Chapter XV: George Jeffreys.114 (4)

Considering the systematic form which equity jurisprudence had assumed under his two immediate predecessors, Jeffreys must have been very poorly furnished for presiding in chancery. He had practised little before these judges, and none of their decisions were yet in print; so that if he had been so inclined, he had not the opportunity to make himself familiar with the established practice and doctrines of the court.

Although he must often have betrayed his ignorance, yet with his characteristic boldness and energy he contrived to get through the business without any signal disgrace, and among all the invectives, satires, and lampoons by which his memory is blackened, I find little said against his decrees. He did not promulgate any body of new orders according to recent custom; but, while he held the great seal, he issued separate orders from time to time, some of which were very useful. He first put an end to a very oppressive practice, by which a plaintiff, having filed a frivolous and vexatious bill, might dismiss it on paying merely twenty shillings costs, and he directed that the defendant should be allowed all the costs he had incurred, to be properly ascertained by an officer of the court. He then checked the abuse of staying actions at law for the examination of witnesses abroad, by requiring, before a commission to examine them issued, an affidavit specifying the names of the witnesses, and the facts they were expected to prove. By subsequent orders which he framed, vexatious applications for re-hearings were guarded against, and an attempt was made to get rid of what has ever been the opprobrium of the court--controversies about settling the minutes of a decree after it has been pronounced.

I have discovered one benevolent opinion of this cruel judge, and strange to say, it is at variance with that of the humane magistrates who have adorned Westminster Hall in the nineteenth century. "The prisoner's convict bill" was condemned and opposed by almost all the judges in the reign of William IV., yet even Jeffreys was struck with the injustice and inequality of the law, which, allowing the accused to defend himself by counsel "for a two-penny trespass," refuses that aid "where life, estate, honor, and all are concerned," and lamented its existence, while he declared himself bound to adhere to it.[151] The venerable sages who apprehended such multiplied evils from altering the practice must have been greatly relieved by finding that their objections have proved as unfounded as those which were urged against the abolition of "_peine forte et dure_;" and the alarming innovation, so long resisted, of allowing witnesses for the prisoner to be examined under the sanction of an oath.

He has been so much abused, that I began my critical examination of his history in the hope and belief that I should find that his misdeeds had been exaggerated, and that I might be able to rescue his memory from some portion of the obloquy under which it labors; but I am sorry to say, that in my matured opinion, although he appears to have been a man of high talents, of singularly agreeable manners, and entirely free from hypocrisy, his cruelty and his political profligacy have not been sufficiently exposed or reprobated; and that he was not redeemed from his vices by one single solid virtue.