DAWKINS, Rowland (1618-91), of Kilvrough (Cil-frwch), Pennard, Glam.

Dawkins came of a Gower family of lesser gentry, and his mother was descended from the Glynne family of Glynllifon, making him a kinsman of John Glynne*. The Dawkins family, like others in Gower and the wider district to the west of Swansea were godly Protestants with a landlord, Henry Somerset, 5th earl of Worcester, who was a Catholic. The parishioners of Pennard, including members of the Dawkins family, appealed to the Commons for a preaching minister, and their petition was heard on 30 April 1642, having been brought in by Denzil Holles*.23CJ ii. 551b; PJ ii. 253, PA, Main Pprs. 30 Apr. 1642. An order was made to send Ambrose Mostyn, a minister who had already been the subject of a Commons order sending him to Wales as an itinerant preacher.24Oxford DNB, ‘Ambrose Mostyn’. On 30 July, it was Rowland Dawkins who was principal complainant to the House against William Edwards, the minister of Pennard.25CJ ii. 698a. With this background of puritan activism, it was almost inevitable that Dawkins would be the subject of retribution when the royalists secured Gower. The Glamorgan commissioners of array ordered his sequestration in 1643, but on 15 September that year, issued an order for restitution of Dawkins’s goods, on hearing from the ministers and the ‘inhabitants of quality’ that Dawkins was well affected to the king.26NLW, LL/MB/17, ‘Book of Resolutions and Orders’. This is unlikely to have been the case, and Dawkins may have taken ship from Gower for England, or may like Philip Jones* have gone further west, to Pembrokeshire: no trace of his whereabouts has been discovered.27Glam. RO, D/DF L/8.

When Jones was made governor of Swansea for Parliament in 1645, Dawkins was with him. He served as Jones’s major in the garrison, and joined him among the committeemen appointed in November to stiffen the structural support for Parliament in south-east Wales, as the king’s party after Naseby tried to win over the majority of waverers in the region.28Glam. RO, D/DF L/8; S.K. Roberts, ‘How the West was Won: Parliamentary Politics, Religion and the Military in South Wales, 1642-9’, WHR xxi., 659. As a major, he took part in the second civil war battle of St Fagans, subscribed to the Swansea meeting’s resolution of 10 Aug. 1648 to raise £850 a month to recruit a regiment, and was one of 14 officers named in the Act of October following, transferring the proceeds of the confiscated Slebech estate from the defeated defector to the king, Rowland Laugharne†, to the New Model colonel, Thomas Horton, and his brigade.29Bodl. Tanner 57, f. 181; Grant Francis, Swansea Charters, 213. By then he had been given charge of the garrisons of Carmarthen and Tenby, and as governor incurred the resentment of the corporation of Haverfordwest, a town he recognized as ‘poor’, for nevertheless ordering troops to be quartered there. An appeal over his head to the major-general, Horton, freed the town from the perils of billeting.30Cal. Recs. Haverfordwest, 82-3. He joined the Carmarthenshire committee in 1649, its counterpart in Pembrokeshire in 1650, and in the same years was appointed a sequestration commissioner in south Wales and a commissioner for propagating the gospel in Wales respectively. He was active among the propagation commissioners in south Wales, attending meetings at Swansea, Neath, Pembroke and Brecon with Philip Jones, John Nicholas*, Bussy Mansel*, John Price* and James Phillips*, to establish schools and augment the livings of ministers.31LPL, Comm. VIII/1.

Based in Carmarthen garrison, he was the senior military figure in west Wales. On 14 August 1649 he was ordered to demolish Aberystwyth Castle and discharge its garrison for Irish service. His garrisons benefited from the seizure of hostile ships driven by storm into the ports of the Bristol Channel.32CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 279, 509; 16652-3, pp. 93, 164. From Carmarthen he marched to Cardiganshire in June 1651 to suppress a rising there. He mobilized the Cardigan horse and foot, and on 13 June routed the rebels, 140 in number according to his own account, in a skirmish near Llanbadarn Fawr. In Dawkins’s view, the instigators had been a small number of the county gentry, who had motivated the rebels by false assurances that Charles Stuart was in mid-Wales.33Mercurius Politicus no. 55 (19-26 June 1651), 888-9 (E.632.20); Faithful Scout no. 29 (20-27 June 1651), 222 (E.786.10). An element in the rising was also resistance to the planned recruitment under Dawkins’s supervision to the militia in Cardiganshire.34SP28/251, Cards. militia orders, 1651. The prisoners were taken back to Swansea, to be received by the governor, Philip Jones*.35Perfect Passages no. 49 (20-22 June 1651), 350-1 (E.786.9). Dawkins was subsequently one of the commissioners appointed to judge them.36CSP Dom. 1651, p. 267. According to later, unfriendly, testimony, he commandeered horses from Richard Vaughan†, earl of Carbery, for use against the army of Charles Stuart at Worcester.37C108/188, petition against the earl of Carbery.

Dawkins was returned for Carmarthenshire in 1654 with Cromwell’s son-in-law, John Claypoole. As governor of Carmarthen he was an obvious choice for the seat, and he would have been elected on the military interest built up by Jones and his clients, among whom Dawkins was himself a principal. Again with Jones, Price and Mansel, a close-knit group of Cromwellians, he became a commissioner for scandalous ministers, which in many respects continued the work of the propagation commission. Under this regime, he continued his practice of leasing tithes from the state, paying an agreed sum to a treasurer or receiver-general, and then collecting tithes from payers in the parish, with the aim of recovering the outlay (or making a profit). He was named to four committees in the first protectorate Parliament. The first (25 Sept. 1654) was on a revision of the ordinance for ejecting scandalous ministers, originally promulgated by the lord protector’s council that summer.38CJ vii. 370a. He was included in the committee on the regulation of chancery (5 Oct.).39CJ vii. 374a. As a senior military officer, he was naturally selected for the investigation into debentures in lieu of army pay, in which a trade in forgeries had sprung up (22 Nov), and he was called to the committee on lessening the burden of the shrievalty to the officeholder (4 Dec.).40CJ vii. 387b, 394b.

After the closure of this Parliament, in March 1655 as a militia commissioner for south Wales he was involved in, and ‘at charges’ for, the precautions against royalist insurgency.41CSP Dom. 1655, p. 79. He reprised the role he had played in 1651, raising 80 men to guard the south Wales counties and moving ammunition between his commands of Tenby and Carmarthen.42CSP Dom. 1655, p. 182. In November he was one of the investigators of the Haverfordwest petition against malignants in office there. The outcome of his enquiry led to the dismissal of the sitting mayor, and his advice or instruction to the common council to replace him with another staunch Cromwellian, James Philipps*.43CSP Dom. 1655-6, p. 35; Cal. Recs. Haverfordwest, 129. When the divisions (‘cantons’) of the major-generals were decided, the whole of Wales was allocated to James Berry*, but in January 1656 Dawkins was made deputy major-general to Berry in south Wales (which Berry visited only once soon afterwards), in tandem with John Nicholas*, governor of Chepstow. In April he was awarded a salary of £300 to Nicholas’s £200, but they were equalized at £333 6s 8d in June.44CSP Dom. 1655-6, p. 102. On 14 April Dawkins had sent Cromwell an interim report on sequestration in south Wales in which he claimed that their enemies were ‘terrified’, peace ‘secured’, and wickedness ‘suppressed’: ‘but for our proceedings, the good interest had been over-topped by the royal and worldly’. He tactfully added, ‘the people bless God for their enjoyments through you’.45CSP Dom. 1655-6, p. 265. Yet in July he was ordered to put down disorderly meetings masquerading as markets being held at Caerphilly.46CSP Dom. 1656-7, p. 16. He was probably less tolerant than Berry: on 8 October he sent John ap John, prominent among the south Wales Friends, to prison for disrupting Sunday service at Swansea church.47Besse, Collection of Sufferings, i., 736. Under the new charter for Swansea, he was made senior alderman, no doubt at Philip Jones’s instigation.48A.M. Johnson, ‘Politics and Religion in Glam. during the Interregnum, 1649-1660’, Glam. Co. Hist. iv. 301; Grant Francis, Swansea Charters, 213.

Colonel Dawkins was re-elected for Carmarthenshire in 1656. The personal estates bestowed on Cromwell were managed by Philip Jones, and so Dawkins, Jones’s close ally, was a loyal Cromwellian. He would thus have been an enthusiast for the committee for the safety of the lord protector and the public safety (26 Sept.) and would have supported the government in the expiring statute bill (27 Sept.).49CJ vii. 429a, 429b, After the turbulence of the propagation era and the ejections from livings came in this Parliament a bill to confirm ministers in their benefices, a sign of a drive towards settlement (4 Oct.).50CJ vii. 434a. He was included in two committees on 7 October, to legislate for artificers’ wages and abolish customary oaths.51CJ vii. 435a,b. At the call of the House (31 Dec.), he was absent, but was excused, having been present the previous day.52Burton’s Diary, i. 288. On 19 May 1657 he was named to the committee to set limits and define the protectorate.53CJ vii. 535a.

He had by now reached the zenith of his local power, and the disbanding of the major-generals that year reduced him in terms of civilian office to assessment commissioner for Carmarthen and Glamorgan. Nevertheless, he remained in charge of the two garrisons. His diminished status was evident in his failure to make good his election for Carmarthen – the borough this time – in 1659 when the House seated his opponent David Morgan. It was unfortunate for Dawkins, who expected to sit for the county again, that Thomas Hughes, Philip Jones’s nominee for the borough, faced instant rejection at the Guildhall, and was switched to the county, leaving Dawkins to attempt strong-arm tactics to force his return for the borough.54The State of the Case betwixt Major General Rowland Dawkins and David Morgan (1659, BL 1865.c.16.116). Despite this, he had, however, been returned for Cardigan Boroughs. He was a commissioner to administer to MPs the oath of loyalty to the protector, 27 January 1659, taking it himself among the first eight, and was named to the elections committee, 28 January, despite his own difficulty at Carmarthen, which was not resolved until 22 March in favour of David Morgan*.55CJ vii. 593a,b, 594b, 617a,b. In July Bussy Mansel replaced Dawkins as commander of the militia in south-west Wales, and he was omitted altogether from the county committees. In March 1660 he was restored to the Glamorgan commissionerships, but was not returned to Parliament.56Glam. Co. Hist. iv. 302, 304-7; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p.24.

Unlike Philip Jones, who had soared higher during the protectorate and whose rehabilitation under the Restoration did not go unchallenged, Dawkins had not incurred widespread enmity on his own account. Even so, he was bound to have been the subject of a bill out of exchequer in pursuit of detained public funds, and in February 1661 was ordered by the treasury to list commissioners he himself had appointed. He took the opportunity to declare some tithes he had farmed, but there was nothing for him to fear.57CTB 1660-7, p. 208; E113/2, answer of Rowland Dawkins. Nevertheless, he was removed from the corporation of Swansea in 1662, and in the winter of 1662-3, he had to meet a consistory court charge of refusing to have his children baptised in church, though given his age this seems suspiciously like an attempt by the church authorities at revenge for his defiance in the early 1640s.58R.L. Hugh, ‘Annibyniaeth yng Ngorllewin Morganwg’, Y Cofiadur, xviii. 16; Jnl. Hist. Soc. of the Church in Wales, xii. 52. By 1677 Sir Edward Mansel was prepared to lump him in Glamorgan with the gentry who had exploited ‘the late times’ to feather their nests, while ascribing to him a modest income of £250 a year.59SP29/398, pp. 283-4. He was easily the most wealthy man in Pennard, paying tax on eight hearths.60Glam. Hearth Tax Assessment of 1670 ed. E. Parkinson (S. Wales Rec. Soc. x.), 110. When he was restored to the magistrates’ bench in the 1680s, he was supposed by the duke of Beaufort, who employed him as surveyor of his Swansea estate, to be a dissenter who looked to the Stuarts for Indulgence.61I.G. Jones, ‘Glam. Politics from 1660-1688’, Glam. Co Hist. iv. 391-2. For that reason he was detained briefly at Chepstow with other suspects during the Monmouth rebellion of 1685.62NLW, Penrice and Margam MS 1137; E.T. Davies, G. Williams, G. Roberts, ‘Religion and Education in Glam., 1660-c.1775’, Glam. Co. Hist. iv. 476. Dawkins died on 7 May 1691, and was buried in Pennard church. His will, dated 31 Mar. 1687, provided for his five offspring then living, and included cash bequests to them of over £1000. Among his papers the appraisers of his estate found bonds from the 1650s with a face value of £338, but ‘not ... worth the executor a farthing’.63NLW St David’s probate SD/1691/167. The second son, George, became a non-juring parson.64Grant Francis, Swansea Charters, 219.