On the south side is the entry to the Prerogative Court, and at No. 10 the Faculty Office. They have no marriage licences at the Faculty Office of an earlier date than October, 1632, and up to 1695 they are only imperfectly preserved. There is a MS. index to the licences prior to 1695, for which the charge for a search is 4s. 6d. Since 1695 the licences have been regularly kept, and the fee for searching is a shilling.
The great Admiralty judge of the early part of this century was Dr. Johnson's friend, Lord Stowell, the brother of Lord Eldon.
According to Sir Herbert Jenner Fust, Lord Stowell's decisions during the war have since formed a code of international law, almost universally recognised. In one year alone (1806) he pronounced 2,206 decrees. Lord Stowell (then Dr. Scott) was made Advocate-General in Doctors' Commons in 1788, and Vicar-General or official principal for the Archbishop of Canterbury. Soon after he became Master of the Faculties, and in 1798 was nominated Judge of the High Court of Admiralty, the highest dignity of the Doctors' Commons Courts. During the great French war, it is said Dr. Scott sometimes received as much as £1,000 a case for fees and perquisites in a prize cause. He left at his death personal property exceeding £200,000. He used to say that he admired above all other investments "the sweet simplicity of the Three per Cents.," and when purchasing estate after estate, observed "he liked plenty of elbow-room."
"It was," says Warton, "by visiting Sir Robert Chambers, when a fellow of University, that Johnson became acquainted with Lord Stowell; and when Chambers went to India, Lord Stowell, as he expressed it to me, seemed to succeed to his place in Johnson's friendship."
"Sir William Scott (Lord Stowell)," says Boswell, "told me that when he complained of a headache in the post-chaise, as they were travelling together to Scotland, Johnson treated him in a rough manner—'At your age, sir, I had no headache.'
"Mr. Scott's amiable manners and attachment to our Socrates," says Boswell in Edinburgh, "at once united me to him. He told me that before I came in the doctor had unluckily had a bad specimen of Scottish cleanliness. He then drank no fermented liquor. He asked to have his lemonade made sweeter; upon which the waiter, with his greasy fingers, lifted a lump of sugar and put it into it. The doctor, in indignation, threw it out. Scott said he was afraid he would have knocked the waiter down."
Again Boswell says:—"We dined together with Mr. Scott, now Sir William Scott, his Majesty's Advocate-General, at his chambers in the Temple—nobody else there. The company being so small, Johnson was not in such high spirits as he had been the preceding day, and for a considerable time little was said. At last he burst forth—'Subordination is sadly broken down in this age. No man, now, has the same authority which his father had—except a gaoler. No master has it over his servants; it is diminished in our colleges; nay, in our grammar schools.'"
"Sir William Scott informs me that on the death of the late Lord Lichfield, who was Chancellor of the University of Oxford, he said to Johnson, 'What a pity it is, sir, that you did not follow the profession of the law! You might have been Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, and attained to the dignity of the peerage; and now that the title of Lichfield, your native city, is extinct, you might have had it.' Johnson upon this seemed much agitated, and in an angry tone exclaimed, 'Why will you vex me by suggesting this when it is too late?'"
The strange marriage of Lord Stowell and the Marchioness of Sligo has been excellently described by Mr. Jeaffreson in his "Book of Lawyers."
"On April 10, 1813," says our author, "the decorous Sir William Scott, and Louisa Catherine, widow of John, Marquis of Sligo, and daughter of Admiral Lord Howe, were united in the bonds of holy wedlock, to the infinite amusement of the world of fashion, and to the speedy humiliation of the bridegroom. So incensed was Lord Eldon at his brother's folly that he refused to appear at the wedding; and certainly the chancellor's displeasure was not without reason, for the notorious absurdity of the affair brought ridicule on the whole of the Scott family connection. The happy couple met for the first time in the Old Bailey, when Sir William Scott and Lord Ellenborough presided at the trial of the marchioness's son, the young Marquis of Sligo, who had incurred the anger of the law by luring into his yacht, in Mediterranean waters, two of the king's seamen. Throughout the hearing of that cause célèbre, the Marchioness sat in the fetid court of the Old Bailey, in the hope that her presence might rouse amongst the jury or in the bench feelings favourable to her son. This hope was disappointed. The verdict having been given against the young peer, he was ordered to pay a fine of £5,000, and undergo four months' incarceration in Newgate, and—worse than fine and imprisonment—was compelled to listen to a parental address, from Sir William Scott, on the duties and responsibilities of men of high station. Either under the influence of sincere admiration for the judge, or impelled by desire of vengeance on the man who had presumed to lecture her son in a court of justice, the marchioness wrote a few hasty words of thanks to Sir William Scott, for his salutary exhortation to her boy. She even went so far as to say that she wished the erring marquis could always have so wise a counsellor at his side. This communication was made upon a slip of paper, which the writer sent to the judge by an usher of the court. Sir William read the note as he sat on the bench, and having looked towards the fair scribe, he received from her a glance and a smile that were fruitful of much misery to him. Within four months the courteous Sir William Scott was tied fast to a beautiful, shrill, voluble termagant, who exercised marvellous ingenuity in rendering him wretched and contemptible. Reared in a stately school of old-world politeness, the unhappy man was a model of decorum and urbanity. He took reasonable pride in the perfection of his tone and manner, and the marchioness—whose malice did not lack cleverness—was never more happy than when she was gravely expostulating with him, in the presence of numerous auditors, on his lamentable want of style and gentleman-like bearing. It is said that, like Coke and Holt under similar circumstances, Sir William preferred the quietude of his chambers to the society of an unruly wife, and that in the cellar of his inn he sought compensation for the indignities and sufferings which he endured at home."