LLOYD, Jenkin (c. 1624-60), of Y Faerdref Fawr, Llandysul, Card.

There are contradictory pedigrees of the family of Lloyd of Y Faerdref, and evidence from records of probate is preferable to that picked from the conflicting family trees. A significant patriarch of the family was Ievan David Lloyd (d. 1620), Jenkin Lloyd’s grandfather, who supplied a pedigree of 1609 to the collection later published under the name of Lewis Dwnn. Y Faerdref, on the banks of the Teifi in Llandysul, was celebrated for a collection of pedigrees, suggesting that Jenkin Lloyd was nurtured in a family in which cultural pursuits were respected.13Dwnn, Vis. Wales, i. 149. Ievan David Lloyd’s will provides us with the details of Jenkin Lloyd’s parentage, in particular the name and family background of his mother, which differs from that given in at least one late seventeenth- century pedigree.14SD/1620/52; West Wales Recs. i. 19. Lloyd was sent to Shrewsbury school, and then to Jesus College, Oxford, a familiar pathway for Welsh students. According to Anthony Wood, his studies were disrupted by the civil war, and he left Oxford without taking a degree. He may not have moved far. Radical sermons were preached to a troop of the New Model army at Aston Rowant, Oxfordshire, in June 1646. The preacher, ‘one Floyd’, ‘a youth of 20 years’, has previously tentatively been identified as Morgan Llwyd (1619-59), but the age is nearer that of Jenkin Lloyd at the time, and the reporter, Thomas Edwards, was implacably hostile to any preaching that did not uphold the tenets of the orthodox, ordained, Presbyterian ministry. ‘Floyd’ was said to be lodging with Giles Calvert, the printer of radical books, whose printing shop was described by Thomas Hall, a Presbyterian minister, as ‘a forge of the Devil’.15T. Edwards, The Third Part of Gangraena (1646), 62 (E.368.5); Oxford DNB, ‘Morgan Llwyd’, ‘Giles Calvert’.

The parliamentary visitation of Oxford University in April 1648 under the auspices of Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke, drew Lloyd back to Oxford. He was awarded an MA on 14 April, and became successively a fellow and then bursar of Jesus College. In this latter capacity in 1650 he collected a rent-charge due to the college from the impropriator of Maenclochog, Pembrokeshire, and rents from Llangynhafal, Nannerch and Ysceifiog in north-east Wales.16T. Richards, The Puritan Visitation of Jesus College, Oxford (1924), 46, 51. Dr Michael Roberts, the principal of Jesus, reckoned his appearance on 1 January 1649 before the visitors of the university, at the behest of Lloyd, as the first of 16 proceedings he was obliged to endure as a defendant before various interregnum judicatures.17M. Roberts, One Charge Prosecuted Sixteen Times (1660). According to Wood, Lloyd became rector of Llandysul, his native parish, around the same time as he returned to Oxford in the late 1640s.18Ath. Ox. iv, Fasti, 258. However, another man was given the living there in 1647 by the Lords, and yet another was ejected from it by the propagation commissioners in the early 1650s.19Richards, Hist. Puritan Movement, 58, 66, 124. Lloyd was certainly rector there by July 1658, when he produced his only publication, describing himself as ‘minister of the gospel, and rector of Llandysul’, perhaps meaning that he was lay rector of the impropriation.

At some point during the year after January 1649, Lloyd became a reliable servant of the council of state and a trusted messenger to Oliver Cromwell*, and if Lloyd was the army preacher of 1646 it would explain how an Oxford bursar, even in unusual times, acquired credibility in army circles. By whatever means Lloyd came to the attention of the government, in April 1650 he was sent first to Ireland with a message for Cromwell, and in March 1651 he was selected again to journey to Scotland on the sensitive mission of establishing the state of the health of the lord general. Lloyd was recruited for the task because the council was confident that Cromwell would find him an acceptable intermediary, and he was commended for his diligence in establishing that the lord general was on the mend.20CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 73, 75, 533; 1651, pp. 90, 91, 117, 118. Michael Roberts, writing in 1660 or thereabouts, describes Lloyd as having been chaplain to Cromwell.21M. Roberts, One Charge Prosecuted Sixteen Times (1660). This seems to overstate Lloyd’s standing in the army, but a loose association with it as a fellow-travelling minister would explain why he was among the general army council when its members wrote a letter of encouragement, tinged with millenarian optimism, to the army marching to Scotland in May 1650. His co-signatories included Thomas Harrison I*, Edward Whalley*, Charles Fleetwood* and Thomas Pride*.22The Fifth Monarchy (1659), 12 (E.993.31).

Even before Lloyd had been recruited for bearing messages to Cromwell, he had been named to the commission for propagating the gospel in Wales (22 Feb. 1650), in which army influences, particularly from its millenarian wing, were powerful. A number of lay commissioners were serving or future MPs, but Lloyd was unusual in being named as an ‘approver’, one of the ministers whose task was to judge the fitness of candidates for the peripatetic group of preachers the commission sponsored. The following month, he was made a trustee for a similar scheme in Ireland, which would account in part for his selection for the mission to Cromwell there, but which may also suggest some prior interest of his, as yet undiscovered, across the Irish Sea. Lloyd had evidently become a lobbyist for the preaching ministry. On 18 February 1653, during the declining months of the Rump Parliament, he joined a group of senior army officers, politicians and ministers in offering support to a committee of the House which produced detailed proposals adumbrating the structure which would be adopted by the state church during the Cromwellian protectorate.23CJ vii. 259a. After the expulsion of the Rump, during the zenith of Cromwell’s relations with the Nominated Assembly, the civilian commissioners in Ireland wrote to three ministers, John Owen*, Nicholas Lockyer and Lloyd (31 Aug. 1653), seeking testimonials for candidates to fill posts in the Protestant clerical ministry in Ireland, which was assailed as ever by a chronic shortage of applicants. 24Ludlow, Mems. i. 540. Lloyd was in Ireland again by mid-March 1654, when he reported from Dublin to Secretary John Thurloe* on the reception given to Henry Cromwell II*, himself an emissary of his father, the lord protector. Lloyd supplied a long, detailed and dispassionate analysis of Irish politics and the threats from cavaliers and ‘anabaptists’, the portmanteau term for radicals. From what can be gleaned of Lloyd’s own views from this despatch, it appears he was sympathetic to efforts by the former regime, during the period of the Nominated Assembly to eradicate tithes, the prop of the ‘rotten clergy’. Lloyd was evidently acting as an active promoter of the interests of the protectorate, attending to the printing of its apologia, A True State of the Case of the Commonwealth and expressing himself willing to print in Dublin a book by the Independent divine, John Goodwin, challenging the principles of the Baptists. The letter reveals Lloyd as someone close to Thurloe at this point.25Bodl. Rawl. A.328, pp. 21, 95; TSP ii. 162-4; J. Goodwin, Philadelphia, or XL Queries (1653, E.702.7).

When Lloyd wrote to Thurloe in March 1654, he was on the point of returning to England. On 12 July 1654 he was elected as ‘Jenkin Lloyd esquire’ to represent his native county in the first Parliament of the protectorate. He seems to have made a lasting alliance with his fellow-Member, James Philipps. Even before the Parliament assembled, he and Philipps complained against the burden of the assessment in Cardiganshire, particularly about the size of the levy, and proved to be persistent and tenacious petitioners.26CSP Dom. 1654, p. 359; 1655-6, pp. 154, 176. As ‘Mr Flud’, Lloyd was named to the committee for Irish affairs (29 Sept.) and as ‘Mr Lloyd’ to a bill for removing the obsolete tax of purveyance, which had supported the provisioning of the royal court.27CJ vii. 371b, 407b. These were his only known appointments during this Parliament. He may have been the Mr Floyd recently returned in January 1655 from a visit to Ireland, and he was certainly the recipient of a letter of intelligence, doubtless for forwarding to Thurloe, from Cheshire on 10 March, warning of a royalist rising in north-east Wales.28CSP Dom. 1655, p. 419; TSP iii. 218. The dissolution of the Parliament marked the end of his career as a Member, and it was reported that some had been uncomfortable at his presence in the House: ‘he sitting in Parliament was excepted against as a minister’.29LPL, MS 1027, f. 35, quoted in T. Richards, Hist. Puritan Movement in Wales (1920), 216-7. However, Lloyd remained in Whitehall, still occupying government lodgings in May 1655. He joined other south Wales commissioners for ejecting scandalous ministers (in this commission he was a lay ‘ejector’ not a clerical ‘trier’) in August in petitioning the government. Their petition was passed on to the treasury, so was doubtless financial in character.30CSP Dom. 1655, pp. 160, 292. By late November 1655 he had joined the major-generals’ commissioners for south-west Wales, given the task of investigating an allegation that the civic government of Haverfordwest had been infiltrated by a royalist ‘malignant’.31CSP Dom. 1655-6, p. 35. They asked Thurloe in March 1656 for guidance on how to deal with the Cardiganshire estate of a royalist confined in the Tower of London.32TSP iv. 583.

By this time Lloyd had evidently left London for west Wales, where he had been named to the commission of the peace after 1655. It seems very likely that he was the Jenkin Lloyd whose name appears among the signatories of the pro-Cromwellian Humble Representation and Address, an attack in print (9 Feb. 1656) on the radical minister, Vavasor Powell, who had denounced Cromwell and his protectorate.33A Humble Representation and Address (1656), 8 (E.866.3). After his voluble complaints about the burden of the assessment, he himself was made a commissioner supervising its administration in two south Wales counties from June 1657, and despite his strong Cromwellian allegiances, he was included by the revived Rump Parliament in July 1659 in its militia commission. Lloyd must have spent some of his time during the second half of the 1650s in contemplative pursuits, since in July 1658 he produced his only publication, a pious treatise on Christ’s last words on the cross.34Ath. Ox. iv, Fasti, 258; J. Lloyd, Christ’s Valedictions (1658, E.1895.2).

Some doubts have arisen concerning the course of Lloyd’s later years, but it is clear that in February 1660 he drew up his will, describing himself then as of Y Faerdref, his birthplace. He was, or at least had been, married; apparently to Anne Browne, daughter of a Bristol alderman who numbered among his close friends and business partners Richard Aldworth*, Robert Aldworth* and Joseph Jackson*.35PROB11/242, f. 223. Lloyd’s will provides no names of a wife or any children, but he referred to his troublesome mother-in-law in Bristol, who continued to detain his property, including books. He established a trust to settle his lands.36PROB11/301, f. 313. The trustees were his nephews, Morgan Herbert of Hafod Uchtryd and Erasmus Lloyd; Giles Calvert, the stationer and printer of radical books, with whom the fiery, youthful preacher of 1646, ‘Floyd’, was said at that time to have lodged; and Thomas Trapham of Abingdon, an army surgeon. Trapham was noted for having attended to the decapitated body of Charles I after his execution, announcing immediately afterwards that ‘he had sewed on the head of a goose’.37Edwards, Third Part of Gangraena , 62; Ath. Ox. iv, Fasti, 146. Lloyd referred in his will to impropriations in Cardiganshire and Carmarthenshire that he held jointly with James Philipps; and to lands in Dublin.

Lloyd was dead by 21 September 1660, when the will was proved. The course of his life seems to have been conflated, since virtually his own time, with that of at least one other of the same name, profession and regional identity. A Jenkin Lloyd was recognized and favoured by the Committee for Plundered Ministers and the Westminster Assembly, which in September 1646 appointed him to the rectory of Llangoedmor, some 16 miles from Llandysul, and awarded him an augmentation, approved by Parliament, of the living (27 Mar. 1647), subject to his taking the Covenant.38LJ ix. 108a. The rectory had been sequestered by the Cardiganshire county committee from ‘Dr Taylor’, doubtless Jeremy Taylor, the celebrated religious writer, who had been captured near Cardigan with the royalist force of Col. Charles Gerard early in 1645.39Oxford DNB, ‘Jeremy Taylor’. But it seems unlikely that a favoured client of the Westminster Assembly in 1647 would shortly afterwards have moved to Oxford to bait the principal of his old college during the supremacy of the Independents. It seems even less likely that the reliable Cromwellian should not only have retained his living at Llangoedmor at the Restoration, but have acceded subsequently to the livings of four west Wales parishes and the prebendary of Clydau in the diocese of St David’s.40Al Ox.; T. Richards, Religious Developments in Wales (1654-1662) (1923), 458, 462, 486, ; Richards, Puritan Visitation, 93; R.T. Jones, B.G. Owens, ‘Anghydffurfwyr Cymru 1660-1662’, Y Cofiadur xxxi. 52. Wood asserts that by means of lobbying royalists and Presbyterians Jenkin Lloyd acquired a doctorate of divinity on 12 September 1661, but this cannot have been the man of Y Faerdref, by that time dead for a year or more.41Ath. Ox. iv, Fasti, 258.