This rash attempt only served to produce irritation, and to render the parliamentarians more suspicious and revengeful when negotiations were afterwards opened which might have led to a satisfactory accommodation.
In the summer of the following year, Chief Justice Heath held assizes at Exeter, and there actually obtained the conviction of Captain Turpine, a parliamentary officer, who had been taken in arms against the king, and was produced as a prisoner at the bar. The sheriff appears to have refused to carry the sentence into execution; but the unfortunate gentleman was hanged by Sir John Berkeley, Governor of Exeter. The Parliament, having heard of their partisan being thus put to death in cold blood, ordered that the judges who condemned him might be impeached of high treason; but they were afterwards satisfied with passing an ordinance to remove Heath, and his brethren who had sat with him on this occasion, from their judicial offices, and to disable them from acting as judges in all time to come.
Sir Robert Heath never ventured to take his seat as chief justice of the Court of King’s Bench at Westminster; but, after travelling about for some time with the king, fixed himself at Oxford, where he was made a doctor of the civil law, and attended as a judge when Charles’s Parliament was held there.
When Oxford was at last obliged to surrender, and the royalists could no longer make head in any part of England, Heath found it necessary to fly for safety to the continent. The parliamentary leaders said that they would not have molested him if he had confined himself to the discharge of his judicial duties; or even if, like Lord Keeper Littleton and other lawyers, he had carried arms for the king; but as, contrary to the law of nations, he had proceeded against several of those who bore a commission which the Parliament had granted to them in the king’s name, they were determined to make an example of him. Therefore, when an ordinance was passed, granting an indemnity to the royalists who submitted, he was excepted from it by name. After suffering great privations, he died at Caen, in Normandy, in the month of August, 1649.
He had, from his professional gains, purchased a large landed estate, which was sequestrated by the Parliament, but afterwards was restored by Charles II. to his son. He had never tried to make his peace with the dominant party by any concession, and he declared that “he would rather suffer all the ills of exile than submit to the rule of those who had first fought their sovereign in the field, and then had murdered him on the scaffold.” With the exception of his bribery, which was never properly inquired into, and does not seem to have injured him much in the opinion of his contemporaries, no grievous stain is attached to his memory; and we must feel respect for the constancy with which he adhered to his political principles, although we cannot defend them.
CHAPTER IX.
ROBERT FOSTER.
At the restoration of Charles II. it was considered necessary to sweep away the whole of the judges from Westminster Hall, although, generally speaking, they were very learned and respectable, and they had administered justice very impartially and satisfactorily.[57] Immense difficulty was found in replacing them. Clarendon was sincerely desirous to select the fittest men that could be found, but from his long exile he was himself entirely unacquainted with the state of the legal profession, and, upon making inquiries, hardly any could be pointed out, whose political principles, juridical acquirements, past conduct, and present position entitled them to high preferment. The most eminent barristers on the royalist side had retired from practice when the civil war began, and the new generation which had sprung up had taken an oath to be faithful to the commonwealth. One individual was discovered—Sir Orlando Bridgman—eminent both for law and for loyalty. Early distinguished as a rising advocate, he had sacrificed his profits that he might assist the royal cause by carrying arms; and, refusing to profess allegiance to those whom he considered rebels, he had spent years in seclusion,—still devoting himself to professional studies, in which he took the highest delight. At first, however, it was thought that he could not properly be placed in a higher judicial office than that of chief baron of the Exchequer; and the chiefships of the King’s Bench and Common Pleas were allowed to remain vacant some months, puisnies being appointed in each court to carry on the routine business.