JONES, John I (c.1597-1660), of London, Uwchlaw’r Coed, Llanenddwyn, Merion., Bryn-y-Ffynnon, Wrexham and Plas Uchaf Eliseg, Llangollen, Denb.

Origins and service in London

After Jones had become an important figure in north Wales politics, Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt compiled a pedigree for him which showed his links in blood with several ancient Merioneth families, but his immediate ancestors were modest Ardudwy landowners. His elder brother Edward was heir to the estate: the isolated farmhouse of Maesygarnedd in Cwmnantcol, forever associated with John Jones’s name, was his birthplace but never in his ownership.38Davies, Ardudwy a’i Gwron, 59-60. There is a tradition that Jones was educated at Wrexham, but no substantive evidence can be found to support this.39Davies, Ardudwy a’i Gwron, 80. He was evidently educated to the standard necessary for a senior position in the management of a gentry estate, with competence in Latin and some working legal knowledge: though at his trial in 1660 he was at pains to disclaim any idea that he was skilled in the law. He was almost certainly sent to London in his youth to enter the service of two generations of the Myddelton family of Chirk, with whom his mother claimed kinship. The mother of Sir John Wittewronge*, who had been the widow of Sir Thomas Myddelton†, described Jones in 1647 as once her servant.40PROB11/199/232. After Sir Thomas Myddelton* succeeded to the family estates in 1630, Jones was senior enough in the household to be honoured in 1632 with the freedom of Denbigh and the following year with membership by redemption (not by apprenticeship) of the Grocers’ Company, in whose records he was described as Myddelton’s servant. Jones maintained a presence in north Wales despite his familiarity with London. In 1637 he witnessed the probate bond of an Ardudwy neighbour of his family, and before 1639 he married the daughter of John Edwardes of Stansty, Wrexham.41NLW, Bangor probate records, B1637-33B. In 1643, Jones brought to the marriage settlement land in three Merioneth parishes acquired, with a house in Wrexham, Bryn-y-Ffynnon, from his employers.42DWB. The Edwardes family were old associates of the Myddeltons; Jones’s father-in-law had witnessed the will of the first Sir Thomas Myddelton in 1630.43PROB11/160, f. 197.

On the eve of civil war Jones was simply a London solicitor or agent for the Myddeltons, working to protect the interests of his employers.44Cal. Wynn Pprs. 276. After the Restoration, his royalist enemies excoriated him as one who had served as an infantry captain at the start of the civil war, but concrete contemporary evidence is lacking for this assertion.45A Compleat Collection of the Lives, Speeches, Private Passages (1661), 135. His activities in the earliest years of the war remain obscure. In March 1644, with the rank of captain evidently bestowed upon him by his employer, he was working with another relative of Myddelton’s as the London-based receiver of subscriptions towards Sir Thomas’s second attempt to muster a force to take north Wales for Parliament.46SP28/346, pt. 1. The many warrants processed by Jones reveal him to have been at the heart of Myddelton’s administrative machine, making any previous military career in the field unlikely. In the summer of 1644, the Committee for Examinations referred to ‘Mr Jones’ as Myddelton’s agent, and at that point he was living in Paternoster Row with his brother, Humphrey Jones, even after Myddelton himself had captured Oswestry.47SP16/539/2, f. 162; Harl. 166, f. 81. Only in November that year is there a possibility that he was among the seaborne force intended for Anglesey but driven by foul weather on to the west Wales coast at Milford Haven, where it was able to assist Rowland Laugharne† in efforts to secure that region for the parliamentary cause.48HMC 9th Rep.pt. ii. 445. By April 1645, much more certainly, he was with Myddelton in Shropshire, and from there he wrote to another army officer reporting lobbying efforts on Myddelton’s behalf in the Commons by William Ashhurst*.49Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 240. His letter, probably written with mischievous intent, was reported to Sir William Brereton* and Ashhurst, both of whom construed it as an attempt to undermine Brereton and the Shropshire committee in the field and in the Commons. Throughout April, a number of other senior officers around Myddelton tried to exculpate themselves from Jones’s suggestions of their sloth and incompetence.50Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 272-3, 294, 314-5, 318-9. None of this damaged Jones, who by mid-December 1645 had been promoted to colonel and was stationed at Wrexham, probably living in one of his own properties.51Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 393. In this period, care must be taken to distinguish him from John Jones II*, a military figure also active in London but with unwavering Presbyterian views.

Active service in north Wales

The Self-Denying ordinance saw command of the army dedicated to the reduction of north Wales pass from Myddelton to his brother-in-law, Thomas Mytton*, who retained confidence in Jones and re-commissioned him.52Bodl. Tanner 59, f. 577v. On 28 May 1646 Jones and Mytton summoned the tithe farmers of Denbighshire to account before the county committee before leaving for north-west Wales, where with Roger Pope* and Thomas Edwards, both like Jones himself trusted members of the Myddelton family and household circle, he served as a commissioner to Anglesey to secure the island’s surrender. He was part of the force that supervised the capitulation of royalist garrisons in Beaumaris and Caernarfon, and signed the surrender articles (14 June 1646).53Bodl. Tanner 59, f. 298; Phillips, Civil War in Wales, i. 361,366, ii. 307-8, 312-3; Cal. Wynn Pprs. 291-3, 294. He wrote with Mytton and other officers to William Lenthall* from Wrexham in January 1647, and must have been involved in the protracted siege of Harlech castle, which capitulated on 15 March. Harlech was of particular interest to him as a native of that district, because he took possession of lands of his in the area at that time.54Bodl. Tanner 59, f. 675; E134/13 Chas. II/Mich. 19; Davies, Ardudwy a’i Gwron, 101. From the summer of 1647 he began to appear on the assessment commissions for Merioneth. In establishing himself more prominently in the political life of north Wales he incurred the active enmity of John Williams, former archbishop of York, who in a letter probably addressed to Sir John Trevor*, denounced Jones as ‘the most universally hated in these parts as now lives here’, and the only person whose unacceptability was likely to prise the region from its shallow-rooted adherence to Parliament. Williams’s letter, of 14 October, was a crude attempt to support Mytton against Jones in the contest for the Merioneth seat vacant on the death of Roger Pope*, bolstered as it was with appropriate references to the ‘Parliament reformed’, in other words purged of the Eleven Members.55Cal. Wynn Pprs. 302-3. In the event, Jones’s superior local interest prevailed over Mytton’s, and by 22 October he was making his way to Westminster to take his seat, having been elected on the 12th.56Flint RO, D/G/3275, no. 95; NLW, Peniarth Estate, CA61.

Jones’s military duties in north Wales prevented him from making any immediate impact on the Commons, and he probably returned to Wales after a visit to London that must have been brief. He was excused at a call of the House on 24 April 1648, and during the second civil war his troop was deployed in suppressing the revolt of Sir John Owen.57CJ v. 543b; Phillips, Civil War in Wales, ii. 381. He wrote from Wrexham to the Commons on 16 May, but by the 29th had set off for the capital, leaving his troop in the hands of George Twisleton*. On 10 June he was instructed by the House to join with William Foxwist* to supervise the printing of letters of propaganda value from north Wales, and to thank Mytton and other army officers for their efforts in the region. He was presumably in the House to receive these instructions, but the same day was required to return to north Wales by direction of the Derby House Committee.58Mont. Colls. viii. 159-60, 165; CJ v. 560a, 592b, 593a. He was still attending the House on the 13th, when he was named to the committee for settling the militia of the kingdom, but by 5 July was in Denbigh to witness an attempt to wrest the castle there from Parliament’s control. Back in London by the end of July, he was required on 1 August to identify suitable commissioners for the assessment in north Wales and to bring in an ordinance to fund the military there. However, he did resume military duties in the autumn, to suppress the lingering revolt in Anglesey, and was himself the subject of a letter of thanks from the Speaker and of an award of £2,000 for his arrears of pay (4 Oct.). He would be the beneficiary of an order from Goldsmiths’ Hall identifying composition fines of north Wales royalists as the source for his payment. On 25 November he was required with Myddelton, his former master, to write to north Wales in the drive to bring in outstanding assessments, but by this time Myddelton had lost sympathy with the trajectory of political developments in London, and probably retreated to the privacy of Chirk.59CJ v. 597b, 656a; vi. 88a; HMC Portland i. 472, 475, 479; CCC 148. It was perhaps the last occasion on which the pair worked actively together.

Republican official

Jones was untouched by Pride’s Purge, and indeed was among the first to take the dissent to the event which precipitated it, the vote on 5 December to continue addresses to the king (20 Dec.).60A Full Declaration (1660), 21 (E.1013.22). He was added to the Committee for Compounding on 18 December and named to three Commons’ committees later that month, including those on the taking of bribes and in response to a petition of London aldermen (23 Dec.). He was among those who on 1 January 1649 examined the former clerk of the Commons, Henry Elsynge, who had resigned his office to avoid involvement in the impending trial of the king.61CJ vi. 99a, 102a, 103a,b, 107b; LJ x. 632b. On the 6th he was included among those to try Charles I, and was evidently enthusiastic about the trial, since he attended 15 of the 23 meetings of the commissioners.62Muddiman, Trial, 195-6, 199, 201, 203, 206, 208, 210, 212-13, 222-4, 226-8. On the 17th he was named to the parliamentary committee to sift through all the petitions from the garrisons. One had arrived from Denbigh, calling for judgment on those who had prolonged the nation’s troubles, and so it is possible that Jones may have had a hand in it.63CJ vi. 120b; The Moderate no. 25 (26 Dec. 1648-2 Jan. 1649), 233 (E.536.30). He was equally prominent in asserting support for the republic. He served on the committee for hastening sales of bishops’ lands, and was included in committees for prohibiting sheriffs from proclaiming any as king (27 Jan.), for abolishing the House of Lords as ‘useless and dangerous’ (5 Feb.), for reviewing the commissions of the peace (8 Feb.) and for banning any published accounts of the king’s trial (9 Feb.).64CJ vi. 120b, 124a, 132b, 134a, 135b. It was perhaps his enthusiasm for revolution that accounted for his election to the council of state, a rapid ascent to prominence for one who had been in the House for a relatively short period, and whose military achievements had in fact been modest.65CJ vi. 141a. As he was never a member of a New Model field regiment or even settled as a garrison commander, and had served for so long with the highly traditionalist Myddelton, it can only be speculated that the most important religious inspiration for Jones by this time was the radical charismatic minister and former military chaplain, Morgan Llwyd, like Jones a native of Merioneth. Llwyd was by 1647 established in his increasingly chiliastic ministry at Wrexham, Denbighshire, where Jones himself enjoyed property and influence.66Oxford DNB.

Jones proved to be a diligent councillor of state, attending 172 of a possible 232 meetings in the year from February 1649. Only nine members of council attended more frequently.67CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. lxxv. In the period of the first council, to June 1650, he was named to nearly 70 of its committees.68CSP Dom. 1649-50, 1650 passim. A few of these were related to Welsh affairs, specifically on the security of Montgomeryshire and Radnorshire.69CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 78, 179, 327, 364; 1650, p. 6. But his election to council confirmed Jones as now prominent in national affairs of state. From the outset of his service on council, he was named to committees on aspects of the military presence in Ireland, and on 2 March 1650 became a member of a committee to manage Irish affairs in general.70CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 22, 26, 56, 62, 248, 453, 465; 1650, pp. 18, 174. Among other important council committees to claim Jones’s attention were those for the admiralty (26 Mar. 1649), at which he signed 60 letters between March 1649 and February 1650; for garrisons (29 June), on instructions to magistrates (28 Aug.), on the currency (18 Aug.) and for creditors of the state to benefit from the sales of fee farm rents (13 Apr. 1650).71CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 53, 213, 252, 284; 1650, p. 100; V.A. Rowe, Sir Henry Vane the Younger (1970), 166. He reported to the House from the council on a number of occasions in 1649: on Montgomery castle and the petition of its owner, Lord Herbert of Chirbury; on the military establishment of Ireland; on Shropshire affairs.72CJ vi. 228a, 270b, 291b, 296a. His membership of the council did not diminish his presence in the House: he was named to a total of 45 parliamentary committees in 1649 and 38 the following year. Among the most important of these committees in the early months of 1649 were those re-structuring church and state: abolishing deans and chapters (20 Feb.), surveying crown lands (24 Feb.), the bills for taking away monarchy and Lords (7 Mar.) and for selling fee farm rents (3 Apr.) and for settling £20,000 on preaching ministers.73CJ vi. 147b, 150b, 158a, 178b, 196a.

As well as being a diligent attender of both House and council, Jones soon acquired specific legislative responsibilities in 1649. With two other Rumpers he was asked to introduce a bill for taking accounts (23 Feb.), and later in the year became the leading figure in the committee managing the matter.74CJ vi. 149b, 324a. On 9 July he was given charge of a bill to reward Colonel Michael Jones (a distant relative) and Colonel Charles Coote*, both of whom had distinguished themselves in Ireland. Later in that year it was Jones who reported to the House on the act for compositions in north Wales (10 Aug.), which took a lenient view of Jones’s enemy, Archbishop Williams; and it was he who managed amendments to the bill providing instructions to the trustees for sales of crown lands (2 Oct.).75CJ vi. 256b, 277a, 301b. It was the committees of early 1649, rather than military service in the field, that provided the context for Jones’s first association with Thomas Harrison I; the two were named to at least six committees together in February and March, and the pair plus Thomas Scot I had sole charge of the bill for taking accounts.76CJ vi. 134a, 142a, 147b, 149b, 150b, 158a. They evidently discovered a millenarian religious enthusiasm in common, and on 20 December a petition from north Wales, doubtless supported if not engineered by Jones, was referred to a committee chaired by Harrison. The resulting legislation, steered through by Harrison and William Say, was the celebrated act for propagating the gospel in Wales (22 Feb. 1650).77CJ vi. 336a, 352a, 365b; S.K. Roberts, ‘Propagating the Gospel in Wales: the Making of the 1650 Act’, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion n.s. x. 57-75. Jones was involved in law-making for other evangelical initiatives, for Norwich and Bristol, around the same period.78CJ vi. 358a, 365b.

As a former man-of-business with experience in conveyancing matters, Jones would have been able to contribute informed advice on a number of the committees involving the transfer of the former assets of church and crown. Among the briefs of these bodies were a bill for removing obstacles to crown land sales (18 Feb. 1650), for which he was largely responsible.79CJ vi. 358b, 366b, 367b. After the bill had been passed, Jones drafted particulars of obstructions in the way of soldiers seeking to perfect accounts of their service before claiming lands in lieu of pay, which were referred to the Army Committee. He was asked to consider the case of claimant at the opposite end of the social spectrum, William Cecil*, 2nd earl of Salisbury (15 Apr.), and served on a committee bestowing on the executive bodies of penal taxation the power of seeking out fresh estates to sequester (3 July).80CJ vi. 371b, 398b, 436b. Other lesser committees removing lands from some and bestowing lands on others, and yet others addressing technical complications of sales and confiscations, claimed his time.81CJ vi. 400b, 403b, 409a, 420a, 428b. It was probably his namesake, the Presbyterian Londoner, who had been named by the City in 1646 as a trustee for bishops’ lands, but from 1650 it was the regicide who bought lands of the two north Wales bishoprics.82CJ iv. 684b; Bodl. Rawl. B.239, pp. 48, 50, 51. This was the start of a series of purchases by Jones in the land market opened up by government confiscations and sales, and his brother-in-law, Watkin Kyffin, who like Jones had served Myddelton, now became his own agent; but even before the civil war, his family had been active in land transactions in a pattern which saw accretions of holdings both in Merioneth and Denbighshire.83Chirk Castle Accts. 1605-66, 17.

The entry into the House of Colonel Philip Jones (5 Feb. 1650) is a potential complication in identifying all of John Jones’s committee appointments in the Rump. Even so, as the senior parliamentarian of the pair it was probably John Jones who was the ‘Col. Jones’ named to most, and who was named to committees on a range of reforming issues such as reducing the poor laws into a single code (1 Mar. 1650), on relief of poor debtors (18 June) and simplifying exchequer procedure for local officials accountable there (12 Sept.). Jones was one of three Members given charge of the poor law reform bill, indicating surely that he was an enthusiast for radical measures.84CJ vi. 374b, 424b, 467a. He and John Weaver were given responsibility for a bill abolishing compulsory attendance at parish churches (13 Sept.), on which it was Jones who reported.85CJ vi. 468a, 470a. However, he was willing to be named to committees that delineated the limits of religious freedom: on licentious practices masquerading as liberty (14 June) and on suppressing blasphemy (24 June), the latter along with Philip Jones.86CJ vi. 423b, 430a. He served a teller only twice in this Parliament: with Sir Arthur Hesilrige in a division on articles of war (18 Mar. 1650) when they lost by one vote; and on a motion to accept the advice of the Navy Committee in its dealings with the East India Company (27 June), which Jones’ side was successful in rejecting.87CJ vi. 383b, 433b. All of this would confirm that he was among the most radical of the republicans in the House, but his military credentials were never more than modest. It was for his abilities as an administrator that he was respected at Westminster, though he clung on to command of his north Wales troop.88NLW, MS 11440D, p. 15.

It was doubtless for these abilities that Jones was selected for civilian service in Ireland in support of Henry Ireton*, the lord deputy there. He was nominated by the council of state (27 June), and the appointment was approved by the House on 2 July 1650. The process of his despatch to his new post was leisurely: instructions for Jones and his fellow-commissioners passed the House on 4 October, his annual salary of £1,000 was settled nearly three weeks later, and the last of his committee appointments in the House came on 27 December.89CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 219, 376, 397; CJ vi. 435a, 479a, 486b, 515b. By the time of his appointment, Jones had built up significant experience in Irish affairs, so his selection was based on his merits, but he himself attributed his posting to Oliver Cromwell, whom he still held in high regard after nearly a year in Ireland. Edmund Ludlowe II suspected his own posting to be a means of removing him from the political scene in England, and like him, Jones was more wholeheartedly republican than Cromwell was.90‘Inedited Letters’, 178, 196; Ludlow Mems. i. 249. He shared none of Cromwell’s optimism about the potential for a new Parliament, and on several occasions in the early 1650s expressed his belief in the need for the commonwealth to strike deeper roots before stability was hazarded in further political upheaval.91‘Inedited Letters’, 191; NLW, MS 11440D, p. 31. Jones and the other commissioners, Ludlowe, Miles Corbett* and John Weaver*, made their first report from Waterford on 25 January 1651.92Ludlow Mems. i. 486. Jones’s belief in the English republic co-existed with a punitive approach to Ireland and the Irish. He regarded the polity of the country as a tabula rasa, describing to a relative in Wales his task as ‘the framing or forming of a commonwealth out of a corrupt rude mass’.93NLW, MS 11440D, p. 75. The Irish were ‘an accursed people’, and only evictions, resettlement and plantation by English (or Welsh) settlers would pacify the country. He was convinced that only the most brutally defensive pattern of colonial settlement would suffice, whereby the populace was confined to garrisons, priests expelled and Irish political interests and groupings broken.94MS 11440D, pp. 36-8, 52-5; ‘Inedited Letters’, 206. He himself acquired property in Ireland: holdings in the moorlands of Kildare, and the lease of a house at Chapelizod, just outside Dublin.95‘Inedited Letters’, 228-30, 233-5, 246-8. He hoped to set himself up as a landed gentleman in Ireland, stocking his estate with Welsh cattle shipped over in lieu of rents from his impoverished tenants in Merioneth.96‘Inedited Letters’, 230-2.

Commissioner in Ireland

From Ireland, Jones wrote letters to various correspondents in England and Wales which make clear his perspective on political developments. He invested great hope in Cromwell, whom he thought ‘meek’ even after the latter’s apotheosis after the battle of Worcester (3 Sept. 1651), and whose only fault he could identify was a too emphatic ‘idolizing’ of ideas of justice. He shared the radicals’ interpretation of Worcester as the last in ‘a series of successes’. 97‘Inedited Letters’, 178, 186. While he was in favour of a comprehensive measure of indemnity and oblivion after the battle, to bring closure to political divisions, he feared the ambitions of those who sought to take the places of the peers executed for fomenting rebellion against the commonwealth, though Cromwell himself was evidently not among his suspects. His approach to the treatment of Scotland contrasted sharply with the policy he advocated in his own work. He was sceptical of the strategy of sending commissioners to Scotland, and thought the best way to win over the Scots was to create and extend freeholds of estates there, so they would ‘fix their interest in you’: exactly the opposite of his nostrums for Ireland. He was troubled by the republic’s war with the Dutch, pressing Sir Henry Vane II*, like himself a sceptic on the wisdom of such a conflict, on whether the mind of God had really been sufficiently divined on the matter.98‘Inedited Letters’, 192-3; MS 11440D, pp. 66-7.

Jones’s principal and consistent priority lay in the creation of a godly commonwealth, sharing the millenarian optimism of the minority who saw the republic as deliverance from ‘a time of ignorance whereat God winked’.99MS 11440D, pp. 121-2. His posting to Ireland meant he could only offer support and encouragement to the commissioners for the propagation of the gospel in Wales, and thought that nowhere was more in need of reformation than his native county. His impatience in October 1651 at what he considered delays in despatching preachers to Merioneth was apparent. When separate petitions from north and south Wales against the propagators emerged in February 1652 he seemed unperturbed, believing ‘the more the Saints are tried, the more their lustre will appear’. He probably did not know at this point that a promoter of one of these petitions was his former employer, Sir Thomas Myddelton, and six months later was expressing more concern about it.100‘Inedited Letters’, 209-10; MS 11440D, p.87. He apparently saw no contradiction in calling on the same ministers not only to evangelize more actively in Wales, but also to visit Ireland to proselytize there. His disappointment therefore only deepened when no ministers came in numbers; he deplored the fact that they were evidently unwilling to abandon their ‘fruitful vineyards’ in England to visit Ireland.101MS 11440D, pp. 12-14, 75. For all his millenarian sympathies, he believed in the potential of the secular magistrate for enforcing a godly reformation in society. He recommended to Merioneth magistrates the example of Dublin, where fines for drunkenness were used to fund the city’s workhouse. He believed in winnowing the ungodly from the commissions of the peace, feared the pretence at godliness that might be found in some candidates for office, but conceded that he was an idealist whose ‘qualifications [were] too narrow for the ministers of any commonwealth but Sir Thomas More’s’. ‘Much knowledge of the affairs of men and much grace and godliness do not always dwell together’, was his view.102NLW. Peniarth 233, pt. ii., pp. 7-10; MS 11440D, pp. 43-5, 86. On more than one occasion he professed an indifference to changes in the ‘outward administration’ (political constitution) that seems surprising, even unwarranted, given the prevailing crisis of the time, but which he thought the natural corollary of a belief in God’s providence: ‘when I am over-voted I fully acquiesce and conform as being the mind of God’.103‘Inedited Letters’, 219-21, 237-9; MS 11440D, pp. 52-5; A. Clarke, Prelude to Restoration in Ireland (Cambridge, 1999), 93-4.

Jones’s own theological opinions were orthodox. He deplored divisions among the godly, which he considered one of the greatest threats to the Christian commonwealth, and for that reason particularly disliked formal, public disputations among the clergy.104MS 11440D, pp. 75, 111-3; ‘Inedited Letters’, 211-4. While he saw Morgan Llwyd’s books through the press in Dublin, he was troubled at the complexities in Llwyd’s thought, which he considered obscurities beyond the ken of the reading public: ‘babes must be fed with milk’.105‘Inedited Letters’, 245-6; MS 11440D, pp. 137-9. In February and 1652 he robustly rejected allegations that ‘Anabaptists’ were taking over the army, with the defence employed in the 1640s by Cromwell that they were merely the most godly. However, he was hostile to antinomianism, ‘a spirit of delusion, this dragon’s tail’; and wrote reprovingly to Colonel Robert Phaier, whose regiment included some very unorthodox members, for not intervening in his command to impose a measure of discipline on spiritual matters.106MS 11440D, pp. 36-8, 75, 131; ‘Inedited Letters’, 207-8, 209-10. In late 1652 and early 1653 Harrison wrote to Jones as a friend and ally, hoping that he would be able to visit London to participate in discussions centring on the millenarian congregation at Blackfriars under the ministry of Christopher Feake, and Jones wrote in support of Harrison in the last months of the Rump Parliament, adopting a faintly critical tone towards Henry Cromwell*. When congregations and army officers began to make nominations for what was to become the Nominated Assembly, Harrison wrote for Jones’s approval of names, but it was an indication of how his posting to Ireland had confined his influence that Jones was asked only to advise on selections for north Wales.107‘Inedited Letters’, 201-2, 217, 218, 226-7; MS 11440D, pp. 111-13.

Jones transferred his loyalty readily to the regime that followed Cromwell’s dismissal of the Rump, welcoming the new assembly which first met in July 1653 as ‘the choicest and most singularly elected Parliament that ever was in England.’ He retained his appointment in Ireland, from whence as early as August, however, he was warning against political divisions and reminding his correspondents of the importance of the communion of saints, ‘once an article of our creed’.108‘Inedited Letters’, 237-9. His anxieties over Christian divisions intensified while the Nominated Assembly was in session. He consulted Peter Sterry, a minister whose preaching he had heard while attending council of state meetings in Whitehall, over differing interpretations among Irish Protestants on the efficacy of baptism, and sought to dispel an unwelcome rumour that the Wrexham church under Llwyd had abandoned prayers and the Lord’s Supper.109‘Inedited Letters’, 246-8, 248-51, 260-2; MS 11439D, f. 36. He accepted the disappointment of the failure of the Nominated Assembly with equanimity. He began to talk of retirement, but made it clear he would continue to serve in Ireland if asked. Jones confined himself to writing to Colonel Philip Jones*, a member of the lord protector’s council, to assure him of his political pragmatism: ‘If the government be so established as may produce the fruits of righteousness, peace and love to the Saints, I am not solicitous what form or shape it hath.’ But he included an oblique warning to Cromwell and his council to take care lest they become offensive to God, a ‘burthensome stone and a rock of offence to his people, lest he break you with a rod of iron and dash you in pieces like a potter’s vessel’.110‘Inedited Letters’, 219-21. Henry Cromwell* considered Jones to be disaffected towards the protectorate, simply ‘more cunning and close’ than the openly hostile Edmund Ludlowe II in his opposition and attempts to undermine the new regime in Dublin, but Jones’s protestations of somewhat qualified loyalty were probably genuine.111TSP ii. 149. Although he served effectively during the early months of 1654, he seems soon to have resigned his post in Ireland voluntarily but probably at the government’s prompting, and returned to London to petition for debentures he forfeited by virtue of his Irish service, and for arrears of army pay.112TSP iii. 308-9, 404, 516; CSP Dom. 1654, 303.

Service under the protectorate

The advent of the protectorate broke the unity of the Welsh ‘saints’ and their English associates, a unity which Jones had striven as best he could to preserve. Some of his collaborators, such as Vavasor Powell, Feake and Thomas Harrison I, moved into opposition, while others, such as Morgan Llwyd, accommodated themselves to the regime. Jones was in the latter camp, and was sufficiently acceptable to the government in the summer of 1654 to be appointed a commissioner for ejecting scandalous ministers in north Wales. When a royalist rising began to stir in Montgomeryshire, the old troop Jones had commanded in the early days of the Rump re-formed, and during the extended civil emergency of 1655-6, James Berry* came to think well of Jones, one of the major-general’s commissioners, and to appreciate his continuing usefulness to the government.113TSP iii. 209, 214, iv. 413. From early 1656, Jones’s rehabilitation at Whitehall began in earnest. He was identified as someone who might take an ambassadorial role to the Dutch, but the suggestion that he be recalled to the council in Ireland met with hostility from Henry Cromwell who reminded Thurloe of his earlier warnings about Jones’s capacity for sowing divisions among Dublin Protestants: an odd and unconvincing condemnation in the light of ample evidence in Jones’s correspondence for his efforts in the interests of Protestant unity. For good measure Cromwell threw in as an aside that Jones was corrupt, but he was obliged to modify his opposition to him when he learned that Jones was to marry Oliver Cromwell’s sister, Katherine Whitstone.114Henry Cromwell Corresp. 92, 115 ; TSP iv. 413, 606, 672.

It seems that in 1656 while he was accepting various commissions from the government, Jones was discussing with Thomas Harrison I the principles on which support for it could be justified.115‘Inedited Letters’, 256-8. He was seemingly expected to work on the government’s behalf in the 1656 elections, and Major-general James Berry held Jones responsible for the government’s briefing to Caernarfonshire magistrates.116TSP v. 219. Jones was himself a candidate in the 1656 election, and was returned as knight for the two north Wales shires in which he maintained an interest. In Denbighshire he stood co-operatively with John Carter*, with the support of Simon Thelwall*. To the dismay of Henry Cromwell, he was also a candidate for Dublin County. He chose to sit for his native shire.117CJ vii. 434a; Cal. Wynn Pprs. 345-6; TSP v. 327. Once at Westminster, he became a reliable supporter of the government, and was quickly named to the committees for privileges (18 Sept.) and for Scottish and Irish affairs (23 Sept.).118CJ vii. 424a, 427a. In the House his record is once more obscured by the presence, by now looming significantly larger than his own, of Colonel Philip Jones. Both were named to the committee of privileges, the committee for exclusion of Charles Stuart from the throne; both to the committee for Scottish and Irish affairs, for the security of the protector (26 Sept.), for the sequestered parsonages bill (4 Oct.), the naturalization bill (6 Oct.), the Peyton estate sale bill (16 Oct.), the court of wards abolition bill (29 Oct.), on James Naylor’s blasphemies and ministers’ maintenance (31 Oct.) and on the petition of civil lawyers (1 Dec.).119CJ vii. 425a, 429a, 434a, 434b, 439b, 447a, 448a, 448b, 462b. In 1657 both men were named to committees to pen a new clause for the Remonstrance (6 Mar.), to examine the bill settling Irish lands on Charles Lloyd* (1 May), to define the Protector’s title (19 May), to consider Viscount Moore’s lands sale bill (4 June), and the public debts bill (19 June).120CJ vii. 499b, 529a, 535a, 545a, 563a. To the end of December 1656, Jones was named unambiguously to a further nine committees, a number associated with topics of previous interest to him, such as the reformation of manners and social regulation more generally. Typical were committees on bills to prohibit labour on fast days (22 Sept.) and on abuses in alehouses (29 Sept.). He had a wealth of experience to bring to the committee on eliciting reports from contractors on obstacles to sales of confiscated lands (17 Oct.).121CJ vii. 426a, 430a, 440b.

In the Journal for 1657, the possibility of distinguishing the two Colonels Jones becomes fainter, as the clerk’s preferred style was not to record a forename for either. No unambiguous committee nomination of his without Philip Jones as a colleague occurred in 1657 until 22 May (the Irish lands bill) and it is probable that only a few of the undifferentiated committee listings for ‘Colonel Jones’ from February to June were his lot, and more likely that those that concerned the Remonstrance and the Petition and Advice fell to Philip, as an active manager for the government.122CJ vii. 537b. Burton’s diary of debates 1656-7 attributes some 85 speeches to ‘Colonel Jones’, another 20 to ‘Colonel Philip Jones’ and only one to ‘Colonel John Jones’ (9 June 1657). There is no compelling reason to suppose that any of the undifferentiated speeches were John’s: the balance of probability is that they were Philip’s with very few, if any, exceptions. John Jones’s speech of 9 June was a plea for the House to find time for a bill to settle £100 on Mrs Moorcock, the widow of an Irish clergyman whose virtues he was prepared to commend.123Burton’s Diary, ii. 204, 304. Possibly he had other things to say during the debates on Ireland that month, when he was named to two Irish committees.124CJ vii. 545a, 546a. It is certain that, following a petition of his to the House for arrears (17 Feb.), which was referred to a committee, he was granted Irish lands in lieu (2 June), and on 24 June when Lord Broghill’s compensation bill was passed, Jones’s grant of lands worth £3,002 8s and Mrs Moorcock’s mite were tagged on as ‘provisos’.125CJ vii. 492b, 543b, 544a, 573b. Eleven divisions in this Parliament were recorded as attended by ‘Colonel Jones’ as a teller, but only two of these, on Irish land allocations (5, 12 June 1657), can with reasonable confidence be attributed to John Jones.126CJ vii. 546a, 555b.

In December 1657, Jones was given responsibility for distributing gunpowder in the north Wales garrisons, and on the 10th was promoted to the new Upper House, the alternative Lord Jones, as Philip was likewise recruited.127CSP Dom. 1657-8, p. 217. An observer surely correctly spotted Jones as an oddity among the Cromwellian lords, as a man ‘not thorough-paced for the court proceedings, nor … his conscience fully hardened against the good old cause’.128Second Narrative of the Late Parliament (1658), 17. He proved a regular and reliable attender at the Other House, and in the last months of Oliver Cromwell’s life in 1658, Jones and Henry Cromwell seem to have arrived at a state of amicable relations, with Jones suggesting himself to Ireland for a summer visit and warning Henry against a politically compromised north Walian.129Henry Cromwell Corresp. 289, 387-8. His loyalty to the house of Cromwell survived Oliver’s death. He served in the same parliamentary capacity during Richard Cromwell’s short-lived Parliament. He was named to the committee of privileges for the Other House, and to its committees on reviewing the legislation on immoral behaviour, the bill to continue the suppression of the Stuart monarchy, and for suppressing stage plays and opera. All of these were typical of Jones’s long-held interests and concerns.130HMC Lords, iv. 526, 529, 537.

Restored Rump, Trial and Execution

His membership of the Other House and family links with the Cromwells notwithstanding, Jones was on hand at Westminster to become an active member of the Rump Parliament when it was restored in May 1659. He played a prominent part in settling in the new government. As a member of a committee of safety and with high-profile republicans such as Sir Arthur Hesilrige* and Sir Henry Vane II* he quickly assured army officers of the Parliament’s high regard for them (7 May), and he reported on the measure to introduce a council of state. He himself was a member of that body when it was formed a week later.131CJ vii. 646a, 650a, 654a; Ludlow, Memoirs, ii. 74. He helped seek out information on the whereabouts of the Rumpers of 1649-53, advised on Irish affairs, and served on committees to bring in a fresh bill of indemnity and to allocate accommodation at Westminster to Members.132CJ vii. 645a, 655a, 656a. Probably because of his relations with the Cromwell family he was selected to separate out in the London palaces which property was the state’s from that of their previous occupants, and to make a settlement on Richard Cromwell, which took him until 16 July to prepare for the House.133CJ vii. 663a, 665a, 720a. Jones would have been in support of Charles Fleetwood’s ascent to become lord general (4 June), as one who had worked with him closely in Ireland, and a few days after Fleetwood was appointed to supreme military command, he recovered his Irish commissionership.134CJ vii. 668a, 672b, 674a, 700a When a proviso to exempt from the bill of indemnity all guilty of malfeasance in office since 1653 came to a division, Jones opposed the reading of it, suggesting that he still retained his instinct for political harmony where possible. As governor of Anglesey, he tried to ensure that his godly friend, Hugh Courtney*, succeeded him in that role, but the council seemed unenthusiastic. On 16 July, he was given military commissions to bestow in Ireland on the Parliament’s behalf.135CJ vii. 714b, 721b; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 28.

With Edmund Ludlowe II, Jones sailed from Holyhead to Dublin soon after 19 July 1659.136Ludlow, Memoirs, ii. 104. Soon afterwards, Jones and other Irish officials ordered troops back to north Wales to help suppress the rising of Sir George Boothe*, whose co-adjutor in Denbighshire was Jones’s former master, Myddelton.137Ludlow, Memoirs, ii. 107-9. Ludlowe’s reasons for wishing to return to London in October remain somewhat opaque, but on his departure he invested command of the army in Ireland in Jones, whose appointment as a civilian commissioner in Ireland had in fact lapsed in September. In his retrospective memoirs, Ludlowe was at pains to stress how he had worked to ensure that Jones was acceptable to senior army officers before he announced his choice. Before leaving Dublin, Ludlowe warned Jones against ‘the common enemy’ (the royalists), but when he reached Anglesey, he was told that the military had for a second time expelled the Rump Parliament.138Ludlow, Memoirs, ii. 122-5, 127, 129. Jones’s response was to assure Fleetwood, one of the officers involved in the coup, that the army in Ireland remained intact and that his leadership commanded the trust of the officers. He found the coup ‘strange and unparalleled’, but took comfort from its bloodlessness.139‘Inedited Letters’, 262-4. He complained to Fleetwood about his workload, his debts and his arrears of salary, and his engrained indifference to forms of state polity rendered him an inadequate leader in a crisis which was about these very matters.140‘Inedited Letters’, 268-9, 269-70; Clarke, Prelude to Restoration, 93. During the closing months of 1659 he continued to report to London that he was working to maintain unity in the governing class in Dublin, but he was quick to suspect the commander of the army in Scotland, thinking first that George Monck* had misjudged the capacity of the forces in Ireland and Scotland to suppress any English rising in the interests of Charles Stuart, then by mid-November coming to realize that another recall of the Rump would lead by stages to the restoration of monarchy.141‘Inedited Letters’, 270-1, 272-3, 274, 275-6, 277-8, 279-80.

By the end of November, Jones had become demoralized, reporting on a rising tide of faction in Ireland, assuring Ludlowe that he never wanted the job there, which he had only taken to oblige his former colleague; and envying Ludlowe his freedom from ‘snares’ in England.142‘Inedited Letters’, 280-3. In particular he feared a resurgence of the ideology which had driven the rising in the summer of Boothe and Myddelton: royalism masquerading as Presbyterianism.143‘Inedited Letters’, 287-9, 289-91; CSP Ire. 1647-60, p. 693 His relations with the Cromwells took a turn for the worse, as he thought they conspired to stop his wife’s pension from Oliver, and he more than hinted that because of their materialism and ambition he had been deprived of the ‘sweetness and comfort’ he had expected from joining the family.144‘Inedited Letters’, 291-2, 297-8, 298-9. Jones soon faced an open revolt by a group of officers led by Colonel John Bridges*, ostensibly in support of the Rump Parliament, which had been restored again. He was arrested on 13 December 1659.145CSP Ire. 1647-60, p. 716; Ludlow, Memoirs, ii. 184. From his confinement in the castle, Jones remonstrated with Sir Hardress Waller*, one of those issuing orders to officers in defiance of the authority of Jones and Ludlowe, and expressed incredulity that the regicide Waller appeared not to see that his actions would lead to the return of Charles Stuart.146Ludlow, Memoirs, ii. 184-5; ‘Inedited Letters’, 292-4. He later reproached Waller for detaining from him a letter from Monck, which would have given Jones an insight sooner into Monck’s sympathies towards demands for a free Parliament and the boost to a return of the monarchy that that course would entail.147‘Inedited Letters’, 296-7.

On 5 January 1660, Jones, Ludlowe and Miles Corbett were summoned back to London to account for themselves before a Parliament that was increasingly hostile towards the republicans.148CJ vii. 803b. Two weeks later, impeachment articles against them were presented by Sir Charles Coote*, probably acting primarily in the best interests of the Protestant landowning interest in Ireland, and secondarily, if at all, in those of the exiled king. The gravamen of the charge against Jones was that he had taken the side of the army against Parliament, a charge which his surviving correspondence and various remonstrations amply show to have been grossly unfair.149CJ vii. 815b; Ludlow, Memoirs, ii. 213, 464-70. In contrast to the more spirited Ludlowe, who escaped from London, Jones complied with the demand by the council of state after the Secluded Members had returned to Parliament that he should promise not to act to alter the present government.150Ludlow, Voyce, 104. He seems not to have appreciated quickly that he was in danger of his life after the return of the king and the passage through the Houses of the act of indemnity and oblivion, which exempted the regicides from clemency.151LJ xi. 32b, 101b, 102a. He was granted a pass to go to Chester (5 May 1660), but was slow to leave London and was arrested (2 June) while taking the air.152CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 575; Ludlow, Memoirs, ii. 272; Ludlow, Voyce, 154. At his trial for high treason (12 Oct.), he pleaded not guilty but did not deny his participation in that of the king.153State Trials ed. T. B. Howell (21 vols. 1815), v. 1004, 1072-3. As it was by then clear that no argument would avail him, he did not prolong the proceedings

I have little to say, your Lordships have already heard what is to be said in this case; I have nothing to say to the point; I am not fit to plead anything, especially in matter of law; I must wholly put myself upon the Lord, and this honourable court and jury.154State Trials ed. Howell, v. 1073.

Found guilty, and denied royal clemency in spite of his age, he bowed to his fate and was hanged, drawn and quartered (17 Oct. 1660). Reduced to the role of the small man caught up in events beyond his influence, he had asserted the dignity of a political loser, but his contemporaries saw only his baffled compliance with the dictates of a religion which had seemingly misguided him, letting him suppose that he was a promoter of the divine direction of affairs. True to this perception, his friends represented him as a martyr, borne to execution in Elijah’s chariot, ‘only it goes through Fleet Street’.155Ludlow, Voyce, 248-50.

Jones’s only surviving son was allowed to retain the lands his father had held before 1646. The rest were granted by the king to the duke of York, despite an attempt by Jones’s royalist stepson to obtain them, except for the Irish lands, which went to Arthur Annesley*, Viscount Valentia.156CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 442; CSP Ire. 1660-2, p. 271; Cal. Lttrs. relating to N. Wales, 14. Correspondence about Jones’s debts and the incumbrances on his remaining estate dragged on until the mid-1660s, and in 1668 his widow declared herself to be in ever worsening straits.157Cal. Lttrs. relating to N. Wales, 117-35; NLW 11447C, letter 3. John Jones’s son became the heir of Humphrey Jones, the uncle who had worked alongside Jones in London to set out Myddelton’s army in the first civil war, and who later served as a public official during the interregnum.158Aylmer, State’s Servants, 229-30. John Jones junior married Humphrey’s step-daughter, but the Wrexham-bred heir eventually sold out of Merioneth and, himself leaving an only daughter, threw a veil over the heritage of Jones the regicide.159DWB. Despite his entanglements with the protectorate, Jones was at heart consistently a republican, but was driven by the millenarian faith he had espoused at Wrexham in the late 1640s rather than by the conventional and conservative piety for so long his natural environment as a servant of the Myddeltons. His skills lay in conveyancing rather than in military strategy, his interests in godly proselytizing rather than state polity, but yet more than any other figure his name has come to personify the Welsh experience of seventeenth-century republicanism.