Sir Charles Caesar (27 January 1590 – 6 December 1642), of Benington in Hertfordshire, was an English judge who served as

Master of the Rolls The Keeper or Master of the Rolls and Records of the Chancery of England, known as the Master of the Rolls, is the President of the Civil Division of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales and Head of Civil Justice. As a judge, the Master of ...

in the period leading up to the outbreak of the

English Civil War The English Civil War (1642–1651) was a series of civil wars and political machinations between Parliamentarians ("Roundheads") and Royalists led by Charles I ("Cavaliers"), mainly over the manner of Kingdom of England, England's governanc ...

; his father, Sir Julius Caesar, had held the same office for many years. Caesar entered Magdalen College, Oxford, aged 12 in 1602, and was a fellow of All Souls from 1605 to 1611. He was incorporated at

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge beca ...

with a LL.B. in 1609, but continued at Oxford, where he was made Doctor of Civil and Canon Law in 1612. In 1611 he joined the

Middle Temple The Honourable Society of the Middle Temple, commonly known simply as Middle Temple, is one of the four Inns of Court exclusively entitled to call their members to the English Bar as barristers, the others being the Inner Temple, Gray's Inn ...

and began to practice in the

ecclesiastical courts An ecclesiastical court, also called court Christian or court spiritual, is any of certain courts having jurisdiction mainly in spiritual or religious matters. In the Middle Ages, these courts had much wider powers in many areas of Europe than be ...

; he was knighted in 1613, and served as MP for Weymouth in the Addled Parliament of 1614. In 1615, he was appointed a master in chancery, no doubt through the influence of his father, and continued in this post until 1639; he was also from before 1626 a judge of the Court of Audience and

Master of the Faculties The Master of the Faculties is a judicial officer in the Faculty Office of the Archbishop of Canterbury and has some important powers in English law, in particular the appointment and regulation of public notaries. Since 1873 the position has ...

, both appointments which held until his death. In 1639 the Mastership of the Rolls became vacant on the death of

Sir Dudley Digges Sir Dudley Digges (19 May 1583 – 18 March 1639) was an English diplomat and politician who sat in the House of Commons between 1610 and 1629. Digges was also a "Virginia adventurer," an investor who ventured his capital in the Virgin ...

, and Caesar consulted

Archbishop Laud William Laud (; 7 October 1573 – 10 January 1645) was a bishop in the Church of England. Appointed Archbishop of Canterbury by Charles I in 1633, Laud was a key advocate of Charles I's religious reforms, he was arrested by Parliament in 164 ...

on whether he might obtain it, but was warned ''"that as things then stood, the place was not like to go without more money than he thought any wise man would give for it"''. Caesar apparently paid the

King King is the title given to a male monarch in a variety of contexts. The female equivalent is queen, which title is also given to the consort of a king. *In the context of prehistory, antiquity and contemporary indigenous peoples, the ...

£15,000 in a lump sum with a further £2,000 loan, and was duly appointed. Foss in his ''Lives of the Judges'' comments that "It is difficult to regret that he did not live long enough to profit by this iniquitous traffic of the judicial seat, as disgraceful to one party as the other". He had made little mark through his tenure of the post when his family was struck down by

smallpox Smallpox was an infectious disease caused by variola virus (often called smallpox virus) which belongs to the genus Orthopoxvirus. The last naturally occurring case was diagnosed in October 1977, and the World Health Organization (WHO) ce ...

in November 1642: one of his daughters died on 2 November, he himself did so on 6 December 1642 (even though, as he declared in the will he made on his death-bed, he had already had the disease as a younger man), and his eldest son, Julius, followed five days later. He was succeeded by his second son, Henry, still a minor at the time of his father's death.

References

Sources

Edward Foss Edward Foss (16 October 1787 – 27 July 1870) was an English lawyer and biographer. He became a solicitor, and on his retirement from practice in 1840, devoted himself to the study of legal antiquities. His ''Judges of England'' (9 vols., 1848� ...

, ''The Judges of England'', Volume 6 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts, 1857

*Edward Wedlake Brayley, ''The Beauties of England and Wales '' (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme, etc., 1808

* Evan Haynes, ''The Selection and Tenure of Judges'' (Newark: The National Conference of Judicial Councils, 1944, reprinted January 2005 by the Lawbook Exchange, Ltd

* Maija Jansson (ed.), ''Proceedings in Parliament, 1614 (House of Commons)'' (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1988

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Caesar, Charles 1590 births 1642 deaths English MPs 1614 17th-century English judges Alumni of Magdalen College, Oxford Fellows of All Souls College, Oxford Members of the Middle Temple Masters of the Rolls Knights Bachelor English people of Italian descent Deaths from smallpox People from Benington, Hertfordshire

Charles Charles is a masculine given name predominantly found in English and French speaking countries. It is from the French form ''Charles'' of the Proto-Germanic name (in runic alphabet) or ''*karilaz'' (in Latin alphabet), whose meaning was ...