LVIII. --for certain he had not a drop of lazy blood in his veins. He CHAP. filled up every hour of the day, and a good part of the night, with the despatch of some public and necessary business."* Thus energetic and thus assisted, notwithstanding his inexperience and ignorance as a Judge, he got on marvellously well, and the causes, petitions, and motions were disposed of without any public clamour. As yet, the proceedings in Chancery were not reported, precedent not being considered binding there, as in other Courts, and none of his decisions have been preserved to us. But as there were several sessions of parliament while he held the Great Seal, and there does not appear to have been any complaints against him except in one instance, which was without foundation †, we are bound to believe that, in spite of all the objections reasonably made to his appointment, he gave satisfaction to the public. ‡ His success as a Judge. satisfaction. At all events, he satisfied himself. On the 10th of July, His self1622, the anniversary of his receiving the Seal, he thus wrote to Buckingham. "In this place I have now served his Majesty one whole year diligently and honestly. But to my heart's grief, by reason of my rawness and inexperience, very unprofitably. Yet, if his Majesty will examine the registers, there will be found more causes finally ended this one year than in all the seven years preceding. How well ended, I ingenuously confess, I know not. His Majesty and your Lordship (who, no doubt, have received some complaints, though in your love you conceal them from me,) are in that the most competent judges." power im puted to him. He and his friends suggested that it was by some sort of Miraculous miraculous influence that he performed so well; but the miracle is solved in his judiciously availing himself of the knowledge and skill of others. His assessors may truly be considered the Lords Commissioners of the Great Seal while he held it; and his great merit was, that he steadily kept them to their work. He seems from his own resources to have done his duty creditably in the House of Lords. Parliament met in No Hacket, 76. † Sir John Bouchier's case, post. Quod nemo noverit, pæne non fit. Nov. 1621. ment. LVIII. Lord Keeper's speech. CHAP. vember, 1621. He had then to address the two Houses, in the absence of the King, who was indisposed. This speech was well seasoned with divine right and passive obedience, and we have this account of it in a letter written to him next day by Buckingham. "I know not how the Upper House of Parliament approve your Lordship's speech. But I am sure he that called them together, and as I think can best judge of it, is so taken with it, that he saith it is the best that ever he heard in Parliament, and the nearest to his Majesty's meaning; which, beside the contentment it hath given to his Majesty, hath much comforted me in his choice of your Lordship, which in all things doth so well answer his expectation." Attack in the House of Lords on the Bishops. But the speech caused some disgust, extending to the whole order to which the Speaker belonged. A few days after, during a protracted debate respecting oaths, an aged Bishop, very infirm in health, begged permission to withdraw, which then seems to have been necessary before a member could be absent from the division. Thereupon several Lords, who are said to have "borne a grudge to that apostolical order," cried out, that "they might all go home if they would ;" and the Earl of Essex, the future leader of the parliamentary army, then a hot-headed young man who had just taken his seat,— made a formal motion, which he required to be put from the woolsack and entered on the journals, Motion of "that their Lordships were content to open their doors wide Earl of Essex. to let out all Bishops." The Lord Keeper, who perceived that this blow was aimed at himself, "replied with a prudent animosity, that he would not put the question even if commanded by the House, for their Lordships, as well spiritual as temporal, were called by the King's writ to sit and abide there till the same power dissolved them, and for my Lords temporal, they had no power to license themselves, much less to authorise others to depart from the Parliament." This spirited conduct quelled the disturbance, and the debate was allowed quietly to proceed; but Williams lived to see the day when he ineffectually opposed a bill for preventing the * 1 Parl. Hist. 1295. Bishops from sitting in the House of Lords, and he had the mortification to find that the bill, after passing both Houses, received the royal assent. CHAP. LVIII. petition Lord The only other proceeding in which he was personally Sir John concerned during this session, was upon a petition presented Bouchier's to the House of Lords by Sir John Bouchier, complaining against the that he had given judgment against the petitioner in the Keeper. Court of Chancery without allowing his counsel to speak. The case was heard for several days at the bar, — when it turned out that the complaint was entirely unfounded, as, after ample discussion, the decree had been pronounced on the advice of the Master of the Rolls, Mr. Justice Hutton, and Mr. Justice Chamberlayne. tioner. The Lords determined that, for this false charge against the Sentence Lord Keeper, Sir John Bouchier should be imprisoned, and on the petithat he should make an acknowledgment in their House, and in Chancery, of his faults. But the Lord Keeper saying that Sir John had behaved temperately in Chancery, besought a remission of the acknowledgment of his fault in that Court, and also of his imprisonment. The Lords highly commended the Lord Keeper's clemency, and remitted both. Then Sir John being brought to the bar, and his acknowledgment, ready drawn up, being delivered to him, he, kneeling, said, "My Lords, in obedience to the judgment of this House, I humbly submit myself. Whereas by the honourable sentence of the Lords spiritual and temporal, I stand convicted of a great misdemeanour, for taxing and laying an imputation on the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of England, I do in all humbleness acknowledge the justice of their sentence, and also mine own fault and offence, and am heartily sorry therefore, and do crave pardon both of your Lordships in general, and of the Lord Keeper in particular."* On account of Dec. 1621. a quarrel with the House of Commons this parliament was soon after dissolved by proclamation, and by an order of Council, in which the Lord Keeper concurred, Sir Edward Coke, Sir Robert Phillips, Mr. Selden, Mr. Prynne, and several other leaders of the opposition party were committed to prison. Dissolution of parlia ment. CHAP. Williams active in promotion of Laud, his future enemy. Prosecu tion of shooting a game keeper. About this time he was instrumental in the promotion of a man who afterwards turned out to be his greatest enemy. Buckingham wished to appoint Laud, one of the King's chaplains whom he had found very useful on several occasions, to the Bishopric of St. David's; but most unexpectedly James demurred, on account of some trouble caused to him from the ultra high church principles of this Divine, in attempting to introduce episcopacy into Scotland. The Lord Keeper seeking to remove these scruples, the King said to him: "I perceive whose messenger you are; Stenny hath set you on. The plain truth is, that I keep Laud back from all place of rule and authority, because I find he hath a restless spirit, and cannot see when matters are well, but loves to toss and change, and to bring things to a pitch of reformation floating in his own brain. I speak not at random; he hath made himself known to me to be such a one." The Lord Keeper allowed that this was a great fault, which might make Laud be likened to Caius Gracchus, qui nihil immotum, nihil tranquillum, nihil quietum, nihil denique in eadem statu relinquebat; - but undertook that it should be cured in time to come. "Then take him," said the King, "but on my soul you will repent it." We now come to an affair in which Williams acted an exArchbishop ceedingly ungenerous part. Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury, when shooting at a deer with a crossbow, had accidentally killed a keeper in Lord Zouch's park. Williams, on hearing of this calamity, instead of eagerly assisting in averting its consequences, and comforting the afflicted Metropolitan, thought it an opportunity of raising himself to the highest ecclesiastical as well as civil dignity, and wrote the following mean and cunning letter to be laid before the King: Williams's letter to King on this occasion. "My Lord's Grace, upon this accident, is, by the common law of England, to forfeit all his estate to his Majesty, and by the canon law, which is in force with us irregular" ipso facto, and so suspended from all ecclesiastical function, until he be again restored by his superior, which, I take it, is the King's Majesty in this rank and order of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. I wish, with all my heart, his Majesty would be as merciful as ever he was in all his life. But yet I hold it my nature. duty to let his Majesty know, that his Majesty is fallen upon a matter of great advice and deliberation. To add affliction to the afflicted, as no doubt he is in mind, is against the King's To leave a man of blood, Primate and Patriarch of all his churches, is a thing that sounds very harsh in the old councils and canons of the Church. The Papists will not spare to descant upon the one and the other. I leave the knot to his Majesty's deep wisdom to advise and resolve upon." The Archbishop's friends quoted the maxims, "Actus non facit reum, nisi mens sit rea," and "omne peccatum in tantum est peccatum in quantum est voluntarium;" and it being argued against him, that if one acting in indebitâ materiâ kills a man involuntarily, it is to be gathered that God gave him up to that mischance, that he might be disciplined by the censure of the Church, they replied, that hunting was no unpriestly sport by the laws of England, for every Peer in the higher House of Parliament, as well Lords spiritual as temporal, hath permission, by the Charta de Foresta, when, after summons, he is on his journey to parliament, and travels through the King's forests, to cause a horn to be sounded, and to kill a brace of bucks for his sustentation. CHAP. LVIII. Commissioners apdecide case pointed to of Arch To decide this knotty point, a commission was directed to ten Bishops, common-law Judges, and civilians, -the Lord Keeper being chief Commissioner. They were equally divided on the question, "whether the Archbishop was irre- bishop. gular' by the fact of involuntary homicide?" But a majority held that "the act might tend to a scandal in a churchman," the Lord Keeper, on both questions, voting against the Archbishop. Williams, This intrigue was counteracted by the general sympathy In spite of in favour of the Archbishop, and the King, in due form, "assoiled him from all irregularity, scandal, or infamation, bishop aspronouncing him to be capable to use all metropolitical authority as if that sinistrous contingency of spilling blood had never happened." soiled. The Lord Keeper's installation as Bishop of Lincoln had been Williams's delayed by these proceedings, and now, from disappoint- spleen. |