they told me wonderful observations of God's providence in the affairs of the war, and in the business of the army's coming to London and seizing the members of the House, in all which were miraculous passages. As they went home from my house their coach was stopped, and they examined by the guards, to whom they told their names; but the captain of the guards would not believe them, and threatened to carry these two great officers to the court of guard. Ireton grew a little angry, but Cromwell was cheerful with the soldiers, gave them twenty shillings, and commended them and their captain for doing their duty."*

CHAPTER LXX.

LORDS KEEPERS FROM THE ADOPTION OF THE REPUBLICAN GREAT SEAL TILL CROMWELL BECAME PROTECTOR."

THERE were nominally three Lords Commissioners of the Great Seal, but Whitelock was chiefly looked to; and it [A. D. 1649.] is allowed that, though sometimes much harassed by his colleagues, he presided in the Court of Chancery with impartiality and ability. He was powerfully assisted by Lenthal, who continued Master of the Rolls as well as Speaker, and though occupied at Westminster in the morning, held sittings in the evening at his official house in Chancery Lane.

That the example which the parliament had set might not be imitated, an ordinance was passed to make it high treason to counterfeit the new Great Seal.t

The Lords Commissioners were ordered “ "to take care that all indictments, outlawries, and other acts against any person for adhering to the parliament remaining upon record be searched out, taken off the file, cancelled, and burnt, as things scandalous and void."‡

While Cromwell was engaged in his Scotch and Irish campaigns, the march of government was smooth and regular in London, and the holders of the Great Seal were engaged in few transactions which require our notice.

On the 5th of April, 1649, they were ordered to assist at the solemnity of the Lord Mayor-elect being presented to the House of Commons for approbation, when Lord Commissioner Whitelock, taking the purse containing the Great Seal by one corner, and Lord Commissioner Lisle by the other, they carried it up, making obeisances to the Speaker, and laid it on the table, both being in their black velvet gowns; but they were not allowed, as in times

*Whit. Mem. 384.

† Schobell's Acts, A.D. 1649, c. 44.

‡ Whit, 449.

of royalty, to express approbation of the choice of the citizens, this task being now performed by the Speaker, as organ of the supreme authority of the state.

Whitelock, in his "Memorials," presents to us a very amusing account of a grand banquet given soon after at Guildhall by the City to the Parliament. The Lord Mayor, when at Temple Bar he met the members of the Commons' House coming in procession, delivered the sword of State carried before him, into the hands of the Speaker, who graciously restored it to him, after the fashion of the Kings of England. The highest place at the table was assigned to the Speaker, and the next to the Lord General. The Earl of Pembroke then called upon Whitelock, as first Commissioner, to be seated; and on his wishing the old courtier to sit above him, said, in a loud voice to be heard over the whole hall, “What; do you think that I will sit down before you? I have given place heretofore to Bishop Williams, to my Lord Coventry, and my Lord Littleton: you have the same place that they had, and as much honour belongs to the place under a Commonwealth as under a King, and you are a gentlemen as well born and bred as any of them; therefore I will not sit down before you." Whitelock yielded and had the Earl of Pembroke next him,-the President of the Council and the other Commissioners of the Great Seal sitting lower down.* There seems to have been full as much importance attached to such trifles in these republican times as at the Court of Charles I.

A house and grounds at Chelsea, belonging to the Duke of Buckingham, now in exile, were assigned to the Lords Commissioners as a private residence. Their general scal days after term they held in the hall of the Middle Temple, of which Lord Commissioner Whitelock continued a bencher.

Six of the common law Judges having refused to act under the parliament, others of learning and character were appointed in their stead, and Lord Commissioner Whitelock, in swearing them in, congratulated them on being the first Commonwealth Judges, and delivered to them a lecture of enormous length, on the duties of their office, which he deduced from the Druids, who were the Judges of the Britons, and the ancient Germans, "Graff" among whom signified both a Judge and a noble, showing the nobility of Judges."

Among Whitelock's faults and follies, it should be recorded to his honour, that he was most zealous and useful in preserving the medals, books, and monuments of learning, which having belonged to the King personally, had become the property of the state, and which certain Vandals were now eager to sell or to destroy.

I must likewise gratefully mention a noble defence which he made in the autumn of this year in defence of the profession of the law. One of Cromwell's cfficers, an ignorant fanatical fel

* Whit. Mem. Life of Whit. 99. 3 Parl. Hist, 1315,

low, had made a motion "that all lawyers should be excluded from parliament, or at any rate, while they sit in parliament they should discontinue their practice,"-introducing his motion with a violent invective against the conduct of lawyers both in and out of the House, and being particularly severe upon their loquacity in small causes, and their silence when the lives of their clients were at stake. Whitelock showed that the multiplicity of suits. in England did not arise from the evil art of lawyers, but from the greatness of our trade,—the amount of our wealth,—the number of our contracts,-the power given to every man to dispose of his property as he pleases by will,-and the equal freedom among us, by which all are entitled to vindicate their rights by an appeal to a Court of Justice. He showed that the silence of counsellors on capital cases was the fault of the law, which kept them silent; and “he ingenuously confessed that he could not answer that objection that a man, for a trespass to the value of sixpence, may have a counsellor to plead for him; but that, where life and posterity were concerned, he was debarred of that priviledge. What was said in vindication or excuse of that custom,— that the Judges were counsel for the prisoner,-had no weight in it; for were they not to take the same care of all causes that should be tried before them? A reform of that defect he allowed would be just.”* He then showed the valuable services of lawyers in parliament, instancing Sir Edward Coke, with whom he himself had had the honour to co-operate in the beginning of the late reign, and who had carried "the Petition of Right," and the cxertions of St. John Wilde, and others in the recent struggles. He likewise pointed out the oppressive laws passed at the Parliamentum Indoctum, from which lawyers were excluded. As to the Sarcasms on the lawyers for not fighting, he deemed that the gown did neither abate a man's courage or his wisdom, nor render him less capable of using a sword when the laws were silent. Witness the great services performed by Lieutenant General Jones, and Commissary Ireton, and many other lawyers, who putting off their gowns when the parliament required it, had served stoutly and successfully as soldiers, and had undergone almost as many and as great hardships and dangers as the honourable gentleman who so much undervalued them. With respect to the proposal for compelling lawyers to suspend their practice while they sat in parliament, he only insisted that, in the act for that purpose, it be provided that merchants should forbear their trading, physicians from visiting their patients, and country gentlemen from selling their corn or wool while they were members of that House." He was loudly applauded, and the motion was withdrawn.§

* But it was nearly 200 years before that reform came, and I am ashamed to say it was to the last opposed by almost all the Judges.

† Whitelock himself served with great distinction.

+ Life of Whitelock, 109-120.

§ Although on the rare occasions when it was my duty to speak while a member of the house of Commons I had the good fortune to experience a favourable hearing

mer.

Whitelock was a most zealous man and enlightened law reforThe long vacation of 1649 he devoted, with the assistance of Lenthal, the Master of the Rolls, Keble, his brother Commissioner, and two or three public-spirited barristers to a review of the practice of the Court of Chancery; and in the following term came out a most valuable set of " Orders" for correcting the abuses which had multiplied there during the late troubles, and for simplifying and expediting the conduct of suits in Equity.* These were the basis of the subsequent orders of Lord Clarendon, which are still of authority.

In the following year, on Whitelock's suggestion, a committee was appointed, over which he presided, to consider

generally the improvements which might be intro- [A. D. 1650.] duced in the body of the law and the adminstration of justice.

In 1652, Whitelock prevailed on the parliament to appoint Commisioners, not members of the House," to take into [A. D. 1652.] consideration what inconveniences there are in the law, and how the mischiefs that grow from the delays, the chargeableness, and the irregularities in the proceedings in the law may be prevented, and the speediest way to reform the same." At the head of this commission was placed that most learned and virtuous lawyer Sir MATTHEW HALE.

They proceeded with great vigour, meeting several times every week in the Chamber in which the Peers had formerly sat, ordering returns from the Judges and the officers in the different Courts with their fees and duties, examining the most experienced practitioners as to defects and remedies in legal process, and entering scientifically into the whole field of English jurisprudence. They made several valuable reports, but their labours were suddenly interrupted by the violent dissolution of the Long Parliament.

There had for some time been a coolness between Whitelock and Cromwell, in consequence of a conversation which had passed between them respecting the future plan of government to be adopted. The elated General, after the victories of Dunbar and Worcester, and the subjugation of Ireland, sounded the Lord Commissioner as to the expediency of actually putting the Crown upon his own head; when he was told frankly that the nation would greately prefer the Stuarts to the Cromwells, and he was

I must observe that there has subsisted in this assembly down to our own times, an envious antipathy to lawyers, with a determined resolution to believe that no one can be eminent there who has succeeded at the bar. The prejudice on the subject is well illustrated by a case within my own knowledge. A barrister of the Oxford circuit taking a large estate under the will of a distant relation, left the bar, changed his name under a royal licence, was returned for a Welsh county, and made his maiden speech in top-boots and leather breeches, holding a hunting-whip in his hand. He was most rapturously applauded, till he unluckily alluded to some cause in which he had been engaged while at the bar-and when it was discovered that he was a lawyer in disguise, he was coughed down in three minutes. In the other House of parliament there is no such prejudice against the law. * See Appendix to Beame's Collection of Chancery Orders.

VOL. III.

6

advised to send for Prince Charles and to make him King, on such terms as he might prescribe, whereby he might promote the good of the nation, and for ever secure the greatness of his own family.* Although Cromwell's carriage to Whitelock was thenceforth much altered, he summoned him to attend the meeting of officers of the army and leaders of the independent party, held at his lodgings in Whitehall, the night before he ordered the "bauble" to be removed from the table of the House of Com[A. D. 1653.] mons. It was here proposed that the Parliament, which had sat above twelve years, should be peremptorily required to pass an act to put an end to its existence, ostensibly, that the nation might express its will by new representatives,-but, in reality, that the military men might get possession of the civil offices which they considered the just reward of the perils they had undergone. Whitelock, assisted by Sir Thomas Widdrington, his late colleague, strenuously combated this project,-pointing out the glory and prosperity enjoyed under the existing system, and the danger of the attempt to set up a new government, which must lead to tyranny or anarchy, and strongly asserting that to plot against that authority which they had sworn to respect, was neither consonant to prudence nor justifiable in conscience. The officers of the army, however, inveighed bitterly against the parliament, and declared violently for a change. Cromwell reproved them for these expressions of opinion,-from which those who knew him best conjectured that he had prompted their project, and that he was resolved at all risks to support it. The conference lasted till late at night, when my Lord Commissioner Whitelock went home weary and much troubled in his mind to see the ingratitude and indiscretion of these men. The meeting was resumed before day-light next morning, and Cromwell himself proposed that the present parliament should forthwith be dissolved by its own act, and that a joint council of officers of the army and those who had served in the House of Commons, should be appointed to rule the affairs of the republic till a new parliament could be assembled. Whitelock again earnestly protested against the formation of such a body, although it was proposed that he should belong to it, and he declared his resolution to stand by the parliament which had conferred such benefits on the country. They separated without coming to any agreement.

Historians profess themselves wholly at a loss to account for the open, imperious, and frantic manner in which Cromwell a few hours after expelled the members from the House,--which [APRIL 20.] they consider inconsistent with his general character. -not attending to the fact that to gain his object he

* Mem. 548. Cromwell had previously tried to soften him with a present of a horse and two Scotch prisoners."-" The horse," says Whitelock, "I kept for carrying me; the two Scots, unlucky gentlemen of that country, I handsomely sent home again without any ransom."-Mem. 484.