Atrocious Judges : Lives of Judges Infamous as Tools of Tyrants and Instruments of Oppression

The Cabal was now in its full ascendancy; and as the leaders did not take any inferior members of the government into their councils, and contrived to prevent the meeting of Parliament for nearly two years, the new solicitor had only to attend to his profession. Of course, he gave up the circuit, and he set the example, generally followed for one hundred and fifty years, of making the Court of Chancery his principal place of practice, on being promoted to be a law officer of the crown; henceforth going to other courts only in cases in which the crown was concerned, or which were of very great magnitude. To keep up his law, when he could be spared from the Court of Chancery, he stepped across the hall and seated himself in the Court of King’s Bench, “with his note book in his hand, reporting as the students about the court did, and during the whole time of his practice every Christmas he read over Littleton’s Tenures.” He had hitherto practised conveyancing to a considerable extent; but he now turned over this business to Siderfin the reporter, whom he appointed to serve him in the capacity of “devil,” as he himself had served Sir Jeffrey Palmer. He was on very decent terms with Sir Heneage Finch, who had much assisted his promotion; but he showed his characteristic cunning by an expedient he adopted to get the largest share of the patent business. Then, as now, all patents of dignity belong exclusively to the attorney general; but the warrants for all other patents might be carried either to the attorney or solicitor. North, with much dexterity, took into his employment a clerk of Sir Jeffrey Palmer, who was reputed to have a magazine of the best precedents, and who had great interest among the attorneys, whereby many patents came to his chambers which otherwise would have gone to the attorney general’s.

But if he was eager to get money, he spent it freely. He was now appointed “autumn reader” of the Middle Temple, and though the festivity was not honored with the presence of royalty, like Finch’s, in the Inner Temple, it was conducted sumptuously, and cost him above a thousand pounds. He took for his subject “The Statute of Fines,” which he treated very learnedly, and the arguers against him, the best lawyers of the society, did their part very stoutly. On the “Grand Day” all the king’s chief ministers attended, and the profusion of the best provisions and wine led to such debauchery, disorder, tumult, and waste, that this was the last public reading in the Inns of Court, the lectures being discontinued and the banqueting commuted for a fine.

I must not pass over his loves, although they were not very romantic or chivalrous. He was desirous of being married, among other reasons, because he was tired of dining in the hall and eating “a costelet and salad at Chastelin’s in the evening with a friend;” and he wished to enjoy the pleasures of domestic life. One would have thought that the younger son of a peer, of great reputation at the bar, solicitor general at thirty-one, and rising to the highest offices in the law, might have had no difficulty in matching to his mind; but he met with various rebuffs and disappointments. Above all, he required wealth, which it seems was not then easily to be obtained without the display of a long rent roll. He first addressed the daughter of an old usurer in Gray’s Inn, who speedily put an end to the suit by asking him “what estate his father intended to settle upon him for present maintenance, jointure, and provision for children.” He could not satisfy this requisition by an “abstract” of his “profitable rood of ground in Westminster Hall.” He then paid court to a coquettish young widow; but after showing him some favor, she jilted him for a jolly old knight of good estate. The next proposition was made by him to a city alderman, the father of many daughters, who, it was given out, were to have each a portion of six thousand pounds. North dined with the alderman, and liked one of them very much; but coming to treat, the fortune shrank to five thousand pounds. He immediately took his leave. The alderman ran after him, and offered him to boot five hundred pounds on the birth of the first child, but he would not bate a farthing of the six thousand.

At last his mother found him a match to his mind in the Lady Frances Pope, one of the three daughters and coheirs of the Earl of Down, who lived at Wroxton, in Oxfordshire, with fortunes of fourteen thousand pounds apiece. We are surprised to find that, with all his circuit and Westminster Hall earnings, he was obliged to borrow six hundred pounds from a friend before he could compass six thousand pounds to be settled upon her. He then ventured down with grand equipage and attendance, and in less than a fortnight obtained the young lady’s consent, and the writings being sealed, the lovers were happily married. The feasting and jollities in the country lasted three weeks, and Mr. Solicitor, heartily tired of them, was very impatient to get back to his briefs. However, he seems always to have treated his wife, while she lived, with all due tenderness. He took a house in Chancery Lane, near Serjeants’ Inn, and acquired huge glory by constructing a drain for the use of the neighborhood – a refinement never before heard of in that quarter. This was the happiest period of his life.

In the beginning of 1673, the meeting of Parliament could be deferred no longer, and it was considered necessary that the solicitor general should have a seat in the House of Commons.

He remained member for Lynn till he was made chief justice of the Common Pleas, in January, 1675; but I can hardly find any trace of his ever having spoken in the House of Commons.

Shaftesbury was at last turned out, the great seal was given to Sir Heneage Finch, and North became attorney general. He had for his colleague as solicitor his old rival, Sir William Jones, who seems to have been a considerable man, who afterwards had the virtue voluntarily to give up office that he might join the popular party, and who, if not cut off by an early death, would probably have acted the part of Lord Somers at the Revolution, and left a great name in history.

Parliament met in a few weeks after North’s promotion. We are told that “little or nothing of the king’s business in the House of Commons leaned upon him, because Mr. Secretary Coventry was there, who managed for the court.” North once or twice spoke a few words, “in resolving the fallacies of the country party,” but did not venture beyond an opinion upon a point of law which incidentally arose.

“He could not attend the house constantly, but took the liberty of pursuing his practice in Westminster Hall.”86 There he was easily the first; and the quantity of business which he got through in Chancery (“his home”) and the other courts where he went special seems to have been enormous. His mode of preparation was (like Lord Erskine’s) to have a consultation in the evening before reading his brief, when “he was informed of the history of the cause, and where the pinch was”. Next morning at four he was called by a trusty boy, who never failed, winter or summer, to come into his chamber at that hour,87 and by the sitting of the court he had gone through his brief, and was ready to do ample justice to his clients.

Fees now flowed in upon him so fast that he hardly knew how to dispose of them. He seems to have taken them from his clients with his own hand. At one time he had had a fancy, for his health, to wear a sort of skullcap. He now routed out three of these, which he placed on the table before him, and into these he distributed the cash as it was paid to him. “One had the gold, another the crowns and half crowns, and another the smaller money.” When these vessels were full, they were committed to his brother Roger, who told out the pieces and put them into bags, which he carried to Child’s, the goldsmith, at Temple Bar.88

But still Mr. Attorney was dissatisfied with his position. He could not but be mortified by his insignificance in the House of Commons. The country party there was rapidly gaining strength, and although it was not then usual for the crown to turn out its law officers on a change of ministers, he began to be very much frightened by threats of impeachment uttered against all who were instrumental in executing the measures of the government. Shaftesbury was in furious opposition. While only at the head of a small minority in the House of Lords, the House of Commons was more and more under his influence. North was exceedingly timid, always conjuring up imaginary dangers, and exaggerating such as he had to encounter. He now exceedingly longed to lay his head on “the cushion of the Common Pleas,” instead of running the risk of its being laid on the block on Tower Hill.

Vaughan, the chief justice of that court, died, and North’s wishes were accomplished, notwithstanding some intrigues to elevate Sir William Jones or Sir William Montagu. When it came to the pinch, North was rather shocked to think of the sacrifice of profit which he was making, “for the attorney’s place was (with his practice) near seven thousand pounds per annum, and the cushion of the Common Pleas not above four thousand. But accepting, he accounted himself enfranchised from the court brigues and attendances at the price of the difference.”

North held the office of chief justice of the Common Pleas nearly eight years, which may be divided into two periods – 1st. From his appointment till the formation of the Council of Thirty, on the recommendation of Sir William Temple, in the year 1679; 2dly. From thence till he received the great seal, in the end of the year 1682. During the former he mixed little in politics, and devoting himself to his juridical duties, he discharged them creditably.

At this time, and for long after, the emoluments of the judges in Westminster Hall depended chiefly upon fees, and there was a great competition between the different courts for business. The King’s Bench, originally instituted for criminal proceedings, had, by a dexterous use of their writ of “latitat,” tricked the Common Pleas of almost all civil actions; and when the new chief justice took his seat, he found his court a desert. There was hardly sufficient business to countenance his coming every day in term to Westminster Hall, while the serjeants and officers were repining and starving. But he was soon up with the King’s Bench, by a new and more dexterous use of the “capias,” the ancient writ of that court – applying it to all personal actions.

At this time, a judge, when appointed, selected a circuit, to which he steadily adhered, till another, which he preferred, became vacant. Chief Justice North for several years “rode the western;” and in his charges to juries, as well as in his conversation with the country gentlemen, he strongly inculcated the most slavish church-and-king doctrines, insomuch that the Cavaliers called him “Deliciæ Occidentis,” or “The Darling of the West.”

The chief justice afterwards went the northern circuit, attended by his brother Roger, who gives a most entertaining account of his travels, and who seems to have thought the natives of Northumberland and Cumberland as distant, as little known, and as barbarous, as we should now think the Esquimaux or the aborigines of New Zealand.

Till the Popish plot broke out, Chief Justice North had no political trials before him; and the only cases which gave him much anxiety were charges of witchcraft. He does not appear, like Chief Justice Hale, to have been a believer in the black art; but, with his characteristic timidity, he was afraid to combat the popular prejudice, lest the countrymen should cry, “This judge hath no religion; he doth not believe witches.” Therefore he avoided trying witches himself as much as possible, and turned them over to his brother judge, Mr. Justice Raymond, whom he allowed to hang them. He was once forced to try a wizard; but the fraud of a young girl, whom the prisoner was supposed to have enchanted and made to spit pins, was so clearly exposed by the witnesses, that the chief justice had the boldness to direct an acquittal.

The Popish plot he treated as he did witchcraft. He disbelieved it from the beginning, but was afraid openly to express a doubt of its reality. He thought it might be exposed by the press, and he got a man to publish an anonymous pamphlet against it, to which he contributed; but sitting along with Chief Justice Scroggs, who presided at the trial of those charged with being implicated in it, he never attempted to restrain this “butcher’s son and butcher” from slaughtering the victims.

So on the trial of Lord Stafford, though he privately affected severely to condemn the proceeding, he would not venture to save Lord Nottingham,89 the high steward, from the disgrace of assisting in that murder; and he dryly gave his own opinion that two witnesses were not necessary to each overt act of treason.

We have still more flagrant proof of his baseness on the trial of Reading, prosecuted by order of the House of Commons for trying to suppress evidence of the plot. North himself now presided, and having procured a conviction, in sentencing the defendant to fine, imprisonment, and pillory, he said, “I will tell you your offence is so great, and hath such a relation to that which the whole nation is concerned in, because it was an attempt to baffle the evidence of that conspiracy, which, if it had not been, by the mercy of God, detected, God knows what might have befallen us all by this time.”

We now come to present North on the political stage, where he continued to act a very conspicuous and disreputable part down to the time of his death. In the year 1679, when the king adopted his new plan of government by a Council of Thirty, of which Shaftesbury was made president, and into which Lord Russell and several of the popular leaders were introduced, it was thought fit to balance them by some determined ultra-royalists; and the lord chief justice of the Common Pleas, who had acquired himself the reputation of being the most eminent of that class, was selected, although he had not hitherto been a privy councillor. At first he seldom openly gave any opinion in council, but he secretly engaged in the intrigues which ended in the abrupt prorogation and dissolution of the Parliament, in the dismissal of Shaftesbury, and the resignation of Lord Russell and the whigs. The scheme of government was then altered, and a cabinet, consisting of a small number of privy councillors, was formed, North being one of them. To his opinion on legal and constitutional questions the government was now disposed to show more respect than to that of Lord Chancellor Nottingham.

There being much talk against the court in the London coffee houses, it was wished to suppress them by proclamation; and our chief justice, being consulted on the subject, gave this response – that “though retailing of coffee may, under certain circumstances, be an innocent trade, yet as it is used at present in the nature of a common assembly to discourse of matters of state, news, and great persons, it becomes unlawful; and as the coffee houses are nurseries of idleness and pragmaticalness, and hinder the consumption of our native provisions, they may be treated as common nuisances.” Accordingly, a proclamation was issued for shutting up all coffee houses, and forbidding the sale of coffee in the metropolis; but this caused such a general murmur, not only among politicians and idlers, but among the industrious classes connected with foreign and colonial trade, that it was speedily recalled.

The meeting of the new Parliament summoned in the end of 1679 having been repeatedly postponed, there arose the opposite factions of “Petitioners” and “Abhorrers” – the former petitioning the king that Parliament might be speedily assembled for the redress of grievances, and the latter, in their addresses to the king, expressing their abhorrence of such seditious sentiments. The “Petitioners,” however, were much more numerous and active, and a council was called to consider how their proceedings might be stopped or punished. Our chief justice recommended a proclamation, which the king approved of, and ordered the attorney general, Sir Creswell Levinz, to draw. Mr. Attorney, alarmed by considering how he might be questioned for such an act on the meeting of Parliament, said, “I do not well understand what my lord chief justice means, and I humbly pray of your majesty that his lordship may himself draw the proclamation.” King.– “My lord, I think then you must draw this proclamation.” Chief Justice.– “Sire, it is the office of your majesty’s attorney general to prepare all royal proclamations, and it is not proper for any one else to do it. I beg that your majesty’s affairs may go on in their due course; but if in this matter Mr. Attorney doubts any thing, and will give himself the trouble to call upon me, I will give him the best assistance I can.”

Sir Creswell, having written on a sheet of paper the formal commencement and conclusion of a royal proclamation, carried it to the chief justice, who filled up the blank with a recital that, “for spurious ends and purposes relating to the public, persons were going about to collect and procure the subscriptions of multitudes of his majesty’s subjects to petitions to his majesty; which proceedings were contrary to the known laws of this realm, and ought not to go unpunished;” and a mandate to all his majesty’s loving subjects, of what rank or degree soever, “that they presume not to agitate or promote any such subscriptions, nor in any wise join in any petition in that manner to be preferred to his majesty, upon pain of the utmost rigor of the law, and that all magistrates and other officers should take effectual care that all such offenders against the laws be prosecuted and punished according to their demerits.”90

Parliament at last met, and strong measures were taken against the “Abhorrers,” who had obstructed the right of petitioning. An inquiry was instituted respecting the proclamation. Sir Creswell Levinz was placed at the bar, and asked by whose advice or assistance he had prepared it. He several times refused to answer; but being hard pressed, and afraid of commitment to the Tower, he named the Lord Chief Justice North, against whom there had been a strong suspicion, but no proof. A hot debate arose, which ended in the resolution, “That the evidence this day given to this house against Sir Francis North, chief justice of the Common Pleas, is sufficient ground for this house to proceed upon an impeachment against him for high crimes and misdemeanors.”

He was a good deal alarmed by the vote of impeachment,91 but it raised him still higher in favor at court. Next day, presiding in the House of Lords as speaker, in the absence of the lord chancellor, and seeming very much dejected, King Charles (according to his manner) “came and clapped himself down close by him on the woolsack, and ‘My lord,’ said he, ‘be of good comfort; I will never forsake my friends, as my father did.’” His majesty, without waiting for a reply, then walked off to another part of the house.

A committee was appointed to draw up the articles of impeachment against the chief justice; but before they made any report, this Parliament too was dissolved.

Soon after the summoning of Charles’s last Parliament, North was obliged to set off upon the spring circuit; and notwithstanding his best efforts to finish the business rapidly, he could not arrive at Oxford till the two houses had assembled.

He was one of the small junto to whom was intrusted the secret of immediate dissolution. The moment the deed was done, he set off for London, pretending to be afraid of what he called “the positive armament against the king, which manifestly showed itself at Oxford.”

As soon as the Cabinet met at Whitehall, North advised the issuing of a Declaration to justify the dissolution of the three last Parliaments which had met respectively at Westminster and Oxford, and himself drew an elaborate one, which was adopted. This state paper certainly puts the popular party in the wrong upon the “exclusion question” and other matters with considerable dexterity, and it was supposed to have contributed materially to the reaction going on in favor of the government.

So far his conduct was legitimate, and in the fair exercise of his functions as a privy councillor; but I am sorry to say that he now sullied his ermine by a flagrant disregard of his duties as a judge. The grand jury for the city of London having very properly thrown out the bill of indictment against Stephen College, “the Protestant joiner,” it was resolved to try him at Oxford; and for this purpose a special commission was issued, at the head of which was placed Lord Chief Justice North. Burnet says mildly, “North’s behavior in that whole matter was such that, probably, if he had lived to see an impeaching Parliament, he might have felt the ill effects of it.” After perusing the trial, I must say that his misconduct upon it was most atrocious. The prisoner, being a violent enemy to Popery, had attended the city members to Oxford as one of their guard, with “No Popery” flags and cockades, using strong language against the Papists and their supporters, but without any thought of using force. Yet the chief justice was determined that he should be found guilty of compassing and imagining the king’s death, and levying war against him in his realm.92 College’s papers, which he was to use in his defence, were forcibly taken from him, on the ground that they had been written by some other persons, who gave him hints what he was to say. They were in reality prepared by his legal advisers, Mr. Aaron Smith and Mr. West. The prisoner was checked and browbeaten as often as he put a question or made an observation. His defence was much more able than could have been expected from a person in his station of life, but of course he was convicted. The chief justice, in passing sentence, observed, “Look you, Mr. College; because you say you are innocent, it is necessary for me to say something in vindication of the verdict, which I think the court were all well satisfied with. I thought it was a case that, as you made your own defence, small proof would serve the turn to make any one believe you guilty. For, as you defend yourself by pretending to be a Protestant, I did wonder, I must confess, when you called so many witnesses to your religion and reputation, that none of them gave an account that they saw you receive the sacrament within these many years, or any of them particularly had seen you at church in many years, or what kind of Protestant you were. But crying aloud against the Papists, it was proved here who you called Papists. You had the boldness to say the king was a Papist, the bishops were Papists, and the church of England were Papists. If these be the Papists you cry out against, what kind of Protestant you are I know not – I am sure you can be no good one. How it came into your head, that were but a private man, to go to guard the Parliament, I much wonder. Suppose all men of your condition should have gone to have guarded the Parliament, what an assembly had there been! And though you say you are no man of quality, nor likely to do any thing upon the king’s guards or the king’s person, yet if all your quality had gone upon the same design, what ill consequences might have followed! We see what has been done by Massaniello, a mean man, in another country – what by Wat Tyler and Jack Straw in this kingdom.” College asked him to fix the day of his death, but he answered that that depended on the king; adding, in a tone of great humanity, “that he should have due notice of it to prepare, by repenting of his crimes.” College’s innocence was so manifest, that even Hume, eager to palliate all the atrocities of this reign, says, “that his whole conduct and demeanor prove him to have been governed by an honest but indiscreet zeal for his country and his religion.” On the 31st of August, 1681, the sentence, with all its savage barbarities, was carried into execution. “Sir Francis North,” observes Roger Coke, “was a man cut out, to all intents and purposes, for such a work.”

He was next called upon to assist at the immolation of a nobler victim, who escaped from the horns of the altar. Shaftesbury had been for some time very careful never to open his mouth on politics out of the city of London and county of Middlesex, and during the Oxford Parliament had touched on no public topic except in the House of Lords. It was resolved at all hazards to bring him to trial; but this could only be done by an indictment to be found at the Old Bailey. There did North attend when the indictment was to be preferred, and, resolutely assist Lord Chief Justice Pemberton in perverting the law,93 by examining the witnesses in open court, and by trying to intimidate and mislead the grand jury; but he was punished by being present at the shout, which lasted an hour, when “Ignoramus” was returned.