Evan Seys
Encyclopedia
Evan Seys was an eminent lawyer of his day and rose to national office under Oliver Cromwell as Attorney General
, and subsequently served as a Member of Parliament from 1659 to 1681. From c.1649 until his death he was also consistently important in the politics of his native Glamorgan
, and of Gloucestershire
. He was a committed and active Protestant and an antiquarian scholar to boot.
Place in the Vale of Glamorgan
. They claimed descent from Bleddyn Ap Maenarch, an eleventh-century lord of Brecon. In the nineteenth century, descendants of the family through a female line were still incorporating the alleged arms of Bleddyn, and perhaps do even now. But it was standard practice for "new" families in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to "discover" a noble ancestor amid the conveniently remote mists of the heroic age. Evan's properly documented forebears are far less romantic and far closer to home: his great-grandfather was Yevan Saisy of Cowbridge. Such a provenance implies that Yevan was a burgess rather than a gentleman who was likely to have been rurally based and, coupled with his surname, the descendant of a fairly recent English incomer: "Sais" is Welsh for "Englishman". Whatever his occupation, status, and antecedents, Yevan was well-off enough to have his son, Roger, educated (where and by whom?) and then legally trained. There may have been other sons equally fortunate given the proliferated Seys cousinhood of Evan's own seventeenth-century day. But back in the Tudor period, the family, recent gentry/nouveaux riches, were rising into the local elite by a shrewd blend of lawyering, marriage and land-buying: Roger's wife brought him the lands on which he built Boverton Place, his son Richard's, Evan's mother, property near Swansea. This blend Evan was to continue on a large scale to considerable effect, adding a prudently mutable infusion of politics to the mix.
Thus the filiation is:
and is first heard from, aged 14, formally orating in Latin before an audience of its co-founder, Sir John Stradling, 1st Baronet
, and his lady, of his own parents quite possibly, plus some distinctly lesser local worthies. This was probably a special occasion to celebrate the school's tenth anniversary rather than the annual speech day familiar in recent times. Nor was Seys likely to have been the head boy: even if the concept is not itself also anachronistic, there were presumably pupils markedly senior to him: he himself was to stay at school until the age of 17, when in 1621 he went up to Christ Church, Oxford
. Rather, he may well have been chosen as orator because he was virtually the Stradlings' social equal — or at least on the way. Indeed, he was probably the pupil of highest social status. This had been bestowed of course by his own parents, also local potentates, therefore well worth the honour and flattery which the choice of their son accorded them, and which, if present, they could savour at first hand. And young Evan must have been a good scholar to boot. He was however just the upmarket mouthpiece: the actual author of the speech was the master, the Revd Walter Stradling, a poor relation of the founders.
Thus composed and delivered, its tone is, unsurprisingly, sycophantic, but the speech is the main source for the foundation and furbishment of Cowbridge School, and by extension useful evidence for Jacobean grammar schools on a broader plane. Strikingly, Sir John had presented his own, at £10, very expensive copy of the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum
of the Flemish geographer Ortelius: so Geography as well as Classics was on the curriculum.
in 1649 and a Bencher
of Lincoln's Inn
in 1652. He went on to hold legal office in Wales under the Protectorate
and was a member of the committee for governing Glamorgan, in which capacity he examined the charters of its boroughs in the 1650s, possibly with a view to remodelling them to favour his own Cromwellian party. This culminated in his becoming the Attorney General to Oliver Cromwell
and serving as MP for Glamorgan during the evanescent rule of Richard Cromwell
in 1659. At Oliver's quasi -royal funeral he was an official mourner.
But this devoted Cromwellian then had a change of heart – or head. The year 1659 also saw him as part of the broad (indeed "rainbow") coalition of "moderates" preparing the restoration of Charles II
. From 1661 to 1681 (namely up to his very last years) he was MP for Gloucester, having smoothly crossed into the Restoration era via the bridge of his new-found Royalism and Loyalism.
Seys prospered materially as well during these politically variegated decades: in 1656 he capitalized on his Gloucestershire connection by acquiring the Manor of Dymock off Sir John Winter, a staunch royalist who had suffered financially because of his convictions. In 1666–8 he bought a substantial slice of the Glamorgan lands worth £12,000 alienated by the Earl of Pembroke
. The Gloucestrian connexion went back to 1638 at least when Evan had married Margaret, daughter of Robert Bridges of Woodchester, who brought him £2,500 (at least £1,000,000 in our money) earmarked to buy land. . Even a bizarre family rift of his youth turned out to his advantage: his eldest brother, Roger, was disinherited for striking his mother and proceeded to compound this and destroy any hopes of rehabilitation by embarking on a career of wildly oscillating religious extremism. Emerging from a Jesuit seminary as a priest in the 1620s, Roger was, by the 1640s, an "itinerant Puritan
minister of radical views" (Philip Jenkins
).
Evan, by contrast, seems essentially to trim to the side of those wielding power, wealth, and authority at any given time: his own parents and Sir John Stradling in his youth – he became the formers' heir in place of the disgraced and extreme Roger –, the Rump Parliament
in 1649–53, Lord Protector Cromwell in 1653–8, Richard Cromwell briefly in 1658–9, King Charles II immediately afterwards, and the Earl of Pembroke in 1666–8. His mouthpiece delivery in adolescence of a speech truckling to the local great and good (probably including his own parents) was a harbinger.
His career enjoyed the most worldly success of any seventeenth-century pupils at Cowbridge School, with the striking exception of his junior, Sir Leoline Jenkins (1623/5–1685). Jenkins's was all the more impressive as he was of much humbler origin: the more impressive also as he never wavered from his staunch Royalism and Anglicanism, although he suffered from this materially after the fall of Charles I
in 1646. Much the same can be said of Evan's close kinsman, Richard Seys of Swansea, and a host of fellow Glamorganites of all ranks, while for the radical left, the mid-Walian Vavasor Powell
supported the Rump and then the brief Republic of 1649, but was openly and bravely defiant towards the Protectorate and towards the restored monarchy; and this oddly assorted trio could well have endured far worse persecution (Sir John Winter of Gloucester likewise): Cromwellian rule, which got a grip on the country from 1653 after a prolonged stretch marked by intermittent chaos (1646–53), was particularly harsh in obdurately royalist shires like Glamorgan, and Seys was one of its leading agents there. He, conversely, seems to have enjoyed an unbroken run of success in the 1640s, 1650s, and 1660s alike: he could have mentored his younger contemporary the Vicar of Bray.
In the way of political cataclysms, the English Civil War
/Interregnum
gave opportunities for "new men" to rise: Phillip Jones, the leader of the Roundheads in Glamorgan, was, like many of his followers, from the extreme west of the county:largely hilly and infertile. A gentleman in name only in 1641, with a yeoman's income of £20 a year, he had become by 1658 Comptroller
of Cromwell's household with the title of Phillip, Lord Jones. Like Seys, but even more remarkably, he not only survived the Restoration but flourished under it: was put on the Glamorgan Bench in 1672 – a sure sign of rehabilitation – and died worth c.£1,500 a year in 1673 with a large country house in the Vale at Fonmon.
Seys, his supporter and follower, did not have so far to travel, being already of an affluent gentry family of the Vale, then the key portion of Glamorgan given its rich farmland; nor did he rise so high. Even so, he held positions under the Cromwells – Attorney General for the whole of England and Wales and MP – that his ancestors had never enjoyed under the old regime. His grandfather, Roger, had been Queen's Attorney for Wales under Elizabeth, his father, Richard, had enjoyed the grandiose title of Attorney-General of Glamorgan, an office he duly passed on to Evan in 1636; but these were sectional and, therefore, lesser versions of Attorney General. And like Jones, he consolidated this self-enhancement under the Restoration, remaining an MP for most of Charles II's reign, namely for most the rest of his own life. There was wealth as well as office: his purchase of the Pembroke lands (1666–8), which was probably facilitated on favourable terms because Seys was a member of the moderate party which looked to the Earl for leadership.
Philip Jenkins argues that this moderate party was significant in South Wales throughout the period of the 1640s–80s, although, given the extreme political volatility of that time, naturally mutating over the years. There were two other main factions. First the high/inveterate royalists, regionally headed by the Marquises of Worcester based at Raglan Castle
. This party was mainly Anglican but with, damagingly, some Catholics, the most prominent of whom were the first two Marquises themselves. And, at the other extreme, the equally inveterate left-leaning Parliamentarians/Republicans who overlapped in religion with the Sectarians and who either would not accept the Restoration or were not accepted by it.
The core quest of the moderates was for a regime, which in an era when anarchy loomed, could provide firm stable rule fused with the upholding and dissemination of a Protestantism conservative enough to bolster the values/interests of the ruling elite. Thus these moderates were centrists, fearing both mass Protestant sectarianism/anarchy and Roman Catholicism, and in effect, post-Restoration, high Anglicans and Royalists (whether Anglican or Catholic) who supported Absolutism
. However, post-1660 the moderates were themselves practically all Anglicans of some sort, at least outwardly.
How far this moderate model fits into the bloodier and most anarchic years of the Civil War/Interregnum of 1642–53 is questionable. It is hard to know how in these apocalyptic circumstances such a party could have organized itself or many potential members even been aware of each other. And that Seys could at that time be fitted in to such a tendency is even more questionable. There is no evidence yet unearthed of his political sympathies/activities until he comes to light as Recorder of Gloucester in 1649 when he was already 45. Thus he was serving the Rump in the very year of the regicide
, which the Rump had authorized: no "decent interval" for Seys. This hardly fits a moderate mode. Then in 1652 the Rump endorsed him as a Bencher of his Inn. His subsequent seemingly seamless transition to working for the Protectorate (1653–9) may with this background appear as opportunism rather than moderation. A few moderate Anglicans/Royalists in Glamorgan and elsewhere did pragmatically and gingerly serve the Protectorate in the quest for stability: perhaps in South Wales disillusioned by the Catholicism of their erstwhile leaders, the Worcesters. But Seys's CV indelibly marks him as having come to "moderation" from the opposite radical/republican background, at least in his outward subscription. And the scale of his activities, the high office they earned him, rapidly made him a pillar of the regime of both Cromwells. However, the Protectorate did for a few years offer an opportunity to secure the moderates' key objectives. Secondly, Seys's transition from Rump to Protectorate can also be explained by each successive Interregnum regime and the local Republicans/Radicals needing each other very much as mutual props, especially in such Royalist areas as Glamorgan: if they did not hang together, they would hang separately. So anti-Royalists of all shades at the centre and the grassroots had to keep their considerable internal differences within bounds. Thus mere opportunism is too simple an explanation, although the personal aggrandisement of the likes of Jones and Seys strongly implies it was one element.
It was the failure of the last short-lived Republican regime in 1659 which itself had brought about the collapse of the equally short-lived rule of Richard Cromwell ("Tumbledown Dick") to carry such Interregnum "worthies" as Jones and Seys with it which doomed the Republicans. It appeared to be left-wing sectarian, and under it Quakerism was spreading fast enough in the arable lands of the Vale of Glamorgan, around Seys's Boverton, for example, to threaten squirearchical dominance there. The Quakers were hostile to tithes and rents, were then by no means pacifist, and indeed led locally by Roundhead veterans of the New Model Army
. With the Cromwells gone, the Restoration of Charles II appeared to Seys (as to many others of the broad elite) as the only barrier to this threat of expropriation from fanatical populists.
Regionally, the President of the Council of Wales
was the Carmarthen-based Earl of Carbery
, the biggest Welsh Cromwellian turncoat of the lot. Hence, he was probably a man after Seys's own heart, and Carbery certainly provided some insurance along with the more locally focussed Jones that those with his particular CV were relatively secure. Carbery, resident in South Wales and holding the most powerful Welsh office, was a more effective counterweight to the Marquis of Worcester than the time-honoured but absentee Earl of Pembroke, although Pembroke's South Welsh agents sustained his connection: see the 1666–8 land sales.
But as the 1670s got underway, the Roundhead/Dutch threat faded, to be replaced by that of a domestic Catholic coup backed by French arms: the opposite extreme. In Wales, Worcester replaced Carbery as President in 1672. He was, unlike his forebears, a strong and sincere Anglican, but this was not generally believed. Too many of Worcester's immediate family and entourage remained Catholics; one or two close relations were even ecclesiastics. He was a close friend of James, Duke of York, who embodied the lethal combination of heir to the throne and recent Catholic convert out and proud: hence, Worcester was widely, if erroneously, regarded as a crypto-Papist, his conversion to Anglicanism insincere: just a pretext to unite his formidable territorial interest with delegated Government power and command of the Chepstow
garrison. In any case, the acknowledged true Anglicans surrounding him were extreme, keen on persecuting Dissenters while such as Seys wished to reach out to the more moderate of these in – within bounds – a Protestant ecumenicalism. There had been disputes in Glamorgan between high Anglicans and moderates as early as 1661. And Seys, given his record under the Interregnum, could as well have been accused of being a crypto-Dissenter as Worcester was of being a crypto-Catholic. The moderates emphasized the need to consolidate what moderate Protestantism there was in Wales against the allegedly fused perils of Popery and ignorance on one side, and on the other extreme Protestant sectarianism. Anti-Popery in Wales had a specific colouring based on the potential threat from neighbouring Ireland, which could be a springboard for French invasion.
The Welsh Trust was prepared to work with ejected Interregnum ministers to spread the word among the commonalty through preaching and translating edifying tracts into Welsh. They had after all the time and the mobility, unlike parish-bound conforming Anglican parsons. Even bishops such as Thomas of St David's favoured this co-operation. In the 1670s the Trust's known lay backers "read like a roll-call of Worcester's enemies" (Jenkins), and Evan Seys was prominent among them. The Restoration compromise was breaking down. It had depended on fudging a wide spectrum of semi-incompatible opinions. The essence was to let bygones be bygones as encapsulated in the Act of Oblivion of 1660 of which in descending order Carbery, Jones, and Seys were prime local beneficiaries. In the 1670s, however, Worcester regarded everyone who opposed his actions as crypto-Republicans/Dissenters, subversive of the House of Stuart: a tit-for-tat for their perceiving him as crypto-Papist. An ex-Cromwellian such as Seys was particularly easy to fit into his frame. This oversimplification, therefore caricature, gradually approached a self-fulfilling prophecy. The complex local reality came to be dominated over the course of the 1670s by two increasingly opposed and polarized factions. Seys and his like had very understandably never really been trusted by the local true Royalists. This may help explain why, having represented his native Glamorgan,a shire seat, under Richard Cromwell, he moved for the Restoration period to represent the erstwhile Republican/Puritan enclave of Gloucester, a less prestigious borough seat, but in a county where he had built up connections and interests both extensive and rooted. However,by the end of the 1670s such mistrust was overt. The decade culminated in the Popish Plot
and the Exclusion Crisis. In the latter, Seys revamped his earlier role as an opponent of the Court and a member of the Country Party: he was an Exclusionist MP. In response, Worcester, leading the regional Royalist reaction, kicked Seys, despite his impressive legal credentials, off the Glamorgan Bench in 1680.
The 1670s, then, do not show Seys as a knee-jerk opportunist. Had he been so, he would have rushed to join the Worcester faction around 1672. He had his principles, or at least his position. This ex-Cromwellian and Puritan died in c.1685 a conforming Anglican protesting loyalty at least to King Charles II. But he had sympathy for moderate Dissenters among whom he had himself once been numbered and he wanted also to limit royal power. Complementarily, he was firmly anti-Catholic. Thus he ended up, whether he accepted the term or not, as a founder of the Whig Party.
Seys's descendants and wider kin maintained his Whig allegiance in a Tory county until the family left Boverton in the late eighteenth century. The religious tradition was maintained equally. One of his daughters left an endowment of £600 in capital for a weekly sermon at St Illtyd's Church in Llantwit Major
in 1705. But Evan's direct male line ended with the death of his grandson in 1718. The Boverton estate passed to cousins, then out of the family altogether when Jane Seys, born 1750,conveyed it c 1770 to her husband, Robert Jones of Fonmon, interestingly a descendant of the famous Phillip. After her early death,childless, he promptly sold it. The property passed through various hands, the Place was demoted to a farmhouse,and was on the way to ruin in 1861: a condition which was fully attained not long afterwards. Nonetheless, some folk memory of Evan lingered: " a majestic oak in the fold at Boverton" was "still shewn (to visitors) by the
name of 'the sergeant's oak' " in 1830. As Wordsworth had it near the same time re the vanished dwelling place of a much humbler family, "yet the oak is left
That grew beside their door": into the 1830s at least.
Attorney General
In most common law jurisdictions, the attorney general, or attorney-general, is the main legal advisor to the government, and in some jurisdictions he or she may also have executive responsibility for law enforcement or responsibility for public prosecutions.The term is used to refer to any person...
, and subsequently served as a Member of Parliament from 1659 to 1681. From c.1649 until his death he was also consistently important in the politics of his native Glamorgan
Glamorgan
Glamorgan or Glamorganshire is one of the thirteen historic counties and a former administrative county of Wales. It was originally an early medieval kingdom of varying boundaries known as Glywysing until taken over by the Normans as a lordship. Glamorgan is latterly represented by the three...
, and of Gloucestershire
Gloucestershire
Gloucestershire is a county in South West England. The county comprises part of the Cotswold Hills, part of the flat fertile valley of the River Severn, and the entire Forest of Dean....
. He was a committed and active Protestant and an antiquarian scholar to boot.
Origins
Seys was born into a squirearchical family of BovertonBoverton
Boverton is a village located to the east of Llantwit Major in the Vale of Glamorgan in South Wales.Llantwit Major and Boverton are connected by Boverton Road. Boverton was founded during the reign of William the Conqueror. It is thought that he himself founded Boverton as a farming community...
Place in the Vale of Glamorgan
Vale of Glamorgan
The Vale of Glamorgan is a county borough in Wales; an exceptionally rich agricultural area, it lies in the southern part of Glamorgan, South Wales...
. They claimed descent from Bleddyn Ap Maenarch, an eleventh-century lord of Brecon. In the nineteenth century, descendants of the family through a female line were still incorporating the alleged arms of Bleddyn, and perhaps do even now. But it was standard practice for "new" families in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to "discover" a noble ancestor amid the conveniently remote mists of the heroic age. Evan's properly documented forebears are far less romantic and far closer to home: his great-grandfather was Yevan Saisy of Cowbridge. Such a provenance implies that Yevan was a burgess rather than a gentleman who was likely to have been rurally based and, coupled with his surname, the descendant of a fairly recent English incomer: "Sais" is Welsh for "Englishman". Whatever his occupation, status, and antecedents, Yevan was well-off enough to have his son, Roger, educated (where and by whom?) and then legally trained. There may have been other sons equally fortunate given the proliferated Seys cousinhood of Evan's own seventeenth-century day. But back in the Tudor period, the family, recent gentry/nouveaux riches, were rising into the local elite by a shrewd blend of lawyering, marriage and land-buying: Roger's wife brought him the lands on which he built Boverton Place, his son Richard's, Evan's mother, property near Swansea. This blend Evan was to continue on a large scale to considerable effect, adding a prudently mutable infusion of politics to the mix.
Thus the filiation is:
- Yevan Saisy (fl. 1530s/40s)
- Roger (d. 1599) m. Elizabeth Voss
- Richard (c1565-1640) m. Margaret Evans
- Evan m. Margaret (b.1608) the daughter of Robert Bridges of Woodchester (c.1579 - 12 May 1648).
The speech at school
Evan attended Cowbridge SchoolCowbridge Grammar School
Cowbridge Grammar School was one of the best-known schools in Wales until its closure in 1974. It was replaced by a comprehensive school.Founded in the 17th century by Sir John Stradling and refounded by Sir Leoline Jenkins, it had close links with Jesus College, Oxford. The school took both...
and is first heard from, aged 14, formally orating in Latin before an audience of its co-founder, Sir John Stradling, 1st Baronet
Sir John Stradling, 1st Baronet
Sir John Stradling, 1st Baronet , was a British politician.He was born the son of Francis Stradling of St. George, Bristol and adopted by a relative, Sir Edward Stradling. He inherited the family estate at St Donat's on the death of Sir Edward in 1609.Educated at Oxford , he was Sheriff of...
, and his lady, of his own parents quite possibly, plus some distinctly lesser local worthies. This was probably a special occasion to celebrate the school's tenth anniversary rather than the annual speech day familiar in recent times. Nor was Seys likely to have been the head boy: even if the concept is not itself also anachronistic, there were presumably pupils markedly senior to him: he himself was to stay at school until the age of 17, when in 1621 he went up to Christ Church, Oxford
Christ Church, Oxford
Christ Church or house of Christ, and thus sometimes known as The House), is one of the largest constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England...
. Rather, he may well have been chosen as orator because he was virtually the Stradlings' social equal — or at least on the way. Indeed, he was probably the pupil of highest social status. This had been bestowed of course by his own parents, also local potentates, therefore well worth the honour and flattery which the choice of their son accorded them, and which, if present, they could savour at first hand. And young Evan must have been a good scholar to boot. He was however just the upmarket mouthpiece: the actual author of the speech was the master, the Revd Walter Stradling, a poor relation of the founders.
Thus composed and delivered, its tone is, unsurprisingly, sycophantic, but the speech is the main source for the foundation and furbishment of Cowbridge School, and by extension useful evidence for Jacobean grammar schools on a broader plane. Strikingly, Sir John had presented his own, at £10, very expensive copy of the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum is considered to be the first true modern atlas. Written by Abraham Ortelius and originally printed on May 20, 1570, in Antwerp, it consisted of a collection of uniform map sheets and sustaining text bound to form a book for which copper printing plates were specifically...
of the Flemish geographer Ortelius: so Geography as well as Classics was on the curriculum.
The Interregnum, 1649–1660
Come to man's estate (in both senses), Seys enjoyed a long and successful legal and political career, although the latter was not of the first rank: successful in part because he was "flexible" and sure-footed in that era of political tsunamis. He was Recorder of GloucesterGloucester
Gloucester is a city, district and county town of Gloucestershire in the South West region of England. Gloucester lies close to the Welsh border, and on the River Severn, approximately north-east of Bristol, and south-southwest of Birmingham....
in 1649 and a Bencher
Bencher
A bencher or Master of the Bench is a senior member of an Inn of Court in England and Wales. Benchers hold office for life once elected. A bencher can be elected while still a barrister , in recognition of the contribution that the barrister has made to the life of the Inn or to the law...
of Lincoln's Inn
Lincoln's Inn
The Honourable Society of Lincoln's Inn is one of four Inns of Court in London to which barristers of England and Wales belong and where they are called to the Bar. The other three are Middle Temple, Inner Temple and Gray's Inn. Although Lincoln's Inn is able to trace its official records beyond...
in 1652. He went on to hold legal office in Wales under the Protectorate
Protectorate
In history, the term protectorate has two different meanings. In its earliest inception, which has been adopted by modern international law, it is an autonomous territory that is protected diplomatically or militarily against third parties by a stronger state or entity...
and was a member of the committee for governing Glamorgan, in which capacity he examined the charters of its boroughs in the 1650s, possibly with a view to remodelling them to favour his own Cromwellian party. This culminated in his becoming the Attorney General to Oliver Cromwell
Oliver Cromwell
Oliver Cromwell was an English military and political leader who overthrew the English monarchy and temporarily turned England into a republican Commonwealth, and served as Lord Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland....
and serving as MP for Glamorgan during the evanescent rule of Richard Cromwell
Richard Cromwell
At the same time, the officers of the New Model Army became increasingly wary about the government's commitment to the military cause. The fact that Richard Cromwell lacked military credentials grated with men who had fought on the battlefields of the English Civil War to secure their nation's...
in 1659. At Oliver's quasi -royal funeral he was an official mourner.
But this devoted Cromwellian then had a change of heart – or head. The year 1659 also saw him as part of the broad (indeed "rainbow") coalition of "moderates" preparing the restoration of Charles II
Charles II of England
Charles II was monarch of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland.Charles II's father, King Charles I, was executed at Whitehall on 30 January 1649, at the climax of the English Civil War...
. From 1661 to 1681 (namely up to his very last years) he was MP for Gloucester, having smoothly crossed into the Restoration era via the bridge of his new-found Royalism and Loyalism.
Seys prospered materially as well during these politically variegated decades: in 1656 he capitalized on his Gloucestershire connection by acquiring the Manor of Dymock off Sir John Winter, a staunch royalist who had suffered financially because of his convictions. In 1666–8 he bought a substantial slice of the Glamorgan lands worth £12,000 alienated by the Earl of Pembroke
Earl of Pembroke
Earl of Pembroke is a title created ten times, all in the Peerage of England. It was first created in the 12th century by King Stephen of England. The title is associated with Pembroke, Pembrokeshire in West Wales, which is the site of Earldom's original seat Pembroke Castle...
. The Gloucestrian connexion went back to 1638 at least when Evan had married Margaret, daughter of Robert Bridges of Woodchester, who brought him £2,500 (at least £1,000,000 in our money) earmarked to buy land. . Even a bizarre family rift of his youth turned out to his advantage: his eldest brother, Roger, was disinherited for striking his mother and proceeded to compound this and destroy any hopes of rehabilitation by embarking on a career of wildly oscillating religious extremism. Emerging from a Jesuit seminary as a priest in the 1620s, Roger was, by the 1640s, an "itinerant Puritan
Puritan
The Puritans were a significant grouping of English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries. Puritanism in this sense was founded by some Marian exiles from the clergy shortly after the accession of Elizabeth I of England in 1558, as an activist movement within the Church of England...
minister of radical views" (Philip Jenkins
Philip Jenkins
Philip Jenkins is as of 2010 the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Humanities at Pennsylvania State University . He was Professor and a Distinguished Professor of History and Religious studies at the same institution; and also assistant, associate and then full professor of Criminal Justice and...
).
Evan, by contrast, seems essentially to trim to the side of those wielding power, wealth, and authority at any given time: his own parents and Sir John Stradling in his youth – he became the formers' heir in place of the disgraced and extreme Roger –, the Rump Parliament
Rump Parliament
The Rump Parliament is the name of the English Parliament after Colonel Pride purged the Long Parliament on 6 December 1648 of those members hostile to the Grandees' intention to try King Charles I for high treason....
in 1649–53, Lord Protector Cromwell in 1653–8, Richard Cromwell briefly in 1658–9, King Charles II immediately afterwards, and the Earl of Pembroke in 1666–8. His mouthpiece delivery in adolescence of a speech truckling to the local great and good (probably including his own parents) was a harbinger.
His career enjoyed the most worldly success of any seventeenth-century pupils at Cowbridge School, with the striking exception of his junior, Sir Leoline Jenkins (1623/5–1685). Jenkins's was all the more impressive as he was of much humbler origin: the more impressive also as he never wavered from his staunch Royalism and Anglicanism, although he suffered from this materially after the fall of Charles I
Charles I of England
Charles I was King of England, King of Scotland, and King of Ireland from 27 March 1625 until his execution in 1649. Charles engaged in a struggle for power with the Parliament of England, attempting to obtain royal revenue whilst Parliament sought to curb his Royal prerogative which Charles...
in 1646. Much the same can be said of Evan's close kinsman, Richard Seys of Swansea, and a host of fellow Glamorganites of all ranks, while for the radical left, the mid-Walian Vavasor Powell
Vavasor Powell
Vavasor Powell was a Welsh Nonconformist Puritan preacher, evangelist, church leader and writer.-Life:He was born in Knucklas, Radnorshire and was educated at Jesus College, Oxford...
supported the Rump and then the brief Republic of 1649, but was openly and bravely defiant towards the Protectorate and towards the restored monarchy; and this oddly assorted trio could well have endured far worse persecution (Sir John Winter of Gloucester likewise): Cromwellian rule, which got a grip on the country from 1653 after a prolonged stretch marked by intermittent chaos (1646–53), was particularly harsh in obdurately royalist shires like Glamorgan, and Seys was one of its leading agents there. He, conversely, seems to have enjoyed an unbroken run of success in the 1640s, 1650s, and 1660s alike: he could have mentored his younger contemporary the Vicar of Bray.
In the way of political cataclysms, the English Civil War
English Civil War
The English Civil War was a series of armed conflicts and political machinations between Parliamentarians and Royalists...
/Interregnum
Interregnum
An interregnum is a period of discontinuity or "gap" in a government, organization, or social order...
gave opportunities for "new men" to rise: Phillip Jones, the leader of the Roundheads in Glamorgan, was, like many of his followers, from the extreme west of the county:largely hilly and infertile. A gentleman in name only in 1641, with a yeoman's income of £20 a year, he had become by 1658 Comptroller
Comptroller
A comptroller is a management level position responsible for supervising the quality of accounting and financial reporting of an organization.In British government, the Comptroller General or Comptroller and Auditor General is in most countries the external auditor of the budget execution of the...
of Cromwell's household with the title of Phillip, Lord Jones. Like Seys, but even more remarkably, he not only survived the Restoration but flourished under it: was put on the Glamorgan Bench in 1672 – a sure sign of rehabilitation – and died worth c.£1,500 a year in 1673 with a large country house in the Vale at Fonmon.
Seys, his supporter and follower, did not have so far to travel, being already of an affluent gentry family of the Vale, then the key portion of Glamorgan given its rich farmland; nor did he rise so high. Even so, he held positions under the Cromwells – Attorney General for the whole of England and Wales and MP – that his ancestors had never enjoyed under the old regime. His grandfather, Roger, had been Queen's Attorney for Wales under Elizabeth, his father, Richard, had enjoyed the grandiose title of Attorney-General of Glamorgan, an office he duly passed on to Evan in 1636; but these were sectional and, therefore, lesser versions of Attorney General. And like Jones, he consolidated this self-enhancement under the Restoration, remaining an MP for most of Charles II's reign, namely for most the rest of his own life. There was wealth as well as office: his purchase of the Pembroke lands (1666–8), which was probably facilitated on favourable terms because Seys was a member of the moderate party which looked to the Earl for leadership.
Philip Jenkins argues that this moderate party was significant in South Wales throughout the period of the 1640s–80s, although, given the extreme political volatility of that time, naturally mutating over the years. There were two other main factions. First the high/inveterate royalists, regionally headed by the Marquises of Worcester based at Raglan Castle
Raglan Castle
Raglan Castle is a late medieval castle located just north of the village of Raglan in the county of Monmouthshire in south east Wales. The modern castle dates from between the 15th and early 17th-centuries, when the successive ruling families of the Herberts and the Somersets created a luxurious,...
. This party was mainly Anglican but with, damagingly, some Catholics, the most prominent of whom were the first two Marquises themselves. And, at the other extreme, the equally inveterate left-leaning Parliamentarians/Republicans who overlapped in religion with the Sectarians and who either would not accept the Restoration or were not accepted by it.
The core quest of the moderates was for a regime, which in an era when anarchy loomed, could provide firm stable rule fused with the upholding and dissemination of a Protestantism conservative enough to bolster the values/interests of the ruling elite. Thus these moderates were centrists, fearing both mass Protestant sectarianism/anarchy and Roman Catholicism, and in effect, post-Restoration, high Anglicans and Royalists (whether Anglican or Catholic) who supported Absolutism
Absolutism
The term Absolutism may refer to:* Absolute idealism, an ontologically monistic philosophy attributed to G.W.F. Hegel. It is Hegel's account of how being is ultimately comprehensible as an all-inclusive whole...
. However, post-1660 the moderates were themselves practically all Anglicans of some sort, at least outwardly.
How far this moderate model fits into the bloodier and most anarchic years of the Civil War/Interregnum of 1642–53 is questionable. It is hard to know how in these apocalyptic circumstances such a party could have organized itself or many potential members even been aware of each other. And that Seys could at that time be fitted in to such a tendency is even more questionable. There is no evidence yet unearthed of his political sympathies/activities until he comes to light as Recorder of Gloucester in 1649 when he was already 45. Thus he was serving the Rump in the very year of the regicide
Regicide
The broad definition of regicide is the deliberate killing of a monarch, or the person responsible for the killing of a monarch. In a narrower sense, in the British tradition, it refers to the judicial execution of a king after a trial...
, which the Rump had authorized: no "decent interval" for Seys. This hardly fits a moderate mode. Then in 1652 the Rump endorsed him as a Bencher of his Inn. His subsequent seemingly seamless transition to working for the Protectorate (1653–9) may with this background appear as opportunism rather than moderation. A few moderate Anglicans/Royalists in Glamorgan and elsewhere did pragmatically and gingerly serve the Protectorate in the quest for stability: perhaps in South Wales disillusioned by the Catholicism of their erstwhile leaders, the Worcesters. But Seys's CV indelibly marks him as having come to "moderation" from the opposite radical/republican background, at least in his outward subscription. And the scale of his activities, the high office they earned him, rapidly made him a pillar of the regime of both Cromwells. However, the Protectorate did for a few years offer an opportunity to secure the moderates' key objectives. Secondly, Seys's transition from Rump to Protectorate can also be explained by each successive Interregnum regime and the local Republicans/Radicals needing each other very much as mutual props, especially in such Royalist areas as Glamorgan: if they did not hang together, they would hang separately. So anti-Royalists of all shades at the centre and the grassroots had to keep their considerable internal differences within bounds. Thus mere opportunism is too simple an explanation, although the personal aggrandisement of the likes of Jones and Seys strongly implies it was one element.
It was the failure of the last short-lived Republican regime in 1659 which itself had brought about the collapse of the equally short-lived rule of Richard Cromwell ("Tumbledown Dick") to carry such Interregnum "worthies" as Jones and Seys with it which doomed the Republicans. It appeared to be left-wing sectarian, and under it Quakerism was spreading fast enough in the arable lands of the Vale of Glamorgan, around Seys's Boverton, for example, to threaten squirearchical dominance there. The Quakers were hostile to tithes and rents, were then by no means pacifist, and indeed led locally by Roundhead veterans of the New Model Army
New Model Army
The New Model Army of England was formed in 1645 by the Parliamentarians in the English Civil War, and was disbanded in 1660 after the Restoration...
. With the Cromwells gone, the Restoration of Charles II appeared to Seys (as to many others of the broad elite) as the only barrier to this threat of expropriation from fanatical populists.
The Restoration, 1660–1685
The reign of Charles II was also vicissitudinous, but at least avoided the bloody anarchy and destruction of the Civil War. And a moderate party can be more clearly discerned in Glamorgan. Broadly, the interests of ex-Cromwellians (now born again as Anglicans and Royalists: prime examples Seys and Jones) continued to align with those of the true Royalists and of the regime in general throughout the 1660s. The threat to moderation was still thought to come from a possible Roundhead insurrection backed by Dutch arms (England was at war with the Netherlands 1665–7). As for Royalist reciprocation, Seys himself was made secure by a royal pardon in 1662 and was allowed to keep the rank of serjeant at law conferred on him by the Rump. Back home in Glamorgan, he was at some point put on the Commission of the Peace. Thereby he was re-admitted to at least some share in the governance of a county which he and his unpopular and unrepresentative clique had recently sought to dominate. The Bench of Justices was timehonoured in gentry eyes. Ideally it should be broad-based and representative (of themselves). Retrospectively, Seys might well have considered this measure of reintegration with the now predominant true royalists among his fellow gentry more advantageous than spearheading a precarious,provocative, quasi-revolutionary takeover of Glamorgan against its grain. Inclusion of ex-Cromwellites in such a traditional body also furthered the attainment of general as well as personal security.Regionally, the President of the Council of Wales
Council of Wales
See also the Council of Wales and the Marches for the council governing Wales between 1473 and 1689.The Council for Wales and Monmouthshire was an appointed advisory body announced in 1948 and established in 1949 by the UK government under Labour prime minister Clement Attlee, to advise the...
was the Carmarthen-based Earl of Carbery
Earl of Carbery
Earl of Carbery, in the County of Cork, was a title in the Peerage of Ireland. It was created on 5 August 1628 for the Welsh courtier and politician John Vaughan, 1st Baron Vaughan. He had already been created Baron Vaughan, of Mullengar in the County of Westmeath, on 13 July 1621, also in the...
, the biggest Welsh Cromwellian turncoat of the lot. Hence, he was probably a man after Seys's own heart, and Carbery certainly provided some insurance along with the more locally focussed Jones that those with his particular CV were relatively secure. Carbery, resident in South Wales and holding the most powerful Welsh office, was a more effective counterweight to the Marquis of Worcester than the time-honoured but absentee Earl of Pembroke, although Pembroke's South Welsh agents sustained his connection: see the 1666–8 land sales.
But as the 1670s got underway, the Roundhead/Dutch threat faded, to be replaced by that of a domestic Catholic coup backed by French arms: the opposite extreme. In Wales, Worcester replaced Carbery as President in 1672. He was, unlike his forebears, a strong and sincere Anglican, but this was not generally believed. Too many of Worcester's immediate family and entourage remained Catholics; one or two close relations were even ecclesiastics. He was a close friend of James, Duke of York, who embodied the lethal combination of heir to the throne and recent Catholic convert out and proud: hence, Worcester was widely, if erroneously, regarded as a crypto-Papist, his conversion to Anglicanism insincere: just a pretext to unite his formidable territorial interest with delegated Government power and command of the Chepstow
Chepstow
Chepstow is a town in Monmouthshire, Wales, adjoining the border with Gloucestershire, England. It is located on the River Wye, close to its confluence with the River Severn, and close to the western end of the Severn Bridge on the M48 motorway...
garrison. In any case, the acknowledged true Anglicans surrounding him were extreme, keen on persecuting Dissenters while such as Seys wished to reach out to the more moderate of these in – within bounds – a Protestant ecumenicalism. There had been disputes in Glamorgan between high Anglicans and moderates as early as 1661. And Seys, given his record under the Interregnum, could as well have been accused of being a crypto-Dissenter as Worcester was of being a crypto-Catholic. The moderates emphasized the need to consolidate what moderate Protestantism there was in Wales against the allegedly fused perils of Popery and ignorance on one side, and on the other extreme Protestant sectarianism. Anti-Popery in Wales had a specific colouring based on the potential threat from neighbouring Ireland, which could be a springboard for French invasion.
The Welsh Trust was prepared to work with ejected Interregnum ministers to spread the word among the commonalty through preaching and translating edifying tracts into Welsh. They had after all the time and the mobility, unlike parish-bound conforming Anglican parsons. Even bishops such as Thomas of St David's favoured this co-operation. In the 1670s the Trust's known lay backers "read like a roll-call of Worcester's enemies" (Jenkins), and Evan Seys was prominent among them. The Restoration compromise was breaking down. It had depended on fudging a wide spectrum of semi-incompatible opinions. The essence was to let bygones be bygones as encapsulated in the Act of Oblivion of 1660 of which in descending order Carbery, Jones, and Seys were prime local beneficiaries. In the 1670s, however, Worcester regarded everyone who opposed his actions as crypto-Republicans/Dissenters, subversive of the House of Stuart: a tit-for-tat for their perceiving him as crypto-Papist. An ex-Cromwellian such as Seys was particularly easy to fit into his frame. This oversimplification, therefore caricature, gradually approached a self-fulfilling prophecy. The complex local reality came to be dominated over the course of the 1670s by two increasingly opposed and polarized factions. Seys and his like had very understandably never really been trusted by the local true Royalists. This may help explain why, having represented his native Glamorgan,a shire seat, under Richard Cromwell, he moved for the Restoration period to represent the erstwhile Republican/Puritan enclave of Gloucester, a less prestigious borough seat, but in a county where he had built up connections and interests both extensive and rooted. However,by the end of the 1670s such mistrust was overt. The decade culminated in the Popish Plot
Popish Plot
The Popish Plot was a fictitious conspiracy concocted by Titus Oates that gripped England, Wales and Scotland in Anti-Catholic hysteria between 1678 and 1681. Oates alleged that there existed an extensive Catholic conspiracy to assassinate Charles II, accusations that led to the execution of at...
and the Exclusion Crisis. In the latter, Seys revamped his earlier role as an opponent of the Court and a member of the Country Party: he was an Exclusionist MP. In response, Worcester, leading the regional Royalist reaction, kicked Seys, despite his impressive legal credentials, off the Glamorgan Bench in 1680.
The 1670s, then, do not show Seys as a knee-jerk opportunist. Had he been so, he would have rushed to join the Worcester faction around 1672. He had his principles, or at least his position. This ex-Cromwellian and Puritan died in c.1685 a conforming Anglican protesting loyalty at least to King Charles II. But he had sympathy for moderate Dissenters among whom he had himself once been numbered and he wanted also to limit royal power. Complementarily, he was firmly anti-Catholic. Thus he ended up, whether he accepted the term or not, as a founder of the Whig Party.
The Political Career: A Summary
Seys reached his zenith under The Protectorate: considerable local then regional power was his springboard to national prominence. To be slightly anachronistic, he was as Attorney-General a member of Oliver's cabinet: in the inside set of the insiders. He weathered the Restoration well, but was never again admitted to the national engine-room. As an MP he was immediately edged out of his native Glamorgan which he had recently taken a big hand in ruling. The "reconciled" Cromwellians gradually faded, symbolised in South Wales by the replacement of Carbery in 1672 and the death of Jones in 1673. And a "royalist reaction" gathered force. Seys's age could not have helped: in 1670 he turned 66; quite a tally when many members even of the elite topped by Charles II and Cromwell themselves expired (well) short of sixty. So he faced the Worcesterian onslaught of the 1670s as an old, then as a very old man: in 1680 when Worcester sacked him, he turned 76: frankly, he should have been dead. That he was not only alive, but also still fighting his corner in Parliament, is a tribute to his physical stamina and to his tenacity. But, by then, even political players in their early fifties were young enough to be his sons. Was he, as a compromised survivor from the regicide past, an embarrassment to younger members of his own side and an easy target for their opponents, in the manner of former keen supporters of Fascist and Communist regimes around 1980? Certainly as a backer of the Welsh Trust and perceived enemy of Worcester, and then as an Exclusionist, he was marked out as an oppositionist, both regionally and nationally. Perhaps he was chivvied into opposition: his purging from the Bench while/because he was an Exclusionist MP bathed his position in the most glaring clarity. Chiaroscuro may well have been his shade of preference enabling him to cling on to at least some official power: he did not resign from his Glamorgan magistracy. Hence in 1658 he was prominent in a precarious Establishment; in 1681 he was still prominent, but in opposition to the restored Court: rather more precarious. In a superficial paradox, Seys "adapted" far better to the Restoration in the 1660s than in the 1670s when he might have expected to have been ever more deeply embedded into the current Establishment as time helped the memories of the interregnum to fade. Conversely, he retained property and concomitant "interest" in at least two shires, a seat in Parliament thereby, and until 1680 one on the Glamorgan bench. He remained the reverse of disinherited, disgraced, exiled and forgotten — let alone executed; fates which, variously or in combination, had befallen quite a few of his old Cromwellian comrades. And the future lay with the Whigs. Seys himself, however, may not have enjoyed such prescience: in the year of his death this future was still very effectively occluded.Seys the scholar
Seys, like many educated and intelligent gentlemen of his day, was also a noted antiquarian with probably a big library at Boverton Place, so some of his wealth was diverted to scholarly interests. The British Archaeological Association is currently (July 2010) posting on its website a book full of medieval charters and the like which once belonged to him. The books provided by his Stradling neighbours for Cowbridge School set him off on a scholarly trajectory which was not simply exploited for self-aggrandisement.Family, will, and death
In his own will signed on 7 July 1682 (with a codicil dated 10 August 1684), Seys made proper provision for his daughters Margaret and Elizabeth (who appear to be still unmarried in middle age), and his heir was his son Richard. There is no reference to his wife, the former Miss Margaret Bridges who died 14 January 1651. The will breathes strikingly Protestant sentiment which must reflect his own beliefs rather than mere convention, because, as befitted a distinguished lawyer, he drew the document up himself in his own hand. His great age for the period meant he died within months of two much younger contemporaries with whom his life had intersected: King Charles II himself, and Sir Leoline Jenkins, although Jenkins survived until 1 September 1685, and he was on hand at the proving of the will on 23 February 1684/5. Jenkins and Seys were both politicized lawyers from the Vale of Glamorgan who had gone to the same school and subsequently done extremely well for themselves reaching what, shortly after their day, was to be termed the cabinet, although the younger man displayed more consistency of principle.Seys's descendants and wider kin maintained his Whig allegiance in a Tory county until the family left Boverton in the late eighteenth century. The religious tradition was maintained equally. One of his daughters left an endowment of £600 in capital for a weekly sermon at St Illtyd's Church in Llantwit Major
Llantwit Major
Llantwit Major is a small coastal town and community in the Vale of Glamorgan, Wales, lying on the Bristol Channel coast. A small stream, the Afon Col-huw, runs through the town.-Local government:...
in 1705. But Evan's direct male line ended with the death of his grandson in 1718. The Boverton estate passed to cousins, then out of the family altogether when Jane Seys, born 1750,conveyed it c 1770 to her husband, Robert Jones of Fonmon, interestingly a descendant of the famous Phillip. After her early death,childless, he promptly sold it. The property passed through various hands, the Place was demoted to a farmhouse,and was on the way to ruin in 1861: a condition which was fully attained not long afterwards. Nonetheless, some folk memory of Evan lingered: " a majestic oak in the fold at Boverton" was "still shewn (to visitors) by the
name of 'the sergeant's oak' " in 1830. As Wordsworth had it near the same time re the vanished dwelling place of a much humbler family, "yet the oak is left
That grew beside their door": into the 1830s at least.