MANLEY, John (c.1622-99), of Bryn-y-Ffynnon, Wrexham, Denb.

The Manleys probably came from Poulton, just outside Chester, and one Cornelius Manley, probably John Manley’s father, was apprenticed in 1600 to a mercer in that city.16Cheshire Archives, 17/ZM/AB/1, f. 160. It was certainly John Manley’s father who in 1616 married Mary Lloyd, daughter of a Shropshire gentleman. One of the parties to the marriage settlement was John Edwardes of Stansty, Denbighshire, who became father-in-law to John Jones I*. There is evidence to suggest that Edwardes was sympathetic to puritanism.17NLW, Plymouth Estate Records, 820; DWB, ‘Edwards family of Stansty’. As a younger son of a gentleman of modest estate, who died in 1623 leaving three sons minors, John Manley needed a means of earning a living, and in 1639 was apprenticed in the London Company of Skinners. He was therefore in London at the outbreak of civil war. His elder brother, Francis, who remained at the family home in Erbistock, fought for the king with the rank of major and was captured outside Shrewsbury by the 2nd earl of Denbigh in July 1644.18Phillips, Civil War in Wales, ii. 183. Another brother, Roger, served in the same regiment, that of Lord Byron (John Byron†), and was taken prisoner at Powis Castle three months later: he escaped, and made his way eventually to the continent.19Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Roger Manley’.

John Manley’s apprenticeship in the City and perhaps contacts among the London Welsh community, of which Sir Thomas Myddelton* was a leading member, helped draw him into the opposite camp to that of his brothers. By the middle of 1643, Manley was receiving payments from Myddelton, who was recruiting an army intended to win north Wales for Parliament. The warrants survive intermittently for the period from mid-1643 until June 1645, but specify no military rank, so it is possible that at this stage Manley was acting in a civilian capacity for Myddelton in London.20SP28/346, unfol. It may be relevant that the City parish where Manley is known to have been living by 1650, St Stephen Walbrook, does not appear in the book Myddelton kept of City parish subscriptions to his army.21NLW, Chirk F12543. Manley may have been a book-keeper in a separate collecting system for which no records survive. This conjecture that he was a civilian military administrator is given support by his role as a recruiting official in the summer of 1648, when he was tasked by Major-general Philip Skippon* with enlisting men in London for a strengthened City force to secure the capital against the revolts in south-east England forming part of the second civil war. His title during this emergency was ‘Mr John Manley’.22Die Mercurii 5o Julii 1648 (Wing E2713A). However, the expedient of enlistment on the authority of what the London civic fathers styled ‘printed papers which they call commissions’ met with opposition from the City common council, and the scheme was revoked by the Lords.23LJ x. 390a-91b. It may have been expedient to bestow military rank upon Manley during his period of service for either Myddelton or Skippon. There seems to be no reliable source before 1652 to indicate that he was a captain.24CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 555.

By December 1650, Manley was married to Margaret, daughter of Dr Isaac Dorislaus. Dorislaus had been an army lawyer for Parliament, an ambassador to the States General of Holland in 1648, and counsel for the prosecution during the trial of Charles I, although he did not speak. Soon after returning to The Hague after the execution of the king, Dorislaus was assassinated by royalist agents (2 May 1649). On 14 May 1649, Parliament awarded £500 to his daughter, who probably married Manley soon afterwards.25CJ vi. 209b. It was probably in connection with the affairs of Dorislaus that Manley travelled overseas in March 1652.26CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 555. As a figure in the City, married to an early martyr of the republic, Manley was well placed to pick up preferment. He was able to buy two substantial properties confiscated from royalist delinquents and sold off by the Treason Trustees: the manor of Bidston, on the Wirral in Cheshire, and the manor of Oswestry in Shropshire. His successful bid for the franchise of the post office should be viewed in the same light. His was not the lowest tender, when bids were considered in the summer of 1653, but his offer of £8,259 was accepted nevertheless.27CSP Dom. 1652-3, pp. 450, 455, 456; P. Gaunt, ‘Interregnum Governments and the Reform of the Post Office, 1649-59’, HR lx. 290-1.

He became postmaster or farmer of the post office with a near monopoly of foreign as well as inland mail, in preference to six other contenders and overriding the claims and protests of those he superseded. It was later claimed by his competitors that he owed his success to an intervention by Col. Nathaniel Rich*, and his accession to the farm was allegedly marked by violence on Manley’s part when he turned his predecessors ‘out of their house and employment’.28SP18/65, f. 109. Manley was said to have been attended on this occasion by Edmund Prideaux I*, whose own grip on the postmastership had been tenacious.29SP18/65, f. 111. He was to hold the ‘farm’ for two years at a rent of £10,000. Manley’s own tenure was unhappy, and he had complaints of his own to make. In December 1653, when he protested that his monopoly was incomplete, lowering his expectations, he was relieved from paying his quarterly rent in advance, but failed to obtain a prolongation of his contract despite his claim that he was investing in packet posts to Spain and Flanders and a postal system throughout Ireland.30SP18/42, f. 212; Gaunt, ‘Reform of the Post Office’, 293-6. In January 1654 when an ordinance of the lord protector’s council confirming Manley’s privilege was due for drafting, it came under fire from his dispossessed opponents, but the council eventually passed it (2 Sept.).31CSP Dom. 1653-4, pp. 350, 365, 372-3; A. and O. ii. 1007. In April 1655 the council of state recommended that Manley, whose authority had extended to the interception of post and the gathering of information about ‘suspicious’ or ‘disaffected’ persons, should be replaced by John Thurloe* when his contract expired at the end of July.32CSP Dom. 1655, pp. 4, 22, 82, 133, 139.

On 4 April 1655, ‘Captain John Manley’ was granted a pass to go to Holland, and so soon afterwards was Roger Manley, his brother, evidently willing to make a show of coming to terms with the protectorate. Roger Manley’s pass was obtained through the recommendation of Isaac Dorislaus, John Manley’s brother-in-law, who would himself became a post office official after the restoration of the monarchy. Francis Manley, the other brother, was also ingratiating himself with the Cromwellian government.33CSP Dom. 1655, pp. 581, 592; TSP iii. 569; Oxford DNB, ‘Isaac Dorislaus’. John Manley appeared for the first time in the Denbighshire assessment commission in June 1657, implying that after the end of his post office farm, he acquired estate there, even if he did not necessarily give up his London residence. By the time of his election to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament in 1659, however, he was described as of Bryn-y-Ffynnon, the most imposing town house in Wrexham.34A Perfect List of the Lords of the Other House (1659). His tenure of Bryn-y-Ffynnon was probably leasehold, and in any case a house in Wrexham gave him no obvious claim to the seat of Denbigh Boroughs. He is likely to have to have sat with the approval of the Cromwellian loyalist and governor of Denbigh, Col. George Twisleton*.

In the 1659 Parliament, Manley is known with any certainty to have served on only two committees. As ‘Mr Manley’ he was named to the elections committee (28 Jan.) and to the committee on supplying a pious ministry for Wales (5 Feb.), which was also an investigation into the propagation of the gospel scheme under the commonwealth nine years earlier.35CJ vii. 594b, 600b. It is possible, but not likely, that the clerk confused his name with that of Thomas Manby, which would inflate his total of committees only by a few more. He had since the time of his post office farm protested his loyalty to the protectorate, and probably did or said nothing to hasten the demise of Richard Cromwell’s regime. However, he proved to be active in defence of the commonwealth during the emergency of the rising attributed to Sir George Boothe* in the summer of 1659, and as a militia captain arrested Edward Vaughan*, the serving sheriff of Denbighshire, before taking him to Shrewsbury.36CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 159. In 1659 he was briefly a justice of the peace for Denbighshire.

With the return of the king in 1660, Manley lost all offices, and became an opponent of Stuart religious policy. In 1663 he was presented at the Wrexham great sessions for not attending church, while on 12 February 1665 his house was raided by the Denbighshire militia while a conventicle of supposedly 80-100 people was being held inside. Manley prevaricated at a window to delay the besiegers’ entry; a list was made of 21 nonconformists present, with Manley’s name in first place.37A.N. Palmer, Hist. Older Nonconformity of Wrexham (Wrexham, 1888), 3; SP29/112, ff. 167, 168. By tradition, Manley has been associated with the church of Morgan Llwyd in Wrexham, but his occupancy of Bryn-y-Ffynnon coincided only with the last few years of Llwyd’s life: the minister died in June 1659.38Palmer, Older Nonconformity, 3. The statement that he was a Baptist, denied the legitimacy of the Anglican church and claimed spiritual inspiration of an order with the Apostles rests on the highly questionable assumption that he was a man complained of by a minister of Monks Kirby, Warwickshire, in 1644.39HMC 4th Rep. 271. This seems quite incompatible with Manley’s known willingness to see his children baptized into the state church in 1650. Rather than a millenarian, Manley seems more likely to have been a Cromwellian propelled into defiant nonconformity by the initially uncompromising policies of the Cavalier Parliament.

Manley had returned to London by 1666, when his premises were destroyed in the Great Fire. However, his return to trade was successful enough for him to become master of the Skinners in 1673-4. In 1678 he was awarded a land grant in Carolina, but did not emigrate, instead throwing in his lot first with the earl of Shaftesbury (Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper*), as an active organizer of the ‘Wapping boys’ during the Exclusion Crisis, and then with the duke of Monmouth. Manley was with Monmouth when he landed in Lyme Regis on 11 June 1685. The duke gave him a commission as a major, and he was successful in driving out the militia from Bridport. Before the disaster of Sedgemoor, Manley made his way to London to raise more support for the rising. He managed to escape to Holland, but returned with William III in 1688. If he owed his election for Bridport in 1689 to the Prideaux interest, it was the coda to a relationship that may have begun in 1653 when Edmund Prideaux I backed Manley as postmaster. He raised a thousand men when the French threatened invasion, but this helped ruin him, and he was in debtors’ prison in 1698. He was buried at St Stephen Walbrook on 31 January 1699. His eldest son, John, a strong tory, sat for Bossinney and Camelford; his second son, Isaac became postmaster-general in Ireland.40HP Commons 1660-90; Oxford DNB.