Family and Education

b. 1566/7,1 1st s. of William Jones (William ap Gruffydd ap John) of Castellmarch and 1st w. Margaret, da. of Humphrey Wynn ap Meredydd of Y Gesail Gyfarch, Caern.2 educ. ?St. Edmund Hall, Oxf. c.1580; Furnival’s Inn c.1585; L. Inn 1587, called 1595; King’s Inn, Dublin 1617.3 m. (1) c.1588, Margaret (d. 10 May 1609) da. of Griffith ap John Griffith of Cefnamwlch, Tudweiliog, Caern. 5s. (2 d.v.p.), 6 da. (1 d.v.p.);4 (2) by 1620, Catherine, da. of Thomas Powis of Abingdon, Berks., wid. of Robert Hovenden D.D., warden of All Souls’, Oxf.5 suc. fa. 1587;6 kntd. 12 Mar. 1617.7 d. 9 Dec. 1640.8 sig. Will[iam] Jones.

Offices Held

Bailiff, Cafflogion commote, Caern. c.1600-at least 1617;9 j.p. Caern., 1600-d., Anglesey, 1616-d.;10 commr. oyer and terminer, Wales and Marches 1602-d., London 1621-d., Mdx. 1621-38, Oxf. circ. 1622-d., Verge 1627-d., Surr. 1640, gaol delivery, Newgate, London 1622-d.;11 subsidy Anglesey 1608, 1621, Caern. 1608, 1624-6, 1628-9, aid Anglesey, 1609, Caern. 1609, 1612, subsidy arrears Anglesey, Caern. 1626, Forced Loan, Anglesey, Caern. and Salop 1626-7, sewers, N. Wales 1609;12 feoffee, Beaumaris free sch., Anglesey 1609-d.;13 member, Council in the Marches 1623-?d.;14 commr. piracy, London 1623-d., N. Wales 1631, highway repair, Mdx. 1626, sewers, Stepney by 1630-d, charitable uses, Mdx. 1633-d., London 1640, new bldgs., London 1630.15

Recorder, Beaumaris 1604;16 bencher, L. Inn 1611-17, reader 1616;17 ?attorney, Star Chamber by 1616-17;18 sjt.-at-law 1617;19 j.c.p. 1621-4;20 just. of assize, Oxf. circ. 1622-d.;21 j.k.b. 1624-d.;22 j. in eyre, Windsor forest, Berks. and Surrey 1632-3, 1638, forest of Dean, Glos. 1634, Waltham forest, Essex 1634, 1636, Rockingham forest, Northants. 1636-7, Shotover, Stowood and Whichwood forests, Oxon. 1636-7.23

C.j.k.b. [I] 1617-20;24 PC [I] 1617-?20;25 chief commr., wardships [I] 1617-?20;26 commr. gt. seal [I] Apr.-May 1619,27 plantation co. Longford [I] 1619-20,28 inquiry [I] 1622-3, 1624-5,29 summons of Parl. [I] 1628.30

Commr. inquiry, Virg. and Somers Is. companies 1623, bpric. of St. Asaph 1623;31 member, High Commission, Canterbury prov. 1633.32

Biography

Commended by Sir John Wynn†, 1st bt. as ‘a very ancient house’, the Joneses claimed to have lived at Castellmarch, Caernarvonshire, at the western end of the Llŷn peninsula, since the Edwardian conquest. The MP’s great-grandfather, Crown bailiff of Cafflogion commote in the mid-sixteenth century, has been described as ‘virtually the ruler of this part of the Llŷn’. The bailiwick remained in the family until the death of Jones’s father in 1587, when it was granted to Griffith ap John Griffith, who was soon to become Jones’s father-in-law.33 Jones succeeded as bailiff after the latter’s death, but his lack of regard for the office suggests that he had already set his sights on a legal career in London. He began making notes on cases in King’s Bench while still a student in 1589, and, as with many lawyers, he sought clients from among his neighbours, particularly Wynn: he lobbied John Panton* to excuse Wynn from the shrievalty of Denbigh in 1606, and was one of the trustees of Wynn’s estates in 1614. He also twice attempted to arbitrate a settlement of the inheritance dispute between Richard Bulkeley* and his Cheshire cousins.34

Jones should not be confused with a namesake of Twickenham who was appointed gamekeeper of Hampton Court park in 1615, nor with the ‘William Jones, gent.’ to whom translations of Lipsius’ Six Books of Politics and Nennio’s Treatise of Nobility were attributed in 1595: the former was dedicated to Sir John Puckering†, which would suggest that the author was Edward Jones*.35 The Caernarvonshire man did, however, own a copy of the Society of Antiquaries’ debates on the antiquity of Parliament. He may have been one of the anonymous contributors to the society’s debates, several of whom were clearly fluent in Welsh, and he was later the dedicatee of a book on the Wars of the Roses.36

Though his brother was later to settle in Beaumaris, serving as mayor in 1625, Jones spent most of his time in London, and his regular return to Parliament can probably be attributed Sir William Maurice*, ‘the good and well natured knight whom I found always loving to me’. At the 1604 election, Jones relinquished the Caernarvonshire county seat to Maurice, replacing the latter at Beaumaris, presumably with the consent of the local magnate Sir Richard Bulkeley*. Jones was recorder by this time, and as such, he and his son Charles* controlled Beaumaris’s parliamentary representation until 1640.37 Two other MPs called Jones were returned in 1604, but while they were referred to by their full names he generally seems to have been recorded in the Commons Journal as ‘Mr. Jones’. None of the three, however, played a particularly significant role in the first three sessions. In 1604 ‘Mr. Jones’ was included on the committee for the bill to ensure that MPs could not use parliamentary immunity to default on their debts (added 26 Apr.), and another for the annexations bill intended to entail lands upon the Crown of England (4 July).38 In the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot he was included on three committees to revise the recusancy laws (27 Mar., 5, 7 Apr. 1606), and added to the subsidy bill committee, presumably because he had moved for some unrecorded proviso (16 April). Jones was also one of the lawyers co-opted to consider amendments to the attainder bill (7 May).39 Unlike his Caernarvonshire neighbour Sir William Maurice, Jones contributed little to the Union debates, but on 4 June 1607 he corrected Nicholas Fuller* on a technical matter concerning the summoning of witnesses before an English court during a felony trial.40

Jones showed little recorded interest in Welsh issues, although the committees for bills for regulation of the trades in leather (added 28 June 1604) and butter and cheese (20 Apr. 1610), to both of which he was named, may have interested his constituents.41 In 1614 Jones warmly supported the bill to allow defendants in dispute with the Crown over land tenures to retain possession pending trial, an issue of particular relevance to Wales, with its vast Crown estates.42 His papers include two accounts of the 1609 dispute over the jurisdiction of the Council in the Marches, but he is not known to have been involved with the 1610 bill to remove the English Marcher shires from the Council’s jurisdiction.43 He later claimed to have promoted a bill to abrogate the Henrician Act allowing the Crown to make statute law for Wales by Proclamation. Presumably he was referring to a measure that was introduced in February 1606. Whether or not this was the case, he alleged that the bill foundered over the question of how much money to offer for the repeal of the Henrician legislation. However, when Matthew Davies* backed a similar measure in 1614, Jones suggested ‘that the danger [was] not so much to be feared as by Mr. Davies’. The powers in the Henrician Act, he now claimed, were ‘given only to alter the form not the substance of the laws’.44

Jones first emerged as a significant figure in the Commons during the impositions debates of June 1610, when he was one of the lawyers who made set-piece speeches attacking the Crown’s claim to a prerogative right of increasing customs duties without parliamentary approval. While acknowledging that the king was permitted to ‘restrain for the good of the commonwealth, and dispense’ from such a restraint, he insisted that ‘to take a sum of money for a dispensation he [the king] cannot’. He also answered the pragmatic objection that the abolition of impositions would put the king at a disadvantage compared to the arbitrary methods employed by the continental monarchs by suggesting that the king ‘may stay for a Parliament, which is at his pleasure’.45 Presumably on the strength of this performance, in 1614 Jones was one of the legal team chosen to present the Commons’ arguments against impositions at a conference with the Lords (12 May). When Thomas Hitchcock* raised objections to the Commons’ case, ‘which did consist upon false interpretations of some points in law’, he was ‘well answered by one Mr. Jones’, and when Leonard Bawtree* expressed similar doubts, Jones retorted ‘that tenants in ancient desmesne anciently but the king’s villeins; so impositions would make us here’.46

In the 1610 impositions debate Sir Francis Bacon* presented the Crown’s response to Jones’s speech, and he later borrowed Jones’s notes of the records cited in this debate to prepare for the 1614 session. Acknowledging Jones as a well-briefed opponent, he considered it ‘no ill counsel to win or to remove such men’, and shortly after he assumed the office of lord keeper in 1617, Jones was sent to Ireland as chief justice of that country’s Court of King’s Bench. Jones may have been preparing the ground for this appointment in the previous year, when he based his readings at Lincoln’s Inn upon 43 Eliz. c.1, a statute confirming Crown tenures, the surrender and re-grant of which underpinned Dublin’s attempts at settlement with the native Irish.47 Speaking at his appointment, Bacon exhorted Jones to take care of Crown revenues and the recent plantations of English settlers, and also to employ ‘due temperance and equality in matters of religion, lest Ireland civil become more dangerous to us than Ireland savage’. This was an oblique criticism of lord deputy Sir Oliver St. John*, and Jones, who provided Bacon with intelligence about the notoriously corrupt Dublin administration, was advised ‘neither servilely to second him [St. John], nor factiously to oppose him’.48 Despite the divisive role which he had been given, Jones quickly established cordial relations with the New English, particularly Richard, Lord Boyle. Moreover, at Sir Francis Annesley’s* behest, he explored the prospects for a marriage alliance between the Welshman Henry Salusbury of Lleweni and the daughter-in-law of Lord Chichester, the former lord deputy.49

The first task which fell to Jones upon his arrival in Ireland was the controversial suppression of Waterford’s borough charter: he fined Catholic grand jurors for refusing to present recusants at the assizes, and later seized the corporation’s lands and regalia. The English Privy Council commended his conduct, but Jones, like Bacon, may have had misgivings about such harsh treatment of the Old English: his report cited the townsmen’s humble submission, and when the residents petitioned for a fresh charter some years later, he reported that the old could be reinstated almost unchanged.50 In line with Bacon’s reformist agenda, Jones (with the other Irish chief justices) drafted new regulations for the passing of land grants in 1619; the plantation of co. Longford, for which he was one of the commissioners, made a relatively generous allocation of land to the native occupants in order to avoid the friction which had marred the earlier Wexford plantation; and many of the legal reforms recommended by the enquiry commission he chaired in 1622 may be attributed to his experience.51 Nor was he a particular friend to the Church of Ireland: he opposed plans for the establishment of a Court of High Commission for Ireland; the 1622 inquiry commission upset the bishops with their plans to use part of the revenues from recusancy fines to fund the army; and Archbishop Ussher later assumed that Jones would oppose plans for restoring impropriations to the church.52 Yet for all his reformist credentials, Jones had no intention of undermining the Protestant ascendancy: the 1622 commissioners advocated a well-endowed, resident preaching ministry as a prerequisite for the conversion of Ireland; while Jones later endorsed a memorandum stating that any native Irish remaining in the Ulster plantation should convert to Protestantism.53

Jones’s departure from Ireland early in 1620 was apparently prompted by financial reasons, but even so, it is somewhat surprising that he chose not to stand for a Commons’ seat in January 1621; indeed, when (Sir) Richard Wynn* inquired about his intentions towards the Caernarvonshire seat, Jones offered his ‘goodwill and assent’ to Wynn’s own candidacy, although he later changed his allegiance to support his first wife’s nephew, John Griffith III*.54 Jones made a brief appearance in the Commons in 1621 as counsel for the glass patentees, unsuccessfully claiming the superior quality of his clients’ wares, but Sir Francis Seymour’s motion that he be interrogated about Irish affairs wilted in the face of royal disapproval.55 His patron Bacon was impeached for corruption in April 1621, but the latter’s replacement, John Williams, a Caernarvonshire native who was related to Sir John Wynn, far from being eager to dispense with his services, quickly appointed Jones a justice in Common Pleas, in which role he served as a legal assistant in the Lords from the autumn of 1621. Owen Wynn reported that ‘Sir William Jones came to be judge by the lord keeper’s means full sore against his will, whereby he lost £300 a year gains by his practice, but for aught I can learn he is not called by my lord to assist him in Chancery, nor anywhere else...’.56 There may have been some truth in these observations: Jones was not wealthy by the standards of the judicial bench; and when the Crown failed to pay the judges’ stipends in 1627, he was among those who threatened a lawsuit in retaliation.57 The precise nature of his relations with Williams are difficult to gauge, as most of the evidence derives from the correspondence of the younger Wynns, who feared that Jones planned to supplant them in Williams’s favour, a development which was unlikely, as Jones managed to upset the lord keeper with his advice over the purchase of a Caernarvonshire estate.58

Shortly after the dissolution of the 1621 Parliament, an official inquiry into Irish affairs was announced. Despite his protestations of penury, Jones was nominated as one of the English commissioners by lord treasurer (Sir Lionel) Cranfield*, being familiar with the Dublin administration, but not beholden to the New English interest. This investigation produced reports on trade, monopolies, the church, army, and legal and administrative systems, all of which exposed extensive corruption, while visits to the plantations uncovered widespread breaches of the terms of the original grants.59 The royal favourite, the marquess of Buckingham, was closely involved in Irish affairs, and the reports were potentially an embarrassment for him, but the only one of his clients to be explicitly criticized was Edward Wray*, patentee for discovery of insufficient titles. Jones ensured that Sir Francis Annesley, another of Buckingham’s supporters, signed this report; and in any case by this time Wray had managed to offend his patron.60

Meanwhile, back in London, Sir Richard Wynn nurtured a grudge against Jones for his behaviour at the 1621 election, despite Sir John Wynn’s advice ‘to use Sir William Jones respectfully and as a friend’, albeit one with unwelcome links to the Griffiths. In the summer of 1622, Charles Jones and Owen Wynn quarrelled at Beaumaris, but on his return Jones implored Sir John Wynn to ‘let not the unfortunate carriage of my son be objected against me, for which I was as sorry as yourself’, and a formal apology was drawn up with the assistance of the assize judge Edward Littleton II*.61 The wound was reopened during the 1624 Parliament, when Jones’s son supported a petition opposing Sir Richard Wynn’s plan to farm the Welsh greenwax fines. There were suspicions that the Wynns’ adversaries had tried to frustrate Owen Wynn’s marriage to one of lord keeper Williams’ nieces, and, perhaps in retaliation, when it was announced that Littleton was to marry one of Jones’s daughters, Sir John Wynn resolved to press for Littleton’s removal from the Anglesey circuit.62

Greater damage was done to Jones’s prospects by the development of a rift at Court between Buckingham, now a duke, and Cranfield, now earl of Middlesex, in 1623. Shortly before returning to Ireland at the end of the year, Jones asked Middlesex to procure him a place on Prince Charles’s Council, in order to have ‘some further interest in his [Charles’s] favour’, a request which was unsuccessful.63 Jones returned to Dublin as part of a commission intended to implement the 1622 reforms, but Middlesex resolved the immediate financial crisis at Dublin by defaulting on part of the army’s arrears. The commissioners doubled the rents due from the Ulster plantation, established an Irish Court of Wards and imposed a revised set of legal fees, but their efforts created resentment and failed to eradicate the deficit at the Irish Exchequer. The new lord deputy, Viscount Falkland (Sir Henry Carey I*), a Buckingham client, swiftly blamed these ‘calamities’ on ‘the advices of my lord of Middlesex and Sir William Jones’.64 Jones later secured a measure of revenge when a complaint about Falkland’s attempts to dispossess Phelim McPhee Byrne of lands in co. Wicklow was referred to the English Privy Council: Jones vouched for McPhee’s loyalty, and Falkland’s intemperate reaction helped to contribute to his fall from office.65 Thereafter, Jones remained an adviser to the Privy Council sub-committee on Irish affairs until the appointment of lord deputy Wentworth (Sir Thomas Wentworth*), who brusquely advised lawyers to ‘monopolize less to themselves all judicature, as if no honour or justice could be rightly administered, but under one of their benchers’ gowns’.66

Jones returned to Westminster as a judicial assistant in late March 1624, but there was nothing he could do to save Middlesex from impeachment over the following weeks. However, unlike many, he remained willing to assist the earl’s efforts to seek a reduction in his fine.67 In October 1624, after his return to London, Jones transferred from Common Pleas to King’s Bench. Lord keeper Williams ascribed this to ‘the good opinion that the king has conceived of his services’, and claimed that the move had nothing to do with profit, as the places were of equal value. However, Henry Wynn* may have been nearer the mark in surmising that Jones sought the post ‘because he would favour his son-in-law [Littleton] and his own son [Charles Jones], which he cannot do in the Common Pleas for there pleads none but serjeants in that court’. King James apparently also promised Jones a reversion as chief baron, but as he died shortly before the incumbent, Sir Lawrence Tanfield*, the new king, Charles I, appointed his servant Sir John Walter* to the vacancy instead.68 Williams’s dismissal as lord keeper in October 1625 deprived Jones of his last ally at Court. He may subsequently have considered withdrawing to the Marches, as that Christmas he was tipped for the chief justiceship of Chester. Buckingham may have dashed this prospect, as in February 1626 Owen Wynn noted that ‘it seems the duke’s hatred lights on Sir William Jones as well as my lord [Williams], they being both countrymen, and Sir William having sometimes a dependence upon the lord treasurer Cranfield, who is still odious to the favourite’.69

As an object of Buckingham’s distaste, Jones had little to lose by adopting a critical stance towards the constitutional innovations of the next few years. He was in no hurry either to pay or to secure a discharge for the Privy Seal loans charged upon his brother and son at the end of 1625, and while the judges were rated for a contribution towards a fresh loan in September 1626, the only one who paid was Sir John Walter.70 Jones was one of the first to pay the Forced Loan in October 1626, but when the Five Knights’ case eventually came to trial in King’s Bench a year later, he urged the attorney-general, Sir Robert Heath*, to consider ‘if it be so that the law of Magna Carta and other statutes be now in force, and the gentlemen be not delivered by this court, how shall they be delivered?’ When Heath ignored this advice, and secured an order remanding the prisoners to gaol pending further consideration, it was Jones who ordered the clerk ‘that he should not enter any judgment at all, but curia advisare vult [the court will take advice]’. Thus when Jones was questioned about his conduct by the Lords in 1628, he insisted that the judges were ‘not so high as others brought to serve the king’, and protested that he would ‘not advance the king’s prerogative against his conscience, nor be popular to wrong the king’.71

Buckingham’s assassination in August 1628 gave Jones an opportunity to redeem himself at Court, and shortly before Parliament reconvened in January 1629 he ordered the release of a dozen Jesuits from Newgate gaol. The Commons soon learned of this flagrant breach of the recusancy laws, but when questioned by Sir Thomas Barrington*, Jones offered the lame response that he had not studied the case file, because ‘he came late for want of his health, and the second day was not there at all’.72 The session ended with a provocative demonstration in the Commons, but the trial of the ringleaders put Jones in an invidious position, as his son Charles was one of the defence counsel for Walter Long II*, while his son-in-law Littleton represented John Selden*.73 Jones and the other judges were sympathetic to the defendants’ application for bail, especially after the Crown transferred the prisoners to the Tower to evade the execution of the resulting habeas corpus, but when three of the prisoners were brought to trial in November 1629, Jones wholeheartedly backed the Crown, insisting that ‘in this case there was a conspiracy between the defendants to slander the state, and to raise sedition and discord between the king, his peers, and people; and this was not a parliamentary course.74 This effectively asserted the right of the Common Law to act as the arbiter in any contest between the liberties of the subject and the prerogative, and he stood by the logic of his case in 1638, when he dismissed calls to summon a Parliament to judge the legality of Ship Money: ‘the king hath tried this way already and the subjects have failed him, and quarrelled at those in whom he took most delight, and therefore he need not be put to shifts but make use of his prerogative’.75

Jones’s exalted view of the Common Law inevitably brought him into conflict with rival law courts. In February 1631, having questioned the jurisdiction of the Earl Marshal’s Court, he was ‘shaken up by both lord chamberlains of the king’s and queen’s side; my lord of Pembroke calling him a saucy fellow’. Two years later, when questioned by the Privy Council about a prohibition he had granted against a cause pending in the Admiralty Court, he insisted that the supremacy of the Common Law was de jure.76 Thus it was logical that in 1638, only weeks before giving his verdict in the Ship Money case, Jones should advise the Oxford assizes that ‘no man need take it ill that so small a part of his estate should be determined of not by one single judge, but by the reverend society of the judges’. In his judgement, he scorned both the absolutist justifications for Ship Money advanced by some Laudian clerics, ‘who under favour take more liberty than is fitting to say in a pulpit’, and also the court of public opinion, reflecting that ‘we should be happy to be judged by them that are learned; but when it is by them that understand not, then it is turned into calumny and reproach’.77

Jones’s verdict on Ship Money was based on the advice the judges had given the Crown in advance of the test case: while the Petition of Right prohibited the imposition of any tax without parliamentary consent, it could not abrogate the obligation to assist when the Crown judged the nation’s security to be in ‘imminent danger’.78 However, he went further than this, revising opinions he had expressed in Parliament in 1610: he now considered impositions to have been justified ‘in case of necessity’; while concerning wardship, he recalled that ‘upon a mature debate it was resolved that this was jus regium [a regalian right] and therefore an Act of Parliament could not give freedom to their tenures’. He therefore concluded that the prerogative ‘taketh away the statute when it is pro bono publico, to defend the kingdom’. However, he reassured those who feared Charles’s intentions that ‘it is against presumption of law, that the king, whose heart is in the hand of the Lord, should tell a lie ... We have a good king, and our imaginations ought to be good of him’. Jones’s earlier fears about the royal prerogative had thus been dispelled by his conception of the judiciary as ultimate arbiters of the constitution, which caused him to take issue with his fellow judge, Sir George Croke†, who had ruled in favour of the sanctity of private property: ‘I would wish no man to clamour, that this [Ship Money] is to divest the subject of the property in his goods; for it is nothing but what is for the defence of the kingdom’.79

Perhaps because of his eccentric views on jure divino judiciary, Jones’s verdict was not immediately clear to those present. George Garrard* remarked that ‘no man could tell what to make of his argument, in dock, out nettle, sometimes for the king, then for the subject’; the confusion was compounded when he either forgot or omitted to give a verdict, obliging the presiding judge, (Sir) John Finch II*, to ask him to clarify himself.80 He declared that payment was due to the Crown, ‘with this limitation and condition, that none of it comes to the king’s purse, for if it do, my opinion is against it’. In due course, Lord chief baron Davenport’s judgment established that the writ could only compel payment to the Exchequer, not directly to the Navy. However, under the Common Law, Jones’s judgment, once given, could not be altered, and therefore the Crown won its case by the narrowest possible margin, seven votes to five.81

A supporter of the Crown to the end of the Personal Rule, Jones tried deserters from the royal army at the Berkshire assizes in 1640, fining the deputy lieutenants when the case failed through their negligence. When the Long Parliament began its investigation of the judges, Jones indignantly denied that Finch had tried to influence his verdict over the Ship Money case, and had he lived longer he would undoubtedly have been impeached.82 As it was he died at his house in Holborn on 9 Dec. 1640, and was buried at Lincoln’s Inn five days later. His estates passed to his eldest son Griffith Jones, but in his brief will of 2 Dec. he left most of his goods to his wife and two of his daughters, which provoked some litigation.83 Jones’s law reports found their way into the hands of John Glynne†, but were later recovered and published by his daughters.84 Three of Jones’s sons sat in Parliament, but none had any male children, and in 1671 his estates passed to the Williams family of Vaynol, Caernarvonshire.85

Ref Volumes: 1604-1629

Author: Simon Healy

Notes

• 1. Les Reportes de Sir William Jones (1675), sig. A2.
• 2. J.E. Griffith, Peds. Anglesey and Caern. Fams. 191.
• 3. Les Reportes, sig. A2; LI Admiss.; LI Black Bks. ii. 35; C. Kenny, King’s Inns and Kingdom of Ire. 277.
• 4. Griffith, 191; Dwnn, Vis. Wales ed. S.R. Meyrick, ii. 118 and n. 1; Les Reportes, sig. A2.
• 5. NLW, Brogyntyn 399; Griffith, 191; DNB sub Hovenden, Robert.
• 6. Griffith, 191.
• 7. Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 161.
• 8. Les Reportes, sig. A2.
• 9. SC6/Eliz.I/3015; SC6/Jas.I/1427.
• 10. JPs in Wales and Monm. ed. Phillips, 7-11, 22-30.
• 11. C181/1, f. 33; 181/3, ff. 45v-6v, 55v, 74v, 129v, 217; 181/5, ff. 57v, 154v, 169, 172v, 184v, 186, 191.
• 12. SP14/31/1; 14/43/107; C212/22/21; E115/229/119; 115/230/183; 115/230/189; E179/220/154, 156; 179/224/598; C181/2, f. 102; C193/12/2; NLW, Brogyntyn 2334.
• 13. Anglesey RO, David Hughes Charity mss box 5 (David Hughes’s will, 30 Dec. 1609); box 16 (23 Apr. 1640, n.d.).
• 14. CSP Dom. 1623-5, p. 46; HMC 13th Rep. iv. 270.
• 15. C181/3, ff. 79v, 204; 181/4, ff. 62, 95v; C181/5, f. 142v; C192/1, unfol. (17 June 1633, 17 June 1634, 8 Feb. 1636, 3 Oct. 1639, 6 Aug. 1640); T. Rymer, Foedera, viii. pt. 3, p. 114.
• 16. C219/35/2/182.
• 17. LI Black Bks. ii. 139, 176.
• 18. Lansd. 273, ff. 13, 60.
• 19. C66/2092.
• 20. C66/2246.
• 21. J.S. Cockburn, Hist. Eng. Assizes, 270-2.
• 22. C66/2324.
• 23. Les Reportes 266-98, 347-9, 382-4; CSP Dom. 1634-5, pp. 143, 216; 1637-8, pp. 609- 10; SO3/11, unfol. (July 1636, July 1637).
• 24. CPR Ire. Jas. I, 327a; APC, 1616-17, p. 311.
• 25. CSP Ire. 1615-25, pp. 166-7, 240; HMC Hastings, iv. 183.
• 26. C66/2131; CPR Ire. Jas. I, 342, 424b, 444b.
• 27. CPR Ire. Jas. I, 433.
• 28. Ibid. 432, 466-9.
• 29. Chamberlain Letters ed. N.E. McClure, ii. 427, 536; APC, 1621-3, pp. 421-2; 1623-5 pp. 455-7, 461-3; 1625-6, pp. 15, 97, 119.
• 30. APC, 1628-9, pp. 107, 111-12, 194-5.
• 31. APC, 1623-5, pp. 96-8; CSP Col. 1574-1660, pp. 44, 52; CSP Dom. 1623-5, pp. 116, 136.
• 32. CSP Dom. 1633-4, p. 326.
• 33. J. Wynn, Hist. Gwydir Fam. ed. J. Gwynfor Jones, 63; Lords Procs. 1628, v. 230; M. Gray ‘Power, Patronage and Pols.’, Estates of Eng. Crown ed. R. Hoyle, 142-3, 159; PROB 11/34, f. 181; A.H. Dodd, Hist. Caern. 30-1; SC6/Eliz./3006.
• 34. UCNW, Mostyn 127; Baron Hill 62, 299, 300, 311; Exeter Coll. Oxf. ms 151, ff. 28-72; Cal. Wynn Pprs. nos. 231, 248, 262, 301, 325, 377, 392, 394, 444, 520.
• 35. C66/2076; C54/2324/120; J. Lipsius, Six Books of Politics (1594/5) sig. Aii; G.B. Nennio, A Treatise of Nobility (1595), sig. A2.
• 36. SP16/475/80; T. Hearne, Curious Discourses (1771), i. 128-38; ii. 448-9; J. Trussell, Continuation ... of the Hist. of Eng. (1636), sig. A2.
• 37. C219/35/2/182; NLW, Brogyntyn 468.
• 38. CJ, i. 185a, 252a.
• 39. Ibid. 290b, 294a, 307a; W. Notestein, House of Commons 1604-10, p. 209.
• 40. Bowyer Diary, 311.
• 41. CJ, i. 247b, 419b.
• 42. Procs. 1614 (Commons), 161, 166; Gray, 140-2.
• 43. Exeter Coll. Oxf. ms 154, ff. 4-54.
• 44. Procs. 1614 (Commons), 98, 101. Jones was not named to the 1606 cttee. (CJ, i. 272b), but could have attended as a Welsh MP.
• 45. Parl. Debates 1610 ed. S.R. Gardiner, 64-6.
• 46. Procs. 1614 (Commons), 213, 261-2, 287, 310-11.
• 47. CJ, i. 476a, 486b; Letters and Life of Francis Bacon ed. J. Spedding, vi. 208; Harl. 1692, ff. 82-4; Kenny, 78; M. O’Dowd, ‘Gaelic Economy and Soc.’, Natives and Newcomers ed. C. Brady and R. Gillespie, 132-6.
• 48. Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, vi. 205-7, 310; R. Bagwell, Ire. under the Stuarts, i. 151-2.
• 49. Lismore Pprs. ed. A.B. Grosart (ser. 1), i. 198, 237; (ser. 2), ii. 130; APC, 1619-21, pp. 308, 313; Cal. Salusbury Corresp. ed. W.J. Smith (Bd. of Celtic Studs., Hist. and Law ser. xiv), 59.
• 50. Lismore Pprs. (ser. 2), ii. 87; B. Fitzpatrick, Seventeenth Cent. Ire. 34; HMC Egmont, i. 53; CSP Carew, 1603-24, pp. 335-40; APC, 1618-19, p. 94; CSP Ire. 1625-32, p. 22.
• 51. CPR Ire. Jas. I, 434a, 466-8; Add. 4756, ff. 35v-9; Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, vi. 205-6; Bagwell, i. 152-65; J.C. Beckett, Making of Mod. Ire. 54-5.
• 52. Lismore Pprs. (ser. 2), ii. 136-7; M. Prestwich, Cranfield, 351-2; Add. 4756, ff. 18v-23; CSP Ire. 1625-32, p. 631.
• 53. Add. 4756, ff. 18v-23; APC, 1623-5, pp. 455-7.
• 54. NLW, 9057E/916, 930; Brogyntyn 399.
• 55. Nicholas, Procs. 1621, ii. 39; CD 1621, iii. 101, 196; v. 153; R. Zaller, Parl. of 1621, pp. 118-19.
• 56. CPR Ire. Jas. I, 472a; NLW, 9057E/988; Cent. Kent. Stud. U269/1/Hi74.
• 57. Liber Famelicus of Sir J. Whitelocke ed. J. Bruce (Cam. Soc. lxx), 108-9.
• 58. Cent. Kent. Stud. U269/1/Hi74; NLW, 9057E/988, 9058E/1002, 1015, 1047; R. Lockyer, Buckingham, 111-17.
• 59. Cent. Kent. Stud. U269/1/Hi74-5; Add. 4756, ff. 2-60, 81-133; Exeter Coll. Oxf. ms 95; HMC 7th Rep., 250b; Prestwich, 349-51; V. Treadwell, Buckingham and Ire. 172-8; M. MacCarthy-Morrogh, Munster Plantation, 171-3.
• 60. Fortescue Pprs. ed. S.R. Gardiner (Cam. Soc. n.s. i), 184; Treadwell, 202-3.
• 61. NLW, 466E/1000, 1052; 9058E/1070, 1082.
• 62. NLW, 9059E/1217, 1237, 1242, 1246, 1253; 9060E/1276, 1279.
• 63. Lockyer, 174-6; Cent. Kent. Stud. U269/1/OE404.
• 64. Prestwich, 354-6; CSP Ire. 1615-25, pp. 456-7, 526; SP63/241/151; APC, 1623-5, pp. 165, 445-7; N. Canny, ‘Identity Formation in Ire.’, Col. Identity in Atlantic World ed. N. Canny and A. Pagden, 182-197; Beckett, 57.
• 65. Beckett, 61-2; SP63/247/154.
• 66. Strafforde Letters (1739) ed. W. Knowler, i. 223; CSP Ire. 1633-47, p. 10.
• 67. LJ, iii. 277a; Cent. Kent. Stud. U269/1/Oo92.
• 68. Diary of Sir Richard Hutton ed. W.R. Prest (Selden Soc. suppl. ser. ix), 54; NLW, 466E/1254; 9060E/1335.
• 69. NLW, 9060E/1380; 9061E/1389.
• 70. NLW, 9061E/1422; E401/2442; 401/2586, p. 467.
• 71. E401/1913; State Trials ed. T.B. Howell, iii. 31-2; Diary of Sir Richard Hutton, 72; Lords Procs. 1628, v. 230, 236; W.J. Jones, Pols. and the Bench, 71-3; M. Kishlansky, ‘Tyranny Denied: Chas. I, Attorney General Heath and the Five Knights’ case’, HJ, xlii. 60-79.
• 72. CSP Dom. 1628-9, p. 20; C. Russell, PEP, 394; CD 1629, p. 82.
• 73. CSP Dom. 1628-9, p. 556; L.J. Reeve, Chas. I and the Road to Personal Rule, 125-8.
• 74. Reeve, 124-8, 152-5; SP16/149/110; 16/150/3-4; Howell, iii. 309.
• 75. Howell, iii. 294; Reeve, 149-50; HMC Various, vii. 419.
• 76. T. Birch, Ct. and Times of Chas. I, ii. 98, 220.
• 77. Howell, iii. 1182-4; J.P. Somerville Pols. and Ideology in Eng. 1603-40, pp. 37, 160-1; HMC Var. vii. 419.
• 78. HMC Var. vii. 417; Howell, iii. 1183. For the original ruling, see CSP Dom. 1636-7, pp. 416-18.
• 79. Howell, iii. 1186-90; HMC Var. vii. 417.
• 80. Strafforde Letters, ii. 167; State Trials, iii. 1190-91; HMC 9th Rep, ii. 497a; CSP Ven. 1636-9, p. 410.
• 81. Howell, 1191, 1213; C. Russell, ‘Ship Money Judgments of Bramston and Davenport’, EHR, lxxvii. 314-18.
• 82. CSP Dom. 1640, pp. 489, 512-13; D’Ewes ed. W. Notestein, 117, 122.
• 83. Les Reportes, sig. A2; PROB 11/185, f. 223; Cal. Salusbury Corresp. 114; NLW, Wynnstay RA34, Griffith Jones to Robert Jones, 20 Oct. 1641.
• 84. Les Reportes, frontispiece and sig. A2.
• 85. Griffith, 191; NLW, Bangor Wills, 1671/77.