LLOYD, Francis (c.1615-69), of Maesyfelin, Lampeter, Card.

Lloyd was descended from the Llwyds of Castell Hywel, Cardiganshire. The family’s arms, supposedly bestowed by Lord Rhys (1132-97), included scaling ladders representing an ancestor’s exploits at the taking of Cardigan during the revolt against Henry II.18West Wales Recs. i. 9-10. Lloyd’s paternal grandfather was treasurer of St David’s cathedral between 1574 and 1612 and brother-in-law to a bishop deprived of the see for forging a will.19W.B. Jones, E. A. Freeman, Hist. and Antiquities of St David’s (1856), 116, 331, 359. His father, Sir Marmaduke, became a pillar of the judicial structure in Wales, serving as attorney-general for Wales and the marches and thus a member of the council in the marches at Ludlow. He was a judge on the Chester circuit and, from 1636 until the civil wars led to the breakdown of the great sessions, chief justice of the Brecon circuit. It was Sir Marmaduke who acquired the house and lands of Maesyfelin.20DWB, ‘Lloyd family of Maesyfelin’. Francis Lloyd’s parents were married by 1617, and a later parliamentary survey described him as aged 34 in October 1649. However, there is no mention of him in his grandmother’s will of 1617.21LPL, Comm. XIIa/4/50; NLW, SD/1617/126. The first record of his life that has been identified is his admission to his father’s inn of court, with the special assent of the masters of the bench, suggesting something unusual about his enrolment, doubtless his young age. His appointment as a gentleman of the privy chamber took place the same year, and should therefore be read as an honour to his father.22MTR ii. 736. Because of his youthfulness it seems most unlikely that Lloyd was an active courtier, and his appointment to the Carmarthenshire commission of the peace in 1634 must surely have marked the beginning of his entry to public affairs. He was married by May 1632 to the daughter of the 1st earl of Carbery, but the marriage can hardly have been a happy one, since a chronicler later in the century noted the three children from his adulterous relationship with Bridget Leigh or Lee, of a Carmarthen family accounted gentry by Lewys Dwnn, the herald.23PROB11/180, f. 46; West Wales Recs. i. 10-11; Dwnn, Vis. Wales, i. 201. A strong suggestion that Lloyd’s relations with his mother were strained comes from Sir Marmaduke’s will, which in more than one place enjoined the pair to amity, ‘the last request of a dying, loving father … and of a dying, loving husband’.24PROB11/219, f. 130v.

Lloyd did not follow his father into the law, but became by virtue of his social standing a captain in the Cardiganshire militia, and took up arms at least semi-professionally. It seems likely that he served as a soldier away from Wales. He was listed in the regiment of Sir Ralph Hopton* when it marched north to confront the Scots in 1639, and after the Restoration he petitioned the king for a reward for his services to the monarchy, including those on ‘several expensive expeditions before the [civil] war’.25SP16/427, f. 73; SP29/60, f. 76. However, it was on his family’s own interest and that of the Vaughans of Golden Grove that secured his election for Carmarthen to the Short Parliament in 1640. The knight of the shire was Henry Vaughan, his wife’s uncle. A number of speeches in this Parliament were made by a Member described by the diarist Sir Thomas Aston* as ‘Mr Flood’ or ‘Mr Floyd’. These interventions seem to be mainly procedural or legal in character, and thus are more safely attributed to Richard Lloyd*, a barrister, than to Francis. It seems more likely that Francis Lloyd made no impact on the assembly. He was returned again for Carmarthen to the second Parliament of 1640, as was Vaughan for the shire.

Lloyd was not prominent in his second Parliament. He is difficult to disentangle with any degree of certainty from Walter Lloyd. One of them was called to a committee on the Great Marlow election (4 Jan. 1641).26CJ ii. 62b. Sir Simonds D’Ewes* noted two Lloyds voted against the attainder of Sir Thomas Wentworth†, earl of Strafford on 21 April, as did the list compiled by Sir Ralph Verney*. Other lists, including one copied by John Rushworth*, included only man of that surname.27Procs. LP iv. 42, 51; Verney, Notes, 58; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 248. Either Francis or Walter Lloyd took the Protestation late, on 5 May, probably the same Lloyd who had been granted leave on 29 April.28CJ ii. 130a, 135a. On 12 June and 6 August, one of either man was granted further leave.29CJ ii. 174b, 240b. In contrast to these uncertainties about his behaviour at Westminster, it is beyond doubt that he was named to the commission for disarming recusants in Carmarthenshire.30Northants. RO, FH133, unfol. In 1642, a ‘Mr’ Lloyd was one of the committee to confer with the Lords on sedition (5 Apr.), and on 28 May was named to the committee to inquire into military misdemeanours in Anglesey.31CJ ii. 512b, 591a. One of them spoke to the petition of a Protestant former soldier in Ireland, a victim of the rebellion there (13 May), and one was a teller against fining Members who were absent without leave £20 (16 June), a subject on which one man would have held views, given the record of leave granted.32PJ i. 314; CJ ii. 627a. Either Francis or Walter was added to the committee on Lady Sedley’s petition against John Griffith II*, on 21 July, perhaps more probably Walter, whom D’Ewes recorded as present in the House that day.33CJ ii. 685a; PJ ii. 247.

To judge from Francis Lloyd’s later political conduct, it seems on balance unlikely that he remained in the House as late as the summer of 1642, as the gulf widened between king and Parliament. He probably left Westminster for Carmarthenshire, where he would have consulted the head of his family, Richard Vaughan†, 2nd earl of Carbery, his brother-in-law. Carbery raised a regiment disciplined enough by January 1643 to march to Oxford, and Lloyd was a few years later said to have been among ‘the most active sticklers and setters on of my lord of Carbery, both to embrace the employment [of military command], and to have been the most vehement traducers of the Parliament’.34Dugdale, Diary and Corresp. 46; Some Particular Animadversions of Marke (1646), 9. Lloyd himself credibly claimed to have raised both infantry and cavalry in the civil war, although it remains unclear exactly what rank he gave himself or was given.35SP29/60, f. 76. The assertion that he became comptroller of the royal household in 1642 seems to be an error.36Phillips, Civil War in Wales, ii. 286. He almost certainly accompanied Carbery on that first expedition to Oxford, because he was knighted by the king there on 24 March, but by late October 1643 he and his force claimed Haverfordwest for Charles, and imposed Carbery’s tax levy there. The church bells of the town rang as Lloyd entered on 30 October.37Cal. Recs. Haverfordwest, 13, 74; A.L. Leach, Hist. Civil War in Pemb. (1937), 57. His occupation of the borough was punctuated by a visit to Oxford in January 1644 as the king’s Parliament there was opening, but his must have been a token appearance only. He did not sign the letter to the 3rd earl of Essex which was aimed at a cessation of hostilities, because he was excused further attendance at Oxford.38Names of the Lords and Commons Assembled (1646), 6; A Declaration of the Lords and Commons (Oxford, 1644), 25. Instead, his military duties called, and he joined other west Wales gentry in raising soldiers to resist an expected parliamentarian assault, and to seize Pembroke castle for the king.39Phillips, Civil War in Wales, ii. 119-21. On 25 February Rowland Laugharne† took Haverfordwest for Parliament, and an attempt by Lloyd with 60 horse and foot to draw out the town’s new occupying force was easily repulsed. The account written by Simon Thelwall* of the parliamentarian successes in Pembrokeshire depicted Lloyd as having run away from Haverfordwest. 40A True Relation (1644), 5-6 (E.42.13). By then, however, the Commons at Westminster had included him among those expelled for deserting the House, ‘being in the king’s quarters, and adhering to that party’ (5 Feb. 1644).41CJ iii. 389b. On 30 March, the king granted Lloyd a pardon, which in his case can hardly have been anything more than a single-payment tax.42Docquets of Letters Patent ed. Black, 181.

It seems likely that Lloyd joined Carbery in returning to Oxford to account for their military failures. Carbery surrendered his command, but Lloyd remained on active military service, putting himself under the authority of Col. Charles Gerard.43SP29/60, f. 76. If he did, he would have participated in the winning back of territory from Laugharne in Carmarthenshire. Probably with Gerard, and certainly with his father, he was at Hereford when the king journeyed westward after the defeat at Naseby in June 1645. On 23 June 1645 he was reported to be marching west with 500 men, first to Cardigan, then to Swansea.44Mems. of Prince Rupert, iii. 120. Gerard moved on, but the Lloyds remained at Hereford and were taken prisoner there by Col. John Birch* on 18 December 1645.45J. Vicars, Magnalia Dei Anglicana (1646), 334 (E.348.1). Sir Francis was ordered to be brought a prisoner to London and given liberty to compound.46CJ iv. 415a, 442a. Even before this, Lloyd’s estate had been sized up by the Committee for Advance of Money and assessed at £1,000, even though no action was taken against him before his capture.47CCAM 435, 666. Lloyd petitioned the Commons to be able to compound for his delinquency, since Birch had no power to negotiate terms with a surrendering Member, and claimed that he had intended to accept a fine before he surrendered. His fine was set at £1,275, a third of his estate’s value (28 July 1646).48CCC 1084. His capture and fine appear to have marked the end of Lloyd’s practical involvement in the military affairs of the king. The assertion that his father was captured at St Fagans at the end of the second civil war in May 1648 seems to rest on a misreading; it was Sir Francis Lloyd’s brother, Marmaduke, who was taken there, evidently still in arms.49A Declaration by Major General Laughorn (1648), 7 (E.442.8); A List of the Prisoners (1648), 8 (E.441.33); Phillips, Civil War in Wales, ii. 369.

Lloyd was excluded from the general act of sequestrations in Wales (23 Feb. 1649), and soon afterwards he complained that his fine ignored the many debts and encumbrances on his estate. These debts appear to have been genuine, as his father mentioned them in the codicil he appended to his will on 18 March 1651.50A. and O. ii. 15; CCC, 1084. In response to Lloyd’s complaints, the compounding commissioners increased his fine in June 1652 to £1,320 though some reduction was allowed for properties wrongly held to be his.51CCC 572, 1084-5, 3018-9. Later publications, recounting the sufferings of royalists, gave his fine as £1,033.52D. Lloyd, Memoires of the Lives, Actions (1668), 661; J. Bramhall, Fair Warning (Oxford, ?1680), 4. At the Restoration, Lloyd’s rehabilitation was limited. He stood for Cardigan Boroughs in the elections to the Cavalier Parliament, and petitioned against the victory of James Philipps* on the grounds that insufficient notice had been given to the out-boroughs. The House agreed, but at the subsequent by-election (6 Apr. 1663) Lloyd lost to Sir Charles Cotterell. He recovered his place in the Carmarthenshire commission of the peace but not in that that of Cardiganshire; his appearance in tax commissions was confined to Cardiganshire and was intermittent. He claimed his place as a gentleman of the privy chamber, but had to petition for a reward for his services to Charles I; it remains unclear whether he acquired the receivership of monies in the hands of accountants of the crown for which he was angling in 1662.53SP29/60, f. 76. The contemporary pen-portrait of him seems convincing: ‘A lover of monarchy, withdrew from the Long Parliament, being a member thereof about 1643, paid a fine at Goldsmiths’ Hall and seems to love his private ease above the public affairs of his country’.54E.D. Jones, ‘Gentry of South West Wales’, NLWJ xi. 144. His very lengthy will was proved at St David’s in 1669. His eldest son with Bridget Leigh was made his heir, but later took his own life; a younger son, Sir Charles, who lived at Forest Hill, Oxfordshire, sat for Cardigan Boroughs, 1698-1700.55West Wales Recs. i. 11; NLW, SD/1669/63. By 1828, a romantic story involving a curse on Maesyfelin in the seventeenth century was making an appearance in popular Welsh literature.56B. Phillips, Peterwell (Llandysul, 1983), 7.