It is edifying and consolatory to think that he was outdone by his own arts, and that the rest of his career was attended by almost constant mortification, humiliation, and wretchedness. Saunders enjoyed the office of chief justice of the king’s bench only for a few months, being carried off by an apoplexy soon after the decision of the great London quo warranto cause. An intrigue was immediately set on foot to procure the appointment for Jeffreys, who had more than ever recommended himself to the court by his zeal on the trial of Lord Russell, in which he had eclipsed the attorney and solicitor general; and he was anxiously wanted to preside at the trial of Sydney, against whom the case was known to be so slender, but who was particularly obnoxious on account of his late quarrel with the Duke of York, and his sworn enmity to despotism.[100] The pretensions of Jeffreys were supported by Sunderland, probably out of ill will to the lord keeper, who had intuitively shown a great jealousy of the new favorite. But the proposal produced great opposition and bickerings among different sections of courtiers. The lord keeper of course resisted it totis viribus, representing to the king that the office, according to ancient and salutary usage, ought to be offered to the attorney and solicitor general, who had been irregularly passed over on the appointment of the late chief justice, to gain an object of such magnitude as the forfeiture of the city charters; that Saunders was a man of immense learning, which countenanced his sudden elevation; but that Jeffreys, though gifted with a fluency of speech, was known to be unequal to so high an office; and that the whole profession of the law, and the public, would condemn an act so arbitrary and capricious. Charles was, or pretended to be, impressed by these arguments, which he repeated to Sunderland, and the office was kept vacant for three months after the death of Saunders. But on the 29th of September, the lord keeper had the mortification to put the great seal to the writ constituting Jeffreys “chief justice of England,” and on the first day of the following Michaelmas term to make a speech, publicly congratulating him on his rise to the supreme seat of criminal justice, so well merited by his learning, his abilities, and his services.
What was worse, the new lord chief justice was not only sworn a privy councillor, but, in a few weeks, was admitted into the cabinet, where he, from the first, set himself to oppose the opinions, and to discredit the reputation, of him who, he knew, had opposed his appointment, and whom (his ambition being still unsatiated) he was resolved, in due time, to supplant.
Jeffreys began with interfering very offensively in the appointment of puisne judges, which of right belonged to the lord keeper. At first he was contented with the reputation of power in this department.
He next resolved to make a judge, by his own authority, of a man almost as worthless as himself. This was Sir Robert Wright, who had never had any law, who had spent his patrimony in debauchery, and who, being in great distress, had lately sworn a false affidavit to enable him to commit a fraud upon his own mortgagee.[101]
Jeffreys was not satisfied with his triumph without proclaiming it to all Westminster Hall. “Being there that same morning, while the Court of Chancery was sitting, he beckoned to Wright to come to him, and giving him a slap on the shoulder, and whispering in his ear, he flung him off, holding out his arms towards the lord keeper. This was a public declaration that, in spite of that man above there, Wright should be a judge. His lordship saw all this as it was intended he should, and it caused some melancholy.” But he found it convenient to pocket the insult: he put the great seal to Wright’s patent, and assisted at the ceremony of his installation. There is no trace of the lord keeper’s speech on this occasion, so that we do not know in what terms he complimented the new judge on his profound skill in the law, his spotless integrity, and his universal fitness to adorn the judgment seat.
When heated with liquor, Jeffreys could not now conceal his contempt for the lord keeper, even in the king’s presence. It is related that, upon the hearing of a matter before the council, arising out of a controversy for jurisdiction between two sets of magistrates, Guilford proposed some sort of compromise between them, when the lord chief justice, “flaming drunk,” came from the lower to the upper end of the board, and “talking and staring like a madman,” bitterly inveighed against “trimmers,” and told the king “he had trimmers in his court, and he never would be easy till all the trimmers were sent about their business.” “The lord keeper, knowing that these darts were aimed at him,[102] moved the king that the whole business should be referred to the lord chief justice, and that he should make a report to his majesty in council of what should be fit to be done.” This was ordered, and Guilford seems to have entertained a hope that Jeffreys, from the state of intoxication he was in, would entirely forget the reference, and so might fall into disgrace.[103]
But the most serious difference between them in Charles’s time was on the return of Jeffreys from the northern circuit in the autumn of 1684, when, backed by the Duke of York, he had a deliberate purpose of immediately grasping the great seal. At a cabinet council, held on a Sunday evening, he stood up, and addressing the king while he held in his hands the rolls of the recusants in the north of England—“Sir,” said he, “I have a business to lay before your majesty which I took notice of in the north, and which well deserves your majesty’s royal commiseration. It is the case of numberless members of your good subjects that are imprisoned for recusancy:[104] I have the list of them here to justify what I say. They are so many that the great jails cannot hold them without their lying one upon another.” After tropes and figures about “rotting and stinking in prison,” he concluded with a motion to his majesty “that he would, by his pardon, discharge all the convictions for recusancy, and thereby restore air and liberty to these poor men.” This was a deep-laid scheme, for besides pleasing the royal brothers, one of whom was a secret, and the other an avowed Papist, he expected that Guilford must either be turned out for refusing to put the great seal to the pardon, or that he would make himself most obnoxious to the public, and afterwards to Parliament, by compliance. A general silence prevailed, and the expectation was that Halifax or Rochester, who were strong Protestants, would have stoutly objected. The lord keeper, alarmed lest the motion should be carried, and seeing the dilemma to which he might be reduced, plucked up courage and said, “Sir, I humbly entreat your majesty that my lord chief justice may declare whether all the persons named in these rolls are actually in prison or not?” Chief Justice.—“No fair man could suspect my meaning to be that all these are actual prisoners; for all the jails in England would not hold them. But if they are not in prison, their case is little better; for they lie under sentence of commitment, and are obnoxious to be taken up by every peevish sheriff or magistrate, and are made to redeem their liberty with gross fees, which is a cruel oppression to them and their families.” Lord Keeper.—“Sir, I beg your majesty will consider what little reason there is to grant such a general pardon at this time. For they are not all Roman Catholics that lie under sentence of recusancy, but sectaries of all kinds and denominations; perhaps as many, or more, who are all professed enemies to your majesty and your government in church and state. They are a turbulent people, and always stirring up sedition. What will they not do when your majesty gives them a discharge at once? Is it not better that your enemies should live under some disadvantages, and be obnoxious to your majesty’s pleasure, so that, if they are turbulent or troublesome, you may inflict the penalties of the law upon them? If there be any Roman Catholics whom you wish to favor, grant to them a particular and express pardon, but do not by a universal measure set your enemies as well as your friends at ease. The ill uses that would be made of such a step to the prejudice of your majesty’s interests and affairs are obvious and endless.”[105] The king was much struck with these observations, urged with a boldness so unusual in the lord keeper. The other lords wondered, and the motion was dropped.
The lord keeper, not without reason, boasted of this as the most brilliant passage of his life. When he came home at night, he broke out in exclamations—“What can be their meaning? Are they all stark mad?” And before he went to bed, as a memorial of his exploit, he wrote in his almanack, opposite to the day of the month, “Motion cui solus obstiti.”
By such an extraordinary exhibition of courage, to which he was driven by the instinct of self-preservation, he escaped the peril which Jeffreys had planned for him, and he retained the great seal till the king’s death.
In the morning of Monday, the 2d of February, 1685, he was sent for to Whitehall, by a messenger announcing that his majesty had had an apoplectic seizure. According to the ancient custom and supposed law when the sovereign is dangerously distempered, the Privy Council was immediately assembled; and the lord keeper examined the king’s physicians.[106] “Their discourse ran upon indefinites—what they observed, their method intended, and success hoped. He said to them, that these matters were little satisfactory to the council, unless they would declare, in the main, what they judged of the king’s case; whether his majesty was like to recover or not? But they would never be brought to that; all lay in hopes.”