17 Morgan's Annus Horribilis

Part One:

The Morgan Family’s ‘Annus Horribilis’ 1831

The General Election of July - August 1830 triggered by the death of George IV on 26th June came and went in Monmouthshire with little fuss. As per usual, there was no contest. Since the 1680s, elections had only been held in 1722 and 1771 for the two shire seats. And since 1715, the Monmouth Boroughs seat (representing Monmouth, Usk and Newport) had been contested only once and that was in 1820.

In the 1780s, Sir Charles Morgan’s father abandoned the family’s longstanding Whig loyalties and joined forces with the Tory Duke of Beaufort. That pact was placed in jeopardy in 1820, when Thomas Prothero, the Tredegar estate agent (since 1807), nominated the Whig candidate, John Hodder Moggridge (Woodfield estate) for the Monmouth Boroughs seat.

Prothero was playing a devious game. He undoubtedly upset the Beauforts, but due to Moggridge’s failure to revive Whig fortunes, he got away with it. Prothero had dissuaded Moggridge from his original intention to challenge Sir Charles for his Shire seat. Sir Charles was grateful for his agent’s apparent adroitness. He was even more pleased with how, following that election, his agent dealt with the firebrand radical, John Frost. Six months spent in Cold Bath gaol, served for criminal libel against Prothero, had removed Frost from Newport Borough politics.

Ten years later, all appeared calm. In the elections of 1826 and 1830, Sir Charles Morgan of Tredegar Park and Lord Somerset, son and heir of the Duke of Beaufort, were returned without opposition for the two Shire seats and the Duke’s younger son, the Marquis of Worcester was similarly returned for the Monmouth Boroughs seat. The Tories held their ground throughout the country, winning more seats than the Whigs.

However, divisions amongst the Tories caused Wellington to resign as Prime Minister in November and Earl Grey, the leading Whig politician, formed a government. He immediately announced his intention to introduce a bill for electoral reform, which was an issue that most Tories did not favour. The Beauforts were militantly opposed to the Bill, when it was introduced to the House of Commons on 1st March 1831. Sir Charles Morgan too, was inclined to follow their lead.

Prothero recognised that public opinion was moving fast. On Sir Charles’ instructions he had called a public meeting to debate law and order, only to find his agenda hijacked by Frost demanding ‘Reform’. Prothero shrewdly advised Sir Charles Morgan to vote for the Bill at its second reading on 22 March 1831.

At the same time in France....

In July 1830, revolution toppled the Bourbon monarchy that had been restored in 1815 when Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo. The news of Parisians taking to the streets demanding more than just a change of King, sent shock waves across Europe - families like the Morgans, their retainers and supporters felt threatened. Across a continent enveloped in economic depression, others felt energised, even thrilled, there was a willingness to imitate....

Large numbers of distressed Britons had endured a period of continuous wage deflation that had lasted since 1812-15. With growing personal debt and living in a time of bad harvests, not surprisingly people objected to high prices and direct taxes on essential goods of all kinds. There was a restlessness in both town and country, amongst the middling as well as the working classes.

During the 1830-31 winter, ‘Captain Swing’ stalked rural southern England and unemployed agricultural labourers wrecked threshing machine and burned ricks. Britain was experiencing the second of two very severe winters in a row and the summer between the two winters had been very wet, with below average temperature figures.

That December Sir Charles Morgan called a public meeting, to discuss the threat of ‘incendiarism’. It was organised at the King’s Head, Newport by his land agent, Thomas Prothero. To their dismay, the middle class audience in attendance was more concerned about the burden of taxation, which the townsmen discussed at a subsequent meeting that same month. On both occasions John Frost raised the need for Parliament to put its house in order and deal with corruption. He had touched a raw nerve. Throughout the land, discontent was feeding support for Lord Grey’s Reform Bill.

Frost was clearly successfully voicing popular opinion. By February 1831, he was joined on the ‘Reform’ campaign platform by Thomas Phillips, attorney and the junior legal partner of Thomas Prothero. Phillips would never have publicly acted in this way, without encouragement from his senior partner. Prothero was signalling to his employer, Sir Charles, the need to rethink their opposition to Parliamentary Reform. Prothero, like his master, had previously opposed a widening of the franchise and Phillips had shown no enthusiasm. Prothero could see that the political landscape was changing, but Sir Charles was still abiding by the political arrangements that his father Charles Gould had brokered with Beaufort, nearly fifty years previously, well before he inherited the Tredegar estates in 1792.

Monmouthshire Elections were normally sorted out informally by a cabal of major landowners, assisted by their land agents. Neither shire nor borough was truly an electorate, both were small ‘selectorates’ that, since the death of John Hanbury (Pontypool House) in 1784, danced to the tune of the Beaufort and Morgan families. Since the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 they had vied for hegemony in Monmouthshire.

The Somersets, descendants of the Raglan Herberts, were Tories, who used their influence at court to gain from Charles II the revival of the Dukedom of Beaufort in 1682. The Duke lived at Badminton House in Gloucestershire, possessed lands that stretched from Wiltshire to Monmouthshire and Breconshire, and operating as lords of Monmouth and Usk, from Troy House, near Monmouth, used their seigneurial power to keep these two boroughs under their thumb. The Somerset family boasted descent from John of Gaunt, son of Edward the Third. Flaunting their royal blue blood, they paraded their superiority over the Morgans, despising their Welsh princely ancestry, and claiming prime place in the affairs of Monmouthshire.

Originally the Morgans were Whigs. Their landholdings totalled over 40,000 acres in western Monmouthshire, Breconshire and in Glamorgan between the Rhymney and the borough of Cardiff. In 1724, Sir William Morgan of Tredegar boosted the family’s social ranking when he married Lady Rachel Cavendish. Although he died prematurely at the age of 31; his widow exercised considerable political influence as a daughter of the Duke of Devonshire, the leading Whig grandee in England. For a period of fifty years, the Morgans joined forces with John Hanbury of Pontypool to hold both shire seats for the Whig cause, whilst the Tory Duke of Beaufort controlled the Borough seat.

The accession of George III (1760-1820) swung the political pendulum back to the Tories and Sir Charles’ father, known then as Charles Gould, was well known at court, serving as a Judge Advocate. Married (1758) to Jane Morgan, eldest daughter of Thomas Morgan, he became M.P. for Brecon 1778–87 and Breconshire 1787–1806.

In the 1780s, Charles Gould, shifted the family’s allegiance from its Whig roots to Toryism. With the deaths of Lady Rachel (1780) and John Hanbury (1784), Whiggism withered in Monmouthshire and the Beaufort family re-entered Shire politics. This is a piece of history that must have loomed large in the political calculations of Prothero.

Sir Charles was aware that Gould needed Beaufort’s support for a royal licence, permitting him to adopt the Morgan name and coat of arms at the death of his brother-in-law. This was prearranged with his brother-in-law, John Morgan, who died in 1792, leaving Rhiwperra and Tredegar estates to Sir Charles Gould Morgan, a baronet.

The deal he struck with Beaufort ensured that the Morgans continued to hold the county seat that they had held since the 1680s. It was also agreed that Beaufort would support Morgan control of both the Brecon Borough and the Breconshire seats. In return, he acknowledged that the Beauforts were the senior partners, controlling two of the three available Parliamentary seats.

This pact was reaffirmed by his son, Sir Charles Morgan, when inheriting his father’s estates in 1807. Nifty footwork and forward planning had saved the Morgan family from an existential crisis caused by lack of male heirs. The Morgans could no longer claim Welsh lineage through the male line. In 1839 and onwards, Sir Charles and his youngest son, Octavius, reinvented that ‘lost’ Celtic past to bolster the family’s claims to land, social status and political power.

Who Voted? It is estimated that across England and Wales, the voters numbered less than 1 in 10 of all adult men (over 21). The proportion of adult men eligible to vote in Monmouthshire was undoubtedly much lower than this. The coalfield parishes of western Monmouthshire together with the port of Newport, had the fastest growing population in mainland Britain. This mining, iron manufacturing and port workforce constituted a demographic group, socially and economically aspirational, capable of creating mutual organisations and erecting chapels, but rarely eligible to vote and not in possession of any political representation. Consequently by the 1830s, these burgeoning communities posed a threat to the political status quo.

The electorate for the Shire seats was restricted to the landholding gentry, clergy, freeholders and copyholders. The largest body of Sir Charles Morgan’s farm tenants were leasehold tenant farmers, and unless they had some freehold land, they were not eligible to vote. A consequence of the 1832 Reform Act was their enfranchisement. That decision of Parliament deliberately provided the Tredegar estate with a voting block of loyal retainers. Their presence on the electoral roll was intended to strengthen the political voice of landed society. Unexpectedly, it inclined the Morgan family to indulge this agricultural lobby at the expense of other economic interests in the 1830s and 1840s. Unlike Bute at Cardiff, no Morgan invested heavily in floating dock facilities at Newport and in 1846 Octavius Morgan MP voted against Peel and the abolition of the Corn Laws.

The Borough election of 1820 showed that voting eligibility was far from clear and removal of voters, all of whom were men, from the poll book, resulted from challenges made by both political factions A lack of electoral practice for over a century meant that a mere 90 votes, 71 of them cast in the boroughs of Monmouth and Usk for the Tory Earl of Worcester, was sufficient to see off the Whig challenger, John Hodder Moggridge who scraped 40 votes, half in Newport where he won 20-19 and half at Monmouth, with none at Usk where all 40 votes cast were taken by Worcester. The traditional ‘Open Voting’ system, recording votes in a poll book, bred intimidation and corruption. Secret voting did not exist before 1872.

Moggridge was the victim of ‘Borough mongering’. At the last borough election, more than a century previously in 1715, a total of 1,972 votes had been cast. Over those years, officers of the Beaufort estate closed the corporations, making admission to the freedom of both boroughs solely by election. This meant they successfully reduced the combined electorate of 2,166 registered in 1715 to 250 by 1831.

It was not Moggridge’s wish to stand in this Borough election, but Prothero convinced him that he had a better chance of beating Worcester than winning a Shire seat. Deftly, Prothero had saved his master’s Parliamentary seat.

He had also shown that the Beaufort brand had an Achilles heel - the borough of Newport, where the Marquis had narrowly lost in 1820. Worcester won the seat with his vote in Monmouth and Usk.

On 22nd March, Grey’s Reform Bill passed its second reading by one vote. Sir Charles Morgan had voted in favour. This angered his Tory Beaufort allies, who pressed him to support a ‘wrecking’ amendment during the Bill’s committee stage. This defeat set in motion a procedural motion dissolving Parliament for an election that took place between May 28 to June 10th 1831.

This election gave Prothero the opportunity to prove his point that the Beauforts were no longer in the driving seat. However, events did not entirely pan out as he planned.

Sir Charles had pleased nobody. Prothero recognised that given the current public mood, the Whig bandwagon might prove unstoppable. Looking after his own interests as always, he made sure that there was only one Whig candidate for the county seats and counselled Sir Charles to withdraw his candidacy.

Morgan family members and their Tredegar Estate retainers were shaken to the core. Sir Charles Morgan had surrendered to the Whigs, the county Parliamentary seat that his family had represented since the 1680s. He had taken this decision on the advice of Prothero, who was suggesting that now he was over 70, it would be wise to retire and avoid a bruising, expensive contest. His sons were needed to defend the family political interests in the two seats at Brecon and its county. His sacrifice ensured the return of his fellow Tory, Lord Somerset, but it also ensured the election of the Whig, William Adams Williams of Llangibbby Castle.

In the midst of the Borough contest, Sir Charles came under pressure from the Beaufort camp to act. Sir Charles sacked Prothero, who had been his agent since 1807.

29th April - Frost came to the Rescue of the Marquis of Worcester who arrived at the King’s Head, parading as a ‘hero of Waterloo’. An angry crowd barred his way, keen to bundle him into the river Usk. Frost, whose drapery business was on the opposite side of the High Street from the inn, fearlessly rushed in front of the Marquis and appealed for calm allowing Worcester and his entourage to beat a hasty retreat back across the bridge to Usk.

Consequently, as never before, the way the Newport electors voted was determined by the ‘crowd’, rather than the landlords. Prothero used his position as Town Clerk to selectively create freemen and add them to the electoral roll. Those without a vote observed the voters intently and read the poll books. They took their trade away from shopkeepers and business people who supported Worcester. They practiced ’exclusive dealing’, refusing to deal with the likes of Thomas Jones Phillips, attorney and corn dealer, political agent of the Marquis.

Thomas Phillips (legal partner of Prothero) was agent for Benjamin Hall, the Whig candidate. For the first time, the Newport vote determined who was elected the MP for the Monmouth Borough’s seat. Hall won narrowly by 168 to 149 votes, with 140 of his votes cast at Newport. The Tories won the vote in Monmouth and Usk, but not in Newport. There, John Frost and his supporters held sway in the streets and Thomas Prothero fixed the votes.

A few days after the result was announced at Monmouth, Hall was given a triumphal entry into Newport, where it was said 10,000 supporters from far and wide assembled to greet him with cannon fire and the ringing of church bells. With traditional civic honour, the horses were removed from his carriage and he was physically drawn by men through the streets, decorated with flowers and bunting in the crimson colours of his party. Many present would have remembered how a decade earlier, Frost had received a similar hero’s welcome from the Newport people, on his return from six months incarceration in Cold Bath Fields prison, served for a criminal libel action brought against him by Thomas Prothero. On this occasion, Prothero was in the chair at the dinner held in honour of Benjamin Hall at the hitherto Tory HQ, the King’s Head Inn. Amongst the people he toasted during proceedings was John Frost. Prothero must have gritted his teeth. Frost and his supporters had not only taken charge of the streets again, he had entered the citadel and sat at the dinner table.

In this period, Frost consolidated his political position by setting up the Patriotic Society, with himself as secretary. He sought to broaden the debate, supporting local issues of concern that differentiated himself from Prothero and Phillips, and which he hoped would be adopted by the new MPs - For as well as Hall, William Adams Williams (Whig) had been returned unopposed as replacement for the Shire seat that Sir Charles Morgan had resigned.

Prothero’s ‘borough mongering’ was challenged in the courts by the Beaufort agent at Newport, Thomas Jones Phillips. The success of his legal objections meant Hall was unseated later that year and the Marquis was restored as MP.

Hall had to wait until December 1832 when the first General Election was called using the rules laid down by the 1832 Reform Act. He was then returned as MP by 393 to 355 votes:

Hall Worcester

Monmouth 94 179

Newport 289 86

Usk 10 90

The Beauforts never contested the Monmouth boroughs seat again and it remained Whig until 1852.

Sir Charles Morgan and his family faced an existential crisis. For the Morgans, the elections of 1831 and 1832 proved to be a family catastrophe. Not only did Sir Charles forfeit his parliamentary seat, both his elder sons, Charles Robinson and George, were voted out in both the Brecon Borough and the Breconshire seats. And for a decade, no Morgan nor family appointee sat in Parliament as a Monmouthshire M.P.

Sir Charles Morgan could hear the tumbrils rolling. He was right to worry; an era of social unrest and protest had begun. Mass discontent and unrest lasted into the ‘Hungry Forties’, dominated by the spectre of Chartism in Britain, culminating 1848-51 with revolutions throughout continental Europe.

And nobody could see where it might end. Constitutional ‘Reform’ had opened the door not only to a period of rumbustious borough electioneering, but also riotous protest. In 1831, the most serious disturbance occurred at the beginning of June in Merthyr Tydfil, during the General Election. Late October, during the Bristol disturbances, the authorities were fearful of further outbreaks in south Wales, including Newport.

Part 2 in the next edition will explore the Morgans’ ‘existential crisis’ further.