A.D. 1646. SPEAKERS OF THE TWO HOUSES JOINT KEEPERS. 325 should have power to seal all original writs and processes, and likewise commissions and pardons, which have usually passed, and ought to pass, under the Great Seal, as fully as any Lord Keeper or Commissioner for the Great Seal for the time being ought and might have done;" and sent it up to the Lords with a message, "That in regard of the great obstruction of the proceedings in Chancery because the Commissioners of the Great Seal are not settled, and in regard of the great prejudice the subject suffers for want of sealing of writs, there being now 8000 writs ready to be sealed, the Commons had framed an ordinance for preventing of these inconveniences, wherein they desire their Lordships' concurrence." The Lords agreed to the ordinance with some immaterial amendments; and it was followed by another, for appointing the Master of the Rolls and certain Judges to hear causes in Chancery in the absence of the Lords Commissioners. An order was thereupon made that the late Commissioners should deliver the key of the chest in which the Great Seal was kept to the Speaker of the House of Commons; and Lenthal accordingly received it from Serjeant Wilde. The sum of 1000l. was voted to each of them for their trouble, and it was ordered that such of them as were of the 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 place on 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 Lords' House took it into his hand, and said,- According to the ordinance of both Houses of parliament authorising me to be a Commissioner of the Great Seal, I do receive it and deliver it unto you (the Speaker of the House of Commons) as the other Commissioner." 66 On the 2nd of November the new Lords Commissioners d Lords' Jour. viii. 552. began the business of the Seal, and a Judge and a Master in Chancery by turns assisted them; but their sittings were very irregular, and there were heavy complaints of delays and illconsidered 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, and 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. Soon after 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 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 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." e Whit. Mem. 291, 292, 301, 347, 389, 464, 511. A.D. 1646. SUPREMACY OF CROMWELL. 327 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 being unavailing, every thing must bend to the mandate of Cromwell. f Lords' Jour. viii. 560 et seq. 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. A.D. 1648. AMIDST the stirring political events which for some time occupied the public, the negotiations with the King at Holmby, his 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 introduced 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 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, A.D. 1620. HIS ORIGIN AND EDUCATION. 329 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 Heralds' 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 fit him for the bar. His father was his instructor, 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.h Yet he conducted himself with such propriety, that Charles I. was forced to characterise him as а stout, wise, and learned man, and one who knew what belonged to uphold magistrates and magistracy in their dignity." g" But some amidst the legal throng Who think to them thy streams belong, 66 Judge Croke's Reports are thus cited by the names of the princes in whose reigns the cases were described. h Darnel's case, 3 St. Tr. 1. |