Welsh Journals

Christchurch (1724-27) and Francis for Wells (1741-54). Both were equally staunch maintainers of their father's politics, voting against the government in all recorded divisions. The Tory opposition which their father had done so much to evolve was surviving remarkably well after forty years in the political wilderness, despite its internal ambiguities. But the Gwyn family itself had changed considerably. First, it no longer had strong Welsh interests, and it is very doubtful if any member of the family spent a long period at Llansannor after about 1710. During the bitter Glamorgan county election of 1745, a Tory organizer wrote approvingly of 'Frank Gwyn, whose Welsh blood is up',76 but otherwise the Gwyns were Welsh only in their surnames. Francis Gwyn's descendants were also subject to the 'strange fatality' which befell so many Welsh families in the eighteenth century. I have remarked elsewhere on the tendency of old gentry lines to die out at this time, due to a failure to produce male heirs, and this was to be the fate of the house of Llansannor.77 Edward died without issue in 1736, Francis in 1777. At that point, Llansannor passed to a Gwyn cousin, Ford to the distant relative, John Fraunceis. Fraunceis adopted the surname Gwyn and pursued some Welsh antiquarian interests,78 but otherwise the tradition had been broken. In the present century, the family papers were dispersed, and this event contributed to the historical neglect of this vital party activist. We are left to reconstruct his career on the basis of chance references and isolated letters; but the picture that emerges is one of a figure central to the key age of the development of party ideologies in Britain. PHILIP JENKINS Pennsylvania State University Glamorgan Record Office, D/DKT/1/19. J. P. Jenkins, 'The demographic decline of the eighteenth-century gentry', ante, Vol. 11, No. 1 (June 1982), pp. 31-49. For John Fraunceis Gwyn and the preservation of antiquarian MSS., see Cardiff Central Library MSS. 3. 10, 5. 7. Presumably, these were largely MSS. from Francis Gwyns' time of activity and scholarly research.