the courtier Prise was challenged by Robert Williams, who was most probably the son of David Williams of Gwernyfed†, and the father of Henry Williams*. Robert Williams’ appearance was likely to have been an attempt by the local gentry to assert themselves against the government. There was a double return, though the ‘two several indentures’ have been lost. Only in January 1641 did the House address the question of the Brecon election. On 6 January, the House adopted the resolution of the committee of privileges, chaired by John Maynard, that Prise should sit as Member, at least until his election was declared void, and that Williams should not sit, unless the election was decided in his favour. CJ ii. 63b; Procs. LP ii. 124. Prise's election was never nullified, and he certainly sat. Prise became an enthusiastic supporter in arms of the king when civil war broke out, and by April 1643 was governor of Hereford when the town surrendered to Sir William Waller*. On 8 May 1643, Prise was disabled from sitting further in Parliament. CJ iii. 75b. The order was disregarded by the king and his council, and Prise obeyed their summons to attend the Oxford Parliament in January 1644.

The king stayed in Brecon in his attempt to rebuild his support after Naseby, but from October 1645, a parliamentarian committee, established in Cardiff and loyal to the New Model army, began to make overtures to the Breconshire gentry to join them in their allegiance. On 23 November, as a consequence of this persuasion, 34 of the Brecon gentlemen framed a declaration of loyalty to Parliament. NLW, Tredegar mss, box 105/134, 135, 137; A Declaration of the Gentlemen and Inhabitants (1645, E.3119). Part of their manifesto was a repudiation of ‘detestable neutrality’, a dig at the ‘Peaceable Army’ which had delayed any settlement in Glamorgan. In the wake of the Brecon gentlemen’s declaration, writs could be issued both for Brecon and Cardiff (5 Dec.). CJ iv. 366a. By 26 January, however, the committee-men at Cardiff had become aware of their own over-confidence about the political conditions in the region. In February a full-blown revolt in Glamorgan was led by Edward Carne of Ewenni, which would the following year be laid at the door of Sir William Lewis* by the army. Roberts, ‘How the West was won’, WHR xxi. 664-66; A Full Vindication and Answer (1647), 26 (E.398.17). The crushing of the Carne revolt and the imposition of parliamentary authority put an end, at least for a period, to armed insurgency, but the peace led to an intensifying of factional conflict through 1646, and the initiative in the build-up to the Brecon election passed to the Presbyterians. Sir William Lewis, of Langorse in Breconshire, was one of the Eleven Members accused by the army and their Independent allies in the House of having detained the writ for Brecon for eight months. His defence was that having taken the writ to Breconshire in July 1646, he learned that the city of Worcester had still to surrender formally to Parliament (the surrender was agreed on 20 July). Lewis claimed that these negotiations convinced him that no election in Brecon could safely be contemplated, and that therefore, after consulting Edmund Prideaux I*, a commissioner of the great seal, he returned the writ to Henry Scobell, secretary to the commissioners. Full Vindication and Answer, 28-9.

The Brecon election was finally held on 30 April 1647, after Sir William Lewis had, on his own admission, taken the writ back to Brecon towards the end of March. The only candidate was Lodowick Lewis, the only son of Sir William, who could at least claim to be of a county family. The indenture was signed by around 70 electors, and Sir William Lewis would claim that his son was returned ‘by the unanimous assent of the burgesses’. C219/43/6/5/160; Full Vindication and Answer, 28-9. In little more than a month after the election, however, the army had begun to formulate charges against Sir William Lewis and the other Eleven Members. These events overshadowed the negligible parliamentary career of Lodowick Lewis, who was almost inevitably secluded on 6 December 1648 as an enemy of the army. The borough was thus unrepresented in the Rump Parliament, but in July 1651 elements within Brecon corporation complained to the council of state about the royalist past of the town’s recorder, Edmund Jones*. Under the Instrument of Government of December 1653, the borough of Brecon was disenfranchised, and two seats were instead bestowed on the county.

The borough was next specifically represented in Richard Cromwell’s Parliament, to which it returned a legal office-holder, Samuel Wightwick, elected on 29 December 1658. C219/48. His daughter Abigail was the wife of Sir Henry Williams of Gwernyfed, the second baronet and cousin of Henry Williams, who sat for Radnorshire. Williams of Gwernyfed was the son of the ardent royalist Henry†, who had been rewarded by Charles I with a baronetcy and who had died by 1656, and his wife Ann, sister of Sir Walter Pye*. Wightwick was thus representing long-established electoral interests in Brecon. His eldest son, John, married Jane Prichard, daughter of Edward Prichard of Llancaiach, Glamorgan, who had been made governor of Cardiff for Parliament in December 1645. Clark, Limbus Patrum, 60. Samuel Wightwick played no known part in his only Parliament. In September 1659, the civic elections at Brecon were disrupted when one party arrested and detained a number of common councillors and overbore the others in order to secure a victory of their own candidate as bailiff. Soon after these events at Brecon, the restored Rump Parliament was prevented from meeting further by the leaders of the army, and supreme authority passed to a military committee of safety (13 Oct). The Brecon men whose choice as bailiff had been prevented from taking office petitioned the committee of safety, procuring 108 signatures. They identified as the ringleader of the disruption Edmund Jones, the town’s recorder, who had been a cause of complaint in 1651, and had been expelled from Richard Cromwell’s Parliament as a royalist. SP18/205, f. 118. The committee of safety referred the matter to the governor of Hereford, Wroth Rogers*, whose solution was to appoint his own nominee, the retiring bailiff. This provoked a further appeal from the complainants, this time in the form of a printed pamphlet directed to the country at large; an invitation to note the fate of the town’s legitimate civic government under the force majeure of soldiers and the ‘lusts, ambition and ignorance’ of ‘levellers, who under a pretence to get arms into their hands to secure the interest of the good people will ruin, destroy and throw down all that we have to defend our lives, liberties and estates’. In this appeal, no mention was made of Edmund Jones, and the ringleaders of the unrest had now become a group of militia soldiers allegedly under the direction of Jenkin Jones of Llanddeti, who was both a captain loyal to the commonwealth and ‘pastor of a congregated church’. An Alarum to Corporations (1659), 2, 8; DWB, ‘Jenkin Jones’; P. Davies, ‘Episodes in the Hist. of Brecknockshire Dissent’, Brycheiniog, iii. 21; F. Rees, ‘Breconshire during the Civil War’, Brycheiniog, viii. 8. In implied contrast to these outbursts of faction among the townspeople, the parliamentary candidates in 1660 and 1661 were familiar names: Sir Henry Williams, Samuel Wightwick’s son-in-law, and Herbert Prise, who in 1657 had acquired a baronetcy from Charles II when the king had been in exile.