Attorney-General as above mentioned. In the Don Pacifico debate Lord
Palmerston had made the great speech of his life; and the law had been
prepared for him by Cockburn. On the fourth night of the debate Mr.
Cockburn replied to a long speech made by Mr. Gladstone against
Palmerston’s policy. At the end of his reply, according to a description
by Sir Robert Peel, “one half of the Treasury benches were left empty,
while honourable members ran one after another, tumbling over each other
in their haste to shake hands with the honourable and learned member.”
He remained Attorney-General in Palmerston’s Government until November,
1856; and thus it fell to him to conduct the Palmer prosecution. It is
worth mentioning that Cockburn’s reply at the end of the case was made
without a single note. Palmer had therefore against him the greatest
figure at the bar, and one of the most accomplished orators of his
generation. It was in November, 1856, that Cockburn gave up his enormous
income, and his Parliamentary position, to become Chief Justice of the
Common Pleas; and the rest of his distinguished career, until his death
in 1880, was spent in that office, or in that of Lord Chief Justice of
England, which under the Judicature Acts superseded the two ancient
Chief Justiceships. Sir Alexander Cockburn was of an ancient Scottish
family; he was several times offered a peerage, but declined; he was
never married, and his baronetcy expired with him.
* * * * *
JOHN EDWIN JAMES was forty-four years of age in 1856. “With the
appearance of a prize fighter,” he failed when he went on the stage as a
young man and played “George Barnwell.” His father, being a solicitor
and an officer of the city of London it was natural for him to turn to
the bar, and he was called at the Inner Temple in 1836, when he was
twenty-four. By 1856 he was a noted advocate, had been made a Queen’s
Counsel, was Recorder of Brighton, and had a professional income of
£7000 a year. He was member of Parliament for Marylebone in 1859; but in
1861 his retirement was announced. He was overwhelmed with pecuniary
difficulties, and owed £100,000. An inquiry by his Inn in 1861 showed
that he had in 1857 and 1860 inveigled a young man, a son of Lord
Yarborough, into debts of £35,000; had obtained, three years before the
trial, £20,000 from a solicitor by false misrepresentations; and in a
case in which he was acting for the plaintiff had borrowed £1250 from
defendant, promising to let him off easily in cross-examination. He was
disbarred; went to America in 1861; was admitted to the bar there and
practised; but in 1865 was playing at the Winter Garden Theatre, New
York. He returned to England in 1873, and failed in persuading the
judges to reconsider his case. He had married in 1861, but his wife
divorced him in 1863. After his failure to return to the bar he was
articled as a solicitor, but was not admitted; and he even offered
himself again as candidate for Marylebone. He practised as an expert in
American and English law, but sank into very poor circumstances, and a
subscription was being made for him when he died in 1882.
* * * * *
SIR WILLIAM HENRY BODKIN. Three years after the trial Mr. Bodkin was
appointed assistant judge of the Middlesex Sessions, and in 1867 was
knighted. He held his office until a few weeks of his death, in 1874, at
the age of eighty-three. At the time of the trial he was sixty-five, and
was the most distinguished of the practitioners in specialised criminal
business. In 1832 he had been appointed Recorder of Dover, after being
only six years at the bar. He acquired a large practice on the Home
Circuit and at the Middlesex, Westminster, and Kentish Sessions; he was
counsel to the Treasury at the Central Criminal Court in 1856, and was
_ex officio_ of the counsel for the Crown in prosecutions in that Court.
He retained this appointment until he was made a judge. As an expert on
the practice of the poor law and secretary of the Mendicity Society he
took great interest in poor law questions. In 1841 he had been returned
to Parliament as a Conservative member for Rochester, but lost his seat
at the election in 1847 for having supported Sir Robert Peel’s Corn Law
Bill. While he sat in Parliament he brought forward and passed an
important measure of reform as to the chargeability of irremovable poor,
which has become a permanent feature of our poor law system. Sir William
held several distinguished and important offices. He was President of
the Society of Arts, a Deputy-Lieutenant of Middlesex, and chairman of
the Metropolitan Assessment Sessions. By his marriage in 1812 to Sarah
Sophia, daughter of Peter Raymond Poland of Winchester Hall, Highgate,
he became connected with the family of the distinguished lawyer, Sir
Harry Bodkin Poland, whose own professional career has followed so
closely that of his uncle. Sir Harry Bodkin Poland succeeded him in his
Recordership of Dover and his office at the Central Criminal Court. This
family and legal connection alike suggested the dedication of this book
to Sir Harry Bodkin Poland. None of those who actually took part in the
trial are now living.
* * * * *
WILLIAM NEWLAND WELSBY had been called to the bar in 1826, was made
Recorder of Chester in 1841, and eventually became the leader on the
North Wales Circuit. When Sir John Jervis, who became Lord Chief Justice
of the Common Pleas, was made Attorney-General in 1846, Welsby was
appointed by him junior counsel to the Treasury; in other words, junior
counsel with the Attorney-General in all his legal duties, thence known
in English legal professional slang as the Attorney-General’s “devil,” a
very important and lucrative post, which generally leads to a judgeship.
It was probably his experience of criminal law in this office, and his
general reputation for knowledge of criminal law, founded on his editing
numerous law books as well as on his practice at the bar, that led to
his being associated with the Attorney-General at the trial. He had
enormous industry, and besides editing a large number of legal books was
an editor of one of the most celebrated series of Reports, the seventeen
volumes of “Meeson and Welsby,” the product of their reports for years
in the Court of Exchequer in the earlier part of Welsby’s career. He
died eight years after the trial, at sixty-one, without having reached
the bench, broken down, it was believed, by his excessive labours.
* * * * *
SIR JOHN WALTER HUDDLESTON (Mr. Baron Huddleston). A year after the
trial Mr. Huddleston was made a Q.C. From 1865 to 1875 he was
Judge-Advocate of the Fleet. In the latter year he became a judge of the
Common Pleas, and was afterwards transferred to the Court of Exchequer;
hence the name of Mr. Baron Huddleston, by which in later years he
continued to be known, even after the reconstitution of the Courts by
the Judicature Acts, when all the judges took the title of Justices of
the High Court. Huddleston was a remarkable man. His father was a
captain in the merchant service. He was educated at Trinity College,
Dublin, but did not take a degree, and he became usher in an English
school. He was called by Gray’s Inn in 1839, when he was twenty-four
years of age, so that he was forty-one at the time of the trial. He was
member of Parliament for Canterbury from 1865 to 1868, and for Norwich
in 1874 and until he was made a judge. He was a great advocate, but not
so great a judge. His reputation increased rather on the social than the
legal side. He had married in 1872 Lady Diana De Vere Beauclerk,
daughter of the ninth Duke of St. Albans, and he was accounted to be
ambitious most of all of social distinction. He was fitted for this, if
not by family connections, by his brilliance as a conversationalist, and
his gifts as a man of the world and his associations with the theatre
and the turf. His accomplishments included an extensive knowledge of
French literature and a facility of speaking in French which few
Englishmen have. He thus represented gracefully the English bar at the
funeral in 1868 of Berryer, the great French advocate, over whose grave
he made a speech in French. He died in 1890, aged seventy-five.
SIR WILLIAM SHEE. The leading counsel for Palmer, Mr. Serjeant Shee, was
in his fifty-second year; seven years afterwards he was appointed a
judge of the Queen’s Bench, the first Roman Catholic judge since the
Reformation. He was Irish, but educated at a French school in Somers
Town, London, subsequently at St. Cuthbert’s College, near Durham, where
his cousin, afterwards famous as Cardinal Wiseman, was, and then at
Edinburgh University. A student of Lincoln’s Inn when nineteen, he had
become a serjeant at law by 1840, and was one of the leading counsel in
London and on the Home Circuit. In 1852 he became member of Parliament
for Kilkenny, and represented it for five years. He had been prominent
as an advocate for Catholic Emancipation very early in his career, and
in Parliament he was a zealous promoter of measures connected with Irish
land tenancy, and dealing with the Church endowments, measures
precursory of later land legislation and the Disestablishment of the
Irish Church. He lost his seat for Kilkenny in 1857, and he never sat in
Parliament afterwards. In 1860, three years before he was made a judge,
he refused the Chief Justiceship of Madras. Four years after his
appointment, in 1868, he died of apoplexy at the age of sixty-three. It
is noticeable that though Serjeant Shee had been in most of the great
trials he had never defended in a murder trial until he defended Palmer.
We have referred to his declaration of belief in Palmer’s innocence; and
this was not the only point on which his speech was criticised at the
time. The leading legal Journal characterised it in terms which will
most likely be agreed with by the present-day reader, even more
decisively than by the reader of half a century ago, when the taste was
more for florid speaking than it is now. “The defence of Mr. Serjeant
Shee was clever, ingenious, and eloquent, but wanting in judgment and
taste. The peroration was a striking instance of this defect, for the
allusion to the family of the prisoner, and to his supposed affection
for his wife, grated sorely, and almost ludicrously, on the sense of
propriety in the face of the undisguised fact, known to all his
audience, that he was accused of murdering his wife, that he slept with
his maid servant on the very night she died, and that he had confessed
himself guilty of forgery upon his mother. Equally injudicious was the
philippic against the insurance offices. In worse taste still was his
solemn assertion to the jury that he was convinced by the evidence of
the prisoner’s innocence.”
SIR WILLIAM ROBERT GROVE. Palmer’s second counsel, Mr. Grove, Q.C., was
in one respect the most distinguished of all the persons who took part
in the trial. At the time he had a European reputation, but this was due
to his career as a scientific investigator, and not as a lawyer. Without
mentioning more, it is sufficient to say that he had published in 1846
the great book, “The Correlation of Physical Forces,” which placed him
in the front rank of European science. The book was translated into
French in the year of the trial. He had been called to the bar in 1835,
and was in 1856 forty-five; but he had ill-health, and he turned to
science rather than to practice. He was at his call a member of the
Royal Institution, and in 1844 he had become its vice-president. By 1853
his health had improved, and he was then a Q.C., having a practice
chiefly in patent and scientific cases; but he had also become a leader
on his Circuit. It was probably his scientific eminence that led to his
brief in the Palmer case. Grove was appointed a judge in 1871, retired
in 1887, and died in 1896 at eighty-five. He did not gain any special
distinction as a judge nor add to his scientific reputation after he
left the bench, though he published several scientific studies.
* * * * *
EDWARD VAUGHAN HYDE KENEALY was the junior counsel for Palmer, and was
thirty-seven years old. He was a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, in
1840, the year of his call to the Irish bar. In 1847 he was called to
the English bar by Gray’s Inn, and by 1850 he was a Doctor of Laws of
Trinity College, Dublin. He had published poems as translations from
many Eastern and European languages, and especially in 1850 a poem which
has been described as marked by genius, “Goethe, a new Pantomime.”
Between the year of the trial and 1868 he had risen rapidly, and in the
latter year he was made a Queen’s Counsel and a Bencher of his Inn. He
was the leading counsel for the prosecution in the great Overend and
Gurney case of 1869; and in 1873 came the most extraordinary period of
his career, when he became chief counsel for the Tichborne claimant. His
conduct of that person’s defence on the prosecution for perjury, and his
editing of the wild paper called _The Englishman_, and his scurrilous
attacks on the Chief Justice and others, led to his expulsion from the
Circuit, the deprival of his legal distinctions, and finally to his
disbarring. He was elected in 1875 as member for Stoke, solely as the
champion of the Tichborne claimant. He sat until 1880, but was defeated
then at the General Election, and in that year he died. He was an
accomplished and successful advocate, and a scholar of unusual learning,
but his gifts seemed of that order of genius which is allied to madness.
In 1860 he published a translation of a Celtic poem, and in 1864 a
volume of “Poems”; in 1878, “Prayers and Meditations,” “An Introduction
to the Apocalypse,” and “Fo, the Third Messenger of God.”
* * * * *
JOHN GRAY. Mr. Gray was born at Aberdeen in 1807, and educated at
Gordon’s Hospital. First a solicitor in London, he was called to the bar
in 1838. After attaining the rank of Queen’s Counsel in 1863, seven
years after the Palmer trial, he was appointed solicitor to the Treasury
in 1870. It was while holding this office, in 1873, that he conducted
the prosecution of Arthur Orton; so that his career and Dr. Kenealy’s
touched in two points. He was the author of a number of valuable
contemporary legal text books. He died in 1875, owing, it was said, to
his labours in preparing and directing the Orton prosecution.
[Illustration: Letter from William Palmer to his wife.
(_Reproduced from the original in the possession of Dr. Kurt Loewenfeld,
Bramhall, Cheshire._)]
[Illustration: [19 to 21] November--19 MONDAY [323-42]--11th Month 1855
20 Tuesday [324-41]
21 Wednesday [325-40]
Facsimile of page from the Diary of William Palmer.]
[Illustration: 1855 11th Month--22 THURSDAY [326-39]--November [22 to
25]
--23 FRIDAY [327-38] O--
--24 SATURDAY [328-37]--
25 SUNDAY-25 aft Trin. [329-36]
Facsimile of page from the Diary of William Palmer.]