564 The Court of Chancery. [JUNE, 



Council Board should always be sufficient for him to make a decree in 

 equity ; and they must have been low indeed in the scale of character, 

 of whom James I. could say, on receiving the seals from Bacon, " Now, 

 by my soule, I am pained at the heart where to bestow this j for, as to my 

 lawyers, I think they be all knaves." (p. 93). In the custody of the 

 king's conscience they evidently lost the keeping of their own, and with 

 a few a very few exceptions,* their personal history has been but one 

 long record of political subserviency and venal corruption. Clarendon, 

 speaking of the part played by the Lord Keeper Williams, in the 

 political struggles of his time, says that, " like most of the lawyers, he 

 took retainers on both sides/' So insignificant a consideration, indeed, 

 in the elevation to office, was judicial competency, that this very Williams, 

 a Welch divine, celebrated only for his knowledge of Hebrew, and the 

 dead languages, was appointed to the administration of equity, though 

 himself confessed that it would be better to retire to his original pro- 

 fession, " a keeper of sheep." In the reign of George II. Lord Chan- 

 cellor King acquired the name of " the sleeping chancellor," from the 

 frequency of his naps on the bench. Such are the results of the union in 

 the same individual of political and judicial functions such the conse- 

 quence of holding out the first law office of the crown as the reward of 

 political apostacy ! 



The precise subjects of the early jurisdiction of the chancellor are 

 involved in a good deal of obscurity. Mr. Parkes thinks, that for the 

 first twelve centuries the court was almost destitute of any equitable 

 jurisdiction. His opinion is confirmed by the reports of some early cases 

 in Chancery, which have lately been published under the authority of 

 the commissioners of public records ; by which it appears, that the chief 

 employment of the court was affording redress in those cases of trespass, 

 assault, and the like, in which the protection of the sheriff of the county, 

 or some powerful baron, prevented execution of the common law process. 

 As the courts of common law increased in power, this branch of its juris- 

 prudence was gradually given up to them, though about the time of 

 Wickliffe we find an application for its redress against certain of his 

 followers, for an assault committed by them upon a luckless clergyman, 

 who had been inveighing against their heresies. The moulding of the 

 common law, however, into a narrow and technical system, whilst the 

 infancy of society as yet contained little power of anticipating the wants 

 of mankind, necessarily left many cases unprovided for, and gave birth 

 to many individual hardships. These it became the province of equity 

 to supply and to redress ; and indeed we might almost suspect that the 

 interpretation of the law itself may have been among the earliest occasions 

 for the equitable bill of discovery, for Brady pronounces the law, even so 

 early as the reign of Henry III., " a very sublime mystery, very intricate 

 and involved," a reputation in which, we believe, the doctrines of equity 

 may now very fairly participate, without being open to the charge of 

 swaggering in borrowed plumes. It is very certain that the encroaching 

 spirit of the chancellors rendered them often little scrupulous in en- 



* We may be excused for gratifying ourselves with the relation of an anecdote 

 recorded by one of these exceptions, as it serves to illustrate the judicial character of the 

 court. Sir Thomas More, being presented by one Mrs. Goaker, with a pair of gloves, 

 and forty pounds of angels put into them, he said to her, " Mistress, since it were against 

 good manners to refuse your new-year's gift, I am content to take your gloves ; but as for 

 the lining, I utterly refuse it." 



