WILLIAMS, Sir Charles (1590-1642), of Llangibby Castle, Mon.

The Williams of Llangibby traced their descent to Howell Gam ap David, lord of Penrhos, Monmouthshire, in the fourteenth century.24Bradney, Hist. Mon. iii. 97, 100-1. The family’s estate had been augmented considerably in the mid-sixteenth century by Williams’s grandfather, who had used his position as a client of the 1st earl of Pembroke to purchase crown lands in the Usk valley, including the manor of Llangibby.25STAC8/291/16, ff. 1-2; E112/107/75; M. Gray, ‘Crown property and the land market in south-east Wales in the sixteenth century’, Agricultural History Review, xxxv. 135, 142, 143, 145; ‘Change and continuity: the gentry and the property of the church in south-east Wales and the Marches’, in Class, Community and Culture in Tudor Wales ed. J.G. Jones (Cardiff, 1989), 12-13. Williams’s father, who had served as sheriff of Monmouthshire in 1604-5, died a wealthy man, bequeathing legacies in his will totalling £1,300 and charging his estate with annuities of £60.26PROB11/170, ff. 25v-26. Shortly after his father’s death in 1612, Williams received a grant of the manor of Usk from the crown.27C66/2000/16.

In 1614, Williams married a daughter of Sir William Morgan† of Tredegar, who was a leading figure in Monmouthshire’s Protestant interest and its quarrels with the circle of prominent Catholics around the 4th earl of Worcester.28HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Sir William Morgan’; L. Bowen, The Politics of the Principality: Wales, c.1603-42 (Cardiff, 2007), 31-2, 100, 102. Williams probably owed his return for the county in 1621 to the patronage of Morgan and of the 3rd earl of Pembroke. Morgan succeeded Williams as an MP for Monmouthshire in the 1624 and 1625 Parliaments.29HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Sir Charles Williams’; ‘Sir William Morgan’; ‘Monmouthshire’. By the late 1620s, Williams was acting as deputy to the earl of Pembroke as steward of the king’s lands in Monmouth.30NLW, Badminton Estate (A), warrant Mich. 1629. Some idea of Williams’s religious sympathies can be gleaned from his presentation to Caerwent church, Monmouthshire, in 1632 of an oak pulpit inscribed with the words ‘Woe is unto me if I preach not the gospel [1 Corinthians 9.16]’.31Bradney, Hist. Mon. iv. 143. However, there is nothing to associate him with the Independent congregation at nearby Llanfaches, which had formed by the end of the decade.32J. Knight, Civil War and Restoration in Mon. (Woonton Almeley, 2005), 35.

Williams retained his place on the Oxford circuit oyer and terminer commission throughout the 1630s, but was briefly omitted from the Monmouthshire bench in 1637 for failing to attend the judges to renew his oath of office.33Coventry Docquets, 73, 74. In the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640 he was returned for Monmouthshire again, taking the junior place to a younger son of Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke.34Supra, ‘Monmouthshire’. He received no committee appointments in this Parliament and seems to have limited his contribution to the Commons’ proceedings to the space of a few weeks in May 1641. Thus on 3 May he took the Protestation, and on 27 May – as the Commons prepared to vote on whether to give a second reading to a bill for abolishing episcopacy – he declared that ‘if they were but six that were noes yet he would divide the House though many that were noes did yield’.35CJ ii. 133b, 159a; Procs. LP iv. 614. After this division, in which the noes lost by 139 to 108, the godly MP William Strode castigated Williams, desiring ‘that hereafter such words might be forborne that any would cause the House to be divided for six voices’ difference only’, whereupon Williams ‘acknowledged that those words were spoken rashly by him, which gave the House good satisfaction’.36Procs. LP iv. 606, 614.

Having obtained leave of absence on Sir Guy Palmes’s motion, on 1 June 1641, Williams made no further appearance in its records until 19 March 1642, when news of his death prompted the issue of a writ to elect a new MP for Monmouthshire.37CJ ii. 162b; Procs. LP iv. 675. He had been ailing when he had made his will, on 5 March, in which he had asked to be buried ‘in or near the sepulchre of my father’ in Llangibby church and had made bequests totalling £2,000 – the sum owed him by Sir William Morgan and his son Thomas Morgan* by way of a portion for Thomas’s daughter Elizabeth on her marriage in 1640 to Williams’s heir Trevor Williams†.38PROB11/189, f. 95; NLW, Tredegar estate recs. 22/64, 91/111. Created a baronet in May 1642, Sir Trevor supported the king for most of the first civil war, but from 1645 he shifted allegiance according, it seems, to the dictates of self-interest and his professed ‘dislike of popery’. He represented Monmouth and Monmouthshire in five Parliaments between 1660 and 1689.39HP Commons 1660-90, ‘Sir Trevor Williams’; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Trevor Williams’.