The first Earl of Mansfield was a younger son of a noble house in Scotland, which he raised to higher rank by his own brilliant talents and successful industry.

William Murray was the eleventh child of David, Viscount Stormont, and was born at Perth, March 2, 1704. He received his education at Westminster School and Christchurch College, Oxford, where he gained distinction by the elegance of his scholarship. He took his degree of M.A. in June, 1730, and was called to the bar in the Michaelmas term following: the interval he employed in travelling in France and Italy. At an early age he gained the friendship of Pope, who in several passages has borne testimony to the grace, eloquence, rising fame, and attractive social accomplishments of the young lawyer. In 1737, in consequence of the sudden illness of his leader, who was seized with a fit in court, Mr. Murray had to undertake, at an hour’s notice, the duty of senior counsel, in the cause of Cibber v. Sloper. From his success on this occasion he was wont to date the origin of his fortune. “Business,” he said, “poured in upon me on all sides; and from a few hundred pounds a year I fortunately found myself, in every subsequent year, in possession of thousands.” In the same year he was retained by the corporation of Edinburgh in the memorable transactions which arose out of the Porteous riot; and his exertions to preserve their privileges were subsequently acknowledged by the gift of the freedom of the city in a gold box. November 20, 1738, Mr. Murray was married to Lady Elizabeth Finch, daughter of the Earl of Winchelsea, a lady who, in addition to rank and fortune, possessed those more valuable qualities which rendered their married life, through near half a century, one of harmony and domestic happiness.

Mr. Murray was appointed Solicitor-General in 1742, and took his seat in parliament, for the first time, as member for Boroughbridge.

For many years, during which he held office under the Pelham administration, he was recognized in the House of Commons as one of the ablest supporters of government; and he was frequently opposed in the outset of his career to Mr. Pitt, who, after the elevation of both to the upper house, bore this high testimony, among others, to Murray’s weight as a speaker. “No man is better acquainted with his abilities and learning, nor has a greater respect for them, than I have. I have had the pleasure of sitting with him in the other house, and always listened to him with attention. I have not lost a word of what he said, nor did I ever.” In his official station, he necessarily took a prominent part in the prosecution of the rebel lords, especially at the trial of Lord Lovat in 1747; and his eloquence was set off by his fairness towards the prisoner, whose concern in the rebellion was indeed too evident to admit of hesitation on the part of his judges. We may follow up the history of his legal advancement by briefly stating that, in 1754, he was appointed Attorney-General, and, in 1756, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, and, at the same time, raised to the peerage, by the title of Baron Mansfield. It is said that the Duke of Newcastle was extremely unwilling to consent to the removal of his most powerful supporter from the Commons, but was forced to comply by the threat that, if he refused, Murray would no longer act as Attorney-General.

Lord Mansfield’s private life appears for the most part to have been passed in tranquil prosperity, which afforded no incidents for the biographer to dwell on; at least the published records of him are nearly confined to his exertions as an advocate, his speeches in parliament, and reports on the important cases which he adjudicated. It will be sufficient here to mention those events by which Lord Mansfield is connected with the public history of England, and to make a few general observations on his character as a lawyer and a judge.

In 1763, the legality of what were called general warrants, not directed against persons by name specifically, but generally against any person or persons supposed to be guilty of a certain act, was mooted, in consequence of a secretary of state’s warrant to apprehend the “authors, printers and publishers” of the celebrated No. 45 of the ‘North Briton.’ Wilkes, being apprehended by virtue of this warrant, was discharged by Pratt, afterwards Lord Camden, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, when brought up before that court by writ of habeas corpus. The question came before Lord Mansfield in a different form. An action of trespass was brought in the court of Common Pleas against the messengers who executed the warrant, and a verdict was given for the plaintiff. A bill of exceptions against Chief Justice Pratt’s directions to the jury was tendered, in pursuance of which the question was again argued before Lord Mansfield, who coincided with his brother chief in holding the instrument illegal under which the defendants had acted. Since this decision, general warrants have been disused.

In 1768, Wilkes, then at the height of his popularity, returned to England, and applied for a reversal of his outlawry. The excitement of his partisans broke out both in riots and in indecent attempts to intimidate the judges before whom the point was to be argued. Lord Mansfield pronounced for the reversal upon the ground of a technical informality, which the Court held fatal to the process; but in his elaborate judgment he took care strongly to censure the seditious efforts which had been made to influence the court, and to impress on his auditors that the apparently trifling objection on which the judgment turned was fatal in law, and could not have been passed over in any other case. This speech has been much admired; nor is it easy to overrate its beauties as a composition: it lies open, however, to the objection of being too theatrical. After overruling the objections made by the defendant’s counsel, it rises into eloquent declamation against the attacks of the press, and the threats of the mob; and, at the moment when all seems ripe for a contrary decision, proceeds to grant the thing so loudly clamoured for. He may safely contemn danger who does not expose himself to it; and it would on this occasion have been more dignified to make less parade of independence.

Lord Mansfield’s view of the law of libel exposed him to much obloquy. He was a resolute assertor of the doctrine that juries were to judge of the fact only, not of the law, or rather of the question, libel or no libel. A prerogative lawyer on the bench, he was a supporter of Tory principles in parliament. He strenuously maintained the right of the British legislature to tax America, and was the advocate, though he probably would not have been the adviser, of those measures which led to the American revolution; for the temper of his mind seems to have been cautious and somewhat timid, and his political conduct was swayed by an habitual moderation, which sometimes prevented his accession to the more violent measures of his party. His course was consistent with what we may suppose to have been his early prejudices, for he came of a Jacobite family; and it was made a matter of accusation against him, while Attorney-General (most unfairly revived by Junius), that, as a schoolboy, he had been known to drink Jacobite toasts. The charge, if true, was too trivial to merit further notice than George II. bestowed upon it: “Whatever they were while they were Westminster boys, they are now my very good friends.” At the same time he was a steady advocate of religious toleration, both on the bench and in the House of Lords. This he showed in 1768, on occasion of the prosecution of a Roman Catholic priest by a common informer, in his strict dealing with the penal laws enacted against that class of men; and in assigning his reasons for admitting a Quaker’s evidence on affirmation in certain cases. And the Dissenters in general, and especially of the city of London, were much indebted to his support in the House of Lords in 1767, for the abolition of that mean and oppressive custom by which they were fined for refusing to serve the office of sheriff, being at the same time subject to legal penalties if they accepted it. Lord Mansfield’s exposition of the iniquity of this practice was unsparing and conclusive.

The unprecedentedly-long period during which Lord Mansfield presided in the King’s Bench is one of considerable importance in the history of British jurisprudence; indeed, the multiplicity of his decisions during a period of thirty-four years could not fail materially to affect the law relating both to commercial and other property, especially in a country so rapidly increasing in wealth, and in which new cases were continually arising out of the ever-changing state of society. By a large body of his admirers, a class including the majority of the nation, he was regarded with almost unlimited admiration; but several of his important judgments have since been overruled; and we probably shall not err in stating it as the general opinion of well-informed persons in the present day, that, indecent and virulent as is Junius’s attack on him as a judge, there is a solid foundation for the charge that he was more prone to enlarge the power of the crown than to protect the liberty of the subject, and more willingly referred to the Roman law and the law of nations than to Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights. But the charge of introducing equitable doctrines into the common law must be received with much more caution. He may have gone too far in his favourite scheme of introducing more enlarged and liberal views than had prevailed before his time; he may have neglected former authorities, and introduced too great laxity in the interpretation of the law; but, dangerous as such licence is, lest, in the uncertainty of law, a greater evil be incurred than by the occasional commission of an essential injustice, yet we must look with complacency on that alleged tendency to relax the strict rigour of law in favour of substantial justice, which seems to have consisted chiefly in a disposition to admit evidence when mere technical disqualification, and not essential unfitness, was urged against it; and rather to let right prevail than give the victory to wrong by rigid adherence to the technicalities of the law. His feelings may be illustrated by a playful saying of his own to Garrick. “A judge on the bench is now and then in your whimsical situation between Tragedy and Comedy; inclination drawing one way, and a long string of precedents the other.” It is certain that to him we owe all that our mercantile law has of system, and of consistency with the principles which govern the practice of other nations. It is no less true that the remedies generally afforded by our courts of law have become much more beneficial, since he enlarged and moulded actions originally of an equitable nature to suit cases to which proceedings in equity are very ill adapted. Nor is it too much to assert that under him the science of law assumed the form of a liberal study.

It is hardly necessary to reply to the graver charges of moral guilt adduced by the able and unscrupulous author to whom we have referred. The spirit in which they are conceived may be estimated from the unmeasured vituperation of the Scotch in general, which forms the opening of the forty-first letter of Junius, addressed to Lord Mansfield. His lordship’s knowledge of English law has been impugned; his innovations upon its doctrines have been censured; his application and extension of its principles have been questioned; and his constitutional doctrines have been often and justly condemned; but we do not believe that his honesty has been seriously doubted, since the violence of party animosity has ceased to inflame men’s passions and pervert their judgment.

Our knowledge of Lord Mansfield’s private history is very limited. His life however seems to have been spent in happiness and tranquillity, until the riots of 1780, in which his house, with its contents, was destroyed. Beside a valuable property in books, pictures, and furniture, he sustained that loss which, to a literary man, is irreparable,—the collected manuscripts of a laborious life. He bore this heavy calamity with honourable fortitude, and declined to accept of pecuniary compensation. To the application of government he returned this answer: “I think it does not become me to claim or expect reparation from the state. I have made up my mind to my misfortune as I ought, with this consolation, that it came from those whose object manifestly was general confusion and destruction at home, in addition to a dangerous and complicated war abroad. If I should lay before you any account or computation of the pecuniary damage I have sustained, it might seem a claim or expectation of being indemnified.” Shortly afterwards he appeared in the House of Lords, to justify the strong measures by which the riots had been quelled. “It was wonderful,” says Bishop Newton in his ‘Life and Anecdotes,’ “after such a shock as he had received, that he could so soon summon his faculties as to make one of the finest and ablest speeches that ever was heard in parliament, to justify the legality of the late proceedings on the part of government, to demonstrate that no royal prerogative had been exerted, no martial law had been exercised, nothing had been done but what every man, civil or military, had a right to do in the like cases. ‘I speak not from books,’ he said, ‘for books I have none;’ having been all consumed in the fire. The effects of his speech were the admiration and conviction of all who heard him, and put an end to the debate without division. Lord Mansfield never appeared greater in any action of his life.” No particular cause connected with the frenzy of the time can be assigned for this attack on the Chief Justice; he had not been active in supporting the measures for the relief of the Catholics, which produced this remarkable ebullition of folly and wickedness. But when once riot is afoot, the causes which have first stirred up men’s minds are readily forgotten; and the violence of party abuse with which Lord Mansfield had been assailed, and the unpopularity of the government, in which he was supposed to exercise a principal though secret influence, are sufficient to account for this calamity.

In 1776, Lord Mansfield, at his own request, was raised to the dignity of an earl. He had no children, and his object was to raise the rank of his paternal family in the person of his nephew Lord Stormont, to whom the succession was secured. In 1784, he was compelled to absent himself from his judicial duties for a season, and spent some time, with considerable benefit to his health, at Tunbridge Wells. He returned to his judicial employment and continued to exercise it with unclouded intellect, being only prevented by bodily infirmity from attending the court during the last year and a half that he held the office. In 1788 he resigned it, at the advanced age of eighty-four, having presided in the court of King’s Bench for the unprecedented period of thirty-two years, and being still in possession of a share of health and power of enjoyment which seldom fall to the lot of so advanced an age. He retained the perfect possession of his faculties until within a week of his death, which took place March 18, 1794, in the ninetieth year of his age.

In the case of this, as of many other eminent men, we may regret that so few particulars of their every-day manners have been preserved. In the relations of private life his conduct was exemplary; and the amenity of his manners, the playfulness of his wit, and his admirable qualifications as a companion, secured the affection of those who enjoyed his society. His talents as a speaker were set off by a graceful and attractive person, and a remarkably harmonious voice; qualifications greatly conducing to good delivery, which it is said he was in the habit of improving in youth, by sedulous cultivation under the direction of Pope.

A gentleman (Mr. Baillie), who had been deeply indebted to Lord Mansfield’s professional abilities, bequeathed 1500l. to erect a monument to his memory. The commission was entrusted to worthy hands, for it was given to Flaxman. A sketch of his work forms the vignette to this memoir.

The ‘Life of the Earl of Mansfield,’ by Mr. Halliday, is the only biographical account of this eminent lawyer which we know to exist. It is too manifestly panegyrical, and, as has been intimated, contains a very meagre account of the private history of its noble subject. It is mainly occupied by reports of Lord Mansfield’s speeches and judgments, and must therefore be chiefly acceptable to legal readers.