Atrocious Judges : Lives of Judges Infamous as Tools of Tyrants and Instruments of Oppression

by Baron John Campbell Campbell

While the lord chancellor was languishing, the chief justice being at Windsor, the king plainly intimated to him that when the fatal event, which must be shortly looked for, had taken place, the great seal would be put into his hands. He modestly represented himself to his majesty as unfit for the place, and affected by all his art and skill to decline it. In truth, he really wished to convey to the king’s mind the impression that he did not desire it, although he had been working so foully for it—as he knew it would be pressed upon him, there being no competitor so knowing and so pliant, and he had an important stipulation to make for a pension before he would accept it. When he came back to London, and confidentially mentioned what had passed between him and the king, he pretended to be annoyed, and said “that if the seal were offered to him he was determined to refuse it;” but it is quite clear that he was highly gratified to see himself so near the great object of his ambition, and that his only anxiety now was, that he might drive a good bargain when he should consent to give up “the cushion of the Common Pleas.”

Lord Nottingham having died about four o’clock in the afternoon of Monday, the 18th of December, 1682, the great seal was carried next morning from his house, in Great Queen Street, to the king at Windsor. The following day his majesty brought it with him to Whitehall, and in the evening sent for the lord chief justice of the Common Pleas, to offer it to him. When North arrived, he found Lord Rochester, the treasurer, and several other ministers, closeted with Charles. As yet there was no distinction between the funds to be applied to the king’s private expenses and to the public service—the exchequer being now very empty, and the resolution being taken never more to summon a Parliament for supplies—it was considered an object that the keeper of the great seal should be contented with the fees of his office, without any allowance or pension from the crown. Charles himself was careless about such matters, but the treasurer had inculcated upon him the importance of this piece of economy. As soon as North entered, his majesty offered him the seal, and the ministers began to congratulate the new lord keeper; but, with many acknowledgments for his majesty’s gracious intentions, he begged leave to suggest the necessity, for his majesty’s honor, that a pension[95] should be assigned to him, as it had been to his predecessor, for otherwise the dignity of this high office could not be supported. Rochester interposed, pointing out the necessity, in times like these, for all his majesty’s servants to be ready to make some sacrifices; that the emoluments of the great seal were considerable; and that it would be more becoming to trust to his majesty’s bounty than to seek to drive a hard bargain with him. But Sir George Jeffreys being yet only a bustling city officer, who could not with any decency have been put at the head of the law; the attorney and solicitor general not being considered men of mark or likelihood; Sir Harbottle Grimston, the master of the rolls, being at death’s door, and no other common law judge besides himself being produceable, the little gentleman was firm, and positively declared that he would not touch the great seal without a pension. After much haggling, a compromise took place, by which he was to have two thousand pounds a year instead of the four thousand pounds a year assigned to his predecessor. The king then lifted up the purse containing the seal, and putting it into his hand, said, “Here, my lord, take it; you will find it heavy.” “Thus,” says Roger North, “his majesty acted the prophet as well as the king; for, shortly before his lordship’s death, he declared that, since he had the seal, he had not enjoyed one easy and contented minute.”

When the new lord keeper came home at night from Whitehall to his house in Chancery Lane, bringing the great seal with him, and attended by the officers of the Court of Chancery, instead of appearing much gratified, as was expected by his brother and his friends, who were waiting to welcome him, he was in a great rage—disappointed that he had not been able to make a better bargain, and, perhaps, a little mortified that he had only the title of “lord keeper” instead of the more sounding one of “lord chancellor.” Recriminating on those with whom he had been so keenly acting the chapman, he exclaimed, “To be haggled with about a pension, as at the purchase of a horse or an ox! After I had declared that I would not accept without a pension, to think I was so frivolous as to insist and desist all in a moment! As if I were to be wheedled and charmed by their insignificant tropes! To think me worthy of so great a trust, and withal so little and mean as to endure such usage! It is disobliging, inconsistent, and insufferable. What have I done that may give them cause to think of me so poor a spirit as to be thus trifled with?” It might have been answered that, though the king and the courtiers made use of him for their own ends, they had seen his actions, understood his character, and had no great respect for him. Till Jeffreys was a little further advanced, they could not run the risk of breaking with him; but then he was subjected to all sorts of mortifications and insults.

On the first day of the following Hilary term he took his place in the Court of Chancery. By this time he was in possession of his predecessor’s house in Great Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and he had a grand procession from thence to Westminster Hall, attended by the Duke of Ormond, the Earls of Craven and Rochester, the great officers of state, and the judges. He took the oaths, the master of the rolls holding the book. He does not appear to have delivered any inaugural address. The attendant lords staid and heard a motion or two, and then departed, leaving the lord keeper in court.

They might have been well amused if they had remained. For the crooked purposes of the government, with a view to the disfranchising of the city of London by the quo warranto defending against it, Pemberton[96] was this day to be removed from being chief justice of the King’s Bench to be chief justice of the Common Pleas, and Edmund Saunders was to be at once raised from wearing a stuff gown at the bar to be chief justice of the King’s Bench. This keen but unscrupulous lawyer was previously to be made a serjeant, that he might be qualified to be a judge, and, coming into the Court of Chancery, he presented the lord keeper with a ring for himself, and another for the king, inscribed with the courtly motto, “Principi sic placuit.” The lord keeper then accompanied him into court where he was to preside, called him to the bench, and made him a speech on the duties of his office. The ceremonies of the day were concluded by his lordship afterwards going to his old court, the Common Pleas, and there swearing in Pemberton as his successor, whom he congratulated upon “the ease with dignity” which he was now to enjoy.

Parasites and preferment-hunters crowded the levee of the new lord keeper. He was immediately waited upon by the courtly Evelyn, who discovered in him a thousand good qualities.[97]

In the midst of these blandishments he applied himself with laudable diligence to the discharge of his judicial duties. He declared that he was shocked by many abuses in the Court of Chancery, and he found fault with the manner in which his two predecessors, Bridgeman and Nottingham, had allowed the practice of the court to lead to delay and expense.

North’s conduct as a law reformer was extremely characteristic. He talked much of issuing a new set of “rules and orders” to remedy all abuses, but he was afraid “that it would give so great alarm to the bar and officers, with the solicitors, as would make them confederate and demur, and, by making a tumult and disturbance, endeavor to hinder the doing any thing of that kind which they would apprehend to be very prejudicial to their interests.”[98] Then, when he wished to simplify the practice and to speed causes to a hearing and final decree, he considered that he was not only to regard the suitors, but that “there was a justice due as well to the crown, which had advantage growing by the disposition of places, profits, by process of all sorts, as also the judges and their servants, and counsel at the bar, and solicitors, who were all in possession of their advantages, and by public encouragement to spend their youth to make them fit for them, and had no other means generally to provide for themselves and their families, and had a right to their reasonable profits, if not strictly by law, yet through long connivance.”

I think we must say that his alleged merit as a chancery reformer consists chiefly in the profession of good intentions; that he allowed the practice of the court to remain pretty much as he found it; and that if he saw and approved what was right, he followed what was wrong—aggravating his errors by disregarding the strong dictates of his conscience.

Nevertheless, he applied himself very assiduously to the business of his court, which, from his experience at the bar, and from his having often sat for his predecessor, was quite familiar to him; and he seems to have disposed of it satisfactorily. He was not led into temptation by having to decide in equity any political case; and no serious charge was preferred against him of bribery or undue influence. Till the meeting of Parliament in the reign of James, and the failure of his health, he prevented the accumulation of arrears; and, upon the whole, as an Equity judge, he is to be praised rather than censured.