LLOYD, Andrew (c.1606-82), of Aston, Oswestry, Salop.

The Lloyd family hailed from Glascoed, Denbighshire, and Andrew Lloyd’s great-grandfather, Ieuan Lloyd ap Meredith, bore the Welsh patronymic form of personal name. Andrew Lloyd’s grandmother was a daughter of the Edwards family of Chirk, but some of the family migrated towards Shropshire. Richard Lloyd, Andrew’s father, was a second son who established himself in Oswestry, becoming bailiff of the town.17Vis. Salop 1623, ii. (Harl. Soc. xxix), 338-9. He acquired the property of Aston just outside the town, and was well enough established as a Shropshire gentleman to succeed in fixing a marriage into the Charlton family of Apley, near Wellington. Andrew Lloyd was given the forename of his grandfather, Andrew Charlton. The Charltons were godly Protestants, and so evidently was Richard Lloyd, who in 1614 established a trust to maintain a preacher at the chapel-of-ease at Aston on £15 a year. Among the trustees was Robert Charlton*, uncle of the young Andrew.18PROB11/131/482. The Aston trust was among Richard Lloyd’s last achievements, as he died in October 1618, when Andrew was around 12 years old. Andrew was by this time a pupil at Shrewsbury school, and his mother was granted the rents of his patrimonial inheritance by the court of wards.19NLW, Aston Hall Deeds, 652. Anne Lloyd also came to an arrangement with her brother at Apley by which she continued to enjoy the Aston property.20NLW, Aston Hall Deeds, 221. She lived in London at one stage in her life, and left quantities of silver items to her many relatives when she drew up her will in December 1631.21PROB11/162/77.

On 9 May 1627, probably soon after he had come of age, Andrew Lloyd came into his estate.22NLW, Aston Hall Deeds, 358. He is not known to have proceeded to any higher education, and his prospects may have been disrupted by his father’s death. He married Margaret Powell of Whittington Park, making him by marriage a kinsman of William Jones II*, and seems before 1640 to have settled at Aston into the life of the country squire, being named to the Shropshire commission of the peace from 1634.23C231/5, p. 137. In 1639, his eldest son, Thomas, married Sarah Albany, whose step-father, Anthony Hunt of Fernhill, near Whittington, was a Catholic. The presence of Humphrey Mackworth I* among the trustees of the marriage settlement was proof of a good relationship between two godly Protestant families on the eve of the civil war. Another experience that Lloyd and Mackworth had in common at this time was their resort to the court of chivalry, a civil law court under the auspices of the earl marshal, to bring actions against their neighbours. In June 1637, Lloyd opened proceedings against Sir Robert Eyton of Dudleston. Eyton was alleged to have given Lloyd the lie in front of a number of gentry, saying that ‘he scorned to be compared to those that were come of bastards’.24Cases in the High Ct. of Chivalry 1634-1640 ed. R.P. Cust, A.J. Hopper (Harl. Soc. n.s. xviii), 168. It has been suggested that Eyton’s marriage to Joyce Lloyd of Hardwick made this a family quarrel of some kind, but no immediate kinship links are evident between the Lloyds of Aston and those of Hardwick. More probably the insult arose as a result of a personal quarrel between Andrew Lloyd and Eyton, the latter playing on the sensitivities around the existence in London of John Floyd or Lloyd, Andrew’s illegitimate half-brother.25Vis. Salop 1623, ii. 330, 339; NLW, Aston Hall Deeds, 613. The grounds for Mackworth’s case in December 1639 were that a shaming ritual had been organised against him in Shrewsbury, but in both his case and Lloyd’s their opponents took the king’s side during the civil war while they themselves took Parliament’s.26CCC 1599.

In January 1640, Lloyd was licensed by John Owen, bishop of St Asaph, to bury the dead in Aston chapel and to erect monuments there.27NLW, Aston Hall Deeds, 1212. There is nothing to suggest that Lloyd was at this stage a particular hostile critic of the established church. He continued to be named to government tax commissions during 1641 and 1642, but when the civil war broke out, threw in his lot with Parliament, perhaps because of ties with Mackworth; perhaps because of the puritan leanings of many of the gentry in the Oswestry district. Lloyd’s first civil war commission came in 1643 when he was made a sequestration commissioner for Parliament, a nominal appointment only, as Shropshire was in the grip of the royalists. However, the key supporters of Parliament could provide support for Basil Feilding, 2nd earl of Denbigh, when he was appointed successor to Lord Brooke as commander-in-chief of the West Midlands association. In July 1643, Lloyd, with Thomas Mytton*, Richard More*, Humphrey Mackworth I and Harcourt Leighton formed the nucleus of the Shropshire guarantors of Denbigh’s war borrowing.28NLW, Aston Hall Deeds, 2148. By December, Lloyd was reported to be among the principal figures on the Shropshire county committee.29CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 503. While Humphrey Mackworth I was seconded to become military governor of Coventry, Lloyd and probably his uncle Robert Charlton* reported to Parliament on royalist military activity in Cheshire and asked Mackworth to represent the needs of the Shropshire skeletal committee to Parliament.30HMC 4th Rep. 263.

Lloyd was one of the vanguard of the Shropshire parliamentarians who established a toehold in the county at Wem. From there, in July 1644, he wrote to Denbigh asking that steps be taken to draw out the royalist Francis Newport* from the district because of the loyalty shown to him locally.31Warws. RO, CR2017/C10/2. Lloyd must have been behind the appointment that month of Nathaniel Barnet as lecturer to the Oswestry garrison.32Bodl. Tanner 59, f. 741. He supported the appointment of Mackworth as governor of Shrewsbury in March 1645, to the displeasure of Thomas Mytton.33Bodl. Tanner 60A, f. 11. Thereafter, he and the other Shropshire committeemen were based outside High Ercall, where the royalist garrison was under siege and from whence they kept Sir William Brereton* posted with intelligence on royalist troop movements.34Brereton Letter Bks. i. 209, 217, 225, 231, 238-9, 241-2, 243, 265-6, 276, 277-8, 278-9, 282-3, 290-1, 303, 343, 370, 393, 431, 443. Lloyd signed the letter to Speaker William Lenthall to report the capture in August 1645 of Sir Thomas Whitmore I*, whom they presumed would fetch a good ransom, and by December his committee was confident enough to request from Brereton the return of the Shropshire foot regiment to defend their own territory.35HMC Portland, i. 236; Brereton Letter Bks. ii. 413. Lloyd’s efforts on behalf of Shropshire supporters of Parliament were duly acknowledged when Shrewsbury corporation made him a burgess, at the same time as it bestowed the same honour on Samuel More*, Robert Clive* and Lloyd’s uncle, Robert Charlton.36Salop Archives, 6001/290 n.p.

By 1646, a quarrel had erupted between Mytton and the Shropshire committee. Oswestry garrison was proving hard to govern, which must have been particularly irksome to Lloyd, whose home lay so close to it. The committee complained to Speaker Lenthall, but Mytton entered his own counter-petition. The essence of the quarrel lay in resentments over rival commands over the Shropshire soldiers, but the 1646 eruption exposed frictions going back to 1644.37Bodl. Tanner 60B, ff. 444, 461. Lloyd stayed at High Ercall and in March reported to the Speaker on the taking of the royalist garrison there. The following month, he was at Bridgnorth when the town fell.38Bodl. Tanner 59A, ff. 5, 28. He signed the articles of surrender on behalf of Parliament, and was left as governor, with the rank of colonel, when the rest of the committee removed to Dudley.39Brereton Letter Bks. iii. 171; LJ viii. 300b. On 12 May he signed a letter to Brereton, with Robert Charlton and Robert Clive, expressing a hope that the king’s surrender to the Scots and the consequent surrender of Newark would mark the end of the war and the task they had laboured in for so long. This was a clear expression of hope that the ancient constitution would be restored and that the king would negotiate terms, not an expression of radicalism.40Brereton Letter Bks. iii. 235-6.

Lloyd was by this time in Shrewsbury with the rest of the committee.41Brereton Letter Bks. iii. 235, 267; Bodl. Tanner 59B, f. 459. The end of the war made recruiter elections in Shropshire a practical possibility, and Lloyd stood as knight of the shire in the county election held on 27 August. Here he found himself the victim of a delayed revenge by Mytton, the sheriff, who moved the poll and ensured the return of his relative, Humphrey Edwardes*, who had not been an active member of the Shropshire county committee, the bête noire of Mytton since 1644. Lloyd petitioned the sympathetic parliamentary committee chaired by Sir Robert Harley*, but Edwardes, an Independent, survived the investigation and kept the Shropshire seat.42NLW, Aston Hall Deeds, 2462, 2464. The close links with Mackworth persisted: Mackworth and Robert Charlton stood trustees for the marriage settlement drawn up for Lloyd’s son, Thomas, when he married in July 1646.43NLW, Aston Hall Deeds, 874. In his public life, Lloyd continued to be an important figure in maintaining the security of Shropshire. In March 1647 we find him still active in the committee, regulating sequestration business.44NLW, Aston Hall Deeds, 1470; Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. ser. 4, i. 241. He continued in some military capacity, too, as Mackworth wrote to put him on alert after the king had been taken away from Holdenby by the army in June 1647, and in August 1648 he was given a commission as colonel of foot in the county.45NLW, Aston Hall Corresp. 2; Aston Hall Deeds, 2468. His membership of the second Shropshire Presbyterian classis in 1647, as an elder, was part of a broad scheme in which the attitudes of individual gentry towards Presbyterian church government were not subjected to close scrutiny, but he was probably generally supportive of the plans.46Severall Divisions and Persons for Classicall Presbyteries, 4.

Unlike Robert Clive, another stalwart of the Shropshire committee, Lloyd seems to have accepted the regicide and the inauguration of the commonwealth without any obvious anxiety. He remained in the commission of the peace, and while he was never as active or as prominent in support of the commonwealth as Humphrey Mackworth I, he was nevertheless continuously named to lesser local government offices. He was removed from the commission of the peace in October 1653, however, suggesting that there were limits to his enthusiasm for reform, and he was omitted from the assessment commission of November 1653.47An Act for an Assessment (1653, E.1068.28). Lloyd may have been cautious, too, in welcoming the protectorate. While Mackworth quickly found a place on the lord protector’s council, Lloyd was not named among the ‘ejectors’ appointed by ordinance of the lord protector’s council in August 1655 to regulate the clergy. Perhaps a certain distance had by this time developed between him and Mackworth. Church reform nevertheless affected his personal interests. In the survey of church livings that was undertaken in 1655 with a view to reorganizing and where necessary amalgamating parishes, it was recommended that Aston chapelry would become a parish in its own right, building on reforms that had already seen tithes belonging to William Craven, 1st Baron Craven, who had held those of Oswestry, being used to support the ministry elsewhere in Shropshire.48Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. xlvi. 23.

That long-standing associate of Lloyd’s, Humphrey Mackworth I, died suddenly in December 1654 in London, and another comrade-in-arms from the days of the Shropshire county committee, his uncle, Robert Charlton, was discovered dead by Lloyd in 1655.49NLW, Aston Hall Deeds, 2946. But neither of these deaths heralded any shift in political behaviour by Lloyd, and indeed, in March 1656, he recovered his place as a justice of the peace in Shropshire. This alone, without taking into account his record as a long-standing supporter of both Parliament and non-monarchical government, should have made him an uncontroversial choice as one of the four knights for Shropshire in the 1656 Parliament. With Samuel More, however, he was excluded from the assembly by the lord protector’s council.50CJ vii. 425a. As in More’s case, the exclusion is puzzling, and perhaps can be attributed to a fear that Lloyd was too devout a religious Presbyterian. The only alternative explanation is that in the absence of Humphrey Mackworth I, who had dominated Shropshire politics for so long, the government was unable properly to gauge who from that county would be dependable and who not. A ‘Mr Lloyd’ is mentioned frequently in the Journal and in Thomas Burton’s* diary, but the latter notes only one Mr Lloyd, and usually in association with Sir Christopher Packe*. It is most likely that all references to Mr Lloyd are to Alderman Charles Lloyd, and that Andrew Lloyd never attended the Parliament at all.

For the rest of the decade, Lloyd is to be found pursuing private business in the courts, as when he helped his daughter, Mary Lloyd of Clerkenwell, sue to recover debts, and playing a modest part in county government.51NLW, Aston Hall Deeds, 1346, 4269. The last days of the commonwealth marked his appearance for the first time in the commission of oyer and terminer, but it was a brief late flowering of his public career: the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 was inevitably and emphatically the end of it. He stayed within the bounds of the established church, however, and continued to pay rent for his pew in Oswestry church.52NLW, Aston Hall Deeds, 1775, 2003. Some confusion has surrounded the date of Lloyd’s death. He is said to have died in 1663, but the Andrew Lloyd buried at Aston chapel on 13 August was ‘Captain’ Andrew Lloyd, bearer of too junior a military rank to be the MP, and one whose children were baptised in 1662 and posthumously in 1664.53Salop Par. Regs. Oswestry, ii. 601, 613, 620. This was Lloyd’s son. Perhaps he died as a result of a hunting accident at Boreatton Park, when it is said that one Andrew Lloyd was accidentally shot by a keeper.54Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. ser. 4, xi. 144. Lloyd senior himself lived on, to draw up his will in January 1681, declaring that ‘nothing [is] more certain than death, and nothing more uncertain than the hour of death’. He left money for the ‘preaching minister’ at Aston, and drew up a schedule of bequests to 13 of his relatives. Andrew Lloyd was buried at Oswestry on 21 February 1682.55PROB11/370/389; Salop Par. Regs. Oswestry, ii. 406.