LLOYD, Walter (1599-c.1664), of Llanfair Clydogau, Card.

The Lloyd family had lived in the plâs at Llanfair Clydogau for at least ten generations before Walter Lloyd.15W. Wales Hist. Recs. i. 11-12. Jenkin Lloyd’s great-grandfather was sheriff for three separate terms during Elizabeth’s reign; his grandfather served two terms in that post.16F. Jones, Historic Card. Homes and their Families (Newport, Pemb. 2004), 161. Lloyd inherited when he was small child, on the death of his father in 1606. After education at the Inner Temple, he married Elizabeth Pryse, niece of Sir Richard Price† (Pryse) of Gogerddan, head of the dominant gentry family in north Cardiganshire. Lloyd took his place in the Cardiganshire commission of the peace in 1620, and served on a number of commissions from chancery, as well as a single year as sheriff. In 1632 he tried to evade a fine, with what degree of success is unknown, for not attending court to receive a knighthood. He pleaded, as did many others, that he had received no summons to the king’s coronation.17W.J. Lewis, ‘Some of the Freeholders of Card. in 1632’, Ceredigion, iii. 92. That same year, he was granted a lease by John Vaughan I*, steward of the Cardiganshire estates of Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, of some of Essex’s tenements in three Cardiganshire parishes.18NLW, Crosswood Estate, II/30. Lloyd was elected to Westminster in 1640 on the interest of the Gogerddan family, having succeeded James Lewis, who sat in the Short Parliament, and whose mother was a daughter of Sir Richard Price.

Lloyd made no recorded impression on the Commons until 2 January 1641, and even then it is uncertain whether it was he or Francis Lloyd that was added to the committee to investigate the election at Great Marlow.19CJ ii. 62b. On 8 March, after John Griffith I had moved for Welsh-speaking Members to be included in the committee on the Caernarvon and Caernarvonshire elections, so that the evidence of monoglot Welsh witnesses could be interpreted, Walter Lloyd and John Vaughan I were added to it.20CJ ii. 99b; Procs. LP, ii. 665. On 21 April, the day when the attainder bill against Sir Thomas Wentworth†, earl of Strafford, was put to the vote, ‘Mr Lloyd’ was a teller against the bill, although the Journal clerk reversed in error the names of tellers for yeas and noes. The noes numbered 59, and became identified as ‘Straffordians’, in the eyes of their detractors guilty of treason themselves. The sources differ on whether one or two of the Lloyds was of their number, but later evidence suggests strongly that Walter Lloyd certainly was.21CJ ii. 125a; Procs. LP, iv. 42; Verney, Notes, 58; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 248; CCC 600; E.D. Jones, ‘The Gentry of South West Wales in the Civil War’, NLWJ xi. 144. One of the Lloyds was given leave of absence on 29 April, probably Francis, since it was certainly Walter who took the Protestation with most other Members, on 3 May and ‘Mr Lloyd’ took it late, two days later.22CJ ii. 130a, 133b, 135a. One or other of the Lloyds was given further periods of leave on 12 June and 6 August, but then both men disappear from the record until 1642.23CJ ii. 174b, 240b.

The uncertainties over identity persist during the months leading to civil war. ‘Mr Lloyd’ was among the Commons men who were to join with the Lords to consider government information on disorders in London and seditious literature (5 Apr. 1642). One was included in the committee of enquiry into military misdemeanours against the populace of Anglesey (28 May).24CJ ii. 512b, 591a. One of them addressed the petition of a Protestant former soldier and victim of the Irish rebellion (13 May), and one was a teller against fining Members absent without leave (16 June), a subject on which at least one Lloyd would have taken a view as a leave-taker himself.25PJ i. 314; CJ ii. 627a. It was certainly Walter Lloyd who was included in a committee of both Houses on the information Parliament had received from York about the king (6 June), and probably he who was added to the committee on Lady Sedley’s petition against John Griffith II* (21 July), because D’Ewes recorded him as present in the House that day.26CJ ii. 685a; PJ ii. 247. This was his last known appearance in the House, and he probably disappeared from Westminster during the summer of 1642.

From the outset of civil war, Lloyd appears to have been a committed royalist, notwithstanding his 1630s leases from the estates of the earl of Essex, Parliament’s lord general. He was in Oxford by 24 March 1643, when he received a knighthood from the king on the same day as Francis Lloyd*, but unlike Francis, Walter seems never to have been in arms against Parliament.27Merevale Hall, Dugdale mss, HT 2D/2/27. He did not remain at Oxford, for when the king summoned the rival Parliament there, Lloyd was noted among those ‘employed in his majesty’s service, or absent with leave, or by sickness’.28The Names of the Lords and Commons (1646), 6; A Declaration of the Lords and Commons (Oxford, 1644), 25. He is likely to have travelled back to Cardiganshire to form part of the backbone of the adherents to the king there. Evidence for his activism as a commissioner of array in Cardiganshire rests on a vehement assertion of his loyalty to the royal cause, sent in April 1644 from Ynysymaengwyn, Merioneth, the home of his new, and second, wife, Bridget, widow of Robert Corbet. Lloyd deplored the ‘traitorous Covenant’ (probably the Vow and Covenant of 1643) imposed by the parliamentarians in Pembrokeshire and feared they would be able to enforce the taking of it in neighbouring counties, including his own. He was involved in drafting a rebuff from the Cardiganshire royalists to the Pembrokeshire men loyal to Col. Rowland Laugharne†, and insisted that ‘For myself nothing of loss, though of life and fortune, can win or deter me from my loyalty’.29Add. 18981, f. 123; Phillips, Civil War in Wales, ii. 148.

News of Lloyd’s presence at Oxford in 1643 and association with the Parliament there in 1644 was enough to ensure that his name was included with those disabled from sitting further at Westminster (5 Feb. 1644).30CJ iii. 389b. When Laugharne secured the surrender of Carmarthen (12 Oct. 1645), the leading royalists of south-west Wales, led by Richard Vaughan†, by this time Baron Vaughan of Emlyn, proposed a treaty with the victorious parliamentarians , but Laugharne insisted that renegade Westminster MPs should be excluded from the negotiations.31Phillips, Civil War in Wales, ii. 273-6. Lloyd was arrested, and the Committee of Both Kingdoms ordered him to be brought to Westminster, on the authority of a letter from the Speaker (19 Dec. 1645). Whether he was detained in London for long, or at all, remains unclear. On 5 June 1646, the writ was moved for a by-election in Cardiganshire. 32CJ iv. 381a, 566b. Nearly a year and a half after the warrant had gone out for his appearance before the House, Lloyd petitioned to compound for his delinquency, and was fined £1003 9s, reckoned to be a third of his estate. He undoubtedly benefited initially from the remoteness of his residence from London. Having lain low until 1650, he was then again brought under the spotlight of the authorities for penal taxation when he was the victim of an informer. He pleaded that he had lived on his estate during the civil war, and that a drover had failed to deliver part of his fine to the Committee for Compounding. From this point his obscurity in the eyes of London-based inquisitors began to work against him. A possible muddle between him and another Cardiganshire man led to a fresh fine, protests from his children and step-children that the Ynysymaengwyn estate was not liable to fines or sequestration and the involvement in the case of Col. John Jones of Nanteos, a royalist turned collaborator with Parliament, who appeared to have lost Lloyd’s records. As a result of these confusions, it was not until December 1653 that an order was given for Lloyd’s estate to be discharged.33CCC 392, 443, 572, 600, 1569, 1751, 1752, 1753, 3286.

Although in May 1651 Lloyd was exempt from the general pardon Parliament bestowed on south Wales, he seems not to have involved himself in the revolt in Cardiganshire that year, or in the second civil war of 1648. Nor did he become active in the cause of Charles Stuart during the rest of the interregnum. Therefore no rewards came to him at the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, beyond a return to the magistracy and a brief inclusion in the Cardiganshire assessment commission. A contemporary observer of the south-west Wales gentry captured Lloyd’s withdrawal from public affairs

Sir Walter Lloyd a gentleman and a scholar, elegant in his tongue: and pen: nobly just in his deportment, naturally fit to manage the affairs of his country, which he did, before these times with honour and integrity undertake … contents himself within the walls of his own house, praying for these times, which now in good measure … appeared unto us.34E.D. Jones, ‘Gentry of South West Wales in the Civil War’, NLWJ xi. 144.

The date of Lloyd’s death remains unclear. His name appeared in the commission of the peace in August 1663, but was still in it in May 1666, by which time he was certainly dead. His widow made her own will on 13 June 1665, though no record of probate seems to have survived; so it seems likely that Walter Lloyd died around 1664.35NLW, Peniarth Estate, NA117.