Anglesey

The island of Anglesey, rich in cultural significance though it was for the Welsh people, not least as the patrimonial home of the Tudor dynasty, was in the seventeenth century marked by its poverty. Indeed, Penmynydd, from whence the Tudors had sprung, was thought the most barren parish of all. In 1636 it was asserted by a resident that agricultural practice on Anglesey was backward, and no more than three men there could ‘lay out £300 at an instant’. Cal. Salusbury Corresp. 86, 87. A modern attempt to compute population sizes for the early modern Welsh counties concludes that Anglesey was the smallest of all the shires, with a populace probably of no more than 16,000 in 1640. L. Owen, ‘The Population of Wales’, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion (1959), 113. However, with Holyhead established as an embarkation point for Ireland, the county was of some strategic and political significance to English governments of whatever complexion, and was far from insulated from developments in the British polity. Fear of seaborne invasion by the rebellious Irish, or a land invasion by large numbers of soldiers loyal to the London government en route to Ireland, was never remote from the thinking of the Anglesey gentry. The island’s parliamentary representation was like every other Welsh county in returning a single Member to the Commons, but instead of the more usual arrangement of the contributory boroughs, the franchise was restricted to the corporation of Beaumaris. The dominant political interest on the island during the century before 1640 had been that of the Bulkeley family of Baron Hill, just outside Beaumaris. Apart from controlling the borough on its doorstep, the Bulkeleys returned 11 of the 25 knights of the shire chosen between 1545 and 1640, and most of the rest by kinship or alliance. Elections for the county took place in Beaumaris, at ‘the shire hall’, a building of 1614. S. Lewis, Topographical Dictionary of Wales (2 vols. 1833), i. sub Beaumaris.

At the first election in 1640, the seat was taken by John Bodvell of Caerfryn on the island and Bodfel in Caernarvonshire. His election, which took place in Beaumaris, was doubtless secured on his own interest, and was probably unopposed. He stood again in November, and the first signature of about 21 electors on the indenture was that of Thomas Bulkeley of Baron Hill. C219/43/6/5/153. The reason there was no Bulkeley candidate may well have lain in the dysfunctional relationships within the family at the time: Robert Bulkeley would petition the Lords in May 1641 against the oppressions of his mother and Thomas Bulkeley, his uncle. PA, Main Pprs. 28 June 1641. Bodvell was to the Bulkeleys evidently acceptable as the island’s knight of the shire, and threw himself with some vigour into life at Westminster. He joined in the chorus demanding reform of the government in 1641, and provided Sir Simonds’ D’Ewes* with material for his parliamentary journal. With the outbreak of civil war, however, Bodvell closed ranks with the Bulkeleys to assert loyalty to the king, although unlike Thomas Bulkeley, whose commitment achieved recognition at Oxford in the form of a viscountcy in the Irish peerage (6 Jan. 1644), Bodvell was rather more cautious in his actions on the king’s behalf. CP ii. 411. However, he attended the Oxford Parliament, sufficient provocation to his Westminster counterparts to earn his disablement from sitting further (5 Feb. 1644).

Not until 8 December 1646 was the writ issued for Bodvell’s replacement to the Long Parliament. CJ v. 4b. The previous June, Anglesey had peacefully and readily surrendered to Thomas Mytton*, parliamentarian major-general of north Wales, and by the end of August Owen Wood, father of Richard, who would soon be elected for the seat, was working for the co-operation of Thomas, Viscount Bulkeley, in paying Mytton’s troops. Bangor Univ. Archives, Baron Hill 6727. As part of the island’s settlement, Mytton worked to win over to Parliament its rulers on as generous terms as possible. Bulkeley was discharged from delinquency in October; and his fellow-royalist, Sir Robert Eyton (of Pentre Madoc, Chirk, Denbighshire), hoped for the help of John Glynne* and John Maynard* in procuring an ordinance from the Houses to confirm Bulkeley’s exemption from penal taxation. CJ v. 686a, 695a; Baron Hill 5386, 5387; Dodd, ‘Anglesey in the Civil War’, Anglesey Antiq. Soc. Trans. (1952), 17. In November Wood senior and other leading gentry islanders were eager to show respect to ‘our noble general’, and on 7 December Mytton organized a meeting of the Anglesey gentry to discuss how best to accommodate, but limit the impact on the island of, the transient soldiers passing through on their way to Holyhead and Ireland. Baron Hill 5390. The parliamentary election on 31 December was held against this background of an island leadership keen to demonstrate its compliance with parliamentary authority. The indenture bore the signatures of over 25 electors, and the Bulkeley family was represented among them. C219/43/6/5/155. Richard Wood was elected without fuss, but played no part at all in Parliament, and may not even have taken his seat. Despite the islanders’ vaunted show of respect for Westminster, in May 1648 Anglesey was the seat of a royalist revolt, fanned by Sir John Owen and timed to coincide with the insurgency in south Wales led by Rowland Laugharne. Owen Wood and son, the nominal Commons-man Richard, remained aloof from this, but the principal rebels included Viscount Bulkeley and John Bodvell. Dodd, ‘Civil War in Anglesey’, 23-5. On 9 October, after the revolt had been snuffed out after fierce fighting outside Beaumaris, the Anglesey gentry, including Bulkeley, Bodvell and Owen Wood, petitioned Parliament for clemency and indemnity, evidently hoping to blur their individual records in the conflict. Baron Hill 5393A. An incident in February 1650 that may have been sparked at least in part from the imposition on Anglesey (that was inevitably harsher than the settlement of 1646) was the duel on Lavan Sands in the Menai Straits between Colonel Richard Bulkeley and Richard Cheadle, who had helped quell the 1648 revolt. Bulkeley was killed and Cheadle subsequently hanged for his murder, the culmination of a feud between Cheadles and Bulkeleys that had begun in the 1620s. Oxford DNB, ‘Richard Bulkeley’; Dodd, ‘Civil War in Anglesey’,

Under the terms of the Instrument of Government of 1653, Anglesey was to return two Members, while Beaumaris was no longer represented. However, such was the disgrace tainting the Anglesey gentry in the eyes of the protectoral government that no islander put himself forward for election during the interregnum. Colonel George Twisleton, elected in Beaumaris on 12 July 1654, was governor of Denbigh castle through the 1650s, but had married a Caernarvonshire heiress around 1648 and had bought lands on Anglesey in 1650. Elected with him was William Foxwist, a native of Caernarfon and a justice of the peace in Caernarvonshire, recorder of St Albans, Hertfordshire, and a client of long standing of John Glynne*. Foxwist’s great patron had in May 1654 been made lord protector’s serjeant, and joined him in the House as Member for Caernarvonshire. The leading county families’ names were conspicuously absent from the indenture surviving for Twisleton’s election. C219/44/3.

Twisleton was returned again in 1656, but Foxwist had been appointed to the Welsh judiciary. The available seat went to Griffith Bodurda, a son of two Caernarvonshire families, seated at Bodwrda and Cefnamwlch. The Griffith family of Cefnamwlch held property in Anglesey. Crucially for the success of his parliamentary career, Bodurda was the brother-in-law of John Glynne, whose patronage must have helped him succeed Foxwist in the seat. No returns survive for the 1656 Anglesey election. In January 1659, the elections for the only Parliament of Richard Cromwell* were held under the electoral arrangements as they had stood in 1640. Anglesey therefore again claimed one Member only, and Twisleton retained the seat in the election held on 13 January 1659. Robert Bulkeley, eldest son of Thomas, Viscount Bulkeley, as sheriff acted as returning officer. There is no evidence of a contest, and the number of electors lending their names to the indenture was under 20. The first name among them was that of Pierce Lloyd junior, who had been bound on the same day as Richard Wood at Lincoln’s Inn. C219/48. Robert Bulkeley must have succeeded to the Baron Hill estates shortly afterwards, and served as knight of the shire in the election for the Convention in 1660, thus restoring the Bulkeley electoral interest.