NICHOLAS, John (c.1620-aft.1681), of Chepstow Castle, Mon.

The parentage of John Nicholas is hard to establish with any certainty. A recent collection of Monmouthshire pedigrees fits him into the family of Trelleck Grange, and makes him a younger son of Philip Nicholas of Llansoy and of Lanpill, Llanfihangel Torymynydd.19Vis. Wales (Harl. Soc. n.s. xiv), 198-9. But the evidence of at least three wills points strongly to his being the son of Andrew Nicholas, who was the eldest son of William Nicholas of Llansoy: Philip Nicholas, who died in 1653, was his uncle. John’s elder brother was Giles Nicholas, who in 1624 matriculated from Jesus College, Oxford, and in due course became rector of Llangynidr, Breconshire.20Al. Ox. It seems most unlikely that John Nicholas had been born when his grandfather drew up his will in 1622.21NLW, LL/1624/51. William Nicholas held leases of Edward Somerset, 4th earl of Worcester, a Roman Catholic, which may well have descended to John Nicholas’s father, and Giles Nicholas would later hold his living in Breconshire at the behest of the Somersets.22T. Jones, Hist. Brec. iii. 188. Giles was admitted to Oxford as the son of a plebeian, but parish gentry shading into yeomanry would probably best encapsulate their social standing.

Nothing is known of John Nicholas’s early life. When civil war broke out, the pressure on the Nicholas family, as tenants of the marquess of Worcester, would have been towards joining their landlord in supporting the king: Worcester was among the most loyal and financially supportive of Charles’s followers. There seems no evidence to suggest that the Nicholas family were sympathetic towards puritanism in defiance of the Somersets. Not a single person of that name signed the Monmouthshire petition to the Long Parliament in 1641 in support of protestantizing religious reform.23Add. 70109, misc. 69. It is quite possible that John Nicholas only took a military commission after one was bestowed on Thomas Hughes* in November 1645 to enable the garrisoning of Chepstow, some ten miles from Llansoy. He first appears as a junior officer in the foot regiment of John Lambert* in 1647, and late that year at around the time the regiment passed to the command of Sir William Constable*, he became a captain. Hughes’s inglorious tenure as governor of Chepstow, during which the castle and garrison fell into the hands of insurgent royalists in May 1648, was succeeded by that of Nicholas, who exerted firmer control. Oliver Cromwell*, who had left to subordinates the suppression of the second civil war in south-east Wales to attend to the greater problem of besieging Pembroke castle, recommended ‘Captain Nicholas’ as a reliable source of support in recovering Monmouthshire for Parliament and for arresting the ringleaders of the revolt.24Letters and Speeches ed. Carlyle, Lomas, i. 316-17; iii. 253. He may have been recruited into the army as a garrison militia officer, but he was certainly a member of Col. Thomas Horton’s brigade, as in 1652 he was one of the beneficiaries of a land settlement on the brigade in lieu of pay.25C54/3677/30. Horton made his will in Cardiff in 1649 before embarking for service in Ireland, where he died of dysentery, but Nicholas remained in Chepstow. By 1650 he was governor there, a posting he would retain throughout the interregnum.26Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 85-7; ‘Thomas Horton’, Oxford DNB.;CSP Dom. 1654, p. 52. In March 1651, supported by Thomas Harrison I*, he petitioned for relief from financial obligations he had incurred while strengthening the castle, and continued to petition into the protectorate period.27CCC 2311; CSP Dom. 1654, p. 52.

Only from December 1649, nearly a year after the execution of Charles I, did Nicholas play any part in civilian government, beginning with the Monmouthshire assessment commissions. He was numbered among the propagators of the gospel in Wales in February 1650, doubtless through his association with the brigade, since its commander was a friend of Philip Jones, the minister Walter Cradock, and others Col. Horton knew as the ‘saints in Wales’.28PROB11/215, f. 27v. Nicholas was evidently an enthusiast for propagating the gospel, as he attended meetings of the commissioners across south Wales during the period in which the act was in force, 1650-3.29LPL, Comm. VIII/1, passim. He was among a number of military men added to the high court of justice to try the Cardiganshire rebels in the summer of 1651. He transferred his loyalty readily to the protectorate: as the trusted governor of Chepstow, a possession of Oliver Cromwell since it had been bestowed on him by Parliament, Nicholas was entirely devoted to the Cromwellian interest. He was evidently in command of the militia in Monmouthshire as a whole, not just in charge of Chepstow garrison, by no later than the spring of 1655. In that spring he recruited 183 horse and dragoons, with a further 591 foot soldiers.30SP25/77, p. 872; CSP Dom. 1655, pp. 93, 148, 272, 607. He conferred with colleagues in the Forest of Dean, arrested suspected royalists and urged Cromwell to provide more money for soldiers’ pay. 31TSP iii. 242-3, 252.

Nicholas reported in March 1655 to the protector that the turbulent minister, Vavasor Powell, once a supporter of Cromwell’s but by this time a fierce critic of the protectorate, had himself arrested royalists in north Wales.32TSP iii. 252. If this report was born of a hope that the integrity of the Welsh ‘saints’ would endure despite differing responses to the rise of the protectorate, Nicholas was to be disappointed. In December 1655 Powell orchestrated an attack in print on the government, to which were appended the names of 322 subscribers, including himself. A pro-Cromwellian response in which Walter Cradock was a principal party was published in February 1656.33A Word for God (1655, E.861.5); The Humble Representation and Address (1656, E.866.3). The name ‘John Nicholas’ is to be found on both these opposing addresses to Cromwell, but it was surely the Chepstow governor who signed, prominently, the one in support of the government. He probably married around this time, as a daughter of his was baptised in Chepstow in 1654, and according to a hostile commentator of a few years later, Nicholas’s wife was a niece of Cromwell.34Narrative of the Late Parliament, 17. In July 1659 he reported that his ‘father’ (father-in-law), John Jones I* had sailed for Ireland.35CCSP iv. 295. As Jones had only a single son, it seems likely that Nicholas married Catherine Whitstone, daughter of Jones’s second wife, Katherine, widow of Roger Whitstone and the sister of Oliver Cromwell.36M. Noble, Memoirs of the Protectoral-House of Cromwell (2 vols. 1787), ii. 207. If this surmise is correct, Nicholas’s marriage would have made him the brother-in-law of Richard Beke*.

At some point during the second half of 1655, Nicholas was appointed to the south Wales commission for assisting the major-generals, and further proof of his dependability in the eyes of the lord protector and his advisers came when he was made one of two deputy major-generals of south Wales and Monmouthshire in 1656. His fellow deputy was the Glamorgan man, Rowland Dawkins*.37CSP Dom. 1655-6, p. 102. Initially, Nicholas was paid a salary of £200 as against Dawkins’ £300, but the anomaly was ironed out in July, and both men were given the same, £333 6s. 8d, exactly half what their superior officer, Major-general James Berry*, was to receive.38A.M. Johnson, 'Politics and Religion in Glam. during the Interregnum, 1649-1660', Glam. Co. Hist. iv. 300. Despite his obvious importance in Monmouthshire and south Wales in safeguarding the security of the state, Nicholas seems to have retained the rank of captain throughout the 1650s. He was returned to Parliament in 1656 under the provisions of the Instrument of Government alongside his fellow-officer James Berry and Edward Herbert II, ensuring that the county was solidly Cromwellian in its representation. As he lived near the Forest of Dean it was hardly surprising that his first committee appointment should be to one on preservation and management of timber for public uses (27 Sept.). As a soldier, he was also naturally interested in the excise, a key fiscal element underpinning the military establishment, and was named to two committees on the subject, in one wrongly described as a colonel (17, 25 Oct.).39CJ vii. 429b, 440a, 445b. He was called to two committees on the subject of naturalization, another pointer to his having married into the Whitstones, a number of whom had been born in the Low Countries and were beneficiaries of the naturalization bill. On these committees he was named as Lieutenant-Colonel Nicholas. As plain Mr Nicholas he may have been added to the committee on a bill for recusants (4 Dec. 1656), since Monmouthshire harboured a significant number of Catholics; but this entry in the Journal may refer to Robert Nicholas*.40CJ vii. 434b, 452a, 464a. He also served on the committee to consider the petition of the drainage engineer, Sir Cornelius Vermuyden.41CJ vii. 488b. It can safely be assumed that in the House Nicholas would have said or done little to criticize the government. A hostile listing of all the government placemen in the House included Nicholas, and identified his command of more than one foot company, as well as of the county militia. It also identified him as receiver-general of south Wales, an office he held by 1655.42Narrative of the Late Parliament, 17.

Nicholas was returned again for Monmouthshire in 1659 to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament, but left no trace in its records. He suffered no obvious loss of local authority after the subsequent eclipse of the Cromwell family. He remained the principal military figure in the parliamentary interest in Monmouthshire during the rising of Sir George Boothe* in July 1659, supplying Charles Fleetwood* with intelligence on the principal royalists in the region.43CCSP iv. 273. As in 1655 he vigorously recruited to his Monmouthshire force, and operated across that county and into Glamorgan, where he was responsible for the arrest of one of the Stradlings of St Donats.44CCSP iv. 294-5. The republican government took care to encourage him, and to approve as his lieutenant, Richard Creed, the son-in-law of Walter Cradock and former clerk to Thomas Harrison I*.45CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 15, 16, 202, 578; G. Parry, ‘Richard Creed: Mab-yng-Nghyfraith i Walter Cradoc’, National Library of Wales Jnl. xxiv. 392-4: A. Griffith, A True and Perfect Relation (1654), 11.

The restoration of the monarchy was inevitably a personal disaster for Nicholas, because of his associations with two regicides, Cromwell and John Jones I. He decamped to the continent, but in 1661 official passes were in contemplation for those whom the new king wished to call home, among them ‘Captain Nicholas’. This was not a prelude to reconciliation: the government was in possession, a year later, of a list of 32 persons who served Cromwell in Chepstow garrison while Nicholas was governor, and who still lived there.46CSP Dom. 1661-2, pp. 213, 420. Although Nicholas was not in a draft list of 26 March 1666 of persons who had remained overseas in defiance of royal proclamations, nor named in the proclamation of 9 April, ‘John Nicholas of Monmouth’ was inserted as an extra when the proclamation was reissued on 21 April. Had those proclaimed returned by 23 July, as required, they would have faced trial for having treasonably served in war (with the Dutch) against their native country; failing that, they would have been proceeded against as traitors.47CSP Dom. 1665-6, p. 358. On 1 Feb. 1672 a warrant was issued to pardon Nicholas, with Thomas Kelsey* and another, for all ‘treasons, murders and felonies’ committed since 24 June 1660. This gave a fright to Sir George Probert† of the Argoed, who had leased Nicholas’s lands, forfeit to the crown, in Llanfihangel Torymynydd since 1667, and wished to be sure that they, at least, would not be restored to Nicholas. Probert was kept in suspense, and on 25 November 1673 Nicholas stated his case to the Treasury commissioners in person.48CSP Dom. 1671-2, p. 116; CTB ii. 201, 205; iii. 1070, 1219; iv. 208. Inevitably he was last heard of as a dangerous plotter during the aftermath of the Exclusion crisis, and in September 1682 a government informer alleged that he, ‘quondam governor of Chepstow and indeed Monmouthshire’, was in London plotting rebellion.49CSP Dom. 1682, p. 405. It is possible he was the John Nicholas of Llangwm, the parish of Walter Cradock, who died in 1689, then with a wife named Jane, but this can only be conjecture.50NLW, LL/1689/66.