Mr. Justice Cresswell. Sir Cresswell Cresswell was the junior judge on the bench. His age was sixty-two, and he had been on the bench in the Court of Common Pleas since 1842, where he had established a reputation as a learned and strong judge. At the bar he had a large practice, and his legal name, apart from his judicial career, would have lived as one of the editors of the Barnewall and Cresswell’s Reports in the King’s Bench from 1822 to 1830. But his most abiding fame rests on his having been the first appointed judge of the new Probate and Divorce Court which was established in 1858. He became for the new principles and practice of divorce what Mansfield had been for commercial law—their creator and expounder. He sat in this Court, achieving a distinction which falls to the lot of few judges, until 1863. In July of this year he was knocked down in Constitution Hill by runaway horses belonging to Lord Aveland, which had been frightened by the breakdown of the carriage, and he died from the shock. On being made judge of the Probate and Divorce Court he was offered a peerage, but declined it, probably, as he was a bachelor, being sufficiently content with the ancestral name of Cresswell of Cresswell, near Morpeth. Though as a judge he was considered overbearing, it is noticeable that he did not intervene very much in the trial; the letter to Lord Campbell makes a point of contrasting his opinions on admission of evidence, and in other respects, as being in favour of the prisoner, while those of Lord Campbell and Mr. Baron Alderson were asserted to show bias and even strong and unfair prejudice.
Sir Alexander James Edmund Cockburn was appointed Solicitor-General in July, 1850, and early next year, in succession to Sir John Romilly, was made Attorney-General. He had up to the former year been obtaining considerable reputation as an advocate, had been appointed Q.C. in 1841, and especially had attracted attention by his defence of M’Naughten, who shot Mr. Drummond, Sir Robert Peel’s secretary. He obtained his acquittal on the ground of insanity; a defence less credible and easy in 1843 than it subsequently became. But he first obtained real public distinction, and proved his qualifications to be of the highest class, in 1850 by speeches in Parliament,
which led immediately to his appointment as Solicitor and Attorney-General as above mentioned. In the Don Pacifico debate Lord Palmerston had made the great speech of his life; and the law had been prepared for him by Cockburn. On the fourth night of the debate Mr. Cockburn replied to a long speech made by Mr. Gladstone against Palmerston’s policy. At the end of his reply, according to a description by Sir Robert Peel, “one half of the Treasury benches were left empty, while honourable members ran one after another, tumbling over each other in their haste to shake hands with the honourable and learned member.” He remained Attorney-General in Palmerston’s Government until November, 1856; and thus it fell to him to conduct the Palmer prosecution. It is worth mentioning that Cockburn’s reply at the end of the case was made without a single note. Palmer had therefore against him the greatest figure at the bar, and one of the most accomplished orators of his generation. It was in November, 1856, that Cockburn gave up his enormous income, and his Parliamentary position, to become Chief Justice of the Common Pleas; and the rest of his distinguished career, until his death in 1880, was spent in that office, or in that of Lord Chief Justice of England, which under the Judicature Acts superseded the two ancient Chief Justiceships. Sir Alexander Cockburn was of an ancient Scottish family; he was several times offered a peerage, but declined; he was never married, and his baronetcy expired with him.
John Edwin James was forty-four years of age in 1856. “With the appearance of a prize fighter,” he failed when he went on the stage as a young man and played “George Barnwell.” His father, being a solicitor and an officer of the city of London it was natural for him to turn to the bar, and he was called at the Inner Temple in 1836, when he was twenty-four. By 1856 he was a noted advocate, had been made a Queen’s Counsel, was Recorder of Brighton, and had a professional income of £7000 a year. He was member of Parliament for Marylebone in 1859; but in 1861 his retirement was announced. He was overwhelmed with pecuniary difficulties, and owed £100,000. An inquiry by his Inn in 1861 showed that he had in 1857 and 1860 inveigled a young man, a son of Lord Yarborough, into debts of £35,000; had obtained, three years before the trial, £20,000 from a solicitor by false misrepresentations; and in a case in which he was acting for the plaintiff had borrowed £1250 from defendant, promising to let him off easily in cross-examination. He was disbarred; went to America in 1861; was admitted to the bar there and practised; but in 1865 was playing at the Winter Garden Theatre, New York. He returned to England in 1873, and failed in persuading the judges to reconsider his case. He had married in 1861, but his wife divorced him in 1863. After his failure to return to the bar he was articled as a solicitor, but was not admitted; and he even offered himself again as candidate for Marylebone. He practised as an expert in American and English law, but sank into very poor circumstances, and a subscription was being made for him when he died in 1882.
Sir William Henry Bodkin. Three years after the trial Mr. Bodkin was appointed assistant judge of the Middlesex Sessions, and in 1867 was knighted. He held his office until a few weeks of his death, in 1874, at the age of eighty-three. At the time of the trial he was sixty-five, and was the most distinguished of the practitioners in specialised criminal business. In 1832 he had been appointed Recorder of Dover, after being only six years at the bar. He acquired a large practice on the Home Circuit and at the Middlesex, Westminster, and Kentish Sessions; he was counsel to the Treasury at the Central Criminal Court in 1856, and was ex officio of the counsel for the Crown in prosecutions in that Court. He retained this appointment until he was made a judge. As an expert on the practice of the poor law and secretary of the Mendicity Society he took great interest in poor law questions. In 1841 he had been returned to Parliament as a Conservative member for Rochester, but lost his seat at the election in 1847 for having supported Sir Robert Peel’s Corn Law Bill. While he sat in Parliament he brought forward and passed an important measure of reform as to the chargeability of irremovable poor, which has become a permanent feature of our poor law system. Sir William held several distinguished and important offices. He was President of the Society of Arts, a Deputy-Lieutenant of Middlesex, and chairman of the Metropolitan Assessment Sessions. By his marriage in 1812 to Sarah Sophia, daughter of Peter Raymond Poland of Winchester Hall, Highgate, he became connected with the family of the distinguished lawyer, Sir Harry Bodkin Poland, whose own professional career has followed so closely that of his uncle. Sir Harry Bodkin Poland succeeded him in his Recordership of Dover and his office at the Central Criminal Court. This family and legal connection alike suggested the dedication of this book to Sir Harry Bodkin Poland. None of those who actually took part in the trial are now living.
William Newland Welsby had been called to the bar in 1826, was made Recorder of Chester in 1841, and eventually became the leader on the North Wales Circuit. When Sir John Jervis, who became Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, was made Attorney-General in 1846, Welsby was appointed by him junior counsel to the Treasury; in other words, junior counsel with the Attorney-General in all his legal duties, thence known in English legal professional slang as the Attorney-General’s “devil,” a very important and lucrative post, which generally leads to a judgeship. It was probably his experience of criminal law in this office, and his general reputation for knowledge of criminal law, founded on his editing numerous law books as well as on his practice at the bar, that led to his being associated with the Attorney-General at the trial. He had enormous industry, and besides editing a large number of legal books was an editor of one of the most celebrated series of Reports, the seventeen volumes of “Meeson and Welsby,” the product of their reports for years in the Court of Exchequer in the earlier part of Welsby’s career. He died eight years after the trial, at sixty-one, without having reached the bench, broken down, it was believed, by his excessive labours.
Sir John Walter Huddleston (Mr. Baron Huddleston). A year after the trial Mr. Huddleston was made a Q.C. From 1865 to 1875 he was Judge-Advocate of the Fleet. In the latter year he became a judge of the Common Pleas, and was afterwards transferred to the Court of Exchequer; hence the name of Mr. Baron Huddleston, by which in later years he continued to be known, even after the reconstitution of the Courts by the Judicature Acts, when all the judges took the title of Justices of the High Court. Huddleston was a remarkable man. His father was a captain in the merchant service. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, but did not take a degree, and he became usher in an English school. He was called by Gray’s Inn in 1839, when he was twenty-four years of age, so that he was forty-one at the time of the trial. He was member of Parliament for Canterbury from 1865 to 1868, and for Norwich in 1874 and until he was made a judge. He was a great advocate, but not so great a judge. His reputation increased rather on the social than the legal side. He had married in 1872 Lady Diana De Vere Beauclerk, daughter of the ninth Duke of St. Albans, and he was accounted to be ambitious most of all of social distinction. He was fitted for this, if not by family connections, by his brilliance as a conversationalist, and his gifts as a man of the world and his associations with the theatre and the turf. His accomplishments included an extensive knowledge of French literature and a facility of speaking in French which few Englishmen have. He thus represented gracefully the English bar at the funeral in 1868 of Berryer, the great French advocate, over whose grave he made a speech in French. He died in 1890, aged seventy-five.