DEWY, James II (c.1635-aft. 1705), of the Middle Temple, London.

According to a pedigree drawn up in 1676, Dewy’s mother was a niece of William Hervey†, 1st Baron Hervey of Rosse and Kidbrook, and like him a descendent through two lines of William Chichele, sheriff of London and brother of Henry, royal servant and archbishop of Canterbury from 1414 to 1443.25Hants RO, 1M53/1350. Hervey, an influential figure in several counties along the Channel coast, forged his distinguished career in the navy, and it is likely that his niece married into a family with a maritime connection, albeit of less elevated social status.26HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘William Hervey’; ‘William Hervey’, Oxford DNB. Her husband, the shadowy James Dewy the elder ‘esquire’, was probably an officeholder in a sphere related to maritime trade. If he was indeed of Milford (near Hurst Castle and the mouth of the Solent) as well as of Christchurch (on the Hampshire/Dorset border), then he may well have had a supervisory role over coastal areas. 27Al. Ox.; MTR iii. 1042-3; Winchester Scholars, 182. Perhaps he was the Mr Dewy who in 1649 as one of the clerks of Sir Walter Erle*, MP for Lyme Regis, was ordered by the admiralty commissioners to produce a survey of ordnance in castles and forts.28CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 527. Dewy’s father was certainly living in Christchurch Tyneham in June 1674, and he was thus likely to have been the man who owned a house with nine hearths in Christchurch in 1665, who was mayor there in 1669 and who as ‘waiter and searcher’ there in 1679 was deemed fit to administer the oaths of supremacy and allegiance to British subjects returning from abroad. This man resigned as waiter in October 1680 and perhaps died soon after, while a Benjamin Dewy, probably the MP’s brother of that name, who was surveyor at Lymington in 1679, went on to perform a similar function in Ipswich until considered too infirm for the post.29Hants Hearth Tax 1665 (Hants Rec. Ser. xi), 84; M. Stannard, The Makers of Christ Church (1999), 263; CTB vi. 266, 710 and passim; Add. Ch. 6205.

If his later assertion is to be believed, James Dewy the younger, on the other hand, spent almost all his adult life in London.30Hants RO, 1M53/1266, answer of defendent. Almost certainly educated at Winchester and at Hart Hall in Oxford before matriculating from Exeter College in November 1651, he did not stay long in any of these places.31Al. Ox.; Winchester Scholars, 182. By 1652, if not earlier, he had acquired powerful patrons. On 22 November that year one George Dewy petitioned the navy commissioners that he was still awaiting the purser’s place for which he had been recommended 14 months previously by four of their number, including John Lisle*, Hampshire MP and commissioner of the great seal. Not only could he victual the navy at cheaper rates than they could find at Portsmouth, but his nephew James Dewy was Lisle’s secretary.32CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 539. Ten days later, doubtless at Lisle’s behest, James obtained a special admittance to the Middle Temple.33MTR iii. 1042-3. There Lisle’s fellow commissioner of the great seal, Bulstrode Whitelocke*, also advanced the career of a servant who satisfied him with ‘high expressions of thankfulness’.34Whitelocke, Diary, 429. Given an opportunity as clerk to the commission which tried the western rebels at Salisbury and Exeter in 1655, Dewy ‘did considerable service for Sir Robert Mason, Sir George Brown, Sir Henry Moore and others’ and, as Whitelocke noted, ‘it was supposed they were not ungrateful’.35Whitelocke, Diary, 402-3. Called to the bar in May 1656 after only three and a half years at his inn at the request of Lisle and Whitelocke, Dewy continued to enjoy special privileges and in June 1657 succeeded to recently-built chambers surrendered by William Whitelocke.36MTR 1094, 1110, 1111; Whitelocke, Diary, 459. Officially described as clerk to the commissioners of the great seal in May 1658, he may never have intended to practise as a lawyer in the central courts.37CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 19.

On 25 December 1656 Dewy married a widow, Elizabeth Frost, at Parliament’s church, St Margaret’s Westminster.38St Margaret, Westminster, par. reg. Her family and its financial circumstances are unknown, but given the location of the wedding, her origins seem unlikely to be humble. Perhaps her first husband was a kinsman of the late secretary of state Gualter Frost (d. 1652), who had once been a supplier of naval expeditions and several of whose sons were still in public service.39‘Gualter (Walter) Frost’, Oxford DNB. James and Elizabeth’s son, given the imperial but faintly heretical name of Anastasius (an anti-Trinitarian), was baptized at the Temple church on 29 September 1657.40Temple Church Reg. (Harl. n.s. i), 4. At least two daughters followed, but of all the children only Martha, born about 1660, survived to adulthood.41St Margaret, Westminster Reg. (Harl. Soc. lxiv), 83; (Harl. Soc. lxxxix), 22; Hants RO, 1M53/1266.

Dewy’s election to Parliament on 13 January 1659 for the Wiltshire seat of Ludgershall, just over the border from Hampshire, probably owed much to his patrons and his office. His own return was apparently already secure when on 30 December Dewy informed his master of strong opposition by the sheriff to Richard Sherwyn*, the other choice of Whitelocke and fellow commissioner of the great seal Nathaniel Fiennes I*, a challenge that was ultimately unsuccessful.42Whitelocke, Diary, 503. The Parliament which assembled in 1659 also contained James Dewy I*, Member for the Dorset seat of Wareham, with whom James II had no discernible connection. It is probable that the former, an older man with a significant army service, a record in local and central administration and an abrasive personality, was the nominee to three committees (31 Mar., 13 Apr.).43CJ vii. 622b, 637b, 638a. However, James II was not a complete unknown, being related through his mother and the Herveys to William Wheler*, the Evelyns and others, and he thus had the potential to play some visible part in proceedings.

At the Restoration Dewy’s one-time association with Lisle may have encouraged him to stay briefly in the shadows, but unlike James Dewy I, who had fled with Edmund Ludlowe*, the clearly more conformist James Dewy II soon re-emerged. Although he never again sat in Parliament, in May 1663 Whitelocke noted that, in a manner unspecified, he had assisted the former royalist propagandist Sir John Berkenhead† to steer through the Commons a bill introduced by the earl of Portland (probably Jerome Weston, recently-deceased 2nd earl).44Whitelocke, Diary, 667. Dewy’s financial means at this period are a mystery, but in January 1665 (as of the Middle Temple) he spent £65 on property in Ripley and Sopley, between Christchurch and Ringwood.45Hants RO, 1M53/1172. Before the end of May 1666 he became an officer of the privy purse for seizures in customs; perhaps he had held it for several years previously.46CSP Dom. 1666, p. 416. In this capacity he was summoned to the treasury on numerous occasions to give information and advice.47CTB iii. 187, 364, 528; iv. 459-60; vi. 12, 534; vii. 996. By 1677 he had become one of the more prominent justices of the peace in Middlesex, taking an active part in measures for poor relief and receiving some of the early information about the ‘popish plot’.48Mdx. Co. Recs. iv; T. Knox, The tryal and conviction of Thomas Knox and John Lane (1680), 32, 36; An Account of the general nursery, or colledg of infants, set up by the justices of peace for the county of Middlesex (1686), 12; Cent. Kent. Stud. U269/O81; City of Westminster Archives Centre, WBA 1103/128 and 131; CTB xiv. 2; Hants RO, 1M53/1373. In April 1695 he was appointed an agent for land taxes, being apparently regarded as an expert on fraud, while in 1697 he became a manager of duties on houses and on marriages, and in 1699 he was proposed as a land bank commissioner.49CTB x. 1370; xii. 221; xiii. 1; xiv. 176, 397; xvi. 121; xvii. 204; xviii. 455; xx. 342; CJ xii. 509a.

In November 1677 a marriage arranged at the Middle Temple took place between Dewy’s daughter Martha, described as of St Martin-in-the-Fields, and William Bulkeley, son of John Bulkeley* of Nether Burgate, grandson of Sir John Trenchard*, and a twenty-year-old law student in the guardianship of lawyer John Trenchard†.50Mar. Lics. Bishop of London (Harl. Soc. xxvi), 301; M. Temple Admiss. i. 195; Hants RO, 1M53/492. Following Martha’s death in March 1688 and her husband’s soon afterwards, Dewy retired temporarily to Burgate to take care of his sickly grandson, Dewy Bulkeley†, for whom he provided a tutor in the shape of a French Huguenot minister. There he expended considerable sums on improvements to the Bulkeley estates, but stricken by palsy he returned after about four years to the more congenial surroundings of a house in Suffolk Street, Westminster. In 1695, while still a minor, Dewy Bulkeley, who had been married very young into the family of the eminent judge Sir Samuel Eyre, took his grandfather to court for allegedly withholding lands at Holdenhurst, near Christchurch, settled on Martha Dewy.51Hants RO, 1M53/489–491, 493, 1266, 1371, 1373; Fordingbridge, Hants, par. reg.; PROB11/392, 135v (William Bulkeley, pr. 17 Aug. 1688). However, the two were probably later reconciled: Dewy’s few surviving papers are with the Bulkeley manuscripts.

Dewy eventually retired from the city, but not from public life. On 31 July 1706 the lord treasurer heard his petition that he had for the previous three years endeavoured to advance the queen’s service with the same application and industry as he had done before in Westminster, but that in the country there was less than a third of the business, and certainly insufficient to employ him.52Cal. Treasury Pprs. 1702–1707, 452. He probably died soon afterwards. Dewy Bulkeley, who was knighted in 1696 and was sheriff of Hampshire in 1704-5, served as Member for Bridport from 1719 to 1727.53HP Commons 1715–1754.