Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2

by George Frisbie Hoar

I found in the church, close by, the tomb of John Sherman, one of my own kindred, I have no doubt, of the race which came from Colchester and Dedham in Essex, and Yaxley in Suffolk.

The Lord Chief Justice was much distressed lest he had done wrong in complying with General Butler's invitation to visit him at Lowell. He said that many of his American friends had treated him coldly afterward, and that his friend Richard Dana, whom he highly esteemed, had refused to call upon him for that reason.

I told him he did absolutely right, in my opinion. I said that General Butler was then Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and that an eminent person, holding a high official character, from a foreign country, could not undertake to question the personal character, or the title to be considered gentlemen, of the men whom the American people put into their high places.

Lord Coleridge said he received fifty guineas every morning for his services in the Tichborne trial. "But," he added, "my general practice in my profession was so much interrupted by it that I could not have got along that year but for my salary as Attorney-General."

He spoke with great pride of his cross-examination of the Claimant. He said one of the papers had complained that his cross-examination did no good to his case whatever. "But I made him admit that he sent his photograph to some person, as the photograph of Arthur Orton." He said the common people in England still held to the belief that the Claimant was the genuine Sir Roger Tichborne, and, by a curious contradiction, this feeling was inspired largely by their sympathy with him as a man of humble birth. I said, "Yes, I think that is true. I heard somebody, a little while ago, say that they heard two people talking in the cars, and one of them said to the other, 'They wouldn't give him the estate, because he was the son of a poor butcher.'" This very much amused the Lord Chief Justice.

I asked him about the story I had heard and had verified some time before, of the connection, in the person of Lady Rolle, between two quite remote periods. Lady Rolle was alive until 1887, maintaining her health so that she gave dinner parties in that year, shortly before she died. She was the widow of Mr. Rolle, afterward Lord Rolle, who made a violent attack on Charles James Fox in 1783. He was then thirty-two years old. From him the famous satire, the Rolliad, took its name. When he went to pay his homage to Queen Victoria at her Coronation in Westminster Abbey, he was quite feeble, and rolled down the steps of the throne. The young Queen showed her kindness of heart by jumping up and going to help him in person. Some of the English told the foreigners present at the ceremonial that that was part of the ceremony, and that the Rolles held their lands on the tenure of going through that performance at every coronation. Lady Rolle was married to her husband in 1820. He was then sixty-nine, and she a young girl of twenty years old. He was eighty or ninety years old when he died, and she survived as his widow for many years. Something came up on the subject of longevity which induced me to refer to this story and ask Lord Coleridge if it were true. We were then riding out together; "Yes," said he, "there," pointing to a dwelling-place in full sight, "is the house where she lived."

His Lordship asked me about an American Judge with whom he had some acquaintance. I told him that I thought his reputation was rather that of a jurist than a Judge. "Oh, yes," said he, "a jurist is a man who knows something about the law of every country but his own."

Lord Coleridge had a good reputation as a story-teller. It was pleasant to get an auditor who seemed to like to hear the stories which have got rather too commonplace to be worth telling over here. He had a great admiration for President Lincoln, and was eager to hear anything anybody had to tell of him. I told him the famous story of Lincoln's reply to the man who had left with him his poem to read, when he gave it back. "If anybody likes that sort of thing, it's just the sort of thing they'd like." I overheard his Lordship, as he circulated about the room, a little while afterward, repeating the story to various listeners.

He thought Matthew Arnold the greatest living Englishman. He spoke with great respect of Carlyle. He said: "Emerson was an imitator of Carlyle, and got his thoughts from him." I could not stand that. It seemed to me that he had probably never read a page of Emerson in his life, and had got his notion from some writer for a magazine, before either of these great men was well known. I took the liberty of saying, with some emphasis, "Emerson was a far profounder and saner intellect than Carlyle." To which he said, "Why, what do you say?" I repeated what I had said, and he received the statement with great politeness, but, of course, without assent.

During this summer I paid a visit to Moyle's Court, near Southampton, formerly owned by Lady Alice Lisle, whose daughter married Leonard Hoar, President of Harvard College. Leonard Hoar was the brother of my ancestor, John Hoar of Concord, and the son of Charles Hoar, Sheriff of Gloucester. There is a statement in an old account of some Puritan worthies that I have seen, to the effect that John Hoar and Leonard married sisters. If that be true, John Hoar's wife, Alice, was a daughter and namesake of Lady Alice Lisle. Although I should like to believe it, I am afraid that the claim cannot be made good. Lady Alice Lisle was a lady of large wealth and good lineage. Her husband was John Lord Lisle, who was Lord Justice under Cromwell, and one of the Judges in the trial of Charles I. He drew the indictment and sentence of the King, and sat next to Bradshaw at the trial, and directed and prompted him in difficult matters. He was murdered one Sunday morning on his way to church when in exile at Lausanne, Switzerland, on the Lake of Geneva, by three ruffians, said to be sent for that purpose by Queen Henrietta. Lady Alice Lisle was a victim of the brutality of Jeffries. After Monmouth's rebellion and defeat, she gave shelter and food to two fugitives from Monmouth's army. The report of her trial is in Howell. There was no proof that she knew that they were fugitives from Monmouth's army, although she supposed one of them was a Dissenting minister. There had been no conviction of the principals, which the English law required before an accessory after the fact could be found guilty. She suggested this point at the trial, but it was overruled by Jeffries. He conducted the case with infinite brutality. She was a kindly old lady, of more than seventy years. She slept during part of the trial, probably being fatigued by the journey, in which she had been carried on horseback from Moyle's Court to Winchester, and the sleepless nights which would naturally have followed. She was sentenced to be burned at the stake. But the sentence was commuted to beheading, at the intercession of the gentry of the neighborhood. She had disapproved of the execution of the King; said she had always prayed for him, and had a son in the King's army. Macaulay's account of the story is familiar to all readers of English history.