Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 by Various

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Very curious instances of character occur in the experience of counsel.
Lord Eldon gives one of them as occurring to himself. "Once," said he,
"I had a very handsome offer made to me. I was pleading for the rights
of the inhabitants of the Isle of Man. Now I had been reading in Coke,
and I found there that the people in the Isle of Man were no beggars,"
(the words are, 'The inhabitants of this Isle are religious,
industrious, and true people, without begging or stealing.') "I
therefore do not beg their rights, I demand them. This so pleased an old
smuggler who was present, that when the trial was over, he called me
aside and said, 'Young gentleman, I tell you what, you shall have my
daughter if you will marry her, and one hundred thousand pounds for her
fortune.' That was a very handsome offer, but I told him that I happened
to have a wife who had nothing for her fortune, therefore I must stick
to her." In December of this year 1784, Johnson died. "He was a good
man," said Lord Eldon; "he sent me a message on his death-bed, to
request that I would make a point of attending public worship every
Sunday, and that the place should be the Church of England."

An excellent anecdote, illustrative of the advantages of knowing some
thing of every thing, is given on a trial at Carlisle. Bearcroft, a
celebrated advocate, was brought down on a special retainer of three
hundred guineas, in a salmon fishery cause. Scott led on the other side;
and at a consultation held the evening before, it was determined to
perplex Bearcroft, by examining all the witnesses in the dialect of
Cumberland, and, as it appears, in the _patois_ of the fishermen.
Accordingly, when Scott began to cross-examine his first witness, who
said a good deal out the salmon good and bad, he asked whether they were
obliged to make _ould soldiers_ of any of them. Bearcroft asked for an
explanation of the words, which Scott would not give him. He then asked
the judge, who answered that he did not know. After a squabble, the
phrase was explained; but nearly every other question produced a similar
scene. The jury were astonished that neither judge nor Bearcroft
understood what they all understood so well, and they inferred from
Bearcroft's ignorance that he had a rotten cause. The consequence was,
that Bearcroft lost the cause; and he swore that no fee should ever
tempt him to come among such a set of barbarians as the Cumberland men
again.

An _ould soldier_ is made by hanging up in a chimney a salmon caught out
of season, when the fish is white instead of red, and it acquires by
hanging the colour of an old red coat.

Cross-examination may sometimes produce peril to the performer. At the
assizes, Scott once examined a barber severely. The barber got into a
great passion, and Scott desired him to moderate his anger, and that he
should employ him to shave him as he passed through Kendal to the
Lancaster assizes. 'The barber said, with great indignation, "I would
not advise you, lawyer, to think of that, or risk it."

Scott's reputation was now rising year by year, in both Parliament and
his profession; and Lord Mansfield's resignation, in 1788, of the
chief-justiceship of the King's Bench making a general move in the
higher orders of the bar, Scott was appointed solicitor-general, Kenyon
being appointed to the chief-justiceship, and the attorney-general,
Arden, succeeding to the Rolls. On this occasion he was knighted. A
melancholy event soon gave him the most public opportunity for the
display of his official faculties. In the autumn of 1788, the king was
attacked with disorder of the mind, and the great question of the
regency necessarily came before Parliament. The Whigs, who regarded the
Prince of Wales as their dependent, if not as their dupe, insisted on
his succession to the unlimited prerogatives of the sovereign; the
Tories insisted, on the other hand, that Parliament alone had a right to
confer the regency and to assign its powers, though they admitted that
the choice, in the present instance, ought to fall upon the Prince of
Wales. A question of this importance naturally brought out all the
ability on both sides. Pitt and the solicitor-general took the lead on
the side of limitation, and the prince ultimately accepted the regency
on their terms. It became unnecessary, however; for, while the bill was
in the House of Lords, a communication was made by the chancellor, that
the king's health was in a favourable state.

His majesty was able to return to business in March.

Lord Thurlow had been universally charged with carrying on an intrigue
with the Opposition, for the purpose of continuing in office under the
regency. Lord Eldon's belief is introduced against that charge; but
there can be no doubt whatever that the charge was universally rumoured
at the time; that anecdotes confirmatory of the fact were told in every
direction; that no known attempt was ever made to answer them; and that,
from the period of the regency, an alienation arose, which finally
determined his dismissal by the minister. The well-known boast of the
chancellor's loyalty to the incapacitated king, which produced such
animadversion in the House, and such burlesque out of it--Burke's
ridicule of his official sensibilities, "the iron tears down Pluto's
cheeks," were all founded on the public belief of this intrigue. And it
is certainly no answer, at the end of half a century of uncontradicted
opinion, to say that no formal accusation on the subject was made on the
king's recovery, when the whole subject of the regency had become alike
distasteful to both sides of the House--to Ministers, from delicacy to
the king; and to Opposition, from a sense of failure.

Soon after Scott became solicitor-general, the king, at Weymouth, said,
"Well, I hope your promotion has been beneficial to you?" He asked his
majesty if he meant his professional income. "Yes," said the king, "in
that and in other respects." Scott told him that he must lose by it
about L2000 a-year; and on the king expressing surprise, he said "That
the attention of the law-officers was called to matters of international
law, public law, and revenue law--matters which, as they were not
familiar to them, took up a good deal of their time, and that the fee
usually given to the solicitor-general with the government cases was
only three guineas, while those from private cases were from ten to
twenty-five." "Oh!" said the king, "then for the first time I comprehend
what I never could understand, why it has always been so difficult to
get any opinion from my law-officers."

At the close of the session of 1792, Lord Thurlow gave up the great
seal. "What it was," said Lord Eldon afterwards, "that occasioned the
rupture between Lord Thurlow and his colleagues, I never could find
out." We here see an instance of the ignorance in which a high official
was content to remain, on a subject which might naturally and fairly
excite his curiosity. It is obvious that he wished to keep himself out
of the melee and took the best probable way of doing so, by asking no
questions. But a dilemma arose out of this resignation to Scott himself.
Pitt sent for him, and said, "I have a circumstance to mention to you,
which, on account of your personal and political connexion with Lord
Thurlow, I wish that you should first hear from myself. Lord Thurlow and
I have quarreled, and I have signified to him his Majesty's commands
that he should resign the great seal." Scott replied, that he was not at
all surprised at the event which had taken place; but added, that he
owed too great obligations to Lord Thurlow to reconcile it to himself to
act in political hostility to him, and he had also been too long in
political connexion with the minister to join any party against him; so
that nothing was left but to resign his office, and make his bow to the
House of Commons. Pitt argued against this, and finally induced him to
consult Lord Thurlow. Thurlow at once told him, that to resign would be
a foolish thing; adding in the spirit of a prediction, which was
afterwards strikingly realized, "it is very possible that Mr Pitt, from
party and political motives, at this moment may overlook your
pretensions; but, sooner or later, you, _must_ hold the great seal. I
know no man but yourself qualified for its duties."

If the ex-chancellor was complimentary to Scott, it notoriously was not
his habitual style; the fierceness of his tone was well known. His
language of Loughborough, who succeeded him, was savagely contemptuous.
On one occasion, when the latter was speaking with considerable effect
on a subject on which Lord Thurlow had an adverse opinion, though he did
not regard himself as sufficiently master of it for direct refutation,
he was heard to mutter, "If I was not as lazy as a toad at the bottom of
a well, I could kick that fellow Loughborough heels over head, any day
in the week."

Thurlow told the Prince that though Loughborough "had the gift of the
gab in a marvellous degree, he was no lawyer;" and added, "in the house
of Lords I get Kenyon or somebody to start some law doctrine, in such a
manner that the, fellow _must_ get up to answer it, and then I
leave the woolsack, and give him such a thump in his bread-basket that
he cannot recover himself."

The solicitor-general was now growing rich, and he purchased for
L.22,000 the manor of Eldon, a property of about 1300 acres in the
county of Durham. He was an "improving landlord," and for several years
he expended the income of the estate on planting--which at once much
increased its value, and added to the beauty of that part of the county
of Durham.

In 1793, he ascended another step in his profession, by his appointment
to the great office of attorney-general, in succession to Sir Archibald
Macdonald, who was made chief baron of the exchequer. The new
attorney-general was soon summoned to the highest exercise of his
abilities, his learning, and his courage; he commenced office in the midst
of national convulsion.

The Revolution of France, which had been growing violence and havoc for
the last four years, had now arrived at its height. The change,
beginning with popular reform in 1789, had, in 1793, been consummated in
regicide. The republic proclaimed in the year before, within three
months had darkened into a democracy. The general alarm of the
continental kings; combined them in an attempt to overthrow a government
which threatened them all; the attempt was found to result only in
consolidating its power; and, in the first year of war, France presented
to the disaffected of all nations, the tempting spectacle of a land in
which the foremost prizes of power had fallen into the hands of men of
the humblest condition; and in which those men humbled to the dust the
proudest diadems of Europe. Obscure pamphleteers, country advocates,
monks, and editors of struggling journals, were suddenly seen in the
first offices of state, wielding the whole power of the mightiest
kingdom of the Continent, absorbing its revenues, directing its armies,
and moving in the rank of princes among the proud hereditary
sovereignties of the world. To the crowd of unprincipled men, engendered
by the habits of European life, and their consciousness of abilities
fully equal to those which had won such opulent enjoyments and lofty
distinctions in France, the success of the Revolution was an universal
summons to conspiracy. On the Continent that conspiracy was, according
to the habits of the people, crafty and concealed. In England, equally
according to the habits of the people, it was bold and public, daring
and defying. Great meetings of the population were held in the open air;
committees of grievance were appointed; correspondences were spread
through the country; the whole machinery of overthrow was openly
erected, and worked by visible hands. Even where secresy was deemed
useful by the more cautious or the more fearful, it was of a different
character from the assassin-like secresy of the foreign insurgent; it
was more the solemn and regulated observance of a secret tribunal. The
papers which have transpired of those secret committees have all the
forms of diplomacy, combined with a determination of language, and an
intensity of purpose, which would do honour to a nobler cause. But the
contest was now at hand, and on three men in England depended the
championship of the monarchy. These three were the King, the Minister,
and the Attorney-General. There were never three individuals more
distinctly, and we shall scarcely hesitate to say, more providentially,
prepared to meet the crisis. George III., a sovereign of the most
constitutional principles, and of the most unshaken intrepidity; William
Pitt, the most sagacious and the most resolute statesman that England
had ever seen, formed by his manly eloquence to rule the legislature,
and, by his character for integrity, to obtain the full confidence of
the empire; and Sir John Scott, at once wise, calm, and bold, profoundly
learned in his profession, personally brave, and alike incapable of
yielding to the menaces of party or the corruptions of power. It is not
to be forgotten, as a portion of that genuine public respect which in
England is always withheld from even the most shining personal gifts,
when stained by private profligacy, that those three were wholly and
alike above the breath of slander. The king, eminent for domestic
virtue; Pitt, unstained by even an imputation; and Scott, fondly
attached to his wife and family.

In January 1793, the cruel murder of the innocent and unfortunate Louis
XVI. had been perpetrated by the National Convention--an act which
Napoleon long afterwards pronounced "a grand political error; sufficient
to stamp the government not merely with guilt, but with infatuation."
The French minister at the Court of St James's was ordered to leave the
country, and war was proclaimed. The revolutionary committees in England
now assumed increased activity. Communications were established between
them and the Jacobin government; and while France prepared for War,
English republicanism prepared for revolution. The time of the struggle
was fully come. The English minister now buckled on his armour. A
succession of vigorous measures employed the legislature during the
whole period; they were fiercely combated, but they were all ultimately
carried. Opposition never exhibited more brilliant parliamentary powers.
Fox was matchless in declamation, alternately solemn and touching;
Sheridan, Grey, and a long list of practised and indefatigable talent,
were in perpetual debate; but Pitt, "with huge two-handed sway", finally
crushed them all. The classic illustration of Hercules destroying the
Hydra, was frequently used to express the solitary prowess of this
extraordinary man in resisting the multiplied, wily, and envenomed
attacks of his opponents; and he realized the fable to the full--he
not merely crushed the heads, but he seared them. He extinguished that
principle of evil increase, by which all the efforts of foreign
governments had been baffled in their contests with Jacobinism; and in
the midst of an empire at all times inclined to look with jealousy on
power, and at that moment nervous for the suspended privileges of its
constitution, Pitt utterly extinguished the Whigs. Fox was defeated so
hopelessly, that he gave up Parliament altogether, and his party
followed his example. Pitt had not merely cut down the statelier trunks
of Opposition, but he had swept away the brushwood, and smote the ground
with sterility. His bold enterprise had not merely taken the citadel Of
faction by storm, and driven its defenders, faint-hearted and fugitive,
over the face of the land, but he had sown the foundations with salt.
The total solitude of the Opposition benches, during the greater part of
the minister's political life, was the most unequivocal and striking
evidence ever given to ministerial supremacy.

The services of the attorney-general were in another less wide, but not
less important province. On the Continent, the conspirators against the
state would have been thrown into dungeon for life, or shot. In France,
the idol of the revolutionist of all countries, they would heave been
carried before a mob tribunal, their names simply asked, their sentences
pronounced, and their bodies headless within the first half hour. In
England, they had the benefit of the law in all its sincerity, the
assistance of the most distinguished counsel, the judgment of the most
impartial tribunal, and the incalculable advantage of a trial by men of
their own condition, feelings, and passions. On the 28th of October, at
the Old Bailey, commenced the trial of Hardy, one of the secretaries of
the chief treasonable society. The bill brought in by the grand jury had
included twelve. The charges were those of "compassing the death of the
king, and the subversion of the government." Hardy was a shoemaker, a
man of low attainments, but active, and strongly republican. His
activity had made him secretary to the London Corresponding Society, and
by its direction a member of a similar body, named the Society for
Constitutional Information. The direct object of all those societies was
the same--to summon a national convention, which must, of course,
supersede Parliament. As those societies grew more mature, instead of
becoming more rational they exhibited more savage ferocity. Placards
were distributed in the form of a playbill, announcing, "For the Benefit
of John Bull, La Guillotine," or, "George's Head in a Basket." The airs
of their meetings were Ca Ira and the Marseillaise. Attempts were made
to corrupt the army. It was openly declared in their harangues, that it
was "impossible to do any thing without some bloodshed, and that Pitt's
and the King's heads would be upon Temple Bar." The sentiment was
general, but at the conclusion of the especial harangue in which this
atrocious language was first used, the whole meeting rose up, and shook
hands with the madman by whom it was uttered.

The attorney-general's speech on this occasion was masterly; English
jurisprudence had never before witnessed so striking a combination of
refined knowledge with clear arrangement and unanswerable facts. It had
one disadvantage, it was overwhelmingly long; it lasted nine hours, a
period, if not beyond the strength of the advocate, palpably beyond any
power of attention in the jury. But even this disadvantage arose from an
honourable public feeling. The judges who examined the papers declared
them to be high treason. The warrants of commitment had declared them to
be high treason. Lord Eldon, in his "anecdotes" of this period, says,
that, "after this, he did not think himself at liberty to _let down_ the
character of the offence." An additional and still stronger reason is
given, that "unless the _whole_ evidence was laid before the jury, it
would have been impossible that the country should have ever been made
fully acquainted with the danger to which it was exposed. And it
appeared to him more essential to the public safety that the whole of
those transactions should be published, than _that any of these
individuals should be convicted_." This was a sentiment which does
honour to the memory of a great man. He had been urged by his fellow
counsel, and probably by others, to bring the accused to trial only for
a misdemeanour, in the expectation of thus being sure of a verdict. But
he determined to bring the case before the jury in its true shape, be
the result what it might. It has been rumoured that this, too, was the
opinion of Pitt, in contradiction to that of some of the cabinet. With
that pre-eminent man the blood of these criminals could never have been
the object. No servant of the British crown was ever less chargeable
with cruelty. But the true object was, to expose the treason; to prove
to the nation the actual hazards of revolutionary intrigue, and to
extinguish conspiracy, however the conspirators might escape. The
consequence amply justified this bold and candid determination. _The_
conspiracy was crushed; all conspiracy was crushed. Nothing of the same
degree of guilt, nor even of the same shape of guilt, ever recurred. The
lesson was not the less complete, for its sparing the country the sight
of the abhorred scaffold. The conspirators, though successively
acquitted, were so warned by their peril that they never sinned again.
All, if not converted, sank into total obscurity. The nation, freed from
this nightmare, started up in fresh vigour, and began, with a unanimity
in its heart, and irresistible strength in its hands, that illustrious
battle for Europe, which accomplished the liberation of mankind.

The attorney-general had now given such undeniable proofs of fitness for
the highest rank of his profession, that office seemed to fall to him by
right of universal acknowledgment; and on a vacancy in the Common Pleas,
he was promoted to the chief-justiceship in 1799, and at the same time
raised to the peerage by the title of Baron Eldon. It is an instance of
the dutiful and affectionate nature, which long connexion with the world
and the pride of success--the two strongest temptations to
heartlessness--could not extinguish, that he made a point of writing the
first letter which he signed with his title to his aged mother. In this
interesting document, after mentioning his double promotion, and
attributing it, "under the blessing of Providence," to the lessons of
virtue which he had received from his parents; he adds--"I hope God's
grace will enable me to do my duty in the station to which I am called.
I write in some agitation of spirits; but am anxious to express my love
and duty to my mother, and affection to my sisters, when I _first_
subscribe myself, your loving and affectionate son, ELDON."

Lord Kenyon, then chief-justice of the King's Bench, pronounced a
panegyric on this promotion, congratulating the profession, and
especially those who practised in the Common Pleas, on the appointment
of one who would probably be found "the most consummate judge that ever
sat in judgment."

The step from the office of attorney-general to the presidency of one of
the courts, has been not unusual; but, as modern experience has shown,
it is by no means a necessary procedure. In Lord Eldon's instance, it
received the universal approval of the bar. But he held the
chief-justiceship only for a year and a half, when he was raised to the
summit of the bar, and sat down lord chancellor.

We hasten over the melancholy details of the following period. The
labours of the attorney-general were light and cheerful compared with
the toils and responsibilities of the chancellor; the disturbed state of
the king's mind; the growing difficulties of that millstone round the
neck of English legislation, the Popish claims; the retirement of Pitt,
and the general alarm of the nation at its external hazards, formed a
trial of unexampled severity to all public men. The death of the Great
Minister in 1806, (23d of January,) at length broke up the Tory
administration; the Whigs assumed power, and Lord Eldon, of course,
resigned the Seals.

But the mere official routine of a chancellor's life is tremendous. Lord
Eldon's account of one of his days, shows at what a price the honour of
the Seals must be purchased. In one of his letters he says--"Mine has
been no easy life. I will tell you what once happened to me. I was ill
with the gout, it was in my feet, and so I was carried into my carriage,
and from it was carried into court. There I remained all the day, and
delivered an arduous judgment. In the evening, I went straight from my
court to the House of Lords. There I sat until two in the morning, when
some of the lords came and whispered to me, that I was expected to
speak. I told them that I really could not, that I was ill, and could
not stand. It was an important question, (the peace of Amiens,) I forgot
my gout, and spoke for two hours. Well, the House broke up, I was
carried home, and at six in the morning I prepared to go to bed. My poor
left leg had just got in; when I recollected that I had important papers
to examine; so I put on my clothes, and went to my study. I examined the
papers; they related to the Recorders' Report, which had to be heard
that day. I was again carried into court, where I had to deliver another
arduous judgment. Again went to the House of Lords, and it was not till
the middle of the second night that I got into bed!" Such desperate
performances do not occur every day in the life even of lord
chancellors; but the judicial labours, combined with the political, are
too heavy a task for the body or the mind of any man.

The Whigs are never destined to a long supremacy. They have never come
into power but in some perverted state of the public feelings. There
must be some terror, or some infatuation, in the public mind, before it
calls in the quack; but the moment that sees quiet succeed to
disturbance, and the nation has recovered its composure, always sees the
Whigs driven out of office. The death of Fox, in 1806, unquestionably
deprived the party of a great popular name, but the whole strength of
Whiggism survived. It was in full possession of power, and the late
dissolution had filled Parliament with its adherents; still its old fate
prevailed. Like ships floating over the land only by the help of an
inundation, when the waters return to their channel the ships remain,
only to be broken in pieces, the Whig government was broken up never to
be restored, until a new convulsion in France, producing a corresponding
convulsion in England, brought them into office, after a lapse of
another quarter of a century.

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