The Chancellor was not more dependent on customary gratuities than the chief of the three Common Law courts. At Westminster and on circuit, whenever he was required to discharge his official functions, the English judge extended his hand for the contributions of the well-disposed. No one thought of blaming judges for their readiness to take customary benevolences. To take gifts was a usage of the profession, and had its parallel in the customs of every calling and rank of life. The clergy took dues in like manner: from the earliest days of feudal life the territorial lords had supplied their wants in the same way; amongst merchants and yeomen, petty traders and servants, the system existed in full force. These presents were made without any secrecy. The aldermen of borough towns openly voted presents to the judges; and the judges received their offeringsnot as benefactions, but as legitimate perquisites. In 1620-just a year before Lord Bacon's fall-the municipal council of Lyme Regis left it to the "mayor's discretion" to decide "what gratuity he will give to the Lord Chief Baron and his men" at the next assizes. system, it is needless to say, had disastrous results. Empowering the chief judge of every court to receive presents not only from the public, but from subordinate judges, inferior officers, and the bar; and moreover empowering each place-holder to take gratuities from persons officially or by profession concerned in the business of the courts, it produced a complicated machinery for extortion. By presents the chief justices bought their places from the crown or a royal favorite; by presents the puisne justices, registrars, counsel bought place or favor from the chief; by presents the attorneys, sub-registrars, and outside public sought to gain their ends with the humbler placeholders. The meanest ushers of Westminster Hall took

The

coins from ragged scriveners. Hence every place was

actually bought and sold, the sum being in most cases very high. Sir James Ley offered the Duke of Buckinham £10,000 for the Attorney's place. At the same period the Solicitor General's office was sold for £4000 Under Charles I. matters grew still worse than they had been under his father. When Sir Charles Cæsar consulted Laud about the worth of the vacant Mastership of the Rolls, the archbishop frankly said, "that as things then stood, the place was not likely to go without more money than he thought any wise man would give for it." Disregarding this intimation, Sir Charles paid the king £15,000 for the place, and added a loan of £2000. Sir Thomas Richardson, at the opening of the reign, gave £17,000 for the Chiefship of the Common Pleas. If judges needed gifts before the days when vacant seats were put up to auction, of course they stood all the more in need of them when they bought their promotions with such large sums. It is not wonderful that the wearers of ermine repaid themselves by venal practices. The sale of judicial offices was naturally followed by the sale of judicial decisions. The judges having submitted to the extortions of the king, the public had to endure the extortions of the judges. Corruption on the bench produced corruption at the bar. Counsel bought the attention and compliance of the court,' and in some cases sold their influence with shameless rascality. They would take fees to speak from one side in a cause and fees to be silent from the other side-selling their own clients as coolly as judges sold the suitors of their courts. Sympathizing with the public, and stung by personal experience of legal dishonesty, the clergy sometimes denounced from the pulpit the extortions of corrupt judges and unprincipled barristers. The assize sermons of Charles I.'s reign were frequently seasoned with such animadversions. At Thetford Assizes, March,

1630, the Rev. Mr. Ramsay, in the assize-sermon, spoke indignantly of judges who "favored causes," and of "counsellors who took fees to be silent." In the summer of 1631, at the Bury Assizes, one Mr. Scott made a sore sermon in discovery of corruption in `judges and others." At Norwich, the same authority, viz., 'Sir John Rous's Diary,' informs us- "Mr. Greene was more plaine, insomuch that Judge Harvey, in his charge, broke out thus: 'It seems by the sermon that we are corrupt, but we know that we can use conscience in our places as well as the best clergieman of all.'”

In his 'Life and Death of Sir Matthew Hale,' Bishop Burnet tells a good story of the Chief's conduct with regard to a customary gift. "It is also a custom," says the biographer, "for the Marshall of the King's Bench to present the judges of that court with a piece of plate for a New Year's Gift, that for the Chief Justice being larger than the rest. This he intended to have refused, but the other judges told him it belonged to his office, and the refusing it would be a prejudice to his successors; so he was persuaded to take it, but he sent word to the marshall, that instead of plate he should bring him the value of it in money, and when he received it, he immediately sent it to the prisons for the relief and discharge of the poor there."

BY

CHAPTER XV.

GIFTS AND SALES.

Y degrees the public ceased to make presents to the principal judges of the kingdom; but long after the Chancellor and the three Chiefs had taken the last offer

ings of general society, they continued to receive yearly

presents from the subordinate judges, placemen, and barristers of their respective courts. Lord Cowper deserves honor for being the holder of the seals who, by refusing to pocket these customary donations, put an end to a very objectionable system, so far as the Court of Chancery was concerned.

On being made Lord Keeper, he resolved to depart from the custom of his predecessors for many generations, who on the first day of each new year had invariably entertained at breakfast the persons from whom tribute was looked for. Very droll were these receptions in the old time. The repast at an end, the guests forthwith disburdened themselves of their gold-the payers approaching the holder of the seals in order of rank, and laying on his table purses of money, which the noble payee accepted with his own hands. Sometimes his lordship. was embarrassed by a ceremony that required him to pick gold from the fingers of men, several of whom he knew to be in indigent circumstances. In Charles II.'s time it was observed that the silver-tongued Lord Nottingham on such occasions always endeavored to hide his confusion under a succession of nervous smiles and exclamations "Oh, Tyrant Cuthtom!-Oh, Tyrant Cuthtom!"

:

It is noteworthy that in relinquishing the benefit of these exactions, the Lord Keeper feared unfriendly criticism much more than he anticipated public commendation. In his diary, under date December 30, Cowper wrote "I acquainted my Lord Treasurer with my design to refuse New Year's Gifts, if he had no objection against it, as spoiling, in some measure, a place of which he had the conferring. He answered it was not expected of me, but that I might do as my predecessors had done; but if I refused, he thought nobody could blame me for it." Anxious about the consequences of his innovation, the new Lord Keeper gave notice that on January 1,

1705-6, he would receive no gifts; but notwithstanding this proclamation, several officers of Chancery and counsellors came to his house with tribute, and were refused admittance. "New Year's Gifts turned back," he wrote in his diary at the close of the eventful day, "and pray God it doth me more credit and good than hurt, by making secret enemies in fœce Romuli." His fears were in a slight degree fulfilled. The Chiefs of the three Common Law Courts were greatly displeased with an innovation which they had no wish to adopt; and their warm expressions of dissatisfaction induced the Lord Keeper to cover his disinterestedness with a harmless fiction. To pacify the indignant Chiefs and the many persons who sympathized with them, he pretended that though he had declined intentionally the gifts of the Chancery barristers, he had not designed to exercise the same self-denial with regard to the gifts of Chancery officers.*

The common law chiefs were slow to follow in the Lord ̈ ́ Keeper's steps, and many years passed before the reform, effected in Chancery by accident or design, or by a lucky combination of both, was adopted in the other great courts. In his memoir of Lord Cowper, Campbell observes: "His example with respect to New Year's Gifts was not speedily followed; and it is said that till very recently the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas invited the officers of his court to a dinner at the beginning of the year, when each of them deposited under his plate a present in the shape

* It should be observed that many persons are of opinion that the Lord Keeper's assertion on this point was not an artifice, but a simple statement of fact. To those who take this view, his lordship's position seems alike ridiculous and respectable-respectable because he actually intended to forbear from taking the barrister's money; ridiculous because, through clumsy and inadequate arrangements, he missed the other and not less precious gifts which he did not mean to decline. Anyhow, the critics admit that credit is due to him for persisting in a change wrought in the first instance partly by honorable design and partly by accident.