Gwent’s Unknown Warrior- Little Sir Thomas Morgan, the Great Soldier

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  Gwent’s Unknown Warrior - Little Sir Thomas Morgan, the Great Soldier

 by Jeremy Knight
Portrait -an engraving from a portrait by C.W. Bampfylde   
 Arguably the greatest soldier that Monmouthshire has produced, Major General Sir Thomas Morgan (1604-1679) is largely forgotten in his native county, partly because, in the opinion of many, he fought on the wrong side. Accounts of the epic siege of Raglan Castle focus, for several reasons, on its defence by the Marquis of Worcester and ignore the embarrassing fact that until the arrival of Sir Thomas Fairfax with the New Model Army (the first time that the red coats that became synonymous with the British army were seen in the county), the siege was conducted by two Monmouthshire gentlemen, Thomas Morgan of Llangattock Lingoed and Sir Trevor Williams of Llangybi. Yet Morgan had a distinguished military career in the Thirty Years War and under the Commonwealth, went on to play a significant part in the restoration of Charles II and even had an incidental role in the creation of the Coldstream Guards. 
   
 John Aubrey’s statement that Morgan was ‘of meane Parentage in Monmouthshire’ is misleading. He was the eldest son of Lewis Morgan, of Old Court, Llangattock Lingoed, a gentry and landowning family. Like many distinguished soldiers he was of very short stature. As a boy of 16, someone gave him a letter of introduction to a relative who was fighting for the Protestant cause in the Thirty Years War. ‘What’ said his kinsman ‘has my cousin recommended a Rattoon to me’.  Aubrey’s anecdote may have been another exaggeration, but Morgan was understandably offended and went off to fight in Sir Horace Vere’s protestant volunteers and under Bernard of Weimar, where he served alongside Thomas Fairfax and George Monck, future parliamentary commanders who were to play major roles in his career. Networking is not a modern invention . In 1631 he won distinction during the decisive Dutch naval victory of the Slaak, when, at the head of 2,000 English and Scots volunteers he prevented the Spanish from landing.

On the outbreak of war in 1642 he returned home and fought under Sir Thomas Fairfax in northern England. In 1645 he was given command of the Gloucester garrison. With the help of two former royalists, Sir Trevor Williams and Robert Kyrle, he went on to take Monmouth and Chepstow for Parliament and to besiege Raglan.  
   
Under Cromwell, he became second in command in the English army fighting in Flanders as allies of the French against the Spanish. In 1658, after the Battle of the Dunes outside Dunkirk  (the same Dunes from which a later British Expeditionary Force was evacuated in 1940) the great French soldier Marshal Turenne and Cardinal Mazarin ‘had a great mind to see this famous warrior’ expecting ‘ an Achillean or gigantique person’, Instead, they found ‘a little man….sitting in a hutte of Turves, with his fellow soldiers, smoking a pipe’. According to Aubrey ‘He spake Welch, English, French, High Dutch and Low Dutch, never a one well ’- perhaps another Aubrey canard. On his return to England, Morgan was knighted.  

Morgan became second in command of the English army in Scotland under General George Monck. By 1660 Monck was working for the restoration of Charles II. Leaving Morgan in command in Edinburgh, Monck marched south into England over Coldstream Bridge in Northumberland (hence the Coldstream Guards) and visited Thomas Fairfax at his home at Nun Monkton in Yorkshire to get him on side, before marching to London to remove what was left of the Rump Parliament.

Morgan was rewarded for his part in the restoration by a Baronetcy and purchased an estate at Kinnersley in western Herefordshire.  This presumably included the magnificent Elizabethan house Kinnersley Castle, built by Roger Vaughan between 1585 and 1601. If so, he had little time to enjoy his new house, for in 1665 Charles II made him Governor of Jersey. This was far from being a retirement job. There were fears of a French invasion. Morgan improved the fortifications and re-organised the garrison. He died in post in 1679. That fine historian Arthur Dodd paid him a tribute- ‘ A man of short stature, he ranks high among the soldiers of the age, with a reputation for chivalrous treatment of his foes’  
  
Notes
There are numerous editions of Aubrey’s Brief Lives. Including the Folio Society edition of 1957 and the Penguin Classics edition of 1987, the latter with a lengthy and entertaining introduction (‘ The Life and Times of John Aubrey’) by Oliver Lawson Dick.
On Kinnersley see Nikolaus Pevsner Buildings of England: Herefordshire 1963, 211-212. The Lady Morgan, whose memorial of 1764 is in the church may be a descendant.
Dodd’s tribute is from Dictionary of Welsh Biography (retrieved 3 June 2020)
    

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