ROGER NORTH’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.
The Cambridge wit who some vast amount of years ago sang of Bohn’s publications, ‘so useful to the student of Latin and Greek,’ hit with unerring precision the main characteristic of those very numerous volumes. Utility was the badge of all that tribe, save, indeed, of those woeful ‘Extra Volumes’ which are as much out of place amongst their grave brethren as John Knox at a ballet. There was something in the binding of Messrs. Bohn’s books which was austere, and even forbidding; their excellence, their authority, could not be denied by even a youthful desperado, but reading them always wore the stern aspect of duty. The binding had undoubtedly a good deal to do with this. It has now been discarded by Messrs. George Bell and Sons, the present proprietors, in favour of brighter colours. The difference thus effected is enormous. The old binding is kept in stock because, so we are told, ‘it is endeared to many book-lovers by association.’ The piety of Messrs. Bell has misled them. No book-lover, we feel certain, ever held one of Messrs. Bohn’s publications in his hands except to read it.
A valuable addition has lately been made to the ‘Standard Library’ by the publication—in three bright and cheerful volumes—of Roger North’s well-known ‘Lives of the Norths,’ and also—and this practically for the first time—of Roger North’s Autobiography, a book unknown to Macaulay, and which he would have read with fierce interest, bludgeon in hand, having no love for the family.
Dr. Jessopp, who edits the volumes with his accustomed skill, mentions in the Preface how the manuscript of the Autobiography belonged to the late Mr. Crossley, of Manchester, and was sold after the death of that bibliophile, in 1883, and four years later printed for private circulation. It now comes before the general public. It is not long, and deserves attention. The style is gritty and the story far from exciting, but the book is interesting, particularly for lawyers, a deserving class of readers for whose special entertainment small care is usually taken.
Roger North was born at Tostock, in Suffolk, in 1653—the youngest of his brothers. Never was man more of a younger brother than he. This book of his might be called ‘The Autobiography of a Younger Brother.’ The elder brother was, of course, Francis, afterwards Lord Guilford, a well-hated man, both in his own day and after it, but who at all events looked well after Roger, who was some sixteen years his junior.
In 1669 Roger North was admitted a student of the Middle Temple, Francis being then a Bencher of that learned society. Roger had chambers on the west side of Middle Temple Lane, and £10 wherewith to furnish them and buy a gown, and other necessaries. He says it was not enough, but that he managed to make it serve. His excellent mother, though she had some ten children and a difficult husband, produced £30, with which he bought law books. His father allowed him £40 a year, and he had his big brother at hand to help him out of debt now and again.
He was, we feel as we read, a little uneasy under his brother’s eye. The elder North had a disagreeable fashion of putting ‘little contempts upon his brother,’ and a way of raising his own character by depressing Roger’s, which was hard to bear. But Roger North bore it bravely; he meant sticking to his brother, and stick he did. In five years he saw Francis become King’s Counsel, Solicitor, and Attorney-General. ‘If he should die, writes Roger, ‘I am lost.’ But Francis did not die, which was as well, for he was much better suited for this world than the next.
Roger North was no great student of the law. He was fond of mathematics, optics, mechanics, architecture, music, and of sailing a small yacht—given him by Mr. Windham, of Felbrigge—on the Thames; and he gives in his Autobiography interesting accounts of these pastimes. He was very anxious indeed to get on and make money, but he relied more upon his brother than upon either his own brains or his own industry.
In 1674 Francis North became Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, succeeding Sir John Vaughan, the friend of Selden; and Roger at once got himself called to the Bar, and thenceforward, so far as possible, whenever Francis was on the Bench, there was Roger pleading before him. Indeed, it went much further than this. ‘I kept so closely to him that I can safely say I saw him abed every night without intermission for divers years together, which enables me to contradict the malicious report a relation raised of him, that he kept a mistress as the mode of that time was.’ The morals of a Chief Justice two centuries after his death having no personal concern for this generation, I feel free to confess that I am rather sorry for Francis with Roger ever by his side in this unpleasantly pertinacious fashion. The younger North, so he tells us, always drove down to Westminster with the Chief Justice, and he frankly admits that his chief appui was his brother’s character, fame, and interest. Not being a Serjeant, Roger could not actually practise in the Common Pleas, but on various circuits, at the Guildhall, at the Treasury, and wherever else he could lawfully go before the Chief Justice, there Roger went and got a business together. He also made money, sometimes as much as £9 a day, from court-keeping—that is, attending manor courts. This was a device of his elder brother’s, who used to practise it before he was called to the Bar. It savours of pettifogging. However, it seems in Roger’s case to have led to his obtaining the patent office of Temporal Steward to the See of Canterbury, to which he had the courage to stick after the deprivation of Archbishop Sancroft. This dogged devotion to the Church redeems North’s life from a commonplacedness which would otherwise be hopeless. The Archbishop left his faithful steward £20 for a ring, but North preferred, like a wise man, to buy books, which he had bound in the Archbishop’s manner.
In 1682 Roger North ‘took silk,’ as the phrase now goes, and became one of the Attorney-General’s devils, in which capacity his name is to be found in the reports of the trial of Lord William Russell. What he says about that trial in the Autobiography is just what might be expected from an Attorney-General’s devil—that is, that never before was a State trial conducted with such candour and fairness. He admits that this is not the judgment of the world; but then, says he, ‘the world never did nor will understand its true good, or reward, encourage, or endure its true patriots and friends.’
At the end of 1683 Francis North came home one night with no less remarkable a companion in his coach than the Great Seal. Roger instantly transposed himself to the Court of Chancery, where he began coining money. ‘My whole study,’ he says, ‘is causes and motions.’ He found it hard work, but he buckled to, and boasts—like so many of his brethren, alive as well as dead—that he, at all events, always read his briefs. In the first year his fees amounted to £4,000, in the second to nearly as much, but in the third there was a falling off, owing to a smaller quantity of business in the Court. A new Lord Keeper was always the occasion of the rehearing of old causes. The defeated litigants wished to try their luck before the new man.
North was at first astonished with the size of the fees he was offered; he even refused them, thinking them bribes: ‘but my fellow-practisers’ conversation soon cured me of that nicety.’ And yet the biggest fee he ever got was twenty guineas. Ten guineas was the usual fee on a ‘huge’ brief, and five ‘in the better sort of causes.’ In ordinary cases Roger North would take two or three guineas, and one guinea for motions and defences.
In the Long Vacations Roger still stuck to his brother, who, no doubt, found him useful. Thus when the Mayor, Aldermen, and Council of Banbury came over to Wroxton to pay their respects to the Lord Keeper, they were handed over to the charge of Roger, who walked them all over the house to show the rooms, and then made them drunk at dinner ‘and dismissed them to their lodgings in ditches homeward bound.’ But the effort was too much for him, and no sooner were they gone than he had to lie down, all on fire, upon the ground, from which he rose very sick and scarce recovered in some days. As a rule he was a most temperate man, and hated the custom and extravagance of drinking. He had not enough understanding to obfuscate it by drink.
All went well with the brothers until the death of Charles II. Then the horizon grew troubled—but still Roger was being talked of as a Baron of the Exchequer, when the Lord Keeper died on September 5, 1685. With him ended the public life of his younger brother. Roger North was only thirty-two. He was a King’s Counsel, and in considerable practice, but he had not the will—perhaps he had not the force—to stand alone. At the Revolution he became a non-juror, and retired into the country. His Autobiography also ceases with his brother’s death.
He had much private family business to transact, and in 1690 he bought the Rougham estate in Norfolk, where he carried on building and planting on a considerable scale. He married and had children, bought books, restored the parish church, and finally died on March 1, 1734, in his eighty-first year.
Dr. Jessopp tells us very little is left of Roger North—his house has been pulled down, his trees pulled up, and his books dispersed. But his Lives of his three brothers, and now his own Autobiography, will keep his memory green. There is something about him one rather likes, though were we asked what it is, we should have no answer ready.