CAESAR, Sir Charles (1590-1642), of Benington, Herts.

Given his very full education, Caesar was clearly a man of some erudition, though his distinguished father, Sir Julius, undoubtedly used his position as a senior lawyer and government minister to advance the young man’s career. In 1605 the king was prevailed upon to nominate Caesar for a fellowship at All Soul’s, Oxford, though the college apparently took over a year to comply with the request. HMC Hatfield, xvii. 481. Sir Julius himself arranged his heir’s admission to the Inner Temple in 1611, though as a civil lawyer Caesar associated himself with Doctors’ Commons once he secured his doctorate in the following year. An advocate in the ecclesiastical Court of Arches from 1613, Caesar was knighted the same year in the presence of the Privy Council. Hill, 250. After his stepsister, Lady Vere, proved implacably opposed to marrying him, Caesar secured a wealthy City bride instead, and early in 1614 he was provided with a country estate when Sir Julius purchased Benington manor for him. Chamberlain Letters ed. N.E. McClure, i. 477; VCH Herts. iii. 75; Hill, 251.

Caesar probably owed his election at Weymouth in 1614 to an intervention by his father, who certainly corresponded with the borough at the time of its 1610 by-elections. SP14/55/20. However, he also possessed kinship ties with an important Dorset gentry family, the Trenchards, which may have assisted his candidature. The Gen. n.s. xvii. 102-3; Vis. Kent (Harl. Soc. xlii), 139. He is not known to have spoken in the Commons, and his only appointment, on 16 May, was to help scrutinize the bill concerning the almshouses at East Grinstead, Sussex founded by the 2nd earl of Dorset (Robert Sackville*). Procs. 1614 (Commons), 258. Caesar became a full master in Chancery in 1615, and consequently attended the House of Lords as an assistant throughout the 1620s. LJ, iii. 7a. During the 1621 Parliament he promoted a bill to settle a disputed Hertfordshire land transaction involving himself and his father-in-law. Although this measure passed successfully through the Lords, it was lost in committee in the Commons after Sir Edward Coke and Edward Alford used its first reading debate on 31 May to complain about Chancery masters’ fees. CJ, i. 632a-b, 654a; Nicholas, Procs. 1621, ii. 134. The bill was reintroduced during the following Parliament, when it reached the statute book. LJ, iii. 284b; CJ, i. 773a, 778b, 784a; HLRO, O.A. 21 Jas.I, c. 54.

Caesar enjoyed a successful career in the fields of ecclesiastical and maritime law, his progress smoothed not just by his father’s patronage but also by his own personality. In 1618 the newsletter writer John Chamberlain recorded a visit by ‘courteous Sir Charles Caesar’ to Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, while two years later the judge Sir John Davies* praised his ‘discretion and sweetness of manners’ during the summer assizes. Chamberlain Letters, ii. 189; Add. 12,504, f. 152. These were valuable qualities in the uncertain world of Caroline ecclesiastical government. Caesar became judge of the Court of Audience in 1626 through the patronage of the Calvinist Archbishop Abbot, but he proved equally capable of working with the latter’s Arminian successor, William Laud, despite allegedly making the court a haven for puritans. CSP Dom. 1627-8, p. 377; 1637-8, pp. 572-3; 1639, p. 3. In 1635 he was accused of partiality while hearing a tithe dispute involving his half-brother Robert, but he was not in general regarded as corrupt. Ibid. 1635, p. 125. Rather, critics such as George Garrard* dismissed him as ‘a very ass’, and ‘the very anvil on which doctors of law of his society played’, an allusion both to Doctors’ Commons and to his prominent role in the Battery Company. Accordingly, Garrard was outraged when Caesar emulated his late father by obtaining the prestigious mastership of the Rolls in 1639, in succession to Sir Dudley Digges*. Now a very wealthy man as a result of the deaths of his uncle, Henry Caesar, dean of Ely, and of Sir Julius himself, Caesar outbid his rivals by offering the Crown £15,000, though he reportedly borrowed £10,000 from the St. Paul’s Cathedral repair fund in the short term. Ibid. 1638-9, pp. 622-3; 1639, p. 3; Hill, 251-4.

Under pressure from Laud, Caesar lent the king £2,000 in 1640 towards the costs of the Bishops’ Wars, apparently employing money assigned to charitable purposes by his uncle, the dean, though these bequests were subsequently honoured. CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 532; E. Lodge, Life of Sir Julius Caesar, 47-8. In the following year he was impeached by the Long Parliament for his part in the High Commission trial of the puritan pamphleteer, John Bastwick, but died of smallpox in December 1642 before proceedings commenced. Caesar was buried at Benington, his predictably flattering epitaph describing him as ‘an equal distributor of unsuspected justice, ... just without corruption, merciful without affectation’. CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 479; Clutterbuck, ii. 284, 290. His son and heir, Henry, twice represented Hertfordshire in the Commons between 1660 and 1668. HP Commons, 1660-90, ii. 1-2.