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A BOOK ABOUT LAWYERS.

BY

JOHN CORDY JEAFFRESON,

BARRISTER-AT-LAW

AUTHOR OF

"A BOOK ABOUT DOCTORS,"

ETC., ETC.

Reprinted from the London Edition.
TWO VOLUMES IN ONE.

NEW YORK:
Carleton, Publisher, Madison Square.
LONDON: S. LOW, SON & CO.,
M DCCC LXXV.

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1807, by
G.W. CARLETON & CO.,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the
Southern District of New York.

John F. Trow & Son, Printers,
205-213 East 12th St., New York.

CONTENTS.

PART I.

HOUSES AND HOUSEHOLDERS.

CHAPTER I.

LADIES IN LAW COLLEGES.

A law-student of the present day finds it difficult to realize the brightness and domestic decency which characterized the Inns of Court in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Under existing circumstances, women of character and social position avoid the gardens and terraces of Gray's Inn and the Temple.

Attended by men, or protected by circumstances that guard them from impertinence and scandal, gentlewomen can without discomfort pass and repass the walls of our legal colleges; but in most cases a lady enters them under conditions that announce even to casual passers the object of her visit. In her carriage, during the later hours of the day, a barrister's wife may drive down the Middle Temple Lane, or through the gate of Lincoln's Inn, and wait in King's Bench Walk or New Square, until her husband, putting aside clients and papers, joins her for the homeward drive. But even thus placed, sitting in her carriage and guarded by servants, she usually prefers to fence off inquisitive eyes by a bonnet-veil, or the blinds of her carriage-windows. On Sunday, the wives and daughters of gentle families brighten the dingy passages of the Temple, and the sombre courts of Lincoln's Inn: for the musical services of the grand church and little chapel, are amongst the religious entertainments of the town. To those choral celebrations ladies go, just as they are accustomed to enter any metropolitan church; and after service they can take a turn in the gardens of either Society, without drawing upon themselves unpleasant attention. So also, unattended by men, ladies are permitted to inspect the floral exhibitions with which Mr. Broome, the Temple gardener, annually entertains London sightseers.

But, save on these and a few similar occasions and conditions, gentlewomen avoid an Inn of Court as they would a barrack-yard, unless they have secured the special attendance of at least one member of the society. The escort of a barrister or student, alters the case. What barrister, young or old, cannot recall mirthful eyes that, with quick shyness, have turned away from his momentary notice, as in answer to the rustling of silk, or stirred by sympathetic consciousness of women's noiseless presence, he has raised his face from a volume of reports, and seen two or three timorous girls peering through the golden haze of a London morning, into the library of his Inn? What man, thus drawn away for thirty seconds from prosaic toil, has not in that half minute remembered the faces of happy rural homes,—has not recalled old days when his young pulses beat cordial welcome to similar intruders upon the stillness of the Bodleian, or the tranquil seclusion of Trinity library? What occupant of dreary chambers in the Temple, reading this page, cannot look back to a bright day, when young, beautiful, and pure as sanctity, Lilian, or Kate, or Olive, entered his room radiant with smiles, delicate in attire, and musical with gleesome gossip about country neighbors, and the life of a joyous home?

Seldom does a Templar of the present generation receive so fair and innocent a visitor. To him the presence of a gentlewoman in his court, is an occasion for ingenious conjecture; encountered on his staircase she is a cause of lively astonishment. His guests are men, more or less addicted to tobacco; his business callers are solicitors and their clerks; in his vestibule the masculine emissaries of tradesmen may sometimes be found—head-waiters from neighboring taverns, pot-boys from the 'Cock' and the 'Rainbow.' A printer's devil may from time to time knock at his door. But of women—such women as he would care to mention to his mother and sisters—he sees literally nothing in his dusty, ill-ordered, but not comfortless rooms. He has a laundress, one of a class on whom contemporary satire has been rather too severe.

Feminine life of another sort lurks in the hidden places of the law colleges, shunning the gaze of strangers by daylight; and even when it creeps about under cover of night, trembling with a sense of its own incurable shame. But of this sad life, the bare thought of which sends a shivering through the frame of every man whom God has blessed with a peaceful home and wholesome associations, nothing shall be said in this page.

In past time the life of law-colleges was very different in this respect. When they ceased to be ecclesiastics, and fixed themselves in the hospices which soon after the reception of the gowned tenants, were styled Inns of Courts; our lawyers took unto themselves wives, who were both fair and discreet. And having so made women flesh of their flesh and bone of their bone, they brought them to homes within the immediate vicinity of their collegiate walls, and sometimes within the walls themselves. Those who would appreciate the life of the Inns in past centuries, and indeed in times within the memory of living men, should bear this in mind. When he was not on circuit, many a counsellor learned in the law, found the pleasures not less than the business of his existence within the bounds of his 'honorable society.' In the fullest sense of the words, he took his ease in his Inn; besides being his workshop, where clients flocked to him for advice, it was his club, his place of pastime, and the shrine of his domestic affections. In this generation a successful Chancery barrister, or Equity draftsman, looks upon Lincoln's Inn merely as a place of business, where at a prodigious rent he holds a set of rooms in which he labors over cases, and satisfies the demands of clients and pupils. A century or two centuries since the case was often widely different. The rising barrister brought his bride in triumph to his 'chambers,' and in them she received the friends who hurried to congratulate her on her new honors. In those rooms she dispensed graceful hospitality, and watched her husband's toils. The elder of her children first saw the light in those narrow quarters; and frequently the lawyer, over his papers, was disturbed by the uproar of his heir in an adjoining room.

Young wives, the mistresses of roomy houses in the western quarters of town, shudder as they imagine the discomforts which these young wives of other days must have endured. "What! live in chambers?" they exclaim with astonishment and horror, recalling the smallness and cheerless aspect of their husbands' business chambers. But past usages must not be hastily condemned,—allowance must be made for the fact that our ancestors set no very high price on the luxuries of elbow-room and breathing-room. Families in opulent circumstances were wont to dwell happily, and receive whole regiments of jovial visitors in little houses nigh the Strand and Fleet Street, Ludgate Hill and Cheapside;—houses hidden in narrow passages and sombre courts—houses, compared with which the lowliest residences in a "genteel suburb" of our own time would appear capacious mansions. Moreover, it must be borne in mind that the married barrister, living a century since with his wife in chambers—either within or hard-by an Inn or Court—was, at a comparatively low rent, the occupant of far more ample quarters than those for which a working barrister now-a-days pays a preposterous sum. Such a man was tenant of a 'set of rooms' (several rooms, although called 'a chamber') which, under the present system, accommodates a small colony of industrious 'juniors' with one office and a clerk's room attached. Married ladies, who have lived in Paris or Vienna, in the 'old town' of Edinburgh, or Victoria Street, Westminster, need no assurance that life 'on a flat' is not an altogether deplorable state of existence. The young couple in chambers had six rooms at their disposal,—a chamber for business, a parlor, not unfrequently a drawing-room, and a trim, compact little kitchen. Sometimes they had two 'sets of rooms,' one above another; in which case the young wife could have her bridesmaids to stay with her, or could offer a bed to a friend from the country. Occasionally during the last fifty years of the last century, they were so fortunate as to get possession of a small detached house, originally built by a nervous bencher, who disliked the sound of footsteps on the stairs outside his door. Time was when the Inns comprised numerous detached houses, some of them snug dwellings, and others imposing mansions, wherein great dignitaries lived with proper ostentation. Most of them have bean pulled down, and their sites covered with collegiate 'buildings;' but a few of them still remain, the grand piles having long since been partitioned off into chambers, and the little houses striking the eye as quaint, misplaced, insignificant blocks of human habitation. Under the trees of Gray's Inn gardens may be seen two modest tenements, each of them comprising some six or eight rooms and a vestibule. At the present time they are occupied as offices by legal practitioners, and many a day has passed since womanly taste decorated their windows with flowers and muslin curtains; but a certain venerable gentleman, to whom the writer of this page is indebted for much information about the lawyers of the last century, can remember when each of those cottages was inhabited by a barrister, his young wife, and three or four lovely children. Into some such a house near Lincoln's Inn, a young lawyer who was destined to hold the seals for many years, and be also the father of a Lord Chancellor, married in the year of our Lord, 1718. His name was Philip Yorke: and though he was of humble birth, he had made such a figure in his profession that great men's doors, were open to him. He was asked to dinner by learned judges, and invited to balls by their ladies. In Chancery Lane, at the house of Sir Joseph Jekyll, Master of the Rolls, he met Mrs. Lygon, a beauteous and wealthy widow, whose father was a country squire, and whose mother was the sister of the great Lord Somers. In fact, she was a lady of such birth, position, and jointure, that the young lawyer—rising man though he was—seemed a poor match for her. The lady's family thought so; and if Sir Joseph Jekyll had not cordially supported the suitor with a letter of recommendation, her father would have rejected him as a man too humble in rank and fortune. Having won the lady and married her, Mr. Philip Yorke brought her home to a 'very small house' near Lincoln's Inn; and in that lowly dwelling, the ground-floor of which was the barrister's office, they spent the first years of their wedded life. What would be said of the rising barrister who, now-a-days, on his marriage with a rich squire's rich daughter and a peer's niece, should propose to set up his household gods in a tiny crip just outside Lincoln's Inn gate, and to use the parlor of the 'very small house' for professional purposes? Far from being guilty of unseemly parsimony in this arrangement, Philip Yorke paid proper consideration to his wife's social advantages, in taking her to a separate house. His contemporaries amongst the junior bar would have felt no astonishment if he had fitted up a set of chambers for his wealthy and well-descended bride. Not merely in his day, but for long years afterward, lawyers of gentle birth and comfortable means, who married women scarcely if at all inferior to Mrs. Yorke in social condition, lived upon the flats of Lincoln's Inn and the Temple.

CHAPTER II.

THE LAST OF THE LADIES.

Whatever its drawbacks, the system which encouraged the young barrister to marry on a modest income, and make his wife 'happy in chambers,' must have had special advantages. In their Inn the husband was near every source of diversion for which he greatly cared, and the wife was surrounded by the friends of either sex in whose society she took most pleasure—friends who, like herself, 'lived in the Inn,' or in one of the immediately adjacent streets. In 'hall' he dined and drank wine with his professional compeers and the wits of the bar: the 'library' supplied him not only with law books, but with poems and dramas, with merry trifles written for the stage, and satires fresh from the Row; 'the chapel'—or if he were a Templer, 'the church'—was his habitual place of worship, where there were sittings for his wife and children as well as for himself; on the walks and under the shady trees of 'the garden' he sauntered with his own, or, better still, a friend's wife, criticising the passers, describing the new comedy, or talking over the last ball given by a judge's lady. At times those gardens were pervaded by the calm of collegiate seclusion, but on 'open days' they were brisk with life. The women and children of the legal colony walked in them daily; the ladies attired in their newest fashions, and the children running with musical riot over lawns and paths. Nor were the grounds mere places of resort for lawyers and their families. Taking rank amongst the pleasant places of the metropolis, they attracted, on 'open days,' crowds from every quarter of the town—ladies and gallants from Soho Square and St. James's Street, from Whitehall and Westminster; sightseers from the country and gorgeous alderwomic dowagers from Cheapside. From the days of Elizabeth till the middle, indeed till the close, of the eighteenth century the ornamental grounds of the four great Inns were places of fashionable promenade, where the rank and talent and beauty of the town assembled for display and exercise, even as in our own time they assemble (less universally) in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens.

When ladies and children had withdrawn, the quietude of the gardens lured from their chambers scholars and poets, who under murmuring branches pondered the results of past study, or planned new works. Ben Jonson was accustomed to saunter beneath the elms of Lincoln's Inn; and Steele—alike on 'open' and 'close' days—used to frequent the gardens of the same society. "I went," he writes in May, 1809, "into Lincoln's Inn Walks, and having taking a round or two, I sat down, according to the allowed familiarity of these places, on a bench." In the following November he alludes to the privilege that he enjoyed of walking there as "a favor that is indulged me by several of the benchers, who are very intimate friends, and grown in the neighborhood."

But though on certain days, and under fixed regulations, the outside public were admitted to the college gardens, the assemblages were always pervaded by the tone and humor of the law. The courtiers and grand ladies from 'the west' felt themselves the guests of the lawyers; and the humbler folk, who by special grant had acquired the privilege of entry, or whose decent attire and aspect satisfied the janitors of their respectability, moved about with watchfulness and gravity, surveying the counsellors and their ladies with admiring eyes, and extolling the benchers whose benevolence permitted simple tradespeople to take the air side by side with 'the quality.' In 1736, James Ralph, in his 'New Critical Review of the Publick Buildings,' wrote about the square and gardens of Lincoln's Inn in a manner which testifies to the respectful gratitude of the public for the liberality which permitted all outwardly decent persons to walk in the grounds. "I may safely add," he says, "that no area anywhere is kept in better order, either for cleanliness and beauty by day, or illumination by night; the fountain in the middle is a very pretty decoration, and if it was still kept playing, as it was some years ago, 'twould preserve its name with more propriety." In his remarks on the chapel the guide observes, "The raising this chapel on pillars affords a pleasing, melancholy walk underneath, and by night, particularly, when illuminated by the lamps, it has an effect that may be felt, but not described." Of the gardens Mr. Ralph could not speak in high praise, for they were ill-arranged and not so carefully kept as the square; but he observes, "they are convenient; and considering their situation cannot be esteemed to much. There is something hospitable in laying them open to public use; and while we share in their pleasures, we have no title to arraign their taste."

The chief attraction of Lincoln's Inn gardens, apart from its beautiful trees, was for many years the terrace overlooking 'the Fields,' which was made temp. Car. II. at the cost of nearly £1000. Dugdale, speaking of the recent improvements of the Inn, says, "And the last was the enlargement of their garden, beautifying with a large tarras walk on the west side thereof, and raising the wall higher towards Lincoln's Inne Fields, which was done in An. 1663 (15 Car. II.), the charge thereof amounting to a little less than a thousand pounds, by reason that the levelling of most part of the ground, and raising the tarras, required such great labor." A portion of this terrace, and some of the old trees, were destroyed to make room for the new dining-hall.

The old system supplied the barrister with other sources of recreation. Within a stone's throw of his residence was the hotel where his club had its weekly meeting. Either in hall, or with his family, or at a tavern near 'the courts,' it was his use, until a comparatively recent date, to dine in the middle of the day, and work again after the meal. Courts sat after dinner as well as before; and it was observable that counsellors spoke far better when they were full of wine and venison than when they stated the case in the earlier part of the day. But in the evening the system told especially in the barrister's favor. All his many friends lying within a small circle, he had an abundance of congenial society. Brother-circuiteers came to his wife's drawing-room for tea and chat, coffee and cards. There was a substantial supper at half-past eight or nine for such guests (supper cooked in my lady's little kitchen, or supplied by the 'Society's cook'); and the smoking dishes were accompanied by foaming tankards of ale or porter, and followed by superb and richly aromatic bowls of punch. On occasions when the learned man worked hard and shut out visitors by sporting his oak, he enjoyed privacy as unbroken and complete as that of any library in Kensington or Tyburnia. If friends stayed away, and he wished for diversion, he could run into the chambers of old college-chums, or with his wife's gracious permission could spend an hour at Chatelin's or Nando's, or any other coffeehouse in vogue with members of his profession. During festive seasons, when the judges' and leaders' ladies gave their grand balls, the young couple needed no carriage for visiting purposes. From Gray's Inn to the Temple they walked—if the weather was fine. When it rained they hailed a hackney-coach, or my lady was popped into a sedan and carried by running bearers to the frolic of the hour.

Of course the notes of the preceding paragraphs of this chapter are but suggestions as to the mode in which the artistic reader must call up the life of the old lawyers. Encouraging him to realize the manners and usages of several centuries, not of a single generation, they do not attempt to entertain the student with details. It is needless to say that the young couple did not use hackney-coaches in times prior to the introduction of those serviceable vehicles, and that until sedans were invented my lady never used them.

It is possible, indeed it is certain, that married ladies living in chambers occasionally had for neighbors on the same staircase women whom they regarded with abhorrence. Sometimes it happened that a dissolute barrister introduced to his rooms a woman more beautiful than virtuous, whom he had not married, though he called her his wife. People can no more choose their neighbors in a house broken up into sets of chambers, than they can choose them in the street. But the cases where ladies were daily liable to meet an offensive neighbor on their common staircase were comparatively rare; and when the annoyance actually occurred, the discipline of the Inn afforded a remedy.

Uncleanness too often lurked within the camp, but it veiled its face; and though in rare cases the error and sin of a powerful lawyer may have been notorious, the preccant man was careful to surround himself with such an appearance of respectability that society should easily feign ignorance of his offence. An Elizabethan distich—familiar to all barristers, but too rudely worded for insertion in this page—informs us that in the sixteenth century Gray's Inn had an unenviable notoriety amongst legal hospices for the shamelessness of its female inmates. But the pungent lines must be regarded as a satire aimed at certain exceptional members, rather than as a vivacious picture of the general tone of morals in the society. Anyhow the fact that Gray's Inn[1] was alone designated as a home for infamy—whilst the Inner Temple was pointed to as the hospice most popular with rich men, the Middle Temple as the society frequented by Templars of narrow means, and Lincoln's Inn as the abode of gentlemen—is, of itself, a proof that the pervading manners of the last three institutions were outwardly decorous. Under the least favorable circumstances, a barrister's wife living in chambers, within or near Lincoln's Inn, or the Temple, during Charles II.'s reign, fared as well in this respect as she would have done had Fortune made her a lady-in-waiting at Whitehall.

A good story is told of certain visits paid to William Murray's chambers at No. 5, King's Bench Walk Temple, in the year 1738. Born in 1705, Murray was still a young man when in 1738 he made his brilliant speech in behalf of Colonel Sloper, against whom Colley Cibber's rascally son had brought an action for crim. con. with his wife—the lovely actress who was the rival of Mrs. Clive. Amongst the many clients who were drawn to Murray by that speech, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, was neither the least powerful nor the least distinguished. Her grace began by sending the rising advocate a general retainer, with a fee of a thousand guineas; of which sum he accepted only the two-hundredth part, explaining to the astonished duchess that "the professional fee, with a general retainer, could neither be less nor more than five guineas." If Murray had accepted the whole sum he would not have been overpaid for his trouble; for her grace persecuted him with calls at most unseasonable hours. On one occasion, returning to his chambers after "drinking champagne with the wits," he found the duchess's carriage and attendants on King's Bench Walk. A numerous crowd of footmen and link-bearers surrounded the coach; and when the barrister entered his chambers he encountered the mistress of that army of lackeys. "Young man," exclaimed the grand lady, eying the future Lord Mansfield with a look of warm displeasure, "if you mean to rise in the world, you must not sup out." On a subsequent night Sarah of Marlborough called without appointment at the same chambers, and waited till past midnight in the hope that she would see the lawyer ere she went to bed. But Murray being at an unusually late supper-party, did not return till her grace had departed in an over-powering rage. "I could not make out, sir, who she was," said Murray's clerk, describing her grace's appearance and manner, "for she would not tell me her name; but she swore so dreadfully that I am sure she must be a lady of quality."

Perhaps the Inns of Court may still shelter a few married ladies, who either from love of old-world ways, or from stern necessity, consent to dwell in their husbands' chambers. If such ladies can at the present time be found, the writer of this page would look for them in Gray's Inn—that straggling caravansary for the reception of money-lenders, Bohemians, and eccentric gentlemen—rather than in the other three Inns of Court, which have undoubtedly quite lost their old population of lady-residents. But from those three hospices the last of the ladies must have retreated at a comparatively recent date. Fifteen years since, when the writer of this book was a beardless undergraduate, he had the honor of knowing some married ladies, of good family and unblemished repute, who lived with their husbands in the Middle Temple. One of those ladies—the daughter of a country magistrate, the sister of a distinguished classic scholar—was the wife of a common law barrister who now holds a judicial appointment in one of our colonies. The women of her old home circle occasionally called on this young wife: but as they could not reach her quarters in Sycamore Court without attracting much unpleasant observation, their visits were not frequent. Living in a barrack of unwed men, that charming girl was surrounded by honest fellows who would have resented as an insult to themselves an impertinence offered to her. Still her life was abnormal, unnatural, deleterious; it was felt by all who cared for her that she ought not to be where she was; and when an appointment with a good income in a healthy and thriving colony was offered to her husband, all who knew her, and many who had never spoken to her, rejoiced at the intelligence. At the present time, in the far distant country which looks up to her as a personage of importance, this lady—not less exemplary as wife and mother than brilliant as a woman of society—takes pleasure in recalling the days when she was a prisoner in the Temple.

One of the last cases of married life in the Temple, that came before the public notice, was that of a barrister and his wife who incurred obloquy and punishment for their brutal conduct to a poor servant girl. No one would thank the writer for re-publishing the details of that nauseous illustration of the degradation to which it is possible for a gentleman and scholar to sink. But, however revolting, the case is not without interest for the reader who is curious about the social life of the Temple.

The portion of the Temple in which the old-world family life of the Inns held out the longest, is a clump of commodious houses lying between the Middle Temple Garden and Essex Street, Strand. Having their entrance-doors in Essex Street, these houses are, in fact, as private as the residences of any London quarter. The noise of the Strand reaches them, but their occupants are as secure from the impertinent gaze or unwelcome familiarities of law-students and barristers' clerks, as they would be if they lived at St. John's Wood. In Essex Street, on the eastern side, the legal families maintained their ground almost till yesterday. Fifteen years since the writer of this page used to be invited to dinners and dances in that street—dinners and dances which were attended by prosperous gentlefolk from the West End of the town. At that time he often waltzed in a drawing-room, the windows of which looked upon the spray of the fountain—at which Ruth Pinch loved to gaze when its jet resembled a wagoner's whip. How all old and precious things pass away! The dear old 'wagoner's whip' has been replaced by a pert, perky squirt that will never stir the heart or brain of a future Ruth.

[1] The scandalous state of Gray's Inn at this period is shown by the following passage in Dugdale's 'Origines:'—"In 23 Eliz. (30 Jan.) there was an order made that no laundress, nor women called victuallers, should thenceforth come into the gentlemen's chambers of this society, until they were full forty years of age, and not send their maid-servants, of what age soever, in the said gentlemen's chambers, upon penalty, for the first offence of him that should admit of any such, to be put out of Commons: and for the second, to be expelled the House." The stringency and severity of this order show a determination on the part of the authorities to cure the evil.

Chapter III.

YORK HOUSE AND POWIS HOUSE.

Whilst the great body of lawyers dwelt in or hard by the Inns, the dignitaries of the judicial bench, and the more eminent members of the bar, had suitable palaces or mansions at greater or less distances from the legal hostelries. The ecclesiastical Chancellors usually enjoyed episcopal or archiepiscopal rank, and lived in the London palaces attached to their sees or provinces. During his tenure of the seals, Morton, Bishop of Ely, years before he succeeded to the archbishopric of Canterbury, and received the honors of the Cardinalate, grew strawberries in his garden on Holborn Hill, and lived in the palace surrounded by that garden. As Archbishop of Canterbury, Chancellor Warham maintained at Lambeth Palace the imposing state commemorated by Erasmus.

When Wolsey made his first progress to the Court of Chancery in Westminster Hall, a progress already alluded to in these pages, he started from the archiepiscopal palace, York House or Place—an official residence sold by the cardinal to Henry VIII. some years later; and when the same superb ecclesiastic, towards the close of his career, went on the memorable embassy to France, he set out from his palace at Westminster, "passing through all London over London Bridge, having before him of gentlemen a great number, three in rank in black velvet livery coats, and the most of them with great chains of gold about their necks."

At later dates Gardyner, whilst he held the seals, kept his numerous household at Winchester House in Southwark; and Williams, the last clerical Lord Keeper, lived at the Deanery, Westminster.

The lay Chancellors also maintained costly and pompous establishments, apart from the Inns of Court. Sir Thomas More's house stood in the country, flanked by a garden and farm, in the cultivation of which ground the Chancellor found one of his chief sources of amusement. In Aldgate, Lord Chancellor Audley built his town mansion, on the site of the Priory of the Canons of the Holy Trinity of Christ Church. Wriothesley dwelt in Holborn at the height of his unsteady fortunes, and at the time of his death. The infamous but singularly lucky Rich lived in Great St. Bartholomew's, and from his mansion there wrote to the Duke of Northumberland, imploring that messengers might be sent to him to relieve him of the perilous trust of the Great Seal. Christopher Hatton wrested from the see of Ely the site of Holborn, whereon he built his magnificent palace. The reluctance with which the Bishop of Ely surrendered the ground, and the imperious letter by which Elizabeth compelled the prelate to comply with the wish of her favorite courtier, form one of the humorous episodes of that queen's reign. Hatton House rose over the soil which had yielded strawberries to Morton; and of that house—where the dancing Chancellor received Elizabeth as a visitor, and in which he died of "diabetes and grief of mind"—the memory is preserved by Hatton Garden, the name of the street where some of our wealthiest jewelers and gold assayers have places of business.

Public convenience had long suggested the expediency of establishing a permanent residence for the Chancellors of England, when either by successive expressions of the royal will, or by the individual choice of several successive holders of the Clavis Regni, a noble palace on the northern bank of the Thames came to be regarded as the proper domicile for the Great Seal. York House, memorable as the birthplace of Francis Bacon, and the scene of his brightest social splendor, demands a brief notice. Wolsey's 'York House' or Whitehall having passed from the province of York to the crown, Nicholas Heath, Archbishop of York, established himself in another York House on a site lying between the Strand and the river. In this palace (formerly leased to the see of Norwich as a bishop's Inn, and subsequently conferred on Charles Brandon by Henry VIII.) Heath resided during his Chancellorship; and when, in consequence of his refusal to take the oath of supremacy, Elizabeth deprived him of his archbishopric, York House passed into the hands of her new Lord Keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon. On succeeding to the honors of the Marble Chair, Hatton did not move from Holborn to the Strand; but otherwise all the holders of the Great Seal, from Heath to Francis Bacon inclusive, seem to have occupied York House; Heath, of course, using it by right as Archbishop of York, and the others holding it under leases granted by successive archbishops of the northern province. So little is known of Bromley, apart from the course which he took towards Mary of Scotland, that the memory of old York House gains nothing of interest from him. Indeed it has been questioned whether he was one of its tenants. Puckering, Egerton, and Francis Bacon certainly inhabited it in succession. On Bacon's fall it was granted to Buckingham, whose desire to possess the picturesque palace was one of the motives which impelled him to blacken the great lawyer's reputation. Seized by the Long Parliament, it was granted to Lord Fairfax. In the following generation it passed into the hands of the second Duke of Buckingham, who sold house and precinct for building-ground. The bad memory of the man who thus for gold surrendered a spot of earth sacred to every scholarly Englishman is preserved in the names of George Street, Duke Street, Villiers Street, Buckingham Street.

The engravings commonly sold as pictures of the York House, in which Lord Bacon kept the seals, are likenesses of the building after it was pulled about, diminished, and modernized, and in no way whatever represent the architecture of the original edifice. Amongst the art-treasures of the University of Oxford, Mr. Hepworth Dixon fortunately found a rough sketch of the real house, from which sketch Mr. E.M. Ward drew the vignette that embellishes the title-page of 'The Story of Lord Bacon's Life.'

After the expulsion of the Great Seal from old York House, it wandered from house to house, manifesting, however, in its selections of London quarters, a preference for the grand line of thoroughfare between Charing Cross and the foot of Ludgate Hill. Escaping from the Westminster Deanery, where Williams kept it in a box, the Clavis Regni inhabited Durham House, Strand, whilst under Lord Keeper Coventry's care. Lord Keeper Littleton, until he made his famous ride from London to York, lived in Exeter House. Clarendon resided in Dorset House, Salisbury Court, Fleet Street, and subsequently in Worcester House, Strand, before he removed to the magnificent palace which aroused the indignation of the public in St. James's Street. The greater and happier part of his official life was passed in Worcester House. There he held councils in his bedroom when he was laid up with gout; there King Charles visited him familiarly, even condescending to be present to the bedside councils; and there he was established when the Great Fire of London caused him, in a panic, to send his most valuable furniture to his Villa at Twickenham. Thanet House, Aldersgate Street, is the residence with which Shaftesbury, the politician, is most generally associated; but whilst he was Lord Chancellor he occupied Exeter House, Strand, formerly the abode of Keeper Littleton. Lord Nottingham slept with the seals under his pillow in Great Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, the same street in which his successor, Lord Guildford, had the establishment so racily described by his brother, Roger North. And Lord Jeffreys moving westward, gave noisy dinners in Duke Street, Westminster, where he opened a court-house that was afterwards consecrated as a place of worship, and is still known as the Duke Street Chapel. Says Pennant, describing the Chancellor's residence, "It is easily known by a large flight of stone steps, which his royal master permitted to be made into the park adjacent for the accommodation of his lordship. These steps terminate above in a small court, on three sides of which stands the house." The steps still remain, but their history is unknown to many of the habitual frequenters of the chapel. After Jefferys' fall the spacious and imposing mansion, where the bon-vivants of the bar used to drink inordinately with the wits and buffoons of the London theatres, was occupied by Government; and there the Lords of the Admiralty had their offices until they moved to their quarters opposite Scotland Yard. Narcissus Luttrell's Diary contains the following entry:—"April 23, 1690. The late Lord Chancellor's house at Westminster is taken for the Lords of the Admiralty to keep the Admiralty Office at."

William III., wishing to fix the holders of the Great Seal in a permanent official home, selected Powis House (more generally known by the name of Newcastle House), in Lincoln's Inn Fields, as a residence for Somers and future Chancellors. The Treasury minute books preserve an entry of September 11, 1696, directing a Privy Seal to "discharge the process for the apprised value of the house, and to declare the king's pleasure that the Lord Keeper or Lord Chancellor for the time being should have and enjoy it for the accommodation of their offices." Soon after his appointment to the seals, Somers took possession of this mansion at the north-west corner of the Fields; and after him Lord Keeper Sir Nathan Wright, Lord Chancellor Cowper, and Lord Chancellor Harcourt used it as an official residence. But the arrangement was not acceptable to the legal dignitaries. They preferred to dwell in their private houses, from which they were not liable to be driven by a change of ministry or a grist of popular disfavor. In the year 1711 the mansion was therefore sold to John Holles, Duke of Newcastle, to whom it is indebted for the name which it still bears. This large, unsightly mansion is known to every one who lives in London, and has any knowledge of the political and social life of the earlier Georgian courtiers and statesmen.

CHAPTER IV.

LINCOLN'S INN FIELDS.

The annals of the legal profession show that the neighborhood of Guildhall was a favorite place of residence with the ancient lawyers, who either held judicial offices within the circle of the Lord Mayor's jurisdiction, or whose practice lay chiefly in the civic courts. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there was quite a colony of jurists hard by the temple of Gogmagog and Cosineus—or Gog and Magog, as the grotesque giants are designated by the unlearned, who know not the history of the two famous effigies, which originally figured in an Elizabethan pageant, stirring the wonder of the illiterate, and reminding scholars of two mythical heroes about whom the curious reader of this paragraph may learn further particulars by referring to Michael Drayton's 'Polyolbion.'

In Milk Street, Cheapside, lived Sir John More, judge in the Court of King's Bench; and in Milk street, A.D. 1480, was born Sir John's famous son Thomas, the Chancellor, who was at the same time learned and simple, witty and pious, notable for gentle meekness and firm resolve, abounding with tenderness and hot with courage. Richard Rich—who beyond Scroggs or Jeffreys deserves to be remembered as the arch-scoundrel of the legal profession—was one of Thomas More's playmates and boon companions for several years of their boyhood and youth. Richard's father was an opulent mercer, and one of Sir John's near neighbors; so the youngsters were intimate until Master Dick, exhibiting at an early age his vicious propensities, came to be "esteemed very light of his tongue, a great dicer and gamester, and not of any commendable fame."

On marrying his first wife Sir Thomas More settled in a house in Bucklersbury, the City being the proper quarter for his residence, as he was an under-sheriff of the city of London, in which character he both sat in the Court of the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs, and presided over a separate court on the Thursday of each week. Whilst living in Bucklersbury he had chambers in Lincoln's Inn. On leaving Bucklersbury he took a house in Crosby Place, from which he moved, in 1523, to Chelsea, in which parish he built the house that was eventually pulled down by Sir Hans Sloane in the year 1740.

A generation later, Sir Nicholas Bacon was living in Noble Street, Foster Lane, where he had built the mansion known as Bacon House, in which he resided till, as Lord Keeper, he took possession of York House. Chief Justice Bramston lived, at different parts of his career, in Whitechapel; in Philip Lane, Aldermanbury; and (after his removal from Bosworth Court) in Warwick Lane, Sir John Bramston (the autobiographer) married into a house in Charterhouse Yard, where his father, the Chief Justice, resided with him for a short time.

But from an early date, and especially during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the more prosperous of the working lawyers either lived within the walls of the Inns, or in houses lying near the law colleges. Fleet Street, the Strand, Holborn, Chancery Lane, and the good streets leading into those thoroughfares, contained a numerous legal population in the times between Elizabeth's death and George III.'s first illness. Rich benchers and Judges wishing for more commodious quarters than they could obtain at any cost within college-walls, erected mansions in the immediate vicinity of their Inns; and their example was followed by less exalted and less opulent members of the bar and judicial bench. The great Lord Strafford first saw the light in Chancery Lane, in the house of his maternal grandfather, who was a bencher of Lincoln's Inn. Lincoln's Inn Fields was principally built for the accommodation of wealthy lawyers; and in Charles II.'s reign Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields was in high repute with legal magnates. Sir Edward Coke lived alternately in chambers, and in Hatton House, Holborn, the palace that came to him by his second marriage. John Kelyng's house stood in Hatton Garden, and there he died in 1671. In his mansion in Lincoln's Inn Fields, Sir Harbottle Grimston, on June 25, 1660 (shortly before his appointment to the Mastership of the Rolls, for which place he is said to have given Clarendon £8000), entertained Charles II. and a grand gathering of noble company. After his marriage Francis North took his high-born bride into chambers, which they inhabited for a short time until a house in Chancery Lane, near Serjeants' Inn, was ready for their use. On Nov. 15, 1666,—the year of the fire of London, in which year Hyde had his town house in the Strand—Glyn died in his house, in Portugal Row, Lincoln's Inn Fields. On June 15, 1691, Henry Pollexfen, Chief Justice of Common Pleas, expired in his mansion in Lincoln's Inn Fields. These addresses—taken from a list of legal addresses lying before the writer—indicate with sufficient clearness the quarter of the town in which Charles II.'s lawyers mostly resided.

Under Charles II. the population of the Inns was such that barristers wishing to marry could not easily obtain commodious quarters within College-walls. Dugdale observes "that all but the benchers go two to a chamber: a bencher hath only the privilege of a chamber to himself." He adds—"if there be any one chamber consisting of two parts, and the one part exceeds the other in value, and he who hath the best part sells the same, yet the purchaser shall enter into the worst part; for it is a certain rule that the auntient in the chamber—viz., he who was therein first admitted, without respect to their antiquity in the house, hath his choice of either part." This custom of sharing chambers gave rise to the word 'chumming,' an abbreviation of 'chambering.' Barristers in the present time often share a chamber—i.e., set of rooms. In the seventeenth century an utter-barrister found the half of a set of rooms inconveniently narrow quarters for himself and wife. By arranging privately with a non-resident brother of the long robe, he sometimes obtained an entire "chamber," and had the space allotted to a bencher. When he could not make such an arrangement, he usually moved to a house outside the gate, but in the immediate vicinity of his inn, as soon as his lady presented him with children, if not sooner.

Of course working, as well as idle, members of the profession were found in other quarters. Some still lived in the City; others preferred more fashionable districts. Roger North, brother of the Lord Keeper and son of a peer, lived in the Piazza of Covent Garden, in the house formerly occupied Lely the painter. To this house Sir Dudley North moved from his costly and dark mansion in the City, and in it he shortly afterwards died, under the hands of Dr. Radcliffe and the prosperous apothecary, Mr. St. Amand. "He had removed," writes Roger, "from his great house in the City, and came to that in the Piazza which Sir Peter Lely formerly used, and I had lived in alone for divers years. We were so much together, and my incumbrances so small, that so large a house might hold us both." Roger was a practicing barrister and Recorder of Bristol.

During his latter years Sir John Bramston (the autobiographer) kept house in Greek Street, Soho.

In the time of Charles II. the wealthy lawyers often maintained suburban villas, where they enjoyed the air and pastimes of the country. When his wife's health failed, Francis North took a villa for her at Hammersmith, "for the advantage of better air, which he thought beneficial for her;" and whilst his household tarried there, he never slept at his chambers in town, "but always went home to his family, and was seldom an evening without company agreeable to him." In his latter years, Chief Justice Pemberton had a rural mansion in Highgate, where his death occurred on June 10, 1699, in the 74th year of his age. A pleasant chapter might be written on the suburban seats of our great lawyers from the Restoration down to the present time. Lord Mansfield's 'Kenwood' is dear to all who are curious in legal ana. Charles Yorke had a villa at Highgate, where he entertained his political and personal friends. Holland, the architect, built a villa at Dulwich for Lord Thurlow; and in consequence of a quarrel between the Chancellor and the builder, the former took such a dislike to the house, that after its completion he never slept a night in it, though he often passed his holidays in a small lodge standing in the grounds of the villa. "Lord Thurlow," asked a lady of him, as he was leaving the Queen's Drawing-room, "when are you going into your new house?" "Madam," answered the surly Chancellor, incensed by her curiosity, "the Queen has asked me that impudent question, and I would not answer her; I will not tell you." For years Loughborough and Erskine had houses in Hampstead. "In Lord Mansfield's time," Erskine once said to Lord Campbell, "although the King's Bench monopolized all the common-law business, the court often rose at one or two o'clock—the papers, special, crown, and peremptory, being cleared; and then I refreshed myself by a drive to my villa at Hampstead." It was on Hampstead Heath that Loughborough, meeting Erskine in the dusk, said, "Erskine, you must not take Paine's brief;" and received the prompt reply, "But I have been retained, and I will take it, by G-d!" Much of that which is most pleasant in Erskine's career occurred at his Hampstead villa. Of Lord Kenyon's weekly trips from his mansion in Lincoln's Inn Fields to his farm-house at Richmond notice has been taken in a previous chapter. The memory of Charles Abbott's Hendon villa is preserved in the name, style, and title of Lord Tenterden, of Hendon, in the county of Middlesex. Indeed, lawyers have for many generations manifested much fondness for fresh air; the impure atmosphere of their courts in past time apparently whetting their appetites for wholesome breezes.

Throughout the eighteenth century Lincoln's Inn Fields, an open though disorderly spot, was a great place for the residence of legal magnates. Somers, Nathan Wright, Cowper, Harcourt, successively inhabited Powis House. Chief Justice Parker (subsequently Lord Chancellor Macclesfield) lived there when he engaged Philip Yorke (then an attorney's articled clerk, but afterwards Lord Chancellor of England) to be his son's law tutor. On the south side of the square, Lord Chancellor Henley kept high state in the family mansion that descended to him on the death of his elder brother, and subsequently passed into the hands of the Surgeons, whose modest but convenient college stands upon its site. Wedderburn and Erskine had their mansions in Lincoln's Inn Fields, as well as their suburban villas. And between the lawyers of the Restoration and the judges of George III.'s reign, a large proportion of our most eminent jurists and advocates lived in that square and the adjoining streets; such as Queen Street on the west, Serle Street, Carey Street, Portugal Street, Chancery Lane, on the south and south-east. The reader, let it be observed, may not infer that this quarter was confined to legal residents. The lawyers were the most conspicuous and influential occupants; but they had for neighbors people of higher quality, who, attracted to the square by its openness, or the convenience of its site, or the proximity of the law colleges, made it their place of abode in London. Such names as those of the Earl of Lindsey and the Earl of Sandwich in the seventeenth, and of the Duke of Ancaster and the Duke of Newcastle in the eighteenth century, establish the patrician character of the quarter for many years. Moreover, from the books of popular antiquaries, a long list might be made of wits, men of science, and minor celebrities, who, though in no way personally connected with the law, lived during the same period under the shadow of Lincoln's Inn.

Whilst Lincoln's Inn Fields took rank amongst the most aristocratic quarters of the town, it was as disorderly a square as could be found in all London. Royal suggestions, the labors of a learned committee especially appointed by James I. to decide on a proper system of architecture, and Inigo Jones's magnificent but abortive scheme had but a poor result. In Queen Anne's reign, and for twenty years later, the open space of the fields was daily crowded with beggars, mountebanks, and noisy rabble; and it was the scene of constant uproar and frequent riots. As soon as a nobleman's coach drew up before one of the surrounding mansions, a mob of half-naked rascals swarmed about the equipage, asking for alms in alternate tones of entreaty and menace. Pugilistic encounters, and fights resembling the faction fights of an Irish row, were of daily occurrence there; and when the rabble decided on torturing a bull with dogs, the wretched beast was tied to a stake in the centre of the wide area, and there baited in the presence of a ferocious multitude, and to the diversion of fashionable ladies, who watched the scene from their drawing-room windows. The Sacheverell outrage was wildest in this chosen quarter of noblemen and blackguards; and in George II.'s reign, when Sir Joseph Jekyll, the Master of the Rolls, made himself odious to the lowest class by his Act for laying an excise upon gin, a mob assailed him in the middle of the fields, threw him to the ground, kicked him over and over, and savagely trampled upon him. It was a marvel that he escaped with his life; but with characteristic good humor, he soon made a joke of his ill-usage, saying that until the mob made him their football he had never been master of all the rolls. Soon after this outbreak of popular violence, the inhabitants enclosed the middle of the area with palisades, and turned the enclosure into an ornamental garden. Describing the Fields in 1736, the year in which the obnoxious Act concerning gin became law, James Ralph says, "Several of the original houses still remain, to be a reproach to the rest; and I wish the disadvantageous comparison had been a warning to others to have avoided a like mistake.... But this is not the only quarrel I have to Lincoln's Inn Fields. The area is capable of the highest improvement, might be made a credit to the whole city, and do honor to those who live round it; whereas at present no place can be more contemptible or forbidding; in short, it serves only as a nursery for beggars and thieves, and is a daily reflection on those who suffer it to be in its abandoned condition."

During the eighteenth century, a tendency to establish themselves in the western portion of the town was discernible amongst the great law lords. For instance, Lord Cowper, who during his tenure of the seals resided in Powis House, during his latter years occupied a mansion in Great George Street, Westminster—once a most fashionable locality, but now a street almost entirely given up to civil engineers, who have offices there, but usually live elsewhere. In like manner, Lord Harcourt, moving westwards from Lincoln's Inn Fields, established himself in Cavendish Square. Lord Henley, on retiring from the family mansion in Lincoln's Inn Fields, settled in Grosvenor Square. Lord Camden lived in Hill Street, Berkeley Square. On being entrusted with the sole custody of the seals, Lord Apsley (better known as Lord Chancellor Bathurst) made his first state-progress to Westminster Hall from his house in Dean Street, Soho; but afterwards moving farther west, he built Apsley House (familiar to every Englishman as the late Duke of Wellington's town mansion) upon the site of Squire Western's favorite inn—the 'Hercules' Pillars.'

CHAPTER V.

THE OLD LAW QUARTER.

Fifteen years since the writer of this page used to dine with a conveyancer—a lawyer of an old and almost obsolete school—who had a numerous household, and kept a hospitable table in Lincoln's Inn Fields; but the conveyancer was almost the last of his species. The householding legal resident of the Fields, like the domestic resident of the Temple, has become a feature of the past. Among the ordinary nocturnal population of the square called Lincoln's Inn Fields, may be found a few solicitors who sleep by night where they work by day, and a sprinkling of young barristers and law students who have residential chambers in grand houses that less than a century since were tenanted by members of a proud and splendid aristocracy; but the gentle families have by this time altogether disappeared from the mansions.

But long before this aristocratic secession, the lawyers took possession of a new quarter. The great charm of Lincoln's Inn Fields had been the freshness of the air which played over the open space. So also the recommendation of Great Queen Street had been the purity of its rural atmosphere. Built between 1630 and 1730, that thoroughfare—at present hemmed in by fetid courts and narrow passages—caught the keen breezes of Hampstead, and long maintained a character for salubrity as well as fashion. Of those fine squares and imposing streets which lie between High Holborn and Hampstead, not a stone had been laid when the ground covered by the present Freemason's Tavern was one of the most desirable sites of the metropolis. Indeed, the houses between Holborn and Great Queen Street were not erected till the mansions on the south side of the latter thoroughfare—built long before the northern side—had for years commanded an unbroken view of Holborn Fields. Notwithstanding many gloomy predictions of the evils that would necessarily follow from over-building, London steadily increased, and enterprising architects deprived Lincoln's Inn Fields and Great Queen Street of their rural qualities. Crossing Holborn, the lawyers settled on a virgin plain beyond the ugly houses which had sprung up on the north of Great Queen Street, and on the country side of Holborn. Speedily a new quarter arose, extending from Gray's Inn on the east to Southampton Row on the West, and lying between Holborn and the line of Ormond Street, Red Lion Street, Bedford Row, Great Ormond Street, Little Ormond Street, Great James Street, and Little James Street were amongst its best thoroughfares; in its centre was Red Lion Square, and in its northwestern corner lay Queen's Square. Steadily enlarging its boundaries, it comprised at later dates Guildford Street, John's Street, Doughty Street, Mecklenburgh Square, Brunswick Square, Bloomsbury Square, Russell Square, Bedford Square—indeed, all the region lying between Gray's Inn Lane (on the east), Tottenham Court Road (on the west), Holborn (on the south), and a line running along the north of the Foundling Hospital and 'the squares.' Of course this large residential district was more than the lawyers required for themselves. It became and long remained a favorite quarter with merchants, physicians,[2] and surgeons; and until a recent date it comprised the mansions of many leading members of the aristocracy. But from its first commencement it was so intimately associated with the legal profession that it was often called the 'law quarter;' and the writer of this page has often heard elderly ladies and gentlemen speak of it as the 'old law quarter.'

Although lawyers were the earliest householders in this new quarter, its chief architect encountered at first strong opposition from a section of the legal profession. Anxious to preserve the rural character of their neighborhood, the gentlemen of Gray's Inn were greatly displeased with the proposal to lay out Holborn Fields in streets and squares. Under date June 10, 1684, Narcissus Luttrell wrote in his diary—"Dr. Barebone, the great builder, having some time since bought the Red Lyon Fields, near Graie's Inn walks, to build on, and having for that purpose employed severall workmen to goe on with the same, the gentlemen of Graie's Inn took notice of it, and, thinking it an injury to them, went with a considerable body of 100 persons; upon which the workmen assaulted the gentlemen, and flung bricks at them, and the gentlemen at them again. So a sharp engagement ensued, but the gentlemen routed them at last, and brought away one or two of the workmen to Graie's Inn; in this skirmish one or two of the gentlemen and servants of the house were hurt, and severall of the workmen."

James Ralph's remarks on the principal localities of this district are interesting. "Bedford Row," he says, "is one of the most noble streets that London has to boast of, and yet there is not one house in it which deserves the least attention." He tells us that "Ormond Street is another place of pleasure, and that side of it next the Fields is, beyond question, one of the most charming situations about town." This 'place of pleasure' is now given up for the most part to hospitals and other charitable institutions, and to lodging-houses of an inferior sort. Passing on to Bloomsbury Square, and speaking of the Duke of Bedford's residence, which stood on the North side of the square, he says, "Then behind it has the advantage of most agreeable gardens, and a view of the country, which would make a retreat from the town almost unnecessary, besides the opportunity of exhibiting another prospect of the building, which would enrich the landscape and challenge new approbation." This was written in 1736. At that time the years of two generations were appointed to pass away ere the removal of Bedford House should make way for Lower Bedford Place, leading into Russell Square.

So late as the opening years of George III.'s reign, Queen's Square enjoyed an unbroken prospect in the direction of Highgate and Hampstead. 'The Foreigner's Guide: or a Necessary and Instructive Companion both to the Foreigner and Native, in their Tours through the Cities of London and Westminster' (1763), contains the following passage:—"Queen's Square, which is pleasantly situated at the extreme part of the town, has a fine open view of the country, and is handsomely built, as are likewise the neighboring streets—viz., Southampton Row, Ormond Street, &c. In this last is Powis House, so named from the Marquis of Powis, who built the present stately structure in the year 1713. It is now the town residence of the Earl of Hardwicke, late Lord Chancellor. The apartments are noble, and the whole edifice is commendable for its situation, and the fine prospect of the country. Not far from thence is Bloomsbury Square. This square is commendable for its situation and largeness. On the North side is the house of the Duke of Bedford. This building was erected from a design of Inigo Jones, and is very elegant and spacious." From the duke's house in Bloomsbury Square and his surrounding property, the political party, of which he was the Chief, obtained the nickname of the Bloomsbury Gang.

Chief Justice Holt died March 5, 1710, at his house[3] in Bedford Row. In Red Lion Square Chief Justice Raymond had the town mansion wherein he died on April 15, 1733; twelve years after Sir John Pratt, Lord Camden's father, died at his house in Ormond Street. On December 15, 1761, Chief Justice Willes died at his house in Bloomsbury Square. Chagrin at missing the seals through his own arrogance, when they had been actually offered to him, was supposed to be a principal cause of the Chief Justice's death. His friends represented that he died of a broken heart; to which assertion flippant enemies responded that no man ever had a heart after living seventy-four years. Murray for many years inhabited a handsome house in Lincoln's Inn Fields; but his name is more generally associated with Bloomsbury Square, where stood the house which was sacked and burnt by the Gordon rioters. In Bloomsbury Square our grandfathers used to lounge, watching the house of Edward Law, subsequently Lord Ellenborough, in the hope of seeing Mrs. Law, as she watered the flowers of her balcony. Mrs. Law's maiden name was Towry, and, as a beauty, she remained for years the rage of London. Even at this date there remain a few aged gentlemen whose eyes sparkle and whose checks flush when they recall the charms of the lovely creature who became the wife of ungainly Edward Law, after refusing him on three separate occasions.

On becoming Lord Ellenborough and Chief Justice, Edward Law moved to a great mansion in St. James's Square, the size of which he described to a friend by saying: "Sir, if you let off a piece of ordnance in the hall, the report is not heard in the bedrooms." In this house the Chief Justice expired, on December 13, 1818. Speaking of Lord Ellenborough's residence in St. James's Square, Lord Campbell says: "This was the first instance of a common law judge moving to the 'West End.' Hitherto all the common law judges had lived within a radius of half a mile from Lincoln's Inn; but they are now spread over the Regent's Park, Hyde Park Gardens, and Kensington Gore."

Lord Harwicke and Lord Thurlow have been more than once mentioned as inhabitants of Ormond Street.

Eldon's residences may be noticed with advantage in this place. On leaving Oxford and settling in London, he took a small house for himself and Mrs. Scott in Cursitor Street, Chancery Lane. About this dwelling he wrote to his brother Henry:—"I have got a house barely sufficient to hold my small family, which (so great is the demand for them here) will, in rent and taxes, cost me annually six pounds." To this house he used to point in the days of his prosperity, and, in allusion to the poverty which he never experienced, he would add, "There was my first perch. Many a time have I run down from Cursitor Street to Fleet Market and bought sixpenn'orth of sprats for our supper." After leaving Cursitor Street, he lived in Carey Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, where also, in his later years, he believed himself to have endured such want of money that he and his wife were glad to fill themselves with sprats. When he fixed this anecdote upon Carey Street, the old Chancellor used to represent himself as buying the sprats in Clare Market instead of Fleet Market. After some successful years he moved his household from the vicinity of Lincoln's Inn, and took a house in the law quarter, selecting one of the roomy houses (No. 42) of Gower Street, where he lived when as Attorney General he conducted the futile prosecutions of Hardy, Horne Tooke, and Thelwall, in 1794.

On quitting Gower Street, Eldon took the house in Bedford Square, which witnessed so many strange scenes during his tenure of the seals, and also during his brief exclusion from office. In Bedford Square he played the part of chivalric protector to the Princess of Wales, and chuckled over the proof-sheets of that mysterious 'book' by the publication of which the injured wife and the lawyer hoped to take vengeance on their common enemy. There the Chancellor, feeling it well to protract his flirtation with the Princess of Wales, entertained her in the June of 1808, with a grand banquet, from which Lady Eldon was compelled by indisposition to be absent. And there, four years later, when he was satisfied that her Royal Highness's good opinion could be of no service to him, the crafty, self-seeking minister gave a still more splendid dinner to the husband whose vices he had professed to abhor, whose meanness of spirit he had declared the object of his contempt. "However," writes Lord Campbell, with much satiric humor, describing this alliance between the selfish voluptuary and the equally selfish lawyer, "he was much comforted by having the honor, at the prorogation, of entertaining at dinner his Royal Highness the Regent, with whom he was now a special favorite, and who, enjoying the splendid hospitality of Bedford Square, forgot that the Princess of Wales had sat in the same room; at the same table; on the same chair; had drunk of the same wine; out of the same cup; while the conversation had turned on her barbarous usage, and the best means of publishing to the world her wrongs and his misconduct."

Another of the Prince Regent's visits to Bedford Square is surrounded with comic circumstances and associations. In the April of 1815, a mastership of chancery became vacant by the death of Mr. Morris; and forthwith the Chancellor was assailed with entreaties from every direction for the vacant post. For two months Eldon, pursuing that policy of which he was a consummate master, delayed to appoint; but on June 23, he disgusted the bar and shocked the more intelligent section of London society, by conferring the post on Jekyll, the courtly bon vivant and witty descendant of Sir Joseph Jekyll, Master of the Rolls. Amiable, popular, and brilliant, Jekyll received the congratulations of his numerous personal friends; but beyond the circle of his private acquaintance the appointment created lively dissatisfaction—dissatisfaction which was heightened rather than diminished by the knowledge that the placeman's good fortune was entirely due to the personal importunity of the Prince Regent, who called at the Chancellor's house, and having forced his way into the bedroom, to which Eldon was confined by an attack of gout, refused to take his departure without a promise that his friend should have the vacant place. How this royal influence was applied to the Chancellor, is told in the 'Anecdote Book.'

Fortunately Jekyll was less incompetent for the post than his enemies had declared, and his friends admitted. He proved a respectable master, and held his post until age and sickness compelled him to resign it; and then, sustained in spirits by the usual retiring pension, he sauntered on right mirthfully into the valley of the shadow of death. On the day after his retirement, the jocose veteran, meeting Eldon in the street, observed:—"Yesterday, Lord Chancellor, I was your master; to-day I am my own."

From Bedford Square, Lord Eldon, for once following the fashion, moved to Hamilton Place, Piccadilly. With the purpose of annoying him the 'Queen's friends,' during the height of the 'Queen Caroline agitation,' proposed to buy the house adjoining the Chancellor's residence in Hamilton Place, and to fit it up for the habitation of that not altogether meritorious lady. Such an arrangement would have been an humiliating as well as exasperating insult to a lawyer who, as long as the excitement about the poor woman lasted, would have been liable to affront whenever he left his house or looked through the windows facing Hamilton Place. The same mob that delighted in hallooing round whatever house the Queen honored with her presence, would have varied their 'hurrahs' for the lady with groans for the lawyer who, after making her wrongs the stalking-horse of his ambition, had become one of her chief oppressors. Eldon determined to leave Hamilton Place on the day which should see the Queen enter it; and hearing that the Lords of the Treasury were about to assist her with money for the purchase of the house, he wrote to Lord Liverpool, protesting against an arrangement which would subject him to annoyance at home and to ridicule out of doors. "I should," he wrote, "be very unwilling to state anything offensively, but I cannot but express my confidence that Government will not aid a project which must remove the Chancellor from his house the next hour that it takes effect, and from his office at the same time." This decided attitude caused the Government to withdraw their countenance from the project; whereupon a public subscription was opened for its accomplishment. Sufficient funds were immediately proffered; and the owner of the mansion had verbally made terms with the patriots, when the Chancellor, outbidding them, bought the house himself. "I had no other means," he wrote to his daughter, "of preventing the destruction of my present house as a place in which I could live, or which anybody else would take. The purchase-money is large, but I have already had such offers, that I shall not, I think, lose by it."

Russell Square—where Lord Loughborough (who knows aught of the Earl of Rosslyn?) had his town house, after leaving Lincoln's Inn Fields, and where Charles Abbott (Lord Tenterden) established himself on leaving the house in Queen Square, into which he married during the summer of 1795—maintained a quasi-fashionable repute much later than the older and therefore more interesting parts of the 'old law quarter.' Theodore Hook's disdain for Bloomsbury is not rightly appreciated by those who fail to bear in mind that the Russell Square of Hook's time was tenanted by people who—though they were unknown to 'fashion,' in the sense given to the word by men of Brummel's habit and tone—had undeniable status amongst the aristocracy and gentry of England. With some justice the witty writer has been charged with snobbish vulgarity because he ridiculed humble Bloomsbury for being humble. His best defence is found in the fact that his extravagant scorn was not directed at helpless and altogether obscure persons so much as at an educated and well-born class who laughed at his caricatures, and gave dinners at which he was proud to be present. Though it fails to clear the novelist of the special charge, this apology has a certain amount of truth; and in so far as it palliates some of his offences against good taste and gentle feeling, by all means let him have the full benefit of it. Criticism can afford to be charitable to the clever, worthless man, now that no one admires or tries to respect him. Again, it may be advanced, in Hook's behalf, that political animosity—a less despicable, though not less hurtful passion than love of gentility—contributed to Hook's dislike of the quarter on the north side of Holborn. As a humorist he ridiculed, as a panderer to fashionable prejudices he sneered at, Bloomsbury; but as a tory he cherished a genuine antagonism to the district of town that was associated in the public mind with the wealth and ascendency of the house of Bedford. Anyhow, the Russell Square neighborhood—although it was no longer fashionable, as Belgravia and Mayfair are fashionable at the present day—remained the locality of many important families, at the time when Mr. Theodore Hook was pleased to assume that no one above the condition of a rich tradesman or second-rate attorney lived in it. Of the lawyers whose names are mournfully associated with the square itself are Sir Samuel Romilly and Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd. In 1818, the year of his destruction by his own hand, Sir Samuel Romilly lived there; and Talfourd had a house on the east side of the square up to the time of his lamented death in 1854.

That Theodore Hook's ridicule of Bloomsbury greatly lessened for a time the value of its houses there is abundant evidence. When he deluged the district with scornful satire, his voice was a social power, to which a considerable number of honest people paid servile respect. His clever words were repeated; and Bloomsbury having become a popular by-word for contempt, aristocratic families ceased to live, and were reluctant to invest money, in its well-built mansions. But Hook only accelerated a movement which had for years been steadily though silently making progress. Erskine knew Red Lion Square when every house was occupied by a lawyer of wealth and eminence, if not of titular rank; but before he quitted the stage, barristers had relinquished the ground in favor of opulent shopkeepers. When an ironmonger became the occupant of a house in Red Lion Square on the removal of a distinguished counsel, Erskine wrote the epigram—

"This house, where once a lawyer dwelt,
Is now a smith's,—alas!
How rapidly the iron age
Succeeds the age of brass."

These lines point to a minor change in the social arrangements of London, which began with the century, and was still in progress when Erskine had for years been mouldering in his grave. In 1823, the year of Erskine's death, Chief Baron Richards expired in his town house, in Great Ormond Street. In the July of the following year Baron Wood—i.e., George Wood, the famous special pleader—died at his house in Bedford Square, about seventeen months after his resignation of his seat in the Court of Exchequer to John Hullock.

At the present time the legal fraternity has deserted Bloomsbury. The last of the Judges to depart was Chief Baron Pollock, who sold his great house in Queen Square at a quite recent date. With the disappearance of this venerable and universally respected judge, the legal history of the neighborhood may be said to have closed. Some wealthy solicitors still live in Russell Square and the adjoining streets; a few old-fashioned barristers still linger in Upper Bedford Place and Lower Bedford Place. Guilford Street and Doughty Street, and the adjacent thoroughfares of the same class, still number a sprinkling of rising juniors, literary barristers, and fairly prosperous attorneys. Perhaps the ancient aroma of the 'old law quarter'—Mesopotamia, us it is now disrespectfully termed—is still strong and pleasant enough to attract a few lawyers who cherish a sentimental fondness for the past. A survey of the Post Office Directory creates an impression that, compared with other neighborhoods, the district north and northeast of Bloomsbury Square still possesses more than an average number of legal residents; but it no longer remains the quarter of the lawyers.

There still resides in Mecklenburgh Square a learned Queen's Counsel, for whose preservation the prayers of the neighborhood constantly ascend. To his more scholarly and polite neighbors this gentleman is an object of intellectual interest and anxious affection. As the last of an extinct species, as a still animate Dodo, as a lordly Mohican who has outlived his tribe, this isolated counselor of her Gracious Majesty is watched by heedful eyes whenever he crosses his threshold. In the morning, as he paces from his dwelling to chambers, his way down Doughty Street and John Street, and through Gray's Inn Gardens, is guarded by men anxious for his safety. Shreds of orange-peel are whisked from the pavement on which he is about to tread; and when he crosses Holborn he walks between those who would imperil their lives to rescue him from danger. The gatekeeper in Doughty Street daily makes him low obeisance, knowing the historic value and interest of his courtly presence. Occasionally the inhabitants of Mecklenburgh Square whisper a fear that some sad morning their Q.C. may flit away without giving them a warning. Long may it be before the residents of the 'Old Law Quarter' shall wail over the fulfillment of this dismal anticipation!

[2] Dr. Clench lived in Brownlow Street, Holborn; and until his death, in 1831, John Abernethy occupied in Bedford Row the house which is still inhabited by an eminent surgeon, who was Abernethy's favorite pupil. Of Dr. Clench's death in January, 1691-2, Narcissus Luttrell gives the following account: "The 5th, last night, Dr. Clench, the physician, was strangled in a coach; two persons came to his house in Brownlow Street, Holborn, in a coach, and pretended to carry him to a patient's in the City; they drove backward and forward, and after some time stopt by Leadenhall, and sent the coachman to buy a couple of fowls for supper, who went accordingly; and in the meantime they slipt away, and the coachman when he returned found Dr. Clench with a handkerchief tyed about his neck, with a hard sea-coal twisted in it, and clapt against his windpipe; he had spirits applied to him and other means, but too late, he having been dead some time." Dr. Clench's murderer, one Mr. Harrison, a man of gentle condition, was apprehended, tried, found guilty, and hung in chains.

[3] Holt's country seat was Redgrave Hall, formerly the home of the Bacons. It was on his manor of Redgrave, that Sir Nicholas Bacon entertained Queen Elizabeth, when she remarked that her Lord Keeper's house was too small for him, and he answered—"Your Majesty has made me too great for my house."

PART II.

LOVES OF THE LAWYERS.

CHAPTER VI.

A LOTTERY.

"I would compare the multitude of women which are to be chosen for wives unto a bag full of snakes, having among them a single eel; now if a man should put his hand into this bag, he may chance to light on the eel; but it is an hundred to one he shall be stung by a snake."

These words were often heard from the lips of that honest judge, Sir John More, whose son Thomas stirred from brain to foot by the bright eyes, and snowy neck, and flowing locks of cara Elizabetha (the cara Elizabetha of a more recent Tom More was 'Bessie, my darling')—penned those warm and sweetly-flowing verses which delight scholars of the present generation, and of which the following lines are neither the least musical nor the least characteristic:—

"Jam subit illa dies quæ ludentem obtulit olim
Inter virgineos te mibi prima choros.
Lactea cum flavi decuerunt colla capilli,
Cum gena par nivibus visa, labella rosis:
Cum tua perstringunt oculos duo sydera nostros
Perque oculos intrant in mea corda meos."

The goddess of love played the poet more than one droll trick. Having approached her with musical flattery, he fled from her with fear and abhorrence. For a time the highest and holiest of human affections was to his darkened mind no more than a carnal appetite; and he strove to conquer the emotions which he feared would rouse within him a riot of impious passions. With fasting and cruel discipline he would fain have killed the devil that agitated him, whenever he passed a pretty girl in the street. As a lay Carthusian he wore a hair-shirt next his skin, disciplined his bare back with scourges, slept on the cold ground or a hard bench, and by a score other strong measures sought to preserve his spiritual by ruining his bodily health. But nature was too powerful for unwholesome doctrine and usage, and before he rashly took a celibatic vow, he knelt to fair Jane Colt—and rising, kissed her on the lips.

When spiritual counsel had removed his conscientious objections to matrimony, he could not condescend to marry for love, but must, forsooth, choose his wife in obedience to considerations of compassion and mercy. Loving her younger sister, he paid his addresses to Jane, because he shrunk from the injustice of putting the junior above the older of the two girls. "Sir Thomas having determined, by the advice and direction of his ghostly father, to be a married man, there was at that time a pleasant conceited gentleman of an ancient family in Essex, one Mr. John Colt, of New Hall, that invited him into his house, being much delighted in his company, proffering unto him the choice of any of his daughters, who were young gentlewomen of very good carriage, good complexions, and very religiously inclined; whose honest and sweet conversation and virtuous education enticed Sir Thomas not a little; and although his affection most served him to the second, for that he thought her the fairest and best favored, yet when he thought within himself that it would be a grief and some blemish to the eldest to have the younger sister preferred before her, he, out of a kind of compassion, settled his fancy upon the eldest, and soon after married her with all his friends' good liking."

The marriage was a fair happy union, but its duration was short. After giving birth to four children Jane died, leaving the young husband, who had instructed her sedulously, to mourn her sincerely. That his sorrow was poignant may be easily believed; for her death deprived him of a docile pupil, as well as a dutiful wife.

"Virginem duxit admodum puellam," Erasmus says of his friend, "claro genere natam, rudem adhuc utpote ruri inter parentes ac sorores semper habitam, quo magis illi liceret illam ad suos mores fingere. Hanc et literis instruendam curavit, et omni musices genere doctam reddidit." Here is another insight into the considerations which brought about the marriage. When he set out in search of a wife, he wished to capture a simple, unsophisticated, untaught country girl, whose ignorance of the world should incline her to rely on his superior knowledge, and the deficiencies of whose intellectual training should leave him an ample field for educational experiments. Seeking this he naturally turned his steps toward the eastern countries; and in Essex he found the young lady, who to the last learnt with intelligence and zeal the lessons which he set her.

More's second choice of a wife was less fortunate than his first. Wanting a woman to take care of his children and preside over his rather numerous establishment, he made an offer to a widow, named Alice Middleton. Plain and homely in appearance and taste, Mistress Alice would have been invaluable to Sir Thomas as a superior domestic servant, but his good judgment and taste deserted him when he decided to make her a closer companion. Bustling, keen, loquacious, tart, the good dame scolded servants and petty tradesmen with admirable effect; but even at this distance of time the sensitive ear is pained by her sharp, garrulous tongue, when its acerbity and virulence are turned against her pacific and scholarly husband. A smile follows the recollection that he endeavored to soften her manners and elevate her nature by a system of culture similar to that by which Jane Colt, 'admodum puella,' had been formed and raised into a polished gentlewoman. Past forty years of age, Mistress Alice was required to educate herself anew. Erasmus assures his readers that "though verging on old age, and not of a yielding temper," she was prevailed upon "to take lessons on the lute, the cithara, the viol, the monochord, and the flute, which she daily practised to him."

It has been the fashion with biographers to speak bitterly of this poor woman, and to pity More for his cruel fate in being united to a termagant. No one has any compassion for her. Sir Thomas is the victim; Mistress Alice the shrill virago. In those days, when every historic reprobate finds an apologist, is there no one to say a word in behalf of the Widow Middleton, whose lot in life and death seems to this writer very pitiable? She was quick in temper, slow in brain, domineering, awkward. To rouse sympathy for such a woman is no easy task; but if wretchedness is a title to compassion, Mistress Alice has a right to charity and gentle usage. It was not her fault that she could not sympathize with her grand husband, in his studies and tastes, his lofty life and voluntary death; it was her misfortune that his steps traversed plains high above her own moral and intellectual level. By social theory they were intimate companions; in reality, no man and woman in all England were wider apart. From his elevation he looked down on her with commiseration that was heightened by curiosity and amazement; and she daily writhed under his gracious condescension and passionless urbanity; under her own consciousness of inferiority and consequent self-scorn. He could no more sympathize with her petty aims, than she with the high views and ambitions; and conjugal sympathy was far more necessary to her than to him. His studious friends and clever children afforded him an abundance of human fellowship; his public cares and intellectual pursuits gave him constant diversion. He stood in such small need of her, that if some benevolent fairy had suddenly endowed her with grace, wisdom, and understanding, the sum of his satisfaction would not have been perceptibly altered. But apart from him she had no sufficient enjoyments. His genuine companionship was requisite for her happiness; but for this society nature had endowed her with no fitness. In the case of an unhappy marriage, where the unhappiness is not caused by actual misconduct, but is solely due to incongruity of tastes and capacities, it is cruel to assume that the superior person of the ill-assorted couple has the stronger claim to sympathy.

Finding his wife less tractable than he wished, More withheld his confidence from her, taking the most important steps of his life, without either asking for her advice, or even announcing the course which he was about to take. His resignation of the seals was announced to her on the day after his retirement from office, and in a manner which, notwithstanding its drollery, would greatly pain any woman of ordinary sensibility. The day following the date of his resignation was a holiday; and in accordance with his usage the ex-Chancellor, together with his household, attended service in Chelsea Church. On her way to church, Lady More returned the greetings of her friends with a stateliness not unseemly at that ceremonious time in one who was the lady of the Lord High Chancellor. At the conclusion of service, ere she left her pew, the intelligence was broken to her in a jest that she had lost her cherished dignity. "And whereas upon the holidays during his High Chancellorship one of his gentlemen, when the service of the church was done, ordinarily used to come to my lady his wife's pew-door, and say unto her 'Madam, my lord is gone,' he came into my lady his wife's pew himself, and making a low courtesy, said unto her, 'Madam, my lord is gone,' which she, imagining to be but one of his jests, as he used many unto her, he sadly affirmed unto her that it was true. This was the way he thought fittest to break the matter unto his wife, who was full of sorrow to hear it."

Equally humorous and pathetic was that memorable interview between More and his wife in the Tower, when she, regarding his position by the lights with which nature had endowed her, counseled him to yield even at that late moment to the king. "What the goodyear, Mr. More!" she cried, bustling up to the tranquil and courageous man. "I marvel that you, who have been hitherto always taken for a wise man, will now so play the fool as to lie here in this close, filthy prison, and be content to be shut up thus with mice and rats, when you might be abroad at your liberty, with the favor and good-will both of the king and his council, if you would but do as the bishops and best learned of his realm have done; and, seeing you have at Chelsea a right fair house, your library, your books, your gallery, and all other necessaries so handsome about you, where you might, in company with me, your wife, your children, and household, be merry, I muse what, in God's name, you mean, here thus fondly to tarry." Having heard her out—preserving his good-humor, he said to her, with a cheerful countenance, "I pray thee, good Mrs. Alice, tell me one thing!" "What is it?" saith she, "Is not this house as near heaven as my own?"

Sir Thomas More was looking towards heaven.

Mistress Alice had her eye upon the 'right fair house' at Chelsea.

CHAPTER VII.

GOOD QUEEN BESS.

Amongst the eminent men who are frequently mentioned as notorious suitors for the personal affection of Queen Elizabeth, a conspicuous place is awarded to Hatton, by the scandalous memoirs of his time and the romantic traditions of later ages. Historians of the present generation have accepted without suspicion the story that Hatton was Elizabeth's amorous courtier, that the fanciful letters of 'Lydds' were fervent solicitations for response to his passion; that he won her favor and his successive promotions by timely exhibition of personal grace and steady perseverance in flattery. Campbell speaks of the queen and her chancellor as 'lovers;' and the view of the historian has been upheld by novelists and dramatic writers.

The writer of this page ventures to reject a story which is not consistent with truth, and casts a dark suspicion on her who was not more powerful as a queen than virtuous as a woman.

For illustrations of lovers' pranks amongst the Elizabethan lawyers, the reader must pass to two great judges, the inferior of whom was a far greater man than Christopher Hatton. Rivals in law and politics, Bacon and Coke were also rivals in love. Having wooed the same proud, lovely, capricious, violent woman, the one was blessed with failure, and the other was cursed with success.

Until a revolution in the popular estimate of Bacon was effected by Mr. Hepworth Dixon's vindication of that great man, it was generally believed that love was no appreciable element in his nature. Delight in vain display occupied in his affections the place which should have been held by devotion to womanly beauty and goodness; he had sneered at love in an essay, and his cold heart never rebelled against the doctrine of his clever brain; he wooed his notorious cousin for the sake of power, and then married Alice Barnham for money. Such was the theory, the most solid foundation of which was a humorous treatise,[4] misread and misapplied.

The lady's wealth, rank, and personal attractions were in truth the only facts countenancing the suggestion that Francis Bacon proffered suit to his fair cousin from interested motives. Notwithstanding her defects of temper, no one denies that she was a woman qualified by nature to rouse the passion of man. A wit and beauty, she was mistress of the arts which heighten the powers of feminine tact and loveliness. The daughter of Sir Thomas Cecil, the grandchild of Lord Burleigh, she was Francis Bacon's near relation; and though the Cecils were not inclined to help him to fortune, he was nevertheless one of their connection, and consequently often found himself in familiar conversation with the bright and fascinating woman. Doubtless she played with him, persuading herself that she merely treated him with cousinly cordiality, when she was designedly making him her lover. The marvel was that she did not give him her hand; that he sought it is no occasion for surprise—or for insinuations that he coveted her wealth. Biography is by turns mischievously communicative and vexatiously silent. That Bacon loved Sir William Hatton's widow, and induced Essex to support his suit, and that rejecting him she gave herself to his enemy, we know; but history tells us nothing of the secret struggle which preceded the lady's resolution to become the wife of an unalluring, ungracious, peevish, middle-aged widower. She must have felt some tenderness for her cousin, whose comeliness spoke to every eye, whose wit was extolled by every lip. Perhaps she, like many others, had misread the essay 'Of Love,' and felt herself bound in honor to bring the philosopher to his knees at her feet. It is credible that from the outset of their sentimental intercourse, she intended to win and then to flout him. But coquetry cannot conquer the first laws of human feeling. To be a good flirt, a woman must have nerve and a sympathetic nature; and doubtless the flirt in this instance paid for her triumph with the smart of a lasting wound. Is it fanciful to argue that her subsequent violence and misconduct, her impatience of control and scandalous disrespect for her aged husband, may have been in some part due to the sacrifice of personal inclination which she made in accepting Coke at the entreaty of prudent and selfish relations—and to the contrast, perpetually haunting her, between what she was as Sir Edward's termagant partner, and what she might have been as Francis Bacon's wife?

She consented to a marriage with Edward Coke, but was so ashamed of her choice, that she insisted on a private celebration of their union, although Archbishop Whitgift had recently raised his voice against the scandal of clandestine weddings, and had actually forbidden them. In the face of the primate's edict the ill-assorted couple were united in wedlock, without license or publication of banns, by a country parson, who braved the displeasure of Whitgift, in order that he might secure the favor of a secular patron. The wedding-day was November 24, 1598, the bridegroom's first wife having been buried on the 24th of the previous July.[5] On learning the violation of his orders, the archbishop was so incensed that he resolved to excommunicate the offenders, and actually instituted for that purpose legal proceedings, which were not dropped until bride and bridegroom humbly sued for pardon, pleading ignorance of law in excuse of their misbehavior.

The scandalous consequences of that marriage are known to every reader who has laughed over the more pungent and comic scenes of English history. Whilst Lady Hatton gave masques and balls in the superb palace which came into her possession through marriage with Sir Christopher Hatton's nephew, Coke lived in his chambers, working at cases and writing the books which are still carefully studied by every young man who wishes to make himself a master of our law. In private they had perpetual squabbles, and they quarrelled with equal virulence and indecency before the world. The matrimonial settlement of their only and ill-starred daughter was the occasion of an outbreak on the part of husband and wife, that not only furnished diversion for courtiers but agitated the council table. Of all the comic scenes connected with that unseemly fracas, not the least laughable and characteristic was the grand festival of reconciliation at Hatton House, when Lady Hatton received the king and queen in Holborn, and expressly forbade her husband to presume to show himself among her guests. "The expectancy of Sir Edward's rising," says a writer of the period,[6] "is much abated by reason of his lady's liberty,[7] who was brought in great honor to Exeter House by my Lord of Buckingham from Sir William Craven's, whither she had been remanded, presented by his lordship to the king, received gracious usage, reconciled to her daughter by his Majesty, and her house in Holborn enlightened by his presence at a dinner, where there was a royal feast; and to make it more absolutely her own, express commandment given by her ladyship, that neither Sir Edward Coke nor any of his servants should be admitted."

If tradition may be credited, the law is greatly indebted to the class of women whom it was our forefathers' barbarous wont to punish with the ducking-stool. Had Coke been happy in his second marriage, it is assumed that he would have spent more time in pleasure and fewer hours at his desk, that the suitors in his court would have had less careful decisions, and that posterity would have been favored with fewer reports. If the inference is just, society may point to the commentary on Littleton, and be thankful for the lady's unhappy temper and sharp tongue. In like manner the wits of the following century maintained that Holt's steady application to business was a consequence of domestic misery. The lady who ruled his house in Bedford Row, is said to have been such a virago, that the Chief Justice frequently retired to his chambers, in order that he might place himself beyond reach of her voice. Amongst the good stories told of Radcliffe, the Tory physician, is the tradition of his boast, that he kept Lady Holt alive out of pure political animosity to the Whig Chief Justice. Another eminent lawyer, over whose troubles people have made merry in the same fashion, was Jeffrey Gilbert, Baron of the Exchequer. At his death, October 14, 1726, this learned judge left behind him that mass of reports, histories, and treatises by which he is known as one of the most luminous, as well as voluminous of legal writers. None of his works passed through the press during his life, and when their number and value were discovered after his departure to another world, it was whispered that they had been composed in hours of banishment from a hearth where a scolding wife made misery for all who came within the range of her querulous notes.

Disappointed in his suit to his beautiful and domineering cousin, Bacon let some five or six years pass before he allowed his thoughts again to turn to love, and then he wooed and waited for nearly three years more, ere, on a bright May day, he met Alice Barnham in Marylebone Chapel, and made her his wife in the presence of a courtly company. In the July of 1603, he wrote to Cecil:—"For this divulged and almost prostituted title of knighthood, I could, without charge by your honor's mean, be content to have it, both because of this late disgrace, and because I have three new knights in my mess in Gray's Inn Commons, and because I have found out an alderman's daughter, a handsome maiden, to my liking. So as if your honor will find the time, I will come to the court from Gorhambury upon any warning." This expression, 'an alderman's daughter,' contributed greatly, if it did not give rise to, the misapprehension that Bacon's marriage was a mercenary arrangement. In these later times the social status of an alderman is so much beneath the rank of a distinguished member of the bar, that a successful queen's counsel, who should make an offer to the daughter of a City magistrate, would be regarded as bent upon a decidedly unambitious match; and if in a significant tone he spoke of the lady as 'an alderman's daughter' his words might be reasonably construed as a hint that her fortune atoned for her want of rank. But it never occurred to Bacon's contemporaries to put such a construction on the announcement. Far from using the words in an apologetic manner, the lover meant them to express concisely that Alice Barnham was a lady of suitable condition to bear a title as well as to become his bride. Cecil regarded them merely as an assurance that his relative meditated a suitable and even advantageous alliance, just as any statesman of the present day would read an announcement that a kinsman, making his way in the law-courts, intended to marry 'an admiral's daughter' or a 'bishop's daughter.' That it was the reverse of a mercenary marriage, Mr. Hepworth Dixon has indisputably proved in his eighth chapter of 'The Story of Lord Bacon's Life,' where he contrasts Lady Bacon's modest fortune with her husband's personal acquisitions and prospects.

[4] To readers who have no sense of humor and irony, the essay 'Of Love' unquestionably gives countenance to the theory that Francis Bacon was cold and passionless in all that concerned woman. Of the many strange constructions put upon this essay, not the least amusing and perverse is that which would make it a piece of adroit flattery to Elizabeth, who never permitted love "to check with business," though she is represented to have used it as a diversion in idle moments. If Sir Thomas More's 'Utopia' had been published a quarter of a century after 1518 (the date of its appearance), a similar construction would have been put on the passage, which urges that lovers should not be bound by an indissoluble tie of wedlock, until mutual inspection has satisfied each of the contracting parties that the other does not labor under any grave personal defect. If it were possible to regard the passage containing this proposal as an interpolation in the original romance, it might then be regarded as an attempt to palliate Henry VIII.'s conduct to Anne of Cleves.

[5] When due allowance has been made for the difference between the usages of the sixteenth century and the present time, decency was signally violated by this marriage, which followed so soon upon Mrs. Coke's death, and still sooner upon the death of Lady Hatton's famous grandfather, at whose funeral the lawyer made the first overtures for her hand. Mrs. Coke died June 27, 1598, and was buried at Huntingfield, co. Suffolk, July 24, 1598. Lord Burleigh expired on August 4, of the same year. Coke's first marriage was not unhappy; and on the death of his wife by that union, he wrote in his note-book:—"Most beloved and most excellent wife, she well and happily lived, and, as a true handmaid of the Lord, fell asleep in the Lord, and now lives and reigns in heaven." In after years he often wished most cordially that he could say as much for his second wife.

[6] Strafford's Letters and Despatches, I. 5.

[7] Lady Hatton never used her second husband's name either before or after his knighthood. A good case, touching the customary right of a married lady to bear the name, and take her title from the rank of a former husband, is that of Sir Dudley North, Charles II.'s notorious sheriff of London. The son of an English peer, he married Lady Gunning, the widow of a wealthy civic knight, and daughter of Sir Robert Cann, "a morose old merchant of Bristol"—the same magistrate whom Judge Jeffreys, in terms not less just than emphatic, upbraided for his connection with, or to speak moderately, his connivance at, the Bristol kidnappers. It might be thought that the merchant's daughter, on her marriage with a peer's son, would be well content to relinquish the title of Lady Gunning; but Roger North tells us that his brother Dudley accepted knighthood, in order that he might avoid giving offence to the city, and also, in order that his wife might be called Lady North, and not Lady Gunning.—Vide Life of the Hon. Sir Dudley North. After Sir Thomas Wilde (subsequently Lord Truro), married Augusta Emma d'Este, the daughter of the duke of Sussex and Lady Augusta Murray, that lady, of whose legitimacy Sir Thomas had vainly endeavored to convince the House of Lords, retained her maiden surname. In society she was generally known as the Princess d'Este, and the bilious satirists of the Inns of Court used to speak of Sir Thomas as 'the Prince.' It was said that one of Wilde's familiar associates, soon after the lawyer's marriage, called at his house and asked if the Princess d'Este was at home. "No, sir," replied the servant, "the Princess d'Este is not at home, but the Prince is!" That this malicious story obtained a wide currency is not wonderful; that it is a truthful anecdote the writer of this book would not like to pledge his credit. The case of Sir John Campbell and Lady Strathedon, was a notable instance of a lawyer and his wife bearing different names. Raised to the peerage, with the title of Baroness Stratheden, the first Lord Abinger's eldest daughter was indebted to her husband for an honor that made him her social inferior. Many readers will remember a droll story of a misapprehension caused by her ladyship's title. During an official journey, Sir John Campbell and Baroness Stratheden slept at lodgings which he had frequently occupied as a circuiteer. On the morning after his arrival, the landlady obtained a special interview with Campbell, and in the baroness's absence thus addressed him, with mingled indignation and respectfulness:—"Sir John Campbell, I am a lone widow, and live by my good name. It is not in my humble place to be too curious about the ladies brought to my lodgings by counsellors and judges. It is not in me to make remarks if a counsellor's lady changes the color of her eyes, and her complexion every assizes. But, Sir John, a gentleman ought not to bring a lady to a lone widow's lodgings, unless so long as he 'okkipies' the apartments he makes all honorable professions that the lady is his wife, and as such gives her the use of his name."

CHAPTER VIII.

REJECTED ADDRESSES.

No lawyer of the Second Charles's time surpassed Francis North in love of money, or was more firmly resolved not to marry, without due and substantial consideration.

His first proposal was for the daughter of a Gray's Inn money-lender. Usury was not a less contemptible vocation in the seventeenth century than it is at the present time; and most young barristers of gentle descent and fair prospects would have preferred any lot to the degradation of marriage with the child of the most fortunate usurer in Charles II.'s London. But the Hon. Francis North was placed comfortably beneath the prejudices of his order and time of life. He was of noble birth, but quite ready to marry into a plebeian family; he was young, but loved money more than aught else. So his hearing was quickened and his blood beat merrily when, one fine morning, "there came to him a recommendation of a lady, who was an only daughter of an old usurer in Gray's Inn, supposed to be a good fortune in present, for her father was rich; but, after his death, to become worth, nobody could tell what." One would like to know how that 'recommendation of a lady' reached the lawyer's chambers; above all, who sent it?

"His lordship," continues Roger North, "got a sight of the lady, and did not dislike her; thereupon he made the old man a visit, and a proposal of himself to marry his daughter." By all means let this ingenuous, high-spirited Templar have a fair judgment. He would not have sold himself to just any woman. He required a maximum of wealth with a minimum of personal repulsiveness. He therefore 'took a sight of the lady' (it does not appear that he talked with her) before he committed himself irrevocably by a proposal. The sight having been taken, as he did not dislike her (mind, he did not positively like her) he made the old man a visit. Loving money, and believing in it, this 'old man' wished to secure as much of it as possible for his only child; and therefore looking keenly at the youthful admirer of a usurer's heiress, "asked him what estate his father intended to settle upon him for present maintenance, jointure, and provision for children." Mildly and not unjustly Roger calls this "an inauspicious question." It was so inauspicious that Mr. Francis North abruptly terminated the discussion by wishing the usurer good-morning. So ended Love Affair No. 1.

Having lost his dear companion, Mr. Edward Palmer, son of the powerful Sir Geoffry Palmer, Mr. Francis North soon regarded his friend's wife with tender longing. It was only natural that he should desire to mitigate his sorrow for the dead by possession of the woman who was "left a flourishing widow, and very rich." But the lady knew her worth, as well she might, for "never was lady more closely besieged with wooers: she had no less than five younger sons sat down before her at one time, and she kept them well in hand, as they say, giving no definite answers to any of one of them." Small respect did Mistress Edward Palmer show her late husband's most intimate friend. For weeks she tortured the wretched, knavish fellow with coquettish tricks, and having rendered him miserable in many ways, made him ludicrous by jilting him. "He was held at the long saw above a month, doing his duty as well as he might, and that was but clumsily; for he neither dressed nor danced, when his rivals were adroit at both, and the lady used to shuffle her favors amongst them affectedly, and on purpose to mortify his lordship, and at the same time be as civil to him, with like purpose to mortify them." Poor Mr. Francis! Well may his brother write indignantly, "It was very grievous to him—that had his thoughts upon his clients' concerns, which came in thick upon him—to be held in a course of bo-peep play with a crafty widow." At length, "after a clancular proceeding," this crafty widow, by marrying "a jolly knight of a good estate," set her victims free; and Mr. Francis was at liberty to look elsewhere for a lapful of money.

Roger North tells the story of the third affair so concisely and pithily that his exact words must be put before the reader:—"Another proposition came to his lordship," writes the fraternal biographer, giving Francis North credit for the title he subsequently won, although at the time under consideration he was plain Mister North, on the keen look-out for the place of Solicitor General, "by a city broker, from Sir John Lawrence, who had many daughters, and those reputed beauties; and the fortune was to be £6000. His lordship went and dined with the alderman, and liked the lady, who (as the way is) was dressed out for a muster. And coming to treat, the portion shrank to £5000, and upon that his lordship parted, and was not gone far before Mr. Broker (following) came to him, and said Sir John would give £500 more at the birth of the first child; but that would not do, for his lordship hated such screwing. Not long after this dispute, his lordship was made the King's Solicitor General, and then the broker came again, with news that Sir John would give £10,000. 'No,' his lordship said, 'after such usage he would not proceed if he might have £20,000.'" The intervention of the broker in this negotiation is delightfully suggestive. More should have been said about him—his name, address, and terms for doing business. Was he paid for his services on all that he could save from a certain sum beyond which his employer would not advance a single gold-piece for the disposal of his child? Were there, in olden time, men who avowed themselves 'Heart and Jointure Brokers, Agents for Lovers of both Sexes, Contractors of Mutual Attachments, Wholesale and Retail Dealers in Reciprocal Affection, and General Referees, Respondents, and Insurers in all Sentimental Affairs, Clandestine or otherwise?'

After these mischances Francis North made an eligible match under somewhat singular circumstances. As co-heiresses of Thomas, Earl of Down, three sisters, the Ladies Pope, claimed under certain settlements large estates of inheritance, to which Lady Elizabeth Lee set up a counter claim. North, acting as Lady Elizabeth Lee's counsel, effected a compromise which secured half the property in dispute to his client, and diminished by one-half the fortunes to which each of the three suitors on the other side had maintained their right. Having thus reduced the estate of Lady Frances Pope to a fortune estimated at about £14,000, the lawyer proposed for her hand, and was accepted. After his marriage, alluding to his exertions in behalf of Lady Elizabeth Lee's very disputable claim, he used to say that "he had been counsel against himself;" but Roger North frankly admits that "if this question had not come to such a composition, which diminished the ladies' fortunes, his brother had never compassed his match."

It was not without reluctance that the Countess of Downs consented to the union of her daughter with the lawyer who had half ruined her, and who (though he was Solicitor General and in fine practice) could settle only £5000 upon the lady. "I well remember," observes Roger, "the good countess had some qualms, and complained that she knew not how she could justify what she had done (meaning the marrying her daughters with no better settlement)." To these qualms Francis North, with lawyer-like coolness, answered—"Madam, if you meet with any question about that, say that your daughter has £1000 per annum jointure."

The marriage was celebrated in Wroxton Church; and after bountiful rejoicings with certain loyalist families of Oxfordshire, the happy couple went up to London and lived in chambers until they moved into a house in Chancery Lane.

It may surprise some readers of this book to learn that George Jeffreys, the odious judge of the Bloody Circuit, was a successful gallant. Tall, well-shaped, and endowed by nature with a pleasant countenance and agreeable features, Jeffreys was one of the most fascinating men of his time. A wit and a bon-vivant, he could hit the humor of the roystering cavaliers who surrounded the 'merry monarch;' a man of gallantry and polite accomplishments, he was acceptable to women of society. The same tongue that bullied from the bench, when witnesses were perverse or counsel unruly, could flatter with such melodious affectation of sincerity, that he was known as a most delightful companion. As a musical connoisseur he spoke with authority; as a teller of good stories he had no equal in town. Even those who detested him did not venture to deny that in the discharge of his judicial offices he could at his pleasure assume a dignity and urbane composure that well became the seat of justice. In short, his talents and graces were so various and effective, that he would have risen to the bench, even if he had labored under the disadvantages of pure morality and amiable temper.

Women declared him irresistible. At court he had the ear of Nell Gwyn and the Duchess of Portsmouth—the Protestant favorite and the Catholic mistress; and before he attained the privilege of entering Whitehall—at a time when his creditors were urgent, and his best clients were the inferior attorneys of the city courts—he was loved by virtuous girls. He was still poor, unknown, and struggling with difficulties, when he induced an heiress to accept his suit,—the daughter of a rural squire whose wine the barrister had drunk upon circuit. This young lady was wooed under circumstances of peculiar difficulty; and she promised to elope with him if her father refused to receive him as a son-in-law. Ill-luck befell the scheme; and whilst young Jeffreys was waiting in the Temple for the letter which should decide his movements, an intimation reached him that elopement was impossible and union forbidden. The bearer of this bad news was a young lady—the child of a poor clergyman—who had been the confidential friend and paid companion of the squire's daughter.

The case was hard for Jeffreys, cruel for the fair messenger. He had lost an advantageous match, she had lost her daily bread. Furious with her for having acted as the confidante of the clandestine lovers, the squire had turned this poor girl out of his house; and she had come to London to seek for employment as well as to report the disaster.

Jeffreys saw her overpowered with trouble and shame—penniless in the great city, and disgraced by expulsion from her patron's roof. Seeing that her abject plight was the consequence of amiable readiness to serve him, Jeffreys pitied and consoled her. Most young men would have soothed their consciences and dried the running tears with a gift of money or a letter recommending the outcast to a new employer. As she was pretty, a libertine would have tried to seduce her. In Jeffreys, compassion roused a still finer sentiment: he loved the poor girl and married her. On May 23, 1667, Sarah Neesham was married to George Jeffreys of the Inner Temple; and her father, in proof of his complete forgiveness of her escapade, gave her a fortune of £300—a sum which the poor clergyman could not well afford to bestow on the newly married couple.

Having outlived Sarah Neesham, Jeffreys married again—taking for his second wife a widow whose father was Sir Thomas Bludworth, ex-Lord Mayor of London. Whether rumor treated her unjustly it is impossible to say at this distance of time; but if reliance may be put on many broad stories current about the lady, her conduct was by no means free from fault. She was reputed to entertain many lovers. Jeffreys would have created less scandal if, instead of taking her to his home, he had imitated the pious Sir Matthew Hale, who married his maid-servant, and on being twitted by the world with the lowliness of his choice, silenced his censors with a jest.

Amongst the love affairs of seventeenth-century lawyers place must be made for mention of the second wife whom Chief Justice Bramston brought home from Ireland, where she had outlived two husbands (the Bishop of Clogher and Sir John Brereton), before she gave her hand to the judge who had loved her in his boyhood. "When I see her," says the Chief Justice's son, who describes the expedition to Dublin, and the return to London, "I confess I wondered at my father's love. She was low, fatt, red-faced; her dress, too, was a hat and ruff, which tho' she never changed to death. But my father, I believe, seeing me change countenance, told me it was not beautie, but virtue, he courted. I believe she had been handsome in her youth; she had a delicate, fine hand, white and plump, and indeed proved a good wife and mother-in-law, too." On her journey to Charles I.'s London, this elderly bride, in her antiquated attire, rode from Holyhead to Beaumaris on a pillion behind her step-son. "As she rode over the sandes," records her step-son, "behind mee, and pulling off her gloves, her wedding ringe fell off, and sunk instantly. She caused her man to alight; she sate still behind me, and kept her eye on the place, and directed her man, but he not guessing well, she leaped off, saying she would not stir without her ringe, it being the most unfortunate thinge that could befall any one to lose the wedding-ringe—made the man thrust his hand into the sands (the nature of which is not to bear any weight but passing), he pulled up sand, but not the ringe. She made him strip his arme and put it deeper into the sand, and pulled up the ringe; and this done, he and shee, and all that stood still, were sunk almost to the knees, but we were all pleased that the ringe was found."

In the legal circle of Charles the Second's London, Lady King was notable as a virago whose shrill tongue disturbed her husband's peace of mind by day, and broke his rest at night. Earning a larger income than any other barrister of his time, he had little leisure for domestic society; but the few hours which he could have spent with his wife and children, he usually preferred to spend in a tavern, beyond the reach of his lady's sharp querulousness. "All his misfortune," says Roger North, "lay at home, in perverse consort, who always, after his day-labor done, entertained him with all the chagrin and peevishness imaginable; so that he went home as to his prison, or worse; and when the time came, rather than go home, he chose commonly to get a friend to go and sit in a free chat at the tavern, over a single bottle, till twelve or one at night, and then to work again at five in the morning. His fatigue in business, which, as I said, was more than ordinary to him, and his no comfort, or rather, discomfort at home, and taking his refreshment by excising his sleep, soon pulled him down; so that, after a short illness, he died." On his death-bed, however, he forgave the weeping woman, who, more through physical irritability than wicked design, had caused him so much undeserved discomfort; and by his last will and testament he made liberal provision for her wants. Having made his will, "he said, I am glad it is done," runs the memoir of Sir John King, written by his father, "and after took leave of his wife, who was full of tears; seeing it is the will of God, let us part quietly in friendship, with submissiveness to his will, as we came together in friendship by His will."

CHAPTER IX.

"CICERO" UPON HIS TRIAL.

A complete history of the loves of lawyers would notice many scandalous intrigues and disreputable alliances, and would comprise a good deal of literature for which the student would vainly look in the works of our best authors. From the days of Wolsey, whose amours were notorious, and whose illegitimate son became Dean of Wells, down to the present time of brighter though not unimpeachable morality, the domestic lives of our eminent judges and advocates have too frequently invited satire and justified regret. In the eighteenth century judges, without any loss of caste or popular regard, openly maintained establishments that in these more decorous and actually better days would cover their keepers with obloquy. Attention could be directed to more than one legal family in which the descent must be traced through a succession of illegitimate births. Not only did eminent lawyers live openly with women who were not their wives, and with children whom the law declined to recognize as their offspring; but these women and children moved in good society, apparently indifferent to shame that brought upon them but few inconveniences. In Great Ormond Street, where a mistress and several illegitimate children formed his family circle, Lord Thurlow was visited by bishops and deans; and it is said that in 1806, when Sir James Mansfield, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, was invited to the woolsack and the peerage, he was induced to decline the offer more by consideration for his illegitimate children than by fears for the stability of the new administration.

Speaking of Lord Thurlow's undisguised intercourse with Mrs. Hervey, Lord Campbell says, "When I first knew the profession, it would not have been endured that any one in a judicial situation should have had such a domestic establishment as Thurlow's; but a majority of judges had married their mistresses. The understanding then was that a man elevated to the bench, if he had a mistress, must either marry her or put her away. For many years there has been no necessity for such an alternative." Either Lord Campbell had not the keen appetite for professional gossip, with which he is ordinarily credited, or his conscience must have pricked him when he wrote, "For many years there has been no necessity for such an alternative." To show how far his lordship erred through want of information or defect of candor is not the duty of this page; but without making any statement that can wound private feeling, the present writer may observe that 'the understanding,' to which Lord Campbell draws attention, has affected the fortune of ladies within the present generation.

That the bright and high-minded Somers was the debauchee that Mrs. Manley and Mr. Cooksey would have us believe him is incredible. It is doubtful if Mackey in his 'Sketch of Leading Characters at the English Court' had sufficient reasons for clouding his sunny picture of the statesman with the assertion that he was "something of a libertine." But there are occasions when prudence counsels us to pay attention to slander.

Having raised himself to the office of Solicitor General, Somers, like Francis Bacon, found an alderman's daughter to his liking; and having formed a sincere attachment for her, he made his wishes known to her father. Miss Anne Bawdon's father was a wealthy merchant, styled Sir John Bawdon—a man proud of his civic station and riches, and thinking lightly of lawyers and law. When Somers stated his property and projects, the rental of his small landed estate and the buoyancy of his professional income, the opulent knight by no means approved the prospect offered to his child. The lawyer might die in the course of twelve months; in which case the Worcestershire estate would be still a small estate, and the professional income would cease. In twelve mouths Mr. Solicitor might be proved a scoundrel, for at heart all lawyers were arrant rogues; in which case matters would be still worse. Having regarded the question from these two points of view, Sir John Bawdon gave Somers his dismissal and married Miss Anne to a rich Turkey merchant. Three years later, when Somers had risen to the woolsack, and it was clear that the rich Turkey merchant would never be anything grander than a rich Turkey merchant, Sir John saw that he had made a serious blunder, for which his child certainly could not thank him. A goodly list might be made of cases where papas have erred and repented in Sir John Bawdon's fashion. Sir John Lawrence would have made his daughter a Lord Keeper's lady and a peeress, if he and his broker had dealt more liberally with Francis North. Had it not been for Sir Joseph Jekyll's counsel, Mr. Cocks, the Worcestershire squire, would have rejected Philip Yorke as an ineligible suitor, in which case plain Mrs. Lygon would never have been Lady Hardwicke, and worked her husband's twenty purses of state upon curtains and hangings of crimson velvet. And, if he were so inclined, this writer could point to a learned judge, who in his days of 'stuff' and 'guinea fees' was deemed an ineligible match for a country apothecary's pretty daughter. The country doctor being able to give his daughter £20,000, turned away disdainfully from the unknown 'junior,' who five years later was leading his circuit, and quickly rose to the high office which he still fills to the satisfaction of his country.

Disappointed in his pursuit of Anne Bawdon, Somers never again made any woman an offer of marriage; but scandalous gossip accused him of immoral intercourse with his housekeeper. This woman's name was Blount; and while she resided with the Chancellor, fame whispered that her husband was still living. Not only was Somers charged with open adultery, but it was averred that for the sake of peace he had imprisoned in a madhouse his mistress's lawful husband, who was originally a Worcester tradesman. The chief authority for this startling imputation is Mrs. Manley, who was encouraged, if not actually paid, by Swift to lampoon his political adversaries. In her 'New Atalantis'—the 'Cicero' of which scandalous work was understood by its readers to signify 'Lord Somers,'—this shameless woman entertained quid-nuncs and women of fashion by putting this abominable story in written words, the coarseness of which accorded with the repulsiveness of the accusation.

At a time when honest writers on current politics were punished with fine and imprisonment, the pillory and the whip, statesmen and ecclesiastics were not ashamed to keep such libellers as Mrs. Manley in their pay. That the reader may fully appreciate the change which time has wrought in the tone of political literature, let him contrast the virulence and malignity of this unpleasant passage from the New Atalantis, with the tone which recently characterized the public discussion of the case which is generally known by the name of 'The Edmunds Scandal.'

Notwithstanding her notorious disregard of truth, it is scarcely credible that Mrs. Manley's scurrilous charge was in no way countenanced by facts. At the close of the seventeenth century to keep a mistress was scarcely regarded as an offence against good morals; and living in accordance with the fashion of the time, it is probable that Somers did that which Lord Thurlow, after an interval of a century, was able to do without rousing public disapproval. Had his private life been spotless, he would doubtless have taken legal steps to silence his traducer; and unsustained by a knowledge that he dared not court inquiry into his domestic arrangements, Mrs. Manley would have used her pen with greater caution. But all persons competent to form an opinion on the case have agreed that the more revolting charges of the indictment were the baseless fictions of a malicious and unclean mind.

CHAPTER X.

BROTHERS IN TROUBLE.

In the 'Philosophical Dictionary,' Voltaire, laboring under misapprehension or carried away by perverse humor, made the following strange announcement:—"Il est public en Angleterre, et on voudroit le nier en vain, que le Chancelier Cowper épousa deux femmes, qui vécurent ensemble dans sa maison avec une concorde singulière qui fit honneur à tous trois. Plusieurs curieux ont encore le petit livre que ce Chancelier composa en faveur de la Polygamie." Tickled by the extravagant credulity or grotesque malice of this declaration, an English wit, improving upon the published words, represented the Frenchman as maintaining that the custodian of the Great Seal of England was called the Lord Keeper, because, by English law, he was permitted to keep as many wives as he pleased.

The reader's amusement will not be diminished by a brief statement of the facts to which we are indebted for Voltaire's assertions.

William Cowper, the first earl of his line, began life with a reputation for dissipated tastes and habits, and by unpleasant experience he learned how difficult it is to get rid of a bad name. The son of a Hertfordshire baronet, he was still a law student when he formed a reprehensible connexion with an unmarried lady of that county—Miss (or, as she was called by the fashion of the day Mistress) Elizabeth Culling, of Hertingfordbury Park. But little is known of this woman. Her age is an affair of uncertainty, and all the minor circumstances of her intrigue with young William Cowper are open to doubt and conjecture; but the few known facts justify the inference that she neither merited nor found much pity in her disgrace, and that William erred through boyish indiscretion rather than from vicious propensity. She bore him two children, and he neither married her nor was required by public opinion to marry her. The respectability of their connexions gave the affair a peculiar interest, and afforded countenance to many groundless reports. By her friends it was intimated that the boy had not triumphed over the lady's virtue until he had made her a promise of marriage; and some persons even went so far as to assert that they were privately married. It is not unlikely that at one time the boy intended to make her his wife as soon as he should be independent of his father, and free to please himself. Beyond question, however, is it that they were never united in wedlock, and that Will Cowper joined the Home Circuit with the tenacious fame of a scapegrace and roué.

That he was for any long period a man of dissolute morals is improbable; for he was only twenty-four years of age when he was called to the bar, and before his call he had married (after a year's wooing) a virtuous and exemplary young lady, with whom he lived happily for more than twenty years. A merchant's child, whose face was her fortune—Judith, the daughter of Sir Robert Booth, is extolled by biographers for reclaiming her young husband from a life of levity and culpable pleasure. That he loved her sincerely from the date of their imprudent marriage till the date of her death, which occurred just about six months before his elevation to the woolsack, there is abundant evidence.

Judith died April 2, 1705, and in the September of the following year the Lord Keeper married Mary Clavering, the beautiful and virtuous lady of the bedchamber to Caroline Wilhelmina Dorothea, Princess of Wales. This lady was the Countess Cowper whose diary was published by Mr. Murray in the spring of 1864; and in every relation of life she was as good and noble a creature as her predecessor in William Cowper's affection. Of the loving terms on which she lived with her lord, conclusive testimony is found in their published letters and her diary. Frequently separated by his professional avocations and her duties of attendance upon the Princess of Wales, they maintained, during the periods of personal severance, a close and tender intercourse by written words; and at all other times, in sickness not less than in health, they were a fondly united couple. One pathetic entry in the countess's diary speaks eloquently of their nuptial tenderness and devotion:—"April 7th, 1716. After dinner we went to Sir Godfrey Kneller's to see a picture of my lord, which he is drawing, and is the best that was ever done for him; it is for my drawing-room, and in the same posture that he watched me so many weeks in my great illness."

Lord Cowper's second marriage was solemnized with a secrecy for which his biographers are unable to account. The event took place September, 1706, about two months before his father's death, but it was not announced till the end of February, 1707, at which time Luttrell entered in his diary, "The Lord Keeper, who not long since was privately married to Mrs. Clavering of the bishoprick of Durham, brought her home this day." Mr. Foss, in his 'Judges of England,' suggests that the concealment of the union "may not improbably be explained by the Lord Keeper's desire not to disturb the last days of his father, who might perhaps have been disappointed that the selection had not fallen on some other lady to whom he had wished his son to be united." But this conjecture, notwithstanding its probability, is only a conjecture. Unless they had grave reasons for their conduct, the Lord Keeper and his lady had better have joined hands in the presence of the world, for the mystery of their private wedding nettled public curiosity, and gave new life to an old slander.

Cowper's boyish escapade was not forgotten by the malicious. No sooner had he become conspicuous in his profession and in politics, than the story of his intercourse with Miss Culling was told in coffee-rooms with all the exaggerations that prurient fancy could devise or enmity dictate. The old tale of a secret marriage—or, still worse, of a mock marriage—was caught from the lips of some Hertford scandal-monger, and conveyed to the taverns and drawing-rooms of London. In taking Sir Robert Booth's daughter to Church, he was said to have committed bigamy. Even while he was in the House of Commons he was known by the name of 'Will Bigamy;' and that sobriquet clung to him ever afterwards. Twenty years of wholesome domestic intercourse with his first wife did not free him from the abominable imputation, and his marriage with Miss Clavering revived the calumny in a new form. Fools were found to believe that he had married her during Judith Booth's life and that their union had been concealed for several years instead of a few months. The affair with Miss Culling was for a time forgotten, and the charge preferred against the keeper of the queen's conscience was bigamy of a much more recent date.

In various forms this ridiculous accusation enlivens the squibs of the pamphleteers of Queen Anne's reign. In the 'New Atalantis' Mrs. Manley certified that the fair victim was first persuaded by his lordship's sophistries to regard polygamy as accordant with moral law. Having thus poisoned her understanding, he gratified her with a form of marriage, in which his brother Spencer, in clerical disguise, acted the part of a priest. It was even suggested that the bride in this mock marriage was the lawyer's ward. Never squeamish about the truth, when he could gain a point by falsehood, Swift endorsed the spiteful fabrication, and in the Examiner, pointing at Lord Cowper, wrote—"This gentleman, knowing that marriage fees were a considerable perquisite to the clergy, found out a way of improving them cent. per cent. for the benefit of the Church. His invention was to marry a second wife while the first was alive; convincing her of the lawfulness by such arguments as he did not doubt would make others follow the same example. These he had drawn up in writing with intention to publish for the general good, and it is hoped he may now have leisure to finish them." It is possible that the words in italics were the cause of Voltaire's astounding statement: "Plusieurs curieux ont encore le petit livre que ce Chancelier composa en faveur de la Polygamie." On this point Lord Campbell, confidently advancing an opinion which can scarcely command unanimous assent, says, "The fable of the 'Treatise' is evidently taken from the panegyric on 'a plurality of wives,' which Mrs. Manley puts into the mouth of Lord Cowper, in a speech supposed to be addressed by Hernando to Lousia." But whether Voltaire accepted the 'New Atalantis,' or the Examiner, as an authority for the statements of his very laughable passage, it is scarcely credible that he believed himself to be penning the truth. The most reasonable explanation of the matter appears to be, that tickled by Swift's venomous lines, the sarcastic Frenchman in malice and gaiety adopted them, and added to their piquancy by the assurance that the Chancellor's book was not only published, but was preserved by connoisseurs as a literary curiosity.

Like his elder brother, the Chancellor, Spencer Cowper married at an early age, lived to wed a second wife, and was accused of immorality that was foreign to his nature. The offence with which the younger Cowper was charged, created so wide and profound a sensation, and gave rise to such a memorable trial, that the reader will like to glance at the facts of the case.

Born in 1669, Spencer Cowper was scarcely of age when he was called to the bar, and made Comptroller of the Bridge House Estate. The office, which was in the gift of the corporation of London, provided him with a good income, together with a residence in the Bridge House, St. Olave's, Southwark, and brought him in contact with men who were able to bring him briefs or recommend him to attorneys. For several years the boy-barrister was thought a singularly lucky fellow. His hospitable house was brightened by a young and lovely wife (Pennington, the daughter of John Goodeve), and he was so much respected in his locality that he was made a justice of the peace. In his profession he was equally fortunate: his voice was often heard at Westminster and on the Home Circuit, the same circuit where his brother William practised and his family interest lay. He found many clients.

Envy is the shadow of success; and the Cowpers were watched by men who longed to ruin them. From the day when they armed and rode forth to welcome the Prince of Orange, the lads had been notably fortunate. Notwithstanding his reputation for immorality William Cowper had sprung into lucrative practice, and in 1695 was returned to Parliament as representative for Hartford, the other seat for the borough being filled by his father, Sir William Cowper.

In spite of their comeliness and complaisant manners, the lightness of their wit and the prestige of their success, Hertford heard murmurs that the young Cowpers were too lucky by half, and that the Cowper interest was dangerously powerful in the borough. It was averred that the Cowpers were making unfair capital out of liberal professions: and when the Hertford Whigs sent the father and son to the House of Commons, the vanquished party cursed in a breath the Dutch usurper and his obsequious followers.

It was resolved to damage the Cowpers:—by fair means or foul, to render them odious in their native town.

Ere long the malcontents found a good cry.

Scarcely less odious to the Hertford Tories than the Cowpers themselves was an influential Quaker of the town, named Stout, who actively supported the Cowper interest. A man of wealth and good repute, this follower of George Fox exerted himself enthusiastically in the election contest of 1695: and in acknowledgment of his services the Cowpers honored him with their personal friendship. Sir William Cowper asked him to dine at Hertford Castle—the baronet's country residence; Sir William's sons made calls on his wife and daughter. Of course these attentions from Cowpers to 'the Shaker' were offensive to the Tory magnates of the place: and they vented their indignation in whispers, that the young men never entered Stout's house without kissing his pretty daughter.

While these rumors were still young, Mr. Stout died leaving considerable property to his widow, and to his only child—the beauteous Sarah; and after his death the intercourse between the two families became yet more close and cordial. The lawyers advised the two ladies about the management of their property: and the baronet gave them invitations to his London House in Hatton Garden, as well as to Hertford Castle. The friendship had disastrous consequences. Both the brothers were very fascinating men—men, moreover, who not only excelled in the art of pleasing, but who also habitually exercised it. From custom, inclination, policy, they were very kind to the mother and daughter; probably paying the latter many compliments which they would never have uttered had they been single men. Coming from an unmarried man the speech is often significant of love, which on the lips of a husband is but the language of courtesy. But, unfortunately, Miss ('Mistress' is her style in the report of a famous trial) Sarah Stout fell madly in love with Spencer Cowper notwithstanding the impossibility of marriage.

Not only did she conceive a dangerous fondness for him, but she openly expressed it—by speech and letters. She visited him in the Temple, and persecuted him with her embarrassing devotion whenever he came to Hertford. It was a trying position for a young man not thirty years of age, with a wife to whom he was devotedly attached, and a family whose political influence in his native town might be hurt by publication of the girl's folly. Taking his elder brother into his confidence, he asked what course he ought to pursue. To withdraw totally and abruptly from the two ladies, would be cruel to the daughter, insulting to the mother; moreover, it would give rise to unpleasant suspicions and prejudicial gossip in the borough. It was decided that Spencer must repress the girl's advances—must see her loss frequently—and, by a reserved and frigid manner, must compel her to assume an appearance of womanly discretion. But the plan failed.

At the opening of the year 1699 she invited him to take up his quarters in her mother's house, when he came to Hertford at the next Spring Assizes. This invitation he declined, saying that he had arranged to take his brother's customary lodgings in the house of Mr. Barefoot, in the Market Place, but with manly consideration he promised to call upon her. "I am glad," Sarah wrote to him on March 5, 1699, "you have not quite forgot there is such a person as I in being: but I am willing to shut my eyes and not see anything that looks like unkindness in you, and rather content myself with what excuses you are pleased to make, than be inquisitive into what I must not know: I am sure the winter has been too unpleasant for me to desire the continuance of it: and I wish you were to endure the sharpness of it but for one short hour, as I have done for many long nights and days, and then I believe it would move that rocky heart of yours that can be so thoughtless of me as you are."

On Monday, March 13, following the date of the words just quoted, Spencer Cowper rode into Hertford, alighted at Mrs. Stout's house, and dined with the ladies. Having left the house after dinner, in order that he might attend to some business, he returned in the evening and supped with the two women. Supper over, Mrs. Stout retired for the night, leaving her daughter and the young barrister together. No sooner had the mother left the room, than a distressing scene ensued.

Unable to control or soothe her, Spencer gently divided the clasp of her hands, and having freed himself from her embrace, hastened from the room and abruptly left the house. He slept at his lodgings; and the next morning he was horror-struck on hearing that Sarah Stout's body had been found drowned in the mill-stream behind her old home. That catastrophe had actually occurred. Scarcely had the young barrister reached the Market Place, when the miserable girl threw herself into the stream from which her lifeless body was picked on the following morning. At the coroner's inquest which ensued, Spencer Cowper gave his evidence with extreme caution, withholding every fact that could be injurious to Sarah's reputation; and the jury returned a verdict that the deceased gentlewoman had killed herself whilst in a state of insanity.

In deep dejection Spencer Cowper continued the journey of the circuit.

But the excitement of the public was not allayed by the inquest and subsequent funeral. It was rumored that it was no case of self-murder, but a case of murder by the barrister, who had strangled his dishonored victim, and had then thrown her into the river. Anxious to save their sect from the stigma of suicide the Quakers concurred with the Tories in charging the young man with a hideous complication of crimes. The case against Spencer was laid before Chief Justice Holt, who at first dismissed the accusation as absurd, but was afterwards induced to commit the suspected man for trial; and in the July of 1699 the charge actually came before a jury at the Hertford Assizes. Four prisoners—Spencer Cowper, two attorneys, and a law-writer—were placed in the dock on the charge of murdering Sarah Stout.

On the present occasion there is no need to recapitulate the ridiculous evidence and absurd misconduct of the prosecution in this trial; though criminal lawyers who wish to know what unfairness and irregularities were permitted in such inquiries in the seventeenth century cannot do better than to peruse the full report of the proceedings, which may be found in every comprehensive legal library. In this place it is enough to say that though the accusation was not sustained by a shadow of legal testimony, the prejudice against the prisoners, both on the part of a certain section of the Hertford residents and the presiding judge, Mr. Baron Hatsel, was such that the verdict for acquittal was a disappointment to many who heard it proclaimed by the foreman of the jury. Narcissus Luttrell, indeed, says that the verdict was "to the satisfaction of the auditors;" but in this statement the diarist was unquestionably wrong, so far as the promoters of the prosecution were concerned. Instead of accepting the decision without demur, they attempted to put the prisoners again on their trial by the obsolete process of "appeal of murder;" but this endeavor proving abortive, the case was disposed of, and the prisoners' minds set at rest.

The barrister who was thus tried on a capital charge, and narrowly escaped a sentence that would have consigned him to an ignominious death, resumed his practice in the law courts, sat in the House of Commons and rose to be a judge in the Court of Common Pleas. It is said that he "presided on many trials for murder; ever cautious and mercifully inclined—remembering the great peril which he himself had undergone."

The same writer who aspersed Somers with her unchaste thoughts, and reiterated the charge of bigamy against Lord Chancellor Cowper, did not omit to give a false and malicious version to the incidents which had acutely wounded the fine sensibilities of the younger Cowper. But enough notice has been taken of the 'New Atalantis' in this chapter. To that repulsive book we refer those readers who may wish to peruse Mrs. Manley's account of Sarah Stout's death.

A distorted tradition of Sarah Stout's tragic end, and of Lord Cowper's imputed bigamy, was contributed to an early number of the 'European' by a clerical authority—the Rev. J. Hinton, Rector of Alderton, in Northamptonshire. "Mrs. Sarah Stout," says the writer, "whose death was charged upon Spencer Cowper, was strangled accidentally by drawing the steenkirk too tight upon her neck, as she, with four or five young persons, were at a game of romp upon the staircase; but it was not done by Mr. Cowper, though one of the company. Mrs. Clavering, Lord Chancellor Cowper's second wife, whom he married during the life of his first, was there too; they were so confounded with the accident, that they foolishly resolved to throw her into the water, thinking it would pass that she had drowned herself." This charming paragraph illustrates the vitality of scandal, and at the same time shows how ludicrously rumor and tradition mistell stories in the face of evidence.

Spencer Cowper's second son, the Rev. John Cowper, D.D., was the father of William Cowper, the poet.

CHAPTER XI.

EARLY MARRIAGES.

Notwithstanding his illustrious descent, Simon Harcourt raised himself to the woolsack by his own exertions, and was in no degree indebted to powerful relatives for his elevation. The son of a knight, whose loyalty to the House of Stuart had impoverished his estate, he spent his student-days at Pembroke, Oxford, and the Inner Temple, in resolute labor, and with few indulgences. His father could make him but a slender allowance; and when he assumed the gown of a barrister, the future Chancellor, like Erskine in after years, was spurred to industry by the voices of his wife and children. Whilst he was still an undergraduate of the university, he fell in love with Rebecca Clark, daughter of a pious man, of whose vocation the modern peerages are ashamed. Sir Philip Harcourt (the Chancellor's father) in spite of his loyalty quarrelled with the Established Church, and joined the Presbyterians: and Thomas Clark was his Presbyterian chaplain, secretary, and confidential servant. Great was Sir Philip's wrath on learning that his boy had not only fallen in love with Rebecca Clark, but had married her privately. It is probable that the event lowered the worthy knight's esteem for the Presbyterian system; but as anger could not cut the nuptial bond, the father relented—gave the young people all the assistance he could, and hoped that they would live long without repenting their folly. The match turned out far better than the old knight feared. Taking his humble bride to modest chambers, young Harcourt applied sedulously to the study of the law; and his industry was rewarded by success, and by the gratitude of a dutiful wife. In unbroken happiness they lived together for a succession of years, and their union was fruitful of children.

Harcourt fared better with his love-match than Sergeant Hill with his heiress, Miss Medlycott of Cottingham, Northamptonshire. On the morning of his wedding the eccentric sergeant, having altogether forgotten his most important engagement for the day, received his clients in chambers after his usual practice, and remained busy with professional cares until a band of devoted friends forcibly carried him to the church, where his bride had been waiting for him more than an hour. The ceremony having been duly performed, he hastened back to his chambers, to be present at a consultation. Notwithstanding her sincere affection for him, the lady proved but an indifferent wife to the black-letter lawyer. Empowered by Act of Parliament to retain her maiden-name after marriage, she showed her disesteem for her husband's patronymic by her mode of exercising the privilege secured to her by special law; and many a time the sergeant indignantly insisted that she should use his name in her signatures. "My name is Hill, madam; my father's name was Hill, madam; all the Hills have been named Hill, madam; Hill is a good name—and by ——, madam, you shall use it." On other matters he was more compliant—humoring her old-maidish fancies in a most docile and conciliating manner. Curiously neat and orderly, Mrs. Medlycott took great pride in the faultlessness of her domestic arrangements, so far as cleanliness and precise order were concerned. To maintain the whiteness of the pipe-clayed steps before the front door of her Bedford Square mansion was a chief object of her existence; and to gratify her in this particular, Sergeant Hill use daily to leave his premises by the kitchen steps. Having outlived the lady, Hill observed to a friend who was condoling with him on his recent bereavement, "Ay, my poor wife is gone! She was a good sort of woman—in her way a very good sort of woman. I do honestly declare my belief that in her way she had no equal. But—but—I'll tell you something in confidence. If ever I marry again, I won't marry merely for money." The learned sergeant died in his ninety-third year without having made a second marriage.

Like Harcourt, John Scott married under circumstances that called forth many warm expressions of censure; and like Harcourt, he, in after life, reflected on his imprudent marriage as one of the most fortunate steps of his earlier career. The romance of the law contains few more pleasant episodes than the story of handsome Jack Scott's elopement with Bessie Surtees. There is no need to tell in detail how the comely Oxford scholar danced with the banker's daughter at the Newcastle assemblies; how his suit was at first recognised by the girl's parents, although the Scotts were but rich 'fitters,' whereas Aubone Surtees, Esquire, was a banker and gentleman of honorable descent; how, on the appearance of an aged and patrician suitor for Bessie's hand, papa and mamma told Jack Scott not to presume on their condescension, and counseled Bessie to throw her lover over and become the lady of Sir William Blackett; how Bessie was faithful, and Jack was urgent; how they had secret interviews on Tyne-side and in London, meeting clandestinely on horseback and on foot, corresponding privately by letters and confidential messengers; how, eventually, the lovers, to the consternation of 'good society' in Newcastle, were made husband and wife at Blackshiels, North Britain. Who is ignorant of the story? Does not every visitor to Newcastle pause before an old house in Sandhill, and look up at the blue pane which marks the window from which Bessie descended into her lover's arms?

Jack and Bessie were not punished with even that brief period of suffering and uncertainty which conscientious novelists are accustomed, for the sake of social morals, to assign to run-away lovers before the merciful guardian or tender parent promises forgiveness and a liberal allowance, paid in quarterly installments. In his old age Eldon used to maintain that their plight was very pitiable on the third morning after their rash union. "Our funds were exhausted: we had not a home to go to, and we knew not whether our friends would ever speak to us again." In this strain ran the veteran's story, which, like all other anecdotes from the same source, must be received with caution. But even the old peer, ever ready to exaggerate his early difficulties, had not enough effrontery to represent that their dejection lasted more than three days. The fathers of the bride and bridegroom soon met and came to terms, and with the beginning of the new year Bessie Scott was living in New Inn Hall, Oxford, whilst her husband read Vinerian Lectures, and presided over that scholastic house. The position of Scott at this time was very singular. He was acting as substitute for Sir Robert Chambers, the principal of New Inn Hall and Vinerian Professor of Law, who contrived to hold his university preferments, whilst he discharged the duties of a judge in India. To give an honest color to this indefensible arrangement, it was provided that the lectures read from the Vinerian Chair should actually be written by the Professor, although they were delivered by deputy. Scott, therefore, as the Professor's mouth-piece, on a salary of £60 a year, with free quarters in the Principal's house, was merely required to read a series of treatises sent to him by the absent teacher. "The law-professor," the ex-Chancellor used to relate with true Eldonian humor and fancy—"sent me the first lecture, which I had to read immediately to the students, and which I began without knowing a single word that was in it. It was upon the statute (4 and 5 P. and M. c. 8), 'of young men running away with maidens.' Fancy me reading, with about 140 boys and young men all giggling at the Professor! Such a tittering audience no one ever had." If this incident really occurred on the occasion of his 'first reading,' the laughter must have been inextinguishable; for, of course, Jack Scott's run-away marriage had made much gossip in Oxford Common Rooms, and the singular loveliness of his girlish wife (described by an eye-witness as being "so very young as to give the impression of childhood,") stirred the heart of every undergraduate who met her in High Street.

There is no harm done by laughter at the old Chancellor's romantic fictions about the poverty which he and his Bessie encountered, hand in hand, at the outset of life; for the laughter blinds no one to the genuine affection and wholesome honesty of the young husband and wife. One has reason to wish that marriages such as theirs were more frequent amongst lawyers in these ostentatious days. At present the young barrister, who marries before he has a clear fifteen hundred a year, is charged with reckless imprudence; and unless his wife is a woman of fortune, or he is able to settle a heavy sum of money upon her, his anxious friends terrify him with pictures of want and sorrow stored up for him in the future. Society will not let him live after the fashion of 'juniors' eighty or a hundred years since. He must maintain two establishments—his chambers for business, his house in the west-end of town for his wife. Moreover, the lady must have a brougham and liberal pin money, or four or five domestic servants and a drawing-room well furnished with works of art and costly decorations. They must give state dinners and three or four routs every season; and in all other matters their mode of life must be, or seem to be, that of the upper ten thousand. Either they must live in this style, or be pushed aside and forgotten. The choice for them lies between very expensive society or none at all—that is to say, none at all amongst the rising members of the legal profession, and the sort of people with whom young barristers, from prudential motives, wish to form acquaintance. Doubtless many a fair reader of this page is already smiling at the writer's simplicity, and is saying to herself, "Here is one of the advocates of marriage on three hundred a year."

But this writer is not going to advocate marriage on that or any other particular sum. From personal experience he knows what comfort a married man may have for an outlay of three or four hundred per annum; and from personal observation he knows what privations and ignominious poverty are endured by unmarried men who spend twice the larger of those sums on chamber-and-club life. He knows that there are men who shiver at the bare thought of losing caste by marriage with a portionless girl, whilst they are complacently leading the life which, in nine cases out of ten, terminates in the worst form of social degradation—matrimony where the husband blushes for his wife's early history, and dares not tell his own children the date of his marriage certificate. If it were his pleasure he could speak sad truths about the bachelor of modest income, who is rich enough to keep his name on the books of two fashionable clubs, to live in a good quarter of London, and to visit annually continental capitals, but far too poor to think of incurring the responsibilities of marriage. It could be demonstrated that in a great majority of instances this wary, prudent, selfish gentleman, instead of being the social success which many simple people believe him, is a signal and most miserable failure; that instead of pursuing a career of various enjoyments and keen excitements, he is a martyr to ennui, bored by the monotony of an objectless existence, utterly weary of the splendid clubs, in which he is presumed by unsophisticated admirers to find an ample compensation for want of household comfort and domestic affection: that as soon as he has numbered forty years, he finds the roll of his friends and cordial acquaintances diminish, and is compelled to retire before younger men, who snatch from his grasp the prizes of social rivalry; and that, as each succeeding lustre passes, he finds the chain of his secret disappointments and embarrassments more galling and heavy.

It is not a question of marriage on three hundred a year without prospects, but a marriage on five or six hundred a year with good expectations. In the Inns of Court there are, at the present time, scores of clever, industrious fine-hearted gentlemen who have sure incomes of three or four hundred pounds per annum. In Tyburnia and Kensington there is an equal number of young gentlewomen with incomes varying between £150 and £300 a year. These men and women see each other at balls and dinners, in the parks and at theatres; the ladies would not dislike to be wives, the men are longing to be husbands. But that hideous tyrant, social opinion, bids them avoid marriage.

In Lord Eldon's time the case was otherwise. Society saw nothing singular or reprehensible in his conduct when he brought Bessie to live in the little house in Cursitor Street. No one sneered at the young law-student, whose home was a little den in a dingy thoroughfare. At a later date, the rising junior, whose wife lived over his business chambers in Carey Street, was the object of no unkind criticism because his domestic arrangements were inexpensive, and almost frugal. Had his success been tardy instead of quick and decisive, and had circumstances compelled him to live under the shadow of Lincoln's Inn wall for thirty years on a narrow income, he would not on that account have suffered from a single disparaging criticism. Amongst his neighbors in adjacent streets, and within the boundaries of his Inn, he would have found society for himself and wife, and playmates for his children. Good fortune coming in full strong flood, he was not compelled to greatly change his plan of existence. Even in those days, when costly ostentation characterized aristocratic society—he was permitted to live modestly—and lay the foundation of that great property which he transmitted to his ennobled descendants.

When satire has done its worst with the miserly propensities of the great lawyer and his wife, their long familiar intercourse exhibits a wealth of fine human affection and genuine poetry which sarcasm cannot touch. Often as he had occasion to regret Lady Eldon's peculiarities—the stinginess which made her grudge the money paid for a fish or a basket of fruit; the nervous repugnance to society, which greatly diminished his popularity; and the taste for solitude and silence which marked her painfully towards the close of her life—the Chancellor never even hinted to her his dissatisfaction. When their eldest daughter, following her mother's example, married without the permission of her parents, it was suggested to Lord Eldon that her ladyship ought to take better care of her younger daughter, Lady Frances, and entering society should play the part of a vigilant chaperon. The counsel was judicious; but the Chancellor declined to act upon it, saying,—"When she was young and beautiful, she gave up everything for me. What she is, I have made her; and I cannot now bring myself to compel her inclinations. Our marriage prevented her mixing in society when it afforded her pleasure; it appears to give pain now, and why should I interpose?" In his old age, when she was dead, he visited his estate in Durham, but could not find heart to cross the Tyne bridge and look at the old house from which he took her in the bloom and tenderness of her girlhood. An urgent invitation to visit Newcastle drew from him the reply—"I know my fellow-townsmen complain of my not coming to see them; but how can I pass that bridge?" After a pause, he added, "Poor Bessie! if ever there was an angel on earth she was one. The only reparation which one man can make to another for running away with his daughter, is to be exemplary in his conduct towards her."

In pecuniary affairs not less prudent than his brother, Lord Stowell in matters of sentiment was capable of indiscretion. In the long list of legal loves there are not many episodes more truly ridiculous than the story of the older Scott's second marriage. On April 10, 1813, the decorous Sir William Scott, and Louisa Catharine, widow of John, Marquis of Sligo, and daughter of Admiral Lord Howe, were united in the bonds of holy wedlock, to the infinite amusement of the world of fashion, and to the speedy humiliation of the bridegroom. So incensed was Lord Eldon at his brother's folly, that he refused to appear at the wedding; and certainly the Chancellor's displeasure was not without reason, for the notorious absurdity of the affair brought ridicule on the whole of the Scott family connexion. The happy couple met for the first time in the Old Bailey, when Sir William Scott and Lord Ellenborough presided at the trial of the marchioness's son, the young Marquis of Sligo, who had incurred the anger of the law by luring into his yacht, in Mediterranean waters, two of the king's seamen. Throughout the hearing of that cause célèbre, the marchioness sat in the fetid court of the Old Bailey, in the hope that her presence might rouse amongst the jury or in the bench feelings favorable to her son. This hope was disappointed. The verdict having been given against the young peer, he was ordered to pay a fine of £5000, and undergo four months' incarceration in Newgate, and—worse than fine and imprisonment—was compelled to listen to a parental address from Sir William Scott on the duties and responsibilities of men of high station. Either under the influence of sincere admiration for the judge, or impelled by desire for vengeance on the man who had presumed to lecture her son in a court of justice, the marchioness wrote a few hasty words of thanks to Sir William Scott for his salutary exhortation to her boy. She even went so far as to say that she wished the erring marquis could always have so wise a counsellor at his side. This communication was made upon a slip of paper, which the writer sent to the judge by an usher of the court. Sir William read the note as he sat on the bench, and having looked towards the fair scribe, he received from her a glance and smile that were fruitful of much misery to him. Within four months the courteous Sir William Scott was tied fast to a beautiful, shrill, voluble termagant, who exercised marvellous ingenuity in rendering him wretched and contemptible. Reared in a stately school of old-world politeness, the unhappy man was a model of decorum and urbanity. He took reasonable pride in the perfection of his tone and manner; and the marchioness—whose malice did not lack cleverness—was never more happy than when she was gravely expostulating with him, in the presence of numerous auditors, on his lamentable want of style, tact, and gentlemanlike bearing. It is said that, like Coke and Holt under similar circumstances, Sir William preferred the quietude of his chambers to the society of an unruly wife, and that in the cellar of his Inn he sought compensation for the indignities and sufferings which he endured at home. Fifty years since the crusted port of the Middle Temple could soothe the heart at night, without paining the head in the morning.

PART III.

MONEY.

CHAPTER XII.

FEES TO COUNSEL.

From time immemorial popular satire has been equally ready to fix the shame of avarice upon Divinity Physic, and Law; and it cannot be denied that in this matter the sarcasms of the multitude are often sustained by the indisputable evidence of history. The greed of the clergy for tithes and dues is not more widely proverbial than the doctor's thirst for fees, or the advocate's readiness to support injustice for the sake of gain. Of Guyllyam of Horseley, physician to Charles VI. of France, Froissart says, "All his dayes he was one of the greatest nygardes that ever was;" and the chronicler adds, "With this rodde lightly all physicians are beaten." In his address to the sergeants who were called soon after his elevation to the Marble Chair, the Lord Keeper Puckering, directing attention to the grasping habits which too frequently disgraced the leaders of the bar, observed: "I am to exhort you also not to embrace multitude of causes, or to undertake more places of hearing causes than you are well able to consider of or perform, lest thereby you either disappoint your clients when their causes be heard, or come unprovided, or depart when their causes be in hearing. For it is all one not to come, as either to come unprovided, or depart before it be ended." Notwithstanding Lingard's able defence of the Cardinal, scholars are still generally of opinion that Beaufort—the Chancellor who lent money on the king's crown, the bishop who sold the Pope's soldiers for a thousand marks—is a notable instance of the union of legal covetousness and ecclesiastical greed.

The many causes which affect the value of money in different ages create infinite perplexity for the antiquarian who wishes to estimate the prosperity of the bar in past times; but the few disjointed data, that can be gathered from old records, create an impression that in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the ordinary fees of eminent counsel were by no means exorbitant, although fortunate practitioners could make large incomes.

Dugdale's 'Baronage' describes with delightful quaintness William de Beauchamp's interview with his lawyers when that noble (on the death of John Hastings, Earl of Pembroke, temp. Richard II., without issue), claimed the earl's estates under an entail, in opposition to Edward Hastings, the earl's heir-male of the half-blood. "Beauchamp," says Dugdale, "invited his learned counsel to his house in Paternoster Row, in the City of London; amongst whom were Robert Charlton (then a judge), William Pinchbek, William Branchesley, and John Catesby (all learned lawyers); and after dinner, coming out of his chapel, in an angry mood, threw to each of them a piece of gold, and said, 'Sirs, I desire you forthwith to tell me whether I have any right or title to Hastings' lordship and lands.' Whereupon Pinchbek stood up (the rest being silent, fearing that he suspected them), and said, 'No man here nor in England dare say that you have any right in them, except Hastings do quit his claim therein; and should he do it, being now under age, it would be of no validitie.'" Had Charlton, the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, taken gold for his opinion on a case put before him in his judicial character, he would have violated his judicial oath. But in the earl's house in Paternoster Row he was merely a counsellor learned in the law, not a judge. Manifest perils attend a system which permits a judge in his private character to give legal opinions concerning causes on which he may be required to give judgment from the bench; but notwithstanding those perils, there is no reason for thinking that Charlton on this occasion either broke law or etiquette. The fair inference from the matter is, that in the closing years of the fourteenth century judges were permitted to give opinions for money to their private clients, although they were forbidden to take gold or silver from any person having "plea or process hanging before them."

In the year of our Lord 1500 the corporation of Canterbury paid for advice regarding their civic interests 3s. 4d. to each of three sergeants, and gave the Recorder of London 6s. 8d. as a retaining-fee. Five years later, Mr. Serjeant Wood received a fee of 10s. from the Goldsmiths' Company; and it maybe fairly assumed, that so important and wealthy a body paid the sergeant on a liberal scale. In the sixteenth century it was, and for several generations had been, customary for clients to provide food and drink for their counsel. Mr. Foss gives his readers the following list of items, taken from a bill of costs, made in the reign of Edward IV.:—

In like manner the accountant of St. Margaret's, Westminster, entered in the parish books, "Also, paid to Roger Fylpott, learned in the law, for his counsel given, 3s. 8d., with 4d. for his dinner."

A yet more remarkable custom was that which enabled clients to hire counsel to plead for them at certain places, for a given time, in whatever causes their eloquence might be required. There still exists the record of an agreement by which, in the reign of Henry VII., Sergeant Yaxley bound himself to attend the assizes at York, Nottingham and Derby, and speak in court at each of those places, whenever his client, Sir Robert Plumpton—"that perpetual and always unfortunate litigant," as he is called by Sergeant Manning—required him to do so. This interesting document runs thus—"This bill, indented at London the 18th day of July, the 16th yeare of the reigne of King Henry the 7th, witnesseth that John Yaxley, Sergeant-at-Law, shall be at the next assizes to be holden at York, Nottin., and Derb., if they be holden and kept, and there to be of council with Sir Robert Plumpton, knight, such assizes and actions as the said Sir Robert shall require the said John Yaxley, for the which premises, as well as for his costs and his labours, John Pulan, gentleman, bindeth him by thease presents to content and pay to the said John Yaxley 40 marks sterling at the feast of the Nativetie of our Lady next coming, or within eight days next following, with 5 li paid aforehand, parcell of paiment of the said 40 marks. Provided alway that if the said John Yaxley have knowledg and warning only to cum to Nottin. and Derby, then the said John Yaxley is agread by these presents to take only xv li besides the 5 li aforesaid. Provided alwaies that if the said John Yaxley have knowledg and warning to take no labour in this matter, then he to reteine and hold the said 5 li resaived for his good will and labour. In witness hereof, the said John Yaxley, serjeant, to the part of this indenture remaining with the said John Pulan have put his seale the day and yeare above-written. Provided also that the said Robert Plumpton shall beare the charges of the said John Yaxley, as well at York as at Nottingham and Derby, and also to content and pay the said money to the said John Yaxley comed to the said assizes att Nott., Derb., and York. John Yaxley."

This remarkable agreement—made after Richard III. had vainly endeavored to compose by arbitration the differences between Sir Robert and Sir Robert's heir-general—certifies that Sir Robert Plumpton engaged to provide the sergeant with suitable entertainment at the assize towns, and also throws light upon the origin of retaining-fees. It appears from the agreement that in olden time a retaining fee was merely part (surrendered in advance) of a certain sum stipulated to be paid for certain services. In principle it was identical with the payment of the shilling, still given in rural districts, to domestic servants on an agreement for service, and with the transfer of the queen's shilling given to every soldier on enlistment. There is no need to mention the classic origin of this ancient mode of giving force to a contract.

From the 'Household and Privy Purse Expenses of the Le Stranges of Hunstanton,' published in the Archæologia, may be gleamed some interesting particulars relating to the payment of counsel in the reign of Henry VIII. In 1520, Mr. Cristofer Jenney received from the Le Stranges a half-yearly fee of ten shillings; and this general retainer was continued on the same terms till 1527, when the fee was raised from £1 per annum to a yearly payment of £2 13s. 4d. To Mr. Knightley was paid the sum of 8s. 11d. "for his fee, and that money yt he layde oute for suying of Simon Holden;" and the same lawyer also received at another time 14s. 3d. "for his fee and cost of sute for iii termes." A fee of 6s. 8d. was paid to "Mr. Spelman, s'jeant, for his counsell in makyng my answer in ye Duchy Cham.;" and the same serjeant received a fee of 3s. 4d. "for his counsell in putting in of the answer." Fees of 3s. 4d. were in like manner given "for counsell" to Mr. Knightley and Mr. Whyte; and in 1534, Mr. Yelverton was remunerated "for his counsell" with the unusually liberal honorarium of twenty shillings. From the household book of the Earl of Northumberland, it appears that order was made, in this same reign, for "every oone of my lordes counsaill to have c's. fees, if he have it in household and not by patent." After the earl's establishment was reduced to forty-two persons, it still retained "one of my lordes counsaill for annswering and riddying of causes, whenne sutors cometh to my lord." At a time when every lord was required to administer justice to his tenants and the inferior people of his territory, a counsellor learned in the law, was an important and most necessary officer in a grand seigneur's retinue.

Whilst Sir Thomas More lived in Bucklersbury, he "gained, without grief, not so little as £400 by the year." This income doubtless accrued from the emoluments of his judicial appointment in the City, as well as from his practice at Westminster and elsewhere. In Henry VIII.'s time it was a very considerable income, such as was equalled by few leaders of the bar not holding high office under the Crown.

In Elizabeth's reign, and during the time of her successor, barristers' fees show a tendency toward increase; and the lawyers who were employed as advocates for the Crown, or held judicial appointments, acquired princely incomes, and in some cases amassed large fortunes. Fees of 20s. were more generally paid to counsel under the virgin queen, than in the days of her father; but still half that fee was not thought too small a sum for an opinion given by Her Majesty's Solicitor General. Indeed, the ten-shilling fee was a very usual fee in Elizabeth's reign; and it long continued an ordinary payment for one opinion on a case, or for one speech in a cause of no great importance and of few difficulties. 'A barrister is like Balaam's ass, only speaking when he sees the angel,' was a familiar saying in the seventeenth century. In Chancery, however, by an ordinance of the Lords Commissioners passed in 1654, to regulate the conduct of suits and the payments to masters, counsel, and solicitors, it was arranged that on the hearing of a cause, utter-barristers should receive £1 fees, whilst the Lord Protector's counsel and sergeants-at-law should receive £2 fees, i.e., 'double fees.'

The archives of Lyme Regis show that under Elizabeth the usage was maintained of supplying counsel with delicacies of the table, and also of providing them with means of locomotion. Here are some items in an old record of disbursements made by the corporation of Lyme Regis:—"A.D. Paid for Wine carried with us to Mr. Poulett—£0 3s. 6d.; Wine and sugar given to Mr. Poulett, £0 3s. 4d.; Horse-hire, and for the Sergeant to ride to Mr. Walrond, of Bovey, and for a loaf of sugar, and for conserves given there to Mr. Poppel, £1 1s. 0d.; Wine and sugar given to Judge Anderson, £0 3s. 4d. A bottle and sugar given to Mr. Gibbs (a lawyer)."

Under Elizabeth, the allowance made to Queen's Sergeants was £26 6s. 8d. for fee, reward, and robes; and £20. for his services whenever a Queen's Sergeant travelled circuit as Justice of Assize. The fee for her Solicitor General was £50. When Francis Bacon was created King's Counsel to James I., an annual salary of forty pounds was assigned to him from the royal purse; and down to William IV.'s time, King's Counsel received a stipend of £40 a year, and an allowance for stationery. Under the last mentioned monarch, however, the stipend and allowance were both withdrawn; and at present the status of a Q.C. is purely an affair of professional precedence, to which no fixed emolument is attached.

But a list of the fees, paid from the royal purse to each judge or crown lawyer under James I., would afford no indication as to the incomes enjoyed by the leading members of the bench and bar at that period. The salaries paid to those officers were merely retaining fees, and their chief remuneration consisted of a large number of smaller fees. Like the judges of prior reigns, King James's judges were forbidden to accept presents from actual suitors; but no suitor could obtain a hearing from any one of them, until he had paid into court certain fees, of which the fattest was a sum of money for the judge's personal use. At one time many persons labored under an erroneous impression, that as judges were forbidden to accept presents from actual suitors, the honest judge of past times had no revenue besides his specified salary and allowance. Like the king's judges, the king's counsellors frequently made great incomes by fees, though their nominal salaries were invariably insignificant. At a time when Francis Bacon was James's Attorney General, and received no more than £81 6s. 8d. for his yearly salary, he made £6000 per annum in his profession; and of that income—a royal income in those days—the greater portion consisted of fees paid to him for attending to the king's business. "I shall now," Bacon wrote to the king, "again make oblation to your Majesty,—first of my heart, then of my service; thirdly, of my place of Attorney, which I think is honestly worth £6000 per annum; and fourthly, of my place in the Star Chamber, which is worth £1600 per annum, and with the favor and countenance of a Chancellor, much more." Coke had made a still larger income during his tenure of the Attorney's place, the fees from his private official practice amounting to no loss a sum than seven thousand pounds in a single year.

At later periods of the seventeenth century barristers made large incomes, but the fees seem to have been by no means exorbitant. Junior barristers received very modest payments, and it would appear that juniors received fees from eminent counsel for opinions and other professional services. Whilst he acted as treasurer of the Middle Temple, at an early period of his career, Whitelock received a fee from Attorney General Noy. "Upon my carrying the bill," writes Whitelock, "to Mr. Attorney General Noy for his signature, with that of the other benchers, he was pleased to advise with me about a patent the king had commanded him to draw, upon which he gave me a fee for it out of his little purse, saying, 'Here, take those single pence,' which amounted to eleven groats, 'and I give you more than an attorney's fee, because you will be a better man than the Attorney General. This you will find to be true.' After much other drollery, wherein he delighted and excelled, we parted, abundance of company attending to speak to him all this time." Of course the payment itself was no part of the drollery to which Whitelock alludes, for as a gentleman he could not have taken money proffered to him in jest, unless etiquette encouraged him to look for it, and allowed him to accept it. The incident justifies the inference that the services of junior counsel to senior barristers—services at the present time termed 'devilling'—were formerly remunerated with cash payments.

Toward the close of Charles I.'s reign—at a time when political distractions were injuriously affecting the legal profession, especially the staunch royalists of the long robe—Maynard, the Parliamentary lawyer, received on one round of the Western Circuit, £700, "which," observes Whitelock, to whom Maynard communicated the fact, "I believe was more than any one of our profession got before."

Concerning the incomes made by eminent counsel in Charles II.'s time, many data are preserved in diaries and memoirs. That a thousand a year was looked upon as a good income for a flourishing practitioner of the 'merry monarch's' Chancery bar, may be gathered from a passage in 'Pepys's Diary,' where the writer records the compliments paid to him regarding his courageous and eloquent defence of the Admiralty, before the House of Commons, in March, 1668. Under the influence of half-a-pint of mulled sack and a dram of brandy, the Admiralty clerk made such a spirited and successful speech in behalf of his department, that he was thought to have effectually silenced all grumblers against the management of his Majesty's navy. Compliments flowed in upon the orator from all directions. Sir William Coventry pledged his judgment that the fame of the oration would last for ever in the Commons; silver-tongued Sir Heneage Finch, in the blandest tones, averred that no other living man could have made so excellent a speech; the placemen of the Admiralty vied with each other in expressions of delight and admiration; and one flatterer, whose name is not recorded, caused Mr. Pepys infinite pleasure by saying that the speaker who had routed the accusers of a government office, might easily earn a thousand a year at the Chancery bar.

That sum, however, is insignificant when it is compared with the incomes made by the most fortunate advocates of that period. Eminent speakers of the Common Law Bar made between £2000 and £3500 per annum on circuit and at Westminster, without the aid of king's business; and still larger receipts were recorded in the fee-books of his Majesty's attorneys and solicitors. At the Chancery bar of the second Charles, there was at least one lawyer, who in one year made considerably more than four times the income that was suggested to Pepys's vanity and self-complacence. At Stanford Court, Worcestershire, is preserved a fee-book kept by Sir Francis Winnington, Solicitor-General to the 'merry monarch,' from December 1674 to January 13, 1679, from the entries of which record the reader may form a tolerably correct estimate of the professional revenues of successful lawyers at that time. In Easter Term, 1671, Sir Francis pocketed £459; in Trinity Term £449 10s.; in Michaelmas Term £521; and in Hilary Term 1672, £361 10s.; the income for the year being £1791, without his earnings on the Oxford Circuit and during vacation. In 1673, Sir Francis received £3371; in 1674, he earned £3560;[8] and in 1675—i.e., the first year of his tenure of the Solicitor's office—his professional income wars £4066, of which sum £429 were office fees. Concerning the Attorney-General's receipts about this time, we have sufficient information from Roger North, who records that his brother, whilst Attorney General, made nearly seven thousand pounds in one year, from private and official business. It is noteworthy that North, as Attorney General, made the same income which Coke realized in the same office at the commencement of the century. But under the Stuarts this large income of £7000—in those days a princely revenue—was earned by work so perilous and fruitful of obloquy, that even Sir Francis, who loved money and cared little for public esteem, was glad to resign the post of Attorney and retire to the Pleas with £4000 a year. That the fees of the Chancery lawyers under Charles II. were regulated upon a liberal scale we know from Roger North, and the record of Sir John King's success. Speaking of his brother Francis, the biographer says: "After he, as king's counsel, came within the bar, he began to have calls into the Court of Chancery; which he liked very well, because the quantity of the business, as well as the fees, was greater; but his home was the King's Bench, where he sat and reported like as other practitioners." And in Sir John King's memoirs it is recorded that in 1676 he made £4700, and that he received from £40 to £50 a day during the last four days of his appearance in court. Dying in 1677,[9] whilst his supremacy in his own court was at its height, Sir John King was long spoken of as a singularly successful Chancery barrister.

Of Francis North's mode of taking and storing his fees, the 'Life of Lord Keeper Guildford' gives the following picture: "His business increased, even while he was Solicitor, to be so much as to have overwhelmed one less dexterous; but when he was made Attorney General, though his gains by his office were great, they were much greater by his practice; for that flowed in upon him like an orage, enough to overset one that had not an extraordinary readiness in business. His skull-caps, which he wore when he had leisure to observe his constitution, as I touched before, were now destined to lie in a drawer to receive the money that came in by fees. One had the gold, another the crowns and half-crowns, and another the smaller money. When these vessels were full, they were committed to his friend (the Hon. Roger North), who was constantly near him, to tell out the cash, and put it into the bags according to the contents; and so they went to his treasurers, Blanchard and Child, goldsmiths, Temple Bar."[10] In the days of wigs, skull-caps like those which Francis North used as receptacles for money, were very generally worn by men of all classes and employments. On returning to the privacy of his home, a careful citizen usually laid aside his costly wig, and replaced it with a cheap and durable skull-cap, before he sat down in his parlor. So also, men careful of their health often wore skull-caps under their wigs, on occasions when they were required to endure a raw atmosphere without the protection of their beavers. In days when the law-courts were held in the open hall of Westminster, and lawyers practising therein, were compelled to sit or speak for hours together, exposed to sharp currents of cold air, it was customary for wearers of the long robe to place between their wigs and natural hair closely-fitting caps, made of stout silk or soft leather. But more interesting than the money-caps, are the fees which they contained. The ringing of the gold pieces, the clink of the crowns with the half-crowns, and the rattle of the smaller money, led back the barrister to those happier and remote times, when the 'inferior order' of the profession paid the superior order with 'money down;' when, the advocate never opened his mouth till his fingers had closed upon the gold of his trustful client; when 'credit' was unknown in transactions between counsel and attorney;—that truly golden age of the bar, when the barrister was less suspicious of the attorney, and the attorney held less power over the barrister.

Having profited by the liberal payments of Chancery whilst he was an advocate, Lord Keeper Guildford destroyed one source of profit to counsel from which Francis North, the barrister, had drawn many a capful of money. Saith Roger, "He began to rescind all motions for speeding and delaying the hearing of causes besides the ordinary rule of court; and this lopped off a limb of the motion practice. I have heard Sir John Churchill, a famous Chancery practitioner, say, that in his walk from Lincoln's Inn down to the Temple Hall, where, in the Lord Keeper Bridgman's time, causes and motions out of term were heard, he had taken £28. with breviates only for motions and defences for hastening and retarding hearings. His lordship said, that the rule of the court allowed time enough for any one to proceed or defend; and if, for special reasons, he should give way to orders for timing matters, it would let in a deluge of vexatious pretenses, which, true or false, being asserted by the counsel with equal assurance, distracted the court and confounded the suitors."

Let due honor be rendered to one Caroline, lawyer, who was remarkable for his liberality to clients, and carelessness of his own pecuniary interests. From his various biographers, many pleasant stories may be gleaned concerning Hale's freedom from base love of money. In his days, and long afterward, professional etiquette permitted clients and counsel to hold intercourse without the intervention of an attorney. Suitors, therefore, frequently addressed him personally and paid for his advice with their own hands, just as patients are still accustomed to fee their doctors. To these personal applicants, and also to clients who approached him by their agents, he was very liberal. "When those who came to ask his counsel gave him a piece, he used to give back the half, and to make ten shillings his fee in ordinary matters that did not require much time or study." From this it may be inferred that whilst Hale was an eminent member of the bar, twenty shillings was the usual fee to a leading counsel, and an angel the customary honorarium to an ordinary practitioner. As readers have already been told, the angel[11] was a common fee in the seventeenth century; but the story of Hale's generous usage implies that his more distinguished contemporaries were wont to look for and accept a double fee. Moreover, the anecdote would not be told in Hale's honor, if etiquette had fixed the double fee as the minimum of remuneration for a superior barrister's opinion. He was frequently employed in arbitration cases, and as an arbitrator he steadily refused payment for his services to legal disputants, saying, in explanation of his moderation, "In these cases I am made a judge, and a judge ought to take no money." The misapprehension as to the nature of an arbitrator's functions, displayed in these words, gives an instructive insight into the mental constitution of the judge who wrote on natural science, and at the same time exerted himself to secure the conviction of witches. A more pleasant and commendable illustration of his conscientiousness in pecuniary matters, is found in the steadiness with which he refused to throw upon society the spurious coin which he had taken from his clients. In a tone of surprise that raises a smile at the average morality of our forefathers, Bishop Burnet tells of Hale: "Another remarkable instance of his justice and goodness was, that when he found ill money had been put into his hands, he would never suffer it to be vented again; for he thought it was no excuse for him to put false money in other people's hands, because some had put it into his. A great heap of this he had gathered together, for many had so abused his goodness as to mix base money among the fees that were given him." In this particular case, the judge's virtue was its own reward. His house being entered by burglars, this accumulation of bad money attracted the notice of the robbers, who selected it from a variety of goods and chattels, and carried it off under the impression that it was the lawyer's hoarded treasure. Besides large sums expended on unusual acts of charity, this good man habitually distributed amongst the poor a tithe of his professional earnings.

In the seventeenth century, General Retainers were very common, and the counsel learned in the law, were ready to accept them from persons of low extraction and questionable repute. Indeed, no upstart deemed himself properly equipped for a campaign at court, until he had recorded a fictitious pedigree at the Herald's College, taken a barrister as well as a doctor into regular employment, and hired a curate to say grace daily at his table. In the summer of his vile triumph, Titus Oates was attended, on public occasions, by a robed counsel and a physician.

[8] In his 'Survey of the State of England in 1685,' Macauley—giving one of those misleading references with which his history abounds—says: "A thousand a year was thought a large income for a barrister. Two thousand a year was hardly to be made in the Court of King's Bench, except by crown lawyers." Whilst making the first statement, he doubtless remembered the passage in 'Pepys's Diary.' For the second statement, he refers to 'Layton's Conversation with Chief Justice Hale.' It is fair to assume that Lord Macauley had never seen Sir Francis Winnington's fee-book.

[9] In the fourth day of his fever, he being att the Chancery Bar, he fell so ill of the fever, that he was forced to leave the Court and come to his chambers in the Temple, with one of his clerks, which constantly wayted on him and carried his bags of writings for his pleadings, and there told him that he should return to every clyent his breviat and his fee, for he could serve them no longer, for he had done with this world, and thence came home to his house in Salisbury Court, and took his bed.... And there he sequestered himself to meditation between God and his own soul, without the least regret, and quietly and patiently contented himself with the will of God.—Vide Memoir of Sir John King, Knt., written by his Father.

[10] The lawyers of the seventeenth century were accustomed to make a show of their fees to the clients who called upon them. Hudibras's lawyer (Hud., Part iii. cant. 3) is described as sitting in state with his books and money before him:

"To this brave man the knight repairs
For counsel in his law affairs,
And found him mounted in his pew,
With books and money placed for shew,
Like nest-eggs, to make clients lay,
And for his false, opinion pay:
To whom the knight, with comely grace,
Put off his hat to put his case,
Which he as proudly entertain'd
As the other courteously strain'd;
And to assure him 'twas not that
He looked for, bid him put on's hat."

Under Victoria, the needy junior is compelled, for the sake of appearances, to furnish his shelves with law books, and cover his table with counterfeit briefs. Under the Stuarts, he placed a bowl of spurious money amongst the sham papers that lay upon his table.

[11] In the 'Serviens ad Legem,' Mr. Sergeant Manning raises question concerning the antiquity of guineas and half-guineas, with the following remarks:—"Should any cavil be raised against this jocular allusion, on the ground that guineas and half-guineas were unknown to sergeants who flourished in the sixteenth century, the objector might be reminded, that in antique records, instances occur in which the 'guianois d'or,' issued from the ducal mint at Bordeaux, by the authority of the Plantagenet sovereigns of Guienne, were by the same authority, made current among their English subjects; and it might be suggested that those who have gone to the coast of Africa for the origin of the modern guinea, need not have carried their researches beyond the Bay of Biscay. Quære, whether the Guinea Coast itself may not owe its name to the 'guianois d'or' for which it furnished the raw material."

CHAPTER XIII.

RETAINERS GENERAL AND SPECIAL.

Pemberton's fees for his services in behalf of the Seven Bishops show that the most eminent counsel of his time were content with very modest remuneration for advice and eloquence. From the bill of an attorney employed in that famous trial, it appears that the ex-Chief Justice was paid a retaining-fee of five guineas, and received twenty guineas with his brief. He also pocketed three guineas for a consultation. At the present date, thirty times the sum of these paltry payments would be thought an inadequate compensation for such zeal, judgment, and ability as Francis Pemberton displayed in the defence of his reverend clients.

But, though lawyers were paid thus moderately in the seventeenth century, the complaints concerning their avarice and extortions were loud and universal. This public discontent was due to the inordinate exactions of judges and place-holders rather than to the conduct of barristers and attorneys; but popular displeasure seldom cares to discriminate between the blameless and the culpable members of an obnoxious system, or to distinguish between the errors of ancient custom and the qualities of those persons who are required to carry out old rules. Hence the really honest and useful practitioners of the law endured a full share of the obloquy caused by the misconduct of venal justices and corrupt officials. Counsel, attorneys, and even scriveners came in for abuse. It was averred that they conspired to pick the public pocket; that eminent conveyancers not less than copying clerks, swelled their emoluments by knavish tricks. They would talk for the mere purpose of protracting litigation, injure their clients by vexations and bootless delays, and do their work so that they might be fed for doing it again. Draughtsmen find their clerks wrote loosely and wordily, because they were paid by the folio. "A term," writes the quaint author of 'Saint Hillaries Teares,' in 1642, "so like a vacation; the prime court, the Chancery (wherein the clerks had wont to dash their clients out of countenance with long dashes); the examiners to take the depositions in hyperboles, and roundabout Robinhood circumstances with saids and aforesaids, to enlarge the number of sheets." 'Hudibras' contains, amongst other pungent satires against the usages of lawyers, an allusion to this characteristic custom of legal draughtsmen, who being paid by the sheet, were wont

"To make 'twixt words and lines large gaps,
Wide as meridians in maps;
To squander paper and spare ink,
Or cheat men of their words some think."

In the following century the abuses consequent on the objectionable system of folio-payment were noticed in a parliamentary report (bearing date November 8, 1740), which was the most important result of an ineffectual attempt to reform the superior courts of law and to lessen the expenses of litigation.

More is known about the professional receipts of lawyers since the Revolution of 1688 than can be discovered concerning the incomes of their precursors in Westminster Hall. For six years, commencing with Michaelmas Term, 1719, Sir John Cheshire, King's Sergeant, made an average annual income of 3241l. Being then sixty-three years of age, he limited his practice to the Common Pleas, and during the next six years made in that one court 1320l. per annum. Mr. Foss, to whom the present writer is indebted for these particulars with regard to Sir John Cheshire's receipts, adds: "The fees of counsel's clerks form a great contrast with those that are now demanded, being only threepence on a fee of half-a-guinea, sixpence for a guinea, and one shilling for two guineas." Of course the increase of clerk's fees tells more in favor of the master than the servant. At the present time the clerk of a barrister in fairly lucrative practice costs his master nothing. Bountifully paid by his employer's clients, he receives no salary from the counsellor whom he serves; whereas, in old times, when his fees were fixed at the low rate just mentioned, the clerk could not live and maintain a family upon them, unless his master belonged to the most successful grade of his order.

Horace Walpole tells his readers that Charles Yorke "was reported to have received 100,000 guineas in fees;" but his fee-book shows that his professional rise was by no means so rapid as those who knew him in his sunniest days generally supposed. The story of his growing fortunes is indicated in the following statement of successive incomes:—1st year of practice at the bar, 121l. 2nd, 201l.; 3rd and 4th, between 300l. and 400l. per annum; 5th, 700l.; 6th, 800l.; 7th, 1000l.; 9th, 1600l.; 10th, 2500l. Whilst Solicitor General he made 3400l. in 1757; and in the following year he earned 5000l. His receipts during the last year of his tenure of the Attorney Generalship amounted to 7322l. The reader should observe that as Attorney General he made but little more than Coke had realized in the same office,—a fact serving to show how much better paid were Crown lawyers in times when they held office like judges during the Sovereign's pleasure, than in these latter days when they retire from place together with their political parties.

The difference between the incomes of Scotch advocates and English barristers was far greater in the eighteenth century than at the present time, although in our own day the receipts of several second-rate lawyers of the Temple and Lincoln's Inn far surpass the revenues of the most successful advocates of the Edinburgh faculty. A hundred and thirty years since a Scotch barrister who earned 500l. per annum by his profession was esteemed notably successful.

Just as Charles Yorke's fee-book shows us the pecuniary position of an eminent English barrister in the middle of the last century, John Scott's list of receipts displays the prosperity of a very fortunate Crown lawyer in the next generation. Without imputing motives the present writer, may venture to say that Lord Eldon's assertions with regard to his earnings at the bar, and his judicial incomes, were not in strict accordance with the evidence of his private accounts. He used to say that his first year's earnings in his profession amounted to half-a-guinea, but there is conclusive proof that he had a considerable quantity of lucrative business in the same year. "When I was called to the bar," it was his humor to say, "Bessie and I thought all our troubles were over, business was to pour in, and we were to be rich almost immediately. So I made a bargain with her that during the following year all the money I should receive in the first eleven months should be mine, and whatever I should get in the twelfth month should be hers. That was our agreement, and how do you think it turned out? In the twelfth month I received half-a-guinea—eighteenpence went for charity, and Bessy got nine shillings. In the other eleven months I got one shilling." John Scott, be it remembered, was called to the bar on February 9, 1776, and on October 2, of the same year, William Scott wrote to his brother Henry—"My brother Jack seems highly pleased with his circuit business. I hope it is only the beginning of future triumphs. All appearances speak strongly in his favor." There is no need to call evidence to show that Eldon's success was more than respectable from the outset of his career, and that he had not been called many years before he was in the foremost rank of his profession. His fee-book gives the following account of his receipts in thirteen successive years:—1786, 6833l. 7s.; 1787, 7600l. 7s.; 1788, 8419l. 14s.; 1789, 9559l. 10s.; 1790, 9684l. 15s.; 1791, 10,213l. 13s. 6d.; 1792, 9080l. 9s.; 1793, 10,330l. 1s. 4d.; 1794, 11,592l.; 1795, 11,149l. 15s. 4d.; 1796, 12,140l. 15s. 8d.; 1797, 10,861l. 5s. 8d; 1798, 10,557l. 17s. During the last six of the above-mentioned years he was Attorney General, and during the preceding four years Solicitor General.

Although General Retainers are much less general than formerly, they are by no means obsolete. Noblemen could be mentioned who at the present time engage counsel with periodical payments, special fees of course being also paid for each professional service. But the custom is dying out, and it is probable that after the lapse of another hundred years it will not survive save amongst the usages of ancient corporations. Notice has already been taken of Murray's conduct when he returned nine hundred and ninety-five out of a thousand guineas to the Duchess of Marlborough, informing her that the professional fee with the general retainer was neither more nor less than five guineas. The annual salary of a Queen's Counsel in past times was in fact a fee with a general retainer; but this periodic payment is no longer made to wearers of silk.

In his learned work on 'The Judges of England,' Mr. Foss observes: "The custom of retaining counsel in fee lingered in form, at least in one ducal establishment. By a formal deed-poll between the proud Duke of Somerset and Sir Thomas Parker, dated July 19, 1707, the duke retains him as his 'standing counsell in ffee,' and gives and allows him 'the yearly ffee of four markes, to be paid by my solicitor' at Michaelmas, 'to continue during my will and pleasure.'" Doubtless Mr. Foss is aware that this custom still 'lingers in form;' but the tone of his words justifies the opinion that he underrates the frequency with which general retainers are still given. The 'standing counsel' of civic and commercial companies are counsel with general retainers, and usually their general retainers have fees attached to them.

The payments of English barristers have varied much more than the remunerations of English physicians. Whereas medical practitioners in every age have received a certain definite sum for each consultation, and have been forbidden by etiquette to charge more or less than the fixed rate, lawyers have been allowed much freedom in estimating the worth of their labor. This difference between the usages of the two professions is mainly due to the fact, that the amount of time and mental effort demanded by patients at each visit or consultation is very nearly the same in all cases, whereas the requirements of clients are much more various. To get up the facts of a law-case may be the work of minutes, or hours, or days, or even weeks; to observe the symptoms of a patient, and to write a prescription, can be always accomplished within the limits of a short morning call. In all times, however, the legal profession has adopted certain scales of payment—that fixed the minimum of remuneration, but left the advocate free to get more, as circumstances might encourage him to raise his demands. Of the many good stories told of artifices by which barristers have delicately intimated their desire for higher payment, none is better than an anecdote recorded of Sergeant Hill. A troublesome case being laid before this most erudite of George III.'s sergeants, he returned it with a brief note, that he "saw more difficulty in the case than, under all the circumstances, he could well solve." As the fee marked upon the case was only a guinea, the attorney readily inferred that its smallness was one of the circumstances which occasioned the counsel's difficulty. The case, therefore, was returned, with a fee of two guineas. Still dissatisfied, Sergeant Hill wrote that "he saw no reason to change his opinion."

By the etiquette of the bar no barrister is permitted to take a brief on any circuit, save that on which he habitually practises, unless he has received a special retainer; and no wearer of silk can be specially retained with a less fee than three hundred guineas. Erskine's first special retainer was in the Dean of St. Asaph's case, his first speech in which memorable cause was delivered when he had been called to the bar but little more than five years. From that time till his elevation to the bench he received on an average twelve special retainers a year, by which at the minimum of payment he made £3600 per annum. Besides being lucrative and honorable, this special employment greatly augmented his practice in Westminster Hall, as it brought him in personal contact with attorneys in every part of the country, and heightened his popularity amongst all classes of his fellow-countrymen. In 1786 he entirely withdrew from ordinary circuit practice, and confined his exertions in provincial courts to the causes for which he was specially retained. No advocate since his time has received an equal number of special retainers; and if he did not originate the custom of special retainers,[12] he was the first English barrister who ventured to reject all other briefs.

There is no need to recapitulate all the circumstances of Erskine's rapid rise in his profession—a rise due to his effective brilliance and fervor in political trial: but this chapter on lawyers' fees would be culpably incomplete, if it failed to notice some of its pecuniary consequences. In the eighth month after his call to the bar he thanked Admiral Keppel for a splendid fee of one thousand pounds. A few years later a legal gossip wrote: "Everybody says that Erskine will be Solicitor General, and if he is, and indeed whether he is or not, he will have had the most rapid rise that has been known at the bar. It is four years and a half since he was called, and in that time he has cleared £8000 or £9000, besides paying his debts—got a silk gown, and business of at least £3000 a year—a seat in Parliament—and, over and above, has made his brother Lord Advocate."

Merely to mention large fees without specifying the work by which they were earned would mislead the reader. During the railway mania of 1845, the few leaders of the parliamentary bar received prodigious fees; and in some cases the sums were paid for very little exertion. Frequently it happened that a lawyer took heavy fees in causes, at no stage of which he either made a speech or read a paper in the service of his too liberal employers. During that period of mad speculation the committee-rooms of the two Houses were an El Dorado to certain favored lawyers, who were alternately paid for speech and silence with reckless profusion. But the time was so exceptional, that the fees received and the fortunes made in it by a score of lucky advocates and solicitors cannot be fairly cited as facts illustrating the social condition of legal practitioners. As a general rule, it may be stated that large fortunes are not made at the bar by large fees. Our richest lawyers have made the bulk of their wealth by accumulating sufficient but not exorbitant payments. In most cases the large fee has not been a very liberal remuneration for the work done. Edward Law's retainer for the defence of Warren Hastings brought with it £500—a sum which caused our grandfathers to raise their hands in astonishment at the nabob's munificence; but the sum was in reality the reverse of liberal. In all, Warren Hastings paid his leading advocate considerably less than four thousand pounds; and if Law had not contrived to win the respect of solicitors by his management of the defence, the case could not be said to have paid him for his trouble. So also the eminent advocate, who in the great case of Small v. Attwood received a fee of £6000, was actually underpaid. When he made up the account of the special outlay necessitated by that cause, and the value of business which the burdensome case compelled him to decline, he had small reason to congratulate himself on his remuneration.

A statement of the incomes made by chamber-barristers, and of the sums realized by counsel in departments of the profession that do not invite the attention of the general public, would astonish those uninformed persons who estimate the success of a barrister by the frequency with which his name appears in the newspaper reports of trials and suits. The talkers of the bar enjoy more éclat than the barristers who confine themselves to chamber practice, and their labors lead to the honors of the bench; but a young lawyer, bent only on the acquisition of wealth, is more likely to achieve his ambition by conveyancing or arbitration-business than by court-work. Kenyon was never a popular or successful advocate, but he made £3000 a year by answering cases. Charles Abbott at no time of his life could speak better than a vestryman of average ability; but by drawing informations and indictments, by writing opinions on cases, he made the greater part of the eight thousand pounds which he returned as the amount of his professional receipts in 1807. In our own time, when that popular common law advocate, Mr. Edwin James, was omnipotent with juries, his income never equalled the incomes of certain chamber-practitioners whose names are utterly unknown to the general body of English society.

[12] Lord Campbell observes: "Some say that special retainers began with Erskine; but I doubt the fact." It is strange that there should be uncertainty as to the time when special retainers—unquestionably a comparatively recent innovation in legal practice—came into vogue.

CHAPTER XIV.

JUDICIAL CORRUPTION.

To a young student making his first researches beneath the surface of English history, few facts are more painful and perplexing than the judicial corruption which prevailed in every period of our country's growth until quiet recent times—darkening the brightest pages of our annals, and disfiguring some of the greatest chieftains of our race.

Where he narrates the fall and punishment of De Weyland towards the close of the thirteenth century, Speed observes: "While the Jews by their cruel usuries had in one way eaten up the people, the justiciars, like another kind of Jews, had ruined them with delay in their suits, and enriched themselves with wicked convictions." Of judicial corruption in the reigns of Edward I. and Edward II. a vivid picture is given in a political ballad, composed in the time of one or the other of those monarchs. Of this poem Mr. Wright, in his 'Political Songs,' gives a free version, a part of which runs thus:—

"Judges there are whom gifts and favorites control,
Content to serve the devil alone and take from him a toll;
If nature's law forbids the judge from selling his decree,
How dread to those who finger bribes the punishment shall be.
"Such judges have accomplices whom frequently they send
To get at those who claim some land, and whisper as a friend,
''Tis I can help you with the judge, if you would wish to plead,
Give me but half, I'll undertake before him you'll succeed.'
"The clerks who sit beneath the judge are open-mouthed as he,
As if they were half-famished and gaping for a fee;
Of those who give no money they soon pronounce the state,
However early they attend, they shall have long to wait.
"If comes some noble lady, in beauty and in pride,
With golden horns upon her head, her suit he'll soon decide;
But she who has no charms, nor friends, and is for gifts too poor,
Her business all neglected, she's weeping shown the door.
"But worse than all, within the court we some relators meet,
Who take from either side at once, and both their clients cheat;
The ushers, too, to poor men say, 'You labor here in vain,
Unless you tip us all around, you may go back again.'
"The sheriff's hard upon the poor who cannot pay for rest,
Drags them about to every town, on all assizes press'd
Compell'd to take the oath prescrib'd without objection made,
For if they murmur and can't pay, upon their backs they're laid.
"They enter any private house, or abbey that they choose,
Where meat and drink and all things else are given as their dues;
And after dinner jewels too, or this were all in vain,
Bedels and garçons must receive, and all that form the train.
"And next must gallant robes be sent as presents to their wives,
Or from the manor of the host some one his cattle drives;
While he, poor man, is sent to gaol upon some false pretence,
And pays at last at double cost, ere he gets free from thence.
"I can't but laugh to see their clerks, whom once I knew in need,
When to obtain a bailiwick they may at last succeed;
With pride in gait and countenance and with their necks erect
They lands and houses quickly buy and pleasant rents collect.
"Grown rich they soon the poor despise, and new-made laws display,
Oppress their neighbors and become the wise men of their day;
Unsparing of the least offence, when they can have their will,
The hapless country all around with discontent they fill."

In the fourteenth century judicial corruption was so general and flagrant, that cries came from every quarter for the punishment of offenders. The Knights Hospitallers' Survey, made in the year 1338, gives us revelations that confound the indiscreet admirers of feudal manners. From that source of information it appears that regular stipends were paid to persons "tam in curia domini regis quam justiciariis, clericis, officiariis et aliis ministris, in diversis curiis suis, ac etiam aliis familaribus magnatum tam pro terris tenementis redditbus et libertatibus Hospitalis, quam Templariorum, et maxime pro terris Templariorum manutenendis." Of pensions to the amount of £440 mentioned in the account, £60 were paid to judges, clerks, and minor officers of courts. Robert de Sadington, the Chief Baron, received 40 marks annually; twice a year the Knights Hospitallers presented caps to one hundred and forty officers of the Exchequer; and they expended 200 marks per annum on gifts that were distributed in law courts, "pro favore habendo, et pro placitis habendis, et expensis parliamentorum." In that age, and for centuries later, it was customary for wealthy men and great corporations to make valuable presents to the judges and chief servants the king's courts; but it was always presumed that the offerings were simple expressions of respect—not tribute rendered, "pro favore habendo."

Bent on purifying the moral atmosphere of his courts, Edward III. raised the salaries of his judges, and imposed upon them such oaths that none of their order could pervert justice, or even encourage venal practices, without breaking his solemn vow[13] to the king's majesty.

From the amounts of the royal fees or stipends paid to Edward III.'s judges, it may be vaguely estimated how far they were dependent on gifts and court fees for the means of living with appropriate state. John Knyvet, Chief Justice of the King's Bench, has £40 and 100 marks per annum. The annual fee of Thomas de Ingleby, the solitary puisne judge of the King's Bench at that time, was at first 40 marks; but he obtained an additional £40 when the 'fees' were raised, and he received moreover £20 a year as a judge of assize. The Chief of the Common Pleas, Robert de Thrope, received £40 per annum, payable during his tenure of office, and another annual sum of £40 payable during his life. John de Mowbray, William de Wychingham, and William de Fyncheden, the other judges of the Common Pleas, received 40 marks each as official salary, and £20 per annum for their services at assizes. Mowbray's stipend was subsequently increased by 40 marks, whilst Wychingham and Fyncheden received an additional £40 par annum. To the Chief Baron and the other two Barons of the Exchequer annual fees of 40 marks each were paid, the Chief Baron receiving £20 per annum as Justice of Assize, and one of the puisne Barons, Almaric de Shirland, getting an additional 40 marks for certain special services. The 'Issue Roll of 44 Edward III., 1370,' also shows that certain sergeants-at-law acted as Justices of Assize, receiving for their service £20 per annum.

Throughout his reign Edward III. strenuously exerted himself to purge his law courts of abuses, and to secure his subjects from evils wrought by judicial dishonesty; and though there is reason to think that he prosecuted his reforms, and punished offending judges with more impulsiveness than consistency—with petulance rather than firmness[14]—his action must have produced many beneficial results. But it does not seem to have occurred to him that the system adopted by his predecessors, and encouraged by the usages of his own time, was the real source of the mischief, and that so long as judges received the greater part of their remuneration from suitors, fees and the donations of the public, enactments and proclamations would be comparatively powerless to preserve the streams of justice from pollution. The fee-system poisoned the morality of the law-courts. From the highest judge to the lowest usher, every person connected with a court of justice was educated to receive small sums of money for trifling services, to be always looking out for paltry dues or gratuities, to multiply occasions for demanding, and reasons for pocketing petty coins, to invent devices for legitimate peculation. In time the system produced such complications of custom, right, privilege, claim, that no one could say definitely how much a suitor was actually bound to pay at each stage of a suit. The fees had an equally bad influence on the public. Trained to approach the king's judges with costly presents, to receive them on their visits with lavish hospitality, to send them offerings at the opening of each year, the rich and the poor learnt to look on judicial decisions as things that were bought and sold. In many cases this impression was not erroneous. Judges were forbidden to accept gifts from actual suitors, or to take payments for judgments after their delivery; but on the judgment-seat they were often influenced by recollections of the conduct of suitors who had been munificent before the commencement of proceedings, and most probably would be equally munificent six months after delivery of a judgment favorable to their claims. Humorous anecdotes heightened the significance of patent facts. Throughout a shire it would be told how this suitor won a judgment by a sumptuous feast; how that suitor bought the justice's favor with a flask of rare wine, a horse of excellent breed, a hound of superior sagacity.

In the fifteenth century the judge whose probity did not succumb to an excellent dinner was deemed a miracle of virtue. "A lady," writes Fuller of Chief Justice Markham, who was dismissed from his place in 1470, "would traverse a suit of law against the will of her husband, who was contented to buy his quiet by giving her her will therein, though otherwise persuaded in his judgment the cause would go against her. This lady, dwelling in the shire town, invited the judge to dinner, and (though thrifty enough herself) treated him with sumptuous entertainment. Dinner being done, and the cause being called, the judge gave it against her. And when, in passion, she vowed never to invite the judge again, 'Nay, wife,' said he, 'vow never to invite a just judge any more.'" It may be safely affirmed that no English lady of our time ever tried to bribe Sir Alexander Cockburn or Sir Frederick Pollock with a dinner à la Russe.

By his eulogy of Chief Justice Dyer, who died March 24, 1582, Whetstone gives proof that in Elizabethan England purity was the exception rather than the rule with judges:—

"And when he spake he was in speeche reposde;
His eyes did search the simple suitor's harte;
To put by bribes his hands were ever closde,
His processe juste, he tooke the poore man's parte.
He ruld by lawe and listened not to arte,
Those foes to truthe—loove, hate, and private gain,
Which most corrupt, his conscience could not staine."

There is no reason to suppose that the custom of giving and receiving presents was more general or extravagant in the time of Elizabeth than in previous ages; but the fuller records of her splendid reign give greater prominence to the usage than it obtained in the chronicles of any earlier period of English history. On each New Year's day her courtiers gave her costly presents—jewels, ornaments of gold or silver workmanship, hundreds of ounces of silver-gilt plate, tapestry, laces, satin dresses, embroidered petticoats. Not only did she accept such costly presents from men of rank and wealth, but she graciously received the donations of tradesmen and menials. Francis Bacon made her majesty "a poor oblation of a garment;" Charles Smith, the dustman, threw upon the pile of treasure "two bottes of cambric." The fashion thus countenanced by the queen was followed in all ranks of society; all men, from high to low, receiving presents, as expressions of affection when they came from their equals, as declarations of respect when they came from their social inferiors. Each of her great officers of state drew a handsome revenue from such yearly offerings. But though the burdens and abuses of this system were excessive under Elizabeth, they increased in enormity and number during the reigns of the Stuarts.

That the salaries of the Elizabethan judges were small in comparison with the sums which they received in presents and fees may be seen from the following Table of stipends and allowances annually paid, towards the close of the sixteenth century:—

Prior to and in the earlier part of Elizabeth's reign, the sheriffs had been required to provide diet and lodging for judges travelling on circuit, each sheriff being responsible for the proper entertainment of judges within the limits of his jurisdiction. This arrangement was very burdensome upon the class from which the sheriffs were elected, as the official host had not only to furnish suitable lodging and cheer for the justices themselves, but also to supply the wants of their attendants and servants. The ostentatious and costly hospitality which law and public opinion thus compelled or encouraged them to exercise towards circuiteers of all ranks had seriously embarrassed a great number of country gentlemen; and the queen was assailed with entreaties for a reform that should free a sheriff of small estate from the necessity of either ruining himself, or incurring a reputation for stinginess. In consequence of these urgent representations, an order of council, bearing date February 21, 1574, decided "the justices shall have of her majesty several sums of money out of her coffers for their daily diet." Hence rose the usage of 'circuit allowances.' The sheriffs, however, were still bound to attend upon the judges, and make suitable provision for the safe conduct of the legal functionaries from assize town to assize town;—the sheriff of each county being required to furnish a body-guard for the protection of the sovereign's representatives. This responsibility lasted till the other day, when an innovation (of which Mr. Arcedeckne, of Glevering Hall, Suffolk, was the most notorious, though not the first champion), substituted guards of policemen, paid by county-rates, for bands of javelin-men equipped and rewarded by the sheriffs. In some counties the javelin-men—remote descendants of the mail-clad knights and stalwart men-at-arms who formerly mustered at the summons of sheriffs—still do duty with long wands and fresh rosettes; but they are fast giving way to the wielders of short staves.

Amongst the bad consequences of the system of gratuities was the color which it gave to idle rumors and malicious slander against the purity of upright judges.

When Sir Thomas More fell, charges of bribery were preferred against him before the Privy Council. A disappointed suitor, named Parnell, declared that the Chancellor had been bribed with a gift-cup to decide in favor of his (Parnell's) adversary. Mistress Vaughan, the successful suitor's wife, had given Sir Thomas the cup with her own hands. The fallen Chancellor admitting that "he had received the cup as a New Year's Gift," Lord Wiltshire cried, with unseemly exultation, "Lo! did I not tell you, my lords, that you would find this matter true?" It seemed that More had pleaded guilty, for his oath did not permit him to receive a New Year's Gift from an actual suitor. "But, my lords," continued the accused man, with one of his characteristic smiles, "hear the other part of my tale. After having drunk to her of wine, with which my butler had filled the cup, and when she had pledged me, I restored it to her, and would listen to no refusal." It is possible that Mistress Vaughan did not act with corrupt intention, but merely in ignorance of the rule which forbade the Chancellor to accept her present. As much cannot be said in behalf of Mrs. Croker, who, being opposed in a suit to Lord Arundel, sought to win Sir Thomas More's favor by presenting him with a pair of gloves containing forty angels. With a courteous smile he accepted the gloves, but constrained her to take back the gold. The gentleness of this rebuff is charming; but the story does not tell more in favor of Sir Thomas than to the disgrace of the lady and the moral tone of the society in which she lived.

Readers should bear in mind the part which New Year's Gifts and other customary gratuities played in the trumpery charges against Lord Bacon. Adopting an old method of calumny, the conspirators against his fair fame represented that the gifts made to him, in accordance with ancient usage, were bribes. For instance Reynel's ring, presented on New Year's day, was so construed by the accusers; and in his comment upon the charge, Bacon, who had inadvertently accepted the gift during the progress of a suit, observes, "This ring was received certainly pendente lite, and though it were at New Year's tide, yet it was too great a value for a New Year's Gift, though, as I take it, nothing near the value mentioned in the articles." So also Trevor's gift was a New Year's present, of which Bacon says, "I confess and declare that I received at New Year's tide an hundred pounds from Sir John Trevor, and because it came as a New Year's Gift, I neglected to inquire whether the cause was ended or depending; but since I find that though the cause was then dismissed to a trial at law, yet the equity is reserved, so as it was in that kind pendente lite." Bacon knew that this explanation would be read by men familiar with the history of New Year's Gifts, and all the circumstances of the ancient usage; and it is needless to say that no man of honor thought the less highly of Bacon at that time, because his pure and guiltless acceptance of customary presents was by ingenious and unscrupulous adversaries made to assume an appearance of corrupt compliance.

How far the Chancellors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries depended upon customary gratuities for their revenues may be seen from the facts which show the degree of state which they were required to maintain, and the inadequacy of the ancient fees for the maintenance of that pomp. When Elizabeth pressed Hatton for payment of the sums which he owed her, the Chancellor lamented his inability to liquidate her just claims, and urged in excuse that the ancient fees were very inadequate to the expenses of the Chancellor's office. But though Elizabethan Chancellors could not live upon their ancient fees, they kept up palaces in town and country, fed regiments of lackeys, and surpassed the ancient nobility in the grandeur of their equipages. Egerton—the needy and illegitimate son of a rural knight, a lawyer who fought up from the ranks—not only sustained the costly dignities of office, but left to his descendants a landed estate worth £8000 per annum. Bacon's successor in the 'marble chair,' Lord Keeper Williams, assured Buckingham that in Egerton's time the Chancellor's lawful income was less than three thousand per annum. "The lawful revenue of the office stands thus," wrote Williams, speaking from his intimate knowledge of Ellesmere's affairs, "or not much above it at anytime:—in fines certain, £1300 per annum, or thereabouts; in fines casual, £1250 or thereabouts; in greater writs, £140; for impost of wine, £100—in all, £2790; and these are all the true means of that great office." It is probable that Williams under-stated the revenue, but it is certain that the income, apart from gratuities, was insufficient.

The Chancellor was not more dependent on customary gratuities than the chief of the three Common Law courts. At Westminster and on circuit, whenever he was required to discharge his official functions, the English judge extended his hand for the contributions of the well-disposed. No one thought of blaming judges for their readiness to take customary benevolences. To take gifts was a usage of the profession, and had its parallel in the customs of every calling and rank of life. The clergy took dues in like manner: from the earliest days of feudal life the territorial lords had supplied their wants in the same way; amongst merchants and yeomen, petty traders and servants, the system existed in full force. These presents were made without any secrecy. The aldermen of borough towns openly voted presents to the judges; and the judges received their offerings—not as benefactions, but as legitimate perquisites. In 1620—just a year before Lord Bacon's fall—the municipal council of Lyme Regis left it to the "mayor's discretion" to decide "what gratuity he will give to the Lord Chief Baron and his men" at the next assizes. The system, it is needless to say, had disastrous results. Empowering the chief judge of every court to receive presents not only from the public, but from subordinate judges, inferior officers, and the bar; and moreover empowering each place-holder to take gratuities from persons officially or by profession concerned in the business of the courts, it produced a complicated machinery for extortion. By presents the chief justices bought their places from the crown or a royal favorite; by presents the puisne justices, registrars, counsel bought place or favor from the chief; by presents the attorneys, sub-registrars, and outside public sought to gain their ends with the humbler place-holders. The meanest ushers of Westminster Hall took coins from ragged scriveners. Hence every place was actually bought and sold, the sum being in most cases very high. Sir James Ley offered the Duke of Buckingham £10,000 for the Attorney's place. At the same period the Solicitor General's office was sold for £4000. Under Charles I. matters grew still worse than they had been under his father. When Sir Charles Cæsar consulted Laud about the worth of the vacant Mastership of the Rolls, the archbishop frankly said, "that as things then stood, the place was not likely to go without more money than he thought any wise man would give for it." Disregarding this intimation, Sir Charles paid the king £15,000 for the place, and added a loan of £2000. Sir Thomas Richardson, at the opening of the reign, gave £17,000 for the Chiefship of the Common Pleas. If judges needed gifts before the days when vacant seats were put up to auction, of course they stood all the more in need of them when they bought their promotions with such large sums. It is not wonderful that the wearers of ermine repaid themselves by venal practices. The sale of judicial offices was naturally followed by the sale of judicial decisions. The judges having submitted to the extortions of the king, the public had to endure the extortions of the judges. Corruption on the bench produced corruption at the bar. Counsel bought the attention and compliance of 'the court,' and in some cases sold their influence with shameless rascality. They would take fees to speak from one side in a cause and fees to be silent from the other side—selling their own clients as coolly as judges sold the suitors of their courts. Sympathizing with the public, and stung by personal experience of legal dishonesty, the clergy sometimes denounced from the pulpit the extortions of corrupt judges and unprincipled barristers. The assize sermons of Charles I.'s reign were frequently seasoned with such animadversions. At Thetford Assizes, March, 1630, the Rev. Mr. Ramsay, in the assize-sermon, spoke indignantly of judges who "favored causes," and of "counsellors who took fees to be silent." In the summer of 1631, at the Bury Assizes, "one Mr. Scott made a sore sermon in discovery of corruption in judges and others." At Norwich, the same authority, viz., 'Sir John Rous's Diary,' informs us—"Mr. Greene was more plaine, insomuch that Judge Harvey, in his charge, broke out thus: 'It seems by the sermon that we are corrupt, but we know that we can use conscience in our places as well as the best clergieman of all.'"

In his 'Life and Death of Sir Matthew Hale,' Bishop Burnet tells a good story of the Chief's conduct with regard to a customary gift. "It is also a custom," says the biographer, "for the Marshall of the King's Bench to present the judges of that court with a piece of plate for a New Year's Gift, that for the Chief Justice being larger than the rest. This he intended to have refused, but the other judges told him it belonged to his office, and the refusing it would be a prejudice to his successors; so he was persuaded to take it, but he sent word to the marshall, that instead of plate he should bring him the value of it in money, and when he received it, he immediately sent it to the prisons for the relief and discharge of the poor there."

[13] A portion of the oath prescribed for judges in the 'Ordinances for Justices,' 20 Edward III., will show the reader the evils which called for correction and the care taken to effect their cure. "Ye shall swear," ran the injunction to which each judge was required to vow obedience, "that well and lawfully ye shall serve our lord the king and his people in the office of justice; ... and that ye take not by yourself or by other, privily or apertly, gift or reward of gold or silver, nor any other thing which may turn to your profit, unless it be meat nor drink, and that of small value, of any man that shall have plea or process before you, as long as the same process shall be so hanging, nor after for the same cause: and that ye shall take no fee as long as ye shall be justice, nor robes of any man, great or small, but of the king himself: and that ye give none advice or counsel to no man, great or small, in any case where the king is party; &c. &c. &c." The clause forbidding the judge to receive gifts of actual suitors was a positive recognition of his right to customary gifts rendered by persons who had no process hanging before him. It should, moreover, be observed that in the passage, "ye shall take no fee as long as ye shall be justice, nor robes of any man," the word "fee" signifies "salary," and not a single payment or gratuity. The Judge was forbidden to receive from any man a fixed stipend (by the acceptance of which he would become the donor's servant), or robes (the assumption of which would be open declaration of service); but he was at liberty to accept the offerings which the public were wont to make to men of his condition, as well as the sums (or 'fees,' as they would be termed at the present day) due on different processes of his court. That the word 'fee' is thus used in the ordinance may be seen from the words "for this cause we have increased the fees (les feez) of the same our justices, in such manner as it ought reasonably to suffice them," by which language attention is drawn to the increase of judicial salaries.

[14] Mr. Foss observes: "In 1350, William de Thrope, Chief Justice of the King's Bench, was convicted on his own confession of receiving bribes to stay justice; but though his property was forfeited to the Crown on his condemnation, the king appears to have relented, and to have made him second Baron of the Exchequer in May, 1352, unless I am mistaken in supposing the latter to have been the same person."

CHAPTER XV.

GIFTS AND SALES.

By degrees the public ceased to make presents to the principal judges of the kingdom; but long after the Chancellor and the three Chiefs had taken the last offerings of general society, they continued to receive yearly presents from the subordinate judges, placemen, and barristers of their respective courts. Lord Cowper deserves honor for being the holder of the seals who, by refusing to pocket these customary donations, put an end to a very objectionable system, so far as the Court of Chancery was concerned.

On being made Lord Keeper, he resolved to depart from the custom of his predecessors for many generations, who on the first day of each new year had invariably entertained at breakfast the persons from whom tribute was looked for. Very droll were these receptions in the old time. The repast at an end, the guests forthwith disburdened themselves of their gold—the payers approaching the holder of the seals in order of rank, and laying on his table purses of money, which the noble payee accepted with his own hands. Sometimes his lordship was embarrassed by a ceremony that required him to pick gold from the fingers of men, several of whom he knew to be in indigent circumstances. In Charles II.'s time it was observed that the silver-tongued Lord Nottingham on such occasions always endeavored to hide his confusion under a succession of nervous smiles and exclamations—"Oh, Tyrant Cuthtom!—Oh, Tyrant Cuthtom!"

It is noteworthy that in relinquishing the benefit of these exactions, the Lord Keeper feared unfriendly criticism much more than he anticipated public commendation. In his diary, under date December 30, Cowper wrote:—"I acquainted my Lord Treasurer with my design to refuse New Year's Gifts, if he had no objection against it, as spoiling, in some measure, a place of which he had the conferring. He answered it was not expected of me, but that I might do as my predecessors had done; but if I refused, he thought nobody could blame me for it." Anxious about the consequences of his innovation, the new Lord Keeper gave notice that on January 1, 1705-6, he would receive no gifts; but notwithstanding this proclamation, several officers of Chancery and counsellors came to his house with tribute, and were refused admittance. "New Year's Gifts turned back," he wrote in his diary at the close of the eventful day, "and pray God it doth me more credit and good than hurt, by making secret enemies in fæce Romuli." His fears were in a slight degree fulfilled. The Chiefs of the three Common Law Courts were greatly displeased with an innovation which they had no wish to adopt; and their warm expressions of dissatisfaction induced the Lord Keeper to cover his disinterestedness with a harmless fiction. To pacify the indignant Chiefs and the many persons who sympathized with them, he pretended that though he had declined intentionally the gifts of the Chancery barristers, he had not designed to exercise the same self-denial with regard to the gifts of Chancery officers.[15]

The common law chiefs were slow to follow in the Lord Keeper's steps, and many years passed before the reform, effected in Chancery by accident or design, or by a lucky combination of both, was adopted in the other great courts. In his memoir of Lord Cowper, Campbell observes: "His example with respect to New Year's Gifts was not speedily followed; and it is said that till very recently the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas invited the officers of his court to a dinner at the beginning of the year, when each of them deposited under his plate a present in the shape of a Bank of England note, instead of a gift of oxen roaring at his levee, as in ruder times." There is no need to remind the reader in this place of the many veracious and the many apocryphal stories concerning the basket justices of Fielding's time—stories showing that in law courts of the lowest sort applicants for justice were accustomed to fee the judges with victuals and drink until a comparatively recent date.

Lucky would it have been for the first Earl of Macclesfield if the custom of selling places in Chancery had been put an end to forever by the Lord Keeper who abolished the custom of New Year's Gifts; but the judge who at the sacrifice of one-fourth of his official income swept away the pernicious usage which had from time immemorial marked the opening of each year, saw no reason why he should purge Chancery of another scarcely less objectionable practice. Following the steps of their predecessors, the Chancellors Cowper, Harcourt, and Macclesfield sold subordinate offices in their court; and whereas all previous Chancellors had been held blameless for so doing, Lord Macclesfield was punished with official degradation, fine, imprisonment, and obloquy.

By birth as humble[16] as any layman who before or since his time has held the seals, Thomas Parker raised himself to the woolsack by great talents and honorable industry. As an advocate he won the respect of society and his profession; as a judge he ranks with the first expositors of English law. Although for imputed corruption he was hurled with ignominy from his high place, no one has ventured to charge him with venality on the bench. That he was a spotless character, or that his career was marked by grandeur of purpose, it would be difficult to establish; but few Englishmen could at the present time be found to deny that he was in the main an upright peer, who was not wittingly neglectful of his duty to the country which had loaded him with wealth and honors.

Amongst the many persons ruined by the bursting of the South Sea Bubble were certain Masters of Chancery, who had thrown away on that wild speculation large sums of which they were the official guardians. Lord Macclesfield was one of the victims on whom the nation wreaked its wrath at a crisis when universal folly had produced universal disaster. To punish the masters for their delinquencies was not enough; greater sacrifices than a few comparatively obscure placemen were demanded by the suitors and wards whose money had been squandered by the fraudulent trustees. The Lord Chancellor should be made responsible for the Chancery defalcations. That was the will of the country. No one pretended that Lord Macclesfield had originated the practice which permitted Masters in Chancery to speculate with funds placed under their care; attorneys and merchants were well aware that in the days of Harcourt, Cowper, Wright, and Somers, it had been usual for masters to pocket interest accruing from suitors' money; notorious also was it that, though the Chancellor was theoretically the trustee of the money confided to his court, the masters were its actual custodians. Had the Chancellor known that the masters were trafficking in dangerous investments to the probable loss of the public, duty would have required him to examine their accounts and place all trust-moneys beyond their reach; but until the crash came, Lord Macclesfield knew neither the actual worthlessness of the South Sea Stock, nor the embarrassed circumstances of the defaulting masters, nor the peril of the persons committed to his care. The system which permitted the masters to speculate with money not their own was execrable, but the Lord Chancellor was not the parent of that system.

Infuriated by the national calamity, in which they were themselves great sufferers, the Commons impeached the Chancellor, charging him with high crimes and misdemeanors, of which the peers unanimously declared him guilty. In this famous trial the great fact established against his lordship was that he had sold masterships to the defaulters. It appeared that he had not only sold the places, but had stood out for very high prices; the inference being, that in consideration of these large sums he had left the purchasers without the supervision usually exercised by Chancellors over such officers, and had connived at the practices which had been followed by ruinous results. To this it was replied, that if the Chancellor had sold the places at higher prices than his predecessors, he had done so because the places had become much more valuable; that at the worst he had but sold them to the highest bidder, after the example of his precursors; that the inference was not supported by any direct testimony.

Very humorous was some of the evidence by which the sale of the masterships was proved. Master Elde deposed that he bought his office for 5000 guineas, the bargain being finally settled and fulfilled after a personal interview with the accused lord. Master Thurston, another purchaser at the high rate of 5000 guineas, paid his money to Lady Macclesfield. It must be owned that these sums were very large, but their magnitude does not fix fraudulent purpose upon the Chancellor. That he believed himself fairly entitled to a moderate present on appointing to a mastership is certain; that he regarded £2000 as the gratuity which he might accept, without blushing at its publication, may be inferred from the restitution of £3250 which he made to one of the purchasers for £5250 at a time when he anticipated an inquiry into his conduct; that he felt himself acting indiscreetly if not wrongfully in pressing for such large sums is testified by the caution with which he conferred with the purchasers and the secrecy with which he accepted their money.

His defence before the peers admitted the sales of the places, but maintained that the transactions were legitimate.

The defence was of no avail. When the question of guilty or not guilty was put to the peers, each of the noble lords present answered, "Guilty, upon my honor." Sentenced to pay a fine of £30,000, and undergo imprisonment until the mulct was paid, the unfortunate statesman bitterly repented the imprudence which had exposed him to the vengeance of political adversaries and to the enmity of the vulgar. Whilst the passions roused by the prosecution were at their height, the fallen Chancellor was treated with much harshness by Parliament, and with actual brutality by the mob. Ever ready to vilify lawyers, the rabble seized on so favorable an occasion for giving expression to one of their strongest prejudices. Amongst the crowds who followed the Earl to the Tower with curses, voices were heard to exclaim that "Staffordshire had produced the three greatest scoundrels of England—Jack Sheppard, Jonathan Wilde, and Tom Parker." Jonathan Wilde was executed in 1725—the year of Lord Macclesfield's impeachment; and Jack Sheppard died on the gallows at Tyburn, November 16, 1724.

Throughout the inquiry, and after the adverse verdict, George I. persisted in showing favor to the disgraced Chancellor; and when the violent emotions of the crisis had passed away it was generally admitted by enlightened critics of public events that Lord Macclesfield had been unfairly treated. The scape-goat of popular wrath, he suffered less for his own faults, than for the evil results of a bad system; and at the present time—when the silence of more than a hundred and thirty years rests upon his tomb—Englishmen, with one voice, acknowledge the valuable qualities that raised him to eminence, and regret the proceedings which consigned him in his old age to humiliation and gloom.

[15] It should be observed that many persons are of opinion that the Lord Keeper's assertion on this point was not an artifice, but a simple statement of fact. To those who take this view, his lordship's position seems alike ridiculous and respectable—respectable because he actually intended to forbear from taking the barrister's money; ridiculous because, through clumsy and inadequate arrangements, he missed the other and not less precious gifts which he did not mean to decline. Anyhow, the critics admit that credit is due to him for persisting in a change—wrought in the first instance partly by honorable design and partly by accident.

[16] The cases of John Scott, Philip Yorke, and Edward Sugden are before the mind of the present writer, when he pens the sentence to which this note refers. The social extraction of the English bar will be considered in a later chapter of this work.

CHAPTER XVI.

A ROD PICKLED BY WILLIAM COLE.

"A proneness to take bribes may be generated from the habit of taking fees," said Lord Keeper Williams in his Inaugural Address, making an ungenerous allusion to Francis Bacon, whilst he uttered a statement which was no calumny upon King James's Bench and Bar, though it is signally inapplicable to lawyers of the present day.