The little fugitive found shelter in Clement’s Inn, where “he lived by obsequiousness, and courting the attorneys’ clerks for scraps.” He began as an errand boy, and his remarkable diligence and obliging disposition created a general interest in his favor. Expressing an eager ambition to learn to write, one of the attorneys of the Inn got a board knocked up at a window on the top of a staircase. This was his desk, and, sitting here, he not only learned the running hand of the time, but court hand, black letter, and engrossing, and made himself “an expert entering clerk.” In winter, while at work, he covered his shoulders with a blanket, tied hay bands round his legs, and made the blood circulate through his fingers by rubbing them when they grew stiff. His next step was to copy deeds and law papers, at so much a folio or page, by which he was enabled to procure for himself wholesome food and decent clothes. Meanwhile he not only picked up a knowledge of Norman French and law Latin, but, by borrowing books, acquired a deep insight into the principles of conveyancing and special pleading. By and by the friends he had acquired enabled him to take a small chamber, to furnish it, and to begin business on his own account as a conveyancer and special pleader. But it was in the latter department that he took greatest delight and was the most skilful—insomuch that he gained the reputation of being familiarly acquainted with all its mysteries; and although the order of “special pleaders under the bar” was not established till many years after, he was much resorted to by attorneys who wished by a sham plea to get over the term, or by a subtle replication to take an undue advantage of the defendant.
It has been untruly said of him, as of Jeffreys, that he began to practise as a barrister without ever having been called to the bar. In truth, the attorneys who consulted him having observed to him that they should like to have his assistance to maintain in court the astute devices which he recommended, and which duller men did not comprehend, or were ashamed of, he rather unwillingly listened to their suggestion that he should be entered of an Inn of Court, for he never cared much for great profits or high offices; and having money enough to buy beer and tobacco, the only luxuries in which he wished to indulge, he would have preferred to continue the huggermugger life which he now led. He was domesticated in the family of a tailor in Butcher Row, near Temple Bar, and was supposed to be rather too intimate with the mistress of the house. However, without giving up his lodging here, to which he resolutely stuck till he was made lord chief justice of England, he was prevailed upon to enter as a member of the Middle Temple. Accordingly, on the 4th of July, 1660, he was admitted there by the description of “Mr. Edward Saunders, of the county of the city of Gloucester, gentleman.” The omission to mention the name of his father might have given rise to the report that he was a foundling; but a statement of parentage on such occasions, though usual, was not absolutely required, as it now is.
He henceforth attended “moots,” and excited great admiration by his readiness in putting cases and taking of objections. By his extraordinary good humor and joviality, he likewise stood high in the favor of his brother templars. The term of study was then seven years, liable to be abridged on proof of proficiency; and the benchers of the Middle Temple had the discernment and the liberality to call Saunders to the bar when his name had been on their books little more than four years.
We have a striking proof of the rapidity with which he rushed into full business. He compiled reports of the decisions of the Court of King’s Bench, beginning with Michaelmas term, 18 Charles II., A. D. 1666, when he had only been two years at the bar. These he continued till Easter term, 24 Charles II., A. D. 1672. They contain all the cases of the slightest importance which came before the court during that period; and he was counsel in every one of them.
His “hold of business” appears the more wonderful when we consider that his liaison with the tailor’s wife was well known, and might have been expected to damage him even in those profligate times; and that he occasionally indulged to great excess in drinking, so that he must often have come into court very little acquainted with his “breviat,” and must have trusted to his quickness in finding out the questions to be argued, and to his storehouses of learning for the apposite authorities.
But when we peruse his “reports,” the mystery is solved, There is no such treat for a common lawyer. Lord Mansfield called him the “Terence of reporters,” and he certainly supports the forensic dialogue with exquisite art, displaying infinite skill himself in the points which he makes, and the manner in which he defends them; doing ample justice at the same time to the ingenuity and learning of his antagonist. Considering the barbarous dialect in which he wrote, (for the Norman French was restored with Charles II.,) it is marvellous to observe what a clear, terse, and epigrammatic style he uses on the most abstruse juridical topics.
He labored under the imputation of being fond of sharp practice, and he was several times rebuked by the court for being “trop subtile,” or “going too near the wind;” but he was said by his admirers to be fond of his craft only in meliori sensu, or in the good sense of the word, and that, in entrapping the opposite party, he was actuated by a love of fun rather than a love of fraud. Thus is he characterized, as a practitioner, by Roger North:—
“Wit and repartee in an affected rusticity were natural to him. He was ever ready, and never at a loss, and none came so near as he to be a match for Serjeant Maynard. His great dexterity was in the art of special pleading, and he would lay snares that often caught his superiors, who were not aware of his traps. And he was so fond of success for his clients that, rather than fail, he would set the court hard with a trick; for which he met sometimes with a reprimand, which he would wittily ward off, so that no one was much offended with him. But Hale could not bear his irregularity of life; and for that, and suspicion of his tricks, used to bear hard upon him in the court. But no ill usage from the bench was too hard for his hold of business, being such as scarce any could do but himself.”
He did not, like Scroggs and Jeffreys, intrigue for advancement. He neither sought favor with the popular leaders in the city, nor tried to be introduced into Chiffinch’s “spie office” at Whitehall. “In no time did he lean to faction, but did his business without offence to any. He put off officious talk of government and politics with jests, and so made his wit a catholicon or shield to cover all his weak places and infirmities.” He was in the habit of laughing both at Cavaliers and Roundheads; and, though nothing of a Puritan himself, the semi-Popish high-churchmen were often the objects of his satire.
His professional, or rather his special pleading, reputation forced on him the advancement which he did not covet. Towards the end of the reign of Charles II., when the courts of justice were turned into instruments of tyranny, (or, as it was mildly said, “the court fell into a steady course of using the law against all kinds of offenders,”) Saunders had a general retainer from the crown, and was specially employed in drawing indictments against Whigs, and quo warrantos against whiggish corporations. In crown cases he really considered the king as his client, and was as eager to gain the day for him, by all sorts of manœuvres, as he had ever been for a roguish Clement’s Inn attorney. He it was that suggested the mode of proceeding against Lord Shaftesbury for high treason; on his recommendation the experiment was made of examining the witnesses before the grand jury in open court, and he suggested the subtlety that “the usual secresy observed being for the king’s benefit, it might be waived by the king at his pleasure.” When the important day arrived, he himself interrogated very artfully Mr. Blathwayt, the clerk of the council, who was called to produce the papers which had been seized at Lord Shaftesbury’s house in Aldersgate street, and gave a treasonable tinge to all that passed. The ignoramus of his indictment must have been a heavy disappointment to him; but the effort which he made gave high satisfaction to the king, who knighted him on the occasion, and from that time looked forward to him as a worthy chief justice.