[00.00]
Mike Gibbs: Lloyd, can I begin by asking you to tell us why did you come to Edward Vaughan and this book?
Lloyd Bowen: I guess that’s actually quite a – it’s a short story in some ways but it covers quite a long period of time. When I was doing my doctorate, I did quite a lot of work in the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, and in the National Library of Wales, there was a group of manuscripts – gentry family manuscripts – which were called The Wynnstay Manuscripts. I looked through this and I came across this very sort of strange bundle of material: I still remember the reference, it’s Wynnstay Manuscripts as it was in 90/16 and it was kind of 200 documents all to do with the Civil Wars.
And I didn’t really understand what I was looking at, at that point in time, but it, it kept popping up in my head, it kept popping up in my head that there was something that was detailed in there, that was interesting, that was considering the, the Civil Wars and would be of greater interest but I didn’t know what it was really; I couldn’t make head or tail of it. A lot of it was to do with legal material and so on.
So as I began to do other projects and what have you, this thing kept popping up into, into discussions and into my head and then when they re-catalogued that whole entire Wynnstay Manuscript collection, it made it easier to kind of find out what other kind of stuff was in there, and you began to be able to make these connections to Edward Vaughan. And when I looked into him a little bit more, I found that there was all this stuff in the National Archives as well that I stumbled across doing something completely different. In fact, I stumbled across it partly doing the Civil War Petitions project.
[01.44]
And then I realised you could put these two kind of archival troves together and begin to tell the story of this man who wasn’t really very well known, and when you began to do that, I found that it started shining light into all kinds of dark places about the Civil Wars on the English-Welsh border, in North Wales, and this guy was quite fascinating although not a particularly – he’s not a particularly sort of nice chap; I don’t think you would like to meet him on a dark night!
[02.15]
Mike Gibbs: So who was he?
Lloyd Bowen: What’s interesting about Vaughan in many ways is that he was a bit of a nobody in the sense that he was a member of a gentry family who came from the old county of Montgomeryshire which is on the England-Wales border – a very big county, quite a rural county, sparsely populated – and he was born at the end of Elizabeth I’s reign, so he was born in 1596. And he is born into this gentry family that control quite a lot of land in that area in Montgomeryshire.
But what’s – the reason I say that he’s a bit of a nobody is because he is a fifth son. That means in the Early Modern period that he’s got no real hope of inheriting his family’s sort of large power base in that area, so he was actually trained up to be a lawyer. He went to the Inner Temple in London, he’s clearly got his sights set on a legal career but the reason that Vaughan becomes more of an important figure is because of that sort of bane of the Early Modern world – early mortality.
His elder brothers die. One of his elder brothers called Charles has actually got some kind of mental incapacity, which means that he’s not really in a position to run such a large estate. And so when Edward Vaughan’s much older – sorry, when Edward Vaughan’s older brother, a chap called Sir Robert, when he dies, Edward Vaughan, if you like, makes a bid for the throne. It’s a bit of a succession kind of story, if you know what I mean. There’s a – there’s a big prize at the end of it and family members are sort of squabbling over who should lay their hands on it.
[04.08]
And Vaughan makes a play after a number of his elder brothers have passed away and one of them is incapacitated, as I said, and this is in 1624 that his brother, Sir Robert Vaughan, dies, and so Edward sees his opportunity and tries to grab the family estate. It’s a big estate, a place called Llwydiarth. In this period, it’s around about 120,000 acres, so you’re looking at a huge tract of land with a lot of power that comes with it.
But the problem that he faces is that Sir Robert Vaughan’s wife was a member of the Vaughan’s sort of ancestral enemies – the Herbert family – and shortly after her husband, Sir Robert, dies, she has a son and so the question then becomes: should the son inherit this huge tract of land or has, should Edward Vaughan’s claim be recognised? And that’s where sort of a lot of the problems that he faces in the 1620s and 1630s arise from.
[05.10]
Mike Gibbs: And how does that story play out then in the 1620s and 1630s?
Lloyd Bowen: It plays out -. As I said, he was a lawyer and it plays out in a place that I think he was very, very happy, which is to say the Law Courts. Now one problem that he has in trying to get his talons into this large estate is that his, his nephew, who now claims to be – well, he is really the heir, a chap called Herbert Vaughan – he’s got a very, very powerful backer in the shape of a chap called Lord Powis, his grandfather, who is of Powis Castle, Red Castle, so the family that ultimately will sort of – give rise to a dynasty there, but he’s very, very powerful, this guy. And so Vaughan is sort of outmatched in some ways in the Law Courts, because this guy has such deep pockets.
But where it plays out is in all of these different jurisdictions, and this is where I was able to glean huge amounts of evidence and huge amounts of information about the, the different battles that they were having, is through all these kind of Law Courts and through this litigation. And when you begin to look through some of the material that was in Aberystwyth in the National Library of Wales, there you will find that quite a lot of the stuff in the Wynnstay archive was to do with all of this sort of litigation.
[06.40]
And so he is prosecuting and being prosecuted in many, many different jurisdictions but the most important ones that he’s being prosecuted in, and that he’s trying to prosecute and get the estate back in, are Star Chamber – that sort of notorious Carolean court – and also in the Court of Wards. And the Court of Wards is the court that will sort of look after inheritance and individuals who are yet to come of age as his grand – as his nephew, sorry – Herbert was.
But in these machinations, Edward makes all sorts of claims, he makes some outrageous and scandalous attempts to sort of maintain that Herbert Vaughan wasn’t really the true heir of his brother, that actually he was substituted for a changeling at birth. There’s even allegations that Edward Vaughan tries to have a wet nurse poison his own nephew so he can take over this huge estate. These are all kinds of allegations that are being made in Law Courts so you’ve got to take it with a little bit of – a pinch of salt.
But what’s clear, if you put all of these thousands of sort of pages of documents together, is that Edward Vaughan is absolutely indefatigable. He is tireless in trying to get his hands back on this estate because, on the one hand, if he gets it, he’s going to be a very wealthy and a very powerful individual. If he doesn’t get it, he’s going to be a country lawyer and he has ambition and he has drive if nothing else.
[08.18]
Mike Gibbs: And what were the roots of the conflict with the Herbert family?
Lloyd Bowen: These roots go back -. One of the interesting things about this case, if you like, is these roots go back decades and they go back into the late Elizabethan, sort of even before perhaps, period in Montgomeryshire. And the roots of the antagonism between the two families is the Vaughans were there first, if you like, and they were trying to expand their territories, they were trying to expand their lands, they were becoming more and more powerful. And then in come the Herbert family and the Herbert family have very powerful connections at Court. They themselves are, you know, a big landed, wealthy family and they stop that sort of Vaughan territorial expansion if you like, and they begin to roll it back and this generates all kinds of antagonisms.
We have reports of murders, we have reports of arson, we have reports of brawls in the street. We are told that when one of these law suits comes to Shrewsbury to be sort of litigated between the Vaughans and the Herberts in the 1580s – that, basically, there’s a full-blown riot in the town, the people are afraid to come out. So the two families, if you like, are at loggerheads over power and influence in the locality but, interestingly, there is another dimension to be folded into this, which is that, whereas the Vaughan family have come to an accommodation with Protestantism and are good Protestants, the Herbert family are suspected Catholics. So there is also a religious difference that is adding a real spice and flavour to the antagonism between these two families.
[10.06]
And we must remember that we are not talking about only the families themselves. We are talking about all their friends, supporters and retainers, and some of the reports have literally hundreds of people fighting one another in the name of Vaughan or in the name of Herbert. And we are told that Edward Vaughan’s father had an inveterate hatred of the very name of Herbert, and so this kind of is almost inherited with his mother’s milk, if you like, that he’s going to hate these guys. Indeed, when they take his estate away, it’s unsurprising that he responds in the way he does.
[10.43]
Mike Gibbs: And this Shakes- almost Shakespearean drama I guess is, is being played out – a lot of it – in Montgomeryshire. What was Montgomeryshire like at that time?
Lloyd Bowen: Montgomeryshire is little known if you like, so we’re thinking about the old counties of Wales and the old counties of England too, if you like, because Montgomeryshire is one of those carved out in 1536 by Henry VIII. It is in mid-Wales, it’s quite mountainous, it’s sparsely populated, it’s got the Cambrian mountains running through it but it’s important for access to the sea – you can get to the sea through Montgomeryshire – it’s important for access to North Wales itself. It’s a key route for getting through to Denbighshire, Merioneth in the North and so on, but it’s a key route to the East as well, so it’s a key route into Shropshire and Shrewsbury and there’s a great deal of intermixing and intermingling between the English gentry in Shropshire and the Welsh gentry in Montgomeryshire.
[11.55]
It’s also an important route for one of the big trades of this period, the trades in Welsh wool, and we have the Welsh woollen trade coming, if you like, down from the mountains in the interior of Wales and through Montgomeryshire into Shropshire, into Shrewsbury, into Oswestry and thence on into London, and this is a really powerful, lucrative trade at the time.
So Montgomeryshire in and of itself – it’s, like I said, not a particularly sort of powerful part of the world, but it’s a key to unlocking North Wales and it’s a key to the trade that supports a great deal of the economy in Wales and also in western England at this time.
[12.41]
Mike Gibbs: And against the background of this longstanding, decades-long feud that’s going on between these two families that you describe, the Civil War starts. What was the impact of that on life in the two families?
Lloyd Bowen: Yeah, I mean this is – this is a real inflection point for the relationship and it’s a real sort of critical point for Vaughan. He is being beaten back, if you like, on the losing side of most of these law suits that he is involved in in the 1630s. In some ways, the critical moment comes for him in the year before the Civil Wars, because the Long Parliament is called and, you know, one of the things that an awful lot of our listeners will probably know about – the tyranny of the Personal Rule and so on – is the idea that Charles was using these prerogative law courts to impose his rule. And the key law courts in this dynamic that we have been talking about – Star Chamber and, indeed, the Court of Wards, and there is also another one in which Vaughan has been defeated called the Court in the Council in the Marches of Wales – these are three kind of big sort of courts that are held up as part of Charles’s attempt to deny the people their liberties.
So Vaughan is now handed a wonderful opportunity to say: along with the Long Parliament, ‘oh, you can now free me from this kind of legal tyranny. You can now stop this crypto-Catholic Herbert individual taking over this huge amount of land and, you know, make sure that the terrible decisions being made in these tyrannous courts are overturned’. And so, indeed, he’s actually – he is instrumental in causing the downfall of one of these courts – the Court in the Council in the Marches of Wales. His case becomes a test case for how it is deeply problematic in the sorts of ways that it’s made its decision-making.
Also in Star Chamber, his case is quite prominent and so the Long Parliament and its reforming zeal gives him the opportunity to take the fight to the Herberts. And, shortly before the Civil War breaks out, just as the Civil War is breaking out in some senses as Charles is leaving London, he manages to get a decision which sort of says that some of the claims that have been made in these courts with regards to his inheritance are problematic and that he should be allowed a brief sort of moment to take over these lands until a full determination can be made.
[15.29]
Now a full determination is not going to be made because the Civil War happens and so all of these sort of – all of this litigation breaks down in the face of all of this fighting. But what’s interesting in terms of the dynamics of the Civil War unleashes is that we have Vaughan on the one side saying the Long Parliament is this great sort of liberating force for him, it’s actually very difficult to disengage is he ideologically committed to the Parliamentarian cause here, or is the Parliamentarian cause the one that’s going to give him 120,000 acres and make him into an incredibly wealthy chap?
But, on the other hand, you’ve got the Herberts and the Herberts are dyed-in-the-wool Royalists, they’re Catholics, they’re the sort of individuals who Charles needs to rely on, deep pockets, again, to bank-roll his war effort. And so as the Civil War breaks out, we have a few glimpses of Edward Vaughan running around the country trying to get these sort of local decisions in Law Courts that will say that he is the true owner of Llwydiarth.
Equally, however, he is trying to rally some support for the Parliamentarian cause but Wales becomes a real bastion of Royalism, and that means that it becomes a real power base for the Herbert family who are big supporters of King Charles – powerful supporters of King Charles. And so, ultimately, Edward Vaughan is forced to flee the area and he’s forced into exile in London for a few years at the start of the Civil War, because the Herberts are simply too powerful in Royalist Wales to be overcome.
[17.08]
Mike Gibbs: Parliament eventually re-conquers his home county. Vaughan reappears on the scene. Is his possession of the family lands now in trouble?
Lloyd Bowen: No, far from it. It’s -. He does, indeed, appear on the scene. He kind of – he’s one of these guys who sort of rolls in at the eleventh hour when all the fighting has been done and says, ‘come down everyone, I’m here, you know, don’t worry!’.
He appears in 1645. This is actually after Montgomeryshire has fallen to the Parliamentarian forces. Sir Thomas Myddelton of Chirk Castle in Denbighshire is the guy who leads an army – an army, it has to be said, mostly levied in London and in the south east – of individuals to retake North Wales. Now he doesn’t succeed in doing that but he does succeed in taking over this county of Montgomeryshire, so he’s got this kind of peninsula into Wales of Parliamentarianism. And Vaughan appears and he establishes a garrison of his own, he says that he bankrolls it himself and, interestingly, it’s quite close to his home of Llwydiarth. Because what he recognises is that, as Parliament is taking over this part of the world, it’s taking over his ancestral estate, but it’s also going to be taking over those Herbert lands, because Parliament is not going to allow the Herbert family to control all of that property. They are dyed-in-the-wool Royalists, crypto-Catholics and so on, so he sees the opportunity to be on the scene there for when, if you like, that estate is up for grabs, he can grab it, and that’s precisely what he does.
[18.57]
He maintains that he now has rulings from the Long Parliament which have said that he is the true tenant of this estate. The problem is that Long Parliament never made any determination in that case which was quite so black and white. It remains rather grey as to who should control this but he says that he is now the rightful heir, in he comes and he calls himself now the Lord of Llwydiarth.
The issue is, if you like, is that you can imagine from the Parliamentarian side you’ve got this guy who sort of turns up at the eleventh hour, you are trying to fight a war, the war in North Wales will go on for years yet, it will go on for years and years. You want that land perhaps – the money from that land – to help support your forces, to help taxation, to help bankroll another force and so on. You would like to sequester that land for yourself because the Herberts, if they’re Royalists, they should give their lands up to you. And so, actually, Vaughan gets involved in yet another set of tussles, this time, if you like, with his own side – Parliament – over trying to keep his, keep his title to this land intact.
[20.212]
Mike Gibbs: And he falls out particularly with the two commanders of the region I gather?
Lloyd Bowen: That’s – that’s right. I mean, I think that that, you know Vaughan is one of those guys who could have an argument in an empty room and he, he manages to fall out – he is, he is you know an inveterate sort of bruiser, if you like, and he manages to fall out with a guy who was initially in lead – in, in charge of the army, a man called Sir Thomas Myddelton, as I mentioned. And then he crosses Sir Thomas’s son-in-law, Thomas Mytton, who takes over from him, and the reason I think that he clashes with them is in part because he never liked Myddelton himself. He, he claims that he was a crypto-Royalist in the beginning of his – of the Civil war in any event, but also because this army that is beginning to conquer North Wales, this army is a threat to his unimpeachable sort of controlling of all of this estate.
So he begins to lobby against them. He begins to suggest that they’re the wrong people to lead a force. Mytton, for example, comes from Shropshire so, you know, Vaughan starts lobbying and saying ‘well, shouldn’t we have local men to lead these kinds of armies, shouldn’t it be somebody, I don’t know, called Vaughan maybe, who is very well known in this area?’. And so he’s, he’s absolutely shameless in sort of putting position papers ahead that suggest that actually the war effort would be better handled by others.
[21.51]
And so, interestingly, although we have this sense of Parliament as a body, in fact there are all sorts of competing interests, competing different sort of emphases within the Parliamentarian party, within the Parliamentarian Army even. And so Vaughan actually sees his own Army – Parliament’s Army in North Wales – as potentially something of a problem, something of a force that’s going to take his home away from him and use its revenues to, you know, support more, the levying of more men, to buy weapons, to make sure that they can re-conquer Wales quicker and so on. And so Vaughan becomes a real thorn in the side of the Parliamentarian war effort, his own side, in the sort of 1645-47 period.
[22.42]
Mike Gibbs: And what’s the outcome of this rupture?
Lloyd Bowen: Well the outcome of the rupture is, is, is it’s quite complex. I don’t want to confuse our listeners too much here but the outcome of the rupture, if you like, is that Parliament needs to control this area, it needs to put down government again in an area that has been seen as lawless. And the way that it tended to do this in the areas it took over was to establish committees and so would establish these committees to run the area and it established – well, Sir Thomas Myddelton established one in Montgomeryshire when he took it over. And it’s often known as The Sequestration Committee or just the Montgomeryshire County committee.
And this was a body that was very closely allied to the Army, it was very, very closely tied into Mytton and to Myddelton. Now the problem is, is that the people who were running that Committee, they really thought that Edward Vaughan should not be in charge of his home estate. They also seem to have had quite a long dispute with Vaughan, again reaching back to the Civil Wars, about things like inheritance, things like marriages through the families and so on.
And the guy who actually runs this Montgomeryshire Committee, he’s a chap called Lloyd Pierce who’s a relatively unknown sort of guy but he then becomes a powerful individual in running this territory. Now Vaughan, for his part, he needs to clip his wings somehow and he finds a way to do this in what Parliament establishes in sort of the 1646-47 period, which are called Committees of Account. These are much more moderate sort of Presbyterian Parliamentarians who generally want to see that the money that Parliament is raising is being spent properly, and they are trying often to be more moderate than the radicals in the Army.
So Vaughan gets himself on to be the chairman of this Account sub-Committee in Montgomeryshire. And what we have then playing out, while the war is going on, let’s remember, is a set of battles on the one hand between Edward Vaughan and on the other between Lloyd Pierce, and these sets of battles, yes, they’re about who controls this estate, who controls all this money, but they’ve also got wider ideological dimensions.
[25.11]
You know, Lloyd Pierce and the War Party, if you like, they’re much more militant, they’re much more radical in their, in their sort of politics and their religion. Vaughan is much more conservative, he’s much more of an older sort of moderate Puritan type and, again, we have between these two committees running battles, if you like, over, you know, who has the authority to do what, how should we prosecute the war effort. Vaughan, himself, actually begins to organise tax strikes in the area, so the Army isn’t properly paid. There are efforts to eject clergymen and then put moderate clergymen in and so on. Vaughan begins to orchestrate a big campaign against the, against The Sequestration Committee, which results in a large petition and so on, and, ultimately, we get this coming together when the area tries to elect two new MPs. Its old MPs were Royalists, they were disabled, so in 1647 – 1646-47 – there are new elections that are going to be held to the Long Parliament.
And here we see a huge clash between Vaughan and his supporters and Lloyd Pierce and his supporters, Thomas Mytton as well, the war sort of effort that the army interest there over who’s going to be elected. And, ultimately, Vaughan does prevail in that and he is elected in 1647 as the MP for Montgomeryshire, for this sort of more moderate view of things. His ally, George Devereux, is also elected but his enemies in the army manage actually to get him unseated as soon as he takes his place within London.
[27.00]
So the ultimate outcome of it is, is that I think the war effort is rather more protracted, rather more difficult in, you know, in North Wales but also there’s this fundamental fissure that appears and will continue to sort of characterise politics in this area for many years to come between, if you like, that more moderate Parliamentarian wing and that more radical Parliamentarian wing, the latter sort of represented by the War interest, by the people on The Sequestration Committee and so on, and the former represented by Vaughan and his allies.
[27.37]
Mike Gibbs: Vaughan was excluded eventually from Parliament during Pride’s Purge.
Lloyd Bowen: Yes, he was indeed. So Pride’s Purge, you know, an exceptionally sort of famous event, I know you’ve covered it on, on the podcast as well, but I think it’s as well to sort of rehearse this quickly as to what it was.
After the Second Civil War had happened, and the radicals in Parliament had simply had enough of, of Charles and his, and his allies, Pride’s Purge was an effort to make sure that those more conservative members of Parliament didn’t attempt to continue to negotiate with Charles, and come to a peace with Charles that would be anathema to all that the radicals had attempted to achieve.
Pride’s Purge in December 1648 was the means by which Colonel Thomas Pride stopped individuals sitting in Parliament who had shown that they were sympathetic to that more moderate position. And somebody like Edward Vaughan was one of these prominent sort of moderates. He was one of these Presbyterians rather than your Thomas Crom- sorry, your Oliver Cromwells, your Independents, your more radical individuals. So, yes, indeed, he was targeted at Pride’s Purge. He was not only stopped from going in and sitting in the House of Commons – what would become the Rump Parliament after Pride’s Purge – but he was actually imprisoned in a tavern called Hell along with some of the more prominent individuals who were on the moderate side of Parliament, and he had to petition – he was held under, effectively under house arrest for several weeks before he could be released. And so he looked on from the sidelines, if you like, as the Parliamentarian effort spiralled out of control into Regicide and things that he really didn’t have very much sympathy with.
[29.43]
Mike Gibbs: What was his experience of the Republic?
Lloyd Bowen: Again, tricky because he had been a Parliamentarian so you can imagine that in the Republic, he was an MP as well. He wasn’t actually disbarred necessarily from being an MP even though he was stopped from sitting at Pride’s Purge. He’s never sort of – his election is never truly overturned while the Rump Parliament sits, although he would never actually go back and sit in the House. So you would imagine that he’s somebody who should be able to make good on his claims to this huge estate and live in relative quietude.
But, like I said, he’s absolutely come up against this more radical wing, both within Parliament and also back at home with these sort of sequestrators and individuals who had become more radical in the Montgomeryshire area. And so his experience of the republic is more law suits, it is more bitter, truly bitter political infighting between individuals who are trying to effectively ruin him completely by saying that he was never the rightful owner of this enormous estate, that actually all of the monies, the huge amounts of wealth that this generates should all be going to the Commonwealth, to Parliament.
And, on the other side, Vaughan is there desperately fighting a rearguard action time and time and time again to try and make sure that this doesn’t happen, and some of the ways in which he does it – you can tell he’s a lawyer, because he’s a truly sort of slippery individual who will take any opportunity. He even invents his own law hearings that never happened. He has forged depositions from friends that say, ‘oh yes, I was – I was there when they said that Edward Vaughan was the rightful heir of this estate’. He actually tells individuals that this, this – these hearings are happening only sort of minutes before they’re going to happen, so they can say that they’ve – that they’ve had notice of it, these are his opponents of course, even though they’re not going to be able to, you know, make the 20 miles to get there when it starts at 11 o’clock because they’ve only been told about it at five to 11. He’s sort of adhering to the letter of the law but he’s tangling these law suits up continually in huge amounts of bureaucracy.
[32.16]
And this is partly where we know a lot about him, because he generates huge volumes of paper and those of you who sort of, you know, get involved in law suits or anything, you know that that’s the case: paperwork can be the absolute bane of getting anything done, and Vaughan uses that to his advantage. And, in many ways, what he manages to do is quite extraordinary: this one individual, albeit a powerful one, he manages, if you like, to absolutely wear out his Parliamentarian opponents like a, a sort of a weary boxer. They simply don’t want to put the gloves on again and they kind of like – ‘oh well, you know, he’s no good this guy but he’s at least a Parliamentarian. You know, at least we can say that he’s supported our side’, and by the mid sort of 1650s, things have settled down sufficiently that I think he’s, he’s punched them out. They sort of allow him to quietly enjoy his estate as long as he doesn’t make too much fuss.
[33.15]
Mike Gibbs: And so he succeeds?
Lloyd Bowen: Ultimately. This is the remarkable thing about Vaughan. He does, he succeeds. Reading through all of these transcripts, I think that he has lied, he has forged, he has badgered, he has cajoled, he has inveigled his way through every single stage of this decades-long process. He has -. I don’t believe that Vaughan was ever the true heir of Llwydiarth in that sense but what he manages to do, if you like, is that he tells a compelling story over and over and over again and he manages, ultimately, to gum up the works of the legal system so effectively, he makes political interventions at a moment when it’s to his advantage. He runs with the tide of Parliamentarianism, on the one hand, and then, as we get towards the Restoration, of a rather more Royalist sort of view on the other, and, you know, yes, ultimately, by the later 1650s, this is an individual who doesn’t seem to be bothered too much by his enemies. He is bringing in the cash and sitting pretty on it in Llwydiarth itself.
Ultimately, you know, it’s not until 1659 that he sort of – maybe a little bit earlier – that he re-enters the political sphere because of his problems with Parliament but he certainly is raking in the cash from his estates. He’s raking in those rents and he’s doing quite nicely, thank you very much.
[34.55]
Mike Gibbs: And in 1659, he manages to get elected to Parliament again –
Lloyd Bowen: Yes, yes.
Mike Gibbs: – and the Cavalier Parliament of 1661. How did he manage it? He’s like a chameleon, he just seems to change colour?
Lloyd Bowen: Yes, you’re quite right, he does – so, yes, he’s elected to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament in 1659 and then he – for Montgomeryshire, and he’s elected again for Montgomeryshire in the Cavalier Parliament in 1661. And you call him a chameleon, I think that’s a nice way of putting it, and I think that, at some sort of level, he is able to suggest that it’s the times that have changed not himself quite so much.
By when we get to 1659, in any event, that sort of radical, radical Parliamentarianism of, if you like, the earlier 1650s had died down somewhat, so people like himself who are old Presbyterians, old moderates, they are able to, you know, present themselves as the more acceptable face of Republicanism if you know what I mean, the sort of quasi-monarchical one. And if you are able to do that, then when the King comes back, you know, instead of saying, oh well, you’re a Parliamentarian, you can kind of say, ‘oh no, if you look that I was always in the vanguard of resisting these sort of loony individuals; these real head-bangers of the Republic, the sort of – the Independents and the radicals and these individuals. I have always managed to make sure that I’m in the vanguard of resisting them’, and so, yes, he plays his hand very beautifully in that sense. He’s got friends, if you like, who are old Presbyterians, old Parliamentarians, but he’s also managed to get in with the sort of moderate Royalists as well.
[37.01]
And if you’re looking for somebody to sort of – sort of hold the peace if you like in this huge tract of North Wales, Edward Vaughan is not a terrible choice, because he is someone who has managed – who’s shown, if you like, political adroitness. He has shown that he can make sure that, although he might antagonise people, he doesn’t necessarily sort of – you know, he’s not notorious if you like for kicking people out who are in the moderate sort of spectrum of Parliamentarian politics. So, yes, quite remarkably, he gets elected to the seat in the Cavalier Parliament in 1661, although he doesn’t enjoy it for very long, because he, he – he dies at the moment of his triumph, I’m afraid.
[37.49]
Mike Gibbs: And at this moment of triumph, is there a new controversy over the estate?
Lloyd Bowen: Yes. I’m afraid this entire period is one of controversy over an estate, but it’s a controversy that sheds light on some interesting areas but, yes, there is. What is in some ways absolutely gobsmacking about Vaughan is that all of the sort of background to his family and the contention that’s there, the fact that his brother when he dies doesn’t leave a clear line of inheritance and so on, and there are disputes over documents that are produced in this case and so on and so forth – what’s extraordinary is that Vaughan, himself, Edward Vaughan, a lawyer, does not leave a clear will and a clear sort of – ‘this is what I want to happen to this estate which I have tried to make sure is mine for the best part of sort of 40 years’. And he doesn’t – he doesn’t provide very easily for its subsequent disposition.
And so, yes, I’m afraid we have another few decades of lots and lots and lots of lawsuits and these are claimants because Vaughan doesn’t have any acknowledged children. These are claimants who include his brother, but this is a different brother with a mental incapacity but a brother, and the individuals come out and say, well, you know, he can’t handle money so we can’t give him the estate. Then there are people who come out of the woodwork and say, well, you know, ‘this ultimately should come down to me’, and so on, and through generating all of these lawsuits, quite a lot of them reflect back on Vaughan’s life. And so there is this absolutely enormous box of depositions that I went through, it’s over a thousand folios thick, it’s about three foot high. it’s a remarkable sort of thing, in this sort of case in the 1660s and 1670s over Vaughan’s estate.
[39.55]
The way I was able to understand Vaughan quite a lot was the ways in which individuals would talk about him, you know, in his lifetime and what he wanted to do with his estate, and they have incidentally mentioned, you know, oh, you know, when he was trying to fight – when he was trying to fight the Independents in this fashion, and when he was trying to sit in the Long Parliament, and when he was doing this. So I was able to put quite a lot of his life story together partly from that.
But, I mean, ultimately, his estate is settled but it’s not settled until the 1670s, so you’re talking well over a decade after his death, and it’s a – it’s sort of a collateral branch of the family that ultimately takes it over. It’s another chap, unfortunately called Edward Vaughan, for anybody who wants clear separation, that’s rare in these things, but it’s another chap called Edward Vaughan who takes it over. And then in the sort of later seventeenth and into the eighteenth centuries, this huge estate gets amalgamated with several others and is brought into the ambit of a chap who becomes very famous as a leviathan of politics in the sort of Hanoverian period, a chap called Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn.
Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn is of Wynnstay, the Wynnstay manuscripts, that’s why all this Vaughan stuff is there. Ultimately, it follows where the estate ends up. So, yes, there is a huge amount of controversy left in this estate but it kind of settles down by the 1670s.
[41.28]
Mike Gibbs: And in your delving into the documents, into these manuscripts, am I right in thinking that you discovered that Vaughan had a secret wife?
Lloyd Bowen: That’s correct, yes. Individuals, when you look at some of the sort of basic information about his life, he – in something like some of the History of Parliament volumes, for example, it simply said that he, he goes through his life as a single man. But, as we’re getting into the Restoration period and these sort of claims on the estate, one of them is from a woman who claims to have been his wife and this brought me up rather short, because she doesn’t really appear anywhere else. I’m like, good God! – what on earth is going on here? You know, what is this?
This actually took me to another set of archives, this time in Shrewsbury, in Shropshire archives, in the Hanmer of Pentrepant papers, and there, there is another whole set of legal depositions and things from the mid-1650s and, yes, indeed, it seems – well, no, he did – Vaughan had a secret wife. He married a woman called Frances, Frances Meredith who herself was a widow in 1636. And he marries her secretly in Herefordshire and they marry under assumed names as well. And you’re like, what is going on here, why did this happen?
It seems that, if you like, what Vaughan is doing he, he is not a very savoury individual. It seems what Vaughan is doing is he is trying to latch onto Frances’s money and use it in his ongoing and lengthy legal efforts against the Herbert family at that time and he tells Frances – he tells her that it’s best if they marry in secret. Because if anyone knows about her from the Herbert side of the family, they’ll come after her and they’ll come after her money. So he’s effectively trying to suggest that, you know, when this is all blown over, we can – we can, you know, declare our love to the world and so on and so forth but, really, it appears that he is essentially being parasitic using her estates to bankroll his own legal business and then, although it appears they have a daughter – a daughter who doesn’t seem to have survived into adulthood – he then casts her aside and treats her very, very poorly.
[44.10]
And so, ultimately, she reappears when the estate is up for grabs. Again, he claims that she isn’t his wife, of course, but it’s fairly obvious that she is. There’s all these individuals who come out of the woodwork and say, ‘yes, I was there in 1636 when he made this attempt – when he made this effort to marry her and said we have to do it under assumed names’ and so on.
So the vaguely decent part of the – the conclusion of this is that she does actually manage to get some money out of him and she gets an annuity out of the estate for her lifetime but, partly, that is only in recompense for the fact that they believe that he has effectively duped her out of her inheritance in trying to support his own legal cases. So, like I said, it’s a interesting guy but he’s not an individual that I would want to spend a great deal of time with!
[45.06]
Mike Gibbs: But what does his life tell us about the period, about the Civil Wars?
Lloyd Bowen: I think that it tells us a number of things. It can tell us about the complexity of Parliamentarianism itself, the fact that we shouldn’t see them as this single body but that there were all sorts of different factions, different kinds of impetuses behind supporting the Parliamentarian side and sometimes they were ranged against one another as much as they were ranged against what we might easily think of as, you know, the King’s party and the Parliament’s party.
I think he also tells us quite a lot about how the personal gets involved in the political. It’s often very difficult to disengage where Vaughan is looking after himself and his own interests only, and where he is becoming a Parliamentarian for reasons of conviction, or reasons that align with his ideas of what politics and religion should look like. I think that it’s interesting when you get into all of these law suits to recognise how central litigation could be for some individuals like this, how it was an everyday presence in their life and how some of those legal documents can tell us about more than just the Law Courts; they can tell us something about real life,
And I think that, you know, Vaughan can also tell us about a relatively neglected part of the world, North Wales, in this period which doesn’t have a lot of records surviving for it. And so, in some ways, although it’s a very biased archive, if you want to put it that way, it’s an archive of one man and one man’s view of the War, reading it alongside some other documents and so forth can give us a really valuable insight into understanding some of the dynamics that we can see in relief, if you like, from other documents but here we get into the nitty-gritty of where some of those personality clashes, political differences and, you know, real sort of struggles over policy and the future direction of the country have their basis in everyday life.
[47.15]
Mike Gibbs: Lloyd, thank you very, very much indeed for introducing us to such a fascinating character, such a fascinating but it seems little-explored era – area of Wales at this very unusual time.
Lloyd Bowen: My pleasure, thank you very much indeed.
[Ends]