The county did not go to a poll from 1780 until 1820. A contest had seemed likely when the Parliament of 1784 was dissolved, but the retiring county Member Charles Edwin of Dunraven Castle, ambitious to secure the return of his son Thomas Wyndham, averted it by resigning in 1789, while the rival candidate, put up as he himself had been by the ‘Grand Alliance’ of landowners led by the Duke of Beaufort and the future Marquess of Bute, was absent on naval duties.
During this period the representation of Glamorgan became firmly established in the Mansel family, and no electoral contests are known to have occurred. The head of the elder branch, which had not been involved in the Civil War, was elected in 1660, but in the following year gave way to the Earl of Pembroke’s heir. This was the last occasion on which the county returned one of the Herbert family, most of whose estates in South Wales were soon to be alienated.
In all the Parliaments of this reign except two, Glamorganshire was represented by members of its leading county families, the Herberts, the Mathews, the Bassetts, the ManseIls and the Carnes. 1584, however, Robert Sidney of Penshurst, Kent, aged only el, was returned as Glamorgan’s knight of the shire. There were certain general reasons for this, particularly his father’s position as president of the council in the marches of Wales; his own marriage into a leading Glamorganshire family and his willingness to serve without the wages that could be demanded by Welsh county MPs.
The medieval lordship of Glamorgan was formed after the Norman invasion of the Welsh kingdom of Morgannwg in the last years of the eleventh century. The lordship extended from the River Rhymni in the east to the upper reaches of the Tawe in the west, and was bounded to the north and south by the lordship of Brecon and the Bristol Channel respectively. Glam. Co. Hist. ed. T.B. Pugh, iii. 1-11. The Union legislation of the mid-sixteenth century enlarged the lordship to form the new county of Glamorgan by uniting it with the western lordships of Gower and Kilvey.
Glamorgan, where, partly on account of rapid industrialization, the population increased from 71,525 in 1801 to 126,200 in 1831, was a county of large estates extending from the barren uplands and unfranchised iron town of Merthyr Tydfil in the north, to the corn-growing Vale, with its high concentration of freeholders, and the coastal boroughs of Cardiff, Neath and Swansea in the south. Parl. Gazetteer of England and Wales (1844), ii.