WILLIAMS, John (d. 1670), of Bron-y-Garn Llwyd, Llanbister, Rad.

It seems impossible to trace with any certainty the ancestry of John Williams. He seems to have lived for most, perhaps all, of his life at Bron-y-Garn Llwyd, a small estate in the parish of Llanbister. He described himself at the end of his life as an esquire, and it seems likely that he was of the Radnorshire parish gentry. The minister of Llanbister in the 1630s was William Hassard or Hazzard, and some of his parishioners wrote in 1641 to Sir Robert Harley*, a great patron of puritan ministers in the marcher counties of England and Wales, to ask Harley to find a godly minister to preach in Welsh on Sundays when Hassard was not present.15Add. 70062, Harley to Hazzard, 7 Oct. 1641. This suggests a core of puritan activists in what was a small parish, and it is highly likely that Williams would have been among them. Another correspondent of Harley’s was John Tombes, minister at Leominster, Herefordshire. Tombes advised Harley in June 1642 of the hostility of Brian Crowther of Radnorshire towards puritan preaching and Crowther’s view that unless it were suppressed, ‘there must no honest man show his face in their streets’.16Add. 70106, f. 164. Within a few months of this report, John Williams was bringing allegations to the Commons against Crowther, Hugh Lloyd (the high sheriff) and, more significantly, Charles Price* of Pilleth. They stood charged with executing the king’s commission of array, proclaiming the 3rd earl of Essex a traitor and denigrating the Parliament as ‘a silly and simple Parliament’. Crowther and his colleagues had intercepted the letter of Williams and his colleagues, among them the radical minister, Vavasor Powell, complaining of them; they had imprisoned the bearer, and indicted at least 64 individuals they thought would oppose the commission of array. Brian Crowther was condemned by Williams and his associates as ‘an entertainer of papists and an upholder of them’.17Brotherton Lib. Leeds, Marten Loder mss, vol. 92, f. 34. The tactics brought to bear by Powell and Williams were spectacularly successful, in that they terminated the parliamentary career of Price, who became the first Welsh Member to be disabled from sitting in the Long Parliament (4 Oct. 1642).18CJ ii. 793a.

Like Williams, Vavasor Powell was a Radnorshire man, but by the time of the charges against Price was living and preaching in London. Williams may have followed him to the capital, but more probably remained in Radnorshire during the civil war. Either way, he was a close associate of Powell’s, willing, 12 years later, to offer testimony in support of Powell against attacks on him in print. In a published defence of Powell, Williams offered evidence on the details of the minister’s marriage in 1642, in order to rebut suggestions that Powell had taken a newly-widowed bride in indecent haste.19Vavasoris Examen et Purgamen (1654), 9 (E.732.12). It seems unlikely that Williams took a military commission anywhere in the armies in the service of Parliament during the first civil war. He was active in the Radnorshire county committee by July 1646, however, probably by virtue of his nomination as a commissioner for Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and south-east Wales (17 Nov. 1645).20SP28/251, accts. of Henry Williams; CJ iv. 347a. As soon as the fighting of the first civil war ended, Williams and a victim of Hugh Lloyd, the Radnorshire sheriff in 1642, journeyed to London to seek compensation for cattle that had been seized or plundered by Lloyd on the authority of the commission of array. With the help of a lawyer and the willing participation of Powell, the pair secured a court award of £100 against Lloyd, even though the royalist former sheriff defaulted on payment.21Vavasoris Examen et Purgamen, 25-6. In the period 1646-8, Williams has to be distinguished from another Radnorshire man of the same name, from Nantmel, who acted for the county committee as a sequestrator, and who farmed the tithes of his home parish.22SP28/189, pt. 3. This man was subjected to an arrest order by the sub-committee of accounts in Radnorshire, which was hostile to elements in the county committee, probably including Williams the future Member, not least because of its handling of the sequestration of Hugh Lloyd.23SP28/251; SP28/189, pt. 3. Later charges against both the men called John Williams relating to Radnorshire committee business came to nothing.24CCC 3301.

Williams’s devotion to Powell ran deep. At some point soon after August 1646, acting as an elder of the gathered church or churches of Radnorshire, Williams journeyed to Dartford, Kent, to invite Powell to return to minister in their native county.25Vavasoris Examen et Purgamen, 12. Before taking up ministerial duties, Powell involved himself in the fighting on Anglesey (1 Oct. 1648), but it is unclear whether Williams accompanied him. He was without doubt actively in favour of a radical settlement of the nation’s political crisis, and was admitted to the commission of the peace, firstly for Radnorshire and subsequently for Breconshire, around the time of the regicide and the establishment of the republic. Through his close association with Powell, he was included among the commissioners for propagating the gospel in Wales, a millenarian-inspired project close to the hearts of Colonels Thomas Harrison I* and John Jones I. Williams proved an active member of the commission, attending meetings as far away from Radnor as Neath, in west Glamorgan, as well as closer to home, in Brecon, throughout the duration of the scheme.26LPL Comm. VIII/1. At this stage in his career he must be distinguished from another namesake, John Williams of Llanbedrog, Caernarfonshire, who preached in the Llŷn peninsula of north Wales and who served as chaplain to Colonel Jerome Sankey’s* brigade, and to the soldiers of John Jones I.27Oxford DNB, ‘John Williams’.

Any confusion between Williams of north Wales and Williams of Llanbister would be understandable, since the latter was drawn to some aspects of the ministry himself. He was an elder of Powell’s church by 1654 at the very latest, and accepted a post of schoolmaster at Radnor during the heyday of the propagation commissioners in the commonwealth period.28Vavasoris Examen et Purgamen, sig. A2 (v). During the threat of royalist insurgency in 1650-1, Williams was a committed supporter of the commonwealth government. He was named to the high court of justice convened to try the rebels arrested during the rising in Cardiganshire, and was given a commission as a captain of horse in the militia of south Wales, alongside another preacher-soldier, Jenkin Jones. He was commissioned in September 1650, so it seems quite likely that Williams rode alongside Vavasor Powell in July 1651 when the latter, with the Monmouthshire radical minister, Walter Cradock, rode through Hereford on their way to the north of England in defence of the republic. The pro-government press noted how the preachers were attended by two horse troops ‘selected out of their gathered churches’.29CSP Dom. 1650, p. 511; Severall Proceedings no. 99 (24-31 July 1651), 1476 (E.786.26). From the north, Powell and his followers wrote a letter of encouragement to their colleagues in the gathered churches of Radnorshire and Montgomeryshire, full of millenarian imagery

we find a general assurance and particular grounds that the last great monarch (our saviour) who sitteth upon the clouds, having on his head a golden crown, and in his hand a sharp sickle to reap the earth; calls upon the temple-angel (or saints out of the churches) to thrust in his sickle also; for we believe the harvest of the earth is come, and the Lord doth send you against an hypocritical nation.30Mercurius Politicus no. 58 (10-17 July 1651), 925 (E.637.11).

Whether he was with Powell or one of the recipients of this letter back in Radnorshire, it provides a reliable insight into Williams’s religious views in the early 1650s.

After the dismissal of the Rump Parliament by Oliver Cromwell* in April 1653, the shape of any future representative assembly lay in the hands of the religious radicals who then had the ear of the lord general. By mid-May, Thomas Harrison I and Vavasor Powell had settled on what might seem the exiguous number of six Members to sit for the whole of Wales in what would become the Nominated Assembly.31‘Inedited Letters’ ed. Mayer, 53. Williams’s nomination to serve at Westminster is thus readily explained, as he was one of Powell’s closest and most devoted allies. The council of state took care to house ‘Captain Williams’ with other Members from Wales and the Welsh marches, and on 14 July he was added, as ‘John Williams of Wales’ to the council of state.32CSP Dom. 1652-3, p. 412; 1653-4, pp. 14, 25. With Harrison, Williams was included in a council committee to examine unheard petitions (19 July), one to consider the salaries of the council’s own officers (22 July) and one to examine complaints of commoners in Whittlewood Forest, Northamptonshire (27 July), in which he served with another Welsh Member, Hugh Courtney.33CSP Dom. 1653-4, pp. 36, 44, 53. Again with Courtney, he considered the petition of the Welsh lawyer and administrator, Robert Coytmor (29 July), and two further petitions on 5 August. On 4 August he was included in a council committee to consider the fate of those informed against as Catholic priests.34CSP Dom. 1653-4, pp. 59, 73, 75. This modest record of back room business in the council of state proved to be his main contribution to this Parliament. He was added to the committee of the House on prisons and prisoners (20 July), but that was the extent of his service, and none of it was on religious topics.35CJ vii. 287b. He made his last appearance at the council of state as early in the life of the Parliament as 6 August, attending on 19 days in total.36CSP Dom. 1652-3, pp. xxxviii, xxxix, xli.

Williams was reported to be ill in August 1653, but this hardly seems an adequate explanation for his evident lack of enthusiasm for the Nominated Assembly. More telling, probably, was the coincidence by which his call to serve in Parliament coincided with the second half of his year-long tenure of the office of high sheriff of his county. He may have withdrawn to attend to his shrieval duties, perhaps with the consent and support of his parliamentary colleagues. The idea that he was nominated as a ‘token Welshman’ to the Parliament seems wide of the mark, given the special relationship between Harrison and the leading Welsh ‘saints’.37Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 210. Along with the other Welsh Members except James Phillips, Williams was recorded as not being in favour of a state ministry, and was not returned to the council of state in the elections of 1 November, but he must surely have been back in Radnorshire long before then.38A Catalogue of the Names (1654, 669.f.19.3). His attitude towards state religious provision was doubtless inferred from what was known at Westminster of his associations and loyalties. After the closure of the Nominated Parliament and the inauguration of the Cromwellian protectorate, he was quickly identified as an implacable opponent of the new regime. He was reported to have preached in Radnorshire, taking his text

out of the 3rd of Amos, and the 3rd verse; and after a short space, he fell off from his text, and out of a discontented spirit began to speak of the alteration of the present time, and to resemble some prophets of these times unto the prophet Amos, and the rulers of this time unto Jeroboam ... and also resembling this present government unto a king succeeding his father, which king said his little finger should be heavier than his father's loins ... now our taxation and burden is greater, and like to be as long as he liveth, naming the lord protector.39TSP ii. 46.

News also reached Secretary John Thurloe* in February 1654 of a journey made by Powell and Williams to Cardiganshire, where with another member of Powell’s church they preached at Llanddewibrefi. Reports were circulating that Williams regretted not having arrived in time to choke off the county’s tax revenues

If he had come here but a little sooner, he had stopped the commissioners and the country from paying the last contribution; and that he and his fellows, meaning the last Parliament, made an act, that there should be no king or protector in England; and that it was treason for to name or proclaim any protector in England, by reason they had made a statute against it.40TSP ii. 90.

Back in New Radnor later in the month, Williams preached before his successor as sheriff, the magistrates and a large congregation, though his diatribe ‘stormed many out of the church’. He was said to have insisted

You must have a protector, and ministers, to be drunk together. You have a protector to protect you in slavery and popery. If we had known so much a few years ago, we would have prevented him from being protector. And you shall have ministers, but you shall not enjoy them long, nor they you.41TSP ii. 128.

While these lurid reports of Williams and Powell doubtless included elements of truth, they were circulating among entrenched opponents of the Welsh propagation commissioners, intent by any means possible on discrediting the millenarians in the changed political and religious climate. For reasons of revenge against the supporters of Thomas Harrison I, examples were collected of anti-protectoral preaching such as Williams’s rhetorical ‘What do you want now, a king? You have one, and that as great a tyrant as the former’.42TSP ii. 129.

The government may have taken a more measured approach towards Williams, and sought to include him in Welsh local government. In recognition of his godliness, and despite his apparent lack of enthusiasm for a state ministry, in August 1654 Williams was listed among the ‘ejectors’ who tried the cases of delinquent or inadequate clergy under the Cromwellian state church arrangements, and at the next royalist-inspired insurgency in the spring of 1655 he was named as a commissioner in support of Major-general James Berry*.43A. and O.; SP25/76A, f. 16v. In November 1655, Berry was trying to meet Williams on one of his journeys between Wales and London, probably seeking to harness his influence with Powell, in the interests of softening the opposition to the protectorate of the Radnorshire men.44TSP iv. 211. Any olive branch Berry may have succeeded in proffering was rejected. On 3 December 1655, A Word for God, a fierce denunciation of the protectorate, was published in London. It took the form of a personal address to Cromwell, accusing him of a betrayal of the godly cause that could only result in ‘God’s signal withdrawing from you and your designs’.45A Word for God (1655), 2 (E.861.5). Among the names of 322 Welshmen who endorsed the petition was that of Williams, immediately below that of Vavasor Powell.46A Word for God, 7. This cost Williams his favoured position as custos of Radnorshire, and he was dropped from the assessment commission, but even so he remained in the commission of the peace. Whether he was active in it is most doubtful.

The government began to fear Williams’s involvement in Fifth Monarchist insurrection by April 1657, but when Powell to the more conciliatory minister of Wrexham to admonish him for his tendencies towards Arminianism, he denied that he and Williams had any hand in the ‘simple enterprise’ of revolt.47TSP vi. 187; Gweithiau Morgan Llwyd, iii. ed. J.G. Jones, G.W. Owen (Cardiff 1994), 146-7. Powell and Williams were as hostile to the protectorate of Richard Cromwell* as they had been to that of his father. They were reported to have done what they could to prevent Richard from being proclaimed in Radnorshire, ‘tearing his proclamations and putting it (sic) in their pockets’.48Bodl. Rawl. A.61, f. 29. They were doubtless briefly heartened somewhat by the return of the Rump, to judge from a parodic parliamentary order that circulated in Wales, with mock signatures of Williams and Powell and supposedly produced in the names of ‘the common knaves of England assembled’.49NLW 11439D, f. 21. The restoration of the monarchy brought the final exit of Williams from all public office. A letter of April 1660, so uncompromising and open in its hostility to the monarchy that it seems suspiciously like the work of an agent provocateur, spoke of Williams once again journeying between London and Wales in a last attempt to shore up the godly cause.50CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 407. During the 1660s, Williams’s namesake, the former chaplain of Jerome Sankey, is said to have espoused the cause of armed resistance to the king during the 1660s.51R. Greaves, Deliver Us From Evil (Oxford, 1986), 202. Williams of Radnor seems to have been more quietist, content to nurture the godly cause in conventicles. In April 1664, George Gwynne* reported to the 2nd earl of Carbery (Richard Vaughan†) how as a deputy lieutenant he had summoned Williams and five other nonconformists to account for their conventicling. Two refused to accept the oath of allegiance and were imprisoned, but Williams conformed to the extent of taking the oath when it was tendered to him.52SP29/97, f. 131.

Williams continued to live at Bron-y-Garn Llwyd during the 1660s. In December 1668 he was named by Vavasor Powell as an overseer of the preacher’s will.53PROB11/337, f. 35v. A few days earlier, he had recorded his own testamentary wishes (12 Dec. 1668), but amended them on 6 June 1670, shortly before his death, to vary the provision he had made for his wife, Joan. He commended his soul to God and the burial of his body to ‘the advice of the godly then and there living when and where the Lord appoint my dissolution’. He named three sons, John, William and Caleb, and when the inventory of his property was taken, on 15 June following his death, he was reckoned to have property worth £180.54NLW, BR/1670/91. In 1675, there were gathered congregations surviving in three locations in Radnorshire.55Records of a Church in Broadmead, 517-8. By the first quarter of the nineteenth century John Williams had become identified with the ‘Lieutenant Williams’, of Llangollen in Denbighshire, who as an ailing man was spared death in prison by a timely release, only to be denied burial in Llangollen churchyard, where his body had lain ten days. His friends obtained permission to bury him in his own garden there, in September 1681.56W. Richards, Welsh Nonconformists’ Memorial (1820), 151-2; Diaries and Letters of Philip Henry ed. M.H. Lee (1882), 305; T. Rees, Hist. Protestant Nonconformity in Wales (1861), 170. The 1670 will seems to disprove the identification and to settle the questions arising from the change of military rank and the 60-mile removal to Denbighshire. None of Williams’s descendants is known to have sat in Parliament.