LEWIS, Evan (c.1623-88/9), of Ynysarwed, Neath, Glam.

Lewis’s origins were obscure, although later allegations that he was the son of a butcher ‘of mean quality’ in Breconshire cannot be relied upon as accurate.15SP29/62/59. He was probably recruited into the garrison force commanded by Colonel Philip Jones* either before or during the parliamentarian reduction of the royalists in Glamorgan in the second civil war in 1648. Jones was said to have promoted Lewis to major that year, but later references continue to describe him as a lieutenant.16SP29/62, f. 99. More certainly, he became deputy governor of Cardiff, in Jones’s absence. Lewis was quick to avail himself of opportunities to acquire property confiscated from royalists by the state. The Herefordshire county committee granted him the farm of the manor of Ewyas Lacy, formerly held by the delinquent, Sir Ralph Hopton*, and when the arrangement ended with Hopton’s death in December 1650, Lewis petitioned the Committee for Compounding for it to continue.17CCC 302, 2303. In April 1652 Lewis took advantage of the forfeiture of the estates of Henry Somerset, marquess of Worcester, to purchase land in Breconshire.18CCC 1714.

Lewis was never a commissioner for propagating the gospel in Wales, and the statement that he was clerk to the commissioners of south Wales seems suspect; it seems more likely that as a senior officer in the Cardiff garrison he was merely one of the reliable enforcers that the propagators could call upon for assistance.19A.G. Veysey, ‘Colonel Philip Jones’, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion 1966 (ii), 324; Mercurius Cambro-Britannicus (1652), 14 (E.674.25). It was undoubtedly through the influence of Philip Jones that Lewis entered civilian local government, becoming assessment commissioner for Glamorgan in December 1652 and JP in September 1653.20A. and O.; C231/6, p. 268. In December 1653 Lewis took possession of forfeited lands at Wrinston, near Wenvoe, part of a series of transactions by which parcels of the Glamorgan estates of the marquess of Worcester were acquired by Jones from the officers of Col. Thomas Horton’s brigade, victors at St Fagans in May 1648. Lewis’s role in this was, typically, as intermediary and enforcer. In the case of Wrinston, he was met by well-publicised objections by Bassett Jones, son of the sitting tenant and former high sheriff, Richard Jones of Michaelston-super-Ely.21Veysey, ‘Col. Philip Jones’, 337; The Copy of a Petition (1654), 8-9 (E.809.26).

By September 1654, Lewis had married Philip Jones’s wife’s sister, thereby becoming brother-in-law also to John Price* of Gellihir.22Copy of a Petition, 8. The closeness of Jones and Lewis is evident in the inclusion of a younger son of Jones as one of the three lives in a lease of a mill in Neath from Bussy Mansel* to Lewis in 1656.23Glam. Archives, D/CL/BF/165. Lewis later lent Jones money.24Glam. Archives, D/DF L/20. During the protectorate the connection between Lewis and Philip Jones strengthened further. In August 1654 Jones secured the protector’s consent for the omission of Lewis’s name from the list of commissioners to investigate the accounts of the propagation scheme of 1650-3; Jones himself was helping draft the ordinance.25CSP Dom. 1654, pp. 211, 348; A. and O. That Lewis was exempted was presumably a recognition that his garrison duties at Cardiff were pressing, but the same month he was appointed to the commission against scandalous ministers in south Wales.26A. and O. Despite, or perhaps because of, his exemption from the investigative committee, he was consulted in July 1655 by the trustees for the maintenance of preaching ministers.27T. Richards, Religious Developments in Wales (1654-1662) (1923), 150.

Lewis was evidently as loyal to the protectorate as his patron, Jones, and in February 1656 he accompanied Walter Cradock on his visit to Oliver Cromwell* to present him with a Humble Representation refuting Vavasor Powell’s Word for God.28Abbott, Writings and Speeches iv. 96. According to John Thurloe*, the representation was ‘very affectionate and full of kindness’ toward the protector and his government and ‘hath almost 900 hands to it, and all subscribed by the persons themselves’.29TSP iv. 505, 531. In March Lewis became a magistrate for Breconshire.30C231/6, p. 330.

In August 1656 Lewis and Jones were returned as Members for Breconshire. Lewis’s contribution to this Parliament was slight. On 26 September he was named to the committee on a bill for the security of the protector, but he may have returned to Wales shortly afterwards as on 31 December he was listed as absent from a call of the House owing to his command of a militia troop.31CJ vii. 429a; Burton’s Diary i. 288. The ‘Mr. Lewis’ added to the committee on the marriage bill on 3 Feb. 1657 was either this Member or James Lewis*, who had since entered the House.32CJ vii. 591a. Lewis sat in one Parliament only, and his later career is hard to disentangle. It seems unlikely that he would have been the Evan Lewis appointed a quartermaster to Colonel Thomas Sanders’ regiment in July 1659, or the man of the same name listed a lieutenant in Colonel Samuel Clarke’s regiment in August 1659, when three regiments were reduced to two.33CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 396; 1659-60, p. 121. In the same month it was reported that ‘one Evan Lewis’ was to replace one of the quartermasters in George Monck’s regiment of horse, but this seems equally improbable as the former MP: Lewis is only known to have served in a garrison, not in a field regiment.34Clarke Pprs. iv. 39. Lewis continued to be appointed to local commissions during the later 1650s, including the assessment commissions for Glamorgan (June 1657) and Breconshire (June 1657 and January 1660), and the Glamorgan militia commission (12 Mar. 1660).35A. and O. He was added to the Glamorgan assessment commission, along with other associates of Philip Jones, by order of the Commons of 14 March 1660.36CJ vii. 876b.

Lewis’s public career was inextricably linked to that of Jones; in 1659 he was listed as among Jones’s ‘agents, instruments and adherents’, and was among the witnesses scheduled to be called to testify in the impeachment planned against him.37Glam. Archives, D/DF L/4; D/DF L/5. With the restoration of the monarchy, that career came to an abrupt end. He was appointed to no more local commissions, and in 1662 he was arrested in London as a suspected plotter.38CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 546. In November Robert Thomas† urged the secretary of state, Sir Henry Bennet†, not to let Lewis go free, as he was ‘the most dangerous person in these counties’. Thomas denounced Lewis as a religious radical and a supporter of the regicide, and recounted his own treatment at his hands: ‘I was several times a close prisoner for several months, and do assure you that he was the most tyrannical, domineering person there … I know his malice to equal any man’s, his cunning is great, his courage far exceeding [Philip] Jones’s’.39SP29/62/59.

Lewis seems to have retired to his native fastnesses thereafter. By August 1658 he was laying claim to property in Betws Diserth, Radnorshire, but he was doubtless the ‘Mr Evan Lewis’ whose house, Ynysarwed in Lower Glyn Neath, had 8 hearths in 1670.40West Glam. Archives, NAS/ C 13/58-9; Glam. Hearth Tax ed. Parkinson, 18, 26. His past occasionally caught up with him, as in 1676 when the king granted Thomas, Lord Howard, the arrears of the Glamorgan county assessment of 1652, for which Lewis had been a commissioner.41CTB v. 413. In this period, Lewis became increasingly active in the radical dissenting movement. He was recalled by Francis Davies, historian of the ‘hard usages’ of the Glamorgan clergy, as attending the sermons of Jenkin Walter the Independent minister in the Neath district.42P. Jenkins, ‘”Sufferings of the Clergy”: Part 2: The Account of Francis Davies’, Jnl. Welsh Ecclesiastical Hist. iv. 41. On 4 November 1684 Lewis was excommunicated by the St David’s consistory court at Brecon for refusing to offer penance on his knees for absenting himself from church and the sacrament.43W.T. Morgan, ‘The Prosecution of nonconformists in the consistory courts of St David’s’, Jnl. Hist. Soc. Church in Wales xii. 47. Despite official disapproval from church and state, Lewis retained the wealth he had accrued during the interregnum. He was one of the five nonconformists in Radnorshire noted by the duke of Beaufort in 1687 as being of sufficient means to serve as justice of the peace.44Morgan, ‘Prosecution of nonconformists’. 47.

His will, dated March 1688, shows Lewis as squire of Maesllwch, Glasbury, Radnorshire, with property also in Breconshire and in the neighbourhood of Neath, where he had fishing royalties acquired about 1666.45Phillips, Hist. of the Vale of Neath, 204. The most important clauses in the will transferred the bulk of his landed estate, comprising various parcels and messuages near Neath, but including other properties in Breconshire and Radnorshire, to a trust made up of four ministers ejected from livings at the Restoration (Samuel Jones of Llangynwyd, Daniel Higgs, John Spilsbury and John Weaver) and two Breconshire lay patrons of nonconformist congregations, Philip Williams and David Richards. The appearance of Jones’s name at the head of the list may indicate that the property was intended to support Jones’s dissenting academy in Glamorgan.46R.T. Jones, B.G. Owens, ‘Anghydffurfwyr Cymru 1660-1662’, Y Cofiadur xxxi. 32, 46, 87; Calamy Revised, 455; P. Davies, ‘Episodes in the Hist. of Brecknockshire Dissent’, Brycheiniog iii. 31; DWB. Lewis was in the process of selling Maesllwch to Charles Lloyd, who provided the land for the first purpose-built Independent chapel in Wales, at Maesyronnen, Glasbury, and left his second wife £1,800 due from Lloyd with other debts due (one of £600 from his son-in-law John Watkins of Ilston, who was also purchasing property from him), and his Glamorgan rental for a year.47P. Davies, ‘Episodes’, 32; DWB. His legacies in cash amounted to over £900, but the only kinsfolk specified, apart from his brother-in-law and debtor Robert Bateman, were his ‘cousins’ including Mrs Mary Higgins of Sheinton, Shropshire (a relative of his second wife) and John Llewellin (probably a cousin of his first wife) of Ynys-y-Gerwn, Cadoxton juxta Neath, Glamorgan. Last and least came his granddaughter (unnamed) whom he had disinherited ‘as I thought fit in conscience to do that she might be an example to all disobedient children for the time to come’: he so far relented as to offer her £300 if her other grandfather, William Watkins of Penyrwrlodd, another Cromwellian soldier of fortune, endowed her with £1,000.48PROB11/396/107. Lewis probably died in the autumn of 1688. He had married as his second wife Elizabeth Bateman, one of the two children of Sir Anthony Bateman, lord mayor of London in 1663 but a bankrupt in 1671. Elizabeth and her brother succeeded at law in protecting their legacies from Bateman’s creditors.49Beaven, Aldermen, ii. 186, 188; Modern Reports (1796), Mich. 1671. After Lewis’s death, she married Cyriack Cornewall, one of the family of Berrington, Herefordshire, on 8 July 1691, but died less than a month later, and was buried in Ludlow.50Glam. Archives, Cardiff City Library Deeds, Mon. collection; Ludlow par. reg.