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

I must prepare my readers for the scene which follows by relating, in the words of Roger North, an anecdote of the behavior of Jeffreys to a suitor in the heyday of his power and arrogance. “There was a scrivener of Wapping brought to hearing for relief against a bummery bond.¹⁴⁶ The contingency of losing all being showed, the bill was going to be dismissed;¹⁴⁷ but one of the plaintiff’s counsel said that the scrivener was a strange fellow, and sometimes went to church, sometimes to conventicles, and none could tell what to make of him; and it was thought he was a trimmer. At that the chancellor fired; and ‘A trimmer!’ said he; ‘I have heard much of that monster, but never saw one. Come forth, Mr. Trimmer, turn you round, and let us see your shape,’ and at that rate talked so long that the poor fellow was ready to drop under him; but at last the bill was dismissed with costs, and he went his way. In the hall one of his friends asked him how he came off. ‘Came off’ said he; ‘I am escaped from the terrors of that man’s face, which I would scarce undergo again to save my life, and I shall certainly have the frightful impression of it as long as I live.’”¹⁴⁸

It happened, by a most extraordinary coincidence, that this very scrivener was then walking through Anchor and Hope Alley on the opposite side of the way, and immediately looking towards “The Red Cow,” thought he recollected the features of the sailor who was gazing across towards him. The conviction then flashed upon his mind that this could be no other than the lord chancellor who had so frightened him out of his wits before pronouncing a decree in his favor about the “bummery bond.” But hardly believing his own senses, he entered the tap-room of the alehouse to examine the countenance more deliberately. Upon his entrance, Jeffreys must have recognized the “trimmer,” for he coughed, turned to the wall, and put the quart pot before his face. An immense multitude of persons were in a few minutes collected round the door by the proclamation of the scrivener that the pretended sailor was indeed the wicked Lord Chancellor Jeffreys. He was now in the greatest jeopardy, for, unlike the usual character of the English mob, who are by no means given to cruelty, the persons here assembled were disposed at first to tear him limb from limb, and he was only saved by the interposition of some of the more considerate, who suggested that the proper course would be to take him before the lord mayor.

The cry was raised, “To the lord mayor’s!” but before he could be secured in a carriage to be conveyed thither, they assaulted and pelted him, and might have proceeded to greater extremities if a party of the train-bands had not rescued him from their fury. They still pursued him all the way with whips, and halters, and cries of “Vengeance! justice! justice!” Although he lay back in the coach, he could still be discovered in his blue jacket, and with his sailor’s hat flapped down upon his face. The lord mayor, Sir John Chapman, a nervous, timid man, who had stood in tremendous awe of the lord chancellor, could not now see him, disguised as a sailor, without trepidation; and instead of ordering him to stand at the bar of his justice room, with much bowing and scraping, and many apologies for the liberty he was using, requested that his lordship would do him the honor to dine with him, as, it being now past twelve o’clock, he and the lady mayoress were about to sit down to dinner. Jeffreys, though probably with little appetite, was going to accept the invitation, when a gentleman in the room exclaimed, “The lord chancellor is the lord mayor’s prisoner, not his guest, and now to harbor him is treason, for which any one, however high, may have to answer with his own blood.” The lord mayor swooned away, and died (it is said of apoplexy) soon after.

The numbers and violence of the mob had greatly increased from the delay in examining the culprit, and they loudly threatened to take the law into their own hand. Some were for examining him before an alderman, and leading him out by a back way for that purpose; but he himself showed most prudence by advising that, without any previous examination, he should be committed to the Tower for safe custody, and that two other regiments of the train-bands should be ordered up to conduct him thither. In the confusion, he offered to draw the warrant for his own commitment. This course was followed, but was by no means free from danger, the mob defying the matchlocks and pikes of the soldiers, and pressing round the coach in which the noble prisoner was carried, still flourishing the whips and halters, and expressing their determined resolution to execute summary justice upon him for the many murders he had committed. Seeing the imminent danger to which he was exposed, and possibly conscience struck when he thought he was so near his end, he lost all sense of dignity and all presence of mind. He held up his imploring hands, sometimes on one side of the coach, and sometimes on the other, exclaiming, “For the Lord’s sake, keep them off! For the Lord’s sake, keep them off!” Oldmixon, who was an eye-witness of this procession, and makes loud professions of compassion for malefactors, declares that he saw these agonizing alarms without pity.

The difficulty was greatest in passing the open space on Tower Hill. But at length the carriage passed the drawbridge, and the portcullis descended. Within all was still. Jeffreys was courteously received by Lord Lucas, recently appointed lieutenant, and in a gloomy apartment, which he never more left, he reflected in solitude on the procession which had just terminated, so different from those to which he had been accustomed for some years on the first day of each returning term, when, attended by the judges and all the grandees of the law, he had moved in state to Westminster Hall, the envy and admiration of all beholders.

A regular warrant for his commitment was the same night made out by the lords of the Council, and the next day a deputation from their body, consisting of Lords North, Grey, Chandos and Ossulston, attended to examine him at the Tower. Four questions were asked him. 1. “What he had done with the great seal of England.” He answered “that he had delivered it to the king on the Saturday before at Mr. Cheffnel’s, no person being present, and that he had not seen it since.” He was next asked, 2. “Whether he had sealed all the writs for the Parliament, and what he had done with them.” “To the best of his remembrance,” he said, “the writs were all sealed and delivered to the king,” (suppressing that he had seen the king throw a great many of them in the fire.) 3. “Had he sealed the several patents for the then ensuing year?” He declared “that he had sealed several patents for the new sheriffs, but that he could not charge his memory with the particulars.” Lastly, he was asked “whether he had a license to go out of the kingdom.” And to this he replied, “that he had several licenses to go beyond sea, which were all delivered to Sir John Friend.” He subscribed these answers with an affirmation that “they were true upon his honor,” and the lords withdrew.

But no sympathy did he meet with from any quarter, and he was now reproachfully spoken of even by the king. The news of the outbreak against him coming speedily to Feversham, the fugitive monarch, who then meditated an attempt to remount his throne, thought that his chancellor might possibly be accepted by the nation as a scape-goat, and laid upon him the great errors of his reign. It happened, strangely enough, that the inn to which James had been carried when captured off Sheerness, was kept by a man on whom Jeffreys, for some supposed contempt of court, had imposed a very heavy fine, which had not yet been levied. Complaining of this arbitrary act to his royal guest, – who had admitted him to his presence, and had asked him, in royal fashion, “his name, his age, and his history,” – James desired him to draw a discharge as ample as he chose; and, establishing a precedent, which has been often followed since, for writing in a seemingly private and confidential document what is intended afterwards to be communicated to the public, he subjoined to his signature these remarkable words, which were immediately proclaimed in Feversham and transmitted to London: “I am sensible that my lord chancellor hath been a very ill man, and hath done very ill things.”

Jeffreys was assailed by the press in a manner which showed how his cruelties had brutalized the public mind. A poetical letter, addressed to him, advising him to cut his own throat, thus concluded: “I am your lordship’s obedient servant in any thing of this nature. From the little house over against Tyburn, where the people are almost dead with expectation of you.”

This was followed by “a letter from hell from Lord Ch – r Jeffreys to L – C – B – W – d.” His “confession,” hawked about the streets, contained an exaggerated statement of all the bad measures of the latter part of the preceding and of the present reign. Then came his “last will and testament,” commencing, “In the name of Ambition, the only god of our setting and worshipping, together with Cruelty, Perjury, Pride, Insolence, &c., I, George Jeffreys, being in sound and perfect memory, of high commissions, quo warrantos, dispensations, pillorizations, floggations, gibitations, barbarity, butchery, &c., do make my last will,” &c. Here is the concluding legacy: “Item, I order an ell and a half of fine cambric to be cut into handkerchiefs for drying up all the wet eyes at my funeral; together with half a pint of burnt claret for all the mourners in the kingdom.”

When he had been some weeks in confinement, he received a small barrel, marked “Colchester oysters,” of which, ever since his arrival in London when a boy, he had been particularly fond. Seeing it, he exclaimed – “Well, I have some friends left still;” but on opening it, the gift was – a halter!

An actual serious petition was received by the lords of the council of England from “the widows and fatherless children in the west,” beginning, “We, to the number of a thousand and more widows and fatherless children of the counties of Dorset, Somerset, and Devon; our dear husbands and tender fathers having been so tyrannously butchered and some transported; our estates sold from us, and our inheritance cut off, by the severe and brutish sentence of George Lord Jeffreys, now we understand in the Tower of London, a prisoner,” &c. After enumerating some of his atrocities, and particularly dwelling upon his indecent speech (which I may not copy) to a young lady who asked the life of her lover, convicted before him, the petitioners thus concluded: – “These, with many hundred more tyrannical acts, are ready to be made appear in the said counties by honest and credible persons, and therefore your petitioners desire that the said George Jeffreys, late lord chancellor, the vilest of men, may be brought down to the counties aforesaid, where we the good women of the west shall be glad to see him, and give him another manner of welcome than he had there three years since.”

Meanwhile, the great seal, the clavis regni, the emblem of sovereign sway, which had been thrown into the Thames that it might never reach the Prince of Orange, was found in the net of a fisherman near Lambeth, and was delivered by him to the lords of the council, who were resolved to place it in the hands of the founder of the new dynasty; and James, after revisiting the capital and enjoying a fleeting moment of popularity, had finally bid adieu to England, and was enjoying the munificent hospitality of Louis at St. Germaine’s.

The provisional government, in deference to the public voice, issued an order for the more rigorous confinement of the ex-chancellor in the Tower, and intimated a resolution that he should speedily be brought to trial for his misdeeds; but, amidst the stirring events which rapidly followed, he was allowed quietly to languish out the remainder of his miserable existence. While the elections were proceeding for the Convention Parliament – while the two houses were struggling respecting the “abdication” or “desertion” of the throne – while men were occupied with discussing the “declaration of rights” – while preparations were making for the coronation of the new sovereigns – while curiosity was keenly alive in watching their demeanor, and while alarms were spread by the adherence of Ireland to the exiled king – the national indignation, which at first burst forth so violently against the crimes of Jeffreys, almost entirely subsided, and little desire was evinced to see him punished as he deserved.

However, considerable sensation was excited by the news that he was no more. He breathed his last in the Tower of London, on the 19th of April, 1689, at thirty-five minutes past four in the morning. Those who take a vague impression of events, without attention to dates, may suppose, from the crowded vicissitudes of his career, that he must have passed his grand climacteric, but he was still only in the forty-first year of his age.

On the meeting of the Convention Parliament, attempts were made to attaint the late Chancellor Jeffreys, to prevent his heirs from sitting in Parliament, and to charge his estates with compensation to those whom he had injured; but they all failed, and no mark of public censure was set upon his memory beyond excepting him, with some other judges, from the act of indemnity passed at the commencement of the new reign.

We have no very distinct account of him in domestic life. Having lost his first wife, whom he had espoused so generously, within three months from her death he again entered the married state. The object of his choice was the widow of a Montgomeryshire gentleman, and daughter of Sir Thomas Bludworth, who had been lord mayor of London, and for many years one of the city representatives. I am sorry to say there was much scandal about the second Lady Jeffreys, and she presented him prematurely with a full-grown child. It is related that he was once disagreeably reminded of this mistake: when cross-examining a flippant female, he said to her, “Madam, you are very quick in your answers.” “Quick as I am, Sir George,” cried she, “I was not so quick as your lady.” Even after the marriage she is still said to have encouraged Sir John Trevor, M. R., and other lovers, while her husband was indulging in his cups.

He had children by both his wives; but of these only one son grew up to manhood, and survived him. This was John, the second Lord Jeffreys, who has acquired celebrity only by having rivalled his father in the power of drinking, and for having, when in a state of intoxication, interrupted the funeral of Dryden, the poet. He was married, as we have seen, to the daughter of the Earl of Pembroke, but dying in 1703, without male issue, the title of Jeffreys happily became extinct. He soon dissipated large estates, which his father, by such unjustifiable means, had acquired in Shropshire, Buckinghamshire, and Leicestershire.

In his person Jeffreys was rather above the middle stature, his complexion (before it was bloated by intemperance) inclining to fair, and he was of a comely appearance. There was great animation in his eye, with a twinkle which might breed a suspicion of insincerity and lurking malice. His brow was commanding, and he managed it with wonderful effect, whether he wished to terrify or to conciliate. There are many portraits of him, all, from his marked features, bearing a great resemblance to each other, and, it may be presumed, to the original.

“He had a set of banterers for the most part near him, as in old time great men kept fools to make them merry. And these fellows, abusing one another and their betters, were a regale to him.” But there can be no doubt that he circulated in good society. He was not only much at court, but he exchanged visits with the nobility and persons of distinction in different walks of life. In the social circle, being entirely free from hypocrisy and affectation, from haughtiness and ill-nature, laughing at principle, courting a reputation for profligacy, talking with the utmost freedom of all parties and all men – he disarmed the censure of the world, and, by the fascination of his manners, while he was present, he threw an oblivion over his vices and his crimes.

On one occasion, dining in the city with Alderman Duncomb, the lord treasurer and other great courtiers being of the party, they worked themselves up to such a pitch of loyalty by bumpers to “confusion to the Whigs,” that they all stripped to their shirts, and were about to get upon a signpost to drink the king’s health, when they were accidentally diverted from their purpose, and the lord chancellor escaped the fate which befell Sir Charles Sedley, of being indicted for indecently exposing his person in the public streets. But this frolic brought upon him a violent fit of the stone, which nearly cost him his life.

As a civil judge he was by no means without high qualifications, and in the absence of any motive to do wrong, he was willing to do right. He had a very quick perception, a vigorous and logical understanding, and an impressive eloquence.

When quite sober, he was particularly good as a Nisi Prius judge. His summing up, in what is called “the Lady Ivy’s case” – an ejectment between her and the dean and chapter of St. Paul’s to recover a large estate at Shadwell – is most masterly. The evidence was exceedingly complicated, and he gives a beautiful sketch of the whole, both documentary and parol; and, without taking the case from the jury, he makes some admirable observations on certain deeds produced by the Lady Ivy, which led to the conclusion that they were forged, and to a verdict for the dean and chapter.¹⁴⁹

Considering the systematic form which equity jurisprudence had assumed under his two immediate predecessors, Jeffreys must have been very poorly furnished for presiding in chancery. He had practised little before these judges, and none of their decisions were yet in print; so that if he had been so inclined, he had not the opportunity to make himself familiar with the established practice and doctrines of the court.

Although he must often have betrayed his ignorance, yet with his characteristic boldness and energy he contrived to get through the business without any signal disgrace, and among all the invectives, satires, and lampoons by which his memory is blackened, I find little said against his decrees. He did not promulgate any body of new orders according to recent custom; but, while he held the great seal, he issued separate orders from time to time, some of which were very useful. He first put an end to a very oppressive practice, by which a plaintiff, having filed a frivolous and vexatious bill, might dismiss it on paying merely twenty shillings costs, and he directed that the defendant should be allowed all the costs he had incurred, to be properly ascertained by an officer of the court. He then checked the abuse of staying actions at law for the examination of witnesses abroad, by requiring, before a commission to examine them issued, an affidavit specifying the names of the witnesses, and the facts they were expected to prove. By subsequent orders which he framed, vexatious applications for re-hearings were guarded against, and an attempt was made to get rid of what has ever been the opprobrium of the court – controversies about settling the minutes of a decree after it has been pronounced.

I have discovered one benevolent opinion of this cruel judge, and strange to say, it is at variance with that of the humane magistrates who have adorned Westminster Hall in the nineteenth century. “The prisoner’s convict bill” was condemned and opposed by almost all the judges in the reign of William IV., yet even Jeffreys was struck with the injustice and inequality of the law, which, allowing the accused to defend himself by counsel “for a two-penny trespass,” refuses that aid “where life, estate, honor, and all are concerned,” and lamented its existence, while he declared himself bound to adhere to it.¹⁵⁰ The venerable sages who apprehended such multiplied evils from altering the practice must have been greatly relieved by finding that their objections have proved as unfounded as those which were urged against the abolition of “peine forte et dure;” and the alarming innovation, so long resisted, of allowing witnesses for the prisoner to be examined under the sanction of an oath.

He has been so much abused, that I began my critical examination of his history in the hope and belief that I should find that his misdeeds had been exaggerated, and that I might be able to rescue his memory from some portion of the obloquy under which it labors; but I am sorry to say, that in my matured opinion, although he appears to have been a man of high talents, of singularly agreeable manners, and entirely free from hypocrisy, his cruelty and his political profligacy have not been sufficiently exposed or reprobated; and that he was not redeemed from his vices by one single solid virtue.