Welsh Journals

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been included in this volume. Only one letter of major political significance is here printed-a cogent memorandum from Herbert to Charles I in 1635, advocating a Dutch-French alliance and an attack on the Spanish West Indies (pp. 86-8). The king did not take the advice: it was Oliver Cromwell who later put Herbert's policy into effect. Historians who believe that the great Protector's anti-Spanish policy was motivated by irrelevant religious considerations would be well advised to ponder the sober justification of this policy by the deist Lord Herbert. Mr. Smith has also excluded from this volume the business correspondence and commercial documents of John Oldbury, merchant of Broad Street, London, which came into the possession of the Herberts of Dolguog by marriage and is not of direct Welsh interest. There is apparently a letter book containing some 350 letters between 1669 and 1690, as well as invoices, bills of lading, insurance policies, etc. (p. 1). A great many of the letters in the second collection deal in detail with the management of the Irish estates of the Herberts of Chirbury. They show the hand of Wentworth falling heavily on landowners in the 1630s (pp. 78-9, 88-9, 93-4, 104-5), and attempts at the same time to recover church lands from lay possession (pp. 82-5). They show absentee landlords, who needed Irish tenants and labourers, opposing the policy of wholesale transplantation in the 1650s (p. 141). And they illustrate at length the anxieties caused in 1684 by the Irish Commission for Remedy of Defective Titles. In 1686 Lord Herbert was warned from London that there was 'great talk of the abbey lands, but nothing begun' (p. 322). Next year James II had to reassure English landowners in his Declaration of Indulgence that he had no intention of resuming monastic lands. Otherwise the interest of the correspondence is mainly local, though there are some incidental points for the general historian. A German expert is brought over in 1567 to help to distil salt from sea-water near the mouth of the river Dovey (pp. 49-60). Lord Herbert of Chirbury's civil war losses, despite his ambiguous role in the fighting, are listed at length (pp. 118-19, 128-32, 218). The deficiency of preaching ministers in Montgomeryshire is illustrated (p. 130), as well as Parliament's anxiety to remedy this deficiency in 1650 (p. 136). Monmouthshire juries have to be packed in 1656, since parts of the county are 'so infected with the new disease' that Lord Herbert 'may fail of a verdict, be his title ever so clear' (p. 143). The fourth Lord Herbert of Chirbury (1678-91) seems from these letters to have been an unpleasant person. His agents rebuke him delicately for his meanness and grasping nature (pp. 280-1, 289): this may lead us to discount Lord Herbert's perpetual complaints of those who served him. He haggled with a wig-maker over the sum of E8: 'You have dealt with mee like a very greate Rascall' (p. 290). His attempts to dictate to the borough of Montgomery 'relished ill with them' (pp. 340-1). There are some informative letters about Parliamentary elections (pp. 168, 227,