Family and Education

b. c.1628, 1st s. of William Cawley^† of Chichester by 1st w. Catherine, da. of William Walrond of Isle Brewers, Som. educ. I. Temple 1645, called 1652. m. by 1655, Elizabeth. suc. fa. 1667.1

Offices Held

J.p. Suss. 1652-July 1660; commr. for assessment 1652, 1657, Jan. 1660, militia 1659.

Biography

Cawley was the grandson of a prominent Chichester brewer. His father sat for the city in 1628-9 and for Midhurst in the Long Parliament and Richard Cromwell’s Parliament. A regicide and a Rumper, he fled to Switzerland before the Restoration. But his mother came from a royalist family, his younger brother became an archdeacon and he himself married the daughter, not otherwise identified, of a sequestrated Cavalier.2

Cawley sat for Chichester in 1659, and was involved in a double return at the general election of 1660. Seated on the merits of the return, he was displaced by John Farrington on the merits of the election without leaving any other trace on the records of the Convention. The family estate was granted to the Duke of York, who sold it to Henry Brouncker for £2,100. Brouncker bequeathed it to Sir Charles Lyttelton. After the Revolution, when it was rumoured that Edmund Ludlow was to be brought back from exile to suppress the Irish rebellion, Lyttelton, like other holders of regicides’ lands, feared that they might be restored to the heirs. In order to confirm his title to the manor of Rumboldswyke he paid Cawley and his wife £400 But by 1700 Cawley was reduced to poverty and was granted £5 by the Inner Temple. The date of his death is not known, and he was the last of his family to sit in Parliament.3

Ref Volumes: 1660-1690

Authors: B. M. Crook / Basil Duke Henning

Notes

• 1. DNB; Som Wills, v. 106.
• 2. Cal. Comm. Comp. 834; CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 338.
• 3. Fines for Manors (Suss. Rec. Soc. xx), 376; A. Hay, Chichester, 351-2; Cal. I.T. Recs. 356.