The City having complained to the House of Commons of the action of its recorder in obstructing the citizens in their attempts to have a parliament summoned, the House passed a resolution requesting the king to remove him from all public offices. The king took no such action, but Jeffreys submitted to a reprimand on his knees at the bar of the House, and resigned the recordership, eliciting the remark from Charles that he was “not parliament proof.”
In 1683, Jeffreys was promoted to be Lord Chief Justice, and was soon a member of the privy council. Shortly afterwards he tried Algernon Sidney for high treason, conducting the proceedings with manifest unfairness and convicting the prisoner on quite illegal grounds. On the accession of James II. in 1685, he was raised to the peerage, an honour never before conferred upon a chief justice during his tenure of office.
In July, after the battle of Sedgmoor, he was appointed president of the commission for the western circuit, and on 25th August he opened the commission at Winchester. This, the “bloody assizes,” was conducted with merciless severity, but the king was so satisfied that, on Jeffreys calling at Windsor on his return to London, he was given the custody of the great seal with the title of Lord Chancellor. During the next three years he vigorously supported the king in his claims to prerogative. He presided over the ecclesiastical commission, and over the proceedings against the Universities. Jeffreys thus became identified with the most tyrannical measures of James II., and therefore, when the king in December, 1688, fled from the country, he also endeavoured to escape. He disguised himself as a common sailor, but was recognised, and was only saved from lynching by a company of the train-bands. He was confined at his own request in the Tower, and here, his health having been seriously undermined by long continued disease and dissipation, he died in April, 1689. His name has become a by-word of infamy, although there can be little doubt that he was not entirely as black as he has been painted, and no impartial account can fail to insist on the traditional picture of him being modified in many respects. Nevertheless, when every allowance is made, the character of Jeffreys is one of the most hateful in English history.
On his accepting the Great Seal he also took over the house in Great Queen Street,[[402]] but about 1687 he removed to the new mansion, which he had had built in Westminster overlooking the park.[[403]]
For the next few years the history of Conway House is a blank. In 1696 a private Act[[404]] was obtained, which, after reciting that there was a mansion house, with stables and outhouses, in Queen Street, St. Giles, forming portion of the estate belonging to the Marchioness of Normanby[[405]] (life tenant) and of the estate belonging to Popham Seymour alias Conway, and that the house was liable to fall down from want of repair, gave authority to arrange with a builder to effect the repairs and to let the house for 51 years at a proper rent.
The work was evidently carried out without delay, for the Jury Presentment Roll for 1698 has the entry “Dr. Chamberlain for the Land Credit Office,” but little luck seems to have attended the house during most of its remaining half-century of existence.
The sewer ratebooks for 1700 and 1703 make no mention of the house. Those for 1715, 1720 and 1723, and the parish ratebooks from their commencement in 1730 until 1734 mention it as “The Land Bank.” The first entry refers to it as “Empty many years,” and it was still empty in 1720. Certain deeds of later date[[406]] allude to the premises as a “large old house or building commonly called or known by the name of the Land Bank.”[[407]]
The Land Bank, as known to history, was an institution founded in 1696, for the purpose of raising a public loan of two millions on the basis of the estimated value of real property. Its promoter was Dr. Chamberlain, an accoucheur.[[408]] It is unnecessary to give here a full account of the scheme, but it may be regarded as certain that it would never have been supported in Parliament but for the satisfaction felt by many influential members in dealing a blow at the recently formed Bank of England.
The evidence given above is decisive as to some connection between the house and this scheme, but no reference to the former has been found amongst the literature on the Land Bank.[[409]] The fact that Dr. Chamberlain was in occupation of the premises in 1698, two years after the ignominious collapse of the scheme, shows that the Land Bank still pursued some kind of existence, and, indeed, there is other evidence that it was surviving in some form in January, 1698.[[410]]
The above evidence shows that for many years after Dr. Chamberlain’s tenancy the house lay empty, and not until 1735 is the name of an occupier given. This was Thomas Galloway, who stayed until 1739. After this, the house again remained empty, until in 1743 it was pulled down, and its frontage to Great Queen Street was occupied by four smaller houses. The residents in the two westernmost of these (the other two occupied the site of Markmasons’ Hall) were as follows:—