The dominance of the influence of Thomas James, 1st Baron Bulkeley, of Baron Hill, which had secured the return of John Parry of Wernfawr in 1780 and 1784, was further confirmed in 1790, when Parry made way for Robert Williams, Bulkeley’s uterine brother.
Nor was Williams secure in his seat; in 1792 Newborough returned to Glynllifon, and in the following year Assheton Smith came back to the county: it was feared he might ‘molest’ Williams. In August 1795, moreover, Penrhyn announced his candidature. It was understood that he had Assheton Smith’s backing and he gave Bulkeley a fright by securing the support of Sir Roger Mostyn, the Flintshire Member, whom Bulkeley subsequently drove off the scene by raising the phantom of opposition to him in Flintshire. Penrhyn afterwards claimed that he was encouraged by Newborough, but the latter announced his own intention of standing soon after Penrhyn, and contemporary evidence suggests that he was annoyed at Penrhyn’s anticipating him and refused to parley with him, or with Penrhyn’s friend John Warren, bishop of Bangor. The latter, writing to Pitt on 15 Sept. 1795, based his support for Penrhyn not only on his usefulness ‘in improving the agriculture of this county, as well as in promoting its trade and navigation’, but on his objection to Williams’s private character. While Williams’s sexual morals were certainly irregular, the ‘pious prelate’ provoked some indignation by his open hostility towards a man who had ‘bled for his country at Lincelles’, and was attacked for it by a pamphleteer, probably Thomas Williams.
Newborough had thus himself suggested the terms of a concordance which would clinch the new balance of power in the north-western counties created by the decline of his house, but Uxbridge hesitated. He was informed that a rumour of this deal had already got abroad and that it was described as ‘a bad job’; while allowance must be made for the ‘folly, youth and inexperience’ of Williams, he was not as unpopular as Penrhyn, ‘a d—d negro driver’ and his friend the bishop. On 10 Oct. Newborough again pressed his claims on Uxbridge, asking him to support his application to Pitt, penned the next day. On 28 Oct. he again wrote, to say that he knew Williams had ‘a number sufficient and that, my dear lord, you know must be increased by accelerating a certain event’. Uxbridge and Bulkeley now agreed to support Newborough’s pretensions, and after repeated pressure from the latter in the spring of 1796 Uxbridge wrote to Pitt, 10 May, describing this peerage as the best way of preserving the peace of the county. When the plan failed through Pitt’s refusal on 20 May, Bulkeley pacified Newborough by offering him a safe seat for his borough of Beaumaris. Then, to quote Penrhyn, Newborough, who had once assured him that he would ‘always oppose the party of my opponent ... in contradiction to all his professions and declaration ... joined my opponent with all his support and interest’. This, as well as Bulkeley’s territorial superiority, ensured Penrhyn’s defeat. There had allegedly been ‘great bribery on both sides’, but Penrhyn ‘gave up and mounted his horse and galloped off as if he had been crazy’, peeved at the ingratitude of a county where he spent ‘every month, from fifteen to seventeen hundred pounds’.
Exit Penrhyn, but Bulkeley’s peace of mind was again disturbed, before the election of 1802, by the restiveness of Newborough, who realized his nuisance value and had to be warned off the county, and by the importunity of Assheton Smith and Gwyllym Lloyd Wardle, both of whom tried to make an issue of the improvement of communications in the county by road and bridge: what Bulkeley called ‘kicking up a dust by land and sea’. To his alarm Williams talked of retirement and had to be persuaded to ‘talk big’ and ‘carry on a dry canvass’ in order to dispel Assheton Smith’s pretensions. Bulkeley, who feared he could not deposit £10,000 in the Caernarvon Bank, which would ‘silence all opposition’, was not prepared to face the expense of a contest at first, thinking ‘£6,000 every seven years’ too much for any county, but he succeeded in keeping the issue of communications out of the election and no opposition materialized.
There was no further opposition to Williams. Admittedly, on Newborough’s death in 1807, his nephew and delegate trustee, Thomas Wynn Belasyse, disappointed of a seat on Bulkeley’s interest, declared hostility to him in the county, but Bulkeley reinforced his position by obliging Sir Edward Pryce Lloyd with the seat for Beaumaris, thus securing the support of the latter and his brothers-in-law Sir Thomas Mostyn and (Sir) Robert Williames Vaughan to reinforce his position in the county.
Number of voters: about 1100