691 



SOMERS, JOHN, LORD. 



SOMERS, JOHN, LORD. 



C92 



becoming a great magistrate. He had always agreed in his notions 

 with the Whigs, and had studied to bring them to better thoughts 

 of the king, and to a greater confidence in him." The most remark- 

 able occasion on which Somers distinguished himself while holding 

 the office of lord keeper, was what is called the case of the Bankers 

 in the Court of Exchequer, in 1696. He delivered a judgment 

 against the bankers, and reversing the decision of the Barons of the 

 Exchequer, which has been characterised by Mr. Hargrave as " one 

 of the most elaborate arguments ever delivered in Westminster Hall," 

 and in collecting books and pamphlets for which he is said to have 

 expended several hundred pounds. It is contained in the report of 

 the case in Howel's 'State Trials,' voL xiv., pp. 39-105. This judg- 

 ment however, in which he was supported by Treby, chief justice 

 of the court of Common Pleas, but opposed by Holt, chief justice of 

 the King's Bench, was afterwards reversed by the Lords ; and Lord 

 Dartmouth, in a note to Burnet's ' History,' asserts that when the 

 decree which he had made was, after a very warm debate, set aside, 

 Somers fell ill, and never appeared upon the woolsack more. This 

 was in 1700. 



Meanwhile, in 1697, Somers had been appointed lord-chancellor, 

 and raised to the peerage by the title of Baron Somers of Evesham in 

 the county of Gloucester. He appears to have had a seat in the 

 cabinet from the time of his promotion to the place of lord keeper; and 

 he was now generally regarded as one of the chiefs of the ministry, as 

 well as one of the most attached and influential of the king's friends. 

 This made him a principal object of attack on the part of the Tory 

 opposition in the second, or last, session of King William's fourth 

 parliament, which commenced in November 1699. After two succes- 

 sive charges brought against him had been negatived the one for his 

 having improperly, as was alleged, dismissed many persons from the 

 commission of the peace ; the other, founded on the affair of Captain 

 Kid, who, after having been sent out in the command of an armament 

 to destroy certain pirates in the West Indies, the expense of which 

 had been very patriotically contributed by Somers, Shrewsbury, and 

 some other noblemen, had taken to piracy himself, a motion was 

 made on the 10th of April 1700, the day before the king came down 

 to prorogue the parliament, that his majesty should be addressed to 

 remove Somers from his presence and councils for ever. But this 

 attempt also failed : the numbers, according to Lord Hardwicke, in a 

 note to Burnet, were 106 for the motion, and 167 against it. Imme- 

 diately befora this, the bill for resuming the king's Irish grants had 

 been carried through both Houses, in spite of the most strenuous 

 opposition by the court, and the determination which William was at 

 one time understood to have come to rather to risk everything than 

 give his consent to the measure. " While the bill was in suspense," writes 

 Lord Dartmouth, in a note upon Burnet, "the whole city of London 

 was in an uproar ; Westminster was so thronged, that it was with 

 great difficulty anybody got into either House. . . All seemed under 

 the greatest distraction. I heard the king was come to the Cockpit, 

 and had sent for the crown, with a resolution to dissolve us imme- 

 diately, which I communicated to the Earl of Shaftesbury, who ran full 

 speed with it to the House of Commons; upon which they adjourned 

 in great haste." It was this apprehension, according to Burnet, of 

 the king's resorting to the violent measure of a dissolution in order to 

 quash the bill, that provoked the second of the above-mentioned 

 attacks of the Commons upon Somers. But the chancellor did not 

 please either party in this unfortunate business. " During the debates 

 about the bill," says Burnet, " he was ill, and the worst construction 

 possible was put on that : it was said he advised all the opposition 

 that was made to it in the House of Lords ; but that, to keep him- 

 self out of it, he feigned that he was ill ; though his great attendance 

 in the Court of Chancery, the House of Lords, and at the council- 

 table, had so impaired his health, that every year about that time he 

 used to be brought very low, and disabled from business." Lord 

 Hardwicke tells us, in a note on this passage, that for this conduct of 

 Somers, in absenting himself from the House, and taking little or no 

 share in the debates about the bill, " it is said the king was angry 

 with him, and made easy to part with so wise a servant soon after." 

 It is certain at any rate, that, shortly after this, William resolved to 

 endeavour to rid himself of the incessant annoyance and obstruction 

 he received from the aversion the Commons had taken up against the 

 chancellor by the dismissal of Somers. Tindal, who says that the 

 account was given to Mr. Oldmixon by a gentleman who had it from 

 Somera'a own mouth, tells us that the first time Somers came to court 

 after his illness, the king stated that it seemed necessary for his 

 service that he should part with the great seal, and expressed his 

 wish that he would make the delivering of it up his own act. Somers 

 replied, that he knew this was what his enemies were striving after; 

 that the seal was his greatest crime, and that if he quitted that, he 

 should be freed from their abuse and persecution ; but that he was 

 resolved, with his majesty's permission, to keep it in defiance of their 

 malice; adding, that "he did not doubt but, if his majesty would be 

 as firm to his friends as they would be to him, they should' be able to 

 carry whatever points he had in view for the public welfare in a new 

 parliament." His majesty however shook his head, and said "It 

 must be so." But Somers persisted in declining to offer the surrender 

 of the seal; so that a few days after, on the 17th of April, the king 

 sent Lord Jersey for it, with a warrant under his hand, on which, of 



course, it was immediately given up. About a mouth after it was 

 given to Sir Nathan Wright, with the title of lord- keeper. 



After all, his ejection from office neither saved Somers from the 

 enmity of the Commons, nor lost him the favour and confidence of the 

 king. In the new parliament, which met in February 1701, the Tories 

 found themselves in a majority in the Lower House ; and they had 

 not sat long before they proceeded to direct their power against the 

 chief of the king's friends and ministers, the Duke of Portland, Lord 

 Somera, the Earl of Oxford, and Lord Halifax, all of whom it was 

 resolved to impeach. The resolution to impeach Somers was carried 

 at a late hour on the night of the 14th of April, by a majority of 198 

 to 188, after he had come down to the House, and been heard in his 

 own defence. The principal, and indeed at this stage of the proceed- 

 ing, the only crime laid to his charge, was the concern he had had in 

 the two treaties for the partition of the Spanish monarchy, which had 

 been negociated in 1698 and 1699 by King William, without consulting 

 with his ministers, and for which Somers had forwarded at the king's 

 desire, the necessary powers in blank under the great seal. We sup- 

 pose there can be no question, but that, according to the modern 

 practice of the constitution no minister would be held to be justified 

 in acting as Lord Somers admitted he had done in this case ; but 

 ministerial responsibility was not so well understood or so completely 

 established in those early days of the system introduced by the Revo- 

 lution as it now is. The precise charge against Lord Somers too, as 

 stated in the resolution for impeaching him, was, that he had advised 

 his majesty to the treaties ; and that certainly was not and could not 

 be made out, being in truth contrary to the fact. Afterwards fourteen 

 distinct articles of impeachment were drawn out and sent up to the 

 Lords, which charged his lordship distinctly with having presumed to 

 affix the great seal to the blank commissions, contrary to the duty of 

 his office, and in violation of the great trusts reposed in him, " with- 

 out communicating the same to the rest of the then lords justices 

 of England, or advising in council with his majesty's privy council 

 thereuppn." His conduct in the affair of Captain Kid, which surely 

 was the very reverse of blameable, was also made the subject of one 

 of the articles ; but the most remarkable of the charges brought 

 against him related to various personal grants of land and money 

 which he was asserted to have begged and obtained from the crown 

 "many great, unreasonable, and exorbitant grants," as they wero 

 styled, " of several manor.-", lands, tenements, rents, hereditaments, 

 and revenues," besides the annual salary, or pension (as it is called), of 

 4000?., which, '' through his majesty's most abundant grace and bounty," 

 he had received during all the time he was lord keeper and lord 

 chancellor, over and above " the fees, profits, and perquisites of or 

 belonging to the great seal, established by law as a sufficient and ample 

 recompense and reward for the faithful discharge of that high 

 station." The grants were alleged to consist of the manors of Rye- 

 gate and Howleigh, granted in 1697, to Joseph Jekyl, Esq., in trust for 

 Lord Somers and his heirs of certain fee-farm rents to the value in all 

 of 33,000?., granted at various times by the pretended contracts under 

 which " there was not any sum of money whatsoever really and bond 

 fide paid as the consideration of the conveyances of the said rents" 

 from the trustees to whom they were granted for Somers's benefit and 

 of certain other rents to the yearly value of nearly 400Z. obtained iu a 

 similar manner. Somers in his answer stated that the 4000?. a year 

 was the same allowance that had been made to several of his pre- 

 decessors; and as to the other grants, he pointed out certain de- 

 ductions from their value to which the Commons had not adverted, 

 and denied that there had been anything unlawful in the transactions, 

 or that the grants had been obtained either in deceit of his majesty or 

 in elusion of any acts of parliament. The affair ended after many 

 messages and conferences between the two houses, by the Commons 

 declining to appear to prosecute their impeachment on the day 

 appointed by the Lords, under the pretence that the Lords had 

 refused them justice in the matter ; on which their lordships pro- 

 nounced him acquitted, and dismissed the impeachment. (See 

 Howel's 'State Trials,' xiv. 311.) 



In October of this same year a negociation was opened by the king 

 with Somers, through Lord Sunderland, for bringing him again into 

 power; but his majesty's death, in March 1702, put an end to the 

 project after everything had been arranged. The speech with which 

 William opened his last parliament, on the 31st December 1701, called 

 by Burnet " the best speech that he, or perhaps any other prince, ever 

 made to his people," was written by Somers ; Lord Hardwicke 

 mentions that he had Eeeu the original in Somers's handwriting. 



In 1702 Somers, unoccupied by the cares and toils of office, was 

 elected presidt-nt of the Royal Society. In 1706 he introduced and 

 carried through parliament a bill " for the amendment of the law, and 

 the better advancement of justice," which, although deprived of some 

 useful clauses by the Commons, corrected various abuses in the courts 

 both of Chancery and of Common Law. He also took a leading part 

 in the discussion and arrangement of the great measure of the Union 

 with Scotland, which was now at last brought to a conclusion, after 

 having been again and again unsuccessfully attempted during more 

 than a century. It may also be mentioned, that the learned and able 

 statement of the famous Ajlesbury Election Case, ordered to be 

 printed by the House of Lords in 1703, was, according to Mr. Speaker 

 Onslow, drawn up by Lord Somers. He too, it is stated by Lord 



