MORGAN, David (c.1624-75), of St James, Westminster, Mdx. and Alltygog, Abergwili, Carm.

Morgan’s surname was a patronymic, his father being styled ‘Morgan Lewis, gentleman’ when the son was admitted to Gray’s Inn. Morgan Lewis was a Carmarthenshire farmer, most of whose estate of £38 at his death around 1636 was in cattle and sheep. He considered himself enough of a gentleman to claim the privilege of burial within the church of Abergwili, and a late seventeenth-century antiquary compiled a lengthy pedigree of the family, treating it as gentry.16NLW, SD/1636/1; W. Wales Hist. Recs. ii. 11. David Morgan’s maternal grandfather, Harry Watkin, was from a similar yeoman/parish gentleman background.17NLW, SD/1609/27. There is no doubt that David Morgan’s education at Gray’s Inn transformed his prospects. His activities during the civil war remain obscure. A David Morgan was appointed a commissioner for the three south-western counties of Wales on 10 June 1644 and was one of three ejected by parliamentary order on 14 August that year for ‘having turned to them that are in actual war against Parliament’: this seems more likely to have been David Morgan (d.1679) of Coedllwyd, Clydey, Pembrokeshire, who was distinguished by his address when he came to terms with the protectorate and was chosen for county committees in Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire.18LJ vi. 670a. Nor was he the sequestrator of Breconshire removed by the county committee in 1651 for under-valuing estates.19CCC 494. It seems likely that Morgan spent the civil war years in London, if not practising law, then working as an agent in property transactions. Soon after 1644 he married the widow of a Hertfordshire gentleman, who had been wealthy enough to leave £3,000 to each of his two daughters.20PROB11/191, f. 49. Dorothy Mayne was the heiress of a London haberdasher, who by January 1649 had lent Morgan at least £1,000.21PROB11/233, f. 113. Morgan went to live at Bovingdon on his marriage, but by 1651 had probably returned to London.22Herts. RO, DE/Cm/37593.

In March 1649, Morgan made the first of a number of purchases of confiscated bishops’ lands across south Wales, suggesting strongly that he was on hand in London to gain an advantage when bids were invited from would-be buyers. Also in March that year he was added to the commission of the peace for his native county and to other local government bodies. After the surveys of Welsh crown lands had been completed, Morgan once again intervened to buy up some attractive properties. The most important of these lay in and around Brecon and across Carmarthenshire. He was probably able to acquire these advantageously as an ‘original creditor’ because of discoveries he reported to the surveyors of ‘concealed’ lands in the three counties of Breconshire, Carmarthenshire and Cardiganshire.23Madge, Domesday of Crown Lands, 342. These acquisitions brought with them rights of patronage, and Morgan bestowed one of his new livings, Meidrim, on Stephen Hughes, son of a Carmarthen alderman and silk merchant. Hughes, an Independent, achieved fame after his later ejection from Meidrim as a publisher of books in Welsh, gaining widespread respect as the ‘apostle of Carmarthenshire’. 24Oxford DNB, ‘Stephen Hughes’. Morgan’s nomination of Hughes, later confirmed by the ‘approvers’, came two days after the former had been included among the ‘ejectors’ for south Wales, indicating Morgan’s acceptability to the lord protector’s council.

In January 1656 Morgan and his wife petitioned the protector’s council concerning Dorothy Morgan’s daughter, Sarah Mayne, whose fortune from her late father they estimated as £12,000. The Morgans alleged that Sarah had been abducted overseas by Charles Glascock, with the help of James Ley, 3rd earl of Marlborough, a former royalist with a background in naval command.25CSP Dom. 1655-6, p. 152. The petition was at least an indicator that Morgan was more likely then to have been living in the metropolis than in west Wales, and in 1658 his address was St James, Westminster.26Herts. RO, DE/Cm/37583. However, Morgan was intent on building a political interest in Carmarthenshire appropriate for his new-found landed wealth. As one with both an estate and a family history in the borough of Carmarthen he would have found little or no resistance to his membership of the common council. The borough had returned no Members to the Parliaments of 1654 and 1656 held under the rubric of the Instrument of Government, so the elections of January 1659 were the first opportunity for Morgan to attempt a seat since acquiring his estates. At the election, on 3 January, the sheriffs did what they could to win support for Thomas Hughes*, but the popular cry was for Morgan. An indenture was returned for Hughes, but recognizing Hughes’s unpopularity, the sheriffs then proposed Rowland Dawkins*, and refused to accept the townsmen’s preference for Morgan. The hostility towards Morgan of one of the sheriffs, John Vaughan, a kinsman of Richard Vaughan, earl of Carbery, was palpable. When the case came to the committee of privileges, the House accepted its findings, for Morgan.27CJ vii. 617a,b, 620b, 621a; The State of the Case betwixt Major General Rowland Dawkins (1659, BL 1865.c.16.116). Morgan had damaged Vaughan’s interests in a lease of the tithes of Abergwili and two other parishes, but this seems inadequate to explain the sheriff’s determination to block Morgan’s candidature.28E113/1, answers of Thomas Vaughan, Evan Thomas. He made, it seems, no impact on the proceedings of the House between his admission on 22 March and the dissolution on 22 April. However, he was certainly in London on the day the Parliament found in his favour. He was summoned before Richard Cromwell to offer evidence in the case of Philip’s Jones’s complaints that he had been slandered. In response to allegations that Jones had acquired an estate with tithe money, Morgan said he thought Jones might have been guilty, ‘in regard he had always obstructed the bringing that money to account’, and seemed confident that the committee of Edward Freeman* would discover the truth. As the narrator of this incident wryly observed, ‘when a faction breaks out in Wales it seldom dies’.29Henry Cromwell Corresp. 482-3.

The 1659 election was Morgan’s only known venture into parliamentary politics. Having been a victim of the Carmarthen sheriff’s rough handling early in 1659, he served in the office himself in 1659-60, and presumably therefore presided over the borough election for the Convention Parliament of 1660. When the monarchy was restored, most of his Welsh estates were forfeit to the original owners, the bishops and the crown, and even his local government career came to an abrupt end. During his shrievalty he was alleged to have disenfranchise seven common councillors, among them his enemy John Vaughan and the recorder, Edmund Jones*. In the greatly altered circumstances of the Restoration he fell victim to local revenge, and he was expelled from the council (22 Mar. 1661) for having

insinuated into the commonalty of this corporation that they had or ought to have equal voices with the common council to elect and remove officers of this corporation ... contrary to law and to the ancient ordinances of this corporation by which irregular proceedings and practice the good government of this corporation is much corrupted and great discords risen between the common council and commonalty.30Carm. RO, Mus. 155, f. 82.

Excluded from local office, at least until the Declaration of Indulgence of 1672, Morgan became a litigant. On 19 August 1669 he petitioned the king to transfer an indictment against him for barratry, the offence of habitual litigiousness being doubtless the sense of that word intended, from the Carmarthen sessions to the nearest English county, claiming that he was the victim of ‘several persons of quality’ whose debts to Aubrey de Vere, 20th earl of Oxford, he had been employed by the latter to recover. In 1672 he brought an information against two men who in the course of a public quarrel in Carmarthenshire had hurt his servants, but his antagonists were pardoned.31CSP Dom. 1668-9, p. 453, 1672-3, p. 10. Restored to the county bench, and appointed to a local duchy of Lancaster receivership, he died between 5 and 7 June 1675, describing himself in his will as ‘of the town of Carmarthen, esquire’, but desiring burial at Bovingdon. He left his wife £200 a year and legacies of £800 and £1,000 to his daughters, one docked for disobedience. He left £2 to the Rev. William Jones, who was probably the minister who after 1660 journeyed from Independency to the Baptist fold. If so, the bequest suggests that Morgan’s nonconformist sympathies were more than superficial. Another of his friends was Capt. Ralph Grundy, who had once claimed to be the only parliamentarian in Carmarthenshire.32PROB11/348, f. 119; DWB, ‘William Jones’; HMC Portland i. 660-1. His son John Morgan (d.1682) of Baily-ficar, Llansawel, who succeeded him as duchy receiver for a while, left children who married into notable county families, but the heir, John Morgan of Upland, Llandyfaelog (d.1726) left childless sons.