Part 3 (1/2)

”His lords.h.i.+p,” continues Roger North, ”got a sight of the lady, and did not dislike her; thereupon he made the old man a visit, and a proposal of himself to marry his daughter.” By all means let this ingenuous, high-spirited Templar have a fair judgment. He would not have sold himself to just any woman. He required a _maximum_ of wealth with a _minimum_ of personal repulsiveness. He therefore 'took a sight of the lady' (it does not appear that he talked with her) before he committed himself irrevocably by a proposal. The _sight_ having been taken, as he did not dislike her (mind, he did not positively like her) he made the old man a visit. Loving money, and believing in it, this 'old man'

wished to secure as much of it as possible for his only child; and therefore looking keenly at the youthful admirer of a usurer's heiress, ”asked him what estate his father intended to settle upon him for present maintenance, jointure, and provision for children.” Mildly and not unjustly Roger calls this ”an inauspicious question.” It was so inauspicious that Mr. Francis North abruptly terminated the discussion by wis.h.i.+ng the usurer good-morning. So ended Love Affair No. 1.

Having lost his dear companion, Mr. Edward Palmer, son of the powerful Sir Geoffry Palmer, Mr. Francis North soon regarded his friend's wife with tender longing. It was only natural that he should desire to mitigate his sorrow for the dead by possession of the woman who was ”left a flouris.h.i.+ng widow, and very rich.” But the lady knew her worth, as well she might, for ”never was lady more closely besieged with wooers: she had no less than five younger sons sat down before her at one time, and she kept them well in hand, as they say, giving no definite answers to any of one of them.” Small respect did Mistress Edward Palmer show her late husband's most intimate friend. For weeks she tortured the wretched, knavish fellow with coquettish tricks, and having rendered him miserable in many ways, made him ludicrous by jilting him. ”He was held at the long saw above a month, doing his duty as well as he might, and that was but clumsily; for he neither dressed nor danced, when his rivals were adroit at both, and the lady used to shuffle her favors amongst them affectedly, and on purpose to mortify his lords.h.i.+p, and at the same time be as civil to him, with like purpose to mortify them.” Poor Mr. Francis! Well may his brother write indignantly, ”It was very grievous to him--that had his thoughts upon his clients' concerns, which came in thick upon him--to be held in a course of bo-peep play with a crafty widow.” At length, ”after a clancular proceeding,” this crafty widow, by marrying ”a jolly knight of a good estate,” set her victims free; and Mr. Francis was at liberty to look elsewhere for a lapful of money.

Roger North tells the story of the third affair so concisely and pithily that his exact words must be put before the reader:--”Another proposition came to his lords.h.i.+p,” writes the fraternal biographer, giving Francis North credit for the t.i.tle he subsequently won, although at the time under consideration he was plain _Mister_ North, on the keen look-out for the place of Solicitor General, ”by a city broker, from Sir John Lawrence, who had many daughters, and those reputed beauties; and the fortune was to be 6000. His lords.h.i.+p went and dined with the alderman, and liked the lady, who (as the way is) was dressed out for a muster. And coming to treat, the portion shrank to 5000, and upon that his lords.h.i.+p parted, and was not gone far before Mr. Broker (following) came to him, and said Sir John would give 500 more at the birth of the first child; but that would not do, for his lords.h.i.+p hated such s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g. Not long after this dispute, his lords.h.i.+p was made the King's Solicitor General, and then the broker came again, with news that Sir John would give 10,000. 'No,' his lords.h.i.+p said, 'after such usage he would not proceed if he might have 20,000.'” The intervention of the broker in this negotiation is delightfully suggestive. More should have been said about him--his name, address, and terms for doing business.

Was he paid for his services on all that he could save from a certain sum beyond which his employer would not advance a single gold-piece for the disposal of his child? Were there, in olden time, men who avowed themselves 'Heart and Jointure Brokers, Agents for Lovers of both s.e.xes, Contractors of Mutual Attachments, Wholesale and Retail Dealers in Reciprocal Affection, and General Referees, Respondents, and Insurers in all Sentimental Affairs, Clandestine or otherwise?'

After these mischances Francis North made an eligible match under somewhat singular circ.u.mstances. As co-heiresses of Thomas, Earl of Down, three sisters, the Ladies Pope, claimed under certain settlements large estates of inheritance, to which Lady Elizabeth Lee set up a counter claim. North, acting as Lady Elizabeth Lee's counsel, effected a compromise which secured half the property in dispute to his client, and diminished by one-half the fortunes to which each of the three suitors on the other side had maintained their right. Having thus reduced the estate of Lady Frances Pope to a fortune estimated at about 14,000, the lawyer proposed for her hand, and was accepted. After his marriage, alluding to his exertions in behalf of Lady Elizabeth Lee's very disputable claim, he used to say that ”he had been counsel against himself;” but Roger North frankly admits that ”if this question had not come to such a composition, which diminished the ladies' fortunes, his brother had never compa.s.sed his match.”

It was not without reluctance that the Countess of Downs consented to the union of her daughter with the lawyer who had half ruined her, and who (though he was Solicitor General and in fine practice) could settle only 5000 upon the lady. ”I well remember,” observes Roger, ”the good countess had some qualms, and complained that she knew not how she could justify what she had done (meaning the marrying her daughters with no better settlement).” To these qualms Francis North, with lawyer-like coolness, answered--”Madam, if you meet with any question about that, _say_ that your daughter has 1000 per annum jointure.”

The marriage was celebrated in Wroxton Church; and after bountiful rejoicings with certain loyalist families of Oxfords.h.i.+re, the happy couple went up to London and lived in chambers until they moved into a house in Chancery Lane.

It may surprise some readers of this book to learn that George Jeffreys, the odious judge of the b.l.o.o.d.y Circuit, was a successful gallant. Tall, well-shaped, and endowed by nature with a pleasant countenance and agreeable features, Jeffreys was one of the most fascinating men of his time. A wit and a _bon-vivant_, he could hit the humor of the roystering cavaliers who surrounded the 'merry monarch;' a man of gallantry and polite accomplishments, he was acceptable to women of society. The same tongue that bullied from the bench, when witnesses were perverse or counsel unruly, could flatter with such melodious affectation of sincerity, that he was known as a most delightful companion. As a musical connoisseur he spoke with authority; as a teller of good stories he had no equal in town. Even those who detested him did not venture to deny that in the discharge of his judicial offices he could at his pleasure a.s.sume a dignity and urbane composure that well became the seat of justice. In short, his talents and graces were so various and effective, that he would have risen to the bench, even if he had labored under the disadvantages of pure morality and amiable temper.

Women declared him irresistible. At court he had the ear of Nell Gwyn and the d.u.c.h.ess of Portsmouth--the Protestant favorite and the Catholic mistress; and before he attained the privilege of entering Whitehall--at a time when his creditors were urgent, and his best clients were the inferior attorneys of the city courts--he was loved by virtuous girls.

He was still poor, unknown, and struggling with difficulties, when he induced an heiress to accept his suit,--the daughter of a rural squire whose wine the barrister had drunk upon circuit. This young lady was wooed under circ.u.mstances of peculiar difficulty; and she promised to elope with him if her father refused to receive him as a son-in-law.

Ill-luck befell the scheme; and whilst young Jeffreys was waiting in the Temple for the letter which should decide his movements, an intimation reached him that elopement was impossible and union forbidden. The bearer of this bad news was a young lady--the child of a poor clergyman--who had been the confidential friend and paid companion of the squire's daughter.

The case was hard for Jeffreys, cruel for the fair messenger. He had lost an advantageous match, she had lost her daily bread. Furious with her for having acted as the _confidante_ of the clandestine lovers, the squire had turned this poor girl out of his house; and she had come to London to seek for employment as well as to report the disaster.

Jeffreys saw her overpowered with trouble and shame--penniless in the great city, and disgraced by expulsion from her patron's roof. Seeing that her abject plight was the consequence of amiable readiness to serve him, Jeffreys pitied and consoled her. Most young men would have soothed their consciences and dried the running tears with a gift of money or a letter recommending the outcast to a new employer. As she was pretty, a libertine would have tried to seduce her. In Jeffreys, compa.s.sion roused a still finer sentiment: he loved the poor girl and married her. On May 23, 1667, Sarah Neesham was married to George Jeffreys of the Inner Temple; and her father, in proof of his complete forgiveness of her _escapade_, gave her a fortune of 300--a sum which the poor clergyman could not well afford to bestow on the newly married couple.

Having outlived Sarah Neesham, Jeffreys married again--taking for his second wife a widow whose father was Sir Thomas Bludworth, ex-Lord Mayor of London. Whether rumor treated her unjustly it is impossible to say at this distance of time; but if reliance may be put on many broad stories current about the lady, her conduct was by no means free from fault. She was reputed to entertain many lovers. Jeffreys would have created less scandal if, instead of taking her to his home, he had imitated the pious Sir Matthew Hale, who married his maid-servant, and on being twitted by the world with the lowliness of his choice, silenced his censors with a jest.

Amongst the love affairs of seventeenth-century lawyers place must be made for mention of the second wife whom Chief Justice Bramston brought home from Ireland, where she had outlived two husbands (the Bishop of Clogher and Sir John Brereton), before she gave her hand to the judge who had loved her in his boyhood. ”When I see her,” says the Chief Justice's son, who describes the expedition to Dublin, and the return to London, ”I confess I wondered at my father's love. She was low, fatt, red-faced; her dress, too, was a hat and ruff, which tho' she never changed to death. But my father, I believe, seeing me change countenance, told me it was not beautie, but virtue, he courted. I believe she had been handsome in her youth; she had a delicate, fine hand, white and plump, and indeed proved a good wife and mother-in-law, too.” On her journey to Charles I.'s London, this elderly bride, in her antiquated attire, rode from Holyhead to Beaumaris on a pillion behind her step-son. ”As she rode over the sandes,” records her step-son, ”behind mee, and pulling off her gloves, her wedding ringe fell off, and sunk instantly. She caused her man to alight; she sate still behind me, and kept her eye on the place, and directed her man, but he not guessing well, she leaped off, saying she would not stir without her ringe, it being the most unfortunate thinge that could befall any one to lose the wedding-ringe--made the man thrust his hand into the sands (the nature of which is not to bear any weight but pa.s.sing), he pulled up sand, but not the ringe. She made him strip his arme and put it deeper into the sand, and pulled up the ringe; and this done, he and shee, and all that stood still, were sunk almost to the knees, but we were all pleased that the ringe was found.”

In the legal circle of Charles the Second's London, Lady King was notable as a virago whose shrill tongue disturbed her husband's peace of mind by day, and broke his rest at night. Earning a larger income than any other barrister of his time, he had little leisure for domestic society; but the few hours which he could have spent with his wife and children, he usually preferred to spend in a tavern, beyond the reach of his lady's sharp querulousness. ”All his misfortune,” says Roger North, ”lay at home, in perverse consort, who always, after his day-labor done, entertained him with all the chagrin and peevishness imaginable; so that he went home as to his prison, or worse; and when the time came, rather than go home, he chose commonly to get a friend to go and sit in a free chat at the tavern, over a single bottle, till twelve or one at night, and then to work again at five in the morning. His fatigue in business, which, as I said, was more than ordinary to him, and his no comfort, or rather, discomfort at home, and taking his refreshment by excising his sleep, soon pulled him down; so that, after a short illness, he died.”

On his death-bed, however, he forgave the weeping woman, who, more through physical irritability than wicked design, had caused him so much undeserved discomfort; and by his last will and testament he made liberal provision for her wants. Having made his will, ”he said, I am glad it is done,” runs the memoir of Sir John King, written by his father, ”and after took leave of his wife, who was full of tears; seeing it is the will of G.o.d, let us part quietly in friends.h.i.+p, with submissiveness to his will, as we came together in friends.h.i.+p by His will.”

CHAPTER IX.

”CICERO” UPON HIS TRIAL.

A complete history of the loves of lawyers would notice many scandalous intrigues and disreputable alliances, and would comprise a good deal of literature for which the student would vainly look in the works of our best authors. From the days of Wolsey, whose amours were notorious, and whose illegitimate son became Dean of Wells, down to the present time of brighter though not unimpeachable morality, the domestic lives of our eminent judges and advocates have too frequently invited satire and justified regret. In the eighteenth century judges, without any loss of _caste_ or popular regard, openly maintained establishments that in these more decorous and actually better days would cover their keepers with obloquy. Attention could be directed to more than one legal family in which the descent must be traced through a succession of illegitimate births. Not only did eminent lawyers live openly with women who were not their wives, and with children whom the law declined to recognize as their offspring; but these women and children moved in good society, apparently indifferent to shame that brought upon them but few inconveniences. In Great Ormond Street, where a mistress and several illegitimate children formed his family circle, Lord Thurlow was visited by bishops and deans; and it is said that in 1806, when Sir James Mansfield, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, was invited to the woolsack and the peerage, he was induced to decline the offer more by consideration for his illegitimate children than by fears for the stability of the new administration.

Speaking of Lord Thurlow's undisguised intercourse with Mrs. Hervey, Lord Campbell says, ”When I first knew the profession, it would not have been endured that any one in a judicial situation should have had such a domestic establishment as Thurlow's; but a majority of judges had married their mistresses. The understanding then was that a man elevated to the bench, if he had a mistress, must either marry her or put her away. For many years there has been no necessity for such an alternative.” Either Lord Campbell had not the keen appet.i.te for professional gossip, with which he is ordinarily credited, or his conscience must have p.r.i.c.ked him when he wrote, ”For many years there has been no necessity for such an alternative.” To show how far his lords.h.i.+p erred through want of information or defect of candor is not the duty of this page; but without making any statement that can wound private feeling, the present writer may observe that 'the understanding,' to which Lord Campbell draws attention, has affected the fortune of ladies within the present generation.

That the bright and high-minded Somers was the debauchee that Mrs.

Manley and Mr. Cooksey would have us believe him is incredible. It is doubtful if Mackey in his 'Sketch of Leading Characters at the English Court' had sufficient reasons for clouding his sunny picture of the statesman with the a.s.sertion that he was ”something of a libertine.” But there are occasions when prudence counsels us to pay attention to slander.

Having raised himself to the office of Solicitor General, Somers, like Francis Bacon, found an alderman's daughter to his liking; and having formed a sincere attachment for her, he made his wishes known to her father. Miss Anne Bawdon's father was a wealthy merchant, styled Sir John Bawdon--a man proud of his civic station and riches, and thinking lightly of lawyers and law. When Somers stated his property and projects, the rental of his small landed estate and the buoyancy of his professional income, the opulent knight by no means approved the prospect offered to his child. The lawyer might die in the course of twelve months; in which case the Worcesters.h.i.+re estate would be still a small estate, and the professional income would cease. In twelve mouths Mr. Solicitor might be proved a scoundrel, for at heart all lawyers were arrant rogues; in which case matters would be still worse. Having regarded the question from these two points of view, Sir John Bawdon gave Somers his dismissal and married Miss Anne to a rich Turkey merchant. Three years later, when Somers had risen to the woolsack, and it was clear that the rich Turkey merchant would never be anything grander than a rich Turkey merchant, Sir John saw that he had made a serious blunder, for which his child certainly could not thank him. A goodly list might be made of cases where papas have erred and repented in Sir John Bawdon's fas.h.i.+on. Sir John Lawrence would have made his daughter a Lord Keeper's lady and a peeress, if he and his broker had dealt more liberally with Francis North. Had it not been for Sir Joseph Jekyll's counsel, Mr. c.o.c.ks, the Worcesters.h.i.+re squire, would have rejected Philip Yorke as an ineligible suitor, in which case _plain_ Mrs. Lygon would never have been Lady Hardwicke, and worked her husband's twenty purses of state upon curtains and hangings of crimson velvet. And, if he were so inclined, this writer could point to a learned judge, who in his days of 'stuff' and 'guinea fees' was deemed an ineligible match for a country apothecary's pretty daughter. The country doctor being able to give his daughter 20,000, turned away disdainfully from the unknown 'junior,' who five years later was leading his circuit, and quickly rose to the high office which he still fills to the satisfaction of his country.

Disappointed in his pursuit of Anne Bawdon, Somers never again made any woman an offer of marriage; but scandalous gossip accused him of immoral intercourse with his housekeeper. This woman's name was Blount; and while she resided with the Chancellor, fame whispered that her husband was still living. Not only was Somers charged with open adultery, but it was averred that for the sake of peace he had imprisoned in a madhouse his mistress's lawful husband, who was originally a Worcester tradesman.

The chief authority for this startling imputation is Mrs. Manley, who was encouraged, if not actually paid, by Swift to lampoon his political adversaries. In her 'New Atalantis'--the 'Cicero' of which scandalous work was understood by its readers to signify 'Lord Somers,'--this shameless woman entertained quid-nuncs and women of fas.h.i.+on by putting this abominable story in written words, the coa.r.s.eness of which accorded with the repulsiveness of the accusation.