A.D. 1708. IMPEACHMENT OF SACHEVERELL. 75 Although it did not suit party arrangements that King should be promoted to be a law officer of the Crown, he was now at the head of the bar for reputation and business, being not only the acknowledged leader of the Western Circuit, but retained in all the great causes which came before the common law courts at Westminster. His first judicial July 27, appointment was as Recorder of Glastonbury, where 1708. it is said that his forefathers had been settled; but if this pleased his feelings, it brought him no emolument and little éclat. He was introduced to the honours of the profession by the City of London, which has in several ages corrected the injustice of the government to eminent lawyers. On the death of Sir Salathiel Lovel he was elected Recorder of that great Corporation. Soon after, on the presentation of an address of congratulation from the City on Marlborough's bloody victory at Malplaquet, he was knighted by Queen Anne, although she looked upon him personally with no favour, by reason of his early connection with the Dissenters, and his present preference of the Low Church party. 1710. At the meeting of the new parliament in 1708 there was a strong inclination to propose Sir Peter King·as A.D. 1708— Speaker, but another section of the Whigs were resolved to have a country gentleman in the chair, and the whole party united in the election of Sir Richard Onslow, that they might keep out the Tory candidate. When the trial of Sacheverell came on, Sir Peter, in respect of his ecclesiastical lore, was selected to support the second article of the foolish impeachment, which charged the Doctor with having attacked the Toleration Act, by asserting "that he is a false brother with relation to God, religion, and the Church, who defends toleration and liberty of conscience; that Queen Elizabeth was deluded by Archbishop Grindal, a false son of the Church, and a perfidious prelate, to the toleration of the Genevese discipline; and that it is the duty of true Christian pastors to thunder out anathemas against all who do not approve of the discipline as well as the doctrines of the Church of England." Sir Peter's speech at the bar of the House of Lords was very long and elaborate, but cannot now be perused with much pleasure. He gives a history of the Reformation in England, with a list of the statutes to enforce conformity to the Church, and in ease of Protestant dissenters. He very ably defends Archbishop Grindal, and refutes the doctrine that the toleration of Protestant dissenters is antichristian; but he utterly fails in giving a satisfactory answer to the Doctor's plea, that "no words spoken of an archbishop 120 years since deceased will, in construction of law, amount to a high crime and misdemeanor," or in showing that the preaching of intolerance and bigotry from the pulpit was a fit subject of prosecution by the House of Commons. Says Sir Peter, in his peroration, "for the Doctor to come and say that though the Dissenters are tolerated by act of parliament, and though they are exempted by law from penalties, yet, be the law of the land what it may, let the ecclesiastical pastors do their duty, let them fulminate their excommunications, and thunder out their anathemas, and let the civil magistrate, the earthly powers, dare to reverse them if they can,' I submit this to your Lordships, whether this is not directly infringing the Queen's supremacy as well as weakening and censuring the toleration— which is what he is charged with in this article." m On a subsequent day he replied to the defence of the Doctor and his counsel on the second article, and turned, rather ingeniously, against them their argument that the Toleration Act could not alter the sin of schism. 66 Here is the force of the Doctor's argument: The Dissenters were schismatics before the Act of Toleration; as they were schismatics before, so they are schismatics still; it is the duty of all superior pastors to thunder out their anathemas against schismatics; when they thunder out these anathemas, they are ratified in heaven; whatever is ratified in heaven no power on earth can reverse; therefore, though the Dissenters be exempted from human penalties by the Toleration Act, and are thereby preserved in the free exercise of their religion and consciences, yet, notwithstanding that, let the superior pastors do their duty and thunder out their anathemas against them, and let any power on earth reverse those anathemas.' Have we not here an open defiance of the authority of parliament, and a direct incitement to a violation of the law of the land?" Sir Peter was supposed to acquit himself very creditably, but was rather thought to be too forbearing in dealing with the High Church party, and did not please the Government by any means so much as Parker, who furiously assailed the Doctor and his adherents, covering them with odium and ridicule, and was therefore made Chief Justice of the Court of Queen's Bench, on the vacancy now occurring by the lamented death of Holt." A.D. 1712. COUNSEL FOR WHISTON. 77 A.D. 1712. Mr. Recorder King continued to practise at the bar, till the conclusion of this reign, with undiminished reputation; but there is only one reported trial in which I find any account of his pleading, which was in the famous prosecution of "Wicked Will Whiston,' for heresy. This lover of eccentricity and paradox, when condemned before the Convocation and the Vice-Chancellor's Court at Cambridge, was without counsel; but when his case came, by appeal, before the DELEGATES, he was ably defended (without a fee) by our great theological lawyer, who showed that his notions of the Trinity were not Arian, but were founded on the Apostolical constitutions, and that, at any rate, the sentence against him was irregular, and ought to be reversed. Some bishops and doctors of the civil law, who were in the commission, were nevertheless strongly inclined to affirm the sentence, but no common law judge would join them, and, King boldly threatening them with a pramunire, they concurred in the acquittal. This prosecution, instituted by the High Church party, and meant as a set-off to Sacheverell's, was equally foolish and equally abortive. Bishop Burnet, who had tried to stifle it, said on the occasion, with excellent good sense, "I 0 15 St. Tr. 703-716; Som. Hist. Anne, 426; Tindal, ix. 91; 15 St. Tr. Although King met with unbounded gratitude at the time, afterwards, because he would not adopt the fantastical notions which, as an advocate, he had attempted to palliate, Whiston attacked, maligned, and, I believe, grossly misrepresented him. "Upon my application to him," says Will (probably in favour of a friend as wrong-headed as himself), "I found so prodigious a change in him, such strange coldness in matters that concerned religion, and such an earnest inclination to money and power, that I gave up my hopes quickly. Nay, indeed, I soon perceived that he disposed of his preferments almost wholly at the request of such great men as could best support him in his high station, without regard to Christianity; and I soon cast off all my former acquintance with him. Now, if such a person as the Lord King, who began with so much sacred learning and zeal for Christianity, was so soon thoroughly perverted by the love of power and money at Court, what good Christians will not be horribly affrighted at the desperate hazard they must run if they venture into the temptations of a Court hereafter; Exeat aulâ qui vult esse pius.". "When I was one day with the Lord Chief Justice King, one brought up among the dissenters at Exeter under a most religious, Christian, and learned education, we fell into a dispute about signing articies which we did not believe, for preferment; which he openly justified, and pleaded for it that we must not lose our usefulness for scruples.' Strange doctrine in the mouth of one bred among dissenters, whose whole dissent from the legally established church was built on scruples! I replied, that 'I was sorry to hear his Lordship say so; and desired to know whether in their Courts they allowed of such prevarication or not?' He answered, they did not allow of it;' which produced this rejoinder from me, 'Suppose God Almighty should be as just in the next world as my Lord Chief Justice is in this, where are we then?' To which he made no answer. And to which the late Queen Caroline added, when I told her the story, Mr. Whiston, no answer was to be made to it.'" Archbishop Wake, Archbishop Potter, and Lord King, Whiston sets down as "three excellent men utterly ruined by their preferment at Court."-Whiston's Memoirs, i. 35, 227, 314, 365. have ever thought that the true interest of the Christian religion was best consulted where nice disputing about mysteries was laid aside and forgotten." About the same time Dr. Fleetwood, a Whig bishop, but so warmly attached to the Church as to be a favourite of Queen Anne, having published a volume of Sermons, with a Preface, in which he lamented that " God, for our sins, permitted the spirit of discord to go forth and sorely to trouble the camp, the city, and the country, and to spoil for a time the beautiful and pleasing prospect which the nation had enjoyed," this was construed into an insult on the government,—and, to annoy a low churchman, a complaint was made in the House of Commons against the author. He was denounced as an enemy to religion and good government, and some very violent Tories, trying to outdo the folly of their antagonists, proposed that he should be impeached. Sir Peter King warmly took up his defence, and contended that the Bishop, whether right or wrong, had not exceeded the limits of fair discussion. The Commons waived the impeachment, but, by a majority of 119 to 54, "resolved this Preface to be malicious and factious, highly reflecting on the present administration of public affairs under her Majesty, and tending to create discord and sedition amongst her subjects;" and condemned it to be burnt by the hands of the common hangman.P I cannot find any other occasion on which Sir Peter King distinguished himself, except the debate on the 8th and 9th articles of the treaty of commerce concluded at Utrecht, providing “that no higher duties should be imposed on the importation of goods from France than were payable for the like goods brought from any other country in Europe." I am sorry to say that he joined General Stanhope and several other eminent Whigs in opposing this measure of free trade, on the ground that our rising manufactures of linen, silk, and paper would be ruined by French competition; and as it was defeated by the clamours they excited for "protection to native industry," the favourable opportunity for establishing a reciprocally advantageous commercial intercourse with France was for ever lost. But I think my brother barrister may well be forgiven for his bad political economy in the very be P Tindal's Cont., xix. 537. Bishop Fleetwood, in a letter to Bishop Burnet, giving an account of this affair, pays a compliment to the defence set up for him by Sir Peter King and other gentlemen of the long robe. A.D. 1714. SUPPORTS THE PROTESTANT SUCCESSION. 79 ginning of the eighteenth century, when we find an enlightened nobleman, in the middle of the nineteenth, still condemning this treaty, observing, with undoubting confidence in the soundness of the old mercantile system," it has been calculated, on apparently good grounds, that, had the project passed, the annual balance against, or loss to, Great Britain would have been not less than 1,400,000l. ;" and quoting, with applause, the saying of a bishop profoundly ignorant of such subjects, that the treaty would have been disgraceful "if even we had been as often beat by the French as they had been beat by us. It has been alleged against Sir Peter King, that during the domination of the Tories in the latter part of Queen Anne's reign he showed an inclination to go over to them, and that he used some harsh expressions against Walpole when that distinguished Whig was most infamously expelled the House of Commons and sent to the Tower for alleged corruption in his office of Secretary at War: whereas Sir Peter most steadily adhered to his party and his principles through good report and evil report, and what he said of Walpole was that he deserved as much to be hanged as he deserved the punishment inflicted upon him, expulsion and imprisonment." He was a most zealous friend to the succession of the House of Hanover, and took an active part in supporting the Regency Bill, and counteracting the machinations of the Jacobites. After Parker's elevation to the bench, he was by far the most eminent Whig lawyer in the House of Commons, and upon a change of government his promotion was considered certain as he was so much esteemed by Lord Somers and Lord Cowper, who, in such an event, would regulate legal appointments. But the prospect still continued very gloomy till the death of the Queen, which suddenly reversed the respective positions of the rival factions. At the head of the grand procession of the lord mayor, aldermen, and citizens of London, to meet King George when he first entered the limits of their jurisdiction 9 Lord Mahon, i. 49. On the first division on the subject, Ministers had a majority of 252 to 130; but the bill to carry these articles of the treaty into effect was thrown out by a majority of 194 to 185. Had it reached the House of Lords, I am afraid it would have had no chance there, where the Whig party was still so powerful. "Free trade" A.D. 1714. |