CAWLEY, William II (d. aft. 1708), of Chichester, Suss.

Cawley was the eldest son of a man whose standing had grown steadily from the 1620s and whose wealth had burgeoned with the help of sequestered properties in the 1640s and the 1650s, only for all to be swept away as a consequence of his participation in the regicide. His own early life, however, remains obscure until his admission to the Inner Temple in November 1645. Thereafter he devoted himself to the law, being called to the bar in July 1652 a few months within the normal minimum of seven full years as a member of his inn.13I. Temple database; CITR ii. 302. By this time he had probably already married Elizabeth, the ‘very young’ daughter of someone sequestered for assisting Charles I, as the couple later claimed.14SP29/20. f. 67.

Probably in connection with this marriage, in December 1651 Cawley’s father settled on him large parts of the family estate.15C54/3588/12; C54/3687/26. In the early years of the decade father and son co-operated in the management of their lands.16W. Suss. RO, Add. MS 884, 12763; C54/3814/41. Named to the commission of the peace in Sussex in 1652, young Cawley attended sessions at Arundel and Chichester in the spring of 1653.17E. Suss. RO, QO/EW2, ff. 39v, 44v. In the early years of the protectorate he was, like his father, absent from the bench. However, unlike his father, he resumed his activity in January 1656, after which he attended sessions in West Sussex regularly until January 1660.18E. Suss. RO, QO/EW3, ff. 10–73. What little is known of his circle of friends suggests that his political and religious views diverged from those of Cawley senior. In 1658, having been granted the presentation by the patron, John Stapley*, Cawley junior presented his brother John to the Sussex living of Rotherfield.19Sawyer, `Parlty. presentations to Suss. livings', 270. Although intruded as a fellow of All Souls’ College, Oxford, by the parliamentary visitors, John Cawley was developing into an establishment clergyman of the kind despised by their father; nine years later he was to be appointed archdeacon of Lincoln.20Lansd. 987, f. 198. John Stapley, meanwhile, was in 1658 plotting a royalist uprising.21s.v. ‘John Stapley’.

Plausibly representing a different constituency of opinion from his father, Cawley was elected for his home town of Chichester to the third protectorate Parliament, which opened in January 1659. He was returned in the second place alongside another local man, and a royalist sympathiser, Henry Peckham*, the borough’s recorder.22Mercurius Politicus no. 550 (13-20 Jan. 1659), 176 (E.761.6). Cawley was not visibly active, however: there is no indication of his involvement in proceedings until 6 April, when he was named to his only committee – to consider the manner of transacting business with the Other House.23CJ vii. 627a.

Despite their apparently different perspectives, in the last weeks of the re-assembled Rump William Cawley senior appears to have exerted his influence on his son's behalf. As a result, Cawley junior was appointed judge of the admiralty court, and judge of the court for the probate of wills (18 Jan. 1660), and was later awarded a salary of £500 per annum (3 Feb.).24CJ vii. 814b, 834a-b. On 16 February the House ordered the passing of his commission, but nothing more was heard after the readmission of the Secluded Members, when his father withdrew from Westminster, and he probably never took office.25CJ vii. 844b.

With a restoration of the monarchy in prospect, while his father fled for his life, Cawley junior sought re-election to Chichester’s one seat in the Convention. Initially successful, he was then displaced by another local man, John Farrington†, whose credentials were more convincingly royalist and whose father had been an inveterate enemy of Cawley senior, as a member of the Presbyterian sub-committee of accounts in Sussex during the mid-1640s. A Commons committee established that Cawley had been returned on the basis of the votes of the freemen only, rather than the whole electorate, and he was therefore removed from Parliament on 21 May 1660.26CJ viii. 40a, 44a; HP Commons 1660-1690.

As well as losing his seat at Westminster, Cawley lost any hopes of succeeding to the family estate, which was forfeit to the crown for the treason of his father. The duke of York, to whom it was granted, later sold it for £2,100 to Henry Brouncker†, who in turn bequeathed it to Sir Charles Lyttelton†. In October 1660, Cawley and his wife petitioned for the estate of his ‘late father’, on the grounds that most of it had already been settled on him at his marriage. Cawley sought to highlight his loyalist links, appealing to his father-in-law’s sequestration and his maternal grandfather’s plundering at the hands of parliamentarian forces, and claiming that he had risked disinheritance by seeking often, by ‘solemn tears and prayers, to dissuade his father from contracting the guilt of that detestable fact’. He also claimed to have taken on responsibility for many of his father's debts.27CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 338; SP29/20, f. 67. Cawley’s plea was evidently unsuccessful, although after the revolution of 1688 – when it was rumoured that regicide Edmund Ludlowe II* would be brought back from exile to suppress the Irish rebellion – Sir Charles Lyttelton, fearing that he would be displaced, paid Cawley £400 to confirm his title to the estate at Rumboldswyke.28Suss. Manors, ii. 376; VCH Suss. iv. 171-2.

Little more is heard of Cawley. On 24 June 1677 he was appointed a steward of the reader’s feast at the Inner Temple, but a week later he was replaced, having apparently failed to perform related duties.29CITR, iii. 111. By June 1700, Cawley was living in poverty, and was awarded £5 by the council of the Inner Temple.30CITR, iii. 356. Thereafter, his whereabouts are obscure. The date of his death is unknown, and no will has been found. He was still alive in October 1709, however, when he was granted the administration of the estate of his brother, John Cawley, the archdeacon.31PROB6/85, f. 169v. No further family member sat in Parliament.