"I hate a fanatic in lawn sleeves." Fortunately Tillotson had his wits about him, and instead of being startled into helplessness by this extraordinary assault, he replied to it with delightful effect. Stopping in his walk, the primate arrested the lawyer by a sign; and then, after a minute's pause, during which he coolly surveyed his enemy with evident amusement, he observed with deliberate enunciation, and in a tone of playfulness rather than of irritation, " And I hate a knave in any sleeves."

Many are the good stories about lawyers during the Stuart troubles who found politics a source of embarrassment. From the outbreak of the civil war in the time of Charles I., till the final destruction of the hopes of the Jacobites after the lapse of more than a hundred years, barristers were often sadly distracted by principle and selfishness, by attachment to party and devotion to personal interest. When the exiled Charles's fortunes were at their darkest, Clarendon is said to have meditated on the propriety of retiring from the wanderer's service, and is even said to have tendered his submission to Cromwell in a letter addressed to Mr. Secretary Thurloe. When the tables turned, and the royalists having come into power, republicans deemed it prudent to sue for mercy, Mr. Secretary Thurloe is said to have called on his old correspondent and shown the great Lord Chancellor Clarendon the letter written by Edward Hyde. This story is by some judges deemed apocryphal, but it is true to the life of the period which may be said to have closed with those grim trials whereby the Lords Lovat and Balmerino, and certain other bold traitors, were sent against their will to the next world. In the trials of the rebel lords a conspicuous part was played by William Murray, the Solicitor General, subsequently Lord Mansfield. In prosecuting these culprits, Murray acted against men with whom he had formerly sympathized, and whose cause had been aided by the blood and treasure of his nearest relations. Lord Campbell observes-" Murray must have viewed the struggle with divided feelings. He had cast in his lot with the new dynasty; but his second brother, whom he dearly loved, had been twenty years in the service of the Pretender, had been created by him Earl of Dunbar, and was supposed to be his

destined prime minister." Indeed the aged Lovat was cousin to the successful lawyer, in whose breast youthful Jacobitism had been replaced by ardent devotion to the Hanoverian cause; and to this relationship the old lord alluded in a few graceful words after the unanimous verdict of guilty had been given. During the trials, whilst the peers had adjourned for refreshment, Lord Lovat had complimented Murray on his speech, and added, "But I do not know what the good lady your mother will say to it, for she was very kind to my clan as we marched through Perth to join the Pretender." It is certain that Horace Walpole was in error when he charged Murray with acting harshly and insolently towards the rebel prisoners. The letter-writer was wrong in giving Balmerino's name when he should have given Lovat's, and still more wrong in attributing brutality to the lawyer, who, though a man of cold nature, never sinned against good taste, and who on the occasion of Lovat's trial-in which he acted as a manager of the prosecution for the House of Commons, not as a crown lawyer-was especially courteous and considerate towards the prisoner.

CHAPTER LVII.

THE PEERS.

URING the reign of George III. there was a steady in

abundance of strictly professional employment, held themselves aloof from the uncertain contentions of politics; but from that monarch's accession until the passing of the Reform Bill in 1832, the most eminent members of the bench and the bar were active party-men, and are remembered by the present generation quite as much for their political services as for their forensic celebrity. Thurlow, Wedderburn, Scott, Erskine, Copley, Romilly, and Brougham are names that carry the mind back to the parliamentary struggles in which they took part. The policies which they favoured or opposed, the measures which they promoted or hindered, are known to all educated Englishmen; but their most masterly speeches in the courts of law are forgotten by all save lawyers, with the exception of a few orations which were inspired by political fervour, and are, consequently, preserved from oblivion by political sympathy.

It is credible that Thurlow was not, at heart, a narrow partisan. Sympathizing with success, he always meant to fight on the winning side; but more daring or more shameless than most time-serving politicians, he took but small pains to conceal his true character. At the time of the king's first illness the Tory Chancellor showed himself quite ready to serve the Whigs if they should ever need his assistance; and at a later period, as a purely official upholder of Church and State, he frankly told a deputation of nonconformists that he would join them and cordially adopt their religious opinions as soon as their sect had made itself the Established Church.

And when his political life met a premature and violent end, he gave the following characteristic counsel to Sir John Scott:"Stick by Pitt; he has tripped up my heels, and I would have tripped up his if I could. his if I could. I confess I never thought the king would have parted with me so easily. My course is run, and for the future I shall remain neutral. But you must on no account resign; I will not listen for a moment to such an idea. We should be looked on as a couple of fools. Your promotion is certain, and it shall not be balked by any such whimsical proceedings." Though this friendly and generous speech contains little to which the moralist can take exception, it must be admitted that its tone leaves no room for doubt that the speaker regarded politics as a game in which clever men sought personal advancement, and stuck to those who could help them.

To Alexander Wedderburn, more than to any other lawyer of his period, must be attributed the still popular belief that in political affairs a lawyer's promises are at best no more than indications of the course which he thinks it will be most profitable for him to pursue. "I am not surprised, but grieved,"

was Lord Camden's comment on the clever Scotchman's desertion of his old friends at the close of 1770; and it was not the last occasion when those who were credulous enough to rely on his word had reason to utter the same criticism.

And yet

this man, whose name has become a by-word for perfidy, and the shame of whose dishonesty still rests upon the profession which he at the same time dishonoured and adorned, had the effrontery to stigmatize Benjamin Franklin as a thief before a committee of the Privy Council, because certain letters concerning the public affairs of the American colonists had come into the hands of the American envoy. Nominally private, but written by the Lieutenant-Governor and the Chief Justice of Massachusetts, to George Grenville's private secretary, Mr. Whately, and containing recommendations that soldiers should be employed to awe the people of Massachusetts into submission, these letters had come into the hands of Franklin, whilst he was agent for Massachusetts. Consigned to him for use in behalf of his constituents, the envoy sent them to the Speaker of Massachusetts House of Assembly; and when the papers

VOL. II.

I

were subsequently laid before the Privy Council, Wedderburn (acting as Solicitor General for that government, to serve which he betrayed his former companions) had the diabolical malignity to exclaim-"How they came into the possession of any one but the right owners is still a mystery for Dr. Franklin to explain. He was not the rightful owner, and they could not have come into his hands by fair means. Nothing will acquit Dr. Franklin of the charge of obtaining them by fraudulent or corrupt means, for the most malignant of purposes-unless he stole them from the person who stole them. This argument is irrefragable. I hope, my lords, you will mark and brand the man, for the honour of this country, of Europe, and of mankind. Private correspondence has hitherto been held sacred in times of the greatest party rage, not only in politics, but in religion. The betrayer of it has forfeited all the respect of the good, and of his own associates. Into what companies will the fabricator of this iniquity hereafter go with an unembarrassed face, or with any semblance of the honest intrepidity of virtue? Men will watch him with a jealous eye-they will hide their papers from him, and lock up their escritoires. Having hitherto aspired after fame by his writings, he will henceforth esteem it a libel to be called a man of letters- homo trium literarum.'

"I am not surprised but grieved," was the honest Franklin's mental ejaculation, as he thought of all the harm which that legal turncoat's speech would work on the other side of the Atlantic. With what justice might Burke or any sympathizer with the colonists have addressed Lord North's Solicitor General with the same cutting words that Parr unjustly used at a later day in his memorable altercation with Sir James Mackintosh.*

Erskine's high place amongst political barristers is rendered

*Soon after O'Coigley's execution, Sir James Mackintosh, just at the time when he was unjustly suspected of having made terms with the Tories, observed to ParrAnyhow, O'Coigley was a prodigious scoundrel. A worse man cannot be imagined." "Nay, Jammie, you're wrong, man," the great Whig scholar replied, with scathing intonation, his eye glowing with contemptuous animosity whilst he spoke with torturing slowness as well as significance: "he was an Irishman, he might have been a Scotchman-Jammie. He was a priest, he might have been a lawyer-Jammie. He was a traitor, but-Jammie-he might have been an apostate.”