Welsh Journals

COUNTY ELECTIONS IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CARDIGANSHIRE By the late seventeenth century Parliament was becoming the centre of the British political stage, and membership of the House of Commons increas- ingly coveted by the ruling landed class. In Wales, where each shire had only one county M.P., election conveyed the implication of being the most influential man, and to this prestige there was added local power. Since Wales lacked the aristocracy dominant in most of England, M.P.s could aspire themselves to the twin key posts in each county: Lord-Lieutenant, the sovereign's official representative and commander of its militia, and Custos Rotulorum, head of the county bench of magistrates, which was in the eighteenth century the effective body of local government in matters social and economic as well as legal. M.P.s, too, normally had a decisive voice in such local appointments as to church livings, customs posts and other offices in the gift of the Crown; while army commissions and civil service posts might be obtained for relatives and friends .M.P.s would also make suggestions for additions to and removal from the county bench, favouring friends and snubbing their enemies. In all these and other ways a political 'interest' could be created that would serve a family for generations of goodwill. There were high stakes to play for at Parliamentary elections, and whereas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Welsh representation at Westminster had been shared quite widely among the gentry, now it was a matter of contention only between a few leading squires in each county. In Cardiganshire the most influential family from Tudor times had been the Pryses of Gogerddan, whose extensive estates had early enabled them to establish a predominance in the shire constituency, where there was an electorate of between 700 and 1000 forty-shilling freeholders. The Gogerddan interest was also dominant in the Cardigan Boroughs constit- uency, through control of Cardigan and Aberystwyth, and members of the Pryse family sometimes opted for the borough seat when the Gogerddan influence was weakened by mismanagement, misfortune, or simply a long minority, as happened twice in the eighteenth century. For the Gogerddan dominance in Cardiganshire was seldom unchallenged, and during the later seventeenth century the Pryse family had been temporarily eclipsed by the Vaughans of Trawsgoed (then called Crosswood). The able lawyer-politician Sir John Vaughan and his son Edward held the county seat from 1661 until the latter's death in 1683. At Westminster