EDWARDS family, of Cilhendre and Plas Yolyn (Salop)
This Border family claimed descent from Iddon ap Rhys Sais of Cilhendre, who married a daughter of Sir John Done, also an ancestor of the Myddeltons and of John Jones (1597? - 1660) the regicide. The surname was adopted early in the 16th century, but the family did not become prominent till the 17th century, when THOMAS EDWARDS (1592 - 1667), of Cilhendre and Plas Yolyn, an intimate friend of the 2nd Sir Thomas Myddelton, was one of the civilian envoys deputed by Thomas Mytton to negotiate the surrender of Anglesey (May - June 1646) and Harlech (16 March 1647), becoming governor of Wrexham in 1647. His namesake, who signed the loyal declaration of the Salop gentry in 1642 and was declared a delinquent in 1650, was almost certainly his second cousin of Shrewsbury, sheriff of Salop 1644 and created a baronet 1645 (J. R. Phillips, Civil War, ii, 43; G.E.C., Baronetage, ii, 243). He remained on friendly terms with his fellow-envoy John Jones the regicide; his son, THOMAS EDWARDS, M.D. (died 1668), married Jones's niece, the daughter of Watkin Kyffin, Myddelton's agent at Chirk. Jones is traditionally believed to have stayed at Cilhendre in May 1660, before returning to London to face his doom, and his son John in later years frequently visited his widowed cousin there, taking a lease of the house in 1688 and dying in it c. 1717. Thomas Edwards's daughter and heiress, Judith, married JOHN MORRALL, and they and their descendants lived at Plas Yolyn, whence the family papers of the regicide found their way to the National Library of Wales in 1937, Cilhendre having been demolished in 1794.
Author
- Emeritus Professor Arthur Herbert Dodd, (1891 - 1975)
- History of the Princes, the Lords Marcher, and the Ancient Nobility of Powys Fadog, iv, 88-90
- NLW Archives: Plas Yolyn Estate Records and Manuscripts
- William Martial Myddelton, Chirk Castle Accounts, A.D. 1605-1666 (St. Albans 1908), 34, 68, 127
- Calendar of Wynn (of Gwydir) Papers, 1515–1690, in the National Library of Wales and elsewhere, 1774, 1777-9, 1782, 1797-1801
- John Roland Phillips, Memoirs of the Civil War in Wales and the Marches, 1642–1649 (London 1874), ii, 42-3, 307-8, 312-3, 332-3
- A. N. Palmer, A history of the older nonconformity of Wrexham and its neighbourhood being the third part of 'A history of the town and parish of Wrexham' (1888), 7-8
- The Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1948, 253-70
- Calendar of the Committee for Compounding with Delinquents, etc., 1643–1660, i, 205
Sources
Published date: 1959
Article Copyright: http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/
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