Offices Held
Collector, mise, Merion. c.1612-16.
Biography
The Lloyds, who claimed descent from the Anglesey chieftain Llywarch ap Brân, settled in Merioneth around 1500, when the head of the family married into a junior branch of the Cors-y-Gedol family. During the early Stuart period the Rhiwgoch estate comprised pasture land in the Trawsfynydd area, and properties in Harlech and Dolgellau, all of which was valued at £400 a year by Sir John Wynn. Even by local standards, this was a relatively modest estate for a county family, and Lloyd’s father, who served as sheriff four times, knight of the shire twice, and deputy lieutenant from 1600, undoubtedly owed much of his status to his relations the Vaughans of Cors-y-Gedol and the Nanneys of Nanney.
At the time of the Addled Parliament Lloyd was a newly qualified barrister at Lincoln’s Inn, and his London residence doubtless helps to explain his return for Merioneth, while his father, the Vaughans and the Nanneys had ample local standing to secure his election. The sole mention of a ‘Mr. Lloyd’ in the surviving records of the session makes no distinction between the Merioneth MP and Robert Lloyd, burgess for Ludlow: on 26 May one of the two men called for Bishop Neile, who had accused the Commons of sedition for its attacks on impositions, to be reported directly to the king, ‘because this a scandal capital’. This motion, had it been adopted, would have provoked a privilege dispute with the Upper House, but wiser counsels secured instead the appointment of a committee to pen a protest to the Lords.
At the next election in December 1620 William Salesbury was returned for Merioneth, presumably without a contest, as both Lloyd and his father signed the indenture. Lloyd and his father also attended the Caernarvonshire county court (twice) during the same general election in support of Sir Richard Wynn, whose brother Henry had married Lloyd’s daughter a few weeks earlier. The alliance with Gwydir dragged the family into the factional politics of Caernarvonshire, and in March 1622 Lloyd was recommended for the attorneyship of North Wales in an unsuccessful attempt to deny the post to the Wynns’ enemy, John Griffith III.
Lloyd probably died in 1622-3; it is otherwise difficult to explain why he failed to sign the indentures for the general elections of 1624 and 1625, when his son-in-law Henry Wynn was returned for Merioneth. No probate would have been required, as the family estates were still held by his father and the reversion was entailed on his daughter under the terms of her marriage settlement of 1620. Any letters of administration in respect of his goods were presumably granted at Bangor, and thus lost in the Civil War. Rhiwgoch passed to Henry Wynn after the death of Robert Lloyd in about 1640, and ultimately became part of the Wynnstay estate. 2
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