Breconshire

Breconshire lay about half way in demographic size among the Welsh counties, with a population estimated to have been above 27,000 by 1670. L. Owen, ‘The Population of Wales’, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion (1959), 113. Its topography was dominated by the Black Mountains and the Brecon Beacons, but in the eastern and western fringes of the county there was scope for the growing of wheat to complement the pasturage dictated by the upland conditions. Leland’s Itinerary in Wales ed. L. Toulmin Smith (1906), 104. Brecon, the county town, was a regional capital, and so politically unassertive were the other ancient boroughs that they had abandoned any claim they might once have asserted to have participated in the parliamentary elections for the borough seat. There is no record of any contest for either of the elections in 1640. William Morgan I had been a client of Sir Walter Pye† (father of Sir Walter Pye*), who had probably helped him to his mansion and estate of Y Dderw, in Llyswen. A number of electors signed Morgan’s indenture on 18 March, but the signatures are now too faded to be legible. The indenture for the election to the Long Parliament is no longer extant. During the civil war, Morgan made his own survival his main goal, but his appearance at the Oxford Parliament in January 1644 gave the Commons cause to identify him as an enemy of Westminster. However, he avoided expulsion, and after Naseby threw in his lot with the parliamentarians. His patron and protector in the House was Sir William Lewis, who was obliged to defend himself against charges arising from his association with Morgan. It was Lewis who paid a price for their friendship, being purged from the Commons as one of the Eleven Members; Morgan remained nominally a Member, and may have evaded seclusion by the army in 1648 because of an association with Colonel Thomas Horton of the New Model army.

When Morgan died in June 1649, he remained at least technically a Commons-man, and so Breconshire was not a constituency where a ‘recruiter’ election was held before the regicide and establishment of the commonwealth. The writ for a by-election for the county was successfully moved on 27 June 1649, three weeks after Morgan’s death, and was issued on 30 November. CJ vi. 244b; C231/6, p. 170.. No indenture survives, but the new Member returned was Colonel Philip Jones, the governor of Cardiff and Swansea, the principal south Wales garrisons. A story that Jones owed his election to Jenkin Jones of the Breconshire parish of Llanddeti, a radical preacher-cum-soldier, may contain a kernel of truth. T. Jones, Hist. Brec. iii. 195. In January 1650, Jones had secured probate for the will of Colonel Horton, and was at the heart of the group known even then as the ‘Welsh Saints’. PROB11/215, f. 28. An even more powerful figure than Horton or Jones was Thomas Harrison I*, by this time major-general of south Wales and the leader of the lay support for the millenarian strand of piety in the region, so Jenkin Jones may have played a part in mobilising Breconshire support for Philip Jones, helping promote the latter as a representative of the south Wales godly interest. Jenkin Jones remained loyal to the commonwealth, and his ‘congregated church’ would later be blamed for the disturbances in Brecon in the autumn of 1659. ‘Brecon’, infra. By the time of his election, however, Philip Jones was the regional garrison commander and a leading committeeman, so had probably built some interest of his own in Breconshire. He was admitted to the House on 5 February 1650.

By the terms of the Instrument of Government of December 1653, Breconshire was given two parliamentary seats. The first election in the county to take place under this constitution was held on 12 July 1654 at the castle green in Brecon, and was contested. A group of 27 of the ‘gentry, freeholders and inhabitants’ of the county afterwards petitioned the lord protector’s council to complain of the force used by the sheriff and his agents to ‘drag and hale’ electors to support the candidature of Edmund Jones, the recorder of Brecon, who in 1651 had already attracted denunciations of his royalist past from the borough. Jones could call upon the electoral interest of the Games family of Buckland, in which he had married, but his own political past was compromised. The petitioners demanded a ‘new and free election’, annexing to their complaint a list of eight challenges to Jones’s eligibility, and a further 17 irregularities in the conduct of the election. John Williams, the sheriff, was alleged to have ‘pre-engaged’ some freeholders by persuading them to ‘subscribe’ for Jones three weeks before the election, and to have allowed votes for Jones by those without the property qualification while disallowing qualified voters for a rival candidate. The royalist careers of numerous electors were listed by the petitioners, but they also described the threatening behaviour by a former lieutenant of Thomas Harrison I, suggesting an effort by the petitioners to present themselves specifically as protectorian loyalists. They also argued that the indenture was defective, because the sheriff had failed to identify the places of residence of Jones’s electors on the indenture, ‘whereby they might be the better known and distinguished from those that voted for Henry Williams’. SP18/73, ff. 151-9. Williams, who had become active in public life on the side of Parliament after the civil war had ended, had by 1654 become sympathetic to the protectorate, and an opponent of the radical preacher, Vavasor Powell. Although the Breconshire election was referred by the council probably to a sub-committee, no further action on it was taken, even when a certificate from Goldsmiths’ Hall showed that Edmund Jones had indeed compounded for delinquency as a royalist. Leniency towards Jones, who was thus seated, may have owed something to the election elsewhere, for Radnorshire, of Williams, but more importantly sprang from the association between Edmund Jones and Colonel Philip Jones, who had vacated the Breconshire seat in 1653 but in these elections had been returned both for Glamorgan and Monmouthshire. ‘Edmund Jones’, infra.

The complaints against the sheriff and Edmund Jones focused exclusively on the contest between Jones and Williams. No mention was made at all of the other successful candidate, Henry Somerset, Lord Herbert of Raglan, the son and grandson of the papist peers whose commission to raise troops for the king's service in six counties in 1638 and 1640, extending to Breconshire, had been so much resented there and elsewhere within the orbit of the 1st and 2nd marquess of Worcester. In fact, the political career of Henry Williams may have been rooted in his opposition to the Raglan interest, but Somerset had allegedly been introduced to Oliver Cromwell* by Colonel Philip Jones, and Williams’s supporters may have deemed it prudent to focus their attack not on a favourite of the lord protector but on a more assailable commoner. No indentures have survived for the Breconshire elections of 1654. The political dominance of Philip Jones over Breconshire, however thinly veiled in 1654, was evident in the elections held in 1656. He himself was at first returned, together with Evan Lewis of Ynysarwed, outside the Glamorgan town of Neath. Lewis was deputy governor of Cardiff and by 1654 had married the sister of Philip Jones’s wife. Jones was also returned for Glamorgan, and when he chose to sit for his native county a new writ was issued (2 Oct. 1656). CJ vii.432b. The substitute for Jones was Robert Nicholas, a judge of the upper bench with no known link with Wales, but who was undoubtedly returned as a supporter of the government. No indentures survive for the 1656 elections.

The arrangements for elections to Richard Cromwell’s* only Parliament were those that had prevailed in 1640, and the sole Member returned was Edmund Jones. The election was held in the shire hall, in Brecon, on 29 December 1658. Many more electors signed the indenture than the 18 whose names are now legible. C219/48, date now illegible and taken from OR. This Parliament was to be Edmund Jones’s undoing, as his patron, Philip Jones, came under sustained attack in the Commons. Edmund’s royalist past was again denounced, and this time he was expelled the House (12 Feb. 1659). In 1660, there was no dominant interest to claim the constituency, and in the elections for the Convention the seat went to Sir William Lewis*, one of the Eleven Members, whose son, Lodowick, had been elected for Brecon in 1647. In April 1661, the contest was between two royalists, Sir Herbert Price (Herbert Prise*) and Sir Henry Williams of Gwernyfed, cousin of the Henry Williams who had stood unsuccessfully in 1654.