BOWEN, CHARLES SYNGE CHRISTOPHER BOWEN, Baron (1835-1894), English judge, was born on the 1st of January 1835, at Woolaston in Gloucestershire, his father, the Rev. Christopher Bowen of Hollymount, Co. Mayo, being then curate of the parish. He was educated at Lille, Blackheath and Rugby schools, leaving the latter with a Balliol scholarship in 1853. At Oxford he made good the promise of his earlier youth, winning the principal classical scholarships and prizes of his time. He was made a fellow of Balliol in 1858. From Oxford Bowen went to London, where he was called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1861, and while studying law he wrote regularly for the Saturday Renew, and also later for the Spectator. For a time he had little success at the bar, and came near to exchanging it for the career of a college tutor, but he was induced by his friends, who recognized his talents, to persevere. Soon after he had begun to make his mark he was briefed against the claimant in the famous “Tichborne Case.” Bowen’s services to his leader, Sir John Coleridge, helped to procure for him the appointment of junior counsel to the treasury when Sir John had passed, as he did while the trial proceeded, from the office of solicitor-general to that of attorney-general; and from this time his practice became a very large one. The strain, however, of the Tichborne trials had been great, so that his physical health became unequal to the tasks which his zeal for work imposed upon it, and in 1879 his acceptance of a judgeship in the queen’s bench division, on the retirement of Mr Justice Mellor, gave him the opportunity of comparative rest. The character of Charles Bowen’s intellect hardly qualified him for some of the duties of a puisne judge; but it was otherwise when, in 1882, in succession to Lord Justice Holker, he was raised to the court of appeal. As a lord justice of appeal he was conspicuous for his learning, his industry and his courtesy to all who appeared before him; and in spite of failing health he was able to sit more or less regularly until August 1893, when, on the retirement of Lord Hannen, he was made a lord of appeal in ordinary, and a baron for life, with the title of Baron Bowen of Colwood. By this time, however, his health had finally broken down; he never sat as a law lord to hear appeals, and he gave but one vote as a peer, while his last public service consisted in presiding over the commission which sat in October 1893 to inquire into the Featherstone riots. He died on the 10th of April 1894.
Lord Bowen was regarded with great affection by all who knew him either professionally or privately. He had a polished and graceful wit, of which many instances might be given, although such anecdotes lose force in print. For example, when it was suggested on the occasion of an address to Queen Victoria, to be presented by her judges, that a passage in it, “conscious as we are of our shortcomings,” suggested too great humility, he proposed the emendation “conscious as we are of one another’s shortcomings”; and on another occasion he defined a jurist as “a person who knows a little about the laws of every country except his own.” Lord Bowen’s judicial reputation will rest upon the series of judgments delivered by him in the court of appeal, which are remarkable for their lucid interpretation of legal principles as applied to the facts and business of life. Among good examples of his judgment may be cited that given in advising the House of Lords in Angus v. Dalton (6 App. Cas. 740), and those delivered in Abrath v. North Eastern Railway (11 Q.B.D. 440); Thomas v. Quartermaine (18 Q.B.D. 685); Vagliano v. Bank of England (23 Q.B.D. 243) (in which he prepared the majority judgment of the court, which was held to be wrong in its conclusion by the majority of the House of Lords); and the Mogul Steamship Company v. M’Gregor (23 Q.B.D. 598). Of Lord Bowen’s literary works besides those already indicated may be mentioned his translation of Virgil’s Eclogues, and Aeneid, books i.-vi., and his pamphlet, The Alabama Claim and Arbitration considered from a Legal Point of View. Lord Bowen married in 1862 Emily Frances, eldest daughter of James Meadows Rendel, F.R.S., by whom he had two sons and a daughter.
See Lord Bowen, by Sir Henry Stewart Cunningham.
BOWEN, FRANCIS (1811-1890), American philosophical writer and educationalist, was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, on the 8th of September 1811. He graduated at Harvard in 1833, taught for two years at Phillips Exeter Academy, and then from 1835 to 1839 was a tutor and instructor at Harvard. After several years of study in Europe, he settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was editor and proprietor of the North American Review from 1843 to 1854. In 1850 he was appointed professor of history at Harvard; but his appointment was disapproved by the board of overseers on account of reactionary political opinions he had expressed in a controversy with Robert Carter (1819-1879) concerning the Hungarian revolution. In 1853 his appointment as Alford professor of natural religion, moral philosophy and civil polity was approved, and he occupied the chair until 1889. In 1876 he was a member of the Federal commission appointed to consider currency reform, and wrote (1877) the minority report, in which he opposed the restoration of the double standard and the remonetization of silver. He died in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 22nd of January 1890. His writings include lives of Sir William Phipps, Baron von Steuben, James Otis and Benjamin Lincoln in Jared Sparks’ “Library of American Biography”; Critical Essays on the History and Present Condition of Speculative Philosophy (1842); Lowell Lectures on the Application of Metaphysical and Ethical Science to the Evidences of Religion (1849); The Principles of Political Economy applied to the Condition, Resources and Institutions of the American People (1856); A Treatise on Logic (1864); American Political Economy (1870); Modern Philosophy from Descartes to Schopenhauer and Hartmann (1877); and Gleanings from a Literary Life, 1838-1880 (1880).
BOWEN, SIR GEORGE FERGUSON (1821-1899), British colonial governor, eldest son of the Rev. Edward Bowen, afterwards rector of Taughboyne, Co. Donegal, was born on the 2nd of November 1821. Educated at Charterhouse school and Trinity College, Oxford, he took a first class in classics in 1844, and was elected a fellow of Brasenose. In 1847 he was chosen president of the university of Corfu. Having served as secretary of government in the Ionian Islands, he was appointed in 1859 the first governor of Queensland, which colony had just been separated from New South Wales. He was interested in the exploration of Queensland and in the establishment of a volunteer force, but incurred some unpopularity by refusing to sanction the issue of inconvertible paper money during the financial crisis of 1866. In 1867 he was made governor of New Zealand, in which position he was successful in reconciling the Maoris to the English rule, and saw the end of the struggle between the colonists and the natives. Transferred to Victoria in 1872, Bowen endeavoured to reduce the expenses of the colony, and in 1879 became governor of Mauritius. His last official position was that of governor of Hong-Kong, which he held from 1882 to 1887. He was made a K.C.M.G. in 1856, a privy councillor in 1886, and received honorary degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge. In December 1887 he was appointed chief of the royal commission which was sent to Malta with regard to the new constitution for the island, and all the recommendations made by him were adopted. He died at Brighton on the 21st of February 1899, having been married twice, and having had a family of one son and four daughters. Bowen wrote Ithaca in 1850 (London, 1854), translated into Greek in 1859; and Mount Athos, Thessaly and Epirus (London, 1852); and he was the author of Murray’s Handbook for Greece (London, 1854).
A selection of his letters and despatches, Thirty Years of Colonial Government (London, 1889), was edited by S. Lane-Poole.
BOWER, WALTER (1385-1449), Scottish chronicler, was born about 1385 at Haddington. He was abbot of Inchcolm (in the Firth of Forth) from 1418, was one of the commissioners for the collection of the ransom of James I., king of Scots, in 1423 and 1424, and in 1433 one of the embassy to Paris on the business of the marriage of the king’s daughter to the dauphin. He played an important part at the council of Perth (1432) in the defence of Scottish rights. During his closing years he was engaged on his work the Scotichronicon, on which his reputation now chiefly rests. This work, undertaken in 1440 by desire of a neighbour, Sir David Stewart of Rosyth, was a continuation of the Chronica Gentis Scotorum of Fordun. The completed work, in its original form, consisted of sixteen books, of which the first five and a portion of the sixth (to 1163) are Fordun’s—or mainly his, for Bower added to them at places. In the later books, down to the reign of Robert I. (1371), he was aided by Fordun’s Gesta Annalia, but from that point to the close the work is original and of contemporary importance, especially for James I., with whose death it ends. The task was finished in 1447. In the two remaining years of his life he was engaged on a reduction or “abridgment” of this work, which is known as the Book of Cupar, and is preserved in the Advocates’ library, Edinburgh (MS. 35. 1. 7). Other abridgments, not by Bower, were made about the same time, one about 1450 (perhaps by Patrick Russell, a Carthusian of Perth) preserved in the Advocates’ library (MS. 35. 6. 7) and another in 1461 by an unknown writer, also preserved in the same collection (MS. 35. 5. 2). Copies of the full text of the Scotichronicon, by different scribes, are extant. There are two in the British Museum, in The Black Book of Paisley, and in Harl. MS. 712; one in the Advocates’ library, from which Walter Goodall printed his edition (Edin., 1759), and one in the library of Corpus Christi, Cambridge.