Atrocious Judges Part 18

The next victim demanded was Jeffreys, who (no one knowing that the great seal had been taken from him) still went by the name of "the chancellor,"

and who, of all professing Protestants, was the most obnoxious to the mult.i.tude. He retired early in the day from his house in Duke Street to the obscure dwelling of a dependent in Westminster, near the river side, and here, lying concealed, he caused preparations to be made for his escape from the kingdom. It was arranged that a coal ship which had delivered her cargo should clear out at the custom house as for her return to Newcastle, and should land him at Hamburg.

To avoid, as he thought, all chance of being recognised by those who had seen him in ermine or gold-embroidered robes, with a long white band under the chin, his collar of S. S. round his neck, and on his head a full-bottom wig, which had recently become the attribute of judicial dignity, instead of the old-fashioned coif or black velvet cap,--he cut off his bushy eyebrows, wont to inspire such terror, he put on the worn-out dress of a common sailor, and he covered his head with an old tarred hat that seemed to have weathered many a blast.

Thus disguised, as soon as it was dusk he got into a boat; and the state of the tide enabling him to shoot London Bridge without danger, he safely reached the coal ship lying off Wapping. Here he was introduced to the captain and the mate, on whose secrecy he was told he might rely; but, as they could not sail till next day, when he had examined his berth, he went on board another vessel that lay at a little distance, there to pa.s.s the night. If he had not taken this precaution, he would have been almost immediately in the power of his enemies. The mate, without waiting to see what became of him, hurried on sh.o.r.e, and treacherously gave information to some persons who had been in pursuit of him, that he was concealed in the Newcastle collier. They applied to justices of the peace in the neighborhood for a warrant to arrest him, which was refused, on the ground that no specific charge was sworn against him. They then went to the lords of the council, whom they found sitting, and who actually gave them a warrant to apprehend him for high treason, under the belief that the safety of the state required his detention. Armed with this, they returned to the coal ship in which he had taken his pa.s.sage, but he was not there, and the captain, a man of honor, baffled all their inquiries.

He slept securely in the vessel in which he had sought refuge; and had it not been for the most extraordinary imprudence, leading to the belief that he was fated speedily to expiate his crimes, he might have effected his escape. Probably with a view of indulging more freely his habit of intemperance, he next morning came ash.o.r.e, and made his appearance at a little alehouse bearing the sign of "The Red Cow," in Anchor and Hope Alley, near King Edward's Stairs, Wapping, and called for a pot of ale.

When he had nearly finished it, still wearing his sailor's attire, with his hat on his head, he was so rashly confident as to put his head out from an open window to look at the pa.s.sengers in the street.

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 _b.u.mmery bond_.[147] The contingency of losing all being showed, the bill was going to be dismissed;[148] 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.'"[149]

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 p.r.o.nouncing a decree in his favor about the "_b.u.mmery 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 mult.i.tude 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 a.s.sembled 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 a.s.saulted 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 sc.r.a.ping, 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 appet.i.te, 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 n.o.ble 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 compa.s.sion for malefactors, declares that he saw these agonizing alarms without pity.

The difficulty was greatest in pa.s.sing the open s.p.a.ce on Tower Hill. But at length the carriage pa.s.sed 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 doc.u.ment 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 a.s.sailed 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 h.e.l.l 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 G.o.d 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 pet.i.tion 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 pet.i.tioners 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 pet.i.tioners 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 t.i.tle 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 n.o.bility 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 b.u.mpers 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 doc.u.mentary 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.[150]

Considering the systematic form which equity jurisprudence had a.s.sumed 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 p.r.o.nounced.

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 trespa.s.s," refuses that aid "where life, estate, honor, and all are concerned," and lamented its existence, while he declared himself bound to adhere to it.[151] 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.

CHAPTER XVI.

ROBERT WRIGHT.

I now come to the last of the profligate chief justices of England; for since the Revolution they have all been men of decent character, and most of them have adorned the seat of justice by their talents and acquirements, as well as by their virtues. Sir Robert Wright, if excelled by some of his predecessors in bold crimes, yields to none in ignorance of his profession, and beats them all in the fraudulent and sordid vices.

He was the son of a respectable gentleman who lived near Thetford, in Suffolk, and was the representative of an ancient family, long seated at Kelverstone, in Norfolk; he enjoyed the opportunity of receiving a good education at Thetford Free Grammar School, and at the University of Cambridge; and he had the advantage of a very handsome person and agreeable manner. But he was by nature volatile, obtuse, intensely selfish, with hardly a particle of shame, and quite dest.i.tute of the faculty of distinguishing what was base from what was honorable. Without any maternal spoiling, or the contamination of bad company, he showed the worst faults of childhood, and these ripened, while he was still in early youth, into habits of gaming, drinking, and every sort of debauchery.

There was a hope of his reformation when, being still under age, he captivated the affections of one of the daughters of Dr. Wren, Bishop of Ely, and was married to her. But he continued his licentious course of life, and, having wasted her fortune, he treated her with cruelty.

He was supposed to study the law at an Inn of Court, but when he was called to the bar he had not imbibed even the first rudiments of his profession. Nevertheless, taking to the Norfolk Circuit, the extensive influence of his father-in-law, which was exercised unscrupulously in his favor, got him briefs, and for several years he had more business than North, (afterwards Lord Keeper Guilford,) a very industrious lawyer, who joined the circuit at the same time. "But withal," says Roger, the inimitable biographer, "he was so poor a lawyer that he could not give an opinion upon a written case, but used to bring such cases as came to him to his friend, Mr. North, and he wrote the opinion on a paper, and the lawyer copied it and signed under the case as if it had been his own. It run so low with him, that when North was at London, he sent up his cases to him, and had opinions returned by the post; and in the mean time he put off his clients upon pretence of taking more serious consideration."

At last the attorneys found him out so completely that they entirely deserted him, and he was obliged to give up practice. By family interest he obtained the lucrative sinecure of "treasurer to the chest at Chatham,"

but by his voluptuous and reckless course of life he got deeper and deeper in debt, and he mortgaged his estate to Mr. North for fifteen hundred pounds, the full amount of its value. From some inadvertence, the t.i.tle deeds were allowed to remain in Wright's hands, and being immediately again in want, he applied to Sir Walter Plummer to lend him five hundred pounds on mortgage, offering the mortgaged estate as a security, and a.s.serting that this would be the first charge upon it. The wary Sir Walter thought he would make himself doubly safe by requiring an affidavit that the estate was clear from all inc.u.mbrances. This affidavit Wright swore without any hesitation, and he then received the five hundred pounds. But the money being spent, and the fraud being detected, he was in the greatest danger of being sent to jail for debt, and also of being indicted for swindling and perjury.

He had only one resource, and this proved available. Being a clever mimic, he had been introduced into the circle of parasites and buffoons who surrounded Jeffreys, at this time chief justice of the King's Bench, and used to make sport for him and his companions in their drunken orgies by taking off the other judges, as well as the most eminent counsel. One day, being asked why he seemed to be melancholy, he took the opportunity of laying open his dest.i.tute condition to his patron, who said to him, "As you seem to be unfit for the bar, or any other honest calling, I see nothing for it but that you should become a judge yourself." Wright naturally supposed that this was a piece of wicked pleasantry, and when Jeffreys had declared that he was never more serious in his life, asked how it could be brought about, for he not only felt himself incompetent for such an office, but he had no interest, and, still more, it so happened, unfortunately, that the Lord Keeper Guilford, who made the judges, was fully aware of the unaccountable lapse of memory into which he had fallen when he swore the affidavit for Sir Walter Plummer, that his estate was clear from all inc.u.mbrances, the lord keeper himself being the first mortgagee. _Jeffreys, C. J._--"Never despair, my boy; leave all that to me."

We know nothing more of the intrigue with certainty, till the following dialogue took place in the royal closet. We can only conjecture that in the meanwhile Jeffreys, who was then much cherished at court, and was impatient to supersede Guilford entirely, had urgently pressed the king that Wright might be elevated to the bench as a devoted friend of the prerogative, and that, as the lord keeper had a prejudice against him, his majesty ought to take the appointment into his own hands. But we certainly know that, a vacancy occurring in the Court of Exchequer, the lord keeper had an audience of his majesty to take his pleasure on the appointment of a new baron, and that he named a gentleman at the bar, in great practice and of good character, as the fittest person to be appointed, thinking that Charles would nod a.s.sent with his usual easy indifference, when, to his utter amazement, he was thus interrogated: "My lord, what think you of Mr. Wright? Why may not he be the man?" _Lord Keeper._--"Because, sir, I know him too well, and he is the most unfit person in England to be made a judge." _King._--"Then it must not be." Upon this, the lord keeper withdrew, without having received any other notification of the king's pleasure; and the office remained vacant.

Again there is a chasm in the intrigue, and we are driven to guess that Jeffreys had renewed his solicitation, had treated the objections started to Wright as ridiculous, and had advised the cashiering of the lord keeper if he should prove obstinate. The next time that the lord keeper was in the royal presence, the king, opening the subject of his own accord, observed, "Good my lord, why may not Wright be a judge? He is strongly recommended to me; but I would have a due respect paid to you, and I would not make him without your concurrence. Is it impossible, my lord?" _Lord Keeper._--"Sir, the making of a judge is your majesty's choice, and not my pleasure. I am bound to put the seal as I am commanded, whatever the person may be. It is for your majesty to determine, and me, your servant, to obey. But I must do my duty by informing your majesty of the truth respecting this man, whom I personally know to be a dunce, and no lawyer; who is not worth a groat, having spent his estate by debauched living; who is without honesty, having been guilty of wilful perjury to gain the borrowing of a sum of money. And now, sir, I have done my duty to your majesty, and am ready to obey your majesty's commands in case it be your pleasure that this man be a judge." The king thanked the lord keeper, without saying more, but next day there came a warrant under the sign manual for creating the king's "trusty and well-beloved Robert Wright" a baron of his Exchequer, and orders were given for making out the patent in due form; and the detected swindler, knighted, and clothed in ermine, took his place among the twelve judges of England.

People were exceedingly shocked when they saw the seat of justice so disgraced; but this might be what Jeffreys intended; and one of his first acts, when he himself obtained the great seal, was to promote his _protege_ from being a baron of the Exchequer to be a judge of the Court of King's Bench.

Wright continued to do many things which caused great scandal, and, therefore, was dearer than ever to his patron, who would have discarded him if he had shown any symptoms of reformation. He accompanied General Jeffreys as _aide de camp_ in the famous "campaign in the west;" in other words, he was joined in commission with him as a judge in the "b.l.o.o.d.y a.s.size," and, sitting on the bench with him at the trial of Lady Lisle and the others which followed, concurred in all his atrocities. He came in for very little of the bribery; Jeffreys, who claimed the lion's share, tossing him by way of encouragement one solitary pardon, for which a small sum only was expected.

But on the death of Sir Henry Beddingfield he was made chief justice of the Common Pleas; and very soon afterwards, the unexpected quarrel breaking out between Sir Edward Herbert and the government about martial law and the punishment of deserters,[152] the object being to find some one who by no possibility could go against the government, or hesitate about doing any thing required of him, however base or however b.l.o.o.d.y, Wright was selected as chief justice of the king's bench. Unluckily we have no account of the speeches made at any of his judicial installations, so that we do not know in what terms his learning and purity of conduct were praised, or what were the promises which he gave of impartiality and of rigorous adherence to the laws of the realm.

On the very day on which he took his seat on the bench he gave good earnest of his servile spirit. The attorney general renewed his motion for an order to execute at Plymouth the deserter who had been capitally convicted at Reading for deserting his colors. The new chief justice, without entering into reasons, or explaining how he came to differ from the opinion so strongly expressed by his predecessor, merely said, "Be it so!" The puisnies now nodded a.s.sent, and the prisoner was illegally executed at Plymouth under the order so p.r.o.nounced.