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.
Montgomeryshire was described in the 1670s as ‘very hilly and mountainous but interlaced with many fertile valleys both for corn and pasturage ... It hath for its eastern limits Shropshire, for its southern the counties of Radnor and Cardigan, for its western, Merionethshire, and for its northern, Denbighshire with parts of Merioneth and Shropshire’. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 289.
Montgomery was a pocket borough of the earls of Powis. The only challenge to their control during this period came in 1761 when Chase Price set up a candidate in retaliation for Powis’s support of Thomas Lewis at New Radnor; but there was no poll.
Since 1728 Montgomery had been in the pocket of the Herbert family, earls of Powis, and attempts to oppose them were few and far between. According to a lawyer of local origin, Samuel Humphreys, writing conspiratorially to his brother, 15 Dec. 1788: ‘an opposition to Lord Powis in the borough would succeed if a proper person contended against him and if the persons concerned in it would be regulated by discretion and secrecy’.
Until 1727 this constituency was dominated by an alliance of the Tory patrons who controlled the three out-boroughs. Llanidloes lay in the Llwydiarth estate, inherited by Watkin Williams Wynn from Edward Vaughan in 1718; Welshpool and Llanfyllin in that of Powis Castle; Montgomery, the shire town, was controlled by the Whig Herberts of Oakley Park, who challenged the Tory interest represented by John Pugh in 1715 and 1722. On Pugh’s retirement in 1727 there was a double return.
Unlike the county, political activity was strong in Montgomery Boroughs and marked by contested elections. Only in 1689 was a candidate apparently returned without opposition. The period saw a determined effort by the Herberts of Chirbury, who controlled Montgomery, to disfranchise the out-boroughs. Of these, Welshpool and Llanfyllin were under the influence of their Roman Catholic cousins of Powis Castle, while the Lloyds of Berthllwyd were lords of the manor of Llanidloes.
Montgomery, shire town of one of the new counties created at the Act of Union, had long been an English outpost on the Welsh border. In 1562 Queen Elizabeth confirmed privileges which had been enjoyed since the reign of Henry III, including the right of the burgesses to choose two bailiffs each year. The town’s independence was greatly reduced by the presence in Montgomery castle of the important Herbert family, stewards of the crown lordship of Montgomery and the most powerful influence in Montgomeryshire politics.
In 1223 Henry III decided to build a new castle at Montgomery with a satellite town to protect the Severn valley against the Welsh. The borough’s charter of 1227 modelled on that for Hereford was confirmed and modified throughout the middle ages and again in 1536 when the town’s government was vested in two bailiffs elected annually and assisted by several lesser municipal officers. The castle and town walls were repaired during Bishop Lee’s presidency of the council in the marches and when Leland visited the town he praised Lee’s work.
According to the terms of the 1536 Act of Union, every Welsh county (except Merioneth) was to have an MP returned by the burgesses of all the shire’s chartered boroughs. This enfranchised six towns in the east of Montgomeryshire, along the upper reaches of the Severn valley. Two of these, Llanfyllin and Welshpool, were prosperous market towns with substantial populations of 1,000 each.