LLOYD, Hugh (1588/9-1667)

‘A very pious, learned, charitable and primitive good man’, Hugh Lloyd was firmly rooted in the diocese of Llandaff well before the civil wars. His family background and details of his marriage are hard to verify, although it has been claimed that he was of armigerous descent. Lloyd entered Oxford as a ‘poor scholar’ and thereafter became an experienced member of the Anglican Church in Wales. He took part in the Glamorganshire ‘insurrection’ of 1647, was taken prisoner after the battle of St Fagans in 1648 and was very severely used by the Interregnum authorities. Jnl. of Welsh Ecclesiastical Hist., iv. 31. His property in Glamorganshire was forfeited for treason in 1652; although he was allowed to retain a tenement in Eye, Herefordshire, which he claimed in right of his wife, he lost the profits of his Welsh livings. A. and O. ii. 211; CCC, 3211.

After the Restoration, the re-establishment of the Church in Glamorganshire was in part influenced by the Welsh royalists connected with Jesus College, Oxford, where Leoline Jenkins^‡ was elected as principal in 1661. Despite general acceptance of the pre-war church order, many of the county’s gentry were sympathetic to the piety of moderate Presbyterians and Independents. Lloyd tried to employ the ardent royalism of the local gentry to help with the re-establishment of the Church but they were divided among themselves over the issue of Dissent: some harboured itinerant preachers, and implementation of the penal laws was sporadic and inconsistent. Lloyd’s own appointment owed much to his long-standing relationship with the diocese as well as to the desire (arising from being a Welsh-speaker himself) to secure the appointment of Welshmen able to minister to their countrymen in their own language. He instituted a pastoral regime that he considered most likely to return the people to religious orthodoxy. This involved flouting Church rules that stipulated the ordination only of graduates; only 19 of the 100 men that he ordained were graduates. His ordinands were drawn from the same close-knit rural communities that they would serve as ministers. He also appointed Welshmen to the diocesan higher clergy, taking advantage of the situation to appoint two of his own sons-in-law. Religion and National Identity ed. S. Mews, 336–43.

On 20 Nov. 1661 the 72-year-old Lloyd took his seat in the House of Lords. Although he attended the session for more than half of its sittings, he did not return after a final visit on 26 Apr. 1662. For the remainder of his episcopate he covered his absences by registering proxies. His proxy was most often registered with Humphrey Henchman, successively bishop of Salisbury and London, (on 28 Apr. 1662, 2 Feb. 1663, 29 Mar. 1664, 10 Nov. 1664) but also once with Seth Ward, of Exeter and Salisbury (from 2 Oct. 1666). Despite his absence from parliament, in the summer of 1663 he was listed as a likely opponent of the attempt by George Digby, 2nd earl of Bristol, to impeach Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon.

In 1662 Lloyd conducted a diocesan visitation. H. Lloyd, Articles of Visitation and Enquiry Concerning Matters Ecclesiastical (1662). The bishop’s leniency against Dissent resulted in an anonymous petition to Gilbert Sheldon, archbishop of Canterbury, in January 1665 pleading for Sheldon’s intervention. The petitioner alleged that religion had become ‘faint’ through Lloyd’s failure to censure the ‘vicious and profane’ and through his ordination of those ‘whom none sober, religious, or loyal could approve of’. Lloyd was accused of using presentations to church livings as a way of augmenting portions for his granddaughters and kinswomen and of appointing clergymen so inclined to drunkenness that ‘the common people … know them by their rubied cheeks and studded noses as by their coats’. Bodl. Add. C 302, f. 121. Sheldon appears to have ignored the allegations; later that year, in response to a plea from the ageing bishop, Sheldon’s secretary (and Lloyd’s kinsman), Miles Smith, allowed Lloyd an additional commendam. Bodl. Add. C 305, ff. 340, 342.

Lloyd died on 7 June 1667 and was buried in Llandaff cathedral, his simple epitaph stating that he had ‘dispersed abroad and given to the poor; his righteousness remaineth for ever’.