Welsh Journals

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husband's ancient silver mace and family seal to be melted down into a chocolate pot. Small wonder that the earl predeceased her by forty-five years. GERAINT H. JENKINS Aberystwyth A WELSH HOUSE AND rrs FAMILY: THE Vaughans OF Trawsgoed. By Gerald Morgan. Gomer Press, Llandysul, 1997. Pp. 260. £ 12.95 (paperback). For all the democratic values of our present-day society, the lavish lifestyle and privileged world of old landed families have exercised a continuing allure for the general public and historians alike. Precise judgement of their role and contribution as a class, as the 'natural leaders' of their com- munities, eludes us. For this reviewer, it is simply churlish to deny the largesse and paternalism of many aristocratic and gentry families. Where they were fatally flawed was in their perception of such charity as constituting a gift which must be dutifully acknowledged and deferred to rather than as the people's rightful due. Developments in the late nine- teenth century like Board schools, trade unions, the widening franchise, and, nearer home, tenant rights, all emancipating agencies, were anathema to them. They failed to move with the spirit of the times. Moreover, in Wales all too many signally lacked understanding of the consciousness of Welsh nationality that was surging through most areas of life in the 1880s and 1890s. Gerald Morgan provides us with a fascinating, scholarly account of a major Cardiganshire landed family from their emergence in the early fourteenth century down to their sale of the mansion and park in 1947. During that long ownership, the family rose to prominence within Cardiganshire and won recognition and influence much further afield: predictably, MPs were provided from among members of the family in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, none more outstanding than Sir John Vaughan (1603-74), chief justice of the Common Pleas, suitably described by Morgan as 'a great parliamentarian and a remarkable lawyer', and whose eminence clinched the family's eventual rise to the titled aristocracy; fame outside Cardiganshire was won too, by Lieutenant-General Sir John Vaughan (1747-95), significantly in this respect a younger brother, whose distinguished military career in North America was such as to earn him-though he was ultimately unsuccessful-consideration for the post of commander-in-chief in America; the family, too, were influential in local