MORGAN, William I (c.1600-49), of Y Dderw, Llyswen, Brec. and the Middle Temple, London

Morgan was the first of his family to abandon the Welsh patronymic system in favour of a fixed surname, which was bestowed retrospectively on his father at his admission to the Middle Temple. Morgan’s father was a well-established Breconshire gentleman, who at his death left lands in three parishes, £200 in cash, £60 in debts owed to him, and an interest in the church lands of Ystradfellte.17PROB11/222, f. 97v. Morgan was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1623, and immediately afterwards, in association with his father, began acquiring properties in and around his native parish.18NLW, Tredegar Park 122/80-2; 114/25, 79-80, 93-4, 95-6, 101-2. It was later alleged that at this period he contracted a clandestine marriage with Sybilla Wayte, a kinswoman of Walter Kyrle*, another Middle Temple lawyer.19NLW, Tredegar Park 138/51-2. In June 1627, Morgan was absolved in a church court of sexual incontinence with Sybilla, and then brought a case himself in the court of arches against her father for claiming a marriage had taken place.20NLW, Tredegar Park 138/1, 8, 39, 43.

None of this potential scandal seems to have impeded Morgan’s progress. He was elected to the 1628 Parliament for Monmouth Boroughs, probably through the influence of Sir Walter Pye†, father of Sir Walter Pye*, a prominent Middle Temple legal office-holder, a powerful patron and manager of elections in the Welsh marcher counties and, incidentally, a patron of Sybilla Wayte’s kinsman, Kyrle.21HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Sir Walter Pye I’. From the late 1620s onwards came another wave of property purchasing by Morgan. At the heart of this, as a badge of his professional success, was the acquisition of the mansion house of ‘Therrow’ (Y Dderw), with a third of the manor of Llyswen, the manorial mills and around 100 acres of land, which he bought for £415.22NLW, Tredegar Park 86/63. Pye may have had a hand in this transaction somewhere, since Morgan paid him a rent relating to Y Dderw in 1633, and owed him money as late as 1637.23NLW, Tredegar Park 137/202, 228.

Morgan’s appetite for land in Breconshire remained undiminished through the 1630s.24NLW, Tredegar Park 114, passim. As a Breconshire landed proprietor, he was a suitable match for Elizabeth Morgan, daughter of the pre-eminent Monmouthshire house of Tredegar, any doubts about William’s earlier sexual behaviour evidently resolved, ignored or, less plausibly, never harboured through ignorance of them. The marriage probably took place in the spring of 1633, though Elizabeth’s memorial inscription implies a year earlier.25NLW, Tredegar Park 109/9, 108/17, 101/30; Bradney, Hist. Mon. ed. M. Gray (S. Wales and Mon. Rec. Soc. viii), 72. Morgan brought to the settlement properties in at least eight Breconshire parishes.26NLW, Tredegar Park 109/9. By the mid-1630s he was poised to acquire legal office in Wales and the marches, acquiring the post of attorney-general in the south Wales counties in 1636 and working through service in the council of the marches to become its solicitor-general in 1639, with the blessing of John Egerton†, earl of Bridgewater.27CSP Dom. 1638-9, p. 577. A number of his properties lay in and around the town of Brecon, focusing on the castle and its grounds. In some of these, Morgan was a tenant of Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke.28NLW, Tredegar Park 118/29, 124/7-8; 107/130; 108/10-12, 17. The recordership and stewardship of the borough naturally followed. By 1640 Morgan had thus acquired a substantial estate in Breconshire, membership of a regionally important family which continued despite the death of his wife in 1638, and a range of powerful professional contacts. By this time, however, Pye was dead, and the influence of his father-in-law, Sir William Morgan†, lay primarily in Monmouthshire; suggesting that he entered Parliament as knight of the shire for Breconshire mainly on his own interest.

In the Short Parliament Morgan was named to the important committee of privileges (17 Apr.), but this is the only known contribution he made to that assembly.29CJ ii. 4b. He was returned again for the county in the second Parliament of 1640, and was once again included in the privileges committee (6 Nov.).30CJ ii. 21a. On 17 January 1641 Morgan’s servant was arrested in Breconshire despite the note he carried to identify his protection, and on the 30th the House ordered the arrest of the servant’s assailant for breach of privilege.31CJ ii. 76a; D’Ewes (N), 304-5. Morgan was hardly active in the Commons; not until 7 May was he noted again by the clerk, appearing then with others including Walter Kyrle belatedly to take the Protestation.32CJ ii. 137b. With George Peard and John Glynne he was required to visit the judges of king’s bench to ascertain why they had called in indictments against recusants issued by order of the Commons, suggesting that he shared the anti-popish sentiments of his colleagues in this mission.33CJ ii. 161b. As a lawyer in the council of the marches, Morgan was naturally interested in the committee to review the operations of this and its sister council in the north of England (29 June), but this marked the the end of his brief involvement in the reforming work of the Parliament.34CJ ii. 191b. He was named as one of the commissioners against recusancy for his county in August 1641, but he may have left the Commons soon afterwards.

In Morgan’s own account of 1647, he depicted himself as one who did what he could across the counties of south Wales to urge the gentry to desist from obeying the king’s commission of array, to which he himself admitted he had been named in 1642. He claimed that his stance had cost him his place in the king’s commission of the peace, the plunder of his house and a period of incarceration at Raglan castle.35PA, Main Pprs. 1 May 1647. While some of this narrative was undoubtedly framed by Morgan in order to ingratiate himself with the Commons, the admission that he spent the whole of the civil war away from Westminster rings true. It is most unlikely, therefore, that he was the William Morgan entrusted on 5 August 1643 with the sensitive and probably doomed mission of visiting the king to retrieve from him letters to the French queen regent that would help substantiate a debt of a former French ambassador to Constantinople: all in the interests of some members of the Levant Company.36CJ iii. 196a. By January 1644 he was undoubtedly at Oxford, where he signed the letter of January 1644 urging the 3rd earl of Essex to a peace.37Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 574. His later explanation of his presence there was that he had complied with the summons merely to turn away the king’s wrath towards him, and insisted that signing the letter was his only act in the Oxford Parliament, and that later he ‘very seldom sat amongst them, being indisposed to health and in his own conscience and knowledge disliking the proceedings’.38PA, Main Pprs. 1 May 1647. Whether or not this was the case, the House was inclined to give Morgan the benefit of the doubt when it reviewed Members’ absence on 5 February 1644, and he avoided expulsion from the rival Parliament at Westminster.39CJ iii. 390a.

Morgan’s sojourn at Oxford was probably more congenial than he was later prepared to admit, and he may have served in the royalist administration. In May 1644 a kinsman wrote to him to help him be admitted into the king’s commission of the peace for Monmouthshire, and property transactions of his dating from May and August that year were conducted in the court of great sessions of Breconshire, which remained under the king’s control.40CSP Dom. 1644, p. 166; NLW, Tredegar Park 114/4, 47, 65-6. In Morgan’s account of events after the battle of Naseby in June 1645, he fled to Carmarthenshire to avoid the wrath of the royalist army command. He returned eventually to Breconshire, where he associated himself with gentry overtures to Major-general Rowland Laugharne†, who represented the most coherent expression of parliamentarian military force in south Wales. He assured Parliament of his loyalty by signing the Declaration of the Brecon gentry (23 Nov. 1645).41A Declaration of … Brecknock (1645), 6 (E.311.9). He may have been the William Morgan who joined the Glamorgan parliamentarians at Cardiff in January 1646 to report to Laugharne on the incursions of the royalist force based at Raglan.42Bodl. Nalson V, f. 231. The following spring submitted a petition to the Commons which was swept aside because of the pressure of public business. In May 1647 he petitioned again with a detailed explanation of his behaviour. He explained how his initial involvement with the king’s commission of array had been accompanied by discussions with his ‘ancient true friend and acquaintance’, Sir William Lewis*; a claim of friendship that did Lewis no good at all.43PA, Main Pprs. 1 May 1647. By July 1647, the New Model army had drawn up impeachment articles against the Eleven Members, one of whom was Lewis. The friendship between Morgan and Lewis was said to account for Morgan’s escape from sequestration, and Morgan was lumped in with ‘notorious and dangerous delinquents’ of south Wales favoured by Lewis and other Presbyterian Members.44A Particular Charge or Impeachment (1647), 22 (E.397.17). Lewis’s riposte was to deny that he had ever treated Morgan with ‘more than a civility suitable to their being country-men, and of many years’ acquaintance, which … no good man can look on as an offence’.45State Trials, iv. 899.

Lewis’s association with Morgan cost him his place in Parliament, but no sanction was visited on Morgan at all, despite the hostility towards him shown by the army and its Independent supporters in Parliament. The Commons must have considered him a bona fide Member, even though there is no evidence that he actually resumed his seat. Morgan was merely noted as absent in a call of the House on 9 October 1647, and he was excused from attendance just over a year later, in September 1648.46CJ v. 330a, vi. 34b. During the emergency of the second civil war in 1648, he remained at home and in Brecon, from where he wrote on 29 May, probably to Col. Thomas Horton, certainly to someone Morgan thought had influence with the lord general of the New Model, Sir Thomas Fairfax*, to seek restitution of horses commandeered from him by soldiers. Morgan even drafted a letter on behalf of the leading Breconshire gentry, Edward Games and Charles Walbieffe, aimed at persuading Fairfax of his loyalty. 47NLW, Tredegar Park 105/151, 152. He sought to impress upon the New Model high command that ‘the gentry are all unanimous in this constant resolution to serve the Parliament’; he was ‘sure the country will follow’.48NLW, Tredegar Park 105/152.

Morgan was beset with other problems in 1648. In February his relationship with Sybilla Wayte had received a fresh and doubtless unwelcome airing when he received letters intimating her renewed interest in their case. The timing may have owed much to the decline of Morgan’s father, who drew up his will on 1 April.49NLW, Tredegar Park 138/54-5; PROB11/222, f. 97v. Morgan senior must have died soon afterwards, but a son of Morgan’s from his relationship with Sybilla was sufficiently plausible to be able to secure letters of administration over the estate.50NLW, Tredegar Park 138/6. Morgan’s name appeared among those of the Members secluded or imprisoned in the purge of 6 December 1648, but it seems unlikely that he was in London at that time.51A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669.f.13.62). However earnest his protestations of loyalty to Parliament, Morgan had never been re-admitted to the commission of the peace or any other agencies of local government in south Wales, so his attitude towards the trial and execution of the king remains unknown. Probably because of sympathy shown towards him by Thomas Horton, he granted the colonel a lease of lands in Defynnog in May 1649.52NLW, Tredegar Park 124/145. The traumatic events of that year may have coloured Morgan’s personal outlook on life both public and private. A year after his father had made his will, Morgan made his own on 27 May 1649, declaring himself ‘warned by frequent examples of others, that death overtakes many suddenly and many by violence and tyranny of sickness which distracts both the memory and sense of a natural man’.53PROB11/210, f. 120. He died within a few days of making this assertion. Although some evidence points to his death as occurring before May was out, deponents in a legal case a few years later seemed agreed that he died on 6 June.54NLW, Tredegar Park 138/8. He was buried at Brecon priory.55Jones, Hist. Brec. ii. 72.

His testamentary arrangements showed his relationship with his father-in-law, Sir William Morgan, remained close over ten years after his wife’s death. The will made no mention of any family he may have had with Sibylla Wayte, whom he had imprisoned in Brecon when she turned up there in his last days, but after his death Sibylla reversed a position she had taken many years previously, and declared that she had indeed been married to Morgan.56NLW, Tredegar Park 138/8, 49, 59. Chancery proceedings were initiated in 1650 over the claims of the Waytes, a relatively humble family who may have had financial backing from a wealthier sponsor to pursue their campaign.57HP Commons 1604-29, ‘William Morgan’. In May 1652, a grant of administration to William Morgan alias Wayte over the estate of William Morgan’s father was revoked, and the award made instead to Morgan’s son with Elizabeth Morgan, another William.58NLW, Tredegar Park 138/6. Despite successfully repelling the legal assaults by the Waytes, Morgan’s heir did not long outlive him. The estates then passed to Blanche Morgan, William Morgan’s daughter with Elizabeth. Blanche married William Morgan II* in 1661.