Flintshire

County

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1660-1690, ed. B.D. Henning, 1983
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Background Information

Number of voters:

about 800 in 1702

Elections

DateCandidate
12 Nov. 1660KENRICK EYTON
29 Apr. 1661SIR HENRY CONWAY, Bt.
1 Nov. 1669SIR THOMAS HANMER, Bt. vice Conway, deceased
18 Nov. 1678MUTTON DAVIES vice Hanmer, deceased
10 Feb. 1679MUTTON DAVIES
22 Sept. 1679MUTTON DAVIES
  Sir John Hanmer, Bt.
7 Mar. 1681SIR JOHN HANMER, Bt.
7 Apr. 1685SIR JOHN CONWAY, Bt.
15 Jan. 1689SIR ROGER PULESTON

Main Article

The death of the sheriff, to whom the writs had been sent, probably prevented a contest in Flintshire in 1660. The Presbyterian John Trevor of Plas Teg found that so many of his friends receded from their former engagements to him, even before the Restoration, that he did not stand. A new writ was ordered on 31 July, but not issued until after the recess. With the monarchy now firmly re-established the county chose Kenrick Eyton, a lawyer from an old Denbighshire family with a good record in the Civil War. Presumably the more important figures in the county were not interested in a ‘lame dog’ session. Before the next general election the Earl of Derby, who still owned extensive property in the county despite forced sales to the Trevors during the Interregnum, wrote to his tenants to bestow their votes on such candidates as Robert Davies, the retiring sheriff, should nominate, his loyalty being sufficient guarantee of the ‘worth and fitness of such persons as he shall propose’. No doubt these instructions were aimed chiefly at the Plas Teg family, who never stood again for a Welsh constituency. Eyton devoted himself to his legal career, and gave way to Sir Henry Conway, the heir of a leading Royalist.1

When Conway died in 1669, he was succeeded by Sir Thomas Hanmer, whose royalist sympathies had not inspired him to any degree of self-sacrifice. Hanmer in turn died in the closing months of the Cavalier Parliament, in which his son Sir John was sitting for Evesham. Conway’s son was still under age, and Davies’s son Mutton was elected by ‘the greater part of the whole county’. He was re-elected in February 1679, but despite his record of loyalty voted for the exclusion bill. Sir John Hanmer stood unsuccessfully against Davies as a court candidate in the autumn, but won the seat in 1681, when his opponent desisted before the election. In 1685 Hanmer, a courtier and a soldier, moved down to the borough seat, leaving the county free for another Tory, the rakish Sir John Conway. In September 1688 Sunderland ordered Hanmer to stand for Flintshire, but at the general election a few months later he preferred the Boroughs, despite his services to the Revolution. It is not known whether Conway stood, but the county was represented in the Convention by a moderate Whig, Sir Roger Puleston.2

Author: A. M. Mimardière

Notes

  • 1. NLW, Rhual mss 98; CJ, viii. 108; J. Hanmer, Par. and Fam. of Hanmer, 130-1; HMC 7th Rep. 149.
  • 2. True Dom. Intell. 9 Sept. 1679; A. H. Dodd, Studies in Stuart Wales, 206; CSP Dom. 1687-9, p. 276.