JONES, Richard II (1605-92), of Stowey, Chew Magna, Som.

This MP’s father, William Jones, was a Welshman, originally from either Monmouthshire or Haverfordwest, who had made his fortune as a merchant in Bristol.15Vis. Som. 1672, 18; Bristol RO, SMV/10/1/4/7, unf. By 1618 he was a member both of the council of the city’s corporation and of the elite group of Bristol traders, the Society of Merchant Venturers.16Bristol RO, SMV/10/1/2/1, unf.; SMV/10/1/4/7, unf.; Recs. relating to the Soc. of Merchant Venturers, ed. P. McGrath (Bristol Rec. Soc. xvii), 7, 8, 10, 27, 120, 123, 168, 185, 215, 221; Merchants and Merchandise in Seventeenth-Century Bristol, ed. P. McGrath (Bristol Rec. Soc. xix), 210, 213. Over the next two decades he steadily worked his way through the corporation’s cursus honorum, serving as one of the city’s two sheriffs in 1622 and, on being promoted to become an alderman, as its mayor in 1637.17Latimer, Annals of Bristol, 498; Adams’s Chronicle, 256. His contribution to the affairs of the Merchant Venturers was just as distinguished and in 1641 he held its highest office, that of master.18Bristol RO, SMV/10/1/4/7, unf.; Latimer, Annals of Bristol, 500; McGrath, Recs. relating to the Soc. of Merchant Venturers, 127. Such a career would only have been possible if back up by commercial success. One indication of just how well-connected he was within the local mercantile community is that in 1626 he and John Barker† acted as the executors of Martin Pring, the noted Bristol explorer who had sailed to the coast of Maine in 1606 with Thomas Hanham* and who had traded as far as Japan.19J.W. Damier Powell, Bristol Privateers and Ships of War (Bristol, 1930), 350-3. Jones himself almost certainly acquired considerable wealth as a result of his own trading venturers. Over the years he acquire a wide range of properties throughout Bristol.20Bristol RO, 28960/11-12; PRONI, D.2640/1; City Chamberlains’ Accounts, ed. D.M. Livock (Bristol Rec. Soc. xxiv), 87; The Topography of Medieval and Early Modern Bristol (Bristol Rec. Soc. xlviii), 37, 182.

Richard Jones seems to have been William Jones’s only son. But instead of pursuing a mercantile career in his native city, he became a Somerset country gentleman. The key event in that process was probably his marriage to Joyce Woodward, which took place at St Philip and St Jacob in Bristol in 1623.21St Philip and St Jacob, Bristol par. reg. Jones was then aged just 18. His bride’s father was another Bristol merchant, Thomas Woodward. However, Joyce Woodward had only recently inherited an estate at Compton Bishop from her uncle, Thomas Jones of Stowey. William Jones was sufficiently close to Thomas Jones that he had been appointed as one of the overseers of his will and it is entirely possible that the two were kinsmen.22Brown, Abstracts of Som. Wills, ii. 52. The marriage may even have been intended to keep those lands within the family. The estate at Stowey which Richard Jones would subsequently acquire and which became his principal residence was probably that formerly owned by Thomas Jones. His wife’s inheritance made it unnecessary for Jones to follow his father’s commercial or civic interests. His appointment as a Bristol burgess in 1638 was only as a mark of respect to his father during William Jones’s term as mayor.23Bristol RO, 04359/2, f. 269v. He can, however, be assumed to have inherited his father’s sizable property holdings in Bristol when William Jones died in October 1645, just seven weeks after the city had been recaptured by Parliament.24St John the Baptist, Bristol par. reg.

Richard Jones first emerged as a political figure in Somerset in the mid-1640s. Once Parliament had regained control of the county in the summer of 1645, the existing county institutions were purged and new, pro-parliamentarian officeholders appointed in their place. This was the point at which Jones joined the commission of the peace and the sewers commission. Like his friend, John Buckland*, he soon made himself indispensable, regularly attending the county sessions, taking depositions, acting as an adjudicator in local disputes and dealing with vagrancy and bastardy cases.25QS Recs. Som. Commonwealth, 1-71; Som. Assize Orders ed. Cockburn, 15, 16, 22; Som. RO, DD/HI/B/462: acct. of John Preston as treas. for maimed soldiers, 1647-8. In the spring of 1647 he gained a further office, when his colleagues appointed him as the treasurer of the hospitals in the eastern half of the county. His priority was supposed to be the rebuilding of part of the house of correction at Shepton Mallet, although the money for this was never collected and the work was left unfinished.26QS Recs. Som. Commonwealth, 30, 31, 37, 44, 86. The execution of the king and the establishment of the republic made no discernible difference to his enthusiasm for these duties. He continued to work as hard as ever as a justice of the peace under the Rump as he had before.27QS Recs. Som. Commonwealth, 76-198; Som. Assize Orders ed. Cockburn, 38. Among the cases he handled in the spring of 1649 was one involving an alleged witch from Minehead; Jones was the local justice who carried out the initial examinations.28Som. Assize Orders ed. Cockburn, 30. From 1649 Parliament also began including Jones on the Somerset assessment commissions.29A. and O.

Throughout this period Jones and Buckland seem to have taken care to remain aloof from the factional infighting within Somerset between John Pyne* and John Ashe*. Jones may even have performed his local offices out of a sense of public-spirited duty. In early 1650 this attempt to avoid taking sides came unstuck over the appointment of the county sequestrators. Ashe used his influence on the Committee for Compounding to appoint three of his allies to those new positions. The list was completed with the inclusion of Jones and Buckland, evidently on the principle that Pyne could not object to two such loyal, hardworking members of the commission of the peace. When Pyne then objected to the other three, Jones and Buckland kept their heads down and avoided acting in their new positions. After much lobbying in London by both sides, Pyne won out and was able to install his preferred nominees. In July 1650 the Committee for Compounding* denied that Jones and Buckland had been dismissed, but later that year the two of them were moved aside to make way for the new pro-Pyne appointees.30CCC 173, 221, 226, 264.

A reputation for impartiality may have benefitted Jones when he stood in the 1654 elections for the first Protectoral Parliament. He was one of the 11 Somerset MPs elected on 12 July. He probably approached his parliamentary duties with the same dedication as he had his role as a justice of the peace. During the six months in which this Parliament sat, Jones was named to six committees, a respectable total for a novice MP. These ranged from those on reforming chancery (5 Oct.) to mercantile affairs (4 Dec.), from the status of civil law (22 Dec.) to the excise arrears (18 Jan.).31CJ vii. 373b, 374a, 381a, 395a, 407b, 419a. At the next election, held in 1656, he stood for re-election as a Somerset MP, but failed to regain his seat. In the county poll at Wells on 20 August he polled 1,271 votes and so achieved twelfth place in a race for 11 seats.32Som. Assize Orders ed. Cockburn, 77. His third election required a change of tactic. The restoration of the old franchises for the elections for the 1659 Parliament gave him the chance to be elected at Ilchester. His role in this Parliament is more difficult to discern. He may however have been the ‘Mr Jones’ who, in the debate on 22 February, moved that they should proceed to a vote on whether the old peers should be allowed to sit in the Other House. John Disbrowe* instead persuaded the House to adjourn.33Burton’s Diary, iii. 424.

Jones had remained an active justice in Somerset throughout the protectorate.34QS Recs. Som. Commonwealth, 223-368; Som. Assize Orders ed. Cockburn, 45, 50. That would soon be held against him. In June 1660 Jones publicly declared his loyalty to the newly-restored Charles II.35Som. RO, DD/SH/3/154. However, this was not enough to prevent his removal from the commission of the peace. His only local offices thereafter were ones appointed by Parliament, which did at least continue to appoint him as an assessment commissioner in every subsequent commission.36SR. There were also a number of indirect ways in which he now became involved in Bristol civic affairs. In the early 1670s he acted as the executor for his sister, Elizabeth Farmer, who left money to provide a weekly distribution of bread to the poor of the parish of St Michael’s.37PROB11/338/462; Bristol RO, P/St.M/CH/9/a-b; 00223/8. In 1686, when the trustees of the charity established by a former alderman, Thomas Stevens, decided to build almshouses, they borrowed £200 from Jones in order to proceed with construction immediately.38Bristol RO, 12145/9. As he also bought a mortgage from one of his neighbours, a maltster from Hinton Blewett, in 1673, he may have been regularly using his spare capital to engage in money-lending.39Bristol RO, 39048/6 (d)-(e).

Jones was no longer young and it was the next generation of the family that increasingly played its part in public affairs. His younger son, Sir William†, who was closely associated with George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, prospered as a lawyer and rose first to become solicitor-general in 1673 and then attorney-general in 1675. Sir William, who was briefly a whig MP in 1680 and 1681, died in 1682. Another son, Samuel, died five years later, so, by the time he died in 1692, Jones had no surviving son. Most of his lands therefore passed to Samuel’s son, William, with a remainder to the MP for Bath, Joseph Langton†. But Jones made one other major bequest. He left £3,000 for ‘such use and uses as I in my life time shall by writing under my hand direct and appoint’, or, if no such instructions were prepared, to whatever charitable purposes his executors thought fit.40PROB 11/410/51; PROB11/410/61; Som. RO, DD/GL/164 Whether Jones did leave specific instructions is unclear. But two institutions benefited from his generosity. One was a school built at Newton St Lo.41Collinson, Som. iii. 345. The other was the Society of Merchant Venturers of Bristol, which received £1,000 to assist six poor sailors or their widows. This money was then used to construct the Society’s almhouses in King Street, Bristol, three wings of which still survive.42McGrath, Recs. relating to the Soc. of Merchant Venturers, 111; A. Foyle, Bristol (New Haven and London, 2004), 161. Someone, whether Jones himself or his executors, presumably intended this to be an acknowledgement of the source of the family’s fortune in the previous generation.