Denbigh Boroughs

At its formation under the Henrician Acts of Union, the constituency of Denbigh Boroughs had comprised the four chartered boroughs of Denbigh, Ruthin, Holt and Chirk. Located close to the centre of Denbighshire in the Vale of Clwyd, Denbigh and Ruthin were among the county’s three main market towns – the third being Wrexham. Holt, a smaller market town near the county’s eastern border with Cheshire, was falling under the economic sway of nearby Wrexham and reverting to an agrarian community. Chirk, lying close to the county’s south-eastern border with Shropshire, had ‘shrunk to insignificance’ and had probably ceased to participate in parliamentary elections by the 1640s.‘Denbigh Boroughs’, HP Commons 1509-58, HP Common, 1604-29, HP Commons 1660-90; G.D. Evans, ‘Denb. market town communities in the Stuart era’, Trans. Denb. Hist. Soc. lix. 97.

The economies of Denbigh and Ruthin rested largely upon processing and marketing the wide range of agricultural produce farmed in the Vale of Clwyd and its surrounding uplands. D.H. Owen, ‘Denbigh’, in Boroughs of Medieval Wales ed. R.A. Griffiths (Cardiff, 1978), 173-4; G.D. Evans, ‘Denb. market town economies in the Stuart era – pt. 1’, Trans. Denb. Hist. Soc. lx. 20-2, 26-35. Denbigh was described in the 1670s as ‘indifferent large, well-built, inhabited by glovers and tanners, enjoyeth a good trade ... and hath a good market for corn, cattle and provisions’; Ruthin was ‘a large, well-inhabited and frequented town-corporate’, with a market that was ‘very considerable for corn and provisions, being esteemed the best in the Vale’. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 283, 284. Estimating the size of the populations of Denbigh, Ruthin and Holt has proved difficult; at most, they contained 2,000, 1,700 and 900 inhabitants respectively by the late seventeenth century. The county’s largest urban community by quite some margin was the unchartered town of Wrexham, with a population by 1670 in excess of 3,200. Evans, ‘Denb. market town communities’, 101; N. Powell, ‘Urban population in early modern Wales revisited’, WHR xxiii. 25, 37.

Parliamentary elections for the Boroughs alternated between Denbigh and Wrexham and appear to have been dominated by Denbigh corporation – not least because the returning officers were the town’s two bailiffs. HP Commons 1604-29; HP Commons 1690-1715. In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, the Boroughs returned John Salusbury of Bachygraig – a village lying just over the border in Flintshire in the Vale of Clwyd. Salusbury’s election for the Boroughs may have been the result of an electoral arrangement among the Flintshire gentry – some of whom had proposed him for Flint Boroughs. Infra, ‘Flintshire’. But whatever the nature of this deal among Flintshire’s electors, Salusbury’s election for Denbigh Boroughs had probably required the endorsement of his kinsman, Sir Thomas Salusbury of Lleweni, who was returned for Denbighshire at Wrexham on 25 March. Supra, ‘Denbighshire’. The Salusburys of Lleweni were the leading family in the Vale of Clwyd and had dominated the affairs of Denbigh since the late fifteenth century. Owen, ‘Denbigh’, 178-9; ‘John Salusbury’, HP Commons 1604-29; DWB, ‘Salusbury, Salisbury, Salesbury fam. of Lleweni and Bachygraig’. The election indenture has not survived.

In the elections to the Long Parliament, the Boroughs returned Simon Thelwall of Plas-y-Ward (a few miles to the south east of Denbigh and north west of Ruthin) on 24 October 1640. Again, there is no evidence of a contest. The Thelwalls of Plas-y-Ward and Bathafarn in the Vale of Clwyd had occupied the shire seat on four occasions since 1614. Infra, ‘Simon Thelwall’; ‘Denbighshire’, ‘Simon Thelwall’, ‘Sir Eubule Thelwall’, HP Commons 1604-29. Nevertheless, it is likely that Thelwall had required the backing and consent of his kinsmen the Salusburys to secure the Boroughs seat. Prominent among the parties named on the election indenture and among its 12 or so signatories were Sir Thomas and John Salusbury – Denbigh’s two annually-elected aldermen, or chief municipal officers – and one of the town’s bailiffs, Fulke Salusbury. The indenture refers to the aldermen and bailiffs of Denbigh as the returning parties and makes no discernible mention (the document is barely legible) of any participation in the election by the out-boroughs – which may explain a report in December 1640 that the ‘Holt men’ had petitioned the Commons (although there is no record of this petition in the Journal). C219/43/3/186; J. Williams, Ancient and Modern Denbigh (Denbigh, 1856), 112; Salusbury Corresp. 115. Thelwall sided with Parliament in the civil war but was secluded at Pride’s Purge in December 1648, leaving the Boroughs without formal representation in the Rump. Infra, ‘Simon Thelwall’.

Disenfranchised under the Instrument of Government in 1653, Denbigh Boroughs regained its seat in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament of 1659, to which it returned John Manley of Bryn-Y-Ffynnon in Wrexham. A younger son of a minor Denbighshire gentry family, Manley had taken up residence at Bryn-Y-Ffynnon, the largest house in Wrexham, by 1658 at the latest. As a religious radical and man of small estate, he had probably relied heavily for electoral support on his colleagues among the county’s parliamentarian leadership – and in particular, perhaps, on the governor of Denbigh, Colonel George Twisleton*. Infra, ‘John Manley’, ‘George Twisleton’; ‘John Manley’, Oxford DNB. The Boroughs returned another noted parliamentarian, Colonel John Carter, to the 1660 Convention. But the Salusburys regained control of the constituency in the elections to the Cavalier Parliament and did not relinquish their grip on it until the 1680s. HP Commons 1660-90.