Haverfordwest

One of the most prosperous towns in south Wales, Haverfordwest, a county borough, had by statute in 1543 acquired the privilege of returning a single Member to Parliament. A charter in 1610 clarified the governance of the borough, which lay in a common council of 24 which elected the mayor, two bailiffs and the sheriff, the returning officer, from out of its number. The common council has been described as ‘a self-perpetuating oligarchy of the wealthier and most prominent burgesses’. Cal. Recs. Haverfordwest, 1-3. Borough and parliamentary elections were held in the guildhall or shire hall, near St Mary’s church. Pemb. Co. Hist. iii. 23. The borough recognized eight trade guilds, and in the town tradesmen in leather, corvisers and glovers, were strongly represented. Cal. Recs. Haverfordwest, 5. The population was probably something over 2,000 in 1640 and is unlikely to have exceeded 3,000 in 1652 when hundreds of townspeople fell victim to an epidemic. Cal. Recs. Haverfordwest, 15-17; N. Powell, ‘Urban Population in Early Modern Wales Revisited’, WHR xxiii. 41. Since Tudor times two gentry families resident nearby, the Perrots of Haroldston and the Stepneys of Prendergast, had been influential in parliamentary elections. It may have been the deaths of Sir James Perrot† (1637) and Sir Thomas Canon† (1639), who had lived in the town for over 60 years, that prompted Sir John Stepney to offer his services as Member gratis to the corporation (6 Jan. 1640). Why he was not returned for Haverfordwest to the Short Parliament does not appear, but by what looks like a convenient and collusive arrangement, Stepney was returned for Pembroke Boroughs, and the dominant gentry figure there, Hugh Owen of Orielton, took the seat of Haverfordwest. This exchange has been dismissed as a ‘ludicrous blunder’ on the part of chroniclers, but the returned electoral indentures confirm it. J. Phillips, ‘Haverfordwest in the Civil War’, Arch. Cambr. 6th ser. xv. 4.

The election of March 1640 is one of only two for which indentures survive for this borough in the period under consideration. The original is in very poor condition, but an (almost) fair copy of it was made for a 1662 election dispute in order to demonstrate that the franchise was with the burgesses only, and not the inhabitants. The election was as usual held at the guildhall and the return was contracted between the sheriff of Haverfordwest and about 90 electors, headed by the mayor, a barrister, four aldermen and seven councillors, the rest being tradesmen whose occupations are specified, or yeomen. Corvisers, glovers and tanners, as if to confirm the evidence of taxation records, predominate. C219/42/2/6/123; Pemb. RO, HAM/19. If Stepney had been excluded because of opposition to him, it had evaporated later that year when Haverfordwest returned him to the Long Parliament, and Owen reverted to Pembroke. Garrisoned for Parliament, the town capitulated to the royalists in 1643, with Stepney as governor, and participated in the declaration of loyalty of the three south-west Wales counties to the king (18 Aug. 1643). CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 477-8; Cal. Recs. Haverfordwest, 74. Major-general Rowland Laugharne† recaptured the town for Parliament early in 1644, but it was again yielded to the royalists, and was not recovered by Laugharne until 2 August 1645. Cal. Recs. Haverfordwest, 12-14.

Stepney had been disabled from sitting further in the Long Parliament as early in the war as 19 April 1643, because of his close association with Richard Vaughan†, 2nd earl of Carbery [I]. CJ iii. 52b. However, he kept his membership of the common council, and apologized to the mayor in March 1649 for his inability, because of ‘unhappy times and many troubles’, to pay back a debt of £50 he owed the town. Cal. Recs. Haverfordwest, 84, 86, 93, 96. The arrangements for electing his successor in Parliament fell to the victorious Laugharne. The writ was moved in the House on 25 September 1645. CJ iv. 287a. By 20 October, Laugharne had written to the common councillors soliciting their request to give their voices for Sir Robert Needham at an election. There were family connections linking Laugharne and Needham, through the latter’s mother, but probably more significant was an acquaintanceship between Needham and Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex. By the following day, Laugharne was confident that he would receive the writ shortly, and assured the townsmen that Needham would serve them without charge. On 22 November, writing from Brecon, Laugharne reported ambiguously that Needham had ‘in person repaired to make himself known’ to them. Cal. Recs. Haverfordwest, 75. He was probably elected without opposition shortly thereafter.

Once elected, Needham was lobbied by the townspeople to intervene at Westminster on their behalf. A letter of his to the corporation, of 26 September 1646, reveals that he was under pressure from them to find and fund a preaching minister for St Mary’s church, and to prevent further harassment of the town by the excise commissioners, whose activities had been challenged by women protesters ‘of the poorest sort’, who had vigorously lobbied the common council as they sat in the guildhall. A further letter of Needham’s (21 Feb. 1647) referred to a visit made to his constituency, and included a promise to fill the pulpit of St Mary’s: an immediate response from the corporation drew from him in April an expression of his wish to see St Mary’s endowed with a lectureship of £100 a year. He recommended one Freeman to the townspeople as the choice of the Westminster Assembly. Cal. Recs. Haverfordwest, 76-7, 80. That was the extent of Needham’s involvement in the town; the relationship between Member and corporation was overtaken by the events of 1648. The town escaped the second civil war in May, though Oliver Cromwell* called on it to assist him in his siege of Pembroke, quartered troops in Haverfordwest, and ordered the dismantling of the castle, which was clumsily attempted. Cal. Recs. Haverfordwest, 15.

Needham, as an obvious Essexian, was secluded from the House in December, and the town would have been grateful for his assistance when its assessment was raised from £15 a month to £45 in 1649. Cal. Recs. Haverfordwest, 90. Even before the tripling, the corporation had appealed to Cromwell for relief in view of the cost of accommodating wounded soldiers; in 1650 and 1651 draft petitions to Parliament feature in the corporation records, and in 1652 the campaign was intensified when the plague decimated the town and its ‘paymasters’ deserted it. Cal. Recs.Haverfordwest, 90, 91, 94, 97, 100. On 1 March 1652 Herbert Perrot* was sent to London to further the petition, which William Goffe* (a native), Thomas Harrison I*, Cromwell and the Speaker were also lobbied to support: it alleged that ‘every person ... pays a hundred times more than they do in other places’. Cal. Recs. Haverfordwest, 100-103. The corporation also appealed to the Committee of the Army for a respite on current payments. In March Thomas Cozen, and in April his father-in-law the mayor proceeded to London to promote the cause, but the assessment act was passed in June 1652 without abatement for the town, and Cromwell informed the mayor that the petition was referred to the Army Committee. The Haverfordwest assessment commissioners therefore appealed to the committee on 10 July. Cal. Recs. Haverfordwest, 119, 124. All in vain, it seems, as a further appeal to the army commissioners was made in November 1652, and on 10 June 1653 the common council asked Thomas Davids (mayor the year before) to present a petition to the council of state, and to secure the assistance of James Philipps*, who first features in the corporation records in 1649, and was now one of Wales’s six representatives in the Nominated Assembly. Davids reported that Philipps showed himself ‘much the town’s friend’ in the House on 22 July, when the town’s petition was referred to the Army Committee. By the end of the year the town’s quota was reduced to £25 a month, and as Philipps was an army commissioner, they appealed to him to secure them time to pay their arrears since 24 June, the balance amounting to £1,260 having been remitted. Philipps offered to square the account by a loan. The town’s assessment was also separated from that of the county, ‘as formerly’. Cal. Recs. Haverfordwest, 127, 138-47.

James Philipps’s services for the town were rewarded in June 1654 when the corporation invited him to recommend the Member for the lord protector’s first Parliament, in which Haverfordwest and Cardiff were the only Welsh towns to retain a Member, under the terms of the Instrument of Government. Philipps’s choice fell upon John Upton II, who had no local connections, but whose brother-in-law was John Thurloe*, Cromwell’s secretary of state. Philipps was already a committed supporter of the protectorate, active in the Army Committee, but Upton was even closer to the heart of government than he was. Upton’s constituents had ‘desires’ to communicate to him: to make up the living of St Mary’s to £100 a year; to secure parliamentary approval of a moratorium on their assessment arrears; to see to it that more justices were added to the town bench. In an assertion of the importance of regional loyalty over connections at Whitehall and the City, they added that Upton should seek James Philipps’s assistance in case of need for further advice. Cal. Recs. Haverfordwest, 148. Philipps was one of a local committee of seven, also including Major-general Rowland Dawkins*, Arthur Owen*, Jenkin Lloyd* and Sampson Lort*, appointed by the lord protector’s council to consider a petition from the ‘well affected’ of the town; it had complained of the election of a ‘malignant’ to office, the disaffection of the town clerk, and the contempt shown by Thomas Davids and William Walter towards the recent proclamation prohibiting enemies of the state from holding local positions (27 Nov. 1655). CSP Dom. 1655-6, p. 35. On 1 February 1656 the common council ordered that no ‘foreigner’ was to be admitted a burgess without paying a fine of 40s. On 22 February, Philipps was elected to the council, and on 7 April 1656 he was chosen mayor, the incumbent having been displaced by Dawkins. On 1 July Philipps informed his deputy from Westminster that he had that day procured the desired augmentation for St Mary’s, and sounded out the corporation about their choice for the ensuing parliamentary election, advising them not to make promises until he arrived on the scene. He concluded with an unambiguous statement of his fidelity to their interests. Cal. Recs. Haverfordwest, 128, 129, 130, 152-3.

Upton was again returned, on 20 August 1656. The indenture, the only Welsh one for that general election surviving in the chancery records, suggests a more modest affair than in March 1640: a contract between the sheriff of Haverfordwest and a smaller number of electors (30 or so), headed by James Philipps as mayor, who with ‘all other the burgesses and inhabitants there have named and made the choice and election of John Upton esq.’. C219/45. The inclusion of ‘inhabitants’ is interesting in view of the post-Restoration dispute over the franchise. After the election, on 29 October 1656, the corporation informed Upton that he should, as before, apply to James Philipps, one of themselves (as well as the county Member) for their wishes. The list of priorities included moderating the assessments in view of the town’s often repeated expressions of poverty; procuring an extension of the town’s assessment catchment into outlying hamlets; obtaining a post office so that they were not dependent on the one at Pembroke; promotion of their latest textile manufacturing venture; reservation for the council alone of any issue of arms for security purposes; to have a barrister as recorder and assistant to the mayor; to have copies of the latest parliamentary ordinances for their own use; and to settle the maintenance for a preaching minister. Cal. Recs. Haverfordwest, 153-4.

Upton was elected a third time to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament, and the corporation in a letter of 31 December 1658 commended his readiness to serve them, and again referred him to James Philipps for an account of the grievances they wished to see redressed. This account is missing, but a letter to them from Philipps, of 28 March 1659, indicates that they desired a renewal and enlargement of their borough charter, which he admitted had not been practicable because of the more urgent public business. He asked them to accept Upton’s offer of a bursary at one of the universities or an annuity for an almshouse, which they chose, as a gift. Cal. Recs. Haverfordwest, 159, 160. They were not used to choice, as the 1660 election was soon amply to demonstrate, when Sir Robert Needham, his local patron Laugharne, Philipps and Sampson Lort*, all prominent in the 1640s and 50s, together with a local royalist, were all in contention for the single seat. In February 1662, a copy of the March 1640 return was made to show that the right of election lay in the burgesses, not the inhabitants, though the 1656 indenture implied the wider franchise. Pemb. RO, HAM/19.