HERBERT, Edward II (d. c. 1666), of the Upper Grange, Magor, Mon.

Edward Herbert was undoubtedly of the great clan which Victorian genealogists traced back to one Jenkin ap Adam (floruit 1325), a descendant of Herbert, chamberlain of Henry I. He was therefore related to the Herbert earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, as well as to Lord Herbert of Chirbury and others of that name in the seventeenth century. However, his was a cadet branch, descended from the Herberts of St Julians, near Newport, Monmouthshire. In the early Tudor period, the family held property at Merthyr Gerin, a settlement near Magor, on which site stood a grange of Tintern abbey, and which after the dissolution became the house and demesne known as Upper Grange. Herbert’s great-grandfather, Sir Walter Herbert, served as sheriff of Monmouthshire in 1542, while his grandfather lived in Newport. Herbert’s father, Walter Herbert of Christchurch, was illegitimate, and described himself as a mere ‘gentleman’, an indication of how remote, in terms of social status, Edward Herbert’s branch of the family had become from their illustrious kin.14Clark, Limbus Patrum, 250, 251, 282-3; NLW, Tredegar 9/9, 10. Edward Herbert II should not be confused with his contemporaries Edward Herbert, later 3rd Baron Herbert of Chirbury, who held property in Newport; or Edward Somerset, 2nd marquess of Worcester, who with the courtesy title Lord Herbert signed himself ‘Edward Herbert’ before 1646.15NLW, Chirk Castle (6), 840; Arch. Cambr., 1886, 11; J. F. Marsh, Annals of Chepstow Castle (Exeter, 1883), 226.

Nothing is known of Edward Herbert’s maternal ancestry or date of birth. However, in relation to the great political divide in south-east Wales between the Somersets of Raglan and the bloc headed by the earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, Herbert was certainly associated politically with the latter, indicating that kinship ties could trump social standing. It may well have been to Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke, that he owed his position as customer (chief financial officer of customs) at the port of Cardiff. This was a significant if not especially lucrative office, which gave Herbert oversight over all customs collection in the Bristol Channel, from Chepstow down to Burry Port, west of Swansea. It seems likely that Herbert acquired his post as a consequence of Parliament’s establishing political control over south-east Wales after the first civil war; certainly he was in office before the second civil war broke out there in 1648. However, in a shake-up of the customs establishment in 1649, the ‘regulators’, a London committee given free range over the structure of the customs service, decided to thin out appointments in the out-ports as well as in the capital, and Herbert, an officer in one of the poorest ports, lost his post. A letter supposedly written by a royalist infiltrator in the London custom house, naming Herbert as one of the victims of the purge, predicted the ruin of the service, but the publication could well be a forgery by a disgruntled insider.16Letter-Bk. of John Byrd, xxv-xxvi, 2, 27; A Notable Plot Discovered (1649), 4 (E.555.30); Aylmer, State’s Servants, 16.

At the time of his death, Edward Herbert was an associate of the minister and elders of the Independent church at Llanfaches, established in 1639, and accounted the first gathered church to be formed in Wales. It seems likely, although it cannot be proved, that he was an early member, since in 1651 he bought property locally with the church’s first minister, Walter Cradock.17PROB11/325/490; NLW, Tredegar 19/57-8; T. Richards, ‘Eglwys Llanfaches’, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion, 1941, 154. And however loyal to Parliament and the Herberts of Wilton he may have been, he was a tenant of the Catholic Edward Somerset, 2nd marquess of Worcester. That changed in March 1648, when the Somerset estates including Magor and the Grange, ‘Marthingeringes Grange’, in the spelling of the Commons Journal, were granted to Oliver Cromwell in recognition of his services to Parliament.18LJ x. 104a,b; CJ vi. 601b. As a tenant of Cromwell, Herbert was well placed to benefit from this new source of patronage in south-east Wales, and after the trial and execution of the king, he began to appear on commissions authorised by the Rump Parliament, including the sequestration committee and the commission of the peace. He was an active commissioner for assessments in 1650.19Letter-Bk. of John Byrd, 52. His inclusion as one of the commissioners for propagating the gospel in Wales in February that year is further evidence of his commitment to Independency in religion, although he seems not to have played a significant part in the meetings of the commissioners.

Two other associates of Herbert’s by 1651 were Col. Philip Jones* and Rowland Dawkins*, and it was Jones who conveyed to Herbert in January that year a grant of the manor of Undy, adjacent to Herbert’s home.20NLW, Tredegar 19/57-8; Glam. Archives, D/DF D/1928; Letter-Bk. of John Byrd, 84. After 1660, an enemy of Herbert’s recalled how ‘Comptroller Jones did use to stroke [Herbert] upon the head and say this head must be knighted’.21SP22/44, f. 69. Herbert was named as a commissioner of the high court of justice established to try the rebels routed in June by Dawkins in Cardiganshire, along with others in the Jones circle such as John Price*, whose first wife came from Nash, a parish near Magor. On 1 Oct. 1651, Cromwell let the Upper Grange to Herbert at £30 a year plus customary perquisites for 51 years, provided he, his wife or son Walter lived so long. Nathaniel Waterhouse, Herbert's future colleague as county Member, was a witness to this lease.22Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 479-81.

Herbert had by this time evidently been identified as a reliable colleague by the Glamorgan men, and by January 1652, he was acting explicitly as steward for Cromwell in his Monmouthshire manors, present at meetings of Magor manorial courts.23NLW, Tredegar 59/7. He was also, from 1650, a lessee of Somerset lands in Monmouthshire and of the estate in Badminton of a Somerset kinswoman, Elizabeth Somerset, by virtue of leases from the Monmouthshire committee for managing papists’ estates.24SP28/213, accts. of Robert Jones et al; CCC, 2248. Herbert was probably an important local agent in the process by which Henry Somerset*, Lord Herbert of Raglan, recovered possession of part of his family estates. This began in 1651, when the parliamentary committee confirming the grant to Cromwell was required also to identify the estate settled on Somerset’s father, the banished Edward, 2nd marquess of Worcester, for his life only and therefore not subject to the award to the lord general.25Glos. RO, D2700/QA 5/7-17. When Elizabeth Somerset died in 1655, leaving her lands to Henry Somerset, Herbert was bound to be a significant figure in the transactions that ensued. That year, he was also well-enough thought of by his distant kinsman, Henry Herbert*, to be named as a trustee in the latter’s will.26‘Henry Herbert’ infra.

Herbert was firmly in the camp of the Independents in religion. In February 1656, he was a natural supporter of his old friend, Walter Cradock, lending his name to Cradock’s Humble Representation and Address, a statement in support of the Cromwellian church, against Vavasor Powell’s A Word for God, which depicted the protectorate as a betrayal of godly principles.27Gweithiau Morgan Llwyd iii. ed. J. G. Jones, G. W. Owen (Cardiff, 1994), 71. Herbert’s tolerance and belief in the legitimacy of gathered congregations seems not to have extended to the Quakers, who recorded several instances of his robust interventions against them in his capacity as a magistrate in Monmouthshire in the second half of the 1650s, though he seems in each case simply to have been enforcing the law.28F. Gawler, A Record of Some Persecutions (1659), 8-9, 13, 20. It is possible that the wife of the celebrated Welsh writer and minister of Wrexham, whose Christian name was Anne, was Herbert’s sister. This is based on a letter of sympathy which Herbert sent to her in March 1659, though the looseness of contemporary usage of the word ‘sister’ makes it impossible to be certain. There is no doubt, however, that a close familial link, and probably a confessional one also, existed between Herbert and the family of Llwyd.29Gweithiau Morgan Llwyd iii. 201; Richards, ‘Eglwys Llanfaches’, 154.

Herbert was returned to the only Parliament of his career on the Cromwellian interest, with the regional major-general, James Berry, who soon made way for Nathaniel Waterhouse, and John Nicholas, a fellow propagation commissioner. As a Member he featured only once in the House's records, being granted leave to go into the country on 2 Jan. 1657. He was reported to have voted on 25 March 1657 for Cromwell to take the crown.30CJ vii. 478a; A Narrative of the Late Parliament (1658), 23 (E.935.5). His loyalty to the house of Cromwell was further evidenced by his inclusion on the commission for the security of the protector (27 Nov. 1656), the body which provided commissioners for the high court of justice on royalist plotters. After the fall of the protectorate of Richard Cromwell*, Herbert was deemed acceptable enough by the restored Rump Parliament to be named as a militia commissioner in July 1659, but he lost all office at the restoration of the monarchy. In November 1661, he was arrested and made the subject of information provided to the government by the place-seeker, Sir Robert Mason†. Mason naturally emphasised Herbert’s closeness to Cromwell and to Philip Jones, describing him, implausibly, as ‘dangerous’.31SP29/44, f. 69. After this harassment, Herbert seems to have been left alone by the government, but he left Magor to live in Bristol, where he drew up his will in June 1666. Naturally, there was some attrition of his estate during the transfer of Cromwell’s Monmouthshire property back to the crown and to the Somerset family, but Herbert helped manage this, in part with help from his former subordinate in the customs service, John Byrd.32Letter-Bk. of John Byrd, 124, 126-7. Herbert was able to leave a farm and lands to each of his six sons, mainly in the Magor district.33PROB11/325/490. He was dead by November 1667. His eldest son William was father of Edward Herbert of Undy (d. 1718), who left no male heir.34Clark, Limbus Patrum, 283. Like Herbert himself, his daughters, Elizabeth and Anne, left Monmouthshire and in 1674 were living in London.35Letter-Bk. of John Byrd, 193, 194.