CHAPTER XXVII
SOME LAWYERS
Dim enough now is the memory of the Parnell Commission. There are few who, without reference to record, could give an intelligent summary of the findings of the unhappy judges whom political exigency condemned for over a year to take “evidence” concerning a vast amount of miscellaneous matter incapable of legal proof.
But from the general vagueness of that dreary inquiry there still stand out in sharp and abrupt relief two main figures. One is that of an ageing man, bald and bowed, of a threadbare respectability; respectability, indeed, is the only real thing about him, and to that god he is presently to make the last sacrifice. Richard Pigott was not, one imagines, a specially bad man. But, unfortunately for himself, there was the necessity for him and his to live respectably, and his situation and endowments did not permit him to live at once respectably and honestly. He had no kind of settled calling behind the wall of which he could fruitfully cultivate such small talents as he possessed. In a shop or an office he might have carried his little battle of life to the point where one may at least make terms of dignity with Death. But he had strayed into one of the dangerous trades. Journalism abounds in perils to all men; it is quite fatal to the man who lacks both scruple and ability. Richard Pigott was a bravo with the parts of a small shopkeeper. One of Fagin’s pupils let others take the risks and glory of burglary; his specialty was the “Kinchin Lay,” or snatching pence out of the hands of small children. Pigott belonged to the “kinchin lay” of political journalism; his business was that of furtive slander and timid lying. He was only used by his employers for jobs which bigger if not more scrupulous men would disdain; and as these jobs were neither numerous nor lucrative he had sunk in middle life to all sorts of miserable stratagems to keep his small pot boiling. On such service, however, or the pretence of it, Pigott acquired a certain standing with propagandist auxiliaries of the Unionist Party, and was eventually employed to collect evidence connecting Parnellism with crime. He was paid a guinea a day; expenses were liberally defrayed, and for the first time for many years the poor hack found himself in clover. During a considerable period he enjoyed himself at first-class hotels in Ireland, Great Britain, and on the Continent. But as time went on his patrons, disappointed with the tame and inconclusive character of the “evidence,” hinted that something much more sensational was wanted, or supplies would be stopped. Pigott saw before him a new plunge, perhaps this time without hope of re-emergence, into the penury from which he had momentarily escaped. The prospect was too bleak, and he decided that, whatever happened, his employers must be satisfied, and the essential something must be supplied. So he forged certain letters purporting to be written by Mr. Parnell—letters which, if genuine, would have proved Parnell’s privity to the Phœnix Park murders, and branded him as a man merely infamous. These letters had been printed in facsimile as Parnell’s; they were supported by all the prestige of a great newspaper; and probably a majority of people in this country still believed they were really Parnell’s when Richard Pigott first stood up to face the cross-examination of Sir Charles Russell.
Those who sat through that cross-examination will never forget it. It is usual to describe such a spectacle as dramatic, and in a sense this spectacle was. It was, however, the drama not of the theatre, with its surprises and quick alternations, but of one of those gigantesque novels of Victor Hugo which depict some devoted wretch overwhelmed by the slow march of an unrelenting destiny. For two days Pigott saw closing round him, thread by thread and mesh by mesh, the net from which death was the sole escape. At first he was moderately glib and composed. But as the cross-examination proceeded the miserable man showed in the contortion of his features, in a brow dank with perspiration, in whitened face and trembling limb, the agony that oppressed him. It was a sight to awaken compassion even in those who had suffered most from his villainy. In his easiest moments Sir Charles Russell was sufficiently formidable. “A more frigid-looking man,” says his Irish biographer, “it had never been my fortune to behold.” His eyes were of the kind that take in everything and give out nothing; in one mood they seemed to search the very soul of his interlocutor, in another they were capable of the kind of ferocity that has the effect of physical shock. It is said that an unfortunate suitor lost his wits at the glare of Jeffreys, and those who had to do with Russell could find no great difficulty in believing the legend.
Not a few judges, fenced round with scarlet dignity, felt the terror of Russell’s manner, and as for the solicitors who brought him briefs, “the way he treated them,” says a contemporary, “won’t bear repeating.” Those who knew him best declared that his roughly imperious manner concealed a kind heart. But there was no cross-examiner at the Bar whose very personality was more likely to strike awe into the heart of a witness with something on his conscience. His strong features—there was something a little sinister in their expression, the effect, so far as I remember him, of a very decisive nose just a little out of the straight—could wear a positively terrifying expression; it was hard to say whether his voice was most deadly when it sank to a menacing whisper or when it boomed out in tones of thunder; but above all there was the sense almost of an elemental force, as resistless and unrelenting as the bog which engulfs the incautious traveller.
There is no need to describe in detail how the wretched Pigott, entrapped and bedevilled till there was no possible escape, broke down under that pitiless torture, made confession during the adjournment of the court, fled the country, and finally ended his earthly troubles with a suicide’s bullet. But those two days, in the words of Lord Rosebery, brought Russell at a bound “from a solid reputation to supreme eminence.” Russell was not exaggerating when, in his subsequent speech for Parnell, he claimed to have reversed the whole position, placing in the dock those who had so far been the prosecutors. “When I opened this case, my lords,” he began in low conversational tones, “I represented the accused.” Then, suddenly allowing his voice to reach its full volume, and pointing a minatory finger to the place occupied by the Attorney-General—Sir Richard Webster—he cried, “Now we are the accusers, and the accused are there.” It was a moment of intense drama. There was little in what was said. But the manner and the effect were marvellous; the whole thing was a triumph, not of eloquence, or of intellect, but of that mysterious force we call personality. Russell, indeed, was no great orator, even in the law courts, and as a political speaker he was very far from successful. But he was, in his own proper way, a great person, and something akin to genius enabled him to achieve, with less obvious endowments than many other lawyers—for he was wholly deficient in wit, and was not exceptionally subtle, or exceptionally learned, or exceptionally gifted in words—a position as an advocate unequalled in his time. During the Nineties his earning capacity was far beyond that of any other lawyer. As early as 1874, when little more than forty, he was making an income of over ten thousand a year; after the triumph of the Parnell Commission the value put on his services mounted abruptly, and in his last full year of practice at the Bar his fees amounted to over £22,000.
It was a weakness of Russell to boast that he was a pure “Celt,” by which he probably meant a pure Irishman. But he was really of Anglo-Norman ancestry, the descendant of one Robert de Rosel who accompanied Strongbow on the expedition which brought Ireland under the English Crown. His family was in comfortable circumstances, devoutly Catholic, and inclined to things of the mind. Of the children only Charles followed a secular career. His brother Matthew rose to distinction in the Society of Jesus; his three sisters became nuns. There is a story that the two boys were once cut off by the rising tide in Carlingford Lough. Matthew prayed; Charles whistled. The whistle was heard, and the boys were rescued. But Charles Russell would at no time have suggested that the appeal to human aid was more efficacious than the prayer. For he was, in his own way, not less devout than his brother the Jesuit. The great advocate, gorged with suitors’ gold, the politician for whom Mr. Gladstone strained every nerve to secure the Lord Chancellorship, the man of pleasure so well known wherever horses ran or cards were played, was in many ways a very different person from the Belfast solicitor of the Fifties and the struggling barrister of the early Sixties. But his religion remained a constant with Russell, and, though it was a shock to him to find his daughter, like her aunts, determined to take the veil, he accepted the situation with grace, and his letter yielding to her wishes was as tender and delicately expressed a renunciation of a father’s natural hopes as can be found in the language. His religious bias was rather quaintly illustrated in his views on divorce, not so much on the thing itself as on the attitude of parties towards it. He had no objection to a woman seeking relief from the Courts; but he thought she ought to wear black when doing so. He was always annoyed by a gaily dressed petitioner. “They may not be sorry,” he used to say, “but they should at least pretend they are sorry.”
Russell’s fame as an advocate wholly overshadowed his reputation as a politician. He was twice Attorney-General; he had a place of importance in the inner councils of the Liberal Party; and he spoke with industry and intelligence wherever he was wanted to speak. But he was not at his happiest either in the House of Commons or on the platform. With fellow-members of Parliament he was too haughty, and with popular audiences too cold and formal, and his mind had neither the breadth nor the geniality for the part either of a statesman or a demagogue. But as Lord Chief Justice he notably falsified the saying that a great advocate seldom makes a great judge. Some of his faults of manner remained. He was sometimes a little arbitrary, and often not a little rough. But he had the one great quality of getting straight, through all kinds of incidental and irrelevant matter, at the heart of a case; and the trial of Dr. Jameson showed his iron disregard for mere popularity. Standing between the Jury and public opinion, he permitted them no loophole for a verdict of acquittal. Four years afterwards he said: “Public opinion was apparently exasperated because any sentence had been passed at all. When I tried them people said I was too hard on them. Now people say I was not hard enough.” Lord Russell as a judge and a Peer turned to account the considerable knowledge of the seamy side of business life he acquired in his early years as a solicitor and as an advocate appearing chiefly in commercial suits, and one of his latest acts was the introduction of a Bill to deal with the evil of secret commissions. “He was struck down,” wrote a great lawyer after his death, “before the full measure of his powers as a law reformer and administrator could be felt.”