Carmarthen was thought to be the largest town in Wales in the early seventeenth century, with a population thought to have been more than 2,000 by 1676. Compton Census, 465; Hist. Carm. ed. Lloyd, ii. 13. It served as a regional capital for south-west Wales, if not south Wales as a whole. This primacy reflected the strong agrarian economy of the town’s hinterland, based on dairying and the rearing of cattle, the essence of rural Carmarthenshire’s husbandry for centuries later.
By the seventeenth century, Carmarthenshire had through the incorporation of outlying lordships become the largest of the Welsh counties. In 1646 the gentry described the ‘mere commodities’ of their county as ‘butter, cheese, hay, oats etc.’, but insisted that ‘the subsistence of our county consists in stock of cattle not in corn or other commodities’. C108/189, petition of Carm.
‘An ancient, but not a decayed town . . . well built and populous’, Carmarthen borough no less than the rest of the county was in thrall for most of this period to the Vaughans of Golden Grove, and was represented in every Parliament by the head of a cadet branch of the family, Richard Vaughan I of Cwrt Derllys, who was also recorder of the corporation. Vaughan’s connexion with the borough went back to 1683, when he was first elected to the recordership as a Tory and in all probability a client of the 1st Duke of Beaufort (Henry Somerset†).
Since 1746 a chaotic situation had existed in Carmarthen. The town had two corporations, each claiming to be the only legal one. One corporation was Tory, controlled by Sir John Philipps of Picton Castle; the other, Whig, was controlled by Griffith Philipps of Cwmgwili. At the general election of 1754 each side presented a candidate, and as the writ was sent to the Whig corporation, the Whig candidate, Griffith Philipps, was returned. In 1761 Philipps did not stand, and Lord Verney was returned as the candidate of the Whig corporation.
Carmarthen was the most unruly borough in Wales and elections there continued to be dominated, as they had been for 50 years past, by the rivalry of the Blue and Red factions. In this period, the Whig Blues were triumphant; and it was a renegade from their camp, the firebrand John Jones, who from 1812 onwards revived the Red party nominally led by Lord Dynevor and secured their vengeance in the by-election of 1821.G. Roberts, Hist. Cam. ed. Lloyd, ii. 1-87; R. D. Rees, ‘Parl. Rep. S. Wales 1790-1830’ (Reading Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1962), i. 176.
For over a century the representation of Carmarthen was almost monopolized by the Vaughans of Golden Grove, Whigs, whose family represented it in most Parliaments from 1621. This hegemony came to an end with the death in 1724 of Richard Vaughan, who had held the seat since 1685. He was succeeded by James Phillips, the son of a local alderman, who was defeated in 1727 by Arthur Bevan, recorder of the borough.
There were no contributory boroughs in Carmarthenshire, and the Vaughans of Golden Grove monopolized the seat in this period. Excluded as Cavaliers from the election in 1660, they put up Arthur Annesley, who had married the sister-in-law of the 2nd Earl of Carbery, and was returned by about a hundred named ‘burgesses’, besides many more unnamed. Carbery’s second son John sat for the borough in the Cavalier Parliament, and his youngest son Altham in the Exclusion Parliaments.
The county of the borough of Carmarthen (Caerfyrddyn) was a well-built county town, administrative centre and inland port situated on the north-west bank of the River Towy, nine miles directly north of Carmarthen Bay on the Bristol Channel and 17 miles west by road from Llanelli. Formerly the Roman capital of Wales and the seat of the South Wales princes, its boundaries were coextensive with those of the parish of St. Peter (5,155 acres), and until eclipsed by Swansea in the early nineteenth century it was the region’s largest town.