HAVARD, John, of Brecon.

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1509-1558, ed. S.T. Bindoff, 1982
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Constituency

Dates

Family and Education

Offices Held

Biography

John Havard’s election to the last Henrician Parliament for the Brecon Boroughs was the only break in Edward Games’s monopoly of that seat between 1542 and 1554. However, as Games was descended from a Havard and married to the widow of another, while his father John Games was knight for Breconshire in 1545 and Thomas Havard the sheriff at the election, the intermission in favour of John Havard was clearly a matter of family arrangement.

Havard came of a family which favoured the baptismal name John and it has not proved possible to distinguish between him and his namesakes. He may have been the student admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in 1522, although this is more likely to have been the John ap Lewis Havard who assisted in the division of Breconshire into commotes and whose widow married Edward Games. The John Havard who was a scholar at Peckwater Inn at Oxford in 1534 seems to have been a younger son of Thomas Havard (d.1547) of Willersley in Herefordshire, and as his father named the sheriff for 1545 a supervisor of his will the former scholar could have benefited by the conjunction. Evidence of local standing points to yet a third man, the John ap Llewellyn Havard who in 1536 was steward of St. John’s priory in Brecon: the priory was leased in 1542 to John Price, secretary to the council in the marches, bailiff of Brecon in 1545, friend of Thomas Havard the sheriff, and knight for Breconshire in the following Parliament.

Jones, Brec. i. 61; ii. 146; iv. 226-8, 285, 306; C2/Eliz.H15/40; 60/369, mm.18-19; St.Ch.5/P15/4; NLW mss Wales 17/6, m.3v; G. Owen, Taylors Cussion, ii. 34; Emden, Biog. Reg. Univ. Oxf. 1501-40, p. 274; PCC 36 Alen; LP Hen. VIII, xvii.

Ref Volumes: 1509-1558

Author: P. S. Edwards

Notes