The first Chancellor of an actively partisan character was Lord Thurlow—
"The rugged Thurlow who with sullen scowl, In surly mood, at friend or foe will growl"—
whose well-known asperity had earned for him the title of "the Tiger." It was said of him that in the Cabinet he "opposed everything, proposed nothing, and was ready to support anything." He was supposed to have derived his descent from Thurloe, Cromwell's secretary. "There are two Thurlows in my county," he remarked, when questioned upon the subject, "Thurloe the secretary and Thurlow the carrier. I am descended from the carrier."[166] His bad manners on the bench were proverbial, but not apparently incorrigible. Once at the commencement of the Long Vacation, when he was quitting the court without taking the usual leave of the Bar, a young barrister whispered to a companion, "He might at least have said 'D—— you!'" Thurlow overheard the remark, returned to his place, and politely made his bow.[167] Eldon said of Thurlow that he was a sturdy oak at Westminster, but a willow at St James's, where he long figured as the intimate and grateful confidant of George III.[168]
"Oft may the statesman in St Stephen's wave, Sink in St. James's to an abject slave,"
but Thurlow's attitude towards his royal master does not appear to have been marked by extreme servility. Once, indeed, when the Chancellor had taken some Acts to receive the royal assent, he read one or two of them through to the King and then stopped. "It's all d——d nonsense trying to make you understand this," said Thurlow, with brutal frankness, "so you had better consent to them at once!" And if he adopted this tone to his King, it may be certain that his attitude towards his equals or inferiors was no less overbearing.
Thurlow's character has been cruelly portrayed in the Rolliad under the heading:
"How to Make a Chancellor."
"Take a man of great abilities, with a heart as black as his countenance. Let him possess a rough inflexibility, without the least tincture of generosity or affection, and be as manly as oaths and ill-manners can make him. He should be a man who should act politically with all parties—hating and deriding every one of the individuals who compose them."[169]
If the Speaker of the Lords had been expected to conduct himself in a fashion similar to that of the Speaker of the Commons, Thurlow's behaviour on the Woolsack would certainly have given rise to adverse criticism. He was a frank and bitter partisan, and when some opponent had spoken, would step forward on to the floor of the House and, as he himself described it, give his adversary "such a thump in the bread-basket" that he did not easily recover from this verbal onslaught.[170] Thurlow's pet aversion was Lord Loughborough, his successor on the Woolsack. When Loughborough spoke effectively upon some subject opposed by Thurlow, who had not however taken the trouble to study it, the latter could be heard muttering fiercely to himself. "If I was not as lazy as a toad at the bottom of a well," he would say, "I could kick that fellow Loughborough heels over head, any day of the week." And he was probably right, for Lord Loughborough was a notoriously bad lawyer,[171] whereas his rival's sagacity almost refuted Fox's celebrated saying that "Nobody could be as wise as Thurlow looked."
The amount of work accomplished by a Lord Chancellor depends very largely upon the man himself, as we may see by comparing the two most distinguished Chancellors of their day—Lord Eldon and Lord Brougham.