Commended by Sir John Wynn†, 1st bt. as ‘a very ancient house’, the Joneses claimed to have lived at Castellmarch, Caernarvonshire, at the western end of the Llŷn peninsula, since the Edwardian conquest. The MP’s great-grandfather, Crown bailiff of Cafflogion commote in the mid-sixteenth century, has been described as ‘virtually the ruler of this part of the Llŷn’. The bailiwick remained in the family until the death of Jones’s father in 1587, when it was granted to Griffith ap John Griffith, who was soon to become Jones’s father-in-law.
Jones should not be confused with a namesake of Twickenham who was appointed gamekeeper of Hampton Court park in 1615, nor with the ‘William Jones, gent.’ to whom translations of Lipsius’ Six Books of Politics and Nennio’s Treatise of Nobility were attributed in 1595: the former was dedicated to Sir John Puckering†, which would suggest that the author was Edward Jones*.
Though his brother was later to settle in Beaumaris, serving as mayor in 1625, Jones spent most of his time in London, and his regular return to Parliament can probably be attributed Sir William Maurice*, ‘the good and well natured knight whom I found always loving to me’. At the 1604 election, Jones relinquished the Caernarvonshire county seat to Maurice, replacing the latter at Beaumaris, presumably with the consent of the local magnate Sir Richard Bulkeley*. Jones was recorder by this time, and as such, he and his son Charles* controlled Beaumaris’s parliamentary representation until 1640.
Jones showed little recorded interest in Welsh issues, although the committees for bills for regulation of the trades in leather (added 28 June 1604) and butter and cheese (20 Apr. 1610), to both of which he was named, may have interested his constituents.
Jones first emerged as a significant figure in the Commons during the impositions debates of June 1610, when he was one of the lawyers who made set-piece speeches attacking the Crown’s claim to a prerogative right of increasing customs duties without parliamentary approval. While acknowledging that the king was permitted to ‘restrain for the good of the commonwealth, and dispense’ from such a restraint, he insisted that ‘to take a sum of money for a dispensation he [the king] cannot’. He also answered the pragmatic objection that the abolition of impositions would put the king at a disadvantage compared to the arbitrary methods employed by the continental monarchs by suggesting that the king ‘may stay for a Parliament, which is at his pleasure’.
In the 1610 impositions debate Sir Francis Bacon* presented the Crown’s response to Jones’s speech, and he later borrowed Jones’s notes of the records cited in this debate to prepare for the 1614 session. Acknowledging Jones as a well-briefed opponent, he considered it ‘no ill counsel to win or to remove such men’, and shortly after he assumed the office of lord keeper in 1617, Jones was sent to Ireland as chief justice of that country’s Court of King’s Bench. Jones may have been preparing the ground for this appointment in the previous year, when he based his readings at Lincoln’s Inn upon 43 Eliz. c.1, a statute confirming Crown tenures, the surrender and re-grant of which underpinned Dublin’s attempts at settlement with the native Irish.
The first task which fell to Jones upon his arrival in Ireland was the controversial suppression of Waterford’s borough charter: he fined Catholic grand jurors for refusing to present recusants at the assizes, and later seized the corporation’s lands and regalia. The English Privy Council commended his conduct, but Jones, like Bacon, may have had misgivings about such harsh treatment of the Old English: his report cited the townsmen’s humble submission, and when the residents petitioned for a fresh charter some years later, he reported that the old could be reinstated almost unchanged.
Jones’s departure from Ireland early in 1620 was apparently prompted by financial reasons, but even so, it is somewhat surprising that he chose not to stand for a Commons’ seat in January 1621; indeed, when (Sir) Richard Wynn* inquired about his intentions towards the Caernarvonshire seat, Jones offered his ‘goodwill and assent’ to Wynn’s own candidacy, although he later changed his allegiance to support his first wife’s nephew, John Griffith III*.
Shortly after the dissolution of the 1621 Parliament, an official inquiry into Irish affairs was announced. Despite his protestations of penury, Jones was nominated as one of the English commissioners by lord treasurer (Sir Lionel) Cranfield*, being familiar with the Dublin administration, but not beholden to the New English interest. This investigation produced reports on trade, monopolies, the church, army, and legal and administrative systems, all of which exposed extensive corruption, while visits to the plantations uncovered widespread breaches of the terms of the original grants.
Meanwhile, back in London, Sir Richard Wynn nurtured a grudge against Jones for his behaviour at the 1621 election, despite Sir John Wynn’s advice ‘to use Sir William Jones respectfully and as a friend’, albeit one with unwelcome links to the Griffiths. In the summer of 1622, Charles Jones and Owen Wynn quarrelled at Beaumaris, but on his return Jones implored Sir John Wynn to ‘let not the unfortunate carriage of my son be objected against me, for which I was as sorry as yourself’, and a formal apology was drawn up with the assistance of the assize judge Edward Littleton II*.
Greater damage was done to Jones’s prospects by the development of a rift at Court between Buckingham, now a duke, and Cranfield, now earl of Middlesex, in 1623. Shortly before returning to Ireland at the end of the year, Jones asked Middlesex to procure him a place on Prince Charles’s Council, in order to have ‘some further interest in his [Charles’s] favour’, a request which was unsuccessful.
Jones returned to Westminster as a judicial assistant in late March 1624, but there was nothing he could do to save Middlesex from impeachment over the following weeks. However, unlike many, he remained willing to assist the earl’s efforts to seek a reduction in his fine.
As an object of Buckingham’s distaste, Jones had little to lose by adopting a critical stance towards the constitutional innovations of the next few years. He was in no hurry either to pay or to secure a discharge for the Privy Seal loans charged upon his brother and son at the end of 1625, and while the judges were rated for a contribution towards a fresh loan in September 1626, the only one who paid was Sir John Walter.
Buckingham’s assassination in August 1628 gave Jones an opportunity to redeem himself at Court, and shortly before Parliament reconvened in January 1629 he ordered the release of a dozen Jesuits from Newgate gaol. The Commons soon learned of this flagrant breach of the recusancy laws, but when questioned by Sir Thomas Barrington*, Jones offered the lame response that he had not studied the case file, because ‘he came late for want of his health, and the second day was not there at all’.
Jones’s exalted view of the Common Law inevitably brought him into conflict with rival law courts. In February 1631, having questioned the jurisdiction of the Earl Marshal’s Court, he was ‘shaken up by both lord chamberlains of the king’s and queen’s side; my lord of Pembroke calling him a saucy fellow’. Two years later, when questioned by the Privy Council about a prohibition he had granted against a cause pending in the Admiralty Court, he insisted that the supremacy of the Common Law was de jure.
Jones’s verdict on Ship Money was based on the advice the judges had given the Crown in advance of the test case: while the Petition of Right prohibited the imposition of any tax without parliamentary consent, it could not abrogate the obligation to assist when the Crown judged the nation’s security to be in ‘imminent danger’.
Perhaps because of his eccentric views on jure divino judiciary, Jones’s verdict was not immediately clear to those present. George Garrard* remarked that ‘no man could tell what to make of his argument, in dock, out nettle, sometimes for the king, then for the subject’; the confusion was compounded when he either forgot or omitted to give a verdict, obliging the presiding judge, (Sir) John Finch II*, to ask him to clarify himself.
A supporter of the Crown to the end of the Personal Rule, Jones tried deserters from the royal army at the Berkshire assizes in 1640, fining the deputy lieutenants when the case failed through their negligence. When the Long Parliament began its investigation of the judges, Jones indignantly denied that Finch had tried to influence his verdict over the Ship Money case, and had he lived longer he would undoubtedly have been impeached.