Stabilisation came with 1661, the year which saw the crushing of Venner's outbreak, the failure of the Savoy Conference, the elections to the Cavalier Parliament. The time had passed for nicely-balanced sentences and counsels of restraint. The Anglican order was reinvested with its full panoply of privileges. Leases and renewals of leases became common. As already mentioned, the Mostyns at once sought the corroboration of their old lease from the new prebendary of Meliden (made necessary by the Twisleton intermission). Evan Edwards of Rhual was too precipitate, stooped to something like sharp practice, and saw the Llannefydd interest conferred on the son of an Anglican minister who had sufferred badly in the late times. The new Bishop of St. Asaph, the Dr. George Griffith who was consecrated in October 1660, had so little respect for the Act of Oblivion and so great a desire to recover every penny of the Llanasa profits' since the feast of the Annunciation in that year that he is found tilting in the Exchequer lists against Edward Mostyn of Talacre, who had been leased or assigned these profits in the latter years of the Puritan dispensation. It is down south, however, over the prebend of Llanfynydd (in the collegiate church of Brecon) that we get one of the liveliest pictures. of Restoration materialism. In 1660 the prebend was conferred upon the Dr. William Creed who shortly afterwards became Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford. On 22 May, 1663, he leased for 21 years the profits of the prebend to two learned friends of his in trust to the use Keble, 844). But that case only concerned the matters of presentment, induction, etc., and not leases at all. Levinz has reported the terms of the Act in a very slovenly manner. He might well have admitted (as Justice Twysden actually did) that he had never read it.

1It should be stated that they had been for a long time part and parcel of the temporalities of the Bishopric.

2

Exch, Bills & Ans., Flint, No. 2, Trinity, 15 Chas. II.

of the wife and children of Dr. Creed', a transaction not altogether dissimilar to that which had once brought down the wrath of Charles I upon the head of a Bishop of St. David's. The financial arrangements which followed the Doctor's death in the same year, the selling of the remainder interest to William Gwynn of Taliaris for £800, the two stipulated payments of £400, the £20 abatement allowed him for the expense of bringing the money to Oxford, the payment of the first £20 and the refusal of the secondthese bred such an evil temper that a quarrel over Church lands among loyal and learned Churchmen had to be settled by the Court of Exchequer.'

Whether in June 1660 the King was really serious in outlining his policy of augmenting by lease the salaries of the lower clergy at the expense of the higher is a question particularly difficult to answer. The clergy themselves. evidently thought no: for only a faint response was made to the King's declaration. Seventeen years were to pass before the declaration of 1660 was given statutory force by 29 Chas. II, c. 8,2 and even that statute did nothing more than confirm and perpetuate the arrangements that had been made voluntarily by the parties concerned. Of Archbishop Sancroft's feelings on the point there can be no doubt-in 1680 he was addressing an encyclical to his clergy expressing his grief and fear that so pious a duty had been so perfunctorily carried out. The loaves and fishes of the Restoration were far too acceptable for

Exch. Bills & Ans., Carmarthen, No. 14, Mich., 19 Chas. II; also No. 3, Mich., 20 Chas. II. It was to be regretted that Gwynn of Taliaris had lost his copy of the bargain about abatement.

2 Statutes at Large (pub. 1734), ii, 793-794.

3 Cardwell: Docty. Annals, ii, Doct. CLVIII, 294-295. What in this respect had been done in Wales can to some extent be deduced from returns made by the Bishops in 1670 (Tanner MS, 146, ff. 2, 3, 126, 127, 133-133', 159),

the well-placed clergy to remember the lot of their poorer brethren. The golden age for curates had not dawned. yet. By Bishop Lloyd's time (he came to St. Asaph in 1680) the then curate of Meliden had come down to the proverbial rate of £10 a year.'

Early in July 1668, almost half-way between the letter of 1660 and the Act of 1677, at a time when men's consciences were particularly easy throughout the land, Sir Roger Mostyn approached the sinecure rector of Whitford to grant him a lease of the rectorial profits for three lives at a reserved rent of £40 per annum de claro'. It was readily granted, and as readily confirmed by Dr. Henry Glemham, by Divine Providence Lord Bishop of St. Asaph. There was not the faintest suggestion that any of them saw well to remember the vicar and raise his endowment of £40 to £100 or even to £80. Nor was there the slightest effort to raise the reserved rent from the sum at which it stood in a previous lease. Statutes of Elizabeth and injunctions of Charles II were equally disregarded.

Would the Dean and Chapter not lift their voices. against such proceedings ?

(ii) DRAMATIS PERSONE.

Let it be said quite boldly that Sir Roger Mostyn of Mostyn had deserved well of Church and King. In character he was a gentleman of good parts and mettle', a daring swashbuckler much of a kin to Sir John Owen of Clenennau; in proportion to his wealth, he spent almost as much money in the service of Charles I as the Catholic lords of Raglan in the south. He proved a true friend of

1

Archden. D. R. Thomas: Hist. Dioc. St. Asaph, new ed., i, 406. 2 For copies of his portrait at Gloddaeth and of his dashing autograph signature, and for an account of the moneys spent by him in the wars, see Journal of the Flintshire Hist. Soc. (1916-1917), pp. 84, 88, 89.

the Stuarts from the time he was governor of Flint Castle in the first years of the Civil War to the day when, beset with the unhappiness' of old age, he was distributing the directions of James II to the J.P.'s of the county at the end of 1687.' As a delinquent Sir Roger had had his share of hard knocks at the hands of the Parliamentary authorities; for example, in 1648 he had to pay a decimation fine of £852. But choice Cavalier though he was, he also happened on the mother's side to be nephew to Bulstrode Whitelock, one of the republic's commissioners of the Treasury. Whitelock became active on his behalf on more than one occasion: he wrote a strong letter to Col. John Jones pressing the Mostyn claims to the manor of Gogarth purchased by the regicide a short time before, and it was Whitelock who secured his nephew's liberty upon parole to be at his own house at Mostyn' when Sir Roger for some unnamed offence was sent prisoner to Conway in 1658. And in return for these good offices, it was perhaps the Mostyn influence which kept Whitelock's head on his shoulders at the Restoration, and enabled him not very long afterwards to transact business on an equal footing with Clarendon. With such a powerful friend and intercessor in high quarters Pennant's story that during the interregnum Mostyn was obliged to retire from his ancestral home to a small house close by called Plasucha may be dismissed as a piece of picturesque extravagance. At the Restoration he was made a baronet, partly for his services to the Crown and partly (no doubt)

1 Rawlinson MS. A. 139A, f. 176 (letter to the Duke of Beaufort, dated 24 Dec., 1687).

2 Cal. Comm. Comp., iii, 1666.

3 D. Davies: Ardudwy a'i Gwron, pp. 207-208; Whitelock's Memorials (Oxford ed., 1853), iv, 332.

4 Cobbett's State Trials, vi, 487.

6 History of the Parishes of Whiteford and Holywell, p. 62.

because he was much the wealthiest man in all Flint.' By descent and marriage he was connected with the Pulestons of Emral, the Trevors of Brynkinallt, the Salesburys of Rhug, and the Bulkeleys of Baron Hill. He was great-grandson to Sir John Wynn of Gwydyr. He lived in the parish of Whitford and had his name inscribed on the new bells given to the parish church in 1662. Early in 1668 he had through his influence with the Bishop got a relative of his made vicar of the same parish. Such was the man who a little later in that year proclaimed his desire to have a lease of the tithes and profits of the rectory.

The sinecure rector, William Thelwall by name, was the last man in the world to put any obstacles in the way. Instituted to the place in 1634,' he had managed to hold it without interruption during the long troublous years from 1642 to 1660. In other words, Thelwall was an opportunist of a particularly innocuous type. Being a younger son of Simon Thelwall of Bathafarn,' he was very probably shielded from harm by the fact that several Thelwalls of Dyffryn Clwyd had taken sides with the Parliament. In 1661 he was made prebendary of Meliden; he was the prebendary who so readily re-sanctioned the title of the Mostyns of Rhyd to their old Meliden lease of 1639. Why should he not follow suit in 1668 and grant a lease of Whitford to a Mostyn of Mostyn ?

What did Dr. Henry Glemham care, one of the worst bishops that ever sat in the seat of St. Asaph? Was he not maternal uncle to Lady Castlemaine, the brazen virago Henry Taylor: Historic Notices, p. 143.

2 Exchequer First Fruits Certificates, St. Asaph, File 15. His name was Richard Coetmor (or Coytmore) and was inst. on 14 April. 3 Liber Institutionum, St. Asaph, f. 144.

Hist. of Powys Fadog, iv, 312. The pedigree makes the slip of calling Thelwall vicar instead of rector.