JONES, Richard I (1578- betw. 1658 and 1664), of Trewern, Llanfihangel Nant Melan, Rad.

Richard Jones was a member of a long-established Radnorshire family which had been prominent in the affairs of the borough of New Radnor since Elizabethan times. Jones improved his fortunes by marriage with the daughter of the dominant figure in local affairs, John Price of Pilleth. Thereafter he became sheriff of the county in 1614, a justice of the peace in 1615 and deputy lieutenant in 1623.21List of Sheriffs, 169; Justices of the Peace ed. Phillips, 326; NLW, Lleweni 668. He probably owed his election as knight of the shire in 1628 to his brother-in-law, Charles Price*.22HP Commons 1604-1629. Jones was less active during the 1630s, although he was appointed captain of a troop of militia horse before 1637.23HEHL, EL7443. He maintained his close connection with New Radnor, paying in £42 Ship Money on behalf of the bailiff in May 1637.24CSP Dom. 1637, p. 132.

Jones was elected for New Radnor boroughs for the Short Parliament on 2 April 1640, but apparently made no mark in the House. In the following November he stood down in favour of Philip Warwick*.25C219/42/2. In August 1641 he was appointed as a local commissioner for disarming recusants.26LJ iv. 386a. He committed himself to the king’s cause at the outbreak of civil war, being appointed a commissioner for array in the summer of 1642, commissioner to guard Radnorshire in 1643, and the following year he was one of the local gentlemen chosen to oversee the county's accounts.27Northants RO, FH133, unfol.; Bodl. Dugdale 19, ff. 21, 87. In 1645 he was appointed custos rotulorum, but in October of that year he submitted to Parliament - an action that provoked the royalist commander Sir William Vaughan to arrest Jones on 28 February 1646 and to plunder his house at Trewern, taking horses, livestock and household goods to the value of between £400 and £500.28SP28/251, unfol.; SP23/205/985. In January 1647 the Radnorshire committee pressed for Jones’s estate to be sequestered, describing him as ‘about 70 years of age and an unwieldy gentleman’.29SP23/205/979. On 24 March Jones begged to compound, claiming that his only act of ‘delinquency’ was to issue warrants to raise money and men for the king’s forces. He was fined £144 (a sixth) on 2 June 1648, but this was halved in February 1649, after he had proved that he had only an estate for life of £48 a year. In January 1652 his estate was re-sequestered as he not yet paid in full, but on his petition to the compounding commissioners the remaining fine was cancelled the following May.30CCC 1693.

Jones kept a low profile during the remainder of the 1650s, although he was involved in a protracted legal dispute over the will of Charles Price.31PROB11/196/406; C6/113/7. The date of Jones’s death is uncertain. He was still alive on 11 February 1658, and certainly deceased by 23 May 1664, but it seems unlikely he survived the restoration of the king as there is no evidence of his rehabilitation.32C6/19/72; C6/113/72. His grandson and heir, Griffith Jones†, was returned for New Radnor in 1679.