It must not be supposed that during this period the literary lawyer was silent in the House of Lords. He spoke frequently. The 3rd volume of the Protests of the Lords, edited by Thorold Rogers (1875), contains no less than ten protests by Campbell, entered in the years 1842-1845. He protests against Peel’s Income Tax Bill of 1842; against the Aberdeen Act 1843, as conferring undue power on church courts; against the perpetuation of diocesan courts for probate and administration; against Lord Stanley’s absurd bill providing compensation for the destruction of fences to dispossessed Irish tenants; and against the Parliamentary Proceedings Bill, which proposed that all bills, except money bills, having reached a certain stage or having passed one House, should be continued to next session. The last he opposed because the proper remedy lay in resolutions and orders of the House. He protests in favour of Lord Monteagle’s motion for inquiry into the sliding scale of corn duties; of Lord Normanby’s motion on the queen’s speech in 1843, for inquiry into the state of Ireland (then wholly under military occupation); of Lord Radnor’s bill to define the constitutional powers of the home secretary, when Sir James Graham opened Mazzini’s letters. In 1844 he records a solitary protest against the judgment of the House of Lords in R. v. Millis, 1844, 10 Cla. and Fin. 534, which affirmed that a man regularly married according to the rites of the Irish Presbyterian Church, and afterwards regularly married to another woman by an episcopally ordained clergyman, could not be convicted of bigamy, because the English law required for the validity of a marriage that it should be performed by an ordained priest.
On the resignation of Lord Denman in 1850, Campbell was appointed chief justice of the queen’s bench. For this post he was well fitted by his knowledge of common law, his habitual attention to the pleadings in court and his power of clear statement. On the other hand, at nisi prius and on the criminal circuit, he was accused of frequently attempting unduly to influence juries in their estimate of the credibility of evidence. It is also certain that he liked to excite applause in the galleries by some platitude about the “glorious Revolution” or the “Protestant succession.” He assisted in the reforms of special pleading at Westminster, and had a recognized place with Brougham and Lyndhurst in legal discussions in the House of Lords. But he had neither the generous temperament nor the breadth of view which is required in the composition of even a mediocre statesman. In 1859 he was made lord chancellor of Great Britain, probably on the understanding that Bethell should succeed as soon as he could be spared from the House of Commons. His short tenure of this office calls for no remark. In the same year he published in the form of a letter to Payne Collier an amusing and extremely inconclusive essay on Shakespeare’s legal acquirements. One passage will show the conjectural Drocess which runs through the book: “If Shakespeare was really articled to a Stratford attorney, in all probability, during the five years of his clerkship, he visited London several times on his master’s business, and he may then have been introduced to the green-room at Blackfriars by one of his countrymen connected with that theatre.” The only positive piece of evidence produced is the passage from Thomas Nash’s “Epistle to the Gentlemen of the Two Universities,” prefixed to Greene’s Arcadia, 1859, in which he upbraids somebody (not known to be Shakespeare) with having left the “trade of Noverint” and busied himself with “whole Hamlets” and “handfuls of tragical speeches.” The knowledge of law shown in the plays is very much what a universal observer must have picked up. Lawyers always underestimate the legal knowledge of an intelligent layman. Campbell died on the 23rd of June 1861. It has been well said of him in explanation of his success, that he lived eighty years and preserved his digestion unimpaired. He had a hard head, a splendid constitution, tireless industry, a generally judicious temper. He was a learned, though not a scientific lawyer, a faithful political adherent, thoroughly honest as a judge, dutiful and happy as a husband. But there was nothing admirable or heroic in his nature. On no great subject did his principles rise above the commonplace of party, nor had he the magnanimity which excuses rather than aggravates the faults of others. His life was the triumph of steady determination unaided by a single brilliant or attractive quality.
Authorities.—Life of Lord Campbell, a Selection from his Autobiography, Diary and Letters, ed. by Hon. Mrs Hardcastle (1881); E. Foss, The Judges of England (1848-1864); W.H. Bennet, Select Biographical Sketches from Note-books of a Law Reporter (1867); E. Manson, Builders of our Law (ed. 1904); J.B. Atlay, The Victorian Chancellors, vol. ii. (1908).
[1] Two of his later acts, allowing the defendant in an action for libel to prove veritas, and giving a right of action to the representatives of persons killed through negligence, also deserve mention.
[2] Greville in his Memoirs says that Campbell got this post on condition that he should not expect the ordinary promotion to the bench; a condition which, it if were so, he immediately violated by claiming the vice-chancellorship on the death of Sir John Leach. Pepys (Lord Cottenham) and Bickersteth (Lord Langdale) were both promoted to the bench in preference to Campbell.
[3] “There can be no doubt that old Wynton was at the bottom of it all, and persuaded Lord Grantley to urge it on for mere political purposes.”—Greville, iii. 351.
[4] See thereon J.B. Atlay, The Victorian Chancellors (1908), vol. ii. p. 174.
[5] In 1842 he published the Speeches of Lord Campbell at the Bar and in the Home of Commons, with an Address to the Irish Bar as Lord Chancellor of Ireland (Edin., Black).
[6] It was of this book that Sir Charles Wetherell said, referring to its author, “and then there is my noble and biographical friend who has added a new terror to death.” See Misrepresentations in Campbell’s “Lives of Lyndhurst and Brougham” corrected by St Leonards (London, 1869).