Sir William Shee. The leading counsel for Palmer, Mr. Serjeant Shee, was in his fifty-second year; seven years afterwards he was appointed a judge of the Queen’s Bench, the first Roman Catholic judge since the Reformation. He was Irish, but educated at a French school in Somers Town, London, subsequently at St. Cuthbert’s College, near Durham, where his cousin, afterwards famous as Cardinal Wiseman, was, and then at Edinburgh University. A student of Lincoln’s Inn when nineteen, he had become a serjeant at law by 1840, and was one of the leading counsel in London and on the Home Circuit. In 1852 he became member of Parliament for Kilkenny, and represented it for five years. He had been prominent as an advocate for Catholic Emancipation very early in his career, and in Parliament he was a zealous promoter of measures connected with Irish land tenancy, and dealing with the Church endowments, measures precursory of later land legislation and the Disestablishment of the Irish Church. He lost his seat for Kilkenny in 1857, and he never sat in Parliament afterwards. In 1860, three years before he was made a judge, he refused the Chief Justiceship of Madras. Four years after his appointment, in 1868, he died of apoplexy at the age of sixty-three. It is noticeable that though Serjeant Shee had been in most of the great trials he had never defended in a murder trial until he defended Palmer. We have referred to his declaration of belief in Palmer’s innocence; and this was not the only point on which his speech was criticised at the time. The leading legal Journal characterised it in terms which will most likely be agreed with by the present-day reader, even more decisively than by the reader of half a century ago, when the taste was more for florid speaking than it is now. “The defence of Mr. Serjeant Shee was clever, ingenious, and eloquent, but wanting in judgment and taste. The peroration was a striking instance of this defect, for the allusion to the family of the prisoner, and to his supposed affection for his wife, grated sorely, and almost ludicrously, on the sense of propriety in the face of the undisguised fact, known to all his audience, that he was accused of murdering his wife, that he slept with his maid servant on the very night she died, and that he had confessed himself guilty of forgery upon his mother. Equally injudicious was the philippic against the insurance offices. In worse taste still was his solemn assertion to the jury that he was convinced by the evidence of the prisoner’s innocence.”
Sir William Robert Grove. Palmer’s second counsel, Mr. Grove, Q.C., was in one respect the most distinguished of all the persons who took part in the trial. At the time he had a European reputation, but this was due to his career as a scientific investigator, and not as a lawyer. Without mentioning more, it is sufficient to say that he had published in 1846 the great book, “The Correlation of Physical Forces,” which placed him in the front rank of European science. The book was translated into French in the year of the trial. He had been called to the bar in 1835, and was in 1856 forty-five; but he had ill-health, and he turned to science rather than to practice. He was at his call a member of the Royal Institution, and in 1844 he had become its vice-president. By 1853 his health had improved, and he was then a Q.C., having a practice chiefly in patent and scientific cases; but he had also become a leader on his Circuit. It was probably his scientific eminence that led to his brief in the Palmer case. Grove was appointed a judge in 1871, retired in 1887, and died in 1896 at eighty-five. He did not gain any special distinction as a judge nor add to his scientific reputation after he left the bench, though he published several scientific studies.
Edward Vaughan Hyde Kenealy was the junior counsel for Palmer, and was thirty-seven years old. He was a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, in 1840, the year of his call to the Irish bar. In 1847 he was called to the English bar by Gray’s Inn, and by 1850 he was a Doctor of Laws of Trinity College, Dublin. He had published poems as translations from many Eastern and European languages, and especially in 1850 a poem which has been described as marked by genius, “Goethe, a new Pantomime.” Between the year of the trial and 1868 he had risen rapidly, and in the latter year he was made a Queen’s Counsel and a Bencher of his Inn. He was the leading counsel for the prosecution in the great Overend and Gurney case of 1869; and in 1873 came the most extraordinary period of his career, when he became chief counsel for the Tichborne claimant. His conduct of that person’s defence on the prosecution for perjury, and his editing of the wild paper called The Englishman, and his scurrilous attacks on the Chief Justice and others, led to his expulsion from the Circuit, the deprival of his legal distinctions, and finally to his disbarring. He was elected in 1875 as member for Stoke, solely as the champion of the Tichborne claimant. He sat until 1880, but was defeated then at the General Election, and in that year he died. He was an accomplished and successful advocate, and a scholar of unusual learning, but his gifts seemed of that order of genius which is allied to madness. In 1860 he published a translation of a Celtic poem, and in 1864 a volume of “Poems”; in 1878, “Prayers and Meditations,” “An Introduction to the Apocalypse,” and “Fo, the Third Messenger of God.”
John Gray. Mr. Gray was born at Aberdeen in 1807, and educated at Gordon’s Hospital. First a solicitor in London, he was called to the bar in 1838. After attaining the rank of Queen’s Counsel in 1863, seven years after the Palmer trial, he was appointed solicitor to the Treasury in 1870. It was while holding this office, in 1873, that he conducted the prosecution of Arthur Orton; so that his career and Dr. Kenealy’s touched in two points. He was the author of a number of valuable contemporary legal text books. He died in 1875, owing, it was said, to his labours in preparing and directing the Orton prosecution.
