ANCESTRY OF ?MARGARETTA PRICHARD (est 1650 –?1728)

The family of MORRIS BOWEN was part of the Carmarthenshire ancestry of of his great-granddaughter, ELIZABETH ferch THOMAS ap RHYS of Ravensdale. Included are two important families of gentry and officials who were well known from the 13th century on.

OWAIN’S younger brother Thomas was escheator for Cardiganshire between 1438 and 1450, and he succeeded his father as deputy Chamberlain in 1454 and as leaseholder of Dinefwr in 1460. The two brothers gave strong support to Jasper Tudor, who had been created earl of Pembroke, but their side was defeated at Mortimer’s Cross in 1461, where the Yorkist opposition included their cousin John DWNN. After being captured at Carreg Cennen castle they had to make terms with Sir Roger VAUGHAN II and Sir Richard Herbert. Thomas regained possession of Dinefwr, which he held until 1465, but his Lancastrian sympathies caused him to be excluded from all offices thereafter until his death in 1474.

All of Elizabeth’s estate descended to their son Rhys ap Thomas (Griffiths, Sir Rhys, pp.16,61). Francis Jones says that their descendants at Abermarlais took the name Jones, and much later Sir Henry Jones’s heiress married Sir Francis Cornwallis in 1665 (Hist Carms Homes, p.4). An interesting aside for the LEIGH family is that a daughter of this marriage, Frances Cornwallis, became the second wife of Sir Charles LLOYD, the son of BRIDGETT LEIGH and Sir Francis LLOYD of Maesyfelin.

Thomas ap GRUFFUDD’S son Rhys ap Thomas was generally considered the greatest supporter of Henry Tudor at Bosworth, and was rewarded with a knighthood. He had a remarkable career. After Henry VII made his eldest son Arthur the Prince of Wales, he sent the boy to Ludlow castle under Sir Rhys’s guardianship. Rhys recovered the Dinefwr estates, which his descendants continued to hold apart from a few breaks (their mansion stands near the ruins of Dinefwr castle).
 

I-94.MORRIS BOWEN and II-95.JANE LEWIS

The rewards extended by Henry VII to Sir Rhys ap Thomas also extended to Rhys’s cousin MORRIS BOWEN, who was made steward of the lordship of Kidwelly and receiver in two Carmarthenshire commotes. MORRIS’S marriage to JANE LEWIS of Monmouthshire brought four sons: John who inherited Bryn-y-beirdd, Rhys who married the heiress of Llechdwni near Kidwelly, Thomas who inherited Upton castle through his grandmother’s family, the MALEPHANTS, and another Thomas who built a gentry house at Fishweir in Glamorgan which still exists (Glamorgan Farmhouse and Cottages). Their daughter JANE BOWEN, of course, married HUGH VAUGHAN, as we shall see.
 

Our male ancestors in this pedigree made profitable marriages. Just as JANE LEWIS and JANE BOWEN brought distinguished relatives to their husbands, so did the earlier wife of GRUFFUDD ap NICHOLAS. We turn next to the family of MABLI DWNN (also spelled Don).

Pedigree of the DWNN family of Kidwell

I-1508.HENRY DWNN and family of Kidwelly

GRUFFUDD was the first of the family to whom the epithet Dwn, meaning dusky or dark, was applied. For his children it became the surname Dwnn or Don, and they provide a very early example of a Welsh family adopting a fixed surname.  The Herald Frances Jones tells us that the DWNN family lived at Penallt (head of the hillside) near Kidwelly in the south west of Carmarthenshire, where GRUFFUDD DWNN witnessed charters between 1340 and 1358. He led 350 Welshmen in the retinue of the earl of Lancaster in the 1340s. The family also held Croesallgwn, from where GRUFFUDD made a gift of lands to Carmarthen priory in 1364 (Historic Carmarthenshire Homes, pp.44, 145). The family bore arms Azure, a wolf salient Argent (on a blue shield a silver wolf leaping).

GRUFFUDD’S son HENRY DWNN served under John of Gaunt in France in 1369, and became Gaunt’s steward or chief officer of the lordship of Kidwelly in 1388-9. HENRY also served in Ireland with Richard II in 1394-5. Nevertheless, he became a very prominent supporter of the rebellion of Owain Glyn Dwr, and led the attacks on Dinefwr and Kidwelly castles in 1403, for which he was outlawed and fined 400 marks. The chief historian of the Glyn Dwr revolt has summarized HENRY’S audacious support for the revolt and his amazing resilience and survival instinct, with the result that his lands were restored to him in 1413 in return for a very large fine of £200, which he managed never to pay. R.R. Davies makes clear that HENRY DWNN was simply serving well his own interests and desires, and he was certainly not unique in this high-handed use of his power, which was doubtless replicated throughout Wales. This long quotation gives us a striking picture of the man:

By 1403...Henry Don donned the mantle of leadership in revolt as naturally and unquestioningly as he had done so in peace. In early June and again on 13 August 1403 Henry Don—now a man well advanced in late middle age—and his son led ‘all the Welsh’ of the commotes of Cydweli and Carnwyllion in an attack on Kidwelly Castle in which several of its defenders were killed: late in September another major attack on the Castle was anticipated.... Don had shown that he had lost none of his military appetite even if he was now directing his attacks against the English whom he had once served; nor had he lost his eye for the profits of war, for among his trophies was a ship he had captured from a Llansteffan merchant in the port at Carmarthen. Once he had opted for the Welsh cause, Henry Don remained remarkably steadfast to it. Owain Glyn Dwr counted him as a confidant and a most effective lieutenant.... Don in turn paid a heavy price for his commitment: his lands were formally forfeited in 1407 and the title to them was granted to... the English constable of Kidwelly; Don himself spent spells in prison at Kidwelly and Gloucester, and was only eventually pardoned in May 1413 in return for a fine of 200 pounds, one of the very largest recorded for a former rebel.

In fact the fine was never paid and was eventually cancelled in February 1445. Nor had Henry Don been in any way chastened by the events of the last few years. He was as defiant as ever, even sheltering a fugitive rebel in his household as late as 1413. He lorded it over the area as masterfully as he had done for the last forty years and allowed no sense of contrition for his role as a rebel to cramp his style or his activities. Perhaps nothing expressed more vividly the view that for him the Welsh rebellion was no more than a formal change of the regime under which he exercised his power in his country than the outrageous fact, from the government’s point of view, that he now exacted fines from over 200 local Welshmen who had failed to follow him in his revolt and had dared to occupy his lands during the uprising! The brazen audacity of such an act beggars belief, but it is a measure of the degree to which effective social power—before, during, and after the revolt—lay in the hands of local potentates. It was only death which could loosen the grip of those hands; it did so for Henry Don in November 1416. (R.R.Davies, Glyn Dwr, p.200).

While this characterization of HENRY DWNN may not be appealing and uplifting, it is a realistic view of an ancestor demanding money, seizing lands, and evicting tenants, because he was living in a period with much harsher social and political conditions than our own, and a time when the law was not being enforced effectively. Though self-serving and grasping, it was also HENRY’S way of protesting, and R.R. Davies seems to express a kind of respect for his unbreakable “defiance,” because “it was only death, sometime during 1416, which exacted an eventual surrender from Henry Don” (p.313).

HENRY’S son MAREDUDD is much less well known than his father and may have died as a young man. He is known primarily through his daughter MABLI DWNN, who married GRUFFUDD ap NICHOLAS, and his two sons Owain and Gruffudd. R.R. Davies contrasts the two brothers to their grandfather after the failure of the Glyn Dwr revolt as they began ”clambering their way back to favour and power” (Glyn Dwr, p.313). Others may see them as no different from their grandfather who had also fought for the king as a younger man and was restored to power in 1413, but was then too close to the end of his life, and too powerful, to bother about ‘favour’. They were all representative of their times, and there were plenty of similar examples.
 

The other daughter Jenet Dwnn inherited Mudlescwm and married the attorney Trahaearn MORGAN, the son of MORGAN ap JENKIN of Pencoed castle in Monmouthshire in our LEWIS line. This Trahaearn was the son of MORGAN’S second wife, Margaret, daughter of Sir David Mathew, not our ancestor. Interestingly, Trahaearn was not a Yorkist, and had passed messages between Sir Rhys ap Thomas of Dinefwr and Henry Tudor (later Henry VII) during Henry’s semi-captivity in Brittany (Evans p.128, Griffiths, Sir Rhys, pp.38-40). The granddaughter of Jenet and Trahaearn, Catherine Morgan, married John Vaughan of Golden Grove, who was ELEN VAUGHAN’S brother.

MABLI’S eldest brother Gruffudd DWNN had been present with his grandfather at the siege of Kidwelly castle but had been pardoned in 1413, though he and his brother Owain still had not paid the fine in 1439, and they secured its cancellation five years later.  He had redeemed the family honor in English eyes by his distinguished war record as a man-at-arms at Agincourt in 1415 and as a lieutenant up to 1443, including his action in 1440 which led to the capture of Harfleur (Griffiths, Principality, p.201; Evans p.32).  He acquired lands in France and traded with that country, importing Gascon wines into Carmarthen.  He married an English woman, Joan Scudamore, when it became legal for a mixed marriage of Welsh and English.  Interestingly, Joan was not wholly English, as her mother Alice was the daughter of Owain Glyn Dwr (Jones, Historic Carms Homes, p.145).

The Penal Laws introduced at the time of Owain Glyn Dwr, as we said earlier, imposed severe restrictions on Welshmen, but the English soon began to realize it was unwise to withhold citizenship from men of influence in their locality, such as Gruffudd DWNN and his brother-in-law GRUFFUDD ap NICHOLAS, who otherwise could foster law and order. Therefore, by 1421, the DWNN brothers were allowed to petition Parliament for letters of denizenship which granted them the free liberties of a royal subject. Subsequently Gruffudd DWNN was awarded many offices under the crown, becoming sheriff of Carmarthen in 1426, receiver of Kidwelly and Constable of Kidwelly castle, and deputy to his father-in-law Sir John Scudamore as Constable of Carmarthen castle.

Gruffudd DWNN had four sons, all of whom fought with him in France. As a Yorkist his son Robert was a servant of Edward IV, and in 1471 was appointed Constable of Cardigan castle for life. Gruffudd’s younger son John DWNN became the most widely known and most distinguished member of the DWNN family. Griffiths has summarized his very successful career (Principality, pp.187-8, 203,277). He fought for the future Edward IV at Mortimer’s Cross in 1461, and was rewarded by being appointed Constable of Carmarthen and Aberystwyth castles, and in that capacity he defeated an uprising with the help of Sir Roger VAUGHAN of Tretower. He was an itinerant judge in three Welsh lordships, and among the other offices he held was the position of deputy Chamberlain of south Wales in 1474-5. In London, as an Usher of the Chamber in 1461-5 he was made sergeant of the armory of the Tower, and he was an Esquire of the Body from 1465 to 1469 and a councilor of Edward IV from 1477. By 1466 his wife Elizabeth, the daughter of Lord Hastings, had become one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting. When the earl of Warwick and the king’s brother the duke of Clarence were plotting against Edward in 1470, the king sent John DWNN with letters to tell them to come to him and to disband. The duke and the earl told DWNN that they would come to the king with a thousand men, but DWNN observed that they were not travelling in the direction of the king (Camden Miscellany, I, 10-12, No.39, as cited by Evans p.113). This led to Warwick being proclaimed as a traitor, as we have seen, and to the battle of Tewkesbury where DWNN was knighted on the field of battle.

In 1472-3, Sir John conducted negotiations for Edward IV at the French and Burgundian courts, and helped to arrange the marriage of Edward’s sister to Charles the Bold of Burgundy in 1468. While living in Calais he commissioned the Flemish painter Hans Memling to paint a triptych altarpiece with Sir John and his family in the central panel. It hangs in the National Gallery in London, called the Donne Triptych. The earliest known portrait of a Welshman, it shows the couple kneeling in front of the Virgin and Child, with the name saints John the Baptist and John the Evangelist in the side panels. The couple are identified by their heraldic arms, and they wear Yorkist collars of roses and suns with Edward IV’s pendant the lion of March.

Sir John was respected enough that he could still keep his offices given by Yorkist patronage after the final Lancastrian victory of the Wars of the Roses. He made peace with Henry VII, who in 1487 described him as “our trusty and well-beloved councilor” when he went on embassy to France. His prominent position also enabled him to build a substantial landed interest in England and Wales. He died in 1503 and was buried in St George’s Chapel, Windsor castle (Griffiths, Principality, pp.187-8).

Now we turn from the DWNN family back to MORRIS BOWEN’S daughter JANE and her husband HUGH VAUGHAN with their descendants, especially our ancestor ELEN VAUGHAN.

Pedigree of I-23. ELEN VAUGHAN

II-46.HUGH VAUGHAN and JANE BOWEN with their line at Golden Grove

HUGH had been made forester of the lordship of Kidwelly in 1485, and in 1500/1 his father-in-law MORRIS answered in the accounts of the lordship of Kidwelly for the sum of 15 shillings for “a certain custom of the Forest of Kevengorath which had been demised to Hugh Vachan” (Vaughan archive in the Cawdor Collection at Carmarthen Record Office, quoted by Jones in “The Vaughans” p.99). He appeared in the records of the Court of Star Chamber after 1509. By 1532 he was Groom of the Chamber to Henry VIII, and in the same year he was appointed keeper and receiver of Kidwelly and other lands forfeited from Rhys ap Gruffudd, grandson of Sir Rhys ap Thomas, who had been executed for treason (Griffiths, Sir Rhys. p.115). HUGH’S descendants built on these foundations to become the dominant family in Carmarthenshire during the 17th century.

Little is known of JANE personally except that she bore one son and eight daughters, seven growing to adulthood and marriage. As a widow she married Jenkin Lloyd of Blaen Tren, who had been Esquire of the Body to Henry VIII and High Sheriff of Carmarthenshire in 1539 (Francis Jones, “The Vaughans,” p.100). She appears to have been near 67 years old when she remarried, according to the Star Chamber records that HUGH was still alive in 1547 (Ifan ab Owen Edwards, A catalogue of Star Chamber proceedings relating to Wales, Cardiff, 1929, p. 3, cited by Francis Jones, “The Vaughans,” p.99).

The family of HUGH and JANE was of great importance in Carmarthenshire, as seen in this brief summary of Francis Jones’s research (“The Vaughans,” pp.100-01). John VAUGHAN acquired many leases of Crown lands and of the forfeited properties of Rhys ap Gruffudd between 1541 and 1546. He was then described as being “of Kidwelly’” and was appointed receiver of the lordship in 1553, but by 1559 he was described as “of Carmarthen”, where he was mayor in 1554 and 1563. In the latter year he was also High Sheriff of the county, and around that time he built the first mansion at Gelli Aur (Golden Grove) not far from Dinefwr.
 

In the 1560s he obtained a lease of part of the lordship of Dinefwr and of extensive properties in Carmarthenshire. He was an MP in 1558-9 and from 1571 until his death in 1574. His wife, Catherine MORGAN of Mudlescwm, was a descendant of both Owain DWNN and of MORGAN ap JENKIN of Pencoed castle. Their grandson, also named John (c.1575-1634), was knighted in 1617 and created earl of Carbery in 1628 (pp.110-11). His daughter Mary married Sir Francis Lloyd of Maesyfelin, whose mistress was OAKLEY LEIGH’S sister BRIDGETT, who was of course the sister-in-law of
?MARGARETTA PRICHARD.. At the height of its affluence the Golden Grove estate comprised over 50,000 acres, 25 lordships and 6 castles, and when the cadet lines are taken into account it can be said that nearly half of Carmarthenshire had a VAUGHAN for a landlord (p.97). In 1804 the estate came to Lord Cawdor, who built the present mansion (Jones, Historic Carmarthenshire Homes, p.84).

This was the illustrious family of ELEN VAUGHAN, who became the mother of ELIZABETH f. THOMAS ap RHYS.