All men are not privileged to cross-examine royalty, and especially future emperors.
On July 1, 1847, which was not very long after my call to the Bar, Prince Louis Napoleon, who afterwards became Emperor of the French, was residing in England.
Of course, in looking back upon a man who afterwards became an Emperor, the proportions seem to have altered, and he looks greater than his figure actually was. He is more important in one's eyes, and therefore from this point of view the event seems to be of greater magnitude than the mere police-court business that it was. When a man becomes great, the smallest details of his career increase in value and importance.
The Prince had given a man of the name of Charles Pollard into custody for stealing and obtaining by fraud two bills of exchange for £1,000 each.
I was instructed by one Saul (not of Tarsus) to defend, and old Saul thought it would be judicious to cross-examine the Prince into a cocked hat, little dreaming what kind of a cocked hat our opponent would one day wear.
But Saul, not content with this ordinary drum-beating kind of Old Bailey performance, in which there is much more alarm than harm, instructed me to make a few inquiries as to the Prince's private life, and so show him up in public. Saul loved that kind of persecution. To him the witness-box was a pillory, notwithstanding there was more mud attaching to the throwers than to the mere object of their attention.
Young as I was in my profession, I had sense enough to know that to dip into a prosecutor's private history, and the history of his father and grandfather, and a succession of grandmothers and aunts, was hardly the way to show that the prisoner had not stolen that gentleman's property, but was a good way to prevent the Prince from recommending him to mercy.
I therefore, in my simplicity, asked old Saul what the uncle of the Prince and his voyage in the Bellerophon, etc., had to do with this man's stealing these two bills of exchange.
"Never mind, Mr. Hawkins, you do it; it has a great deal to do with it."
However, I made up my own mind as to the course I should pursue, and having carefully read my "instructions," found that the man had been unjustly accused by this Napoleon—there never was a man so trampled on—and every word of the whole accusation was false. So did some solicitors instruct young counsel in those days.