Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Catlin, Robert

1383706Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 09 — Catlin, Robert1887James McMullen Rigg

CATLIN, Sir ROBERT (d. 1574), judge, was born at Beby in Leicestershire, though his ancestry is said to have belonged to Northamptonshire. He was a member of the Middle Temple, and was appointed reader to that society in 1547. In 1553, the lordship of his native place having reverted to the crown through the attainder of the Duke of Suffolk, Catlin obtained a grant of it. In the following year he was called to the rank of serjeant-at-law, and two years later to that of king's and queen's serjeant. He was appointed a justice of the common pleas in October 1558, was reappointed on the accession of Elizabeth in November of the next year, and in the ensuing January was created chief justice of the queen's bench in the room of Sir Edward Saunders, removed on account of his religious opinions, and was knighted. During his tenure of office he would seem to have had next to no judicial business to perform. He presided over the judges at the trial of the Duke of Norfolk for high treason in conspiring with Mary Stuart to dethrone the queen in January 1571, and the following month sentenced one of the duke's retainers, Robert Hickford, to death as an accomplice. His judgment on this occasion is reported at some length. It is a homily on the sacredness of majesty and the heinousness of treason, and, so regarded, not altogether a discreditable performance. The closing sentences evince an acquaintance with Chaucer's ‘House of Fame.’ But he does not appear to have been particularly subservient as a judge, as we find that this same year, 1571, he incurred the serious displeasure of the queen by refusing to ‘alter the ancient forms of the court’ in the interests of the Earl of Leicester. He was accused of denying justice and making the queen's bench ‘a court of conscience’ by one Thomas Welch in 1566. He married Ann, daughter of John Boles of Wallington, Hertfordshire, and relict of John Burgoyne, by whom he had one daughter, whose first husband was Sir John Spencer. He died at his seat at Newenham, Bedfordshire, in 1574.

[Fuller's Worthies (Leicestershire); Dugdale's Orig. 217, Chron. Ser. 89, 90, 91; Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1547–80, pp. 107, 416; Cobbett's State Trials, i. 957, 1042, ii. 1046; Foss's Lives of the Judges.]

J. M. R.