Denis Bond (President of the Council)

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Denis Bond of Lutton, Dorset (died 1658), was an English politician who served as president of the Council of State during the Commonwealth.

Bond was the son of John Bond of Lutton and Margaret Pitt. He was a prosperous woollen draper in Dorchester, bailiff in 1630 and Mayor of the town in 1635, and was one of the founders of the Dorchester Company, an early attempt to promote colonisation in New England.

In 1640 Bond was elected to the Long Parliament as one of Dorchester's two MPs. When the Civil War broke out a couple of years later, he supported the Parliamentary cause and was a sufficiently hardline anti-Royalist to retain his seat in the Rump after Pride's Purge. He was an extremely active member, sitting on an extraordinary total of 263 committees.

Bond was initially named as one of the Commissioners to try the King, but somehow avoided serving. Having become a friend of Oliver Cromwell, he was a member of the Council of State from 1649 to 1653, and was its president in 1652 and 1653; he also served as comptroller of the receipts of the Exchequer. In the first two Parliaments of the Protectorate, he was MP for Weymouth and Melcombe Regis.

In 1610, Bond married Joan Gould (sister of one of his fellow investors in the Dorchester Company). Their oldest son, John (1612-1676), a Puritan preacher, who became Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge and Professor of Law at Gresham College as well as MP for Weymouth. After his first wife's death Bond was married again, in 1622, to Lucy Lawrence; two of their sons, Samuel and Nathaniel (1634-1707), were also MPs.

He died in 1658 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, but his body was exhumed after the Restoration.

[edit] References

• D Brunton & D H Pennington, Members of the Long Parliament (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954)
• Concise Dictionary of National Biography (1930)
• Leigh Rayment's Peerage Page
• ”Burke’s Landed Gentry” (4th edition, London: Harrison, Pall Mall, 1862-3)