LEWIS, John (c.1660-1720), of Coedmor, Card.

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

Family and Education

b. c.1660, 1st s. of James Lewis of Coedmor by Catherine da. of Richard Harrison of Hurst, Berks. m. 1680, Elizabeth (d.1734), da. and coh. of Lodowick Lewis of Llangorse, Brec., 1s. d.v.p. 4da. suc. fa 1669.1

Offices Held

Sheriff, Brec. 1683-4, Card. 1710-11; dep. lt. Card. 1683-?Feb. 1688, 1689-?d.; j.p. Card. 1684-Apr. 1688, Oct. 1688-?d., Brec. and Pemb. by 1701-d.; commr. for assessment, Card. 1689-90, capt. of militia horse by 1697-?d.2

Biography

The Lewis family of Coedmor were prominent in Cardiganshire by Elizabethan times, first representing the county in 1604. Lewis’s grandfather ‘of inoffensive, facile constitution’ sat in five Parliaments before the Civil War and again in the second Protectorate Parliament. His father married into a royalist family just before the Restoration, and was proposed as a knight of the Royal Oak with an estate of £700 p.a. Lewis inherited the heavily encumbered Coedmor estate as a child. He was brought up by his uncle in Berkshire, where he continued to reside. By his marriage to the granddaughter of Sir William Lewis he acquired an estate in Breconshire. Despite non-residence, he was six times elected for either the county or borough seat in Cardiganshire, though his first return in 1685 was probably due to the minority of the Trawscoed heir. He served on no committees in James II’s Parliament, and his politics at this date are hard to determine, but he may have been a moderate Tory. He was noted as living in Berkshire when the King’s questions on the repeal of the Test Act and Penal Laws were put, and was removed from local office. He defeated John Vaughan with the support of the Pryce interest in 1689, but no committee work can be ascribed to him in the Convention, and his name figures on neither division list. He was a court Whig after regaining his seat in 1693. ‘Indolent in his affairs’, he was obliged to sell Coedmor in 1700. He was buried at Hurst on 26 Jan. 1720, the last of the family.3

Ref Volumes: 1660-1690

Authors: Leonard Naylor / Geoffrey Jaggar

Notes

  • 1. Ceredigion, vi. 164; Vis. Berks. (Harl. Soc. lvi), 219.
  • 2. Eg. 1626, f. 60.
  • 3. Ceredigion, vi. 150-3, 157, 159; Berks. RO, Hurst par. reg.