CHAPTER LVI.

HONOURS GAINED AND HONOUR LOST.

WHILST the dignity and influence of their order have

invariably suffered, individual lawyers have no less invariably reaped advantage from the temper and policy of those of our sovereigns who have signalized themselves by encroachments on the rights of the people, or by despotic intolerance. This remark is equally applicable to the crown lawyers who grew rich under the Stuarts, and to the crown lawyers who battened on ministerial prosecutions in the reign of George III. Upon the whole the popular despotism of Cromwell had a beneficial effect on the morality and social repute of barristers and judges; but there can be no doubt that the Protector's system did not favour the hopes of ambitious gownsmen. On the other hand, the unpopular tyrannies of the Jameses and the Charleses lowered the tone and status of the law, notwithstanding the profuseness with which honours and public money were squandered on a few obsequious judges and counsel. The inability of titles and pensions to win respect for an order which systematically provokes contempt, is well illustrated by the position of the bench and the bar throughout the seventeenth century. At first sight a superficial student might think that the Stuarts were good friends to the lawyers, and greatly raised the prestige of their profession; and unquestionably such a statement of the case would find an appearance of support from certain circumstances.

Under James I. the Attorney General won permission* to

* Francis Bacon was permitted to sit in the House of Commons, whilst he was Attorney General; but since 1614, the right of the Attorney to keep his seat has been questioned in debate. In 1620, 1625, and 1640 new writs were ordered because the office of Attorney General had been conferred on a member of the house. In

sit in parliament, from which he had hitherto been excluded on the ground that he was an assistant of the House of Peers. Under Charles II. lawyers gained such influence in the Commons that, of the seven speakers who presided in the lower house during his reign, six were of their order.* Had Elizabeth lived three lustres longer, Egerton would have gone to the grave like Puckering, Hatton, Bromley, and Nicholas Bacon, without the honours of the peerage; but James placed a coronet on his head, and by the subsequent elevation of Bacon to the hereditary nobility, contributed greatly to a custom which has been a chief source of honour to the law. Before the accession of James I., lay-keepers of the royal conscience had been created peers; and since the Revolution of 1688, a lawyer of decent fame, although of humble parts, has held the seals and missed his patent of nobility: but notwithstanding these earlier precedents and this later departure from the rule, the four Stuart kings may be said to have fixed the usage, in accordance with which the Lord Chancellors are now invariably made actual members of the chamber over which they preside by virtue of their office. The earlier half of the eighteenth century had indeed passed away before it was regarded as a matter of course that the Lord Chancellor should receive a peerage upon his appointment to the woolsack, but -Lord Keeper Sir Nathan Wright and certain lords commissioners excepted-no person entrusted with the seals since the deposition of James II. has failed to obtain a patent of nobility. Nor were the Stuarts content with raising holders of the Great Seal to the peerage. James I. made Sir Henry

1674 Francis North's right to continue in his seat for King's Lynn was made a subject of irregular discussion. Roger says, "The same good friends began to discourse of his incapacity of sitting as a member of that house, there being an order, as they said, against it, whereof the reason was that the Attorney is of course an assistant of the House of Peers." The discourses, however, did not take the form of a debate followed by a division; and since 1674 no attempt seems to have been made within the house to exclude the Attorney General.

*The exception was Sir Edward Seymour. Mr. Foss observes with regard to the legal speakers: "When elected to that honourable office they desisted from practising; and so jealous was the house of their privileges, that on Sir Edward Turnour asking their opinion, in 1668, whether, the adjournment being a long one, he ought to be attended by the mace and forbear to practise, it was declared that the practice must be the same as in shorter adjournments."-Foss's Judges of England.

So

Montagu a baron and viscount, and Charles I. placed the ex-Chief Justice of England in the brotherhood of earls. also, on retiring from the bench, Chief Justice Ley was created Baron Ley by James I.-a rank and title which he exchanged in the following reign for Earl of Marlborough. It may of course be urged that these honours were conferred on them as political partisans, and not as judges who had faithfully discharged the arduous duties of the Chief Justice's office. Still they were lawyers who had risen by their profession, and if they were not rewarded for having been Chief Justices, it is certain that their conduct in the King's Bench had rendered them acceptable to the Crown, and gained them distinctions that would never have marked them had they not worn the ermine. Moreover, their successive elevations were regarded by lawyers as additions to the glory of their profession, and as proofs of the honour in which the law was held by princes. But though the hereditary and venal eloquence of the Finches, the unscrupulous rascality of Ley, the eager servility of North,*

Francis North entered the House of Commons in 1673, when he was sent by King's Lynn to Charles II's Long Parliament. His seat was not gained without the trouble and cost of two elections, for his first election was declared void, and he had again to offer himself to the constituency,-on which second occasion he was opposed by Sir Simon Taylor, a wealthy merchant of the place. Roger North's account of these elections affords graphic pictures of electioneering in the time of Charles II. "Before the writ came down," says Roger, speaking of the first election, "he made the town a visit and regaled the body with a very handsome treat, which cost him above one hundred pounds. . . . And when the writ was sent to the Sheriff of Norfolk, his lordship's engagements were such that he could not go down to the election himself, but sent a young gentleman, his brother, to ride for him (as they call it), and Mr. Matthew Johnson, since Clerk of the Parliament, for an economist, of which there was need enough. Their rule was to take but one house, and there to allow scope for all taps to run." Speaking of the second election the biographer says: "At first, all things seemed fair; but the night before the election there was notice given that Sir Simon Taylor, a wealthy merchant of wine in that town, stood, and had produced a butt of sherry, which butt of sherry was a potent adversary. All that night and next morning were spent in making dispositions for conduct of the interest, and such matters as belong to a contested election. But the greatest difficulty was to put off the numerous suitors for houses to draw drink, of which every one made friends to insinuate in their favour, as if the whole interest of the town depended upon it. But these gentlemen plenipos determined to take no other house but where they were, to let the quill, as well as the tap, run freely, which made an account of above three hundred pounds. After the election and poll closed, all the chiefs on both sides met to view the poll-books; and Sir Simon Taylor, being on his own knowledge of the people's

and the overbearing selfishness of Jeffreys* added much to that spurious grandeur of the law, which is measured by entries on the roll of the peerage: and though the four Stuart kings were always ready to flatter and caress individual lawyers, the entire legal profession suffered more from public disesteem during the seventeenth century than it had suffered in any previous hundred years, or has suffered since. The bench and bar became more and more odious to the people, and before Charles II.'s death-notwithstanding the influence of the peerages and pensions, and royal visits to the Inns of Court, with which three generations of Stuarts endeavoured to enhance the éclat of the law-country gentlemen were growing loth to educate their sons for a profession in which success was so rarely achieved without dishonour.

Few political lawyers have been convicted of a grave misdemeanour under circumstances of greater humiliation than those which attended Sir John Trevor's expulsion from the House of Commons; and no political lawyer on clear demonstration of corrupt behaviour, ever contrived to escape with less punishment than that which fell on the Master of the Rolls, who, whilst acting as Speaker of the Lower House, accepted a bribe for his influence in behalf of a proposed measure. A clever and persevering Welshman, John Trevor names, satisfied that the election was against him, called for the indenture, and signed it with the rest." Francis North was upon the whole lucky in getting his seat for so little money. His successor paid more than 7000l. for the same honour. The biographer says, "But, long before that time, his lordship was removed i-to the Common Pleas, and Mr. Coke of Norfolk succeeded him in the burgess-ship of Lynn, but not so easy and cheap; for his managers did not keep in due bounds, but let loose the tap all over that large town, and made an account of 70001. or more, resting due to the town, besides what had been paid for the expenses. Sir Simon Taylor opposed, and thought he had the returns, and being resolved to petition, was courted by the Earl of Danby, at the price of all his charges, which were not trifles, to forbear, as he did, else his lordship's son-in-law, Coke, at that conjuncture had been turned out." In Charles II.'s time the ordinary expenses of a contested election ranged between 1007. or 2007. and 2000l. Mr. Coke paid the prodigious sum of 30001. in addition to “what had been paid for the expenses" and his opponent's bill of costs!!! * Jeffreys was an exceptional character amongst the political lawyers of his country. Having dabbled in treason to the Crown, he made his fortune by treason to the people. A turncoat of a truly legal type passed from the mob to the court; but, unlike all the political barristers of the Stuart period, he never sate in the House of Commons. It may be added that perhaps no politician of his day is more accountable for the unpopularity of lawyers in parliament.

began life as clerk to his kinsman, "Old Arthur Trevor, of the Inner Temple;" and having through his relative's interest been called to the bar, he rose rapidly in his profession. Clinging to the skirts of Jeffreys, and also to the skirts of that judge's second wife (with whom he was generally believed to maintain a licentious intercourse, not unknown to her husband), the adventurer worked himself into practice. Charles II. made him a king's counsel, and in the first year of James II. he became Master of the Rolls and Speaker of the House of Commons. His parliamentary position and forensic success were the more remarkable, because he was a man of no eloquence or address, and his appearance was far from prepossessing. He was He was so aggressively and hideously cross-eyed that a witty barrister had no need to explain the sarcastic speech when he observed, "Justice is blind, but Equity squints in the Rolls Court." The same personal defect was also the cause of infinite merriment in the House of Commons, where two members, on opposite sides of the chamber, often claimed the ear of the assembly at the same time, as each of them had "caught the Speaker's eye."

Holding his ground in the political arena, notwithstanding his devotion to James II. and his connexion with Jeffreys, Trevor became Speaker of William III.'s first regular parliament, and by cautiously serving the Whigs without losing the confidence of the Tories,* so far won the favour of the government that he was made First Lord Commissioner of the Great Seal, and was reappointed to the Mastership of the Rollswhich post he had lost on William's accession. But this prosperous course was stayed by an event that throws light on the public morality of the period. On March 7, 1695, whilst

• Trevor's services to the government educated him for the commission of the crime which caused his expulsion from the House of Commons. Being a Tory in principle," Bishop Burnet says of this Master of the Rolls, "he undertook to manage that party, provided he was furnished with such sums of money as might purchase some votes; and by him began the practice of buying off men, in which hitherto the king had been kept to stricter rules. I took the liberty once to complain to the king of this method; he said he hated it as much as any man could do, but he saw it was not possible, considering the corruption of the age, to avoid it, unless he would endanger the whole." Thus employed to distribute bribes, it is not wonderful that he was ready to accept them. Hired to corrupt others, he was protected by no moral scruples when others endeavoured to corrupt him.