CONSTANTINE, William (1612-70), of Merley, Canford Magna, Dorset.

A native of Shropshire, William Constantine’s great-grandfather and namesake had purchased an estate at Merley near Wimborne Minster in 1528, and during the 1560s was repeatedly elected mayor of nearby Poole.19Hutchins, Dorset, i. 34; iii. 304. The family became armigerous in 1575, and by the early seventeenth century had secured their position among the leading gentry of eastern Dorset.20Vis. Dorset 1677 (Harl. Soc. cxvii), 94. When he succeeded his father in 1613, the infant Constantine was heir to extensive estates which included land in Wiltshire and Hampshire, as well as Dorset; his wardship was granted to his mother in May 1614.21C142/333/27; WARD9/162, f. 171; WARD7/49/72. Constantine soon became closely allied to the influential Hanham family of Dean’s Court in Wimborne Minster, marrying Jane, the daughter of Thomas Hanham. The match had obvious territorial advantages to both sides: the Merley estate was barely a mile from Wimborne, and the two families also owned land in the parish of Leigh in north-west Dorset.22E179/105/336, m. 11. The Hanham connection may also have influenced Constantine’s religious views: his father-in-law was known to be ‘inclined to the puritan’.23Christie, Shaftesbury, i. appx i, p. xviii.

The Hanham family also shared a common interest with Constantine in the Middle Temple. Constantine was admitted to the Inn in April 1630, and in June entered the chambers of William Boothe and Richard Deyer.24M. Temple Admiss.; MTR 768; sig. Bodl. Nalson II, ff. 159-60: 5 Oct. 1642. In 1633 he acted with his brother-in-law, John Hanham, as manucaptor (or surety) for John Horton of Gloucestershire, and they supported the admission of another brother-in-law, Thomas Hanham, in 1637.25MTR: Mins. of Parl. 807, 854. Another east Dorset lawyer connected with Constantine was Bartholomew Hall of Kingston Lacy. Constantine was admitted to Hall’s chambers in 1637, shortly before he was called to the bar, and by 1639 he was Hall’s partner in the Utter Bar of the Middle Temple.26M. Temple Admiss.; MTR 855, 887. The rapid promotion of Constantine suggest that his legal practice was thriving during the 1630s, and his association with his future client, Denzil Holles*, may have been established during this period. Constantine’s prosperity can be seen in his purchase of the impropriated rectory of Stourton Caundell, near Stalbridge, from one of the Somerset Hanhams for £400 in 1640.27C54/3234. Constantine’s successful legal career also served to strengthen his ancestral ties with the borough of Poole. He had been elected freeman of the borough in 1630, at the age of 18; became a capital burgess in 1631; and, once established as a London lawyer, was elected recorder in 1639.28Hutchins, Dorset, i. 32, 35. Among his business contacts was the prominent Poole burgess, George Skutt*, to whom he sold his rights in the town brewhouse in 1640.29C54/3234.

Constantine’s election as one of the burgesses for Poole in both the Short and Long Parliaments was no doubt on his own interest as the borough’s recorder, although he may have also benefited from his connection with the Hanhams and George Skutt. His fellow burgess on both occasions was John Pyne, who was also related to the Hanham family.30C219/43/166. Constantine took no recorded part in the Short Parliament, and his activities in the Long Parliament began only at the end of February 1641. In the weeks that followed he was involved in the committee appointed to examine the case concerning the 1st earl of Bristol’s step-son, Sir Lewis Dyve†, which also considered the elections in Worcestershire.31CJ ii. 94a, 95a, 95b. The original chairman of this committee, Sir Henry Herbert, had assaulted Serjeant John Wylde* in committee and ‘had since abused two other members of the House, viz. Mr Prideaux [Edmund Prideaux I] and Mr Constantine’.32D’Ewes (N), 415. When Herbert voluntarily stood down as chairman on 13 March, he was replaced by Constantine.33CJ ii. 103b. In the meantime, Constantine had become involved in the trial of the 1st earl of Strafford. In a speech noted for its extreme legalism, he told the House on 27 February that the earl, ‘being accused of high treason by all the Commons of England, he cannot be allowed counsel because everyone was party and none could plead for him’.34Procs. LP, ii. 578. Constantine took the Protestation on 7 May in company with John Trenchard.35CJ ii. 137b. Thereafter, his activity in the House appears to have been somewhat disjointed. On 10 May, for example, John Moore* recorded ‘Mr Constantine made a proposition, which did not take well’, but we do not know what the subject matter was.36Procs. LP, iv. 306. Similarly, on 22 June Constantine pressed for a proviso in the assessment bill to lower the rates on ‘all such of the degree of an esquire or upwards’, but it is not clear what prompted this intervention.37Procs. LP, v. 278. He was given leave of absence to go to Dorset on 14 July and did not return to Westminster until January 1642.38CJ ii. 210a, 395a.

On his return to the Commons, Constantine was for a time preoccupied with religious affairs. On 4 February 1642 he acted as messenger (with the knight of the shire, Richard Rogers*) to acquaint the lord keeper with the petition of the sheriff and magistrates of Dorset for commissioning Sir Thomas Trenchard* and others to examine local recusants and search their houses for arms.39CJ ii. 411b. On 7 April he was added to the commission against scandalous ministers in Dorset.40CJ ii. 516a. Constantine’s religious concerns may have been heightened by the Catholic rebellion in Ireland. On 21 February he was named to a committee to prevent Irish Catholics from travelling to England; on 5 March he was named to the committee on the bill for suppressing the rebellion; and on 19 March he was involved in the disbursement of money for distressed Protestants in Ireland.41CJ ii. 447a, 468b, 486a. In May Constantine was named to a committee to give extra powers to the Irish adventurers, although he does not seem to have invested money in their scheme.42CJ ii. 562a.

During the same period, Constantine’s attention was also drawn by attempts to justify Parliament’s actions through the law. He was involved in attacks on Charles I’s lawyers: on 22 March he was named to a committee to prepare charges against the recorder of London, Sir Thomas Gardiner*; on 23 April he was named to a committee to consider the impeachment of the attorney general, Edward Herbert I*; and on 5 May he was appointed manager of the trial of the Ship Money judge, Sir Robert Berkeley.43CJ ii. 492b, 539b, 558b. In mid-May, when Parliament sought to raise money and forces on its own authority, Constantine was named to a committee to consider precedents for passing bills without royal assent.44CJ ii. 572b. On 20 June he was appointed to search records to examine the forms of royal coronation oaths, to defend Parliament’s actions against the king.45CJ ii. 634a. The theoretical justifications of the early summer of 1642 were soon complicated by the practicalities of organizing resistance against the king. In mid-June Constantine promised to supply a horse for Parliament’s service.46PJ, iii. 473. On 9 July he was involved in the committee to prepare a declaration to prevent obstruction of the Militia Ordinance, and two days later he reported a conference on the lord mayor’s refusal to cooperate in housing the magazine recently brought to London from Hull.47CJ ii. 663b, 665b. On 21 July he was instructed by the Commons to prepare an order for the defence of Poole.48CJ ii. 684a. On 3 August he prepared a similar order for Norwich and presented an order which was then carried to the Lords by Sir Walter Erle*, indemnifying those who had taken measures to secure the county powder magazine at Dorchester.49CJ ii. 701b.

Constantine’s commitment to Parliament’s cause at this stage is confirmed by his actions after the outbreak of hostilities. He returned to Dorset in August or September 1642, and on 5 October wrote to Speaker Lenthall giving an account of the support for the king within the county, adding that ‘God, more merciful to them than they [are] provident, frustrates their endeavours, and we see their party vanished’.50Bodl. Nalson II, ff. 159-60. When the letter was read on 10 October, Sir Walter Erle was sceptical, warning MPs that the malignants in the county were still armed and dangerous.51Harl. 164, f. 10v. Constantine had returned to the Commons by 28 October, when he was named to the Committee for Examinations.52CJ ii. 825b. In November he was involved in numerous measures to prevent royalists taking horses, and to defend the home counties against plundering by the enemy.53CJ ii. 835b, 836a, 863a, 863b; Add. 18777, f. 51. Constantine was a man with some influence among his fellow MPs. On 19 November he informed Sir Simonds D’Ewes* (erroneously, as it turned out) that he had privileged information that his brother was on the list of those killed at Edgehill; and on 5 December, when the Commons considered news of Sir Ralph Hopton’s* advance into Devon, he intervened to prevent the debate turning into an attack on the 3rd earl of Essex’s generalship, instead moving that the letter from Plymouth should be considered in detail.54Harl. 164, ff. 56v, 243. Despite Constantine’s standing in the House, in the early months of 1643 there were signs that he was concerned at Parliament’s ambitions. On 23 February he joined Harbottle Grimston as teller to prevent the arbitrary searching of chambers in the inns of court, and two days later he was named to a committee to consider the request that the assizes might be delayed.55CJ ii. 977a, 979b. In March, Constantine was named to a committee to defend Parliament against royalist proclamations and he was vigorously opposed to the neutralist moves of some of his Dorset colleagues; but his inactivity in the Commons between then and July suggests that his enthusiasm for the cause was cooling.56CJ ii. 986b; Add. 18777, f. 174v. He refused to take the oath and covenant, and on 5 August was identified as the only sitting MP who had refused to do so.57Harl. 165, f. 138v.

Although Constantine continued to be appointed to parliamentary committees in the second half of July and the beginning of August, and presumably sat in the chamber during that time, he had already decided to defect to the king.58CJ iii. 172b, 186a, 196b. On 15 July, during a visit to Wimborne, he had written to his constituents at Poole seeking to ‘discharge the duty of my place being recorder’ and to advise them to surrender to the royalist forces rapidly advancing through the west country. He warned of swift retribution if his advice was not heeded: ‘how some of you as have been most active will be handled, I tremble to imagine, perhaps to the loss of life, doubtless of liberty and estate’.59Bodl. Tanner 62, f. 170. Poole stood firm, however, and Parliament took immediate action against Constantine, summoning him to attend on 15 August, and on 4 September disabling him from serving further as an MP and as recorder of Poole, as he had ‘yielded himself, or rather repaired, to some of the king’s forces in the western parts’.60CJ iii. 206a, 227a; Harl. 165, f. 165v; Add. 18778, f. 30v; Add. 31116, p. 151. His estate was sequestered on 28 September.61CJ iii. 256b.

The decisive influence on Constantine during this period may have been his brother-in-law, John Hanham, who had been sent to secure the surrender of Poole by John Ashburnham*.62Bayley, Dorset, 111. It is telling that Constantine’s letter to Poole was addressed from Wimborne (Hanham’s home town) rather than from his own house at nearby Merley; it also explains the eccentric timing of the defection. Constantine’s letter to Poole was written some 11 days before the fall of Bristol (the decisive royalist victory in the west), and nearly three weeks before the royalists gained military control of Dorset. Constantine’s decision, which he later claimed was made in order to save his family from the king’s forces, was surely conditioned by a longer-term disillusionment with Parliament. Mercurius Aulicus, the royalist newspaper, was perhaps right to claim that Constantine and others had been disabled: ‘as men suspected to be weary of going along with them [the Commons] in their desperate designs’.63Newsbooks, Mercurius Aulicus, II. 29.

Constantine’s career as a turncoat royalist was short. He attended the Parliament at Oxford in January 1644, and then returned to Dorset, where he surrendered to Colonel John Bingham*, the parliamentarian governor of Poole, in July 1644.64Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 573. This capitulation came within weeks of Marston Moor, and, more importantly, coincided with the recapture of Dorset by the earl of Essex.65CCC 940. On 23 July Bingham wrote to Parliament with the news, and a resolution was passed to imprison Constantine in the Compter in Southwark ‘for deserting the service of Parliament and adhering to the enemies of the same’.66CJ iii. 571a. Yet Constantine was treated very leniently by Parliament. Although he was duly imprisoned, and rated at £1,000 by the Committee for Advance of Money on 28 July 1644, he was expected to be of use to the parliamentarians: by the end of July the Commons had ordered the Committee of the West to examine Constantine, ‘upon all such matters as he can inform’.67CCAM 435; CJ ii. 571a. On 25 March 1645 he was freed on bail for six weeks.68CJ iii. 89b; Harl. 166, f. 194v. In October Constantine supported his bid to compound by stating that, although he had gone to Oxford, he did had not taken up arms for the king, nor had he concurred with any vote against the Westminster Parliament.69CCC 940. In November, the committee seems to have accepted his version, on the strength of evidence that, at the Oxford Parliament, Constantine had strongly opposed a motion to proclaim the Members of the Westminster Parliament traitors.70CCC 940. In the same month he was fined at a tenth of the value of his estate, a lenient rate for those who had sued for their composition before the Uxbridge propositions were delivered in the new year of 1645.71CCC 940.

The impression that Constantine was being aided by sympathetic elements within Parliament is reinforced by his treatment by the Dorset county committee and the inns of court. Despite the parliamentary resolution to sequester his estate in September 1643, no action was taken locally once Parliament had recovered Dorset, and in July 1646 the Committee for Compounding had to issue a specific order to the county committee to proceed.72CJ iii. 256b; CCC 940. By October 1646 Constantine’s credit with the local committee was such that he was able to put forward a motion on behalf of a royalist officer’s wife.73Dorset Standing Cttee. ed. Mayo, 28. He also requested a cut in the contributions paid by the school and church at Wimborne, and succeeded in gaining them relief, despite the town’s reputation for malignancy.74Dorset Standing Cttee. ed. Mayo, 440. Constantine reappeared as a practising lawyer in the Middle Temple during July 1647, at the same time that his brother-in-law, Bartholomew Hall, was promoted to be bencher of the same inn; the two continued to share chambers, and acted together as manucaptors.75M. Temple Admiss.; MTR: Mins. of Parl. 953. Hall’s influence, and that of Constantine, may reflect the growing power of the Presbyterian interest at Westminster. Constantine’s connection with the Presbyterians is also suggested by his willingness to stand surety for the admission of Francis Holles, son and heir of Denzil Holles, in February 1648.76MTR: Mins. of Parl. 960. In November Constantine reacted to rumours of a purge of the Commons by passing a message of warning to his fellow lawyer, Bulstrode Whitelocke*, that he also would be dismissed.77Whitelocke, Diary, 224-5.

Constantine kept a low profile during the early years of the commonwealth, but the surviving records of the mayor of Poole indicate that the corporation was again turning to him for legal advice during the early 1650s. In the accounts for 1651-2 there are recorded ‘Mr Constantine’s expenses at [the] Antelope’, an inn at Dorchester, on undisclosed business, and several references to Constantine working with the future MP, Edward Butler*.78Poole Borough Archives, MS MA48, unfol. In March 1654 he was involved in appointing a new pro-Presbyterian minister of the town, and was paid fees ‘for his advice about settling Mr Haddesley amongst us’.79Poole Borough Archives, MS 29(7), unfol. In 1656 and 1657 the mayor repeatedly visited Constantine for advice, and in February 1657 Edward Butler wrote to the corporation from Westminster assuring them of his efforts on their behalf, and that ‘Mr Constantine acquaints me with your reasons and your minds’.80Poole Borough Archives, MS 29(7), pp. 20-1; MS L5. Constantine’s relations with the county government also improved. In June 1656 he petitioned the council of state for exemption from the decimation tax against former royalists, and the matter was referred to Major-general John Disbrowe* and the commissioners for Dorset.81CSP Dom. 1655-6, p. 385. In September they had given him a glowing testimonial, saying that he had protested against Charles Stuart, had provided £80 for the government’s service, and they recommended that he be relieved from the tax and received as a person ‘well affected’.82CCC 940. In March 1658, Constantine was added to the Dorset bench, doubtless to the dismay of the county’s Quakers, who referred to him as one of the ‘priest-ridden men’, an insult which confirms his Presbyterian, or at least his orthodox, leanings.83C231/6, p. 386; SP18/130, f. 46.

The local prosperity of Constantine was no doubt facilitated by his growing influence within the Middle Temple. During the 1650s he stood surety for the admission of a number of prominent Dorset figures, including Haviland Hiley of Poole, his second wife’s father, William Collyer of Hermitage, and the youngest son of James Gould* of Dorchester.84MTR: Mins. of Parl. 1092, 1112, 1118. In 1658 Constantine’s eldest son was admitted, and in 1659 given chambers in the Utter Bar, and on 4 November 1659 Constantine was called to the bench.85MTR: Mins. of Parl. 1128, 1133, 1140. His legal standing presumably helped to smooth Constantine’s path through the Restoration crisis. He was active in his duties as bencher from 1659 until his death in 1670, and also acquired a number of higher offices. In February 1662 he was made cupboardman, and in October 1663 was chosen as reader for the following summer term. Constantine was Lent reader in 1664, and served as assistant reader in the following two terms. In October 1668, by this time knighted, he was chosen as treasurer of the Middle Temple.86MTR: Mins. of Parl. 1183-1231.

Constantine’s local position after the Restoration was also fairly secure. A writ was issued to restore him as recorder of Poole in June 1660, and he duly took up office once more; but two years later, Constantine was removed by the commission to regulate corporations, reputedly for refusing to take the necessary oaths.87Poole Borough Archives, MS 29(7), p. 59; Hutchins, Dorset, i. 36. Yet there is more to this than is at first apparent. Constantine’s examination and expulsion by the commissioners at Poole, conducted in October 1662, came nine months after he had accepted an offer from the borough of Dorchester to serve as their recorder.88Dorset RO, D/DOB/16/3, f. 54. He took the oaths of supremacy and allegiance as recorder in April 1662, and served Dorchester without molestation from the commissioners until his death in 1670.89Dorset RO, D/DOB/16/5, p. 129. As the new recorder of Poole was the former royalist, Anthony Ettricke, whom Constantine described in his will as ‘my good friend’, it seems more likely that Constantine gave up Poole in favour of Dorchester, and that he refused the oaths on grounds which were other than religious.90Hutchins, Dorset, i. 36; PROB11/334/217.

Whatever the principal cause, the exchange of recorderships was not a mark of Constantine’s unwillingness to cooperate with the Stuart regime. During the 1660s he acted as a magistrate, although he sat only infrequently until 1666, and not at all after that date, presumably because of his duties in the Middle Temple.91Dorset Hearth Tax, 116-7. In 1664, however, he proved his worth to the government in hunting down parliamentarian fugitives in Dorset, and he even advised the destruction of the earthworks at Poole, considering the borough to be an ideal base for rebellion.92CSP Dom. 1663-4, pp. 522, 544-5. This demonstrable loyalty, combined with his legal prestige, no doubt lay behind the grant of a knighthood to Constantine in 1668. Although his house at Merley was of only modest proportions (having only ten hearths in the mid-1660s), Constantine’s will shows that, by his death in 1670 he had accrued considerable landed wealth, largely through lending money and foreclosing on mortgages.93Dorset Hearth Tax, 37; PROB11/334/217. The will also sheds light on Constantine’s religious views, showing that although he had conformed to the Church of England, he remained sympathetic to nonconformity:

I profess myself a member of the Catholic church and in communion with that part of it which is called the Church of England, whose doctrine seems most primitive and unbiased to secular ends by which the Romanish clergy have destroyed the holy Catholic church and peace of Christians which can never be restored until the clergy be reduced to their primitive spiritual estate which the Lord in his own good time will effect. I condemn none that live godly [lives] and in virtue through their opinions be averse from mine, so as they believe the Creed.94PROB11/334/217.

No immediate descendants of Constantine sat in the Commons, and the family connection with Poole was broken when Sir William’s son, Henry Constantine, sold the manor of Merley to Mr Ashe of Wiltshire later in the seventeenth century.