WOGAN, John (1588/9-c.1644), of Wiston, Pemb.

Wogan’s family had settled at Wiston, near Haverfordwest, by the mid-fourteenth century.13Green, ‘Wogans of Pemb.’, 190. His father, William Wogan, who was knighted on the accession of James I, owned a substantial estate in southern Pembrokeshire and served as a magistrate, custos rotulorum (from 1609) and deputy lieutenant for the county.14HP Commons 1604-29, ‘John Wogan’; R. Turvey, ‘Admiration or revulsion: interpreting the life, career and character of Sir James Perrot (1571-1637’, Jnl. of the Pemb. Hist. Soc. xi. 14. The Wogan family generally has been identified as part of the conjoined Perrot and Devereux interests in Pembrokeshire, which were distinguished by their aggressive anti-popery and close connections with the Protestant community in Ireland. It was no accident that Wogan’s wife was the daughter of a Protestant settler in Leinster. However, Sir William Wogan’s cousin Sir John Wogan of Boulston – not to be confused with the future MP – and perhaps Sir William himself quarrelled with Sir James Perrot† during the early Stuart period; and John Wogan repeatedly clashed with him during the 1620s for the honour of representing Pembrokeshire at Westminster. The only county election that Wogan lost between 1614 and his death in the mid-1640s was in 1624, when he was ousted by Perrot.15Supra, ‘Pembrokeshire’; Pemb. Co. Hist. iii. 161-2, 163; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘John Wogan’; Turvey, ‘Admiration or revulsion’, 13-14, 23, 25.

Yet for all his evident determination to represent Pembrokeshire in Parliament, Wogan made almost no recorded impact at Westminster before May 1641, when he took the Protestation.16CJ ii. 133b; HP Commons 1604-29. In June 1642, he pledged to contribute one horse ‘well furnished’ on the propositions for the defence of Parliament; and on 10 August 1642 the Commons nominated him to the delegation that Parliament sent down to Pembrokeshire with instructions to execute the militia ordinance.17PJ iii. 474; CJ ii. 713b; LJ v. 304a-305b. Having refused to obey a summons by the royalist commander in the west, William Seymour†, marquess of Hertford, to meet him at Carmarthen in November 1642, Wogan and his uncle Sir Hugh Owen* wrote to the parliamentarian commander Henry Grey*, 1st earl of Stamford to inform him that they had ‘garrisoned our trained bands in Haverfordwest, Tenby and Pembroke’ for Parliament.18LJ v. 441a. That same month (November), Wogan wrote to the Commons, warning of the dangers that threatened Pembrokeshire.19CJ ii. 865a. And in January 1643, he wrote to the mayor of Bristol, requesting reinforcements to secure the county against an anticipated royalist advance in south Wales.20HMC Portland, i. 92-3.

Wogan was dead by June 1644, it seems, for his name is absent from the ordinance of that month for associating the counties of Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire and Cardiganshire.21Phillips, Civil War in Wales, ii. 163-5. It was not until December 1645, however, that the Commons ordered a writ for electing his replacement.22CJ iv. 366a. No will is recorded, and his place of burial is not known. His third son, the regicide Thomas Wogan, was a recruiter Member for Cardigan in 1646.