ART. VI.-POLITICAL LAWYERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH

CENTURY.

History of the House of Commons from the Convention Parliament of 1688-9, to the passing of the Reform Bill in 1832. By W. Charles Townsend, Esq. A. M. Recorder of Macclesfield. Vol. I. London. 1843.

FOUR complete chapters of this work are devoted to lawyers. This fairly brings it within our jurisdiction, and we gladly avail ourselves of the opportunity to bear testimony to the learning, judgment and ability with which Mr. Townsend has executed the first division of his task. What we feel most disposed to find fault with, is the title-page. Biographical notices of distinguished members, interwoven with notices of remarkable customs and events, do not constitute a history of the House of Commons; and we cannot help suspecting that this rather ambitious title was suggested by the publisher. The plan, particularly that portion of it which concerns lawyers, is explained in the Preface:

"A popular history of the House of Commons, furnishing biographical notices of those members who have been most distinguished in its annals, and describing the changes in its internal economy, powers, and privileges, appears to be still wanting in our literature. In vain we look for many a likeness in the national portrait-gallery of senators who have have achieved greatness within the walls of St. Stephen's Chapel; -the long array of Speakers, lawyers, country gentlemen, and men of the sword, marshalled in the procession of England's worthies, seems far from complete. How little is comparatively known of those who claimed precedence as first commoners in the land! The name of Powle, to whom belonged the peculiar honour of presiding over the Convention, sounds almost strangely in our ears; Sir John Trevor is chiefly remembered by the erroneous statement of Granger, that he put the question to the vote on his own expulsion; of the virulent declaimer Foley, the scheming Lyttleton, the one Smith,' who occupied the chair of the first parliament of Great Britain,-scarcely more than few empty titles and barren dates are recorded!

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"Nor have the great lawyers, who informed the debates with their constitutional knowledge, and whose merits are deeply graven in the statute-book, been more fortunate in obtaining an honest

chronicler.' The venerable trimmer, Serjeant Maynard, exhibiting, in his eighty-eighth year, the very impersonation of Chaucer's portraiture of

"A Serjeant-at-law, wary and wise,

That oft had been at the pervise,

There was also; full of rich excellence,
Discreet he was, and of great reverence;

thegentle Somers,' who redeemed his learned brothers from the charge, too common in that age, of universal corruption; the tainted learning of Sawyer and Williams; the stout-hearted Price, who rescued by his eloquence so fair a portion of the principality from the prodigal gifts of King William; the black-letter Jacobite Sir Bartholomew Shower, the impetuous Lechmere, who harangued the House immediately on taking the oaths, and was facetiously objected to by a country gentleman, as not having a right to speak, not being at the time a sitting member; the much-quizzed Sir Joseph Jekyll, 'that good old neutral member,'

"Who never changed his politics or wig,

deserve to be better known. Even the most exalted in professional rank, Cowper, Harcourt, King, Parker, have been consigned to the tender mercies of genealogists, and compilers of peerages, instead of having their names written in characters that may be read in the Fasti of their country."

Mr. Townsend begins his professional notices by dwelling on the gallant stand made by the great lawyers of the seventeenth century in the cause of the constitution, and endeavours to show that the profession was always an object of jealousy to those who sought to advance the undue influence of the Crown. Thus, lawyers were excluded from the famous lack-learning parliament (6 Hen. IV.) from a well-founded suspicion that they would resist the king's demands, and both James the First and his fated son Charles entertained an instinctive fear of them. James desires the House "to go on cheerfully in their business, rejecting the curious wrangling of lawyers upon words and syllables." Charles alleges, amongst other reasons for a dissolution, that "young lawyers sitting there take upon them to deny the opinions of the judges," &c. Strafford writes to Laud: "I disdain to see the gown-men hang their noses over the flowers of the crown, and blow and snuffle upon them till they take both scent and beauty off them." And again: And again: "How well this suits with. monarchy, when common lawyers monopolize all to be go

verned by their Year-Books, you in England have a costly experience."

Archbishop Whitgift complains to Burleigh: "The temporal lawyer, whose learning is no learning any where but here at home, being born to nothing, doth by his labour and travail in that barbarous knowledge purchase to himself and his heirs for ever a thousand pounds per annum, and oftentimes much more, whereof there are at this day many examples."

Bishop Goodman (temp. James I.), under the guise of a complaint, bears witness at once to their prosperity and influence:

"The lawyers usually had all the good matches in the kingdom, and there is not a mean lawyer but spendeth as much venison in his house as he doth that hath an ordinary park. I did once intend to have built a church, and a lawyer in my neighbourhood did intend to build himself a fair house. One sent to desire him to accept from him all his timber; another sent to desire he might supply him with all the iron. In the building of my church, where it was so necessary, for without the church they had not God's service. and no church was near them within four or five miles, truly I could not get the contribution of one farthing."

On the other hand they have been vehemently attacked, and not without reason, for subserviency. Thus Lord Halifax, at the Revolution of 1688, cautions the constituencies against choosing lawyers," who, almost all, had narrow minds, and by the whole scope of their studies found themselves pressed to adhere to the king and his prerogative." The truth is, precise-minded men will always be deemed narrow-minded by loose-minded; people in general, as we formerly observed, seldom give themselves the trouble of forming distinct notions on any subject till they are compelled; and if forced to define their own meaning, or kept strictly to the matter in hand, they are apt to get irritated and find fault with the logic which convicts them of inaccuracy. Any trained reasoners would be exposed to the same animadversion, but lawyers alone are regularly trained as reasoners. As legal studies, however, necessarily inspire a love of order and an attachment to establishments, lawyers, as a body, will be generally opposed to extravagant encroachments and hazardous innova

tions of all sorts. "Men who have more especially devoted themselves to legal pursuits," says M. de Tocqueville, “ derive from those occupations certain habits of order, a taste for formalities, and a kind of instinctive regard for the regular connection of ideas, which naturally render them very hostile to the revolutionary spirit and the unreflecting passions of the multitude."

At the same time, from the number of adventurers necessarily included in their ranks, individual examples will never be wanting to prove them either democrats or aristocrats, tools of power or tribunes of the people.

Mr. Townsend thus accounts for their unpopularity:

"For this general odium, the venality of some and tergiversation of other great lawyers, who trafficked with their powers of speech, may perhaps in some degree account.

"The exactions of Dudley, wresting the law to iniquity; the apostacy of Noy, suggesting in his guilty flight the impost of shipmoney; the late repentance of Coke, becoming in his old age, but not till then, a tribune of the people, may in part explain this deeprooted aversion. But a still stronger motive of dislike may be traced to the trivial jealousy which the weak entertain against the strong, depreciating those arts of oratory with which themselves may be unacquainted; undervaluing that research and laborious investigation for which they have neither leisure nor capacity; measuring by a money standard, those acquirements which, though it may retain, gold cannot purchase. The gift of ready elocution, the self-possession, apt address, unfailing facility of speech, and those attendant evils, the habits of prolixity and repetition, an unsparing consumption of time, and minute subtlety, tend to weariness, and irritate and annoy the most impatient, the least merciful in criticism, of all audiences-a crowded House of Commons. Hence the frequent complaints we read of the house being laywer-ridden; of the garrulity of learned serjeants; of St. Stephen's being overwhelmed with the politicians of Westminster Hall, though they count but very few in a division."

He says that the number of lawyers in parliament in James the First's time was between twenty and thirty.

"When that king commanded the house, as an absolute king, to confer with the judges on a disputed return for the county of

1 Democracy in America, vol. ii. ch. 8.

VOL. XXX, NO. LXII.

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Bucks, they selected a committee of twenty-one lawyers and sixteen gentlemen-apparently all the lawyers in the house with the exception of Coke-comprising the eminent names of Serjeant Hobbard, Doddridge, Sir Francis Bacon, Yelverton, Lawrence, Hyde, Sir Roger Wilbraham, &c., yet has the return of practising barristers been always proportionably small. Of this compact phalanx there has been in modern times rather a diminution than increase, if we exclude those country gentlemen and men of large fortune who have been called to the bar, more as a matter of form than with any serious intention of pursuing the law as a profession, and on whom of course the esprit de corps must have little, if any weight. So long as the house still continue a legislative assembly, there must be some persons conversant with the language and interpretation of statutes, nor can they become numerically formidable, since the abolition of nomination boroughs. Their favour with large popular constituencies is not so proverbial, nor their wealth or influence so great, as to occasion, except in the minds of sensitive country gentlemen, an inordinate cause of alarm. Prynne's argument, that their exclusion would shorten the debates, can only be noticed with contempt. There may be serious evil in excessive discussion, but the forcible thrusting forth of argument, the carrying measures of government by the mere tyranny of numbers, is a far more serious evil, and abhorrent to the genius of the constitution."

We discussed this subject, including the questions-whether and why lawyers did not succeed in parliament, at some length in a former number. We may therefore proceed at once to the biographical notices.

"At the head of those distinguished lawyers who were summoned to the Convention Parliament may fairly be placed the venerable Maynard, then in his eighty-sixth year!

"To have toiled in his profession for sixty years with intellect and spirits unbroken; to have received a larger amount of fees than any serjeant, or utter barrister before his time; to have impeached some of the most eminent lay and spiritual peers, and to have been impeached himself and twice committed to the Tower; to have held rank and conciliated favour under five dynasties-for he partook more of the willow than the oak-and finally to have been first commissioner of the great seal at the age of eighty-five-are a few among the many singular incidents that illustrate the life of this remarkable man."

1 22 L. M. 270.