Cardiff Boroughs

In an Elizabethan account of Glamorgan towns, Cardiff was ‘the chiefest and therefore accounted the shire town’. Except where it bordered the River Taff, it was a walled town, and with a certain amount of local chauvinism Rice Merrick described it as ‘very well compacted, beautified with many fair houses and large streets’, on one of which stood ‘a fair town hall’. R. Merrick, Morganiae Archaiographia ed. B. Ll. James (S. Wales Rec.Soc. i), 84, 87, 88. On the north edge of the town stood the extensive site of Cardiff castle, within which stood the shire hall, where county courts were held. Morganiae Archaiographia, 89. The trade of Cardiff depended on access to the river and the Bristol Channel, but in the mid-seventeenth century, trade subject to customs duties there was modest, and as a port Cardiff was overshadowed not only by the very much larger and more prosperous port of Bristol, but also even by smaller places up-Channel such as Caerleon. The Letter Bk. of John Byrd ed. S.K. Roberts (S. Wales Rec. Soc. xiv), xxvii. Its population was rising through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from an estimate of just over a thousand in the mid-Tudor period to something between 1,750 and 2,450 in the 1670s. L. Owen, ‘The Population of Wales in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion (1959), 110; Compton Census, 521. In 1608, William Herbert, 3rd earl of Pembroke, procured a charter for Cardiff that vested authority in a common council of 24, consisting of 12 capital burgesses and 12 aldermen. Two of the 12 aldermen were to be bailiffs. A man ‘learned in the laws of England’ was to be steward. The justices of the peace were to be the constable of Cardiff castle, the steward and the senior alderman. Cardiff Recs. i. 63-4, 67-8. However, the charter said nothing about parliamentary representation, and the borough continued to be linked with other Glamorgan boroughs in returning a single Member according to the Henrician legislation of 1536-42.

In theory Cardiff, with its seven contributory boroughs, was the most complex Welsh borough constituency. It was not so in its political pattern, as five of the seven, as well as Cardiff, had been under the patronal control of the Herberts, earls of Pembroke, from the mid-sixteenth century: Swansea and Loughor, in Gower, were swayed by the Somersets of Raglan, but apparently offered no competition to the Herberts. Even so, the contributory boroughs continued to play a part in the elections of the 1620s, as the names of burgesses from some of them are recognizable on indentures from 1621, 1624 and 1626. All elections for the seat in the period 1604-29 appear to have been held in Bridgend, located in the middle of Glamorgan, to better enable participation from the more western boroughs of Aberavon, Loughor, Neath and Swansea. HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Cardiff Boroughs’. All Members elected were local kinsfolk, or clients, of the earls of Pembroke. Only one indenture for Cardiff Boroughs survives for the 1640s (1646), and its poor condition makes it impossible to judge where the elections were held.

William Herbert I of Cogan Pill, a second cousin twice removed of Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke, lived three miles west of Cardiff and followed in the footsteps of his grandfather Nicholas Herbert and his cousin William Herbert of the Friars, Members for Cardiff in 1584 and 1621 respectively. His return attracted the attention of the clerk of the crown in chancery or perhaps the privileges committee, as it was noted that Herbert had been described on the indenture, wrongly, as mayor. By convention, serving mayors were not eligible to stand for election to Parliament, but what caused the indenture to be amended by the sheriff was the error of describing Cardiff as a ‘mayor town’. HMC 4th Rep. 24. Herbert made no impression on the Short Parliament and little on the Long Parliament, though he may have been the man who challenged Sir Robert Harley* by casting aspersions on his client puritan ministers, Walter Cradock and Henry Walter, for unorthodox religious opinions. Herbert and his namesake cousin of ‘the Friars’ (known variously also as Grey Friars, White Friars or Cardiff Friars), constable of Cardiff castle, were early partisans of the king as the conflict deepened in 1642, despite their apparent dependence on the earl of Pembroke for parliamentary seat and local office. Herbert was killed fighting for the king at Edgehill (23 Oct. 1642). Three weeks earlier, a London newspaper reported that Herbert had been disabled from sitting further in the Commons for giving up Cardiff castle to the royalists. It may have been a double error, since the constable was in fact Herbert’s cousin, and there is no record at that time of Herbert’s having been disabled. A Continuation of Certaine Speciall Passages no. 12 (3-5 Oct. 1642), 5 (E.121.9). However, in December 1645 the House pronounced Herbert to have been disabled as well as to be deceased, and moved the writ for the by-election accordingly. CJ iv. 366a.

From September 1642, Cardiff was in royalist hands, and remained so under successive governors until after Naseby, when the king’s attempt to maximise the potential of south-east Wales for supply of revenue and men induced first a recalcitrant show of defiance by a ‘peaceable army’ (July 1645) outside Cardiff, and then on 17 September 1645 the surrender of Cardiff to the same clubman force, which seemed by December to have been won over to Parliament. A short-lived revolt against parliamentary rule was crushed on 18 February 1646. C.M. Thomas, ‘The civil wars in Glam.’ Glam. Co Hist. iv. 260-73. The moving of the writ on 5 December 1645 had been premature and born of ill-judged confidence in the strength of regional allegiance, as was the second moving of the writ on 21 January 1646, five days before Bussy Mansell* and the Glamorgan committee sounded alarm bells in a letter to Laugharne about the security of the region. CJ iv. 412b; Bodl. MS Nalson V, f. 231. An election was not held until 17 July 1646, when Algernon Sydney was recruited. His Glamorgan connections were real enough: his grandmother was a Gamage of Coity; his grandfather had been knight of the shire in 1584, an aunt had married Sir Lewis Mansel of Margam and the Sidneys retained extensive lands in the county; but Sydney’s election was not a product of local politics. He had been prominent among the nominees for commissions in the New Model army, but had been obliged to decline an appointment owing to war injury, and was closely allied in politics with Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland, whose agent, Robert Scawen*, was prominent in the Army Committee. Sydney’s election was a victory for Northumberland and the Independent interest at Westminster. The indenture, which has been extensively damaged, indicates that Bussy Mansell, as sheriff of Glamorgan, was the returning officer, but it is impossible to determine know whether the contributory boroughs were involved in any way, or where the election was held. C219/43/6/6/196. The committee of south Wales cannot be credited with recruiting Sydney.

Sydney retained his seat until Oliver Cromwell* expelled the Rump Parliament in April 1653. In the revised electoral arrangements that pertained under the Instrument of Government, Cardiff was allocated a single seat, while Glamorgan had two, and the contributory boroughs were disenfranchised. Haverfordwest was the only other Welsh borough to retain separate representation at Westminster. The logic dictated that elections would henceforth take place in the borough, not elsewhere, and the first to be held under the Instrument took place on 12 July 1654. About 30 aldermen and burgesses put their names to the indenture. C219/44/3. John Price, who was returned to three consecutive Cromwellian Parliaments, was the brother-in-law of Colonel Philip Jones*, governor of Cardiff and de facto constable of the castle. For the third of these elections, held on 30 December 1658, the pre-1654 electoral arrangements were restored. The election was held in Cardiff, as Price was described on the indenture as having been returned for ‘the said town’, but the presence among the 19 known electors of Herbert Evans, a prominent figure in the contributory borough of Neath, suggests that aspects of former practice had been recovered. C219/48. Evans would stand unsuccessfully for the seat in the election for the 1660 Convention, and the Restoration saw the full return of the contributory boroughs as an active element in elections. The electoral changes of the commonwealth and protectorate seem to have hastened the demise of the Herbert interest in this constituency, as no Members in the period after 1660 owed their election to the earls of Pembroke.