David Morgan of Penygraig (c.1695 – 30 July 1746) was a Welsh lawyer and Jacobite, or supporter of the claim of the exiled House of Stuart to the British throne.
Morgan was notable as one of only a handful of Welshmen to join the Jacobite rising of 1745, during which he briefly served in Lord Elcho's 'Life Guards' and helped raise the Manchester Regiment. Unwilling to retreat to Scotland with the rest of the Jacobite Army, he was arrested by the government near Stone, Staffordshire, tried and executed in July 1746.
Life
Morgan was born about 1695, probably in Glamorganshire. His family were of the small gentry class but were considered fairly well-connected; his father, Thomas Morgan, was the second son of landowner William Morgan of Coed-y-Gores and his mother Dorothy was the granddaughter of a baronet, Sir Edmund Stradling. On his mother's side Morgan was the first cousin of Admiral Thomas Mathews.
Details of Morgan's early life are obscure; he attended Christ Church, Oxford though did not graduate. He trained in law and was called to the bar in 1721 at the Middle Temple but although said to have been well known at Westminster, he seems to have spent much of his time at his father's estate of Penygraig, near present-day Edwardsville, Merthyr Tydfil. While some of his surviving poetry suggests he practised actively as a barrister on the Welsh circuit, he later claimed to have “never pretended to much knowledge that way”. He may have spent some time as an officer in the British Army; at his trial he said that he had “served the crown of England in two campaigns with some reputation”. Much of his income seems to have come from valuable leasehold property in Shoreditch that he acquired through his marriage.
During the early part of the 18th century a number of Welsh gentry continued to support the claims of the exiled Stuarts. The most senior Welsh Jacobite was the powerful Tory landowner and MP Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn, 3rd Baronet; Wynn had indicated his support for a Stuart restoration on condition it was backed by French military support. His political club, the ‘Cycle of the White Rose’, was a focus for Jacobite activity in North Wales; a comparable role in South Wales was filled by the ‘Sea Serjeants’, led by Sir John Philipps.
Morgan himself was a friend of both Wynn and Philipps: he was closely associated with the circle of the Duke of Beaufort, another Tory with Jacobite sympathies, and was a prominent member of the “Independent Electors of Westminster”, a pro-Jacobite London club. He published several poems dealing with Jacobite themes, notably The Country Bard (1739).
1745 Rising
At the time the Stuart heir Charles Edward Stuart landed in Scotland in late July 1745, he was partly relying on French intelligence from 1743 that had suggested he would find strong support in Wales. While there is evidence of some latent support during 1745, the majority of the Welsh Tory gentry were horrified by the turn events had taken, which seemed to presage a bloody civil war rather than a Stuart restoration on the terms they had hoped for. Viewing the Rising primarily as a Scottish internal conflict, they felt Charles had aligned himself with “alien and barbarous Highlanders, rather than [...] a British political faction”. While Wynn was subjected to intense government scrutiny, he did no more than send the Jacobites equivocal verbal messages of support; in the event Morgan, along with the Catholic William Vaughan of Courtfield and his brother Richard, was one of the few Welshmen of the property owning class to join the Rising.
Morgan's own motives for joining appear to have been at least partly ideological, although he later admitted in a letter he might not have got involved had his "personal Affairs been more to [his] Liking". His surviving poetry and other writings focus on core High Tory themes such as indefeasible dynastic right, a ‘country’ attack on high taxation and on the standing army, while like many other senior Jacobites he was a 'High Church' nonjuring Anglican.