George Jeffreys was a younger son of John Jeffreys, Esq., of Acton, near Wrexham, in Denbighshire, a gentleman of a respectable Welsh family, and of small fortune. His mother was a daughter of Sir Thomas Ireland, Knight, of the County Palatine of Lancaster. Never was child so unlike parents; for they were both quiet, sedate, thrifty, unambitious persons, who aspired not higher than to be well reputed in the parish in which they lived, and decently to rear their numerous offspring. Some imputed to the father a niggardly and covetous disposition; but he appears only to have exercised a becoming economy, and to have lived at home with his consort in peace and happiness till he was made more anxious than pleased by the irregular advancement of his boy George. It is said that he had an early presentiment that this son would come to a violent end; and was particularly desirous that he should be brought up to some steady trade, in which he might be secured from temptation and peril.
He was born in his father’s lowly dwelling at Acton in the year 1648. He showed, from early infancy, the lively parts, the active temperament, the outward good humor, and the overbearing disposition which distinguished him through life. He acquired an ascendancy among his companions in his native village by coaxing some and intimidating others, and making those most opposed to each other believe that he favored both. At marbles and leap-frog he was known to take undue advantages; and nevertheless, he contrived, notwithstanding secret murmurs, to be acknowledged as “master of the revels.”
While still young, he was put to the free school at the town of Shrewsbury, which was then considered a sort of metropolis for North Wales. Here he continued for two or three years; but we have no account how he demeaned himself. At the end of this time his father, though resolved to bind him apprentice to a shopkeeper in Wales, sent him for a short time to St. Paul’s School, in the city of London. The sight of the metropolis had a most extraordinary effect upon the mind of this ardent youth, and exceedingly disgusted him with the notion of returning into Denbighshire, to pass his life in a small provincial town as a mercer. On the first Sunday in every term he saw the judges and the serjeants come in grand procession to St. Paul’s Cathedral, and afterwards go to dine with the lord mayor—appearing little inferior to this great sovereign of the city in power and splendor. He heard that some of them had been poor boys like himself, who had pushed themselves on without fortune or friends; and though he was not so presumptuous as to hope, like another Whittington, to rise to be lord mayor, he was resolved that he would be lord chief justice or lord chancellor.
Now it was that he acquired whatever scholarship he ever possessed. Jeffreys applied with considerable diligence to Greek and Latin, though occasionally flogged for idleness and insolence. He at last ventured to disclose his scheme of becoming a great lawyer to his father, who violently opposed it, as wild and romantic and impossible, and who inwardly dreaded that, from involving him in want and distress, it might lead to some fatal catastrophe. He wrote back to his son, pointing out the inability of the family to give him a university education, or to maintain him at the inns of court till he should have a chance of getting into practice—his utter want of connections in London, and the hopelessness of his entering into a contest in an overstocked profession with so many who had the advantage of superior education, wealth, and patronage. Although the aspirant professed himself unconvinced by these arguments, and still tried to show the certainty of his success at the bar, he must have stood a crop-eared apprentice behind a counter in Denbigh, Ruthyn, or Flint, if it had not been for his maternal grandmother, who was pleased to see the blood of the Irelands break out, and who, having a small jointure, offered to contribute a part of it for his support. The university was still beyond their means; but it was thought this might be better dispensed with if he should be for some time at one of the great schools of royal foundation, where he might form acquaintances afterwards to be useful to him. The father reluctantly consented, in the hope that his son would soon return to his sober senses, and that the project would be abandoned with the general concurrence of the family. Meanwhile young George was transferred to Westminster School, then under the rule of the celebrated Busby.
There is reason to fear that the zeal for improvement which he had exhibited at St. Paul’s soon left him, and that he here began to acquire those habits of intemperance which afterwards proved so fatal to him. His father hearing of these had all his fears revived, and when the boy was at Acton during the holidays, again tried in vain to induce him to become a tradesman. But finding all dissuasions unavailing, the old gentleman withdrew his opposition, giving him a gentle pat on the back, accompanied by these words—“Ah, George, George, I fear thou wilt die with thy shoes and stockings on!”
Yet the wayward youth, while at Westminster, had fits of application, and carried away from thence a sufficient stock of learning to prevent him from appearing in after-life grossly deficient when any question of grammar arose. He was fond of reminding the world of the great master under whom he had studied.
His confidence in his own powers was so great, that, without conforming to ordinary rules, he expected to overcome every obstacle. Being now in the neighborhood of Westminster Hall, his ambition to be a great lawyer was inflamed by seeing the grand processions on the first day of term, and by occasionally peeping into the courts when an important trial was going forward. When he was actually lord chancellor, he used to relate that, while a boy at Westminster School, he had a dream, in which a gipsy read his fortune, foretelling “that he should be the chief scholar there, and should afterwards enrich himself by study and industry, and that he should come to be the second man in the kingdom, but in conclusion should fall into disgrace and misery.”
He was now sixteen, an age after which it was not usual to remain at school in those days. A family council was called at Acton, and as George still sanguinely adhered to the law, it was settled that, the university being quite beyond their reach, he should immediately be entered at an inn of court; that, to support him there, his grandmother should allow him forty pounds a year, and that his father should add ten pounds a year for decent clothing.
On the 19th of May, 1663, to his great joy, he was admitted a member of the Inner Temple. He got a small and gloomy chamber, in which, with much energy, he began his legal studies. He not only had a natural boldness of eloquence, but an excellent head for law. With steadiness of application he would have greatly excelled Lord Keeper Guilford, and in the mastery of this science would have rivalled Lord Hale and Lord Nottingham. But he could not long resist the temptations of bad company. Having laid in a very slender stock for a counsel or a judge, he forsook Littleton and Plowden, “moots and readings,” for the tavern, where was his chief delight. He seems to have escaped the ruinous and irreclaimable vice of gaming, but to have fallen into all others to which reckless templars were prone. Nevertheless, he had ever a keen eye to his own interest; and in these scenes of dissipation he assiduously cultivated the acquaintance of young attorneys and their clerks, who might afterwards be useful to him. When they met over a bowl of punch at the Devil tavern, or some worse place, he charmed them with songs and jokes, and took care to bring out before them, opportunely, any scrap of law which he had picked up, to impress them with the notion that, when he put on his gown and applied to business, he should be able to win all the causes in which he might be retained. He was exceedingly popular, and he had many invitations to dinner; which, to make his way in the world, he thought it better to accept than to waste his time over the midnight oil in acquiring knowledge which it might never be known that he possessed.
After the first fervor of loyalty which burst out at the restoration had passed away, a malcontent party was formed, which gradually gained strength. In this, most of the aspiring young lawyers, not actually employed by the government, were ranged—finding it politic to begin in “the sedition line,” that their value might be better appreciated by the court, and a better price might be bid for them. From such reasoning, or perhaps from accidental circumstances, Jeffreys associated himself with the popular leaders, and in the hour of revelry would drink on his knees any toasts to “the good old cause,” and to “the immortal memory of old Noll.”