HUGHES, Thomas (?1608-67), of Moynes Court, Mathern, Mon.

The antiquaries of Monmouthshire in the nineteenth century were confident that Thomas Hughes was the grandson of the sheriff of the county in 1618-19, William Hughes of Llantilio Crossenny.13Bradney, Hist. Mon. i. 106; Clark, Limbus Patrum, 276-7; Williams, Parlty. Hist. Wales, 124. Were this assertion to have been correct, John Hughes would have been of a family anciently settled in Gwent. In fact, his father, John Hughes senior, was of Presteigne, Radnorshire. When he died in 1624, the inquisition post mortem was held at Presteigne, and lands there and in Mathern, Itton and Mounton, Monmouthshire were attributed to him.14C142/434/91; Coventry Docquets, 453. Only two years before his death, Hughes senior had bought the estate of Moynes Court, Mathern, from Robert Rowbotham, archdeacon of Llandaff.15Wood, Moyne’s Court, 64, 67-8, 69; Le Neve, Fasti ed. Hardy, ii. 260. Mathern was the site of the ruined palace of the bishops of Llandaff, and the advowson was still the property of the bishop. When Hughes purchased it, for £160, the Moynes Court estate consisted of four messuages and some 190 acres of arable, meadow, pasture and woodland.16Wood, Moyne’s Court, 64. The basis of the family’s appearance among the landed proprietors of Monmouthshire was legal office. Hughes senior had in 1616 acquired for life the office of prothonotary of the counties of south-east Wales.17Williams, Hist. Gt. Sessions in Wales, 156. He seems to have been readily confused with a grander figure of the same name with Somerset associations.18W.R. Prest, Rise of the Barristers (1986), 371.

Thomas Hughes junior was aged 16 at the time of his father’s death, but his wardship was retained by his mother and a family associate, Thomas Ken, an attorney and clerk of assize in south Wales whose own son would become non-juror bishop of Bath and Wells in 1685.19PROB11/144, f. 149; Coventry Docquets, 468; Oxford DNB (Thomas Ken). Hughes was soon sent to the Middle Temple.20MTR ii. 797. He was called to the bar in 1632, and it seems that Moynes Court was tenanted or empty at the time of the 1628 subsidy, as no member of the Hughes family is listed as a taxpayer at Mathern.21E179/148/85. After qualifying as a barrister, Hughes may have bought lands in Hertfordshire and Middlesex, and in 1634 he acquired the reversion of the legal office in south-east Wales that his father had held.22Coventry Docquets, 190, 631. He seems to have harboured no political ambitions, and is not known to have accepted public office beyond his remunerated post in the south Wales courts. He cannot safely be identified as the man who surrendered the receivership of crown revenues in the west of England in 1636.23Coventry Docquets, 197. He seems rather to have settled into the life of a barrister at the Middle Temple, where Henry Herbert* was admitted in 1634.24MTR ii. 739, 755, 807, 811, 812, 821, 824, 827, 833, 869.

Hughes probably remained in London during the civil war, and there is no evidence for the suggestion that he promoted the petition calling in 1641 for the advancement of Protestantism in Monmouthshire.25J. Knight, Civil War and Restoration in Mon. (Woonton Almeley, 2005), 63. His brother, Charles, bound to him at the Middle Temple in 1638, became a major for the king in the civil war, but had changed sides by early in 1645.26MTR ii. 869; CCC, 1356; Knight, Civil War in Mon. 57. Thomas Hughes himself was later said to have been a royalist commissioner of array. There is no evidence for this, but he was appointed justice of the peace for Monmouthshire in June 1643, which must have been approved by the king.27Articles of Impeachment (1659), 15 (E.983.31); Justices of the Peace ed. Phillips, 359. In this context, Hughes should not be confused with a namesake, of Llanvetherine, who compounded for delinquency in 1647 but who would continue to be suspected of disaffection by the government of the protectorate.28CCC 1665; Add. 34013, p. 90. Only from July 1645 did Thomas Hughes’s name appear among the parliamentarian committeemen for Monmouthshire, with no suggestion of military rank in the record of his nomination.29CJ iv. 198b. On 11 October 1645, however, Chepstow castle was taken for Parliament, and two weeks later Hughes, now with the rank of colonel, was nominated by the Commons as governor, doubtless in part at least because of his local knowledge.30Phillips, Civil War in Wales, i. 340; CJ iv. 321a. His commission passed the Lords on 6 November.31LJ vii. 678a. The following day, Michael Oldisworth* and others wrote to Speaker William Lenthall* from Cardiff, commending Philip Jones*, their messenger.32Bodl. Nalson V, f. 17. It is likely that Hughes was hastily commissioned so as to be able to act as governor. His posting was intended to be temporary, but in June 1647 he was still there, still in an acting capacity.33CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 563. Hughes was a supporter of James Kyrle, a client of the 3rd earl of Essex and an associate of Sir Robert Harley*.34LJ viii. 14b; ‘Walter Kyrle’, infra. He was among the Monmouthshire committeemen who dealt brusquely with Henry Somerset, marquess of Worcester, at the siege of Raglan castle in June 1646. Hughes was before Raglan in the company of Henry Herbert*, whom he had known at the Middle Temple and was doubtless his patron.35A Letter from the Marquesse of Worcester (1646), 7 (E.340.11). When Raglan surrendered in August, Hughes was not among the commissioners who negotiated Worcester’s capitulation.36Perfect Occurrences no. 160 (17-24 Aug. 1646) 1285 (E.513.4).

On 5 May 1647, Chepstow was bestowed by Parliament on Oliver Cromwell*. This made no difference to Hughes’s governorship, but his reputation must have suffered when during his absence from the castle, it was betrayed at night into the hands of a local royalist, Sir Nicholas Kemeys† (10 May 1648), whom Henry Herbert had publicly identified as a royalist delinquent back in September 1642.37Whitelocke, Mems. ii. 311; Harl. 163, f. 385v. The castle was re-captured on 25 May, after the town had surrendered, and Kemeys was shot on the spot.38A Full and Particular Relation (1648, E.445.6). Cromwell was on hand to begin the siege, but left the re-capture to a subordinate, as he moved west to deal with the revolt in Pembrokeshire. The episode had been a serious threat to Parliament’s hegemony in the region, and it seems unlikely that Hughes was continued as governor. He had certainly been replaced by March 1649, and he was omitted from the assessment commission of April 1649, quite possibly because of his record at Chepstow.39CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 54; A. and O. Shortly afterwards, allegations arose that while governor Hughes had helped himself to iron-making materials properly belonging to the Somerset family. It also seems likely that a letter by the Independent preacher, Walter Cradock, to Col. John Hughes, reproaching him and reminding him that Cradock had been obliged to protect him, was intended for Thomas, the only Hughes in the region with a military commission.40CCAM 216; NLW, Clenennau 630.

Hughes accepted the regicide without any recorded demur, and returned to the commissions for taxes and the militia. In March 1651, John Byrd, the customs collector for Cardiff, included him in a circular letter calling the Monmouthshire militia committee to a meeting about monies unaccounted for during disbanding soldiers in 1646.41Letter-Bk. of John Byrd ed. Roberts (S. Wales Rec. Soc. xiv), 80. He had retained his legal office, and from 1650 was a colleague, in name at least of Philip Jones*, chamberlain and chancellor on the south Wales circuit and by the advent of the protectorate the most powerful regional figure working in the Cromwellian interest in south Wales. Hughes was later identified as a client of Jones’s, but the patronage of Henry Herbert is likely to have been of at least equal importance, since their association was of longer duration. Herbert was elected to the first protectorate Parliament for Monmouthshire, as was Jones and Richard Cromwell, but the latter’s decision to sit for Hampshire, and Jones’s to sit instead for his native county of Glamorgan precipitated a by-election, at which Hughes and Thomas Morgan took the seats on 9 November 1654. Hughes seems to have made no impact at all at Westminster, his name appearing not once in the Journal. His patron Herbert died in June 1656, and Hughes is not known to have stood for a seat in the elections of that year. Thereafter Hughes was certainly a client of Jones. It was ‘for the private ends of great men’, specifically at the behest of Jones, that Hughes appeared in the elections at Carmarthen for Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament. His interest was promoted for several days in Carmarthen by the sheriff, but at the poll no more than six voices were heard for Hughes. This humiliation was mitigated by switching Hughes to a county seat, which he took, but at the further cost to his reputation of a threat of legal action against him: he had no property in Carmarthenshire, which offended against a statute of Henry VI.42The State of the Case betwixt Major General Rowland Dawkins and David Morgan (1659, BL 1865.c.16.116). As ‘Colonel’ Hughes he was named to the privileges committee (28 Jan. 1659), but that was the only record of his participation.43CJ vii. 594b.

During the period of the revived Rump Parliament in May, Hughes was excoriated as one of the clients of Philip Jones and thus a member of the fallen Cromwellian interest.44Glam. Archives, D/DF L/8; Articles of Impeachment (1659), 15 (E.983.31). He weathered the Restoration, appearing regularly in Monmouthshire commissions of taxes and sewers until his death. Furthermore, he retained the legal office he had inherited from his father, which passed to his brother Charles at his death. Hughes drew up his will on 16 August 1667, and died soon afterwards. He was buried at Mathern on 25 August. An extensive, and absurdly inflated, inscription in Latin in Mathern church memorialized him as ‘learned even beyond his measure’; one who like Minos ‘gave out laws united with piety’, and like Hercules ‘raised his tottering country and with an honourable disposition to all men quickly and easily settled disputes which were really sensible’. It made no direct mention of his military career. 45Bradney, Mon. iv, pt. 1, 70. His elder daughter and surviving coheiress carried all her father’s lands to her second husband, Richard Lyster of Rowton, Shropshire, from whom by another wife was descended Richard Lyster, member for Shrewsbury from 1722.46Bradney, Mon. iv, pt. 1, 56.