VAUGHAN, John I (1603-74), of Trawsgoed, Llanafan, Card. and the Inner Temple.

When compiling his autobiography in exile after 1667, the earl of Clarendon (Edward Hyde*) sketched a pen-portrait of John Vaughan as one whose loyalties within the legal profession were to the greatest critics of the monarchy before 1640 but who sought no change of government, and who withdrew to private life in Wales at the start of the civil war. On Hyde’s estimation, Vaughan was able to return from seclusion in 1660 as one untainted by association with the ruling powers of the 1650s to enjoy a reputation as an unblemished royalist.32Clarendon, Life (Oxford, 1761), i. 32-3. The truth was rather more complicated, but no-one could challenge the antiquity of the Vaughan family’s possession of Trawsgoed, their home since the thirteenth century. Elizabethan expansion of the estate was matched by enhanced political standing when Edward Vaughan, this Member’s father, first appeared in 1601 in the Cardiganshire commission of the peace. A further measure of the step upwards in the family’s fortunes was the marriage between Edward Vaughan and Lettice Stedman of Strata Florida. John Vaughan was educated at Worcester, a hundred miles away from Llanafan, where his talented schoolmaster, Henry Bright, canon of Worcester cathedral, instructed him in grammar before he proceeded to Christ Church, Oxford and to the care of an uncle, Jenkyn Vaughan, a fellow of All Souls.33Wood, Fasti, i. 237. A third and even more important educational influence was John Selden*, 19 years his senior and his mentor at the Inner Temple. Hyde, a friend of Vaughan’s at his inn before the civil war, noted that Vaughan ‘owed the best part of his reputation’ to Selden, but was unable to resist the sour reflection that ‘all Mr Selden’s instructions, and authority, and example, could not file off that roughness of his nature so as to make him very grateful’.34Clarendon, Life, i. 33. Whether or not Vaughan exhibited gratitude towards Selden, there can be no doubt that their relationship was the most significant in Vaughan’s professional and public life. For his part, Selden dedicated his Vindicae … Maris Clausi (1653) to Vaughan, and named him as an executor of his will.

Initially tutored by Selden, Vaughan spoke in the 1628 Parliament first to resist the Lords’ alterations to the Petition of Right, and subsequently to warn the House against pressing the king for a more satisfactory response to it. As might be expected from a lawyer, he took an active interest in the question of privilege. Not long after the dissolution, Vaughan was called to the bar, and spent the 1630s building up a successful legal practice principally in the court of star chamber. The remunerative proceeds were invested in Cardiganshire, where Vaughan bought granges of the Strata Florida estate from Richard Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, for £4,800. The relationship with the Essex interest persisted after this purchase - which became contentious - as Vaughan was made steward of three of the earl’s Cardiganshire manors.35HP Commons 1604-1629. However, during the 1630s London must have seen much more of Vaughan than did his native county. In March 1639 he contributed to the king’s northern expedition against the Scots as a bencher of the Inner Temple, but at home he could mobilize a sufficient interest to return him to the first Parliament of 1640, again for Cardigan Boroughs.36CSP Dom. 1625-49, p. 605.

In the Short Parliament, the ‘Mr Vaughan’ whose frequent interventions in debate were legalistic in character, must surely have been John, rather than (as the modern editors of the diaries have it) Henry. He was named to the committees on the implied breach of privilege at the closure of the Parliament in 1629 (18 Apr.), and on Convocation (21 Apr.).37CJ ii. 6b, 8a. On 18 April 1640 he offered reflections on the turbulent circumstances in which the 1628 Parliament had been dissolved, but a diarist noted how he ‘recited what was before recited’ before agreeing with Sir Henry Vane I* on the need to consult the record.38Aston’s Diary, 15; Procs. Short Parl. 160. Two days later he urged clarification on the wording of a remonstrance to the king, and on the 22nd repeated the need for procedural clarity in the dealings between king and Commons. However, that same day the effect of his contribution was to discount the reports advanced by the government’s critics that the Protestant churches in Europe considered the English church lost from the confessional fold.39Aston’s Diary, 21, 27, 32. Vaughan commented further on the government’s religious policy on 29 April, again to blunt the attack by the opposition.40Aston’s Diary, 88, 92, 94. On the 23rd, he spoke on relations between Commons and Lords, and took what was recorded as a robust expression of the formula that governed redress and supply: ‘If he [the king] can take at his own pleasure, no use of our giving. When the king is in necessity, we are as much obliged to give as he to redress’.41Aston’s Diary, 42-3. The occasion for these remarks was the proposed conference with the Lords on innovations, and Vaughan was numbered with the committee tasked with drawing up the reasons for the conference, intended for the perusal of the peers. The following day (24 Apr.) he was included in the committee to manage the conference.42CJ ii. 10a, 12a.

A number of Vaughan’s speeches recorded by Sir Thomas Aston* now seem obscure, though an insistence on correct procedure appears to have been a theme running though them.43Aston’s Diary, 74, 97, 127. At the privileges committee of the whole (28 Apr.), Vaughan offered what appears to have been intended as an even-handed judgment about how disputed elections should be determined, with reference to the Gloucestershire election and the challenge by Nathaniel Stephens* to the electoral pact between Sir Robert Tracy* and Sir Robert Cooke*.44Aston’s Diary, 155. Of a piece with these lawyerly interventions were his insistence that the records should be trawled before a judgment determined on the illegality of Ship Money (though he could appreciate the wider application of the case of John Hampden*) and that the identity of complainants should be properly established in grievance cases reaching the House (29 Apr.).45Aston’s Diary, 97, 108, 157. He was vocal in denouncing fellow Member-lawyers who absented themselves from the House – ‘a blemish to them that do it, as neglecting their duty to the king and country’ – but he quickly rejected a suggestion that he himself should chair a sitting of the committee of the whole on privileges.46Aston’s Diary, 121, 136. His last committee (1 May) was on a bill for the tenants of certain Lancashire towns, and his final speech of the Parliament (4 May) was in support of voting supply to the king.47CJ ii. 18b; Aston’s Diary, 139.

Vaughan was returned once again for Cardigan Boroughs to what became the Long Parliament, although he was slower to make a mark than he had been in the assembly earlier that year. His election was late, and the reason for this had become apparent by 30 December, when the House granted him permission to continue to act as counsel in a case proceeding through the Lords, which had evidently been occupying his time – perhaps the case of Sir Richard Wiseman, in which Vaughan was sworn in the Lords as a witness (27 Jan. 1641).48CJ ii. 60a; LJ iv. 146b. From the beginning of 1641 until the end of July 1642, he was named to 35 committees. On 6 January 1641, he was named to a committee on four cases connected with the alleged crimes of the earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†) in Ireland, and he was later included in a number of other committees dealing with Strafford’s impeachment and trial.49CJ ii. 79b, 88b, 98a, At no point, however, did Vaughan ever move beyond the periphery of the parliamentary attack on Strafford, and indeed was later marked as one who exhibited ‘good will’ towards the earl.50Harl. 4931, f. 126. He was engaged by what became bill for triennial Parliaments. His question (19 Jan.), ‘If there be no person to return the writs what shall become of the Member of Parliament?’ was evidently an airing of his concerns about the role of the sheriff, and was probably intended not to be in support of the bill’s promoters.51D’Ewes (N), 264n. In a number of committees in February he coat-tailed Selden, who was first-named to the committee on amendments to the subsidy bill (6 Feb.). Two days later, when Selden urged rejection of the London petition against bishops, he appeared to assert that the clergy were the church, an impression Vaughan tried his best to dispel later in the debate.52CJ ii. 80a, Procs. LP ii. 391-2. The two men served together on the committee for abolishing superstition and idolatry (13 Feb.).53CJ ii. 84b. Other topics claiming Vaughan’s attention in February and March were grants and conveyances made by the king to the queen, the elections in Caernarfonshire, ecclesiastical pluralities and the dangers arising from popish recusancy.54CJ ii. 87b, 99b, 113b. As the Strafford case reached its denouement, Vaughan walked carefully in step with Selden. He was not listed among the ‘Straffordians’ in April, but supported Selden in his attempt to ensure that the charges against the earl were tightly defined. However, when Vaughan proposed on 19 April, probably after a long legalistic speech, that the debate on the case should be postponed, it was met with the House’s disapproval.55Procs LP iv. 8, 9.

Vaughan’s response to the Protestation again echoed Selden’s. With his mentor and Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, he was included in last-minute consideration of the Protestation when it was re-committed, a group of revisers that may well have been intended as a counter-weight to the opposition ‘junto’. He took the Protestation when it was tendered to Members later that day (3 May), but his attempt with Selden to refer the matter to the whole House suggests a delaying tactic. When the City enthusiastically called upon the Commons to give the citizens permission to take the Protestation, surely intended as a gesture of solidarity, Vaughan argued in negative terms that the House had no power in the matter.56CJ ii. 132b, 133a; Two Diaries of Long Parl. 41, 42; Verney, Notes, 53-4. While he continued to contribute to the reform programme through the spring of 1641, it was generally to moderate or blunt drastic remedies. He sat on the committee on the abuses perpetrated by the court of star chamber (4 May), but on the 31st argued alongside John Coventry that the intention of the committee had been to reform the court, not to abolish it. He spoke, of course, as a legal practitioner in that court.57CJ ii. 134a; Procs. LP iv. 655. He thought the question of supply to the king the most momentous matter before the House: ‘the crisis of the Parliament and the crisis of the commonwealth depend upon what you have now [in] debate’, but it was more than likely that he wanted to see the government granted its revenue. He worried that the Commons resorted too readily to disciplining and punishing ‘delinquents’, among whom were the customs farmers, a group subject to the scrutiny of one of the committees he attended.58Two Diaries, 75; CJ ii. 154b.

Vaughan was called to play a part in reforming religion, including the committee on securing Protestantism (6 May), a committee to justify the legislation to exclude clergy from temporal affairs (3 June), and the efforts to hasten the trial of Archbishop Laud (5 June).59CJ ii. 136b, 165b, 168b. It seems unlikely that Vaughan was himself a voice in favour of reform, and his speech (12 June) on the relations between bishops and other diocesan clergy in the church hierarchy was probably intended to defend episcopacy against the promoters of the bill to abolish it. However, he supported the king’s critics in censuring the unruly conduct in the chamber of the future royalists Herbert Price and Sir William Withrington (9 June): a diarist noted, doubtless meaningfully, that Vaughan reserved his opinion until the very end of the debate, going with the majority view.60Verney, Notes, 94; Two Diaries, 49. He was in favour of initiatives to pay off the armies in the summer of 1641, seeking to disallow any exemption for colleges from surrendering their gold and silver plate. With Selden, he served on a committee for a strategy for disbanding the army, and when the inns of court showed some reluctance in bringing in the taxes assessed on them, it was Vaughan who was sent to encourage his fellow-lawyers at the Inner Temple to pay (5 July).61Procs. LP v. 85; CJ ii. 188b, 199a. His legal training qualified him to opine on the technicalities of privilege, and he was given the task of drafting a declaration on sheriffs’ entertainment of judges (5 Aug.). He insisted that the changes in the Montgomeryshire commission of the peace were by the usual process, and not evidence of promotion of Catholicism by the crown (16 Aug.).62Procs. LP v. 256-7, vi. 440; CJ ii. 238b. As a lawyer and as a Welshman, Vaughan would naturally have been interested in the bill to exempt the English shires from the jurisdiction of the council in the marches (29 June).63CJ ii. 191b.

From August 1641 Vaughan’s name disappears from the parliamentary record, suggesting he returned either to the Inner Temple or to Trawsgoed; and by the time he made his next appearance, in February 1642, the political climate had worsened after news of the Irish rebellion had shocked Parliament, which had then been stunned still further by the king’s attempt to arrest the Five Members. Vaughan was willing enough to offer £100 as a gift towards the expeditionary force for Ireland (15 Feb. 1642), and was later added to the committee on quelling the rebellion there.64CJ ii. 432b, 498a; PJ i. 388. It would be Vaughan who in April 1642 chaired a committee to draft a letter hastening the soldiers of Sir William Brereton* to Ireland.65CJ ii. 524b, 525b. However, he and Selden were measured in their response to the king’s breach of parliamentary privilege when he invaded the chamber. They tried to deflect the hostility towards Sir Edward Herbert, the attorney-general, who was targeted as the principal assailable actor in the outrage, by arguing that as he had already on oath denied contriving the articles against the Five Members, the House could not now charge him with having done so.66PJ i. 357-8. In similar vein, he defended Thomas Howell, a chaplain of the king, against the attack on him by John Glynne* for criticizing Parliament (14 Mar.).67PJ ii. 38. He and Selden were among those charged with establishing the facts in the allegation that Lucius Cary, Lord Falkland had attempted to publish parliamentary papers, against the blanket rule preventing publication, and it seems likely therefore that Vaughan would again have tried to mitigate Falkland’s censure.68CJ ii. 421a.

Vaughan’s last recorded speech to this Parliament came on 14 April 1642, when he responded to John Pym’s criticisms of the king’s plan to go to Ireland and to raise soldiers. Vaughan rebutted any suggestion that the king’s recruiting methods were ‘a terror to his people’, arguing that subjects were bound to obey him; and he reproved those who spoke of disobeying any commissioners the king might appoint if he left the kingdom, reminding the House that Parliament had accepted temporary governing arrangements when Charles had gone to Scotland the previous year.69PJ ii. 169-70. During the rest of that month, he joined a number of committees on the impeachment of Herbert, on implementing the proposals for church government that had emerged from consultations with divines (25 Apr.), on the Commons’ responses to messages from the king after entry to Hull had been denied him, and on a declaration about the militia. These were all discussions in which the king’s critics would have been in a majority, so it is probable that Vaughan was in a distinct minority in all of them.70CJ ii. 539b, 541b, 549a, 551a. He was probably the Vaughan whose case before the House was postponed several times during May, and the case in question was the repayment of a loan of £400 he had made to the Commons. His last committee appointment (26 July) was on the defects of writs that allowed prisoners in London to continue at liberty.71CJ ii. 572a, 577b, 585b, 662b, 691a.

Thereafter, Vaughan’s name no longer appeared in the Journal. It was Henry Vaughan, not John, who was first of all summoned to attend the Commons in custody in November 1642. Clarendon’s recollection of Vaughan’s whereabouts was that he returned to the country, though other commentators simply noted that he withdrew from Parliament.72Clarendon, Life, i. 33; Williams, ‘Sir John Vaughan’, 37, 45. It seems likely that for a while he lay low at the Inner Temple, but in January 1644 was summoned to the Oxford Parliament, though he did not attend. He did not decline the service, but was listed among those ‘employed in his majesty’s service, or absent with leave or by sickness’.73Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 575. On 6 February 1644 his absenteeism was scrutinized by the Commons, who ‘respited’ his case, giving him the benefit of the doubt.74CJ iii. 390a. By March 1644, he was at Trawsgoed, in correspondence with Herbert Prise*. He supplied Prise with intelligence on the reverses suffered by the king’s forces in south-west Wales, and it is clear from the surviving letters that by then Vaughan was committed to the cause of the king, albeit as an armchair supporter. He looked forward to Prince Rupert’s arrival in the region as a successor to Richard Vaughan†, 2nd earl of Carbery as commander.75Phillips, Civil War in Wales, ii. 154-7. In January 1645, Trawsgoed was plundered by parliamentarian soldiers, and nine months later (1 Sept. 1645) he was ‘discharged from being a Member’ for the duration of the Parliament.76Cambrian Quarterly Magazine, i. 61; CJ iv. 260a. On 18 October John Glynne* was granted ‘all the books and manuscripts belonging to Mr John Vaughan, of the Inner Temple ... to be by him retained for his own use’, and on 5 June 1646 a new writ was issued for Vaughan’s constituency.77CJ iv. 313b, 566a. It was alleged that Vaughan assisted at the successful siege by parliamentarian troops of Aberystwyth (14 Apr. 1646) to curry favour with the winning side in the civil war, but no evidence has been discovered to corroborate this.78E.D. Jones, ‘Gentry of South-West Wales in the Civil War’, NLWJ xi. 145. Not until the aftermath of the second civil war did Vaughan came to the attention of the parliamentary agencies for penal taxation, but despite the paucity of the record, it seems probable that he compounded for delinquency – as he himself insisted in 1660.79CCAM 894; SP29/8, f. 146. He was certainly obliged to sell lands in 1648.80NLW, Crosswood deeds, II/87. Despite the evidence of measured support for the king, to his critics after the Restoration Vaughan had failed to perform his duty. A Cardiganshire critic would describe him as ‘one that upon fits will talk loud for monarchy but scrupulous to wet his fingers to advance it’, and Clarendon sarcastically noted that Vaughan ‘lived as near an innocent life as the iniquity of that time would permit’.81Jones, ‘Gentry of South-West Wales’, 144; Clarendon, Life, i. 33.

If Vaughan had been as secluded from public life as his critics implied, it is surprising that he was summoned, following several years of obscurity, to attend the king on the Isle of Wight. His selection by the king for this role must have been predicated on his continuing freedom of movement and active engagement in legal circles. On 29 August 1648, he was reported in the London press, albeit with an incorrect forename, to have been nominated by the king, and not excepted against by Parliament. Subsequently, his name was given correctly as one of the advisers who would attend the king after Charles had listened to the parliamentary commissioners sent to Newport to negotiate the treaty.82Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 24 (5-12 Sept. 1648), sig. A2i (E.462.33); Peck, Desiderata (1779), 386; Prince Charles his Summons (1648), 5 (E.462.4); A Declaration of the Order of the Treaty (1648), 3 (E.463.11). Vaughan declined to act in this commission, according to his Cardiganshire enemy, but the sources do not allow confirmation of this. It seems unlikely that Vaughan would have sought openly to decline such a signal honour, or that his reputation would easily have survived intact had he done so.

Whether or not Vaughan compounded for delinquency, he was certainly treated with leniency by Parliament. In July 1650 he was granted permission by the council of state to journey from Trawsgoed to London in order to recover his health, a curious destination for the unwell, given the prevalence of disease in the metropolis. The order was to be certified by ‘Col. Jones’, and this could have been either John Jones I* or Philip Jones*. John Jones was a councillor, but had little to do with Cardiganshire; Philip Jones had recently entered the House, sat on Cardiganshire committees, but had not attained eminence at Whitehall. On balance it seems more likely that Philip was intended, especially since Vaughan was alleged to have lent £800 to Philip Jones and other Welsh establishment figures of the 1650s.83CSP Dom. 1650, p. 248; SP29/8, f. 146. His rehabilitation had advanced still further by 1656, when he was re-admitted to his legal practice, even though it suited him after 1660 to claim he had remained excluded from it throughout the decade.84CSP Dom. 1656-7, p. 203. It seems most unlikely that he was the man of his name appointed to the Cardiganshire commission of the peace in 1653, but he probably was the individual who in 1657 joined the assessment commission there. However, there remains a significant gulf between these modest official concessions towards Vaughan and the claim that he ‘personally advised Cromwell to put the crown upon his own head’.85CJ vii. 299b; Jones, ‘Gentry of South-West Wales’, 145.

Vaughan quickly recovered office and legal practice at the Restoration, glossing over his rehabilitation during the Cromwellian period in his petition to the monarchy.86SP29/8, f. 146. He was granted the stewardship of crown manors in Cardiganshire, but had to fight off rival claims to them.87CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 171. Clarendon offered him a judgeship, but he declined it on the grounds that he had not practised law since 1640.88Clarendon, Life, i. 33. From 1661 his legal standing developed steadily, and he began to act as a circuit judge. His career reached its apotheosis in 1668, when he became chief justice of common pleas. Following the convention, he gave up his parliamentary seat at that point. In the Cavalier Parliament he had sat as knight of the shire for Cardiganshire, and was very active in the House, generally following a line critical of the government. He lent his support to the overthrow of Clarendon, who was understandably bitter towards his former friend. Vaughan died on 10 December 1674, and was buried in the Temple church.