CHAPTER XIV.

EDMUND SAUNDERS.

THERE never was a more flagrant abuse of the prerogative of the crown than the appointment of a chief justice of the King's Bench for the undisguised purpose of giving judgment for the destruction of the charters of the city of London, as a step to the establishment of despotism over the land. Sir Edmund Saunders accomplished this task effectually, and would, without scruple or remorse, have given any other illegal judgment required of him by a corrupt government. Yet I feel inclined to treat his failings with lenience, and those who become acquainted with his character are apt to have a lurking kindness for him. From the disadvantages of his birth and breeding, he had little moral discipline; and he not only showed wonderful talents, but very amiable social qualities. His rise was most extraordinary, and he may be considered as our legal Whittington.

"He was at first," says Roger North, " no better than a poor beggar-boy, if not a parish foundling, without known parents or relations." There can be no doubt that, when a boy, he was discovered wandering about the streets of London in the most destitute condition penniless, friendless, without having learned any trade, without having received any education. But although his parentage was unknown to the contemporaries with whom he lived when he had advanced himself in the world, recent inquiries have ascertained that he was born in the parish of Barnwood, close by the city of (248)

Gloucester; and his father, who was above the lowest rank of life, died when he was an infant, and that his mother took for her second husband a man of the name of Gregory, to whom she bore several children. We know nothing more respecting him, with certainty, till he presented himself in the metropolis; and we are left to imagine that he might have been driven to roam abroad for subsistence, by reason of his mother's cottage being levelled to the ground during the siege of Gloucester; or that, being hardly used by his step-father, he had run away, and had accompanied the broadwheeled wagon to London, where he had heard that riches and plenty abounded.

The little fugitive found shelter in Clement's Inn, where "he lived by obsequiousness, and courting the attorneys' clerks for scraps." He began as an errand boy, and his remarkable diligence and obliging disposition created a general interest in his favor. Expressing an eager ambition to learn to write, one of the attorneys of the Inn, got a board knocked up at a window on the top of a staircase. This was his desk, and, sitting here, he not only learned the running hand of the time, but court hand, black letter, and engrossing, and made himself

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an expert entering clerk." In winter, while at work, he covered his shoulders with a blanket, tied hay bands round his legs, and made the blood circulate through his fingers by rubbing them when they grew stiff. His next step was to copy deeds and law papers, at so much a folio or page, by which he was enabled to procure for himself wholesome food and decent clothes. Meanwhile he not only picked up a knowledge of Norman French and law Latin, but, by borrowing books, acquired a deep insight into the principles of conveyancing and special pleading. By and by the friends

he had acquired enabled him to take a small chamber, to furnish it, and to begin business on his own account as a conveyancer and special pleader. But it was in the latter department that he took greatest delight and was the most skilful insomuch that he gained the reputation of being familiarly acquainted with all its mysteries; and although the order of "special pleaders under the bar" was not established till many years after, he was much resorted to by attorneys who wished by a sham plea to get over the term, or by a subtle replication to take an undue advantage of the defendant.

It has been untruly said of him, as of Jeffreys, that he began to practise as a barrister without ever having been called to the bar. In truth, the attorneys who consulted him having observed to him that they should like to have his assistance to maintain in court the astute devices which he recommended, and which duller men did not comprehend, or were ashamed of, he rather unwillingly listened to their suggestion that he should be entered of an Inn of Court, for he never cared much for great profits or high offices; and having money enough to buy beer and tobacco, the only luxuries in which he wished to indulge, he would have preferred to continue the huggermugger life which he now led. He was domesticated in the family of a tailor in Butcher Row, near Temple Bar, and was supposed to be rather too intimate with the mistress of the house. However, without giving up his lodging here, to which he resolutely stuck till he was made lord chief justice of England, he was prevailed upon to enter as a member of the Middle Temple. Accordingly, on the 4th of July, 1660, he was admitted there by the description of "Mr. Edward Saunders, of the county of the city of Gloucester, gentleman." The omission to mention the name

of his father might have given rise to the report that he was a foundling; but a statement of parentage on such occasions, though usual, was not absolutely required, as it now is.

He henceforth attended "moots," and excited great admiration by his readiness in putting cases and taking of objections. By his extraordinary good humor and joviality, he likewise. stood high in the favor of his brother templars. The term of study was then seven years, liable to be abridged on proof of proficiency; and the benchers of the Middle Temple had the discernment and the liberality to call Saunders to the bar when his name had been on their books little more than four years.

We have a striking proof of the rapidity with which he rushed into full business. He compiled reports of the decisions of the Court of King's Bench, beginning with Michaelmas term, 18 Charles II., A. D. 1666, when he had only been two years at the bar. These he continued till Easter term, 24 Charles II., A. D. 1672. They contain all the cases of the slightest importance which came before the court during that period; and he was counsel in every one of them.

His "hold of business" appears the more wonderful when we consider that his liaison with the tailor's wife was well known, and might have been expected to damage him even in those profligate times; and that he occasionally indulged to great excess in drinking, so that he must often have come into court very little acquainted with his "breviat," and must have trusted to his quickness in finding out the questions to be argued, and to his storehouses of learning for the apposite authorities.

But when we peruse his "reports," the mystery is solved,

There is no such treat for a common lawyer. Lord Mansfield called him the "Terence of reporters," and he certainly supports the forensic dialogue with exquisite art, displaying infinite skill himself in the points which he makes, and the manner in which he defends them; doing ample justice at the same time to the ingenuity and learning of his antagonist. Considering the barbarous dialect in which he wrote, (for the Norman French was restored with Charles II.,) it is marvellous to observe what a clear, terse, and epigrammatic style he uses on the most abstruse juridical topics.

He labored under the imputation of being fond of sharp practice, and he was several times rebuked by the court for being "trop subtile,” or “going too near the wind;" but he was said by his admirers to be fond of his craft only in meliori sensu, or in the good sense of the word, and that, in entrapping the opposite party, he was actuated by a love of fun rather than a love of fraud. Thus is he characterized, as a practitioner, by Roger North:

"Wit and repartee in an affected rusticity were natural to him. He was ever ready, and never at a loss, and none came so near as he to be a match for Serjeant Maynard. His great dexterity was in the art of special pleading, and he would lay snares that often caught his superiors, who were not aware of his traps. And he was so fond of success for his clients that, rather than fail, he would set the court hard with a trick; for which he met sometimes with a reprimand, which he would wittily ward off, so that no one was much offended with him. But Hale could not bear his irregularity of life; and for that, and suspicion of his tricks, used to bear hard upon him in the court. But no ill usage from the bench was too hard for his hold of business, being such as scarce any could do but himself.”