Abstract
Henry Jones murdered his mother, Grace, in Monmouth on October 11, 1671. An anonymous pamphlet published the following year attributed the crime to Jones’s ambition to receive an annuity promised to him by his deceased father, the payments of which would begin after his mother’s death. With the assistance of a servant, Jones enticed his mother into a wooded area in search of corn that apparently had been stolen from her barn, at which point he shot her in the head with his pistol. His servant, fearful that the shot did not accomplish its task, subsequently slit her throat. When the body was discovered the next day, the local magistrates noticed footprints that matched Jones’s shoes. They quickly established that Jones and his servant carried out the murder and that Jones’s sister Mary, who had washed his bloody clothes on the night of the crime, was an accessory to it. In March, Jones was pressed to death by heavy stones, and his servant and sister were burnt at the stake.
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Notes
Anon., The Bloody Murtherer, or, The Unnatural Son (1672), quotations on pp. 1, 4–5, and 12.
For a wide-ranging interpretation of early modern English murder pamphlets generally and the presumed corruption of the metropolitan backstreets, see Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), esp. pp. 3–125.
Portions of this chapter are adapted from Newton E. Key and Joseph P. Ward, “’Divided into parties’: Exclusion Crisis Origins in Monmouth,” The English Historical Review 115, 464 (2000): 1159–83 and Newton E. Key and Joseph P. Ward, “Metropolitan Puritans and the Varieties of Godly Reform in Interregnum Monmouth,” The Welsh History Review 22, 4 (2005): 646–72.
Material is reused here with permission of Oxford University Press and University of Wales Press, respectively. These two articles focus on the continuation of controversies in Monmouth from the Civil Wars into the Glorious Revolution, and on their national political significance, while the current chapter is concerned more narrowly with the interaction between the London haberdashers and the people of Monmouth.
Multiplying the number of hearths found in the tax registers by 4.5 suggests populations of towns in the region during the 1660s as follows: Hereford, 5,700; Leominster, 2,900; Monmouth, 2,000; and Ross, 1,680.
K. E. Kissack, Monmouth: The Making of a County Town (London: Phillimore, 1975), 50.
On the generally successful integration of Wales into the English governing system in the sixteenth century see Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 347–55.
Ian W. Archer, The History of the Haberdashers’ Company (Chichester: Phillimore, 1991), 71–89.
Wiliam M. Warlow, A History of the Charities of William Jones (Bristol: William Bennett, 1899), 338–45 (transcription of Jones’s will) and 345–57 (transcription of letters patent). The political elite in the Monmouth region, including the earl of Worcester, supported the legislation that would have confirmed Jones’s charities and allowed for the alienation of property that was subject to mortmain for the purpose of establishing a charity, but the bill died at the dissolution of Parliament in 1614
see Lloyd Bowen, The Politics of the Principality: Wales, c. 1603–1642 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), 46–47.
On the godliness of the Haberdashers’ Company see Isabel M. Calder, “A Seventeenth Century Attempt to Purify the Anglican Church,” American Historical Review 53, 4 (1948): 765, n. 14
Paul Seaver, The Puritan Lectureships: The Politics of Religious Dissent, 156–1662 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1970), 160–62
Archer, History of the Haberdashers’ Company, 83. Seaver, Puritan Lectureships, 156, concluded that Jones was “unquestionably a Puritan.” In his will, Jones also gave the Haberdashers’ Company £1,000 “hopeing they will p’forme ye matters” as he had requested; Warlow, History of the Charities, 339.
Glanmor Williams, Wales and the Reformation (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), 278.
Glanmor Williams, The Welsh and their Religion: Historical Essays (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991), 46, 194
J. Gwynfor Jones, Early Modern Wales, c. 1525–1640 (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 164, 187.
Jeremy Knight, Civil War and Restoration in Monmouthshire (Almeley: Logaston Press, 2005), 7.
For more on the religious situation in Monmouth’s region in the early seventeenth century see Key and Ward, “Metropolitan Puritans,” 650–53.
Glanmor Williams, Recovery, Reorientation, and Reformation in Wales, c. 1415–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 483
Geraint H. Jenkins, A Concise History of Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 157.
See Ronald Hutton, The Royalist War Effort, 1642–1646 (London: Longman, 1982)
John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007), 197 suggests that Charles considered Worcestor an anchor of his plans to maintain his “personal monarchy” in 1640.
Joseph Alfred Bradney, ed., The Diary of Walter Powell of Llantilio Crossenny in the County of Monmouth, Gentleman, 1603–1654 (Bristol: J. Wright & Co., 1907), 30–33
Basil Duke Henning, The History of Parliament. The House of Commons, 1660–1690, 3 vols. (London: Secker and Warburg, 1983), 3: 728
Philip Jenkins, A History of Modern Wales, 1536–1990 (London: Longman, 1991), 130
A. H. Dodd, “‘Tuning’ the Welsh Bench, 1680,” NLWJournal, VI (1949–1950): 255.
The diary has been missing since 1859. For extracts, see Warlow, History of the Charities Fred J. Hando, Monmouth Town Sketch Book (Newport, Gwent: R. H. Johns, 1964), 39–41.
David Underdown, Pride’s Purge: Politics in the Puritan Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 179
Paul P. Murphy, “Catholics in Monmouthshire, 1533–1689,” Presenting Monmouthshire 21 (1966): 36.
Jenkins, History of Modern Wales, 133–34; Geraint H. Jenkins, The Foundations of Modern Wales: Wales, 1642–1780 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 49–61.
Walter Cradock, The Saints Fulnesse of Joy in Their Fellowship with God … A Sermon Preached July 21. 1646 (1646), 34.
Walter Cradock, Glad Tydings from Heaven; To the Worst of Sinners on Earth (1648), 49–50.
Bodl., MS Rawl. A351, deposition of John Bulbricke, fol. 27r. Historians who have relied primarily on the haberdashers’ records have underestimated the troubles caused by Evans; see Archer, History of the Haberdashers, 87; Kissack, Monmouth School, 28. See Henry Horwitz, Chancery Equity Records and Proceedings, 1600–1800: A Guide to Documents in the Public Record Office (London: HMSO, 1995).
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© 2013 Joseph P. Ward
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Ward, J.P. (2013). “[B]ring this Trojan horse … into their Countrey”: William Jones, London Haberdashers, and the Reformation of Monmouth. In: Culture, Faith, and Philanthropy. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137065513_6
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