How many gentry?

Glamorgan's society was dominated by a gentry community very wealthy by Welsh standards, and little inferior to their English counterparts. In the century after 1660, they were also free of the need to compete for social and political power with local aristocrats – the constant problem of their relatives in the counties of Carmarthen and Monmouth. Before the Civil War, Glamorgan had been ruled by the Earls of Pembroke, but this interest was declining by the 1630s. In the 1660s, Glamorgan was again represented in parliament by the last of many MPs from the Pembroke family, but this was the end of a long tradition; and land sales in 1666 and 1668 virtually ended the direct ‘Pembroke interest’. It was never fully replaced either by Pembroke's successor (Lord Windsor) or by the Dukes of Beaufort. About 1700, there were still several lords in the county with considerable estates which gave them patronage and electoral influence. Pembroke and Beaufort each dominated the electoral affairs of two of the seven boroughs which combined to elect Glamorgan's borough MP, while major landowners included Lords Ashburnham, Brooke and Abergavenny, and the Earl of Leicester.

However, none of these peers was resident. The Dukes of Beaufort technically had a seat at Swansea Castle, but by the mid eighteenth century this was so dilapidated that it became first a workhouse, and later a debtors' prison. The dukes were therefore distant figures, seen usually on their rare progresses.