JONES, Philip (?1618-74), of Llangyfelach, Swansea and Cardiff, Glam.

Although Jones’s father’s name has often been given as David Johns (or Johnes), he was in fact styled David Philip, and it was during a process of abandoning the patronymic system that Philip Jones and his younger brother Morgan came to be so named. His paternal grandfather, Philip John ap Rees of Gelliwren, Llangyfelach, was a local landowner who divided his estate among his sons, Philip’s father obtaining the large holding of Pen-y-waun in the Clase district of the parish. Even if the family’s genealogical credentials among the Welsh gentry were not confirmed until 1654, they were never as lowly as Philip Jones’s enemies liked to maintain. It is possible that his education included a legal training, as in 1645 he petitioned for the office of prothonotary in north Wales: given his later administrative achievements, he must surely have acquired a formal education from somewhere in his early years.38LJ viii. 66a. At the time of his marriage, in 1642, into a prominent local parliamentarian family, both Jones and his father were termed ‘gentleman’. In the civil war he at first followed the lead of his Price in-laws, who were endeavouring to win over the county to the parliamentarians, and may have left the region for Devonshire with them.39CCC, 2178.

Promotion through the military, 1645-9

When his enemies were encircling Jones in the late 1650s, it was alleged that Rowland Laugharne†, leader of the Pembrokeshire parliamentarian army, had offered Jones a military commission early in the first civil war, which he had refused, pleading a conscientious objection to fighting.40Glam. RO, D/DF L8, L9. Whatever the truth of the allegation, by April 1645 Jones was serving as a captain for Parliament in the army of Sir Thomas Myddelton*. He was sent by Myddelton to London, probably from Nantwich, and probably on some special service.41SP28/346/2, unnumbered warrant. His time in London in 1645 was the key to his rise to prominence. After the fall of Cardiff to the clubman ‘peaceable army’ on 17 September that year, Jones was one of a small group of Glamorgan gentry who sought to forge links with Parliament, and particularly with the Independents, in the capital. On 30 October, he was a signatory to a report from Cardiff on the reduction of south Wales to obedience, which advocated the settlement of godly ministers in the region in tandem with a military invasion by the New Model army. Jones took the plan up to London, with a letter of commendation from his superiors in Glamorgan which commended his ‘pains and good endeavours here’.42LJ vii. 681-2; HMC Portland, i. 304; CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 226. The thanks of the Committee of Both Kingdoms were taken back to Cardiff by Thomas Carne, another Glamorgan adherent of Parliament, but with Presbyterian allegiances; Jones probably stayed on to cement relationships with the Independents. He already had contacts in the New Model army: his brother-in-law, Henry Bowen, was lieutenant-colonel in the regiment of Thomas Rainborowe*.43Temple, ‘Original Officer List’, 58. The importance of this visit to London was stressed in a hostile review of Jones’s career 12 years later; Jones

first, was an agent for some Parliamenteers to London, where gaining acquaintance, and making good use of them, he became governor of a garrison, then a colonel as also steward of some of the protector’s lands in Wales, and one of the Long Parliament ...44Second Narrative of the Late Parliament, 7.

As a result of his new-found contacts in Westminster, Jones was appointed governor of Swansea in December 1645; having passed the Commons on 17 November, his commission did not pass the Lords until 1 December, suggesting some wariness on the part of the peers. As Jones at this point had no military rank at all, it is unsurprising that his rise from nowhere raised a few eyebrows. In 1646, he was commissioned as Colonel Jones, and as parliamentarian governor incurred the resentment of the royalist gentry of the Vale of Glamorgan, to whom Jones and his henchmen were upstarts who had intruded themselves into the traditional structures of local government.45HMC Portland, i. 348-9. It was not he, but his royalist namesake of Treowen, Monmouthshire, who acted as one of the commissioners for the surrender of the 2nd marquess of Worcester’s great fortress of Raglan Castle on 17 August 1646; but he was certainly one of the eight trustees appointed on 17 November to pay three itinerant ministers in south Wales out of diocesan revenues.46CJ iv.347a; LJ vii. 713b, viii. 18b, 19b. This order was a response to the call from Cardiff the previous year to send ministers to the region, and the triumvirate of Richard Symonds, Walter Cradock and Henry Walter, all men of Monmouthshire, went without the blessing of the Westminster Assembly and provoked the wrath of Thomas Edwards, the Presbyterian hunter of heresies.47LJ vii. 569b; Minutes and Pprs. of the Westminster Assembly ed. C. van Dixhoorn, iv. 232, 327, 336, 337, 440, 441; T. Edwards, Gangraena pt. 3 (1646), 131, 241-2. In February 1647, Jones purchased the Great House at Swansea from the royalist, Richard Seys, and it became his headquarters.48Veysey, ‘Philip Jones’, 317.

Jones was evidently far from affluent before the 1640s, and claimed to have been further impoverished as a result of the war in south Wales. In December 1645, petitioning Parliament for the office of clerk of the crown in north Wales, he related how he had been forced with his family to desert his habitation and endure plundering by the royalists. A measure of relief came on 2 April 1647 when the Committee for Advance of Money noted that Jones was owed £780 in arrears, as well as £630 ‘on public faith’. It was ordered that because of his faithfulness to Parliament, his sufferings as a tenant of the royalist marquess of Worcester (formerly the earl of Worcester) and his importance in winning Glamorgan over to Parliament, Jones should in part be rewarded with grants from the estates of the marquess.49CCAM 799. In November Jones was awarded half the papists’ and royalist delinquents’ estates discovered by him as a payment towards satisfaction of his arrears. By virtue of his office as a commissioner for assessments in Glamorgan, he was involved from December in disbanding supernumerary forces in south Wales, the most significant of which were the troops of Rowland Laugharne and John Poyer. After their resistance to disbandment spilled over into armed rebellion in May 1648, Jones played a supporting role in Col. Thomas Horton’s campaign against them. He was given every credit for his help by Horton, who singled out for mention his contribution at the battle of St Fagans: Jones’s stock at Westminster rose as a consequence of his role in stamping out the congeries of malcontents who fomented the second civil war in south Wales.50A. and O.; CSP Dom. 1648-9, p. 42; Phillips, Civil War in Wales, i. 361. Jones’s effective deployment of his cavalry troop led to his promotion to the role of military superintendent of the region, forfeited by the now vanquished renegade Major-general Rowland Laugharne, who had taken the king’s part in the second civil war.

Jones entertained Oliver Cromwell* at Swansea on 19 May 1648, on his way to suppress the royalist insurrection in Pembroke.51Grant Francis, Charters, 171. By the spring of 1648, Jones seems to have been an acquaintance, and possibly a friend, of Cromwell. He entrusted Jones with the stewardship of the properties granted him by Parliament on 9 March 1648 in the lordship of Gower, confiscated from the marquess of Worcester, and employed Jones in the same capacity over the Monmouthshire lands he received from the same sequestered source.52LJ x, 104-5. It was probably through Jones’s efforts that impropriations of three prominent south Wales royalists were bought by the commissioners for compounding with delinquents: two of them later figured in allegations against Jones.53Impropriations purchased by the Commissioners sitting at Goldsmiths-Hall (1648, E.464.30). However, it was almost certainly John Jones I*, rather than Philip Jones, who became a compounding commissioner in this period. As well as wielding power in his garrison command (he had added the garrison at Cardiff castle to his responsibilities by November 1648) and his work as a local tax commissioner, Philip Jones was active in a committee for the south Wales counties which liaised with Parliament’s Army Committee on building up military strength in the region.54Bodl. Tanner 57, f. 181; Worcester Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS LXVII, f. 43, LXXII.

Jones’s further appointment as a sequestrator in south Wales early in 1649 reinforced his local sway, as did his appearance on the bench of magistrates that year, and his acquiring office in the courts of great sessions in 1650. The fines on royalists involved in the second civil war were anxiously awaited to fit out the summer fleet, and were slow to come forth.55CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 81. Jones made enemies through the haste with which he was expected to collect the impositions, but a petition from south Wales the following year acknowledged the considerateness of the sequestrators.56The Humble Acknowledgement of the Inhabitants of South Wales (1650). With his brother-in-law, John Price*, and his close ally Rowland Dawkins (later a Member for Carmarthenshire in the two protectoral Parliaments), Jones appeared as a zealous prosecutor of delinquents in his region, where the new republican régime believed that there was little prospect of winning the support of the local inhabitants.

Member for Breconshire and councillor of state, 1650-3

Jones’s return to the Rump for Breconshire, his first election to Parliament, followed the death of the incumbent Member, William Morgan; a new election was ordered on 27 June 1649 and the necessary writ was issued on 30 November.57CJ vi. 244b; C231/6, p. 170. He was one of the five Members elected after Pride’s Purge, and was formally admitted to the House on 5 February 1650, and named to a committee that day.58CJ vi. 358a. On 15 February, he was named second after Thomas Harrison I* in a list of commissioners for the propagation of the gospel in Wales.59CJ vi. 365b. From this point, Jones’s parliamentary career becomes difficult to disentangle from that of John Jones I, Member for Merioneth, who is also referred to in the journals as ‘Colonel Jones’. Philip is the more likely to have been named to the committee on the bill for the propagation of the gospel in Bristol on 15 February 1650. Both men were named to the committees on the trade regulation bill, Alderman Fowke’s petition, and the anti-blasphemy and sedition bill (16 Mar., 22 and 24 June 1650); but between 16 February and 5 July some 20 committees had one of these two ‘Colonel Jones’ named to them, John being the more likely choice for many. Colonel Philip Jones was named specifically in three additional cases: the committee on public offices (27 June), that on plundered ministers (to which he was added on 4 July), and the committee on the trial of royalist rebels in Wales (5 July).60CJ vi. 365b, 432b, 436b, 437a, 437b.

The ambiguities in the Journal are not resolved until the end of 1650, when John Jones I took up appointment as a commissioner in Ireland, where he was to spend most of the next three years. Thus Philip was specifically added to the committee for correspondence with Spain ( Jan. 1651), and this specification continued, though references seldom occur, until the end of that year, when John Jones’s continued absence presumably rendered the label ‘Colonel’ Jones unambiguous, though his Christian name was still sometimes specified.61CJ vi. 520a. Despite his remove from Wales to Westminster, Jones continued to be regarded as a highly influential figure in his locality. When, in June 1650, the steward of the marquess of Hertford (William Seymour†) wished to present a minister to the rectory of Llangwm, a Monmouthshire living in his master’s gift, the advice he offered was that ‘Colonel Philip Jones (Member of the House for Brecknock [Breconshire] and chief of the commissioners [for the propagation of the gospel] here), being made acquainted with this, might be able to do your honour much right’.62Longleat House, Seymour Pprs. 7, ff. 27-8.

Philip Jones himself spent the spring of 1651 in south Wales, mopping up operations against yet another ineffective royalist rebellion there. He advocated the use of courts sitting without juries to try rebels in Cardiganshire, ‘where little of the gospel hath yet been’.63Bodl. Tanner 54, f. 90. Troops of his were mobilized against Charles Stuart in August.64CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 100, 261, 266, 278, 306, 391. A report from Jones was drawn to the House’s attention on 25 June, when he was added to the high court of justice set up to try the Welsh rebels. Indeed, during the early 1650s, Jones was becoming the ‘virtual ruler of south Wales’, though on 2 October 1651 his regiment of foot, which had furnished 300 men for Irish service and three companies for Fleetwood’s forces against the Scots, was ordered to be disbanded. However, part of the regiment was still together in June 1653.65SP24/14, f. 38v; CSP Dom. 1651, p. 493; Veysey, ‘Philip Jones’, 321; Dodd, Studies in Stuart Wales, 149. Over the winter of 1651-2, he was named to a series of important parliamentary committees, such as those to appoint law reform commissioners (26 Dec. 1651), for the army (1 Jan. 1652), for the high court of justice (1 Jan.), on the bill against John Lilburne (21 Jan.), and on a petition from various ‘ministers of the gospel’ (10 Feb.). He was one of the trustees appointed for the grant of £1,000 a year to Horton’s brigade (6 Feb.), with which Jones had served during the second civil war.66CJ vi. 591a; vii. 24b, 281b, 282b, 283a, 317b, 322b, 325a, 329b, 332b, 335b, 336b, 344a, 347ab, 362a, 363b; CSP Dom. 1652-3, pp. 304, 394, 436. His rising status in Wales is reflected in his appointment to five of the county committees for south Wales during 1652, he having added Carmarthen to his Glamorgan commission in 1649.

Moreover, it was alleged, his creatures and protégés dominated the south Wales committees and virtually all local offices. Whatever their proceedings, Jones was ‘always beside the curtain’, to use the phrase of Llandaff prebendary Francis Davies in his account of the period, complete by 1709 and incorporated in John Walker’s royalist and tory Sufferings of the Clergy (1714).67Bodl. Walker c.4, ff. 65-72; P. Jenkins, ‘”The Sufferings of the Clergy”: the Church in Glam. during the Interregnum, ii.’, Jnl. Welsh Eccles. Hist. iv. 37. Colonel Edward Freeman* attempted to challenge Jones’s power by publicly charging him with packing the sequestration committees with cronies in south Wales in order to afford lenient terms to favoured royalists and pocket the sequestration fines. But the government sided with Jones, and Freeman paid heavily for his failed accusations; he was deprived of office as attorney-general in south Wales in June 1653, and replaced by Jones’s nominee Edmund Jones*, a former royalist and treasurer to the earl of Worcester’s garrison at Raglan.68CCC 512, 517, 667; A.M. Johnson, ‘Politics and Religion in Glam. during the Interrgnum’, Glam. Co. Hist. iv. 282; Grant Francis, Charters, 173-5; Dodd, Studies in Stuart Wales, 149.

After the dissolution of the Rump Parliament by Cromwell in April 1653, and the army’s seizure of power, Jones was at the centre of political influence at Westminster. In mid-May he become a member of the new council of state and was at once named to its committees on Scottish and Irish affairs. Between May and August he attended the meetings of the council of state regularly, and was awarded lodgings in Whitehall on 9 June. He acted as the council’s president from 24 June until 4 July, and played an important role in committee work.69CSP Dom. 1652-3, pp. xli, 304, 332, 333, 336, 339, 346; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 107.

Unsurprisingly, Jones was appointed to the Nominated Parliament (July-December 1653), representing Monmouthshire, given separate representation from Wales: the dominion was allocated six MPs, undifferentiated by constituency. On 5 July he was one of the MPs deputed to request Oliver Cromwell’s presence among them. On 8 July he acted as a teller in a division on the appointment of Edward Birkhead as serjeant-at-arms: Jones’s side, against the appointment, lost by eight votes, and Birkhead was installed, with the traditional title and regalia, including the ‘bauble’ seized by Cromwell on 20 April.70CJ vii. 282b; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 153-4. Jones’s membership of the council of state was confirmed by the Parliament on the following day, and he was also named to the House’s committees to nominate additional councillors and to deal with Irish affairs. Between 13 September and 9 December, Jones acted as teller in support of government motions on ten occasions, and was named to nine committees, including those on law reform. He several times reported from the council of state, and was seventh in the ballot for re-election to the council on 1 November. Despite his lack of naval experience, he became an admiralty commissioner on 3 December, serving as a point de liaison between the admiralty and its masters on the council of state. On religious matters, Jones seems to have espoused the cause of religious liberty as envisaged by Cromwell. He was among the nine Members named to draft a declaration of religious liberty on 10 October 1653.71CJ vii. 332a. Despite his initial appearance on the political stage as a proponent of an itinerant ministry, and in spite of his work in the commission for the propagation of the gospel, there was nothing to suggest that after the conclusion of the propagation arrangements in April 1653, he was interested in anything other than a tolerant state church, funded by tithes in the customary way. An attempt to identify him as a member of John Miles’s closed Baptist congregation at Ilston, in Gower, dependent as it is on assuming that he considered himself in December 1652 as still of Llangyfelach, is unconvincing.72Veysey, ‘Col. Philip Jones’, 318 n. 15. Jones was in favour of the procedures for examining the clergy proposed as a means of encouraging the ‘godly, learned ministry’, and was reported to have contributed to the collapse of the Nominated Assembly.73Second Narrative of the Late Parliament, 7; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 343.

Lord protector’s councillor, 1654-60

Cromwell’s assumption of the protectorate in December 1653 enhanced Jones’s role in the council and in the nascent Cromwellian court. He was named to the first lord protector’s council on 15 December, and kept his place for the rest of Cromwell’s rule.74CSP Dom. 1653-4, 298; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 346, 380-1. Yet the speed of Jones’s rise, and the political influence he now wielded, both in Wales and Westminster, had won him numerous enemies. His appointment as a commissioner for the ejection of scandalous ministers for Monmouth and south Wales in August 1654 provided the occasion for his critics to strike. The management of the funds allocated for the ‘propagation of the gospel’ in Wales in February 1650 had provoked accusations of financial impropriety. Pressure from those claiming that there had been maladministration of the funds resulted in an ordinance by the protector and council (30 Aug. 1654) to take the accounts of the commissioners; and Jones, as the leading commissioner in south Wales, came under investigation.75A. and O. Despite Jones’s evident friendship with Cromwell, the lord protector vetoed the appointment of Jones’s creature, Evan Lewis,* from the investigating commission. However, notwithstanding this setback, which evidently caused Jones some anxiety as he waited ‘on God for his pleasure’, Jones’s enemies were unable to substantiate any case against him, and his accounts as a commissioner for the propagation of the gospel were duly passed at Neath, Glamorgan, on 10 August 1655. The matter later reappeared in attacks on Jones in 1659, when the speed and ease of the accounting came under suspicion. 76Bodl. Walker c.13, ff. 5-69v; Articles of Impeachment of Transcendent Crimes, 9; Grant Francis, Charters, 185.

In the elections to the first protectoral Parliament, conducted under the new franchise established under the Instrument of Government, Jones was returned in two constituencies; as one of the county Members for Glamorgan and also for Monmouthshire (which he had represented in the Nominated Parliament of 1653). It was not until 5 October 1654, four weeks into the session, that Jones formally chose between the two and opted to sit for Glamorgan. Between 5 September 1654 and 19 January 1655, he was named to over a dozen committees, including those for privileges (5 Sept.), recognition of the government (25 Sept.), the scandalous ministers bill (25 Sept.), the review of army and navy (26 Sept.), Irish affairs (29 Sept.), chancery reform (6 Oct.), and several revenue committees. He seems to have held the status of a government spokesman, acting as teller for government measures on 18 occasions between 29 November 1654 and 19 January 1655, being particularly active in working for the passage of the bill to confirm and settle the new protectoral regime.77CJ vii. 392b, 394b, 396ab, 399b, 406b, 409b, 411b, 414a-b, 415a, 417ab, 418ab, 420b. In March 1655 ‘special service’ for the state took him to Shropshire and Yorkshire, with instructions to assist the major-generals in the surveillance of royalist rebels.78TSP iii. 218, 220; CSP Dom. 1655, pp. 8-9. He was back at Westminster by the following month, acting as a government arbitrator in a dispute between English merchants trading to Portugal and the Portuguese government.79TSP vi. 51.

As a member of the council’s foreign affairs committee Jones was also in frequent conference with Dutch diplomats in London. He was named to the protectoral council’s committee on trade, set up in July 1655; indeed, there was scarcely any new policy committee set up by the council to which he was not named. He was in constant demand for its ad hoc committees, frequently their reporter, and one of the council’s most assiduous attenders. From mid-1655, he was never lower than fifth in the frequency of his attendance at council meetings on a yearly computation.80CSP Dom. 1653-4; 1654, passim; 1655, 89, 240; TSP iii. 409, 496; vi. 477. From July 1656 to May 1657, a period which included, in the last few months, the debates on the kingship offer to Cromwell, Jones attended nearly all council meetings, and on occasions when he was absent, it was because he was in the House to try to influence outcomes in the direction favoured by the government.

Jones was appointed custos rotulorum in Glamorgan and Radnor by 20 March 1656, and took the same office in Breconshire a little later. As high steward of Swansea he procured a charter of incorporation for the town from the protector in February 1656; the town corporation was stacked with loyal Cromwellians; and at Jones’s instigation the town was enfranchised, sending its first Member to Westminster to Protector Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament of 1659. Jones’s influence at Westminster and in south Wales was now at its zenith, and a range of Welsh MPs owed their places to Jones’s patronage. Some were directly connected him through kinship or a history of political collaboration in the region: Rowland Dawkins, Evan Lewis and Edward Herbert, Members for Carmarthenshire, Breconshire and Monmouthshire respectively, are examples. Others, like John Claypoole, Nathaniel Waterhouse and Edward Lawrence, were Englishmen associated with the Cromwellian household or political establishment. When the brother-in-law of Sir John Reynolds* resolved to contest Carmarthenshire, he went ahead with his candidature knowing that ‘Colonel Jones ... seemed loath to have him a Welsh Parliament man’. Francis Russell* reported that this man, one Bocking, decided to ‘try his own strength and interest without him, so being a bold Briton he cares not for him’. Predictably, Bocking was unsuccessful.81Henry Cromwell Corresp. 173.

Jones was once again returned in two places for the 1656 Parliament, being elected as county Member for Glamorgan and for Breconshire, and once again opting to sit for Glamorgan (2 Oct. 1656). Despite the presence of the Merioneth MP, Colonel John Jones I, in the Parliament of 1656, it seems almost certain that the Journal entries to the ‘Colonel Jones’ refer to Philip, now so well-known as to make the inclusion of his Christian name superfluous. He was named to more than 50 committees in the Parliament before his elevation to the Cromwellian Upper House on 10 December 1657, in many instances serving along with John Jones I. Their subjects included the exclusion of Charles Stuart from the succession (19 Sept. 1656), Scottish and Irish affairs, (23 Sept.), security (26 Sept.), the court of wards abolition bill (29 Oct.) and James Naylor’s blasphemy (31 Oct.). During the debates on Naylor, the Quaker who had seemingly re-enacted Christ’s entry into Jerusalem by riding into Bristol on a donkey, Jones seems to have acted as Cromwell’s man-of-business in the House, seeking to guide matters towards leniency, the protector’s desired outcome. Thus Jones pressed MPs for a definition of Naylor’s offence (8 Dec.1656), and made a series of interventions apparently intended to have the case deferred. This seems to have been the motive for his motion to have the case decided immediately or, failing that, adjourned (15 Dec.); and for his motion, after sentence had been given, to delay Naylor’s punishment until he recovered from illness (20 Dec.). Three days later, he moved for the reception of a petition from London for the complete remission of Naylor’s penalty, but found himself in a minority of one and was unable to find a seconder (23 Dec.). Again, on 27 December, he was a teller in a division on an unsuccessful bid to have Naylor’s punishment suspended.82CJ vii. 476a; Burton’s Diary, i. 35, 75, 143, 146, 157, 183, 209. In the period of the Naylor debates, Jones missed six council meetings, but on the days he was absent appeared in the House, acting as a teller or to introduce a petition pleading clemency for Naylor.83CSP Dom. 1656-7, pp. xx-xxii; Burton’s Diary, i. 209, 236. He acted as teller in 13 divisions during the 1656 Parliament, almost always intervening in questions intended to promote government measures. On religious settlement questions, his instincts were against restrictive mechanisms that might impinge on the spirit of Cromwellian notions of toleration; hence he opposed a Presbyterian-sponsored bill to promote catechizing, on the grounds that it offended many godly ministers (9 June 1657).84Burton’s Diary, ii. 203.

During the early months of 1657, he was actively involved in the preparation of the new constitution, the ‘remonstrance’ of March 1657 which duly became the Petition and Advice. Jones played a major role throughout the debates on the Remonstrance following Sir Christopher Packe’s presentation of it to the House on 23 February 1657. From the very outset, he was identified as being ‘highly for’ the Remonstrance, and was thought by some to be one of its authors.85Henry Cromwell Corresp. 205; Coventry City Archives, BA/H/Q/A79/302. It may well have been significant that Jones and Packe already had a business relationship. Jones had borrowed £2,000 from Packe and Charles Lloyd in December 1656.86LC4/204, f. 90v. In January 1657, after a report from the Treasury commissioners on arrears owed to the state by Packe, Lloyd and other customs commissioners, their petition was referred to a small committee of the council, including Jones, and on 1 May, a day Jones reported from a committee attending Cromwell about the Humble Petition and Advice, he also reported to the House a bill to bestow Irish lands on Lloyd.87CSP Dom. 1656-7, pp. 253, 254; Burton’s Diary, ii. 94. Jones was on a number of committees to revise and amplify the Remonstrance, and to liaise with the protector when it came to be presented. On 24 February he was a teller in favour of reading the Remonstrance on the following day, and on 6 March, by which time the debates had reached the lengthy sixth article, he was named sixth in the list of the committee appointed to review the clauses on exclusions from the franchise. When the committee reported three days later, Jones was a teller in favour of adopting its recommended formula.88CJ vii. 496b, 499b, 500b.

On 10 March, he was named third to the committee asked to recommend a mechanism for scrutinising the membership of the Commons; it was 23 March before it reported the successful device of a commission of 41 examiners.89CJ vii. 501a, 509b, 510a,b. The judicial powers of the proposed Other House needed to be defined, and Jones was named eighth in the committee of 48 appointed on 12 March; Whitelocke reported from it on the 17th.90CJ vii. 502a, 506a. By 16 March, the House had reached the eighth article, and Jones was named second after John Thurloe among those required to ensure that the wording of the Remonstrance on issues of political and religious liberty harmonised with the law of the land.91CJ vii. 505a. Jones was one of the committee which offered swiftly on 20 March (having been appointed only the previous day) a new clause on the civil rights of ministers who accepted the suggested overarching formula on religious liberty.92CJ vii. 507b; Burton’s Diary, i. 389-90. On the same day this report was made, he was one of the small body of nine delegated the sensitive task of devising clauses to disqualify royalists and others from political life in Scotland and Ireland.93CJ vii. 508a.

Once all the clauses of the Remonstrance had been debated and amended, and some of the more contentious articles had been revisited, there came on 24 March a debate on the title of the chief magistrate, left blank in the Remonstrance. The following day there was a vote on the title of king, and Jones was included in a later list of those who had voted in favour. 94Narrative of the Late Parliament (1658), 23 (E.935.5). There is no doubt that Jones was in favour of bestowing that title on the lord protector, but he was not the sole influence on those Welsh MPs who were ‘kinglings’: the influence of John Glynne* on a number of north Wales MPs worked in the same direction.95Narrative of the Late Parliament, 7, 10; Burton’s Diary, ii. 5. On 26 March he was one of the committee of 17 charged with topping and tailing the Remonstrance; the same day its recommendations, including giving the document a new title, were accepted without a division. When a large delegation was appointed on 27 March to prepare the ground to present what was now the Humble Petition and Advice, Jones was third on the list after Lord Broghill (Roger Boyle) and Wolseley.96CJ vii. 511b, 512b, 514a On 31 March, the petition was presented, and on 7 April Jones was named second only to Broghill to the body of 51 which sought a further meeting with the protector.97CJ vii. 516b, 523a. When, through Bulstrode Whitelocke, the protector contributed his own amendments and additions to the Humble Petition and Advice, Jones was in support of granting generous temporary supply to the government, and urged restraint on the House when it seemed that a full scale debate might take place on a reformation of manners. He offered a view on the validity of further papers presented to the House after dissenting from the proposals of a fellow ‘kingling’, Sir John Reynolds, for confirming existing legislation: he wanted the matter referred to a committee, and so it was, with his own name second on the list of nominees.98CJ vii. 523b; Burton’s Diary, ii. 33, 36, 39, 42, 44.

Jones wished the new constitution to prevail, in the event of a conflict of laws, over all other statutes in force. This, however, proved too much for his fellow MPs, and on 30 April he failed to carry a proviso to a bill for the confirmation of statutes still in force whereby they were invalidated if ‘contrary to the Humble Petition and Advice’.99Burton’s Diary, ii. 82, 85, 88, 90. On the question of securing the titles of those with lands in Scotland and Ireland, under consideration while the protector prepared his final answer to the House on their Petition, Jones (if it was he, since the topic of Irish lands was a favourite of John Jones I’s) was sympathetic in committee, though he kept an eye on how much time it was being allocated.100CJ vii. 526a,b; Burton’s Diary, ii. 63, 76, 79. On 1 May, Jones reported from the committee attending the protector, the first of a series of indecisive consultations that week before Cromwell finally turned down the offer of the crown on 7 May. When on the 19th, the title of lord protector was successfully voted upon, Jones was on the committee to define it more precisely, and attended the protector with the revised additional petition and advice on 23 May. Inevitably, he was among those charged on the 27th with trying to ‘methodise’ the various resolutions and votes on the constitutional changes, and advocated the printing of the Humble Petition and Advice with the additional resolutions appended.101CJ vii. 529b, 535a, 538b, 540b; Burton’s Diary, ii. 100-1, 121, 136.

Ever anxious to see that the House operated effectively as a legislature, particularly when it came to government business, Jones was frequently impatient with the meanderings of debate and the pettifogging habits of individual Members. After a tedious ‘great debate’ on whether a clause should be amended before it was put to the question, Jones expostulated: ‘I compare this to the dressing of a cucumber. First pare, and order, and dress it, and throw it out of the window’.102Burton’s Diary, i. 18. Yet the clause was amended, and then thrown out. He called for the withdrawal of a Member with a stake in the Irish land settlement bill, on 24 December, and next day for a fuller discussion, informed by the protector’s council, of the decimation of cavaliers, ‘that the justice and honesty of the business may be debated’.103Burton’s Diary, i. 222, 236. Even among his fellow Members, Jones was an enigma where his own honesty was concerned. On 8 January 1657 they were gossiping in taverns that he was ‘born but to £8 or £10 a year’ and ‘has now £7,000 per annum’.104Burton’s Diary, i. 331.

In Parliament, Jones was a very active and effective manager of business, coaxing the House away from irrelevant debate, referring controversial matters to committees (where government pressure could often be exerted far more effectively than in the House), and by moving for timely adjournments when circumstances seemed unpropitious for the conduct of debate. Nowhere is this more visible than in the last three months of the session of 1657, ending in June.105CJ vii. 432a, 461a, 469b, 476a, 496b, 500b, 524b, 535b, 546a, 555b, 559b, 563b, 568a, 570a, 575b; Burton’s Diary, ii. 26, 31-4, 36, 39, 42, 49, 51, 54-6, 60, 68, 70, 72, 73, 76, 77-8, 82, 86, 121, 148, 150, 157, 158, 169, 170, 171, 178-9, 185, 202-3, 208, 216, 218, 225-6, 242, 245, 254, 259. Jones’s blunt-talking style commanded respect in the House, and seems to have saved more than one government bill. When, for instance, the House rejected an ordinance for ejection of ‘scandalous’ ministers on 28 April, Jones responded with characteristic pragmatism: ‘I dislike some parts of the ordinance as much as any man, but would not have it taken away till you have provided a better. I shall speedily bring in a bill myself, if you command it’.106Burton’s Diary, ii. 59. The House duly took up Jones’s proposal, establishing a committee to revive the proposal and bring in a new bill. A pragmatist on some legislative matters, Jones was willing to argue in the House that the 1653 act for marriages, ‘inconvenient and absurd’ though it was, should continue indefinitely, despite its evident conflict with other laws. To continue it would strengthen the case for better legislation, now in progress; but Jones’s reasoning drew a reproach from Nicholas Lechmere*. Later in the day, Jones had evidently got over his impatience and was active in addressing points of order and managing the debate.107Burton’s Diary, ii. 68, 72, 73. Characteristically, he intervened in the first week of June to curtail discussion in the House of matters which were not ‘of public consequence’.108Burton’s Diary, ii. 170. Jones was also active in attending to the interests of his fellow members of the lord protector’s council. He moved for public recognition of Admiral Robert Blake’s* services at sea, and exposing the weakness of Members’ attempts to settle a monetary value on Blake’s contribution. His suggestion that a jewel was a token of esteem not a reward, was taken up, and the final cost of the gift to the admiral showed how Jones had successfully reined in some Members’ flights of fancy. However, his suggestion that the widows and orphans created by Blake’s sea-battles deserved relief seems to have fallen on deaf ears.109Burton’s Diary, ii. 145, 146.

Between April and June 1657, Jones was frequently named to committees on the Irish land donatives, and seems to have shown sympathy towards the Old Protestant interest in Ireland. In October 1656, for example, Jones had secured for Vincent Gookin* a meeting with the protector, when Gookin presented a petition from the Irish Old Protestants, and urged Gookin to stay in England while Parliament continued.110Henry Cromwell Corresp. 182, 211. The donatives were gifts of land in Ireland promised to worthy recipients in the Long Parliament, but not yet theirs in title. Lord Broghill reported on their case to the House on 1 May 1657, urging that the grants should be honoured. Whitelocke and Wolseley supported Broghill, as did Jones.111P.J.S. Little, ‘The Political Career of Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill, 1636-1660’ (London PhD thesis, 2000), 234-5. Jones again helped Broghill on 5 June, when he was a teller in support of a bill to bestow on Broghill lands in County Cork worth £1,000 a year.112CJ vii. 575b-576a; Burton’s Diary, ii. 178, 179. On 10 June he suggested the order of debate for the proposed reduced assessment. On 12 June he secured a hearing for critics of the Irish assessment burden. A day later, after he had criticized the proposal to meet the state’s debts by selling forest and Irish lands, he was unable to carry the tax abatement for Ireland, despite his alliance with Lord Deputy Henry Cromwell*, the protector’s son, for the purpose.113Burton’s Diary, ii. 224, 226, 242, 245.

On 20 June, Jones and Thurloe pressed for priority to be given to public business, and successfully carried a motion that attendance in the House should be temporarily compulsory, with a penalty of £50 for defaulters.114Burton’s Diary, ii. 259, 260. The pressing business was that of the Additional Petition and Advice. The government had to accept the House’s amendments to the oaths proposed for the protector and council, on 23 and 24 June, but this was a small price to pay for success in pushing through the startling departure from the Humble Petition: that the lord protector, not the House, should nominate the members of the Other House.115Burton’s Diary, ii. 278, 284, 285, 287, 293, 298. Jones contrived an unconvincing concession to the House on scrutiny of the Other House’s membership, and cautioned Members against tampering with the representation of Scotland.116Burton’s Diary, ii. 298, 306. On 26 June, the last day of the session, he was one of the House’s delegation to Cromwell to present their vote in encouragement of Protestant unity abroad: the following month, William Jephson* was selected as ambassador to Sweden to promote the global Protestant interest, the culmination of Jones’s involvement in this topic for over a year.117‘William Jephson’ supra; Whitelocke, Diary, 429. That day Jones was appointed a commissioner under the Customs Act, and took part in the ceremonial of Cromwell’s investiture and Parliament’s humble address immediately following it. He was also a manager of arrangements to adjourn Parliament until 20 January 1658.118Burton’s Diary, ii. 313; Mercurius Politicus no. 369 (25 June-2 July 1657), 7881-4 (E.505.1).

Jones was promoted to Cromwell’s Upper House on 10 Dec. 1657, and around the same time acquired the office of comptroller of the protector’s household. His importance at council is reflected in his attendance record: since the autumn of 1655 he had been one of the quartet who had attended the council most frequently; only President Lawrence and Walter Strickland were consistently more assiduous. He was regarded as ‘firmly Cromwell’s’. As one contemporary critic observed

he made hay while the sun shined, and hath improved his interest and revenue in land, well-gotten (no question), to £3,000 per annum, if not more; he is also very well qualified with self-denying principles to the protector’s will and pleasure, so as he is fit, no doubt, to rise yet higher, and to be taken out of the House to be a Lord, and to leave a negative voice in the other House over all the good people in Wales, if they please; and over all the commonwealth besides, whether they please or not. All have not lost by the cause, though some have.

A footnote to the phrase ‘well-gotten’ runs

If part of the purchase money was not paid with the great bribe of about three thousand pounds, for which (as it is credibly reported) he hath been privately questioned; he would do well to clear himself, being very much suspected, having gotten so great an estate in so short a time.119Second Narrative of the Late Parliament, 7.

The trust reposed in him by Cromwell was emulated by the protector’s sons: Henry in Ireland relied on Jones to influence the council to secure payment of his military arrears, and by April 1658, when Lord Broghill stepped back, regarded Thurloe and Jones as the duo in charge of affairs of state during his father’s decline.120TSP vi. 648, 651, 661, 665, 714. On Oliver’s death, Jones was one of the principal organizers of the protector’s state funeral; and, as comptroller of the household, he was poised to become one of the chief props of Richard Cromwell’s protectorate. Protector Richard’s ‘cabinet council’, it was reported, was a trio composed of Lord Broghill, Dr John Wilkins, brother-in-law of the late protector and warden of Wadham College, Oxford, and Colonel Philip Jones.121Henry Cromwell Corresp. 359-60; Pepys’s Diary, i. 180; Ludlow, Mems. 61. Jones strongly backed Protector Richard during the crisis of April 1659 which precipitated the first recall of the Rump Parliament between 7 May and 13 October 1659.

Even before Richard Cromwell’s resigning the protectorship on 24 May 1659, Jones found himself once more on the defensive against his Welsh enemies, who were encouraged by the weakness of the regime to revive the charges of peculation against Jones in March in the very presence of the protector. Like those other military men, Major-general William Boteler* and Colonel John Barkstead,* Jones became something of a whipping boy for the unpopularity of the regime.122CCSP iv. 257. Noting that ‘our commonwealth men’ had begun to ‘snarl at Colonel Jones’, a royalist informant remarked that

it may very well be presumed he is injured because of his fidelity to my lord protector, and being too fine a courtier. Nevertheless his patience was at one time so moved by the unworthy shuffling of our republicans that he told the protector that, if his highness would hearken to his advice, he would put him into a way that he should never want money nor ever need to call a Parliament, but his Highness very tenderly and prudently (as he doth all things) answered him, that he had rather starve than displease the people or disoblige this Parliament.

During Protector Richard’s Parliament in 1659, Edward Freeman led the campaign against Jones, which was backed by hardened critics of the protectorate who wished to see Cromwell’s trusted advisers toppled. Jones was hounded by hostile MPs and by what a royalist observer called ‘the licentious press’.123Nicholas Pprs. iv. 84-5; Clarendon SP, iii. 441. This culminated in the presentation of a petition and articles of impeachment against him by Bledry Morgan on 18 May, five days before Protector Richard resigned.124CJ vii. 656a,b; Articles of Impeachment (1659, E.983.31). By then, however, Jones was entitled to answer for himself in the House as a Member of the restored Rump Parliament, which had reconvened by 7 May. Responding to the allegations, he ‘stood up in his place and cleared himself’ of the charges on 23 May.125CJ vii. 663a. Even so, the campaign against Jones intensified. His defence was not accepted by the House, the charges against him were published in pamphlet form, and by 25 May he was described as ‘out of place’.126CSP Dom.1658-9, p. 357. His allies in the Parliament were few and far between. He had already lost his protégé, Edmund Jones, who had been expelled the House for his royalist past; and an attempt had been made to dislodge William Foxwist*, second justice on the Brecon circuit from 1655-59 and Jones’s nominee for the recently enfranchised borough of Swansea.127HP Commons 1660-90, ii. 360.

Worse still, Jones’s local standing was undermined when he was dropped from the militia commission and deprived of the governorship of Cardiff.128CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 36. In these circumstances the royalists had hopes of winning him over as a desperado, ‘ruined beyond all recovery if the commonwealth be established’.129CCSP iv. 209. Although he seems to have continued to serve as comptroller of the household, his court connexions did nothing to shield him from his enemies. A parliamentary committee was set up to investigate the charges against him (26 May), and the best Jones could do was to embarrass, by his presence, those who came from Wales to give evidence against him. Moreover, his name was soon among those ‘destined in their persons or purses to the public sacrifice’, and he thought it prudent to leave the Cockpit, the former residence at Whitehall of the lord chamberlain of the Household. On 5 August, he was required to surrender the keys of his state lodgings, and on 30 September he was fined £5 by the House as a defaulter.130CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 75; CJ vii. 790a. By then he was lodging in the Strand, but he later retreated to East Barnet, Hertfordshire, to his brother-in-law’s house. In January 1660 he was dropped from the Glamorgan county assessment commission, but in March was restored both to that and to the militia commission, and remained a sitting Member at the time of Parliament’s dissolution.131CJ vii. 876b.

Last years and rehabilitation, 1660-74

Although there is no evidence that he promoted it, the Restoration could not have come at a better time for Philip Jones. His pardon cost him only £520, a reflection of his timely conversion to royalism.132C231/7, p. 53; Glam. Archives, D/DF F/210a. As his old enemy, Bledry Morgan admitted, Jones in his heyday had awarded local offices to some 28 royalists in return for his future security. Morgan’s bid to induce the Convention (18 June 1660) to exempt him from the Act of Indemnity, was at once countered by a petition from Jones, and he held his ground; Morgan was last heard of as a pirate in the Caribbean. Of course Jones was excluded at this stage from local office, but he escaped even his minor share in the prosecutions in 1662 of commonwealth officials for peculation in south Wales, and the royalists who tried to settle old scores with him failed to make their charges stick.133Glam. Archives, D/DF L/12b. The good will of the 2nd earl of Carbery (Richard Vaughan†), now lord president in Wales, whose own past was vulnerable, may have kept them at bay.

Jones had allegedly increased his income a hundredfold in ten years (to ‘£5,000 per annum’); in the eyes of contemporaries, he could only be ‘A Presbyterian, an Independent, a cavalier, a defrauder of the public revenue, and thorough paced protectorian’, that is ‘for anything, and for everybody that will reward him’. In fact, Jones was worth something over £1,000 a year when he died, though he had certainly spent nearly £16,000 on land purchases during the interregnum, and his acquisitions were not haphazard. He was building an estate around Fonmon Castle, the former St John property he had purchased in 1654 and subsequently embellished. Four manors purchased from the delinquent marquess of Worcester’s estate in 1651 and quitclaimed to Jones in 1656 could not be recovered by the marquess when he tried to reclaim them in 1662, and Jones beat off other claims on his property, from former allies.134HMC 7th Rep. 160, 162, 8th Rep. 154, 9th Rep. pt. 2, 29a.

Jones’s purchases before 1653, involving an outlay of over £4,000, were nevertheless those that raised lingering doubts: his fourth and youngest son (and eventual heir), Oliver (b.1654) was anxious for reassurance on this point as late as 1681 when his father’s trusty agent William Watkins set his mind at rest by asserting that Philip Jones ‘never received a shilling of tithe money’.135Glam. Archives, D/DF F/41. Jones, to all outward appearances a conformist in religion after the Restoration, was again awarded local office appropriate to his status from 1671 onwards. He died on 5 September 1674, aged 56, and was buried in Penmark church. His will, a business document without religious content, bequeathed £3,500 to his daughters.136PROB11/347, ff. 198v-300. Founder of a county family, he was grandfather of Robert Jones, elected tory Member for Glamorgan in 1712. He is not to be confused with members of the Jones family of Treowen, Monmouthshire – one with the same forename as the MP held public office in Monmouthshire after 1660 – or with a pioneer Baptist at Ilston, Gower.137List of Sheriffs (List and Index ix), 84; T.M. Bassett, The Welsh Baptists (1977), 19; The Ilston Bk. ed. B.G. Owens (Aberystwyth, 1996), 7.