LAWRENCE, William (1613-82), of Wraxall, Dorset.

According to Anthony Wood, this Member was a kinsman of Henry Lawrence I*, sometime president of the commonwealth council of state, but no evidence for this yet appears.21Wood, Ath. O., iv. 63. Our MP’s father, William Lawrence senior (1579-1640), was probably connected to the Dorset Lawrences recorded – with numerous gaps – in the 1623 visitations.22Vis. Dorset 1623 (Harl. Soc. xx), 63-4. The latter were descended from (Sir) Oliver Lawrence†, who had sat for Dorset constituencies in four early sixteenth-century Parliaments and acquired an estate at Creech on the Isle of Purbeck.23HP Commons 1509-1558. Sir Oliver’s great-grandson Edward Lawrence† of Creech represented Wareham in 1626, and, like William Lawrence senior, became a justice of the peace and a local commissioner in the later 1630s.24HP Commons 1604-1629; C181/5, ff. 113v, 152v; CSP Dom. 1638-9, p. 27; 1638-9, p. 38, 308; SP16/399, f. 2. However, William was not mentioned in the will of Edward’s father, Sir Edward Lawrence (d.1629), and his significant ties seem to have been elsewhere.25PROB11/156/508.

They centred on the family of his wife, Elizabeth, daughter of Middle Temple bencher William Gibbes (d. 1616) of South Perrott, and niece of the Somerset benefactor (Sir) Edward Hext† (d. 1624), also a Middle Temple lawyer. As William’s will, drafted in 1638, revealed, the couple shared her father and uncle’s pronounced godly attitudes, as well as their social circle. William senior’s main property at Wraxall, some eight miles from South Perrott, was held by lease from (Sir) John Stawell*, Hext’s son-in-law, a major landowner in Somerset, Dorset and Devon.26Vis. Dorset 1623, 46; PROB11/129/204; PROB11/143/539; PROB11/184/358; CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 238; HP Commons 1604-1629. According to William senior’s brother Robert, their father – presumably the Thomas Lawrence, ‘yeoman of Rampisham’, named in 1603-4 among the trustees of Stawell’s grandfather, also Sir John Stawell – was a long-standing tenant of the Stawells and the steward of their Dorset estates.27PROB11/116/21; Stawell, The Vindication, 71-2. However, while Robert’s testimony is consistent in at least some respects with other evidence, in its concern to emphasise the Lawrences’ dependency on the Stawells, it fails to account for William senior’s standing in county administration or for William junior’s privileged upbringing.

William Lawrence junior matriculated as ‘armigerous’ from Trinity College, Oxford, on the same day in November 1631 as his kinsman Roger Gollop*, another member of the Gibbes circle.28Al. Ox.; PROB11/184/358. In February 1634 he gained a special admittance to the Middle Temple, doubtless, like his cousin William Gibbes three years later, as the grandson of a former bencher, but through the mediation of Somerset puritan Robert Hunt*, who had attended a school very close to his home.29MTR ii. 816, 851. At his inn Lawrence became, according to Anthony Wood, ‘proficient in the municipal law, [and] a counsellor of note’.30Wood, Ath. Ox. iv. 62. His father, who provided in his will for an extended legal education, and arranged that William junior’s landed inheritance would not be in his hands until he was 31 (in contrast to a younger brother, Edward, who was to receive his property at Toller Porcorum at 21), was dead by the time William junior was called to the bar in June 1641.31MTR ii. 908; PROB11/184/358. Since his mother enjoyed half the Wraxall property, and much else besides, the postponement may have encouraged Lawrence to establish his legal practice and, as far as possible, avoid political and military engagement as civil war broke out.

The Stawells’ adherence to Charles I and the fact that Edward Lawrence of Creech, as sheriff of Dorset, implemented the king’s commission of array in 1642, thereby earning both a knighthood and sequestration before he died in 1647, may have helped fuel the accusation which surfaced in May 1649 that William Lawrence too had acted as a royalist commissioner.32CCAM 1063; HP Commons 1604-1629. Such claims are hard to verify, but his marriage that year to a near neighbour and sister of the ardent parliamentarian and member of the Dorset county committee William Sydenham* of Wynford Eagle suggests that Lawrence inclined to those opposed to the king. Wood (a potentially hostile commentator in this respect) later noted that Sydenham was to be the most important patron in Lawrence’s career.33Wood, Ath. Ox. iv. 62.

Lawrence’s only appointment under the new regime established in 1649, however, was to the commission of the peace for Dorset, which he joined – probably at Sydenham’s request – that November.34C231/6, p. 168; Names of the Justices (1650), 15 (E.1238.4). There is more evidence of Lawrence’s having supported the protectorate. By this stage he had acquired a financial interest, having purchased property in Wraxall from the forfeited estate of Sir John Stawell.35CCC 1430; SP23/17, p. 243. The Stawell case became controversial and complicated, involving allegations of wrongful sequestration by the Committee for Compounding, and in particular by Somerset grandee John Ashe*. Both Ashe and Lawrence published defences of themselves and of the legislation authorising the sale of delinquents’ lands, and asserted the culpability of Stawell, prompting a rejoinder in kind from Stawell which included a testimony against Lawrence by his uncles, but the protectoral council ruled in Lawrence’s favour.36W. Lawrence, To the Honourable the Referees (1654, 669.f.19.37); J. Ashe, An Answer to Divers Scandals (1654, E.1072.2); J. Stawell, To the Parliament of the Commonwealth (1654, 669.f.19.51); The Vindication (1655, E.1072.4).

Left with a certain debt of gratitude to the regime, Lawrence repaid it by service in a number of important posts in Scotland, probably obtained at least in part through Sydenham. He was approved as a commissioner for the administration of justice in October 1653, and granted an advance of £100 upon his salary of £600 per annum; his powers were confirmed in April 1656.37CJ vii. 339a-b; CSP Dom. 1653-4, p. 273; 1655-6, p. 279; TSP iv. 528. In April 1654 he was also appointed a commissioner to investigate claims under the ordinance for granting pardons in Scotland, while in January 1656 he was given additional duties, having been chosen by the Scottish council as one of two judges for the exchequer court. In the following May, the council of state advised Cromwell to appoint Lawrence a judge of the exchequer and lord of the sessions.38A. and O.; CSP Dom. 1655-6, p. 326; Nicholl, Diary, 173. Finally, in November 1656, he was named as one of the commissioners for the security of the protector in Scotland.39A. and O.

Judging by Lawrence’s later recollections, he and his colleagues were extremely overworked: ‘we discharged all the offices of lords of the session, lords of the exchequer and of justi[c]iar general in his justice eyre’ which was equivalent to deploying ‘all the offices and power of the judges in Westminster, of the chancery, king’s bench, common pleas, and exchequer, and of the justices of gaol delivery in their circuit’. In addition

we discharged the commission for plantation of kirks through all Scotland, and were visitors of the universities ... we likewise discharged a commission to elect all chief officers in the boroughs, and made all the sheriffs of Scotland.

Lawrence claimed that his salary, together with ‘about £200 to bear the charge of a circuit’, meant that the role was far from financially advantageous.40W. Lawrence, Marriage by the Morall Law of God Vindicated (1680), 282-3; Worcester College Oxf., Clarke MS XXVIII, ff. 25-8. The responsibilities were manageable only because

we were saved the labour of having causes tossed and tumbled from chancery to common law, the chancery and common law being there united, and pleas of equity admitted in the same court, and there being no juries in civil actions, the same persons were judges of fact, law and equity.

Lawrence endorsed the streamlined legal procedures in Scotland, which demonstrated ‘the prudence of that noble kingdom, where the people enjoy so great justice with so little cost and contention.41Lawrence, Marriage, 282-3. He also approved of the way in which judicial finances were based on salaries rather than fees, since this led to ‘far more exact justice’, and proposed that, if the same system were introduced south of the border, ‘the like effect must follow as to justice, but vastly greater as to the increase of the public treasury’; this would be the case ‘especially if the number of judges were reduced to three, who’, he suggested somewhat unrealistically, ‘are sufficient to dispatch all matters of judicature, civil, ecclesiastical, and criminal of the kingdom’.42Lawrence, Marriage, 262-3. His knowledge of classical and other history led him to conclude that ‘civil wars and seditions have been caused ... by cruel prosecution and imprisonments by creditors of their debtors’, and he remembered frequent requests from the occupying army in Scotland that the government commissioners should refrain from issuing orders for arresting such offenders, because that prompted them to flee to join enemy forces instead of staying ‘quiet neuters at home’.43Lawrence, Marriage, 276.

Despite the pressure of administrative duties in Scotland, Lawrence took leave to sit at Westminster in the Parliament of 1656. He was elected on 26 November as Member for the Isle of Wight, replacing his brother-in-law Sydenham, who had been double returned for the Isle of Wight and Dorset, and who had opted to represent the latter. He first appeared in the chamber on 26 December.44C219/45ii; Burton’s Diary i. 244. On that day Lawrence made a speech in which, as Oliver Cromwell* himself had done, he challenged the authority of the Commons to determine the nature of the punishment to be inflicted upon the Quaker, James Naylor. Lawrence propounded that ‘there were but three powers’ – arbitrary, legislative and judicial. The first was universally unacceptable; the second, according to the Instrument of Government, was vested ‘upon a joint authority’ in protector and Parliament; the third rested on the breach of pre-existing law, ‘otherwise our proceedings are not justifiable’. The intention was evidently to secure some measure of leniency for Naylor, but, since they came from a debutant, Lawrence’s comments may have provoked some hostility. The diarist Thomas Burton noted that ‘it was the first day he came into the House, but, I [don’t] doubt, at the rate of such distractions, it may be thought soon enough’.45Burton’s Diary i. 246. Lawrence’s stance is consistent with other evidence indicating that he supported toleration within a national church but without the Prayer Book and (as a strong anti-clericalist) with ministers elected by parish congregations. On 20 May 1657 he may have been the ‘Mr Lawrence’ who acted as a teller in support of a proviso in the bill concerning catechising, which dispensed members of gathered churches from compulsory parish church attendance.46CJ vii. 535b.

Given the tendency of the clerk to record simply ‘Mr Lawrence’, when there were three other MPs of that name (Edward, Henry I and Henry II), for much of the session it is difficult to be certain about Lawrence’s role in the House.47CJ vii. 509a, 549a, 558a. It is probable that William Lawrence was the Member appointed to the committee discussing the bill for the maintenance of the minister at Newport in the Isle of Wight (26 Dec.).48CJ vii. 475b. On 8 January 1657 he made a speech which again sought to limit the legislature, questioning the power of the House to appoint officers, ‘for they cannot be removed for any misdemeanours but in Parliament’.49Burton’s Diary i. 329. He was certainly appointed to the committee to consider the question of the judicial proceedings of the proposed ‘Other House’ (12 Mar.), and it seems likely that he was the ‘Mr Lawrence’ on the deputation to persuade Cromwell to accept the ‘Humble Petition and Advice’ in early April.50CJ vii. 502a, 519b, 520b, 521b. He is also known to have spoken about a proviso concerning Scotland in a debate on the explanatory Petition and Advice (25 June) and later indicated strong support for constitutional union.51Burton’s Diary ii. 307. He considered it his ‘fortune’ to have been a Member of an assembly ‘wherein the Parliaments of England, Scotland and Ireland were convened and united in one, with the same facility as they are convened to sit in three places’. In the context of

a war designed against Spain, it was wonderful to see, with that expedition and courage all things were moved towards the design, and what an endearment it was between the three nations to meet, be acquainted, eat, drink, and converse together, about common concernments.52Lawrence, Marriage, 342.

Lawrence’s only other certain contribution to proceedings was a minor intervention in a debate on the excise (23 June), but he is quite likely also to have been the Lawrence nominated (15 June) ‘to consider the distressed condition’ of the family of Edinburgh moneylender Sir William Dick.53Burton’s Diary ii. 272; CJ vii. 558a; ‘Sir William Dick’, Oxford DNB.

Lawrence was returned to Parliament for the second time during the protectorate of Richard Cromwell*, on this occasion for Newtown, plausibly promoted as a loyalist whose election would block more troublesome candidates. He made no recorded impression on the proceedings, and his duties in Scotland may have meant that he did not even attend. On 14 April George Monck*, commander in the north, wrote to Secretary John Thurloe* urging that Lawrence and the other Scottish judges ‘may be here against the beginning of June; for then their sessions ... begins, and lasts four months, and the people will suffer much in their law business, and cry out for want of it’.54TSP vii. 656.

It was perhaps as a partisan of Monck that Lawrence appended his name (as of Dorset) to the protestation against the army’s ‘interruption’ of the proceedings of the returned Rump late in 1659.55A Remonstrance and Protestation of the Well-Affected (1660), 24. But the Restoration ended his career both in Scotland and, for nearly two decades, in English public life. It seems likely that he returned to Dorset to reestablish his legal practice and lived in some obscurity there until his ostensibly sudden re-emergence as sheriff of the county in 1678.56Dorset Hearth Tax Assessments, 1662-1664 ed. C. A. F. Meekings (1951), 93. This appointment may have represented a piece of manoeuvring by the 1st earl of Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper*), the leading whig politician and a Dorset grandee.

Although this re-engagement in public office was not repeated, Lawrence remained politically involved through his publications in the campaign to exclude James, duke of York from the succession to the throne. It is just possible that he (rather than a Gloucestershire namesake) was the author of a 1679 translation of Pallavicino’s satire against the Catholic Church.57F. Pallavicino, The Heavenly Divorce trans. W. Laurence (1679): The Diary of William Lawrence ed. G. E. Aylmer (1961), ix-xxii; M. Goldie, ‘Contextualizing Dryden’s Absalom’, in Religion, Literature and Politics in Post Reformation England, 1540-1688 eds. D. B. Hamilton and R. Strier (1996), 208-30. It was certainly he who in 1680 published Marriage by the Morall Law of God Vindicated, composed according to Anthony Wood ‘upon a discontent arising from his wife (a red-haired buxom woman) whom he esteemed dishonest to him’.58Lawrence, Marriage; Wood, Athenae, iv. 62. That aspersion was patently false, and another contemporary noted that the book aimed ‘to prove a lineal successor to the crowns’ and to defend the claim to the throne of James Scott, duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s illegitimate son.59CSP Dom. 1680-1, p. 441; SP29/416, pt. 2, f. 98. Lawrence targeted ecclesiastical law and asserted the importance of marriage by the ‘moral law of God’, or civil marriage, in order to legitimize the union of Monmouth’s parents and thereby establish the son as rightful heir.60Lawrence, Marriage, sigs. a-av. In The Right of Primogeniture (1681) Lawrence made this even more explicit.61W. Lawrence, The Right of Primogeniture (1681), sig. A2. It was noted at the time that Lawrence’s work was ‘to be found in all the great sectaries’ libraries’, and that ‘Lord Shaftesbury has one sent him too’.62CSP Dom. 1680-1, p. 441; SP29/416, pt. 2, f. 98. In fact, Lawrence wrote to Shaftesbury in October 1680, presenting his two books.63PRO30/24/6A, pt. 1, f. 179. He may have been seeking Shaftesbury’s protection, or perhaps assistance with the publication of the third and final part of his work, of which he enclosed an abstract and which appeared as The Two Great Questions (1681). By this stage fear of civil strife may have prompted him to reassure readers that all questions of succession ought to be decided in conjunction with Parliament, and to argue against any direct action against the duke of York, in case it provoked another civil war.64W. Lawrence, The Two Great Questions (1681), 1, 13, 14.

There is no evidence that Lawrence suffered for his bold views, or that he developed closer links with the whigs. However, this may have been a result of his age, or the infirmity which resulted in his death in March 1682. He was buried in the parish church at Wraxall, where a monument was erected in his honour.65Hutchins, Dorset, ii. 202-3; Wood, Ath. Ox. iv. 63. In a brief will made apparently on his death-bed he named as his heir his son William, having previously made provision for the daughters of his sisters Joan Orchard and Margaret Locket.66PROB11/372/359. No further member of this family sat in Parliament.