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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: JEE-JUN |
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JEFFREYS, GEORGE JEFFREYS, 1ST BARON (1648-1689) , lord chancellor of England, son of John Jeffreys, a Welsh country gentleman , was born at Acton Park, his father's seat in Denbigh-shire, in 1648. His family, though not wealthy, was of good social standing and repute in Wales; his mother, a daughter of Sir Thomas Ireland of Bewsey, Lancashire, was " a very pious good woman." He was educated at Shrewsbury, St Paul's and Westminster schools, at the last of which he was a pupil of Busby, and at Trinity College, Cambridge ; but he left the university without taking a degree, and entered the Inner Temple as a student in May 1663. From his childhood Jeffreys displayed exceptional talent, but on coming to London he occupied himself more with the pleasures of conviviality than with serious study of the law. Though he never appears to have fallen 'into the licentious immorality prevalent at that period, he early became addicted to hard drinking and boisterous company. But as the records of his early years, and indeed of his whole life, are derived almost exclusively from vehemently hostile sources, the numerous anecdotes of his depravity cannot be accepted without a large measure of scepticism. He was a handsome, witty and attractive boon-companion, and in the taverns of the city he made friends among attorneys with practice in the criminal courts. Thus assisted he rose so rapidly in his profession that within three years of his call to the bar in 1668, he was elected common serjeant of the city of London. Such advancement, however, was not to be attained even in the reign of Charles II. solely by the aid of disreputable friend-ships. Jeffreys had remarkable aptitude for the profession of an advocatequick intelligence, caustic humour, copious eloquence. His powers of cross-examination were masterly; and if he was insufficiently grounded in legal principles to become a profound lawyer, nothing but greater application was needed in the opinion of so hostile a critic as Lord Campbell, to have made him the rival of Nottingham and Hale. Jeffreys could count on the influence of respectable men of position in the city, such as Sir Robert Clayton and his own namesake Alderman Jeffreys; and he also enjoyed the personal friendship of the virtuous Sir Matthew Hale. In 1667 Jeffreys had married in circumstances which, if improvident, were creditable to his generosity and sense of honour; and his domestic life, so far as is known, was free from the scandal common among his contemporaries. While holding the judicial office of common serjeant, he pursued his practice at the bar. With a view to further preferment he now sought to ingratiate himself with the court party, to which he obtained an introduction possibly through William Chiffinch, the notorious keeper of the king's closet. He at once attached himself to the king's mistress, the duchess of Ports-mouth; and as early as 1672 he was employed in confidential business by the court. His influence in the city of London, where opposition to the government of Charles II. was now be-coming pronounced, enabled Jeffreys to make himself useful to Danby. In September 1677 he received a knighthood, and his growing favour with the court was further marked by his appointment as solicitor-general to James, duke of York
In the previous month Titus Oates had made his first revelations of the alleged popish plot, and from this time forward Jeffreys was prominently identified, either as advocate or judge, with the memorable state trials by which the political conflict between the Crown and the people was waged during the remainder of the 17th century. The popish plot, followed by the growing agitation for the exclusion of the duke of York
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of April r68o; but when parliament met in October the House of Commons passed a hostile resolution which induced him to resign his recordership, a piece of pusillanimity that drew from the king the remark that Jeffreys was " not parliament-proof." Jeffreys nevertheless received from the city aldermen a substantial token of appreciation for his past services. In r681 he was created a baronet. In June 1683 the first of the Rye House conspirators were brought to trial. Jeffreys was briefed for the crown in the prosecution of Lord William Howard; and, having been raised to the bench as lord chief
In August 1685 Jeffreys opened at Winchester the commission known in history as the " bloody assizes," his conduct of which has branded his name with indelible infamy. The number of persons sentenced to death at these assizes for complicity in the duke of Monmouth's insurrection is uncertain. The official return of those actually executed was 320; many hundreds more were transported and sold into slavery in the West Indies. In all probability the great majority of those condemned were in fact concerned in the rising, but the trials were in many cases a mockery of the administration of justice. Numbers were cajoled into pleading guilty; the case for the prisoners seldom obtained a hearing. The merciless severity of the chief justice did not however exceed the wishes of James II.; for on his return to London Jeffreys received from the king the great seal with the title of lord chancellor. For the next two years he was a strenuous upholder of prerogative, though he was less abjectly pliant than has sometimes been represented. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of his attachment to the Church of England; for although the king's favour was capricious; Jeffreys never took the easy and certain path to secure it that lay through apostasy; and he even withstood James on occasion, when the latter pushed his Catholic zeal to extremes. Though it is true that he accepted the presidency of the ecclesiastical commission, Burnet's statement that it was Jeffreys who suggested that institution to James is probably incorrect; and he was so far from having instigated the prosecution of the seven bishops in 1688, as has been frequently alleged, that he disapproved of the proceedings and rejoiced secretly at the acquittal. But while he watched with misgiving the king's preferment of Roman Catholics, he made himself the masterful instrument of unconstitutional prerogative in coercing the authorities of Cam-bridge University, who in 1687 refused to confer degrees on a Benedictine
Being thus conspicuously identified with the most tyrannical measures of James II., Jeffreys found himself in a desperate plight when on the filth of December 1688 the king fled from the country on the approach to London of William of Orange. The lord chancellor attempted to escape like his master; but in spite of his disguise as a common seaman he was recognized in a tavern at Wappingpossibly, as Roger North relates, by an attorney whom Jeffreys had terrified on some occasion in the court of chanceryand was arrested and conveyed to the Tower. The malady from which he had long suffered had recently made fatal progress, and he died in the Tower onthe 18th of April 1689. He was succeeded in the peerage by his son, John (2nd Baron Jeffreys of Wem), who died without male issue in 1702, when the title became extinct. It is impossible to determine precisely with what justice tradition has made the name of " Judge Jeffreys " a byword of infamy. The Revolution, which brought about his fall, handed over his reputation at the same time to the mercy of his bitterest enemies. They alone have recorded his actions and appraised his motives and character. Even the adherents of the deposed dynasty had no interest
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traditional estimate of the character of Jeffreys obtains no confirmation from the refinement of his features and expression as depicted in Kneller's portrait in the National Portrait Gallery of London. But even though the popular notion requires to be thus modified in certain respects, it remains incontestable that Jeffreys was probably on the whole the worst example of a period when the administration of justice in England had sunk to the lowest degradation, and the judicial bench had become the too willing tool of an unconstitutional and unscrupulous executive. (R. J. M.) End of Article: JEFFREYS, GEORGE JEFFREYS, 1ST BARON (1648-1689) If you wish, you can link directly to this article.
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