Long Robe should thenceforth have the privilege of practising within the bar.

On the 31st of October the two Speakers were sworn in, both Houses being present. The Earl of Manchester, standing in his [A. D. 1647.] place at the woolsack, took the following oaths:-1. The oath of supremacy. 2. The oath of allegiance. 3. The oath of office, which he read himself; and, 4. The oath under the triennial act, administered to him by the Clerk of the Crown. Then Lenthal had the same oaths administered to him,-the two first at the bar, the third read to him by the Speaker of the Lords' House. This being done, the Earl of Manchester went down to the bar, and the Great Seal being brought from the woolsack and taken out of the purse and opened, the Speaker of the Lord's. House took it into his hand, and said,—“ According to the ordinance of both Houses of parliament authorizing me to be a Commissioner of the Great Seal, I do receive and deliver it unto you (the Speaker of the House of Commons) as the other Commissioner."*

On the 2d of November the new Lords Commissioners began the business of the Seal, and a Judge and a Master in Chancery by turns assisted them; but their sittings were very irre[A. D. 1647.] gular, and there were heavy complaints of delays and ill-considered decrees. Their authority was set at defiance by Jenkins, a common-law Judge, who had stoutly adhered to the King, and had tried and executed several persons for taking arms against him. This spirited Welshman being brought up in custody for disobedience to the process of the Court of Chancery, was required to put in an answer to a bill filed against him, imputing to him gross fraud and breach of trust; but he told them "that he neither ought nor would submit to the power of that Court, for that it was no Court, and their Seal was counterfeit."

An ordinance being introduced to attaint him for this contumacy and his other misdeeds, he was brought to the bar to make his defence; but he refused to kneel, denied their authority, told them that they wronged the King, and that there could be no law without a King. The House fined him 10007. for his contempt. At another day he was specifically called upon to plead to the charges of having given judgment of death against men for assisting the parliament, having been himself in arms. against the parliament, having persuaded others to do the like, and having denied the power of the parliament; but he still said they had no power to try him, and he would give them no other answer. The attainder passed the Commons, but was allowed to drop in the Lords; and afterwards, in the year 1651, when the government was better established, on a slight submission Jenkins received a pardon under the Great Seal of the Commonwealth.†

It was meant that the present arrangement respecting the Great Seal should only be temporary, and a joint committee of the two Houses, consisting of fifteen Peers and thirty Commoners, repeatedly met in the

* Lords' Jour. viii. 552.

Whit. Mem. 291, 292, 301, 347, 389, 464, 511.

Painted Chamber, with the view of devising some plan that might be more satisfactory to the public. The Commons, now more and more under the influence of Cromwell, were for extending the [A. D. 1647.] self-denying ordinance to the Great Seal; but the Lords, feeling their influence declining, would not part with this remnant of their power, and came to a resolution "that among the Commissioners of the Great Seal there should be one or more members of their House." These disputes rendered it necessary that the time should be prolonged for which the two Speakers were to be the Lords Commissioners, and this was repeatedly done by ordinance, generally from twenty days to twenty days. But the King was now a prisoner: military despotism was established under the semblance of liberty, and the discerning saw that the struggle of the Peers to maintain their independence would be unavailing, and that every thing must bend to the mandate of Cromwell.

CHAPTER LXIX.

LORDS COMMISSIONERS OF THE GREAT SEAL FROM THE FIRST APPOINTMENT OF WHITELOCK TILL THE ADOPTION OF A NEW GREAT SEAL BEARING THE INSIGNIA OF THE REPUBLIC.

AMIDST the stirring political events which for some time occupied the public, the negotiations with the King at Holmby,-his

[A. D. 1648.] being violently carried off by Joyce,-his flight from Hampton Court,-his imprisonment in Carisbrook Castle,—and the attempts of the army to overpower the parliament,-the custody of the Great Seal, and the administration of justice in the Court of Chancery, excited little attention.

But in an interval of comparative quiet which occurred in the spring of 1648, loud complaints were heard of the absurdity of having for the two supreme Equity Judges a lay Peer, because he happened to be Speaker of the House of Lords, and the Speaker of the House of Commons, who, though he had been bred to the law, was now completely absorbed in his parliamentary duties.

In the hope of satisfying the people and reconciling the clashing pretensions of the two Houses, an ordinance was intro[MARCH 17, 1648.] duced into the Commons, and immediately passed, for the appointment of three new Lords Commissioners, the Earl of Kent, Bulstrode Whitelock, Esq., and Sir Thomas Widdrington, Serjeant-at-law. When the ordinance came up to the Lords, they insisted that there should be an equal number of their body appointed Commissioners, and added the name of Lord Grey de Werke,-with a proviso

* Lords' Jour. viii. 560, et seq.

that no act should be done by the Commoners, unless with the concurrence of one Peer and one Commoner. To these amendments the Commons reluctantly assented, and the ordinance was law.

Three of the new Lords Commissioners of the Great Seal were mere ciphers, and there would be no amusement or instruction in trying to trace their origin or their career; but WHITELOCK is one of the most interesting as well as amiable characters of the age in which he lived,— and as afterwards, on the deposition of His Highness the Lord Protector Richard, he was for a time sole Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under the Commonwealth, I am required to write his Life as if he had presided in the Court of Chancery and on the woolsack by the authority of an hereditary sovereign.

This distinguished republican lawyer was of an ancient family, and very proud of his seventeen descents recorded at the Herald's College. He was the only son of Sir James Whitelock, a Judge of the Court of King's Bench, and Elizabeth, daughter of Edward Bulstrode, Esq., of Hedgely Bulstrode, in the county of Buckingham, and sister of Bulstrode, the famous law reporter. He was strongly connected with the law, Sir George Croke, a Judge successively of the Common Pleas and King's Bench, and the publisher of law cases in three reigns,* being his mother's uncle. In the house of this venerable magistrate in Fleet Street, young Bulstrode Whitelock first saw the light, on the 6th of August, 1605.

After passing with credit through Merchant Taylors' school, he was entered in Michaelmas term, 1620, a gentleman commoner of St. John's College, Oxford. Laud was then the master of the College, and from him he received many kindnesses, which he never afterwards forgot. Having quitted the University (for what cause does not appear) without a degree he was placed in chambers in the Middle Temple, and commenced the arduous course of study necessary to [A. D. 1619.] fit him for the bar. His father was his instructer, and, together with the sound maxims of the common law, early imbued his mind with the principles of constitutional freedom, then little regarded among lawyers. The old Judge, when himself a practising barrister, had been subjected to a Star Chamber prosecution for a professional opinion he had given to a client upon the legality of a " benevolence" exacted by James I.; and when on the bench, he had differed from all his brethren in pronouncing against the power of the King and Council to commit to prison, without specifying in the warrant the cause of the commitment. Yet he conducted himself with such propriety, that Charles I. was forced to characterize him as "a stout, wise, and learned man, and one who

"But some amidst the legal throng

Who think to them thy streams belong,

Are forced to cite opinions wise,

Cro. Car.-Cro. Jac.-and Cro. Eliz."-Plead. Guide.

Judge Croke's Reports are thus cited by the names of the princes in whose reigns the cases were described.

+ Darnel's case, 3 St. Tr. 1.

knew what belonged to uphold magisirates and magistracy in their dignity." While a student, young Hyde was fond of joining amusement with instruction by acting as marshal to the Judges of assize. He himself tells us that, "according to the leave he had from his father, and by his means from the several Judges, he rode all the circuits of England to acquaint himself with his native country, and the memorable things therein."

par

In 1628 he was called to the bar, and went the Oxford circuit, of which he afterwards became the decided leader. He likewise rose into respectable practice in London. He sat, when very young, in the liament which passed the "Petition of Right," and without taking any prominent part in the debates, he steadily voted for that great measure. During the long intermission of parliaments which followed, he did not mix in politics, and he seems to have associated a good deal with the courtiers. Being now Treasurer of the Middle Temple, he [A. D. 1628.] formed an acquaintance with Mr. Attorney-General Noy,

to whom, he tells us, he thus came to be introduced. "A student of the Inn having died in chambers, the Society disbursed money for his funeral, which his father refused to pay. A bill was thereupon preferred against that gentleman in the Court of Requests, in the name of the Treasurer, ingeniously and handsomely setting forth the customs of the Inns of Court, with the whole matter, and praying that he might be compelled to pay the money so disbursed, with damages. Upon my carrying the bill to Mr. Attorney-General Noy for his signature, with that of the other Benchers, he was pleased to advise with me about a patent the King commanded him to draw, upon which he gave me a fee for it out of his little purse, saying, 'Here, take these single pence,' which amounted to eleven groats, and I give you more than an attorney's fee, because you will be a better man than an Attorney-General. This you will find to be true. After much other drollery, wherein he delighted and excelled, we parted, abundance of company attending to speak to him all this time."

Whitelock was principal manager for the Middle Temple of the fa[A. D. 1633.] confutation of "Histriomastix" against interludes, and he mous masque given to the Queen, by the Inns of Court, in has left us a most circumstantial and entertaining account of it. To him was committed "the whole care and charge of the music," which he assures us "excelled any music that ever before that time had been heard in England." His head was quite turned by the Queen's compliment," that she never saw any masque more noble or better performed than this was, which she took as a particular respect to herself, as well as to the King her husband, and desired that her thanks might be returned to the gentlemen of the Inns of Court for it."†

He now passed his vacations in Oxfordshire, affecting while there merely to be a country squire; yet, from his knowledge of the law, he

* As a proof of this he mentions that at the last assizes for the county of Oxford which he attended, thirty-five causes were tried, and he had forty-four retainers,— his ascendency being as great in the other seven counties on the circuit.

† Mem., p. 19.

+ Ibid. p. 22.

was called upon to preside as Chairman of the Justices of peace. Speak. ing of one instance which occurred in 1635, he gives us a statement containing a lively representation of the opinions and manners of the times. "At the Quarter Sessions at Oxford, I was put into the chair in Court, though I was in coloured clothes, a sword by my side, and a falling band, which was unusual for lawyers in those days, and in this garb I gave the Charge to the Grand Jury. I took occasion to enlarge on the point of jurisdiction in the temporal Courts in matters ecclesiastical, and the antiquity thereof, which I did the rather because the spiritual men began in those days to swell higher than ordinary, and to take it as an injury to the church that any thing savouring of the spirituality should be within the cognizance of ignorant laymen. The gentlemen and freeholders seemed well pleased with my charge, and the management of the business of the Sessions; and said they perceived one might speak as good sense in a falling band as in a ruff."* He now began gradually to associate himself with those who were resisting the arbitrary measures of the Court. He exerted himself very much in resisting the encroachments of the Crown upon the rights of the landholders in Whichwood Forest, and he assisted his kinsman, Hampden, in the great case of ship money. Yet he was always moderate, and he did not wish even to take advantage of the discontents of the Scots on account of episcopacy. "I persuaded my friends," says he, "not to foment these growing public differences, nor to be any means for encouraging a foreign nation, proud, and against our natural Prince." He still continued intimate with Hyde, Falkland, and the more reasonable reformers.

When the Long Parliament was summoned, he stood for Great Marlow, and was beaten by unfair means; but upon a petition

it was pronounced by the House of Commons to be a void [JAN. 1641.] election, and on a new writ being issued he was returned. He made his maiden speech, in the debate which arose upon the motion that Selden, and the other members of the House who were illegally imprisoned in 1629, should receive indemnification out of the estates of the Judges who had been parties to the judgment of the Court of King's Bench,his own father being alleged to be one of them;-and he at once defended his father's memory and his own patrimony, by showing that his father had expressed a clear opinion for admitting the defendants to bail, and had himself undergone persecution in behalf of the liberty of the subject.

So favourable an impression did he make by the earnestness and modesty of his demeanour on this occasion, that he was elected chairman of the committee appointed to draw up the impeachment against Lord Strafford, and employed by the House to manage the seven last articles of the impeachment. He objected to have any thing to do with one of them, which charged the Earl with a design of bringing over the army of Ireland for the purpose of reducing England to subjection, as not

* Mem. p. 23.