Family and Education

b. by 1532.2

Offices Held

Sheriff, Brec. 1558-9.

Biography

Rhys Vaughan was probably a kinsman of Sir Roger Vaughan, whose election as knight for Breconshire to the Parliament of March 1553 he attended and whom he was to replace 18 months later after Vaughan’s two re-elections. His own election he may have owed as much to the 1st Earl of Pembroke as lord of Builth and to the 12th Earl of Arundel as to local connexions. A copy of the list of Members of the third Marian Parliament bears a note that ‘Ll[?oydd] Gryffith brought the return for Brecknok from my l[ord] steward’. The returns for both the shire and the Boroughs are lost, but they had presumably been sewn together by the sheriff according to custom and sent to Arundel as lord steward of the Household for transmission to Chancery. Nothing has been found to link Arundel with the sheriff, John Lloyd, or with either Vaughan or the Member for the Boroughs, Meredydd Games. Unlike Games, Vaughan was not one of those who quitted the Parliament before its dissolution, and this may have conduced to his re-election to the next Parliament, that of 1555, for which the name of the knight for Breconshire is lost. It was perhaps his stay in London which led Vaughan and Thomas Jenkin to borrow from Lewis Vaughan of London, a servant of the 1st Baron Rich; after they had returned home their creditor petitioned in Chancery for repayment, but with what result is not known. Vaughan was pricked as the first Elizabethan sheriff of Breconshire and as such he returned two of his kinsmen to the Parliament of 1559. All that is known of the rest of his life is that during March 1574 an information was laid in the Exchequer about his alleged forcible entry into the demesne of Builth castle.3

Ref Volumes: 1509-1558

Author: P. S. Edwards

Notes

• 1. Huntington Lib. Hastings mss Parl. pprs.
• 2. Date of birth estimated from first reference.
• 3. C1/1479/33; 219/20/176; Hungtington Lib. Hastings mss Parl. pprs.; E159/366, Easter 260.