JONES, William II (1613-62), of Sandford, West Felton, Salop.

When the College of Heralds granted William Jones’s grandfather arms in 1607, the origins of the family were recorded as lying in Denbighshire, at Holt. The Jones family had moved to Shrewsbury, by way of Chilton and Uckington, but despite these addresses outside the walls of the county town, it was within them that they carved out an identity for themselves. They were one of the town’s foremost municipal families. William Jones, grandfather of the MP, was an alderman who died in 1612, and three of his four sons enjoyed notable civic careers. Richard Jones, the eldest, served a turn as warden of the important drapers’ company, not quite emulating the success of his father, who was master in 1610, not long before his death.12Salop Archives, 1831/6, ff. 5v, 11. In the days when Shrewsbury had two bailiffs instead of one mayor, William’s second son, Thomas Jones, was bailiff six times, and crowned that achievement with the distinction of being the town’s first mayor. Edward Jones, the third son and this Member’s father, was a senior member of the drapers by 1621, and master in 1626.13Salop Archives, 1831/6, ff. 35v-36v, 45. The fourth and youngest son of William Jones, Isaac Jones, was apprenticed away from Shrewsbury, as a Merchant Taylor in London. The links between Isaac Jones and his native town remained strong enough to make Samuel Jones*, first cousin of William the MP, a credible candidate for a seat in Shrewsbury in 1656.

In marrying Mary, the daughter of Robert Powell of Whittington, Edward Jones was in effect sustaining the family’s claim to gentility and was successfully dispelling any notion that he was a mere townsman. The education of William Jones was a further proof of the family’s social aspirations. His schooling took place at Shrewsbury, the school attended by the sons of mercantile elite and county gentry alike, and from there Jones enrolled at both Emmanuel College, Cambridge and Lincoln’s Inn, apparently at the same time, in 1629. The enduring link between Shrewsbury corporation and Cambridge University went back at least as far as the 1590s, when a learned recommendation for a public preacher was sought, and was visible in 1618 in a similar context.14Salop Archives, A1, f. 72; A3, f. 13. No further record of Jones’s academic career survives, but he evidently settled on legal studies rather than a university course. Those who stood surety for him when he enrolled at Lincoln’s Inn included James Mytton, doubtless of the family of Thomas Mytton*.15LIL, Adm. Bk. vi. f. 20v. In June 1632, Jones himself acted as manucaptor (or sponsor) for Robert Clive*, maintaining links with Shropshire.16LIL, Adm. Bk. vi. f. 62v. He was called to the bar in 1636, on the same day as Matthew Hale*, and the following year stood surety for Vincent Corbett*.17LI Black Bks. ii. 339; LIL, Adm. Bk. vi. f. 131. Shortly afterwards, his father was elected alderman on the same day that saw the same distinction bestowed on Thomas Hunt*, Humphrey Mackworth I* and Thomas Nichols, a triumvirate that was to form the vanguard of opposition to the king during the turbulent years of 1640-2.18Salop Archives, A3, f. 114 (6001/290). Edward Jones was honoured further with the distinction of being the first steward of the town under the new charter of 1638.19Add. 21024, f. 78v.

Some time between 1632 and March 1637, William Jones married into the Worcestershire gentry family of Greaves, of King’s Norton near Birmingham. Mary Greaves brought to the marriage property in Sheldon, Warwickshire, on long lease from the Throckmorton family, but this was sold to her brother in 1637, suggesting that William Jones by this time was a man of some means in his own right, presumably through the practice of law.20Coventry Docquets, 545; PROB11/162/359. This willingness to dispose of west midlands real estate, together with no mention of Jones in either the commission of the peace or any other commissions out of chancery during the 1630s suggests that he lived in London rather than Shropshire before 1642. His common name makes it hard to pin him down in the metropolis: there were at least four propertied individuals with that name in the City of London alone in 1638, without taking Westminster and the suburbs into account.21Inhabitants of London, 1638. If Jones did indeed reside in London, it hardly seems likely that he would have moved from London to the provinces once civil war had broken out, and Shrewsbury would have been the least likely place of all. The town quickly became a royalist stronghold, and Edward Jones’s fellow aldermen, Hunt, Mackworth and Nicholls lost their places in the corporation.22Salop Archives, 6001/290, 16 Nov. 1642. Edward Jones remained in the town under royalist rule, paying local taxes there in 1643.23Salop Archives, 3365/587/3.

Jones probably remained in London for much of the war. His cousin, Colonel Samuel Jones*, took Farnham Castle, in Surrey, for Parliament, and remained there as military governor. A clergyman captured there in 1643 was brought up to London, to appear before Parliament’s Committee for Examinations. One William Jones of Gray’s Inn Lane stood surety for him, and it is tempting, because of the legal context and the circumstances of the case, to presume that this was the future Parliament-man.24CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 512. He is perhaps less likely to have been the man who by May 1644 was an army commissary at Farnham with a commission from Sir William Waller. The balance of probability suggests that this was Samuel Jones’s brother, but decisive proof is absent.25CSP Dom. 1644, p. 143. Similar doubts assail any identification of the ‘William Jones esquire’ captured by the royalists in 1645 and held at Eccleshall Castle before being released in an exchange of prisoners.26CJ iv. 312b. The local government appointments bestowed on William Jones in Westminster in 1644, 1645 and into the 1650s, suggest on balance that as a Parliament-supporting lawyer, Jones enjoyed a trouble-free wartime experience.

After Shrewsbury had been taken by Parliament, Edward Jones was restored to prominence in the town. His house was used for the storage of goods seized from the Staffordshire royalist, Sir Richard Leveson*.27CCC 990. Edward Jones’s death in 1648 brought William an estate at Sandford, and marked his first appearances in Shropshire local government. Even so, he was not as evident in Shrewsbury as his younger brother, Thomas Jones†, who had been imprisoned in 1645, and who under the protectorate was fêted by the town, even before he was elected to Parliament in 1660.28Salop Archives, 3365/603/8. William Jones remained at one remove. He was elected as recorder in 1655 because of the death of Humphrey Mackworth I.29Salop Archives, 6001/290, 5 Mar. 1655. The account of Shrewsbury’s recorders at this time by Owen and Blakeway is confused, and there is no reason to believe that Humphrey Mackworth II* ever held that office as well as the town clerkship.30Owen, Blakeway, Hist. Shrewsbury, i. 538. The corporation seems not to have lavished much of its largesse on Jones, whose fee was nominal and was noted rather pointedly in the civic accounts as to be the same as that given his more illustrious predecessor.31Salop Archives, 3365/602/23. It seems likely that William Jones’s elevation to the recordership was a recognition of the prominence of his family in Shrewsbury over many generations rather than a special and personal honour to him alone.

Jones’s cousin, Samuel Jones, was returned to the second Parliament of the Cromwellian protectorate in 1656. Samuel’s rejection as a Member under the scrutiny of the lord protector’s council seems to have done nothing to deter the Shrewsbury mayor and burgesses from returning him to Parliament a second time, on this occasion with his cousin, William. The Members of Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament faced none of the obstacles from the council that had been put before the MPs of 1656, but there was in any case nothing in William Jones’s past that would have rendered him obnoxious. In fact, Jones’s parliamentary career began auspiciously, when he was named to the standing committee for elections or privileges (28 Jan. 1659).32CJ vii. 595a. Strangely, however, nothing developed from this promising start and he was named to no further committees. He did, however, intervene occasionally in debate. On 10 February, Jones spoke up on a procedural point while the bill to recognise the lord protector was being debated, and on the 22nd he moved that the question be put on the right of the ‘ancient Lords’, in other words on whether the rights and privileges of the historic House of Lords, as against the Cromwellian ‘Other House’, should be revived.33Burton’s Diary, iii. 198, 424. In this, he was thwarted by the Cromwellian Other House appointee, John Disbrowe, who successfully moved an adjournment instead. Jones’s contribution to the Parliament was slight, so his political outlook is hard to assess, but he seems not to have striven to support the protectorate.

After the collapse of the Cromwellian regime, Jones must have returned either to Shropshire or London. It is clear that he was intent on pursuing his legal career. In November 1659, his inn called him to the bench, its governing body, and on 14 March 1660 he was appointed justice of Anglesey, Caernarfonshire and Merioneth by the restored Rump Parliament. Among his colleagues on the Welsh circuits were the Salopian, John Corbett* and William Foxwist*, his exact contemporary at Lincoln’s Inn with less than three months’ advantage in seniority.34CJ vii. 876a; LIL, Adm. Bk. vi. f. 16v. Jones’s career was blighted by the Restoration of the monarchy, however. He must have stood down as recorder of Shrewsbury in favour of Sir Timothy Tourneur, who had been ousted by the parliamentarians, as soon as Charles II was proclaimed king. He was in 1662 cited in evidence by the corporation commissioners when they tuned the Shrewsbury corporation and rid themselves of Jones’s brother, Thomas, as town clerk. The commissioners noted how William when recorder had declared his brother ‘publicly upon the bench at a quarter sessions a man well-affected to the Parliament’.35Owen, Blakeway, Hist. Shrewsbury, i. 484. Indeed, the commissioners made a point of selecting William Jones for ejection from the ranks of the freemen, a privilege to which he would have been admitted by patrimony.36Salop Archives, 3365/2713. His brief tenure as a Welsh judge was abruptly terminated in August after only five months. He probably tried also to resign as a bencher of Lincoln’s Inn, but in February 1662, his colleagues there asked him and others to resume their places.37LI Black Bks. iii. 16. Nothing came of this offer of rehabilitation, however, as on 1 August, in ill-health, Jones drew up his will. He left a portion of £3,000 to his only daughter but all the messuages he had purchased (presumably as against those he had inherited) went to his wife. There was no mention of his sole surviving son, William, in the will, either as executor, overseer or beneficiary, but he must have inherited West Felton. Jones is said to have been buried on the day he died and therefore made his will, but only the will-making date can be confirmed by written record.38PROB11/310/268; MI West Felton. William Jones junior died childless in 1679 and made his estates over to his uncle, Thomas, by this time Sir Thomas, Jones.39Salop Archives, 6001/1078, p. 818.